Barry Adamson "Memento Mori (Anthology 1978-2018)"
BARRY ADAMSON has announced details of Memento Mori (Anthology 1978-2018), a 40th-anniversary release charting the artist’s writing and recording career, along with two very special live shows in October at Manchester’s RNCM Theatre and London’s Union Chapel.
Says Adamson, “I’m immensely looking forward to bringing my anthology, Memento Mori, to the stage – complete with strings and brass, flutes and whistles – along with my band, seething with excellence, chomping at the bit, to bring you the full on Barry Adamson experience. A special album release, worthy of everything I can bring to the table. From Moss Side Story to Memento Mori (before and beyond). Not to be missed.”
Memento Mori charts Adamson’s career from 1978’s Magazine track, ‘Parade’ (co-written by Adamson, from their debut album Real Life); to his work as founding member, alongside Nick Cave, of the Bad Seeds (‘From Her To Eternity’, co-written by Adamson); through his nine solo albums, from 1988’s Moss Side Story to the latest Love Sick Dick EPs, bringing everything up to date with a brand new unreleased track, ‘The Hummingbird’.
Memento Mori (Anthology 1978-2018) is out on limited edition double gold vinyl, CD and download on 26 October 2018, on Mute. The live shows follow on 29 October in Manchester and 30 October in London.
Barry Adamson has been creating all of his life. Brought up in Manchester’s Moss Side, Adamson learnt to play the bass overnight for Magazine, Manchester’s most influential band of that era. When they disbanded, five albums later in 1981, his singular style was spotted by The Birthday Party, with whom he played several times.
His establishment as a solo artist came after a three-year stint with Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds with the release of his classic first solo album, Moss Side Story – the ultimate soundtrack to an “imaginary film” – which raised Adamson’s name as a composer of diverse complexity; able to tell a story with music, where the images were those supplanted in the minds of the listeners. Adamson has worked with some of the film industry’s most intriguing mavericks including Derek Jarman (The Last of England, 1987), David Lynch (The Lost Highway, 1997), Oliver Stone (Natural Born Killers, 1994) and Danny Boyle (The Beach, 2000).
Having released nine studio albums, including the 1992 Mercury Music Prize nominated Soul Murder, 1996’s Oedipus Schmoedipus, which includes collaborations with Jarvis Cocker, Nick Cave and The Associates’ Billy McKenzie, and his most recent release, Know Where To Run, which was in part inspired by a recent US tour, back playing with Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds after 23 years, Adamson’s talents are as much demand by new generations of artists as he was after his first solo release, with collaborations in recent years across a variety of art forms, including an Olivier Award-winning ballet performance by Sylvie Guillem and the Ballet Boyz scored by Adamson.
It was always a logical progression for Adamson to move behind the camera and once again his brooding film noir style and dark comedy has seen him write, direct and score a number of short films, including ‘The Swing The Hole and The Lie’’ (2014), as well as the recent video for They, Walk Amongst Us (2017).
Barry Adamson’s most recent releases, Love Sick Dick and Love Sick Dick Remixed – the latter featured a 6Music playlisted reworking by A Certain Ratio (featured on the Anthology) as well as remixes from Gazelle Twin and ADULT. – have seen Barry Adamson back on the road, recent shows included a unique live performance cut straight to lathe as part of an evening at the British Library examining the Soviet vinyl bootleggers.
Dates have been announced for October in London and Manchester to coincide with the release, and a 2019 performance is confirmed for Rockaway Beach festival. Before then, Barry Adamson will be DJing on 16 August at Somerset House as part of their Film4 Summer Screen series, alongside a screening of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
Musician, composer, writer, photographer, filmmaker. Barry Adamson is not a man to take it easy.
NIna Nastasia "Riderless Horse"
The first new album in over a decade from world-renowned singer-songwriter, Nina Nastasia.
Produced by Steve Albini.
Riderless Horse is my first solo record, and it’s the first record my former partner, Kennan Gudjonsson, didn’t produce.
I haven’t made an album since 2010. I decided to stop pursuing music several years after my sixth record, Outlaster, because of unhappiness, overwhelming chaos, mental illness, and my tragically dysfunctional relationship with Kennan. Creating music had always been a positive outlet during difficult times, but eventually it became a source of absolute misery.
Riderless Horse documents the grief, but it also marks moments of empowerment and a real happiness in discovering my own capability. Steve Albini produced this record with me, and Greg Norman assisted. It was exactly the right environment to work on this record. We all had meals together, cried, laughed, and told stories. It was perfect. It made me realize how much I love writing, playing and recording music.
Terrible things happen. These were some terrible things. So, what to do – learn something valuable, connect with people, move the fuck out of that apartment, remember the humor, find the humour, tell the truth, and make a record. I made a record.
doubleVee "Treat Her Strangely (Rough Trade Publishing)"
Husband-wife duo doubleVee have announced new album Treat Her Strangely for July 15th, 2022, with singles coming up in May and June. Like many musicians who have persevered during the pandemic, their nine new songs were written and recorded while staying holed up in their home studio as much as possible.
Three guest musicians recorded parts on various songs on the album: Brent Williams handled violin and viola, Christi Wans played the trumpet and piccolo trumpet and Kevin Webb performed trombone parts.
Allan Vest and Barb [Hendrickson] Vest both had backgrounds that made for a good match in music when they started working together in 2012, including Vest’s contributions to the band Starlight Mints and TV and film placements and Hendrickson’s long stint on public radio creating a film music program. They released a concept album as their debut album in 2017, The Moonlit Fables of Jack the Rider. Their follow-up EP Songs for Birds and Bats was released in 2019.
Senses Fail "Hell is in Your Head"
Senses Fail have announced their highly anticipated eighth album “Hell Is In Your Head”. The album is set for release 15th July 2022 via Pure Noise Records. Co-produced by Saosin’s Beau Burchell, ‘Hell Is In Your Head’ marks the band’s first studio album since 2018’s “If There Is Light, It Will Find You”.
Having a kid changes you. Ask most new parents and they’ll say that when you bring a child into the world it instils in you a previously unimagined perspective on existence. Some even go so far as to say that it makes life make sense, that it gives it a purpose. For Buddy Nielsen, the sole remaining founding member of Senses Fail, it’s also made him think about his own mortality more than ever before. That started during his wife’s pregnancy, but it’s persisted ever since. As such, he’s found himself staring directly into the black abyss of his mortality a lot recently. It’s that heightened sense of his own impending doom that’s at the centre of “Hell Is In Your Head”, the band’s eighth studio album.
“My wife had a pretty serious childbirth”, he says. “I don’t want to say she almost died but it was pretty scary for a minute. And the relationship you have to have with your child is just a constant letting go of yourself in ways that you didn’t necessarily perceive you needed to. I’ve had to start to come to terms with my own death because my daughter, who’s now four, keeps asking about it. So this felt like an opportunity to maybe address grief and how we process being – how do you have a kid, how do you be alive, how do you continue to live a meaningful life while also knowing that you’re going to die?”.
It’s those questions and more that “Hell Is In Your Head” explores and attempts to answer across its 11 dark, brooding songs. It does so in two very distinct halves. Five of the first six tracks take their titles from the five parts of TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land”. They aren’t based on the 1922 poem per se, but they’re set in its world, and use that setting as a foundation to explore those topics in a more philosophical, abstract and timeless sense. Nielsen, in fact, says he views these songs: “more like a play”. That’s why the portentous, gloomy, atmospheric opener has “references to exiting and entering the wings of a stage”.
“What’s the answer to the inevitable trap of the fact that you’re going to die?”, asks Nielsen. “This record attempts to go to the dark place of ‘What is it that we’re so afraid of death?’ We’re afraid of death because of grief. Are we truly afraid of death because of death? Through my own therapy, I’ve learned you don’t even really have a clear understanding of death because it’s unknowable. And since you literally can’t die and come back, I tried to place the record in a much darker fictional place to help talk about those unanswerable questions”.
The second half of the record takes place more in the setting of the real world. Rather than pondering the philosophical nature of death, its songs are more of a real-time observation of it; tackling both the impending extinction-level threat of climate change and the contemporary political dystopia in the USA.
Needless to say, the album covers a lot of ground, and does so equally as emotionally as it does so cerebrally. Throughout, it weaves both Nielsen’s natural emotions and existential neuroses, and his philosophies as a practicing Buddhist into the very fabric of these songs. Not only are its two halves separated thematically – yet also still bound by the concept of death – Nielsen ensured that they’re also split musically. The “Waste Land” section is minor key, the second in major. The result is a musical journey that embraces the darkness of its subject matter, but then learns to let go, that indulges in plenty of existential self-reflection, but which also zooms out to paint a more widescreen picture.