August Program Titles Released This Week:
BANKS – III CD/LP (Harvest)
The result of a self-imposed period of quiet and reflection, brooding pop singer Banks returns with her third album III and first full-length effort since 2016’s The Altar. “This album is an ode to my journey,” the artist explains. “It documents a major growth spurt. Of self-acceptance, letting go, forgiveness, and deep love. It has been painful to realize that life is not black and white. Romanticism leads to fierce reality checks, which leads to wisdom, which leads to deeper empathy which leads to greater love. This album documents the cycle.” The album’s first single “Gimme” “feels kind of like a slap in the face,” she says, explaining that it’s “about having no shame in who you are and being proud of your own desires.” Banks’ music has always been bold, shadowy and self-empowering, but “Gimme” is a decidedly more aggressive beast than any of her previous songs, from its wobbling bass bombs to its unapologetically direct lyrics.
Bones UK – Bones UK CD (Sumerian)
For London-bred band Bones UK, every song is a chance to speak their minds, and to shed light on the disconnect between the status quo and the far more glorious world inside their heads. On their self-titled debut album, vocalist Rosie Bones and guitarist Carmen Vandenberg confront everything from the beauty industrial complex to toxic masculinity to music-scene sexism, embedding each track with choruses primed for passionate shouting-along. Bones UK offer up an album that’s both provocative and endlessly exhilarating, even in its most outraged moments. True to the L.A.-based band’s anti-conformist spirit, Bones UK unfolds with an entirely uncontainable sound, a riff-heavy collision of rock-and-roll and rough-edged electronic music. On opener “Beautiful Is Boring”, Bones UK bring artful riffs and sinister grooves to a feverish statement against societal expectations of beauty. [Vinyl edition due August 2.]
Calexico/Iron & Wine – Years To Burn CD/LP+MP3 (Sub Pop)
Calexico and Iron & Wine first made an artistic connection with In Ihe Reins, the 2005 EP that brought Sam Beam, Joey Burns and John Convertino together. The acclaimed collaboration introduced both acts to wider audiences and broadened Beam’s artistic horizons, but it was the shared experience of touring together in the tradition of Bob Dylan’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” that cemented the bond. Their metaphorical roads diverged in the years that followed, but they kept in touch and cross-pollinated where they could. Although they often talked about rekindling their collaboration in the studio and on stage, it wasn’t until 2018 that their schedules finally aligned. While Beam wrote all the songs for In the Reins, this recording features contributions from both Beam and Burns. While the two may have taken differing approaches to songwriting, the spirit of collaboration was alive and well in the studio; Sam shared demos ahead of time and was ready for the others to contribute with arrangement ideas and instrumental parts, while Joey spontaneous as ever, came in with concepts and an eagerness to improvise.
