When: 7.30pm on Monday 3 December 2018
Where: YES (The Pink Room), 38 Charles Street, Manchester M1 7DB
We’re delighted to be working with Still Corners for the first time!
With influences that span the spacey experiments of Vangelis, the expansive, cinematic sounds of Ennio Morricone, and glamorous ’80s synth pop, Still Corners is the project of Greg Hughes and Tessa Murray. The group formed shortly after Hughes, an American expatriate, met Murray by chance at a London train stop in 2009.
In 2010 Still Corners released singles Don’t Fall in Love/Wish on 7-inch through British psychedelia label the Great Pop Supplement with an accompanying video for Wish directed by Lucy Dyson. Selling all 700 copies in a single day saw Sub Pop take due notice and quickly sign the group. Their first full length Creatures of an Hour was released by Sub Pop in 2011. By the time of their second record in 2013, Still Corners had shifted focus from ’60s influences in favour of a slicker, more ’80s-sound inspired by Roxy Music’s Avalon. Another Sub Pop release, Strange Pleasures, includes the hit single Fireflies (Pitchfork, Best New Track) and sleeper hit, The Trip.
To record their third album, Murray and Hughes relocated from London to the English seaside. Moved by the water’s intense dark colour, they named the set of songs Dead Blue. The album, which featured the Brian Wilson-inspired single Lost Boys was released on Still Corners’ very own Wrecking Light Records in September 2016 and was highest-rated dream pop album on The Line of Best Fit in 2016.
Still Corners return in 2018 with a new album, Slow Air. Evoking the atmospheric sounds Still Corners are known for, Slow Air continues the band’s journey with a lush, ethereal album inspired by the heat of America’s west.
‘We wanted to hear beautiful guitar and drums and an otherworldliness, something almost indefinable along with a classic song writing vibe,’ says Murray. ‘We’re always trying to get the sound we hear inside of ourselves, so we moved fast to avoid our brains getting in the way too much. The name Slow Air evokes the feel of the album to me, steady, eerie and beautiful.’
Black Lagoon, the lead single/video, has the band on a journey from the desert to the ocean in search of a lost eden. Filmed over a month in Texas, Arizona and California and shot on a small handheld cinema camera, the band travels across America in a white mustang convertible searching and reaching into the unknown.
Slow Air will be released on Wrecking Light Records on 10 August and the band will be touring in North America and Europe this autumn.
Tour support comes from Bella Union‘s Psychic Markers. Psychic Markers – consisting of Alannah Ashworth, Lewis Baker, Steven Dove, Leon Dufficy and Luke Jarvis – are a hodgepodge bunch made up of members of various other bands and with a geographical backdrop that stretches countries as well as counties. So it makes sense that their music would be eclectically emblematic of such sprawling backgrounds. Their sophomore album Hardly Strangers – much like the band themselves – is an assorted affair. 1950s-tinged doo-wop nestles up alongside lush cinema-influenced soundscapes; while flashes of neo-psychedelia take pop hooks and stretch them out into hypnotic and elongated jams befitting of 1970s Germany before pushing them into further cosmic realms.
Local support comes from Manchester doom-pop quartet Easy Kill. DIY Magazine says of them: ‘That open-wound honesty is Easy Kill’s calling card. Amongst the beautiful, often twinkling musicianship lies a bruised but still beating heart: the kind of timeless storytelling that latches itself to the soul, never daring to loosen its grip. Bands as refreshing as Easy Kill come along once in a blue moon.’
This show is a co-promotion with Now Wave.
Buy tickets now. Tickets are available from Vinyl Exchange, WeGotTickets.com, Ticketline.co.uk and on 0871 220 0260.
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