By Bloodshot Records
This year is our 25th and, in celebration, our acts will be out en force this summer.
* Square Roots Festival will have a special Bloodshot Records stage on July 13, including performances from the Mekons (supporting their new album Deserted), Murder By Death (supporting their new album The Other Shore), the Vandoliers (supporting their new album Forever), and surprise guests. The Mekons just premiered a new video:
* The great Fitzgerald’s American Music Festival will be hosting another satellite 25th anniversary celebration with performances from Robbie Fulks, Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, the Waco Brothers, and former label artist Alejandro Escovedo, July 3 – 6. (tickets/info).
* Ruby Boots will be performing her first Chicago street festival at this year’s Ribfest on June 16th. The buzz around her recent release Don’t Talk About It gained her a recent Stagecoach performance and tons of acclaim.
A taste . . .
The Mekons – Deserted
Tour Dates.
“Lawrence of California.”
Emboldened by a sold-out tour and a surge of interest in the States after the release of the documentary Revenge of the Mekons, the Mekons retreated to the fringes of Joshua Tree National Park and popular culture to record their new album Deserted.
The long-running, genre-hopping, impossible-to-kill British folk-punk collective summoned the forces of magic, fear, and superstition for an album of shifting sand Sturm und Drang. It is at once a distorted howl into the emptiness of space, as well as a quiet submission to the shimmering allure of a mirage. The heat and endless horizon can lead to madness or clarity, and while there is relief when the sun goes down, you know the deep chill is not far off.
Jon Langford said of the album’s origin:
“The idea was to go to a brand new studio our bassist the Baron had set up just outside Joshua Tree in Yucca Valley, CA and see what happened – we were in the middle of a hectic tour and had been attempting to write material first by e-mail and then in the van . . .
“Most of what we wrote was abandoned after arriving at the Los Gatos compound. The desert is not unlike the ocean (just drier) and equally inspirational to old pirate punk rockers. The harshness of the environment, the bold and embattled plants and creatures that live there are metaphorical for us perhaps. Have you seen the desert after the rain?
“There are deserts everywhere. We took time to ponder the vastness and the weirdness of the desert. Going to the country to get your head together is a ripe old rock cliché. We went to the desert to have our brains scoured . . . We went from one desert to another. A more hopeful place where we arm ourselves with spikes and endure.”
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Murder By Death – The Other Shore
Tour Dates.
Alas.
Murder By Death’s eighth full-length album, The Other Shore, is a space-Western about a ravaged Earth, its fleeing populace, and a relationship in jeopardy. It’s an epic journey rocketing toward the unknown – in the universe, within the characters represented through 11 songs, and through the band’s evolving sound. But basically, the quest poses the ultimatum: Stick with what you have or risk it all to find something new.
Recorded at La La Land in Louisville by Kevin Ratterman (My Morning Jacket, White Reaper, Ray LaMontagne, Basia Bulat) and Anne Gauthier, The Other Shore sonically captures the mood of two lovers choosing separate paths, one who stays on Earth and one who leaves it.
As trailblazers of the early 2000s indie-Americana style, the Louisville, KY-based quintet finds a way of taking tried & true rock-and-roll and knocking it slightly off axis, into tottering revolutions of something eerie, emotional, immediate, lush, and uniquely theirs. As the album and voyage progress, the atmosphere transitions from earthy to cosmic, sober to festive – from folksy Midwestern indie rock (“Stone”) and piano-laden devil-on-one-shoulder/angel-on-the-other Leonard Cohen-style balladry (“Only Time”), to buoyant new wave recalling The Cure (“Bloom”) and celebratory jangly singalongs (“I Have Arrived”).
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Sarah Shook & the Disarmers – Years
Tour Dates.
“Good As Gold.”
Sarah is self-defined as a vegan, bisexual, atheist mom in a country band from the South. She was home-schooled and raised in a strict, religious family that didn’t allow her to listen to any sort of secular music. Years is about overcoming life challenges and getting people to listen and understand those who are different than themselves.
This is the follow-up to the band’s debut album Sidelong, which was released in 2017 to enthusiastic responses from The Wall Street Journal, She Shreds, KEXP, and others. Years has received recent attention from the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Noisey, Rolling Stone Country, Slant, QNotes, News & Observer, Paste, WellRed Comedy Podcast, WUNC Morning Edition, and elsewhere.
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Comments welcome.
Posted on June 6, 2019