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Wednesday, March 28, 2018
Joan Shelley
The
stunning, self-titled fourth album from the Kentucky singer, songwriter,
and guitarist Joan Shelley began, surprisingly, with a fiddle.
In the summer of 2014, Shelley fell for “Hog of the Forsaken,” a bowed rollick at the end of Michael Hurley’s wayward folk circus, Long Journey, then nearly forty years old. Hurley’s voice, it seemed to Shelley, clung to the fiddle’s melody, dipping where it dipped and climbing where it climbed. This was a small, significant revelation, prompting the guitarist to trade temporarily six strings for four and, as she puts it, “try to play like Michael.” That is, she wanted to sing what she played, to play what she sang. She tried it, for a spell, with the fiddle.
“Turns out, I wasn’t very good at fiddle,” remembers Shelley, chuckling. “But I took that idea back to the guitar and tried that same method. I did it as a game to make these songs, a way to find another access point.”
But that wasn’t the end of the trials. After collaborating and touring with ace guitarist Nathan Salsburg for so many years, Shelley decided to put her entire guitar approach to the test, too. Each day, she would twist and turn into a different tuning... more
In the summer of 2014, Shelley fell for “Hog of the Forsaken,” a bowed rollick at the end of Michael Hurley’s wayward folk circus, Long Journey, then nearly forty years old. Hurley’s voice, it seemed to Shelley, clung to the fiddle’s melody, dipping where it dipped and climbing where it climbed. This was a small, significant revelation, prompting the guitarist to trade temporarily six strings for four and, as she puts it, “try to play like Michael.” That is, she wanted to sing what she played, to play what she sang. She tried it, for a spell, with the fiddle.
“Turns out, I wasn’t very good at fiddle,” remembers Shelley, chuckling. “But I took that idea back to the guitar and tried that same method. I did it as a game to make these songs, a way to find another access point.”
But that wasn’t the end of the trials. After collaborating and touring with ace guitarist Nathan Salsburg for so many years, Shelley decided to put her entire guitar approach to the test, too. Each day, she would twist and turn into a different tuning... more
credits
released May 5, 2017JOAN SHELLEY / guitars, vocals, dobro, baritone ukulele
NATHAN SALSBURG / acoustic and electric guitars
JAMES ELKINGTON / piano, Dobro, organ
JEFF TWEEDY / bass, Theravox, electric guitar
SPENCER TWEEDY / drums and percussion
Produced by Jeff Tweedy.
Engineered and mixed by Tom Schick at The Loft in Chicago December 2016. Design Lacey Guthrie. Cover photo by Ebru Yildiz. Mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound.
Songs © joan shelley (BMI). No Quarter 2017 NOQ05
Bully
While Bully’s 2015 debut 'Feels Like' tumbled headlong into the precarious nature of Alicia Bognanno’s young adult life, its follow-up Losing is their first for Sub Pop (which in many ways feels like their spiritual home; Bully’s sound is an outgrowth of the bands the label championed in the late ‘80s and ‘90s).
Losing is a document of the complexity of growth: navigating breakups with sensitivity, learning not to flee from your troubles but to face them down no matter how messy they may be (“Well, this isn’t the summer I wanted,” she muses on “Blame,” before admitting that she’s trying to “cut down on booze and you”).
Written as the group slowed down from touring constantly and Bognanno attempted to adjust to how different a home schedule is from a road schedule, her songwriting has matured from the quick one-two punches of Feels Like to tracks that contemplate the necessity of space in both song structure and emotion.
Bognanno’s gruff yet dynamic voice is allowed to bloom, and it has a tenderness and openness to it here that’s new. There are multiple layers of wistfulness and care to her delivery of lines like “It just takes one disagreement for you to remember the one time I fucked up,” from “Spiral,” turning songs that could be one-dimensional kiss-offs into warm and complex expressions of regret.
The group returned to Electrical Audio in Chicago, another home for Bognanno, to record Losing. Their core—Bognanno, guitarist Clayton Parker and bassist Reece Lazarus—truly solidified during the process, a detail-oriented push for perfection in which each moving part was labored over and polished.
Emily Lazar’s mastering adds the perfect cap to Bognanno’s engineering; this is a record that has both shimmer and heft. There’s power in the guitar attack, delicacy and toughness in the melodic hooks, precision in the drums, and backbone in the bass.
While Bognanno wouldn’t call this a political record, she doesn’t deny that the current political atmosphere and its urgency and tension haven’t shaped some of her ideas on this record, too—though she does not want that to be its focus.
Mostly, this is an internal record, a universalized diary and an exorcism—not of any one specific demon, but of the host of them that characterize contemporary anxieties. Bully are growing up, sure, but their fire is in no way diminishing.
https://bullythemusic.bandcamp.com/album/losing
The Year of Peggy Gou
This Week on Bandcamp Daily
The return
of Cavern of Anti-Matter is exciting—partly because it’s a consolidation
of the band’s own distinct identity, and partly because it reveals how
certain sonic experiments from 40 years ago are still producing glorious
results.
 In the five years since Evil Wayz, the Canadian producer has become one of the most inspiring producers of the cloud rap era. |
 The South Korean, Berlin-based DJ and producer skillfully balances the artier qualities of house and techno with their driving danceability, gaining the respect of fans and critics alike. |
BANDCAMP WEEKLY
This week, new tunes from Ras_G, The Mauskovic Dance Band, Wendy Rae Fowler, Cut Chemist, and Art Of Tones. We also take a dive into the new BALOJI album.
ALBUMS OF THE WEEK
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Bandcamp, Inc.
1901 Broadway, Oakland, CA 94612
1901 Broadway, Oakland, CA 94612
Kamala Harris U.S. Senator, California
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Classic Material Bonus Tracks: The Remixes (Unmixed) By Chris Read
New show by Chris Read
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