THE TWILIGHT SINGERS RELEASE 'A STITCH IN TIME'
It was a memorable moment when Mark Lanegan joined the Twilight Singers for the August leg of their UK tour. Kerrang Magazine were in attendance at the London show and declared it akin to “a wickedly illicit hit from a masterfully controlled substance.” That very special chemistry has been laid down on an EP, entitled ‘A Stitch In Time’ out now on One Little Indian through iTunes and in all good CD shops.
Leading with the show-stopping moment from their recent set, the hypnotic cover of Massive Attack’s ‘Live With Me’, the five track EP not only features the Twilight Singers alongside Lanegan, but guests Rick McCollum from Greg Dulli’s former charges, the Afghan Whigs, and Joseph Arthur.
The EP release follows the heavy praise The Twilight Singers received for ‘Powder Burns’, and offers a preview to the highly anticipated collaboration between Dulli and Lanegan, who have recorded an album under the moniker of The Gutter Twins, due for release in 2007. Two of the biggest names on the US music scene from the late 80s/early 90s, they have regularly contributed to each other’s projects since 2000. Lanegan was recently shortlisted for a Mercury Music Prize in the UK for his previous collaboration with Isobel Campbell, ‘Ballad Of The Broken Seas’.
‘A STITCH IN TIME’ EP:
1. Live With Me (featuring Mark Lanegan)2. Sublime (featuring Joseph Arthur)
3. Flashback (featuring Mark Lanegan)
4. They Ride (feat Rick McCollum)
5. The Lure Would Prove Too Much
Greg Dulli Interviewed by Phil Jupitus on BBC 6 Music
Greg Dulli was interview by Phil Jupitus on BBC 6 from 7.13.06. They discuss Powder Burns, The Damned and Rescue Me.
To hear this interview head on over to the Summers Kiss website
Lanegan Nominated for Mercury Music Prize
Congratulations to Gutter Twin and sometimes Twilight Singer Mark Lanegan. He has been nominated for the Mercury Music prize for his duet album with Isobel Campbell.
We wish him the best of luck and look forward to seeing him with The Twilight Singers in August
Twilight Singers Powder Burns Vinyl
The new Twilight Singers album Powder Burns is now fully available to buy on vinyl. A double album in a gatefold sleeve it is now out on full release in the shops.
The bigger artwork also throws more light on the hidden image at the front.
Also be sure to check out the new single I'm Ready also by The Twilight Singers out on 7" and CD which features the Lo-Fidelity All Stars mix that is currently being played in clubs across the country.
Both of these are available to buy through our One Little Shop and all good retailers across the world.
The Twilight Singers NEW ALBUM
Greg Dulli known and loved by many as the leader of pioneering alt-rockers Afghan Whigs, has recorded another album (his fourth) under the celebrated Twilight Singers’ moniker; and it’s a veritable masterpiece.
Produced by Mike Napolitano (Joseph Arthur/Neville Brothers) and Greg Dulli, and recorded in New Orleans, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Milan (Italy) and Catania (Sicily), Powder Burns is a very special album by a very special talent. Dulli has long been appreciated as a unique voice. His lyrics are well-told personal yarns delivered with a ravenous intensity. Which isn’t to say that Dulli doesn’t know how to write a great rock n roll tune. As the New York Times was spurred to comment “Mr. Dulli is finally a guy who simply knows how to make music that feels good in the ear”.
Out on 15th May 2006 through One Little Indian Records, Powder Burns strikes an immediate impression; songs like “There’s Been An Accident”, “Underneath The Waves” and “Forty Dollars” display Dulli’s song-writing perfectly; his lyrics - morose and uplifting in equal quantities- are complimented by his salient vocals. Dulli lets loose his spiralling tales of unyielding desires and personal regrets amid a wash of swirling guitars and string-driven orchestration. Beautifully arranged, the intricate production never gets the better of the songs themselves, always taking a back seat to the sentiment of the lyrics and Dulli’s swelling melodies. There’s no doubting the emotion in these songs.
It’s been 18 years since Dulli released the first Afghan Whigs album and five since they called it quits, but with every new recording Dulli cements his place as a national musical treasure, consistently turning out great albums bursting with a soulfulness too often missing from ‘rock’ records. Clearly enjoying the freedom allowed by The Twilight Singers’ ever revolving line-up, Dulli has pulled together an eclectic and viciously gifted lot for Powder Burns. Joseph Arthur, Ani DiFranco and Scott Bennett appear on the record, along with a guest spot from fellow Afghan Whig, bassist John Curley.
After The Twilight Singers provided a much-lauded highlight to the SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas recently, they have confirmed a UK tour for July. The tour kicks off in Manchester on 6th July and finishes in Edingburgh on 27th August.
Sandwiched in-between the dates are a variety of festival performances, starting with Scotland’s T In The Park Festival on Saturday 8th July and and ending with a second to headline slot on the Carling Stage at The Reading and Leeds Festival, and a performance at Edingburgh's T On The Fringe.
The Twilight Singers are:
Greg Dulli (Vocals, Guitar, Keys)
Scott Ford (Bass)
Bobby MacIntyre (Drums)
Dave Rosser (Guitars/Glasses)
Manuel Agnelli (Piano/Guitar/Figo)
POWDER BURNS
In forensic science, “powder burns” are analyzed to determine the distance between a victim and the weapon that killed him; from the evidence available, Greg Dulli was getting too close to the smoking gun. “I have a deeply addictive personality,” he confesses. “God forbid I like something, because if it’s bad for me, I’m in trouble. But it’s always been the most interesting and unpredictable way to live.” Greg Dulli, of course, remains one of the most interesting and unpredictable figures loitering at the razor’s edge of pop culture. In his manifestations as leader/front-man of acclaimed groups the Twilight Singers and, previously, the Afghan Whigs, he’s proven to be one of popular music’s most enduring iconoclasts. Justifiably controversial, provocative, literary and utterly compelling as a performer as well as a songwriter, Dulli has never shied away from his demons. On the Twilight Singers cathartic, brilliantly hallucinatory new album Powder Burns, he continues this pattern—but only to subvert expectations.
Indeed, Powder Burns vitally explores Dulli’s classically maximal obsessions—the sex, the drugs, the rock and roll (and let’s not forget the guilt)—yet shoots them through new prisms. For one, the album was largely produced in New Orleans shortly after the Hurricane Katrina disaster, recorded in ramshackle studio conditions where generators were necessary to provide power and lyrics were written at night by candlelight. As well, Powder Burns is not only the first collection of original Twilight Singers material since 2003’s critical smash Blackberry Belle (which received “A-“ reviews from both SPIN and Entertainment Weekly): the album also features new Twilight collaborators like acclaimed singer-songwriters Ani Di Franco and Joseph Arthur to Brian Wilson’s musical director Scott Bennett, all rubbing up alongside Dulli’s longtime usual suspects like Mark Lanegan (who shows up via a sample on “Candy Cane Crawl”) and producers Mike Napolitano and Mathias Schneeberger. “I bring in talented people, and they leave their mark—Joe’s one of the best songwriters working today,” Dulli says. “And Ani, I love the way our voices sound together: she took the songs to other places.”
Most of all, the Twilight Singers’ fourth full-length album finds Dulli not just wrestling with his infamous demons, but for the first time maybe putting them to rest. “When I started on this album two years ago,” Dulli recalls, “I had lived in a drug haze for seven years. During the writing of this record, I was straightening myself out, learning how to live unclouded.” But unlike, say, James Frey’s bogus Million Little Pieces, instead Powder Burns aspires to be not so much memoir as evocative fiction cut from the transparent cloth of truth. Some of the names and details have been changed, but the stories ring true to anyone who’s been there. In years past, Dulli has tried to numb the pain from various traumas—the death of his good friend, film director Ted Demme, in 2002 and previously in 1998, when he was put into a life-threatening coma in an assault following an Afghan Whigs show in Austin, Texas. “That could’ve cleaned me up and straightened me out,” Dulli says, “or it could’ve sent me deeper into the abyss. Which is exactly where I went.”
Dulli calls Powder Burns “extremely autobiographical”: it features his most abstract, literary yet confessional lyrics yet, like on the powerful single “Bonnie Brae” and the insidiously infectious drug-dealer lament “Forty Dollars.” “Bonnie Brae’ describes a specific event that I’ll never forget,” he says. “I was cleansing myself of the badness, but in close proximity to someone who was deep in it. That brought things into real focus.” That meditative quality extends to Powder Burns’ sonics as well, which mirror the kaleidoscopic mental landscape of its protagonist. “It’s unusually lush in scope and conceptual in theory,” Dulli explains. “It’s a widescreen narrative, super cinematic.” Powder Burns still reflects Twilight’s interest in merging gutter soul-rock and electronic sounds, yet features some of the band’s hardest-rocking moments yet: the brutally carnal album opener, “I’m Ready,” evokes the lysergic chug of Primal Scream fused with Death From Above 1979’s precision sludge attack. “In spite of myself, I love anthemic rock songs,” Dulli concurs. “I wanted songs for the stadium in my mind. I take everything into the cave with me.”
Some caves are more easily accessed than others, as Dulli found out when he decided to complete Powder Burns in post-Katrina New Orleans, whose reconstruction provided an unfortunate, unexpected metaphor for Dulli’s own rebirth. Before Katrina, he’d maintained a home in the Big Easy and regularly spent 3-4 months there annually, having recorded much of Blackberry Belle and the covers album She Loves You there, as well as 1965 by the Afghan Whigs. He did not recognize, however, what he found in Katrina’s wake: “It was not unlike being high—seeing New Orleans on her fucking knees was the most surreal experience in my recent memory. But I had started recording the album there, and it was my goal to finish it there, which I mostly did.”
Powder Burns represents the 11th full-length record spearheaded by Greg Dulli. It’s a long way from rural Hamilton, Ohio, where he grew up. “Scott Walker was born in Hamilton, Ohio; Roger Troutman is from Hamilton, too,” Dulli explains. “Somewhere between Scott Walker and Roger Troutman lies… me.” From there, Dulli made his way to Ohio’s closest big city, Cincinnati, where he marinated amidst the Buckeye State’s rock royalty, rubbing shoulders with local heroes like Guided By Voice’s Bob Pollard and the Breeders’ Kim and Kelly Deal. There, Dulli started the Afghan Whigs in 1986. In 1989, the Whigs earned the distinction of being the first non-Seattle band signed to Sub Pop Records, releasing two albums, 1990’s Up In It and 1992’s Congregation, along with numerous singles and e.p.s, on the seminal proto-grunge label. In 1993, the Whigs released their major-label debut, the soul-powered, stylistically varied masterpiece Gentlemen, which established them as one of the most revered, significant bands of the early ‘90s rock explosion (SPIN placed Gentlemen at number 99 in its list of the top 100 albums in recent memory). After two more successful, acclaimed albums, 1996’s Black Love and 1998’s 1965, the Afghan Whigs broke up in the wake of Dulli releasing the first Twilight Singers album, Twilight As Played By The Twilight Singers, in 2000.
In addition to Powder Burns, Greg Dulli remains as typically prolific as ever. His Gutter Twins project with Mark Lanegan will most likely touch down sometime in 2007; Dulli also contributes vocals to Intramural, a collective electronic project spearheaded by Denver Dalley of Desaparecidos/Bright Eyes/Statistics infamy, and to the debut album of NearLY from former Nine Inch Nails member Jerome Dillon. A sometime actor (he made his thespian debut in Ted Demme’s Boston crime drama Monument Avenue, whose soundtrack album he also exec produced), Dulli has a recurring role on the FX Network’s hit show Rescue Me—and the Twilight Singers’ music remains ubiquitous on the show’s soundtrack as well. It’s an auspicious, prosperous end to the first phase’s tendency towards decadent self-destruction. “Addiction wasn’t my only problem; it masked something much deeper,” Dulli claims. “Despite a deep self-love, I started taking self-loathing to symphonic heights. Getting those tendencies to enjoy commerce is what I’m trying to do in my life. If that becomes reflected in something I’ve done musically, it’s just another entry in my lifelong diary: my records provide a good glimpse of what I would become. Powder Burns is part 11 of my evolution—this is life as a movie, starring me.” So welcome back, friends, to Dulli’s show that never ends—to Powder Burns by The Twilight Singers. Remember, you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave…
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