There are few things that can threaten to tear a band of brothers apart. 

One is having the surname Gallagher. Another is falling foul of the age-old scourge that befell many who came before them: that concussive collision where the irresistible force of the idealistic artist meets the immovable object of the cold, unfeeling music business. And that’s exactly what happened to righteous indie godheads The Cribs, the band made up of Wakefield-born twins Ryan and Gary and their younger brother Ross Jarman, over the most difficult two years in the band’s career. 

The band’s struggle was a time bomb that went off just as their Steve Albini-engineered album '24-7 Rock Star Shit' hit the shelves in August 2017. That record, the band’s harshest and most abrasive to date, was a ‘surprise’ release that started out as a few tracks recorded at Albini’s Electrical Audio studio in Chicago and eventually grew to a full-length album. It was a gear-change for the band, who decided to release it directly to the fans, with very little advance notice. “We chose that approach so that there would be no pressure on it, because we knew that it wasn't really a commercial record,” says Ryan.

But beyond the method of release – no press, no radio, no big build-up – the real surprise was how it was lapped up by fans new and old. 24-7 Rock Star Shit placed at Number One in the midweek charts, and landed at Number Eight – the band’s highest chart placing in a run of seven consistently excellent LP's beginning with their 2004 debut – and their fourth consecutive UK Top 10 album. 

However, in what should have been a week of celebration at this against-the-odds success, tension in the Cribs camp was about to reach a head. The decidedly DIY smash-and-grab approach of the album’s launch had exacerbated frictions that ultimately proved irreconcilable and, smack in the middle of release week, the band parted ways with their longtime UK management, who had guided their career since the band’s earliest days. “It blindsided us, and it really took the wind out of our sails,” says Gary. “And now, looking back, that was the start of a whole load of shit.”

Picking up management duties themselves, the band began the painful process of unpicking their accounts and past contracts, discovering that "nothing was really as it seemed – we didn't even know who owned the rights to the songs".

“It's a classic story, like, you read any old school music biography and it's always, ‘Oh, we didn't realise that this was going on, we didn't realise our rights had been sold to somebody else,’” says Ryan. “And, you know, you don’t think that could still happen now, because it’s so cliched. But essentially, that was exactly what happened to us.”

Finding themselves stuck in what Gary describes as a “legal morass”, The Cribs were unable to record or release new music, so touring wasn’t an option either. That meant 18 months of fallow – heartbreaking stuff for a band who’ve known nothing else in their adult lives. “At one point we were actually so disillusioned with what had happened, we didn't even know if we wanted to get back into the band any more,” says Ryan. “It was like an existential crisis. When you're brothers in a band, you never really know how it's gonna end because your relationship never ends. You’re so strong and you’re so tight that you just figure you’ll do it forever.”

Gary says they were caught between a rock and a hard place – fight, possibly lose and endure the attendant stress and terrific cost, or split up and tell their famously dedicated fans that the group they believe in, has lost its will to fight the good fight. “The problem we were facing was, how do we go to the people who've been fans of ours, believing in us for that long, and tell them the reason for the breakup is an extract straight out of the big book of rock cliches? That was way too depressing.”

Yep, that’s right: 24-7 Music Industry Bullshit.

*

You can tell by the fact that you’re reading this that this story has a happy ending. 

The band are back and on blistering form, brandishing a brand new album, 'Night Network', that is as fresh, cathartic and vital as anything they’ve ever put out. There’s no weariness, no bitterness, just a clear desire to get back to doing what they do best – that unique blend of bittersweet melody, brutal lyrical honesty and riffs for days.

The turning point came at the 11th hour, in the late summer of 2018. The Cribs had been invited to support Foo Fighters at Manchester's Etihad Stadium, in what could very well have been the band's last hurrah. “We had reached a point where we were being quite philosophical about everything, talking about how we had done pretty much everything that we wanted to do as a band, but a stadium show was the one thing that had always eluded us,” says Ryan. “So it seemed weird and serendipitous that we got that offer around that time, in a city that has adopted us as their own, no less. We thought – maybe we do that, we tick that box off… that's a good moment to bow out.”

Enter the brothers’ knight in shining armour, Sir Rock-Don’t-Stop himself, Dave Grohl. 

Back in the Jarmans’ teenage days, they would watch Nirvana live videos “pretty much every night” for the sheer escapism of it, says Ryan. Grohl – ex-Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters frontman – again proved to be a source of strength for the group at the Manchester show. Hanging out backstage, chatting over a few post-show drinks, The Cribs confided their recent struggles to their new friends. “The Foos are such positive people, such a positive force in music, that talking to them had a big effect on us,” says Ryan. “Dave was just like, ‘Forget about all that business stuff, come out to LA and make a record at our studio’ – Dave made that offer to us.”

You don’t get a reputation for being the nicest guy in the business for nothing. 

“We really appreciated the offer and were humbled by Dave's generosity, but it still seemed like a bit of an abstraction at the time” says Ryan. 

“The more we discussed it between ourselves, the more we realised we’d be crazy not to take him up on his offer. It became a thing to look forward to, a beacon of hope on the horizon” adds Gary.

The three brothers are now scattered over nearly 5,000 miles, with Gary in Portland, Oregon, Ryan in Queens, New York and Ross in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. When they gathered in the UK for a family Christmas in December 2018, they began working on songs in Ross’s garage, and found the creative juices flowing. Further UK trips were required for various legal dealings, and the brothers used the opportunity to meet up and thrash out new music, just like they always used to. 

The songs came together fast, and when they finally contacted the Foo Fighters and said they’d be keen to take them up on the offer, they were offered a window of studio time in April 2019 – a fixed date to work towards, and the impetus for a final push to sort out the miasma of business mess.

When they got out to LA, the studio – Studio 606, as it’s known – was exactly how they’d imagined: a batcave of Nirvana and Foos memorabilia, storied studio kit and one-of-a-kind instruments. With its arcade machines and bars, it’s also a hang-out for members of the band, who were rehearsing next door. 

“It was so nice of those guys to invite us into their own private space, cos it’s basically their personal little playground and they just let us let do whatever we wanted there,” says Ross. “We hit it off pretty quickly – they love Queen as much as we do! Taylor [Hawkins, Foos drummer] even owns one of Roger Taylor’s snares, which we got to use on the record. In fact, the only problem we had was when Taylor would come in because we’d spend the next three hours talking about Queen.”

Dave, too, was on hand for the odd pep-talk.

“He was telling us how [the Foos] run everything themselves,” says Ryan. “He said, ‘You've been around long enough, you know what you’re doing and nobody can deal with your stuff better than what you can.’ So, essentially it was all a blessing in disguise. And you know, when that kind of comment comes from one of your formative influences, it really resonates. He's been around a long time and he's seen everything and he’s come through a lot of tough stuff. He knows what he’s talking about.”

This autonomy extended to the recording process itself – this is the first album to be entirely self-produced by the band. Engineered by James Brown (Foo Fighters, Arctic Monkeys) and mixed by frequent Cribs collaborator John O'Mahony (who also worked on 'Men's Needs, Women's Needs, Whatever' and 'For All My Sisters') the record took shape over two weeks in LA, plus an extra week of overdubs at Halfling Studios in Portland. Mercifully, it is not a poor-me album about the ills of the industry. No, they deal with that on the first track, a slice of surf-ready sunshine pop with gorgeous harmonies called 'Goodbye'. “That was our way of saying ‘goodbye’ to that period of our lives. Let's move on,” says Ross.

After that, no indulgence is made to the band’s struggle. Instead, it’s wall-to-wall Cribs bangers, the fruit of that special, symbiotic relationship between the songwriting, singing brothers, drawing on the boiled-down influences they felt had always been there: The Motown stomp of 'Never Thought I'd Feel Again' and 'Under The Bus Station Clock', red and blue album-era Beatles ('Running Into You' and 'In The Neon Night', respectively), melodic 70's style pop on 'Deep Infatuation’, and even early work by their own band.

One track, 'Screaming In Suburbia’, is based around a riff found on a MiniDisc of spare material from the ‘Men’s Needs…’ album era. “It was a song we always really liked but somehow forgot about,” says Ryan. “It does have that classic Cribs sound, so I think people will probably connect with that.”

“That line and that title – Screaming In Suburbia – came from something Ryan said a couple of years ago, that the sound of our early records is the sound of kids screaming into a pillow somewhere in suburbia,” says Gary. 

And they return with a familiar friend, too – Lee Ranaldo, ex-of Sonic Youth, and the man whose spoken word verses on 2007 track 'Be Safe' helped create what might well be a song in a genre entirely of its own, one whose chorus has been bellowed out at Cribs gigs ever since and whose words are inked on the flesh of an army of fans. 

Here, Ranaldo plays guitar on 'I Don’t Know Who I Am' – and Be Safe Part II (Be Safer?) it ain’t. The song started out as a jam in Ross’s garage which the brothers later tracked at 606, before Ranaldo layered sheets of white-noise guitar over the recording at Sonic Youth’s Hoboken studio, and a few backing vocals for good measure. "Reuniting with Lee again was kinda the icing on the cake. I think Be Safe is one of our best songs, so we wanted to stretch ourselves again with I Don't Know Who I Am. I'm really proud at how it turned out" says Gary.

In a typically downplayed way, the band have honed in on what’s so special about The Cribs: really bloody good songs. Fans might well think this is their best album in a decade. It marks the first release of the bands new deal under the umbrella of [PIAS], the home of independent music. So, once again all is right in Cribs world – or as much as all is right in any world in 2020 at least. 

The Cribs are romantics and they’re realists, and the balance, for a hot minute, nearly tipped in the favour of the latter. But now they return empowered, beholden to no one, on the greatest form and still screaming in suburbia.

CONTACT:

Management

US - Mark Kates- Fenway Recordings info@fenwayrecordings.com

UK - Nigel Templeman- Red Light Management nigel.templeman@redlightmanagement.com

Jamie Osman -Real Life Management Jamie@reallifemgmt.com

Agent

US - Matt Hickey- High Road matt@highroadtouring.com

ROW - Jonny Greenfield- WME JGreenfield@wmeagency.com

Publishing

BMG Chrysalis- Contact info@fenwayrecordings.com

Their history you probably know by now. About how brothers Jez and Andy Williams met Jimi Goodwin at 15 and forged a lifelong friendship from their shared passion for music. How the trio’s incarnation as Sub Sub -inspired by ecstatic trips to The Hacienda – saw them hit number three with the sublime ‘Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use) in 1993 only to lose their way until their rebirth as Doves.

How the success of 2000’s debut album Lost Souls spawned the widescreen vision of The Last Broadcast just over two years later. And, more recently, how the civic concerns of 2005’s epic Some Cities paved the way for Kingdom Of Rust, most sane people’s album of the year in 2009. None of which, of course, tells you anything about the beauty and majesty of the music they’ve created over the years.

The Places Between, their latest, is a painstakingly compiled look back at Doves first twelve years. From the opening chorus of There Goes The Fear (“Think of me when you’re coming down / But don’t look back when leaving town”) through classic debut single ‘The Cedar Room’ (originally released on the bands own imprint Casino Records – funded by Rob Gretton) to the sonic maelstrom of ‘Jetstream’, CD 1 is a seamless reminder of Doves unique knack of blending nostalgia, euphoria and social comment with gleaming musical modernism.

Contact:

Management US - Mark Kates - Fenway Recordings info@fenwayrecordings.com UK - Dave Rofe central1179@gmail.com

Agent NA - Steve Ferguson- Paladin steveferguson@paladinartists.com ROW - Geoff Meall- Wasserman geoff.meall@teamwass.com

Publishing/Licensing Contact info@fenwayrecordings.com

Pluralone is the current solo project of singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Josh Klinghoffer. At just 41 years old, Klinghoffer has amassed a resume which dwarfs even the most seasoned musical veterans. He became the youngest Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee at 32 as a member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. While best known for his decade long role with that band, Josh’s credentials extend back to his teenage years. He's been a member of groups like Ataxia, Warpaint, and The Bicycle Thief, he’s toured and recorded as a session musician with notable artists including PJ Harvey, Beck, Butthole Surfers, and Gnarls Barkley.

He also fronts the group Dot Hacker, with frequent collaborators Jonathan Hischke, Clint Walsh, and Eric Gardner. Klinghoffer was recently recruited as a touring member of Pearl Jam and Eddie Vedder’s new group, The Earthlings, and made contributions to new albums for both projects. Klinghoffer performed his first live set as Pluralone at the Ohana Festival Encore Weekend on October 1, 2021. As the end of 2021 approaches, Josh is writing a new Pluralone album, preparing for more live dates, and working extensively with producer Andrew Watt (Producer of the Year, Grammy Awards 2021) on a variety of projects. 

Contact:

Management Mark Kates- Fenway Recordings info@fenwayrecordings.com

Agent Don Muller- WME DMuller@wmeagency.com

Publishing/Licensing SESAC - contact info@fenwayrecordings.com

“It is not my place to tell you how to feel about something as subjective as music. Art is up for individual interpretation. We all hear different things. So go ahead: like what you like and hate what you hate. The choices are all yours.

Except when it comes to MGMT. You have to love MGMT.

If you don’t love MGMT you’re objectively and provably wrong. Do you want to be known as an idiot? Then fine, go on not loving MGMT.

I am of course exaggerating for effect because I clearly have strong feelings about MGMT. Their music has brightened my world for nearly as long as they’ve been making it; for the last fifteen or so years Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden have repeatedly delivered on the promise of ORACULAR SPECTACULAR, their Technicolor explosion of a debut. They followed it up with 2010’s CONGRATULATIONS, the once under-appreciated classic that has now found a modicum of much-deserved respect over the years.

2013 brought their self-titled third album, a dense and paranoid journey of a record that now stands as their current under-appreciated work (by 2026 everyone will consider this one their undeniable masterwork, mark it down!). MGMT’s fourth album was 2018’s LITTLE DARK AGE, a mutated – and equally paranoid! – synth pop collection that many described as “a return to form”.

Which begs the question: when it comes to MGMT, what form are they returning to? What form did they become?

As their very website URL asks, WHO IS MGMT?

It’s a fair question. Each record sounds decidedly different. They are clearly searching for something, their artistic restlessness is apparent. Everything they do is an adventure and they’re not going to stop seeking as long as they are making music. But that doesn’t answer the question.

The truth is, I don’t know who they really are. And I actually know them! I mean, Andrew and Ben are nice guys in real life, both very funny and extremely thoughtful. They will hold open a door for you, and they don’t hesitate to reach for the check. Legitimately decent dudes by any yardstick.

But at first glance you’d never know these unassuming guys were the architects of some of the most audacious and uncompromising rock music of the twenty-first century, a band that maintains a perfect track record, never making a misstep after nearly twenty years in the game. You can count on one hand the artists who push the margins the way MGMT do and you’ll have a couple fingers left over.

MGMT have been able to funnel the catchiest songs imaginable through the filter of relentless experimentation, never settling for the same sound twice. At this point in the game it is time to recognize that MGMT are not just the star pupils of the graduating class of 2007; they are a Great Band whose music has stood the test of time.

Which leads us to MGMT’s fifth album, LOSS OF LIFE. Simply put, the guys did it again! They’re now five-for-five, which last time I checked gets you into virtually any Hall of Fame. This record projects an aura of undeniable warmth throughout, an album brimming with comfortable confidence. The sound bounces from blasts of strummy sunshine (“Mother Nature”) to a corrupted brand of adult contemporary (“People In the Streets”) that could best be described as “Peter Cetera jamming with China Crisis”. There are epic tracks and intimate portraits, a little bit of glam here, some psych-folk there. It’s a slice of magic that fits perfectly into the MGMT oeuvre while expanding the boundaries once again.

LOSS OF LIFE just might be their best to date, a thing of true beauty. Andrew and Ben themselves have described this record as being “SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE directed by Paul Schrader”, which kinda fits the bill. But the game of “this meets that” might not work anymore when it comes to MGMT. They are so much more than a collection of influences and references; those days are long behind them. Now MGMT set the pace.

Let other bands have their music described as “MGMT meets BLANK” (Faust? Keane? The Knack?), all you need to say about an MGMT record is “This is an MGMT record”. All the promise and potential is guaranteed to pay out like a slot machine as long as their name is on the album. “ - Tom Scharpling

Contact:

Management Mark Kates- Fenway Recordings & Dave Gottlieb- Death&Glory mgmt@fenwayrecordings.com

Agent US - Larry Webman - Wasserman lwebman@teamwass.com ROW - Mike Greek- CAA - MGreek@caa.com

Publishing/Licensing US - Sony and BMG Sony: Olivia Barton - olivia.barton@sonymusic.com Taylor Ashcraft - taylor.ashcraft@sonymusic.com BMG: Jake Sampson - jake.sampson@bmg.com Carly Ziff - carly.ziff@bmg.com

ROW - Sony and UMG Sony: Olivia Barton - olivia.barton@sonymusic.com Taylor Ashcraft - taylor.ashcraft@sonymusic.com UMG: Marcella Tweedy - Marcella.Tweedy@umusic.com

www.mgmtrecords.com

‘Unsound’ is Mission of Burma’s fifth studio album, continuing their remarkable legacy. It seems redundant now to even call it a comeback because they’re a dynamic, current band. Originally together just four years, from 1979-83, Mission of Burma reformed in 2002 for a handful of shows...which let to more concerts, then more, and eventually the release of 2004's "ONoffON", their first new recording in over twenty years. But no one expected them to just keep putting out records, let  alone records that were every bit as vital and influential as their seminal early recordings. Their first album ‘Vs’ is down in the annals of time as being one of the most important post-punk records ever. Their subsequent recordings: "ONoffON", "The Obliterati", "The Sound, The Speed, The Light", and now, "Unsound", continue to grow in scope, depth and accomplishment with every step.

On "Unsound" we see Mission of Burma messing with their comfort zone by recording in their Boston rehearsal space which doubles as a recording studio: Analog Divide. As usual, Roger Miller (guitar, vocals), Clint Conley (bass, vocals) and Peter Prescott (drums, vocals) share the songwriting credits with their distinct styles. All of them tried their hand at other instruments and sounds, allowing them to take risks with their creativity and giving them a more fluid line-up. Of course, regular fourth member Bob Weston (of Shellac) was on hand to provide the tape loops and production duties.

Inquiries:
burma@fenwayrecordings.com
Booking (NA): Frank Riley at High Road Touring
Booking (Europe): Peter Meeuwsen at Puschen, Jose Luis Ceuvas at Born! Music

Licensing Inquiries: Kaitlyn Kojian at Bankrobber Music

www.missionofburma.com