FEATURE:
One for the Record Collection!
IN THIS PHOTO: Wolf Alice release their third studio album, Blue Weekend, on 4th June/PHOTO CREDIT: Jordan Hemingway
Essential June Releases
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THE first album I want to include…
for this June edition is Crowded House’s Dreamers Are Waiting. I love the New Zealand band. I am really looking forward to their new album. Go and pre-order it, as it is sure to be a must-hear. This article from February reveals more:
“Crowded House have announced their first new album in over a decade. On June 4, the legendary New Zealand group will release Dreamers Are Waiting via EMI Australia.
The band had teased new material back in October with the release of “Whatever You Want,” which will appear on the new album. Now the band has revealed their lead single titled, “To the Island,” along with a new video for the track, directed by Neil Finn and Mark Simon Brown and shot in a variety of locations worldwide, including Los Angeles, New Zealand, and Ireland.
The band’s line-up on Dreamers Are Waiting includes founding members Neil Finn and Nick Seymour, in addition to producer and keyboardist Mitchell Froom, singer and guitarist Liam Finn, and drummer Elroy Finn, Liam’s brother.
“I’ve always been afraid of just repeating the same formulas, and somehow this feels like a fresh and authentic way to re-approach Crowded House today with an awareness of all our history and where, how and why it began in the first place,” said Finn in a statement. “The original band mentality and philosophy is still in there, especially with Mitchell now part of it again, working in a different way along with Nick and I.”
The band previously announced they had lined up a tour of New Zealand, which has been allowing concerts to happen since last June due to proactive Covid-19 containment measures.
“We were fortunate to be recording in the studio right before lockdown and so began this album with band tracks recorded live in a room, all brimming with character and energy,” Finn said. “We then spent our strangest year, 2020, at distance from each other but connecting daily, swapping files and making those tracks complete. We’re so excited and grateful to be back in one room together now, rehearsing, first to play live in front of audiences in NZ and soon we hope for the rest of the world.”
This news also comes on the heels of Finn’s new radio shows that see the acclaimed singer-songwriter revisit a different Crowded House album and play new acoustic versions of the songs from them. The first broadcast was on February 11 and is available on Fangradio on Mixlr”.
Before moving to the next album due on 4th June that you should buy, I want to bring in some further information from Rough Trade about Crowded House:
“Crowded House is a long standing and much-loved vehicle for the song writing talents of Neil Finn. Formed in Melbourne Australia in 1985 out the ashes of New Zealand’s Split Enz by Neil, Paul Hester and Nick Seymour, their eponymous self-titled debut album on Capitol Records went on to global success with the hits ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ and ‘Something So Strong’. Those songs and many that followed are still resonating with audiences today, the former in particular being one of the most covered songs of the last 20 years. The band’s first incarnation lasted from 1985 through 1995 with 4 studio albums and enjoyed much success worldwide, becoming particularly beloved for their freewheeling and interactive live shows. This line-up said Farewell to the World on the steps of the Sydney Opera House in 1996 with a now legendary performance in front of 150,000 people.
In 2005 following the tragic death of Paul Hester, Neil and Nick felt emotionally compelled to bring Crowded House back, to put some more good history, as they described it, into the story of the band. Drafting in new drummer Matt Sherrod and with long time touring member Mark Hart they released the album Time On Earth to critical acclaim and toured the world. Another album, Intriguer, was recorded in 2009 and Crowded House was inducted into the Aria Hall of Fame in 2016, at the same time reprising its Farewell shows at the Sydney Opera House with 3 nights of stunning performances.
With in excess of 12 Million albums sold across six studio albums, two acclaimed Best of collections, over 1.2 Billion streams to date and following Neil Finn’s surprise star turn and an extremely successful world tour with Fleetwood Mac, Neil and Nick Seymour are inspired to begin a new chapter in the Crowded House story. A new generation has grown up and connected with their songs and will now get to experience fresh new music alongside legendary anthems from the band’s 35-year career”.
4th June is a busy week for great new albums! The next one that you should consider is James’ All the Colours of You. The sixteenth album from the legendary band, this is one you will want to order. It is shaping up to be a terrific release:
“James release their 16th album album All The Colours Of You. Recorded in part before the Covid pandemic struck, the album was produced by the Grammy award-winning Jacknife Lee (Taylor Swift, U2, REM’s, Snow Patrol, The Killers). On production duties with James for the first time, he bought a fresh approach to their sound, working remotely from his studio, reimagining their early demos, and capturing the band in all their virtual glory. The result is a record with the most arena ready tracks of their 38-year career, the sound of one of Britain’s best bands, deconstructed and reassembled by one of the world’s most renowned producers”.
There are three more albums from 4th June I need to include. Liz Phair is a legendary artist who released the genius debut album, Exile in Guyville, in 1993. Soberish is an album that I would urge people to pre-order. Phair is an extraordinary songwriter who has lost none of her magic:
“Liz Phair releases Soberish, her highly-anticipated new album, and first collection of original material in eleven years. Produced by Phair’s longtime collaborator Brad Wood – known for helming Phair’s seminal albums Exile In Guyville, Whip-Smart, and whitechocolatespaceegg – Soberish is released via Chrysalis Records.
Soberish is a portrait of Phair in the present tense, taking all of the facets of her melodic output over the years and synthesizing them into a beautiful, perfect whole. She’s at the top of her game in the recording studio, drawing upon years of experience in television composition to weave through the songs daring and unexpected sound design. With Brad Wood’s exquisite engineering and masterful production, the result is a wholly fresh yet satisfyingly familiar sound that challenges on the first listen and seduces with each subsequent play through. The earworms are strong with this one!
None of the arrangements on Soberish are traditional songwriting standards, but the hooks are so catchy, the imagery so compelling, that the listener is drawn effortlessly along with the music. There are the off-kilter, unexpected guitar chords listeners will recognize as her signature style, a mainstay from her earliest work; the instantly knowable choruses of her most pop-friendly songs of the early 2000’s; the frank lyricism and storytelling that has opened doors for countless women picking up guitars and attempting to speak about their experiences.
If Liz Phair’s career has had a governing philosophy, we might take it as this: hold to the centre, swing around. This return, this new collection of songs, shows her at her finest: playful, inquisitive, uncompromising, but anchored. The centre can still hold”.
One of the most-anticipated albums of the year is from Wolf Alice. The London band won a Mercury Prize in 2018 with Vision of a Life. Blue Weekend looks like it will be another album that is going to scoop awards and earn the band huge acclaim. The first single from the album, Last Man on Earth, is among my favourite tracks of this year. Make sure that you pre-order a copy of Blue Weekend. It doesn’t seem like the creative and recording process of Blue Weekend was all smooth. That said, as we learn from an interview with DIY, there is a sense of hope and positivity to be found:
“But through the difficulties, and almost certainly as a result of those seemingly endless hours spent fine-tuning every second of their forthcoming third, ‘Blue Weekend’ looks set to do everything their hugely anticipatory fanbase could have hoped for. Gearing up for the release, there’s a genuine tangible excitement around the band that’s rare; everyone, as Theo grins, seems Team Wolf Alice. “I hope so,” he continues, “I was so excited when we announced it on the radio, I couldn’t feel my fucking fingers.” “Were you sitting on your hands?” Ellie quips.
Despite the pressure of following up such a game-changing record for the band, the quartet seem grounded and on top of it. “I’ve personally felt the same kind of pressure every time we’ve gone to make an album because we had quite a lot of expectation from [the beginning] of people being like, ‘Are you gonna prove yourself or are you gonna fuck it up?” suggests Joel. “So there is a weight to it, but it’s not really about the Mercury Prize or if your third album is going to be your ‘OK Computer’, you just wanna do the best that you can.”
And the best they can, it turns out, is an album that’s so good, even its authors can’t downplay it: the rarest accolade of them all. “I had a fry up here and we all listened to it on my speakers and were like, ‘This is sick’,” Theo chuckles.
“There’s a hopefulness to [the record] that I really hope doesn’t get lost. You know when you watch a film and you get left completely despondent, where even though it’s been an amazing piece of art, it always flavours the memory of it badly? Hopefulness gives it that sense of, ‘Oh, I’m always gonna like that thing’.”
We’ve got a good feeling the world is gonna like ‘Blue Weekend’ an awful lot”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Japanese Breakfast (Michelle Zauner)/PHOTO CREDIT: Ashley Gellman
Japanese Breakfast is a terrific young talent. Her third studio album, Jubilee, is one from 4th June you need to get a hold of. I am really looking ahead to the album coming out. It is going to be awesome. Go and pre-order Jubilee:
“From the moment she began writing her new album, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner knew that she wanted to call it Jubilee. After all, a jubilee is a celebration of the passage of time—a festival to usher in the hope of a new era in brilliant technicolor. Zauner’s first two albums garnered acclaim for the way they grappled with anguish; Psychopomp was written as her mother underwent cancer treatment, while Soft Sounds From Another Planet took the grief she held from her mother‘s death and used it as a conduit to explore the cosmos. Now, at the start of a new decade, Japanese Breakfast is ready to fight for happiness, an all-too-scarce resource in our seemingly crumbling world.
Jubilee finds Michelle Zauner embracing ambition and, with it, her boldest ideas and songs yet. Inspired by records like Bjork’s Homogenic, Zauner delivers bigness throughout - big ideas, big textures, colours, sounds and feelings. At a time when virtually everything feels extreme, Jubilee sets its sights on maximal joy, imagination, and exhilaration. It is, in Michelle Zauner’s words, “a record about fighting to feel. I wanted to re-experience the pure, unadulterated joy of creation...The songs are about recalling the optimism of youth and applying it to adulthood. They’re about making difficult choices, fighting ignominious impulses and honouring commitments, confronting the constant struggle we have with ourselves to be better people.”
Throughout Jubilee, Zauner pours her own life into the universe of each song to tell real stories, and allowing those universes, in turn, to fill in the details. Joy, change, evolution - these things take real time, and real effort. And Japanese Breakfast is here for it”.
There are three particular albums due on 11th June that you need to investigate. The first is from the iconic Garbage. Led by the sensational Shirley Manson, No Gods No Monsters is certainly worth pre-ordering. This is going to be one of 2021’s biggest albums:
“Garbage return with their seventh studio album No Gods No Masters.
“This is our seventh record, the significant numerology of which affected the DNA of its content: the seven virtues, the seven sorrows, and the seven deadly sins,” says Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson of the band’s ferocious new album No Gods No Masters and its twists and turns from capitalism and lust to loss and grief. “It was our way of trying to make sense of how fucking nuts the world is and the astounding chaos we find ourselves in. It’s the record we felt that we had to make at this time.”
Since releasing their eponymous debut album in 1995, Garbage has blazed a unique sonic trail, garnering critical acclaim and amassing a passel of hits as well as seven Grammy nominations along the way to 17 million albums sold.
2CD - Deluxe CD in clamshell box with 4 x exclusive artcards and 1 x poster (only available in this boxset). 2 x CD with second CD containing a collection of the band’s much loved covers released in the last eight years for Record Store Day, featuring Brody Dalle, Brian Aubert, Screaming Females and John Doe and Exene Cervenka as well as a cover of Bowie’s Starman”.
Melbourne’s King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard prepare to release their second album of 2021, Butterfly 3000. This is the eighteenth album from the super-prolific band1 There will be no singles from the album ahead of time. Keep an eye on their official website for details when you can buy the album (I am writing this on 16th May, so a link may become available soon). Also out on 11th June is Sleater-Kinney’s Path of Wellness. Do go and pre-order, as the U.S. band always bring something very special:
“Sleater-Kinney's 10th studio album was recorded in Portland, Oregon during the summer of 2020 ' against a backdrop of social unrest, devastating wildfires, and a raging pandemic. It's music for an imagined togetherness. This marks the first Sleater-Kinney album produced by the band members themselves. With their new release, the band deliver a provocative, powerful, and poetic statement when alternative music and culture could use it the most”.
There are a few albums from 25th June I want to finish off on. There is one from 18th June that you will not want to miss out on! Kings of Convenience’s Peace or Love is one you need to pre-order - it is the first album from Norwegians Erlend Øye and Eirik Glambek Bøe since 2009’s Declaration of Dependence:
“Peace or Love is the sound of two old friends exploring the latest phase of their lives together and finding new ways to capture that elusive magic. recorded across five years in five different cities, the album sounds as fresh as spring: 11 songs about life and love with the alluring beauty, purity and emotional clarity that you would expect from Kings of Convenience”.
Before wrapping up, 25th June offers up some treats. Boy from Michigan is the upcoming album from the incredible John Grant. With production from Cate Le Bon, I think it will be another hugely praised album from an artist who never drops a beat. Go and pre-order an album that is going to be a real gem:
“Produced by longtime friend Cate Le Bon, Boy from Michigan is Grant’s most autobiographical and melodic work to date. Grant stopped being a boy in Michigan aged twelve, when his family moved to Denver, Colorado, shifting rust to bible belt, a further vantage point to watch collective dreams unravel. Across 12 tracks, Grant lays out his past for careful cross-examination. In a decade of making records by himself, he has playfully experimented with mood, texture and sound, all the better for actualizing the seriousness of his thoughts. At one end of his musical rainbow, he is the battle-scarred piano-man, at the other, a robust electronic auteur. Boy from Michigan seamlessly marries both. With Le Bon at the helm, Grant pared back his zingers, maximizing the emotional impact of the melodies. A clarinet forms the bedrock of a song. One pre-chorus feels lifted from vintage Human League. There is a saxophone solo. Boy from Michigan ultimately swings between ambient and progressive, calm and livid.
The album’s narrative journey opens with Grant at his artistic prettiest, three songs drawn from his pre-Denver life (the Michigan Trilogy, as Grant calls them): the title track, “The Rusty Bull,” and “County Fair.” Each draws the listener in to a specific sense of place, before untangling its significance with a rich cast-list of local characters, often symbolizing the uncultivated faith of childhood. Elsewhere, tracks like “Mike and Julie” and “The Cruise Room” offer an affecting plunge deep into Grant’s late teenage years in Denver, while the midpoint of the album is highlighted by “Best in Me” and “Rhetorical Figure,” a pair of skittish, scholarly dance tunes that build on the lineage of Grant’s electropop heroes, Devo. Childhood as a horror narrative is the theme of “Dandy Star,” which observes a tiny Grant watching the Mia Farrow horror movie ‘See No Evil’ on an old family TV set, and finally on “The Only Baby” (released this January) Grant removes his razor blade from a pocket to cleanly slit the throat of Trump’s America, authoring a scathing epitaph to an era of acute national exposition”.
Another great album due on 25th June is from Lucy Dacus. Home Video is an album that I would encourage everyone to pre-order. Dacus is a tremendous songwriter. Rough Trade reveal more:
“This new gift from Dacus, her third album, was built on an interrogation of her coming-of-age years in Richmond, VA. Many songs start the way a memoir might—“In the summer of ’07 I was sure I’d go to heaven, but I was hedging my bets at VBS”—and all of them have the compassion, humour, and honesty of the best autobiographical writing. Most importantly and mysteriously, this album displays Dacus’s ability to use the personal as portal into the universal. “I can’t hide behind generalizations or fiction anymore,” Dacus says, though talking about these songs, she admits, makes her ache. That Home Video arrives at the end of this locked down, fearful era seems as preordained as the messages within. “I don’t necessarily think that I’m supposed to understand the songs just because I made them,” Dacus says, “I feel like there’s this person who has been in me my whole life and I’m doing my best to represent them.” After more than a year of being homebound, in a time when screens and video calls were sometimes our only form of contact, looking backward was a natural habit for many. If we haven’t learned it already, this album is a gorgeous example of the transformative power of vulnerability. Dacus’s voice, both audible and on the page, has a healer’s power to soothe and ground and reckon”.
Before getting to the final album out on 25th June, LoneLady (Julie Campbell) announced her third studio album, Former Things. It follows from 2015’s Hinterland. There is so much excitement and buzz around right now. Make sure you pre-order the much-anticipated album from the Manchester-based songwriter:
“Former Things is the follow up to acclaimed 2015 album Hinterland, which garnered praise from The Guardian, The Quietus, The Financial Times and more.
The Sound-world of Former Things was entirely crafted by LoneLady during her time spent in Somerset House Studios Rifle Range, and 18th century shooting range that has now been adapted into an experimental performance space.
The album was inspired by a seismic move for LoneLady who left her native Manchester, decamping to London's Somerset House Studios in search of a new cityscape to inspire her poised machine funk. First single "There Is No Logic" went straight onto the A list at BBC 6 Music.
Side A
A1. The Catcher / (There Is) No Logic
A2. Former Things / Time Time Time
Side B
B1. Threats / Fear Colours
B2. Treasure / Terminal Ground
The final album I recommend you get a hold of next month is SPELLLING’s The Turning Wheel. The third full-length by the Bay Area artist SPELLLING (Chrystia Cabral), I wouldn’t want people to pass this by. Go and pre-order it, because this is an album that promises a lot of beauty and memorability:
“Red velvet curtains draw back to reveal a cosmic wheel of fortune, floating in the deep black star-studded theater of infinite space. A whirl of timbres, personalities, and stories. The Turning Wheel revolves around themes of human unity, the future, divine love and the enigmatic ups and downs of being a part of this carnival called Life. Venturing to push the boundaries of her primarily synth-based work, Spellling took on the ambitious task of orchestrating and self-producing an album that features an ensemble of 31 collaborating musicians. The Turning Wheel incorporates a vast range of rich acoustic sounds that cast Spelling’s work into vibrant new dimensions. The double LP is split into two halves - “Above” and “Below.” Lush string quartet shimmer combines with haunting banjo and wandering bassoon leads, as the album progresses from the more jubilant, warm, and dreamy mood of the “Above” tracks to the more chilling and gothic tone of the “Below” tracks. This progression is anchored by Spellling’s familiar bewitching vocal style that emphasizes the theatrical and folkloric heart of her songwriting.
These are the album due next month that I think people should investigate. Of course, there are many others that might tickle the fancy. If you need some musical accompaniment through June, then I think the albums above…
SHOULD have you sorted.