Matt Langley will release his highly anticipated sophomore album Virginia Avenue on May 3rd and take his band on the road to celebrate.
Presented by Groove Guide, Radio 1, RDU, and Radio Active, in association with bFM, the Virginia Avenue Album Release Tour includes:
Dunedin - Friday 3rd May - Chicks Hotel
w/ The Shifting Sands
Lyttleton - Saturday 4th May - Naval Point Yacht Club
w/ Adam McGrath (The Eastern)
Auckland - Sunday 5th May - Kings Arms
w/ Bernie Griffen & Kirsten Warner
Wellington - Thursday 9th May - Mighty Mighty
w/ Darren Watson
Virginia Avenue is named after the street in Broad Bay on the Otago Peninsula where Matt lives and wrote the album.
Produced by renowned pairing Brett Stanton (The Phoenix Foundation) and Riki Gooch (Trinity Roots, Eru Dangerspiel), the album also features some of New Zealand's finest musicians including Gooch on drums, Tom Callwood (Phoenix Foundation) on Bass, Thomas Watson (Cassette) on guitars.
It follows Langley's critically acclaimed 2010 debut Featherbones which included APRA Award winning song '7.13'. The NZ Herald said that Featherbones was "as fine a singer-songwriter debut album album as you could expect" and the Sunday Star Times marvelled that "it is one of life's simple pleasures to hear a voice like this".
Matt has spent the last two years touring NZ consistently with The Eastern, Darren Watson, Mel Parsons and Australian Jordie Lane, building a formidable following nationwide.
He has also taken the time to write, Virginia Avenue, drawing from a batch of over 50 album ready songs.
While Featherbones was a genuine minimal masterpiece, Virginia Avenue is heavier, darker and dripping with quality.
Themed as an actual album in form (two distinct sides complete with an instrumental ‘intermission’), it features fifteen songs that embrace the listener. By turns heartbreak and dark humour… ‘life is a bad joke…and then you die.’ The punch line undercut by Langley's willingness to push lyrical honesty into places that we all know, places that cut ‘…Your love is dirt, the blood under my nails, the way I cling to it.’
The core band of Gooch, Callwood and Watson free up wide open spaces on tear-my-heart-out tracks like ‘Sad Sound Good’, ‘Ghost Wanted’ and ‘So It Seems’ as well unleashing fearsome noise on the apocalyptic ‘Unto the Ends of this Earth’ before delivering the live acoustic heart ache and warm harmonies of ‘Bitter End’.
Virginia Avenue was recorded in Wellington in the Wright Street Production Village.
Produced by Brett Stanton and Riki Gooch
Engineered by Brett Stanton
Mastered by Mike Gibson
Virginia Avenue is distributed by Rhythmethod and was made with the generous assistance of Creative New Zealand.
