Recently in new releases Category

The Johnson Swingtet is one of Jack Neely's favorite local bands, as you can tell from his 2008 feature on them. They've changed things up quite a bit since then, so the new CD, which the Swingtet is officially releasing this weekend, will be a welcome introduction to the band's new lineup and its new interest in Western swing.

The Swingtet's celebrating the release of Volume 1 (oddly enough, the follow-up to their 2008 self-titled debut) on Friday, Oct. 29, at 8 p.m. at the Laurel Theater in Fort Sanders. Admission is $10-$12.

We reported back in April that the Tim Lee 3 had a busy summer ahead of them, mainly because they would be recording a new album at studios in North Carolina, Arizona, and Mississippi.

They apparently got really busy at those sessions--the new album, Raucous Americanus, the follow-up to the band's 2008 disc Good2b3, is an old-fashioned double album. It's due out next month, and the CD-release show the Lees have planned for Patrick Sullivan's on Friday, Nov. 12, is appropriately big: a premiere of the band's video for the song "Get There First," DJ sets from Nathan Moses and Graham McCorkle of the Vaygues, and an opening set by Angela Faye Martin, a North Carolina singer/songwriter the Lees have befriended since playing a local show with her earlier this year. And, of course, a long set of the Tim Lee 3 playing songs from the new album, and probably some old favorites. 

The Dirty Guv'nahs have posted the official video for the song "We'll Be the Light," off their brand-new album Youth Is in Our Blood. It was shot at Preservation Pub a few months ago.

Best Coast, the hazy beach-pop L.A. duo that's getting all kinds of attention from Pitchfork etc. and is scheduled, according to Pollstar, to play at Pilot Light on Sept. 11, has made its upcoming debut album Crazy for You, available for streaming at the Urban Outfitters website. The disc is due on July 27. It sounds pretty good so far. 

Another national album release with local connections is coming in September, when Nonesuch, an imprint of Warner, issues a live recording of avant-garde guitar-army composer Rhys Chatham's A Crimson Grail.



The album was recorded last August in New York at an outdoor music festival with 200 electric guitarists, 16 bassists, and one drummer. One of the guitarists was Knoxville's Ian Henderson; one of the bassists was Cain Blanchard of local record label Laboratory Standard Recordings.

Remember when Christian Fennesz, David Daniell (of San Agustin) and Tony Buck (of Australian improv supergroup the Necks) played together at Big Ears in 2009? I don't either--it was one of many shows I missed. But Thrill Jockey is releasing a recording of the set, titled Knoxville, in August.

I mentioned it in my review this week, but it's worth noting again that the local death-metal band Whitechapel's third disc, A New Era of Corruption, opened at #43 on the Billboard album charts last week, with more than 10,000 copies sold. That's a lot of records for a death-metal band, especially one that was playing all-ages matinees in Knoxville just a few years ago. 

Place of Skulls is one of Knoxville's underappreciated bands. So the 20 or so people who stuck around for PoS's headlining set at the Longbranch Saloon on Saturday got front-row seats and national-class trad doom metal, all for just $5. (The highest price was having to wait through Ophiuchus, a thrash/death band from Nashville with great chops and one of the silliest frontmen I've ever seen.) PoS played for just under an hour, fitting in old songs, newer ones, and at least a handful of songs from frontman Victor Griffin's former band Pentagram and a surprisingly effective cover of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood." The weird thing about the band? Their classic doom is informed by Griffin's Christianity, though PoS is nothing like what anybody would call Christian metal.

Even though the band's barely acknowledged in its hometown--Griffin thanked the small crowd at the end of the show for supporting the "struggling doom metal scene in Knoxville"--Place of Skulls has a distinguished underground lineage: Griffin played in the seminal D.C. doom group Pentagram's classic lineup from 1981 to 1996 and wrote or co-wrote some of that band's signature songs ("Death Row," "Relentless," "20 Buck Spin"), and Scott "Wino" Weinrich (St. Vitus, the Obsessed) played on PoS's 2003 album With Vision. (That album and the 2001 debut were released on Southern Lord, home to Sunn O))), Boris, and Earth.)

Griffin and his band have been busy lately, though, and hopefully that will raise the band's local profile. A new PoS album, As a Dog Returns, has been recorded and is due out this fall, and for the last few weeks Griffin's been pulling double duty with Pentagram, who have seen a swell of past-due recognition in the last few years.  

Superdrag frontman John Davis has a busy summer ahead of him, most of it related to side projects. He recently played an Alex Chilton tribute show with the surviving members of Big Star, and he's got a solo show coming up at Barley's on Friday, June 4. It's the John Davis Liberation Front, which is apparently 40 minutes of solo material and 20 minutes of Davis talking about the ongoing conflict in Darfur, Sudan. Flesh Vehicle, the Nashville band led by Superdrag bassist Tom Pappas, is opening that show.

Then, on Friday, July 9, Davis is regrouping with his pre-Superdrag bandmates in 30 Amp Fuse--Mike Smithers and Joey Sanchez--for a one-off reunion show. They'll be playing at Barley's and performing the Wind-Up album in its entirety. I hope I can find my copy of that between now and then... (Thanks to Steve Wildsmith for the tip.)

Finally, Davis' alter ego Johnny Flame is recording tracks for a song-for-song tribute to the Misfits' 1982 superclassic album Walk Among Us. There's no release date yet, but you can hear a few early samples at Davis' MySpace page.

Tom Fec, aka Tobacco, the frontman for the trippy Pittsburgh electro-pop group Black Moth Super Rainbow, is coming to the Square Room later this year. His new solo album, Maniac Meat, is out on indie hip-hop label Anticon this week, with a supporting tour starting in September.

Tobacco will be in Knoxville on Friday, Oct. 1. Andrew Clayman interviewed him last year, when BMSR played at Pilot Light. (Whatever you do, don't call what he makes in either project psychedelic music. "I've never set out to make psychedelic music," he told Clayman. "I don't listen to psychedelic music. I don't particularly appreciate psychedelic music. ... I find it extremely limiting, and I'm definitely not okay with it," he says. "I mean, I don't care what anyone does when they listen to the music. It does not matter to me as long as you enjoy it. But what bothers me is how 90 percent of our write-ups have to talk about how we're stoners or how you have to be stoned to listen to the music. It just trivializes everything that I'm trying to do. It's fine if people still want to call it whatever they'll call it, but it's just the constant, never-ending drug references that really get old."