On her forthcoming LP, Bird Language, Lithuania-born, New York-based vocalist/composer Simona Smirnova forgoes the fictional narrative elements that characterized her previous releases, instead crafting a sonic portrait of the artist and the world that has shaped her. READ MORE…
When one thinks of horror movies, there are a few things that immediately come to mind — vampires, ghosts, knives, and blood-curdling screams. But for Brian Michael Henry, the genre carries with it a powerful romance, an outsider’s perspective on love and a profound sense of longing. READ MORE…
A veteran rock & roller, singer/songwriter and guitarist with a couple decades in the trenches, Stuffy Shmitt has played with everyone from The Band’s Levon Helm to Violent Femmes’ Gordan Gano and David Johansen of the New York Dolls.
About eight years ago, the poor bastard went off the rails, consumed by bipolar disorder. Finally, though, he got himself properly medicated, moved from NYC to Nashville, and was able to sort out everything he’d created during his bouts of depression and mania. The resulting album, Stuff Happens—featuring Aaron Lee Tasjan, Brian Wright and more—is Stuffy’s finest yet.
And now, on September 10th, he’s releasing a special deluxe edition, More Stuff Happens. …
Big Takeover is stoked to host the premiere of the new music video for the live deluxe-edition “Scratchin’ at the Cat,” which finds Stuffy and his band operating at full-tilt at The 5 Spot in Nashville, offering a taste of what it might sound like to hear Warren Zevon fronting The Beatles circa The White Album.
Read more and check out the new video at The Big Takeover.
Brooklyn-based folk rocker Jon LaDeau’s new video for his song “Cemetery Road” begins in a cloud of smoke, a police SUV burning and cops blasting protesters indiscriminately with pepper spray as they flood the streets, demanding justice and accountability in the wake of yet another senseless and disturbingly casual murder—another black life snuffed out at the hands of police.
Lyrically and visually, “Cemetery Road” shines a light on American civil unrest in response to the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others, amplifying the modern struggle for civil rights against a backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, police violence, income inequality, homelessness, poverty and general injustice in America.
The footage—culled from last summer’s nationwide BLM protests—captures America in turmoil, collectively experiencing some of the largest demonstrations in the nation’s history.
Sleep Still enchants. Big Takeover is pleased to host the absorbing music video for the band’s enchanting single “The Panoramic.” The spare black ‘n’ white-filmed video clip follows the hypnotically slow, but expressive moves of a dancer clad in a dark shift against a pale background.
The Pinkerton Raid’s “Rebel Mama Blues” is a satirical slow-burner with a Bowie-meets-Black Keys feel- a blast of zeitgeist-capturing political garage-psych that explores how a whole generation of white hippie-boomer parents were unconsciously primed for late-life Fox News brainwashing by 1960s anti-authoritarian individualism.
When the Durham, N.C., band’s singer and guitarist Jesse James DeConto wrote the song- premiering exclusively today at The Big Takeover- he’d been meditating on how a steady diet of Right-wing propaganda has strained intergenerational family relationships for him and so many of his friends.
“I always thought of my parents’ generation as these hippies who stood up to The Man,” DeConto says. “Then when all the post-mortems came out after the 2016 election, it was clear that the hippies, the boomers, were the ones who chose Donald Trump. They thought of him as some kind of rebel because he didn’t have political experience, and he was supposed to be this outsider who would ‘drain the swamp.’