RF Shannon — Jaguar Palace (March 31, 2017)

   ^{RF Shannon — Jaguar Palace (March 31, 2017)}  •   Fresh off a tour across Europe with Jess Williamson (after having performed on her latest record Heart Song), RF Shannon has also been invited to play the official Music Showcase at SXSW 2017.
•   RF Shannon’s Jaguar Palace is a true culmination of pastoral textures and reverb laden guitar sounds. Soaking in desert sun and wrapped in native wool blankets of soul searching blues, RF Shannon invokes lust in the listener’s ear; creating a visual landscape for the mind which conjures spirits with the stark, lonely and profound magic emitted by the land they inhabit. Shane Renfro, the band’s mastermind, opens the door that My Bloody Valentine closed; letting his airy, shoegazey voice saturate the lush landscape the music has created. They trade fuzz for lap steels, distortion for disintegration, breaking apart the dried earth of the high plains and exposing the underbelly of the Americana that existed before we arrived. The iron wheels of this dark train cruise along at a whispers pace with allies Jeff Renfro, Austin Burge, Luke Dawson (Christian Bland and the Violators) and Nathan Dixey (The Dan Ryan) armed to the teeth with an arsenal of whines, flutters and backbone stiff enough to make a dead man rise.
•   In the period surrounding the release of their new full length, RF Shannon is planning a special one~off performance in the Austin area where they play Jaguar Palace from start to finish joined by musician friends filling out the textures touched on the album. A full US tour will follow the performance.
•   Get on your wild horse, let the dust cover your face and let your eyes be blinded by the vision to which Renfro and RF Shannon are opening our minds. (http://riotactmedia.com/)Location: Lockhart, Marfa, TX
Genre: Americana
Subgenre: Psychedelic
Album release: March 31, 2017
Record Label: Cosmic Dreamer Music (Venice, CA)
Duration:     30:49
Tracks:
1. Jaguar Palace     7:05
2. In the Wilds of My Mind     5:45
3. Tell My Horse     6:20
4. Had a Revelation     3:50
5. Hotevilla     11:01
6. New Weimar Train     7:46
℗ 2017 Cosmic Dreamer Music
Personnel:
•   Shane Renfro
Press:
•   “Like the larger than life scenery he draws from, Renfro writes songs that slowly expand into sprawling sonic landscapes full of emotion and wide~eyed wonder.” — KUTX Austin
•   “He was funneling his country slides through a desert mysticism — beautifully, too…” — NOISEY
•   “The whole thing sounds as though it’s coming to you through a layer of thick smoke; the guitars squall slowly and epically, while the vocals are drenched in reverb.” — Austin Town Hall
•   “Through earthy soundscapes and slowly painted canvasses, the group knit and weave loosely structured layers and tellingly poignant moods into an album of evocative self~exploration.” — Gold Flake Paint
•   “This album shares the dream state quality of something like Mazzy Star or Brightblack Morning Light; you find yourself listening for sounds outside of the speakers, looking out the window.” — Houston Free Press
•   “Immersive and intimate yet somehow strangely remote, this is a lost radio transmission from the damp, deep caverns of the human spirit…” — Austin Monthly
•   “RF Shannon’s new album, Jaguar Palace, sits somewhere in a triangulation of Pink Floyd’s mellow psyche~ambiance, My Bloody Valentine’s exquisite lushness and Neil Young’s rootsy~but~still~experimental Americana.” — Exclaim
Review
Alex Robert Ross, Feb 23 2017, 4:58pm
•   The title track from his debut album arrives at a cosmic country bliss.
•   Last we heard of RF Shannon, the Texas~based deconstructionist country musician born Shane Renfro, he was grappling with solitude. Last October’s Other Trails EP felt laconic and assured on first listen, but beneath the slow grace, he was searching for a resolution. In the end, he seemed to be assuring himself of a newfound peace more than convincing the listener. It was engrossing, but always a little haunting. “Had a Revelation” asked itself, “Do you change with the seasons? / Do you cling to the past?,” but never got an answer. “There was a time when I knew everything / No more do I care,” he sang on “Ten Spirits Strong.” He was funneling his country slides through a desert mysticism — beautifully, too — but he was still purging earthly bother before leaping over.
•   Shannon’s debut album, Jaguar Palace, is out March 31 (on Cosmic Dreamer, appropriately). And the album’s title~track, premiering on Noisey today, finds him in total reverie. It opens with pan pipes, pianos, and a damp guitar, all yawning into each other, before Shannon walks in in a trance, the drums trying to slow down to his pace. Again, he’s uncertain: “Easy thing, Easy thing to pretend,” he sings. But he finds a resolution divorced from absolute certainty. “There’s a song in the reeds / Hear her sing out to me: ‘Your love doesn’t bring with it a new life, but it sure feels nice.’”
•   Shannon sent Noisey a note to introduce the track:
•   I wanted to write a song that had this constant lull, something like a meditative tone, a wave~constant to refer to ~ almost like the breath in a meditation practice. The tone, musically and lyrically, is referential to the notion of stalking thoughts and feelings as they arise, to stalk them as unconscious prey, tracing them back to their source and watching them disappear. The image of a jaguar kept popping into my mind... just quietly doing its thing in the night jungle, terrifying but peaceful and pure to its existence. I find it to be a penetrative force in confronting fears, taking risks, facing the unknown, this kind of stalking. It’s something of a practice I’ve tried to maintain since.  So this song came about as I was exploring these ideas and images. The end break where I sing “your love doesn’t bring with it a new life, but it sure feels nice” is sort of the result of this process. This non~attached acceptance of a state of being. It’s a thing I’ve always known is better to practice than gasping, grasping, clinging...  nothing like a wild jaguar would be doing, unless he were severely wounded and stuck way up high in a tree. Though I guess that’s not an unthinkable thing, there’s room for that kind of experience too. In the end, I think just wanted to hear this groovy meditative song.   •   https://noisey.vice.com/
Also:
By Peter Ellman, Published Mar 29, 2017;  Score: 8
•   http://exclaim.ca/music/article/rf_shannon-jaguar_palace
Bandcamp: https://rfshannonmusic.bandcamp.com/album/jaguar-palace
Label: http://www.cosmicdreamermusic.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rfshannonmusic/
SXSW: http://schedule.sxsw.com/2017/artists/13965
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rfshannonmusic
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/rfshannon
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO5-STmjV8GcjIptLiIIWAA
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RF Shannon — Jaguar Palace (March 31, 2017)

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