Smokey Brights - "Hot Candy" available Oct 21

Seattle band Smokey Brights will be releasing their sophomore full-length "Hot Candy" on 12" vinyl via Freakout Records on October 21, 2016.

PRE-ORDER HERE: http://www.freakoutrec.com/store/smokey-brights-hot-candy

Read more about the album from CityArts' Jonathan Zwickel:

Hot damn, Hot Candy! Modern rock n roll never sounds this fresh. The second album from Smokey Brights is both a rebirth and a milestone, a head trip and a body high, meticulously crafted but natural as daylight. The music taps into history and stretches out a kind of visionary rock that rolls relentlessly forward while recombining iconic sounds—prog, funk, Bowie, Styx, Wilco, Flaming Lips—into something urgent and fun and utterly surprising.

Seriously: If you're not already listening to Hot Candy, you're losing precious seconds.

What else do you need to know? Two singers (married), a guitar hero some call Keanu J. Fox, and a crack rhythm section with veteran status. Since their 2014 debut Taste for Blood, Smokey Brights have amassed a rabid base of fans across the West Coast, gaining momentum with every show. They are a self-started, self-sustaining rock n roll machine that generates maximum joy through musical communion.

The members of Smokey Brights have been singing and playing together in various incarnations across Seattle for more than 15 years. Ryan Devlin and Kim West—the married singers—write the bones for most of the songs in their North Seattle living room. The mind-meld between drummer Nick Krivchenia and bassist Jim Vermillion leads to unpredictable, shape-shifting groove. Mike Kalnoky—the guitar hero—tops it all off with counterpoint melodies and soaring solos. Coming together at Wizard House, their hand-me-down rehearsal space, the band bursts with life and love and an offbeat energy that's infectious. Hot Candy is an album made by a company of pros finding their finest voice in collective effort.

Listening yet?

Start the album from the beginning and dig it all the way through. Every song is a discreet, complex world unto itself that rewards patient listening. Right from the start Hot Candy evokes a rock n roll fantasy, born from a whoosh of noise to coalesce into the hard-driving opener—and lead single—"In Demand." Is this a fist-pumping rock anthem or a brazen indictment of Internet-driven overconsumption? Yes and yes.

Kim steps to the mic for song two, the sinuous, sultry "Desiree," outro-ing with full flange and four-four stomp. "Not Enough Time" is simultaneously beautiful, foreboding, complex and catchy—a swirl of emotions that might be Smokey Brights' signature cocktail. As Kalnoky unleashes one of the album's most luscious guitar hooks, Ryan sings, "You’ve got to stand some in the rain to get lightening struck/And that’s just how it is."

Four songs in, "Malibu Musk" slows down and slithers into a sinister, twilit foreboding that foreshadows the album's latter half. The band describes the next track, "Baby Bigshot," as a lullaby for the Baby Boom generation, Ryan singing, "We're waiting for the trickle down!"  No, that isn't a Theremin’s weird coo on "Start Wearing Black"—that's Kim's natural singing voice, which goes on to boost a stunning finale and one of the album's finest, freakiest moments. "Ugly Evergreen" features achingly lovely vocal interplay between Ryan and Kim as the band builds to another monumental climax. Closer "Stickman" is a sweet, sad coda, acoustic-strummed and fingersnapped like a tender farewell.

To make Hot Candy, Smokey Brights decamped for a week at the end of 2015 to the Rock n Roll BnB, a live-in recording studio on Sauvie Island, a verdant refuge surrounded by the Columbia River a few miles from Portland, Oregon.  The digs were throwback, but the gear was impeccable, as was the ear of host/producer/engineer Sean Flora. The result is simply one of the most refreshing records you'll hear all year. Trust.

Now get yourself to the nearest sound system and do the damn thing!

Acid Tongue - Beautiful Disaster (EP) out Aug 5

PRE-ORDER ACID TONGUE - BEAUTIFUL DISASTER *HERE*

Hot on the heels of last year's i died dreaming (EP), Seattle's Acid Tongue will be releasing their follow-up, "Beautiful Disaster", on August 5th.

The EP will be released through Freakout Records (US) with a limited-edition run of red, white, and blue tape cassettes available in the UK on Failure By Design Records.

Recorded in London during frontman Guy Keltner's Fall 2015 European tour with Fox and The Law, the EP builds upon Acid Tongue's stoney, heartfelt approach to classic soul and modern psychedelia. Engineered and produced by London musician Rían O'Gandhi (Tess Parks, The Greasy Slicks), Beautiful Disaster provides a glimpse of blue-collar American soul spun through the depths of Britain's Psychedelic scene.

Deeply influenced by Southern R&B, Motown, folk and doo-wop, Keltner's current incarnation as Acid Tongue is an ode to a life spent on the road and a head stuck in the clouds. Equal parts Lou Reed, The Growlers, Brian Wilson and Mac DeMarco, the sound is a dark reflection on love, confusion, satanism and suicidal thoughts familiar to anyone suffering from the American condition.

 [youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlGsKJwqvl8&w=640&h=480] 

Newaxeyes - "The 8th Passenger" out July 15

PRE-ORDER NEWAXEYES - THE 8TH PASSENGER *HERE*

Freakout Records is proud to announce the release of "The 8th Passenger", an unofficial soundtrack to Ridley Scott's 1979 opus, ALIEN. Conceived and performed by Seattle electronic-maestros NEWAXEYES, the soundtrack takes its name from the Polish title of the original film.

The soundtrack will be released as a limited-edition run of double-cassettes, featuring the iconic image of Bolagi Badejo, the man inside the Alien suit.

Seattle quartet Newaxeyes takes a genre-agnostic approach to songcraft. Melding wide-ranging influences, the band fuses diverse samples, guitar squalls, and caustic beats to create pieces that refract the frenzied information-assault associated with our modern era. Their mercurial sound is tinged with the paranoia, volatility, and catharsis of the present.

At the beginning of 2015, Newaxeyes was approached by celebrated Seattle film arts organization Northwest Film Forum to perform an original live score to a film of their choosing as an installment of NWFF's Puget Soundtrack series. The band chose Ridley Scott's sci-fi horror masterwork ALIEN for the thematic and aesthetic resonances that they found between the film and their work. Relationships between human and machine, primal psychosexual associations, The Other, and the work of H. R. Giger were among the many elements of Alien that the band investigated and incorporated in their 2-hour score.

And visit the Facebook Event Page for the JULY 15 RELEASE SHOW AT FREDWILDLIFE REFUGE IN SEATTLE

 [youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnGV-N23uoE&w=854&h=480]