Going for ADDS on 1.31: Fránçois & The Atlas Mountains - ‘E Volo Love’ (Domino)

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GOING FOR TOP 200 ADDS

NOTE: AAA ADD Date is 2.7.2012

We are pleased to announce the release of E Volo Love, the new album from Domino’s first French signing, Fránçois & The Atlas Mountains, on 23rd January 2012.

E Volo Love (which is a palindrome) is comprised of eleven elegant, fragile, velvet-plush songs on an album that is heart-meltingly delicate, enchanting and otherworldly. Delicately poised between sunnily feel-good and wistfully melancholy, E Volo Love has a poignant, end-of-summer feel to it. The grand theme on this dual-language album – sung in both French and English – is simply love.

The album’s hot buttered sound comes from its wide range of influences, from French chanson, traditional indie pop and Aphex Twin to African and Middle Eastern sounds, which can be heard in particular on “Les Plus Beaux” and “Do You Want To Dance”, which bookend the album. The album was mixed by Tinariwen’s studio bod, Jean-Paul Romann.

Texture and mood dominate thanks to slowly ebbing arrangements, elastic rhythms, seamless twists and turns such as on “Piscine.”  The chanson-into-house music track contains heavy doses of elegant French drama, and a soft gaze of electronics. Released as the first single on 7th November, “Piscine” yearns nostalgically for the past, and for lost afternoons at a small-town swimming-pool from Fránçois’ youth.

On writing E Volo Love, “I’m trying to make music that works with the world we live in,” says Fránçois. “I spend lots of time in the countryside. Often, when I write a song, I play it in my mind a few times and kind of find the words when I’m cycling around or go surfing. I’m very keen to let the song rise while I’m just walking around.”

There be ghosts, too. The album was recorded in a grand church in Saintes and the band have employed its natural reverb – especially haunting on the gently celestial “Bail Eternal” with its spooky choir-sung Latin palindrome “In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni” (“We go into circles by night and are consumed by fire”).

The reason for recording in a church? The acoustics, the view and, curiously, the fact that, according to Fránçois, stonemasons used to seek out ‘cracks in the earth where there was more energy and then build cathedrals on top to make people feel good.’ Listening to E Volo Love, either the crack in Saintes was very good, or Fránçois is one talented chap.

Focus Tracks: 3, 4, 1, 8, 10
FCC: None

Going For ADDS on 1.31: Drunken Prayer - ‘Into The Missionfield’ (Fluff & Gravy)

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GOING FOR TOP 200 ADDS

On February 7, 2012, Portland, Oregon-based indie, Fluff & Gravy Records will release Drunken Prayer’s sophomore full-length, Into the Missionfield, an eleven track collection of dark tales and darker melodies.  A journey down a path less traveled, but always more rewarding.

Some may categorize it as alt. country, Americana, folk-rock, or a number of other genres, but, to Drunken Prayer mastermind Morgan Christopher Geer, the songs aren’t trying to be anything; they’re just his way of letting out a howl formed by life and the history of music.  Not representing any one style of music – not representing at all, just being.  Making music out of the reservoirs left by living and listening to humanity.  Drunken Prayer makes an honest tune, an un-ironic narrative of the harsh and beautiful harmonies and discords every human faces: a kind of holy blues.  There is a unique genuineness here born of pure inspiration.

A tall man with a menacing presence, a towering stage persona, and a raspy voice that commands attention with stories where sin and redemption bleed into each other, Geer’s entertaining wit and charismatic delivery a la Warren Zevon come easy, in a swagger of whispers, shouts and sneers.  Drunken Prayer’s songs find the honest place where pool hall gloom and tent revival glory keep one another bona fide.

He’s a showman, “a barking ringleader with chops between Tom Waits and the Butthole Surfers’ Gibby Haynes,” says Portland’s Willamette Week. Bad Seeds-in-New Or-leans noir,” Drunken Prayer pulls no punches.

All of this comes to life on Into the Missionfield, an anything-but-ordinary “singer-songwriter” record.  The album is heavy on percussion, some songs featuring two drummers.  The gut-bucket guitars and keys are dense, blues-y and psychedelic; the horn arrangements are as loose and buoyant as a New Orleans Jazz funeral.  Best of all, the lyrics are as sweet as they are damning.

Including guest appearances by players from The Breeders, Beck, Bright Eyes, Elliott Smith, Supersuckers, Kristen Hersh, and I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch In The House, Geer’s friends help flesh out the songs on Into the Missionfield, picking up where Drunken Prayer’s acclaimed self-titled debut left off, and moving the band toward uncharted territory.

And, to think, Drunken Prayer was born out of a strange turn of events, sometime in 2006 at a fish market in tiny Sebastopol, California.  Geer found himself in a conversation with one of his heroes, Tom Waits, about life and art.  The talk moved Geer to unleash his trademark sound.  Thus it came to pass that in a fish market between Tom Waits and a bin of dead salmon, Drunken Prayer came to life.  Not bad for a melancholy boy born to a New Orleans folk singer and a California mushroom farmer.

Focus Tracks: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7
FCC: Clean