Search Results for:
ELEPHANT
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- 2xColoured LP
- £22.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- PTSN003-5
- Release date
- 24 Nov '23
- Format Info
140g Heavy Metal Grey (gun metal grey) coloured double LP with an etching on side D, housed in a single sleeve jacket with printed insert.
140g Heavy Metal Grey... [ + ]
John McCauley III wrote, arranged, played, and recorded the album at the tender age of 21. The album is full of songs wiser and more nuanced than John should have been able to produce according to natural law. The words are deliberate and heartfelt and follow the lead of singer / songwriter heroes of John’s like Townes van Zandt, Neil Young and Richie Valens.
The album concludes with a cover of the 1962 GRAMMY-winning Song Of The Year, ‘What Kind of Fool Am I’, made famous by Sammy Davis, Jr.
It can safely be said that this debut album is a genre defying classic; it’s a hook filled bar room rock album that is as connected to 90’s Seattle catchy gloom as it is to left-of-the-dial late 80’s Minneapolis and 70’s Austin honky tonk.
TRACK LISTING
1. Ashamed
2. Art Isn't Real (City Of Sin)
3. Standing At The Threshold
4. Dirty Dishes
5. Long Time
6. Nevada
7. Baltimore Blues No. 1
8. These Old Shoes
9. Not So Dense
10. Spend The Night
11. Diamond Rings 2007
12. Sink Or Swim
13. Christ Jesus
14. What Kind Of Fool Am I
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- Coloured LP
- £22.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- MI0115LPX
- Release date
- 5 May '23
- Format Info
Tricolour vinyl.
Tricolour vinyl.
The EP was followed up in 2008 with Peter Katis on the desk for their debut album Elephant Shell which spawned the hits Your English is Good and Tesselate. Elephant Shell is the sound of these four young friends coming of age and into their own. The album catapulted the band into the popular consciousness, landing the band on the stages of the world’s biggest festivals, a spot in MTV’s video rotation, appearances on the Late Show with David Letterman, and even a cameo on Desperate Housewives. Beyond that, Elephant Shell has stood up as one of the defining albums of this particular era in indie rock. Hard to believe it’s 15 years hence. Elephant Shell is ripe for a reissue and this 2023 edition comes on tricolour-incolour-vinyl.
TRACK LISTING
1. Centennial
2. In A Cave
3. Graves
4. Juno
5. Tessellate
6. Sixties Remake
7. The Harrowing Adventures Of…
8. Nursery, Academy
9. Your English Is Good
10. Listen To The Math
11. The Baskervilles
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- 2xColoured LP
- £36.99
- Cat Number
- 81007442157
- Release date
- 21 Apr '23
- Format Info
Red Smoke/Clear with Red & Black Smoke Vinyl.
Red Smoke/Clear with Red... [ + ]
Released on April 1, 2003, Elephant swiftly proved to be a critically acclaimed, award-winning phenomenon, as well as garnering worldwide popularity, peaking at #6 on the Billboard 200 while also topping the UK’s Official Albums Chart. Largely recorded over two weeks in April 2002 at London’s analogue Toe Rag Studios, Elephant includes such now-classic singles as the GRAMMY® Award-winning “Seven Nation Army,” “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself,” “The Hardest Button To Button,” and “There’s No Home For You Here,” all of which prompted Rolling Stone’s David Fricke to hail the album as quite simply, “a work of pulverizing perfection.”Elephant went on to win the 2004 GRAMMY® Award for “Best Alternative Album” and was an “Album of the Year” nominee.
TRACK LISTING
1. Seven Nation Army
2. Black Math
3. There’s No Home For You Here
4. I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself
5. In The Cold, Cold Night
6. I Want To Be The Boy To Warm Your Mother’s Heart
7. You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket
8. Ball And Biscuit
9. The Hardest Button To Button
10. Little Acorns
11. Hypnotize
12. The Air Near My Fingers
13. Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine
14. It’s True That We Love One Another
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- Coloured LP
- £19.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- AJXLP578B
- Release date
- 14 May '21
- Format Info
Blue vinyl.
Blue vinyl. -
- LP
- £18.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- AJXLP578
- Release date
- 14 May '21
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- CD
- £9.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- AJXCD578
- Release date
- 14 May '21
Recorded during the summer of 2020, ‘Blue Elephant’ is testament to Matt’s exceptional musicianship, production skills and songwriting prowess with every instrument played by Matt including, guitars, bass, a variety of keyboards and synthesizers (piano, Wurlitzer, mellotron, Moog, Hammond, Vox and Farfisa organs), with the exception of drums – supplied by Craig Blundell, on arguably his best album to date.
This music soundtracks an album that explores themes surrounding today’s close scrutiny in all its bewildering, objectifying and unnerving experiences. Very much a conceptual and, therefore, continuous long-player, the album’s infectious grooves come to the fore on standout tracks ‘Summer Sun’, heavy-psych instrumental ‘Invisible’, the three-part ‘Blues Inside Me’, which encompasses a psych journey through a late ‘60s and early glam filter mixed with the propulsive ‘Like Stone’.
TRACK LISTING
1. Aboard
2. Summer Sun
3. Safe Passage
4. Now Disappear
5. Alone
6. Invisible
7. Blues Inside Me
8. I Cannot Speak
9. The Blue Elephant
10. Life Unknown
11. Safer Passage
12. Like Stone
13. Story Told
14. Forget Me
15. Now Disappear (Again)
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- 2xLP
- £29.99
Usually ships within: 2-10 days - Cat Number
- 19439842401
- Release date
- 21 Jan '22
- Format Info
Pressed on two glorious 180-gram LPs.
Pressed on two glorious... [ + ] -
- CD
- £11.99
- Cat Number
- 19439842412
- Release date
- 23 Apr '21
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- Ltd LP
- £20.99
- Cat Number
- WV214LP
- Release date
- 9 Apr '21
- Format Info
Limited edition LP format with extra heavy textured jackets and metallic silver ink. LP includes 12” square insert with lyrics and images of the artist, and download.
Limited edition LP format... [ + ] -
- CD
- £10.99
- Cat Number
- WV214CD
- Release date
- 16 Apr '21
- Includes MP3 Download Code.
The raw inspiration for Vague Tidings came from a 2006 DIY tour of the 49th state. It was a trip that went off the beaten path sometimes a bit too far for comfort. Now, over a decade later, listeners find Joe O’Connell aka Elephant Micah stationed at a creaky spinet piano, singing about the Alaskan sky. Throughout, his lyrics take a new angle on a pet theme: human encounters with the natural world.
Vague Tidings places these encounters in the American West and, at times, in its sci-fi corollary, outer space. Its imagery draws from the allure of Alaska, the idea of Western prosperity, and the human relationship to wilderness more broadly. Often, O’Connell sings about the goal of capturing and commodifying nature. In poetic sketches of resource extraction industries and dark sky tourism, frontier lust runs amok. Pipelines catch fire and stars disappear, all to the tune of a stark, uncanny Americana. Vague Tidings is a sustained, hallucinatory rendering of this theme. In style, its eight songs follow a switchback path between foggy incantations and mountain anthems. Made with a small cohort of acoustic instrumentalists, the record is rough hewn, but easy on the ears. To put Vague Tidings down on tape, O’Connell assembled some of his favorite musicians in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina area, where he’s lived since 2015: Libby Rodenbough (Mipso) bows and plucks a detuned fiddle, Matt Douglas (Mountain Goats) breathes life into various woodwinds, and Matt O’Connell (Lean Year) sets the pace on a two-piece drum set. Their loose, imaginative playing pushes Vague Tidings beyond the singer-songwriter genre into something richer in texture. Ultimately, this is foreboding but spacious music, with plenty of room for reconsidering life on earth.
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- LP
- £23.99
Usually ships within: 2-10 days - Cat Number
- 19075927921
- Release date
- 19 Apr '19
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- CD
- £9.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- MI0302CD
- Release date
- 28 Apr '14
Amelia Rivas and Christian Pinchbeck don’t just sing about feverish, frayed and fractured romances - in the three years since forming Elephant, they’ve been living one. It’s fitting that ‘Sky Swimming’, their debut full length release is a seductive, night time delight of an album. After all, it was in the twilight hours of a May morning three years ago that Pontefract native Amelia Rivas and Bristolian Christian Pinchbeck met at a house party and in alcohol-soaked all-nighter sessions that ‘Sky Swimming’ was written.
A fibrous collection of songs about relationships - their own included, which broke down during the making of the album - hazy memories, twisted dreams, the metaphysical bleeding in to the physical - ‘Sky Swimming’ - all trilling keyboards, swooping melodies, broken hip hop beats, looped strings and Amelia’s uniquely curvy vocals - that makes you want to clamp your headphones tighter on your ears, letting you swim in its every detail and emotion. Influenced by everything from Toro Y Moi to composer Angelo Badalamenti, Everything But The Girl to rap originators Arrested Development and Joe Meek’s productions, it’s an intensely varied listen.
“The first time we worked together, I went round to his house and didn’t leave for 3 days. I barely knew him,” Amelia remembers. “She turned up with some £10 Casio she bought from a charity shop in France and the whole demo EP was made on that,” recalls Christian. Elephant have grown beyond their lo-fi roots since then, with Andy Dragazis being drafted in on co-production duties, while retaining the emotional rawness of those early songs. Tracks vary from psyche-delving ballads about growing up - ‘Torn Tongues’ and ‘Skyscraper’ (“I want to understand what’s wrong with my brain,” Rivas laughs), to the thrilling pop of ‘Elusive Youth’, a eulogy to a friend who “wears a city crown”, to the everyday trials of being young and poor in London (see ‘Ants’ about Amelia’s crumbling Tooting bedsit and ‘TV Dinner’, a paean to rubbish telly and cheap booze) and the heartbreaking title track ‘Sky Swimming’ written in the eye storm of their relationship meltdown with the refrain “do your eyes turn blue before you cry, I see the blue in you”.
With winning appearances at Primavera and Eurosonic festivals behind them, not to mention support slots with cult hero Matthew E White, under their belts, Elephant have in ‘Sky Swimming’ one of the year’s most seductive sounds. “I flew to the moon to mirror you” sings Amelia on album closer ‘Shapeshifter’, with the sort raw melancholy that could only be cribbed from a ‘Blue Valentine’ romance. “I saw the future.” It should be a very bright future ahead for Elephant indeed.
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- Ltd 7"
- £4.75
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- MI0284S
- Release date
- 11 Nov '13
Their first recordings, recorded in the strung out early mornings after the night before, were delirious and lightheaded. Rivas’ stream of conscious lyricism combined with Pinchbeck’s innate melodic nous to create vignettes of delight and wonder. A debut single followed, 2011’s woozy ‘Ants’, followed by the ‘Assembly’ EP. But before they had a chance to capitalise on the growing acclaim around them the duo’s relationship broke down, almost to the point of no return.
An unexpected rapprochement in late 2012, along with a renewed musical hunger, saw Rivas and Pinchbeck reconcile. The first fruit was this year’s gauzy single ‘Skyscraper’, which announced their return in spectacular fashion, with Rivas’ swooping vocals allied to a spectral chorus creating an eerie, lens-flared 3 minute wonder of song.
Now, new release ‘Shapeshifter’ provides confirmation that Elephant are truly back as a force to be reckoned with. “I flew to the moon to mirror you and I saw the future” sings Rivas, with a raw melancholy and nostalgic longing. A sumptuous missive of love lost and lessons learned, that sparkles with charm, optimism, and the sort of lush swoonsome string arrangements that reach into your chest and wring your heart dry.
Backed by the sparse and stretched out ‘Snowday’, as icily cool as it sounds, full of chiaroscuro contrasts and flickering atmospherics, this is a release that suggests their debut album is set to be one of the standout albums of 2014.
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- Ltd 7"
- £4.49
- Cat Number
- MI0262S
- Release date
- 25 Mar '13
The two met in the early hours of a house party back in May 2010, a fateful encounter that led to many a long night writing and recording songs in Christian’s South London bedsit. They soon came to the attention of Memphis Industries in the Autumn of 2010, with whom they subsequently released a pair of acclaimed 7” singles, ‘Ants’ and ‘Allured’, with The Guardian declaring “they're a Meg'n'Jack reared on breathy Brill Building pop and haunting atmospherics”.
The pair set to work on their debut EP and the result, titled ‘Assembly’ and released in 2011, was a four track wonder that expanded and developed the quiet beauty evidenced on their previous releases.
But all was not well with Elephant - Amelia and Christian had parted ways in a Fleetwood Mac style bout of acrimony. Then Christian broke his wrist (which may or may not be related to the aforementioned acrimony) rendering him unable to play. It looked unlikely that they would ever write together again.
Sometimes, though, you have to realize when you’ve got something good. After a tempestuous year, where they just about managed to play a show at Primavera’s opening party without injury (or worse), a gradual rapprochement took place. September finally saw them starting to write together again and playing shows (including an appearance at Eurosonic and supports with Matthew E White), and lo and behold, an album shaped batch of songs finally started to take shape.
Sumptuous new track ‘Skyscraper’ sees Amelia’s vocals swooning and swooping over a backdrop that twists familiar fifties Doo-wop stylings into something new and alluring, whilst B side ‘Spies’ is a sweet and sparse repost.
It’s a strong, confident marker that Elephant’s debut album will be worth braving broken hearts and broken bones for.
White vinyl 7”.
TRACK LISTING
Skyscraper
Spies
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- CD
- £4.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- MI0200CD
- Release date
- 14 Nov '11
Elephant are Amelia Rivas (vocals, keys) and Christian Pinchbeck (guitars, computers).
French-by-way-of-Pontefract chanteuse Amelia Rivas met Christian Pinchbeck back in May 2010, since when they’ve been quietly creating some hauntingly fragile songs with a sense of mystery and history that belies their teenage years, picking up strong radio and press support along the way.
Elephant are heading out on tour for the first time, supporting Chapel Club and Casiokids, as well as appearing at SWN Festival
Currently writing toward their debut album which is due some time in 2012.
STAFF COMMENTS
Darryl says: A beautiful debut EP, from this duo with lots of promise. Recalls the likes of AR Kane and Microdisney at their pomp. Can't wait for the album!!-
- CD
- £9.99
- Cat Number
- RER04CD
- Release date
- 6 Dec '10
TRACK LISTING
1. †‡† (Ritualzz) - Misery Walk
2. Party Trash - Sky Clad
3. Fostercare - Cold Light
4. //TENSE// - Versus Man
5. Modern Witch - Your Life A Movie
6. Mater Suspiria Vision - Ritualz Of The Crack Witches
7. Horse MacGyver- Nod
8. White Ring - IxC999
9. Raw Moans - Nectarine
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- Ltd 7"
- £3.99
- Cat Number
- RER001
- Release date
- 20 Sep '10
Describing their sound as 'A kick in the teeth…..with a load of reverb', Speak & The Spells formed somewhere deep inside their collective vinyl collection. And now they’re adding to yours with their debut single.
The ominous surf-rock opening riff of "She’s Dead" sets the tone for a b-movie style tale of grief and grave digging. Scratchy guitars and screams provide the perfect soundtrack for singer Joe Eakin’s lament. Front man Joe is joined by Benjamin Craven (Bass) and Alex Felstead (Drums) to complete a stripped back, bare essentials line-up that’s a million miles from the gadget heavy electro of 2009 but just as thrilling.
The equally enthralling b-side "Brianna" show’s a spiced up more punk side to the band, while "Caleb Pink" finds the band in a more experimental mood with a 4.5 minute instrumental.
Initially bonding at school through a shared love of Garage, Psych and Freak-Beat, the 3-piece outfit was conceived in a West London storeroom playing covers of 60s teenage garage heroes like The Downliners Sect and Tintern Abbey before developing their own unique and exciting style.
Straight out of school, the band created "Ricky Ticks" in a Soho basement, a bi-monthly clubnight where they could play their records and hone their live act. They quickly caught the attention of fellow London promoters, which led to them supporting one of their personal idols; Billy Childish and being invited by The Horrors to play their own night ‘The Cave Club’. They’ve also played alongside the likes of The Guillotines, Bo Ningen and The Vinyl Stitches.
"She’s Dead" is one of those records destined to accompany the sound of needle hitting wax but perfectly at home on your ipod as well as in your pile of prized 45’s.
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- 2xLtd CD
- £9.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- MI0115CD
- Release date
- 5 May '08
- Format Info
Initial pressing of the CD features a bonus disc of remixes by Dntel, Los Campesinos!, Field Music and others. This UK version of "Elephant Shell" also includes two exclusive recordings on the bonus CD – "Friends Of P" and "New New Song".
Initial pressing of the... [ + ]
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- CD
- £8.99
- Cat Number
- ES1005
- Release date
- 21 Jun '04
-
- CD
- £10.99
- Cat Number
- OS2209
- Release date
- 22 Mar '04