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fragility and extraordinary power.
Composer/saxophonist John Harle and singer Marc Almond collaborate on ‘The Tyburn Tree - Dark London’ - an album of contemporary songs about the darkest sides of London’s history - from the Tyburn gallows to Jack the Ripper, and from settings of the words of William Blake to a unique take on the nursery rhyme ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’.
Following Marc’s much lauded guest appearance on Harle’s ‘Art Music’, this is an album full of driving rhythms, emotional impact and theatrical story telling of the highest order. Along for the ride are noted soprano Sarah Leonard and great London poet and author Iain Sinclair who reads from his own texts. But it is the voice of Marc Almond that is the spiritual medium from which appears the ghosts of ‘Dark London’.
“Marc is a true artist and true performer - showing total openness and vulnerability alongside an experimental, non-judgmental view of Art, and in ‘The Tyburn Tree’, London has found its Anti-Hero”. - John Harle
“We all know that Marc Almond can sing but it still comes as a shock to hear his thrillingly drawn-out climax to Harle’s “The Arrival of Spring”, emoting words adapted from William Blake with operatic oomph.” - The Independent.
‘The Tyburn Tree’ has been in gestation for two years - Almond is the primary lyricist, having researched the subject matter and gradually formed his own take on ‘Dark London’, creating lyrics that have both historical relevance and an ear-catching quirkiness. Alongside this John Harle has been writing music that proves him to be at the height of his powers - after a canon of work that includes his “O Mistress Mine” for Elvis Costello, and as composer of the theme to BBC1’s Silent Witness, he has matched Almond’s lyrics with some punchy, compact and bitter-sweet songs full of emotion, percussive shock and humour. ‘The Tyburn Tree’ promises to be a concept album of cult-status.
TRACK LISTING
1. If You Were Here Now
2. Ancient Waves
3. In Wonderland
4. On Leave
5. The Real Deal
6. On Top Of The World
7. Unreservedly Yours
8. North
9. The End Of The Day
This debut album will be preceded by the release of ‘North South Divide’ – the single – as both a download and limited 7” single in late September.
Clearly indebted to early Dylan, John’s influences also include Donovan, Paul Weller, Marc Bolan, Johnny Cash and Jake Bugg.
“An amazing talent for such a young kid!” Alan McGee
“Who is this kid doing Dylan better than Dylan?” Courtney Love
“John is a real talent, I'd happily take him on tour with me in the future. The real deal." Richard Hawley
TRACK LISTING
1. 55 Blues
2. North-South Divide
3. Long Long Way
4. The Ballad Of A Blue Poet
5. It Never Rains
6. Rivers Of Blood
7. The Ballad Of Mr Henderson
8. Colour Of The Sun
9. Slipping Away
10. Short Sharp Shock
11. White Rose
12. The Strand
180gram LP. Cut From Analogue Masters. Original Artwork.
It’s been an extraordinary journey for John Grant, from a point where he thought he would never make music again or escape a life of substance abuse to winning awards and accolades, collaborating with Sinead O’Connor, Rumer and Hercules & Love Affair and having his music featured in the award-winning film Weekend.
It’s a journey that’s taken him from his birthplace in Buchanan, Michigan to be raised in Parker, Colorado, studying languages in Germany and, after his band The Czars split up, basing himself in New York, London, Berlin and, most recently, Iceland, where the bulk of Pale Green Ghosts was recorded. It’s also been a journey from The Czars’ folk/country noir to the lush ‘70s FM alchemy of Queen Of Denmark to the astonishing fusion of sounds that lifts Pale Green Ghosts to even giddier heights.
As if to acknowledge his journey, Grant has named the album after the opening title track, which documents the drives that he’d regularly take through the ‘80s, from Parker to the nearby metropolis of Denver, to the new wave dance clubs that have inspired the electronic elements of Pale Green Ghosts, and later on to visit the boyfriend - the ‘TC’ of Queen Of Denmark’s ‘TC & Honeybear’ - that inspired many of that album’s heartbreaking scenarios.
“I’d take the I-25, between Denver and Boulder, which was lined with all these Russian olive trees, which are the pale green ghosts of the title: they have this tiny leaves with silver on the back, which glow in the moonlight,” Grant explains. “The song is about wanting to get out of a small town, to go out into the world and become someone and made my mark.”
That Grant has made his mark is blatantly clear from how Queen Of Denmark was rapturously received. “Like a couple of similarly intense classics before it – Antony & The Johnsons’ I Am A Bird Now and Bon Iver’s For Emma… Queen Of Denmark sounds like a record its creator has been waiting his whole life to make,” MOJO concluded. Another measure of achievement, and the journey, is that one classic that Grant first heard in those new wave clubs was Sinead O’Connor’s ‘Mandinka’. Two decades later, O’Connor has not only covered the title track of ‘Queen Of Denmark’ on her latest album How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?, but supplies goose-bumping backing vocals on Pale Green Ghosts.
Sinead’s presence is a surprise, but not compared to the album’s portion of synthesisers and beats – unless you already know Grant’s enduring love of vintage synth-pop and industrial dance, and more current electronic acts such as Trentemøller and Mock & Toof. “Electronica is a huge part of my personality and my influences, though I don’t think many people see that fitting in to the John Grant image, whatever that is,” he says. There were occasional electronic undertows to Czars songs and two tracks (‘That’s the Good News’ and ‘Supernatural Defibrillator"’) on the deluxe edition of Queen Of Denmark were dance tracks.
One of those prime influences has even produced Pale Green Ghosts with Grant: Birgir Þórarinsson, a.k.a. Biggi Veira, of Iceland’s electronic pioneers Gus Gus. Queen of Denmark had been recorded in Texas with fellow Bella Union mates Midlake as his backing band, and Grant intended to return there to record again with the band’s rhythm section of McKenzie Smith and Paul Alexander. But a trip beforehand to see more of Iceland, after he’d first played the Iceland Airwaves festival in 2011, led to meeting Biggi, who invited Grant to his studio in Reykjavik. The two tracks the pair recorded – ‘Pale Green Ghosts’ and ‘Black Belt’ – convinced Grant he had to make the entire record there.
If Queen Of Denmark is Grant’s ‘70s album, channeling the spirits of Karen Carpenter and Bread, then Pale Green Ghosts is his ’80s album. Of the electronic tracks, the title track is a panoramic, brooding classic, while ‘Sensitive New Age Guy’ and ‘Black Belt’ are the tracks that you might dance to in new wave clubs. ‘You Don’t Have To’ is a classic example of Grant’s influences blending together, in a reworked arrangement of a track unveiled during concert tours in 2011. It also features the distinct spacey Moog sounds that are familiar to lovers of Queen Of Denmark, while McKenzie and Alexander play on ‘Vietnam’ and ‘It Doesn’t Matter To Him’. Grant’s touring partner, keyboardist Chris Pemberton, plays the gorgeous piano coda on the album’s tumultuous finale ‘Glacier’.
TRACK LISTING
1. Pale Green Ghosts
2. Black Belt
3. GMF
4. Vietnam
5. It Doesn’t Matter To Him
6. Why Don’t You Love Me Anymore
7. You Don’t Have To
8. Sensitive New Age Guy
9. Ernest Borgnine
10. I Hate This Town
11. Glacier
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- CD
- £9.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- RBN018CD
- Release date
- 16 Jul '12
Of the sixteen songs showcased, five (‘This Is The Beat’, ‘Castles In The Grave’, ‘Bennington’, ‘My Hatred Is Magnificent’, and ‘No Title (Molly)’), have appeared on previous compilations. Most notably ‘No Title (Molly)’ was originally released on a flexi disc as part of Domino/Ribbon Music's Record Store Day release ‘Smugglers Way’.
Two songs (‘Angel Of The Night’ and ‘Lost’) have never been released on any format, nor across any media. The same cannot be said of the remaining nine songs, the majority of which initially appeared on ’Demos 2011’, a bundle of tracks originating from mausspace.com where they had been uploaded by their creator (John Maus) to be appreciated, if not reviewed, by those eager enough to search them out.
‘A Collection Of Rarities And Previously Unreleased Material’ has been entirely remixed and remastered and features artwork and design by Turner Prize winning artist Wolfgang Tillmans.
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- CD
- £6.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- BELLACD332SD
- Release date
- 30 Apr '12
He goes on, “‘People who make records are afforded this assumption by the culture that their music is coming from an exclusively personal place, but more often than not what you hear are actually the affectations of an ‘alter-ego’ or a cartoon of an emotionally heightened persona,” says Josh Tillman, who has been recording/releasing solo albums since 2003 and who recently left Seattle’s Fleet Foxes after playing drums from 2008-2011. “That kind of emotional quotient isn’t sustainable if your concern is portraying a human-being made up of more than just chest-beating pathos. I see a lot of rampant, sexless, male-fantasy everywhere in the music around me. I didn’t want any alter-egos, any vagaries, fantasy, escapism, any over-wrought sentimentality. I like humour and sex and mischief. So when you think about it, it’s kind of mischievous to write about yourself in a plain-spoken, kind of explicitly obvious way and call it something like ‘Misty’. I mean, I may as well have called it ‘Steve’”. Musically, “Fear Fun” consists of such disparate elements as Waylon Jennings, Harry Nilsson, Arthur Russell, 'All Things Must Pass', and 'Physical Graffiti', often within the same song. Tillman's voice has never been better and often sounds like Roy Orbison, “The Caruso of Rock”, at his most joyous, while the music maintains a dark, mysterious and yet conversely playful, almost Dionysian quality. Lyrically, his absurdist fever dreams of pain and pleasure elicit, in equal measures, the blunt descriptive power of Bukowski or Braughtigan, the hedonistic philosophy of Oscar Wilde and the dried-out wit of Loudon Wainwright III.
The album began gestating during what Tillman describes as an “immobilizing period of depression”, in his former Seattle home. “Songwriting for me had always only been interesting and necessary because I saw it as this vehicle for truth, but I had this realization that all I had really done with it was lick my wounds for years and years, and become more and more isolated from people and experiences. I don’t even like wound-licking music, I want to listen to someone rip their arm off and beat themselves with it. I don’t believe that until now I’ve ever put anything at risk in my music. I was hell-bent on putting my preciousness at stake in order to find something worth singing about.” He continues, “I lost all interest in writing music, or identifying as a ‘songwriter’. I got into my van with enough mushrooms to choke a horse and started driving down the coast with nowhere to go. After a few weeks, I was writing a novel, which is where I finally found my narrative voice. The voice that is actually useful.”
“It was a while before that voice started manifesting in a musical way, but once I settled in the Laurel Canyon spider-shack where I’m living now, I spent months demoing all these weird-ass songs about weird-ass experiences almost in real-time, and kind of had this musical ‘Oh-there-I-am’ moment, identical to how I felt when I was writing the book. It was unbelievably liberating. I knew there was never any going back to the place I was writing from before, which was a huge relief. The monkey got banished off my back.”
Tillman brought the demos to LA producer/songwriter/pal Jonathan Wilson, and in February 2011 began recording at his home-studio in Echo Park. “Initially, the idea was to just kind of recreate the demos with me playing everything, since they were pretty fleshed out and sounded cool, but a place like LA affords you a different wealth of talent, potential, etc than just about anywhere else. I realized what was possible between Jonathan’s abilities, and the caliber of musicians that are just hanging around LA, pretty quickly. People were coming in and out of the studio all day sometimes, and other days, it would just be Jonathan and I holed up, getting stoned, and doing everything.
“I was honest with myself about what music actually excites my joy-glands when I was considering the arrangements and instrumentation,” says Tillman. “As opposed to what’s been enjoyable to me in the past – namely, alienating people or making choices based what I think people won’t like or understand. Pretty narcissistic stuff.”
When asked about Laurel Canyon, where he eventually ended up living in the aforementioned tree-house with a family of spiders, Tillman says, “My attitude about it all is pretty explicit in the record. Given my pretty adversarial personal attitude about the music and aesthetic that comes from that place, it’s kind of a huge joke that I live in a former hippie-fantasy land. I have a really morbid sense of humour.” Phil Ek (who everyone knows has worked with Fleet Foxes, Built To Spill, Modest Mouse, Band of Horses) heard the rough versions of the album in May 2011 and offered his services to mix. “Phil and I have known each other for a while by virtue of Fleet Foxes, so he was familiar with my music, but we had never discussed working together. I think he immediately recognized the shift in my writing and singing from a producer and friend’s standpoint. His excitement is really evident in mixes, I think.”
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- CD
- £3.99
- Cat Number
- JH2
- Release date
- 19 Mar '12
As one reviewer reflected, ‘Herring bridges that difficult divide between “popular music”, melody and “legitimate” rock with effortless aplomb... John can easily be compared to the likes of Kurt Wagner and Nick Drake as a master craftsman both lyrically and musically.”
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- CD
- £12.49
- Cat Number
- 72GONECD
- Release date
- 20 Feb '12
In his own words: "That's right. My new album is called The Last Donkey Show. It is a fucking roller-coaster recorded in Oakland, California, at Greg Ashley's studio The Creamery and also in the country near Lockhardt, Texas, at my good buddy's childhood home. Aaron Blount is his name. He is a bad-ass songwriter friend of mine. We ate BBQ all day and shot BB guns and had a bonfire. There is a cast of characters on this record... It's a floodgate of memories. Every song has a crazy story. I will tell them to you some time. The donkey is a symbol of hard work, humor and death. I love it! See you at town near you. Eat Gus's Fried Chicken!"
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- LP
- £10.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- DOC052LP
- Release date
- 31 Jan '11
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- CD
- £8.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- DOC052CD
- Release date
- 31 Jan '11
The Magik*Magik Orchestra have a comprehensive mastery of classic performance and repertoire, but also have a full appreciation of the aesthetics of indie and underground music.
Choi arranged and conducted "White Wilderness" with 19 members of the Magik*Magik playing strings and horns, vibraphone, pedal steel and piano, an assortment of reed instruments, and much to JV's benefit, the voice of Minna Choi singing backup at key moments throughout the album.
Recorded in San Francisco, "White Wilderness" was produced by John Congleton, whose resume includes albums by St Vincent, The Walkmen, Explosions in the Sky, Bill Callahan and many more.
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- CD
- £12.99
- Cat Number
- 906 5022
- Release date
- 4 Oct '10
TRACK LISTING
1. Imagine (2010 Digital Remaster)
2. Crippled Inside (2010 Digital Remaster)
3. Jealous Guy (2010 Digital Remaster)
4. It's So Hard (2010 Digital Remaster)
5. I Don't Wanna Be A Soldier Mama I Don't Wanna Die (2010 Digital Remaster)
6. Gimme Some Truth (2010 Digital Remaster)
7. Oh My Love (2010 Digital Remaster)
8. How Do You Sleep? (2010 Digital Remaster)
9. How? (2010 Digital Remaster)
10. Oh Yoko! (2010 Digital Remaster)
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- CD
- £12.99
Usually ships within: 2-10 days - Cat Number
- 9065052
- Release date
- 4 Oct '10
TRACK LISTING
1. Mother (2010 Digital Remaster)
2. Hold On (2010 Digital Remaster)
3. I Found Out (2010 Digital Remaster)
4. Working Class Hero (2010 Digital Remaster)
5. Isolation (2010 Digital Remaster)
6. Remember (2010 Digital Remaster)
7. Love (2010 Digital Remaster)
8. Well Well Well (2010 Digital Remaster)
9. Look At Me (2010 Digital Remaster)
10. God (2010 Digital Remaster)
11. My Mummy's Dead (2010 Digital Remaster)
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- LP
- £25.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- BELLAV235
- Release date
- 19 Apr '10
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- CD
- £10.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- BELLACD235
- Release date
- 19 Apr '10
Everyone has a favorite band or singer they reckon is subject to criminal neglect. That John Grant’s effortlessly rich, expansive baritone, couched in typically heartbreaking, lush melody, hasn’t found a wider audience many would consider a crime. But no longer. Because Grant’s first solo album is so undeniably great that the world will surely listen.
It’s a record of gravitas and grace, of FM melody magic laced with raw emotional bleeding. It asks why relationships are roulette and love is hell in a last-ditch attempt at self-improvement and atonement after years of alcohol and cocaine dependency. And on top, to further the album’s brilliance, Grant’s backing band on the album are Bella Union label-mates Midlake, contributing their most empathic ‘70s-style soft-rock know-how. Put simply, “Queen Of Denmark” is the record Grant’s been waiting his whole life to make.
Not that the Czars didn’t hit their own heights. After emerging from Denver, Colorado, rave reviews were the norm… “Long distinguished by John Grant’s superlative baritone, ‘Goodbye’ reeks of wistful, melancholic class… as meticulous and complete-sounding as the best works by Mercury Rev or The Flaming Lips” said Uncut about The Czars’ final album.
“Queen Of Denmark” was recorded in Denton in late 2008 through 2009 in the studio downtime while Midlake were recording their own record. The album moves through simple piano settings via an infusion of period-perfect synths that epitomise the lonely mood. There’s flute from Midlake frontman Tim Smith on the dreamiest cut ‘Marz’ and velvet strings on ‘Dreams’, which imagines Scott Walker influenced by Patsy Cline. There is pure longing in the opening ‘TC And Honeybear’ and bitterly sarcastic anger in the magnificent title track finale… Pain, hope, fear, regret and self-discovery… “Queen of Denmark” has it all… framed within some of the finest songs you’ll hear in this or any other year…
TRACK LISTING
1. TC & Honeybear
2. Marz
3. Where Dreams Go To Die
4. Sigourney Weaver
5. Chicken Bones
6. Silver Platter Club
7. It’s Easier
8. Outer Space
9. Jesus Hates Faggots
10. Caramel
11. Leopard & Lamb
12. Queen Of Denmark
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- Ltd 7"
- £3.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- DOC036
- Release date
- 1 Feb '10
- Format Info
There's only 100 copies of this, so don't hang about!
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- 5 Mar '07
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- 14 Nov '05
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- 23 Sep '02
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- 15 Oct '01
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- 15 Oct '01
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- CDFF289
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- 24 Sep '01
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- 0081227870614
- Release date
- 12 Mar '01
- Format Info
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