Joe Moore is full of surprises. Every new release his name is on, whether they are his own projects (The Yearning, The Perfect Kiss, Julie Et Joe) or other people's (Lia Pamina, Cristina Quesada and Maddie Mae), gives us incredible results. Lounge music, soul, girl groups, chamber pop, French pop from the 60s... Diverse styles pass through his hands like an unstoppable song-making machine.

What will the journey be this time? "Only When I'm Dancing", transports us to the golden age of disco music, when the dance floor was full of excitement, melancholy, elegance and majestic arrangements (something that Moore notably excels at).

This time, the change of sound comes with a change in singer. The angelic voice of Maddie Dobie makes way for the elegance of Luci Ashbourne. Her mature, velvety voice is perfect for these sensual songs, many of which are aimed directly at the dance floor. When Joe began working on this new album, he imagined Karen Carpenter singing along with the music of Benny and Björn.

"Never Gonna Let You Go" begins like a tribute to Barry White. "Love Has Taken Hold Of My Heart" has echoes of ABBA. Elsewhere we hear Pet Shop Boys, Bee Gees, Tina Charles and Isaac Hayes. A new album, a new surprise, a new pleasure.

TRACK LISTING

1.Never Gonna Let You Go
2.Don't Take Me To Heart
3.Only When I'm Dancing
4.Love Has Taken Hold Of My Heart
5.Lend Me Your Love
6.Come To Me
7.Take A Little Look
8.Song Or A Dance
9.Keep Me In Mind
10.Yearning For You

The untiring Joe Moore in his endless search for beauty in music, is back with a new mini-album from THE YEARNING, and addressing his usual inclinations: the chanson, chamber pop, bossa, and above all, the perfect song. And once again, he is handling all the production work, the recording, and the songwriting, and is playing almost all the instruments.

'A cream-whipped dream of Fleetwood Mac, Tears For Fears and Thomas Mapfumo, all soaring, vocal harmonies, cascading synth parts and muffled tribal drums, with highlife guitars and a children's choir' - Time Out. Yeasayer's smashing debut album is a mesmerizing journey.

Amen & Goodbye is the fourth studio album from Brooklyn-based band Yeasayer.

Yeasayer offer a peek into the world of Amen & Goodbye with “I Am Chemistry,” the first track to be heard from their highly-anticipated forthcoming album. Featuring guest vocals from the legendary folk singer Suzzy Roche of The Roches, “I Am Chemistry” is a linear psychedelic journey proving Yeasayer still has the knack for writing very odd pop songs.

Amen & Goodbye is the follow up to 2012’s work Fragrant World. Moving away from a digital - heavy approach, Yeasayer recorded Amen & Goodbye to tape at Outlier Inn Studio in upstate New York, then brought on board Joey Waronker (drummer - Atoms For Peace / Beck) to deconstruct everything to make the final document.

Amen & Goodbye features Yeasayer’s trademark sound without sounding like anything the band has done before. They have created a collection of strange fables from the Bible from a universe that does not yet exist.

TRACK LISTING

1 Daughters Of Cain
2 I Am Chemistry
3 Silly Me
4 Half Asleep
5 Dead Sea Scrolls
6 Prophecy Gun
7 Computer Canticle 1
8 Divine Simulcrum
9 Child Prodigy
10 Gerson’s Whistle
11 Uma
12 Cold Night
13 Amen & Goodbye

Wake Up Awesome, by C. Spencer Yeh (Burning Star Core), Okkyung Lee, and Lasse Marhaug (Jazzkamer), is the second chapter of Software Studio Series - a new venture in the Software Recording Co.'s expanding catalog that invites artists in the field of electronic music to create collaborative works of quality and vision. Inspired by the historical intersections of live performance and studio post-production, Wake Up Awesome is a modern kind of fusion in technique as well as genre. At its core are three artists highly experienced with both instant and labored composition. Together, they found the studio generated improvisations were iteratively developed by each on their own.

Passages of real-time improvisation duck and swerve into electro-concrete tangles of samples, edits and juxtaposition – all you'd want out of a world of mechanical possibility. If it sounds intentional on the record, it was. If Yeh and Marhaug's more electronic affinities in their respective practices place them as the "producers," then Lee's cello often leads the drive as a sort of soloist.

The resulting conversation is genuinely both serious and iconoclastic. All three artists have a history of dialogue, but this is the first time they've hung out for the record -- we're very happy that they did.

TRACK LISTING

1. Wake Up Awesome
2. Hairslide
3. The Mermen Of Poetry
4. Ophelia Gimme Shelter
5. The Mermaids Of Extended Technique
6. Magic Seagull Lamp
7. Mission: Lazy
8. Mission: Nothing
9. Throw Down The Fishcake
10. Neutrons Whatever
11. Serious Cat's Milk
12. Anise Tongue And Durian Wet Dream
13. Mission: Possible
14. RSVP Skunk
15. Tonight We Sleep Like Empty Hard Drives

Together with Universal Music, Yello is now looking back on their complete works and releasing the first six studio albums as exclusive 2LP bundles consisting of the original albums as black vinyl re-issues, each combined with a coloured vinyl bonus LP with rare bonus versions of their most famous songs, from the original albums.

In an elaborate state-of-the art process, the old original tapes were remastered in the highest possible resolution to reproduce the sound as authentically as never before. In addition to the cult debut "Solid Pleasure" (1980) with the hit "Bostich", the albums "Claro Que Si" (1981), "You Gotta Say Yes To Another Excess" (1983), the Top 1 breakthrough "Stella" (1985), including the mega hit "Oh Yeah", the legendary follow-up "One Second" (1987), from which the single "The Rhythm Divine" emerged, as well as the electro-pop milestone "Flag" from 1988, including the pop anthem "The Race" in a completely new sound shine.

Together with Universal Music, Yello is now looking back on their complete works and releasing the first six studio albums as exclusive 2LP bundles consisting of the original albums as black vinyl re-issues, each combined with a coloured vinyl bonus LP with rare bonus versions of their most famous songs, from the original albums.

In an elaborate state-of-the art process, the old original tapes were remastered in the highest possible resolution to reproduce the sound as authentically as never before. In addition to the cult debut "Solid Pleasure" (1980) with the hit "Bostich", the albums "Claro Que Si" (1981), "You Gotta Say Yes To Another Excess" (1983), the Top 1 breakthrough "Stella" (1985), including the mega hit "Oh Yeah", the legendary follow-up "One Second" (1987), from which the single "The Rhythm Divine" emerged, as well as the electro-pop milestone "Flag" from 1988, including the pop anthem "The Race" in a completely new sound shine.

Together with Universal Music, Yello is now looking back on their complete works and releasing the first six studio albums as exclusive 2LP bundles consisting of the original albums as black vinyl re-issues, each combined with a coloured vinyl bonus LP with rare bonus versions of their most famous songs, from the original albums.

In an elaborate state-of-the art process, the old original tapes were remastered in the highest possible resolution to reproduce the sound as authentically as never before. In addition to the cult debut "Solid Pleasure" (1980) with the hit "Bostich", the albums "Claro Que Si" (1981), "You Gotta Say Yes To Another Excess" (1983), the Top 1 breakthrough "Stella" (1985), including the mega hit "Oh Yeah", the legendary follow-up "One Second" (1987), from which the single "The Rhythm Divine" emerged, as well as the electro-pop milestone "Flag" from 1988, including the pop anthem "The Race" in a completely new sound shine.

Together with Universal Music, Yello is now looking back on their complete works and releasing the first six studio albums as exclusive 2LP bundles consisting of the original albums as black vinyl re-issues, each combined with a coloured vinyl bonus LP with rare bonus versions of their most famous songs, from the original albums.

In an elaborate state-of-the art process, the old original tapes were remastered in the highest possible resolution to reproduce the sound as authentically as never before. In addition to the cult debut "Solid Pleasure" (1980) with the hit "Bostich", the albums "Claro Que Si" (1981), "You Gotta Say Yes To Another Excess" (1983), the Top 1 breakthrough "Stella" (1985), including the mega hit "Oh Yeah", the legendary follow-up "One Second" (1987), from which the single "The Rhythm Divine" emerged, as well as the electro-pop milestone "Flag" from 1988, including the pop anthem "The Race" in a completely new sound shine.

Together with Universal Music, Yello is now looking back on their complete works and releasing the first six studio albums as exclusive 2LP bundles consisting of the original albums as black vinyl re-issues, each combined with a coloured vinyl bonus LP with rare bonus versions of their most famous songs, from the original albums.

In an elaborate state-of-the art process, the old original tapes were remastered in the highest possible resolution to reproduce the sound as authentically as never before. In addition to the cult debut "Solid Pleasure" (1980) with the hit "Bostich", the albums "Claro Que Si" (1981), "You Gotta Say Yes To Another Excess" (1983), the Top 1 breakthrough "Stella" (1985), including the mega hit "Oh Yeah", the legendary follow-up "One Second" (1987), from which the single "The Rhythm Divine" emerged, as well as the electro-pop milestone "Flag" from 1988, including the pop anthem "The Race" in a completely new sound shine.

More than a collection of songs, “Psalms of Yellow House” embodies the culmination of a journey that is both artistic and deeply personal. The album stands as a testament to the relentless pursuit of meaning and beauty. Each track is a psalm, a hymn that serves as a reflection of experiences lived and lessons hard-learned. These psalms are woven together into a narrative that is as diverse musically as the life that inspired its creation. The conception of the album began when Emile was living secluded in a farm cottage hidden in the mountains of South Africa’s Western Cape. Far removed from society, Emile was left to confront his innermost thoughts in stark isolation. Initially, the long-sought freedom was euphoric, almost spiritual, but this soon gave way to an overwhelming darkness. Trapped in a cycle of manic bliss and despair, compounded by a battle with substance addiction, this period inspired songs such as “Trouble Always Finds Me”, “Leave the City” and “Comedown King”. Newly in love and spurred on by a desire for change, Emile returned to the city to face his demons and rebuild his life. During this period, he reflected on his life and recognized that parts of himself needed to be cut loose to create room for rebirth. Turning to his music, he tackled the lingering childhood pains, strained relationships, and the challenges of embracing newfound sobriety through his songwriting. These themes are intimately explored in the album opener “Saviour Complex”. With his demons now behind him, light and hope began to flood back into Emile’s life. This resurgence of joy was amplified by the birth of his daughter, with fatherhood instilling an undying sense of purpose in his life. Grounded upon a foundation that transcends the self, Emile set out to complete the production of “Psalms of Yellow House”, marking a final goodbye to his former self and welcoming a new era. This transformation inspired songs such as “Don’t Cry (It’s Just Goodnight)” and “Blowing Away”. True to its namesake, “Psalms of Yellow House” is a journey through darkness into light. It offers a vulnerable chronicle of life that demonstrates how beauty, power and meaning can be salvaged from the depths of any experience.

TRACK LISTING

1. Saviour Complex
2. Trouble Always Finds Me
3. Milk & Honey
4. Say You Will
5. Leave The City
6. Blowing Away
7. Comedown King
8. Don’t Cry (It’s Just Goodnight) 

Influenced by Adam & The Ants, ABC and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, YSN are Stanley Kubrick's Droogs cast as a pop band of Edwardian dandies. This is their third single, and was produced by XTC and Clash producer Simon Humphrey.

Joe Yellow is a studio project started in 1983 by Domenico Ricchini and the producers Miki Chieregato and Roberto Turatti.Their big hit Eurobeat / Hi NRG tune "U.S.A."('92) will be 7inch on first time, with Japanese imaginary jacket.The song became famous in Japan when dance-pop group Da pump covered it.

TRACK LISTING

1. U.S.A. (Extended Vocal Remix)
2. U.S.A. (Instrumental)

While retaining the melodic, enveloping guitar soundscapes of previous releases, "Melt Inside" is different in one key element. On this occasion, Jon's mesmerising, minimalist, guitar-based arrangements are enhanced by the divine vocals of Ally Todd. The album features nine tracks, composed and recorded between Lund, Sweden and Leicestershire, UK during 2004-5. But it is more than simply a collection of songs. These are vibrant, emotional stories of love and loathing, of mystery and intrigue, of despair and elation.

Now signed to Capitol Records, this EP is a taster of what's to come, after playing on the Vans Warped Tour Yellowcard are proving to be one of the most entertaining new emo-pop bands on the scene and this five track mini-album is just the ticket.

Together with Universal Music, Yello is now looking back on their complete works and releasing the first six studio albums as exclusive 2LP bundles consisting of the original albums as black vinyl re-issues, each combined with a coloured vinyl bonus LP with rare bonus versions of their most famous songs, from the original albums.

In an elaborate state-of-the art process, the old original tapes were remastered in the highest possible resolution to reproduce the sound as authentically as never before. In addition to the cult debut "Solid Pleasure" (1980) with the hit "Bostich", the albums "Claro Que Si" (1981), "You Gotta Say Yes To Another Excess" (1983), the Top 1 breakthrough "Stella" (1985), including the mega hit "Oh Yeah", the legendary follow-up "One Second" (1987), from which the single "The Rhythm Divine" emerged, as well as the electro-pop milestone "Flag" from 1988, including the pop anthem "The Race" in a completely new sound shine.

The follow up EP to Yes Blythe's Debut album "Keep The Faith" first saw the light of day as a short run cassette release on the Gnod tape imprint Tesla Tapes. "Initiate Screen Prevails" is finally being given a vinyl release on Sacred Tapes. Not only the first Vinyl release for the label, kicking off an offshoot SAC-R series, but also a first vinyl release for the artist.

This 30 minute EP ranges from subtle layered field recordings to intense crushing noise created with depth and detail. The record comes packaged with printed fabric insert and risograph'd recycled card info sheet.

TRACK LISTING

A. Travels Nerves To Freedom
B. At Labyrinth Borne-Sun

Enter Yes Grasshopper, taking you on a trip into the unexplored depths of their collective mind, a place of daring rescue missions and uncanny swamp monsters, all imagined through the lens of a playful B-movie aesthetic.

Emerging from England's unforgiving northern coast, this dynamic duo present a wholly unique take on noise rock, with crushing riffs, white water rhythmic twists and barking intertwined vocals making way for heinously catchy hooks you'll find yourself whistling at the most unexpected of times. And with the lyrics spinning esoteric tales over such a compelling foundation, Yes Grasshopper won't let your undivided attention slip for a single second.

Their universe is one where both rage and joy jostle side-by-side, one moment buzzing with all the fury of a swarm of pissed-off hornets/mozzies, the next inviting the whole lot round for an unforgettable afterparty. Call it metal. Call it punk. Hell, call it hardcore-acid-math-crustcore if you want. What's so striking is that it doesn't deal in the usual palette of oppressive blacks and greys those genres invariably paint with, instead imagining a more kaleidoscopic and perhaps even welcoming landscape. And despite the heavy-as-heavy-can-be riffery and hammer-blow grooves, there is somehow an air of levity permeating the whole thing.

Giving the likes of Hella, Lightning Bolt and John (times two) a run for their money in the 'how much noise can two people make?' stakes, the respective halves of this newly established duo have been nourished on a diet of music's more extreme offerings, with the mischievous demons within intent on shredding hard. Live shows consist of the slicing of mustard and people losing their socks.

Effortlessly blending downer, emocore lyrics with poppy hardcore backings this new Lookout Records outfit has what it takes to make you happy as they get more depressed. Oh so young to be sooo cynical. Great stuff.

One of the most successful of the 70s progressive rock groups, Yes began their career with this adventurous debut album. Influenced by the explosion of new pyschedelic prog rock bands like Pink Floyd, Cream and the Nice (who weren't afraid to mix rock idioms with classical music) "Yes" was issued in November 1969 it featured Jon Anderson's distinctive vocals, Chris Squire's huge bass sound, Peter Banks' angular guitar and Tony Kaye's keyboards which were underpinned by Bruford's remarkable drumming that managed to be both complex and effortless. It was their first step on the path to prog rock success.

Limited edition bonus disc version also available - click here.

The incredible second album from Parisian psych-pop duo Yeti Lane, the follow-up to 2010’s hugely acclaimed self-titled debut.

Includes the track ‘Analog Wheel’, premiered on The Line Of Best Fit last December, and the single ‘Sparkling Sunbeam’, featuring guest vocals from Herman Dune.

Co-produced and mixed by Antoine Gaillet (M83, Zombie Zombie, The Berg Sans Nipple).

Artwork by Jean-Philippe Talaga, founder of the Gooom Disques label.

For fans of Kraftwerk, My Bloody Valentine, Broadcast, Stereolab, Can, Pavement and LCD Soundsystem.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Grandaddy gone Krautrock. Heavenly.

Darryl says: Superb psyche-kosmische indie-pop mantras from this Parisian duo on the Sonic Cathedral label.

TRACK LISTING

1. Analog Wheel
2. The Echo Show
3. Warning Sensations
4. -
5. Logic Winds
6. Strange Call
7. --
8. Alba
9. ---
10. Dead Tired
11. Sparkling Sunbeam
12. Faded Spectrum
13. ----

Nat Ćmiel is a non-binary, London-based, Singaporean multi-disciplinary artist and cyborg entity. “Glitch Princess” opens a channel to the in-between spaces: error messages and broken computer code where soothing un-melodies rest comfortably among the jagged edges of feedback loops. Ćmiel’s experiences with sobriety resulted in a flood of emotions and “Glitch Princess” is an undiluted excerpt of this downpour. Video game scores, experimental shoegaze sounds, & ethereal whispers come together to build an underworld with the occasional erratic dance beat to guide users deeper into the fever dream. yeule invites us to transcend into a post-human world where expression is no longer bound by identity, but rather we are free to assemble ourselves along lines of affinity.

TRACK LISTING

01. My Name Is Nat Cmiel
02. Electric
03. Flowers Are Dead
04. Eyes
05. Perfect Blue
06. Don't Be So Hard On Your Own Beauty
07. Fragments
08. Too Dead Inside
09. Bites On My Neck
10. I <3 U
11. Friendly Machine
12. Mandy

Multi-dimensional artist and producer yeule announces their new album softscars arriving 22nd September via Ninja Tune. The album represents a new direction for yeule as they explore softer textures and disembodied arrangements that feature their ethereal vocals front and centre. The project closely examines the anatomy of their long held emotional wounds for their most vulnerable work yet.

The announcement follows their previous single “sulky baby" and their critically-acclaimed 2022 album Glitch Princess, which received a 'Best New Music' stamp from Pitchfork. yeule is a multifaceted artist across music and visual art. The yeule project was fabricated by Ćmiel to act as a portal or rift which allows them to communicate their art to the outside world, while still being protected within their inner shell. yeule was constructed as a manifesto of Ćmiel’s own identity, where they have always had access to multiple avatars and the freedom to change or contort at will — solace through embodying mutable, chameleon-like multiplicities.

STAFF COMMENTS

Martin says: An unnervingly diverse selection of glitched-out electronics, roaring electro-punk and shimmering shoegaze atmospherics, ripped and scattered across the sound field. There are as many moments of tentative beauty as there are uncompromising walls of sound and pummelling syncopated electronics.

TRACK LISTING

Side A:
X W X
Sulky Baby
Softscars
4ui12
Ghosts
Dazies

Side B:
Fish In The Pool
Software Update
Inferno
Bloodbunny
Cyber Meat
Aphex Twin Flame

Derya Yildirim and Grup Şimşek are back with their third album Dost 2, the second of a two part series following 2021’s highly acclaimed Dost 1. The eight-track release sees Turkish singer, bağlama player and multi- instrumentalist Derya Yıldırım and her international band of brothers and sisters continue their psychedelic journey, meandering through Anatolian folk music and poetry with their electrifying grooves, while also delving into their own lives and personal experiences.

While rooted in Anatolian tradition, Grup Şimşek (which translates into Ocean Lightning and the Thunderbolts, a play on Derya’s surname “Yıldırım”, which means lightning in Turkish) draws on a boundless cosmos of sounds and builds on the contribution of each band member.

Yıldırım was born in a multicultural neighborhood of Hamburg, where she was influenced by the culture and music of neighboring communities as well as that of her family, learning the bağlama alongside piano, sax, and guitar. Despite being multilingual, Yıldırım exclusively sings in Turkish: “It’s really important to me because that’s the language I can really express myself in, it’s my emotional language” she explains.

Graham Mushnik (organ, synthesizers, and clavinet player) and Antonin Voyant (guitar, bass, and flute) are both members of London/France-based collective Catapulte Records and played in l’Orchestre du Montplaisant, a quartet known for its cinematic, retro atmospheres — a clear influence on Grup Şimsek’s sprawling, vintage-tinged compositions.

The band marries 1960s and 70s Anatolian influences with a contemporary approach to composition and rhythm, thanks in large part to the contribution of drummer, percussionist, composer, and marimba player Greta Eacott. With a background in experimental and contemporary music, Eacott “thinks about essential things like sound and time within music and space, and contributed this whole mindset to Grup Şimsek” says Yıldırım.

Şimşek’s original compositions dominate Dost 2’s tracklist, with the lyrics on four of the tracks penned by Derya Yıldırım in collaboration with Berlin-based writer Duygu Ağal. Guitar and organ curl around each other on opener “Gümüş”, which unfolds and swells as Yıldırım’s powerful voice takes off and soars above the steady instrumental background before giving way to an evocative guitar solo. “Meraklı Gönül” deals with memory and loss, feelings that permeate Yıldırım’s vocals as they float on a mellow bed of delicate percussions, phased guitars, and winding synth lines; “Mola” is an understated but incredibly powerful bağlama composition, where moments of silence are able to stir up emotions as intensely as the music itself; seconds later the tension is broken by the funky bassline on the irresistibly catchy “Bal”.

The sorrowful atmosphere on “Odam Kireç Tutmuyor” mirrors the heartbreak of the song’s two protagonists, who eventually die of a broken heart after being separated. Based on a traditional love song, the track ends with a cry of “Oy Leminê”, a Kurdish expression that conveys a feeling of pain, hope, and unfulfilled hopes, artfully captured by a wistful flute line.

The third cover on the album is the soul stirring “Ayşe Halam Arıyor” sung by Derya’s aunt Ayşe Yıldırım, who already contributed to Dost 1 with her autobiographical poem on “Hastane Önü”. The track captures a spontaneous and intimate moment: the band was recording in the studio when Ayşe called her niece and began reminiscing about the music from her childhood, intoning her favorite song, “Bulgar Dağı” on loudspeaker. Her voice echoes in the silence, bringing the album to a close with a distant crackle. “It’s a very special end to this whole trip” says Yıldırım.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Gümüş
A2. Darildim Darildim
A3. Odam Kireç Tutmuyor
A4. Yeni Yürekle
B1. Mola
B2. Bal
B3. Merakli Gönül
B4. Ayşe Halam Ariyor

“We wrote this song during the quarantine. ‘Haw pin’ is Maastricht dialect for ‘stay strong’, which you can see on a lot of windows at the moment in Maastricht, and we mixed it up because we used the phin lute from Thailand.”

TRACK LISTING

A1. Haw Phin
B1. Chong Ky

Hooray for Beck-influenced home recording nutjobs! Jason Temple and Brian Esser are a pair of Floridans who gathered a bunch of electronic analog boxes and set them and turned them loose on each other, like a music geek's version of playing toy soldiers. There's a little bit of Sukia electro-soundscape artiness, some Black Dice beat processing, some sci-fi robotics, and finally a dollop of Suicide damaged keyboard music. This music is what they will be playing on commercial transports to Mars in about 50 years. All these songs have a homemade feel, but also an art loft appeal. Songs are not based on chord progressions but nearly sound effects stitched together over rhythm loops. Favourites are "Big Bass With Platinum Limbs" which has a few lyrics and glitchy beats before being tossed into a salad shooter (or something). And of course "High Heel To Mammal" which struts a weird, funky robotic catwalk beat over bubbling synthesizers. This is what robots will do stripteases too.

Fifteen years after its release, UK sextet yndi halda's debut album Enjoy Eternal Bliss remains a landmark release in the post-rock movement, settling between the trance of the genre's early pioneers and the cinematic lushness of its second wave whilst also touching on indie-rock, alt-folk, modern classical and ambient music.

Written and recorded when the band were teenagers, in a tiny fishing village on the Kentish coast, the album was initially self-released in homemade sleeves housing CD-Rs burned on the band's parents' computers. It quickly caught the attention of established labels Big Scary Monsters and Burnt Toast Vinyl, whose official releases of the material received significant acclaim. Following the album's official release, the band toured across Europe, Asia and the US in support.

Its music - elegant string arrangements, sonorous interweaving guitar lines, and spare vocals - belied the youth of its creators and became a true moment in post-rock.

The original, 2007 press release tells us:

The self-released version of Enjoy Eternal Bliss was voted above such genre luminaries as Sigur Ros, Explosions In The Sky, Pelican et. al. in decoymusic.com's top 50 instrumental albums, a reward which anyone would struggle to dispute upon listening to the record. With one beautiful soundscape after another, yndi halda create something bigger than an emotional rollercoaster, it's more like a full-on mountain assault through thick blizzards and incredible sunshine.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: One of my favourite records gets a BEAUTIFUL repress for the 15-year anniversary of it's release. A superb, gorgeous monolith of an album including the not-on-demo 'A Song For Starlit Beaches'. Massive if you enjoy post-rock, symphonic modern classical and HUGE swathes of sound, a true gem.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Dash And Blast
B1. We Flood Empty Lakes
C1. A Song For Starlit Beaches
D1. Illuminate My Heart, My Darling

Continuing with their ever-expanding Revisionist History series, Matador Records announce a 25th anniversary reissue of Yo La Tengo’s 1995 album Electr-o-pura. Now in a gatefold sleeve and cut from the original 58-minute master, the new reissue is pressed for the first time on two LPs to ensure the highest quality of audio the album has had on vinyl to date.

On their seventh studio album, Yo La Tengo would further expand on the venturous songwriting established on their previous album Painful with stunning craft and a deepened exploration of contrasting textures, moods and atmospherics. Chock full with moments of pop gold like “Tom Courtenay,”melancholic ballads such as the heartbreaking “Pablo And Andrea,” and sweeping, feedback-laden jams like the show-stopping “Blue Line Swinger”, Electr-o-pura is a thrilling document of one of America’s most beloved bands hitting their creative stride and remains one of the most sublime records the band has released in their uninterrupted 36-year career.

TRACK LISTING

Decora
Flying Lesson (Hot Chicken #1)
The Hour Grows Late
Tom Courtenay
False Ending
Pablo And Andrea
Paul Is Dead
False Alarm
The Ballad Of Red Buckets
Don't Say A Word (Hot Chicken #2)
(Straight Down To The) Bitter End
My Heart's Reflection
Attack On Love
Blue Line Swinger

‘Fade’ is the most direct, personal and cohesive album of Yo La Tengo’s career. Recorded with John McEntire at Soma Studios in Chicago, it recalls the sonic innovation and lush cohesion of career high points like 1997’s ‘I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One’ and 2000’s ‘…And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out’. ‘Fade’ is a tapestry of fine melody and elegant noise, rhythmic shadow play and shy-eyed orchestral beauty, songfulness and experimentation.

‘Fade’ attains a lyrical universality and hard-won sense of grandeur that’s rare even for this band. It weaves themes of aging, personal tragedy and emotional bonds into a fully-realized whole that recalls career-defining statements like ‘Blood On The Tracks’, ‘I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight’ or Al Green’s ‘Call Me’.

“Nothing ever stays the same / Nothing’s explained”, the band sing in unison on the reflective opening track ‘Ohm’. “We try not to lose our hearts / Not to lose our minds” - a straightforward sentiment for a band that prefer private intimation to forceful expression, making the song’s resistance to resignation feel that much more earned.

This is the first time Yo La Tengo have collaborated with producer John McEntire, best known for his work in post-rock band Tortoise as well as his work with such artists as Bright Eyes, Stereolab and Teenage Fanclub. He has helped the band hone a set of songs as multifaceted as they are seamless, flowing from the low key shimmy of ‘Well You Better’ to the muted motorik kick of ‘Stupid Things’, to the cozy distortion of ‘Paddle Forward’ and right through to the cagey groove, horns and strings of the gorgeous album closer, ‘Before We Run’, in which the band’s Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan sing “Take me to your distant lonely place / Take me out beyond mistrust.”

‘Fade’s emotional core sits at its very centre with two songs, one sung by Kaplan and one by Hubley. The tender, raw, Kaplan-sung ballad ‘I’ll Be Around’ pivots around a circular guitar figure set against James McNew’s calm, pulsating bassline. The song’s simplicity and starkness stand like a beacon against the emptiness.

‘Cornelia And Jane’ features Hubley gently singing “I hear them whispering, they analyse, but nobody knows what’s lost in your eyes / Sending the message that doesn’t get to you, how can we care for you?”, supported by whispering cushions of horns and delicate vocal harmonies. The effect is both heartbreaking and reassuring.

“In the best possible sense, Yo La Tengocan feel less like a band and more like a beloved national trust” - Stereogum

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Modern-day Velvets do it again.

Fakebook is the fourth studio album by American indie rock band Yo La Tengo, released in 1990 by record label Bar None. A collection of mainly cover songs that lean toward the idiosyncratic (e.g., Peter Stampfel, Daniel Johnston, Jad Fair), Fakebook is warm, low-key, and lovely, with heartfelt singing and playing that never flags after hundreds of replays. It's impossible to imagine playing this record and not smiling and singing along. A big bonus is a great version of the Flamin' Groovies' "You Tore Me Down." When Yo La Tengo released Fakebook, their fourth full-length, the band was only a twosome, as future YLT bassist James McNew was presumably still playing in various bands and moonlighting as a parking lot attendant, having yet to join up with the Hoboken-bred crew. According to Ira Kaplan (vocals and guitar, with Georgia Hubley on vocals and drums rounding out the modern trio), the record itself was mostly an excuse to screw around in the studio with YLT’s first lead guitarist, Dave Schramm. While Fakebook is primarily a compilation of covers, like its eventual offspring, the YLT (as “Condo Fucks”) record Fuckbook and 2006’s Yo La Tengo is Murdering the Classics, it also includes five originals. Setting aside their noisier proclivities and the rawer elements of their former work in favor of a more stripped-down, breezily folkish approach, the album was, in its time, a novel approach for the band. Today, more than 20 years on, Fakebook remains a testament to Yo La Tengo’s versatility and early promise, as well as being the first full glimpse into the group’s almost frightfully encyclopedic familiarity with what must be hundreds of radio hits and older cuts.

TRACK LISTING

A1 Can't Forget
A2 Griselda
A3 Here Comes My Baby
A4 Barnaby, Hardly Working
A5 Yellow Sarong
A6 You Tore Me Down
A7 Emulsified
A8 Speeding Motorcycle

B1 Tried So Hard
B2 The Summer
B3 Oklahoma, U.S.A.
B4 What Comes Next
B5 The One To Cry
B6 Andalucia
B7 Did I Tell You
B8 What Can I Say

Once again moving the bar for 'what can be done in just one record', no two songs sound the same. There's everything from epic soundscapes to jaunty popsongs, to gorgeous love songs with a few rock'n'roll numbers thrown in. All delivered with humour, a smattering of falsetto and a huge dose of that unique Yo La Tengo charm.

‘I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass’ is the eleventh full-length album by Hobokonbased alternative indie band Yo La Tengo, originally released on September 12, 2006. It is their sixth album released on Matador.

The title of the album is rumoured to be a (paraphrased) quote by NBA player Tim Thomas. Sitting on the bench together during a game, Thomas was caught on tape by the MSG Network in a profane exchange with another player: “Everyone in this organization is afraid of you, but I’m not, and I will beat your ass.”

The most live-sounding Yo La Tengo album in years. Times have changed for Yo La Tengo as much as they have for everyone else. In the past, the band has often worked with outside producers and mixers. In their latest effort, the first full-length in five years, This Stupid World was created all by themselves. And their time-tested judgment is both sturdy enough to keep things to the band’s high standards, and nimble enough to make things new. At the base of nearly every track is the trio playing all at once, giving everything a right-now feel. There’s an immediacy to the music, as if the distance between the first pass and the final product has become more direct.

Available on standard black vinyl, CD and on limited blue vinyl.

STAFF COMMENTS

Martin says: Yo La Tengo's newest outing takes all of their famous melodicism and folky melancholy and refines it perfectly into a distillation of everything that's made the band so great over the years. Brittle in parts, but retaining the intensity of their more driven excursions and wall of sound art-rock they do so well.

TRACK LISTING

1. Sinatra Drive Breakdown
2. Fallout
3. Tonight’s Episode
4. Aselestine
5. Until It Happens
6. Apology Letter
7. Brain Capers
8. This Stupid World
9. Miles Away

There's a riot going on. You don't need me, or Yo La Tengo, to tell you that. These are dark times, in our heads as much as in the streets. It's easy to lose contact with the ground, flying through endless banks of storm clouds day after day. Confusion and anxiety intrude into daily life and cause you to lose your compass. There are times that call for anthems, something to lift you out of your slump and put fire in your feet. And then there are times when what is indicated is a balm, a sound that will wrap around you and work out the knots in your neck.

While there's a riot going on, Yo La Tengo will remind you what it's like to dream. The sound burbles and washes and flows and billows. If records were dedicated to the cardinal elements, this one would be water. There are shimmery hazes, spectral rumbles, a flash of backward masking, ghostly flamingos calling "shoo-bop shoo-bop." You are there. And even if your mind is not unclouded--shaken, misdirected, out of words and out of time--you can still float, ride the waves of an ocean deeper than your worries, above the sound and above the Sound.

For Yo La Tengo this is a slow-motion action painting, and Georgia Hubley, Ira Kaplan, and James McNew did it all themselves, in their rehearsal studio, with no outside engineer (John McEntire later did the mix). They did not rehearse or jam together beforehand; they turned on the recorder and let things coalesce. Songs came together over long stretches, sometimes as much as a year going by between parts. You'd never guess this, since the layers are finessed with such a liquid brush. You'd imagine most of the songs had sprung forth whole, since they will enter your head that way. Within two listens you will be powerless to resist the magnetic draw of "Shades of Blue," will involuntarily hear "She May, She Might" on your internal jukebox first thing in the morning and "Let's Do It Wrong" late at night. While there's a riot going on you will feel capable of bobbing through like a cork.

In 1971, when the nation appeared to be on the brink of violently coming apart, Sly and the Family Stone released There's a Riot Goin’ On, an album of dark, brooding energy. Now, under similar circumstances, Yo La Tengo have issued a record with the same name but with a different force, an album that proposes an alternative to anger and despair. Their first proper full-length since 2013’s Fade, There's a Riot Goin’ On is an expression of freedom and sanity and emotional expansion, a declaration of common humanity as liberating as it is soft-spoken. 

TRACK LISTING

You Are Here
Shades Of Blue
She May, She Might
For You Too
Ashes
Polynesia #1
Dream Dream Away
Shortwave
Above The Sound
Let's Do It Wrong
What Chance Have I Got
Esportes Casual
Forever
Out Of The Pool
Here You Are

Yo No Se return after a 5-year hiatus since their last album, Soma. Their new album Terraform continues on from the dystopian world created in Soma but this time taking the narrative to the stars. Terraform explores the ideas of making a fresh start on another planet but the same problems creep in…. Greed, corruption and hate. Exploring more of a grunge feel along with some hard psych the band recorded with Dom Mitchison (as well as Alex doing guitars and vocals at home), mixed with Ali Chant and mastered again with grunge godfather, Jack Endino. The band have toured across Europe in support of Soma in the last 5 years and gained a reputation for their loud and energetic shows. The album has 3 drummers under its belt and countless breakdowns on the road. With the pandemic kicking in just as the band started touring, they had plenty of time to finally record (and find another drummer). Terraform is a record 5 years in the making due to sheer bad luck. Hopefully, their luck will change as the band are already working on their follow up record.

The first single Black Door approaches the subject of corruption amongst 'leaders'. The idea comes from Boris Johnson getting Brexit 'done' to forward his own career without thinking about the impact it will have on peoples lives. We’ve had enough and we're ready to tear down the establishment. The idea being that these problems we now face will follow us wherever we go unless we stamp them out, here, on earth. The artwork for the cover is by renowned sci-fi artist Bruce Pennington.

TRACK LISTING

1. Black Door
2. Santa Muerte
3. Pilot
4. Misery
5. Mosquito
6. Slaughter
7. Hairy Chin
8. Feast Of Lies
9. Hold Fire
10. Nectar
11. Terraform

New Parisian label, Disques Messager, presents its new and second release. As its name suggests, the label has a simple leitmotiv: to place itself among the best messengers for rarities and sought-after gems of international rare groove. A mission which began like fire last year with a 7inch reissue release including two Brazilian disco bangers by Cristina Camargo. 

Not many info can be found about Yoanson & Karamie, two young artists from the French African diaspora, who randomly met with Nessim Saroussi and his label Ness Music in the late 80s. Nessim produced their only EP release, "Kalimba" in 1988. Part of this EP, "African Leaders" is a stunning track melting Afro-tropical percussions, disco bass, proto-electro beats and leftfield vocals in a way that reminds us of Dinosaur L or Arthur Russel productions.

Philippe de Lacroix-Herpin (aka Prof Jah Pinpin) has a long musical career started in the mid-70s and became a renowned saxophonist playing and recording for many famous French acts such as Jean-Jacques Goldman, Alain Chamfort, FFF, or even rap band NTM. In 1994, he moved to the Reunion Island where he quickly launched the Prof Jah Pinpin 4tet, in his own words, playing 'free/funk/jazz/rock/tropical' music… Quite a vast and large musical tag, but which immediately make sense when listening to the surprising "The Final Bird" track. Only released as CD in 1996, this instrumental production has a unique sound and flavor mixing all kinds of elements together (even samples of Weather Report!).

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Two tracks of deliciously cosmic music that are, unless its just me, pretty obscure and under played.

TRACK LISTING

A. Yoanson & Karamie - African Leaders
B. Prof Jah Pinpin 4tet - The Final Bird (Le Temps D’une Vie)

Liverpool's YOBS release their self-titled debut album on May 3rd 2024 via Fuzz Club, arriving off the back of their debut double single, 'Fortune Teller b/w Cemetery Man', which saw the four-piece burst on the scene n a gloriously scuzzy and hedonistic blaze. "All skull-crushing riffs and hallucinogenic effects", as Clash Magazine wrote, YOBS deal in primitive garage-punk/noise-rock salvos that race by with a bludgeoning intensity. Across the album's ten tracks and rapid 26-minute running time, the band revel in an abrasive, fun-as-hell rock'n'roll that will leave your bones rattling just as much as your speakers. Emerging out of the rubble of the now-defunct Liverpool bands Weird Sex and Ohmns, YOBS was kick-started in 2022 and is made up of Joey Ackland (Vocals), Alex Smith (Bass/Vocals), Michael Quinlan (Guitar/Vocals) and George Gebbie (Drums). Their debut full-length – recorded in four days at Hackney Road Studios with James Aparicio – arrives off the back of a 2023 spent playing rowdy, ear-ringing shows with the likes of A Place To Bury Strangers, Mark Sultan, C.O.F.F.I.N, Alien Nosejob and more.

TRACK LISTING

1. YOBS Theme
2. Cyanide
3. Wasted
4. Shitty Eye
5. Plastercine
6. Fortune Teller
7. Head The Ball
8. Cemetery Man
9. Tito Puente
10. Carpet Burns (On My Tongue)

Aside from being the phonetic pronunciation of her given name, Yohuna ("yo-HUN-ah") is the solo project of Johanne Swanson, an unsettled native of Eau Claire, WI, whose hazily brilliant music evokes the purest states of mind. With a Casio keyboard, layered vocal arrangements and vehement, minimal beats, she writes sedated, downbeat anthems. Sounds and lyrics drip with moody reference to past love, loss, reflection and rejection while maintaining a hopeful, airy quality eagerly anticipating an uncertain future. Over the course of a year in New Mexico, with her head and heart in other, faraway places, Swanson transformed her emotions into four enigmatic, intimate, leisurely structured pop gems and a collaborative drone.

Recorded December of 2010 with the help of friend Andrew Todryk (Vacation Dad) in a basement during a bitter Wisconsin winter, her debut EP Revery remains relatively unearthed— still frozen in that season waiting to be thawed. Only 50 hand-dubbed cassettes were made, now long soldout rarities. Coupled with a considerate amount of blog coverage, however, Revery left an undeniable impression as a meaningful piece of music in early 2011- an essential listen for anyone interested in home recording. Art Fag Recordings, a California-based label home to a small but potent roster of up-and-coming artists, dug it up a year later, and the label is proud to present a remastered Revery on 7-inch and cassette, incontrovertibly giving this hidden treasure the proper release it deserves. Four sedated, intimate, downbeat pop gems.

Storming tribal / tech-house business here from the Satya label. Via "Just Love", YokoO & Bobi Stevkovski have concocted a trusting, powerful late night tech-house epic - with a cinematic and transportive arrangement that should have listeners fully engrossed in its unraveling story. "Who Are You" is a wigged-out and wriggly deep terrace number, perfect for a blacked-out DC-10 or star-lit Adriatic beach club. It's also got that sleek, serpentine aesthetic that DJs like Craig Richards or Jane Fitz like to weave into their longform sets. Mega.

Side B sees remixes by two Romanian producers: Arapu and Nu Zau. The former sees propulsive, kinetic rhythms interplay with staccato arps and punctuated b-line - tech house brilliance in a similar vein to Ted Amber and the Botanical Minds output. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Impeccably crafted, tribal-tech-house that takes me right back to the golden days of Sankeys Soap. A sound that never seems to leave the terraces of Ibiza.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Just Love
A2. Who Are You
B1. Who Are You (Arapu Remix)
B2. Who Are You (Nu Zau Remix) 

The follow up to last years hugely acclaimed "Sakura", and this is every bit as good. This guy is a huge star on the ambient / leftfield scene being regarded by many as the next Eno. The ambience of the music is complemented with piano, acoustic guitar, windchimes, heartbeats and handclaps all under a jazzy influence.

Since seeping out from the Lisbon underground in 2012 with some clandestine internet musics and supplemented by a debut LP - “Love” which garnered universal admiration and confusion - Yong Yong have since relocated and reconvened at the other end of Europe.

The duo have re-assessed their sound, experimenting with near dancefloor-bothering beat making, warped samples on degrading loops and a much deeper exploration of the frayed atmospherics that they only hinted at previously. On "Greatest It’s" Yong Yong have further embraced the ethical rectitude of the mistake, further opened the crack in the mirror that popular culture perpetually presents to the consumer. Making a virtue of their limitations, "Greatest It’s" was recorded on decaying machinery and obsolete software but with an enhanced sense of electronic dynamics than previous work: still glorifying in the skewed and broken, but now with new depths and emotional response. Tracks like "Sesamstrrat" seem to pour radioactive fog into a R&B pop hit, resulting in a mutated form of unique electronic pop music, "Macu Lu-Lu" present a broken beat that dredges the outer limits of a mid-90s Warp experimentation and the epic "Oeiras" drags a wobbly beat through the melancholic wringer.

Currently residing in the culturally-rich, former industrial superpower of Glasgow, Yong Yong’s excavations of the recent past point ever more pertinently to music of the future. A resolutely imperfect future built on erring, yet beautiful foundations.

As Radiohead tour the world and then regroup to record their new album, Thom Yorke releases his own record, "The Eraser" on XL Recordings. A collection of nine new songs, the record was written and played by Thom and was produced by Nigel Godrich.

“Daily Battles” was written by Thom Yorke (Radiohead, Atoms For Peace) for “Motherless Brooklyn” the film directed, written by, produced by and starring Edward Norton. The film features two versions of the song, each performed by musical icons of modern music. Thom Yorke along with Flea (Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Atoms For Peace) performs a sparse and emotionally stunning version of the song. The other version of “Daily Battles” was arranged and performed by jazz trumpet icon Wynton Marsalis, who, along with his hand-picked quintet of heavy-hitter-jazz-stalwarts delivers an instant jazz standard version of the song that conjures images of the 1950’s-era gin-soaked Harlem jazz club seen in the film.

TRACK LISTING

Side A:
1. Daily Battles

Side B:
1. Daily Battles (feat. Joe Farnsworth, Russell Hall, Isaiah J. Thompson & Jerry Weldon)

Thom Yorke releases his new album ‘ANIMA’.

‘ANIMA’ was written by Thom Yorke and produced by Nigel Godrich.

A ‘one-reeler’, also entitled ‘ANIMA’, will be available exclusively via Netflix, made by Paul Thomas Anderson and set to three tracks from Thom’s new album.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: ‘Anima’ is yet more evidence of Yorke's endless artistic vision and his ability to turn his hand to any musical or audio-visual endeavour with unparalleled success. ‘Amina’ is both an arresting visual feat and a brilliantly realised auditory artifact, as comfortable being listened to in situ (with visuals) or on it's own.

TRACK LISTING

CD/DOWNLOAD:
Traffic
Last I Heard (...He Was Circling The Drain)
Twist
Dawn Chorus
I Am A Very Rude Person
Not The News
The Axe
Impossible Knots
Runwayaway

Vinyl:
Traffic
Last I Heard (...He Was Circling The Drain)
Twist
Dawn Chorus
I Am A Very Rude Person
Not The News
The Axe
Impossible Knots
Runwayaway
Ladies & Gentleman, Thank You For Coming (NB: This Track Is Vinyl Only And Isn't Available On The Download Voucher)

In January it was revealed that Thom Yorke composed the original score for Daniele Luchetti’s film Confidenza, an adaptation of the Italian drama based on Domenico Starnone’s novel of the same name. XL Recordings announces that Thom Yorke’s Confidenza original soundtrack will be released digitally on April 26, with vinyl and CD to follow on July 12.

Confidenza follows Yorke’s previous full-length score and original soundtrack for Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 Suspiria remake, Suspirium receiving a GRAMMY-nomination for Best Song Written for Visual Media. Produced by Sam Petts-Davies (Suspiria, The Smile Wall Of Eyes), Confidenza sees Petts-Davies and Yorke working again with the London Contemporary Orchestra alongside a jazz ensemble which included Robert Stillman and fellow The Smile bandmate Tom Skinner. In 2019 Yorke contributed music to Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn and in 2022 he wrote two original tracks for the series finale of Peaky Blinders.

As of late, Yorke has been touring with The Smile (Tom Skinner, Jonny Greenwood, Thom Yorke), who released their second studio-album Wall Of Eyes in January which follows the band’s 2022-debut album A Light For Attracting Attention.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Big City
2. Knife Edge
3. Letting Down Gently
4. Secret Clarinet
5. In The Trees
6. Prize Giving
7. Four Ways In Time
8. Confidenza
9. Nosebleed Nuptials
10. Bunch Of Flowers
11. A Silent Scream
12. On The Ledge

Suspiria consists of 25 original compositions written by Thom specifically for Luca Guadagnino reimagining of the 1977 Dario Argento horror classic. The album is a mix of instrumental score work, interstitial pieces and interludes, and more traditional song structures featuring Thom’s vocals such as “Unmade”, “Has Ended” and “Suspirium,” the album's first single featuring the melodic theme that recurs throughout the film and its score.

As scoring a horror film presented Thom with altogether new challenges and opportunities, Suspiria stands apart from any of his other work. Piano/vocal ballads, Krautrock-esque modular synth work inspired by the film’s Berlin 1977 setting, multilayered vocals, and melodies that convey terror, longing and melancholy combine to create a chaotic yet cohesive musical spell.

Suspiria was written and arranged by Thom Yorke, recorded and produced by Thom and Sam Petts-Davies. The album also features the London Contemporary Orchestra and Choir, Noah Yorke on drums on “Has Ended” and “Volk,” and Pasha Mansurov on solo flute on “Suspirium.”

TRACK LISTING

A Storm That Took Everything
The Hooks
Suspirium
Belongings Thrown In A River
Has Ended
Klemperer Walks
Open Again
Sabbath Incantation
The Inevitable Pull
Olga’s Destruction (Volk Tape)
The Conjuring Of Anke
A Light Green
Unmade
The Jumps
Volk
The Universe Is Indifferent
The Balance Of Things
A Soft Hand Across Your Face
Suspirium Finale
A Choir Of One
Synthesizer Speaks
The Room Of Compartments
An Audition
Voiceless Terror
The Epilogue

TRACK LISTING

A Brain In A Bottle
Guess Again!
Interference
The Mother Lode
Truth Ray
There Is No Ice (For My Drink)
Pink Section
Nose Grows Some

Yorkston/Thorne/Khan release their new album Neuk Wight Delhi All-Stars, the follow up to the band’s debut album, 2016’s critically acclaimed Everything Sacred, and presents a confluence of currents, among them the north Indian sarangi; jazz-tinged bass, reminiscent in places of Danny Thompson; acoustic guitar that owes a debt to Elizabeth Cotton, Dick Gaughan and Mississippi John Hurt; and three very different vocalists - James Yorkston (East Neuk of Fife), Jon Thorne (Isle of Wight) and Suhail Yusuf Khan (New Delhi).

“Piya is a word in the Hindi language, meaning beloved,” explains Khan. “The Hindi lyrics of the song were composed and written by me. They talk about a lover who is longing for a beloved, devastated by pain. A point comes when the lover starts hallucinating that the beloved has arrived and starts having conversations with this hallucination. There is a strange feeling of dark happiness: the beloved is there, but only as a hallucination.” “When Suhail explained the Hindi lyric to me,” Yorkston continues, “it reminded me of the great old song The Daemon Lover, also known as The House Carpenter, so I sang a fragment of Annie Watson’s version to introduce the piece.”

This harmonious and singular collaboration can be found across all of Neuk Wight Delhi All-Stars, and in fact, YTK’s Everything Sacred may be the only precedent. “The combination of a singer-songwriter, a jazz bassist and an Indian classical sarangi player is totally unheard off,” says Khan.

A collection of traditional Indian and UK folk songs, beautiful originals and idiosyncratic covers, Neuk Wight Delhi All-Stars does not only bring together Indian classical music and jazz, then, but kosmische too; Yorkston also cites dub reggae, Uilleann pipes and the Madagascan guitarist D’Gary as influences. That breadth, says Thorne, is critical: “I think YTK is a fine example of how music operates without boundaries as a common international language and a source of cross-cultural unity. It’s an important message in the times that we live in.”

Produced by YTK and recorded entirely onto 24 track 2” tape at Analogue Cat studios in Northern Ireland by Julie McLarnon, Neuk Wight Delhi All-Stars comes after a period of steady touring for the band (including incredible main stage performances at Green Man, Celtic Connections and Edinburgh International Festival, and tours in India, Spain and Ireland) and reflects the confidence and increasingly fluid interplay between Yorkston, Thorne and Khan.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: From the warming droning fiddles and chanting of 'Chori, Chori' and the soaring emotive twists of 'Bales' to the more ambient excursions and traditionalism of 'Jaldhar Kedara', this is a fascinating and riveting glimpse at one of the most enjoyable and unique collaborations out there today. Brilliant.

TRACK LISTING

1. Chori, Chori (Vocals: Suhail)
2. Samant Saarang / Just A Bloke (Vocals: Jon, Suhail)
3. Bales (Vocals: James, Suhail)
4. Jaldhar Kedara (Wedding Song) (Vocals: Suhail)
5. False True Piya (Vocals: James, Suhail)
6. The Blue Of The Thistle (Vocals: Jon)
7. Recruited Collier (Vocals: James, Suhail)
8. The Blues You Sang (Vocals: James, Suhail, Jon)
9. Halleluwah (Vocals: Suhail)
10. One More Day (Jon’s Song) (Vocals: Jon)

Navarasa : Nine Emotions is the trio’s third record. The first fruits of their fantastic expedition entitled Everything Sacred appeared in 2016. The second, Neuk Wight Delhi All-Stars, followed in 2017. Navarasa : Nine Emotions takes their journey many, many leagues on.

At the heart of YTK’s transporting new album is the subcontinent’s navarasa; the nine (nava) emotions or sentiments (rasa) of the arts. This central unifying underpinning is a centuries-old organising principle. The individual artistic emotions range from Shringara (love, beauty) through Hasya (laughter, mirth, comedy), Raudra (anger), Karuna (sorrow, compassion or mercy), Bibhatsya (disgust), Bhayanaka (horror, terror), Veera (heroism, courage), Adbutha (surprise, wonder) to Shanta (peace, tranquillity).

Each song on YTK’s new album is connected to one of these emotions, and the first track to be shared from Navarasa : Nine Emotions is “Westlin’ Winds”, paired with Adbutha.

“Westlin’ Winds” starts with the life-destroying Act I of Robert Burns’ poem ‘Now Westlin Winds, (And Slaught’ring Guns)’ and deliciously transplants its disjoined, nature-extolling and life-affirming Act II onto Indian soil with a composition “in Purbi, a specific dialect of old Hindi. I learnt the song,” says Suhail, “by listening to various qawwali [Muslim devotional song] singers singing at Hazrat Nizammuddin’s dargah [shrine] in Delhi. Its source is Hazrat Amir Khusrau.” Thus YTK unite one of the key spiritual visionaries and architects of Hindustani art music, the poet-philosopher Hazrat Amir Khusrau with the key literary visionary of Scottish and Scots-language culture, Robert Burns.

This bricolage of diverse cross-cultural elements is apparent across Navarasa : Nine Emotions and all of what YTK create. James Yorkston weaves in Scottish folk, sangster and literary strands. Jon Thorne is grounded in jazz and groove. What the New Delhi-based, eighth-generation hereditary musician Suhail Yusuf Khan brings to this feast of pulses and cycles is northern Indian classical, light classical (thumri, for example) and Sufi devotional musical and literary forms. What binds these diverse musical strands together is, in James’ phrase, “a dark happiness”.

TRACK LISTING

Sukhe Phool
The Shearing’s Not For You
Thumri Bhairavi
Westlin’ Winds
Song For Oddur
The North Carr
Twa Brothers
Waliyan Da Raja
Darbari

Bonus Tracks Exclusive To Vinyl:
All Saved But One
Jon's Poem
Skinfast Haven Blues

Landmark recordings of the 21st century British folk renaissance reissued.

This 10th Anniversary Edition of ‘Moving Up Country’ consists of two discs.

CD1 features the original album, now with the legendary hard to find stand alone debut Domino single ‘The Lang Toun’.

CD2 is a collection of ‘Moving Up Country’ demos, including never heard before demos and a Peel Session originally broadcast on January 2003.

His first album since 2008’s ‘When The Haar Rolls In’, ‘I Was A Cat From A Book’ finds James Yorkston playing with a new band comprised of members of Lamb and The Cinematic Orchestra, alongside old friends.

The album was produced by James Yorkston and Dave Wrench and mostly recorded live during five wintery days in Bryn Derwen Studios, North Wales.

It’s an album full of energy and great musicianship, and contains James’ strongest and most bewildering set of songs yet.

Since the release of ‘When The Haar Rolls In’, James has published a book (‘It’s Lovely To Be Here’), collaborated with The Big Eyes Family Players on Folk Songs, and seen the ten year anniversary release of ‘Moving Up Country’, his landmark debut album.

TRACK LISTING

Catch
Kath With Rhodes
Border Song
This Line Says
Just As Scared
Sometimes The Act Of Giving Love
The Fire & The Flames
A Short Blues
Spanish Ants
Two
I Can Take All This
Thar She Blows *
Black Horse White *
(* = Vinyl Only Track)

This collection is a welcome rattle bag of laments, cover versions and traditionals that reveal the side of Yorkston that would happily sit in on a high-spirited ceilidh, or woozily join on the harmonies at one of the Fence Collective's legendary homegames. It also demonstrates James Yorkston's blood deep understanding of the dynamics of folk music, storytelling, and singing your life even as it unfurls around you. On tracks such as "Sleep Is The Jewel", "The Hills & The Heath" and "The Lang Toun", the instinctive dynamic understanding Yorkston shares with his band The Athletes, especially drummer Faisal, can be heard in full flow. Carrying everything is Yorkston's rich voice and wry lyric, which always manages to sound hopeful and pessimistic at the same time. Yorkston's ruminations on love / lust / longing / liquor share a more eternal, resigned, Celtic feel with the battered reflections of Jacques Brel, Shane McGowan and Bert Jansch than any of his contemporaries. The album compiles unreleased or vinyl-only tracks over the years.

One of the most long-awaited albums, for our shop anyway. Yorkston's debut was one of the surprise records of the year back in 2002 and all of us loved it. Now this one does sound, initially at least, to be less 'Pop'. Instead this feels like a proper folk album. Not 'Hey Nonny Nonny', just more serious, focussed....dense with banjos, mandolins and accordians. The production's slightly fuller thanks to Four Tet's Keiren Hebden and the songs all deal with romance, nature and (everyday) magic. There's the odd sea-shanty too and it all feels very warm, real and unconcerned with commerce or, indeed, 'normal' life. What a lovely world this record inhabits. Add him to the list of greats?

Wonderful timeless folk-tinged pop from James Yorkston. He's been compared to everyone from Shane Macgowan to John Martyn, and there's definitely a bit of Nick Drake in there too. The more I listen to this album, the more I love it! 

The album came to be after the blossoming of a long-term friendship between James Yorkston and Karl-Jonas Winqvist, the Swedish music producer, leader and conductor of The Second Hand Orchestra.

Yorkston says of recording “Struggle” with TSHO: “The band were sat by in the studio by themselves, looping the verses over and over. I was in the control room, drinking sweet tea. I just had to wait for the right moment and jump on board, like when I’m pushing my kids round on a roundabout in the local park. I love that everyone was singing along so freely when we recorded this. There were vocal mics for everyone, and people would just lean in with a harmony, every now and then. It gives it a very communal feeling.”

That communal feeling is apparent across the entire album. Recorded and mixed in Sweden over the course of three days with a selection of musicians Winqvist had brought together, including Peter Morén (Peter, Bjorn & John), Cecilia Österholm (one of Sweden’s best-known nyckelharpa players), Emma Nordenstam (piano & cello) and Ulrika Gyllenberg (violin). The studio approach with The Second Hand Orchestra was entirely improvised around Yorkston’s songs, and the only song they heard in advance was “Ella Mary Leather”; Yorkston didn’t want to direct anyone too much but instead, allowed for a welcoming, instinctive, free-spirited and joyful atmosphere. The Wide, Wide River is a soothing, warm and sublime listen, whilst also highlighting Yorkston’s skills for songwriting, collaboration and as a musical conductor. The record takes in past loves, advancing age and friends, now gone, whilst also containing some of the most sanguine songs Yorkston has ever made.

The Wide, Wide River is James’ tenth album for Domino, not to mention his three albums as part of Yorkston/Thorne/Khan and his two books. A prolific writer, Yorkston has worked with a wealth of talent over his two-decade career including Four Tet, Alexis Taylor, KT Tunstall, Rustin Man, Simon Raymonde, Norma and Mike Waterson, Martin Carthy, Max Cooper, David Wrench and many others.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: James Yorkston makes some of the most endearing melodic indie-folk you're likely to hear and teaming up hear with the Second Hand Orchestra ends up sounding like a joyful, clattering distillation of trad folk and wild exhuberant art-rock. Exactly what we need right now.

TRACK LISTING

Ella Mary Leather
To Soothe Her Wee Bit Sorrows
Choices, Like Wild Rivers
Struggle
There Is No Upside
A Droplet Forms
A Very Old-Fashioned Blues
We Test The Beams

James Yorkston, Nina Persson and The Second Hand Orchestra release The Great White Sea Eagle, the follow up to James Yorkston and The Second Hand Orchestra’s The Wide, Wide River - a Guardian Top 10 Folk Album of 2021.

The record didn’t start life as a follow up; in early 2021, Yorkston began visiting his studio in Cellardyke, Fife and for the first time, starting writing songs on the piano as opposed to his usual guitar as he gazed upon the sea outside his window.

After sending the first five or six songs to Karl-Jonas Winqvist (the ringleader/conductor of TSHO), they began to discuss working on the music together. With Yorkston’s shift from guitar to piano, they thought about what other changes they could make to their process which led to the involvement of a guest singer and the legendary Nina Persson (The Cardigans) was brought into the fold.

They followed the same methodology as The Wide, Wide River – apart from James, Nina and KJ, none of The Second Hand Orchestra had heard the music prior to entering the studio – and the arrangements were made up on the spot. Yorkston summarises: “Everyone who was playing in The Second Hand Orchestra, in their own way they are all unique and colourful players. There was no-one there who didn’t know what to do. I would bring them the songs, we would start one - I would play it, and second time round people would start singing and playing, and by the time we had done it three or four times we would hit record and we would be ready to go. And the thing that they all had was the ability to give each other space and to come up with their parts based on what other people were playing naturally was a very quick process, and they were all so open, nobody was egotistical. Everything was just happy. I love the wildness in it.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It's the second cracking Dinked release for the week and sees The Cardigans' Nina Persson team up with the endlessly talented James Yorkston and The Secondhand Orchestra for a beautiful LP brimming with brittle guitars and twinkling piano, all topped with those instantly recognisable vocal talents. A very welcome meeting of minds.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Sam & Jeanie McGreagor
An Upturned Crab
Keeping Up With The Grandchildren, Yeah
The Heavy Lyric Police
A Sweetness In You
A Forestful Of Rougues
Side B
Peter Paulo Van Der Heyden
Mary
Hold Out For Love
The Harmony
The Great White Sea Eagle
A Hollow Skeleton Lifts A Heavy Wing

Produced by Yorkston and David Wrench, The Route to the Harmonium is James’ first solo record since 2014’s Cellardyke Recording and Wassailing Society (CRAWS) and follows the two collaborative albums he made as one third of Yorkston/Thorne/Khan as well as the release of his debut novel Three Craws in 2016.

The album was almost entirely recorded by James himself, in the small Scottish fishing village of Cellardyke, where he lives. Yorkston’s studio is a ramshackle old loft space, originally used to repair fisherman’s nets, and now stuffed full the antique instruments James has collected throughout his life as a musician. Having created hours of recordings, James called up his old collaborator David Wrench - the mixer and producer who has worked with the likes of Caribou, Four Tet, Frank Ocean, FKA Twigs and David Byrne - and someone who has worked on James’ albums since 2003 – to help make sense of the sessions.

The Route to the Harmonium (or, ‘the search for peace’) is intensely personal; it’s the sound of home, of undisturbed craftmanship. Listen closely and you can imagine him putting it together. Overlaying vocal and guitar tracks, adding further with Dulcitones, harmoniums and autoharps, with nyckelharpa, the distinctive Swedish stringed instrument given to him by a friend. And friends and family, past and present swim all over his songs. Remembering them, and those you’ve shared life with, those who leave and those who remain, is the strongest thread running through these affecting, extraordinary songs. This is Yorkston’s world and could be nowhere else in music.

James adds: “I guess, as a musician and writer, I find myself reacting to what goes on around. So, this album is about life, the life that carries on around me. There’s family, place, and the being away from family that the life of a touring musician brings… But there’s also reference to friends departed – the hows, the whys – When a friend jumps ship it’s always a haymaker to the gut, you know? And this album is about them, but it’s more about us, us who are left behind...”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Tender ballads and brittle songmaship on this stunning outing from the great James Yorkston. Reminiscent of some of the country-folk offerings from Constellation / Alien8 recordings in the early 90's, Yorkston manages to convey a heartbreaking morose air whilst keeping the melodicism intact. A beautifully written collection, as expected.

TRACK LISTING

01 Your Beauty Could Not Save You
02 The Irish Wars Of Independence 
03 Like Bees To Foxglove
04 Shallow
05 The Blue Of The Thistle
06 Brittle
07 My Mouth Ain't No Bible
08 Solitary Islands All
09 The Villages I Have Known My Entire Life
10 Oh Me, Oh My
11 Yorkston Athletic
12 A Footnote To An Epitaph 

"The Year Of the Leopard" confounds categories. If there's a traditional side to it, it's following the tradition of individual singer-songwriter albums which conjure and inhabit a genre which lasts just as long as the needle's in the groove. Produced by former Talk Talk member Paul Webb, Yorkston approached him after hearing his understated but enthralling work on "Out Of Season", Webb's Rustin' Man album with Beth Gibbons (Portishead). And what they've come up with is another warm, mellow, gentle folk album which could snuggle up nicely next to "Moving Up Country" and knocks his last LP into a cocked hat! Lovely.

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.

Guyana folk music reinterpreted and infused with Afro-roots and culture, reissued on vinyl for the first time

A year after their debut album 'Ojinga's Own', the Yoruba Singers from Guyana released the singles 'Black Pepper' and 'Basa Bongo'. These two songs were recorded in Barbados and released on the Green Shrimp label and became extremely popular throughout the Caribbean and South America. The music also became an integral part of the very beginnings of what was later to become the Champeta Criolla sound in the Caribbean coast of Colombia.

TRACK LISTING

Basa Bongo
Black Pepper

The 1974 debut album Ojinga's Own (along with the single Basa Bongo/ Black Pepper) by Guyanese Afro-Folk band The Yoruba Singers has been remastered for the first ever vinyl reissue

The Yoruba Singers formed in Georgetown, Guyana in 1971. Despite their name they were not from Nigeria, but identified strongly with the area from which so many of the African diaspora in Guyana and neighbouring regions were originally descended.

The group started adapting Guyanese traditional folk music as well as writing their own - blending a mixture of protest, social commentary, blues, and genres inspired by the times. Beginning with 12 people sharing vocal duties, most of the early repertoire was inspired by folk songs that started life on plantations or in religious settings accompanied by a few sparse musical instruments.

Integral to the Yoruba Singers' sound are echoes of Obeah traditions which are very closely related to the Santería religion of Cuba and the Orisha and Shango traditions of Trinidad and Tobago. Calypso and steel- band culture from nearby Trinidad and Tobago was to some extent part of the musical DNA of the group, but they were naturally also influenced by the massive volume of rocksteady and roots-reggae coming from Jamaica.

TRACK LISTING

Ojinga's Own
What To Do
Stay Away
Uncomprehensidensible Radio-Matic Woman
Neighbour Jean
Go-Go
Massacura Man
Woman A Dead Ya Fuh Man
Ka Duma
I've Got To Be Somebody
No Intention

‘To The Forest To Live A Truer Life’ is a deluxe LP with fully artworked custom design inner sleeve. All copies come with a poster insert designed by YoshimiO. Jacket design by lauded Japanese designer Ooido Syoujou.

YoshimiOizumikiYoshiduO is comprised of YoshimiO (Boredoms, OOIOO) and modular synthesist izumikiYoshi.

YoshimiO uses the piano as her primary instrument here for the first time, alongside her singular voice. Her every move is bent, stretched, and mutated by IzumikiYoshi’s modular synthesizer into cascades of brightly colored waves and dotted constellations of sound.

YoshimiO, previously known as Yoshimi P-We, is a founder and drummer for Japanese rock band Boredoms, vocalist and multiinstrumentalist of OOIOO, and a member of supergroup Free Kitten alongside Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon.

IzumikiYoshi is a highly regarded synthesist, having contributed synthesizer, sampler, and programmed midi instruments on Boredoms classics ‘Vision Creation Newsun’ and ‘Super æ’.

YoshimiO worked as a session player and vocalist on The Flaminig Lips’ acclaimed album, ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots’, which was named after her.

TRACK LISTING

1. YofuyO
2. YO Me
3. YoY 7
4. OmimiO
5. YosunnyO
6. Sun19
7. Mini YO
8. Niminya
9. Mull
10. 1.yoO
11. 33yOng

"If Surround can be listened to as music that’s as close to air itself, allowing us to enter each listener’s sound scenery, or as something that exists within a new perspective, expanding the middle ground between sound and music, and transforming it into a comfortable space, it would be much appreciated."
— Hiroshi Yoshimura

Originally released as an album in January 1986, Surround was recorded by Yoshimura as a commission from home builder Misawa Homes as part of their Soundscape series, intended to function as an “amenity” designed to enhance the company’s newly built living spaces.

In his original notes for the album, Yoshimura recommends that Surround be placed in the same family of sounds “as the vibration of footsteps, the hum of an air conditioner, or the clanging of a spoon inside a coffee cup.” And, as he suggests, “with the addition of city noise from outside the window,” you may hear Surround in a completely new way.

A pioneer in the field of environmental music, Yoshimura’s previous works included Music For Nine Post Cards (1982), originally produced to be played back inside a museum space, and designing sound environments for public spaces and subway systems. Surround was recorded almost concurrently with the acclaimed and popular GREEN (1986); the two albums are described by Hiroyoshi Shiokawa in his liner notes as being Yoshimura’s yin and yang.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: One of the finest ambient composers of his generation brings us an album in the same world as his much-lauded 'Green', and it's more fluttering new-age ambient with atmospheric organic syncopation and environmental noise. There's an otherworldly experience to be had by sitting and listening to these at high volume, so it's a delight to have 'Surround' next to the player too.

TRACK LISTING

1. Time After Time
2. Surround
3. Something Blue
4. Time Forest
5. Water Planet
6. Green Shower

Ryan Kaiser has already made a name for himself creating daydreamy, sun-blasted, Polaroid-pop as Yot Club. With his second full-length, Rufus, Kaiser is expanding his sonic palette and challenging his own established modes of music making by letting collaborators in. The record includes co-writes with the likes of Tommy English (Carly Rae Jepsen, Kacey Musgraves), and singer Charli Adams, with Patrick Wimberly (formerly one-half of Chairlift) on mixing duties, and the result is a collection of songs that sounds bolder and brighter. From the shimmering surf-pop of opener “Stuntman,” to the minor chord angst and quiet-loud-quiet pulse of “New Day,” to The Strokesian swoon of album closer “Lazy Eyes,” Kaiser lo-fi hooks have a new cinematic scope. It continues Kaiser’s coming of age — looking back, picking it all apart, trying to work it all out, and constantly pushing forward. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Martin says: A lovely bit of optimistic indie-pop, reminiscent of the Moldy Peaches or Claud, beautifully realised and showing all the cleverly written nuances with a new production focus.

TRACK LISTING

1. Stuntman
2. Rufus
3. Too Far Gone
4. Wake Up
5. Lazy Eyes
6. Nostalgia
7. Poison In Your Mind
8. Drowning
9. Human Nature
10. 2084
11. Fool
12. Other World 

You Can Can is an echoed affirmation, an album which traces song forms around silence, field recordings, and degraded analog memories. This is folk music transmogrified and mutated, as if recorded and reconstructed in Pierre Schaffer’s GRM studio.

Not your typical Mariposa folk duo, the group is comprised of Toronto avant-music scene stalwarts, vocalist Felicity Williams (Bernice, Bahamas) and bricolage artist and synthesist Andrew Zukerman (Fleshtone Aura, Badge Epoch). The album feels like a somnambulant conversation, fragmented and half-remembered with Williams’ vocals traveling through a landscape of field recordings and Zukerman’s saturated concrète topographies. It is an electro-acoustic assemblage, both analog and digital, comprised of air, electricity, minerals, wood, and water. Although the album nods towards traditional forms of folk and musique concrète (if at this point it can be called a traditional form), it is outwardly and inwardly contemporary; non-linear, citational, opaque, and sui generis. In a way it feels like a sonic index of the narrative experiments found on the infamous Language school-related publisher The Figures, in the work of Lyn Hejinian, Clark Coolidge, and Lydia Davis. In the musical continuum, the album picks up where Linda Perhacs left off in the early 70’s—explored by Gastr Del Sol in the ‘90s—a convergence of rural acoustic idioms and urban avant-electronics. This is country music for the discerning cosmopolitan citizen of the 21st Century.

RIYL: Luc Ferrari, Brannten Schnüre, William Basinski, Oval, Eric Chenaux, Emmanuelle Parrenin.

About "Everything In Time and Failure Figures", Felicity Williams says:

'Everything In Time is indebted to the language of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (as translated by Alison Entrekin). Drawing on insights from psychoanalysis, we trace the roots of melancholy to render them available to consciousness; words from the ghostly realm of the transpersonal filter through dreams and shine a beam of light onto a lone trillium in a forest at night. Other influences include the experience of not knowing, of being subject to a gestation outside of one’s control. This is an ode to the power of naming to obliterate, to set free.

Failure Figures is a meditation on the radical contingency of reality and the vicissitudes of the will. With Slavoj Zizek as my guide (think: “Hegel for dummies” - I’m the dummy in this scenario), I wander through the valley of the shadow of death, and take heart. The last verse refers to an experience I had recording at a studio in Brussels. I was singing in French, with which I have some fluency, and the producer was complaining to the artist whose song it was that my delivery was not convincing. Thinking I was out of ear shot, he said in French, “c’est comme elle n'est pas là”; I was pronouncing the words correctly, but I failed to express anything. So what or whom is responsible for conveying meaning, if not the form of the word itself? And if the connection between meaning and form is broken, how do we fix it?

Gratitude to Thom Gill (guitar) and Daniel Fortin (bass) who joined us on the recording of Failure Figures. Thanks as well to my old roommate Christopher Willes, who unwittingly left behind his hand bells deep in the hall closet. We unearthed them by accident, and the bells became an important sound element. Thanks to other past roomies Robin Dann and Claire Harvie, whose childhood piano and guitar respectively still reside with us, and were used in the recording. Field recordings were made in Toronto, Canada and Celestún, Mexico in 2020.'

TRACK LISTING

Everything In Time
Lustrous Swarm
Can Can
Big Trouble
Papyri Papaver
Strobe Streusel
Failure Figures
Favorite Umbellifers
Infinity Of Loose Ends

After a tumultuous period of emotional blows, leaving the majority of the band getting to grips with new life scenarios, the new album is rooted in reflection and redemption, and sees You Me At Six harness those darker experiences as a catalyst for creativity, empowerment and positivity.

Recorded over five weeks at Karma Sound studio in Bang Saray, and continuing their creative relationship with that album’s producer, Dan Austin (Biffy Clyro, Massive Attack, Pixies), ‘SUCKAPUNCH’ is the sound of a band embracing change. You Me At Six have crafted their most experimental, personal and progressive record to date.

TRACK LISTING

Nice To Me
Makemefeelalive
Beautiful Way
Wydrn
Suckapunch
Kill The Mood
Glasgow
Adrenaline
Voicenotes
Finish What I Started
What's It Like

French outfit You Said Strange are the latest to join the Fuzz Club Session ranks alongside the likes of A Place To Bury Strangers, The Myrrors, Night Beats, Heaters, The Entrance Band, Holy Wave, Heaters and many more. When last in the UK in support of their debut LP, Salvation Prayer, the four-piece took to London’s Lovebuzz Studios to lay down a live session comprising four tracks of warm, jangly psychedelic bliss taken from their aforementioned debut. The resulting session will be released on vinyl and digital via Fuzz Club. Emerging out of Giverny, Normandy, You Said Strange became a mainstay of the European underground long before they headed over to Portland to record their highly-anticipated debut album with Peter Holmstrom of The Dandy Warhols - whom the band set out on tour with back in 2015, solidifying a friendship that would see Holmstrom take on production duties for another band for the very first time.

Dining on an influence of The Velvet Underground, The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Ride – though delivered with their own insatiable, forward-looking French charm – You Said Strange carve out an intoxicating, heady sound of shimmering guitars and reverb cloaked vocals that’s just as potent when drifting into full-blown fuzz-overloads as it is when dealing in jubilant, earworm melodies that’ll get stuck in your head for hours. The live recording of the session sees both of those sides shine brighter than ever, making it undeniably clear why the band has spent the last several years bringing their sublime live show to countless venues and psych festivals across Europe and beyond. 

TRACK LISTING

1) Brain
2) Cold Crusader
3) Extend
4) Leave The Lord

Available on 180g vinyl. You Said Strange come from the north-western region of Normandy in France, although if it was up to them they’d come from the States, somewhere between Texas and Cali. They’ve been growing their own Norman-spiced-up definition of psychedelia for a few years now, making their way on a historically busy road. Having just signed to Fuzz Club, You Said Strange are gearing up for the release of their debut full length, Salvation Prayer.

The album was recorded in Portland, USA with Peter Holmström of The Dandy Warhols after both bands toured together back in 2015. Salvation Prayer is a condensation of heady riffs, haunting melodies and bright rhythms, half-way between 90s shoegaze and 60s psychedelia. The album touches on the theme of belief, the kind that affects even the most Cartesian spirit; may it be superficial, spiritual, superstitious, religious or moral. This very-human interpretation of reality is meant to help those who seek to free themselves, dream or flee, and that’s what the band is all about. 

TRACK LISTING

1) Salvation Rain
2) Power House
3) Brain
4) Get Out
5) Cold Crusader
6) Tilelli
7) Halo
8) Extend
9) Leave The Lord
10) Just Wait
11) The Way To The Holy Wa (Jesus)

You Tell Me is Field Music’s Peter Brewis and Admiral Fallow member Sarah Hayes. As one half of Field Music, Peter Brewis has been honing the craft of pop songwriting for almost fifteen years, whilst Sarah Hayes has been exploring contemporary folk in her solo work, and the world of indie-pop via her band Admiral Fallow. Their debut self-titled album, the last to be recorded at the old Field Music recording HQ, is set to be released in January on Memphis Industries.

After meeting at a Kate Bush celebration concert, the pair clicked. “I'd been an admirer of Field Music for a good while before meeting Peter at the gig,” Sarah recalls. “So I was pleased to discover he wasn't an insufferable diva, and delighted that he was keen to try working on some music together.” Peter had been “blown away” by Sarah’s voice during a rendition of “This Woman’s Work” and when investigating her solo work heard a lot of parallels to what he was trying to do in Field Music.

By blending their distinct compositional talents, they’ve created a record that possesses their own clear styles but also a new voice too. With both of them writing songs and lyrics, Peter describes it as “a sort of dual-personal record”. Sonically, the result is a subtly crafted album with a rich and intricate sense of composition, in which strings glide above multi-layered keyboards and percussion, and vocal melodies wrap around one another in snug unison. In many senses it feels like a classic songwriter record - rich in craft, songs, arrangements and vocal interplay - yet it manages to feel stylistically contemporary and void of nostalgia.

Lyrically, Peter says, “most of the songs seemed to either be about conversations, be conversational or about talking or not talking.” Sarah echoes this: “the subject of communication - talking and listening, guessing and questioning - looms large on this record and in general for me. It's something I think about a lot.” Which makes sense given that this record is fundamentally a musical conversation between two new collaborators and friends, a constant back and forth of new ideas, shared influences and the expunging of inner feelings.

Whilst the subject matter can occasionally be personal and explores troubled or conflicted conversations around inner turmoil, there’s also a stirring sense of beauty that comes from the record; a feeling of pastures new and moving onto new things rather than being held back by the past. What makes this an even more remarkable musical statement and achievement is that two first-time collaborators were able to channel so much of themselves into a project and create something coherent and poised.

TRACK LISTING

1. Enough To Notice
2. Get Out Of The Room
3. Foreign Parts
4. Water Cooler
5. Springburn
6. No Hurry
7. Clarion Call
8. Jouska
9. Invisible Ink
10. Starting Point
11. Kabuki

The thirteen songs on youbet’s debut hit like relentless bursts of color. Musically adventurous and lyrically intimate, writer Nick Llobet’s vocals lilt, hiss and command attention. His vision is fully Formed on Compare & Despair, driven by equal parts humor and melancholy. Its bright, shocking cover art depicts a cast of psychotropic cartoon characters, each representing a different song. Raised in Davie, Florida, by his Cuban immigrant father and firstgeneration Italian American mother who divorced, Llobet sensed chaos lurking around every corner. youbet’s sound captures that disorder, a backwards world where the adults act like children and kids are on their own to maintain any semblance of order. Compare & Despair sounds like returning to your hometown to rewrite the narrative of your youth with attitude and a confetti cannon. Recently arriving in New York, Llobet discovered music as a creative and therapeutic outlet. He began writing obsessively. “It’s my way of getting lost,” says Llobet.

Depositing what he made on a Bandcamp page, the result was an assortment of disparate ingredients: the sound of his laugh tape-sped to surreality, a birthday song about carnitas for his step mother, fuzzed-out rockers that snuff out before they seem to begin. And then there were these beautiful, complete compositions that recalled the ingenious simplicity of Big Star or Elliott Smith. His page caught the attention of Ava Luna drummer and engineer Julian Fader (Frankie Cosmos, Mr. Twin Sister), who shared it with collaborator Katie Von Schleicher. Katie contacted Llobet, offering to help him produce and release a full-length album. A core group was formed of Llobet, Von Schleicher, Fader and Adam Brisbin (Sam Evian, Molly Sarlé), all of whom contributed over the next year to Compare & Despair. youbet makes the music of idealized youth and time-bombed birth. With a pure aim of freedom, but forever hindered by encroaching adult reality, Compare & Despair thrives in creative conflict. A stunning debut of intent, youbet sets loose a hyperactive imagination that rides the rainbow into a black hole. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Endless
2. Volcano
3. Bite
4. Nice Try
5. Alligator Talk
6. My Side
7. Deb
8. Mental
9. Glass Hill
10. Cycle
11. Discovery
12. Little
13. Cloud

Hardly Art debut by Brooklyn-based artist Nick Llobet, aka youbet, follows their 2020 debut album on Ba Da Bing! Records.

A lovely album of layered melodic pop-rock arrangements fusing rock and electronic instrumentation with Nick Llobet’s poignant, witty, and vulnerable lyrics.

Nick Llobet (they/them) was ready to throw in the towel. Llobet, who grew up in South Florida, learned to play guitar at a very young age, dabbling in everything from classical, blues, classic rock, and flamenco. They’d spent much of their early 20s searching for their voice as an artist and as an individual, as well as for a musical community. Llobet would eventually move to Brooklyn, but after three years of looking for a hopeful artistic breakthrough, they spent much of their time in seclusion, consumed by social anxiety and imposter syndrome—and they were considering abandoning songwriting completely.

One day, while commuting through Penn Station en route to their partner’s family home in Virginia (that would also lead to the crucial purchase of a secondhand Tascam cassette recorder), they noticed Patti Smith sitting alone, waiting for a train. The typically shy Llobet decided to approach the icon, who was, in turn, delighted to see that Llobet was carrying a guitar. At the end of their interaction, Smith offered some parting wisdom: “She wished me luck and said, ‘Practice hard, Nick.’” Llobet took her advice to heart, and this chance encounter kicked off a personal and artistic rebirth.

They started performing as youbet, a play on their last name, and began “changing [their] vision for what a song could be.” youbet’s debut, Compare & Despair, a delightful gem of a record that showcases Llobet’s propensity for freewheeling whimsy and emotional intensity. In May 2019, inspired by a song-a-week writing group that produced Compare & Despair, Llobet started a second club in which contributors would upload that week’s song to a private Bandcamp. Invigorated by this small musical collaboration, the feedback, and the accountability, Llobet wrote 18 songs throughout the duration of the club, twelve of which became Way To Be.

After this songwriting marathon, Llobet spent 2020 focusing on instrumental guitar work and political engagement. By the summer of 2021, they were ready to revisit the Way To Be tracks. Over the next year-and-a-half, Llobet worked on the record relentlessly, refining the lyrics, recording, and arrangements from their apartment. Llobet self-produced Way To Be and describes the process as an enormous, labor-intensive undertaking that felt akin to “making a whole film.” Along the way, Llobet was joined by collaborators, including Julian Fader (Ava Luna), Adam Brisbin (Buck Meek), and Daniel Siles.

Across Way To Be’s 12 delightfully off-kilter tunes, Llobet uses wordplay and tongue-in-cheek humor to obliquely explore dysfunctional relationships, regret, self-confidence or the lack thereof, queerness, and self-discovery. Fuzzy at the edges and filled with playful, kinetic arrangements, Way To Be is a bridge into the entrancing world of youbet. You won’t want to leave.

TRACK LISTING

1. Carsick
2. Way To Be
3. Nurture
4. Seeds Of Evil
5. Alive To You
6. Do
7. Deserve
8. Lost
9. Peel
10. Trauma
11. Vacancy
12. Still

Like a wildflower of positive energy spreading its seed through song, Bergen collective Young Dreams are coming for the head and the heart. An album of stirring, symphonic wonder, Between Places is Young Dreams’ first cultivation of a rich patch of sonic earth, to be released in February 2013.

Young Dreams is at the core, Matias Tellez - composer, raconteur, dreamer; and Rune Vanderskog – vocalist, harmoniser, eternal optimist. Around these two orbits a team of skilled merry men - Matias’ brother Pablo Tellez – bass guitar and boundless enthusiasm; Marius Erster Bergesen – drums and guns; Njål Strøm Paulsberg – electronic nerdery and fashion; and Chris Holm – guitarist, vocalist, and father.

Beyond this core though, which originally began as all great rock’n’roll stories do, through frequenting the same bar (Bergen dive Vamoose in this case), the Young Dreams act swells to as many as the budget will allow, with a clutch of close friends contributing lyrics, vocals and instrumentation both in the studio and on the road. In a way it’s a very modular act (no pun intended), with each member having at least one other project, and often more than one member playing in another members other projects, and so on and so forth.

The genesis for this project though occurred in 2009, when Tellez decided to go about building a studio, where “ instead of spending our money renting studios we would spend the money on building one and give people without much money the opportunity to record their songs without having to get broke. We bought some equipment with the little money we had left and Erlend Øye (K.O.C/TWBA) donated a mixer and a computer”. With likeminded dreamers regularly stopping by to use the studio, Tellez made the decision to move beyond his up-until-then mostly solo work, and make use of the people that surrounded him to bring his ambitious pop prophecies to life.

I asked Rune if he wanted to sing on a new track I had been working on called "Young 1", later known as "Flight 376". I asked one of the bar owners, a Welsh guy called David, if he wanted to help me out on the lyrics so David, Rune and I sat down and wrote the words. We recorded the vocals and the word got around and people got to hear it. More people got keen on contributing so when I had laid down the music tracks people came by the studio to record their vocal parts. Gradually the foundations of Young Dreams were laid, and the result is Between Places - a vast, deep dive into symphonic pop, borrowing from classical composition as much as classic 60’s pop as much as textural electronic experimentation. Dense, darting arrangements are utilized to convey the most plaintive, honest of emotions, and on the contrary, sparse simplistic melodies carry the weighty feelings of young love and uncertain futures. Overall it’s a joyous uplifting celebration of youthful song, and at the same time as grandiose as debut records tend to get.

“The vision was just to compose and record beautiful and honest music. It was kind of a reaction to all the superficial music with the wrong intentions being played around. It kind of hurt. It's like watching someone being beat and not doing anything about it, that’s just wrong. So I looked back at what I wanted to do when I was a kid, what other people wanted to do when they were kids.”

Songs start in unexpected places, and end up even further off the beaten track. ‘Footprints’ is an invigorating splash of vocal harmony and percussive energy, while ‘Fog Of War’ is the heavenly first single, a burst of sweet strings driven by trance-like synthesizers. On ‘Wounded Hearts’ you find an attempt to literally capture the feeling of a dream in song form, as arranged in the style of Gil Evans’ work with Miles Davis in ‘Wounded Hearts Forever’. There’s a choral introduction based on Mozart’s requiem on ‘Through The Turnstiles’, and a “Steve Reich/John Williams-ish” orchestral house track in album centerpiece ‘The Girl That Taught Me How To Drink And Fight’. It could all very easily come across as overwrought, indie pretentiousness if it weren’t for the abundance of pure unfettered feeling at every trick and turn.

“It's about documenting and capturing the sound of people trying the best they can. And that's maybe one of the most beautiful things in the world.”

When it came time to mix, Matias’ brain was understandably fried, and so UK sound architect Gareth Jones (Grizzly Bear, Mogwai, Liars) took a trip to Bergen to put the beast to bed, bringing 20 odd years of mix experience with him, and finding sweet spots that until then only existed in Matias’ head.

And so we have Between Places, the debut record from Young Dreams. For your enjoyment.

TRACK LISTING

1. Footprints
2. Wounded Hearts Forever
3. Fog Of War
4. First Days Of Something
5. When Kisses Are Salty
6. Dream Alone, Wake Together
7. The Girl That Taught Me To Drink And Fight
8. Through The Turnstiles
9. Young Dreams

Cocoa Sugar, announced in November 2017 that Young Fathers had a brand new album and it has been highly anticipated since. The trio – Alloysious Massaquoi, Graham ‘G’ Hastings and Kayus Bankole – marked the news by previewing a brand-new song, ‘Lord’ and a subsequent accompanying video. Just like their previous standalone 2017 single ‘Only God Knows’ (written for the Trainspotting T2 film and described by director Danny Boyle as “the heartbeat of the film”), ‘Lord’ provided an enticing glimpse of what to expect from Young Fathers’ third full album; something typically unique and exhilarating, but leaner, more muscular and self-assured than ever before. Cocoa Sugar sees Young Fathers operating with a newfound clarity and direction, and is without doubt their most confident and complete statement to date.

STAFF COMMENTS

Millie says: Long awaited but is now finally here, Cocoa Sugar is refreshingly original as their new sound is bold and irresistibly good.

TRACK LISTING

1. See How
2. Fee Fi
3. In My View
4. Turn
5. Lord
6. Tremolo
7. Wow
8. Border Girl
9. Holy Ghost
10. Wire
11. Toy
12. Picking You

Young Fathers - Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and G. Hastings - announce details of their brand new album Heavy Heavy. Set for release on February 3rd 2023 via Ninja Tune, it’s the group’s fourth album and their first since 2018’s album Cocoa Sugar. The 10-track project signals a renewed back-to-basics approach, just the three of them in their basement studio, some equipment and microphones: everything always plugged in, everything always in reach.

Speaking about the title, the band write that Heavy Heavy could be a mood, or it could describe the smoothed granite of bass that supports the sound… or it could be a nod to the natural progression of boys to grown men and the inevitable toll of living, a joyous burden, relationships, family, the natural momentum of a group that has been around long enough to witness massive changes.

“You let the demons out and deal with it,” reckons Kayus of the album. “Make sense of it after.”

For Young Fathers, there’s no dress code required. Dancing, not moshing. Hips jerking, feet slipping, brain firing in Catherine Wheel sparks of joy and empathy. Underground but never dark. Still young, after some years, even as the heavy, heavy weight of the world seems to grow day by day.

STAFF COMMENTS

Liam says: Young Fathers have always remained an euphoric and life affirming outlet during turbulent times and with 'Heavy Heavy' this is no different. With huge choruses and exquisite instrumentation that dabbles in neo-soul, hip-hop and avant-pop, 'Heavy Heavy' is just a flat out joyous listen. Main highlight is the massive and awe-inspiring 'Geronimo' - incredible stuff!

TRACK LISTING

01. Rice
02. I Saw
03. Drum
04. Tell Somebody
05. Geronimo
06. Shoot Me Down
07. Ululation
08. Sink Or Swim
09. Holy Moly
10. Be Your Lady

When everything is post-post-post-post something older and better where do the exceptions go? When the sci-fi 20’s ‘Urban’ might as well be the atomic 50’s ‘Race’, when R&B has no blues and hiphop is a boom bip with a shorty, a hoe, it’s off to the street corner we go… where does a group like Young Fathers, who ‘pick'n'mix from the popular music sweety shop and fly no flags and swear allegiance to no country’ (© - 100 interviews with the group in 2014) - where do they go?

They have to go to the place where Beck makes a sandwich with The Beach Boys and Captain Beefheart, where Faust and The Fall tango. In Rock and Pop you are allowed to pretty much be yourself. If you are a blue and green eyed boy from Brixton with the sallowest of white skin you can become the epitome of crystalised soul, itself. It swings both ways. So… Young Fathers are breaking out of the ghetto. Fuck these constrictive selling boxes.

For the purposes of this mission, this album, this 'White Men Are Black Men Too', is rock and pop. And hip hop, too No, you don’t box in the R&B Hits 2003 generation that easily. This sticker is only for the business. The listeners can decide for themselves.

The sounds are closer on this album, closer to your ears. It sounds as if you are in the room during the recording, possibly experiencing a little existential trauma, but not enough that you don’t notice an earworm hook when you hear one. These hooks, they stay with you. ‘Is that what they mean by pop’? you ask yourself. Could be, Madonna, could be. There are less words than before. Why, for fuck’s sake? Where is the hip hop? It slides in, like a reverse version, a negative, of the hip hop blueprint of eight verses and a sweet, female wail of a hook (while comedy rapper number 6 mutters ‘uh huh, uh huh’, you know, keeping it real). But YFs lob raps into songs that morph into sung verses then back into the tune, with no respect, none! for the law.

These are grown men, battle fit and in their prime. There are no celebrations of dole queue theatre, no fake politics - there’s no need. YFs are right there in the middle of the question: what is your ID? Why claim to speak for a dispossessed white or black class or group or generation? When you can only ever speak for yourself.

When they chant ‘nigger nigger nigger’ the group are singing their enemy’s song (and you can all sing along) - it’s not a war cry, it’s the off switch, the left hand turn in the ignition, the pop-hiss of deflation. No more war, motherfucker. The tension is sexual, tuneful, it’s only fun about to kick off.

TRACK LISTING

Still Running
Shame
Feasting
27
Rain Or Shine
Sirens
Old Rock N Roll
Nest
Liberated
John Doe
Dare Me
Get Started

A1. Still Running
A2. Shame
A3. Feasting
A4. 27
A5. Rain Or Shine
A6. Sirens

B1. Old Rock N Roll
B2. Nest
B3. Liberated
B4. John Doe
B5. Dare Me
B6. Get Started

The album is the follow-up to the Polaris Music Prize short-listed Ultramarine and their third album produced by Dan Lissvik (Studio, Atelje). Watch the trailer for Falsework here.

The winter of 2014/2015 took Young Galaxy from their studio in Montreal to Gothenburg and back. The band’s brilliant new full length Falsework completes the sound they have been mining on their past two albums Shapeshifting (2011) and Ultramarine (2013) with producer Dan Lissvik. The album is undeniably synth pop without the simplicity and was informed and inspired by 80’s electro, acid house and r&b, music that was well ahead of its time. Falsework was made using machines from the past to sound like music from the future.

TRACK LISTING

1. Wear Out The Ground
2. The Night Wants Us To Be Free
3. Factory Flaws
4. Body
5. Ready To Shine
6. Must Be Love
7. We’re No Good
8. Little Wave
9. Lean Into My Love
10. Pressure

Limited edition Young Galaxy ‘Privileged Poor’ remix 12” featuring Factory Floor, TOY and Dan Lissvik (Studio). Debut release from new label, 586.

Young Galaxy’s ‘Privileged Poor’ is taken from the Polaris Music Prize short-listed album 'Ultramarine'. Factory Floor's remix comes hot on the heels of the band’s acclaimed debut album on DFA, and has similar sound designs. Their mix strips away the vocals, pads and pop touches, leaving us with a taut, driving analogue techno / house number. If you didn't know it was a remix you would think it was one of Factory Floor's own tracks. TOY’s Dom and Ale continue to emerge as world class remixers as they transform 'Privileged Poor' into a hypnotic, motorik psychedelic freak out. While less synthy than the original, Dan Lissvik keeps the pop edges of the original and an extra bump for the dancefloor.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Privileged Poor (Factory Floor Remix)
AA1. Privileged Poor (TOY Remix)
AA2. Privileged Poor (Dan Lissvik Remix)

The Swiss trio The Young Gods were created in 1985 under the leadership of Franz Treichler. Desiring to go against the tide of conventional rock music with a radical aesthetic proposal. The bet had been won right from the outset with the first eponymous album that released the success of being voted record of the year by Melody Maker. It was not until 1992, their album Tv Sky, finally achieved an international breakthrough. We must take into account the innovative constancy of the Young Gods and their mastery of the elements.

TRACK LISTING

1. L’amourir
2. Pas Mal
3. Gasoline Man (Megadrive Mix)
4. Skinflowers
5. Kissing The Sun

Exactly 30 years ago, The Young Gods’ ‘Play Kurt Weill’ was released, an album of Kurt Weill covers recorded in 1989 at the Artag studios in Zurich and produced by Roli Mosimann.

The band played the album in its entirety during a tribute concert to Kurt Weill commissioned in September 1989 by La Bâtie-Festival in Geneva and by the Fri-Son in Friborg.

This was the group's first album with Alain Monod (aka Al Comet), who replaced Cesare Pizzi on keyboards.

When asked about the most influential groups in the early 1990s, Mike Patton (Faith No More), Devin Townsend, Maynard James Keenan (Tool), Al Jurgensen (Ministry), Trent Treznor (Nine Inch Nails) and The Edge (U2) all quoted The Young Gods. Connoisseurs will tell you that the band have their place in any ultimate discotheque.

TRACK LISTING

Prologue
Salomon Song
Mackie Messer
Speak Low
Alabama Song
Seeräuber Jenny
Ouverture
September Song

30 years ago, the fourth Young Gods album, ‘T.V. Sky’, was released. A timeless record, surely the most accessible and the most effective and certainly the most successful.

This cathedral of sounds, of which ‘Skinflowers’ constituted the vault, allowed this avant-garde group and creators of a new style to conquer a very large audience.

The primordial shadow of The Doors floated throughout this record, which ended with a sort of hypnotic road trip that announced the rest of their more atmospheric career.

With Roli Mosimann (the fourth member of the group) once again at the helm of production, ‘T.V. Sky’ entered the very closed club of rock masterpiece albums.

When asked about the most influential groups in the early 1990s, Mike Patton (Faith No More), Devin Townsend, Maynard James Keenan (Tool), Al Jurgensen (Ministry), Trent Treznor (Nine Inch Nails) and The Edge (U2), among many others, all quote The Young Gods. All connoisseurs will tell you that they have their place in any ultimate discotheque.

TRACK LISTING

Gasoline Man
T.V. Sky
Skinflowers
Dame Chance
The Night Dance
She Rains
Summer Eyes
Skinflowers (Brain Forest Remix)
Skinflowers (Courtney Speed Love Mix)
Gasoline Man (Megadrive Mix)
Gasoline Man (Diesel Mix)

2LP
Our House
Gasoline Man
T.V. Sky
Skinflowers
Dame Chance
The Night Dance
She Rains
Summer Eyes
Skinflowers (Brain Forest Remix)
Skinflowers (Courtney Speed Love Mix)
Gasoline Man (Megadrive Mix)
Gasoline Man (Diesel Mix)
T.V. Sky (Live Sky Tour)
Skinflowers (Live Sky Tour)
She Rains (Live Sky Tour)
Summer Eyes (Live Sky Tour)

Younghusband first appeared in 2011 and this second LP has been a smoke stack on the road ahead since their 2013 debut ‘Dromes'. While that album defined a scene, this one sets them aside. ‘Dissolver' takes in a wide sweep of guitar music and focuses it into a precisely individual proposition; a sound unto itself that nonetheless garners comparisons with Elliott Smith, The Shoes, and Big Star. 

The quartet of Euan Hinshelwood, Joe Chilton, Adam Beach and Pete Baker emerged as one of a crop of so-called neo-psych bands. Under a canopy of reverb and phase, they could be heard hunting for escape routes from the played-out circus of British rock. No easy task in a country so cold, expensive and hostile to change, where bed-bound, infinite scrolls into the past are sometimes the only entertainment you can withstand or afford.

The band have struck well clear of the dying party and markedly expanded their horizons, assiduously refining their sound and pushing themselves beyond their previous work. They could have expected a struggle for orientation but instead circumvented the difficult second album cliché, producing something which feels utterly effortless. Each section of music rolls out of what came before in a shuttle of cause and effect, tension and release that tic-tacks back to the exhilarating opener ‘Waverley Street' and its invitation: "...the offer is open tonight".

Hinshelwood's songs are subtler and more nuanced this time, yet their choruses have been scaled up. They're so discreetly prepared and precisely placed that they seem to come out of nowhere: lily pads hitting an exponential breeding curve, exploding from the crystalline surface of the verses.

Young Jesus, an indie rock quartet from Los Angeles, looks to communicate the tensions between proximity and distance, chaos and order. On their upcoming record S/T, to be released by Saddle Creek, the band focuses on seemingly small moments in everyday life: phone calls with Mom, landscapes along the highway, crows in a tree. Yet with time these strange intimacies add up to a life. A life full of anxiety, confusion, sadness, joy, boredom, and ultimately wonder.

Young Jesus mixes the emotional intensity of bands like Slint, Pile, and Built To Spill with the quiet contemplation of Yo La Tengo, Mogwai, and Laughing Stock-era Talk Talk. They give themselves to moments of aggression and volume, balanced alongside near-silence.

Influenced by the writings of Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton, Wang An-Shih, Wang Wei, Joy Williams, and Marilynne Robinson, singer/songwriter John Rossiter hopes for a making-do with what we have, a sometimes wide-eyed learning process. Life may be too massive to grasp, but that does not mean we should shy away from it. Rather, Young Jesus tries to look toward the complexity and imperfection. “As ever, the questions Rossiter and co. raise are too big to expect any sort of clear answer, but Young Jesus offer a model of coping, a way to remain hopeful and human within their jaws” (Various Small Flames).

Rossiter states, “the ethos is to push each other to express things that are not common-- like ideas of love and trust within friendships-- through being extremely vulnerable and making mistakes. Hopefully those mistakes become framed as an important and necessary part of process. It's about communication between four people. Hopefully it is the sound of four very good friends who want to let other people into that space.” These may be small things, but observed with thought and care they come to make the world of Young Jesus

TRACK LISTING

1. Green 5:46
2. River 3:09
3. Eddy 6:25
4. Under 2:15
5. Desert 6:46
6. Feeling 9:49
7. Storm 12:42

John Rossiter (Young Jesus) had quit music to study permaculture and to work in landscapes and gardens. His last album, 'Shepherd Head', was too much time spent on the computer. Working with soil and plants gave him some life back. He said, “You know, when gardening, the right decision to make for the landscape is usually the one that is already happening. It just takes time to read what that is."

So, John left the orchard to meet Shahzad Ismaily (Feist, Lou Reed, Arooj Aftab) for lunch. They instantly bonded, talking about improvisation, rhythm, the heart. On a lark, Shahzad invited John to New York.

Songs started to form, songs about shame and grief, love and redemption. They came fast, a song a day for two weeks. It was different from past albums, which felt like years of hammering out lyrics and ideas. This one came in the wake of a long illness, where tunes came in a rush, as if they were physical, as if the body couldn’t heal without them. An almost involuntary outpouring, overrunning his usual self-consciousness.

Rossiter had to sit and transcribe without judgment: let the ideas grow on their own. Shahzad was in LA one day when John sat down at the piano and played them for him. They decided to record them at Shahzad's Figure 8 Studios in Brooklyn – these songs would blossom into Young Jesus’ album, 'The Fool'.

Inner landscaping requires presence and bravery. It can get pretty dark and strange the deeper you walk into that jungle. And it’s from the absolute pits of that inner landscape that the truest music rises from.

At the end of the last session, Rossiter and Alex Lappin sat down and drew tarot cards. John drew The Fool.

TRACK LISTING

1. Brenda & Diane
2. Two Brothers
3. Rabbit
4. Rich
5. Moonlight
6. MOTY
7. The Weasel
8. Am I The Only One?
9. Sunrise
10. Dancer
11. God's Plan

Barbarians was written, recorded and mixed by Young Knives (brothers Henry Dartnall and The House of Lords) in their studio near Oxford, UK. John Gray’s book Straw Dogs inspired the brothers to dial into the ultra-violent, brutal nature of human beings. Our progresses in science and knowledge have not made us any less barbaric: our entertainment is obsessed with it, our world is full of it. What if cruelty to others is just part of who we are? How do we live with that?

Building on a base of loved hits from their early work last decade (Voices of Animals and Men, Superabundance, Ornaments from the Silver Arcade) and the metamorphosis of 2013’s Sick Octave, Barbarians is a leap into sonic experimentation by a band who love to confuse and entertain in equal measure.

TRACK LISTING

1. Swarm
2. Society For Cutting Up Men
3. Jenny Haniver
4. Red Cherries
5. I Am Awake
6. Holy Name ‘68
7. Barbarians
8. Sheep Tick
9. Only A God
10. What I Saw

Young Knives return to their noisey DIY roots with new EP - as lead singer and guitarist Henry Dartnall explains “For some reason when you are working with record labels it’s an assumption that you book into a £500 per day studio and a producer tells you what is wrong with your music and makes it better for you. I know it’s a clicheì but after these sessions we have always felt there was no good reason why we couldn’t have done it ourselves like we always used to."

In terms of drastic reinventions, it’s up there with when Dexy’s’ Kevin Rowland started wearing a wedding dress, albeit a rather more appealing one. “We have tried to make a record that will mess with peoples expectations of us,’ Thomas ‘The House Of Lords’ Dartnall says. “We wanted to make something dark and nasty, something industrial, synthetic, crass but with a sprinkling of pretty shit.”

Some of it sounds like Kraftwerk. Some of it sounds like a late 1990s computer games console being forced into a food processor. Some of sounds like experimental Blur. Some of it sounds like The Fall. Some of those riffs do sound a bit like Gang Of Four still, actually. It’s the most intriguing, dark, out there yet still instantly lapel-gripping music the band has ever created. Young Knives under the bed sheets.

"Young Knives are Henry Dartnall (me), The House Of Lords and Oliver Askew. I’m the big cheese in the band. I write a lot of the songs, play guitar and sing. The House Of Lords is my brother, and he plays bass and keys and sings a lot. He has a cool stage name, so fickle people tend to think he is the best in the band. Ollie plays drums and sings.

Our first album Voices of Animals and Men was really popular! We had three singles entering the UK Top 40 and the album was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize in 2007. In 2008 we released Superabundance, we got a couple of Top 40 singles and the album included our most synched track Turn Tail; something to do with the big string section, I reckon. Then we decided very much that we needed to get away from major label pressures as it just didn’t suit our temperament, and although it may have been a naïve move, we decided to start our own label, Gadzöök. In 2011 we released our third album Ornaments from the Silver Arcade, and this felt like the last record in a trilogy. This record has some of our favourite songs to play live, like Vision In Rags and Woman.

Sick Octave has been a new start for us. It has definitely been the most fun record we’ve ever made. We almost didn’t make it a Young Knives record as it feels so different from what went before. But that would be a lie; it is totally a Young Knives record."

Following on from their critically acclaimed debut album, "Voices Of Animals And Men", Young Knives release their hotly anticipated follow up. A muscular clatter of pulsing guitars, head-spinning percussive thuds and harmonic, brotherly vocals provide the backbone to a rich throng of giddy, excited ideas and ageless, wry lyrical themes.

White Sands, the new single from Young Knives and recent winner of the BBC 6 Music Rebel Playlist, is the second single to be taken from Young Knives’ widely acclaimed fourth studio album Sick Octave.

Released on 7” white vinyl limited to 150 copies, each sleeve will be handmade by the band and feature an individual close-up photo of a grimy nook or cranny of the Young Knives studio. No two sleeves will be the same.

The B-side is an exclusive new track called I Only Want Your Love. Lead singer Henry Dartnall says about White Sands “This song highlights our new direction – industrial production, disquieting synth breaks, very loud guitars. It’s also one of our favourite songs on the album. White Sands has a very important message hidden within its seemingly vacuous exterior. When we’ve worked out what it is we will tell you. It’s something about hedonism, the military and the power struggle between Western values and the rest of the world.”

Reigning in the melodic chaos of their previous works, the dystopian beats on Young Magic’s second release were conceived in a new series of experiments. Producer Isaac Emmanuel and vocalist Melati Malay pieced together the album over the past year while on tour – recording in Morocco, France, Czech Republic, Australia, Iceland and their home studio in New York.

As a result, Breathing Statues unfolds in labyrinthine fashion, its surreal lyrics and ghostly harmonies emphasizing the record’s otherworldly intimacy, growing darker as the album progresses from the agile “Fall In” to the lurching chants of “Mythnomer.”

In the spirit of the album’s spontaneity, the band invited a harpist to improvise over their songs, layering celestial fragments over the record’s cavernous beats. The album operates in these extremes, with the airiness of Malay’s vocals set in sharp contrast with the claustrophobic doom of Emmanuel’s warped percussion.

With Breathing Statues, Young Magic’s series of audio experimentations coalesce into a new holographic landscape, showing a band progressing with ambition towards a sound uniquely their own.

Young Magic is the sonic pairing between Indonesian vocalist, Melati Malay and Australian producer, Isaac Emmanuel. Although currently based in New York, the eclectic outfit has recorded music whilst traversing the four corners of the earth.

After debuting a series of 7” releases on Carpark Records in 2011, the band took the stage at Iceland Airwaves and began touring globally, including main support tours with Youth Lagoon and Purity Ring. February 2012 saw the release of their full length, Melt with the likes of NPR, BBC, New York Times, XLR8R and a plethora of other publications and blogs singing the album’s praises. The group’s immersive visual show continued to expand throughout 2012 and 2013 with performances at Berghain, Austin Psych Fest and The Brooklyn Museum.

This year, the duo present a new gift from their explorations in their sophomore release, Breathing Statues. The album navigates through a labyrinth of phantom harmonies and crystalline beats, with cover artwork by longtime collaborator Leif Podhajsky. Breathing Statues is a lush and distinctive collection that colors the world a new soundscape.

TRACK LISTING

1. One
2. Fall In
3. Foxglove
4. Something In The Water
5. Ageless
6. Cobra
7. Holographic
8. Mythnomer
9. Waiting For The Ground To Open
10. Captcha

Although now firmly settled in New York City, Young Magic’s three members came together through equal helpings of openness and fortuity. In 2010, singer and producer Isaac Emmanuel had left his home continent of Australia to travel across Europe, over to New York, and down through Mexico, all the while creating and recording music with whatever instruments he found along the way. While in Mexico, Emmanuel kept a tight correspondence with fellow Australian expat Michael Italia, who for months had been similarly traveling across Europe and South America with portable recording gear in tow. They decided to meet up in New York, where their good friend from a few years prior, Indonesian-born vocalist Melati Malay, had been living and making her own recordings. In early 2011 the three friends, who had initially bonded over their broad musical palettes, began recording together and contributing songs to the record, culling influences and finding their own footing among them.

The immediately fruitful collaboration brought forth singles “Sparkly”, “You With Air” and “Night In The Ocean”, all of which were fitting indicators of the band’s chameleonic sound, heavily informed by West African rhythms, Brainfeeder hip-hop, UK bass, and 60s psychedelic soul. Young Magic’s full-length debut, "Melt", comprises both of these tracks - as well as their B-sides - and expands on their varied aesthetic, at once electronically sequenced and completely organic. Containing recordings from 10 different countries, the album flaunts new facets at each turn, letting - as on “Watch For Our Lights” - rough samples from distant lands coalesce with drum machines and distorted synths. “Night In The Ocean” and “Jam Karet” put soaring synth pads around the higher frequencies while deep kicks keep the songs grounded, allowing Isaac and Melati’s vocals to float in synchronicity between. And with its shifting rhythm, open structure, and layers of echoed vocals, closer and highlight, “Drawing Down The Moon”, hints at crystalline take on UK garage: a last dance from a collection of short stories from around the world.

With a sonic mélange of vibes on a debut that remains cohesive and distinctly their own, it will be exciting to see where the trio’s tastes will guide them next.

TRACK LISTING

1. Sparkly
2. Slip Time
3. You With Air
4. Yalam
5. Jam Karet
6. Night In The Ocean
7. Watch For Our Lights
8. The Dancer
9. Cavalry
10. Sanctuary
11. Drawing Down The Moon

The beginnings of Young Magic’s new album, Still Life, coincided with singer Melati Malay revisiting her own, in her birthplace of Indonesia. Having lost her father the previous year, she returned to the island of Java to reconnect with her family, dig up stories, and begin work on a new collection of music.

“My father had been somewhat of a mystery to me,” Melati says. “How did a boy from the Midwest end up in the jungles of Borneo during the 60s, trading his watch and a carton of cigarettes for the gravestones of the indigenous headhunters?”

The search led Melati deep into her family history. She rented a small shack by the water for a month, and with just a backpack and microphone, began recording – unraveling a past of superstition, black magic, and ties to the Javanese royal family.

“I’ve always felt torn, like some kind of hybrid existing between two worlds,” Melati says. “Born to a Catholic father and a Muslim mother, growing up bilingual, attending an international school in Jakarta where all my friends were from different countries…in a city of 30 million people where the clash between poverty and affluence is extreme.”

Still Life is a deeply personal and idiosyncratic record, somewhere close to the enchanted electronic pop realms occupied by Björk and Broadcast, yet unique to Young Magic. Found sounds and textures feature prominently across Still Life, including the Javanese gamelan, blossoming into ecstatic bursts during the climax of “Lucien.” Melati grounds the textured sonic world with arrows direct to the heart, like the arresting “How Wonderful” where the singer overflows with regret for “all those things I never said.” This is as deeply personal as the group has ever been.

“In a way, Still Life became a kind of antithesis to a world where people tell you who to pray to, what to buy into, and who your enemies should be. It’s my reaction. Still Life is my way to celebrate music from all corners…my home without borders.”

Upon returning to New York, her home of 10 years, Melati put together a group of musicians and began reimagining these new musical works inspired by her personal metamorphosis. She enlisted NYC-based cellist and composer Kelsey Lu McJunkins, Detroit producer Erin Rioux, Bolivian percussionist Daniel Alejandro Siles Mendoza, and Australian producer/songwriter Isaac Emmanuel, her longtime collaborator.

Young Magic met in New York City in 2010 and began collaborating above a speakeasy in Brooklyn. Alongside original member Michael Italia, the trio signed to Carpark Records (Toro Y Moi, Beach House, Dan Deacon) on the strength of one single (Sparkly/You With Air) and a wave of positive press. Touring in Europe and North America began after a series of limited edition 7" releases in 2011. The following year brought new visibility, acclaim, and artistic achievement with the release of the group’s full-length album debut, Melt, which was followed by sophmore album Breathing Statues.

Still Life inhabits a gorgeous, kaleidoscopic world, as delicate and intricate, as it is expansive and immersive. It walks the line between organic and mechanic, where dusty field recordings weave between warm Moogs and Prophets, where jazz breaks bump next to broken drum machines. It’s meticulously crafted outsider pop, made by obsessives, for obsessives. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Valhalla
2. Lucien
3. Sleep Now
4. IWY
5. Held
6. Default Memory
7. How Wonderful
8. Homage
9. Sky Interior
10. Valhalla (Reprise)

Colin Caulfield, aka Young Man may already be familiar to some of you for his reworkings of his favourite song, including a cover of Deerhunter's "Rainwater Cassette Exchange" which Bradford Cox described as "fantastically superior to the original". An accolade indeed!
Now Young Man brings us his debut UK single "Up So Fast" which is a lovely uplifting dream-pop number. Kicking off with simple stripped back guitar strums and vocals, the drum rhythm - a series of mini drum rolls, gradually builds to create a shimmering pop haze before it changes direction once again as it winds down to a finale.
Fans of Altas Sound, Deerhunter, Animal Collective, Panda Bear etc should take note.
Pitchfork: "acoustic guitars that give off the whiff of sunscreen, sun-baked loops, easygoing percussion, vocals blanched in reverb, and lyrics that take an 'aw shucks' wistfulness to growing up."

The new album for the US artist Young Man aka Colin Caulfield with guitarist Emmett Conway, bassist Joe Bailey, drummer Dylan Andrews and synth player Jeff Graupner - produced by John McEntire (Tortoise, The Sea And Cake a.o.)

Before he was even finished with the debut Young Man EP Boy, singersongwriter Colin Caulfield already knew what he wanted to do with this one, the 9-track album Vol. 1. First conceived in Caulfield’s college dorm room in 2009, Young Man is a concept project about youth -- about how that fleeting phase when you're emerging into adulthood can feel like reliving two decades of highs and lows in just a couple years. "I wanted all the things to come out in succession," Caulfield says, "because the series documents what happened to me when I was writing them. The whole project more or less portrays the trajectory of a young musician, first starting out, making mistakes, then growing up.

He's growing in leaps and bounds, turning out a more muscular, focused sound on 'Vol.1,' where songs such as "21" and "Fate" bend the dreamy atmospherics Caulfield has been exploring since his first EP into lean, pliable melodies. Vol. 1 is the first Young Man effort to feature a full band. He is supported here by guitarist Emmett Conway, bassist Joe Bailey, drummer Dylan Andrews and synth player Jeff Graupner, most of whom have been playing live with Caulfield for the past couple years on tours with Cold War Kids, Givers, Grouplove and Fanfarlo, among others. "I always envisioned this as a full band project," Caulfield says. "Experimenting with a group of musicians in a way that you can't when you’re alone is much more appealing for me, but I had to teach myself how to record the songs on my own first."

Vol 1 is also Caulfield's first project to be recorded in a studio -- Chicago's Soma Studios, where Young Man spent several weeks last year with producer John McEntire, known for his influential work with Nineties indie rock heavyweights Tortoise and The Sea And Cake, as well as production/engineering credits for Broken Social Scene and Stereolab. "I had a very good idea of what each song should sound like in my head before we went to the studio," Caulfield says. "They came out sounding different than I thought they were going to, but a lot of the album is about being happy with that. We almost called the album Damon & Division, which are the cross streets where Soma is, because the studio itself was such an important instrument on this record."

Beyond any one instrument, Caulfield says the biggest influence on Vol. 1 was his longtime attraction to progressive rock. "It’s such geeky music," he says. "But the musicianship is something I really get behind. Sometimes I find myself using the same chords and rhythmic concepts, but those influences always push me to do something new as much as I'm able - making music technical in clever ways without letting it get too selfindulgent."

Yet Caulfield also notes that the real writing of this record coincided with his beginning to develop a real taste for pop music again, for the first time since his early teens. "I got more interested in songwriting, and I learned to embrace pop music like Kelly Rowland and Nick Drake. I resented that music for so long, for some reason. I don’t think it’s negative anymore to write a good hook and have it repeat. For the longest time I wanted to make music that had parts that moved in and out, that didn’t follow standard pop conventions. I guess I finally realized it’s cool to do both." Prog pop? Yes. Finally.

TRACK LISTING

1. Heading
2. Thoughts
3. By And By
4. Do
5. Fate
6. Wasted
7. 21
8. Wandering
9. Directions

Taking the unprecedented step of making Young Marble Giants' first ever release a long player certainly paid off. Released in 1980 "Colossal Youth" became a parallel soundtrack to the unsteady stabs of the post punk early eighties, and quickly became one of (the then nascent) Rough Trade Records best sellers. Becalmed, resigned and a little tense, it created a new vocabulary for song. "Colossal Youth" was followed by a couple of EPs, and then the group split up, to everyone's surprise and dismay. 

Combining sparse, home made drum machine rhythms, electric organ lines, funky bass and taut guitar chords, along with Alison Statton's clear, true vocal makes for one of the most evocative and atmospheric albums of the post-punk era.  

TRACK LISTING

1 Searching For Mr Right 3:00
2 Include Me Out 1:56
3 The Taxi 2:07
4 Eating Noddemix 2:04
5 Constantly Changing 2:04
6 N.I.T.A. 3:31
7 Colossal Youth 1:54
8 Music For Evenings 3:02
9 The Man Amplifier 3:15
10 Choci Loni 2:37
11 Wurlitzer Jukebox 2:45
12 Salad Days 2:01
13 Credit In The Straight World 2:29
14 Brand - New - Life 2:54
15 Wind In The Rigging 2:25

The first release from Neil Young's long awaited Archive Performance series is here with "Live At The Fillmore East". In 2006, Neil Young delivered another hit album, "Living With War", and toured with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Thirty-six years earlier, in 1970, Young toured with CSN&Y and released his platinum album "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere", after which he performed a series of shows at New York City's then-new Fillmore East with his band Crazy Horse. That concert finally makes its official debut in the annals of rock history with "Live At The Fillmore East", and the circle is unbroken for one of rock's greatest singer-songwriters.

"Having apparently exorcised his demons by releasing the cathartic Tonight's the Night, Neil Young returned to his commercial strengths with Zuma (named after Zuma Beach in Los Angeles, where he now owned a house). Seven of the album's nine songs were recorded with the reunited Crazy Horse, in which rhythm guitarist Frank Sampedro had replaced the late Danny Whitten, but there were also nods to other popular Young styles in "Pardon My Heart," an acoustic song that would have fit on Harvest, his most popular album, and "Through My Sails," retrieved from one of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's abortive recording sessions. Young had abandoned the ragged, first-take approach of his previous three albums, but Crazy Horse would never be a polished act, and the music had a lively sound well-suited to the songs, which were some of the most melodic, pop-oriented tunes Young had crafted in years, though they were played with an electric-guitar-drenched rock intensity. The overall theme concerned romantic conflict, with lyrics that lamented lost love and sometimes longed for a return ("Pardon My Heart" even found Young singing, "I don't believe this song"), though the overall conclusion, notably in such catchy songs as "Don't Cry No Tears" and "Lookin' for a Love," was to move on to the next relationship. But the album's standout track (apparently the only holdover from an early intention to present songs with historical subjects) was the seven-and-a-half-minute epic "Cortez the Killer," a commentary on the Spanish conqueror of Latin America that served as a platform for Young's most extensive guitar soloing since his work on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere." - AllMusic.

Neil Young's second album yielded several of his most enduring hits (including the title tune, "Cowgirl In The Sand," "Cinnamon Girl," and "Down By The River") and firmly established him as a solo artist of the first rank. Though it's impossible to narrow the catalogue of Young and Crazy Horse down to one representative document, this is about as close as you're likely to get. This was Young's first collaboration with the Horse, and it's still one of that group's defining recorded moments. As in much of Young's subsequent work, the feeling of despair moves unabated through the album, which runs the emotional gamut from laconically desperate to psychotically desperate. Despite the gloom, the heavy electric riffing on "Cinnamon Girl" and "Cowgirl In the Sand" -two surrealistic odes to an idealized muse - is cathartic and invigorating, easily as riveting as the guitar onslaught of anyone from the Stooges to the Velvet Underground. Young's rootsy, acoustic side comes to the fore on "Round & Round" and "Running Dry". The homespun quality of these songs doesn't leaven the consuming sense of dread that permeates this album, though. Strangely, this expression of angst and emotional disorder became one of Young's most lastingly popular albums, and "Down By The River", "Cinnamon Girl" and "Cowgirl In The Sand" quickly turned into FM staples.

Tracklisting
1. Cinnamon Girl
2. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
3. Round & Round (It Won't Be Long)
4. Down By The River
5. The Losing End (When You're On)
6. Running Dry (Requiem For The Rockets)
7. Cowgirl In The Sand

Recognised as one of Young's (and hence one of rock & roll's) finest albums, "Harvest" put the singer on the mainstream map with the mega-hit "Heart of Gold", which defined a soft folk-rock style frequently revisited by lesser artists throughout the 1970s. It also features some of his darker compositions, like the entropy-obsessed "Old Man" and the junkie eulogy, "The Needle and the Damage Done", one of Young's most haunting and compelling songs. Deceptively laid-back-sounding country-rock plaints like "Out On The Weekend" and the title cut caress the ear unassumingly, pulling you into the more ominous subtext that is present even in the rollicking "Are You Ready For The Country". As always, Young has an ear for contrasts, laying down heavy rock ("Alabama") beside his balladry, and even employing the London Symphony Orchestra on the excellent confessional "A Man Needs A Maid". Due to back troubles, Young recorded much of this material while wearing a brace, a fact that seems audible in the tension and unease that underlies the friendly, acoustic surface of this superb release.

TRACK LISTING

1. Out On The Weekend
2. Harvest
3. A Man Needs A Maid
4. Heart Of Gold
5. Are You Ready For The Country?
6. Old Man
7. There's A World
8. Alabama
9. The Needle And The Damage Done
10. Words (Between The Lines Of Age)

The 1971 Concert is the second album in the performance series. On January 19, 1971, Neil Young performed at Massey Hall in Toronto, Canada. In many ways, this was a major homecoming event. He had left Canada in 1966, soon becoming a member of Buffalo Springfield in Los Angeles, then recording his self-titled debut solo album in 1968. That was followed by "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" with Crazy Horse, then Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's "Déjà vu" in 1970 and his best-selling album "After The Gold Rush." By the time Young came back to Canada for the Massey Hall concert, he had become one of the most exciting and successful singer-songwriters in rock. Neil Young was performing solo that evening in Toronto, playing many of his well-known songs like "Down by the River," "Ohio" and "I Am a Child." But he also included several new originals that would be featured on his next new album, "Harvest," which had not been released yet, like "Old Man," "The Needle And The Damage Done" and "Heart of Gold". 'This is the album that should have come out between "After The Gold Rush" and "Harvest",' Young says now. 'David Briggs, my producer, was adamant that this should be the record, but I was very excited about the takes we got on "Harvest" and wanted "Harvest" out. David disagreed. As I listen to this today, I can see why'.

Already hailed as on a par with legendary albums such as "Harvest" and "Harvest Moon", "Prairie Wind" features contributions from keyboardist Spooner Oldham, pedal-steel guitarist Ben Keith, drummer Chad Cromwell, percussionist Karl Himmel, bassist Rick Rosas and vocalist Emmylou Harris, along with the Fisk University Jubilee Singers and other guests.