The Family Battenberg - Fellow Robot - Semisonic - The Nora Kelly Band
The Family Battenberg - Runny Hunny.
Psychedelic upstarts The Family Battenberg announce the release of their reverb coated,fuzz founded new track ‘Runny Hunny’, out today 6th of June! Cardiff, Wales: Runny Hunny is The Family Battenberg’s third release. Born out of a band-wide love for garage rock, 'Runny Hunny' plays with the ethos of pushing the limits andbending the rules of recording equipment to produce overly saturated and noisy results.
The band successfully create fuzz fuelled walls of sound, draped behind Lennon-esc double trackedvocals, with plenty of reverb to boot. Thematically, the song is a commentary on the universalwish of a stable income, from the perspective of a fresh faced arts graduate. The track wasrecorded by The Family Battenberg at Cardiff’s Music Box rehearsal rooms and mixed by Eliot in the back room of his flat.
A total of 4 arts degrees were utilised in the creation of this track.Of the track, producer and lyricist Eliot Jones explains: “Runny Hunny truly is just about having a whinge. Universities do a fantastic job of convincing you that you’ll walk into your dream jobweeks after graduation. ‘LIGHT THE BEACONS, CALL ABBEY ROAD, A 20-SOMETHING POST GRAD HAS JUST COMPLETED A MUSIC PRODUCTION DEGREE’! Being back at your parents house and catching the train to the job centre on a Wednesday morning is quite sobering after you’ve had your photos in your funny hat.”
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Following the release of their acclaimed new album ‘Misanthropioid’, Fellow Robot have released a superbly dark and striking animated video for the album’s opening track. “Rabbit" sets an ominous tone to the album, and its video counterpart is a perfect pairing. Pulling from two previous animated collaborations, the Prebich sisters and Fellow Robot continue their social commentary with a voyeuristic, occasionally red pilled rabbit. We follow the rabbit down a series of disturbing paths, observing drip feed propaganda streams from the outside of your work and living room windows, and ultimately, the rabbit has enough and leaves Earth.
For ‘Misanthropioid’, Fellow Robot has teamed up with Andrew Scheps (Green Day, RHCP, Adele, Metallica, Hozier, Johnny Cash) who helped co-produce and mix the album from his home studio ‘Punkerpad’ in Titton, UK. Scheps joined the team during the peak of the pandemic in 2020 and over the course of two years helped the band complete the album remotely. Fellow Robot’s latest album will be released through Scheps’ own ToneQuake Records.
Fellow Robot originally started out as a concept piece in 2016, pulling lyrics from the sci-fi novel “The Robot’s Guide to Music” written by singer Anthony Pedroza. While deeply rooted to its origins, “Misanthropioid” is an album that lives closer to reality than science fiction however blurred those lines are these days.
Fellow Robot named their new album ‘Misanthropioid’, due to its brutally honest lyrics and melancholy feelings surrounding what it is to be a human. “It’s our soundtrack to the last few years'' says Pedroza, adding “it’s a diverse take on the perception of emotion, especially regarding how we feel about our fellow humans''. The band does well in reflecting their disappointment of humanity, especially in the opening track ‘Rabbit’ which is a clear reflection of the BLM movement in the US. However dark ‘Misanthropioid’ is, it’s ultimately hopeful within its vulnerable and carefully stitched arrangements. The album at times is theatrical and dramatic, each song seemingly being sung by different characters in a stage production, especially in songs like ‘I’m Going to Hell’ and ‘The People Next Door’. “Society has many voices, and the space in between the harshest opinions are the most truthful”, says drummer, engineer, and cofounder Luis Renteria.
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Yesterday, the Grammy-nominated trio Semisonic released “Little Bit Of Sun” and “Grow Your Own,” their first release of new music following their 2020 EP You’re Not Alone. The two new songs arrive as the band embarked on their first national tour in over 20 years with the Barenaked Ladies. In the coming weeks, the band will play their home state of Minnesota, Chicago, Los Angeles and more.
The songs were recorded between Creation Studios in Minneapolis, MN and Ballroom Studio in Los Angeles, and produced by Grammy-winning singer, songwriter and producer Dan Wilson and his co-founding bandmates John Munson and Jacob Slichter.
“’Little Bit of Sun’ came out really fast one day - I think I wrote the first minute of it in one spontaneous take. It felt so right. We’ve all been beaten down by darkness for the last few years, it’s like we can hardly ask for a full sky of sunshine. We’d be willing to scrape by on a glimpse of it. But obviously, the song is asking for more. I can get by on a little bit, but at some point I want it all.” Wilson explains.
“I wrote ‘Grow Your Own’ about the joy and blue sky of starting up a band. If you’re a musician and you hear some music you love, you’re gonna want to make some of that music for yourself. Grow your own. And if you don’t hear the music you want to hear in the world, well then, all the more reason to grow your own. A lot of the imagery in the song is from the years when I lived in Boston, going to Harvard during the day and playing in the clubs at night. I definitely longed to be welcomed by the grungy rock people way more than I needed approval from the scholars. In retrospect, I guess it makes sense when you look at what I’ve done with my life.”
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The Nora Kelly Band traveled to Area 51 to confirm your suspicions on their new single "Roswell." The track is featured on the Montreal quintet’s upcoming debut full-length Rodeo Clown, due to arrive August 25 via Mint Records. In addition, the Nora Kelly Band has announced July dates in the Pacific Northwest along with East Coast dates in August. Rodeo Clown was written by Nora Kelly, produced by Kelly with Ethan Soil, and mixed by Pietro Amato (The Luyas/Belle Orchestre).
Discussing “Roswell,” Nora notes, "As a massive UFOlogy nerd, Roswell was a place I really wanted to visit. Luckily for me, I was in that area of the world when my cousin got married in 2022. In the first verse, I mention an interaction I had with an astronomer at the wedding. He revealed he’d seen a lot of UFOs but, to my dismay, all these events were explainable, according to him. Throughout the rest of the song I try to show the underlying reason why I love thinking about UFOs and aliens. For me, allowing oneself to suspend disbelief is the best way to keep life interesting. If you don’t necessarily believe/not believe something and are just interested in the stories, life stays weird. Once the wedding festivities had ceased, I took off towards New Mexico in a rental car. I wrote the lyrics to ‘Roswell’ in the back seat.”
Regarding the video, directed by Sarah Bradshaw, Nora continues, “Sarah and I shot footage on a recent trip to Mexico (not New Mexico!). I brought along a green alien morph-suit and we had Sarah’s boyfriend wear it all over the country. The result is a silly and whimsical video to accompany the ballad that is ‘Roswell,’ and with this I hope to bring in a little of that weirdness and suspended disbelief.”
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