Country music, as a genuine subculture — as opposed to a Nashville-created product — is intimately tied to the Alamo City. The music’s roots run deep in.
From eerie folk lullabies to bouncy b-sides: Ten of the Chills’ best songs Kiran Dass
A singular band, the Chills are difficult to stylistically define because their diverse sound traverses lush psychedelia, whimsy and gloom, punk rock and bright jangly pop. Known for their revolving door policy on band members, perhaps rivalled only by the Fall (there have been at least 33 members of the Chills over their 41-year career), the one constant is Martin Phillipps. And they’re back with Scatterbrain, their first album since 2018.
10. Draft Morning (1989)
Phillipps goes to an early source of inspiration with this plaintive cover of the Vietnam protest song by the Byrds. Charting the inner world of a freshly recruited soldier on the morning he is to be drafted into the Vietnam war and the existential dilemma he faces, the song begins with the idealistic “sun warm on my face” and ends on the sombre line “today was the day for action. Leave my bed to kill instea
Aria Dean on Designing an Anti-Monument
The artist on her proposed
New Monument for Franksa Tomten and how minimalist aesthetics speak to the complex history of Sweden’s colonial past
Travis Diehl Your proposed
New Monument for Franksa Tomten (2020) would replace a pair of granite and bronze sculptures commemorating Swedish settlers in Delaware – a 1938 monument designed by Carl Milles that sits in Fort Christina Park in Wilmington and a replica installed 20 years later at Stenpiren in Gothenburg – with seven-metre-high monoliths of solid iron. To these would be added a third on the Caribbean island of St. Barts.
Aria Dean I identified three key dates in Swedish colonial history: the departure of the Swedes for America, the transfer of the then-colony of St. Barts from France to Sweden, and the establishment of the Swedish West India Company. People talk about Scandinavia with this sense of exceptionalism regarding colonialism and the slave trade, b
In February 2020, singer-songwriter
Vanessa Peters was in Italy preparing for a European tour when the country went on a national lockdown. The tour was canceled and the recording sessions that had been scheduled in Texas after the tour were scrapped. Working instead in a farmhouse in Castiglion Fiorentino in Italy for 10 days, Peters and her Italian bandmates worked to finish some new songs for her upcoming album
Modern Age. Released Feb. 25, the video for the first of those songs, “Crazymaker,” was shot in Lucca, Italy.
The long-awaited collaboration album from Fort Worth psych-rock legend Johndavid Bartlett and modern psych-rock purists Acid Carousel is finally out on Feb. 26.
Psych-Rocking Dreams
By JUAN R. GOVEA
Bartlett: “I did remember what I was going for and thought that I could recreate the spirit and sound of what … I tried to do back then.”
Photo by Emily Rose Burek.
In 1968, back when Texas’ legendary psych-rock scene was emerging, a young folk musician by the name of Johndavid Bartlett signed a record deal with the Lone Star State’s premier psych-rock label, the Houston-based International Artists. Two labelmates, the 13th Floor Elevators and The Red Krayola, urged the high school student to hit the studio. With help from Krayola mastermind Mayo Thompson, Bartlett went into Golden Star Studio in his birthplace of Houston and began recording his debut album, but the label soon folded, leaving