Month: April 2015

Categories
NEWS

In The News: High On Fire, Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard, Roger Waters, Frank Sinatra, Knack, Jonny Polonsky, Jason Isbell And More

HighOnFire

Luminiferous is the new High On Fire album, due out from eOne on June 23 … Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard have reunited to bring us Django And Jimmie on June 2 via Legacy … An expanded version of Carly Simon’s The Bedroom Tapes will be released by her own boutique label, C’EST Music, on April 20 … On July 24, Roger Waters’ 1992 record, Amused To Death, will be re-released on multiple formats by Columbia/Legacy … Grönland will issue The Conny Plank Session, featuring Duke Ellington & His Orchestra’s 1970 session at Germany’s Rhenus Studio, on July 10 … The September performance of Slash And Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators at The Roxy will be available as Live At The Roxy 9/25/14 on June 16 via Eagle Rock … A Little Bit Of Me: Live In L.A showcases the final performance on Melissa Etheridge’s This Is M.E. tour at the Orpheum Theater last year, and is set for a June 9 release on CD, DVD, Blu-ray and digital from Shout! Factory … In celebration of Frank Sinatra’s 100th birthday, Capitol/UMe will issue several career-spanning Ultimate Sinatra collections in various formats on April 21 … The Knack’s three final albums—Zoom, Normal As The Next Guy and Live From The Rock ‘N’ Roll Fun House—will get expanded reissues from Omnivore beginning May 19 … May 12 will see the release of Jonny Polonsky’s new album, The Other Side Of Midnight, which was mixed at David Lynch’s Asymmetrical Studios … Verve/Decca has announced the June 2 release of Melody Gardot’s new record, Currency Of Man … The fifth album from Jason Isbell, Something More Than Free, will be available from Southeastern on July 17 … High Risk is a new collaborative album between Dave Douglas and Shigeto, which will be released June 23 by Greenleaf … A four-disc set of previously unreleased live shows by Sly & The Family Stone, Live At The Fillmore East October 4th & 5 th 1968, is due out via Epic/Legacy on July 17 … Robin Gibb’s entire musical output at 19 years old will be chronicled on Saved By The Bell: The Collected Works Of Robin Gibb 1969-70, due out June 2 from Reprise … This July, Stereo Total will release a career-spanning best-of compilation, Yéyé Existentialiste … The Fire label has announced the May 19 release of Firestation Towers 1986-1989, a boxed set containing Close Lobsters’ two studio album as well as a singles collection … The lost 1972 LP by Vince Matthews And Jim Casey, The Kingston Springs Suite, will finally see the light of day on May 19 via Delmore.

—Emily Costantino

Categories
GUEST EDITOR

From The Desk Of Diamond Rugs: Hattie B’s

As was the case with Diamond Rugs’ 2012 self-titled debut record, much of the band’s sophomore album, Cosmetics, formed and grew in the studio. That’s an impressive feat, considering that Diamond Rugs is something of a weekender project for members of no fewer than five bands, all of whom keep moderate-to-ridiculous recording and touring schedules anyway: John McCauley and Robbie Crowell (both Deer Tick), Ian St. Pé (Black Lips), T. Hardy Morris (Dead Confederate), Bryan Dufresne (Six Finger Satellite) and the legendary Steve Berlin (Los Lobos, Blasters and about six dozen other outfits). The boys in the band will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our recent feature on them.

7HattieB

St. Pe: Hot chicken is very much a part of the Nashville fabric. Prince’s and Bolton’s are the originators, and true to Nashville. However, a lot of Nashville residents, including myself (and fellow bandmates John and Robbie), are part of the ever growing “new kid in town.” And god damn, this new kid called Hattie B’s is doing it right. So right that I’ll wait in a long line for it … And I hate line. And it’s so good!

Video after the jump.

Continue reading “From The Desk Of Diamond Rugs: Hattie B’s”
Categories
RECORD REVIEWS

Record Review: The Mountain Goats’ “Beat The Champ”

MountainGoats

We smell what John Darnielle is cooking on an adventurous Mountain Goats concept album

For most artists, a concept album about professional wrestling would be a cute novelty curveball, and probably a dubious artistic proposition: something to be approached with a smirk and cautiously lowered expectations. For John Darnielle, it feels no more improbable—if anything, maybe less—than, say, a song cycle chronicling depression after a breakup. Given his preoccupations with desperation, obsessiveness, emotional volatility, marginalized figures and imaginative escape-worlds, wrestlers and their fans make for readily familiar and natural Darnielle character-narrators. And the (totally unsurprising) information that the young Darnielle was a big wrestling fan himself adds an element of autobiography and underscores the sheer glee he takes in delivering lines like “I personally will stab you in the eye with a foreign object.”

So, no surprises here: These songs do exactly the kind of things that latter-day Mountain Goats songs do, and they do them obliquely, evocatively and enviably well. There are subdued, piano-driven ruminations on troubling memories (“Southwestern Territory”); furiously spluttering id-eruptions (“Choked Out,” “Werewolf Gimmick”); unlikely but biographically accurate portraits of celebrities well past their turn in the spotlight (“Luna,” “The Ballad Of Bull Ramos”); patiently chronicled juxtapositions of depravity and tenderness (“Unmasked!,” “Hair Match.”) The wrestling angle turns out to be less a gimmick than a jumping-off point, sketching the shared world these characters inhabit without scripting specific throughlines connecting them, in a set of first-person songs that are ultimately no less earnest or affecting than those on the aforementioned break-up record, albeit more given to colorful insider jargon and particularly inventive physical violence.

—K. Ross Hoffman

Categories
NEWS

It’s Record Store Day!

RSD

Quick Questions for the humans behind Record Store Day, co-founders and organizers Michael Bunnell, Carrie Colliton, Eric Levin and Michael Kurtz

First Record You Fell In Love With?
MB: The first 13th Floor Elevators album
MK: The Beatles’ seven-inch of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” in the fourth grade on my parents’ console.
CC: Every single thing in my babysitters’ collection, but that Elton John And Kiki Dee single stands out.
EL: The Story Of Star Wars

Last Record You Listened To From Beginning To End. On Purpose.
EL: I want to say it was D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, but it was Charli XCX’s Sucker.
MB: Bad Bad Not Good III
MK: St. Vincent St. Vincent
CC: Courtney Barnett Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit

Favorite Band Sirt
EL: I had on old over-sized white New Order shirt from their Brotherhood tour; it looked good on every girl who wore it. Currently, my wife’s got a Waylon Jennings shirt that I’m partial to.
MK: George Harrison Dark Horse shirt
CC: The oldest one in my drawer, TAD, and the newest one, a shirt that doesn’t even say the name of the band but came out of the Sun Kil Moon/Hopscotch Music Festival brouhaha last year. Good story, great shirt.

Late-Night Listening Session. Pizza Or Tacos?
MK: Tacos, but only if it’s corn.
EL: Is it a trick question? This is the most personal thing I’ve ever had to answer. It’s so existential. Where am I? What am I listening to? Is this very bad pizza versus really good tacos? The answer has to be pizza, right? Can I change my answer?
MB: Bourbon

Categories
DAVID LESTER ART FREE MP3s

Normal History Vol. 317: The Art Of David Lester

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 31-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

I recently photographed the 21 pages of Hot Pink — the history of a situation (chapbook, fiction, Smarten UP!, 1987) and posted them on the Smarten UP & Get To The Point Editions Facebook page. It’s legible on my monitor if I crank it up to 250 or 300 percent.

Hot Pink was an extension of song lyrics I wrote for the Mecca Normal album Calico Kills The Cat (K, 1989). The story is (in part) about Joelle, whose boyfriend is around two corners watching TV while Joelle is in the kitchen washing dishes. The frying pan comes out of the water and hits the wall with all the energy and the history of the situation.

Nearly 30 years later, I’m still writing fiction that finds its way into and out of Mecca Normal songs.

“Engine Rain” from Dovetail (K, 1992) (download):

https://magnetmagazine.com/audio/ EngineRain.mp3