Month: April 2019

Vetiver Band

Vetiver

Beginning around 2003, I’ve been referring to my work as Vetiver. Ever since 1998, I’ve been living in San Francisco. Although the lineup of musicians and band members that I’ve worked with has changed as time has passed, throughout my tours and albums, there are still many who have regularly worked with me. Thom Monahan is one of these regulars, as he’s worked on all of the Vetiver albums as a co-producer and engineer. L.A. serves as a home for Thom, and a recording spot for Complete Strangers.

In my San Francisco home, I started creating the album through demos, took L.A. trips, and then worked with Thom to build on it. Over the past few years, there was some incremental progress made on it. Gabe Noel, Bart Davenport, and Josh Adams all worked with us to create rhythm tracks after Thom and I had create most of the arrangements. Once this happened, the album started to form a complete picture. While working with some more musicians in L.A. and San Francisco, Thom and I worked on Complete Strangers more until it was finally done. Like a deck builder in San Jose, I’ve done a lot of work on it.

Complete Strangers is an album where the title and the songs are linked. They both represent entities with common traits and noticeable differences in time and place. For those who take in the world at all hours of the night, “Stranger Still” is the perfect song. The freedom of the night changing into the dawn of responsibility shines brightly on “From Now On”. Much like humans with differences coming together at events, the album puts a spotlight on common qualities. “Confiding” shows the vulnerable nature of people in love pursuits, and “Current Carry” exudes the feeling of love when confidence is present. “Edgar” and “Backwards Slowly” act as transitional phases for the album. Joy can quickly turn into sadness in the album, much like with other ones in the Vetiver catalogue. A chorus that stands out will be linked to a lyric that quietly makes its mark. Loneliness makes itself well known and subtlety shows its true self while we search for life’s meaning.

My time with this album has left me with a lot of thoughts.

-Andy Cabic

HowlinRain Band

Howlin’ Rain

Ethan Miller is the artist who formed the Howlin’ Rain band together with drummer John Moloney and an old school mate, Ian Gradek, who had just given up a plan to start a business to provide services of grease trap cleaning in Philadelphia. This decision to start a new band emerged from Ethan Miller’s desire to embrace a more melodic sound in his creations and to take advantage of his youth years spent on the Lost Coast. He launched the Howlin’ Rain’s debut album in 2006, right after releasing the last album of his then current band, Comets of Fire.

As drummer John Moloney decided to leave the band after the release of this first album, Queens of the Stone Age, Miller added Garett Goddard, Eli Eckert and Joel Robinow. In 2008 the band released its second album, Magnificent Fiend, as well as a third one, The EP Wild Life.

Today, the band counts Ethan Miller and Joel Robinow as pillar members, as well as lead guitar Isaiah Mitchell (Earthless). Cyrus Comiskey and Raj Ojha are the composers of their new rhythm section.

In December 2010, the band was invited to perform at the second edition of the Bowlie Weekender festival, organized by Belle & Sebastian and presented by All Tomorrow’s Parties in the UK. 2010 is also the year when Howlin’ Rain released the digital version of their EP, The Good Life. In the beginning of 2011, a limited vinyl edition followed, courtesy of American and Birdman records. After the band released The Russian Wilds, Joel Robinson unexpectedly left Howlin’ Rain, so the band had to go on without him.

Cohen Band

Sam Cohen

2015 is the year that guitarist, songwriter, producer, and animator SAM COHEN sets out on his sweeping solo project. Formerly a core member of Apollo Sunshine and the man behind Yellowbirds, Cohen spent the last decade touring and making records, mostly in Brooklyn, treading the tenuous boundaries between the roughhewn,the psychedelic, and the justplaintimelesslycool. Along the way he’s lent his guitar playing to the likes of Bob Weir, Norah Jones, CeeLo, and labelmate EDJ. Cohen also directs a beloved annual recreation of The Last Waltz that has featured Nels Cline, Cass McCombs, and former bandmate Twin Shadow, amongst dozens of others.

Cool It, Cohen’s solo debut, is an extension of the kaleidoscopic terrain evident on previous projects, but where those records rested blissfully in the sonic ether, Cool It reaches outward with more directness than ever, dropping a spotlight on Cohen’s arresting and unconventional songwriting. The melodic ebb and flow might call Harry Nilsson to mind, while guitars and synths flicker under song forms, occasionally overtaking them in fits of molten stoner rock.Dynamic vocal deliveries turn sharp corners, ranging from gruff to tender, sometimes within a single stanza.

Cohen plays and recorded everything on the album himself (save a few guest appearances from his former Yellowbirds compatriots), largely in a weeklong flurry in upstate New York. One creative gesture, captured with a lifetime’s worth of accumulated gear. Interestingly, all of the record’s lead synth hooks are performed on heavily processed guitars, a technique that saturates every mix with the feel of Cohen’s expansive and particular guitar virtuosity.

Pitchfork has called his work “willfully chaotic” and “highly refined” in the same review, while Paste has dubbed it “bedroom pop” and “a sonic tapestry.” Plaudits aside, he is an artist without consensus, evasive as ever, and finally all of the monikers, collusions, and alteregos are stripped away.

Introducing: SAM COHEN. 

Papercuts Band

Papercuts

Papercuts is the moniker of San Francisco singer/songwriter/producer Jason Quever. On Life Among the Savages, Quever’s dreamy mixture of baroque pop, storytelling lyrics, and detailed production work is at its most potent. Having spent nearly 2 years whittling the record down to the essentials, Life Among the Savages is the most concise and lucid of the 5 Papercuts releases. Recorded mostly in his SF home studio, Quever’s haunting melodies soar over strings, garagey guitar hooks, piano and mellotron, all held together by energetic bass and drums that never rely on a cliched beat. While there are echoes of bands like Spiritualized and the Zombies in the mood and ambitious orchestration of tracks such as the “Life Among The Savages” title track (which contains an arrangement contribution from Beach Houses’ Alex Scally), and echoes of dream pop such as the hypnotic “Staring At the Bright Lights”, the sound here is undeniably Quever’s all his own. And while the record is a lovely example of the production that he has also become known for, it’s the songwriting itself that shines the brightest here. 

Life Among the Savages is an eclectic, fun yet undeniably melancholy trip full of songs about city life, alienation, playing in bands, and smoking banana peels. Ultimately it’s the story of a couple of tumultuous years of a songwriter’s life transformed into melodies that are hard to forget.

Donkeys Wave

California places a distinct sonic stamp upon the music born with in its boundaries. Owens had his Bakersfield, Parsons his Joshua Tree, and Malkmus his Stockton, and in their tunes you can hear dust, desert highways, and skateboards gliding over suburbia. The Donkeys have San Diego, and from that environment have woven a fundamental ease in their music – a rock, a roll, a sway, a slide – you could even call it a breeze. On Ride the Black Wave, The Donkeys continue their easy rolling, classic vibrations, but add a mystery and tension that make this record their most lyrically and instrumentally compelling. 

Ride the Black Wave embodies what Jack Kerouac described of California’s coast as having an “end of the land sadness.” The Donkeys stare out at the ocean in a “fantastic drowse” – a kind of pensiveness towards their environs that summons the elements of sound and style that belong only to them. In “Blues In The Afternoon”, a collective mantra, the band runs out of land and asks of the ocean to offer suggestions about their fate. It is songs like these that prove the Donkeys are a band in the true sense of the word, sharing each other’s worry and wonder. With RTBW, The Donkeys have further caged their craft and have accomplished the delicate and artful challenge of taming the captured, while also letting it be wild.

Recorded at San Diego’s Singing Serpent and mixed by LA’s Thom Monahan, the Telecasters have a golden shimmer, the drums seem to echo with a regional reverberation. The notes coming off the Rhodes float on like beer-buzzed afternoons, but just when you get lost in the hypnotic swirl of “Sunny Daze” the churning guitars begin to circle like sharks, reminding us of the realities beneath all beautiful surfaces. Ten tracks deep, Adrianne Verhoeven of San Francisco’s Extra Classic appears like the mythic Calafia herself, delivering a vocal that would bring Cortez to his knees. 

So, it is with Ride the Black Wave that The Donkeys add their own stratum to California’s ever expanding musical frontier, while maintaining their golden “shine” as well as interjecting a tension with the sun and beauty. The record hypnotizes as much as it awakens; it poetically puts us at ease while we sit in traffic, peck at our keyboards in cubicles, or conversely, it accompanies us as we ride along desert highways, or sway with our lovers. It is about home; it is about waves, and surrendering to their movements, trusting that they will take us to where we truly belong.

Cohen Coolit

Sam Cohen

Cool It

Cool It – LP $20.00 *This is a pre-order, release date is 4/28/2015* Black vinyl + Digital Download (in package). US Shipping Included (Outside US? Contact us first)

Sam Cohen

Cool It

Cool It – CD $15.00 *This is a Pre-Order, Street Date 4/28/2015* Custom Mini- Gatefold CD Packaging. US Shipping Included (Outside US? Contact us first)

Sam Cohen

Cool It

Cool It – LP Bundle $33.00 *This is a pre-order, release date is 4/28/2015* Black vinyl + Bundle Item TBD + Digital Download (in package). US Shipping Included (Outside US? Contact us first)

Sam Cohen

Cool It

Cool It – CD Bundle $33.00 *This is a Pre-Order, Street Date 4/28/2015* Custom Mini- Gatefold CD Packaging + Bundle Item TBD. US Shipping Included (Outside US? Contact us first)

Sam Cohen

I’m Sam Cohen, and I’ve been making records for kind of a long time. The first time, I was 18. I wrote angsty songs about my girlfriend leaving me and recorded them along with some rockabilly and mambo covers in several midnight to 7 sessions in Houston, Tx. I moved to Boston to learn some chords, formed a band, and made a record in two days. It was horrible. We redeemed it with a home recorded EP that nobody ever heard. The guitars were phenomenal.

That morphed into Apollo Sunshine. We spent a year making a record that was weird and fun, though, at that time, we were singing like some glad­ass castratos. We spent the next two years touring ceaselessly. I think we might have been pretty cool at that point. Dirty dogs. Life on the road. America. The Band.

We moved into a farmhouse and made our most boring record. It was the most successful thing I’ve ever done. We released a third album to soft applause and broke up. A few years later, people started to admit liking, even loving it.

After that, I was living in Brooklyn and started Yellowbirds to be more of a solo thing. I made records I still like to this day. I made stop­motion collage videos to accompany the music, and started to put a little world together. It’s still there on the internet. I got to do some stuff, too: The National had us at All Tomorrow’s Parties, my bandmate Josh and I played with Bob Weir (several times), we toured a bit, Rolling Stone wrote about me (.com, whatever).

So those Yellowbirds records were pretty good, and people started asking me to produce their records. I worked on a ton of albums; playing, producing, engineering, collaborating in many different ways (sometimes with famous people).

I started to hear what I sound like, so I became Sam Cohen and made my latest record, Cool It. It’s mostly just me alone in a room, playing guitars, drums, bass, synths, singing, recording in both haphazard and elaborate methods. A few songs have my beloved Yellowbirds bandmates (Josh Kaufman, Annie Nero, and Brian Kantor).

If you’re reading this, you’re on the internet, maybe thinking about listening to a single mp3 by an artist you’ve never heard of.

Well Hoss, take her for a whirl. I stand behind this shit.

CAVALO Rodrigo Amarante

This is my first solo record. It was made during an unexpected but very welcome exile, in a land I wouldn’t predict I’d moor my boat for long but that, given such difference and a refreshingly nameless arrival, gave me the opportunity to re-cognize my nature, to recoup my ascendance and to disclose a new perspective over myself. It was as a foreigner, separated from others and yet still somehow attached to the furniture I had left behind, bits of myself I hung up around me like dead mirrors I could no longer turn my face to, that came to focus the beauty of the empty room ahead, a hint. I became enamoured by space, by distance, and began to see the double that looks at me from the outside, that reflects the vision I call mine, vehicle and invented accomplice to which I am also a channel, the one I name Cavalo. 

I have always felt like a foreigner, imagined myself as an explorer, moving from city to city every three years as a kid, pretending to have the forbearance and courage i ended up forging while secretly carrying the resentment of the imposed detour, of the wait to return. When I finally arrived back in Rio no longer a child and with an accent three times tampered I realized that my home town was mine only because I had invented it, its memory a dream of smells and hope that didn’t exist in space, maybe in time. I discovered myself a stranger, what I had been since I first left, what I knew I would forever be. And it was light and warm, I felt free and grateful, strong, and like this I departed again. I ended up finding myself in a type of desert, happy to be alone, overwhelmed with the void, with silence, the place where I wrote these songs from. I believe that everybody can feel foreign in one way or another, in the way that they feel they’re perceived by others, in their bodies, their streets, in their fate perhaps, so I dream that this vehicle, an unpredictable mirror that i fill, that serves me and that moves me, can also move you, serve yet others, with luck.

Rodrigo Amarante

Rodrigo Amarante de Castro Neves (born September 6, 1976) is a Brazilian singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and occasional arranger born in Rio de Janeiro. He is part of the bands Los Hermanos, Orquestra Imperial and Little Joy and has released his first solo record called “Cavalo” in Brazil in late 2013.