320 kbps | 178 MB | LINKS
It’s been just under a year since Kevin Morby released his excellent third album, Singing Saw, but the indie-rock singer-songwriter is already coming back for more, announcing today that he will be releasing a new record, City Music, this summer.
If the title didn’t tip you off, City Music is an album inspired by “the metropolitan experience across America and beyond,” according to a press release, with Morby describing it at “a mix-tape, a fever dream, a love letter dedicated to those cities that I cannot get rid of, to those cities that are all inside of me.’ It’s intended to serve both as a companion and counterpart to Singing Saw, tackling some of the same themes of solitude, but through a different stylistic lens.
As Morby explains it, “Saw was imagined as an old bookshelf with a young Bob and Joni staring back at me, blank and timeless. They live here, in this left side of my brain, smoking cigarettes and playing acoustic guitars while lying on an unmade bed,” whereas the new album is more “Lou Reed and Patti Smith … stretched out on a living room floor somewhere in mid-70s Manhattan, also smoking cigarettes.”
That Lou Reed influence is particularly notable in the vocals on City Music’s opening track and lead single “Come To Me Now.” The somber song is built around the slow churn of an old, 1800s pump organ, which Morby says he didn’t even think would work when he first came across it in the studio, but which ended up being his “favorite part of the record to record.”
City Music is out June 16 via Dead Oceans and available for preorder here. You can check out the lyric video for “Come To Me Now” below, along with the album’s cover art and tracklist, and Morby’s full slate of tour dates, which includes stops at festivals like Bonnaroo, Boston Calling, and Newport Folk Fest, where he’ll be appearing as part of “Alone & Together”, a collaboration between him, Fruit Bats’ Eric D. Johnson, former Yeloowbirds frontman Sam Cohen (who produced Singing Saw), Joe Russo and Josh Kaufman.
Also, for what it’s worth, a few weeks back, Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold posted a picture to Instagram, which you can also see below, of him in the studio with Kevin and the caption “Garfunkel-ing for Morby,” so while we don’t know if he’s on this record for certain, keep your ears open for some Robin Pecknold harmonies.
Release Date: March 7, 2007
Label: Rpg
Artist: Hari Om sharan
320 kbps | 323 MB | LINKS
Jason McNiff, a London-based songwriter of Polish and Irish descent, has been a hidden gem in the British indie-folk scene for the last fifteen years or so, quietly and confidently building up a large body of consistently outstanding work. Rain Dries Your Eyes is a comprehensive two-disc retrospective with songs taken from his five albums, plus some new and unreleased tracks.
The material is presented with aesthetics rather than chronology in mind, and the songs range from early work like 1999’s Hang On To Your Woman (one of the first songs he ever wrote) and Woody’s Annie Hall right through to a host of recordings made in 2016. That it is difficult at first to distinguish a difference in quality between the old and the new songs speaks volumes for the consistency of McNiff’s vision. There is a clarity of purpose here that is rarely found, let alone maintained throughout a decade or so of music making.
The first disc opens with Off The Rails, a perfect introduction to McNiff’s well-travelled, bluesy folk. His voice is both tender and rough, a time-worn instrument, located somewhere near the imaginary midpoint between Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt and Ralph McTell. The lyrics are, on the face of it, standard fare, dealing as they do with life on the road and a kind of dislocation that is both geographical and personal, but McNiff’s ear for a sharp turn of phrase, a catchy chorus and an idiosyncratic description elevates this – and all of his songs – are way above your average troubadour. He is backed with subtle skill by Andy ‘Hank Dog’ Allan (guitar) and George Spence (drums). Allan also provides the riff for another song, the lovely, bittersweet Woody’s Annie Hall, a song full of neat and often self-deprecating one-liners that the great director himself would be proud of. To think that McNiff went from being a busker doing covers of Dylan and Cohen to writing a song as complete and as accomplished as this in little more than a year is enough to make anyone envious. Here is a singer-songwriter in full control of his artistic drive.
What is even more enviable is that he maintains this level of control right through to his most recent songs. Sun Comes Up, a brand new track, provides one of the record’s most touching and accomplished moments, while re-recordings of older songs – the gentle Mediterranean pastoral Sicily, for example – or recent reappropriations of old ideas (the evocative slow burn of closing track, Cairo) prove he is never content to rest on his laurels.
![Taboo - Amigo (1988) [Reissue 2013]](http://lossless-galaxy.ru/uploads/posts/2017-05/thumbs/1494398176_177.jpg "Taboo - Amigo (1988) [Reissue 2013]")
