Pixies by Tom Oxley
Our recap of the main stories we featured during the past seven days includes new releases from Pixies and Blondie.
Pixies will release their eighth studio record on September 30th.
Doggerel sessions began late last year when Black Francis worked on the early sketches of 40 new songs with producer Tom Dalgety in Massachusetts, before the final 12 were completed with the rest of the band in Los Angeles.
“We’re trying to do things that are very big and bold and orchestrated,” Francis explains. “The punky stuff, I really like playing it but you just cannot artificially create that shit.”
The Black Angels are back with a new double album that will reflect the travails of geo-politics and the pandemic since we last saw them in 2017 with Death Song.
The lead track from Wilderness Of Mirrors – out on September 16th – has been directed by Vanessa Pia, who says:
“Alex came to me with a dystopian sci-fi idea of a future where Mother Nature is dead because we killed her, and the only way to experience her is through virtual reality- an already relatable feeling, as most of the world lives viscerally through social media.”
Foo Fighters will celebrate the life and music of Taylor Hawkins with his family at two special concerts in London and Los Angeles later this year.
Described as ‘all-star’ occasions, the shows are due to take place at Wembley Stadium on September 3rd and at the Kia Forum on September 27th.
Hawkins passed away in March whilst on tour with the band he had become synonymous with since he joined up in 1997.
Blondie by Shig Ikeda
Blondie have made the most of their first archival box-set collection by packing up 124 tracks – including 36 previously unissued – for release on August 26th.
Blondie: Against The Odds 1974-1982 will document the history of the band through their first six studio albums – building up to the breakthrough of Parallel Lines and Heart Of Glass, concluding with The Hunter and their subsequent hiatus – via demos, alternate versions and studio outtakes.
“It really is a treat to see how far we have come when I listen to these early attempts to capture our ideas on relatively primitive equipment,” Debbie Harry responds.
Tim Burgess’ new album Typical Music is a 22-track double affair which will be released on September 23rd.
The Charlatans frontman returned to Rockfield Studios in Wales for the first time since that band’s 1997 LP Tellin’ Stories was recorded there, doing so with multi-instrumentalist/producer Daniel O’Sullivan and keyboard player Thighpaulsandr to work on this collection of songs which spans many genres from pop to soul, electronica and disco.
“OK, we all know about double albums, right?,” Burgess says. “Historically, they’ve been thought of as indulgent. But I came to the conclusion that what I was doing was the opposite of that.”
Jake Bugg will mark the 10th anniversary of his self-titled debut album with a hometown show at the Nottingham Arena on November 26th.
The LP is to be performed in full at the gig along with select cuts from the records which have followed it during the subsequent decade, while a new deluxe edition of the album is also planned for later this year.
‘Jake Bugg’ went to number one in the UK in 2012.
