🥤 SIPSMAN COMMUNIQUE: February 2024
Animal Hospital • Dana Gavanski • Hallelujah The Hills • Hopscotch • Hour • Katie von Schleicher • Krill • POP Montréal • Truth Club
Let’s begin! ⬎
KATIE VON SCHLEICHER
KvS and her eight-piece wrecking crew stopped by NPR’s legendary Tiny Desk late last year to record “Cranked,” “Montagnard People,” and “Texas” from October’s A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night, as well as “Caged Sleep” from her equally loved 2020 album Consummation. Thank you to Brooklyn Vegan and Rolling Stone for including Touch in year-end accolades, as well as Aquarium Drunkard for including in last month’s Bandcamping. Katie von Schleicher plays next on March 28 at Brooklyn’s Union Pool. Buy an LP today.
TRUTH CLUB
On Saturday, TC hit the road with fellow North Carolinian Indigo De Souza—see them when they roll thru your town. While you wait patiently outside the venue, watch Truth Club’s Audiotree session from last month where they rip through January 2023’s “It’s Time” and several off October’s Double Double Whammy-released Running From the Chase, which wound up on year-end lists by Stereogum, No Expectations, The Fire Note, Merry-Go-Round, and many others. They’ve got some good UK/EU people in their corner now, too, so expect some international travel in the future.
DANA GAVANSKI
LATE SLAP is Gavanski’s third record, due April 05 via Full Time Hobby. It’s an album that gives voice to the highs and lows of the mindscape in all its joys and terrors, injecting some much needed playfulness into the process of writing about emotionally hard things. Exhibits A + B have already been presented: opening track “How To Feel Uncomfortable” arrived last month with a wonderful music video that’s been viewed 239k times, followed last week by track two, “Let Them Row.” Londoners have sold out Gavanski’s run-thru of the album with her band this Wednesday at Folklore.
HOUR
Seems like a great time to announce that I’ll be working with this unique and special project fronted by Philadelphia’s Michael Cormier-O'Leary (Friendship, 2nd Grade). Following an appearance at Joe Pera’s live presentation of Drifting Off With Joe Pera in Brooklyn, the group will embark on a tour to Texas and back around SXSW. Hour’s last albums were Anemone Red and Tiny Houses, both released in 2018.
ANIMAL HOSPITAL
Kevin Micka celebrated his new AH album Shelf Life with a release show at State Park last month featuring Emily Reo, Andrea Pensado, and DJ Whysham. PopMatters named Shelf Life the 17th Best Experimental Album of 2023, proclaiming “The record works as compelling, brilliant post-rock but also an exercise in how to effectively break all the rules.” Buy an LP today.
HALLELUJAH THE HILLS
The Boston band fronted by Ryan Walsh (author of 2018’s Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968) are in the midst of recording their most ambitious project to date: the playing card-inspired DECK, a collection of 52 songs spread across 4 albums. In December, the 7-minute “Alone, In Love” from DIAMONDS was released, a thrilling and propulsive rocker that puts the Can in Americana.
HOPSCOTCH: Sep 5–7, 2024
Early Bird Passes are on sale now, giving folks the opportunity to scoop up cheap admission to what Indy Week described as “a prismatic array of engaging sounds.” Read Under The Radar’s recap of last year’s fest for further proof.
POP MONTRÉAL: September 25–29, 2024
Discovery Passes are available now for this fall’s POP lineup, sure to be filled with “weirdo left-of-center takes, deconstructions, new adventures” as Stereogum reported last year. If you’re SXSW-bound next month, trust that POP will be returning to Swan Dive to showcase some of Quebec’s finest emerging artists.
KRILL
Good bund, imo. No offense. My lovely distributor VERY securely shipped me a few copies of the Alam No Hris 10th anniversary reissue we put out in the world in 2022, so why don’t you let me (very securely) ship you a copy.
That is the news. I’ll be in NYC in a few weeks for Truth Club @ Brooklyn Steel on Jan 23 and Hour @ Murmrr Theatre on Jan 24, let’s hang? Thank for reading, support your friends, loves, family, favorite artists, favorite publications, and demand a ceasefire in Gaza. 🥤