#Stella mozgawa

[milafm2002]

The Next Band On Songs And Their Aesthetics Is...

Warpaint !!!

[kellymagovern]

Warpaint - “Disco//Very - Keep It Healthy” [x]

[possible-streetwear]

Warpaint

[faeriecoma]

Warpaint recording “Jubilee” and their album “The Fool”

[sinceileftyoublog]

Courtney Barnett, Bob Mould, & Squirrel Flower Live Review: 7/26, Illinois Science & Technology Park Field, Skokie

Courtney Barnett

BY JORDAN MAINZER

The three artists who played the inaugural night of Out of Space Skokie at its temporary new location took advantage of the open space's clear sound and turned up the fuzz.

Headliner Courtney Barnett, three years removed from her third studio album Things Take Time, Take Time (Mom+Pop), made even that album's understated songs come alive, live. Backed by bassist Thomy Sloane and drummer Stella Mozgawa (of Warpaint, and co-producer of Things Take Time), Barnett elevated sad sack jam "Rae Street", the motorik "Turning Green", the wiry "Before You Gotta Go", and jangly single "Write a List of Things to Look Forward To", emphasizing sounds and lyrics performed and delivered much more subtly on record. "Time is money, and money is no man's friend," she sang on set opener "Rae Street", as if to contextualize the drawn-out nature of some of her back catalog highlights: the wandering "Avant Gardener", bluesy dirge "Small Poppies", and driving bass-led "City Looks Pretty". Vocally, Barnett's screamed rasp was as gravel-throated as ever, a perfect contrast to her droll sprechgesang, confirming the status of "Pedestrian at Best" as a justified shout-along.

Barnett

Stella Mozgawa

Barnett

Thomy Sloane

Yet, true to Barnett's penchant for storytelling, the anthem of the night was also the slowest song, perhaps her best: the prescient "Depreston". At once a treatise on gentrification, mortality, and time itself, it's the type of song that stops you in your tracks when you realize you're singing back at Barnett, "If you've got a spare half a million / You could knock it down and start rebuildin'," occupying the persona of the grimy real estate agent viewing what was someone's home as a pure capital good. I suppose, after all, the ease at which we sing the song is a tribute to Barnett's empathy, evidence that those of us who participate in the same society with the same set of restrictive rules, have the potential for good and evil. Or maybe it's just a catchy melody.

Barnett

Barnett & Mozgawa

Bob Mould

Bob Mould, meanwhile, performed solo, but electric, and the set was basically the answer to the question, "What would it sound like if you took away bassist Jason Narducy and drummer Jon Wurster from a normal Bob Mould band set?" Indeed, Mould played at the same breakneck pace as always, running around the stage during solos as if he was hyping up his invisible band. The warmth of his vocals was discernible even beside his distorted guitar tones, whether burning through a Hüsker Dü song or solo material (my one gripe from the setlist: only one Sugar song, the chintzy classic "Hoover Dam"). "Out of Space...out of breath!" Mould proclaimed in triumph after finishing "Siberian Butterfly", nonetheless a reminder to himself to keep on going even when you're the one doing all the work.

Mould

Mould

Squirrel Flower

Local artist Squirrel Flower, the project of singer-songwriter Ella O'Connor Williams, opened up the night, playing what she said may be her last show in Chicago for a while. For one, drummer Jacob Getzoff is going to nursing school, an announcement that garnered rapturous applause from the crowd. Moreover, ever prolific, Williams shared she hopes to take a break from playing live and write and record, despite having released her most recent and best album Tomorrow's Fire (Polyvinyl) less than a year ago. I'm glad I got to catch Squirrel Flower now, then, each song from Tomorrow's Fire leveled up, the slowcore "Almost Pulled Away" becoming full-on shoegaze, the crunchy "Intheskatepark" featuring drums that could have been audible even at the expansive Canal Shores. If you really want to get a sense for what Squirrel Flower sounds like live, though, simply take a look at the project's discography from start to finish. In other words, the same artist who self-released the stark early winter songs from middle america in 2015 is now faithfully covering "Cortez the Killer". To clarify, Squirrel Flower played only original material for Williams' first ever show in Skokie. "I've only been up here to get bagels," Williams said. No word on whether she's a New York Bagel & Bialy or Kaufman's person.

Squirrel Flower

Squirrel Flower

[karmaalwayswins]

Warpaint "Undertow - Live at Yours Truly Sessions" (2011)

[alfairb]

Love is to die, love is to not die Love is to dance, love is to dance Love is to die, Why don't you not die? Why don't you dance? Why don't you dance and dance?

[rockinshots]

I was grateful to have captured Courtney Barnett at Bimbos 365 Club. She partnered up with Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint) on her first set, playing some really beautiful instrumentals. Then Courtney dug into some archives on the 2nd set, and the sold-out crowd loved every second of the show.

[eugeslcd]

Ilustración de Stella Mozgawa - WARPAINT !!

[rainingmusic]

Flea - Pedestal Of Infamy 

[thesearenotphotographs]

Courtney Barnett with Stella Mozgawa and Anjimile at National Sawdust

On Thursday, October 12, 2023, National Sawdust hosted the first night of two sold out, intimate shows featuring Courtney Barnett. For the first set, Barnett was joined by Sara Mozgawa and the duo performed the instrumental album, End Of The Day, that was composed for a documentary about Courtney. Then she did a solo set of songs from her albums, and a one song encore that was a cover song by the group Chastity Belt. The tour features Anjimile, who did a solo set on acoustic guitar, and played songs from his most recent album, The King.

I covered the show for National Sawdust and a few images I captured from the show last night can be found in the above gallery. There are limited tickets available for tonight’s show on Friday, the 13th at the door.

Full gallery available on my website here.

[milafm2002]

Happy Music Friday Everyone!!!

This Weeks Songs Are...

Dog Years - Halsey 2014

Melting - Warpaint 2022

I Go Crazy - Orla Gartland 2018

Cutting Teeth - Dear Rouge 2024

Enjoy And Have A Wonderful Weekend

[nuanimistdatabase]

Emily Kokal and Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint, performing in Boston in September 2023.

[uptightcitizensbrigade]

About All Born Screaming

“All Born Screaming”

There is a figure staggering down the street, lurching through a skewed landscape toward a grim new beginning. Rabid, man-sized; disconsolate and grieving in the violent daylight, the smell of death alive on her clothes. No mask, no costume. In fact—though try not to stare—her office wear is somewhat askew. Even her language is ruptured: what was once tightly refined is now impressionistic and felt. No wonder: “I find myself at the precipice of life and death, and reckoning with that,” says Annie Clark, the musician better known as triple-Grammy-winning iconoclast St. Vincent, on the cusp of releasing her seventh album.

Ever since she covered Big Black’s “Kerosene” live in 2011 and the subsequent cataclysmic 7” split “Krokodil”/”Grot,” fans have known that some evil lurked in Clark’s guitar. (Take it back even further if you like: This is someone whose college noise band was named Skull Fuckers.) On All Born Screaming—the first half, at any rate—that lacerating aggression possesses a St. Vincent album for the first time, unleashing a reeling thrash laced with the formative DNA of Albini at his most corrosive and the ugly, spectacular catharsis of Nine Inch Nails, and opening up a brand new fracture in her songwriting. “It’s my least funny record,” says Clark with knowing wryness.

Brawny lead single “Broken Man” is unhinged by loss and lust, unveiling our debilitated antagonist in a desperate confrontation that begs “lover nail yourself right to me / If you go I won’t be well / I can hold my arms right open / But I need you to drive the nail.” “Reckless” loses its footing in the post-loss oblivion. The mischievous “Flea” casts all-consuming desire as an invasive pestilence. “Big Time Nothing” is a mordant catwalk sashay through the deafening assault of self loathing. “There is the feeling: I want everything because I feel nothing,” says Clark. “I am bereft. I am in love. But I want more love too. There’s no drugs and abstraction on this record. It’s cut to the pink meat, hungry for life, even if it’s brutal. Because life is brutal.”

For that reason, All Born Screaming is Clark’s first entirely self-produced record (having co-produced all of her previous records). “I had to walk through the fire with this one alone,” she says. “There was no way to find it except sitting with yourself in a room, singing, playing with modular synths, turning knobs, moving electricity around and trying to find those six seconds of lightning in a bottle that I could build an entire song around. I’m obsessed with production. I’ve obviously done it on all of my records, but this time, I wanted to be the first and final filter for this material. It meant sitting with a lot of self-doubt—like Bowie says, ‘when you feel that your feet aren’t quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.’”

Production 101 is knowing the right people for the job, and All Born Screaming boasts “a tight little wrecking crew,” says Clark. “A curated group of rippers.” On “Broken Man” and “Flea,” that’s Dave Grohl on drums. (If we’re tracing this virulent seam back through Clark’s work, recall the surviving members of Nirvana inviting her to help induct the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014.) “Dave is one of the greatest drummers ever because he’s a great songwriter,” says Clark, noting that Grohl heard the “Yes-style prog section” of “Flea” just three times before he knew “every phase and turnaround. My engineer, Cian Riordan, has a video of me in the studio when Dave was playing. I’m in my chair hearing the first take, and I immediately stand up and, like, my hair is on fire.”

On the immaculately restrained, Portishead-narcotic opener “Hell Is Near” and the dreamily gone “So Many Planets,” that’s new Foo Fighters drummer Josh Freese. There’s Justin Meldal-Johnsen (bass), Rachel Eckroth (keys), David Ralicke (brass), Mark Giuliana (drums), and Stella Mozgawa (drums). Then there’s the invaluable contribution of Welsh creative genius Cate Le Bon, who yanked Clark out of the weeds during a period of frustration and self-doubt, and offered stalwart reinforcement, helping her to surmount a few key obstacles. Case in point: Cate shines on the title track, "All Born Screaming,” a near-seven-minute epic closer propelled by a bassline so perfectly suited that it’s impossible to imagine the song without it. "I had that guitar part but was struggling with the song's overall tone.  Cate listened to it and said ‘Give me a beer, a bass, and three hours’,” and worked out the title track’s puckish low end. “She’s my favorite modern songwriter, period,” says Clark, hinting at future collaborations to come.

As for the life and death we’re dealing with here? The details are immaterial. This isn’t music-as-true-crime designed to be picked apart for clues. On the album’s pivot into the second half, “Violent Times,” we’re waking up and understanding the stakes have irrevocably changed, and who hasn’t felt that these past however many years? The difference, in the album’s back end, is the realization that we must love one another or die, set to an expansive, enveloping palette that steps back from the guitar offensive: Gainsbourg-worthy grandeur on “Violent Times,” the “what if someone who loved 2 TONE did it all wrong?” of “So Many Planets,” about the stumbling search for a place to call home. “The first half is reckoning with loss and how life is basically impossible,” says Clark, “but the second half is: but we get to live it so we better fucking dig in.”

Perhaps compassion and hunger can light the way: “The Power’s Out” is a classically gorgeous St. Vincent portrait of a city’s pushers, parents, racers, and queers waking up to some disaster but finding beauty in the slo-mo confetti cloud of debris. And the racing valediction of “Sweetest Fruit” exalts individuals who attempted to stake out life’s outer reaches. “Take a big swing and fail, but my God, at least you were trying for transcendence,” says Clark.

Perhaps love can, too. The still life of opener “Hell Is Near” marks “the beginning / our beginning / begin again.” “That’s the only reason to do something, the reason to live,” says Clark. “Maybe I go the long way around saying that in this record, but at the end of the day it’s a very dark record about love. I have great love in my life. I’m so lucky. I’m not the rat in the maze in that regard any more.” It comes into focus on the back of priority shifts, shuddering sudden dislocations from the culture’s priorities, old disguises dropping to the floor on the title track’s skittish, happy shrug, “all of the wasted nights fighting mortality when in the ashes of Pompeii lovers discovered in an embrace for all eternity”, as she sings on “Violent Times.”

Unlike the ‘70s cosplay of Clark’s previous album, here, there’s no aestheticizing pain or conceptualizing loss. On Daddy’s Home, Clark says she needed to “become the music my father loved in the hope it would heal me, give me the agency as ‘daddy.’ That was probably largely misinterpreted, but I have no regrets—it’s what I needed to do.” With this record, she says emphatically, “I want to fuck people up.” As the title states, we’re All Born Screaming. It’s both a horrifying condition and whaddya-gonna-do acceptance. “If you’re born screaming, that’s a great sign,” says Clark, “because it means you’re breathing. You’re alive. My god. It’s joyous. And then it’s also a protest. We’re all born in protest in a certain way. It’s terrifying to be alive, it’s ecstatic to be alive. It’s everything.”

[chrisryanspeaks]

Our Girl Delivers Emotional Breakthrough with New Single 'What You Told Me'

Our Girl shatter emotional barriers with their latest single, "What You Told Me," taken from their eagerly awaited album *The Good Kind*, set to drop on November 8 via Bella Union. Channeling Britpop influences with a heavy dose of indie rock, the track is a sonic powerhouse, built on layers of shoegaze-infused guitars, upbeat percussion, and lush vocal harmonies. It’s a song that captures the euphoria of emerging from a rough patch, with someone by your side, as the world suddenly seems brighter and full of possibility. The lyrics paint a vivid picture of that moment when everything shifts into focus, and what once felt unreachable now feels excitingly within grasp. The single follows the success of the album's title track, *The Good Kind*, a sweeping orchestral-pop gem featuring the talents of Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, who contributed to its early development. Frontwoman Soph Nathan explains, “This song’s about watching illness take its toll on someone I love. It’s heartbreaking, but there’s also comfort and joy in the brief moments of peace. Sharing those moments with someone else makes life just a bit better, even when it feels like the odds are against you.” With *What You Told Me*, Our Girl continues to showcase their knack for blending raw emotion with sonic grandeur, leaving listeners both reflective and uplifted. Read the full article