FONTAINES D.C. – ‘A HERO’S DEATH’

‘A HERO’S DEATH’, the second album from Fontaines D.C. is out now on Partisan Records and it’s a heroic legacy

For many, maybe nearly everyone, the perception of time has changed rapidly in the last year. Everyone’s going through their own paces visibly, and behind the scenes. Yet again, in the face of adversary, a loss in income, security and earnings, many artists are using that as fuel to continue creating, to continue sharing their gifts with the world. That is very much the case, for the Irish band, Fontaines D.C.

They haven’t just jumped out from the music scene, but since the release of their debut album ‘Dogrel’, their visibility has expanded exponentially. From a world tour (which sadly – but understandably – has been postponed in some places, to receiving a Mercury Prize nomination, the legacy this band is creating has a solid and stoic foundation.

I think most of us can agree, that when a debut release from an artist has amazing success, there’s pressure (from within and without) to carry on maintaining that standard. There are many one hit wonders on the scene, and Fontaines D.C. are anything but. Their second album ‘A Hero’s Death’ has taken a new direction, evolving the poetry, the messages, while weaving in aspects of their solid signature sound. 

This album is explosive.

‘A HERO’S DEATH’ is currently in a chart battle with Taylor Swift’s latest LP, again, solidifying their mark. I think it’s hilarious, that some of Taylor’s fans (not fair to assume some of her listeners don’t listen to other genres), will be getting irked, seeing this dynamic punk band making Ms Swift sweat by the hour, realising she has serious competition. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate the work Taylor has put into her work as an artist, but the messages conveyed in the songs from Fontaines is more honest, more potent, more direct. 

Considering the unstable, unusual and transformative time period that we’re all currently living and experiencing, I think many are seeking music that will be candid about the human experience, our perception of the world and psyche; wholesome, but with lots of hope, potential and possibilities. 

Whether you’re sitting indoors listening to the rain and reading a book, or seeking some nature and sunshine, this is definitely an album that encapsulates all the elements and factors that have led us to where we currently are. 

Side note: this is displayed in their recently published manifesto. So profound, you can read it left to right, vertically down, or vertically up, revealing a new layer of comprehension each time.

‘Dogrel’ was the album of initiation. ‘A HERO’S DEATH’ is the album of introspection; what you’d expect to perhaps hear on the pilgrimage of one’s soul. The band’s heritage and their pride for it certainly shine through. Their ancestors have heard the call. Don’t be surprised if you feel your own ancestors around you, when you listen too. It’s time we rise. Together. As one. 

I promise you, buying a ticket for their upcoming tour will be worth every penny. And remember, life ain’t always empty.

‘A HERO’S DEATH’: I Don’t Belong, Love Is The Main Thing, Televised Mind, A Lucid Dream, You Said, Oh Such A Spring, A Hero’s Death, Living In America, I Was Not Born, Sunny, No – Buy/Stream: https://www.fontainesdc.com/ahd/

KYLE KRONE ‘ALONE IN PARADISE’

Interview with charismatic, award-winning purveyor of bitter-sweet melodies). New single ‘Alone In Paradise’, shimmers with a true story, eloquently. 

As founder and frontman of indie rock band The Shys, musician, composer and producer, Californian, Kyle, took LA by storm, then joined his musical hero’s (incl Talking Heads, The Cure, and The Smiths) on Sire Records. Krone’s songs featured on multiple TV and movies. The Shys also topped Billboard’s US Garage Rock Charts.

After extensive touring, a solo career and sonic shift earned new fans (Kings Of Leon included), impressive record sales and myriad co-writing partnerships. A good soul, Kyle Krone is on some musical ride! Kelly Munro joins in…

Kelly : “Tell us, how long have you been making music?

Kyle : “Twenty three years”.

What have been some of your highlights so far on your musical journey?

“Making music is an enduring highlight for me. Music is my angel, saves me over and over again.”

Your latest single is called ‘Alone In Paradise’, who would you pick to be alone in paradise with – and why?

“My loved ones… 

When you dedicate your life to something like music, its enormously significant to have supportive friends and family around you because like anything worth doing its no easy feat to attempt to make this thing your life and make a living doing it. So I derive a great deal of joy from all the people around me who are supportive encouraging and understanding.”

Tell us more about that single. Is there a story behind it?

Listen to Alone in Paradise on Spotify. Kyle Krone · Song · 2020.

“It’s this bitter-sweet love letter to my life in Central America. I think anyone who has moved to a foreign country on their own will understand this particular kind of loneliness. 

Its a long story but the cliff notes go something like this… After many years of living on the road and in the studio I needed a change of pace, I wanted to move to a foreign country and live a different kind of life, more peace, more nature, more quiet. Sort of a live off the land type thing…

I found that in a little remote fishing village in Central America for the better part of three years. I lived simply, little apartment on the beach, an old motorcycle, a nylon string guitar, a couple surfboards and a lot of books and journals. Life there can almost feel like going back in time, technology and status has a much less significant impact on daily life and you’re surrounded by raw natural beauty and you find yourself with a lot more free time just to think, feel, read and write, for the lack of a better description life is just a lot more simple there for me. You find yourself more in tune with yourself.

You slow down, the noise dissipates and its like you can hear a lot more clearly and you get a deeper sense of what really matters. There also exists this sort of bittersweet element of missing all your loved ones or experiencing all this beauty on your own and then you have visitors and you share it and its incredible and then they leave and its its own kind of emotional challenge.

The song was born out of those experiences and musically inspired by the landscape culture and geography. There is this kind of emotional inventory you take on yourself and there’s some voice in me that drives me to keep pushing with my music, I have too many ideas, too many things to say, I feel too much and it’s as if life in the tropics just let me rest and recuperate and eventually I kind of felt like that life let me go and I feel all this desire to come up here to California and surrender myself to my music”.

We hear you’ve lived in Los Angeles. Tell us about life there…

“I moved there when I was eighteen, for a little while and ended up back down south at the beach. The city life thing has an early expiration date with me. I prefer a slower pace, less people and more of a natural environment. I lived there off and on from twenty to twenty-five, mostly because of music. 

I like the east side, the little neighborhoods, the cafes, the record stores, the bohemians, artists etc. The beach is also cool, Topanga, certain parts of Malibu. Every-time I lived there it was about music, making records there, playing shows there. It can be really exciting all the action that comes along with it. Most days were spent in the studio when I lived in LA and then the nightlife of playing shows and going out on the town. These days I visit to surf.”

What albums do you never get tired of listening to?

“Anything from Astrud Gilberto, Louis Armstrong, Stan Getz, Robert Francis, The Strokes, Scott Walker, Bob Marley, Leonard Cohen.

Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of French stuff. Polo And Pan, Parcels, Benjamin Biolay. I found this amazing playlist called Cote’D”Azur cause I had written a song with that title and wanted to see how many others were out there and came across this insane playlist and its so good.”

What can we expect from you this year?  

“I started a new band called Casual Vice with my very talented friend Brandon Hoogenboom and we recruited more talented friends Danny Franks and Billy Yarbrough. 

We have some singles out and our debut EP comes out in early August. I am in the studio every day writing recording and playing and making art and visuals. I work with my friend Wes Chiller on most of his stuff, we’ve got a new single coming out, its one of my favorite collaborations. I co-wrote a song with Eagle Rock Gospel Singers for their new album. Mark Batson and I have made a lot of new music for various film and tv projects that will hopefully see the light of day sooner than later. I am making this blissed out instrumental music under the name Floating Islands kind of in the vein of Brian Eno stuff and I’ve been releasing new solo singles. 

I don’t plan on slowing down anytime soon. For the past three or four years I’ve essentially been working every single day on music and its been insane and pretty amazing, I’d like to claim that I have some kind of otherworldly work ethic but the truth is I am just obsessed to to achieve the stuff I hear in my head. I’m excited, I feel really positive about the future, feels good that folks are listening.”

Pre-save Casual Vice‘s EP (out August) on Spotify

https://kylekrone.info/

Words: Kelly Munro

BLAB: ‘R.I.P.’

Heeoojazfuq single!

Released on the Essexual Cool Thing Records, ‘R.I.P.’, the debut single from Blab, has got the ROCK swagger of myriad main stage strutters with youth’s literate suss rapping over with bite. Ice-cool as Johnny Marr guitar. BOLD never gets old. This rock is boulder.

Kinda liked it from first listen. Kinda freaking LOVE it, ‘cos I went back, and again. Ha ha. That first listen evoked a memory of Polly Harvey (from Yeovil in the black leather jacket and docs) when she debuted on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury and a hundred thousand jaws dropped at P.J.Harvey’s bright pink cat suit. I enjoy being vintage but am thrilled that new heritage is being made. Blab is definitely a 50ft Queenie.

The musicians who are a product of two decades of popular culture amplified by the world wide web have no boundaries of inspiration. Music, Art, Books, Politics and working things out for themselves into new thrills and hope for us all. Dystopian pop twisted into The Streets with punk’s DIY arsekick. 

Aah, that sign off line…

Having supported Rat Boy as a teen, composer, vocalist and guitarist Fran Murray a.k.a. Blab is building her own reputation (rapidly) with this real contender. It’s a year of artists having to stand up, gig-less, on the strength of their skills, charisma and creativity. Straight on the must-catch-a-show bucket list! 

Lyrically a knowing wit-spit of frustration, ‘R.I.P.’ is a helluva way to debut. As isolation creation videos go, this is DIY beyond lockdown’s inhibitors;

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

I wish Earth could say RIP to billionaires and other planet/humanity fuckers. The reality of everything could drive you screeching crazy if, every now and then, you don’t listen to massive freakers like ‘R.I.P.’ – People, turn up this medicine!

Added to TheZineUK’s #NewerWave Rocks Spotify Playlist, too.

Words: Caffy St Luce

THOMAS BARTLETT; ‘SHELTER’

Available 24th July 2020 (on Modern Records/BMG), Thomas Bartlett’s debut solo album ‘Shelter’ contains eight piano nocturnes, inspired, he says, by the work of Chopin, Satie, Ravel, Talk Talk and Keith Jarrett. He recorded it in his home studio in New York over two days at the beginning of lockdown as a way of creating something calming.  Thomas explains:  “There’s a space that I really love to be in, as a listener, and as a player.  It’s a feeling of arrival, and comfort, and peace.  It’s an easy place for me to get to, but one that I’m suspicious of because of that.”  He was initially unsure whether the songs were good enough to share, but was quickly convinced by friends.

For those who do not know the name, Thomas Bartlett has been a successful musician, composer, and producer for twenty years.  He has performed as Doveman, with many bands including Antony and the Johnsons, David Byrne, Frightened Rabbit, and his own group, The Gloaming.  As a producer, he has worked with a long list of artists including Glen Hansard, Martha and Rufus Wainwright, Norah Jones, Yoko Ono, Joan Wasser, and Sufjan Stevens, with whom he earned award nominations for “Mystery of Love”.  However, this debut album is something slightly different, featuring as it does just a solo piano, and being straight from his heart; it is inspired by his partner as well as his lifelong love of roses (all of the song titles are the names of different varieties of roses).

Right from the opening notes of ‘Lucida’ Thomas gifts the listener with a beautifully melancholic melody that drips with a sadness and longing, which even the fast arpeggio runs cannot shake, played as it is at a wistfully pedestrian tempo.  The pace somehow slows further on ‘Rubrifolia’ and you appreciate what the composer meant when he describes the album as ‘immersive’; you slip into these songs like you would getting under sheets, or onto a big sofa but it still does require your attention.  It borders on being ambient but is definitely not background music, there is too much movement in the melodies to let it just float over you.

The repetition of phrases in ‘Xanthina’ eloquently expresses a nervous person trying to say something and starting a sentence over and over until it finally flows from them.  The timing, with the pauses and breaks and repeated melodic lines is breath-taking.  The song really feels like a conversation as it moves from one voice to another and it is stunning how one instrument can evoke so much in the listener’s mind. 

The playing is of course excellent throughout, but the attention to tone and dynamics shows the benefits of being the producer, composer and player, as Thomas ekes out even more emotion from less complex passages.  Even when there is almost nothing going on, more information about the mood is being presented through the timbre and space captured by this master producer and engineer.  

Thomas mentions his inspiration comes from late era Talk Talk and he is following Mark Hollis’ advice almost to the letter: “Before you play two notes, learn how to play one note… And don’t play one note unless you’ve got a reason to play it.”  It is clear that Thomas has every reason to play these notes.

There is light and shade throughout the album and the tempo increases on ‘Multiflora’ driven by the constantly shifting left hand part.  ‘Moschato’ has a similar rhythmic force in its left hand part but is more withdrawn in its performance.  ‘Phoenicia’ moves beautifully, with key changes and modulations masterfully constructed.  Moments of discord are effortlessly resolved but their presence serves to leave the listener not knowing where the melody will shift to next.  

The final minutes of closing track ‘Rugosa’ draw the listener in closer, I can’t tell whether this is due to the damper pedal not being used or a change in microphone position, but the air and space in the room seems suddenly to close in.  It’s as if at the end of album, musician and listener are not separated by space; music always has been a beautiful way of bringing people closer together and Thomas has demonstrated this perfectly with such a striking ending to his album.

The production and sound achieved reminds me of Paul Buchanan’s solo album “Mid-air”.  The piano is closely mic’d so you hear the hammers on strings and the creak of the pedals; I love this style of recording solo instruments, as you get a feeling you are in the room with the musician, rather than listening from a distance.  Pure recordings of a piano sound have their place but can be a little sterile; here however, the production puts you sitting on the piano bench with Thomas.  That said, if you want that pure sound, you will be forever annoyed with each squeak of the keys and groan of the damper pedal.

The album may have been conceived out of a feeling of isolation, fear and doubt, but it is an emotional and positive listening experience.

Words: Alan Neilson

BALCONY FESTIVAL 007: BONDING.

For the Carers UK charity, on Saturday 18th July 2020 from 6pm GMT – Balcony Online Festival Number 7

Katie Malco – God Is In The TV Zine. Stage
Vincent Bugozi – Benumu Stage
Nervous Twitch – Reckless Yes Stage
David Woodcock – Joyzine Stage
Mouse – LOUD WOMEN Stage
Gris-de-Lin – Sonic Tonic Stage
KJ & The Fox – GigSlutz Stage
Dan O’Farrell & The Difference Engine – Quarantini – Live Virtual Bar
Donate to Carers UK: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/balconyfestival7

Who cares for the ever essential Carers of our society, – what would we be without them? They are so appreciated, and Carers UK care, that’s who.  
https://www.carersuk.org/ Give thanks/support, and if you can, please give money.

These events are exclusive and personal performances from high quality, selected artists via a coalition of key media, industry mover shakers and future makers.

BalconyOnlineFest #Preview (DIY/audio quality!) highly pleasurable and informal chat with aural sunshine, Vincent Bugozi, playing the #Benumu Stage of Balco...

SEBA! – musical joy bringer, Vincent Bugozi will be appearing on the Benumu Stage. Part of Team Balcony, hear more about this pro active music platform from an artists perspective, plus what to expect at Balcony 7 and raise a smile in this quick festival preview interview. Vincent aces it. Interviewer’s very DIY! Luckily, our welcoming Festival Host, Louise Schofield, is a seasoned and acclaimed media professional!

In fact, Balcony Festival is always teaming up! Get 10% discount with the code BALCONY10 on festival refreshments from the  #PubInABox Signature Brew. The Eastenders-land based outfit have been we’re hiring musicians who have had their tours cancelled to help with deliveries.

Signature Brew create music-inspired beers and collaborate with musicians. Kinda the perfect fit for the spirit of Balcony Festival. The Live Streams involved music world chats and virtual meet ups. So hopefully seeya Saturday evening. As ever, “down the front”! Here:

Created by independent UK blogs and promoters, Balcony Festival aims to raise much needed funds for Carers UK Donate here: https://www.justgiving.com/fundrai...

Words: Caffy St Luce