Nottingham, UK based pop-punk/rock quartet Buenos Treehouse have released a video for “Swim”, the opening track from  their debut album, “Capsized”. The album was released last year and is available on CD/download from the band’s Bandcamp.

You can watch the video and see a list of the band’s upcoming dates below.

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Dutch Melodic pop punks Ravenna are releasing their new album, “Hearts Under Fire,” April 7th. We’re excited to bring you the premiere of the new album! Featuring members of Manu Armata and former members of Nom De Plume and Midnight Menace, Ravenna has some solid melodic punk chops.

You can buy the album from White Russian Records, but in the mean time, stream out the entire LP below! [Read more…]

After months of speculation of new music, Jawbreaker frontman Blake Schwarzenbach confirmed on the latest episode of the Going Off Track podcast that they are indeed planning to work on what will be their record since 1995’s Dear You. Here’s what he had to say:

“Our summer is just gonna be trying to write, jam. What we really wanna do is just riff out and see what comes. I’m spending the next month writing at home, and then we’re gonna converge in San Francisco and go in a studio and see what happens.”

He was also asked what the new Jawbreaker would sound like, “I like the more band-like jams that we have [like “Bivouac”] or “Jet Black” or songs like that, that could only be as a unit.”

And then Blake was asked why the band decided to work on new music for the first time in more than two decades since their breakup, and his response was, “It’s for our own excitement. We can’t keep playing these same songs. I mean, they’re wonderful for people who have not seen it — we’re lucky there are people that wanna see it — but we need some new songs to make it exciting.”

You can listen to the podcast right here. Talk about new music from Jawbreaker comes in around the hour and 37-minute mark.

Jawbreaker broke up in 1996, but reunited a year ago and have been playing shows sporadically ever since then.

I’m not entirely sure if “journalistic integrity” is one of the hallmarks that Dying Scene is known for when we conduct artist interviews, but it’s worth mentioning that I’m going to jettison whatever notions of it there may have been and insert myself right into the middle of this story. The Gaslight Anthem are one of the very few bands that I can not only vividly remember my first exposure to them, but can equally vividly remember being stopped in my tracks about what I was hearing and seeing. It was 2008 and I was a 28-year-old new dad, and the video for “The ’59 Sound” and it was on MTV (remember that?!?) as I was getting ready for work in the morning. I knew nothing about the band, and yet I instantly felt like I knew exactly who they were. Led by their Telecaster-and-patchwork-scally-clad frontman, Brian Fallon, the band presented a look and a sound that combined the best parts of my parents’ favorite artist (Springsteen) and my favorite band growing up (Pearl Jam), and ran it all through a ‘child of the 90s’ punk rock filter.

In the decade since, Fallon’s voice and words have been a constant steadying factor in my life. His lyrics have shifted away from telling other people’s stories and have instead become intensely personal, though each album somehow contains a song that either presently or in hindsight make you wonder if he’d somehow been following you around, telling your own story better than you could. There were rumblings probably five years ago that Fallon would work on a solo album after the release of the band’s 2012 album Handwritten, but those plans were shelved in favor of what became 2014’s Get Hurt. The dark, visceral album (a personal favorite) rather notoriously chronicles Fallon’s then-recent divorce, but it’s in many ways also a chronicle of the drifting away of the band’s members themselves; an indefinite hiatus would begin the following year.

Fallon himself would not be out of the game for long, as 2016 would see the release of his debut solo album, Painkillers. Recorded in Nashville with Butch Walker at the helm, the album was a stylistic departure, largely rooted in folk and Americana music. Still, there were more than enough threads to connect the listener – and the artist – to his past; Gaslight Anthem guitarist Alex Rosamilia joined Fallon’s touring band, The Crowes, on guitar and keyboards, alongside Fallon’s longtime friend and frequent collaborator Ian Perkins, and Jared Hart of fellow Jersey punk band The Scandals.

Which brings us to 2018 and Fallon’s sophomore solo album, Sleepwalkers. We caught up with Fallon by phone earlier this week, hours after the US leg of the album’s tour kicked off in Nashville, to chat about all things Sleepwalkers and, of course, Gaslight Anthem. Released February 9th (Island Records), the new album finds Fallon in a happier, more uplifting mood, having slogged for a few years through some pretty dark places. It can be viewed as a bit of a bookend to an unintentional trilogy that marks the most personal music of Fallon’s career, with 2014’s Get Hurt lamenting the demise of relationships and 2016’s Painkillers playing as a guy trying to figure out what comes next, in myriad levels. That trilogy was not, as you might imagine, by design. “I think that if I planned it out like that to be a trilogy, I’d be pretty smart,” jokes Fallon, pointing out that it was more realistically a natural progression. “It makes the point that records are true to life. I was following exactly where I was at the time on all three records, and it’s funny how it worked out like that, where it seems like it follows a trajectory. It did, although the trajectory wasn’t a planned record, it was my life.” 

Stylistically, Sleepwalkers is more straight-forward, R&B-infused, punk-tinged rock-and-roll than Painkillers or than his 2011 side project The Horrible Crowes. Fallon has long been a student of rock music and has not shied away from referencing his influences directly, especially in the earlier part of the Gaslight catalog. Soaked in references to The Beatles and The Clash and Etta James, Sleepwalkers is the most early-Gaslight thing that Fallon has done since, well, since the early Gaslight period. That’s at least partially by design. Gaslight Anthem, you see, was obviously one-fourth Fallon. “You can’t take away who you are and what your style inherently is and remove it just because you’re doing a new project, you know? I decided that instead of running from that, I’m just going to be myself, and if some people say “well, that sounds like Gaslight,” of course it does, because I’m the one doing it. The parts that don’t sound like the band are the parts that came from the other three people in the band, and now there are new people, so those parts will sound different and I’m the part that sounds the same. I finally was just like “yup, I’m okay with that! That’s fine!” Songwriting choices came quicker and freer after that realization was made. “I got to put my own shoes on again,” he explains, adding only half-jokingly that “I like Bruce Springsteen, I like old movies, I like New Jersey, I don’t care what you say about it!” 

In large part, the remarried, father-of-two Fallon drew motivation to move forward through some of the earlier darkness from his young children. “I didn’t have the luxury of just being a lunatic!” he laughs, adding “I was like ‘you have children, and you have clearly messed yourself up to the point where you don’t know what’s going on, and you’ve got to put your head back together. Your kids deserve better than that’.” While it took a lot of work — therapy, reading, doctors, etc — to come out the other side, Fallon is refreshingly not afraid to talk about that work, and has been inspired by the recent trend, particularly in the punk community, toward shedding light and awareness on mental health issues. It’s a trend that didn’t exist in earlier parts of his career, but that he certainly would have taken advantage of. “I know there’s this site I’ve been following (on social media) called Punk Talks, and they’ve got a number where you can call them and talk to them. I was amazed when I first saw it.” The organization would have come in handy, Fallon says, when dealing with the rapid ascent that Gaslight Anthem found themselves on a decade ago, where they went from playing their first shows in their home state of New Jersey to having The Boss himself join them on festival stages within the span of barely two years. “The speed at which that went and the inability to be prepared for it, whether it was my age or inexperience or expectations or just something that was inside of me,” Fallon explains, “created a lot of anxiety in me, to the point of not being even really able to enjoy a lot of it, because I was so nervous about everything all the time. It really was a hard, hard thing. I wasn’t prepared for the level of anxiety it would cause.”

That’s not to say, however, that Fallon is complaining. Far from it in fact. “It was awesome! We totally went for it. I feel like I was (just) ill prepared for it. I didn’t do the homework on myself to catch up. I was 27 then, now I’m 38, and I have much more — it’s funny to say “wisdom” — but I have much more of a perspective on how to handle something like that now.” Fallon is also not afraid to pass his teachable moments on to younger bands that might find themselves on the type of rapid ascent that Gaslight found themselves on a decade ago. “You have to break this thing down. If your band is getting successful and you’re starting to come up and get more recognition and to get it quicker than you thought and that’s getting to you mentally or emotionally, break it down into small, in-the-day things.” If taking the stage in front of any number of people can be enough to rattle some people’s nerves, taking the stage in front of five- or ten- or twenty-thousand can be downright overwhelming. “You have to remember that those people are not there to crucify you and they’re not there to criticize you,” says Fallon. “There might be one or two, but they’re always going to be there, whether you’re playing to twenty people or twenty thousand people. Most of the people there just love what you’re doing, and they’re trying to have a good time, and they’re just like you. They’re no different than you.”

Head below to read our full chat with Fallon. I had roughly nine years worth of questions to ask, but this was a good start. And yes, there’s plenty of insight on what happened – and is happening – with Gaslight, including the ’59 Sound anniversary shows, but you’ll have to read it to find out. Also, head here to find out where you can catch Brian Fallon and his new band, The Howling Weather, on tour over the next month!

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This is a truly devastating story to have to write for myriad reasons, but Caleb Scofield, bass player for seminal Boston-area post-hardcore band Cave In (as well as founding member of Zozobra with Cave In’s Adam McGrath and he was bassist for Old Man Gloom and probably a few other bands I’m missing right now) as killed in a single car accident in his home state of New Hampshire yesterday. He was thirty-nine years old.

The horrific crash occurred at the northbound tollbooth of the Everett Turnpike in Bedford, a location that yours truly has passed through an incalculable number of times over my several decades in the area. He left behind a wife, Jen, and two children (Desmond, age 10, and Sydney, age 7). A YouCaring page has been set up in their name here; please consider helping out.

Rest in power, Caleb. You’ll be deeply missed.

Dan Cribb recently passed the 20 track mark of covers honoring the Simpsons with recent releases featuring Emmy Hour of the Cutaways and Mane. With character theme songs being this month’s focus, Hour lent vocals for “Blessed Be the Guy That Bonds”, and Mane provided harmonies for “The Ballad of Jebediah Springfield”. You can check out the recently released tracks, along with the other 19 covers featured on “The Worst Tribute Ever”, below.

“I think Mane’s haunting and commanding voice might make “The Ballad Of Jebediah Springfield” one of ‘Worst Tribute Ever’s biggest songs yet,” Cribb said.

More tracks are still to come, including “Who Needs the Kwik-E-Mart” and “See My Vest”.

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North Alone recently released a video for the second single off their upcoming album “Next Stop CA”, due out May 4 on Country Bumpkin Records. The single is titled “My Music Sucks”. The album artwork and video can be found below, as well as a list of upcoming tour dates.

Their last release came in 2016 titled “Rare and Short”.

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France’s Bear and Forbear have recently released an EP titled “Cure and Loneliness” through their bandcamp page. The official release date is set for April 19. You can check it out below.

Bear and Forbear last released an EP titled “Viewpoint” in 2016.

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