Girl Ray - Drive-By Truckers - Poi Dog Pondering
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London's Girl Ray are no strangers to re-invention. The three-piece comprising Poppy Hankin, Iris McConnell and Sophie Moss, made an immediate impact with the release of their 2017 debut Earl Grey on the influential indie Moshi Moshi (Anna Meredith, Florence & The Machine, Kate Nash), which channeled the baroque 70s soft pop of Todd Rundgren through the scrappy aesthetics of 80s UK indie and earned high praise from outlets like Pitchfork, The Guardian, Stereogum and FADER among many others. Their second LP, 2019’s Girl, saw the band change direction dramatically, taking on a kind of indie-fied R&B that The Guardian described as "the great sound of a band getting pop wrong," and in 2021 the band returned in yet another new guise, releasing the one off, house-adjacent single "Give Me Your Love" that was produced with Hot Chip's Joe Goddard and Al Doyle.
Today, Girl Ray have returned to announce their third LP Prestige, an album they made with the revered producer Ben H Allen (Gnarls Barkley, Animal Collective, MIA, Belle & Sebastian), that will be released on August 4th on Moshi Moshi. To mark the announce the band have shared the lead single "Hold Tight", alongside an extremely endearing video directed by long time collaborator Alex Catouris.
The band hinted at their new direction with the one off single "Everybody's Saying That", which was released in February and received best of the month honors from FADER, who described it as "the kind of song Dua Lipa would make if she was more used to playing pubs than arenas." "Hold Tight" sees the band continue in that direction, maintaining the bookish introspection, and open-hearted songwriting that have long been the core of the band's sound with a bright new sonic pallet.
“Lyrically this songs is about how appreciative I am to have found my partner, and how my mental load feels so much lighter and easier to bear now that I'm with her," Hankin explains. "The production on this takes some inspiration from Haim's incredible record ‘Women in Music Pt. III’, and features a subby drum loop inspired by Atlanta’s hip hop scene.”
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The Drive-By Truckers will release The Complete Dirty South on June 16, 2023, via New West Records. Originally released in 2004 to wide acclaim, The Dirty South explores the mean highways and dark hollers of what the band called the “Mythological South,” a tornado-ravaged landscape populated by bootleggers and small-time criminals, everyday folks just scraping to get by and looming icons like Sam Phillips, John Henry, and Sheriff Buford Pusser. The album is a reckoning with the place they call home.
The ground-breaking album has been re-sequenced and expanded to the band’s initially proposed 17-song track listing. It includes 3 bonus tracks that were left off the original album, 4 remixed songs, and 2 featuring newly updated vocals. Also included is a 32-page book featuring original and new liner notes written by the Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood, track-by-track descriptions written by Hood, Mike Cooley and Jason Isbell, never-before-seen photos, and updated artwork by the late Wes Freed. The Complete Dirty South was remastered by the legendary Greg Calbi. This definitive version of the album will finally be available as the band intended.
Today, the Drive-By Truckers shared the remixed & remastered “Puttin’ People on the Moon,” which features new vocals. Patterson Hood says, “I wrote ‘Puttin’ People on the Moon’ in the passenger seat of our van driving through western Tennessee and northern Georgia in late 2003. At the time I was angry about the recently started war in Iraq and the polarization President Bush and his cronies were unleashing on our country, but also drawing a parallel to the policies of President Reagan, who at the time many still viewed as a grandfatherly presence despite his enacting so many policies that had major negative ramifications on our future, a future we’re still living through now. The song was probably the best political song I had ever written at that time and unfortunately is more timely today than it was in 2003.” Hood adds, “We recorded it in Muscle Shoals (in one take) in January 2004, but by the time the record came out, I had already begun to regret the vocal take, which attempted some things I hadn’t yet really learned how to do at that time.
As the years have passed, it is one of two on that album that has always really bothered me when I hear it played, while live it has morphed into a truly powerful song for me to sing. When we were given the opportunity to do a ‘Directors Cut’ version of what many consider to be our masterpiece, I wanted to take another stab at that vocal and nailed what I believe to be a definitive version of it in one take. One that truly captures the inherent anger and despair of the song as written and played by the band. The scream at the end might be the most primal recording of my voice anywhere in our catalog and I’m very proud to have this version out there after all these years. The Complete Dirty South might indeed be DBT’s masterpiece.”
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Poi Dog Pondering's newest album (released in January) Keep On Loving Each Other, a song cycle that reverberates with the determination to follow one's heart while living within an extended arm's embrace of empathy, is the band's 10th full-length album.
The Poi line-up for this album is: Frank Orrall, Ted Cho, Susan Voelz, Max Crawford, Paul Von Mertens, John Nelson, Ron Hall, Rick Gehrenbeck, Dag Juhlin, Ryan Murphy, Julio Davis, Bruce Hughes, Matt Davis, Kelly Hogan, Nora O'Connor, Abra Moore, Kornell Hargrove, Sophia De Leon Sanchez, Robert Cornelius, Carla Prather, and Ali Weiss Mann.
Keep On Loving Each Other was produced by Frank Orrall and Ted Cho, recorded in Chicago and Sonoma, and mixed by Ted Cho with additional recording and mix assist by Frank Orrall.
Formed in Hawaii, coming to national attention after moving to Austin, TX in 1987, and headquartered in Chicago since 1992, Poi Dog Pondering was born out of the mid-80s post-punk indie acoustic scene (the Pogues, Mano Negra, Camper Van Beethoven). They have released albums on the labels Texas Hotel, Sony/Columbia, and Platetectonic Music, occasionally licensing music to Tommy Boy, Premonition, and Bar None Records.
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