Seoul duo Salamanda arrive on Wisdom Teeth with their latest and most focused LP yet: 'In Parallel' - a vividly textural and immersive record that brings a new level of clarity to their typically psychedelic, expansive approach.

Since arriving in 2019, the pair - comprised of friends Uman Therma (aka Sala) and Yetsuby (aka Manda) - have been fast at work mapping out their elaborate, dream-state sonic world - prolifically honing their sound across four albums and over a dozen singles to date.

Across their already-extensive discography the pair have established a few key calling cards. Mallet instruments and tuned drums play out playful music-box melodies. Thick washes of gaseous ambience invoke otherworldly or ancient soundscapes. And buried fragments of found sound and manipulated vocal give their otherwise synthetic compositions a warm sense of first-person narrative. Ambient and Reich-school minimalism are the music’s most obvious sonic touchstones - yet the pulse of contemporary club and pop music have never been totally out of earshot.

All of these themes come in to play here - but 'In Parallel' signals a step well beyond Salamanda’s work to date. Since 2022’s 'ashbalkum' (released on Wisdom Teeth alumni Tristan Arp’s label, Human Pitch), the duo have toured extensively: at classical institutions like London’s Kings Place as well as DIY club dens like Manchester’s White Hotel, all via a series of globally renowned festivals like Mutek, Nachti and Dekmantel. Their creative set-up has grown steadily alongside to incorporate a whole suite of new machines, processes and perspectives, taking their music in bold new directions in the process.

The clearest development here is in the duo’s use of vocals - a shift that has been slowly taking place over their last few records, but that comes to a head on In Parallel. The album’s lead single 'Homemade Jam' is the closest the duo have come to writing an all-out pop track: its buoyant beat and autotuned vocals sounding like something SOPHIE and Charli XCX could have written after a particularly potent batch of mushroom tea. It’s a razor-sharp slice of alt-pop that offers a mouthwatering first look at what happens when Salamanda’s sprawling, unbridled creative energy is distilled right down into something concentrated and polished.

At other points their sonic explorations lead them to embrace a more upfront approach to rhythm, skirting closer than ever before to the dancefloor in the process. The meandering drums and vocal chops on 'Paper Labyrinth' are underpinned by a firm 4x4 pulse, while the dembow groove of 'Tonal, Fluid' would feel right at home in a Nick León or DJ Plead set.

'In Parallel' is a record about connection, and the warmth and nostalgic simplicity of friendship is felt vividly throughout. Its title refers to the harmony the duo have found between them as friends and collaborators - and sonic parallels are traced throughout the record as testament to this. Motifs come and go before reappearing at later points: take, for example, the melody underpinning ‘Sun Tickles’, which returns in a different key and tempo on album closer ‘Mysterious Wedding’. Parallel lines are traced between each artist and through their music, linking back to their past and pointing ahead to the future. Only Salamanda know where these will take us next.

TRACK LISTING

1. Nostalgia
2. Homemade Jam
3. Sun Tickles
4. Purple Punch
5. Paper Labyrinth
6. Tonal, Fluid
7. Sending Ritual
8. Full Of Mushrooms
9. In Parallel
10. Mysterious Wedding

Originally released in the fall of 2003, The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place was a watershed moment for Explosions In The Sky, and a landmark album for underground and experimental music. Its iconic sound would become a touchstone in film and television as it inspired a generational sea change towards introspective art rock in lieu of traditional orchestral scores.

Artfully remastered by Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service, The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place Anniversary Edition is packaged in a stunning triple gatefold with restored and expanded original artwork, housed in a heavyweight slipcase. Exquisitely pressed onto colored vinyl for the first time ever, this is the soundtrack to our everyday lives in full panoramic wonder.

TRACK LISTING

1. First Breath After Coma (9:34)
2. The Only Moment We Were Alone (10:14)
3. Six Days At The Bottom Of The Ocean (8:43)
4. Memorial (8:50)
5. Your Hand In Mine (8:17)

Debut full length for one woman band Marthe on Southern Lord.

True Valkyrian metal inspired heavy riffing in a dark atmosphere of feasting ravens over a thunderous bamleground.

The war cry belongs to a distorted horde of crust punk and black metal venture.

The dust semles over the power of Bathory, the melancholy of Tiamat and the stench of Amebix.

Antifascist. Feminist. Misanthropic.

Includes cover of Siouxsie and the Banshees ‘Sin In my Heart’.

TRACK LISTING

1. I Ride Alone
2. Dead To You
3. Further In Evil
4. VicTmized
5. To Ruined Altars…
6. Sin In My Heart (Siouxsie And The Banshees)

Presented with a carefully selected set of digital multitrack master recordings from the archives of the iconic Jamaican Reggae Producer Bunny Striker Lee, next generation UK producer and dub engineer Prince Fatty (Mike Pelanconi) fed the audio into the analogue realm for mixing through a carefully built audio analogue system similar to that used by Osbourne Ruddock (King Tubby), producing 10 new dub mixes for the modern age.

TRACK LISTING

1. Jah Jah Dub The Conqueror
2. The Invasion
3. Press The Dub Along
4. Don't Try To Dub Me
5. Dub Is Shining
6. Give Thanks & Dub
7. Garden Of Dub
8. Prophetic Dub
9. No Dub In Their Heart
10. Abudajonoi

Women In Revolt! is an exhibition of work by over 100 women artists working in the UK during the 1970s and 80s. In a first of its kind showing, it explores how women used radical ideas and rebellious methods to change the face of British culture. With music, painting, sculpture, photography, film, and performance, they forged a path for women’s liberation in the UK, against a backdrop of extreme social change.

Drawing on the work and experiences of women outside the establishment and often excluded from art history, Women In Revolt! Showcases a productive, politically engaged set of communities, who paved the way for future generations. It explores and reflects on issues and events such as: the British Women’s Liberation movement, the fight for legal changes impacting women, maternal and domestic experiences, Punk and independent music, Greenham Common and the peace movement, the visibility of Black and South Asian Women Artists, Section 28 and the AIDs pandemic.

To underline this trailblazing exhibition, a compilation has been dutifully curated to further reveal the music, sound art, and prominent musicians creating during this artistic and societal paradigm shift. The music that defines and defied this era, not only soundtracked but spurred on increasingly impassioned creative output and representation for women. Bands included on the compilation like X-Ray Spex and The Slits remain front of mind for band’s espousing this robust stance both sonically and politically, with equally impactful artists included like Ludus, whose lead singer Linder Sterling also impacted the genre with her radical feminist visual artwork and music. 

TRACK LISTING

A)

1) White Mice – Mo-Dettes
2) Typical Girls – Slits
3) Idealogically Unsound – Poison Girls
4) Dear Marje – The Gymslips
5) Identity – X-Ray Spex
6) You – Au Pairs
7) Warm Girls – Girls At Our Best!


B)

1) Sightseeing – Ludus
2) No Side To Fall In – The Raincoats
3) In Love – Marine Girls
4) Trees And Flowers – Strawberry Switchblade
5) Aerosol Burns – Essential Logic
6) Launderette – Vivienne Goldman
7) October (Love Song) – Chris & Cosey 

Paused in Cosmic Reflection is the definitive story of The Chemical Brothers. Told in the voices of Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons, with contributions from friends and collaborators, it is fully illustrated with 30 years of mind-bending visuals.

The classic third (and final) album gets a 30th anniversary makeover.

IN UTERO 30 – 8LP SUPER DELUXE BOX SET:
Celebrating In Utero’s 30th, the 8LP Super Deluxe features 180-gram pressings of the album + 5 b-sides & bonus tracks newly remastered, 2 complete concerts from Los Angeles ’93 & Seattle ‘94 plus 6 bonus live songs from the tour – 72 total tracks – 53 unreleased tracks. Bonus items: an Angel-on-acrylic panel; 48-pg book with unreleased photos; new 20-pg fanzine; LA gig poster litho; 2 ticket stubs; replicas of the promo Angel mobile, 3 gig flyers, all-access tour laminate & 4 backstage passes.

IN UTERO 30 – 5CD SUPER DELUXE BOX SET:
Celebrating In Utero’s 30th, the 5CD Super Deluxe features the album + 5 b-sides & bonus tracks newly remastered, 2 complete concerts from Los Angeles ’93 & Seattle ‘94 plus 6 bonus live songs from the tour – 72 total tracks – 53 unreleased tracks. Bonus items: an angel-on-acrylic panel; 48-pg book with unreleased photos; new 20-pg fanzine; LA gig poster litho; 2 ticket stubs; replicas of the promo angel mobile, 3 gig flyers, all-access tour laminate & 4 backstage passes.

IN UTERO 30 – LIMITED EDITION 1LP + 10-INCH:
Celebrating In Utero’s 30th, the album pressed on 180-gram vinyl plus 5 b-sides & bonus tracks pressed on a 10-inch have been newly remastered from 96kHz 24-bit transfers of the original analog tapes by original album engineer Bob Weston. Original album artwork has been expanded to a premium tip-on gatefold jacket for the first time with new 10-inch jacket art.

IN UTERO 30 – 2-CD DELUXE EDITION:
Celebrating In Utero’s 30th, the 2CD Deluxe Edition features the album newly remastered plus 14 previously unreleased live tracks from the ‘93/’94 In Utero tour. Each song on In Utero is represented with a live performance from Los Angeles, Springfield, Rome, New York & Seattle plus two cover songs widely played throughout the tour: The Vaselines’ “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam” & David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World.” Housed in a softpak with newly designed 20-pg booklet.

The renaissance of Divine Horsemen—which began in 2021 with In The Red’s release of Hot Rise Of An Ice Cream Phoenix, the legendary Los Angeles punk band’s first release in 33 years—continues with a thrilling and unexpected new album, Bitter End Of A Sweet Night. The new sixteen-track collection again features the band’s cofounding members, singers-songwriters Chris Desjardins (better known as Chris D.) and Julie Christensen, and the core members of the ferocious Hot Rise band—guitarist / co-writer Peter Andrus (a member of the group’s late ’80s lineup), bassist Bobby Permanent and X’s nonpareil drummer DJ Bonebrake. The sound is filled out by Green On Red and Dream Syndicate keyboardist Chris Cacavas (who appeared on the 1984 Chris D. / Divine Horsemen album Time Stands Still) and classically trained violinist Elizabeth Wilson. Desjardins produced the album. Divine Horsemen’s dramatic In The Red bow and a 2020 archival set of club performances from 1985 and 1987, issued by Feeding Tube Records, reacquainted listeners with their stormy power and eclectic roots-punk musicianship, which diversified the searing approach taken by Desjardins’ previous band, foundational L.A. punk unit the Flesh Eaters. (Christiansen had previously regrouped with her former husband and musical partner Desjardins on I Used to Be Pretty, the 2018 album that reunited the 1980 “all-star” Flesh Eaters lineup.) Reaction to the group’s rebirth was rapturous. Jaime Pina of Punk Globe called Hot Rise Of An Ice Cream Phoenix “brilliant,” adding, “The music is lush with both acoustic and electric guitars and the songs pull influences from all over, including country, rock, traditional ethnic folk music and blues.” Michael Toland wrote in The Big Takeover, “Reclaiming its classic sound of sweat- and grime-stained Americana, Divine Horsemen is reborn like the mythical creature in the title.” John Apice of Americana Highways raved, “Like the Rolling Stones, [Divine Horsemen] continue to thrill. They have grit, muscle and potency….Divine indeed.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Memory Fails
2. Talking In Your Sleep Again
3. You Knew No Other Way
4. Vanina Vanini
5. Bitter End
6. No Mercy
7. The Next Man That I See
8. Dirty Like An Angel
9. On The Wane
10. Murder Of Courage
11. These Evils
12. Coffee Shop Blues
13. Notorious
14. Garden Of Night
15. Footprints On The Moon
16. It's Still Nowhere

"Half multimedia art studio, half experimental musical group- the Vancouver-based collective better known as Crack Cloud took over Evolutionary Arts Hackney with their massive genre-bending sound in October 2022.

Fresh from the September 16th release of their sophomore record Tough Baby, this performance with six piece choir and strings (the band totalled seventeen on stage), for one night only was recorded and documented on film and presented here as Crack Cloud - Crackin Up Live in London. A legendary band at a legendary venue"

Lone Bison / Nick Bonell lives by the sea in Ramsgate. Mainly a guitar player and pedal junky, Nick bought a used Korg MS20 and fell in love with synths. As one half Stuntmen, Nick released the sample-heavy single 'You're the Beat Find' on the very groovy Tummy Touch label, which led to him scoring three Ford adverts in the U.S and a few pieces of well-used production music - which paid for more synths and pedals! An album, 'Transistor Memory' and single 'Drugs' came out via Dom Martin's Polytechnic Youth records in 2021.

Lone Bison's music is influenced by Krautrock, electronica, post-punk, soundtracks and post-rock.

Wave Construction is his first album for Castles in Space. There will be many more.

RIYL: Hinds, Alvvays, Pastels, Heavenly, Shop Assistants, Look Blue Go Purple, Electrelane, Grauzone, Stereolab.

Ahora, the new record by Melenas is the exact opposite of "that di‑cult third album". While other bands might be suffering from a lack of inspiration typical of that delicate creative moment, our Spanish quartet reappears more invincible than ever, reassembled with a collection of dazzling songs, and revitalized with a splendid new palette of sounds that raises the following question: can you make jangle pop and garage rock with synthesizers? Listening to songs like 'K2' or 'Bang' the answer is a resounding yes, because the glorious throb of the analogue keyboards that dominate Ahora does not betray Melenas' sound, that bubbling vibration that the guitars provided until now, propelling their songs to the pop heaven. The new textures that vintage synths like the Korg Delta or the Yamaha PSR-36 provide maintain that immediacy, and also imprint fascinating new shades of color by stretching the band's sonic identity, transforming it with new nuances, from the crystalline pop of '1986' to the somber but moving undertones of 'Flor de la Frontera'.

Moreover, this new wealth of tonalities is in keeping with an album in which Melenas have a lot to say: its title ("Now") aspires to vindicate, according to the band, "the importance of time, to reflect on how we live our everyday lives, with whom we share our moments and how we want (or don't want) to do it". An exploration of their own identity, of their relationships with others and of the importance of " togetherness, shared feelings and shared action". Their intentions to "convey a moment of halting and reflecting on the present to know what we want to remain and what we need to leave behind" are brilliantly captured in verses such as "El tiempo que pasó ¿a quién se lo dí? / Desde hoy ganaré lo que perdí" (The time that passed, who did I give it to? / From today I will gain what I lost") or the irresistible "Lo bonito se acaba, me dijo mi ama / Este fuego calienta o te puede quemar" (What is beautiful always comes to an end, my mama told me / This fire can heat you up or burn you down).

At the same time, musically, the new sonic vibes symbolically delve deep into those themes: the concept of togetherness is conveyed in the vocal harmonies, more abundant and elaborate than ever. The concept of time, by means of some astounding sequencers, arpeggiators and mechanical rhythms. Combined with Melenas' knack for pop, these elements turn many of these songs into an exciting mixture of darker, machine-like shades (the cold wave echoes of 'Flor de la Frontera', the kraut rhythm of 'Bang') with heavenly melodies. All this is woven together with a wealth of dazzling electronic arrangements, hand-crafted to perfection but played with the energy of a live band, in a very post-punk conjunction of synthesizers with real bass and drums. The outcome includes such wonders as 'Dos pasajeros', 'Tú y yo', '1986',or the beautiful 'Promesas', with its synthesizer ridestined to become a neo-synth pop classic.

Melenas are more in command of their creative powers than ever. Not so much to give a new twist to their music - which is still essentially rooted in a love of pop - but to invest their songs with a new electronic energy and vibe. With these ingredients, let's hope the future holds 1,000 more songs from Melanas.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ahora
2. K2
3. 1986
4. Dos Pasajeros
5. Flor De La Frontera
6. Bang
7. Promesas
8. Tú Y Yo
9. Mal
10. 1,000 Canciones

RIYL: Total Control, Cold Beat, Dark Day, Factrix, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, This Heat, New Order, Skinny Puppy, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, Sextile, Suicide.

Anyone paying attention can see that Cincinnati, OH is a very real hotbed of musical creativity at the moment, and the three members of The Serfs - Dylan McCartney (vocals, percussion, guitar, bass, electronics), Dakota Carlyle (Electronics, bass, guitar, vocals) & Andie Luman (vocals, synths) - and their respective side projects (The Drin, Crime of Passing, Motorbike) are undeniably near the center of Cincinnati’s neu-underground scene. After releasing albums on Berlin minimal-synth label Detriti & Seattle-based DREAM Records in 2018 & 2022 respectively, the band makes the move to Trouble In Mind for their third and best album yet. “Half Eaten By Dogs” puts a decidedly Midwestern spin on the modernist twitch of future-forward bands like Total Control or Cold Beat as well as the post-industrialist dance floor grime of Skinny Puppy, Dark Day, This Heat or Factrix.

“Half Eaten by Dogs” is a wide-eyed look through a scope into a desiccated and heathenish vision, where ice-encrusted synth harmonies command oozing chemical rhythms and drilled-out elemental rock formations. There’s a psychedelic melancholy to it-- in both the abstract lyrical sense, with doomed proclamations of natural and supernatural disasters, and the more tangible musical sense. It veers all over the map of tenebrous drum and synthesizer industries and stygian guitar implements, at times with a cautious paranoia and at times with tuneful defiance and exuberance (and in some moments harmonica, saxophone or flute). The album kicks off with the driving ‘Order Imposing Sentence’, a motorik rocker propelled by machine-driven rhythm & tarnished guitar riffing. ‘Cheap Chrome’s skeletal pulse drops in next, summoning the spirit of Cabaret Voltaire’s synth heartbeat into a modern-day mirror reality. ‘Suspension Bridge Collapse’ is a shimmering track that calls to mind Suicide’s oft-neglected second album, buoyed by what sounds like synthesized laser blasts (or perhaps suspension wires snapping?) before the siren-like guitar of ‘Beat Me Down’ kicks in - Its propulsive post-punk offering a sonic diversity under the same dark cloud. ‘Spectral Analysis’ is a late night drive down a lost highway, with a ghostly saxophone (by Eric Dietrich) guiding the doomed listener like the pied piper to their destiny. The flat-out sexy floor filler ‘Club Deuce’ kicks off side two, with its low-end sizzle designed to make you move, slithering like a lurker at the threshold of the dance floor. ‘Electric Like An Eel’ follows, with its “Brotherhood”-esque synth trills & harmonica punctuating the buzzing din. ‘Ending Of The Stream’ adds an unexpected natural warmth to the album, its blanket of synthesized tones envelops like a loving embrace, while ‘The Dice Man Will Become’s triumphant melody comforts as its Rother-like guitar volleys aim skyward. ‘Mocking Laughter’ closes out the album, its waves of synthesis evoking flashes of an end credits sequence - an apropos ending to a truly cinematic album.

“Half Eaten By Dogs” successfully coalesces everything that The Serfs have accomplished to date, but with greater intent and purpose than their preceding albums by a mile. There are songs to dance to, and songs to take in during a storm or while riding free through the roads of the world. It may be a step further down into the catacombs for the band, but if the principle of correspondence is correct, then they could be their way to somewhere higher.

TRACK LISTING

1. Order Imposing Sequence
2. Cheap Chrome
3. Suspension Bridge Collapse
4. Beat Me Down
5. Spectral Analysis
6. Club Deuce
7. Electric Like An Eel
8. Ending Of The Stream
9. The Dice Man Will Become
10. Mocking Laughter

Record Store Exclusive Edition
- Housed in a bespoke slipcase
- Alternate colourway
- Ribbon marker
- Kate Gibb risograph art print
- Limited to 1500 copies

Paused in Cosmic Reflection is the definitive story of The Chemical Brothers. Told in the voices of Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons, with contributions from friends and collaborators, it is fully illustrated with 30 years of mind-bending visuals.

Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons are The Chemical Brothers. In the UK, they have had six No. 1 albums and 13 top-20 singles, including two chart-toppers. They were pioneers in bringing the big beat genre to the forefront of pop culture. Robin Turner has worked with The Chems for more than twenty years.

This debut album from previous Sink Ya Teeth member Maria Uzor treads softly upon opening, before charging headfirst into a cosmic landscape of electro, avant-pop, footwork and stark techno.
Nine tracks delivered as the building blocks for a world seen through Uzor’s eyes where there are no boundaries, there are no walls, just a gentle beckoning to be yourself. ‘Soft Cuts’ is a joyful and groove-led journey with unexpected twists through the darkness.

Eclectic and esoteric, the album revels in it’s own diversity. There are echos of Aphex Twin in there, of Zapp, Kate Bush and Drexciya. And yet for all it’s influences, Maria has created a body of work that’s beautifully seamless in it’s amalgamations. Play loud and lose yourself to find yourself.

This past year has seen Maria Uzor release the first single ‘Ventolin’ from the Soft Cuts album to praise and support from John Kennedy (Radio X), Amy Lame, Tom Ravenscroft, Deb Grant, and Jamz Supernova (BBC 6 Music). She has also played festivals including The Great Escape, Nox Orae (Switzerland) and Manchester Psych Fest, and collaborated with Acid Klaus, !!!, and A Certain Ratio.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: As perfect as it is for home listening, there's no doubt that the endlessly talented Maria Uzor's music is courting the dancefloor, with shimmering arps and hefty percussives perfectly working beneath her haunting, perfectly produced vocals. A heady, dynamic mix of gothic wooze and dance-adjacent rhythm.

The fourth Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan album, The Nation's Most Central Location is released via Castles in Space and it's another absolute gem. This album sees Gordon Chapman-Fox (the man behind Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan) explore the north-south divide and reflect on 40 years of broken 'levelling up' promises.

With eight tracks across 40 minutes, the album offers Gordon's usual mix of mournful remorse and upbeat optimism. Gordon has now added an underlying anger that burns through on tracks such as London's Moving Our Way and A Brighter And More Prosperous Future.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A much needed repress of the great Warrington Runcorn's 'The Nation's Most Central Location', a benchmark release in the Castles in Space catalogue and a beautifully enchanting LP throughout. You need this in the collection.

ALSO, Gordon's come and signed a load of records for us! When they're gone..

TRACK LISTING

1. Just Off The M56 (J12) 03:06
2. Rocksavage 05:36
3. Daresbury Laboratory 04:51
4. London's Moving Our Way 07:13
5. Thelwall Viaduct 04:37
6. Europa Boulevard 07:05
7. Busway 03:14 
8. A Brighter And More Prosperous Future 04:12

2023 marks the 30th anniversary of Liz Phair’s beloved debut record, Exile In Guyville, which was first released on 22nd June, 1993 via Matador. To mark this, Matador Records will reissue the album on limited edition purple vinyl.

An 18-track double album loosely framed as a song-by-song reply to The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St., Exile In Guyville was dubbed a classic upon arrival. The album’s profile has only risen in the ensuing years. It is now regarded as an iconic work and a feminist landmark, recently cracking the top ten of Pitchfork’s “Best 150 Albums of the 1990s” (#4) and the top 100 of Rolling Stone’s “Best 500 Albums of All Time” (#56).

Liz Phair has continued to defy expectations and break barriers. She has released five albums, sold over five million records, composed music for television, and received two Grammy ® nominations. In 2019, she published a memoir titled Horror Stories. On her most recent full-length, Soberish (2021), Phair reunited with Exile in Guyville producer Brad Wood.

Today, three decades after the release of her debut, Phair’s influence in contemporary music – and particularly over female voices – resonates more strongly than ever.

TRACK LISTING

1. 6’1”
2. Help Me, Mary
3. Glory
4. Dance Of The Seven Veils
5. Never Said
6. Soap Star Joe
7. Explain It To Me
8. Canary
9. Mesmerizing
10. Fuck And Run
11. Girls! Girls! Girls!
12. Divorce Song
13. Shatter
14. Flower
15. Johnny Sunshine
16. Gunshy
17. Stratford-On-Guy
18. Strange Loop?

A new 7" double header from Balearic-boogie mainstay, A Vision Of Panorama. A truly diverse artist, whose work graces a number of different labels; his work for Star Creature has always been the perfect marriage of mellow, summery synth work and rugged boogie beats.

"Piano Sunset" epitomizes this ethos beautifully, with vintage drum boxes firing off some familiar rhythms whilst an array of wooden electric bass, sparkly keys and meandering piano notes create a dazzling vista of late afternoon enjoyment. A clean, digital signal path with nods to FM synthesis give this track high definition contours and a bright shine.

"Lost In Palms" sees the producer deliver a nicely swung, late night house jam. Build around a splendid house beat comprised of galloping congas, twatting hi-hats and classic 909 snares with plenty of shuffle; organ stabs and sparkling keyboard licks accompany a wobbly synthline and deep bass notes. Imagine if Kerri Chandler had grown up on the Italian Riviera and you're halfway there...

Top stuff as always from Star Creature and AVOP.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Star Creature heat from AVOP. "Piano Sunset" rocks that Zanzibar proto-house vibe brilliantly and is a must for fans of Mark Seven's Parkway series. On the flip, a swung late night house jam that has Kerri Chandler's DNA coursing through its veins.

TRACK LISTING

Side 1
1. Piano Sunset (4:32)
Side 2
1. Lost In Palms (4:55)

Two hidden gems from the P&P vaults courtesy of a scarcely known talent from Georgia, Florence Miller get an official reissue 'I'm Just A Lonely Girl' and 'The Groove I'm In'. With only two releases to her name, both of which came on Peter Brown’s P&P Records, ‘The Groove I'm In’ released around 1975 got the attention of the Northern and Modern Soul scenes in the mid ‘90s becoming a real star of the show. Since then, it’s maintained consistent demand on the second-hand market with originals selling for over £200.

As with most of Peter Brown's artists, they briefly emerged on the sparsely distributed P&P label, for a brief stab at stardom only to disappear when Peter's attentions moved on to the next releases. Consequently, very little is known about the multi-talented and sadly ignored Florence Miller following her two releases on the Harlem label. Clearly though, the music speaks for itself with the quality of the P&P catalogue and this Florence Miller slice of magic shining through to this day.

TRACK LISTING

A1. I'm Just A Lonely Girl
B1. The Groove I'm In

“When I was a teenager the wreckage of a sailboat washed up on the shore of Agate Beach. The remains of the vessel weren't removed for several days. I walked down with my father to peer inside the boat cabin. Maps, coffee cups and clothing were strewn around inside.

“I remember looking only briefly, wilted by the feeling that I was violating some remnant of this man's presence by witnessing the evidence of its failure. Later I read a story about him in the paper. It was impossible to know what had happened. The boat had never crashed or capsized. He had simply slipped off somehow, and the boat, like a riderless horse, eventually came back home.”

The Man Who Died in His Boat is an album of unreleased songs recorded alongside the Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill album.

TRACK LISTING

01 6 
02 Vital 
03 Cloud In Places 
04 Being Her Shadow 
05 Cover The Long Way
06 Difference (Voices) 
07Vanishing Point 
08 The Man Who Died In His Boat 
09 Towers 
10 STS 
11 Living Room

RIYL: Wet Leg, Es, Devo, LITHICS, Maraudeur, NOTS, The Staches, The Fates, Y Pants, Raincoats, Kleenex/Liliput, Chrisma.

German post-punk band Onyon scrambled our brains when we heard them for the first time last year, so much so that we signed them & reissued their eponymous debut cassette EP (originally co-released in limited quantities by the Flennen/U-Bac labels) in June of ’22. “Last Days On Earth” is the band’s latest & first proper full-length for Trouble In Mind.

The oddball, synth-soaked world of Onyon is disorienting at first - the band’s herky-jerky rhythms may operate in a familiar fashion to bands like Devo, Kleenex/Liliput or label-mates LITHICS, but Maria Untheim’s woozy synth squiggles that populate & punctuate the band’s songs keeps everything at arms-length. Flirting with the primitive cool of 80’s minimal-synth and the wire-haired cretinism of 60s garage, especially on tunes like the manic ‘Dogman’ or first single ‘Alien, Alien’. Guitarist Ilka Kellner’s six-string salvos rage unpretentiously with edges torn & frayed, rarely (if ever) soloing, but never afraid to unleash a spindly lead-line over Florian Schmidt’s rubbery bass lines & Mario Pongratz’s stuttering drum patterns that phase in & out of time imperceptibly like drunks doing their best to seem sober. Kellner & Untheim share vocal duties (in both English & German - sometimes in the same song), but the real magic comes when the two sing together, voices merging in loosely harmonic gang vocals; one deadpan, the other slightly unhinged. The group’s beguiling lyrics add to the mystique - inscrutable neu-world fables about egg machines, ghosts, worms that talk, and urges to consume newspaper that ooze a rural, old-world understanding of life & the imperceptible spaces in between reality & fiction, transmuted thru a modernist sci-fi lensflare.

TRACK LISTING

1. Alien, Alien
2. Talking Worms
3. Egg Machine
4. Goldie
5. Two Faces
6. Dogman
7. Blue Lagoon
8. Yahtzee
9. Invisible Spook
10. I Would Like To Eat The Newspaper
11. O.U.T.
12. Mower

26 years on from its first release and after various recent licensing requests - we have a limited reissue of this sought after deep classic.

Remastered for modern floors with the original '97 artwork, "In Too Deep" sounds deliciously contemporary, or at least, on trend. Those proggy synths, deep bass and crisp drums are all the rage right now, as the youth desperately seek to eek out another summer of love amongst the turmoil, hatred and corruption rife in our modern climate. Records like this can transport you away from the darkness into the light; a miniscule moment of heavenly transportation, to realms of relaxed bliss. Though fast paced and club focused, the dreamy nature of the track lends itself to solo listening as much as it does to dancefloor rotation.

"In Deeper" kicks like a mule on side B; with tough jagged drums and niggly bass sound. It's for the more wacked out period of the night or afterparty, certain to cause strange body contortions and relentless toe tapping at the best post-club kitchen knees up.

Clubs classics from Toko - available once again for a limited time! 

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Ahead of its time 1997, this deep, proggy, acid-flecked groover from Paul Ingall, Alec Greenhough & Si Brad sounds bang on trend right now and therefore been subject to various labels wanting to re-license it. The lads said 'fuck it we'll do it ourself'; resulting in this essential repress.

TRACK LISTING

A. In Too Deep
B. In Deeper

Disco Bits are back with 2 slices of high class edits for your next barn dance.

KLA vs TSI - "Make Me Believe In Free"
The Patti Jo classic is reworked for the dancefloor. Brand new vocals cut together with a steppin' nu-disco beat and soulful strings. Uplifting orchestral disco jive with Loft-y vibe a plenty. 

The Chopper - People On Hold
On the flip "People Hold On" by Rochdale's finest Lisa Stansfield gets sliced n diced by The Chopper. An uptempo chugger that will work in nightclubs and weddings alike!

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Disco Bits can always be relied upon for some tastefully spliced sevens to spice up the dance. Nice to see Rochdale's finest pop songstress making an appearance on this edition.

TRACK LISTING

X. KLA Vs TSI - Make Me Believe In Free
Y. The Chopper - People On Hold

The undisputed masters of brain-altering, transcendent electronics return with their first studio album since 2010’s "Further". Released to coincide with headline slots at Glastonbury, Sonar and Bestival, The Chemical Brothers’ eighth studio album - "Born In The Echoes" - is a magnificent 11-track collection of lean, propulsive machine driven music. From juddering robotic funk to unhinged futurist freakbeat; icy spectral psych to rhapsodic analogue synthetics; from euphoric spiritual acid to harmonic ambient distortion, the album is the sound of a reinvigorated Chemical Brothers creating some of the most mind-expanding music of their career to date. "Born In The Echoes" features a stellar cast of collaborators including previous guests Q-Tip, Ali Love (EML Ritual) as well as first time visitors to the studio - St. Vincent, Cate Le Bon and Beck (his first new music since his Grammy winning album "Morning Phase").

The latest EP from Drab Majesty marks the start of a stirring new chapter in the band’s majestic legacy. Written during a 2021 retreat to the remote coastal Oregon town of Yachats, Deb Demureleaned into the neo-psychedelic resonance of a uniquely bowl-shaped 12-string Ovation acoustic/electric guitar. After early morning hikes in the rain, Deb would record ambient guitar experiments the rest of the day, tapping into “flow states,” letting the sound lead the way. These sessions were then refined or recreated, and later elevated further with key collaborations by Rachel Goswell(Slowdive), Justin Meldal-Johnson(Beck, M83, Air), and Ben Greenberg (Uniform, Circular Ruin Studio). An Object In Motionis true to its title, capturing the chrysalis moment of an artist evolving, reborn and untethered, silhouetted against an open horizon.

“Cape Perpetua” kicks off the collection’s divergent palette: sparkling acoustic finger-picking refracted through delay, equal parts raga and reverie. Melodies and moods congeal and dissipate, at the threshold of rustic American primitivism, brooding neo-folk, and pastoral melancholia. “The Skin And The Glove” deploys jangle to different effect –baggy, soaring, grey-skied kaleidoscopic pop in the spirit of Stone Roses, Primal Scream, and The Glove. Rachel Goswell lends her iconic freefall voice to The Cure-esque ballad, “Vanity,” infusing poetic gravity to the doomed refrain: “If the valve breaks / then the earth quakes / and history finds a way / to put you in your place.”

“Yield To Force”, the closing track of the EP, may be the most anomalous offering of the set. A 15-minute instrumental odyssey of cyclical strings, ominous slide guitar, and simmering synthesizer, the piece sways and spirals like a long zoom into distant storm clouds. Demure finesses the guitar with a restless but regal grandeur, unfolding a panorama of peaks, shadows, and plateaus. It’s music both intuitive and prophetic, tracing the slow swing of pendulums across an endless plain. Taken as a whole, An Object In Motionpresents a showcase of potential futures from Drab’s evolving domain, their sound poised to bloom at the precipice of transformation.

TRACK LISTING

1. Vanity (feat. Rachel Goswell)
2. Cape Perpetua
3. The Skin And The Glove
4. Yield To Force 

A new direction for ODESZA sees them enlist the help of South-African singer-songwriter Yellow House for an EP that sees the duo explores a sound which seeks to blend their signature arena electronic sound with elements of indie rock, folk, & psych.

The latest new collaboration follow previous high-profile musical partnerships with the likes of Leon Bridges, Little Dragon, Regina Spektor, Julianna Barwick, Naomi Wild, Låpsley, and Ólafur Arnalds.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Dissolved In A Daydream
A2. Easy Money
A3. Waiting Forever (Feat. Preston.)
B1. Heavier
B2. Undone
B3. Flaws In Our Design

Throughout their legendary, decade-long run, the Shadow Ring were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-underground. Before their disbandment in 2002, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of rowdy teenagers in southeast England, left behind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7"s, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, all which have bolstered their enduring word-of-mouth mystique. Beginning this year with the first-ever vinyl pressing of the self-released pre-Shadow Ring tape The Cat & Bells Club (1992), Blank Forms Editions is conducting a systematic retrospective of the storied group, including a multi-year LP reissue effort and a forthcoming comprehensive CD box set and an over five hundred page book.

Recorded in summer of 1994 at S.H.P studios (frontman Graham Lambkin’s parents’ home), the group’s sophomore record Put the Music In Its Coffin is a more sinister, saturnine affair than their debut City Lights. Coffin was many listeners’ introduction to the Shadow Ring, who had hitherto self-released their music, courting a steady stable of international fans through the magazine and mail-order catalog Forced Exposure. For their follow-up, the duo reached out to the ascending Philadelphia label Siltbreeze, whose eclectic roster of sneering, low-fidelity rock and noise connected disparate subterranean scenes from rust-belt America to the English Midlands, Dunedin, and beyond. As luck would have it, Siltbreeze proprietor Tom Lax was already a fan of the band’s first record and arranged to release both a 7” and their “difficult second album.” The connection proved to run deeper than vinyl within six months, Lax would pick up the pair from the airport for their spring 1995 US tour. This episode marked not only their first trip to the States but their first live performances at all, formally introducing the Shadow Ring to the American underground and solidifying the allure of the Folkestone pair.

From the get-go, the record has a menacing, vile ambience. Its opening track “Horse-Meat Cakes,” inspired by an anecdote by pulp author Philip K. Dick about how he and his wife subsisted off low-grade pet food when he first arrived in San Francisco, sets the tone lyrically and sonically. Subsequent tracks are filled with Rabelaisian body horror and sinewy, haptic diction. “I try to pass out vital organs, convinced that they are waste,” intones Lambkin in “Heart, Liver & Lungs,” before a chorus of detuned guitars kicks in, nearly drowning out the speaker’s account of consuming chevaline intestines. Later songs similarly detail vernacular cooking (“Caribbean Porridge,” about a cornmeal hangover cure), bodily processes (“Nocturnal Middle Rumbles,” about nighttime defecation), and creaturely conflict (“Crystal Tears” and “Spin The Animal Dial”). The album’s makeshift percussion and teenaged rawness resembles the verve of City Lights, while its screeching strings and gnarly distorted vocals give it a sparse, miasmic atmosphere that look towards the uncompromising, otherworldly experimentation of the band’s Hold Onto I.D. (1996) and Lighthouse (1997), making this one of the Shadow Ring’s most distilled musical statements.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Horse-Meat Cakes
A2. Heart, Liver & Lungs
A3. Put The Music In It's Coffin
A4. Remembering Old Friends
A5. Mustard Hooves
B1. Nocturnal Middle Rumbles
B2. Caribbean Porridge
B3. Crystal Tears
B4. Spin The Animal Dial
B5. Moonlight In Wings

The 1990 debut album from Pale Saints, The Comforts of Madness, is an outstanding record that owed as much to post-punk and L.A.’s Paisley Underground scene than it did to shoegaze. The Sunday Times called it “an unintended indie manifesto: music that is at once wayward and concise, dissonant and beautiful.”

Shortly after its release and in need of a second live guitarist, Lush founding member Meriel Barham joined the Leeds trio of Ian Masters, Graeme Naysmith and Chris Cooper, bringing a new dynamic to the band.

Having previously worked well with producer Hugh Jones (Echo & The Bunnyman, Modern English, The Sound), he did a brilliant job recording their second album, In Ribbons (1992), despite some studio tensions. Brooklyn Vegan said in a recent celebration of the album that it was the “push and pull between Masters’ outsider tendencies and (the rest’s) commercial interests that makes In Ribbons so good. If some of the wild, ragged edges of Comforts of Madness have been smoothed off, the album makes up for it with scope and beauty. And there’s still no shortage of weird.”

Missing its original release date last year due to Covid delays and a production plant in meltdown, In Ribbons is finally getting the 30th Anniversary celebration it deserves with a special double LP / CD release – the first disc be- ing the UK version of the album, the second a bonus disc of never before heard demos (including their first attempt at Slapp Happy’s ‘Blue Flower’ and Ian’s 4 track recording of ‘Kinky Love’) and two brass band versions by The Tintwistle Band.

TRACK LISTING

Tracklisting (2LP/2CD)
A1 - Throwing Back The Apple
A2 - Ordeal
A3- Thread Of Light
A4 - Shell
A5 - There Is No Day
A6 - Hunted
B1 - Hair Shoes
B2 - Babymaker
B3 - Liquid
B4 - Neverending Night
B5 - Featherframe
B6 - A Thousand Stars Burst Open
C1 - Babymaker (Demo) *
C2 - Kinky Love (Demo) *
C3 - Hair Shoes (Demo) *
C4 - Shell (Demo) *
C5 - Hunted (Demo) *
C6 - Featherframe (Demo) *
D1 - Blue Flower (Demo) *
D2 - Throwing Back The Apple (Demo) *
D3 - Ordeal (Demo) *
D3 - Untitled Instrumental (Demo) *
D4 - A Thousand Stars Burst Open (Tintwistle Band Version) +
D5 - A Revelation (Tintwistle Band Version) +
* = Previously Unreleased

Tracklisting (LP Black Vinyl)
A1 - Throwing Back The Apple
A2 - Ordeal
A3 - Thread Of Light
A4 - Shell
A5 - There Is No Day
A6 - Hunted
B1 - Hair Shoes
B2 - Babymaker
B3 - Liquid
B4 - Neverending Night
B5 - Featherframe
B6 - A Thousand Stars Burst Open

In the early 90s, a number of bands exploring the daring side of guitar pop and rock started to emerge in the UK. Most were new, some included members of 80s groups looking for new directions. They were supported by established independent labels such as Rough Trade and 4AD/Guernica and new ventures like Too Pure or Domino.

Influenced by the legacy of post-punk, minimalism, 70s art rock and a growing electronic scene, their first releases were enthusiastically received by the media. This included a 1994 article in The Wire where journalist Simon Reynolds used the term “post-rock” to refer to some of them: Bark Psychosis, Disco Inferno, Moonshake, Seefeel, Main, Pram, Insides…

Even though these bands didn’t sound alike, they seemed to share an ethos of deconstruction and were interested in the possibilities of studio manipulation. Calling their music post-rock meant that it still had a link with established rock music, even as it picked it apart and made something new from its component parts.

However, 1994 was also the first year when Britpop dominated the UK charts and music press, and the contemporary artists featured on this collection felt their already-small window of exposure shrinking. Still, away from the limelight, they released innovative records that were lauded worldwide and have since acquired cult status.

The second part of the 90s brought a new crop of groups and “bedroom” labels that carried on this forward-thinking attitude to music, unburdened by genre notions and open-minded.

“In The Light Of Time” is the first compilation to survey this period and scene of UK music. If they were released today, these tracks would probably be described as post-punk, art rock or leftfield pop. But beyond any tags or labels, they remain as inventive and captivating as when they first came out.

TRACK LISTING

1. Second Language - Disco Inferno
2. Naturally Occurring Anchors – Spoonfed Hybrid
3. City Poison - Moonshake
4. Every Day Shines (D Mix) - Earwig
5. In The Light Of Time - Flying Saucer Attack
6. Starry Night - Laika
7. Spectra Decay - Main
8. Darling Effect - Insides
9. Loose Threads - Pram
10. A Cheery Wave From Stranded Youngsters - Mogwai
11. In The Event Of Just Looking - Appliance
12. (The) Weight - Hood
13. A Street Scene - Bark Psychosis
14. I Am The Sub-Librarian - Piano Magic
15. Play Away - Electric Sound Of Joy
16. Sun Drawing - Movietone
17. Through You - Seefeel 

"Back in the USA" is MC5's 1970 second album, celebrated for its energetic proto-punk vibe and departure from their previous style. Its fast-paced tracks, like "Ramblin' Rose" and "Back in the USA," showcase the band's rebellious spirit and helped shape the punk and garage rock genres that followed. The album's enduring influence on rock music solidifies its place in the annals of musical innovation.

Remain in Light is the fourth studio album by American rock band Talking Heads, released on October 8, 1980. The album features the singles ‘Once in a Lifetime’, ‘Houses in Motion’, ‘Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)’ and ‘Crosseyed and Painless’.

Paying homage to our dance music roots in Funk, with a remarkable curation of XL Middleton’s favourite artists of the moment. "Whether you're on or off the dance floor, it's always on the one. Keep it funkin" - XL Middleton

TRACK LISTING

A1. Saucy Lady - I Got It (XL Middleton Remix)
A2. Milk Talk - Sayonara Alpinist
A3. Tryezz - Sunset Crusin
B1. Moniquea - You Don't Have To Be A Star
B2. Shiro Schwarz - This Is Who I Am
B3. I Ced & XL Middleton - We Don't Have Forever
C1. XL Middleton - Awn-N-Crackin
C2. DJ Rocca - Beans Burrito
C3. Ghost - Groove 4
D1. Zopelar - Blue Gate
D2. Soul Clap & Zackey Force Funk - For You (XL Middleton Remix)
D3. Stimulator Jones - Wake Up
D4. Zyodara - Call My Name (feat Yasmina)

Bringing his worlds of words and music together, Colin MacIntyre’s (aka Mull Historical Society) brand new album ‘In My Mind There’s A Room’ features an all-star cast of literary giants who have penned words about a special room that plays or has played a significant part in their lives. Using these words as the lyrics, Colin has then written the musical arrangements to create a 14 track album of personal and thoughtful songs. Featured authors include Ian Rankin, Nick Hornby, Jacqueline Wilson and Liz Lochhead plus many more. Recorded, fittingly, in a room that means a lot to Colin – his grandfather’s flat above the bank in Tobermory, Mull which has now been turned into a recording studio.

TRACK LISTING

1. Not Enough Sorry
2. 1952
3. Wake Up Sally
4. The Red Flame Diner
5. Panicked Feathers
6. Kelshabeg
7. Somebody Else’s Life
8. My Bedroom Was My Rocket
9. Seeds
10. Meltwater
11. All Empty Rooms Must Be Mourned
12. Room Of Masks
13. Anaglypta
14. Memories Of Mull 

Celebrated composer, performer, saxophonist, soloist, band leader, educator, activist, and mixedmedia artist Matana Roberts returns with a new installment of their acclaimed Coin Coin series. For over a decade, Coin Coin has been the central artistic project for Roberts, a remarkable exploration of American ancestry and the nature of memory through “sound quilting”: modern composition that draws on a wide range of musical sources and traditions, along with researchdriven historical and genealogical narratives that yield prose and poetry both spoken and sung, field recordings, and graphic scores. The Quietus declares “when the 12-album cycle is complete, it will be regarded as a singular masterpiece of 21st century sonic and narrative art” and Pitchfork calls it “one of the most provocative ongoing bodies of work by any American musician.”

Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the garden... is the first new recorded audio chapter since 2019 and centers upon reproductive rights, summoning the story of a family ancestor who died in early adulthood, from a cause kept obfuscated and hushed, shrouded in disinformation and shame. Roberts reimagines diaristic and oral narratives, delivered in strident streams of spoken word that punctuate the hour-long work, with recurring musical themes frequently accompanied by the declarative refrain "my name is your name / our name is their name / we are named / we remember / they forget.” As Roberts writes in the accompanying liner notes essay:

I find it absolutely disgusting that the same trauma my grand ancestor, whose story we are telling in this chapter, is closely mirroring the experiences of some poor soul today as I write this... Our aforementioned grand, who perished at a young age, leaving her growing children motherless, did not have to die. The negative consequences of her death have reverberated down through generations in my family line, in the same way that a similar resounding might happen for someone else’s ancestral line generations from today. While often jazz-adjacent, and with Matana's inimitable saxophone and indomitable voice at the core, Roberts situates Coin Coin outside the Jazz genre and within heterodox pathways of postmodern composition, electroacoustic music, sound collage, experimental voice, and sound art.

In the garden… undeniably continues to express and expand upon the project’s magnificent iconoclasm, nonetheless being the most jazz-inflected chapter since Coin Coin Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile (2013). Recorded in Brooklyn with a stellar acoustic ensemble that includes Stuart Bogie, Gitanjali Jain, Darius Jones, Matt Lavelle, Mike Pride, Ryan Sawyer, Corey Smythe, and Mazz Swift, abetted by some sparkling pieces featuring modular synthesis courtesy of album producer Kyp Malone (Bent Arcana, TV On The Radio), In the garden… traverses a vivid stylistic array of thematic overtures, excursions and set pieces, ranging from spacious textural invocations to gorgeously tempered horn-led compositions to driving free jazz and exhilarating throughcomposed bursts of cacophony. With storytelling spoken-word lead vocals by Roberts channeled recurringly throughout, alongside various other deployments of layered and group voices, the album is alternately a meditation and fever dream of narrative potency.

This is some of the most intense and intensive music Roberts has composed and captured to date, richly conceived and deeply felt, restless yet focused, unflinchingly substantive and unique. Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the garden... channels epigenetic trauma and tragedy with teeming complexity and fierce beauty — a eulogy, testimony, and celebration, melding music and language in a stunning polychromatic flow of vernaculars and poetics. A powerful work of subjective commemoration and historical-cultural communion that speaks indelibly to the present moment.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Matana Roberts has been at the forefront of the experimental jazz scene for some time now, and their Coin Coin series is one of the mainstays of an exceedingly strong CST roster. A peerless performer and impeccable composer and storyteller.

TRACK LISTING

1 We Said
2 Different Rings
3 Unbeknownst
4 Predestined Confessions
5 How Prophetic
6 A Caged Dance
7 I Have Long Been Fascinated
8 Enthralled Not By Her Curious Blend
8 No Way Chastened
9 But I Never Heard A Sound So Long
10 The Promise
11 Shake My Bones
12 A(way) Is Not An Option
13 For They Do Not Know
14 Others Each
15 ...ain't I...your Mystery Is Our History

One can hardly imagine the genre-busting, culture-crossing musical magic of Outkast, Prince, Erykah Badu, Rick James, The Roots, or even the early Red Hot Chili Peppers without the influence of R&B pioneer Betty Davis. Her style of raw and revelatory punk-funk defies any notions that women can’t be visionaries in the worlds of rock and pop. In recent years, rappers from Ice Cube to Talib Kweli to Ludacris have rhymed over her intensely strong but sensual music.

There is one testimonial about Betty Davis that is universal: she was a woman ahead of her time. In our contemporary moment, this may not be as self-evident as it was thirty years ago – we live in an age that’s been profoundly changed by flamboyant flaunting of female sexuality: from Parlet to Madonna, Lil Kim to Kelis. Yet, back in 1973 when Betty Davis first showed up in her silver go-go boots, dazzling smile and towering Afro, who could you possibly have compared her to? Marva Whitney had the voice but not the independence. Labelle wouldn’t get sexy with their “Lady Marmalade” for another year while Millie Jackson wasn’t “Feelin’ Bitchy” until 1977. Even Tina Turner, the most obvious predecessor to Betty’s fierce style wasn’t completely out of Ike’s shadow until later in the decade.

Ms. Davis’s unique story, still sadly mostly unknown, is unlike any other in popular music. Betty wrote the song “Uptown” for the Chambers Brothers before marrying Miles Davis in the late ‘60s, influencing him with psychedelic rock, and introducing him to Jimi Hendrix — personally inspiring the classic album ’Bitches Brew.’

But her songwriting ability was way ahead of its time as well. Betty not only wrote every song she ever recorded and produced every album after her first, but the young woman penned the tunes that got The Commodores signed to Motown. The Detroit label soon came calling, pitching a Motown songwriting deal, which Betty turned down. Motown wanted to own everything. Heading to the UK, Marc Bolan of T. Rex urged the creative dynamo to start writing for herself. A common thread throughout Betty’s career would be her unbending Do-It-Yourself ethic, which made her quickly turn down anyone who didn’t fit with the vision. She would eventually say no to Eric Clapton as her album producer, seeing him as too banal.

In 1973, Davis would finally kick off her cosmic career with an amazingly progressive hard funk and sweet soul self-titled debut. Davis showcased her fiercely unique talent and features such gems as “If I’m In Luck I Might Get Picked Up” and “Game Is My Middle Name.” The album Betty Davis was recorded with Sly & The Family Stone’s rhythm section, sharply produced by Sly Stone drummer Greg Errico, and featured backing vocals from Sylvester and the Pointer Sisters.

TRACK LISTING

If I'm In Luck I Might Get Picked Up 
Walkin Up The Road 
Anti Love Song 
Your Man My Man
Ooh Yea 
Steppin In Her I. Miller Shoes 
Game Is My Middle Name 
In The Meantime

No Fixed Point In Space, the third full-length album by Jack Cooper’s Modern Nature, takes the palette of sound and themes that were honed on 2021’s Island Of Noise and launches them into an expansive world of openness and vivid technicolour. It’s a music that hasn’t been heard before; as melodic as anything Cooper has produced but framed by rhythms and instrumentation that reflect the chaos, unpredictability and colour of the natural world.

Certain moorings - woodwind, percussion, strings and Cooper’s lambent voice - are still present and recognisable from No Fixed Point In Space’s predecessor, Island Of Noise but the new record marks a shift to utilising musical notation as a point of departure, from which the group explore the space around suggested notes and rhythms to create a semi-improvised, semi-composed ensemble performance. These explorations of partly organised chance were recorded live and directly to tape.

This approach gives the music a remarkably fresh feel; songs pulse and evolve. The changes between movements, verse and choruses are almost all ambiguous. During the album’s opener Tonic, a verse of hushed brevity washes away into a passage of overwhelmingly vibrant orchestration.

TRACK LISTING

1. Tonic
2. Murmuration
3. Orange
4. Cascade
5. Sun
6. Tapestry
7. Ensō

‘Reverberations (Travelling In Time)’ is the debut Primal Scream album that never was: 16 perfectly formed pop nuggets weighing in at just under 35 minutes.

Boasting eleven previously unreleased BBC session recordings plus all five songs from the band’s first two Creation Records singles, ‘Reverberations (Travelling In Time)’ perfectly captures what many believe to be a crucial era for one of the UK’s most important groups as they went on to influence a wave of emerging bands, most notably The Stone Roses. It’s a collection which provides a snapshot of the youthful innocence and uninhibited passion that characterised their early two-minute indie-pop adventures.

Bobby Gillespie says, “This music proves we really had something special going on back then. I'm very proud of this album, I'm glad these sessions are finally being released.”

‘Reverberations (Travelling In Time)’ will be available on limited edition black or clear vinyl, as well as a special gatefold CD edition. Physical formats of the album include a wealth of unseen period photography plus essays by band members Bobby Gillespie and Jim Beattie as well as music historian Bob Stanley. The cover illustration was provided by renowned British illustrator and designer Julie Verhoeven, and each vinyl LP comes in a lavish gatefold sleeve with printed inner sleeve and a large format 8-page booklet.

A recap of the band’s early years provides the context within which the songs on ‘Reverberation’ were written and recorded. Primal Scream were formed in Glasgow during the early 1980s by Bobby Gillespie and Jim Beattie, two music obsessed kids from Mount Florida on the southeastern edges of the city. Initially inspired by punk rock and yet to learn how to play their guitars properly, early Scream home recordings were primitive affairs that often-featured Gillespie shouting into the microphone over droning basslines whilst banging on household objects that came to hand.

By 1983 the band were developing a sound and writing style of their own with Beattie playing an amplified acoustic 12-string on songs inspired by the duo's eclectic music tastes that ranged from PiL through Love, Big Star and The Byrds via the Ramones - beautiful melodies delivered with attitude and intent. The duo became a fully formed band during 1984 with the addition of Robert Young on bass and Tom McGurk on drums, by which time Gillespie had been invited to drum - Mo Tucker style - for East Kilbride pals The Jesus and Mary Chain.

The debut Mary Chain single ‘Upside Down’ - released on Alan McGee’s fledgling Creation Records in November 1984 - caused an overnight sensation upon release and placed Gillespie at the centre of a new and exciting sea change in the UK’s independent scene.

The debut Primal Scream single ‘It Happens’ (backed with ‘All Fall Down’) was hastily recorded at Alaska Studios, London in February 1985 but following its release on Creation in May it caught the attention of John Peel at BBC Radio 1 who invited the band for their first session on his show. Four new songs - heard here for the first time since being initially broadcast - indicated that the band were capable songwriters with a melancholic edge and self assured swagger.

Early Primal Scream shows were special events. The band, now augmented by tambourine player Martin St. John, were one of the most exciting and original prospects in the UK at the time. As Bob Stanley describes in this album’s sleeve notes, “They looked like a gang. More precisely, they looked like a Glaswegian variant of Love, a bunch of hard-nuts playing soft sounds laced with something potentially explosive.”

In May 1986 the NME offered the now legendary ‘C86’ cassette to its readers offering recordings that the magazine felt captured the zeitgeist of the UK indie scene at the time. The opening track - and by far the best thing on the tape - was Primal Scream’s ‘Velocity Girl’, a new recording that featured as a B-side on the group’s second single ‘Crystal Crescent’.

‘Velocity Girl’ sparked an even greater interest in the band including a second John Peel session and four songs recorded for the Janice Long show. Whilst fans eagerly awaited an LP of Primal Scream material, Alan McGee was being courted by major labels who had seen the impact of The Jesus and Mary Chain and were keen to cherry-pick the best candidates from the Creation roster for stardom. The two unlucky groups chosen for McGee’s ill-fated Warner Brothers experiment - Elevation - were Primal Scream and The Weather Prophets. Delays in signing the deal and recording what would become the the band’s October ‘87 debut ‘Sonic Flower Groove’ meant that a crucial part of the Primal Scream story had been overlooked - until now.

Released on Primal Scream’s own Young Tiki label, ‘Reverberations’ is the first in a series of limited edition releases that will explore rare and unreleased archive material. The band’s ‘Sonic Flower Groove’ album - including unreleased recordings and remixed masters - is set for release in 2024.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: No early Primals, no Stone Roses! Whilst their first album proper was something of a disappointment, their 2 original Creation Records singles (included here) and magical BBC sessions wrote the book on 80's/60's (what would ultimately be called) indie-pop. 1985-1987; just incredible and even after all these years, still, by far, my favourite era of this brilliant band.

TRACK LISTING

1. Imperial
2. Velocity Girl
3. Feverclaw
4. Silent Spring
5. I Love You
6. Tomorrow Ends Today
7. Bewitched And Bewildered
8. Crystal Crescent
9. Subterranean
10. Leaves
11. Aftermath
12. All Fall Down
13. It Happens
14. Crystal Crescent
15. Velocity Girl
16. Spirea X

You are about to embark on a new intergalactic journey into black space, fuelled by funk, powered by computers.

Soul Jazz Records’ new second collection of twisted hyperspace electro / funk ‘Space Funk 2: Afro Futurist Electro Funk in Space 1976-84’, continues its intergalactic journey. Featuring rare and off-the-wall space funk and electro rarities and obscurities, all released on small independent USA record labels in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Artists on this release include Alien Starr, Bobby Demo, Maggatron, Mid-City Crew, Tribe, Junie, Rich Cason and the Galactic Orchestra, and many more intergalactic space warriors.

The CD / 2LP comes in striking deluxe artwork featuring the radical African American model Pat Evans, who graced numerous album covers for The Ohio Players in the 1970s.

The space shuttle program has been altered, there are no star wars - only electro jam joyriders in space! Reactors are reacting, boosters are boosting, the countdown has started. This is space age bionic funk, programmed to make you dance.

TRACK LISTING

Alien Starr - Music-A-Lizer
Chance - Master Groove (Instrumental)
The Bobby Deemo Band - More Ounce Rap
Mack Simmons - Skin Tight
Maggotron - Computer Pop
Tribe - Vulcan Voyage
Command Performance - Breakdance
Junei - Let's Ride
The Graingers - Shine Your Light
Mid City Crew - Get Right
Chapter Three - Smurf Trek
X-Ray Vision - Video Control
Rich Cason And The Galactic Orchestra - Year 2001 Boogie
Frank James And Shadow - Summer Time

'‘Metallic Spheres’ by The Orb and David Gilmour, the guitar and voice of Pink Floyd, has been reimagined and remixed as ‘Metallic Spheres In Colour’ and will be released on 29th September. Of this new reimagining producer Youth says ‘The idea for Metallic Spheres In Colour, was that Alex Paterson (founder of The Orb) could have done more on the first version, and he didn't really have the opportunity because we had a philosophy of making the music like the Blade Runner soundtrack meets Wish You Were Here. So, I asked him why don't we remix it and make it like an Orb classic? And in doing that, it's almost like a completely different album.’

The original ‘Metallic Spheres’ album was initially released in 2010 was created almost by accident. In 2009 David Gilmour entered the studio to record the Graham Nash track"Chicago/Change The World", originally by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, in aid of the British Hacker Gary McKinnon, who was facing extradition to the USA. The song also featured vocals fromChrissie Hynde, Bob Geldof and Gary himself and the campaign was also supported by Peter Gabriel, Sting and the actress Julie Christie. 

Croatian Amor returns with “A Part of You in Everything” a companion piece to last year’s “Remember Rainbow Bridge”.

“My younger brother died at birth and I never had a chance to meet him. Growing up he was my ghost friend, someone told me he lived in the stars which I accepted. I had not paid attention to him for many years but when I was making "Remember Rainbow Bridge” and waiting for my son to come into the world he suddenly appeared again. I partly dedicated Remember Rainbow Bridge to him, but I knew that it wasn’t his record, so I thought I should make one just for him and here it is; “A Part of You in Everything”, 8 songs about being human on Earth. I think it’s music which is best listened to at night out under the stars. Thank you to all my friends who helped making it!”

Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
- Rilke.

Following on from their critically acclaimed debut album, the second album from Shackleton / Zimpel represents the culmination of the ecstatic trance urge that has underlined both artists work since they embarked on their singular yet somehow parallel paths.

The duo, consisting of electronic music maverick Sam Shackleton and visionary avant folk virtuoso WaclawZimpel, sees them link up with one of Indian Carnatic music’s greatest emerging young vocal talents, Siddhartha Belmannu, to bring an album which is equal parts both a meditative exercise and an urge to transcendence whilst thematising both the acceptance of our mortality and the joyous celebration of living.

The artists’ intention behind the album was to make a piece of work that was beautiful, deep and moving and which engages with the listener in a direct and honest way. Avant and forward looking music which doesn’t rely on cynical gestures to keep attention or enhance its artistic credentials. Put more simply, it is intended to go straight to the heart.

The album consists of four long form tracks which eschew the traditional verse and chorus structure in favour of getting lost within the trance. There are musical cycles within musical cycles whilst diverse time signatures and phrases exist alongside each other in a manner that is in stark contrast to much of Western music tradition. Whilst this may seem demanding for the listener, the artistry of the musicians and Siddhartha’s beautiful and deeply moving vocal, for the most part in his native language Kannada, make for a sublime listening experience.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Ocean Lies Between Us
2. Your Love Pours Like Water
3. Everything Must Decay
4. Relics Of Our Past

From the rock and roll revolutionary responsible for hits like “Great Balls of Fire '' and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On” comes a collection of remastered rare stereo mixes from the Sun Records archive. Jerry Lee Lewis, considered one of the last standing original rock and roll stars when he passed away in 2022, rocks and rolls his way through multi-track takes of songs like “Money” and “Ramblin’ Rose,'' featuring his versions of hits like “What’d I Say” and “Be Bop A Lula.”

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Be Bop A Lula
2. High Powered Woman (Alternate)
3. Good Golly Miss Molly
4. C.C. Rider
5. Hello Josephine
6. Good Rockin’ Tonight
SIDE B
1. Sweet Little Sixteen
2. Ramblin’ Rose
3. Just Who Is To Blame
4. When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold
5. When I Get Paid
6. Save The Last Dance For Me

Bleach Lab proudly call themselves perfectionists. The South London formed in 2017 as a duo of bassist Josh Longman and guitarist Frank Wates, they then recruited vocalist Jenna Kyle before reaching their final form at the start of 2021 with the recruitment of drummer Kieran Weston. After releasing three EPs, they are now gearing up for their debut album Lost In A Rush Of Emptiness, where the band felt free to experiment, always keeping true to their alternative nature. The songs on it are packed with widescreen, dreamy soundscapes that pushed their aesthetics forwards and continued the experimentation that exists at the heart of the project.

TRACK LISTING

All Night
Indigo
Counting Empties
Saving All Your Kindness
Everything At Once
Nothing Left To Lose
Never Coming Back
Smile For Me
Leave The Light On
Life Gets Better
(coda)

The third LP from the New Zealand quartet houses 12 jewels of tight, guitar-heavy songs that worm their way into your head, an incandescent collision of power-pop and skuzz. With Expert, The Beths wanted to make an album meant to be experienced live, for both the listeners and themselves. They wanted it to be fun -- to hear, to play -- in spite of the prickling anxiety throughout the lyrics, the fear of change and struggle to cope.

Most of Expert was recorded at guitarist Jonathan Pearce’s studio on Karangahape Road in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa (Auckland, New Zealand) -- and sometimes in the building's cavernous stairwell at 1am -- toward the end of 2021, until they were interrupted by a four-month national lockdown. They traded notes remotely for months, songwriting from afar and fleshing out the arrangements alone, the first time they’d written together in such a way. The following February, The Beths left the country for the first time in more than two years to tour across the US, and simultaneously finish mixing the album on the road. That latter half felt more collaborative, with everyone on-hand to trade notes in real time, until it all culminated in a chaotic three-day studio mad-dash in Los Angeles. There, Expert finally became the record they were hearing in their heads.

Expert is an extension of the same skuzzy palette the band has built across their catalog, pop hooks embedded in incisive indie rock. The album’s title track “Expert In A Dying Field” introduces the thesis for the record: “How does it feel to be an expert in a dying field? How do you know it’s over when you can’t let go?” Stokes asks. “Love is learned over time ‘til you’re an expert in a dying field.”

The rest is a capsule of The Beths’ most electrifying and exciting output, a sonic spectrum: “Your Side” is a forlorn and sincere love song, emotive; while “Silence is Golden,” with its propulsive drum line and stop-start staccato of a guitar line winding up and down, is one of the band’s sharpest and most driving. “When You Know You Know” skews a bit groovier, pure pop and a natural addition to the band’s live set. “Knees Deep” was written last minute, but yields one of the best guitar lines on Expert. There’s a certain chaos across the 12 tracks, the palpable joy of playing music with long-time friends colliding with the raw nerves of pain.

Stokes strings it all together through her singular songwriting lens, earnest and self-effacing, zeroing in on the granules of doubt and how they snowball. Did I do the wrong thing? Or did you? And are we still good people at the end of it? She isn’t interested in villains, but instead interested in just telling the story. That insecurity and thoughtfulness, translated into universality and understanding, has been the guiding light of The Beths’ output since 2016. In the face of pain, there’s no dwelling on internal anguish - instead, through The Beths’ music, our shortcomings are met with acceptance. And Expert In A Dying Field is the most tactile that tenderness has been. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Expert In A Dying Field
2. Knees Deep
3. Silence Is Golden
4. Your Side
5. I Want To Listen
6. Head In The Clouds
7. Best Left
8. Change In The Weather
9. When You Know You Know
10. A Passing Rain
11. I Told You That I Was Afraid
12. 2am

In the Red Records will proudly present the U.S. edition of Rantings from the Book of Swamp, the freewheeling eighth studio release by Australia’s magnificent and unpredictable Kim Salmon and the Surrealists, as a two-LP. The Surrealists were formed by the Scientists’ singer-songwriter-guitarist Kim Salmon in 1987, betwixt the last two tours by the original incarnation of that pathfinding Perth-bred band. The Surrealists had been dormant in recent years, as the bandleader focused his energy on recording and touring with a reunited lineup of the Scientists featuring guitarist Tony Thewlis, bassist Boris Sujdovic, and drummer Leanne Cowie, who had recorded the career-summarizing 1986 LP Weird Love. (In 2021, In the Red issued Negativity, a new album by that unit, to wide acclaim.) In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown settled around the globe Salmon reconvened with bassist/baritone guitarist Stu Thomas and drummer Phil Collings, who had appeared on the Surrealists’ 2010 release Grand Unifying Theory, the group’s most recent record. As with that work, the new material was created live on the studio floor, and emphasized improvisation in both its structure and content.

“The premise for this recording,” Salmon explains, “was that at its commencement the band members would come prepared with no other material than whatever ideas they might be able to individually bring. The lyrical content was all derived from my notebooks (Book of Swamp) from sketches I’d been jotting down over the last couple of years. There was to be no consultation about musical forms until the event began. Once the event began, the band had carte blanche to do whatever necessary to salvage compelling performances over the two live events @ 7PM AEST 6/13/20 + 6/14/20 respectively…….i.e., we had to make it up from scratch!”

Captured at Rolling Stock Recording Rooms in Collingwood, Victoria, Australia, by Myles Mumford, the music heard on Rantings from the Book of Swamp was originally presented as a pair of live streams directed by Andrew Watson at Semiconductor Media. The resultant album comprises 13 brain-bending tracks characterized by Salmon’s percolating lyrical imagination and the raw, unfettered interplay of the three seasoned musical collaborators. After the world began to emerge from the pandemic lockdown in 2022, the Surrealists hit Australian stages on the double-barreled “You Gotta Let Me Swamp My Rantings” tour, which featured two different lineups performing two albums in toto: the Rantings from the Book of Swamp trio, and the threesome of Salmon, Thomas, and drummer Greg Bainbridge, who played the material from You Gotta Let Me Do My Thing, the 1997 Surrealists album they cut together. Offbeat, off the street, off the map, and off the wall, Rantings from the Books of Swamp serves as a potent reminder that Kim Salmon and the Surrealists remain a puissant force in boundary-pushing rock music.

End, the enigmatic seventh album by Explosions in the Sky, was inspired by darkness, but became a loud, dramatic, wild rumination on life and death.

“Our starting point was the concept of an ending—death, or the end of a friendship or relationship. Every song comes from a story, or an idea one of us has had that we’ve all expanded on and made its own world. Maybe it’s our nature, but we kept feeling that the album title was ultimately open to a lot more interpretation—the end of a thing or a time can mean a stop, but it can also mean a beginning, and what happens after one thing ends might pale in comparison to what it becomes next,” says the band about the album.

End is perhaps the “grandest” Explosions in the Sky album – melding the quiet restraint and crushing feel of their early releases with the sonic texturing and ornate experimentation of their later releases, and their increasingly deep film and television scoring catalog, influenced by personal tastes stretching from classical to soul to experimental ambient music.

The title “End” furthers a story arc reflected in the album titles that started with the “innocence” of their first album (How Strange, Innocence), progressed through the idealism and romanticism of their second and third albums (Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever and The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place), followed by the introspection (All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone and Take Care Take Care Take Care) and big-picture focus (The Wilderness) of their most recent albums.

End is the band’s seventh, but not final, studio album

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It's always going to be a big thing for me when EITS release an LP (massive fan), and while their soundtrack-adjacent 'Big Bend' LP from 2021 was high up my album charts for the year, it's been a while since a full studio album has affected me the way 'Those Who Tell The Truth..' or 'The Rescue' did. I can say with some confidence that 'End' might be my favourite thing they've done for a couple decades now.

TRACK LISTING

1 Ten Billion People
2 Moving On
3 Loved Ones
4 Peace Or Quiet
5 All Mountains
6 The Fight
7 It's Never Going To Stop

Cosmic Myth Records is dedicated to issuing reamstered and fully authorized out of print titles from Sun Ra's independent Saturn Records catalog. Sun Ra's Jazz in Silhouette was enshrined in the Penguin Jazz Guide's "Core Collection" as an album that "will someday be recognized as one of the most important post-war jazz records."

Remastered with extra tracks - extra disc also includes Sound Sun Pleasure LP. Features the original space nymph cover art, which only appeared in cropped and washed out reproductions on an early 60s version.

The album contains 14 tracks sourced from existing duets, songs that previously were not duets, translations from Spanish and a sprinkling of original compositions. Thematically it explores the perennial themes of mortality, love and mankind’s search for meaning as well as an enthused engagement with the enigmatic and mythical. Harvey and Acevedo met several years ago in Mexico City, but it was during 2020/21 that the project burst into life, as ideas were exchanged across the oceans and through the ether. The resulting collection of songs is lush and sweeping in its emotional content and is full of nourishment for the imagination and the senses.

TRACK LISTING

1 Creators Of Rain
2 Indian Summer
3 I Lost Something In The Hills
4 Song To The Siren
5 Milk & Honey
6 Love Is A Battlefield
7 Al Alba
8 The Decadence Of Lust
9 Phantasmagoria In 2
10 The Blue Unicorn
11 She Won’t
12 Trapeze
13 The One & Only (Phantasmagory)
14 You’ve Got Me Singing

PJ Harvey, Sonic Youth, Dead Can Dance, Black Sabbath, Birthday Party.

In Blood is the group’s 14th album and the follow-up to 2020’s critically acclaimed Dances/Curses.

It was typical of a band so well-known for stellar live performances to release their most successful album at a time when they were unable to back it up on the road. As was the case for many, lockdown changed the band’s lives in unexpected ways. Some felt a form of cabin fever at not being able to continue to make music (diverting their energies elsewhere - founding Wrong Speed Records for starters) whereas others relished the peace and quiet, perhaps questioning whether they wanted to return to the life they had before. Gigs (so long the lifeblood of the band) were booked, postponed, and cancelled. Things began to unravel and perhaps for the first time since the band formed in 2003 it was hard to see how it could continue.

A plan was hatched to attempt to re-energise and reassemble the band: they would begin work on a new album. They would approach this as though a Somerset version of The Desert Sessions – members old and new and guests would contribute as and when time and restrictions allowed.

Lyrically, British folk and ghost mythology provided the starting position for the song themes ranging from mutated stories of grief and loss written in the 14th Century (Perle), spiritual reawakening by ancient apparitions (Avalon) to the growth of nature after devastation (Can’t Feel Around Us, Over Cedar Limb), a metaphor also for spirit and body renewal and rebirth after trauma.

The results sound free of any genre shackles and it suits Hey Colossus. They have taken the expansive anything-goes approach that made Dances/Curses so successful and fine-tuned and shaped it into an 8-song single album that never treads water or fills time. The prominent vocals steer the listener through the music, defining it as opposed to punctuating it (or being buried by it).

The album is a calling card for the band in their 20th anniversary year. As odd and challenging as long-term fans would expect or hope for, but somehow more accessible and to the point than ever before. It is the closest the group have ever come to a pop record, radiating positivity through the murk like a small ray of light in some very dark and very weird times. Music can never entirely negate these feelings but, like the natural world referenced in the lyrics and sleeve, it invisibly bonds people together, lifting us up if we choose to let it.

TRACK LISTING

1. My Name In Blood
2. I Could Almost Care
3. Perle
4. Can’t Feel Around Us
5. Curved In The Air
6. Avalon
7. TV Alone
8. Over Cedar Limb

Underground legend Drew Mullholland started recording as The Mount Vernon Arts Lab In the late 1990's. It was just one of the many names he was testing out for his imaginary groups and if things had gone differently, this album would be credited to Hyperion Illusion.

Expertly mastered by Antony Ryan at RedRedPaw and mostly sourced from long lost cassettes rescued from chaotic rehearsal rooms and the apartments of Glasgow friends, Deltic Vespers contains the pre Ghost Box recordings and is the ultimate statement on Mulholland's early experimentations. It's like peering into a disorderd vision of an alternative 1990's where instead of Britpop and it's phony psychedlia-lite, we got the full strenght Owsley acid version. The electronic elements are also there from the start, pulled from the unlikliest of sources and proving that Mulholland's invention and drive to get the sounds down has been there since day one. Fantastic stuff now preserved for posterity. You're welcome.

DELTIC VESPERS Notes from DREW MULHOLLAND:

"My favourite memories are the odd ones. Sharing Larry Grayson’s old dressing room, author Lawrence Norfolk telling a journalist that the Mount Vernon Arts Lab was one of his go to bands when writing, organising the first concert of electronic music in a nuclear command bunker in 1998, playing shows with Silver Apples, Add N to (x), Stereolab, Broadcast, Sonic Boom, Project D.A.R.K.
"Recording with Adrian from Portishead, Norman from Teenage Fanclub, Isobel Campbell, Coil, appearing on telly with Eugene Reynolds pet DALEK, chatting with Stuart Moxham from Young Marble Giants, a backstage conversation with Tim Gane about playing the Status Quo riff over & over for 90 minutes, Pete Kember excitedly calling me having just spoken to Delia Derbyshire, and later Delia herself telling me of her friend-ship with Brian Jones, and once during a performance in Liverpool looking up to see legends Paul Simpson and Will Sergeant in the audience, and finally having played in Shepherds Bush with nowhere to stay we ended sleeping on industrial sized bubble wrap.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Ooof, another essential release from the endlessly talented Drew Mulholland. 'Vespers' sees woozy synths and hissing tape artefacts, airy arpeggios and driven pulses coming together into a surprisingly cohesive, beautifully finished end product. Another killer outing from Castles In Space.

Cosmoba is a brand new Manchester based imprint from Kalcagni. Fresh from releasing his "Manners" EP on Distrito 91, Kalcagni dishes up 4 slices of funk-fueled electro for this label debut.

Lead track "Lost In The System" features retro stylings and gritty electro bass hooks. This is swiftly followed up by "Multislacking", the result of a weekend spent twisting up a modular rig, with wonky bass squelches and 80s pads underpinned by slamming beats.

On the flip side, "Culture Vulture" introduces some heavy 303 workouts, before "After The Fact" rounds off the EP nicely, taking the acid vibe in a slightly darker direction with wonky Reese synth fills and jacked up breaks.

There's a rich sense of cybernetic atmosphere throughout, with just the right amount of squelch and snap present in Kalcagni's synths and drum machines. The EP is mixed and mastered cohesively; with a dull layer of sonic oxidation giving it a rough but penetrating edge.

RIYL: Ceephax, Roy Of The Ravers, Analord-era AFX, Luke Vibert etc. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: New local producer from Levenshume debuts on his own label. We're really liking the sound of this - stronger and tougher than 95% of the new electro also-rans; Kalcagni clearly has his collection of machines under control.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Lost In The System
A2. Multislacking
B1. Culture Vulture
B2. After The Fact

One In A Million is the second studio album by Aaliyah. First released in 1996 by Blackground Records, the album features production from a variety of producers including Timbaland, Missy Elliot, Carl-So-Lowe, J. Dibbs, Jermaine Dupri, Kay Gee, Vincent Herbert, Rodney Jenkins, Craig King, Darren Lighty and Darryl Simmons. With countless accolades, One In A Million remains as one of the most influential albums in Hip-Hop & R&B and proved to be a major breakthrough in Aaliyah's career. Welcome to the new world of funk.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Beats 4 Da Streets (Intro)
A2. Hot Like Fire
A3. One In A Million
A4. A Girl Like You
B1. If Your Girl Only Knew
B2. Choosey Lover (Old School / New School)
B3. Got To Give It Up
B4. 4 Page Letter
C1. Everything's Gonna Be Alright
C2. Giving You More
C3. I Gotcha' Back
C4. Never Givin' Up
D1. Heartbroken
D2. Never Comin' Back
D3. Ladies In Da House
D4. The One I Gave My Heart To
D5. Came To Give Love (Outro)

A pop record for tired times. Sugared with bits of shatterproof glass to put more crack in your strap. At long last, verse / chorus. A weathered thesaurus. This is OSEES bookend sound. Early grade garage pop meets protosynth punk suicide-repellant. Have a whack at the grass or listen while flat on your ass. Heaps of electronic whirling accelerants to gum up your cheapskate broadband. Social media toilet scrapers unite! Allow your 24-hour news cycle eyes to squint at this smiling abattoir doorman. You can find your place here at long last. All are welcome from the get go to the finale…a distant crackling transmission of 80s synth last-dance-of-the-night tune for your lost loves. Suffering from Politic amnesia? Bored of AI-generated pop slop? Then this one is for you, our friends. Wasteland wanderer, stick around. Love y’all. For fans of Teutonic synth punk and Thee Oh Sees (who the fuck are they?)” — John Dwyer.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: The brilliant OSEES are back with a vitriolic blast of fuzzy guitars, frenetic percussion and wonky synth sweeps. Dwyer and co are without a doubt at the forefront of the garage/indie movement, crafting a sound that's both hugely impactful and undoubtedly their own, with more than a hint of irony peeking through here and there. Brilliantly done, as ever.

TRACK LISTING

1. Stunner
2. Blank Chems
3. Intercepted Message
4. Die Laughing
5. Unusual & Cruel
6. The Fish Needs A Bike
7. Goon
8. Chaos Heart
9. Submerged Building
10. Sleazoid Psycho
11. Always At Night
12. LADWP Hold

The final U.S. show, a triumphant and blistering bookend to the storied career of one of the most influential bands in rock music, featuring a unique and expansive eighty-five minute set list that spans Sonic Youth’s nearly three decade catalog. Mixed from multitrack by longtime live engineer Aaron Mullan and mastered and cut by Carl Saff.

On August 12, 2011 Sonic Youth played their final US show on an outdoor stage overlooking the East River at the Williamsburg Waterfront in Brooklyn. Fitting that their storied career would bookend with a panoramic view of New York City where it all began 30 years before, having left in their wake one of one of the most powerfully influential careers in rock music.

Following incredible sets from Kurt Vile and Wild Flag, the band took the stage. As the sun went down over the city, Sonic Youth ripped through a 17 song set that spanned from deep cuts off their first studio album and highlighting many other albums all the way through to their last, like a band with everything to prove. Or as Brooklyn Vegan’s Andrew Sacher said at the time: “While most bands who are thirty years into their career are either fading away or living off of the nostalgia of their older material, Sonic Youth continue to sound and perform as fresh as ever.”

Steve Shelley explains the uniquely career spanning set list of Live in Brooklyn 2011 and how it came to be, as well as the importance of outdoor NYC summer shows in Sonic Youth’s legacy:

“This show was a culmination of a run of really special outdoor summertime shows in New York City for us, starting in ’92 with Summerstage in Central Park when we played with Sun Ra. For the Williamsburg Waterfront show I wrote out the set list to present to the band and it was a lot of material we hadn’t played in a while, a lot of deep cuts, so I wasn’t sure if everybody would feel like doing it. After worrying about which songs the band might say yes or no to, I threw those concerns out the window and I just made a list of songs that I thought would be a great set. We practiced the week of the show at our space in Hoboken and put the set together. First we’d try and make sure we had a guitar in the song’s tuning, then we’d try to remember the arrangement and try and put it together, sometimes re-learning bar by bar. In the end I think the whole song list made it through. Even as early as ’86 and ’87 we stopped playing ‘Death Valley 69’ and ‘Brave Men Run’ with any regularity. We’d just get excited about new material coming into the set and songs would get ‘retired’ and wouldn’t get played again for years. So on this particular night in Brooklyn a lot of those retired songs and deep cuts got dusted off and played for this show. It turned out to be a pretty special event with a really special song list.” The band would go on to fulfill a contracted festival run in South America a few months later but, by then, the group’s center was severed beyond repair and the festival appearances didn’t hold the same kind of weight.

“The stage was facing the East River from the Williamsburg, Brooklyn waterfront, and I recall the sun going down in the west during our set. It was a pretty magical, if kinda weird day. Fitting, somehow, that our ‘last show’ should be in New York City, our home and where it all began…” Lee Ranaldo

The Williamsburg Waterfront show would fondly become referred to as ‘The Last Show’ by fans and band alike, equally for its triumphant high energy performance, its unique and expansive set list and locale.

Newly remixed and remastered, Live in Brooklyn 2011 is presented for the first time on 2xLP, 2Xcd, August 18, 2023.

STAFF COMMENTS

Darryl says: The legendary Sonic Youth played an historic gig on the Williamsburg Waterfront overlooking the East River on August 12th 2011. It would prove to be their final U.S. show, and this double vinyl and double CD on Silver Current Records perfectly captures this raw and expansive 85 minute set.

Heavy on songs from their early years Sonic Youth powered through these tracks like a band full of teenage energy. The fact that this show was their U.S. swansong after around 30 years together makes this blistering set all the more remarkable.

Kicking off with the hypnotic “Brave Men Run (In My Family)”, before exploding into the sensational noise carnage of “Death Valley ‘69”. Sonic Youth continue to rip through the set with 80s classics; “Kotton Krown”, “Kill Yr. Idols”, “Eric’s Trip” and the awesome “Tom Violence” all dispatched with visceral vigour and punky power.

Interspersed with three tracks from their last album ‘The Eternal’ along with a brilliantly brutal “Sugar Kane” they finish off proceedings with an apocalyptic version of “Inhuman” complete with feedback and wailing guitars and then it’s all over with the line “… with the power of love anythin’ is possible”.

TRACK LISTING

1. Brave Men Run (In My Family)
2. Death Valley ’69
3. Kotton Krown
4. Kill Yr Idols
5. Eric’s Trip
6. Sacred Trickster
7. Calming The Snake
8. Starfield Rose
9. I Love Her All The Time
10. Ghost Bitch
11. Tom Violence
12. What We Know
13. Drunken Butterfly
14. Flower
15. Sugar Kane
16. Psychic Hearts
17. Inhuman

Critics in the early 1970s called Gil Scott-Heron the most important Black voice since Martin Luther King Jr and described him as a black Bob Dylan. "His poetry is with much muscle, with stiletto humor, with street talk, much of it justifiably angry and accurate," the New York Times wrote in 1975, marveling at the angry man from the Bronx.

No wonder that decades later Scott- Heron was celebrated as the "Godfather of Rap". Born in Chicago, the musician, poet and pugnacious activist for human rights himself lived for years in the Bronx. Returning to his black roots, he died May 27, 2011, in New York's urban district Harlem.

His legacy includes a fantastic concert Gil Scott-Heron gave with his band at the Schauburg Theater in Bremen (Germany) on April 18, 1981. The technicians of Radio Bremen were on site and recorded this ecstatic show.

Gil's son Rumal Rackley on the release of this concert: "This album from a 1983 concert captures the spirit that permeated every performance throughout Gil Scott- Heron's travels in the US and abroad. From Europe to Asia to Australia to Africa, his work resonates at the heart and soul level."

Live album of the unforgettable American soul/jazz singer, poet and civil rights activist Gil Scott-Heron (* April 1, 1949 in Chicago, + May 27, 2011 in New York), celebrated by the New York Times as "Godfather Of Rap". 112 minutes of exciting live atmosphere, captured by Radio Bremen in 1983, sonically refined by the mastering of Johannes Scheibenreif.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A legendary voice, unrivalled songwriter and unforgettable character, Gil Scott-Heron has been one of the most respected musicians and activists of all time. Here we get a real life, soaring performance from the man himself with The Amnesia Express. Astounding.

TRACK LISTING

We Almost Lost Detroit
Angola, Louisiana
Three Miles Down
B-Movie
A Legend In His Own Mind
Winter In America
Shut 'Em Down
Washington D.C.
The Bottle
Johannesburg

Sex Pistols have made their 4th single available in coloured vinyl for the first time, another limited edition classic.

Further establishing their legendary status, the band's 4th single ‘Holidays In The Sun’, released on October, 14, 1977, climbed the charts to #8 and was the single used to promote their studio album, Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.

On their sophomore album Spirit in the Room, Activity is haunted by technology, the loss of loved ones, capitalism, and humanity's relentless death march towards environmental destruction. Produced by Psychic TV's Jeff Berner, the album is an emotional seance held through an unearthly haze of menacing trip hop, ambient electronica, and synth-based noise rock.

A sense of longing and hopelessness in the face of monumental loss comes through almost instantly on opening track "Department of Blood," in which lead vocalist Travis Johnson sardonically indicts both neoliberalism and "whatever the lord is," beneath a grim collage of processed electronics and a sinister drum machine beat. The David Berman-inspired "Heaven Chords, was written shortly after the iconic songwriter's death, and atmospheric track "Where the Art is Hung," is a haunting lament over the omnipresence of technology and surveillance in the modern world.

Spirit in the Room is no lighthearted journey, but the band's playfulness and obvious natural chemistry keeps the collection from being burdened by its own solemnity. "Unlike the first album, where we'd barely played live before we recorded, we got to take some of the less electronic songs out on the road in the fall of 2021," Johnson explains. "Some tracks had been incubating for over a year in our rehearsals. We could feel them change and open up in a live setting, so when we got back home, we went back to the drawing board on a lot of them. Some got scrapped altogether and we haven't played them since. You get an idea in your head of what it is, but it's something else when you're trying to hold other people's attention. Every part needed to feel earned or necessary." On the one hand, Spirit in the Room is a harrowing journey through a Bosch-like landscape of illness, global capital, and human-caused destruction. On the other hand, it's a room full of friends who are simply trying to make it through the day and process this world we've created. When asked why this album needed to be made, Johnson put it best: "None of us can stand to not make music is all, really." 

TRACK LISTING

01 Department Of Blood
02 Heaven Chords
03 Careful Lets Sleepwalk
04 Where The Art Is Hung
05 Cloud Come Here
06 Ect Frag
07 Icing
08 I Like What You Like
09 Sophia
10 I Saw His Eyes
11 Susan Medical City

Brand new 7-inch from the incredible duo The Double. Their first release since their debut album Dawn Of The Double in 2016. The Double are Emmett Kelly and Jim White—two dudes with resumes so massive it's not even worth bothering to try and drop names. For the recording session that produced this single they brought in bassist Matt Lux. The music The Double make is rhythmic, hypnotic and percussive. Says The Double of this new single, “after the Dance Craze, we took off to go relax in the jungle with our buddy Matt Lux”.

Karen Dalton’s 1971 album, In My Own Time, stands as a true masterpiece by one of music’s most mysterious, enigmatic, and enduringly influential artists. Celebrating the album’s 50th anniversary, Light in the Attic is honored to present a newly remastered (2021) edition of the album on LP, CD, cassette, and 8-Track.

All audio has been newly remastered by Dave Cooley, while lacquers were cut by Phil Rodriguez at Elysian Masters.

A newly expanded booklet—featuring rarely seen photos, liner notes from musician and writer Lenny Kaye, and contributions from Nick Cave and Devendra Banhart—rounds out the CD (32-pgs) and LP (20-pgs) packages.
The Oklahoma-raised Karen Dalton (1937-1993) brought a range of influences to her work. As Lenny Kaye writes in the liner notes, one can hear “the jazz of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, the immersion of Nina Simone, the Appalachian keen of Jean Ritchie, [and] the R&B and country that had to seep in as she made her way to New York."

Armed with a long-necked banjo and a 12-stringed guitar, Dalton set herself apart from her peers with her distinctive, world-weary vocals. In the early ‘60s, she became a fixture in the Greenwich Village folk scene, interpreting traditional material, blues standards, and the songs of her contemporaries, including Tim Hardin, Fred Neil, and Richard Tucker, whom she later married. Bob Dylan, meanwhile, was instantly taken with her artistry. “My favorite singer in the place was Karen Dalton,” he recalled in Chronicles: Volume One (Simon & Schuster, 2004). “Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed.”

Those who knew Dalton understood that she was not interested in bowing to the whims of the record industry. On stage, she rarely interacted with audience members. In the studio, she was equally as uncomfortable with the recording process. Her 1969 debut, It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best, reissued by Light in the Attic in 2009, was captured on the sly when Dalton assumed that she was rehearsing songs. When Woodstock co-promoter Michael Lang approached Dalton about recording a follow-up for his new imprint, Just Sunshine, she was dubious, to say the least. The album would have to be made on her own terms, in her own time. That turned out to be a six-month period at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, NY.

Producing the album was bassist Harvey Brooks, who played alongside Dalton on It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best. Brooks, who prided himself on being “simple, solid and supportive,” understood Dalton’s process, but was also willing to offer gentle encouragement, and challenge the artist to push her creative bounds. “I tried to present her with a flexible situation,” he told Kaye. “I left the decisions to her, to determine the tempo, feel. She was very quiet, and I brought all of it to her; if she needed more, I’d present options. Everyone was sensitive to her. She was the leader.”

Dalton, who rarely performed her own compositions, selected a range of material to interpret—from traditionals like “Katie Cruel” and “Same Old Man” to Paul Butterfield’s “In My Own Dream” and Richard Tucker’s “Are You Leaving For The Country.” She also expanded upon her typical repertoire, peppering in such R&B hits as “When a Man Loves a Woman” and “How Sweet It Is.” In a departure from her previous LP, Dalton’s new recording offered fuller, more pop-forward arrangements, featuring a slew of talented studio musicians.

While ‘70s audiences may not have been ready for Dalton’s music, a new generation was about to discover her work. In the decades following her death, a slew of artists would name Karen Dalton as an influence, including Lucinda Williams, Joanna Newsom, Nick Cave, Angel Olsen, Devendra Banhart, Sharon Van Etten, Courtney Barnett, and Adele. In the recent acclaimed film documentary Karen Dalton: In My Own Time, Cave muses on Dalton’s unique appeal: “There’s a sort of demand made upon the listener,” he explains. “Whether you like it or not, you have to enter her world. And it’s a despairing world.” Peter Walker, who also appears in the film, elaborates on this idea: “If she can feel a certain way in her music and play it in such a way that you feel that way, then that’s really the most magical thing [one] can do.” He adds, “She had a deep and profound and loving soul…you can hear it in her music.”

TRACK LISTING

Something On Your Mind
When A Man Loves A Woman
In My Own Dream
Katie Cruel
How Sweet It Is
In A Station
Take Me
Same Old Man
One Night Of Love
Are You Leaving For The Country
Something On Your Mind (alternate Take)
In My Own Dream (alternate Take)
Katie Cruel (alternate Take)
One Night Of Love - Live At Beat Club, Germany, April 21, 1971
Take Me - Live At Beat Club, Germany, April 21, 1971
Something On Your Mind - Live At The Montreux Golden Rose Pop Festival, May 1, 1971
Blues On The Ceiling - Live At The Montreux Golden Rose Pop Festival, May 1, 1971
Are You Leaving For The Country - Live At The Montreux Golden Rose Pop Festival, May 1, 1971
One Night Of Love - Live At The Montreux Golden Rose Pop Festival, May 1, 1971

In March 1975, Jim Sullivan mysteriously disappeared outside Santa Rosa, New Mexico. His VW bug was found abandoned, his motel room untouched. Some think he got lost in the desert. Some think he fell foul of a local family with alleged mafia ties. Some think he was abducted by aliens.

By coincidence – or perhaps not – Jim’s 1969 debut album was titled U.F.O. Released in tiny numbers on a private label, it too was truly lost, until Seattle’s Light In The Attic Records begun a years-long quest to give it the full release it deserves – and to solve the mystery of Sullivan’s disappearance. Only one of those things happened.

For record collectors, some albums are considered impossible to get hold of, records so rare you could sit on eBay for years and not get a sniff of a copy. U.F.O. is one of those albums. A seventh son, Jim Sullivan was a West Coast should-have-been, an Irish-American former high school quarterback whose gift for storytelling earned him cult status in the Malibu bar where he performed nightly. Sullivan was always on the edge of fame; hanging out with movie stars like Harry Dean Stanton, performing on the Jose Feliciano show, even stealing a cameo in the ultimate hippie movie, Easy Rider.

Friend and actor Al Dobbs thought he could change all that, and founded a label – Monnie Records – to release Jim’s album, enlisting the assistance of Phil Spector’s legendary sessioneers The Wrecking Crew to do so. That’s Don Randi, Earl Palmer and Jimmy Bond you can hear, the latter also acting as producer and arranger.

U.F.O. was a different beast to the one-man-and-his-guitar stuff Jim had been doing on stage; instead, it was a fully realised album of scope and imagination, a folk-rock record with its head in the stratosphere. Sullivan’s voice is deep and expressive like Fred Neil with a weathered and worldly Americana sound like Joe South, pop songs that aren’t happy – but filled with despair. The album is punctuated with a string section (that recalls David Axelrod), other times a Wurlitzer piano provides the driving groove (as if Memphis great Jim Dickinson was running the show). U.F.O. is a slice of American pop music filtered from the murky depths of Los Angeles, by way of the deep south.

With no music industry contacts, the record went largely unnoticed, and Jim simply moved on, releasing a further album on the Playboy label in 1972. But by 1975, his marriage breaking up, Jim left, for Nashville and the promise of a new life as a sessioneer in the home of C&W. That’s where it gets hazy.
We know he was stopped by cops for swerving on the highway in Santa Rosa, some 15 hours after setting off. We know he was taken to a local police station, found to be sober, and told to go to the local La Mesa Motel to get some rest, which he did. Some time later, his car was spotted on a ranch belonging to the local Genetti family, who confronted him about his business there. The next day his car was found 26 miles down the road, abandoned. His car and his hotel room contained, among other things, his twelve-string guitar, his wallet, his clothes and several copies of his second album, but no note, and no Jim. It was as if he had simply vanished into thin air.

Jim’s family travelled out to join search parties looking for him, the local papers printed missing person stories, but the search proved fruitless. Around the same time, the local sheriff retired and the Genettis moved to Hawaii. Jim’s manager Robert “Buster” Ginter later stated that during the early morning hours of a long evening Jim and Buster were talking about what would you do if they had to disappear. Jim said he’d walk into the desert and never come back.

Tracking down the truth behind Jim’s mystery became an obsession of Light In The Attic’s Matt Sullivan (no relation) when he happened upon a copy of the album and fell in love. He took on a cross country pilgrimage in search of master tapes and truth, and came back with neither, despite hundreds of phone calls, e-mails, letters, faxes, private detectives, telepathy, palm readings and meetings with Jim’s wife, son and producer. Thanks to superb digital mastering techniques, Light In The Attic is still able to present a clean, near perfect copy of Jim’s masterpiece for general consumption for the first time. Enjoy. And remember, beyond the mystery, there’s the music.

TRACK LISTING

Jerome
Plain As Your Eyes Can See
Roll Back The Time 
Whistle Stop
Rosey
 Highways
U.F.O.
So Natural
Johnny
Sandman

Bush Tetras have made punk music at the fringes for over four decades. Flashes of reggae, bursts of noise, guitars that rattle, shake and snake, born out of a gutter behind CBGBs. Over the years they have respawned time and time again, contorting their sound, tweaking the vision, remaining singular and indispensable.

In the late 2010s the group—Pat Place, Cynthia Sley, and Dee Pop—reformed again, releasing an EP, Take the Fall, in 2018. It was their first offering of new music in over a decade. A few years later in, 2021, they released a career spanning box set called Rhythm and Paranoia. The New York Times called the box set an artifact that “proves for decades [that Bush Tetras] continued to evolve in surprising yet intuitive directions.” Around the same time, the band began working on a full length record, writing sessions during the pandemic over Zoom.

Right before the release of the box set, beloved drummer Dee Pop passed away. Determined to complete the record to honor his memory, the Tetras went into the studio to finish what they’d started, once the timing was right. They brought in a new drummer, Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley, who also served as producer. Enter They Live in My Head. The band’s 3rd official LP (a misleading fact when viewed alongside a catalog as expansive as it is influential),They Live in My Head is a collection of songs that sometimes reflect on the past and sometimes reckon with our current reality.

From “Ghosts of People,” on which Pat Place’s legendary guitar meanders through closed doors and portals, to the scorching “2020 Vision,” a matterof-fact call to arms to get on the streets and get something done, the album addresses new and old, in both abstract and specific terms. But whether they’re looking forward or backward, Bush Tetras have always been a political band, a band that calls out all kinds of bullshit. And, in that sense, They Live in My Head is absolutely no exception.

TRACK LISTING

1. Bird On A Wire
2. Tout Est Meilleur
3. Things I Put Together
4. 2020 Vision
5. I Am Not A Member
6. Walking Out The Door
7. So Strange
8. Ghosts Of People
9. They Live In My Head
10. Another Room
11. The End

Singer songwriter Daniel Rossen (Grizzly Bear) embarked on a unique and intimate tour in support of his critically acclaimed 2022 release, ‘You Belong There’. He took to the road solo, with no crew or fancy equipment. Armed with just a few acoustic guitars and a small amp packed into his car, he embraced the simplicity and rawness of his performances.

This live album follows the highly acclaimed A24 film score for ‘Past Lives’, composed by Rossen and Grizzly Bear bandmate Christopher Bear.

TRACK LISTING

Unpeopled Space
Silent Song
Shadow In The Frame
Golden Mile
Repeat The Pattern
Made To Rise
Phantom Other
Kathleen
Return To Form
It's A Passage
Saint Nothing
Kentucky Waltz

A fresh chapter takes soft, sure shape for Cape Town-based singer-songwriter Wren Hinds on his new album. Released through Bella Union, Don’t Die in the Bundu follows Bella Union Pressings’ vinyl releases of Wren’s first three Bandcamp LPs. A gleaming set of gently dappled and poetic songs about fatherhood and fortitude, the album roots its restrained strength in an innate understanding of what matters most to us.

Wren’s own life began on the South-east coast of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa. His father was a musician, his mother a landscape painter. While his dad inspired Wren to record whenever and wherever he could, his mother’s artform coloured his approach to songwriting: “painting with sound” is Wren’s description, a methodology illustrated by his use of light, shade and space to communicate powerful impressions and feelings.

Recorded at a timber cabin in the South Peninsula mountainside, about 40km outside of Cape Town, Don’t Die in the Bundu is at once a natural evolution from his earlier work…, a fresh start and a statement of commitment, embedded in its title. Drawn from “a few personal experiences,” says Wren, the inspiration for the title helps pinpoint its purpose. “It was inspired by a very old survival book distributed in South Africa and Zimbabwe. I had a few title options I was playing with, and around July 2022 a friend and I were held up at gunpoint in Cape Town. Fortunately we weren’t harmed or anything, but the whole ordeal helped me to settle on the title.”

Meanwhile, parenthood helped crystallise Wren’s perspective on the trials of our times. “I try not to be too pessimistic about the future, especially now that I have a kid. It forces me to look at the beauty in humanity and the mysterious nature of this place we call home. I guess, like everyone else, I’m often trying to figure out how it all fits together, and how we fit into this story… Now that I’m a father, I’d rather live in hope than in fear.” Richly subtle, deeply inquisitive, Don’t Die in the Bundu illustrates Wren’s preference beautifully.

TRACK LISTING

1. A Song
2. Wild Eyes
3. Father
4. Chasing The River
5. A Wasted Love
6. Restless Child
7. Dream State
8. The Garden
9. Gilded By The Sun, Silvered By The Moon
10. Razor Wing

A few years ago, a very interesting relationship began to develop. A bridge was built out of Jaubi's releases on Astigmatic Records and the increasingly frequent collaborations between musicians from Europe and Asia - out of Latarnik's trip to Pakistan resulting in the widely acclaimed album Nafs at Peace and Zohaib, Dhani and Ali's revisit to Poland, which has been recorded as the EABS meets Jaubi In Search of a Better Tomorrow longplay.

Wrocław and Lahore are almost 7,000 kilometers apart. And despite this immense distance that separates the EABS and Jaubi musicians, the two bands find a surprising amount of common ground that determines their musical explorations. These include both a strong attachment to locality and respect for tradition, a penchant for weaving in some hip-hop elements, and the basis of a love of improvisation and spiritual jazz. It was therefore only a matter of time before they joined forces. And so, they proceeded to build a (cross)cultural bridge between Poland and Pakistan. A bridge whose pillars are Hindustani ragas, polish jazz understood in a variety of ways, and brotherhood in sound. This merger's finale is surprising to such an extent that it is difficult to pigeonhole this collaboration in any way.

TRACK LISTING

1. Yesterday
2. Judgement Day
3. Whispers
4. Strange Love
5. People In Between
6. Raise Your Hearts, Drop Your Guns
7. Tomorrow
8. Madhuvanti
9. Moon
10. Sun

Leeds band Thank return with new single ‘Torture Cube’, the first track to be taken from an upcoming double A - side 7” “ Torture Cube / Dead Dog In A Ditch ”, out via Yard Act’s Zen F.C label on 21 July.

“Torture Cube / Dead Dog In A Ditch” is a slab of guitar fury filtered through Nine Inch Nails’ industrial metal and Full of Hell’s blunt - force hardcore plus a healthy dose of humour fed by one too many nights soundtracked by donk pranksters Lobsta B and DJ Fingerblast.

Speaking on the release, vocalist/guitarist Freddy Vinehill - Cliffe says, “This was our first time in the studio with our friend and Leeds avant - metal legend Steve Myles on drums, and like a lot of our peers it marke d a return to honing tunes in a grotty rehearsal spot rather than writing remotely. The result feels like it has that pent up, fraught, fidgety energy of our first EP, combined with the more ambitious arrangements we started to experiment with on our debut LP ‘Thoughtless Cruelty’. Personally, I think it’s quite good actually.”

Thank formed in 2016 out of Leeds’ notorious DIY collective, CHUNK. Over the next half - decade they gained acclaim for the EPs ‘Sexghost Hellscape’ and ‘Please’, toured in mainland Eu rope, and caught the attention of heavy hitters like Idles with their combination of anxious disco grooves and harsh noise freakouts.

Thank become the latest in a string of artists to release via Yard Act’s Zen F.C. label, following on from the likes of Nu ha Ruby Ra, Baba Ali, Benefits and Yard Act themselves all of who’s 7” broke into the UK vinyl singles charts and Sheffield’s one man rave collective Acid Klaus who’s Step On My Travelator LP was released in November 2022.

TRACK LISTING

A. Torture Cube
AA: Dead Dog In A Ditch

Celebrated engineer Yas Inoue and DJ Takaya Nagase come together in the studio and rework the Voltage Brothers rare groove jam “Happening In the Streets” with a cleverly put together edit with filters, effects and sonically tweaking it to perfection. They've created a perfect dancefloor masterpiece already championed by Louie Vega, Joe Claussell, Spinna, Mike Dunn, and Rich Medina. 

Japanese sound engineer Yas Inoue, based in New York began his career in the world renowned MAW Studios in the late 90s and has engineered for producers such as Masters At Work, Patrick Adams, Leroy Burgess, and Randy Muller contributing to the creation of various New York house and disco hits.

Takaya Nagase, a New York based Japanese DJ started as an A&R for Japanese record label Soundmen On Wax. He learned and studied under the great David Mancuso of the Loft Party NYC and later held his own Joy parties along with other Loft members. Having had regular gigs at Club Shelter from 2006 to 2007 and at Club Output from 2017 until the closing in 2019, he built his DJ chops and now currently DJs at New York City's top venues such as Le Bain, Good Room and Nowadays along with monthly shows on the famed Lot Radio in Brooklyn.

Together they are Domo Domo and with their first project on Vega Records they are on their way to becoming New York household names in the dance music industry. "A Happening In The Streets" does indeed, sound like a lost Loft jazz dance classic. The type of track you assume they don't make anymore. Vibing keys going right off, big bolshy brass staps, crazed conga, wandering b-line - every single musician playing their heart out like its their last performance on earth - and finally given a riotous and soulful injection through that empowered vocal part. Seriously - a future classic of the genre make no mistake! Backed with a tasty DJ tool that stretches out the hook with added filtered reverb, inventive DJs are definitely gonna make use of this...

  

TRACK LISTING

A. Happening In The Streets (Domo Rework 7 Edit)
B. Happening In The Streets (DJ Tool) 

RIYL: Derek Bailey, David Bowie, Tim Buckley, John Cale, Michael Chapman, Lol Coxhill, Davey Graham, Steve Gunn, Van Morrison, Louis Moholo, Mike Osborne, Lou Reed, Sonny Sharrock & Television.

Mike Cooper wrote his final songwriter record, a suite of gloaming glam-rock anthems performed with a spiritual jazz trio, while living on the Costa Tropical of Granada, Spain, an era when he was considering retiring from music altogether. A chance encounter and a last-ditch record deal convinced him to make one last album, which he recorded in 1974 at Pathway Studios in London, with “The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World,” featuring the inventive South African jazz rhythm section of Louis Moholo and Harry Miller with UK saxophonist Mike Osborne.

This first-ever reissue includes a bonus CD of Milan Live Acoustic 2018, a previously unreleased solo set that represents Cooper’s return, after forty-four years pursuing free improvisation and electronics, to a new, deconstructed approach to singing, steel guitar, and songcraft.

The deluxe LP+CD edition also features a six-panel insert with additional artwork and an essay by the artist about both records. The deluxe 2xCD gatefold edition features an eight-panel version of the same insert.

In the wake of his magisterial triptych of early 1970s avant-folk-rock records Trout Steel (1970), Places I Know (1971), and The Machine Gun Co. (1972) the British songwriter, guitarist, and fledgling improviser Mike Cooper retreated to the Costa Tropical of Granada, Spain. With no prospects for touring or recording again, his fiery band the Machine Gun Co. had disintegrated. Cooper sets the scene in his liner notes of the first-ever reissue of his unjustly forgotten next album Life and Death in Paradise (1974): No one came running with offers of fame and riches, and we fell apart, and I left the country and headed for the beach, disillusioned and a bit disorientated musically. I went to Almuñécar in Andalusia, a place I had been going since 1969, because a painter friend from Reading, Rowland Fade who made the collage in the gatefold of my earlier album Trout Steel had moved there in 1968.

It was in this synthetic coastal “paradise,” unmoored and adrift, considering retiring from music altogether, that he began tentatively writing new songs. A chance encounter with producer Tony Hall, who offered Cooper a last-ditch record deal on Hall’s nascent Fresh Air label, convinced him to make one last album with the stipulation that he could assemble what he called “The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World.” I told Tony that I would do it if I could hire some of my South African jazz musician friends that I had used on my Pye/Dawn albums and some friends from Reading that I still knew and admired. I called up Harry Miller, Louis Moholo, and Mike Osborne, who were in fact a trio at the time … and several local Reading heroes, including the singer-songwriter Terry Clarke. The result, recorded live with minimal overdubbing at Pathway Studios in London, was Life and Death in Paradise, an utterly singular suite of gloaming glam-rock anthems performed with a spiritual jazz trio comprising the inventive South African jazz rhythm section of Moholo and Miller with UK saxophonist Osborne. Unlike anything else in Cooper’s extensive catalog. Fresh Air fizzled, and Life and Death became Cooper’s final record as a songwriter, having pushed the form as far as he could.

Drifting north from Spain back to the UK, he fell into the scene of the London Musicians Collective (LMC) including Paul Burwell, David Toop, and saxophonist Lol Coxhill, Cooper’s bandmate in the Recedents and fully embraced free improvisation. He was still, however, interested in singing and lyrics, so, influenced by Tom Phillips, William Burroughs, and Brion Gysin, he began experimenting with text collage and cut-up techniques, arriving at his own hybrid compositional strategy for improvisatory songs. The previously unreleased solo set Milan Live Acoustic 2018 represents Cooper’s return, after more than four decades pursuing free improvisation and electronics, to a new, deconstructed approach to singing, lap steel guitar, and songcraft. Presented here together with Life and Death in Paradise, the two records provide fascinating bookends to Mike Cooper’s long, mercurial, and pioneering practice as a songmaker.

TRACK LISTING

Life And Death In Paradise:
A1. Rocket Summer
A2. Black Night Crash (including “Horry Rocker Show”)
A3. O.M.M. Coda
B1. Suicide De Luxe (including “Rock And Roll Hi Way”)
B2. Life And Death In Paradise (including “Through A Veil,” “Beads On A String,” And “Reprise”)
B3. Critical Incidents

Milan Live Acoustic 2018:
1. Migrants Song
2. Approaching Zero
3. Industrial Hazard
4. In Moments Of Reverie
5. Peach Trees
6. Sage And Thyme
7. Lord Franklin

During the last five years of his life, ex-Bonzo Dog Band solo artist Vivian Stanshall, was working on a final album of music to follow up his muchloved 1981 album 'Teddy Boys Don't Knit', which featured classics such as 'Terry Keeps His Clips On', 'The Cracks Are Showing' & 'Ginger Geezer'

Stanshall had spent his time in the 1980's working on his 'English Comic Opera in the Grand Tradition' Stinkfoot, which first ran at the Old Profanity Showboat in Bristol Harbour in 1985, with a later revival in London. He had also found success writing material with his friend Steve Winwood, co-writing the title track to 'Arc Of A Diver', working on Mike Oldfield's 'Tubular Bells 2' (he had been an integral part to the original 'Tubular Bells' as the narrator) & various advertising campaigns including 'Lemsip', 'Cadburys' & most famously 'Ruddles Beer'.For a considerable period, Vivian had wanted to record & release another rock album & had been collecting songs as far back as the 1970's. With money he earned from his advertising work, he funded various recording sessions & had interest from a major record label, but sadly he tragically died in a fire before an album could be completed.

The twelve tracks on this album are taken from a selection of sixty or so finished or nearly completed recordings on the tapes left by Vivian Stanshall, as his hitherto unpublished legacy.

Andy Frizell (The Wizards of Twiddly, The Coral & Kevin Ayers) is a musician & producer who worked with Vivian briefly in 1994. Using the surviving recordings, he has pieced back together Vivian's final album adding where required, the missing instrumentation but, at all times, paying reverence to the original vision. The collection includes the Beefheartian monster mash blues of 'Dog Howl In Tune' - also the title track - as well as the wistfully melancholic 'No Time Like The Future' on an album that wears its heart fully on its sleeve. It is by far the most biographical album Vivian ever made & draws on songs from 'Stinkfoot' & other projects. 'Goodbye Mother' is the poignant last song from the project 'Shackleton', based around the exploits of the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, which never saw the light of day whilst 'Boy In Darkness' was written by Vivian for a project with Steve Winwood - Winwood's version yet to be released.

Musicians include Jack Bruce (Cream), Ollie Halsall (Pato), Susie Honeyman (The Mekons), Neil Innes & Rodney Slater (The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band), Mike Kellie (Spooky Tooth) & others.

TRACK LISTING

Dog Howl In Tune
Made Of Stone
I'd Rather Cut My Hands
A Good Woman
Goodbye Mother
No Time Like The Future
Strongth
Gecko
Landing On My Feet
Only Being Myself
Boy In Darkness

'An adventurer, an entrepreneur, a buccaneer, a visionary' - BONOAs the founder of Island Records, fabled music producer Chris Blackwell has discovered and worked with some of the most important musicians of the second half of the twentieth century - from Steve Winwood to Cat Stevens, Bob Marley to Grace Jones, U2 to Roxy Music, plus countless others. He is also widely credited with having brought reggae music to the world stage. Now, as reflects on his life, Blackwell takes us back to the island where it all began: Jamaica - the place where his family once partied with the likes of Noel Coward, Ian Fleming and Errol Flynn and where, as Jamaican local music began to adopt contemporary American trends, Blackwell's burgeoning musical instincts flourished.

It was also the birthplace of the now-legendary Island Records, founded by Blackwell in 1959. Five years later, while living in London selling Jamaican records to Caribbean immigrants, Blackwell came across the vocal talents of teenager Millie Small, who he paired with the song 'My Boy Lollipop'. The producer added a ska beat and released what would be a worldwide hit.

But this was just the beginning of a truly remarkable career. In this fascinating memoir, including up to fifty photos supplied by Blackwell's team, the music icon will discuss the many artists he's worked with over the years, as well as unpicking the initiatives, decisions and risks that ultimately brought such success to both Blackwell and his esteemed musical collaborators.

Formed in 2019, Lifeguard are Asher Case (bass, vocals), Isaac Lowenstein (drums, percussion), and Kai Slater (guitar, vocals). At its core, Lifeguard is a punk band. Their music is loud and energetic. It’s also, at its core, visceral and hypnotic. For the Chicago-based trio that can include repetition and blasts of speaker cone-shredding feedback. Their songs adeptly balance melody and chaos, rhythm and drone. Hooks and noise are held to the same standard. Both have to stick.

They’re a young band, but they’ve already found a place at the forefront of an important emerging music community in their hometown. They are quite prolific. In just three years, Lifeguard has put out a full-length, two EPs, and two 7” singles.

Crowd Can Talk and Dressed in Trenches are closely related. They were recorded in separate sessions, but at the same studio (Electrical Audio) and with the same engineer (Mike Lust) and within the space of 12 months. Each finds the band refining its voice – honing songs that are succinct, hooky, and propulsive. There's a newly disciplined attention to detail. Lifeguard write together through collaboration and improvisation, but they’ve learned to streamline their sound, to make each hook, beat, and gesture purposeful.

On each record, there are echoes of underground guitar bands from decades past. This is not record-collector music, though. It’s the product of a present-day community. Lifeguard are, first and foremost, a performing band and the songs are written to stand up in that moment.

“More than old records – before that, before anything – we’re influenced by live shows and people around us,” explains Slater. “The inspiration comes from playing shows with people and having that mind-blown moment of seeing some friend play at Schubas or Book Club,” adds Lowenstein. “It’s happening on these tiny little scales of seeing kids play live and [knowing] this is something new and interesting.”

TRACK LISTING

Crowd Can Talk

New Age (I’ve Got A)
I Know I Know
Fifty Seven
Typecast

Dressed In Trenches

17-18 Lovesong
Alarm
Ten Canisters (OFB)
Shutter Shutter
Tell Me When

James Yorkston returns with his 4th studio album "When The Haar Rolls In" and proves once again why he is one of the most essential songwriters of our time. Returning with his trusty Athletes, along with some legendary English folk names - Norma Waterson, Mike Waterson, Marry Gilhooly, Olly Knight, there is much to mine for Yorkston fans of old and new, all the ambition, beauty and pathos of his previous albums sweeps through with soothing, lush arrangements of all sorts.

If God had a disco, the DJ would be playing California gospel-soul group The Supreme Jubilees. “We won’t have to cry no more,” the tuxedo-clad group would sing, in high, angelic vocals over smooth grooves. “It’ll all be over.” Prepare to dance and contemplate death all at the same time.

A band of brothers and cousins, the group was founded from two familes: brothers Joe and Dave Kingsby plus Dave’s son David Kingsby Jr., and keyboardist Leonard Sanders plus his brothers Phillips (drummer), Tim (bassist), and Melvin (tenor). The Sanders clan grew up singing together in the Witness of Jesus Christ church in Fresno CA, where dad Marion was pastor. Guitarist Larry Price–who belonged to neither family–completed the line-up that recorded the group’s first–and, prophetically, only–album, It’ll All Be Over.

Released in 1980 on the group’s own S&K (Sanders & Kingsby) label, It’ll All Be Over pinpoints a fatalistic mood exemplified by the title. Its lyrics drawn from the Old Testament, its sound from the church by way of the disco, and it’s a feel captured by the album cover–a low, orange sun setting over the Pacific ocean. It is, as Jessica Hundley observes in the brand new liner notes, “both apocalyptic and seductive.”

Making the album was not easy. Sessions began in Trac Record Co, a country and western studio in Fresno, CA, where the engineer was so put out by the group’s requests for heavier bass in the mix, he stopped the session and kicked them out. They left with four songs–one side of the album–and the record was completed at Sierra Recording Studio in Visalia, CA. Leonard Sanders reported having a spiritual encounter in his sleep while in Visalia; the next day he recorded his part of the album’s title track in a single take.

After the LP was pressed, the group took their music on tour, first in California, where they played with acts including the Gospel Keynotes, The Jackson Southernaires, and the Mighty Clouds of Joy, and then on an ill-fated trip to Texas. A follow-up album was planned for 1981, but it never materialized; having slept sometimes a dozen to a room in Texas, the men in the band were reluctant to leave jobs, wives, and kids for the hardship of the road. The group simply fizzled out, even if the friendships never did.

A copy of the album sold to a fan on that Texan tour made its way to a San Antonio record store, where it was discovered nearly three decades later by collector David Haffner (Friends of Sound). He managed to track down the Kingsby-Sanders clan at a Fourth Of July barbeque in Fresno in 2004. And he eventually introduced the group to Light In The Attic Records, which now presents the album, restored, remastered, and available to the public for the first time.

TRACK LISTING

1. It’ll All Be Over
2. Do You Believe
3. Thank You Lord
4. I Am On The Lord’s
5. You Don’t Know
6. Standing In The Need Of Prayer
7. Got A Right
8. We’ll Understand
9. Stop Today

Continuing this super productive year for the Feral Child label, the label releases an absolute peach here. Four totally whacked out, deep cuts that defy any hopes of genre pigeonholing; a deliciously dazzling moulding of ambitious grooves and ideas from the wonderful WET TUNA.

Never short on dizzying ambition, we described it as a ‘Space Dub Psych Disco collision’ on an Instagram post and that kinda holds true a few days on here. Fabulously bonkers and groovy in equal measure, this one comes hugely recommended. WET TUNA feature Matt (MV) Valentine & Erika (EE) Elder alongside Jim Bliss, Woods’ Jeremy Earl and on this record, Myriam Gendron.

We’ve left it to Matt to offer up the introductory words: “Wet Tuna specializes in homegrown, dubwise psychedelia. Exploration is paramount. You have a third ear? Probably if you are that kind, that’s spectrasound. They never do it the same way twice. “Party in the House” features Myriam Gendron and has poetry penned by Benoit Chaput of L’oie de Cravan. Samara Lubelski rips some electric violin, Jeremy Earl from Woods/Woodsist rides some golden tones singing harmony. Wet Tuna also has minor outlying islands, handmade things. Imported records, cassettes, cds. Sonic archepalegos. There are also deep cuts on their Bandcamp. If you really DIG you will find big fun on the mv & ee cottage run private press label child of microtones which they’ve been operating since 1999. You like big DISCO(2000) graphies & dead space? wet channels & foggy notion “jam band” environments, genreless free folk? You are here”.

A fabulously expansive set of jams; totally out there, groovy and beautifully psychedelic. 

TRACK LISTING

01. Party In The House (RAw/poetry Version) [8:09]
02. Electronic Zen [8:22]
03. Rough Road [9:12]
04. Party In The House (beat Poetics: Pornado Version) [7:51]

For fans of: Twerps, Courtney Barnett, Dick Diver, The Go-Betweens, Cate Le Bon, Tim Presley, Yo La Tengo.

“Workin’ all day, trying to forget about the old me.” Like most of us, Martin Frawley is busy trying to work himself out. He lives alongside the long shadow of his late dad, musician and songwriter Maurice Frawley, a cultural icon of the Australian underground and collaborator of Paul Kelly, Tex Perkins and Mick Thomas.

Most of Martin’s 20s were spent writing and playing songs in locally beloved Melbourne band Twerps – a collection of pals who were on the forefront of the city’s jangle pop renaissance. A few albums, US tours and band rotations under its belt, Twerps split up in 2018 and Martin turned his compass towards a solo project. His first album, Undone at 31 (2019), was a bit of a reckoning; a wild ride through the wreckage of both a band and longterm romantic break up. His new album The Wannabe is a personal, cheeky and, at times, self-depreiciating collection of songs unpacking the reality of finding his way as an adult without his dad around, and ultimately falling back in love with life, music and someone new.

Martin and his band – friends Dan Luscombe (The Drones), Steph Hughes (Boomgates, Dick Diver), Nik Imfeld (Tyrannaman) and Dan Kelly had heaps of fun recording The Wannabe in Melbourne. The title track is a particularly spicy take on an entertainment industry that seems to give more shits about marketing than music. The album is a bit of an emotional tour, from anger and derision, through to comedy, through to deep and honest love. It’s positive with a lot of sadness. Not unlike Martin himself.

As well as the guitar, Martin had some fun playing the piano on this record. The technical term is ‘multiinstrumentalist’ but Martin’s more of a musical explorer of sorts. No one is exactly sure how these things work if Martin was born into music or if it was born into him, but it doesn’t really matter. Music is what he loves. It’s what he does. It’s not about the industry or about success not anymore. It’s about the freedom of creating songs on his own terms, and trying to let go of the feeling he has something to prove: to his dad, to his critics, and to himself. And while he’s not sure he’ll ever fully shake that feeling, he’s at least relaxing and having a bit of fun doing it.

Like his dad, Martin has a reputation as a ‘musician’s musician’. He hosts a pretty sporadic podcast Dive For Your Memory, where he has fast and loose chats with musicians while doing a deep dive into their musical inspirations and canon. He and his fiancé Lauren also make wine under the label El’More Wines, named after the farm and small town where his dad grew up. It’s all come a bit full circle, really.

TRACK LISTING

1. This Is Gonna Change Your Mind
2. The Wannabe
3. My Heart Beats
4. Lola
5. Heart In Hand
6. 5th Of The 5th
7. Assumptions
8. Slip Away
9. I Wish Everyone Would Love Me
10. Given Everything

Rising artist THALA finds strength in her vulnerability on new EP In Theory Depression. After forging a path in hazy, lo-fi indie, this forthcoming release is home to her sharpest, boldest songwriting yet, rendering these deeply personal explorations of self in vivid, ‘90s influenced indie-rock, and looming, psych-inspired walls-of-sound.

Recalling the tangled indie-rock of Holly Humberstone, Soccer Mommy, and Phoebe Bridgers, and underpinned by spiky, surging guitars, the songs unearth tenderness, even as they rage.

In Theory Depression marks the artist’s most introspective writing yet, but as much as the lyrics excavate from hidden depths, they’re often paired with widescreen, cinematic-sounding melodies. It brings to mind both the dazzling soundscapes of Mazzy Star, the witty bite of Liz Phair, and the subtle punk influences of Juliana Hatfield, who also spins the genre’s more relentless strains into snarling and bittersweet alternative pop.

THALA has just wrapped up a joint UK tour, alongside showcases at Austin’s SXSW and with Brighton’s Great Escape festival also on the horizon. Having already won the backing of BBC Radio 1’s Jack Saunders, Wonderland Magazine and Clash, THALA’s ascent is only set to continue.

TRACK LISTING

A1 You Had 2
A2 Curtain Call
A3 Easy Out
B1 Are You Thinking Of Me
B2 Sink
B3 In Theory Depression

Chet Baker in New York has Chet Baker playing with great East Coast musicians: Philly Joe Jones on drums, Al Haig on piano, the great Paul Chambers on bass, and tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin added on three tracks.

Recorded in December 1958, Baker didn't sing on any of the tracks on the LP. "Soft Winds" was recorded during the same session as the rest of the tracks, but it wasn't initially included on the Chet Baker in New York LP, as it was originally going to be issued on a compilation LP by various trumpet players titled New Blue Horns. It has been added here in order to complete the original session.

The Complete Album + 1 Bonus Track.

TRACK LISTING

1. Fair Weather 6:56
2. Hotel 49 9:52
3. Blue Thoughts 7:37
4. Polka Dots And Moonbeams 7:57
5. Solar 5:51
6. When Lights Are Low 6:54
7. Soft Winds 6:29
8. The Heather On The Hill 5:05*
9. I Ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face 4:14*
10. On The Street Where You Live 8:37*

Originally released on February 2, 1993 and celebrating its 30th Anniversary.

Lead MC Grand Puba left the group to pursue a solo career in 1991, following the release of their revered debut One for All. DJ Alamo also left to work with Puba, leaving MC's Sadat X and Lord Jamar, who enlisted DJ Sincere to join the group. It was a safe bet that In God We Trust wouldn't have attempted any new jack swing crossovers or tie-dyed imagery. Though the makeover is drastic, it is convincing, with Lord Jamar and Sadat X stepping up with some of the era's fiercest, most intense rhymes and lyrics that were extremely militant reflecting the group's identity adhering to the philosophy of the Nation of Gods and Earths.

The album produced two singles, Punks Jump Up to Get Beat Down and Love Me or Leave Me Alone which both charted on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

TRACK LISTING

Allah U Akbar
Ain't No Mystery
Meaning Of The 5%
Pass The Gat
Black Star Line
Allah And Justice
The Godze
The Travel Jam
Brand Nubian Rock The Set
Love Me Or Leave Me Alone
Steal Ya 'Ho
Steady Bootleggin'
Black And Blue
Punks Jump Up To Get Beat Down
Punks Jump Up To Get Beat Down (Single Mix)
Love Me Or Leave Me Alone (Remix)

UK soul stalwarts Stone Foundation celebrate 25 years and 10 studio albums together with a career retrospective. The tracklist includes their biggest collaborations (Paul Weller, Durand Jones, Graham Parker, Melba Moore, William Bell, Bettye LaVette, Nolan Porter, Mick Talbot and many more) alongside their best known tracks plus 2 brand new songs.

TRACK LISTING

2LP / 2CD Tracklisting
A1 The Limit Of A Man
A2 The Light In Us (Feat. Laville)
A3 Now That You Want Me Back (Feat. Melba Moore)
A4 Deeper Love (Feat. Paul Weller)
A5 Next Time Around
B1 Beverley
B2 Carry The News
B3 Season Of Change (Feat. Bettye LaVette)
B4 Hold On To Love (Feat. Durand Jones)
B5 Your Balloon Is Rising (Feat. Paul Weller)
C1 Summer Feeling
C2 Standing On The Top
C3 Echoes Of Joy
C4 Let The Light
C5 To Find The Spirit
C6 The Night Teller (Feat. Graham Parker)
D1 Strange People (Feat. William Bell)
D2 B What U R (Feat. Shirley Jones)
D3 Pushing Your Love
D4 Tracing Paper (Feat. Nolan Porter)
D5 Outside Looking In (Edit)
D6 Back In The Game (Feat. Paul Weller)

5CD Box Set Tracklisting
CD1
1 The Limit Of A Man
2 The Light In Us Feat. Laville
3 Now That You Want Me Back Feat. Melba Moore
4 Deeper Love Feat. Paul Weller
5 Next Time Around
6 Beverley
7 Carry The News
8 Season Of Change Feat. Bettye Lavette
9 Hold On To Love Feat. Durand Jones
10 Your Balloon Is Rising Feat. Paul Weller
11 Summer Feeling
12 Standing On The Top
13 Echoes Of Joy
14 Let The Light
15 To Find The Spirit
16 The Night Teller Feat. Graham Parker
17 Strange People Feat. William Bell
CD2
1 B What U R Feat. Shirley Jones
2 Pushing Your Love
3 Tracing Paper Feat. Nolan Porter
4 Outside Looking In (Edit)
5 Back In The Game Feat. Paul Weller
6 Changes
7 Only You Can Feat. Hamish Stuart
8 Don't Walk Away Feat. Kathryn Williams
9 Hold On
10 A Love Uprising Feat. Dr Robert
11 When You're In My World Feat. Carleen Anderson
12 Heaven Knows Why Feat. Laville, Sheree Dubois
13 Sweet Forgiveness
14 Bring Back The Happiness
15 Don't Let The Rain
16 Love's Outro Feat. Peter Capaldi
CD3
1 Riches
2 Care Of Heather
3 Brain
4 From The Birth Of Time
5 Deep In The Water
6 The Waiting Game
7 Picked Up The Phone
8 Maybe In A Lifetime
9 Once In A While I Need Some Peace
10 5th October
11 My Love Will Never Be Enough
12 Not Around
13 Are You Really Happy?
14 To Love Somebody
15 Don't Give In Tonight
CD4
1 So Begins The Conversation
2 We'll Be Flying
3 Seven Days
4 Autumn's Child
5 Did My Baby Call Feat. Steve Calloway
6 Our Love Is In The Pocket
7 Eyes Of June
8 No More The Fool
9 Please Tell Me Feat. Joe Harris
10 Can You Keep A Secret (Part 1)
11 Uncomplicated
12 Dogtooth
13 Right Track Feat. Nolan Porter
14 The Last Goodbye
15 Wondrous Place Feat. Pete Williams
16 Crazy Love Feat. Nolan Porter
17 Don't Let The Rain (Dub) Feat. Dennis Bovell
CD5
1 That's The Way I Want To Live My Life
2 These Life Stories (Live)
3 Something In The Light
4 Learning The Hard Way
5 Life Goes On
6 It's Always Been There
7 Simplify The Situation (Live)
8 I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down Feat. Graham Parker
9 Rise Above It
10 Picture A Life
11 Stylin' Feat. Sulene Fleming
12 Deeper Love (Opolopo Remix) Feat. Paul Weller
13 The Light In Us (Soul Weekender Remix) Feat. Laville

California singer / songwriter returns with brighter tones and a more orchestral sound, featuring a large cast of friends and collaborators
Produced by Jarvis Taveniere (Purple Mountains, Woods).

“Born of a thousand nights lost in a surrender to stillness and contemplation, In The Air is Anna St. Louis’ second full length album and her most considered work yet.

“It’s an outlook on the world that was formed when her immediate one was small. The intervening years since her last album found St. Louis in a small one-bedroom cabin in the middle of the woods of upstate New York with a new love and time to think of what she wanted to express with her music. For weeks on end, the only trips she took were to and from her job as the front desk clerk at a nearby hotel. The previous years she had spent on tour and performing constantly in the venues of Los Angeles felt like they had occurred in another lifetime.

“St. Louis describes the writing period as one of a slow harvest; a fertile time but one that required a newfound patience. Instead of documenting her first thoughts, she spent more time with each song, going deeper with the themes and ideas she wanted to express.

“This slower approach also guided the sonic textures of the album. Working with producer Jarvis Taveniere (Purple Mountains, Woods) in two extended recording sessions in Los Angeles in 2021, St. Louis used the studio in a previously unexplored way, opening up her songs to more experimentation featuring brighter tones and a more orchestral sound to accompany her new perspective. To that end, she was aided by a cast of friends and collaborators including Jess Williamson, Kacey Johansing, Oliver Hill (Kevin Morby, Vagabon) on strings, Alex Fischel (Spoon) on piano, Josh Adams on drums (Bedouine, Tim Heidecker) and Keven Lareau (Cut Worms, Hand Habits).” — Justin Sullivan.

TRACK LISTING

1. Trace
2. Morning
3. Better Days
4. Sad Eyes
5. Rest
6. Phone
7. Even
8. Patrollers
9. Soft Cities
10. Into The Deep
11. Sea Glass

Joe Pariota is back on LOVEiT to provide you with four Chicago-house indebted floor fillers that tick all the right boxes. Irresistible driving grooves? Check. Catchy vocal snippets? Check. Funky piano lines? Check! This already impressive package is rounded up by JKs stripped down Dub Mix endlessly floating on a sea of reverb and Nico Bruns Remix, a spaced out downtempo head nodder.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Deep and buoyant 90's-tinged house music with vintage day-glo flair and retrotastic feels.

TRACK LISTING

A1 - Joe Pariota - Contest
A2 - Joe Pariota - Crystal_JKs Dub Mix
A3 - Joe Pariota - Contest Nico Brun Remix
B1 - Joe Pariota - Lost In The Atmosphere (They Make House)
B2 - Joe Pariota - Don't Bother Me

The Side Eyes are back with the follow up to their 2017 self-titled debut album and are asking the question What’s Your Problem? Anyone suspecting that the Southern California band may have mellowed out in the five years between albums will have those suspicions shattered within the first twenty seconds of the opening track “Get Me Out.” If anything, the band is now harder, faster and angrier than they were the first time around. Vocalist Astrid McDonald is in fiery fine form calling out everything from phonies to shit-talkers to people that simply aren’t nice. Brothers Kevin and Chris Devine on guitar and bass and drummer Sam Mankinen thunder through the twelve tracks here at a breakneck speed that is positively pummeling. While The Side Eyes sound like a throwback to early Southern California hardcore punk rock like Circle Jerks and the Adolescents, the band also sites more recent bands like Ceremony, Glue and Babes In Toyland as influences. Produced by Steve McDonald (Redd Kross / Melvins) and clocking in at under twenty minutes (while spinning at 45 RPM), What’s Your Problem is a modern punk rock gem that blows past the sonic barriers of their past inspirations. This is great stuff!

Days In Europa, the 1979 album by Scottish new-wave punk band The Skids, has been remastered and reissued on a double LP featuring original artwork and 7 new bonus tracks

TRACK LISTING

1. Animation
2. Charade
3. Dulce Et Decorum Est (Pro Patria Mori)
4. Pros And Cons
5. Home Of The Save
6. Working For The Yankee Dollar
7. The Olympian
8. Thanatos
9. A Day In Europa
10. Peaceful Times
11. Masquerade
12. Out Of Town
13. Another Emotion
14. Aftermath Dub
15. Grey Parade
16. Working For The Yankee Dollar (Single Version)
17. Vanguard's Crusade

The Japanese House has announced details of her second studio album In the End It Always Does. Featuring recent single ‘Boyhood’, much of the album lives in the contradictory: beginnings and endings, obsession and mundanity, falling in love and falling apart.

With the announcement comes new track ‘Sad to Breathe’, an upbeat sounding heartbreaker co-produced by TJH’s Amber Bain with The 1975’s George Daniel and Chloe Kraemer accompanied by a beautiful live alternate version of the track directed by Sheila Johansson which sees Amber and her extended live band strip the track back to its bare bones.

“I wrote Sad To Breathe some time ago, it’s one of the oldest songs on the record.” tells Amber. “It was very different back then; it’s gone from being solely electronic to what it is now, mostly live/ acoustic instrumentation. It’s about that desperate feeling when someone leaves you and the disbelief that they could. It’s funny you could have those kind of insane dramatic thoughts, that feel so real at the time, but can by some miracle look back in fondness to your entire life being ruined. It all circles back around.”

Four years after her widely celebrated debut Good at Falling, this album sees Bain lean even further into the pop realm–with help from Matty Healy and George Daniel from The 1975, Katie Gavin from MUNA and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon among others. Bain credits Gavin especially with injecting her with creative energy and inspiration throughout.

The album also sees Bain work alongside producer and engineer Chloe Kraemer (Rex Orange County, Lava La Rue, Glass Animals), an experience she describes as “life changing” due to the unspoken, shared understanding between marginalised genders in a creative space.

“I’d never worked with a woman or queer person [in that way] before,” Bain says. “It’s nice to have someone who completely understands your standpoint and shared experience. Also, I say ‘she’ in every song... so it’s important that someone understands that.”

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Spot Dog
2. Touching Yourself
3. Sad To Breathe
4. Over There
5. Morning Pages
6. Boyhood
SIDE B:
1. Indexical Reminder Of A Morning Well Spent
2. Friends
3. Sunshine Baby
4. Baby Goes Again
5. You Always Get What You Want
6. One For Sorrow, Two For Joni Jones

While Duster went into hibernation in the year 2000, Clay Parton’s four-track never stopped rolling. Recorded alone at home over several years, Birds In The Ground is an album of 30-something, post-9/11 malaise. Under his Eiafuawn (Everything Is All Fucked Up And What Not) acronym, Parton hides beneath layers of fuzzy and clean guitars, his hesitant, cottony vocal disappear into noise. 

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Bunny
2. No More Like That
3. Birds
4. The Voice Of Music
5. Bees
6. The Coffin Was So Light I Thought It Might Float Away

Side B
7. Good God Y’all
8. Secret Gypsy Language
9. On A Peoplemover
10. Two Thousand Twelve
11. The Drunk Pilot And The Romantic Passenger
12. Modulator Hustle

Superb 45 featuring two Hammond-led instrumentals. The A-side is taken from The Guy Hamper Trio’s second long player due out on Hangman Records. The B-side is exclusive to this release. ‘Man in the Mouth of a Cave’ I have painted St. Cuthbert’s Cave, Northumberland on many occasions and decided that it was imperative that I write a great jazz /beat theme all about it. (Important info: After Viking raids monks from Lindisfarne wandered the north-east carrying the body of St. Cuthbert. Legend has it that they took refuge in ‘St. Cuthbert’s Cave.’) I wrote the song with my friend Jamie Taylor in mind to have his way with it, which he does to thunderous applause - I should imagine. ‘107 Sleepless’ ‘107 Sleepless’ is a tune I wrote in the early 1980s when me and Mick Hampshire would stay up the entire weekend writing songs for our group The Milkshakes. (We lived at 107 Rochester Street, Chatham.) About 3am Sunday morning we would be flagging and sitting there senseless. I would play this jazz riff over and over for some unknown reason. Meanwhile it should make a nice theme tune to some yet to be written HBO series and make me a millionaire - I should imagine. GUY HAMPER – APRIL 2023

TRACK LISTING

1. Man In The Mouth Of A Cave
2. 107 Sleepless (Alt. Version)

Queens of the Stone Age have announced their long-awaited 8th studio album, In Times New Roman… 

In Times New Roman... is raw, at times brutal and not recommended for the faint of heart. And yet, it’s perhaps the most beautiful and definitely the most rewarding album in their epic discography. Founder Joshua Homme's most acerbic lyrics to date are buoyed by the instantly identifiable QOTSA sonic signature, expanded and embellished with new and unprecedented twists in virtually every song. With In Times New Roman… we see that sometimes one needs to look beneath scars and scabs to see beauty, and sometimes the scabs and scars are the beauty.

Feeling a bit out of place, and having difficulty finding music they could relate to, the members of QOTSA did as they are wont to do: In Times New Roman… is the sound of a band creating the music its own members want to hear, while giving the rest of us a sonic forum in which to congregate. “The world’s gonna end in a month or two," sings Homme, begging the question: What do you want to do to with the time you’ve got left? Homme, Troy Van Leeuwen, Dean Fertita, Michael Shuman and Jon Theodore may not be able to save us, but they’re giving us a place to ride it out.

In Times New Roman… was recorded and mixed at Homme’s own Pink Duck (RIP), with additional recording at Shangri-La. The album was produced by Queens of the Stone Age and mixed by Mark Rankin.

Artwork and double LP gatefold packaging designed by long time collaborator Boneface.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: QOTSA return for their most cathartic outing yet, dealing with Homme's cancer treatment, the loss of friends and the 'new normal' we find ourselves in. It's a quintessentially QOTSA LP, but pushed to 11, with the quiet moments all the more menancing, and the loud interludes (of which there are many) all the more incendiary. Superb.

TRACK LISTING

Obscenery
Paper Machete
Negative Space
Time & Place
Made To Parade
Carnavoyeur
What The Peephole Say
Sicily
Emotion Sickness
Straight Jacket Fitting

Robert Glasper’s 2005 Blue Note debut Canvas signaled the arrival of a singular new voice in jazz and his 2007 follow-up In My Element solidified his status as a rising star who was taking the music someplace new. Featuring bassist Vicente Archer & drummer Damion Reid, the album expanded the possibilities of where a modern jazz piano trio might go by delving further into his hip-hop & gospel roots.

This 2-LP Blue Note Classic Vinyl Edition was mastered by Kevin Gray and pressed on 180g vinyl at Optimal.

This 12" LP was re-cut from the Silver Sonya masters in April 2009 at Chicago Mastering Service.

Ian MacKaye vocals & guitar
Guy Picciotto vocals & guitar
Joe Lally bass
Brendan Canty drums

TRACK LISTING

1. Facet Squared
2. Public Witness Program
3. Returning The Screw
4. Smallpox Champion
5. Rend It
6. 23 Beats Off
7. Sweet And Low
8. Cassavetes
9. Great Cop
10. Walken's Syndrome
11. Instrument
12. Last Chance For A Slow Dance 

Another much-needed repress from Surfin In Kansas. This one hanged ten just under three years ago and has since become one bodacious and highly sought after slice of beach grooving joy.

"I Love You" samples The Gap Band's "Big Fun", extending the percussive breaks, doing away with all the smoochy vocal bits and upping the tempo jussst a tad before adding smatterings of extra piano goodness.

On side B, Johnny Bristol 's "Love No Longer Has A Hold On Me" is reduced to a dubbed out vox and hefty raregroove lick; the Strat part chiming away over a foundation shaking b-line and manly horns. A hefty slab of soul which is perfectly snipped and tucked by A Good Christian.

This repress won't hang around long - you have been warned! 

TRACK LISTING

A. I Love You
B. Free To Be Me

RIYL:Jockstrap/Working Men’s Club/Stealing Sheep/Broadcast etc.

Much anticipated debut album from this Leeds-based electronic duo, following high-profile UK festival slots, and shows alongside luminaries The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Warmduscher, Sea Power, Moonlandingz, The KVB, with multiple plays across BBC6/BBC Introducing and Amazing Radio, jellyskin are finally ready to unleash ‘In Brine’, their first full length release. The result of four years spent writing, recording, and refining the album between Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol, Palamos, and Berlin, ‘In Brine’ showcases the many talents of Will Ainsley and Zia Larty-Healy in a work straddling iridescent electronica, tungsten-tipped techno, art pop, and queasy, brown acid folk.

The songs are pieced together with themes of longing, misadventure by the sea, desire and aquatic apparitions that showcase Larty-Healy’s warm but urgent vocal range, as at home around the campfire as it is in the club. The pair’s meticulous arrangement and rearrangement, sculpting, recording, and mixing was a glacially slow process of adaptation, mutation, cooperation, growth, and, yes, natural selection. First single ‘Bringer of Brine’ thumps from the speaker anthemically and forcefully, pitched somewhere beautiful and uncanny; Larty-Healy’s vocals soar and skim off the production like a smooth stone across choppy waves.

The radio-ready pop electronica of ‘I Was The First Tetrapod’ bursts into the world with an urgency in line with the lyrics. An aquatic tale of crawling onto land for the first time, desperate to make new life forms, it’s also a positive, joyful rebuke to the despair of the world around us. “Growing my legs...”. The fuzzed-out psychedelic keys and forward-moving, Knife-like structure echo throughout while beautiful lyrics detail visions of where this would all lead life as we know it-“I can run freely, white horse behind me. Flexing my bones and artery twine, find human tone and reach for the vine.” ‘Fox Again’ opens with chopped alarm clocks segueing into a lurching rhythm, before exploding into skittering beats and a soaring chorus. The effect is like waking up drowsily, going over to the window in your room and yanking open the curtains to be blasted by searing sunshine.

The pair brought in Berlin based co-producer, mixer and masterer Lewis D-t to help finesse the tracks into fat-free hunks of ecstasy and sonic exploration, their rich depths marking ‘In Brine’ as an album everyone should be talking about this summer and beyond-all nine tracks will have feet moving and hearts swelling in equal measure. As opening track ‘Lift (Come In)’ positively opines “Going up!/Just want to keep going up!”. It’s time to get in on the ground floor...

TRACK LISTING

1.Lift (Come In)
2.Bringer Of Brine
3.Fox Again
4.Chicken, Milk, And Oranges
5.Marmalade
6.I Was The First Tetrapod
7.Pulpy Mouth And Skin
8.52 Blue
9.Punnet

“Are we having fun yet? Living in the grey zone”? The Toads ask the question and already know the answer. There’s many a wry smile, often packed with gallows humour, shared on the Melbourne groups’ debut album “In the Wilderness” (out June 9th on Anti Fade and Upset The Rhythm). Navigating the dross of modern life, whilst keeping one foot in a dream is the key to their nervy post-punk scuffle. Featuring members of The Shifters, The Living Eyes and Parsnip you’d be forgiven for guessing what The Toads sound like, but their mordant step and minor-key enchantment makes for an intriguing parry.

The Toads hatched after a short period of domestic readjustment mid-2021. Billy Gardner (guitar) found himself in need of a roof after his home was consumed by fire, and was kindly hosted by friend Stella Rennex (bass). Elsie Retter (drums) was a regular visitor to the house and after seeing Miles Jansen (vocals) tear it up with his other band at the local bowls club, they invited him along to sprinkle his deadpan musings across their fledgling sound. Pretty quickly they hit on their direction; a savvy, snappy lo-fi pop as openhearted as it is brooding.

After playing some formative shows, including a debut at Jerkfest in 2022, The Toads set about recording five songs mid-year for a tentative EP. Realising the songs were too long to fit on a 7”, they booked in another recording session the following September to extend the EP to 12”. Two tracks’ chords structures were fleshed out with new melodies and arrangements, and by this point The Toads were surprised to find they had an album’s worth of material. ‘In The Wilderness’ is a beguiling record, full of twists and turns. It’s arch, resilient, thoughtful and straight-at-your-head catchy to boot.

It’s fitting that the title track “In The Wilderness” draws this record to a close, being the peak of their invention so far. Drums pound and tumbling bass-lines sprint among the crisply stabbing guitar phrases and soaring horns outro. It’s a survivalist epic of hard-worn wisdom, ambling and restless. “I open up the door trying to get all of us through” sings Miles, becoming progressively more dizzy and despondent. There is a sense of toughing it out that never falters though and this is the essence of what The Toads do best. They push onwards into the darkness and keep their appetite, pulling us all into the light.

TRACK LISTING

01. Nationalsville
02. Two Dozen Functions
03. Sacred Books And The Damage Done
04. Ex-KGB
05. Gimme Little More
06. The Wandering Soul
07. Tale Of A Town Split In Two
08. Sir Francis Drake
09. The Next Door
10. In The Wilderness

Originally released in South Africa in 1983, 'In The Music... The Village Never Ends' is one of those holy grail African records that barely needs any introduction. Featuring the enormous 'Nomalizo', it's a record that aficionados around the world have been waiting many years to get hold of. Now, Be With Records proudly presents the hugely anticipated vinyl reissue of this bonafied classic.

This release is officially licensed and has been lovingly mastered for vinyl by Simon Francis (Claremont 56 mastering engineer) It has been pressed on audiophile 180gram vinyl for the first time and features the original, rarely seen artwork.

South African singer Letta Mbulu possesses one of the most beautiful voices the world has ever known. Her immaculate voice emits a sweetness that radiates from deep within, brimming with a joy of life and inspiring a spirit of hope and happiness. On this album, her voice soars over a strident musical force that veers between disco, soul and pop music of the most incredible kind. The gleaming guitars recall disco's finest hours while the thump of the beats anticipate 80s British soul.

News of this limited reissue has already been causing a significant stir amongst those in the know so do not sleep on this - you have been warned!

Top tier tackle from Heels & Souls Recordings for their fourth reissue as they let loose a much anticipated double header, Gold In The Shade’s 'Over You' backed with 'Shining Through'. Rough, tough, straight-from-the-heart ‘90s street soul, coming courtesy of TSR bossman Robert Roper and the Gold In The Shade ladies Arletta Davis and Sonia Johnson. One of the most sought-after cuts of this scene, it encompasses much of what made street soul special - heavy bass, gritty breaks, emotive chords and off-kilter vocals, marrying together to form a snapshot of a raw DIY scene with optimism at its heart.

The trio’s first single from 1990, ‘Shining Through’ is a no nonsense, bassbin-rattling love song from the underground, seeing long-term friends Sonia and Arletta pulling on the heartstrings from the mic as Robert works his magic behind the studio controls.

Lovingly remastered from the DAT by Cicely Balston, if only ‘Over You’ had been so easy. Two years of endless searching for the tape and subsequently a clean copy of the record, Heels & Souls even went to the lengths of having the multitracks restored so that Robert could attempt to recreate the original mixdown in the studio – but the magic of ‘91, unfortunately, can’t simply be conjured at the drop of a hi-hat.

After all but losing hope, Sean P (by way of Backatcha’s Aiden Leacy), came to the rescue with a mint condition copy of the record that he had from running in the same circles as Robert and Duval back in the day, ripping and restoring it with a precision he’s rightly famed for. And so (finally!) here it is: distorted samples, low-fi hits, speaker rumbling bassweight and all. Raw to the core, but that’s the point – pure, unbridled emotion from the depths of North West London.

Fully licensed from Robert Roper, 20% of profits from Heels & Souls Recordings and Prime Direct Distribution will be donated to Lives Not Knives, a youth-led London-based charity, working to prevent knife crime, serious youth violence and school exclusions.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Over You
A2. Over You (Mix 2)
B1. Shining Through
B2. Shining Through (Dance Mix)

Inspired by the rawness and honesty of artists like Elliott Smith, Julien Baker, Adrianne Lenker & Sufjan Stevens, Callum Pitt imbues his indie-folk with grand, orchestral, chamber pop sensibility plus an alt-rock edge. Despite using music often as a canvas to openly discuss depression & anxiety, as well as political unrest, Callum still manages to imprint feelings of optimism and unity, alongside genuine warmth and honesty, throughout his songs.

This debut album In The Balance pinpoints back to one night in 2019, where Pitt was handed an earth-shaking reminder of how much hangs in the balance with each passing second. Minutes after he waved goodbye to his brother and parents as they left his house, a fire engine hit the back edge of their car. They were all unharmed. But if the car was in the engine’s path a fraction of a second later — if Pitt had said one more word at the doorstep — it would have ploughed directly into the drivers’ side.

28-year-old Pitt has been working on his craft for a decade, beginning in the Newcastle pub scene and gradually refining his thoughtful, poetic songwriting voice. He won the Alan Hull Award for songwriters in 2019, and the Fender Player Plus competition in 2021. Meanwhile, he’s studying a masters in Occupational Therapy, and has worked with children, young people and adults with disabilities through various outlets, including therapeutic music work. These are experiences that shaped In The Balance, his first true body of work, giving him a new perspective on the cathartic and unifying power of music.

In The Balance is an astonishing debut album that marks Pitt as an artist with equal parts vision and talent. As he takes it on stage, he hopes to use his music as a vehicle to create space for other up-and-coming songwriters, including booking shows for fellow artists, and emphasising accessibility and inclusivity. “The North East is a really nice music scene. I’ve got a number of peers who are all really supportive and non-competitive. It doesn’t feel cold, it feels like everyone wants each other to succeed,” he says. This same warmth is key to In The Balance; in a chaotic universe, the instances of connection both big and small can feel like miracles.

TRACK LISTING

1. I Feel A God And Devil In This Room
2. Black Holes In The Sky
3. Crow
4. Fraction Of A Second
5. More Than This
6. Mayfly
7. Moths And Butterflies
8. Uncanny Moon
9. The Will Of The River 

Since their 2012 debut, Protomartyr have mastered the art of evoking place: the grinding Midwest humility of their hometown, as well as the x-rayed elucidation of America that comes with their vantage. The group’s sixth album was recorded at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, TX with producer Jake Aron. “The desert is more of a metaphor or symbol,” singer Joe Casey says, “of emotional deserts, or a place or time that seems to lack life.” The “growth” came from a period of colossal transition for Casey, including the death of his mother. But life does go on, and Casey describes the great theme of Formal Growth In The Desert as an embrace and acknowledgment of that fact: a 12-song testament to “getting on with life,” even when it feels impossibly hard.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: While 'Formal Growth In The Desert' has all of the angular riffs and jagged edges of 2015's superb 'The Agent Intellect', there's a lot more of a nuanced sound on display here. There are moments of relative calm, echoes of country music and gothic choruses scattered around before launching once again into that familiar, scathing fire. Unafraid as ever to push the boundaries but without sacrificing their core sound, classic Protomartyr.

Featuring over 50 song lyrics alongside never-beforeseen insights from Fleet Foxes frontman Robin Pecknold, Wading in Waist-High Water is an intimate look into-and resounding celebration of-musical craftsmanship and care.

“There is something quite moving about seeing the lyrics of these fifty-six songs collected and assembled this way. You can see the evolution of the minds and hearts at work behind the lyrics. . . . It’s a thrill, realizing that it’s a still-evolving and growing body of work.” —Brandon Taylor, from the Introduction

Since the release of their breakout debut in 2008, Fleet Foxes and their frontman, singer-songwriter Robin Pecknold, have enjoyed international critical and commercial acclaim. Drawing comparisons to Simon & Garfunkel; Crosby, Stills & Nash; and the music of Brian Wilson, Grammy-nominated Fleet Foxes have reshaped the American indie-folk sound, crafting songs that are acoustically and melodically driven, steeped in gospel-like harmonies, and propelled by resonant and timeless lyrics.

Wading in Waist-High Water: The Lyrics of Fleet Foxes contains Robin Pecknold’s complete lyrics from 56 songs, capturing the poetic and inventive storytelling that is a hallmark of the band’s music. These richly layered lyrics explore the complexity, darkness, and beauty of physical and emotional landscapes, both pastoral and modern. Alongside the lyrics, Pecknold includes hand-written notes and candid observations on creative processes, inspirations, and motivations.

With an introduction by celebrated author Brandon Taylor, Wading in Waist- High Water: The Lyrics of Fleet Foxes is a moving and intimate look at the art of songwriting, the joy of music-making, and what it means to produce meaningful and memorable sound.

In March 2020, Jack reached out to Lee “Scratch" Perry to produce a dub remix album based on Jack’s most loved recordings. On 8/29/21 the project was brought to a halt as Scratch departed this physical world. In ‘22 Jack and Subatomic Sound System, Perry’s band of the last decade, connected directly and discovered they had all the pieces to bring Lee “Scratch” Perry’s 3 creations to completion. The LP also features dubs from Dennis Bovell, Scientist, Mad Professor, Nightmares on Wax & more.

The new studio album by iconic experimental ambient artist, Eluvium.

­The first Eluvium album to feature a full live orchestra.

(Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality is the new album by Eluvium – the renowned moniker of prolific modern composer, Matthew Robert Cooper. Taking initial inspirations from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Richard Brautigan’s All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, (Whirring Marvels) inherently deals both with humankind’s need for meaning, and the emergence of algorithms reflecting the feedback loops of humankind’s interactions with machines themselves. This complicated relationship that we have with technology, automations, and algorithms – and the influence they in turn have on shaping our image of the world – is the mechanized heart and soul of an album that almost instantly establishes itself as a peak in Eluvium’s inimitable catalog.

During the writing process for (Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality, Cooper began experiencing shoulder and arm pain that rendered his left arm increasingly debilitated. This inspired new compositional methods that blended varying degrees of electronic automations with traditional songwriting. Lyrical themes were built using algorithms to cull content from a notebook filled with years of scribbled thoughts, poems, considerations, conspiracies, scientific notions, and notes on the spirit of existence. Employing musicians from all around the world – including members of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME), Golden Retriever, and the entire Budapest Scoring Orchestra – much of the music was conducted and recorded remotely via teleconference during the global COVID lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. This approach to composing served as an unintended but serendipitous challenge for an album inspired by the complicated convenience of technology.

(Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality blends an ornate combination of ingredients to construct a narrative of our dynamic invention; technological advancement; loneliness and isolationism; and unchecked idealism in a world of never-ending growth. The resulting hope that somehow emerges is itself a marvel of innovation and inspiration.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Matthew Robert Cooper produces some of the most beautiful modern-classical music around today, from the brittle solo piano of 'Pianoworks' to the more grand, expansive outings like 'Copia' or this, his most orchestrated outing yet. 'Whirring Marvels...' is playful in parts, but deeply heartfelt throughout. Rich and fun, just how I like my albums.

TRACK LISTING

1. Escapement (1:37)
2. Swift Automatons (2:37)
3. Vibration Consensus Reality (for Spectral Multiband Resonator) (8:01)
4. Scatterbrains (3:34)
5. Phantasia Telephonics (5:55)
6. The Violet Light (2:30)
7. Void Manifest (4:11)
8. Clockwork Fables (2:16)
9. Mass Lossless Interbeing (3:43)
10. A Floating World Of Demons (3:04)
11. Endless Flower (3:46)

A groundbreaking music history book from BBC Radio 3 broadcaster Kate Molleson, which fundamentally changes the way we think about classical music and the musicians who made it on a global scale.

In a world undergoing rapid transformation, twentieth century classical musicians brought forth a truly paradigm-shifting aural catalogue of human existence. Yet when we reflect on the genre’s history its central figures seem to share three characteristics: they were white, male and western. Sound Within Sound is the impassioned and exhilarating story of the composers who dared to challenge the conventional world of classical music in the twentieth century. Kate Molleson tells the stories of ten figures from across the globe who altered the course of musical history, only to be sidelined during an era that systemically favoured certain sounds – and people – over others.

A celebration of radical creativity rooted in ideas of protest, gender, race, ecology and resistance, Sound Within Sound is an energetic reappraisal of twentieth-century classical music that opens up the world far beyond its established centres, challenges stereotypical portrayals of the genre and shatters its traditional canon.

In the mid-’60s, Albert Ayler found himself at the center of major transformations within jazz. On his albums for ESP-Disk’, his delivery was radically aggressive and his tone blistering—aiming for something beyond the New Thing. His music would be further energized when (at the behest of John Coltrane) Bob Thiele signed him to Impulse! As Ayler told The Plain Dealer at the time, “It’s not about notes anymore. It’s a sound—a feeling. The approach we’re taking will discontinue the use of the word ‘jazz.’”

In Greenwich Village, Ayler’s first LP on Impulse!, perfectly captures the Cleveland-born saxophonist’s radiant intensity. Sourced from a pair of live engagements—February ’67 at the Village Theatre on New York’s Lower East Side and December ’66 at the Village Vanguard—these recordings show an improved clarity in production and performance.

Both sets feature two basses (including Alan Silva and Henry Grimes) which allowed the ensemble to go in different harmonic directions while maintaining an organic unity. Of particular interest are “For John Coltrane,” a tribute to Ayler’s mentor who would pass later that year, and “Truth Is Marching In” where trumpeter Donald Ayler joins his brother to celebrate and ultimately deconstruct several jazz traditions to stunning effect.

Vibrant in sound and vision, Albert Ayler’s In Greenwich Village is a landmark statement in free jazz and a career high-point for this truly original artist. Superior Viaduct is honored to present this classic album on vinyl for the first time domestically in 30 years.

TRACK LISTING

1. For John Coltrane
2. Change Has Come
3. Truth Is Marching In
4. Our Prayer

For Fans Of: The Marked Men, Ducks Ltd, The Sound, Mission of Burma, Straightjacket Fits, The Wipers, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Hüsker Dü, Bailter Space. Auckland, New Zealand post-punk group Guardian Singles return to Trouble In Mind for their follow-up to 2021's debut with "Feed Me To The Doves", a ten-track socio-political burner addressing our collective spiritual chaos that pulls influence from across the history of punk & permeates it into something decidedly Aotearoan & uniquely their own in ways that are both personal & universal.

"Feed Me To The Doves" is the first album to feature the current, long-standing lineup of Thom Burton (guitar, vocals), Fiona Campbell (drums), Yolanda Fagan (bass), and Durham Fenwick (lead guitar). The band has been playing live together now for a few years & it shows. The songs herein vary from the deeply personal, to sketches or postcards, as Burton says "…scribbled while watching the dregs of a delirious culture war play out through broken smartphones and praline vape clouds." Expertly recorded at Neil Finn's Roundhead Studios in Auckland by engineer Steven Marr, who Burton says had a "great sense of being able to keep the urgency of the songs while adding lushness and keeping things sounding like they're about to break at any second". Marr helped turn the album's scrappy beginnings into something more cohesive and beautiful.

TRACK LISTING

1. Chad And Stacey
2. Pit Viper
3. Manic Attraction
4. Metal Fingers
5. Bleak Park
6. Com Trans
7. Nightmare Town
8. Untied, United
9. Shimmer
10. Ground Swell