Karen Schoemer "August"
The debut album by acclaimed poet Karen Schoemer, featuring 31 poems constructed collage-style into “a month of August,” refined at an artist’s residency at Herman Melville’s Arrowhead in Pittsfield, MA. With experimental musical accompaniment by Oli Heffernan, Mike Watt, Amy Rigby, Eric Hardiman, Steve Almaas, Parashi and more.
Action/Adventure "Ever After"
Jim Keller "End of the World"
A cult figure in the music business, Keller’s gigs at New York’s Lakeside Lounge and The Rockwood Music Hall are legendary. If the best players in town weren’t on stage with him, they were in the audience, singing along, playing along, making the sort of noise that would get you locked up in a lesser town.
Produced by long time musical director Adam Minkoff this is a rocking set of 12 Keller originals that confirms Kellers as one of the most exciting and most prolific singer/songwriters of today’s New York music scene.
From the horse’s mouth:
In 2022 I got together with my New York friend Adam Minkoff (a producer, singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who tours with Graham Nash and Amy Helm) to record tracks for an album that we released as Spark and Flame. After that project, I picked up where I left off with my LA buddy Mitchell Froom (a producer of artists such as Los Lobos, Richard Thompson and Suzanne Vega plus musician who is a member of Crowded House) for our second album with Bob Glaub, David Hidalgo and Michael Urbano, called Daylight. Those two projects were in many ways opposites; Adam records tracks, and with Mitchell, everything is totally live. Both were a blast.
Then Adam and I reconvened with our usual jam-session array of Brooklyn, Woodstock and New York City musicians, and a new set of songs emerged. They became this album, End of the World.
Adam produced. We recorded me on guitar and vocals, Lee Falco on drums and Adam on bass, then built the tracks from there. This allowed Adam and I to play with the arrangements and instrumentation in the studio. If there is a downside, it’s that tinkering with songs takes time, but experimentation in the studio is a luxury and process is almost always joyful and engaging. As always, the songs are almost all written by me with Byron Isaacs (singer, songwriter, and bassist for The Lumineers and Ollabelle)) who has been my partner in crime for over 15 years and comes up with all the best lines…
I hope you find something in here to enjoy.
Cheers! Jim Keller
Major Stars "More Colors of Sound"
Out of the roiling miasma of timeless time comes a long-promised delivery from one of the constants of our era: Major Stars, and their new LP, More Colors of Sound. Fueled by overdriven guitars and gut-punching rhythm, these veteran rockers are stalwart in their delivery of trippy, psyched-out extremes. Over 27 years since The Rock Revival (their Twisted Village debut), they can be counted on to come back around every three or four years or so, with something heavy picked up on their journey. This time, it’s been since 2019’s Roots of Confusion Seeds of Joy – but what’s a few years in the larger scheme of things? Because ‘larger’ IS the Major Stars scheme of things, one that’s always cut deeply into the grooves.
YES. It’s been since the late 90s that Major Stars have been transmitting their signal. But even eternity wasn’t built in such an arc of time: Wayne Rogers and Kate Biggar have been crossing necks dating back to the 80s, with Crystallized Movements’ screaming psych-punk hybrids. Tom Leonard, Major Stars’ current third axeman, has been in the mix almost as long: Luxurious Bags’ amorphous low-fi (that’s him!) was released on Twisted Village too, and Kate and Wayne and him all played together in Vermonster. After the demise of Magic Hour -Wayne and Kate’s proto-freak-folk outfit with Damon & Naomi – the three of them formed Major Stars, with Wayne singing and Dave Lynch on drums. Which brings us… not quite to today, but, the More Colors of Sound lineup is as-was for Roots of Confusion Seeds of Joy: Kate, Tom, Wayne, Dave Dougan on bass, Casey Keenan on drums and Noell Dorsey singing lead.
More Colors of Sound had been earmarked as a title for nearly twenty years when they started work on the album that would finally bear its name. For the first ten Major Stars releases, Wayne wrote everything, but due to the way things were in 2020 and 2021, Tom and Noell wrote a bunch of things together, along with Wayne’s stuff. By the time they got around to recording, at Gloucester’s Bang-A Song Studios, there was enough stuff to make a double LP! A double’s a once-in-a-lifetime dream scenario, but once they’d done the overdubs, they skinnied it down to the 44 minutes here – 22 minutes of each songwriting team. Ultimately democratic, not too long… you don’t see that much nowadays!
As ever (and ever), the crush of the three guitars as they riff with the rhythm defines Major Stars’ sound. The work of two writing camps has produced a song-centric focus on More Colors of Sound – one, of course, shot through with distorted tones, fevered neck-wringing solos and several extended jammers – but the production overall has a cleaner sound than its predecessor. That, plus the increased number of writers on deck gives the title a kind of kismet to go along with its historical weight, and that’s alright!
On More Colors of Sound, Major Stars find new hues inside the incendiary approach that’s launched them so ecstatically since early times; another jar of infinity captured with a quality all its own – and it’s all in the grooves!