NEWSFLASH: Wintersleep Announce Details Of New Album + UK Dates

 Wintersleep – New Inheritors

Album Released May 17th 2010  on One Four Seven Records

The title track from the album will be released as a Single on May 10th,  it is available for a limited time as a FREE DOWNLOAD  at www.wintersleep.com
Wintersleep return to the Europe in May for a Camden Crawl appearance and a headline tour – the UK dates are:
May
2nd – Camden Crawl
3rd – Birmingham Hare and Hounds
4th – Manchester Ruby Lounge
(5th – 16th – European Shows)
17th – London Lexington 
What you won’t be expecting is this.
Wintersleep spent two years touring the world in support of their last album Welcome to the Night Sky, picking up a Juno Award back home in Canada for Best New Band and playing with the likes of White Lies, Editors and the Maccabees along the way. Unavoidable on UK radio, whether it was with storming live favourite, “Oblivion” or the festival-hit-in-waiting “Weighty Ghost”. They did sessions for Zane Lowe at Radio 1, 6 Music, and XFM with platitudes heaped upon them from the likes of Mojo, Q, NME, Rock Sound, Clash, The Fly and The Word.

Mojo – ‘Welcome To The Night Sky’ is Wintersleep’s ‘Life’s Rich Pageant’. Musically they’re now on par with Band of Horses, with engulfing waves of FM-friendly sound and the odd glimpse of Interpol’s steely glare ****
NME – a glorious, crashing sound, pulsing outwards, destroying and caressing all it finds. Wintersleep are coming out of hibernation, wide awake and blinking
Rock Sound – lush melodies and a penchant for lyrical introspection that you just can’t resist 8/10
The Word – it’s time to wake up to Canada’s heavy-lidded, heavy-rock Elbow
Clash – Wintersleep’s ‘Welcome To The Night Sky’ is a record for those cold, dark evenings when you want to shut out the world and wrap yourself in a thick layer of guitar fuzz
Q – If Chris Martin had a thing for REM, Neil Young and lumberjack shirts rather than Radiohead, Coldplay may have sounded like Canadian five-piece Wintersleep… a pulsing guitar and a driving rhythm section pushing Paul Murphy’s emotive lyrics along at often breakneck speed
The Fly – ‘Welcome To The Night Sky’ is a rich, layered effort full of lush melodies and hummable missives..great stuff
Lesser bands would have followed up this success with a simple re-write.. if it ain’t broke…instead, Wintersleep have chosen to make some of the most expansive, dynamic, dark and courageous rock music you’ll hear this year.

There’s a lot of time to kill when you play over 200 shows a year and Wintersleep have used it to their advantage. Quality time spent devouring work by the likes of Hank Williams, Jorge Luis Borges, Nathanial Hawthorne, Flannery O’Connor and Karen Dalton, in between understanding the dynamics of sound in a tiny space as well as the power of a 10,000 capacity room.
While their lyrics to date have focused on the personal, the songs on New Inheritors tend towards a bigger worldview.  The narrator is a voyeur, commenting on situations rather than being in the situation itself. Without a doubt, a much more brooding, shadowy record, at times the lyrics verge on the intentionally indecipherable – check the pre-chorus to “Blood Collection” – suggesting a menacing, indefinable figure.  Moments and memories are alluded to across multiple songs and overarching themes of alienation and despondency crop up repeatedly.  But make no mistake this is not a miserable record, from album opener, ‘Experience The Jewel’ to the closer ‘Baltic’, New Inheritors is an album of rousing, inspirational rock songs.
Recorded in Montreal and mixed in Glasgow with Tony Doogan (Mogwai, Malcolm Middleton, Dirty Pretty Things, Teenage Fanclub, The Delgados), Wintersleep’s sound is more expansive, less distorted and more cerebral. For the first time, the band opted to work with both a brass and string arranger on some songs, but rather than overpower with swathes of violins and trumpets, they form a core part of each track rather than an awkward add-on.
You may have felt like you had Wintersleep pegged and pigeonholed but this record will undoubtedly sweep away any misconceptions and win over a huge new audience.  You may have thought you knew exactly what this record would sound like before you clicked play or dropped a needle.  But you definitely will not have been expecting this.

NEWSFLASH: Wintersleep On Tour With Editors plus Free Downloads!

FOUR FREE DOWNLOADS: http://www.wintersleep.com/giveaway/
(one song from Wintersleep’s first album, two from their second and as a bonus a Live recording of ‘Search Party’ from current album ‘Welcome To The Night Sky’

WINTERSLEEP are currently on their biggest European tour to date as special guests to EDITORS. Having spent the last month writing and recording the follow-up to ‘Welcome To The Night Sky’, WINTERSLEEP and their studio tans arrive in Belfast on Oct 7th returning home to Canada just in time for Christmas.

WINTERSLEEP are Special Guests of Editors on their HUGE European tour which reaches London Hammersmith Apollo tomorrow night…
21 Oct – LONDON, Hammersmith Apollo
22 Oct – Sheffield, Academy
23 Oct – Nottingham, Rock City
24 Oct – LONDON, Tabernacle – Wintersleep headline show
25 Oct – Wolverhampton, Civic
26 Oct – Southampton, Guildhall

Their current album, ‘Welcome To The Night Sky’ is a continuing success with Album of the Week on Zane Lowe, A-Lists at 6 Music, XFM and NME Radio and now, previously unreleased outside North America, their first two albums will be available. ‘Wintersleep’ (2003) and ‘Untitled’ (2005) will be released by One Four Seven Records on October 19th 09 in the UK and Europe.

NEWSFLASH: Cursive return with eagerly awaited new album

Cursive make a long awaited return with the release of  ‘Mama, I’m Swollen’ on June 1st. It’s Cursive at their best, evident during recent performances at SXSW and on the David Letterman show.
 Ever since Cursive burst onto the music scene with their 1997 debut album, the band has consistently and continually churned out heady albums heralded by critics and fans alike. Wrestling with life’s miseries and mysteries, Mama, I’m Swollen is an album brimming with the universal, questioning the human condition, social morality, and the “Peter Pan Syndrome” of grown men.
After the underground success of their third album, Cursive’s Domestica, in 2000, the band followed up with what would prove to be their breakthrough album, The Ugly Organ, in 2003. A self-aware conceptual record about artistic constraints (or lack thereof), relationships, sex, and the intersection of all three, it landed them on the Arts section cover of The New York Times and accolades from Rolling Stone, Alternative Press, Blender, Magnet, Esquire, and Spin – as well as a place on many year-end best lists. Cursive spent the next year and a half touring the album relentlessly, headlining the Plea For Peace tour and playing Coachella before being handpicked by The Cure for their Curiosa tour in late 2004.
Exhausted and admittedly daunted by the task of following up a hit record, Cursive went on an indefinite hiatus before reemerging with the adventurous Happy Hollow in 2006. Lauded as a triumphant comeback and evolution of the band by publications such as Alternative Press, Spin, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and Blender, the album examined small-town angst, American dreams, and religion. Midway through touring in early 2007, original drummer Clint Schnase amicably departed the band. After a short break following a national tour with Mastodon and Against Me! and feeling somewhat conflicted about proceeding forward without him, Tim Kasher (vocals, guitar), Matt Maginn (bass, vocals), and Ted Stevens (guitar, vocals) decided to begin writing – only without the ambitions of necessarily turning it into the next Cursive record. Shortly thereafter, Cornbread Compton (formerly of Engine Down) officially signed on as drummer by this time and what musically unfolded from this newly realized foursome was indeed…Cursive.
Conceived together in intermittent rehearsals as the band is now spread out across the west and Midwest (Kasher and Compton live in Los Angeles, CA; Maginn in Columbia, MO; and Stevens in Omaha, NE), they road-tested and refined the new material for Mama, I’m Swollen largely via a few shows this past spring and summer. The band’s new process resulted in a more enthusiastic and focused set of ten songs to record when they entered Mike Mogis’ ARC Studios in Omaha, NE in the fall, producing the album themselves alongside AJ Mogis.
Kasher is a storyteller, a weaver of songs that can read more like short stories or fables than the standard verse-chorus-verse. Mama, I’m Swollen finds him at his literate, lyrical best, where references to both Poe (“Going To Hell”) and Pinocchio (“Donkeys”) are intertwined seamlessly within his own tales of characters grappling with the moral quandary of being human, adult, and playing a role in ‘civilized’ society. Musically, Cursive is as smart and sophisticated as ever, the songs’ rousing, cerebral content complemented by moments alternately hushed and exhilarating (the cathartic “From The Hips,” the noisily melodic romp “I Couldn’t Love You”), eerily moody and jaunty (the almost prayerlike “Let Me Up,” “Mama, I’m Swollen”) – moments that often occur within the very same song. From the charging bass lines of album opener “In The Now” to the quiet first chords of confessional closer “What Have I Done?”, Mama, I’m Swollen is a natural progression that remains distinctively Cursive: a fluid amalgamation of the band’s sound past, present, and future – a band that both your punk kid sister and English lit grad student best friend can call their own.
Whew. Mama, I’m Swollen is also one very simple thing: an amazing Cursive record, proving yet again why–after all these years–the quartet remains one of the most exciting and inventive rock bands today.
Cursive plans to spend the majority of spring and summer 2009 on the road.