Tender Central today shares 'Ashes' featuring Matthew And The Atlas and has also announced her debut album 'The Garden' which is due in January. 'Ashes' is a duet with Matthew Hegarty, where vocals and a clapping rhythm are eventually joined with a deeper musical arrangement, by which time the atmosphere and sheer depth of this song have dug their hooks in deep. ===== Montreal psych-rock band The Besnard Lakes have released the gorgeous new song 'Raindrops' where all the renowned trappings of this act are present, indeed it's grand to see this band can still create epic and addictive music.
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Tender Central is the electronic pop project of Devon born, classically trained cellist India Bourne. Today, Tender Central has shared brand new single ‘Ashes’ alongside the announcement of her long-awaited debut album ‘The Garden’, which is set for release on Jan 22nd via Hello Friendly Recordings. Weaving infectious hooks and ornate piano inflections with classical influences, India manages to keep things refreshingly modern. With Tender Central, she lends her delicate ear for musical arrangement to the realm of electronica and folk, resulting in productions that evoke the sounds of her ethereal electronic forebearers Massive Attack, Lamb and Zero 7, and the unmistakable vocal similarities to legends such as Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell.
Having spent a large portion of her adult years touring as a core member of childhood friend Ben Howard’s band as well as a member of supergroup A Blaze Of Feather, the notion of feeling at ‘home’ had become somewhat foreign to India Bourne. Living such a transient life had left her feeling more than a little unsettled and not only in the physical sense. The songs on ‘The Garden’, created in collaboration with esteemed producer Jakwob, cover a range of subjects, from the aforementioned struggle to feel at home whilst living on the road, womanhood and family crisis to learning to accept and love ourselves and our bodies.
“Underneath all of it I see my journey from anxiety to peace, from hardship to kindness and compassion, from discomfort to understanding and resting in the unknown” explains India. The album title, and song of the same name, comes from the peace she found whilst digging the small patch of earth outside her old London flat. “Digging in the earth is where I find immense peace and stability. It grounds me. It was a revelation in a time I felt so lost” she says. “I found peace in the outdoors and I finally slowed down to appreciate it all. In that space I was also able to realise that peace is always there but that it's 'hard to learn', it requires practice and time. A life's work perhaps.”
New single ‘Ashes’, a sparse yet rousing duet with Matthew Hegarty of Matthew and The Atlas, is based on a quote from Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book ‘Women Who Run With The Wolves’. The quote reads;
“Deep in the wintry parts of our minds, we know that there is no such thing as a work-free transformation. We know that we will have to burn to the ground in one way or another, and then sit right in the ashes of who we once thought we were and go on from there”.
Whilst reading this segment of the book, India was stopped in her tracks. “I was experiencing big change in my life during the time of writing and life felt unsettling. Often in these times I want to control everything and make sure that any step forward is done 'perfectly' but I know really, that perfection doesn't exist” explains India. Reading this quote, it became clear that the hardest but most important thing to do would be to sit in the discomfort of change and see what it had to bring; to find her 'home' and to embrace life’s imperfections rather than resist or resent them. “I realised by letting go of who we feel we 'should' be rather than who we are, is a much better way of living and allows for more space, creativity and joy to come in”.
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The Besnard Lakes have passed through death and they’re here to tell the tale. Nearly five years after their last lightning-tinted volley, the magisterial Montreal psych-rock band have sworn off compromise, split with their long-standing label, and completed a searing, 72-minute suite about the darkness of dying and the light on the other side.
The Besnard Lakes Are The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings is the group’s sixth album and the first in more than 15 years to be released away from a certain midwestern American indie record company. After 2016’s A Coliseum Complex Museum – which saw Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas attempting shorter, less sprawling songs – the Besnards and their label decided it was time to go their separate ways; with that decision came a question of whether to even continue the project at all. What use is a band with an instinct for long, tectonic tunes – rock songs with chthonic heft and ethereal grace, five or 10 or 18 minutes long? How do you sell that in an age of bite-sized streaming? How do you make it relevant?
“Who gives a sht!” the Besnard Lakes realized. Ignited by their love for each other, for playing music together, the sextet found themselves unspooling the most uncompromising recording of their career. Despite all its grandeur, …The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings honours the very essence of punk rock: the notion that a band need only be relevant to itself. At last the Besnard Lakes have crafted a continuous long-form suite: nine tracks that could be listened together as one, like Spiritualized’s Lazer Guided Melodies or even Dark Side of the Moon, overflowing with melody and harmony, drone and dazzle, the group’s own unique weather.
Here now, the Besnard Lakes finally dispensed with the two/three-year album cycle, taking all the time they needed to conceive, compose, record and mix their opus. Some of its songs were old, resurrected from demos cast aside years ago. Others were literally woodshedded in the cabanon behind Lasek and Goreas’s “Rigaud Ranch” – invented and reinvented, relishing this rougher sound. Some of that distortion makes its way into the final mix: an incandescent crackle that had receded from the Besnards’ more recent output.
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