Landscape Dream is Abram Shook’s follow-up to 2014’s Sun Marquee, an album VICE called "…pleasant as fuck" and Texas Monthly called "…compelling, weird, and lovely." Applying what he learned through writing and recording Sun Marquee, Landscape Dream demonstrates how much Shook’s songwriting and production acumen has sharpened over the past year. Stereogum says the first single “Understood” is “…dreamy…refreshing…” You can check out for yourself below.
“Understood”
To celebrate their new album Infinite House, Ava Luna premiered the record’s first single “Billz”, which you can check out via Pitchfork or stream below. The band has two release shows planned in their native Brooklyn and will be spending most of the spring and summer on the road. Details for those tours will be announced shortly.
“Billz”
Native Texan Travis Johnson has lived, worked, and created in the ever evolving Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn for over a decade. His band Grooms practiced, and recorded at Brooklyn’s Death By Audio for seven years (first as Muggabears, then as Grooms) before they were forced out of their spiritual and literal home. A little over a year before, with the band’s income not providing enough money to support any of it’s members, bass player and co-writer Emily Ambruso went on hiatus from the band, leaving Johnson as the only original member. Despite these unfortunate blows, Johnson soldiered on, soon recruiting Jay Heiselmann on bass, and actor/comedian Steve Levine on drums.
“Doctor M”
Erik Hall worked patiently and solitarily for four years to craft Driver, his sophomore album as In Tall Buildings. Raised in downtown Chicago, Hall played drums and guitar in high school rock bands, and then went on to study percussion and audio engineering at the University of Michigan. While in college he joined the avant afro-funk band NOMO and met His Name is Alive’s Warn Defever, who produced many of the band’s albums. As a multi-instrumentalist and producer Hall eventually went on to record and tour with several groups, including old friends His Name is Alive and, more recently, dream-pop duo Wild Belle, performing the rhythm section tracks and lending an engineering hand to their Columbia Records debut.
“Flare Gun”
Nashville’s Stone Jack Jones is back with Love & Torture, which will be out this spring. Like 2014’s Ancestor which The Quietus called “…breathtakingly insightful and poetic…”, and SPIN called "…undeniably compelling…" Love & Torture features Kurt Wagner and Patty Griffin, and was produced by Roger Mountenot. You can check out the first single "Circumstance." +
For 14 years, Elephant Micah’s Joe O’Connell has quietly self-released his work on CD-R and limited LPs. Despite the project’s almost secretive status, Elephant Micah’s songs caught the attention of NPR, WIRE, and Consequence of Sound, and have been championed by an impressive cohort of like-minded artists, including Jason Molina, Patterson Hood, and Hiss Golden Messenger. You can listen to "Slow Time Vultures", which premiered on The Wall Street Journal. +
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith studied voice, classical guitar, and piano at Berklee College of Music. She employed many of the skills she refined in college in her indie-folk band Ever Isles, but a fateful encounter with a neighbor who lent her a Buchla 100 synthesizer convinced her to shift her focus to analog synthesizer compositions. Starting with rhythmic patterns and melodic pulses, she began sculpting lush and exciting worlds of sound. You can check out "Sundry" from her forthcoming album Euclid. +
Glass Ghost’s founding members Eliot Krimsky and Michael Johnson have kept busy since the release of Idol Omen in 2009. Johnson joined Dirty Projectors as their new drummer, Krimsky has been collaborating with Here We Go Magic on keys, and the duo welcomed Tyler Wood and Aerial East to the group. LYFE features Joan Wasser of Joan As Policewoman, Nat Baldwin of Dirty Projectors, Jane Herships (formerly of TEEN), and Brian Betancourt of Hospitality. Check out "Triangle" which premiered on Stereogum. +
We’re proud to announce the deluxe reissue of Balmorhea’s debut album. The audio has been remastered, and the packaging will feature gold foil artwork. In conjunction with the reissue, we’re releasing two new songs on a limited edition colored vinyl 7″ titled HEIR. On HEIR the band returns to the simple structures and melancholic tone that colored their first recordings. You can check out "HEIR I" which premiered on The Atlantic. The band will perform two shows in Texas before Rob Lowe and Michael Muller head to Europe to tour as a duo. +
