Birdcloud is Jasmin Kaset and Makenzie Green, a pair who met in a place called Murfreesboro and who, since 2009, have used things like booze and sacrilege to make very modern country music. The duo write songs about what Sarah Palin deemed “the real America,” that unsung republic of countrified interstices stretching from coast to coast between cities. Kaset and Green’s America is a nation of indulgent reprobates and boastful imbeciles, laughing maniacs and horny high school dropouts— the desperate, absurd place we all inhabit in one way or another. The band’s music is the ravenous id of today’s commercial country sound, and in place of the pandering and polished banality of Nashville’s Music Row is a savagely honest depiction of “real Americans,” where a teenage evangelical designates her vagina (alone among her orifices) to Christ; a Desert Storm veteran dispenses ancient wisdom while driving drunk and toppling birdbaths in the suburbs; a coked up blackout drunk on a spree fellates a rodeo clown and tells her friend’s children that Santa doesn’t exist. These characters are characters in both senses of the word: 1) eccentrics with notoriously outsized personalities, as well as 2) complexly three-dimensional literary creations. The complicated sensation of listening to Birdcloud’s music—the simultaneous urge to laugh, vomit, and maybe break down and cry a little at how familiar and sad and true it all is—has won the band fans across the lower 48, stupefying and sickening audiences in equal measure.
Boasting a strong YouTube presence, Birdcloud’s un-unseeable videos resonate beyond the continental U.S., with a slew of fan-versions of songs available online as well as an odd amount of unauthorized re-releases of official Birdcloud videos with Russian subtitles. Birdcloud’s third and darkest EP was released in spring of 2014, and their follow-up record will launch in the summer of 2015.
In 1999 King Khan, Aquarius and founder of the greatest cult phenomenon since the parting of the Milky Way, decides to put together a musical shrine. The 8-piece band called The Shrines are assembled and together with Khan begin spreading their hypersexual gospel around the world, stunning Krauts and becoming notorious for being one of the most entertaining groups since the days of Ike & Tina.
Dressed in their ceremonial duds, King Khan and the Shrines, are more than just a psychedelic soul revue, imagine Roky Erickson backed by the Sun Ra Arkestra or Wilson Pickett leading The Velvet Underground, wearing a golden cape that wraps around the world, a Bollywood James Brown reading his self- made tarot cards (WHO DOES THAT!?).
As the love child of Anubis and Kali, King Khan & The Shrines have pillaged countless stages around the world and are known to frequently drive audiences into a sweaty orgy. If musical salvation is what you need, if your soul is searching for true absolution, look no further....
Let King Khan & The Shrines come into your mind, body and soul to heal your every hurt.
In his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus wrote that “All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.” 15 years later Richard Wayne Penniman wrote “Wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom”, an undeniably powerful vocalization that on any given Wednesday in any given situation, civilized or otherwise, is still fully capable of setting somebody’s stuff aflame. Over ten years and seven long players into their career, White Denim are still in the relentless pursuit of a thread - in other words, a wick.
The Austin,Texas band have carefully and continuously studied the greatest records ever made, but they write songs just dumb enough to drink, dance, and fight to. Theirs is a music that aims for the whole body, while equally satisfying the mind. While it has morphed, expanded, and even burst apart, White Denim’s sincere and human drive and ability to spark true rock & roll exhilaration have been unerring constants of the band’s 10-year existence.
“White Denim are one of the best live bands you will ever see if you live to be a million. That’s not excitable hyperbole, merely a bald statement of undeniable fact...” — Time Out
“The last great rock & roll band!” — The Guardian
Amazing new album Performance in stores on August 24.
Do Hollywood, The Lemon Twigs’ 2016 debut LP, was an invigorating, much-needed blast of fresh air that whipped across the arid landscape of contemporary rock. If that stunningly accomplished recording, which flew in the face of current musical trends, wasn’t surprising enough on the face of it, the fact that Do Hollywood was the handiwork of two teenagers—brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario—rendered the achievement utterly mind-boggling. Now, with the follow-up full-length, Go to School (4AD, Aug. 24), the siblings, now 21 and 19, respectively, have set the bar dizzyingly high even by their own lofty standards, and proceed to soar over it into the stratosphere. Listening to this wildly ambitious album is like entering and inhabiting a parallel universe.
Go to School’s subtitle is A Musical, and that turns out to be an accurate description of the 15-song extravaganza, which tells the tale of the pure-of-heart chimpanzee Shane, who’s adopted by a childless couple—played by the brothers’ musical hero Todd Rundgren and their mom, Susan Hall—and raised as a human boy. Michael describes Go to School as “a fairy tale with a dark edge,” as Shane is ostracized, bullied and rejected by the girl he falls for, erupts in an extreme act of retribution for being robbed of his innocence. The libretto is played out in a series of intricate, wildly eclectic musical settings ranging from spot-on throwback rockers to traditional Broadway-style production numbers.
JEFF The Brotherhood is an art project started by brothers Jake and Jamin Orrall in 2002 in a basement in Nashville, TN. Their work is influenced by many types of music including jazz, black metal, motorick rhythm and hard rock, as well as many artists and environments including the film work of Werner Herzog, the choreography of Kate Bush, and the rivers of Tennessee.
