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No Kill – Swooning
Brooklyn artist No Kill announces her debut album today, Gold Chorus. The shiny, bright noisy-rock album is illuminated by (real life name) Jamie Cogar’s silvery vocals and voluptuous lyrics. “Swooning” is the first single from the album, accompanied by a video centered on the concept of the female gaze – the protaginists peer into the camera defiantly, yet the space is flickering and awashed in colorful light, playing with the…
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V.V. Lightbody – Really Do Care
Chicago’s V.V. Lightbody has released a new single, “Really Do Care,” a contemplative, groovy reflection on relationships. Really Do Care by V.V. Lightbody Lightbody’s acclaimed 2020 album Make a Shrine or Burn It (Acrophase Records) showcases the musician’s myriad multi-instrumental, vocal, and song-writing talents. “Really Do Care” is the lone B-side, featuring a burning thread of slide guitar from Nashville’s Juan Solorzano, Lightbody’s own flute playing, nouveau folk guitar strums,…
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Jesse Aycock – Sadder Than a Sunset
Today, Tulsa, Oklahoma-based musician Jesse Aycock shares the video and single, “Sadder Than a Sunset,” from his upcoming self-titled album, out April 16th on Horton Records. Of the 13 tracks on the album, “Sadder Than a Sunset” felt the most cosmic. Sometimes songs feel like they come from another place in time. This is one of those songs to me. It kinda wrote itself. All of these images started flooding…
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Hard Working Americans Live at Kenai Peninsula Fairgrounds on 2014-08-03
Just posting this here for posterity and for your revisiting/listening pleasure. In 2014, Todd Snider missed his plane en route to a Hard Working Americans gig but luckily there was already a tremendous vocalist as well as masterful shredder in the band who was able to step in and sing his heart out. I’ve been holding off on listening to a lot of harder-to-find and newer-to-me Neal stuff because I…
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Call and Response : A Mix by Michael Feuerstack
Montreal musician Michael Feuerstack was kind enough to curate this week’s playlist for Petal Motel. Earlier this month, he released the album Harmonize the Moon on Halifax’s Forward Music Group. Formerly recording with The Wooden Stars prior to a stint under the nom de plume Snailhouse, Michael recorded this album all on his own at his home in the spring of 2020, pensive, lyric-forward songs that took shape over gentle,…
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Marjorine – Salton Sea
Salton Sea by Marjorine Nicholas Comaratta spent the last ten years playing in psych bands and experimenting with hardware-based electronic music. When the pandemic hit, he had to deeply re-think his creative approach and figure out a way to balance and marry the worlds he’d been liminally wavering between. On the anniversary of Sgt. Pepper last year, Nicholas spent the night reading about the record and its creation until the…
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Josh Kimbrough
We interviewed Josh Kimbrough, the fingerstyle guitarist and composer from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Josh put out his fantastic solo debut record, Slither, Soar, and Disappear last year on Tompkins Square, as well as a Christmas EP entitled Yule Chime. Josh grew up in the Chapel Hill-area and became an integral part of the music scene there at an early age. In the interview, he described how his interests and…
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Mountain Music
Soon I will go to the mountains.. these are the songs I’m excited to listen to there. Last week I watched Without Getting Killed or Caught and was struck again at how the songwriters who write these stories of immense sadness and joy have such a lore that surrounds them which makes these stories even more vivid and compelling, and all the more heart-rending. Often the real-life stories are even…
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Bill Callahan – Cowboy
When it comes to songwriting, few compare to Bill Callahan. He has a rare gift for telling the truth without much fanfare, gut-punching tenderness and understated depth, prismatic stories of vivid characters sometimes in the guise of objects or animals. Bill captured my attention when I was just a teenager with his brilliant A River Ain’t Too Much Love when he was recording as (Smog) and every release has just…
