Thursday 25 August 2016

TOMMY HALE - MAGNIFICENT BASTARD

Eight years on from his last release, the Dallas-based singer-songwriter returns with nine songs whose recording he describes as “emotionally difficult,” though the resulting LP is unarguably his most rewarding.  

Recorded in rural Wiltshire with his friends from acclaimed alt.country outfits The Snakes and The Redlands Palomino Company, the record – Tommy’s third as a solo artist – draws on a wealth of musical styles, from gospel-tinged soul to delicate pop balladry and driving rock ’n’ roll, while at its centre sits its author’s unmistakable voice. Fragile and reflective one moment, bristling with soulful intensity the next, it’s a unique ingredient of Tommy’s music, and one that has aided his rise, over 20 years, from frontman with raucous cult rockers Swank Deluxe to multi-faceted solo performer and respected face on the Dallas music scene.  

Magnificent Bastard carries the weight of this history and more, mixing punk and ’70s rock influences on the brooding ‘Backburner’, reminiscing over a well-spent youth on the title track and unravelling threads that stretch back to Tommy’s childhood.  

In the wistful ‘Homecoming Mum’, the singer recalls the schoolboy practice of buying elaborate wearable bouquets for their sweetheart – a Southern tradition at homecoming football games  – while the album’s centerpiece, the anthemic ‘Save Me (The Ballad of Odell Barnes Jr)’, finds him pondering the plight of a high-school friend who, convicted of murder, ended up on Death Row. Tommy describes this song, which he started to write eight years ago, as “the most important story of the record.”

“It really affected me,” he says of the moment he found out that Barnes, who Tommy hadn’t seen since his late teenage years, had been killed by lethal injection in 2001. “I don’t know if he did the murder or not, or anything like that, but I want people to know what it is and to know the story.”

While these character pieces showcase Tommy Hale the storyteller, others suggest he has naked sincerity licked, too. Can I Lay Down Next To You? and Simple Song, the album’s most tender tracks, make the listener feel as if they’re eavesdropping on private moments in their author’s life. In fact, so direct is the latter song that the singer felt himself squirm when he played it to producer/guitarist Simon Moor and multi-instrumentalist John O’Sullivan – the album’s co-writers and two people who, alongside drummer Dan Tilbury and keyboardist/engineer Nick Beere, make up a creative team for whom Tommy has “tremendous respect.”

“I think this is hands down the best collection of work I’ve ever put together,” he says. “And a lot of that’s because of the talents of all those other guys.”

Magnificent Bastard is released through Holiday disaster Records on 30 September.






Tuesday 16 August 2016

THE LUCKY STRIKES - THE MOTION AND THE MOVING ON

From the marshlands of the Thames Delta comes the fifth album from Southend on Sea’s Lucky Strikes.  The Motion And The Moving On is the band’s most personal album to date, covering everything from dead-end jobs and missing home to overwhelming grief and mental turmoil. But ultimately this is an album about salvation through music. That life on the road, with your brothers, can save your soul.

It was recorded at Reservoir Studios in north London with producer and engineer Chris Clarke from Danny and The Champions Of The World and features long-time Lucky Strikes collaborator Toby Shaer on fiddle, flute and saxophone.

Formed in 2006, the Lucky Strikes have released four critically-acclaimed albums encompassing garage blues, spaghetti western psych and Celtic folk. Their self-titled debut was recorded warts and all in their hometown of Southend - rough and maybe not quite ready, it was full of the piss, spit and aggression of youth. This was followed by The Chronicles Of Solomon Quick in 2009. A patchwork narrative centred on the man who killed Delta blues pioneer Robert Johnson. The record saw the band move from the monochrome palette of their debut to a more widescreen vison of Americana.  Piano, strings and pedal steel wove together to reveal a compelling musical tale.

Gabriel, Forgive My 22 Sins came next in 2011 and built on the vast Americana of its predecessor. Partly inspired by Nelson Algren’s Man With the Golden Arm, it tells the story of Frankie Valentinez, a boxer who took a bribe to throw a fight and then descended into madness. For 2013’s Exile And The Sea, the band found inspiration closer to home. From the archives of their local newspaper offices, they retold stories of the carnival queens, roughnecks and scoundrels of Estuary folklore. The album was voted one of the best of the year by Vive Le Rock magazine.  

The Lucky Strikes are fronted by MG Boulter, a sometime member of the Simone Felice Group, Emily Portman’s Coracle Band and an accomplished solo artist. He’s joined by Will Bray on drums, Paul Ambrose on bass, and Dave Giles on piano and accordion.

Release date: 30 September, Harbour Song Records

The Motion And The Moving On will be preceded by a single/video ‘War Drums’ in early September.

“Simply too good to ignore. You heard it here first” R2 magazine
“Like The Waterboys on trucker pills” Q magazine
“Dark and dirty Americana to chill your soul” Classic Rock magazine
“The songwriting sensibilities of Ray Davies… informed by Kevin Coyne” Americana-UK
“They're the best thing to come out of Southend since Rossi's ice-cream.” ***** Morning Star



Tuesday 9 August 2016

SCREAMING BLUE MESSIAHS BOX SET

“There’s an English band I like very much. Nobody seems to have heard of them. They’re called The Screaming Blue Messiahs and I’m pushing them like mad. I think they’re really good. There’s an element of The Clash in them that I really like. But there’s something else there. I’m not really sure what it is. There’s an exciting guitar player. He’s a sort of a new wave guitar player, but they’re an angry mob from London.”
David Bowie, Words & Music Magazine, 1988

Post-punk blues/rockabilly trio SCREAMING BLUE MESSIAHS have their original albums included in a new box set.

Formed out of the ashes of Feelgood- and Beefheart-channelling London pub rockers MOTOR BOYS MOTOR, the band released their Vic Maile-produced debut mini-album Good And Gone through Big Beat Records in 1984, before signing to WEA for the full-length Gun-Shy in 1986.

Touring the world, including several dates with THE CRAMPS, the band – guitarist/vocalist Bill Carter, bassist Chris Thompson and drummer Kenny Harris – released their second full-length album Bikini Red – featuring Top 30 single ‘I Wanna Be A Flintstone’ in 1987. That year, no less a figure than DAVID BOWIE proclaimed them his favourite current band, inviting them to play two stadium dates – Cardiff Arms Park and Sunderland Roker Park –  on his Glass Spider tour.

Switching to Elektra for 1989’s Totally Religious – recorded in Miami, Maryland and London – a falling-out with the label caused the album to be withdrawn, and the band split the following year, playing their final show at London’s Subterrania venue in June 1990. Their major label catalogue has long since been unavailable.

Compiled by Easy Action Records with the full co-operation of all three band members, across five CDs Vision In Blues includes all four of their original releases, plus a fully audio-repaired and re-mastered live recording from Zurich in December ’89. The set is bolstered by numerous bonus tracks, including five from a show at London’s ULU, and illustrated by a lavish 24-page booklet, with cover design by Bill Carter himself. It’s topped off with a 7” single featuring of ‘Vision In Blues’ c/w ‘Let’s Go Down To The Woods’/ ‘Good And Gone’.

Easy Action are also issuing a full-length version of the Good And Gone album on limited edition coloured vinyl.

Release date 2 September 2016






Tuesday 2 August 2016

PROUDFOOT - FLOWER OF LONDON

It’s been six years since Proudfoot released the BJ Cole-produced Lincolnshire, an album with its boots in Nashville but its head in the English county of Michael Proudfoot’s birth in the prairies of the East Midlands.

Since then, Michael and guitarist/collaborator Duncan Kerr have been meeting in the former’s basement, recording demos for a new record. Flower Of London is the result. Duncan Kerr is a veteran guitar wrangler from Stiff Records recording artists Plummet Airlines and their spin-off The Favourites, two almost-made-it outfits that morphed out of Nottingham’s pub rock and punk scene. Michael, then singing in wine bars and restaurants to bolster his student grant, was a fan of both these bands. “I thought, if ever I have a band, I want that guitar player in it,” he says of Kerr. A mixture of happenstance and necessity brought the two together almost ten years ago and they have been working together in London ever since as Kerr’s other gig in psych-punk outfit The Brainiac 5 allows.

Both Proudfoot and Kerr knew that this record would be different from Lincolnshire. “I love country music and early rock n’ roll, but I am essentially a child of the 60s,” says Proudfoot. “I can still vividly remember the moment The Beatles came into my world via Thank Your Lucky Stars. We lived, literally, in the middle of nowhere surrounded by potato and wheat fields, The Beatles sound made it seem as if anything were possible and I fell for it hook line and sinker. Music has been in my life ever since”

Flower Of London coalesces Michael Proudfoot’s interests in The Beatles and the Beat Boom, soul, folk and reggae with Kerr’s virtuoso powerpop/punk/country-rock guitar chops into something not too far from the mature New Wave pop of Costello, Parker and Difford & Tilbrook. This time, Michael’s songs are drawn from a wider, more urban spectrum. Flower Of London trades in the anomalies of life, love, leaving and those he has known, good and bad. Album opener ‘Pathfinders’ is about his mother’s first fiancĂ©, an RAF pilot who perished over the English Channel. “The good thing about songwriting,” says Proudfoot, “….is that you can make a single statement about a lot of things or a statement about a single moment. It seems to me the things that affect us most are like that, they are global and big like politics and war or tiny moments in the macro when someone says or does something you love or hate…. That’s what this record is about”.



The album release will be preceded by the single/video ‘Pathfinders’.

Release date:16 September 2016

Tuesday 5 April 2016

BLACK BOMBERS

Black Bombers are a Rock‘n’Roll band from Birmingham, England and Black Bombers is their debut album!


It was recorded virtually live in their rehearsal studio over one weekend with engineer/producer Paul Gray, with minimal overdubs, hence the primal, untamed sound. Combining elements of UK77 punk, Chiswick-era Motorhead and, almost inevitably, The Stooges, close links with Midlands luminaries Swell Maps and The Nightingales might go some way to explain the “hint of post-punk steeliness and economy” that Gus Ironside of Vive Le Rock magazine identified in Black Bombers’ garage-wall of sound.

Black Bombers are Dave Twist – drums, Darren Birch – bass guitar, and Alan Byron – guitar and vocals. Darren Birch was a founder member of notorious Birmingham sleaze-rockers Gunfire Dance. Signed to Island and produced by The Damned’s Brian James and Rat Scabies, they remain highly regarded by connoisseurs of their genre. He also serves in Heartbreaker Walter Lure’s touring band.

A former member of seminal punk/post-punk band The Prefects, Dave Twist features on their Peel Session derived, and much anthologised, ‘Going Through The Motions’ single for Rough Trade, as well as touring and recording several albums with The Tenderhooks alongside Dave Kusworth.of The Jacobites.

Black Bombers’ debut release was the limited edition 7” single ‘Crazy’ b/w ‘That Kind’ in early 2015 on their own Key of E label. It sold out within a week, earning a second pressing. 



"This debut offering is nothing short of being a collection of gutter anthems, classics in the making from a parallel universe where the punk wars were won by the righteous, Nikki Sudden was not only still alive but Minister for Culture and Wayne Kramer was the focus of a major religion." DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE

“Alan Byron has an immediately likeable, spooky, sick croon – this is ominous Super 8 film music for angry eyed adults who don’t go to malls – smoky, muscular, tight...” SUGARBUZZ

“The sort of song best played at stun volume – Dave Twist’s heavily propulsive drumming recalls Rock Action – paint-stripper guitar, Darren Birch’s bass-line throb and a fuck you vocal make ‘Crazy’ glow with menace...” I-94 BAR

“‘Crazy’ is menacing and loose and has the beating heart of some the finer bands of our time, like The Stooges – with some 'Music For Pleasure' era Damned thrown in for good measure, this is fantastic stuff...” UBER ROCK

Catch Black Bombers live at….

12 April           Hare & Hounds, Kings Heath, Birmingham (w/The Bellrays)
27 May            Nambucca, Holloway, London (album launch)



Easy Action Records
Cat No: KOECD01 Format: CD/LP/DL
Release date: 27 May 2016
Distribution: Cargo

Monday 4 April 2016

RUMMAGE - SOMEWHERE ELSE

Rummage is one of the many projects of Scottish musician Mark Mulholland, in which he teams up with a couple of friends and long-time musical collaborators,  Rusty Miller and James Finch Jr from Jackpot on a dozen of his songs, laid down at a studio near San Francisco in 2014.

Born in Glasgow, Mark has been playing in bands since the late '80s, travelling the world with stops in Berlin, Paris, Prague and Galway along the way, combining his solo career with various bands and projects such as acoustic roots outfit Two Dollar Bash and indie-rockers Impure Thoughts, as well as session work with Nikki Sudden, Captain Sensible and many others. In 2010, he moved to Haiti for four years, during which time he collaborated on the just released Afro-Haitian Experimental Orchestra project with legendary Nigerian drummer Tony Allen and also with dEUS guitarist Craig Ward, before relocating to Bamako, Mali, where he is working on several new projects with many of the fantastic musicians there, including internationally acclaimed kora maestros Toumani Diabate and Madou Sidiki Diabate.

While in Prague in the early 90s, Mark met Rusty Miller, a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from Northern California, who has made many albums with his own bands Jackpot and Nightgown, as well as being an in-demand sideman for the likes of Cake, Chuck Prophet and Jason Lytle. Rusty’s European tours and Mark’s US trips permitted the pair to meet quite frequently, before both Jackpot and Two Dollar Bash were invited to the prestigious SXSW festival in Austin, Texas in 2007, where Mark also became firm friends with Jackpot guitarist James Finch Jr. SXSW turned into a regular meeting, and later James worked with Mark on the recording of his second solo album, 2011’s critically acclaimed The Cactus And The Dragon.

The trio met in California in May 2014 to finally record the album they had talked for years of making. Booking time in the studio James was working in at Stinson Beach, Marin County, they locked themselves in for 5 days, working up to 18 hours a day. The resulting 12 songs range from raw rock'n'roll (‘Ebb and Flow’, ‘Hoodathunkit’), catchy pop-rock (‘Dreaming of Trains’, ‘Claret Blue’), laid-back blues and grooves (‘Give Me A Ride’, ‘Less Than Tomorrow’), up-tempo country (‘Smoke Trails’) to wistful folk and late night melancholy (‘Floods Of Memories’, ‘Fucked Up Again’).

“This record is really about three good friends, who also happen to be extremely talented musicians, having a great time together. Luckily, it's not a private party and there is more than enough here to let the listener join in the good times.”  FATEA

“Adaptable and skilled… The songs show off their range. They are approaching the status of power-pop royalty.” AMERICANA UK

“A very cool and playable record that you'll want to listen to a good few times. 8/10” WHISPERIN’ & HOLLERIN’

“A cohesive collection of songs which somehow not only feel at home on the same album but also uniquely and intrinsically his own.” DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE


Cannery Row Records Cat. No. CRR 1621
Format: CD/DL
Release date: 27 May 2016
Distribution: Highlander