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STREAM PS I LOVE YOU’S ENTIRE NEW ALBUM ‘DEATH DREAMS’!

The North American release of PS I Love You‘s new album ‘Death Dreams’ is still a week away (May 8th), however you hear the entire album one week early by heading over to Exclaim Magazine who are currently streaming the album!

CLICK HERE TO STREAM ‘DEATH DREAMS’

PRE-ORDER ‘Death Dreams’ at the Paper Bag Records Online Store on LIMITED EDITION White 180-GRAM Vinyl (CD included) & CD or Pre-Order digitally.

Be sure to pick up the May Issue of Exclaim! Magazine (out now!) as PS I Love You grace the cover this month. You can also check out the entire interview with the band HERE

PS I Love You will embark on a Thirteen-date tour starting in Toronto and ending in their hometown of Kingston, Ontario (full list of dates below). The tour begins on May 15th, days after the band release their much-anticipated second album Death Dreams. The eleven-track LP will be available in Canada and the United States on May 8th and the United Kingdom on May 28th on Paper Bag Records.

PS I Love You are also offering a free download of album stand-out ‘Princess Towers’ here.  And don’t for get to Pre-order Death Dreams (available on CD and Limited Edition 180 GRAM White Vinyl) here.

Death Dreams was recorded with Muster Station producer Matt Rogalsky on his portable studio in the band’s tiny rehearsal space. No big budget studios for these lads. The album’s photography and design of the album’s artwork was created and executed by Benjamin Nelson.

PS I Love You Tour Dates
May 15 Toronto – The Garrison
May 19 Hamilton – The Casbah
May 21 London – The Alex P Keaton
May 23 Chicago – Schubas Tavern
May 25 New York – Mercury Lounge
May 26 Brooklyn – Glasslands
May 28 Hamden – The Outer Space
May 29 Fredericton – The Capital Complex
May 30 Charlottetwon – Hunters Ale House
May 31 Halifax – Michael’s
June 2 Montreal – Il Motore
June 6 Ottawa – Mavericks
June 9 Kingston – The Grad Club

The Muster Sessions features all of the songs from the critically-acclaimed Meet Me At The Muster Station album and b-sides recorded at various radio stations sessions as the band toured across North America.  PS I Love You were asked to perform on taste maker site and radio stations such as Daytrotter, KEXP, and XM Satellite Radio as well as high profile stations CBC Radio 1 (on Jian Ghomeshi’s popular show ‘Q’) and CJLO in Montreal.  We are releasing the Muster Sessions for free as a farewell to PS I Love You’s hometown inspired debut album, and in anticipation of launching their new album Death Dreams – an album inspired by their time on the road.  The sessions capture PS I Love You at their best; in raw form, performing live off the floor.

Tracklisting:

1. Subtle & Majestic (KEXP Session)
2. Meet Me at the Muster Station Part 1 (Daytrotter Session)
3. Breadends (KEXP Session)
4. 2012 (CBC Radio Q Session)
5. CBEZ (XM Session)
6. Little Spoon (XM Session)
7. Leftovers feat. Diamond Rings (Daytrotter Session)
8. Starfield (CJLO “Hooked On Sonics” Session)
9. Butterflies & Boners (CBC Radio Q Session)
10. Scattered (CJLO “Dirty Work” Session)
11. Facelove (CBC Radio Q Session)
12. Get Over (Daytrotter Session)
13. Meet Me At The Muster Station Part 2 (Daytrotter Session)

To the casual on-looker, PS I Love You’s quick rise to the summit of the intensely competitive Canadian music landscape is the thing dreams are made of.  Heck – just over one year ago the band released their highly praised homage to their hometown Kingston, Ontario.  Meet Me At The Muster Station was embraced by critics across the globe garnering consistently dazzling reviews.  As a result PS I Love You’s Benjamin Nelson and Paul Saulnier began to tour Muster Station around the planet.

Naturally, the band’s follow-up would gather inspiration from the opportunities that the success of Muster Station brought their way.  You know, playing gigs all over the world, picking up new fans, making new friends, sharing the stage with artists that you respect.  PS I Love You’s new album touches on all of these themes.  If the band’s debut was about being from Kingston, album number two is about being away from Kingston.  Sounds about right.  Right?

While on the road Paul Saulnier began to have reoccurring dreams centered around, as dark as it may sound, his mortality.  Triggered by life on the road – these images, created by Saulnier’s subconscious have, shaped the direction of the band’s brilliant new LP Death Dreams.

The album’s jumping-off point is the album’s title-track. ‘Death Dreams’ is a slow burning, brooding instrumental.  Darkly beautiful and unlike anything PS I Love You have released to date, the song is a recreation of a melody played by a ‘death march band’ from one of Saulnier’s dreams.  Heavy stuff indeed.

The mood lightens with the second track which has become a live favourite over the past few months.  ‘Sentimental Dishes’ sees the band returning to a conventional PS I Love You sound with new twists.  Death Dreams sees the band experimenting with their formula.  The songs are longer in length this time around with more unpredictable changes and parts.

Upcoming single (or focus track as we call them in 2012) ‘Don’t Go’ is Death Dreams’ centrepiece.  Featuring Nelson on backing vocals for the first time, the song builds to an irresistible crescendo that fades out and then back into hand-claps and a beat that you just don’t want to end.

Death Dreams was recorded with Muster Station producer Matt Rogalsky on his portable studio in the band’s tiny rehearsal space.  No big budget studios for these lads.  The album’s photography and design of the album’s artwork was created and executed by Benjamin Nelson.

Death Dreams Tracklisting:

1. Death Dreams
2. Sentimental Dishes
3. Don’t Go
4. Toronto
5. Future Dontcare
6. Death Dreams II
7. How Do You
8. Princess Towers
9. Red Quarter
10. Saskatoon
11. First Contact

Paper Bag Records would like to congratulate Austra, Cuff The Duke and The Rural Alberta Advantage who were all nominated for Juno Awards this morning.  Returning to Ottawa for the first time since 2003, The 2012 Juno Awards will air on CTV on the evening of Sunday, April 1 from Scotiabank Place and will feature a spectacular lineup of Canadian artists.

Nominated in the Best Electronic Album caterory, Austra released their debut album Feel It Break last year to critical acclaim which resulted in the album being included on the 2011 Polaris Music Prize short list.  The band has maintained a break-neck touring schedule which sees them tour New Zealand and Austrailia this month.

Cuff The Duke’s new album Morning Comes flows like a film, or like a good book, one filled with emotional highs and lows, plot twists, and universal truths. The album tells a story about change, about confronting loss, about – as one track calls it — ‘Standing on the Edge’ and having the courage to look across to an unknown future on the other side.  Morning Comes is nominated for a Juno in the Best Adult Alternative Album category.

The Rural Alberta Advantage are nominated in the New Group of the Year category as well as Video of the Year for their Jose Lourenco-directed whimsical video for ‘Stamp’.  After a breakthrough past couple of years that saw them earn comparisons to  The Arcade Fire and Neutral Milk Hotel, capture SXSW buzz playing on a bill with Grizzly Bear, sell out tours around the world, sign to Saddle Creek and Paper Bag Records, and score a “Breaking Out” feature in SPIN Magazine, The Rural Alberta Advantage exploded in 2011 with Departing.  The album was included on the long list for the 2011 Polaris Music Prize.

CFCF’s new release ‘Exercises’ will be available through Paper Bag Records on April 24th, 2012.

Paper Bag Records will kick-off their 10th Anniversary year with the release of new music from acclaimed producer CFCF on April 24th. Exercises shows a different side of CFCF’s ever expanding palette with a series of subdued piano and synth based pieces. Pulling from influences like Philip Glass, Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Borden, among others, and using institutional architecture and 70′s Canadiana as a framework. Download ‘Exercise #3 (Building)’ here.

Exercises has a distinctly 20th century feel. Opener “1 (Entry)” lures us in with a melancholy bed of synths, while standout “3 (Building)“‘s rolling piano melodies build to a cathartic crescendo. The lone vocal piece, “5 (September)“, is a cover of the opener to David Sylvian’s ‘Secrets of the Beehive’ album, refitted with 2-step percussion and wintry pads. This is a change of pace for CFCF to be sure, but no less cinematic and evocative than his 2009 debut Continent, though where that record evoked long stretches of neon road and epic rainforests, Exercises is all snowy walkways and long corridors, endless escalators ascending to desolate concrete plateaus. Each track feels like an exploration of lost memories, studies in nostalgia, exercises in spatial remembrance.

CFCF is the stage name of Canadian electronic musician Michael Silver. Based in Montreal, Silver took the name CFCF from the call sign of the city’s CFCF-TV. His debut LP, Continent, was an impressive collage of vintage electronic textures evoking grandiose landscapes worthy of a Michael Mann film. ‘The River’, an EP based partly on Werner Herzog’s classic film Fitzcarraldo, deepened a growing obsession with conjuring far-away landscapes and voyages through a style which is at times melancholy, propulsive and ecstatic. Working in genres ranging from house and disco to ambient and new age to rap and R&B, and pulling influences from Peter Gabriel and Popol Vuh to Mr. Fingers and DJ Screw, CFCF’s music is at once versatile and far-reaching yet eminently listenable and recognizably pop, and always vivid.

Since these two releases Silver has stayed busy with a series of evolving mixtapes. ‘Do U Like Nightbus?’ explores the titular “genre” through his remixes of Aaliyah, Ciara and ‘Twin Peaks’, while ‘Reincarnation’ presents a dark mindmeld of exotic chants, pounding drums, R&B crooners and menacing dancefloors. As with his own music, you get the feeling you are embarking on a fantastic journey to an unknown destination.

Exercises Tracklisting:

1. Exercise #1 (Entry)
2. Exercise #2 (School)
3. Exercise #3 (Building) MP3
4. Exercise #4 (Spirit)
5. Exercise #5 (September)
6. Exercise #6 (December)
7. Exercise #7 (Loss)
8. Exercise #8 (Change)

Download the first volume of ‘The Paper Bag Sessions’ for FREE!

1. Under The Knife – The Rural Alberta Advantage
2. Lose It – Austra
3. Lindsay – Elliott BROOD
4. Facelove – PS I Love You
5. Standing On The Edge – Cuff The Duke
6. Tornado ’87 – The Rural Alberta Advantage
7. Believe Me – Austra
8. If I Get Old – Elliott BROOD
9. Butterflies and Boners – PS I Love You
10. Letting Go – Cuff The Duke

The Paper Bag Sessions Vol. 1 is the audio companion to the Paper Bag Sessions video series.

Just over a year ago, we started shooting and distributing our own series of videos around each of our new releases. The videos are always shot by videographer Mitch Fillion in intriguing locations and usually gives an unexpected twist on the material being performed.

The completed sessions are also a neighbourly way of providing exclusive content to blogs and websites that are always supportive of the label’s artists. Paper Bag Sessions videos have been posted on sites like Pitchfork, Stereogum, Herohill, Disco Naïveté, Quick Before It Melts and Soft Signal.

The Paper Bag Sessions have also seen some geography in their short lifetime. The sessions have travelled from PS I Love You’s homage to their hometown in Kingston, to Cuff The Duke returning to their studio away from home on Greg Keelor’s farm, to The Rural Alberta Advantage cruising around Toronto.

Look for more sessions to surface as companions to future Paper Bag Records releases in 2012.

Austra have released a video for ‘Spellwork‘ off their Polaris Award shortlisted album ‘Feel It Break‘.  ‘Feel It Break‘ was also named album of the year by The New Yorker and Toronto Star!

CLICK HERE TO WATCH VIDEO NOW!

And don’t forget to pick up your copy of ‘Feel It Break [Deluxe Edition]‘ from the Paper Bag Records Store!

ELLIOTT BROOD – UPCOMING U.S. SPRING TOUR DATES

February 23 – Detroit, MI @ Magic Stick Lounge
February 24 – Chicago, IL @ Schuba’s
February 25 – Minneapolis, MN @ 7th Street Entry
February 28 – Seattle, WA @The Crocodile
February 29 – Portland, OR @ Doug Fir Lounge
March 2 – San Francisco, CA @ Rickshaw Shop*
March 3 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Echo *
March 5 – Denver, CO @Hi Dive*
March 6 – Omaha, NE @ The Waiting Room*
March 7 – St. Louis, MO @ Old Rock House*
March 8 – Indianapolis, IN @ White Rabbit Cabaret*
March 9 – Cleveland, OH @ Beachland Tavern*
March 10 – Buffalo, NY @ Mohawk Place*
March 13 – Albany, NY @ Valentine’s*
March 14 – New York, NY @ Piano’s*
March 15 – Washington, DC @ DC9*

* w/ The Pack AD

Elliott BROOD are excited to announce their upcoming U.S. tour dates in support of the February 28, 2012 U.S. release of their album “Days Into Years” through Paper Bag Records. Revered for their live performances, Elliott BROOD are guaranteed to sell out shows and fill rooms across the nation.

Seeing is believing with this folk-rock trio, and the glowing support from the press speaks for itself — their shows are filled with energy and spirit, and it is on stage that their music truly comes to life, where not a foot in the room isn’t tapping along to the beat of each song.

Get your tickets now!