Angelo De Augustine returns with 'Angel in Plainclothes', his fifth album and most inspired work yet-a deeply felt rendering of his multi-year journey of healing and renewal. The record showcases De Augustine's powerful melodies and poignant lyrics across tracks like the haunting elegy 'Empty Shell', the hopeful 'Spirit of the Unknown', and standout psychedelic country piece 'Mirror Mirror'. Themes explore life's fragility, second chances, and picking up the pieces after an undiagnosed illness forced him to re-learn basic abilities: "I'm trying to figure out who I am now," De Augustine says. "I feel like I may have been given a second chance at life, and I'd like to live it."

Written, recorded, arranged, produced, and mixed by the artist at his recording studio A Secret Place in Southern California, the album marks his first time welcoming collaborators in years, including string arranger Oliver Hill (Kevin Morby, Helado Negro), harpist Leng Bian, background vocalist/percussionist Wendy Fraser, producer Thomas Bartlett (who produced De Augustine's 'Tomb', as well as St. Vincent, Bebel Gilberto), and co-producer Jonathan Wilson (Angel Olsen, Father John Misty) on 'The Cure'. The result is a powerful statement of hope: "One of the most helpful things that kept me going was the people in my life telling me that everything was ultimately going to be okay. I hope these songs end up having the same kind of effect on people out in the world, and help them know that miracles are possible."

TRACK LISTING

1. Empty Shell
2. Pet Cemetery
3. Spirit Of The Unknown
4. The Cure
5. Mirror Mirror
6. Cosmic Ride
7. The Universe Was Our Mother
8. With A Love So Kind
9. Pictures On My Wall
10. Goodbye Baby Blue

The fourth solo album from Angelo De Augustine, Toil and Trouble exists according to its own quixotic logic, inhabiting a psychic landscape as sublimely mystifying as a fever dream or fairy tale. In creating such an all-enveloping body of work, the Southern California-based artist spent nearly three years working alone and exploring the vast expanse of his imagination. “This album came from thinking about the madness of the world right now and how overwhelming that can be,” says De Augustine. “I used a sort of counter-world as a guide to try to gain some understanding of what’s actually going on here — I had to take myself out of reality in order to try to understand reality.” At turns bewitching and devastating and ineffably lovely, the result is the most visionary work yet from a singular songwriter, revealing his profound capacity to alchemize pain into extraordinary beauty.

TRACK LISTING

1 Home Town
2 The Ballad Of Betty And Barney Hill
3 Memory Palace
4 Healing Waters
5 The Painter
6 I Don't Want To Live, I Don't Want To Die
7 Another Universe
8 Song Of The Siren
9 Blood Red Thorn
10 Naked Blade
11 D.W.O.M.M.
12 Toil And Trouble

A Beginner’s Mind began when the two musicians and Asthmatic Kitty labelmates decamped to a friend’s cabin in upstate New York for a monthlong songwriting sabbatical. Watching a movie to unwind after each day’s work, they soon found their songs reflecting the films and began investigating this connection in earnest.

The resulting album is 14 songs (loosely) based on (mostly) popular films—highbrow, lowbrow and everything in between. They wrote in tandem—one person writing a verse, the other a chorus, churning out chord progressions and lyrics willy-nilly, often finishing each other’s sentences in the process. Rigorous editing and rewriting ensued. The results are less a “cinematic exegesis” and more a “rambling philosophical inquiry” that allows the songs to free-associate at will. Plot-points, scene summaries, and leading characters are often displaced by esoteric interpolations that ask the bigger question: what does it mean to be human in a broken world?

Stevens and De Augustine wrote everything with a deliberate sense of shoshin—the Zen Buddhist concept for which the record is named and an idea that empowered the pair to look for and write about unlikely inspiration without preconceived notions of what a film had to say (The I-Ching and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies also served as incentives along the way). The movies became rhetorical prompts, with the songwriters letting their distinct reactions and creative instincts govern their process. The underlying objective was empathy and openness, absent of judgment: to observe with the eyes of a child.

The album’s artwork comes courtesy of Ghanaian artist Daniel Anum Jasper. In Ghana during the late ’80s, a novel “mobile cinema” culture emerged when enterprising film fans screened Hollywood blockbusters in the backs of pick-up trucks using portable generators. To advertise the movies, artists painted alternate posters inspired only by the scant information they had about each film. Sufjan and Angelo commissioned a pioneer of this form—Jasper—to paint a series of new works for A Beginner’s Mind (including covers for three 7-inch singles). Information about the project was deliberately kept vague so that Mr. Jasper could work without restraint.

Sufjan Stevens is an artist, songwriter and composer living in New York. He has released nine widely lauded studio albums and a number of collaborations with fellow musicians, choreographers and visual artists from the New York City Ballet and the celebrated director Luca Guadagnino to his stepfather Lowell Brams and noted dancer Jalaiah Harmon.

Angelo De Augustine is an artist and songwriter living in Thousand Oaks, California—a suburb north of Los Angeles, where he grew up. He has released three albums including his self-released debut, Spirals of Silence (2014), and two for Asthmatic Kitty Records, Swim Inside The Moon (2017) and Tomb (2019).

STAFF COMMENTS

Darryl says: Beautifully combining the distinct voices and instrumental styles of both performers into an intoxicating juxtaposition of folk and tenderly plucked indie balladry. It's haunting in parts, and elsewhere wonderfully melodic, a perfect outing for both performers.

TRACK LISTING

1. Reach Out 3:43
2. Lady Macbeth In Chains 3:42
3. Back To Oz 4:25
4. The Pillar Of Souls 4:04
5. You Give Death A Bad Name 5:11
6. Beginner’s Mind 2:36
7. Olympus 3:07
8. Murder And Crime 3:43
9. (This Is) The Thing 3:13
10. It’s Your Own Body And Mind 2:27
11. Lost In The World 3:20
12. Fictional California 3:03
13. Cimmerian Shade 5:01
14. Lacrimae 2:05

A quiet heartache threads through Tomb. It’s a universal feeling, the kind that piles up over the years and yearns for resolution. The 12 songs came together quickly, out of necessity following his first true heartbreak around Christmas 2017 -- and while Tomb was born from this breakup, the album expanded to explore years of loss and disappointment. Throughout, De Augustine sings of his first love (“Tomb”), attempts to reconcile possible past mistakes (“You Needed Love, I Needed You”), and reckoning with how personal and familial history impacts present and future relationships (“Kaitlin,” “Bird Has Flown”). Like the best albums about heartbreak, Tomb transforms pain into beauty. “This album is at its core a prayer for hope and clarity, and a prayer for love,” he says.

Ultimately Tomb reflects a beginning for De Augustine -- both emotionally and in his career. It’s a motion towards positivity, addressing lost love, the worthwhile cost of honesty, and the ramifications of regret. In the end, Tomb isn’t about burying or hiding something away, it’s about opening the seal and letting something new emerge. The album’s title reveals these sentiments: “Throughout our lives we bury many dead things in our hearts and minds,” he says. “There they go to rest and hopefully are reborn as something beautiful for the world to behold.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Tomb
2. All To The Wind
3. You Needed Love I Needed You
4. I Could Be Wrong
5. Tide
6. Kaitlin
7. Time
8. Somewhere Far Away From Home
9. Wanderer
10. A Good Man’s Light
11. Bird Has Flown
12. All Your Life