drag city
Track: Mind Maintenance – ‘The Ladder’: Chicago legends Joshua Abrams and Chad Taylor bring percussive African contemplation
IF YOU’RE at all a follower of the Chicago music scene that erupted in so many directions back at the turn of the century, then the rhythmic adepts Chad Taylor and Joshua Abrams will probably need no introduction; given how, they were so deeply woven into intelligent, seminal albums by the Chicago Underground Trio and all its various …
Soundtrack of Our Lives: breaking psych-folk troubadour E.R. Jurken takes us a for a trip through the music of his life
THEY loved what they heard so much they set up a label just for him. Yep, that’s the tale of E.R. (Ed to his friends) Jurken’s slow peregrination towards a recording contract once he’d landed in Chicago after one of those periods when life gets dismantled, leaves you tumbling in its riptides; criss-crossing the States, …
See: Axis: Sova – ‘(Don’t Wanna Have That) Dream’: Chicago psych with a noir lullaby twist
AXIS: SOVA began, as many excellent bands do, as a means to a gigging end (see similarly colonised TEKE::TEKE over at Kill Rock Stars, for example). Brett, the Sova of the equation, was watching his previous outfit Mass Shivers enter its death throes – we’re talking back in 2009 here; and having been offered an opening …
Track: E.R. Jurken – ‘John Doe’: a single drop of melodic harrow ahead of Friday’s album
E.R. JURKEN is a singer-songwriter with a deeply moving, beautiful and fragile take on psych-pop with a 1968 Anglophile twist and a Neutral Milk Hotel twirl to his aesthetic, for whom Drag City have initiated a whole new boutique imprint, Country Thyme; you just know they know when they’re on to a good thing. E.R. …
Album review: E.R. Jurken – ‘I Stand Corrected’: a psych-folk debut full of catharsis and melody
E.R. Jurken’s first full missive into the world reveals quite the saddest tale at an angle, never telling, always hinting. It also shows an absolute grasp of songcraft, of melody, and an abiding love of British psych-pop and later American geniuses such as Neutral Milk Hotel and Elliott Smith
News: Birds of Maya breathe new fire into the stoner vibe with an album for Drag City in late June – see the video for ‘BFIOU’
PHILADELPHIA is a city that knows how to properly rock, dirt under its nails, filthy fuckin’ fuzz in its heart. With the news that Philly headz Bardo Pond are getting a silver jubilee expanded repress for their ’96 psychotropic masterpiece Amanita, comes news from more of the city’s favourite prodigally noisy sons, Birds of Maya; …
Album review: Cory Hanson – ‘Pale Horse Rider’: a psych-country triumph from Wand frontman
You might expect Pale Horse Rider to be a really good record; it’s actually a great one. It’s a record about LA written with all the perception and acuity of native. It takes the country-psych template and when it plays within it, it plays with grace and precision and blur; and when it shifts out beyond, it does with the dynamics of British exploratory rock. All points covered, no filler; perhaps its time to crown Cory the new Wolf King of LA. Buy.
Album review: Bill MacKay and Nathan Bowles – ‘Keys’: pull up a pew for bluegrass instrumental delight
You know what the best thing about Keys is; for all its intimacy, the focus wholly on how the two players and their instruments mesh,a real joy in creation rings through. William Tyler, Black Twig Pickers, Jack Rose fans; please come on over and pull up a pew
See: The video for Mind Maintenance’s ‘Glow & Glimmer’: Chicago’s Chad Taylor and Joshua Abrams step out for some exceedingly cool world-jazz melodicism
TAKE one of the finest and most intuitive leftfield jazz rhythm sections of past decades, Chicago drummer Chad Taylor and bassist Joshua Abrams, who between them amass waay over a couple hundred performance credits to their name on Discogs for artists such as the Chicago Underground Trio and all its various spiralling iterations, Brokeback, Sam …
See: Bill Callahan – ‘Cowboy’: a red-rimmed highlight from ‘Gold Record’ gains a visual dimension
WITH his fine and spontaneously realised album from the end of summer, Gold Record, now back in stock and available again on wax, Bill Callahan has stepped once more to the filmic breach with a brand new record for one of the most nuanced and moving nuggets sifted from that album, “Cowboy”. The song? Well. …