{"title":"Jennifer Castle","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJennifer Castle is a singer\/songwriter hailing from Toronto. With her unique blend of folk and indie rock, she has captivated audiences worldwide. Drawing inspiration from artists such as Daniel Romano, Andre Ethier, and Jenn Grant, Jennifer's music resonates with listeners on a deep level.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eKnown for her soulful vocals and introspective lyrics, Jennifer Castle creates music that is both hauntingly beautiful and deeply personal. Her songs have been described as ethereal and mesmerizing, transporting listeners to another world.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWith a discography that includes albums like \"Angels of Death\" and \"Pink City,\" Jennifer Castle continues to push the boundaries of what it means to be an artist in the modern music industry. Whether performing solo or collaborating with other talented musicians, *Jennifer Castle* never fails to deliver a captivating performance that leaves audiences wanting more.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"castlemusic","title":"Castlemusic","description":"\u003cp\u003ejennifer castle possesses a sought after voice, singing on albums by fucked up, the constantines and doug paisley. 'castlemusic' is her debut under her own name (she previously performed as castlemusic). it's full of rambles, waltzes and ballads. it wanders with equal parts feedback and quiet, through dark melodies, wistful, and straight out of a hazed dream or some offbeat '70s am station. the songs have that type of familiarity, as if they were always there. castle is backed by an assortment of instruments here including pedal steel, percussion and vibraphone.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"No Label","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":50491402912075,"sku":"348202","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/486e9598-db18-4324-b00b-afde41f6f98f_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727686250"},{"product_id":"angels-of-death","title":"Angels of Death","description":"\u003cp\u003eOn Jennifer Castle’s new album \u003ci\u003eAngels of Death\u003c\/i\u003e, her third full-length record under her given name (previous releases were credited to Castlemusic), the Ontario songwriter summons a kindred classical vision of the Muses as domestic familiars intimately in league with death. A sublime meditation on mortality and memory, ghosts and grief, \u003ci\u003eAngels of Death\u003c\/i\u003e casts a series of spells against forgetting and finality, in the form of mystic-minimalist country-soul torch songs about writing, time travel, and spectral visitations. Castle wrote and recorded this breathtaking follow-up to the acclaimed \u003ci\u003ePink City\u003c\/i\u003e (2014) in a 19th century church near the shores of Lake Erie, where her family also lived and experienced a constellation of losses that inhabit these bruised musings. The title track finds Castle wrestling, like Jacob, with the radiant angels of death “hanging in the room,” while she attempts to navigate, or write, her way through the “loopholes and catacombs of time”—the line is borrowed, with permission, from fellow Canadian poet Al Purdy - like Ariadne in the labyrinth, with her spool of silver thread. Real-life muses haunt \u003ci\u003eAngels of Death\u003c\/i\u003e as well. In addition to Al Purdy, whose verse appears as a result of an invitation from Jason Collett of Broken Social Scene to incorporate a Purdy poem, Castle cites Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta, Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, and Spanish artist Susana Salinas (the addressee of “Stars of Milk”) among those whose work served as catalysts. \u003ci\u003eAngels of Death\u003c\/i\u003e was produced by Castle and longtime collaborator Jeff McMurrich. For fans of The Weather Station, Steve Gunn, Aldous Harding, Joan Shelley, Cass McCombs, Angel Olsen, Judee Sill, Sibylle Baier, Vashti Bunyan and Leonard Cohen. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLP - 140 Gram Vinyl with Download.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":50497807286603,"sku":"1033831","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP","offer_id":50497808007499,"sku":"1033833","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/a1a8546d-200e-474a-9cfb-ce1ff6653584_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727733223"},{"product_id":"monarch-season","title":"Monarch Season","description":"\u003cp\u003eJennifer Castle’s sixth full-length record, the moon-suffused \u003ci\u003eMonarch Season\u003c\/i\u003e an album as delicate and diaphanous as its namesake butterfly stands, in a literal sense, as her first proper “solo” album, performed alone in her coastal kitchen, windows open to the insects and the wind and the reflection of the moon on Lake Erie, entirely without human accompaniment (though a chorus of crickets provides rich interstitial support throughout.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eMonarch Season\u003c\/i\u003e is an album as delicate and diaphanous as its namesake creature. Although created half a year pre-pandemic, Castle deliberately pursued a minimalist, homebound, and solitary process that represented, for her musical practice, a radical reduction of scale, coupled with a telescopic expansion of scope. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe follow-up to her acclaimed 2018 record \u003ci\u003eAngels of Death, Monarch Season\u003c\/i\u003e is Castle’s private experiment on the effects of microgravity in this context, increased immediacy, intimacy, domesticity, simplicity, brevity, and directness on her music. As a distillation of the formal, compositional, and collaborative qualities of her previous work to the elemental the singular body, the shared Earth, the charged silence of nature at night \u003ci\u003eMonarch Season\u003c\/i\u003e transports the listener, from the first strains of the heavy-lidded guitar instrumental \u003ci\u003eTheory Rest\u003c\/i\u003e, to that lakeside kitchen at dusk, beneath a bright moon twinned in the water.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShe recorded quickly, with only her longtime co-producer Jeff McMurrich to capture her guitar, piano, and for the first time on record harmonica. Jennifer dedicates her blowing to friend and mentor Kath Bloom, who played the Pink City harp. Her airy, lambent voice renders these taut poems as elegant inscriptions within circumscription, fully present and presciently articulate, months before the age of coronavirus quarantines, about the troubles and delights to be found in aloneness, in the patient observation of our immediate surroundings, and if you’re lucky in negotiating abiding love. \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"Black | LP","offer_id":50512847896907,"sku":"1102629","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50512848060747,"sku":"1102628","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/45a5f243-098c-4a49-a88e-153965c471f4_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727908284"},{"product_id":"camelot-4","title":"Camelot","description":"\u003cp\u003eFor Fans Of: The Weather Station, Weyes Blood, Adrianne Lenker, Phoebe Bridgers, Joan Shelley, Lana Del Rey, Cass McCombs, Angel Olsen and Neil Young.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCamelot, the legendary seat of King Arthur’s court in Early Middle Ages Britain, was probably not a real place. A corruption of the name of a real Romano-Briton city, the word “Camelot” accumulated symbolic, mythic resonances over centuries, until achieving its present usage as a near-synonym of “utopia.” In the mid-20th century alone, Camelot inspired an explosion of representations and appropriations, among them the violent, affectless Arthurian court of Robert Bresson’s 1974 film Lancelot du Lac and the absurdist iteration of Monty Python’s 1975 Holy Grail, both of which feature armoured knights erupting into fountains of blood; the mystical Welsh world of novelist John Cowper Powys’s profoundly weird 1951 novel Porius, with its Roman cults, wizards and witches, and wanton giants; and the nationalist nostalgia of President John F. Kennedy’s White House. Unsurprisingly there are fewer Camelots in more recent memory.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCamelot, Canadian songwriter Jennifer Castle’s extraordinary, moving 2024 chronicle of the artist in early middle age, charts a realer, more rooted, and more metaphorical place than the fabled Camelot of the Early Middle Ages (or its myriad depictions), but it too is a space more psychic than physical. In Castle’s Camelot, the fantastic interpenetrates the mundane, and the Grail, if there is one, distills everyday experience into art and art into faith, subliming terrestrial concerns into sublime celestial prayers to Mother Nature, and to the unfolding process of perfecting imperfection in one’s own nature. Co-produced by Jennifer and longtime collaborator Jeff McMurrich, her seventh record is at once her most monumental and unguarded to date, demonstrating a mastery of rendering her verse and melodies alike with crisply poignant economy. For all their pointedly plainspoken lyrical detail and exhilarating full-band musical flourishes, these songs sound inevitable, eternal as morning devotions.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Back in Camelot,” she sings on the lilting, vulnerable title track, “I really learned a lot \/ circles in the crops and \/ sky-high geometry.” The album opens with a candid admission of sleeping “in the unfinished basement,” an embarrassing joke that comes true. But the dreamer is redeemed by dreaming, setting sail in her airborne bed above “sirens and desert deities.” If she questions her own agency whether she is “wishing stones were standing” or just “pissing in the wind” it does not diminish the ineffable existential jolt of such signs and wonders.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis abiding tension between belief and doubt, magic and pragmatism, self and other, sacred and profane, and even, arguably, paganism and monotheism, suffuses these ten songs, which limn an interior landscape shot through with sunstriped shadows of “multi-felt dimensions” both mystical and quotidian. The epic scale and transport of “Camelot,” with its swooning strings, gives way dramatically to “Some Friends,” an acoustic-guitar-and-vocals meditation in miniature on Janus-faced friends and the lunar and solar temperatures of their promises—“bright and beaming verses” versus hot curses which recalls her minimalist last album, 2020’s achingly intimate Monarch Season. (In a symmetrical sequencing gesture, the penultimate track, the incantatory “Earthsong,” bookends the central six with a similarly spare solo performance and coiled chord progression, this time an ambiguous appeal to … a wounded lover? a wounded saint? our wounded planet?)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThose whom “Trust” accuses of treacherous oaths spit through “gilded and golden tooth” cynics, critics, hypocrites, gurus, scientists, doctors, lovers, government, the so-called entertainment industry sow uncertainty that can infect the artist, as in “Louis”: “What’s that dance \/ and can it be done? What’s that song \/ and can it be sung?” Answering affirmatively are “Lucky #8,” an irrepressible ode to dancing as a bulwark against the “tidal pools of pain” and the “theory of collapse,” and “Full Moon in Leo,” which finds the narrator dancing around the house with a broom, wearing nothing but her underwear and “big hair.” But the central question remains: who can we trust, and at what cost faith, in art or angels or otherwise?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCastle’s confidence in her collaborators is the cornerstone of Camelot. Carl Didur (piano and keys), Evan Cartwright (drums and percussion), and steadfast sideman Mike Smith (bass) comprise a rhythm section of exquisite delicacy and depth. This fundamental trio anchors the airiness of regular backing vocalists Victoria Cheong and Isla Craig and frames the guitars of Castle, McMurrich, and Paul Mortimer (and on “Lucky #8,” special guest Cass McCombs). Reprising his decennial role on Castle’s beloved 2014 Pink City, Owen Pallett arranged the strings for Estonia’s FAMES Skopje Studio Orchestra.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOn the ravishing country-soul ballad “Blowing Kisses” Pallett’s crowning achievement here, which can be heard in its entirety in the penultimate episode of the third season of FX’s The Bear Jennifer contemplates time and presence, love and prayer and how songwriting and poetry both manifest and limit all four dimensions: “No words to fumble with \/ I’m not a beggar to language any longer.” Such rare moments of speechlessness “I’m so fucking honoured,” she bluntly proclaims suggest a state “only a god could come up with.” (If Camelot affirms Castle as one of the great song-poets of her generation, she is not immune to the despairing linguistic beggary that plagues all writers.)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCamelot evinces a thoroughgoing faith not only in the natural world including human bodies, which can, miraculously, dance and swim and bleed and embrace and birth but also in our interpretations of and interventions in it: the “charts and diagrams” of “Lucky #8,” a daydreamt billboard on Fairfax Ave. in LA in “Full Moon in Leo,” the bloody invocations of the organ-stained “Mary Miracle,” and all manner of water worship, rivers in particular. (Notably, Jennifer has worked as a farmer and a doula.)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe album ends with “Fractal Canyon”s repeated, exalted insistence that she’s “not alone here.” But where is here?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe word “utopia” itself constitutes a pun, indicating in its ambiguous first syllable both the Greek “eutopia,” or “good-place” the facet most remembered today and “outopia,” or “no-place,” a negative, impossible geography of the mind. Utopia, like its metonym Camelot, is imaginary. Or as fellow Canadian songwriter Neil Young once sang, “Everyone knows this is nowhere.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Can you see how I’d be tempted,” Castle asks out of nowhere, held in the mystery, “to pretend I’m not alone and let the memory bend?”\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50530923872587,"sku":"2218942","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50530923708747,"sku":"2218941","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Jennifer_Castle__Camelot_5c7d3a15_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1728088446"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/collections\/test_6505fc10_thumbnail_4096_354a124c-28ce-4a5d-84e9-6a2f51757422.jpg?v=1727686229","url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/collections\/jennifer-castle.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}