Stu Bangas has been active online getting fans ready for this new joint from Vangarde (Stu Bangas & Mr. Lif) featuring Reef The Lost Cauze, Bluprint, Murs & Puma Ptah and it certainly hasn’t disappointed. The sombre yet funky bassline sets the tone for a powerful track addressing the state of the world right now and the track title ‘8 Minutes 46 Seconds‘ & cover art is as confronting as it is powerful.
The track is an honest and introspective look at life through a variety of lenses, all while providing some social commentary and adding yet another voice to the growing movement – this is NOT OK. Go and bump this track now and let us know what you think. Support real hip hop, but also support the movements and messages that this new music is delivering.
Read the rest of this article at Raw Side Hip Hop
James Blake has released a new track called “Are You Even Real?”
Blake told Apple Music the track came out of initial sessions with the accomplished US writer and Mad Decent-affiliated artist Starrah. The cut, which was also written with help from Ali Tamposi, was completed at Electric Lady Studios in New York, Pulse Studios and Conway in the Los Angeles area and Blake’s home studio in LA.
It’s the second official single following his RA-recommended album, Assume Form—Blake released a track called “You’re Too Precious” in April.
Blake has made a habit of doing live covers during lockdown. He’s played versions of Nirvana, Bill Withers, Radiohead and Joni Mitchell, to name a few.
Read the rest of this article at Resident Advisor
“My Religion Is You” is the first new single from The Flaming Lips since last month’s “Flowers of Neptune 6”, which will also feature on their forthcoming LP.
American Head will follow on from last year’s King’s Mouth album. It’s produced by longtime collaborator Dave Fridmann, and sees Kacey Musgraves contribute backing vocals to three tracks – “Flowers of Neptune 6”, “Watching the Lightbugs Glow” and “God and the Policeman”.
Vocalist Wayne Coyne says of the album in a statement, “So… for most of our musical life we’ve kind of thought of ourselves as coming from ‘Earth’… not really caring WHERE we were actually from. So for the first time in our musical life we began to think of ourselves as ‘AN AMERICAN BAND’… telling ourselves that it would be our identity for our next creative adventure. We had become a seven-piece ensemble and were beginning to feel more and more of a kinship with groups that have a lot of members in them. We started to think of classic American bands like The Grateful Dead and Parliament-Funkadelic and how maybe we could embrace this new vibe.”
“The music and songs that make up the AMERICAN HEAD album are based in a feeling,” Wayne Coyne continues. “A feeling that, I think, can only be expressed through music and songs. We were, while creating it, trying to NOT hear it as sounds… but to feel it. Mother’s sacrifice, Father’s intensity, Brother’s insanity, Sister’s rebellion…I can’t quite put it into words.”
He adds, “Something switches and others (your brothers and sisters and mother and father…your pets) start to become more important to you…in the beginning there is only you… and your desires are all that you can care about…but… something switches.. I think all of these songs are about this little switch.”
Read the rest of this article at The Line Of Best Fit
“Christ would be ashamed of us all,” Sufjan Stevens wrote on Tumblr in early 2017, about the refugee crisis, days after the inauguration of Donald Trump. “The truest of ‘Americans,’” he wrote, “have either been destroyed by the white immigrant, incarcerated, isolated, held captive, or stolen and enslaved.” His words felt impassioned and precise, and they cut even deeper considering his explorations as a songwriter over the past two decades: his tender narratives of faith and faithlessness, humanity and hopelessness, his own personal tempests and the deeper tests that await us all.
Stevens’ new song, which is called “America,” feels similarly haunted. Its 12 minutes are filled with rhetorical questions and biblical allusions as he returns to subjects he’s revisited again and again, casting them all as signs of the apocalypse. “The dove flew to me like a vision of paranoia,” he sings, and nothing in the song’s characteristically sprawling arsenal—its symphonic slow-build, its sea of recorders, its climactic, singalong chorus—seems able to soothe his fears. As the first single from The Ascension, the 80-minute album he’s billing as the follow-up to 2015’s quiet, autobiographical Carrie & Lowell, it arrives as its own dark omen.
Read the rest of this article at Pitchfork
Beverly Glenn-Copeland has announced a new retrospective compilation.
Coming out through Transgressive Records, Transmissions: The Music of Beverly Glenn-Copeland, fans out over the singer, composer and transgender activist’s 50-year career. The record will comprise reissued music, including studio tracks from his 1986 album Keyboard Fantasies. Three previously unreleased tracks, “River Dreams” as well as live versions of “Deep River” and “Colour Of Anyhow” also make the cut.
Beyond production, Beverly Glenn-Copeland is a folk singer, playwright and composer of children television shows. He’s most known for his cult classic LP Keyboard Fantasies, which was remastered and reissued by Invisible City Editions in 2017. Transmissions follows the 2019 reissue of his 2004 album, Primal Player.
Read the rest of this article at Resident Advisor
