Dr. Robert, of solo and Blow Monkeys fame, has just released his latest solo album. His tenth solo album is entitled Out THere and you can stream it below.
A few years back, I got the chance to interview him – he rang me from his home in Spain, around the time of the Blow Monkeys’ album Feels Like A New Morning. You can read that here.
Strange to think it’s now 15 years since The Strokes appeared. Back in 2001 they had an impact on not only the NME scene but also on the charts, making an impact with their debut Is This It.
Whilst other guitar bands that came in their wake may have reached greater commercial heights – Kings of Leon and White Stripes – The Strokes still have a big fan base, deservedly so, on the basis of their first new track for three years ‘Oblivius.’
It’s the lead track on their new EP Future Present Past, which as well as ‘Oblivius’ also includes ‘Drag Queen’ and “Threat of Joy’, plus a remix of ‘Oblivius’ by the band’s Fab Moretti.
More details on ordering the EP, which will be released on June 3, can be found here
I’ve long championed Kid Canaveral on this blog – and interviewed them around the time of their first album Shouting At Wildlife.
The band are shortly to release their third album Faulty Inner Dialogue on July 29 on Lost Map Records, and are touring before the release of the album, with the launch taking place at Edinburgh’s Summerhall on July 30 (more details about the album launch and live dates here.
This is the video for the first single ‘First We Take Dumbarton.’
This is the album teaser video:
Well, I was off in Australia, and it was fabulous. As always, I try to discover new music while I’m travelling, and maybe I’ll do a post on some of the stuff I heard whilst I was out there.
One email I got when I was in Melbourne was from a Melbourne-based label called Lost and Lonesome. One of the emails I received was of one of their artists called Lucy Roleff.
According to her biography, she is ‘a classically trained, lyrical-folk songstress from Melbourne. Born to a German Opera singer father and Maltese mother, she spent a childhood steeped in ornate European classical music, storytelling and folk styles.’ For all I know, this may not be true, but it makes for more interesting reading than playing on the X-Box and hanging out at the mall, right? ‘Aspen’ is taken from her debut album This Paradise, out on July 15. She produces folk music that has nothing to do with the ‘it’s acoustic so it must be folk’ likes of the beard-strokers by numbers, but instead comparisons could be drawn with the likes of Joanna Newsom, Nick Drake and Cowboy Junkies’ Margo Timmins.
This is one of the best things I have heard this year.
The video is spectacular, too
This is her first EP, Longbows, released in 2013, which is also rather lovely:
It has gone uncharacteristically quiet on the 17 Seconds front. Not because I stopped caring or writing, but simply because I went away on holiday for a few weeks. Australia, since you ask – and it was bloody fantastic.
So there will be more music reviews and whatnot to follow, in the meantime, check out the review I wrote of Wire’s most recent album Nocturnal Koreans, which was printed over at Is This Music?