FAB DISTRIBUTION
BAD BRAINS “Quickness” ORG MUSIC
February 18. “Quickness” is the fourth full-length studio album by Bad Brains, originally released by Caroline Records in 1989. At the time of its release, it was the band’s bestselling album and also landed them a featured MTV music video for the opening track, “Soul Craft”. This reissue marks the fifth release in the Bad Brains remaster campaign, re-launching the Bad Brains Records label imprint. In coordination with the band, Org Music has overseen the restoration and remastering of the iconic Bad Brains’ recordings. The audio was mastered by Dave Gardner at Infrasonic Mastering and pressed at Furnace Record Pressing. Available on LP, CD, and cassette.
BEACH HOUSE “Once Twice Melody” SUB POP
FEBRUARY 18. First new album since 2018 from the standard-bearers of modern atmospheric indie-pop. “Once Twice Melody” is the 8th studio album by Beach House. It is a double album, featuring 18 songs presented in 4 chapters. Across these songs, many types of style and song structures can be heard. Songs without drums, songs centered around acoustic guitar, mostly electronic songs with no guitar, wandering and repetitive melodies, songs built around the string sections. In addition to new sounds, many of the drum machines, organs, keyboards and tones that listeners may associate with previous Beach House records remain present throughout many of the compositions. Beach House’s audience has tripled recently due to massive online exposure: “Space Song” (from 2015’s “Depression Cherry”) was in two separate TikTok memes, while “Silver Soul” (from 2010’s “Teen Dream”) was sampled by Kendrick Lamar and subsequently got tons of exposure on TikTok.
BRAD BARR “The Winter Mission” SECRET CITY
Available now. The front man for the Barr Brothers has set aside his band and his microphone and even his sheets of lyrics - picking up his instrument for a solo guitar album that ripples with immediacy and vulnerability. The album had its origins in a commission, landing just before the arrival of the Pandemic: an invitation to compose for New York City’s acclaimed off-Broadway All For One Theater. The theatre’s founder Michael Wolk, knew “The Fall Apartment”, Barr’s 2008 solo debut, and sought a set of similar instrumental tracks for on- and offstage use. “It felt like a gift,” Barr recalls - as the world shut down and touring stopped, Barr sought a sound he could explore by himself, in this strange intermission. Barr spent decades developing his visceral approach to the guitar, first with The Slip and then across three LPs with the Barr Brothers.
EELS “Extreme Witchcraft” E-WORKS
Available now. Eels have had one of the most consistently acclaimed careers in music. The ever-changing project of principal singer/songwriter E (Mark Oliver Everett), Eels have released thirteen studio albums since their 1996 debut, “Beautiful Freak”. During the height of the pandemic lockdown in early 2021, E got an out of the blue message from Mark Romanek, director of the first Eels video, “Novocaine For the Soul”. It triggered him to reach out to John Parish, who was in between numerous projects and immediately got to work in his HonorSound studio in Bristol and began sending ideas to E. “I’d sneak out of bed at 4 in the morning to hear the latest thing John had sent, and try to add my part to it and get it back to him quickly before my 4 year old son woke up,” E says. The resulting album is “Extreme Witchcraft”.
FRUIT BATS “Sometimes A Cloud is Just A Cloud: Slow Growers, Sleeper Hits and Lost Songs” MERGE
Available now. Eric D. Johnson, the creative force behind Fruit Bats, doesn’t spend a lot of time looking in the rear view mirror. But with the 20th anniversary of his first Fruit Bats release (2001’s “Echolocation”) on his mind, it seemed as good a time as any to take stock of his work - and he’s doing so in the form of “Sometimes a Cloud Is Just a Cloud: Slow Growers, Sleeper Hits and Lost Songs (2001-2021)”, a two-disc collection that tracks the history of Fruit Bats from its earliest days to right now. Thoughtfully compiled by Johnson himself, this set is split in two distinct halves. The first disc cherry-picks from Fruit Bats’ official releases and kicks off with a brandnew track, “Rips Me Up”. The second disc is for longtime fans that want a deeper dive into Fruit Bats lore.
MYRIAM GENDRON “Ma Délire – Songs Of Love, Lost & Found” FEEDING TUBE
Feb 18. Myriam Gendron had spent years sifting through traditional music from Quebec, France and the U.S., highlighting parts of songs and ideas she liked, discarding some she found abhorrent, and merging the good bits with her own writing or other cannibalized shards. At some juncture she flashed on this work’s common thread — its thematic roots were always in one type of romantic longing or another. Mixing vocal tracks with instrumentals, singing in both French and English, using a syncretic blend of original, modern and traditional lyrics, Ma délire fearlessly wanders through a universe of its own invention, daring us to open our minds wide enough to take it all in. Features Chris Corsano & Bill Nace and many fine Québec musicians. “Its 15 tracks cohere into a statement of astonishing power, making it one of 2021’s finest releases”. - Joseph Neff, The Vinyl
CARSON McHONE “Still Life” MERGE
February 25. “Still Life”, Carson McHone’s third album and first release with Merge Records, quivers like a tightrope, with songs about existing within such tension and surviving beyond the breaking point. These are stories of sabotage, confusion, and surrender. The album is a testament to the effort of reaching, sometimes flailing, for understanding and for balance. “Still Life” invites us to gasp at our own reflection and acknowledge the unsettling beauty in this breath. The songs of “Still Life” were written in quiet moments between tours and recorded away from Texas, in Ontario with Canadian musician and producer Daniel Romano. The phrasing and tones recall John Cale, The Kinks, Richard and Linda Thompson - likeminded artists of the late 1960s and early 70s, another era of transition and innovation. The arrangements provide texture to the landscape of the songs while sustaining the underlying thematic tension.
LUMINEERS “Brightside” DUALTONE
Available now. Multi-platinum selling GRAMMY nominated band The Lumineers are back with their highly anticipated fourth album, “Brightside”. Coming off the success of their darkly cinematic third album “III”, Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites’ latest work features their ever-more sophisticated songwriting and arranging, with production from longtime producer and friend Simone Felice. The lead single and title track “Brightside” sets off the album with an anthemic bang, touching on themes of love and American life and featuring the foot-stomping, arena filling sound the band has become beloved for worldwide. The songs of BRIGHTSIDE are buoyed by an underlying optimism. This is unquestionably The Lumineers’ most rocking album—so in a very different way, BRIGHTSIDE is as big a surprise as III was.
MITSKI “Laurel Hell” DEAD OCEANS
February 4. With “Laurel Hell”, Mitski cements her reputation as an artist capable of using her talent to perform the alchemy that turns our most savage and alienated experiences into the very elixir that cures them. Like the mountain laurels for which this new album is named, public perception, like the intoxicating prism of the internet, can offer an alluring façade that obscures a deadly trap - one that tightens the more you struggle. Exhausted by this warped mirror, and our addiction to false binaries, she began writing songs that stripped away the masks and revealed the complex and often contradictory realities behind them. Mitski has written a soundtrack for transformation, a map to the place where vulnerability and resilience, sorrow and delight, error and transcendence can all sit within our humanity, can all be seen as worthy of acknowledgment, and ultimately, love.
SUPERCHUNK “Wild Loneliness” MERGE
February 25. Like every record Superchunk has made over the last thirty-some years, “Wild Loneliness” is unskippably excellent and infectious. A blend of stripped-down and lush, electric and acoustic, and highs and lows; less about what we’ve lost in these harrowing times and more about what we have to be thankful for. Refocusing on possibility, with possibility built into the songs themselves, in the sweet surprises tucked inside them. Like when the sax comes in on the title track, played by Wye Oak’s Andy Stack, adding a completely new texture to the song. Or when Owen Pallett’s strings come in on “This Night”. But your favourite surprise on “Wild Loneliness” might be when the harmonies of Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley of Teenage Fanclub kick in on “Endless Summer” - as perfect a pop song as you’ll ever hear - sweet, bright, flat-out gorgeous - and yet it grapples with the depressing reality of climate change.
WILD RIVERS “Sidelines” NETTWERK
February 4. Indie trio Wild Rivers (Khalid Yassein, Devan Glover, and Andrew Oliver) have a gift for penning introspective lyrics and genre-fluid melodies that transmit wisdom beyond their years. Their anticipated full-length album, Sidelines—coproduced by Peter Katis (The National, Interpol, Sharon van Etten) and Wild Rivers and recorded in Connecticut, Los Angeles and Khalid and Devan’s college town of Kingston, Ontario (where the two originally met and began making music together)— touches on coming-of-age themes and embracing the unknown. A portrait of their early post-college years, Sidelines is where Wild Rivers poured their collective impressions about merging into their mid-20s — a strange, liminal age where it’s easy to romanticize childhood. Sonically, Wild Rivers pull from a spectrum of sounds, imbuing pop, rock, indie, and folk into each song’s blueprint. Watch for Wild Rivers on tour across Canada in March.