Eden Samara’s has shared her video for ‘Days’ the title track of her new EP. The Canadian singer/songwriter’s previous singles ‘Robots’ and ‘Days’ were premiered by Line Of Best Fit and Clash Magazine respectively. Prior to that, ‘Upside Down’ was released in February 2018 and caught the attention of Spotify, being placed on several of their editorial playlists. June 2018 saw the release of a second single, ‘High School’ with the video premiered by Exclaim! Magazine and featured in KALTBLUT’s ‘Top 5 Video’s of the Week’, Spotify’s New Music Friday Canada.
‘Days’ EP was inspired by a backpacking trip to Europe, and explores societal expectations and human interaction in the digital age.
The video is a commentary on how the media influences our social norms and identity and analyses the relationship between human behavior and the media. “I wanted to talk about the universal desire to find meaning in life and create genuine connections with each other, in a time when our empathy has been dulled and the media dictates what an ideal life should look like” she says. The video features Samara as a bored housewife, comparing herself to a ravishing blonde french maid, and wishing to be a dangerous femme fatale.
Speaking of ‘Days EP’ Samara says: “The EP looks at a recent slice of my mid-twenties when I had an existential crisis over this, and so did many of my close friends.”
Oh Sees have announced the reissue of Thee Hounds of Foggy Notion which will be out 5/24 on Castle Face Records. The band also recently announced a run of Fall North American tour dates. You can check out where they are playing below and also check out their forthcoming Spring/Summer shows that include stops at Shaky Knees Fest and Solana Beach.
“Thee Hounds of Foggy Notion / Live Performances Sans Stages And Whatnots With Thee Oh Sees (2008), is a film we made just over a decade ago, and this record is the soundtrack. I loved making it, and I love all that were involved. I’m honestly blissed-out proud to hear over the years that it somehow is loved by so many others, too.
I first met John Dwyer on Flag Day. I was blown away by a trio of roving Coachwhips guerrilla street shows that climaxed at the the scenic vista parking lot high above San Francisco atop Mt. Sutro. Amongst the gathered uninitiated hordes of souvenir sweatshirt selling families, and puzzled elderly global tourist translators, and a white weirdo tuxedo wedding party, was the sonic corruption of the Coachwhips that was collaborating with the all-female, fake-pregnancy, jump-rope-y, real-pit-bull-shredding-fake-plastic-baby fantasy majesty of the performance artist crew Double Dutchess. I’m certain that this exact event was the idea seed for Thee Hounds Of Foggy Notion, and that it saved my life a little bit.
When JPD asked me to consider making a video for Thee Oh Sees with the sole stipulation that he didn’t want to do anything fake-y to playback, my head started swimming. What we mutually agreed upon was to essentially reprise Flag Day, and film Thee Oh Sees performing live, but not on stages. My own secret undisclosed personal caveat was to see this as an opportunity to document his process by mixing in some interstitial interviews between the roving live shows. He shut the ‘interview’ idea after I asked the very first question. Instead, what we got was infinitely more true to the free fun reality of the scene in the form of a multitude of glorious stories.
I rented a 15-passenger van, a generator, and the minimal cinematic equipment my trusted cinematographer friend James Wall deemed we needed. Everything sound wise was JPD territory and went through an ancient mixing board that Johnny had housed within a Samsonite suitcase. We ran all the plate mics from the drums, and the lil pedestal mics from the amps through this old mixer, and we all believed that all would be well and swell. As an emergency audio backup, I also grabbed a 12” Sennheiser directional mic in a fluffy wind muff that directly fed into one of our Canon XL-2s. My residual fear that the only thing that ruins docs or indie films is shit sound came true when we discovered that all the multi-tracking through the mixer was hopelessly covered in geiger counter static tics. All of the audio that you hear on the LP is sourced from that single Sennheiser mono mic that we then dual-mono’d in post.
As great as JPD is as a live performer, he was in absolute alpha epic story-teller genius mode during every single spare second of the journey. Brigid Dawson added some delicious gems as she always does. Petey Dammit is a pretty quiet private guy, but even he proved to be very funny when he gets loose. Patrick Mullins on the other hand is literally Castleface. After editing through 40+ hours of footage of live performances and interstitial stories, it became very shockingly clear to myself, and editor Akiko Iwakawa, that his expression never ever ever changes. He is Castleface incarnate.
Massive Love yous and Thank yous to all involved and to all of Yous toos” – Brian Lee Hughes
It’s out on Castle Face Records May 24th
May 3-5 Atlanta, Georgia Shaky Knees Fest
18 Manchester Albert Hall
19 Glasgow QMU
20 Belfast Limelight 18-20
21Dublin Button Factory
23 Cardiff The Tramshed
24 Derby Bearded Theory Festival
June 7 Nelsonville, OH Nelsonville Music Fest
14 Solana Beach, CA San Diego Belly Up W/ Bronze And Fuckwolf
Arbutus Records signee Crying High has announced his new record ♬ (‘Music’) and shared the new track “Hold Yr Terror Close” on BrooklynVegan.
When talking about the track David Kleiser says, “Sarah Brunning sings with me on this song. We have been very close friends since high school, and this has always been our song. I can still remember how excited she was to show it to me, and how we both sat and took it in; how Chi Fukami had just hit the nail on the goddamn head, and how sad-and-then-safe she made us feel in her honesty and vulnerability. I wanted to reinterpret this Go! Team original as a remind myself and Sarah of the brilliant (as in radiant) truth behind Chi’s message: Fear is real and cannot be ignored, BUT it can be corralled and harnessed if you have your shit together and insist on going wherever yourself takes you. Thats why I think this song is here anyway.
The video was filmed by Airick Woodhed of Doldrums, another dear and long time friend of both Sarah and I. It was shot on 16mm film in High Park, Toronto- which is where I “grew up”
Crying High’s debut album ♬ will be out 4/22 on Arbutus Records.
Kleiser started bringing Crying High to life on the road in 2017 while opening for and playing guitar with Doldrums in Europe. Although Crying High is a new project, Kleiser has been producing weirdo bedroom pop albums for 11 years with The Walls are Blonde (as well as comic books and hand built art toys with ORG), in addition to creating Album art and Music videos for a host of amazing MTL and TO bands. By 2014, while greyhounding between Toronto and Montréal for shows Kleiser and friends began The Rotating Cassette Carrousel project, an ongoing mixtape compilation of demos and home recordings from across Canada. From this, Kleiser began crafting a new and more theatrical solo act that would ultimately become the ‘Karaoke’eko’ cassette, then ‘The Story of Pop Music’, and finally, after learning from and improving upon each of its proto-forms…. CRYING HIGH. Crying High is vapornoir from Montreal: disco and ebm slowed down beyond dance utility and used as the framework to support late night phone confessional vocals that sing heartbreak, joy, catharsis, pleas and attitudes of gratitudes. On-stage, Kleiser evokes Andy Kauffman’s Hawaiian singer, or coo’s like a delay-and-sweat soaked Slim Whitman; A cheap Angel Olsen halloween costume: A yawn is a silent scream. The voice as Analogue VR: Part banshee on Earth and part Bowie in the bardo. Crying Highs music, lyrics and dancing combine to carry its audience thru a dynamic spectrum of emotion and character: screaming every high, milking every low. Serious face. Happy face! It takes only minutes for an audience to realize that Kleiser is watching each performance along with them.
Crying High is the new project from Toronto born multimedia artist and psychedelic crooner, D Kleiser. A new album of 12 songs will be released internationally by Arbutus Records on April 22nd, 2019. The album is called ♬ . You can call it “Music” if that’s easier. It was produced in Montreal by D Kleiser, and is a wonderful introduction to the proud world of Kleisonia, and all the artifacts of its inward adventures.
Kleiser utilizes the raw power of garage band to produce midi-karaoke versions of AM radio hits from deep within the youtube-algorithmic pata-verse. Largely recorded in bed or at the kitchen table, recruiting whichever friends were proximate to sing into that little-built-in-mic-on-everyones-earbuds. Elements of the album (see: trumpet sections, songs about cats/dead friends) belay Kleiser’s desperate affinity for an era when Airplane Over The Sea was the thing, but this music is truly a direct product of its time. Here, Crying High broadcasts little alternative pop pata-communications into the void in an attempt to forgive it. 斤 could not have been made in any other temporal elsewhere. Sifting thru the mp3 junkyard of 20th-century pop culture to cobble together something pretty. A personal exercise in Memehommage-as-Shadow Work, 斤 comes complete with a solid and timeless moral, simply put: learn to love yourself or you’ll die.
CRYING HIGH – 2019 TOUR DATES
Apr 19th | Toronto | Handlebar Apr 20th | Montreal | Brasserie Beaubien May 20th | Brussels, BL | CHAFF May 23rd | Ventspils, LV | Zalais Namins May 24th | Liepaja, LV | Kursas Putni May 25th | Riga, LV | Nurme Bar May 26th | Manchester, UK | Yesfest May 28th | London, UK | The Victoria May 31st | Kraków, PL | Klub RE (Green ZOO Festival) June 1st | Prague, CZ | A(VOID) June 15th | Brooklyn, NY | Sunnyvale
Australia’s Hatchie has shared a video for “Stay With Me,” the second single from her highly anticipated debut album, ‘Keepsake’ which is set for release on June 21st via Heavenly.
Of the song Harriette Pilbeam says: “‘Stay With Me’ was written as a writing exercise in an effort to step away from my usual style into something more fun and dancey. We originally wrote it with someone else in mind, but realized it was the perfect fit for my album as I wanted to expand into a different sound. It became one of my favourite songs on the record because I’m a sucker for crying-in-the-club tracks.”
On her debut EP ‘Sugar & Spice’, Hatchie delivered the sonic equivalent of falling deliriously in love: a sustained rush of feeling, rendered in swoony melodies and gauzy guitar tones and endlessly hypnotic layers of sound. Now, with her full-length debut ‘Keepsake’ due for release in the height of summer, the Australian singer/songwriter tries on countless new textures, exploring everything from industrial to new wave to dance-pop, handling each with understated elegance and pure, powerful feeling.
Throughout ‘Keepsake’, Hatchie’s kaleidoscopic sonic palette draws out distinct moods and tones, continually revealing her depth and imagination as a musician and songwriter. In the making of the record, the Brisbane-bred musician otherwise known as Harriette Pilbeam recorded in a home studio in Melbourne and worked again with John Castle—the producer behind ‘Sugar & Spice’. And while the album begins and ends with two massively catchy pop tracks—the brightly defiant “Not That Kind,” the euphoric and epic “Keep”—many songs drift into more emotionally tangled terrain, shedding light on experiences both ephemeral and life-changing.
From “being dragged to a party I don’t want to be at, then getting at a fight at the party, and kind of hating myself for it but hating everybody else too” amidst the wobbly synth lines and fantastically icy spoken-word vocals of “Unwanted Guest,” to radiant jangle-pop gem “Her Own Heart”, which puts a singular twist on the post-breakup narrative, there’s a self-possessed spirit that infuses all of the record.
Ultimately ‘Keepsake’ serves as a document of a particularly kinetic moment in Hatchie’s life. “I’m not much of a nostalgic person when it comes to memories, but I do have a tendency to hold on to certain things, like tickets from the first time I went someplace on holiday,” says Hatchie in reflecting on the album’s title. “It made sense to me to call the record that, at a time when I’m going to probably end up with a lot of keepsakes—and in a way, this whole album is almost like a keepsake in itself.”
‘Keepsake’ will be released on June 21st via Heavenly. Pre-order links here:
Hatchie live dates: 29-May Primavera Sound Barcelona, ES 1-Jun Heartland Festival Copenhagen, DK 3-Jun Obaren Stockholm, SE 5-Jun Berghain / Kantine Berlin, DE 7-Jun Paradiso (Small Hall) Amsterdam, NL 8-Jun Villette Sonique Paris, FR 9-Jun Green Door Store, BRIGHTON UK 11-Jun The Louisiana, BRISTOL UK 12-Jun Moth Club, LONDON UK 13-Jun Yes, MANCHESTER UK 14-Jun Brudenell Social Club, LEEDS UK (Heavenly Weekender)
‘Keepsake’ tracklist: 1. Not That Kind 2. Without A Blush (YouTube) 3. Her Own Heart 4. Obsessed 5. Unwanted Guest 6. Secret 7. Kiss The Stars 8. Stay With Me (YouTube) 9. When I Get Out 10. Keep
