Yeah, it’s us! Sub Pop will release Wolf Parade’s Apologies to the Queen Mary: Deluxe Edition, a reissue of the group’s acclaimed first album, worldwide on 3xLP/DL May 13th. The reissue features the original album, now as a double LP, along with the band’s pre-Sub Pop, self-titled EPs (released in 2003 and 2004), both of which are making their vinyl debut. The package features new artwork and includes the previously unreleased track “Snakes on the Ladder” from the Apologies… sessions. (There will also be a cassette version of the remastered original album (without bonus tracks) available on May 13th.) The album was remastered for this release by the band’s longtime associate Harris Newman at Grey Market Mastering. The reissue of Apologies to the Queen Mary: Deluxe Edition comes on the heels of Wolf Parade’s recently-announced 2016 reunion.
[Photo Credit : Shawn McDonald]
New to Wolf Parade? We made this handy Beginner’s Guide playlist just for you!
Wolf Parade’s late spring-summer touring kicks-off with a series of residency shows in New York (May 17th-21st; Sold Out), Toronto (May 24th-28th; Sold Out), and London (June 14th-15th). They’ve also scheduled the following international headlining club and festival appearances: Tavaista in Helsinki (June 10th); Best Keep Secret in Hilvarenbeek, Netherlands (June 17th-19th); Gridlock Festival in Halifax (July 10th); Ottawa Bluesfest (July 16th); WayHome Music and Arts Festival in Oro-Medonte, Ontario (July 22nd-24th); Montreal’s Osheaga Festival (July 29th - 31st) and aftershow at The Corona Theatre (July 29th); Pickathon in Happy Valley, Oregon (August 4th-6th); Seattle’s Neptune Theatre (August 7th). (complete tour dates are below.)
Apologies to the Queen Mary: Deluxe Edition is now available for preorder at Sub Pop Mega Mart, Wolf Parade.com, Amazon and Bandcamp. The limited Loser Edition 3xLP set will come on pink, blue, and peach-colored vinyl, and is now available to pre-order at megamart.subpop.com, the band’s web store and at select independent record stores (while supplies last).
Wolf Parade – Spencer Krug, Dan Boeckner, Arlen Thompson, and Dante DeCaro – formed in Montreal in 2003. After the aforementioned self-titled EPs, the group released Apologies to the Queen Mary to much acclaim in September 2005, on Sub Pop. The album was recorded by Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock and engineer Chris Chandler at Audible Alchemy in Portland, Oregon. The album was an entirely collaborative effort, barreling headfirst and breathlessly through songs written during Wolf Parade’s early years together as a band. The album has sold over 100,000 in the U.S. alone.
LP 1 A1. You Are A Runner And I Am My Father’s Son A2. Modern World A3. Grounds For Divorce A4. We Built Another World B5. Fancy Claps B6. Same Ghost Every Night B7. Shine A Light B8. Dear Sons And Daughters Of Hungry Ghosts
LP 2 C9. I’ll Believe In Anything C10. It’s A Curse D11. Dinner Bells D12. This Heart’s On Fire
LP 3 A1. Disco Sheets A2. Lousy Pictures A3. Modern World A4. Wits or a Dagger A5.Secret Knives A6. Dinner Bells B7. Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts B8. We Built Another World B9. Grounds for Divorce B10. It’s a Curse B11. The National People’s Scare B12. Killing Armies B13. Snakes on a Ladder
Tour Dates
May 17 - New York, NY - Bowery Ballroom [Sold Out] May 18 - New York, NY - Bowery Ballroom [Sold Out] May 19 - New York, NY - Bowery Ballroom [Sold Out] May 20 - New York, NY - Bowery Ballroom [Sold Out] May 21 - New York, NY - Bowery Ballroom [Sold Out] May 24 - Toronto, ON - Lee’s Palace [Sold Out] May 25 - Toronto, ON - Lee’s Palace [Sold Out] May 26 - Toronto, ON - Lee’s Palace [Sold Out] May 27 - Toronto, ON - Lee’s Palace [Sold Out] May 28 - Toronto, ON - Lee’s Palace [Sold Out] Jun. 14 - London, UK - Scala Jun. 15 - London, UK - Scala Jun. 16 - Helsinki, FN - Tavaista Jun 17-19 - Hilvarenbeek, NL - Best Kept Secret Fest Jul. 10 - Halifax, NS - Gridlock Festival Jul. 16 - Ottawa, ON - Ottawa Bluesfest Jul. 22 - 24 - Oro-Medonte, ON - WayHome Music and Arts Festival Jul. 29 - 31 Montreal, QC - Osheaga Festival Jul. 29 - Montreal, QC - The Corona Theatre (Osheaga Festival Aftershow) Aug. 04 - 07 - Happy Valley, OR - Pickathon Aug. 07 - Seattle, WA - The Neptune
On Saturday, April 16th, 2016, aka Record Store Day, Sub Pop will release two very limited split singles: Low and S. Carey’s “Not A Word” / “ I Won’t Let You Fall” 10” and METZ and Mission of Burma’s “Good, Not Great” / “Get Off” 7”. Check ‘em out:
METZ and Mission of Burma “Good, Not Great” / “Get Off” 7” single: Toronto noise-rock behemoths METZ team up with Boston post-punk legends Mission of Burma on this split single for Record Store Day 2016. METZ contribute a cover of “Good, Not Great,” a track from Mission of Burma’s 2006 album The Obliterati, while Mission of Burma cover METZ’s 2012 anthem, “Get Off.” This single is a Record Store Day 2016 exclusive, and it is limited to 4,000 copies worldwide. All copies are on starburst purple and green vinyl.
Tracklisting: 1. Good, Not Great (METZ) 2. Get Off (Mission of Burma)
Low / S. Carey “Not A Word” / “I Won’t Let You Fall” 10” single: This 10” single on special translucent white vinyl features two 7-minute collaborations between Duluth group Low and Wisconsin’s S. Carey, aka Sean Carey, best known as the drummer and supporting vocalist for Bon Iver. The idea for this release came from producer BJ Burton. “Not a Word” was an unfinished Low track that BJ worked with S. Carey to complete, while “I Won’t Let You Fall” was an unfinished S. Carey song that BJ worked with Low to complete. This unique partnership between Low, S. Carey and BJ Burton (and Sub Pop and Jagjaguwar) is exclusive to Record Store Day 2016, and it is limited to 4,000 copies worldwide.
Tracklisting: 2. I Won’t Let You Fall (S. Carey) 1. Not a Word (Low)
More About Record Store Day: Record Store Day was conceived in 2007 at a gathering of independent record store owners and employees as a way to celebrate and spread the word about the unique culture surrounding nearly 1400 independently owned record stores in the US and thousands of similar stores internationally. The first Record Store Day took place on April 19, 2008. Today there are Record Store Day participating stores on every continent except Antarctica.
This is a day for the people who make up the world of the record store—the staff, the customers, and the artists—to come together and celebrate the unique culture of a record store and the special role these independently owned stores play in their communities. Special vinyl and CD releases and various promotional products are made exclusively for the day. Festivities include performances, cook-outs, body painting, meet & greets with artists, parades, DJs spinning records, and on and on. In 2008 a small list of titles was released on Record Store Day and that list has grown to include artists and labels both large and small, in every genre and price point. In 2015, 60% of the Record Store Day Official Release List came from independent labels and distributors. The list continues to include a wide range of artists, covering the diverse taste of record stores and their customers. http://www.recordstoreday.com/Home
Kyle Craft’s “Pentecost” is the latest offering from Dolls of Highland, his forthcoming Sub Pop debut.
NPR Music’s “All Songs Considered” had this to say of the track, “Pentecost” sees Kyle Craft…return to his hometown in Louisiana, haunted by the ghost of a friend who took his own life. Paired with his knack for great melodies, it demonstrates Craft’s emotional power as a songwriter (see premiere via “New Mix” March 1st).”
NPR Music also discussed Craft’s ‘Lady of the Ark” for its “Songs We Love” feature this week. They said of the track, “Like many artists from the South, Craft has a conflicted relationship with the region’s cultural duality, a topic he tackles on “Lady Of The Ark.” Shrouded in guitars and organ, he caustically wails, “Swing low, low sweet heathen / Swing for the wretch and the rock and roll kid,” a line he says he wrote in response to the “shame, shame thing that ‘church folk’ tend to do so often,” and which doesn’t sit well with Craft. “Roam this earth repeat it / All this sin until this wicked world makes sense in time,” he defiantly growls near the song’s end. Craft’s roaming days may be done for now, but “Lady Of The Ark” shows his music as wild-eyed and restless (“Songs We Love” feature March 2nd).”
Kyle Craft will release Dolls of Highland, his label debut, on CD / LP / DL / CASS worldwide April 29th through Sub Pop, and preorder is now available from Sub Pop Mega Mart, iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, and Bandcamp. LP preorders from megamart.subpop.com will receive the Loser edition on pink vinyl with black swirl.
Dolls of Highland was written, recorded and produced by Craft, mixed by Brandon Summers and Benjamin Weikel of The Helio Sequence at the Old Jantzen Building in Portland, and mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound.
About Kyle Craft:
Kyle Craft grew up in a tiny Louisiana town on the banks of the Mississippi, where he spent most of his time catching alligators and rattlesnakes instead of playing football or picking up the guitar. He’s not the born product of a musical family, and bands never came through town–it was only a chance trip to K-Mart that gave him his first album, a David Bowie hits compilation that helped inspire him eventually to channel his innate feral energy into songwriting and rock and roll.
That self-made talent drives every note of Dolls of Highland, Craft’s exhilarating, fearless solo debut. “This album is the dark corner of a bar,” he says. “It’s that feeling at the end of the night when you’re confronted with ‘now what?’”
Craft knows the feeling well–Dolls began to take shape when everything he took for granted was suddenly over, including an eight-year relationship. “All of a sudden I was left with just me for the first time in my adult life,” he says. He decided to get himself and the music he’d been working on far away from the ghosts of his home in Shreveport, Louisiana, to make a new life for himself in Portland, Oregon, living under a friend’s pool table while he demoed new songs and started to tackle his own question about what came next.
Dolls of Highland crashes open with “Eye of a Hurricane,” a whirlwind of ragtime piano and Craft’s dynamic, enthralling vocals. He calls it a “jealous song,” stirred up by the memories of an ill-fated crush and a drama of “weird little connections, a spider web of what the fuck?”
The swinging, resonant “Lady of the Ark” is also tied up in that web, “a very incestuous song,” says Craft. “It’s about these messed up relationships, maybe involving me, maybe revolving around me.” Most of the characters and atmospheres on the album come from in and around Shreveport, where Craft briefly returned while recording the album for an intensely productive reckoning with his past. He stayed in a friend’s laundry room in the Highland neighborhood, where he recorded the whole album in two months on a home studio rig. “I dedicated the album to Shreveport and called it Dolls of Highland for all the girls and ghosts in town who influenced it so strongly.”
Craft eventually returned to Portland where Brandon Summers and Benjamin Weikel of The Helio Sequence helped refine and mix the album to move it from its DIY beginnings to a more fully realized work. Craft played most of the instruments on the album, but the recorded songs transmit the power of his live performance. “It’s just letting go,” says Craft. “I think it’s just all about feeling it in your chest.”
And then there’s Craft’s unforgettable voice–”I’m fully aware that I have a very abrasive, very loud voice, but Bob Dylan is the one that taught me to embrace that,” says Craft. “I stray away from him from time to time, but always come back. I don’t want to come off as antique, but I also don’t want to be afraid of paying homage to the stuff I’ve always loved.” With those influences as inspiration, Craft’s talent and singular creativity move the conversation into new and unpredictable places.
And no question, this album is very much about moving forward. “After everything fell apart, it didn’t take very long for me to learn who I was and what I should be doing,” says Craft, who is walking out on the other side with Dolls of Highland.
What ‘The People’ have said about Kyle Craft:
“Craft admits his voice sounds a good deal like Bob Dylan’s, and that his muse has come to him many, many times. Still, “Lady of the Ark” hints that Craft’s music is so full of its own weird singularity that he’s on to something far beyond idol worship.” - Billboard
“With inviting, yet imperfect vocals and a jangly guitar melody, “Lady of the Ark” is a sweeping goodbye to a long-term relationship. It’s somehow warm, melodic, and rough at the same time.” [The Weeks Best Tracks”] - FLOOD
“It’s thrilling. It’s the sort of music that can only come from a somewhat unique musical outlook, a track that instantly sounds like nobody other than Kyle Craft. The huge sound of pounding drums, the almost mariachi handclaps, the frankly bizarre fairground-organ interlude, the lyrics than hint at a complex incestuous web of lives and lies, and all that before you even get to the voice…he has said that listening to Bob Dylan inspired him to embrace his voice and make the most of it. Kyle has suggested he shares a tone with Bob, but to our ears it’s more like the love child of Withered Hand and Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum, and that’s a very good, if slightly divisive, place to be.” - For The Rabbits
“Hard to believe given the innate sense of pop heritage that blossoms from every ounce of his fruitful, endearingly scorched lead vocal but it wasn’t until Craft stumbled upon a David Bowie that he began to take an interest in music. Lucky for us that he did – debut track ‘Lady Of The Ark’ is a stormy, rugged gem, led by one of the most distinctly impressive new voices in the game. A mighty fine introduction.” - Gold Flake Paint
On Friday, March 18th the highly-trained music industry professionals from Sub Pop Records will host “Back by Zero Demand,” our 2016 SXSW showcase. The event, held at The Blackheart in Austin, will feature performances from Mass Gothic, Cullen Omori, So Pitted, Arbor Labor Union, Porter Ray, and Strange Wilds. The showcase is 21 and over, and doors are at 7:30pm.
BACK BY ZERO DEMAND: Sub Pop’s SXSW 2016 Showcase At The Blackheart/Austin
Kristin Welchez - aka Dee Dee, leader of internationally acclaimed rock outfit Dum Dum Girls, will release X-Communicate, the debut album from her new solo project, Kristin Kontrol, on CD / LP / DL / CASS worldwide May 27 via Sub Pop. Tapped as the first single, “X-Communicate” melds new wave with synth pop in a slice of glistening cosmic disco. You can share/listen to the track right over HERE.
The album pre-order is underway HERE. Fans who pre-order X-Communicate digitally will instantly receive “X-Communicate” as well. Additionally, the limited, blue-vinyl Loser Edition is available to pre-order customers at megamart.subpop.com, and at select independent record stores (while supplies last).
With Kristin Kontrol, Dee Dee sheds her skin, ditching the alter ego she’d assumed in Dum Dum Girls – for her given name, Kristin. Once again, she is smashing boundaries, only this time it’s the ones she had drawn to define herself artistically.
“For me as leader of Dum Dum Girls it felt very stoic and serious, and I am serious, but anyone who really knows me knows the other side; I’m silly – I smile a lot,” explains Kristin. “As the years went on, it was so weird that I kept so much of me out of my art.”
[Photo by Jimmy Fontaine]
As Kristin Kontrol, she tells her stories using a sonic palette splashed with bold pop melodies, her vocals showcasing a range hitherto unexplored on record. The album was produced by Kurt Feldman (of Ice Choir and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart) and Andrew Miller (who played guitar in the Dum Dum Girls’ last incarnation). Longtime Dum Dum Girls producer Richard Gottehrer (Blondie, The Go-Go’s) provided “sonic consultation,” giving Kristin feedback on the new songs and inspiring her to continually push further. After writing 62 songs for the project, she whittled them down to the 10 that will be featured on this debut.
“The first music I really identified as my own was very poppy, classic 80s, from Debbie Gibson and Tiffany to Janet Jackson and Madonna,” says Kristin, who grew up in Northern California and now resides in New York City. “I didn’t want to make another rock’n’roll record.”
With its synth-sax flourishes and minimal groove, album opener “Show Me” sounds like the soundtrack to a previously unseen John Hughes movie montage. ”(Don’t) Wannabe” loops Enya-esque vocals and features her first reverse guitar solo while “White Street” is Kristin’s most narrative song yet, telling the tale of a specific night - last New Year’s Eve - in New York City. Kristin spoke more about the upcoming album in her recent Sirius XMU interview with Jenny Eliscu HERE.
Dum Dum Girls was Kristin’s guise for the best part of a decade. After posting her bedroom recordings online, she caught the ears of Sub Pop. From there she assembled her group of badass, black-clad cadets and toured the world. Over the course of three albums, four EPs and a bold brace of singles, Dum Dum Girls morphed from the girl group-gone-bad moves of debut album I Will Be (2010), to the comparatively plush noir-pop of 2014’s Too True.
In a review of Too True, The New York Times observed, “each successive album has largely offered refinements and variations.” “Too True preserves what makes Dum Dum Girls great, while pushing the band to brilliant new heights,” said Alternative Press and MOJO praised its “mythic ambition. “Dum Dum Girls supported Too True with a North American tour, a performance on “Late Show with David Letterman,” and a series of videos, including ”“Lost Boys & Girls Club,” which was produced with support from H&M Life, and “Are You Okay,” which was produced and directed by novelist/screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis.
Kristin Kontrol will announce live dates soon, but in the meantime, fans can find her DJ’ing at SXSW later his month. Her recent video capturing a street art tribute to David Bowie, that was painted on the railings on a New York City street, caught fire and now has more than 13 million views. It can be seen HERE.
