Save Face Share New Track ‘Sharpen Your Teeth’

In just a few weeks, New Jersey’s Save Face will release their monumental new album ‘Another Kill ForThe Highlight Reel’. Produced by The Movielife’s Brett Romnes, the album houses some of the most eccentric and theatrical music vocalist Tyler Povanda (he/him) has ever created –– and he knows it, too.

In a bold video for their new song ‘Sharpen Your Teeth,’ out today, Povanda taps deep into all of our internal odontophobias whilst somehow making us sing along at the same time. It’s a twisted kind of game the young songwriter plays, pulling equal inspiration from Jersey scene titans like My Chemical Romance and Thursday as well as Broadway musicals like Sweeney Todd and Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Watch the ‘Sharpen Your Teeth’ video below.

WARNING: THIS VIDEO CONTAINS EDITING AND VISUALS THAT MAY BE INTENSE/DANGEROUS FOR SOME AUDIENCES. THOSE WHO EXPERIENCE PHOTOSENSITIVITY OR EPILEPSY SHOULD TAKE EXTREME CAUTION. AN ALTERNATIVE VISUAL FOR THIS SONG CAN BE FOUND HERE FOR THOSE SEEKING A DIFFERENT / LESS INTENSE EXPERIENCE.

Elsewhere on the record, the eccentric frontperson draws influence from his Jersey brethren like Thursday (Geoff Rickly actually sings on ‘A.M. Gothic’), but adds a theatrical bent that’s rooted in his love of musicals like Sweeney Todd, West Side Story, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Dear Evan Hansen, and more. It’s clear that this record is much more interested in building worlds around itself than it is in adhering to any genre conventions or expectations. 

“I’m just trying to make something that’s interesting to me, despite whether anyone likes it or hates it,” Tyler explains.

The spirit of art for art’s sake is what truly lies at the core of their ethos. “If you’re going to make art, you have to be willing to have your spirit crushed, and I have repeatedly,” Tyler admits. “But in that, I made the best thing I ever have.”

“It can be hard to reconcile the fact that we live in a world where we’re taught that the validation of your art determines its worth,” he continues. “The only thing that makes it worth it is creating something that is so inspiring to you that it feels like it’s worth the struggle to put it out into the world—and that’s what these songs did for me.”

That drive to keep pushing through discomfort is evident on this album and is what makes the collection of songs on ‘Another Kill For The Highlight Reel’ as cathartic as they are catchy.

Pre-orders for ‘Another Kill For The Highlight Reel’ are available via the following link.

The track listing is available to view below.

1. The Funeral You’ve Been Asking For
2. Curse Me Out
3. Another Kill For The Highlight Reel
4. Bury Me (Tonight!)
5. Sharpen Your Teeth
6. A Song For Your Futile Heart
7. GLITTER
8. The Perks Of Not Being Able To See Your Reflection
9. A.M. Gothic
10. Watch You Die Again
11. Please Murder Me

Guccihighwaters Shares Video For ‘Rock Bottom’

guccihighwaters (AKA Morgan Murphy) has shared a video for the track, ‘Rock Bottom’, a track off the recently released ‘Joke’s On You’.

The track also features a guest spot from Nothing, Nowhere., whom also appears in the video which was shot in the dunes of North Carolina.

Check out ‘Rock Bottom’ and the video below.

‘Joke’s On You’, the second record from guccihighwaters is out now via Epitaph Records.

Orders can be made online via his webstore.

Single Review – Dregg – ‘Evolve’

Melbourne based anomalistic collective DREGG, have shared their new track ‘EVOLVE.’ Drenched in heavy guitars and raging drums the band bang out their frustrations with a sound that hungrily consumes metal, hardcore and rap, only to heave it back up in a colourful rainbow of bombastic brutality. The video, sponsored by EVOLVE Energy, premiered via ROCK SOUND.

“Humans have a long history of adapting to situations and environments they’ve been thrown into. 2020 was no exception and it pushed humanity into new and interesting territory. Without the ability to allow thoughts, feelings and the fundamentals of innovation to advance and improve, the world would have come to an unimaginative decline in ingenuity,” says DREGG on the meaning behind the new track.

DREGG make powerfully energetic music, driven by themes of fierce individualism, with a sound that hungrily consumes metal, hardcore, and rap, only to heave it back up in a colourful rainbow of bombastic brutality and iconoclastic absurdity, lovingly fed to the audience like mother birds. The thought-provoking five-piece, known for tongue-in-cheek take on the current state of the world, continues to push the boundaries of hardcore by making music and art intended to provoke and inspire.  

Now the video alone is genius. It’s just a holy sentiment to everything genre is with the hard powering riffs layered throughout which then just switches from a commercial of an energy drink to a straight out Science Fiction concept as if we’re going through layers in The Matrix one by one. A punchy and chaotic track of destructive propotions for the audio and lastly for the video, they hire a tank. Enough said.

Rating 5/5.

Justin Courtney Pierre Releases New Track ‘Footsteps’

Motion City Soundtrack’s Justin Courtney Pierre has released a new track “Footsteps,” the second single off his upcoming Brett Gurewitz-produced solo EP An Anthropologist On Mars, following “Dying To Know,”.

Check out ‘Footsteps’ below.

The upcoming EP, ‘An Anthropologist On Mars’ is set to be released March 12th 2021 via Epitaph Records.

Justin Courtney (Motion City Soundtrack)

Justin Courtney of Motion City Soundtrack has announced a new solo EP.

‘An Anthropologist On Mars’ was produced by Brett Gurewitz and is set to be released on March 12 2021 via Epitaph Records.

Check out the Cover Art, Tracklisting, Stream of the track ‘Dying To Know’ and Pre-Order options are available below.

Courtney offers an explanation for what the EP represents:

“My obsession with Debbie Reynolds started at a young age. I believe I was 12 when I noticed her book, Debbie: My Life, on my grandmother’s nightstand. My parents traveled for work, so I spent a good deal of my childhood and early teen years in the company of my grandmother. We watched The Golden Girls together, and she let me feast on a rotating smorgasbord of Pepperidge Farm products, sherbet ice cream, and giant bags of gourmet popcorn she’d pick up from our frequent late-night trips to Red Owl.

I didn’t just watch shows; I loved to read. I fully immersed myself in whatever world I was investigating. Didn’t matter if it was The Hardy Boys, Calvin and Hobbes, IT, Spaceballs: The Book, or biographies about old ladies with big hair. I simply enjoyed the act of reading, and I constantly took on characteristics and mannerisms of the people in the stories. I’m pretty sure my parents thought there was something wrong with me, but my grandmother made me feel like I was the most interesting person in the world (even if it was all a grand exaggeration of half-truths and utter nonsense). There was something more comfortable about not fully being myself. A freedom of sorts.

To this day, I do not know what compelled me to pick up Debbie’s book, but from word one, I was enraptured. I couldn’t put it down. The obsession really picked up once I realized that Carrie Fisher was Debbie Reynolds’ daughter. Star Wars was at the forefront of many thoughts, as a child of the ‘80s. I have a strong memory of being taken to Return of The Jedi by the very grandmother whose book I was now reading, along with my cousin Jared, and the subsequent trip to Children’s Palace to purchase a scout trooper and a speeder bike. I thought Princess Leia was a dead ringer for my mom, and Han Solo WAS my dad. To some degree they still are.

I often found connections to things I couldn’t explain, nor did I fully understand, but always just went with it. Like jumping off a cliff and figuring out the landing on the way down. I’ve only in the last few years realized I was living in a purely instinctual way back then (a place I long to get back to). This is to say, my connection to Star Wars, and thus the characters of Princess Leia and Han Solo, made me think of my own parents, my life, my grandmother, our time together watching films like Star Wars, and a book about the mother of Carrie Fisher. It all seemed like a puzzle to me, a puzzle of the unsolvable circular unending variety. Puzzles like these occupied much space in my adolescent brain.

Somewhere along the way I fell in love with Debbie Reynolds. As I grew up, I watched every movie of hers I could get my hands on. Albert Brooks’ Mother is perhaps my favorite performance of hers because she reminds me so much of the grandmother who was responsible for inadvertently sending me on this lifelong obsession I still don’t fully comprehend.

I’ve heard people say that time heals all wounds. I don’t necessarily believe that. I believe that time unearths more accurate truths. It is then up to you to figure out what to do with what you discover.

A strange thing happens when a person experiences trauma at a young age. Your body and your mind find a way to protect you from it. It helps for a while until it doesn’t. Add to that an overactive imagination and a shitload of drugs, and suddenly reality isn’t so obvious. I feel like I somehow used Debbie Reynolds as a substitute for my own mother (her name is Debbie as well) and as I mentioned before, my mother and father always reminded me of Han Solo and Princess Leia.

Over time, the lines get so blurred, you can’t even trust your own memories.

This is essentially what these songs are about. That confused area where, once the fog is lifted and the excavation begins, you start to see the buried bits of this and that residing beneath the false veneer you weren’t even aware of in the first place, yet robotically kept up for over forty years because you never thought to question its validity. For me, that was uncoupling the story of Debbie Reynolds from my own.

Or perhaps it was Deborah Winger.”

01. Dying To Know
02. I Hate Myself
03. Footsteps
04. Promise Not To Change
05. Illumination

Pre-Orders are available via Bandcamp.

Architects Announce Ninth Record, ‘For Those That Wish To Exist’

After the release of their latest single, ‘Animals’ in the last week, Architects have announced the details of their upcoming ninth record, ‘For Those That Wish To Exist’.

The upcoming record is set to be released on February 26th 2021 via Epitaph Records.

Dan Searle (Drums) says:

“This album was me looking at our inability to change to a way of life that would sustain the human race and save the planet. I wanted to look in the mirror and ask ourselves the question of what are going to do, as opposed to trying to point the finger at politicians. Change has to start on a personal level. The world has developed a culture of wanting someone else to deal with it, when we need to take our own responsibility. It has to start there.”

Check out the Cover Art, Tracklisting, stream of the single, ‘Animals’ as well as Pre-Order options below.

01.) Do You Dream Of Armageddon?
02.) Black Lungs
03.) Giving Blood
04.) Discourse Is Dead
05.) Dead Butterflies
06.) An Ordinary Extinction
07.) Impermanence (feat. Winston McCall)
08.) Flight Without Feathers
09.) Little Wonder (feat. Mike Kerr)
10.) Animals
11.) Libertine
12.) Goliath (feat. Simon Neil)
13.) Demi God
14.) Meteor
15.) Dying Is Absolutely Safe

Pre-orders are available via the band’s Webstore, Amazon and Itunes.

The Menzingers Announce New Reworked Record Of ‘Hello Exile’

The Menzingers have announced the details of their upcoming release of ‘From Exile’, which is a reworked version of the latest effort, ‘Hello Exile’, which the band was recorded in quarentine.

The record is set to be released September 25th 2020 digitally and physically on November 13th 2020 via Epitaph Records.

Greg Barnett (guitar) has said the following on the upcoming release.

“The live music industry vanished before our eyes, and just like that we were out of work like tens of millions of others. As the weeks progressed the upcoming tours got rescheduled, then rescheduled again, then effectively cancelled. There were times when it all felt fatal. There’s no guide book on how to navigate being a working musician during a global pandemic, so we were left to make it up as we went along. We wanted to document and create in the moment, and though we couldn’t be in the same room together due to social distancing lockdowns, we got creative.”
 
“We would track the songs from our own home studios, share the files via dropbox, and pray it all made sense when pieced back together. Initially, we planned for the album to be similar to our acoustic demo collection ‘On The Possible Past,’ but we quickly found out that this batch of songs benefited from more detailed arrangements.

“We rewrote, and changed keys and melodies. We blended analog and digital instruments in ways we never had before. We dug through old lyric notebooks and added additional verses. We got our dear friend Kayleigh Goldsworthy to play violin on two songs. No idea was off limits. Hell, I even convinced the band to let me play harmonica on a song (no small feat!). The recording process ran from mid-March till June, and upon completion we sent it over to our dear friend and close collaborator Will Yip to mix and master.”

The Album Art, Tracklisting, Streaming of the tracks, ‘Strawberry Mansion’ and ‘High School Friend’ and Pre-order options can be found below.

01. America (You’re Freaking Me Out) (From Exile) 
02. Anna (From Exile) 
03. High School Friend (From Exile) 
04. Last To Know (From Exile) 
05. Strangers Forever (From Exile) 
06. Hello Exile (From Exile) 
07. Portland (From Exile) 
08. Strain Your Memory (From Exile)
09. I Can’t Stop Drinking (From Exile)
10. Strawberry Mansion (From Exile) 
11. London Drugs (From Exile) 
12. Farewell Youth (From Exile)

Pre-orders are available via the band’s Webstore and Google Play.

Color Film Sign To Epitaph, Confirm Album.

Color film, a side project of Glassjaw and Head Automatia member Daryl Palumbo have signed a record deal with Epitaph Records.

The duo, which features Richard Penzone, will release their debut album, Living Arrangements on June 19th.

If anyone wishes to listen to any material before the the album drops, click on the Spotify link below.