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Tonight, it's cold & rainy here in Da Ju, so we tried to warm up with some old school joints to warm up the vibe, then it's stone cold killer new tunes for the entirety of the two hours, with Dan Lloyd's AMPED feature bringing it in parts 3 & 4.
"The Drop with Danno" on GFN 광주영어방송 98.7FM in Gwangju & 93.7FM in Yeosu, Korea. An eclectic radio curation of all things musical spanning the spectrum every week. Broadcasting 8-10pm KST nightly.
Nov 11, 2021
The Drop with Danno
The Meters – Cissy Strut
Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band – PIMP
Helio Matheus – Mais Kriola
Neal Francis – BNYLV
Silk Sonic – Smokin’ Out The Window
Terrace Martin feat Arin Ray & Smino – This Morning
El Michels Affair feat Bobby Oroza – Stack The Deck
Adrian Quesada feat Aaron Frazer & David Hidalgo – One Woman Man
Omar Apollo feat Kali Uchis – Bad Life
Curtis Harding – Explore
Dojo Cuts – I’ve Been Waiting All My Life For You
Joan As Police Woman w/Tony Allen & Dave Okumu – The Barbarian
I.
It is 20 hours past midnight, and just like the rain drops falling on your head we do not quit, with this Thursday drizzled in a most icy fashion as November 11, 2021. This is Danno layin it down in front of the mic in studio 2 GFN HQ in downtown Gwangju, how do you do? As we do every Thursday it is time to let the odoriferous emanations take control as we begin our Sampled funk & soul first hour foray, with new albums out from Neal Francis & Curtis Harding to give a wee taste along with a bunch of great new singles to give a whirl & let you know about what’s coming up. Of course after we hit the top of the clock again, Dan Lloyd brings it for our AMPED rock and/or roll feature, which smashes down the door and stays until the end of the gig. But that’s all for later and right now we remember a one-off show and only one, but we’ll let you measure it out yourself after we strut Nawlins style once again tonight. THIS is The Drop.
The Meters – Cissy Strut
The Drop has lit the red light once again as we dance after 8pm. Danno here of course, spinning all the new funk & soul just out this week for our Sampled first hour. The new stuff will come in just a bit, but for right now that was The Meters to put on the monocle for our TIGHT (or) feature in order that we commence the show properly, that tune was Cissy Strut.
And after our trip to New Orleans last night you might be wondering why we’re rockin The Meters again, but if you’re even asking why we’re playing one of the greatest funk bands of all time, we’re already in fundamental disagreement.
Now, to answer your already somewhat vexing question, it was on this date in 2000 that the original band got together for one, “and only one” live concert in San Francisco. The band had broken up once Art & Cyril Neville went on with their two other brothers to form the Neville Brothers, which occurred in 1977. However, they got the band back together for this one, not-so-final show, although both Nevilles have since passed although the band still performs.
For some background on the opener, Leo Nocentelli explained to Gibson.com that he penned this song to replace their traditional live set opener. Said Nocentelli: "There was a club on Bourbon Street. This is before The Meters, man. We were called Art Neville and the Neville Sounds. Art Neville was the elder statesman in the group, he already had a group called The Hawkettes. By the time we got to a club called the Ivanhoe, it was George [Porter Jr.] and Zig [Modeliste] and myself and Art. That was really The Meters, but we weren't called The Meters. We used to play Top 40 stuff. And most of the bands, all of the bands had an opening song that they'd play before they'd actually get into their set. And one of the songs that everybody kind of played was a song called 'Hold It.' And everybody played it, man. I got sick of playing that, so I wrote 'Cissy Strut.' The melody came out and I introduced it to George, Art and Zig. And we started opening the set with 'Cissy Strut,' but it didn't have a name or anything. It was just that song, that opening song. That's how that happened. We recorded the song, and it was named 'Cissy Strut' long after I wrote it." This appeared on their self-titled debut from 1969, by the way, for those out there keeping score.
#9870 (50/100)…SM…podcast.
Now, we got some new stuff to get to, but it won’t happen until the end of the block here with Neal Francis and his new album, but prior to that we got Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band and Helio Matheus to try and give a tropical vibe on this November rainy evening. THIS is The Drop on your stay warm Sampled funk & soul Thursday.
____
The Drop returns this evening as we finally opened the can of worms on our . Danno here tryin to help you stay warm as old man winter starts really laying his heft on us here in November. It is our Sampled funk & soul first hour right now, Dan Lloyd’s AMPED rock feature comes up later on. For now, let’s run down that first triad of semi-tropical tunes...
Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band – PIMP (…this bit of steel drum magic came out in 2008, and is of course a cover of 50 Cent’s big hit of the same name. For those unfamiliar, the band is out of Germany which you may find surprising, and are currently signed with Big Crown Records, who we’ll hear more from to start part 2.)
Helio Matheus – Mais Kriola (…nothing quite like a nice groove from Brasil to keep one from shivering even in this frigid rain. For those unfamiliar, this is from the artist’s self-titled debut in 1975, and the title means More Creole.)
Neal Francis – BNYLV (…the sophomore album is out as of Friday from the Chicago-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. In Plain Sight is out everywhere now via ATO Records, do check in full if you dug that.)
Approaching the first jump tonight, we clearly have not gotten in enough new stuff thus far, so let’s make up for that. Up next is the third smashing, fantastic single from the still-upcoming LP from Silk Sonic, this heartbroken new joint is called Smokin’ Out The Window, and after that we’ll cry a bit more with Terrace Martin & Arin Ray along with Smino and a tune called This Morning. You are boppin’ with The Drop on your Sampled funk & soul Thursday night.
Silk Sonic – Smokin’ Out The Window
Terrace Martin feat Arin Ray & Smino – This Morning*
II.
The Drop continues and we are into the soaked & freezing 2nd quarter of this evening’s sloppy, raw game of audio mirrors as nature’s smile is gone for now it seems, but what a fall season we had here. Glorious. What’s going on tonight Drop Gangsters (KOR)? Danno here hoping you’re warm & dry this Thursday evening, and Dan Lloyd will be throwing rocks in part 3 & 4 later on to put a dagger in it. For now though, let’s have it out on the verbiage of those openers for the 2nd stanza tonight...
El Michels Affair feat Bobby Oroza – Stack The Deck (…this was a pleasant discovery this week, and a very indie artist kind of just making his way. Not a lot of background here, but big up to the feature on the New Funk & Soul Weekly Spotify playlist for the discovery.)
Adrian Quesada feat Aaron Frazer & David Hidalgo – One Woman Man (…a real all-star team up right here with the main man from The Black Pumas collabing with the falsetto of falsettos from Durand Jones & The Indications. It seems this is merely a one-off production for now, but we’ll obviously be right there if this is part of a larger project.)
So, let’s head on to the next block, and we’ll put the other big album just out this week from Curtis Harding as the meat in the sammich, breaded by Omar Apollo & Dojo Cuts respectively top to bottom. THIS is The Drop eatin’ well on your Sampled funk & soul Thursday.
____
Back on The Drop for the final airbreak of the first half tonight. Danno here, going through our usual unusual for our Sampled funk & soul first hour seshwaan, and Gwangju’s man on the drums Dan Lloyd joins us in just a smidge for our weekly AMPED jawn as well for parts 3 & 4. Now, as far as what we just let swerve in the atmosphere, that was...
Omar Apollo & Kali Uchis – Bad Life (…it seems it’s that time of year officially, where all the younger people are breaking up, and appropriately enough, this tune is about putting all your energy into a relationship. Again it seems this is just a one-off single.)
Curtis Harding – Explore (…the other highly anticipated LP to drop this weekend was If Words Were Flowers by the rising Atlanta artist. Definitely check in full if you liked what you heard there, Curtis for us is can’t miss and the critical scores are quite high from the critterati and fans alike.)
Dojo Cuts – I’ve Been Waiting All My Life For You (…another standalone but an instrumental right here. Dojo Cuts are a smashing band out of Australia, and do check their last full-length from 2019 called Tomorrow’s Gonna Come if you’d like to hear more.)
So, to finish the first half we just can’t get enough of Joan As Police Woman’s new album with the late great Tony Allen & Dave Okumu called The Solution Is Restless. This one is very, very good and might be album of the year. We’ll start with the epic 11 minute opening salvo from the LP called The Barbarian, and that is whisk us away to Dan Lloyd & our AMPED throwdown. THIS is The Drop on your Sampled & AMPED Thursday at the half.
Joan As Police Woman with Tony Allen & Dave Okumu – The Barbarian
III & IV AMPED
PUP – Waiting
Foals – Wake Me Up
IDLES – Car Crash
Courtney Barnett – If I Don’t Hear From You Tonight
Gregor Barnett – Don't Go Throwing Roses In My Grave
Johnny Marr – Tenement Time
Placebo - Surrounded By Spies
Shame – This Side of the Sun
Jethro Tull – Shoshanna Sleeping
Dashboard Confessional – Here's To Moving On
PUP – Waiting
Hopefully you’ve been resting your vocal chords, because PUP are back with a pair of irresistible shout-along hooks. The Canadian rockers have shared the new songs “Waiting” and “Kill Something,” and you can hear them live on the band’s newly-announced 2022 North American tour.
Both tracks were produced by Peter Katis, who won a Grammy for his work with The National, and who has also stepped behind the boards for Interpol, Kurt Vile, and more. “Waiting” opens with a brief warning of drums followed by an onslaught of sludge-black guitars. The pummeling only lets up on the hook, as vocalist Stefan Babcock shows the emo heart lurking beneath the punk rock sneer. “I’m still waiting,” he howls. “Yeah, I’m still waiting right here for you/ I’m still waiting/ I’m not taking a sabbatical from you.”
In a statement, Babock said, “‘Waiting’ came about by smashing the heaviest riff Nestor [Chumak] could write with the simplest, most uplifting chorus I could write, just to see what would happen. The results were very quintessentially PUP, in that the song is a flurry of darkness and anger through the joyous lens of four guys just happy to be here, four guys who don’t take themselves seriously enough to make music that doesn’t feel like fun, regardless of the subject matter.”
Foals – Wake Me Up
Foals are coming back in 2022 with a new album, and while they haven’t revealed details including the title or release date, they have shared the album’s first offering. “Wake Me Up” arrives with a new Dave East–directed video. Watch it below.
“With ‘Wake Me Up’, I just wanted to write a song about transporting yourself to a better, idyllic situation,” Yannis Philippakis said in a statement. “I think we all had that feeling of the last eighteen months being like a weird fever dream that felt surreal but very affecting. I think we all wished we could have woken up somewhere else at various points.”
The new album will follow Foals’ two-part 2019 album Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost.
IDLES – Car Crash
IDLES have shared the video for their abrasive new single ‘Car Crash’, the latest track to be taken from their upcoming album ‘CRAWLER’.
The Bristol band will release their fourth album next week (November 12), just over a year since the release of its predecessor, 2020’s ‘Ultra Mono’.
The ‘Car Crash’ video features clips of car crashes from old films, edited together as one. It was created by Matthew Cusick and edited by the band’s guitarist Lee Kiernan. Cusick has been compiling car chase scenes from American films throughout the 20th century since 2001, and said his project now has “what it was always missing… a killer soundtrack”.
The song itself, meanwhile, was inspired by IDLES frontman Joe Talbot’s own near-death experience in a car accident. “It’s the horrific, comedown hangover – waking up in the morning and realising the smashes, like, what the fuck am I doing with my life?” he explained in a press release.
Mark Bowen, IDLES guitarist and co-producer on the record, added: “We wanted it to be as violent as possible to reflect that event. We recorded the drums beforehand and put them on a vinyl acetate. Whenever you replay an acetate, because it is kind of like a liquid, it degrades every time.
“It touches on things being transient and momentary — even a single drum hit. It’s like a memory, when the moment has passed and you deal with the repercussions over and over again, and they morph and change into something else.”
Courtney Barnett – If I Don’t Hear From You Tonight
Courtney Barnett has shared a cruisy new single titled ‘If I Don’t Hear From You Tonight’, announcing alongside it a suite of tour dates for her native Australia.
Leaning further into her folk and country influences, the new track shines with twangy lead guitars and soaring vocal harmonies, a dry and punchy bassline thumping along in the background. It arrives with a video fittingly set in the Californian desert, with Barnett and her band playing the song on an idyllic ranch studded with cacti.
In a press release, Barnett explained that her latest single was written after she’d had a change of heart towards the tried-and-true concept of the love song.
“I think my stance in the past was like, ‘There’s so many love songs and they don’t mean anything,’ but there’s something really special about zooming in on a moment and capturing it,” she said. “[The song] comes from the state of where my head was at – trying to communicate honestly instead of keeping [my feelings] guarded.”
‘If I Don’t Hear From You Tonight’ comes as the fourth single from Barnett’s third solo album, ‘Things Take Time, Take Time’, joining ‘Rae Street’, ‘Before You Gotta Go’ and ‘Write A List Of Things To Look Forward To’. The album is slated to land this Friday (November 12) via Marathon Artists.
Gregor Barnett – Don't Go Throwing Roses In My Grave
Last year, The Menzingers released From Exile, a folky reworking of 2019's Hello Exile, and now co-frontman Greg Barnett is exploring his folky side even further with his new solo project. He's going by Gregor Barnett, and he just announced his debut album, Don't Go Throwing Roses In My Grave, due February 18 via Epitaph (clear with black smoke vinyl pre-order). The title track is out now, and it's a warm, rustic, Petty/Springsteen-channelling song, fleshed out by jangly acoustic guitars and bluesy harmonica, and Greg's voice sounds as welcoming as distinct as ever. "It’s a beautiful way to honor the people we’ve lost," Greg says of the ritual of laying flowers down for the deceased, "but I think a lot of times we forget to appreciate our relationships with those people while they’re still here. I wanted this song to be a celebration of life and what we have before it’s gone."
The album was written and recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic, which had a direct impact on the music, as Greg explains:
It was this perfect storm. The band couldn’t tour, I was going through a really difficult time, and I was stuck at home watching my family struggle with illness and death and hardship. The only thing I could do was write my way through it.
Writing’s always been my way of making sense of the world. I was writing because it felt good to write, but once I got three or four songs together, I began to realize that there was a story there and that I should be documenting how I felt as I made my way through this really challenging chapter.
The album was produced by Will Yip, who also drummed on it, and it features Greg's Menzingers bandmates Eric Keen on bass and Joe Godino on additional percussion. Co-frontman Tom May took the photo for the album cover.
Johnny Marr – Tenement Time
Johnny Marr has announced a ‘Fever Dreams Pt 2’ EP and shared two singles ‘Tenement Time’ and ‘Sensory Street’.
Due for release on December 17, the EP will preview four brand new tracks that make up the second quarter of his forthcoming double album, ‘Fever Dreams Pts 1-4’.
You can watch the official music video for ‘Tenement Time’ and the new lyric video for ‘Sensory Street’ below. Completing the EP are ‘Lightning People’ and ‘Hideaway Girl’.
Speaking about the former, Marr said: “That’s the experience of growing up in the inner city as a little kid, running around being quite wild. This idea of “forever, forever is mine” – it’s about running around Ardwick [in Manchester], bunking into warehouses and getting chased.
“That was the first time I was self-consciously into culture: around people who wore certain clothes, and it was part of being a little Manchester boy, really. I have a real romanticism about that period of my life.”
Marr recently spoke to NME about the upcomimg ‘Fever Dreams Pts 1-4’, the first part of which arrived last month. “It felt like a big undertaking, and I think it sounds like a big undertaking,” he explained.
“For me, the album and the whole experience has been expansive, ironically – at a time that’s been so much about seclusion. The ideas and the sound reflect that.”
He continued: “I wanted to come back from the last album with something extremely up-tempo and energetic. A little bit of me thinks that my peers and I are almost expected to coast along with mid-tempo, earnest rock music. I wasn’t at all feeling like putting my feet up and getting some slippers. That never occurred to me.”
‘Fever Dreams Pts 1-4’ will be released on February 25, 2022
Placebo - Surrounded By Spies
Placebo have announced their new album, Never Let Me Go, out March 25th via Rise Records. The band has also shared the record’s second single, “Surrounded by Spies.” Stream the track below.
Never Let Me Go follows 2013’s Loud Like Love, marking the English rockers’ first album in nine years. Whereas the previous single “Beautiful James” buzzed with lighthearted synths, “Surrounded by Spies” offers a look at the darker side of the album. Ominous piano chimes over glitchy percussion as singer Brian Molko buckles under our modern surveillance state. “I gave my heart, now I want it back,” he repeats.
“I began writing the lyrics when I discovered my neighbors were spying on me on behalf of parties with a nefarious agenda,” Molko explained in a statement. “I then began to ponder the countless ways in which our privacy has been eroded and stolen since the introduction of worldwide CCTV cameras that now employ racist facial recognition technologies; the rise of the internet and the cellphone, which has turned practically every user into a paparazzo and spectators in their own lives, and how we have mostly all offered up personal information to enormous multinationals whose sole intent is to exploit us.”
Shame – This Side of the Sun
Shame have shared their rousing new single ‘This Side Of The Sun’, which sees frontman Charlie Steen put through his paces on an exercise bike while he’s smoking a cigarette.
The track is the band’s first since their second album ‘Drunk Tank Pink’ was released earlier this year.
“The whole song came together on the day we recorded it at the studio. It’s also the first live recording we’ve ever done, we didn’t want it to sound overworked. It’s a pure banger, listen with a piña colada in your left hand,” the band said.
The band are set to embark on a UK tour next Tuesday (November 9) in support of ‘Drunk Tank Pink’ – They will also head out on a US tour in February.
Jethro Tull – Shoshanna Sleeping
Folk-prog rock legends Jethro Tull have just announced The Zealot Gene, their first new album in 18 years, and accompanying the album details is the new song "Shoshana Sleeping," which recaptures a great deal of the band's most iconic sounds amid a vast and expansive catalog.
Work on the record began as early as 2017 and, four years later, venerable band leader Ian Anderson has reached the finish line with a 12-track record that is set for a Jan. 28 release on InsideOut Music.
"Shoshana Sleeping" opens with the distinct flair that should take fans right back to the thick of Tull's early '70s ascent, driven by Anderson's melodic flute playing which comes and goes amid a tug of war-like songwriting affair where delicate guitar textures provide a delicate balance to the band's rousing romps.
Speaking about the lyrical inspiration behind The Zealot Gene, Anderson commented, "While I have a spot of genuine fondness for the pomp and fairytale story-telling of the Holy Book, I still feel the need to question and draw sometimes unholy parallels from the text. The good, the bad, and the downright ugly rear their heads throughout, but are punctuated with elements of love, respect, and tenderness.”
Plans to release the first Jethro Tull album since 2003's The Jethro Tull Christmas Album were derailed by the pandemic. "It was so sudden," said Anderson, "Amidst the concerns and warnings of the scientific community and a few more enlightened politicians, we all retreated in disbelief to our homes to wait out the storm."
Dashboard Confessional – Here's To Moving On
While 2020 was a rough year for most, Dashboard Confessional singer Chris Carrabba added recovery from a motorcycle accident to things he had to overcome. But after a trying year, the singer has put some of his emotions into his music, kicking off promotion for his new record with the heartfelt new song, "Here's to Moving On."
On his social media, the vocalist simply stated, "Last year was kind of a rough year. I wrote a song about it. It's called 'Here's To Moving On.'"
Elaborating more in a trailer for the upcoming album, All the Truth That I Can Tell (February 25th), below, Carrabba says of the new song, "To be honest, I wasn't sure I'd ever find a way to put this into words. But through the highs and lows and everything in between I've come to discover that the truth is something that is constantly evolving. I've found the beauty in accepting that you can't always be in control of where life will take you, that not everything is meant to last forever. The beauty is in listening, growing and loving relentlessly with your whole heart. The beauty is in moving on."