Home Blog Page 1047

Wet Announce New EP ‘Pink Room’, Unveil New Song ‘Tell Me Why’

Wet have announced a new EP, Pink Room, with the single ‘Tell Me Why’. The seven-track project will be out July 8 as a part of Secretly Canadian’s Friends Of series. Hear ‘Tell Me Why’ below.

“I’m always interested in multiple feelings at once,” Kelly Zutrau explained in a statement. “Not just a happy song, but happy and sad and guilty — those can all be true. We see these messages in music and media that are very black and white, but our lives don’t really live up to those expectations. Instead, we’re somewhere in the middle of all these states that are much easier to explain.”

Wet issued their third LP, Letter Blue, last year.

Pink Room EP Cover Artwork:

Pink Room EP Tracklist:

1. Tell Me Why
2. Canyon
3. Pink Room
4. Blades of Grass (Demo)
5. There’s a Light
6. I’m Not her
7. Turn the Lights Down Low

Rosie Carney Shares Video for New Single ‘tidal wave’

Rosie Carney has unveiled her new song ‘tidal wave’, the third preview of her forthcoming sophomore album i wanna feel happy. Following ‘dad’ and ‘break the ground’, the track arrives alongside a music video created by Bee Happy Media. Check it out below.

In a press statement, Carney described ‘tidal wave’ as a song about “abandonment issues. It’s about the lonely ache you feel when you realise you’re starting to drift away from someone, but there’s nothing you can do to stop it from happening.”

She added: “I remember being a kid and desperately overanalysing and trying to change who I was in an attempt to cling on to whoever I was drifting away from. The song is both a desperate plea and also an acute awareness of needing to let go and move on.”

i wanna feel happy is out May 27 via Color Study.

Watch PUP Perform ‘Waiting’ With Jeff Rosenstock on ‘Seth Meyers’

PUP were the musical guests on last night’s episode of Late Night With Seth Meyers, where they performed the song ‘Waiting’ with Jeff Rosenstock on guest vocals and saxophone. Watch it below.

PUP dropped their latest record, THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND, last month.  The Canadian band is currently on a North America tour and will head to Australia in the summer before playing in Europe and the UK in the fall.

Bartees Strange Releases New Song ‘Hold the Line’

Bartees Strange has released a new song called ‘Hold the Line’, which was written in late May 2020 about George Floyd’s daughter, Gianna. It’s the second single from his upcoming album Farm to Table, following lead cut ‘Cosigns’. Check it out below.

“I remember watching George Floyd’s daughter talk about the death of her father and thinking wow – what a sad introduction to Black American life for this young person,” Strange said in a statement. “It was painful to watch her grow up in that moment, like all Black kids eventually do.”

He continued: “‘Hold the Line’ was written over the course of three days during that first pandemic summer. Through this song I was trying to make sense of what was happening in the US, my neighborhood and my community at that moment. During the marches people were trying to stop the bleeding, locked arm in arm, doing everything they could to hold the line.”

Farm to Table, Strange’s sophomore album and 4AD debut, is due out June 17.

Watch Florence and the Machine Perform ‘My Love’ on ‘Fallon’

Florence and the Machine stopped by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last night (May 11), where Florence Welch was joined by her band for a performance of ‘My Love’. She also sat down for an interview with Fallon and appeared in his Audience Suggestions segment to sing Jimmy Buffett’s ‘Margaritaville’. Watch it happen below.

‘My Love’ appears on Florence and the Machine’s upcoming album Dance Fever, which was produced with Jack Antonoff and Dave Bayley of Glass Animals. It’s out this Friday, May 13 and also includes the previously shared singles ‘Free’, ‘King’, and ‘Heaven is Here’.

Watch Arcade Fire Cover Harry Styles’ ‘As It Was’

Arcade Fire offered their take on Harry Styles’ ‘As It Was’ during a live session at the BBC’s Maida Vale Studios. The band also performed their own singles ‘Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole)’ and ‘The Lightning I, II’ from their new LP WE. Watch it below.

‘As It Was’ is the latest single from Styles’ upcoming third album Harry’s House, which is out May 20 via Columbia. WE arrived on the same label earlier this month. Both Arcade Fire and Styles took the stage at Coachella 2022.

Album Review: Ethel Cain, ‘Preacher’s Daughter’

Ethel Cain may be haunted by the past, but her eyes are set on the future. She realizes there’s no escape: “The fate’s already fucked me sideways,” she confesses on the introductory track to her masterful debut album, which encapsulates many of the themes she later homes in on: religious trauma, repression, the shadows of a fraught American family. She’s learned enough from history to know that we’re bound to repeat it, yet feverishly clings to broken dreams and doomed relationships in search of some inkling of hope. The album’s lead single is named after Evelyn Nesbit, the artists’ model who was idealized as a ‘Gibson Girl’ over a century ago and for Cain serves both as a reminder of feminine grace and the impossibility of reaching any ideal of perfection. In the gothic, desolate landscape that spreads across Preacher’s Daughter, you wonder how there could be any space for the sort of defiance that fuels the synth-rock anthem ‘American Teenager’, but Cain’s determination ultimately strikes through her discomfort with the titular archetype: “I’m doing what I want and damn, I’m doing it well/ For me,” she sings.

Such flickers of resilience push us through the vast stretches of longing and loneliness that mark Preacher’s Daughter, but it’s the struggle that stands at the center of the story. As the creative outlet of Hayden Anhedönia, Ethel Cain represents a different sort of conflict: the artist herself is disenchanted by the idea of a celebrity, but wants Cain’s impact to be as wide-reaching as possible, even if it involves fame. She’s a self-aware persona drawn from a Southern Baptist upbringing and the cultural influences that offered a peek into the real world – however distorted – from horror stories and true crime TV to the online fandoms she immersed herself into as a teenager. While she seems to have more creative control over the project than many rising stars – the LP was largely written, recorded, and produced alone in her bedroom – she also speaks of Ethel Cain as the result of some kind of possession. Yet these dual realities remain mostly in the background of Preacher’s Daughter, which unfolds as a gripping and fully-realized collection all its own.

The sound and aesthetic of Cain’s earlier releases – including 2021’s excellent Inbred EP – drew comparisons to the likes of Lana Del Rey and Florence + the Machine, and if platforms like Tumblr meant anything to you growing up, you can probably tell why. But Preacher’s Daughter begins to carve out Cain’s legacy in ways that her prior work couldn’t, and it reveals a much wider scope. The music on the album – brooding, visceral, brutal and dramatic – seems to respond to the demands of the narrative more than any nostalgic signifiers. For the most part, it’s more in line with the work of metal-adjacent singer-songwriters like Midwife and Chelsea Wolfe, straddling the border between their takes on “heaven metal” and distortion-heavy doom folk respectively – a song like the disturbing ‘Ptolemaea’ hews much closer to Abyss than anything off Ultraviolence. It may have taken a few years for Wolfe’s music to be viewed as more than a moodier version of Del Rey’s Americana, but Cain’s vision here is so immediately bold and powerful that you couldn’t mistake it for anybody else’s.

What separates Cain from her contemporaries is that her music does display the grand ambition and fearless theatricality of a modern pop star – it’s just that it has little bearing on how those qualities manifest themselves. It might have been Bruce Springsteen that called Lana Del Rey one of America’s best songwriters, but how often do you hear young artists inspired by the kind of romanticism they’re both associated with fill their first album with as many guitar solos and power ballads as Preacher’s Daughter? (Heartland rock might not be a term you’d expect to read at this point in the review, but wait till I get to ‘Thoroughfare’.) As much as she embraces her time spent listening to Guns N’ Roses and Def Leppard Greatest Hits CDs, it’s clear that she uses those features to convey the emotional dynamics that belie the songs. With many of the tracks stretching over the 8-minute mark, the first beat of the drum can feel as big as a revelation, and when a guitar solo arrives, it offers catharsis as much as it merely extends the tension that’s been boiling under the surface.

But on ‘Thoroughfare’, the album’s most epic track, Cain strips things down to acoustic guitar and harmonica, evoking the music of her youth, when the only non-Christian music she was exposed to were the country acts her dad would play in the truck. After outling her tumultuous relationship with father figures throughout the album, it makes sense that she subverts those tropes at this crucial point in the story: leaving home to chase a dream that turns out to be unattainable, the characters stumble upon a deeper kind of connection, and the promise of freedom suddenly seems more tangible than ever: “In your pickup truck with all of your dumb luck is the only place I think I’d ever wanna be.” Things then slowly take a turn, moving through songs that twist and bleed with images of violence, sexuality, and death, before disintegraing into something harder to pin down with two dark, ambient-leaning instrumentals. But Cain reemerges with a track whose lush, glowing production might have you looking for a Jack Antonoff credit even if it wasn’t called ‘Sun Bleached Flies’, though it’s obvious she doesn’t need a megaproducer to make it shine.

As thematically complex as Preacher’s Daughter is, the time spent sprawling out the songs has the effect of exposing the basic emotions that run through its core – the isolating emptiness of ‘A House in Nebraska’, the troubled romance of ‘Western Nights’, the pure exhaustion of ‘Hard Times’. Yet in the overall progression of the album, the protagonist’s growth becomes evident in subtle ways. Take ‘Western Nights’, where Cain proclaims, “Show me how much I mean to you while I’m lying in these sheets undressed” – given how the singer’s obsession casts a shadow over the other person’s true intentions, you could hear the line as Show me how much I’m into you; that’s where the real rush is. On the final track, ‘Strangers’, her language remains just as startling as she yearns for a different kind of validation: “Just tell me I’m yours/ If I’m turning in your stomach and I’m making you feel sick.” But if there’s any lesson to be gained from the journey, it’s that you can only take care of yourself – there’s no salvation, only prayer. “I can’t let go when something’s broken/ It’s all I know and it’s all I want now,” she declares.

When I spoke to Hayden Anhedönia last year around the release of Inbred, she was passionate about the EP but was already eager to discuss her next project, saying that “the vision that I have of Ethel Cain cannot be fully realized until that record is out.” Having accomplished that goal, you might expect a 75-minute album like Preacher’s Daughter to be both the beginning and perhaps the end for this iteration of the project, or at least a chance to step back and consider what the future might look like. But in a new New York Times profile, Anhedönia teased two more albums as well as books and films spanning three generations of women; after all, the story of Preacher’s Daughter is a cyclical one. Cain might have already created her own world, but one can only imagine her universe expanding as she digs into her personal history and uses everything at her disposal to travel far beyond it. “I am no good nor evil, simply I am,” she sings among deafening guitars on ‘Ptolemaea’, “And I have come to take what is mine.”

Ways to Improve Your Brain Power

There are several amazing facts about the human brain. First, it contains about 86 billion neurons that make up the “gray matter.” Also, the human brain can generate about 23 watts of electrical power. That is enough to power a little lightbulb! Fascinating right?

As one of the most complex organs in the body, don’t you think it’s a great idea to keep the brain healthy? There are so many benefits of taking care of your brain. For example, caring for your brain helps to improve memory, carry out tasks that require calculation, and focus on day-to-day activities better. In addition, brain health is important because our brains gradually deteriorate with the rest of our bodies as we grow older.

Our cognitive capabilities begin to decrease, leading to things like memory loss and mental dullness. However, taking good care of the brain can increase its power and, in turn, improve memory and the quality of life (even when you grow older).

To enjoy these benefits, you need to learn how to improve brain power and promote brain health. So, that is what we’d be showing you in this piece! So, keep reading.

How You Can Improve Your Brain Power

It is only logical to note that if the brain can decline, it can also improve if you know how to go about it. Below are some of the things you can adopt in your everyday life to improve your brainpower. 

Mental exercise

They say the brain is a muscle; you must have heard or read that somewhere. While that’s not entirely true, the brain functions similarly to muscles. Like muscles, your brain needs some exercise to stay mentally fit, sharp, and become more powerful. The more brain exercise you do, the greater your brain’s capability.

Some beneficial cognitive exercises include building vocabulary, learning a new skill or hobby, and learning a new language. You can also solve puzzles, play the andar bahar real money game, play cards, and even learn a musical instrument. All these will stimulate thinking and challenge your intellectual capacity. In addition, if you feel like you are getting stressed, maybe shutting down a bit to rest can be helpful for your brain’s health.

Physical exercise

Talking about actual muscles now, exercising the body is another way to exercise the brain. It increases the flow of blood, providing more oxygen to the brain. Physical exercises also help stimulate the growth of new neurons and the production of endorphins. You don’t have to visit the gym daily to exercise; several ways exist to do it. If you work, school, or engage in businesses close to your home, strolling once in a while can be a great form of exercise.

Food and nutrition

The foods we eat can contribute to keeping our brains healthy and powerful. Unfortunately, they can also do the opposite, affecting your memory and increasing your risk of dementia. For instance, consumption of alcohol, highly processed foods, and sugary foods are some dieting habits that can affect your brain negatively. Generally, foods with lower levels of sugar are preferred. Fruits, vegetables, lean protein, and healthy oils from olives, fish, nuts, and avocados will help strengthen the brain.

Sleep and meditation

Lack of sleep can be detrimental to brain health. It interferes with memory and learning, leading to slow brain work, forgetfulness, and poor attention. One of the best ways to increase brain power is to get enough sleep hours. Adequate sleep is the most effective way to manage stress and recharge. Sleep has also been proven to reverse the build-up of beta-amyloid plaque, which is associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Likewise, practicing meditation helps stress management and is key to developing the brain. Devoting a few minutes each day to meditating empowers the brain by clearing the mind and increasing concentration.

Socializing

Engaging in a conversation with someone keeps the brain optimized. It stimulates attention, memory, and other cognitive abilities. It becomes more beneficial when the person you are communicating with is a loved one. The more time you spend with your loved ones, the higher the chances of having meaningful conversations that can be helpful to your brain. Having an active social life is important as we age. Ironically, older people tend to isolate themselves more as the years go by.

According to research, people who were more socially engaged in their midlife had a considerable delay in the onset of dementia. This demonstrates a clear correlation between socialization and a healthy brain.

Conclusion

Although the brain is not a muscle as many may have thought it to be, it does require exercise to maintain excellent health and performance. The more you work at it, the more work it can do. Aging is inevitable, and with it comes the chance of developing brain disorders like dementia. However, developing a low-functioning brain as you grow older can be lowered if you know how to improve your brainpower. Your brain will continue to perform at peak efficiency if you follow the suggestions above and make lifestyle modifications.

Death Cab For Cutie Announce New Album ‘Asphalt Meadows’, Release New Single ‘Roman Candles’

Death Cab For Cutie have announced their tenth studio album, Asphalt Meadows. The LP, which was produced by John Congleton, arrives on September 10 via Atlantic. Check out its first single, ‘Roman Candles’, below, and scroll down for the band’s forthcoming tour dates.

“‘Roman Candles’ is about the crippling, existential dread that goes hand in hand with living in a nervous city on a dying planet,” the band said in a statement. “And that the only way to be in the moment is to let it all go.”

Frontman Ben Gibbard added: “The lyrics were cobbled from a couple of different songs dealing with my general sense of anxiety; the feeling that the fabric that weaves a functioning society together was crumbling during the pandemic.”

Asphalt Meadows will follow Death Cab’s 2018 record Thank You For Today. In 2020, the band released a covers EP titled The Georgia via Bandcamp.

Asphalt Meadows Cover Artwork:

Death Cab for Cutie 2022 Tour Dates:

May 21 Guadalajara, Mexico – Corona Capital Guadalajara
May 28 Portland, OR – TEDxPortland Year 10 @ Moda Center/Theater of the Clouds
Jul 7 Cincinnati, OH – PromoWest Pavilion at Ovation †
Jul 8 Grand Rapids, MI – GLC Live at 20 Monroe †
Jul 9 Milwaukee, WI – Summerfest @ Generac Power Stage
Jul 11 Buffalo, NY – Artpark †
Jul 12 LaFayette, NY – Beak & Skiff Apple Orchards †
Jul 14 Harrisburg, PA – Harrisburg University at Riverfront Park †
Jul 15 Uncasville, CT – Mohegan Sun Arena †
Jul 16 Poughkeepsie, NY – MJN Convention Center †
Sep 22 Madison, WI – The Sylvee ^
Sep 23 Minneapolis, MN – Surly Brewing Festival Field
Sep 24 Chicago, IL – The Salt Shed
Sep 26 Columbus, OH – Kemba Live! ^
Sep 27 Washington, D.C. – The Anthem ^
Sep 29 Philadelphia, PA – The Met ^
Sep 30 Queens, NY – Forest Hills Stadium ^
Oct 1 Boston, MA – Leader Bank Pavilion ^
Oct 3 Raleigh, NC – Red Hat Amphitheater ^
Oct 4 Atlanta, GA – Coca-Cola Roxy ^
Oct 6 Richmond, VA – Virginia Credit Union Live! ^
Oct 7 Asheville, NC – Rabbit Rabbit ^
Oct 8 Charleston, SC – Firefly Distillery ^
Oct 10 Pittsburgh, PA – Stage AE ^
Oct 11 Detroit, MI – The Masonic ^
Oct 13 St. Louis, MO – The Factory ^
Oct 14 Kansas City, MO – Arvest Bank Theatre at The Midland ^
Oct 15 Tulsa, OK – Cain’s Ballroom
Oct 17 Phoenix, AZ – The Van Buren
Oct 18 Anaheim, CA – House of Blues Anaheim #
Oct 19 Santa Barbara, CA – Santa Barbara Bowl #
Oct 21 Los Angeles, CA – The Greek Theatre #
Oct 22 San Diego, CA – Venue TBA #
Oct 23 Oakland, CA – Fox Theater #
Oct 24 Oakland, CA – Fox Theater #
Oct 26 Seattle, WA – Paramount Theatre
Oct 27 Seattle, WA – Paramount Theatre

† with Illuminati Hotties
^ with Low
# with Yo La Tengo

Nina Nastasia Releases New Song ‘This Is Love’

Nina Nastasia has released a new song, ‘This Is Love’, taken from her upcoming album Riderless Horse. It’s the second preview of the record, following lead single ‘Just Stay in Bed’. Give it a listen below.

Talking about the new track, Nastasia said in a statement: “Somehow I got comfortable living with trauma, living in a fight and sitting in sadness. Happiness came in moments, but I must have gravitated towards misery, because I built a life around it. My definition of love became skewed. ‘This Is Love’ is a love I don’t want to repeat. I’m not regretful. It was love, but love doesn’t have to look like that if you ultimately don’t want it to.”

Riderless Horse is set to arrive on July 22 via Temporary Residence.