Gang Of Four - 'Entertainment!' and 'Solid Gold' Remastered LP/CD Editions Out Today
Two of Gang of Four’s critical early works, 'Entertainment! '(1979) and 'Solid Gold' (1981), emastered from the original analog tapes are available today on LP and compact disc.
'Entertainment!'and 'Solid Gold' are also collected in 'GANG OF FOUR: 77-81', available today on for the first time as a CD box set.
(The CD version of the box will not include the badges or the C90 cassette included in the LP edition. The demo recordings will instead be made available through a download code.)
stream / purchase : 'Entertainment!'
stream / purchase : 'Solid Gold'
stream / purchase 'Gang of Four '77-'81'
A new tribute album, 'The Problem of Leisure: A Celebration of Andy Gill and Gang of Four', will be released in May via Gill Music and features contributions from Flea and John Frusciante, Warpaint, La Roux, and more.
Gang of Four '77-81 online :
website
Gang Of Four / Matador Records
Gang of Four official Facebook
Gang of Four official Twitter
Gang of Four official Instagram
Spoon - 'Telephono' 25th Anniversary, 25% Off Sale
today marks the 25th anniversary of Spoon’s debut album, ‘Telephono’.
Grab it on your format of choice for 25% off now thru Sunday night.
Spoon online :
Official Site
Bandcamp
Mdou Moctar - "Live In Niamey, Niger", Livestream Tonight at 8pm EST
(poster art : David Coltun)
Mdou Moctar's live streamed concert, Mdou Moctar – Live in Niamey, Niger. premieres tonight at 8pm eastern. Filmed late last year, the set features Moctar’s full band including Mikey Coltun (bass + production), Souleymane Ibrahim (drums), and Ahmoudou Madassane (guitar).
presave / preorder 'Afrique Victime'
Mdou Moctar online
Official site
VIDEO : Lucy Dacus - "Hot & Heavy" on CBS' "The Late Show WIth Stephen Colbert"
Last night, Lucy Dacus and her band performed the new song, "Hot & Heavy" on CBS' "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert". "Hot & Heavy" is the second single from Dacus' forthcoming 3rd album, 'Home Video', coming June 25.
stream/download "Hot & Heavy"
presave/preorder 'Home Video'
Lucy Dacus On Tour (tickets on sale, Friday April 16 at 10am local time)
Friday, September 10 The National, Richmond VA * - co-headlining with Julien Baker
Saturday, September 11 The National, Richmond VA * - co-headlining with Julien Baker
Monday, September 13 Haw River Ballroom, Saxapahaw NC %
Tuesday, September 14 Terminal West, Atlanta GA %
Wednesday, September 15 Brooklyn Bowl, Nashville TN %
Friday, September 17 Trees, Dallas TX %
Saturday, September 18 White Oak Music Hall (Downstairs), Houston TX %
Sunday, September 19 Scoot Inn, Austin TX %
Monday, September 20 Paper Tiger, San Antonio TX %
Wednesday, September 22 191 Toole, Tucson AZ %
Friday, September 24 The Theatre at Ace Hotel, Los Angeles CA %
Saturday, September 25 The Observatory OC, Santa Ana CA
Monday, September 27 The Fillmore, San Francisco, CA %
Thursday, September 30 Hollywood Theatre, Vancouver BC $
Friday, October 1 Wonder Ballroom, Portland OR $
Saturday, October 2 Neptune Theatre, Seattle WA $
Tuesday, October 5 Urban Lounge, Salt Lake City UT $
Friday, October 8 The Englert Theatre, Iowa City IA $
Saturday, October 9 First Avenue, Minneapolis MN $
Monday, October 11 The Vic Theatre, Chicago IL
Tuesday, October 12 Newport Music Hall, Columbus OH $
Thursday, October 14 The Opera House, Toronto ON $
Friday, October 15 L’Astral, Montreal QC $
Saturday, October 16 House of Blues, Boston MA $
Monday, October 18 Higher Ground, Burlington VT $
Wednesday, October 20 Union Transfer, Philadelphia PA ^
Friday, October 22 9:30 Club, Washington DC $
Monday, October 25 Brooklyn Steel, Brooklyn NY
* co headlining with Julien Baker
% w/ Bachelor
$ w/ Bartees Strange
^ w/ Shamir
Lucy Dacus Online
Website
Lucy Dacus - 'Home Video' Coming June 25
"Hot & Heavy", Directed by Lucy Dacus & Marin Leong, Co-directed by Jordan Rodericks.
(photo : Ebru Yildiz)
Lucy Dacus's long awaited 3rd album, 'Home Video', is out June 25th, and today releases the lead single/video, “Hot & Heavy,” which she’ll perform tonight on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert". Additionally, she has confirmed a September/October 2021 North American tour (dates below). The follow-up to 2018’s 'Historian 'and her 2016 debut 'No Burden', 'Home Video' was built on Dacus’ interrogation of her coming-of-age years in Richmond, Virginia. Many of the songs start the way a memoir might, and all of them have the compassion, humor, and honesty of the best autobiographical writing. These songs capture that specific moment in time growing up where emotions and relationships start becoming more complex. They capture the joys, the excitement, the confusion, and even the heartbreak of going through the process of discovering who you are and where people fit in your life and where you fit in theirs. Most importantly and mysteriously, this album displays Dacus’s ability to use the personal as portal into the universal.
“I thought I was writing ‘Hot & Heavy’ about an old friend, but I realized along the way that it was just about me outgrowing past versions of myself,” explains Dacus. “So much of life is submitting to change and saying goodbye even if you don't want to. Now whenever I go to places that used to be significant to me, it feels like trespassing the past. I know that the teen version of me wouldn't approve of me now, and that's embarrassing and a little bit heartbreaking, even if I know intellectually that I like my life and who I am.”
The accompanying, self-directed video was shot in the historic Byrd Theatre in Richmond where Dacus often saw movies during her adolescent years.
“I knew I wanted to include some of the home video footage that my dad took of me while I was growing up. I wanted to visualize the moment when you first reflect on your childhood, which I think can also be the moment that childhood is over. For me, I feel like there was a hard switch when I started releasing music, when my identity went from being a personal project to something publicly observed and reflected. I asked my family (shoutout to my grandma) and some of my closest friends to be extras because they're the people that knew me before that switch. I may have dropped out of film school, but I still love making movies and had a really fun time directing this one.”
stream/download "Hot & Heavy"
presave/preorder 'Home Video'
Home Video Tracklist
01. Hot & Heavy
02. Christine
03. First Time
04. VBS
05. Cartwheel
06. Thumbs
07. Going Going Gone
08. Partner in Crime
09. Brando
10. Please Stay
11. Triple Dog Dare
'Home Video' : a Foreword
There are a thousand truisms about home and childhood, none of them true but all of them honest. It’s natural to want to tidy those earliest memories into a story so palatable and simple that you never have to read again. A home video promises to give your memories back with a certificate of fact— but the footage isn’t the feeling. Who is just out of frame? What does the soft focus obscure? How did the recording itself change the scene?
Some scrutinize the past and some never look back and Lucy Dacus, a lifelong writer and close reader, has long been the former sort. “The past doesn’t change,” Dacus said on a video call during that interminable winter of video calls. “Even if a memory is of a time I didn’t feel safe, there’s safety in looking at it, in its stability.”
This new gift from Dacus, 'Home Video', her third album, was built on an interrogation of her coming-of-age years in Richmond, Virginia. 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, humor, 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.
While there’s a nostalgic tint to much of Dacus’s work, the obliquely told stories in past songs are depicted here with greater specificity. "Triple Dog Dare" recounts young, queer love complicated and forbidden by religion. The toxic relationship depicted in "Partner in Crime" is filled with pining, deceit, and meeting curfew. (“My heart’s on my sleeve/ it’s embarrassing/ the pulpy thing, beating.”) "Christine" is an elegiac ballad about a close friend vanishing into an inhibiting relationship.
As is often the case with Dacus, these songs are a study in contrast. In "Hot & Heavy " she sings powerfully about blushing and diffidence, while the song "Thumbs" contains an elegant fantasy about the brutal murder of a close friend’s no-good father. After performing "Thumbs" during the nearly nonstop tours for her first two albums, it quickly became a white whale to Dacus fans, who have been counting the days until its release just as we’ve all awaited the end of this endless quarantine.
While all that touring made Lucy long to re-root in her hometown, her sudden acclaim filled Richmond with funhouse distortions of herself. People she didn’t know were looking at her like they knew her better than she knew herself. Strangers showed up at her front door. “You used to be so sweet,” she sings on the opening track, “now you're a firecracker on a crowded street.” That truism, both true and false—you can’t go home again—seemed to taunt her at the very time she needed home the most.
In August 2019, after a too much touring then a month of silence, it was time to go back to Trace Horse Studio in Nashville—Jacob Blizard, Collin Pastore, and Jake Finch, her loyal friends and collaborators were at her side again. Dacus’s boygenius bandmates, Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker sang a loving chorus on "Please Stay" and "Going Going Gone" while each recorded solo songs during the same session. Dacus’s resulting record—full of arrhythmic heartbeat percussion and backgrounds of water-warped pipe organ— was mixed by Shawn Everett and mastered by Bob Ludwig.
Loyal Dacus listeners may notice that the melodies here are lower and more contained, at times feeling as intimate as a whisper. The vulnerability of these songs, so often about the intense places where different sorts of love meet and warp, required this approach. “When you told me ‘bout your first time, a soccer player at the senior high,” she sings in "Cartwheel", “I felt my body crumple to the floor. Betrayal like I’d never felt before.” Yet in "Partner in Crime", Dacus marries content and form in a strikingly different way, using uncharacteristic autotune in a song about duplicity and soft coercion.
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 into a screen, “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.
—Catherine Lacey, February 2021, Chicago, IL
Lucy Dacus On Tour
Friday, September 10 The National, Richmond VA * - co-headlining with Julien Baker
Saturday, September 11 The National, Richmond VA * - co-headlining with Julien Baker
Monday, September 13 Haw River Ballroom, Saxapahaw NC %
Tuesday, September 14 Terminal West, Atlanta GA %
Wednesday, September 15 Brooklyn Bowl, Nashville TN %
Friday, September 17 Trees, Dallas TX %
Saturday, September 18 White Oak Music Hall (Downstairs), Houston TX %
Sunday, September 19 Scoot Inn, Austin TX %
Monday, September 20 Paper Tiger, San Antonio TX %
Wednesday, September 22 191 Toole, Tucson AZ %
Friday, September 24 The Theatre at Ace Hotel, Los Angeles CA %
Saturday, September 25 The Observatory OC, Santa Ana CA
Monday, September 27 The Fillmore, San Francisco, CA %
Thursday, September 30 Hollywood Theatre, Vancouver BC $
Friday, October 1 Wonder Ballroom, Portland OR $
Saturday, October 2 Neptune Theatre, Seattle WA $
Tuesday, October 5 Urban Lounge, Salt Lake City UT $
Friday, October 8 The Englert Theatre, Iowa City IA $
Saturday, October 9 First Avenue, Minneapolis MN $
Monday, October 11 The Vic Theatre, Chicago IL
Tuesday, October 12 Newport Music Hall, Columbus OH $
Thursday, October 14 The Opera House, Toronto ON $
Friday, October 15 L’Astral, Montreal QC $
Saturday, October 16 House of Blues, Boston MA $
Monday, October 18 Higher Ground, Burlington VT $
Wednesday, October 20 Union Transfer, Philadelphia PA ^
Friday, October 22 9:30 Club, Washington DC $
Monday, October 25 Brooklyn Steel, Brooklyn NY
* w/ Julien Baker, Special Guests
% w/ Bachelor
$ w/ Bartees Strange
^ w/ Shamir
Lucy Dacus Online
Website
Spoon - "The Way We Get By", featured on "Shameless" Series FInale, 'Kill The Moonlight', 25% Off Sale
To celebrate the exceedingly prominent placement of Spoon’s “The Way We Get By” (as rendered by the show’s cast) in last night’s series finale of Showime’s ‘Shameless’, ‘Kill The Moonlight’ is on sale for 25% off the LP and CD versions now thru Friday the 17th.
"The Way We Get By", directed by Steve Hanft
purchase 'Kill The Moonlight' on LP or CD, 25% off until April 17
Spoon online :
Official Site
Bandcamp