Rozi Plain’s 2019 ‘What a Boost’ is reissued on limited edition eco-vinyl via Memphis Industries on 14 July. The reissue is timely, following on from the breakthrough success of her 2023 album Prize. ‘What a Boost’ was self-produced with the help of a long list of musical friends including Kate Stables, Jamie Whitby Coles, Neil Smith (all This is the Kit), Chris Cohen, Joel Wästberg (Sir Was) and Sam Amidon.

Rozi Plain has been making music since her brother taught her a few chords on the guitar aged 13. Raised in Winchester, she spent a few years studying art and painting boats in Bristol, where she began collaborating with long-term friends Kate Stables (This Is The Kit) and Rachael Dadd among many others on a thriving local scene. It was there that Rozi made her first two albums, 2008’s Inside Over Here and 2012’s Joined Sometimes Unjoined, each works of deliciously sad and beautiful pop full of heart-wrenching harmonies dotted with unexpected instrumental flourishes. Released in April 2015 on Lost Map and featuring contributions from Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor among others her last album Friend was a deeply meaningful and wonderfully measured ode to memory, place, companionship and music’s remarkable power as an emotional salve.

Almost permanently on tour, Rozi has taken her joyous live show on the road countless times around Europe, the UK and the USA, and has toured with a host of alt-folk luminaries from Devendra Banhart to James Yorkston. She has appeared at festivals including SXSW, Iceland Airwaves, Glastonbury, End of the Road, Latitude, BBC 6Music Festival and Green Man. 2023’s album Prize was something of a breakthrough for Rozi seeing 4 star reviews in Uncut, Mojo and the Guardian and leading to an unlikely support slot with Paramore which saw her perform at mega domes around the UK. As bass player and backing vocalist in Rough Trade signed This Is The Kit, Rozi has been touring the world for years and features on the new album Careful of Your Keepers.

TRACK LISTING

1.Inner Circle
2. Swing Shut
3. Symmetrical
4. The Gap
5. Old Money
6. Conditions
7. Dark Park
8. Trouble
9. Quiz
10. When There Is No Sun

‘One sick party record bursting with overdriven guitars, triumphant trumpet lines, and battling drum assaults that seem to break through walls with the barrelling force of a thousand Kool-Aid men’ Pitchfork 8.7 BNM

The Go! Team burst onto the scene back in 2004 with their debut album “Thunder, Lightning, Strike” putting the disco in discordant & red limiting all the levels. They scored Pitchfork Best New Music, a Mercury music prize nomination and, from a small bedroom concern in Brighton, UK, emerged to take on the world, lighting up stages on every continent.

Nineteen years later The Go! Team, led by main man Ian Parton and MC Ninja, are still releasing brilliant, ever more eclectic albums (see this year’s Get Up Sequences Part 2).

TRACK LISTING

1. Panther Dash
2. Ladyflash
3. Feelgood By Numbers
4. The Power Is On
5. Get It Together
6. We Just Won't Be Defeated
7. Junior Kickstart
8. Air Raid GTR
9. Bottle Rocket
10. Friendship Update
11. Hold Yr Terror Close
12. Huddle Formation
13. Everyone's A V.I.P. To Someone 

Ontario four piece Tokyo Police Club burst on to the scene as teenage sensations with 2007’s A Lesson in Crime EP, an opening salvo that delighted discriminating young music fans around the world and saw them win plaudits from NME, Pitchfork and more.

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

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2023 EXCLUSIVE, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

POLIÇA, founded by vocalist Channy Leaneagh and producer Ryan Olson out of the ashes of Minneapolis collective Gayngs, and featuring Drew Christopherson, and Ben Ivascu on drums and Chris Bierden on bass, came seemingly from nowhere with their debut ‘Give You The Ghost’, released in April 2012 and which became one of that year’s most beloved albums. 

Born out of a tumultuous, head spinning subsequent 18 months POLIÇA released their second album Shulamith in October 2013, the album named in homage to pioneering feminist activist and thinker Shulamith Firestone with cover banned by Apple and hit singles including “Chain My Name” and the Justin Vernon featuring “Tiff”.

Musically, ‘Shulamith’ demonstrated an increased mastery and extension of the unique sonic palette that POLIÇA mined on their debut album. The recording process was naturally a more collaborative process than their debut, with the band reacting to and working off Olsen’s beats, drawing on elements of R&B, electronica and dub to create a sound that, already, this early in their career, is uniquely and identifiably their own. Leaneagh’s continued exploration of, and increased control over the effects processor to manipulate and enhance her already outstanding voice take her vocals to new and unusual heights.

'Shulamith' reaffirmed POLIÇA as one of the most fascinating and vital groups in forward-thinking pop. Ultimately, Channy succinctly summed up the ideas and themes behind ‘Shulamith’, and POLIÇA as follows: “Drums. Bass. Synths. Me, Women”.

2023 marks 10 years since the release of 'Shulamith' and this double LP edition comes on blue opaque vinyl.

TRACK LISTING

Chain My Name
Smug
Vegas
Warrior Lord
Very Cruel
Torre
Trippin
Tiff (featuring Justin
Vernon)
Spilling Lines
Matty
I Need $
So Leave

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2023 EXCLUSIVE, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

Reissued for the first time since 2008 this first ever repress of the much sought after Field Music offshoot The Week That Was celebrates 15 years since its release. Reissued on an exclusive clear vinyl the album has also been remastered by David Brewis of Field Music.

TRACK LISTING

Learn To Learn
The Good Life
The Story Waits For No
One
It's All Gone Quiet
The Airport Line
Yesterday's Paper
Come Home
Scratch The Surface

Having previously collaborated with Al Doyle (LCD Soundsystem/Hot Chip) on their debut album, this time the duo absconded to Doyle’s studio in his own touring absence and took to production duties themselves. Laugh Like A Bomb was recorded in just three weeks before being mixed by Sheffield producer Ross Orton (Working Men’s Club / Arctic Monkeys / MIA).

“I think a lot of the process of writing this album came from pushing ourselves to our limits to get to the essential idea, and discarding anything that felt superfluous or unnecessary.” explains Baba. “There was a lot of writing, re-writing, deleting, re-recording and then just repeating that process again. A lot of times the best idea would come out of that final push when you’re too exhausted to even think and you rely on feeling.”

Returning following the release of their debut ‘Memory Device’ in 2020 and 18 months of touring across Europe and the US with the likes of Yard Act and Chk Chk Chk, Baba Ali have created an incendiary follow up with one foot firmly placed on the dance floor, the other in a state of constant frenzy. Laugh Like A Bomb showcases anxious synths and scratchy guitars that collide with concrete drum hits, pulsing bass and Baba’s snarly vocals in 40 minute collection that explores feelings of unease, abandon and desire as well explorations into the more sinister.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Stark minimal wave synth lines and snappy percussion meet euphoric hypnotic dancefloor business in a perfect clash of styles, resulting in a wonderfully evocative and singular LP. Part funk, part synth, part pop, and all hugely enjoyable.

TRACK LISTING

Hold My Head
Burn Me Out
Gold Rush!
I'm Bored
Anesthesia, Beverly Hill
Laugh Like A Bomb
Make U Feel
A Circle
Lip Service
Bankrupt Funk
Yves Klein Blue

Dutch Uncles, Manchester’s much-revered electro art rock quartet, return with their long-awaited sixth album, True Entertainment.

Taking inspiration from Yellow Magic Orchestra, Prince, Steely Dan, Ennio Morricone, The Blue Nile, Kate Bush and Roxy Music, "True Entertainment behaves like it knows it's been away for some time, and doesn’t apologise for that," jokes vocalist / lyricist Duncan Wallis. "Ultimately, it's written with the mindset that on our sixth album, we’re only in competition with ourselves when it comes to finding satisfaction in our craft."

True to this mantra, True Entertainment bears some of the most delightfully fun Dutch Uncles music to date; paired with some of their most existential and introspective lyrics. What is success? Am I enough? How can I better? (and can I afford to be better?)

The title was a DJ name bestowed upon Wallis by guitarist Peter Broadhead. Wallis, an in-demand DJ and compare in his native city, wrote the acid house and Sign O’ The Times-era Prince-influenced title track when reflecting on the awkwardness he sometimes feels when he’s recognised as the singer in a band while working one of his many public-facing jobs.

While vocalist Wallis and bassist Robin Richards remain Dutch Uncles’ principle composers, the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 prompted other members to contribute musical ideas: the result being their most collaborative album to date. This is evidenced further by Henry Broadhead and Neil Wright (live synth player and live guitarist, respectively) stepping up to production duties alongside the band themselves. The album also sees contributions from Anna Prior of Metronomy and Jonathan Higgs of Everything Everything. Henry Broadhead mixed the album with drummer Andrew Proudfoot, and it was mastered by Matt Colton (Pet Shop Boys, Christine And The Queens et al).

True Entertainment is the long-awaited follow up to Big Balloon (2017), an album which spawned three playlisted singles on BBC Radio 6 Music and enjoyed widespread acclaim from the likes of Uncut ("a high flying triumph" 8/10), The Guardian ("its songs barge in with urgency" 4*), The Quietus, DIY, Exclaim!, Q, Under the Radar and many, many more.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Dutch Uncles are unmistakeable, Duncan's voice atop the rapidly shifting, bright synth-indie stomp is both instantaneously recognisable and always welcome, and it's possible that 'True Entertainment' is the best example of this yet. Cleverly written, sonically expansive and soaringly melodic, without a doubt the perfect example of the Dutch Uncles sound.

TRACK LISTING

True Entertainment
Damascenes
Tropigala (2 To 5)
Poppin’
Exit Row
I’m Not Your Dad
Deep End
In Salvia
End Belief
Dead Letter

Over their six albums The Go! Team have taken sonic daytrips to other lands-musically dipping into other cultures. But now on this, their seventh-they’ve bought around-the-world ticket....Benin, Japan, France, India, Texas and Detroit-all stops along the way. Wildly different voices from wildly different cultures side by side but all still sounding unmistakably Go! Team. Setting the course for a kaleidoscopic, cable access, channel hop.

On the vocal roll call there’s Star Feminine Band, an all-girl group from West Africa, the Indian Bollywood playback singer Neha Hatwar, Kokubo Chisato from J-Pop indie band Lucie Too, 19 year-old Detroit rapper Indigo Yaj, Hilarie Bratset (ex-Apples in Stereo), Brooklyn rapper Nitty Scott, and a whole host of others, alongside Go! Team staple Ninja.

“Maybe it's an anti-Brexit reflex,” says Parton. “A rejection of flag-waving and inward-facing. But this is no Coke ad, some Valium vision of joining hands on a hillside. The Go! Team has always been about knowing what’s happening but focusing on the good shit. It’s about where you let your attention settle”.

Picking up from 2021’s “Get Up Sequences Part One”, Part Two continues the feeling of Technicolour overload. “A feeling that there is so much good shit out there that you are grabbing it all at the same time. The record is saying: “Look at this. Look at this”. When you listen to it I just want the saturation of the world to be turned up”.Simultaneouslymessy and tight, chaotic and coherent both albums have an obsession with the power of a bassline and a backbeat. "For me each successive Go! Team record just gets fucking groovier and for me grooviness is life”, Parton says.

It’s a journey spanning Cyclone Tracey wig-outs, chroma key sitar psychedelia, Casiotone anthems, spoken word melodrama and kalimba callouts. Brill building melodies leading to musical handbrake turns, four track into panoramic. Eighteen years after their debut LP The Go! Team are still unlike anyone else and on "Get Up Sequences Part Two" they sound as fresh as a club soda....

TRACK LISTING

Look Away, Look Away
Divebomb
Getting To Know (All The Ways We're Wrong For Each Other)
Stay And Ask Me In A Different Way
The Me Frequency
Whammy-O
But We Keep On Trying
Sock It To Me
Going Nowhere
Gemini
Train Song
Baby

“I started to think about what I could do to challenge my own listeners,” says Ian Black aka SLUG. “And what would be my angle without just releasing 40 minutes of generic bad music?”

This was a question that Black found himself asking after thinking about albums made by revered artists who released specific records that some of their loyal fanbase hated - Arctic Monkeys and Tranquillity Base Hotel and Casino, Leonard Cohen and Death of a Ladies Man, Lou Reed and Berlin. “My friend likened Lou’s Berlin to ‘Andrew Lloyd Webber on a horrendous drug come down’. Andrew Lloyd Webber on a horrendous drug come down? That sounds amazing!”

Although Thy Socialite!, the first release from Field Music’s new record label Daylight Saving Records, is not the sound of Lloyd Webber quivering and sweating in a rotting Berlin flat but instead, a fun, joyous, audacious record of hard rock, glam, and pop that ranges from arena to art school. “I wanted to include a more rockist palette,” Black says. “My last album, Higgledypiggledy, had influences including The Cardiacs, Prince and The Residents. For this one I wanted to see what I could get out of less indie audience friendly artists such as Toto, Sweet, Wings, Def Leppard and ZZ Top and merge it with a SLUG sensibility. Due to the more rock approach, I was happy for the album to become a big classic rock unit - pompous even.”

However, simply a pastiche and nostalgic throwback this isn’t. Despite the playful nods to some of the more grandiose, theatrical and overblown elements of the aforementioned genre, it’s also an album with a contemporary pop edge, slick production and a tangible connection to SLUG’s previous deft mix of indie, rock and art pop.

The result of all of this is an album that is fun and unpredictable but also conceptually smart, ambitious and adventurous. A place where classic hard rock and smart art-pop are treated equal, and where taking the piss doesn’t have to equate to being novelty or disposable. It was all part of the challenge that Black set himself from the off when he asked himself “how could I challenge the SLUG listener but bring them on a new fresh journey which will confuse them at first but they will ultimately love?”

For David Brewis of Field Music, it was the ideal first record to kick off their new label. "This seemed like the perfect start for Daylight Saving Records," he says. "We've always loved what Ian does and it's been a thrill over the years to help Ian dig these wild musical ideas out from his brain. Now we can have a hand in putting them into people's ears too."

STAFF COMMENTS

Martin says: A reasonably bonkers, shockingly cohesive mashing together of spiky math-rock, dreamy prog and slick indie music that never strays far enough from the melody to be prohibitive. There are definitely echoes of fellow North-Easterner Richard Dawson here too and that's certainly no bad thing.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Insults Sweet Like Treacle
Please Turn It Up
Casual Cruelty
Instant Reaction
Honestly Subjective 'Bout Your Own Thing
Lovingly Legerdemain
Wow (Whatta Gurl)
Side B
Depends On What You Think Is Nice
Be A Good Martyr!
Settled With A Wink
I Love That Actually
Silly Little Things That We Do
Cut Of Your Jib

Rozi Plain returns with new album ‘Prize’ on Memphis Industries. 

Don’t ask Rozi Plain to explain her spellbinding fifth album Prize. Its ten, magical tracks exist as if in another realm, where feelings matter more than meanings, where thoughts have room to roam and where you can live in the moment for as long as you like.

Rozi’s signature, free-floating sound was set with her 2015 breakthrough Friend and cemented with 2019’s globally adored What A Boost (‘Like slipping between cotton sheets’ was Pitchfork’s description). Prize builds on both, but takes its cues from elsewhere. By a stretch, it’s Rozi’s most upbeat and daring album to date.

References to disco and rave, saxophone treated to sound like strings, silly synths and harp all play a part. Economy is key – every sound has an impact out of proportion to its size, every texture pays dividends. Rozi’s bewitching vocals are bolder and brighter than ever before. Male and female backing vocals feel like friends dropping by.

Begun pre-pandemic and composed and recorded everywhere from Glasgow and the Isle of Eigg to a seaside village in French Basque Country, Margate and London’s legendary Total Refreshment Centre, Prize may sound effortless but creating each song was as industry intensive as spinning a spider’s web. A cast of 15 feature, including Kate Stables, with whom Rozi has toured for the past decade in This Is The Kit, contemporary jazz titan Alabaster De Plume and Minneapolis based saxophonist Cole Pulice.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Aaah, it's always lovely to hear some more Rozi plain, and 'Prize' is by far her most spellbinding and focused work yet. The perfect backdrop to Plain's airy vocals has always been the more off-kilter instrumental backing (Múm's perfectly chaotic brand of childlike electronica comes to mind), and here we get the syncopated rhythms and jangling guitars of old, but with a more layered, intricate core. It's both beautifully meditative and hugely uplifting, the perfect balance.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Agreeing For Two
Complicated
Help
Prove Your Good
Side B
Painted The Room
Sore
Spot Thirteen
Standing Up

Wildly creative free-form songwriter Rachael Dadd releases her brand new studio album ‘Kaleidoscope’ via Memphis Industries and follows 2019’s 'Flux', which was released to much acclaim and which she was touring when the pandemic struck.

Like so many people disconnected from their communities and struggling through the lockdowns, Rachael Dadd turned inwards, seeking escape through music and connection through song writing, and her hope is that when people listen to ‘Kaleidoscope' “they will feel held and find space to breathe, grieve and celebrate.”

“This album is a lot more honest and personal than ‘Flux'” she shares, “but I feel the songs are universal as they are largely rooted in truth and love. If I had to pick a favourite album it would be this one because of the magical rekindling of human connection when me and my band got back in a room together again. All that magic went into these songs."

Co-produced "intuitively, boldly, and playfully" by Rachael and Rob Pemberton (The Staves, Emily Barker, Maja Lena), ‘Kaleidoscope’ includes musical collaborators such as Maja Lena (Low Chimes), long-time collaborator Emma Gatrill (Willy Mason), Alex Heane (bass), Charlotte West (synths), Alex Garden (strings) and ‘Flux’ producer Marcus Hamblett (Villagers, James Holden, The Staves), giving the record "just the right colour combination, just the right pattern of shapes, plenty of space where needed and finally landing in a sound world that feels fresh and open and true” reflects Rachael.

Japanese aesthetics absorbed from her time spent living there are subconsciously woven into Rachael’s songs. "I first stepped foot in Tokyo in 2008, sparked by the adventure of such a rich and different culture and later on I lived on a small island and experienced an appealing and balanced way of life: the aesthetics, the art and the traditions,” she recalls. “There was a lot of caring for each other, a lot of gentleness, and a lot of simple living in harmony with nature. Japan left its cultural mark on me and is now part of my inner world and I’m sure this comes out with the words and music I write”.

“But overall” Rachael explains “this is an album of homecoming and reconnecting to my own truth, to my community here, to the earthy land that I love and to the sky that I know.”

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Children Of The Galaxy
Footsteps
Moon Sails
Ox
Ghost
Side B
River Spirit
Heads Down
For Honey And Ray
White Snow
Swift
Join The Dots

Dinked Edition Bonus CD
The Bridge (feat Kate Stables – This Is The Kit)
Fronds
Crystalizing In Time
Fences (feat Rozi Plain)

Jesca Hoop returns with her sixth album, Order of Romance, a record that fortifies her position as one of the most striking and original voices in contemporary music. Order of Romance is Hoop's most intricate and finely balanced album to date, one that draws on classic song writing, recalling anything from Gershwin to Paul Simon, but creating something that is unmistakably, indelibly Jesca Hoop. It is a deep dive into craft. As Jesca says “I set out to mature as a writer, to further clarity my voice and stance, through melodies and phrases only I can construct. Order of Romance feels like every person, character, or artist, I ever was over the many seasons of my life was handed an instrument to play across the songs.”

In the summer of 2021, Hoop once again ventured south from her adopted home of Manchester to Bristol to team up with producer John Parish (PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding), her collaborator for 2019’s Stonechild. This time additional assistance came from in Jess Vernon (This is the Kit) to arrange for a four-piece horn and woodwind quintet. Legendary drummer Seb Rochford lent his skills, John Thorne plays the bass and Chloe Foy and Rachel Rimmer were enlisted to deliver Hoop’s signature vocal arrangements. The result is a fruitful marriage of song craft and arrangement, brimming with a cinematic charm and lyrical wit that signify a new chapter full of new life for an artist who knows her mind, her heart and voice well enough to trust them in uncharted territory.

Order of Romance then is a complete work that demands close attention, an active listen, a filagree that’s apparent lightness of touch belies a serious intent. Themes of empathy and friendship, intertwine with a clear eyed and moralistic poetry on subjects such as gun control, religious and political cults, and climate change.

Order of Romance is perhaps ultimately an exploration of the endless balance act of being a ‘Human Being’, an approach and examination of some of the biggest theme and issues of our time through the doorway of the personal, a way finding meaning and some kind of faith in a world where so much is disconnected and discordant. As she states “I seek out reflection and resolve in my songs. I find out who I am in a sense. For a few minutes, I can exist in nature at my full potential, saying just what I mean, in balance, in awe, in wonder and in full force. As a moral agent, a mode I can’t seem to avoid, my writing is time taken to observe and ask questions. I find humour in our predicament. I find danger in the reckoning. I find faith despite our sorry state and I feel connection when I draw it through my voice. I stand my ground and through the music and point inevitably towards compassion”.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Sudden Light
2. I Was Just 14
3. Hatred Has A Mother
4. One Way Mirror
5. Silent Extinction
Side B
6. 7lbs Of Pressure
7. Sioux Falls
8. Like I Am Time
9. Firestorm
10. Lyre Bird

Leeds art-rock group Mush (Dan Hyndman - vocals / guitar, Phil Porter - drums, Nick Grant - bass, Myles Kirk– guitar) return with album ‘Down Tools’ via Memphis Industries. The new record marks the prolific band’s third album in as many years, following hypebuilding early singles ‘Alternative Facts’ and ‘Gig Economy’, 2020’s debut LP ‘3D Routine’ and 2021's acclaimed ‘Lines Redacted’, which pushed their sound further and, as Uncut wrote, saw them become “kindred spirits to Wand and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, two other bands prolifically honing their sound and approach, steadily developing their voice.”

On ‘Down Tools’, this voice grows again into a more brilliantly singular sound. It sees Mush getting loose, moving away from the defined moods and textures of ‘Lines Redacted’ with a musical openness, straddling genres while avoiding pastiche. Hyndman says of the lyrics on ‘Down Tools’ that “there was a conscious decision to retreat further from an observational approach” with vocals being ad-libbed lending the record a more abstract feel. Hyndman continues: “this album is less dark than the previous one. The Armageddon obsession has eased, or at least the symptoms have become milder due to saturation. Musically there’s a lot more chill on the record – there’s a few more mellow tracks out there and the most astute listener may even be able to decipher some of the words, fingers crossed.”

While grief and work balance form themes on the record, Hyndman’s approach is largely made up of abstract, disconnected streams of consciousness and lines liberally taken from books, paintings, films and beyond. On ‘Human Resources’, Hyndman dramatically retells a battle he had with an HR department at a job in a David and Goliath style. The song ‘Group Of Death’, a phrase chillingly familiar to any football fan, is emblematic of the turn towards softer, more considered sounds. Hyndman says: “In my warped imagination it just sounds like a Paul McCartney song, but it won’t to others. I initially had the idea of doing a World Cup song called ‘Group of Death’, but by the time it was written nothing beyond the title had any relevance to football. Anyway, the next World Cup is in Qatar so fuck that shit.” Northern Safari meanwhile is a song about the way the North of England has been portrayed in the media and used as a mirror to reflect some of the nastier elements of what’s going on in society, in particular vox pops around Doncaster, portraying a particular narrative of the collapse of the red wall and the disgruntled ex-miners.

‘Down Tools’ then sees Mush idiosyncratically ping-pong from finger picked looseners to noise-rock bangers to brilliantly entertaining effect, avoiding post punk saturation with an easy style and wit

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Both 2020's '3D Routine' and 'Lines Redacted' from last year were big hits in the shop, singling mush out as a band unafraid of whimsical melody amongst the more furious moments of activity, and 'Down Tools' looks like it will only continue the legacy. Both beautifully tuneful and full of cleverly written, skilfully played hooks. Great stuff.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Grief Thief
Karoshi Karaoke
Get On Yer Soapbox
Human Resources
Northern Safari
Dense Traffic
Side B
Inkblot And The Wedge
Group Of Death
Groundswell
Interlude
Burn, Suffering!
Down Tools

Dinked Edition Flexi Disc:
Hit The Bricks (non-album Track)

Recorded mostly from 2020-2021 in Ryan Olson’s Minneapolis studio with lyrics written and recorded by Channy Leaneagh in her room, Madness is an experimental expansion of the 4 piece family band of Chris Bierden (bass), Drew Christopherson and Ben Ivascu (drums) to include the anthropomorphic production tool “AllOvers(c)”, designed by Olson and fellow producer & sound-artist Seth Rosetter.

This latest release continues within the collaborative enclave in which POLIÇA resides and includes co-production by Dustin Zahn (“Alive” & “Away”), Alex Ridha and Alex Nutter (“Violence”). First single from the album is the anthemic pulse of “Alive” which Channy Leaneagh describes as follows: “Bad things happen, the fire goes out; even with the best flammables it stays dark until nothing matters becomes the fire itself. Channy sums up the lyrics and the startling artwork for Madness as follows: “I am here for you all and I am never truly myself here. I am her for you all and I am never truly her”.

POLIÇA began in Minneapolis in 2011 when singer Channy Leaneagh started collaborating with Ryan Olson, the producer of Jagjaguwar signed soft rock collective Gayngs, on a new batch of synthesizer and percussion-heavy arrangements. Channy was in the process of emerging from a personal and creative break up, with this informing much of the lyrical content of the songs. The resulting debut album, 2012's Give You The Ghost, immediately garnered international acclaim, with Rolling Stone hailing it as "the sound of heartbreak and celebration happening simultaneously" and Q praising it as "a bewitching, urgent, magical debut." Bon Iver meanwhile declared that POLIÇA were “best band I've ever heard” and Jay-Z weighed in with a co-sign. The record became known for Channy's electronically manipulated vocals (using a TC-Helicon voice processor) that lent the album much of its uniqueness as heard on tracks such as Lay Your Cards Out and Dark Star. The albums Shulamith and United Crushers followed in 2013 and 2016 respectively before the release of 2020’s When We Stay Alive. Madness serves as something of a companion piece to When We Stay Alive and Channy sums up the lyrics and the startling artwork for it follows: “I am here for you all and I am never truly myself here. I am her for you all and I am never truly her”.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: The thoroughly modern, sleek synthpop of POLIÇA takes a new turn with 'Madness', the instrumentation as shimmering and vivid as ever, but with Leangh's voice being abstracted and stretched into more futurist shapes. Brilliant.

TRACK LISTING

Alive
Violence
Away
Madness
Blood
Fountain
Sweet Memz

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2022 EXCLUSIVE, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

The Go! Team reissue their second album Proof of Youth for Record Store Day 2022. Long since out of print, this 15 year anniversary edition comes with an exclusive sleeve and a flexi disc of non-album track Milk Crisis and is pressed on bubblegum vinyl. This edition of Proof of Youth is limited to 3,000 copies worldwide. Bombing melodies into the stone-age with its needle-in-the-red, anti-production approach, Proof of Youth lurches from bubblegum pop to white noise in a heartbeat. 

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2022 EXCLUSIVE, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

Reissued for the first time since its original release in 2012 and long since out of print, Plumb is one of Field Music's best works, an album that firmly cemented them as one of the UK's most creative and critically acclaimed bands. It was nominated for a Mercury Music Prize and received huge praise from the likes of MOJO, Q, UNCUT, The Guardian and more.

Plumb's 10 year anniversary edition is limited to 2,000 copies world wide and comes on clear, plum coloured vinyl for Record Store Day 2022. Plumb digs into the age-old dichotomy between what is reflective or nostalgic and the disorienting immediacy of the outside world. 

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2022 EXCLUSIVE, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

10-year anniversary of POLICA 's classic debut album Give You The Ghost, repressed on limited edition white opaque vinyl and limited to 1,500 worldwide. Give You The Ghost was one of 2012's standout debut albums, marrying as it did post-rock and R&B to stunning effect, leading Bon Iver's Justin Vernon to describe them then as "the best band he'd ever heard".

Give You The Ghost's influence on sonics and production can still being felt to this day. Lead singer Channy Leaneagh's delicate yet visceral vocals, occasionally and subtly manipulated by a Helicon 5, formed a sweet harmonic partnership with Chris Bierden's bass riffs. This, matched with the twin attack of drummers Drew Christopherson and Ben Ivascu and the anti-production techniques of fifth member Ryan Olson, made POLICA a unique proposition, as demonstrated on singles Lay Your Cards Out, Dark Star and Wandering Star. A break out performance at 2012's SXSW saw them booked for TV slots on Jimmy Fallon and Later with Jools Holland, plus a plethora of festivals including Coachella and Glastonbury. 

TRACK LISTING

A1 Amongster
A2 I See My Mother
A3 Violent Games
A4 Dark Star
A5 Form
B1 The Maker
B2 Lay Your Cards Out
B3 Fist, Teeth, Money
B4 Happy Be Fine
B5 Wandering Star
B6 Leading To Death

Blue States returns with his sixth album named after the day each year on which UFO society International Flying Saucer Bureau tries to contact alien lifeforms. World Contact Day arrives six years after the previous Blue States album, written and recorded partly at Dragazis' Lightwell Recordings studio in Hackney featuring a combination of instrumental soundscapes and vocal songs that draw from influences as diverse as world as Morricone, Vangelis, Beak, Broadcast and The Carpenters. Songs on the new record feature guest vocals from the likes of Giampaolo Speziale and Federica Caiozzo of the Italian band, Malihini, English folk-musician, Rachael Dadd and Miami-based Allison May-Brice (The 18th Day Of May, Lake Ruth).

TRACK LISTING

1. Plain Sight
2. Trust In Wires
3. Tides Confusion
4. Warning Signs
5. Tiers
6. Serial Recall
7. The Sun Rose Twice
8. Alarms
9. Resting Heart
10. Science Or Fiction?

Swedish multi-instrumentalist Joel Wästberg’s third album as sir Was following 2019’s “Holding On To A Dream”.

Meditating on love, growth, self-acceptance, forgiveness, mortality and the passing of time, after realized a terminal health condition leaving him prone to strokes; “Let The Morning Come” contains his most candid writing to date. And yet, for all the heartache that comes with being cruelly confronted with one’s own mortality, the prevailing impression Wästberg leaves listeners with is one of hope, resulting in a collection that is life-affirming in the very truest sense.

An artist renowned for conjuring dreamy melodies from unconventional arrangements, the album draws on the luxurious sounds of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”, and utilizes an eclectic palette that encompasses complex polyrhythms, Medieval recorder harmonies and the languid sigh of a second hand Hammond organ. Wästberg sought to condense his songwriting, with the aim of evoking the immediacy of the music of his youth.

Lyrically too, time is of the essence, as displayed in song titles like “Waiting For The Weekend”, “Before The Morning Comes”, “I Don’t Think We Should Wait” and “Time To Let It Out”.

sir Was, praised initially by Stones Throw Records founder Peanut Butter Wolf, has received support around the world with multiple plays on BBC 6 Music & BBC Radio 1, KCRW, Radio Nova, Radio Eins and more. Alongside this, he has performed and collaborated with Little Dragon, Efterklang’s Clasper Clausen, Falle Nioke (on the recent collaborative “Marasi” EP) and Junip, as well as performing at Eurosonic, Mad Cool and Benicassim Festivals.

STAFF COMMENTS

Millie says: Dreamy melodies and sensitive electronic beats, if Sir Was aim was to evoke nostalgia then it worked perfectly, it’s taken me right back. Definitely check this out if you like Foals, Tame Impala, it’s that kind of vibe but more toned down… just Indie music at it’s best.

TRACK LISTING

Hope We’ll Make It Through
I Need A Minute
Spend A Lifetime
Before The Morning Comes
One Day
I Don’t Think We Should Wait
Waiting For The Weekend
You Float
I Wanna Feel Like That
Time To Let It Out

Though most debuts are the culmination of a lifetime of influences and experiences, few artists succeed in mapping their musical journey quite as vividly as Baba Ali has on Memory Device. Tracing his Nigerian heritage, an adolescence absorbing No Wave and the hip hop on NYC’s Hot 97, time immersed in the techno scene in Berlin, and the experimental punk spirit of his current base in London, Memory Device is an enthralling introduction to a musician who resolutely defies pigeonholing.

TRACK LISTING

Draggin' On
Black Wagon
Thought Leader
Nature's Curse
Better Days
The Well
Got An Idea
Waiting Room
Nuclear Family
Temp Worker 

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2021 EXCLUSIVE AND WILL BE AVAILABLE INSTORE ON SATURDAY JULY 17TH ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

IF THERE ARE ANY REMAINING COPIES THEY WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE ONLINE AT 6PM ON THE SAME DAY (SATURDAY JULY 17TH).

Jesca Hoop has a tradition of reimagining and rerecording her own albums and having previously created beautifully stark versions of her albums Kismet and Hunting my Dress it is the turn of The House That Jack Built. Recorded in her Manchester based home-built studio in December 2020, these intimate and immediate reworkings shine the spotlight on Hoops intricate, complex song writing with her astonishing vocals front and centre The Deconstruction of Jackís House comes on limited edition white vinyl for Record Store Day 2021.

On “Get Up Sequences Part One” Ian, Ninja, Nia, Simone, Sam and Adam have created a musical world distinctly of their own making. A place where routine is outlawed and perfection is the enemy. Where Ennio Morricone meets the Monkees armed with flutes, glockenspiels, steel drums and a badass analogue attitude. We’re talking widescreen, four- track, channel hopping sounds that are instantly recognisable.

In The Go! Team's world, old’s cool, the future's bright and melody is the star. Just check the second cut “Cookie Scene” with a bouncing flute and junk shop percussion it introduces guest rapper Indigo Yaj who delivers an old school vocal that continues this sonic trip. Pow channels Curtis Mayfield and enter stage centre, the inimitable Ninja in full flow and you don’t stop, you wont stop to this flute driven free for all.

By way of demonstrating The Go! Team’s old school manifesto, comes the 'needle-in-the-red' “I Love You Better” a defiant message to an ex love, spelling out exactly how he’s fucked up – and then there’s those steel drums. Following that comes the soda fountain soul courtesy of “A Bee Without Its Sting”, a groovy protest song that makes its point with a tambourine – hey only The Go! Team.

The musical wagon train then takes you into the wide screen, windswept western that is Tame the Great Plains heading off into a polyrhythmic panorama that’s full of hope. Slappin’ you back to reality comes “World Remember Me Now”, a timely reminder that when you’re lost in the routine of life, you can always count on The Go! Team.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It's exactly what you'd expect from the Go! Team, this it's bright and bold and chaotic and absolutely on-brand. Summery steel drums and syncopated percussion, offset tinny melodies and jangling percussion, topped with jubilant vocal swathes. Brilliantly bright and wonderfully fun.

TRACK LISTING

1. Let The Seasons Work
2. Cookie Scene
3. A Memo For Maceo
4. We Do It But Never Know Why
5. Freedom Now
6. Pow
7. I Loved You Better
8. A Bee Without Its Sting
9. Tame The Great Plains
10. World Remember Me Now

Remember Wu Lyf? We do! Out of nowhere and straight back, they exploded onto the (Mancunian) scene with magic and mystery, here today / gone tomorrow, as much an “idea” as a band. Bass player, Tom McClung, could not be any more different if he tried. This is a record of exquisitely crafted pop music; gentle, vulnerable, honest, and pure. Recorded in Wales and with every instrument, bar strings, played by himself, this is a deeply personal, introspective yet wonderfully open-hearted record. The songs here are of the very highest calibre. Beginning with the Beatles and moving through Elliott Smith, Big Star (broken heart emoji!) and even Teenage Fanclub, Tom wears his influences on his sleeve, but the 18 carat melodies are all his own. He’s clearly one of the best songwriters in the UK at the minute, and I reckon he’ll go on to become a bit of a star.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: What an enchanting LP this is. Taking in facets of classic rock, psychedelia and folk rock of the late 60's, while remaining true to the sunshine indie-pop roots. Wry observations and even a Vonnegut reference! this is clever songwriting that's easily accessible and endlessly reveals elements the more you listen. Absolutely essential stuff.

TRACK LISTING

1. Intro
2. Bad Hair Day
3. Blondes Have More Fun
4. Miracle
5. Empty Playgrounds, Broken Swings (Demo)
6. Don't Call Me Baby
7. Say So
8. Southern Skies
9. Want 2 Want U
10. Comedown (Again)
11. Uncommon
12. Lonesome No More
13. The Let Down

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2021 EXCLUSIVE AND WILL BE AVAILABLE INSTORE ON SATURDAY JUNE 12TH ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

IF THERE ARE ANY REMAINING COPIES THEY WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE ONLINE AT 6PM ON THE SAME DAY (SATURDAY JUNE 12TH).

Dutch Uncles, Manchesterís premier idiosyncratic prog-popologists, celebrate Cadenza's tenth birthday. Back on wax for the first time since its initial 2011 pressing, this remastered reissue comes on limited edition duck egg blue vinyl. Chock full of joyous, angular anthems such as The Ink and the title track itself, it's a welcome reminder of the playfulness and intellect that has run throughout Dutch Uncles work.

TRACK LISTING

A1 Cadenza
A2 Fragrant
A3 Sting
A4 Dressage
A5 Ocduc
B1 Dolli
B2 X-O
B3 Orval
B4 The Rub
B5 The Ink
B6 Zalo

"We want to make people feel good about things that we feel terrible about." says David Brewis, who has co-led the band Field Music with his brother Peter since 2004. It's a statement which seems particularly fitting to their latest album, Flat White Moon released via Memphis Industries.

Sporadic sessions for the album began in late 2019 at the pair's studio in Sunderland, slotted between rehearsals and touring. The initial recordings pushed a looser performance aspect to the fore, inspired by some of their very first musical loves; Free, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles; old tapes and LPs pilfered from their parents' shelves. But a balance between performance and construction has always been an essential part of Field Music.

By March 2020, recording had already begun for most of the album's tracks and, with touring for Making A New World winding down, Peter and David were ready to plough on and finish the record.

The playfulness that’s evident in much of Flat White Moon's music became a way to offset the darkness and the sadness of many of the lyrics. Much of the album is plainly about loss and grief, and also about the guilt and isolation which comes with that.

Those personal upheavals are apparent on songs like Out of the Frame, where the loss of a loved one is felt more deeply because they can't be found in photographs and compounded by the suspicion that you caused their absence, or on When You Last Heard From a Linda, which details the confusion of being unable to penetrate a best friend's loneliness in the darkest of circumstances.

Some songs are more impressionistic. Orion From The Streets combines Studio Ghibli, a documentary about Cary Grant and an excess of wine to become a hallucinogenic treatise on memory and guilt.. Others, such as Not When You're In Love, are more descriptive. Here, the narrator guides us through slide- projected scenes, questioning the ideas and semantics of 'love' as well the reliability of his own memory. For the most part, the album has fewer explicitly political themes than previous records, though there is No Pressure, about a political class who feel no obligation to take responsibility if they can finagle a narrative instead. And there's I'm The One Who Wants To Be With You which skirts its way around toxic masculinity through teenage renditions of soft-rock balladry.

On Flat White Moon Field Music take on the challenge of representing negative emotions in a way that doesn't dilute or obscure them but which can still uplift. The result is a generous record of bounteous musical ideas, in many ways Field Music's most immediately gratifying to date.

STAFF COMMENTS

Laura says: I'm a bit late to the Field Music party, I have to admit. Always quite liked them when I heard them, but never really got into them properly, despite people telling me I should (yes Marc Riley, you were right!)
But I thought the last album 'Making A New World' was amazing and this one is equally as good.
Flat White Moon is full of intricate, multi-layered songs. They're arty and clever (but not in an annoying smart-arse way) and they know how to write a pop song too!

TRACK LISTING

1. Orion From The Street
2. Do Me A Favour
3. Not When You're In Love
4. Out Of The Frame
5. When You Last Heard From Linda
6. No Pressure
7. In This City
8. I'm The One Who Wants To Be With You
9. Meant To Be
10. Invisible Days
11. The Curtained Room
12. You Get Better

New album from Barbarossa, a.k.a. British singer-songwriter and producer James Mathé via Memphis Industries. Produced by Ghost Culture (Daniel Avery, Kelly Lee Owens, Falle Nioke), “Love Here Listen” is Mathé’s sixth album since his debut, “Sea Like Blood”, released on the Fence Collective back in 2006, since which time he’s joined Jose Gonzales live show, become a member of Junip, toured with POLICA and This is the Kit and morphed from acoustic troubadoury to electronic song smithery all the while seemingly searching for an elusive balance between hopefulness and melancholy. On “Love Here Listen”, it feels like he has found it.

TRACK LISTING

1. Always Free
2. Iris2Iris
3. Recliner
4. Cellular
5. Intuit
6. Make It Through
7. Long Wave
8. Awakeners Awaken Us
9. Hide
10. Love Here Listen

The Leeds-based art-rock trio, Mush, release their feverish second LP, Lines Redacted via Memphis Industries. 

Whereas the band’s debut was very much a product of its time, something part-inspired by the political atmosphere of mid-2019 and a genuine moment of optimism when the prospect of a socialist government in the UK was on the cards, this new record uses tongue-in-cheek cynicism as a coping mechanism for the environment that we now find ourselves in. From one song to the next, Lines Redacted introduces a string of different narrators with each providing a different reflection on the Armageddon scenario that we are slowly entering, whether that’s bemoaning it or gleefully willing it along. 3D Routine presented a bed of scathing political jibes latching onto themes and decisions of the time. Lines Redacted mutates these ideas into something slightly more sinister whilst maintaining all of Hyndman’s razor-sharp wit that permeates the album.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Lines Redacted is a whirling, snarling dervish of punky guitars, booming bass and frantic vocal ruminations. It's a visceral but perfectly measured affair, well rounded and fiery.

TRACK LISTING

1. Drink The Bleach
2. Blunt Instruments
3. Positivity
4. Dusting For Prints
5. Lines Redacted
6. Seven Trumpets
7. Clean Living
8. Morf
9. Hazmat Suits
10. Bots!
11. B2BCDA
12. Lines Discontinued

El Perro del Mar releases her new EP FREE LAND on 20 November 2020 on limited edition hand numbered 12” vinyl via Memphis Industries. “FREE LAND” is about deconstruction and construction. It’s about resisting giving in. It’s about freedom of creativity and freedom of thought. It’s also an appraisal of the free artist as a well as a reclaiming of creative integrity in an over-commercialized world. The EP includes a collaboration with Devonté Hynes of Blood Orange who lends his vocals to a cover of Black Sabbath’s song “Changes” (“Alone in halls”).

TRACK LISTING

1. Enter
2. Life Is Full Of Rewards
3. White On White
4. Free Land
5. Alone In Halls (feat. Blood Orange)
6. Dreamers Change The World
7. EXIT

London band Stats announce their new album ‘Powys 1999’, due for release via Memphis Industries. While the band’s critically acclaimed debut album ‘Other People’s Lives’ - loved by everyone from Elton John to Phoebe WallerBridge - was recorded in a two-day burst, capitalising on a gap in frontman Ed Seed’s busy schedule touring with Dua Lipa, ‘Powys 1999’ is different. The band decamped to a residential studio in Wales near where Seed grew up in Powys to record the record, an area is known for “farming, forestry, tourism, and a low-key but significant military presence,” but it was also Seed’s parents’ generation of incomers and their motivations that fascinated him.

There’s a dense narrative to the album that explores personal upbringing - and the potential untrustworthy memories that come with such reflection - along with the industrial, financial and political landscape of the countryside. This is not an indulgent and saccharine plunge into childhood. “It's not nostalgic,” Seed says. “It’s about the past but also the future. Living another way doesn’t seem so possible now for technological and financial reasons - and I was seeking inspiration from the people I knew who tried to do that.” Plus, the narrative backdrop is just that: a backdrop. “It's got to be fun,” says Seed. “It’s got to bang. As much of that stuff that needs to come across will come across. If I was literally writing songs that were: ‘here's a song about reservoir’ then it’s going to be super dull. If you have something that’s so exciting to listen to then you can kind of say what you want and people might take it in or might take something else.”

And bang the album does - from the Sparks-esque ‘On The Tip Of My Tongue’ to the pulsing dancefloor rager of ‘Kiss Me Like It’s Over’ via the electro-pop-funk swagger of ‘Naturalise Me’ and the stirring piano stabs and vocal harmonies of ‘Travel With Me Through This Ghost World’ (featuring Emmy The Great). The record flows like the rolling hills that surrounded its creation. The band being locked away living and eating and playing together also drew out the deep musical bond they share.

TRACK LISTING

Come With Me
On The Tip Of My Tongue
Old Flames
Naturalise Me
Kiss Me Like It’s Over
Out Of Body
From A High Sky
Travel With Me Through This Ghost World
Innocence
If Only

The Phoenix Foundation have lived many lives. From high school distortion addicts to indie folk trippers to masters of motorik dream pop. It’s been five years since their last album, Give Up Your Dreams, but that downtime has been well spent. The New Zealand outfit have been writing, recording, touring with a Symphony Orchestra, creating the acclaimed soundtrack for Taika Waititi's Hunt For The Wilderpeople, building shrines to light, creating scores for VR, producing other bands and, that most lockdown-friendly activity, baking sourdough.

Slowly, when they could, the six old friends found time to work together in studios, garages, forests, and sheds to put together the concise ten song set of that is Friend Ship. “We took such a long break after Give Up Your Dreams that when we did decide to make a new record we all felt it needed to be in some esoteric sense different,” says co-lead singer Samuel Flynn Scott. “To me that meant returning to something more focused. Honing in on the songs before we went deep into the arrangements and freaky sounds.” And the results reflect this approach too. Whilst Friend Ship, as you would expect, weaves seamlessly between dreamy introspective pop, stretched out grooves and psychedelic rock, it also exists as a collection of masterfully crafted songs.

Friend Ship features vocals from Nadia Reid, Tiny Ruins’ Hollie Fullbrook and Anita Clark aka Motte plus sumptuous string arrangements performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Phoenix Foundation present a widescreen look at the blurred peripheries between dream pop, synthwave and good old fashioned indie music here with their latest outing, Friend Ship'. Beautifully smooth, soaringly melodic and deeply comforting, The Phoenix Foundation have done it again.

TRACK LISTING

1. Guru
2. Miserable Meal (with The NZSO)
3. Hounds Of Hell (with Nadia Reid)
4. Decision Dollars (with Hollie Fullbrook)
5. Transit Of Venus (with The NZSO)
6. Tranquility (with Hollie Fullbrook)
7. Landline
8. Former Glory (with Anita Clark)
9. My Kitchen Rules
10. Trem Sketch

The Go! Team return with new single “Cookie Scene’” - a warped Daisy Age jam to melt pavements. A bouncing flute pattern, finger clicks and firing ray guns make the ground for guest rapper IndigoYaj to skip on. Team main man Ian Parton met Indigo in Detroit recording the last Go! Team record “Semicircle” and she brings the Shante tone on “Cookie Scene”.

With the flute in a locked groove it makes way for junkshop percussion to go front and centre - built from a marching drum, a 50p against a glass bottle, rimshots and the maple on maple of drumsticks hit together. Says Ian: “The stripped back swinging percussion of ‘Iko Iko’ by the Dixie Cups and the loud crunchy shaker in Salt-n-Pepa’s ‘Push It’ were both inspirations and I’ve always loved the way Bollywood or William Onyeabor songs would have random laser beams and electro toms popping up. I wanted to mix the street corner with the intergalactic, to take Detroit to outer space.”

TRACK LISTING

A. Cookie Scene
B. Free Breakfast Program

NZCA LINES, aka producer and multi-instrumentalist, Michael Lovett, releases his new album Pure Luxury via Memphis Industries. His first album since 2016’s Infinite Summer, it’s funk filled and frenetic, fizzing with electricity and teeming with invention.

Written and produced almost entirely by Lovett, yet featuring a wide range of collaborators, Pure Luxury revels in both the insular – the sound of one man processing anxiety-inducing world events - and the communal. It is a record of diverse styles, voices and textures, expanding the musical universe of Lovett’s previous albums whilst cementing his own playful voice with an inescapable sense of joy and excitement.

Tired of the now over-familiar sound of Big Analog Synths and words like glacial, austere, and wistful, he set out with one clear intention: to be Extra. Extra is the governing musical direction on Pure Luxury, accepting that we live in a world of dwindling attention spans whilst acknowledging that traditional notions of accessible musical form are fast becoming irrelevant in a world of online streaming. Simply put, Lovett says, “I didn’t see the point in pulling punches and restraining myself. We are able to access a near-infinite stream of music that we might like based on what we already listen to; it’s an inspirational cul-de-sac. I couldn’t afford to feel like I was making something that sounded boring”.

The notion of being Extra is perhaps best encapsulated by the frenetic title track. Written in New York during a freak February heatwave, Pure Luxury is a response to the notions of luxury, status, and the insanity of pursuing material wealth in the face of environmental catastrophe. Lovett takes us on a technicolour joyride dripping with sarcasm, a hyped-up version of 21st century excess where gold trim hides rotten plywood facades, muscle cars are bought with credit cards and barbed wire fences separate luxury resorts from the slums beyond their walls.

Indeed, perhaps that’s what we need most when the world seems to be falling apart. Tomorrow might be scaring the hell out of us, but, as Lovett reminds us on the album’s closing track, “Tonight is all that really matters, as long as we keep dancing”.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: NZCA Lines is the music from the scene in the movie where everyone takes loads of drugs and goes crazy, throwing up and fighting and jumping off ill-advised floors into barely-there swimming pools. It's green cocktails spilling onto a flashing dancefloor and bass drums paling in comparison to glittering arps and sidechained throbs.

TRACK LISTING

1. Pure Luxury
2. Real Good Time
3. Prisoner Of Love
4. For Your Love
5. Take This Apart
6. Opening Night
7. Larsen
8. Primp & Shine
9. Tonight Is All That Really Matters 

On "Flight of Ideas", Warm Digits make a call to arms: when we all think our ideas are right, what are the costs of never believing you could be wrong? Looking back to the history of psychology to find out what happens when ideas outlive their sell-by date, with their vocal guests they set up a blistering musical exchange between fluorescent agit-funk, primary-coloured synth-bounce and fizzing sheets of guitar noise. The LP features vocal contributions from Maximo Park’s Paul Smith, The Lovely Eggs, The Orielles, Rozi Plain and the Delgados’ Emma Pollock.

Infused with the restive spirit of Warm Digits and their guests, these inspirations are taken as a call to arms rather than an academic panel discussion. “Fools Tomorrow” uses the language of scientific revolutions and a spiral-eyed swirl of electro shoegaze to show how being able to accept you’re wrong can change your life, while “Replication” takes the ever-circling influence of Steve Reich and cult synth-composers like Laurie Spiegel to create a luminescent sparkling throb that’s impossible to resist. The Delgados’ Emma Pollock lends her vocals to "The View From Nowhere" which concerns two people working out their closeness and distance. It could be about any relationship, but the title is a reference to the way psychoanalysts historically kept themselves a "blank screen" with their patients, as if they could take a "view from nowhere" and be wholly objective in what they saw. “Feel the Panic” sees wigout psych-merchants The Lovely Eggs take advantage of Warm Digits’ relentless momentum to enthusiastically rail against pigeonholing and outmoded systems of authority with an unruly air-punching chorus. The song was inspired by the "being sane in insane places" experiment, which argued that the power wielded by psychiatrists' diagnoses was dangerously capricious, and that in some instances the treatment induced precisely the psychic distress they sought to classify.

"Shake The Wheels Off" is about the moment when those subjugated by archaic systems of control take their power back: in this instance, the way research on transport safety took the male body as the norm, drastically increasing the risk that women would get injured in a car crash. The Orielles' roll-call of female engineering heroes heralds the moment when the balance starts to be redressed. Meanwhile Rozi Plain gently turns insecurity on its head over a pulsating Eurobeat-meets-MBV backing to make “Everyone Nervous” almost feel like a valedictory slogan. Celebrate Your Uncertainty!

In an increasingly off-kilter world where reality shifts daily, truth is merely what we decide it to be, and an avalanche of possible identities overwhelms us with possibility, it can feel like our lives are careering towards chaos down a one-way street. The question is: do we “Feel The Panic” or “Shake The Wheels Off”? With its glorious defiance and heart-bursting grooves, “Flight of Ideas” calls to our past experience for answers, and dares us to listen.

Warm Digits are Andrew Hodson and Steve Jefferis from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. Their previous album for Memphis Industries, "Wireless World", featured guest vocals from Field Music and Sarah Cracknell, amongst others, garnered plaudits from BBC 6Music including an "Album of the Day" slot and playlists for “End Times” “Growth of Raindrops”, and boosted them on to the festival bills of Bluedot, Green Man and Festival No.6 amongst others.

TRACK LISTING

1. Frames And Cages
2. Feel The Panic (feat. The Lovely Eggs)
3. The View From Nowhere (feat. Emma Pollock)
4. I'm OK, You're OK
5. Fools Tomorrow (feat. Paul Smith)
6. Replication
7. Shake The Wheels Off (feat. The Orielles)
8. Everyone Nervous (feat. Rozi Plain)
9. False Positive
10. Flight Of Ideas

Following on from their ‘Induction Party E.P’, Mush are circulating their own sonic mythology, blurring the lines between abstract surrealism, existentialism and social commentary. Like its predecessor ‘3D Routine’ is a sensory overload of clattering, hooky, guitar work. However, this time space emerges between the onslaughts and in this respite, room is found for new emotional depth. More expansive than ever before, ‘3D Routine’ manages to maintain the rawness of a classic debut but it’s experimentation and variety portray a band unlikely to rest on their ‘guitar band’ chops.

Songwriter Dan Hyndman explains the genesis of the band as being “fairly boiler plate” a combination of friends old and new converging in Leeds post-uni to form a band predominantly united in their mutual affection for the Pavement back catalogue. Finally settling on a lineup of Nick Grant (bass), Tyson (guitar) and Phil Porter (drums) the band’s progression has taken them far beyond this original vision.

Having garnered local attention in the early days for their unhinged and often calamitous live shows in Leeds, it was the unlikely radio hit ‘Alternative Facts’, (clocking in at an uncompromising ten minutes) that brought the Mush to the attention of a wider audience. The song, one of the last releases for the legendary Too Pure Singles Club saw early support from Marc Riley and others on BBC 6music with them playing multiple sessions, and the follow up single, ‘Gig Economy’ hopping onto the 6music playlist. Roaming further afield from their hometown, Mush spent the first half of 2019 heading out around the UK, earning a reputation for their intense live performances, supporting the likes of Girl Band, The Lovely Eggs, Yak, Shame and Stereolab, as well as releasing the ‘Induction Party’ EP to great acclaim. At the tail end of summer of 2019 Mush headed to Leeds’ Green Mount Studio and with Andy Savours (Dream Wife, Our Girl, My Bloody Valentine) manning the mixing desk, their debut LP, ‘3D Routine’ was born.

The way in which the album brazenly moves from polished 3- minute punk tracks, to avant-garde spoken word, to sardonic-political funk, whilst sounding like the same band is testament to an uncompromisingly unrefined ethic and compounds the jarring nature of Mush. Together, the songs form a unified, abrasive, emotive, frenetic and entirely beguiling concoction of sound and opinion, a fast-moving snapshot of current times, relatable, politically minded and incredibly personal. Music for those who want their guitars loud and weird, and their political commentary a little less ‘on the nose’. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Clashing post-punk attitude meets with playful 'oi' vox and brilliantly intricate counter melodies, forming a melodically diverse but consistently enjoyable shift of pace and style. With more arty sections brilliantly offset by a cohesive anthemic drive, 3D routine is a brilliantly assured debut.

TRACK LISTING

1. Revising My Fee
2. Eat The Etiquette
3. Existential Dread
4. Coronation Chicken
5. Island Mentality
6. Fruits Of The Happening
7. Hey Gammonhead
8. 3D Routine
9. Gig Economy
10. Poverty Pornography
11. No Signal In The Paddock
12. Alternative Facts

When Poliça’s Channy Leaneagh fell off her roof while clearing ice in early 2018, she smashed her L1 vertebrae and battered her spine, leaving her in a brace with limited mobility for months. Yet Poliça’s fourth album, When We Stay Alive, is not about one debilitating accident. It’s about the redemptive power of rewriting your story in order to heal, and reclaiming your identity as a result.

When We Stay Alive possesses a new confidence in its sound, reflected in its fierce, determined songs and anchored by the heavy synths and punctuating beats of Poliça co-founder and producer Ryan Olson. Over the last several years Olson and Leaneagh have widely collaborated with musicians from all over the world: both with Bon Iver, and Leaneagh individually with Boys Noize, Lane 8, Sasha, Leftfield, and Daniel Wohl; Olson with Swamp Dogg in addition to countless musicians from the Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon’s 37d03d collective. As a result, When We Stay Alive features one of the largest musical casts of any Poliça record to date. To create the album, Olson brought his favorite collaborators into his studio for all-night sessions. He’d then send Leaneagh the files to write lyrics to while recovering at home, which she’d record alone or with engineer Alex Proctor. Drummers Drew Christopherson and Ben Ivascu colored the songs with a new approach – drastically changing the rhythmic dynamic from previous efforts by creating an indistinguishable hybrid of live and electronic instrumentation--and bassist Chris Bierden provided a melody-laden low-end as well as more layered backing vocals than ever before.

On Poliça’s first three albums, Leaneagh focused on restructuring the world and her relationships within it. On When We Stay Alive, she realizes the power in restructuring her inner self. The album’s title references the idea of moving forward through life – our experiences, both good and bad – and what happens next with the strength we find. “I had been living unconsciously in past trauma,” Leaneagh says. “I don’t want to deny something happened – this is not about repression – it’s about taking the power back from the past, holding the power in the present, and creating a new story for myself.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Brilliantly bold and beautifully textured, Poliça's 5th LP has a perfect mix of downbeat, percussive synth numbers and more propulsive, shadowy offerings. Dynamically astute and beautifully rendered, this is a disparate but never obtuse triumph from the superb Poliça.

TRACK LISTING

1. Driving
2. TATA
3. Fold Up
4. Feel Life
5. Little Threads
6. Be Again
7. Steady
8. Forget Me Now
9. Blood Moon
10. Sea Without Blue

Field Music’s new release is “Making A New World”, a 19 track song cycle about the after-effects of the First World War. But this is not an album about war and it is not, in any traditional sense, an album about remembrance. There are songs here about air traffic control and gender reassignment surgery. There are songs about Tiananmen Square and about ultrasound. There are even songs about Becontree Housing Estate and about sanitary towels. 

The songs grew from a project for the Imperial War Museum and were first performed at their sites in Salford and London in January 2019. The starting point was an image from a 1919 publication on munitions by the US War Department, made using “sound ranging”, a technique that utilised an array of transducers to capture the vibrations of gunfire at the front. These vibrations were displayed on a graph, similar to a seismograph, where the distances between peaks on different lines could be used to pinpoint the location of enemy armaments. This particular image showed the minute leading up to 11am on 11th November 1918, and the minute immediately after. One minute of oppressive, juddering noise and one minute of near-silence. “We imagined the lines from that image continuing across the next hundred years,” says the band’s David Brewis, “and we looked for stories which tied back to specific events from the war or the immediate aftermath.” If the original intention might have been to create a mostly instrumental piece, this research forced and inspired a different approach. These were stories itching to be told.

The songs are in a kind of chronological order, starting with the end of the war itself; the uncertainty of heading home in a profoundly altered world (“Coffee or Wine”). Later we hear a song about the work of Dr Harold Gillies (the shimmering ballad, “A Change of Heir”), whose pioneering work on skin grafts for injured servicemen led him, in the 1940s, to perform some of the very first gender reassignment surgeries. We see how the horrors of the war led to the Dada movement and how that artistic reaction was echoed in the extreme performance art of the 60s and 70s (the mathematical head-spin of “A Shot To The Arm”). And then in the funk stomp of Money Is A Memory, we picture an office worker in the German Treasury preparing documents for the final instalment on reparation debts - a payment made in 2010, 91 years after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. A defining, blood-spattered element of 20th century history becomes a humdrum administrative task in a 21st century bureaucracy.

TRACK LISTING

1. Sound Ranging
2. Silence
3. Coffee Or Wine
4. Best Kept Garden
5. I Thought You Were Something Else
6. Between Nations
7. A Change Of Heir
8. Do You Read Me?
9. From A Dream, Into My Arms
10. Beyond That Of Courtesy
11. A Shot To The Arm
12. A Common Language Pt 1
13. A Common Language Pt 2
14. Nikon Pt 1
15. Nikon Pt 2
16. If The Wind Blows Towards The Hospital
17. Only In A Man’s World
18. Money Is A Memory
19. An Independent State

Contemporary folk multi-instrumentalist Rachael Dadd is set to release her new album “Flux” on Memphis Industries on the 8th November 2019. Produced with Marcus Hamblett (Villagers / Laura Marling), “Flux” is a response to external and internal tides: the flow of life uprooted; a protest against the flow of recent political history and a diary of the flow within the intimate space of home.

Collaborators include multi-instrumentalist Emma Gatrill (Willie Mason / Matthew and the Atlas), drummer Rob Pemberton (Emily Barker / Low Chimes), bassist Jim Barr (Portishead) and vocalists Kate Stables (This Is The Kit) and Rozi Plain. Flux follows Rachael’s highly acclaimed album “We Resonate” which came out on Talitres and Sweetdreams Press, and a string of international releases on Broken Sound, Lost Map, Sweetdreams Press and Angel’s Egg. Living half her time as a travelling musician in Japan, witnessing how other people create things, connecting with other cultures and landscapes; all this is a furnace for Rachael’s innovative song writing, which has seen her gain a reputation as a pioneering and thought provoking artist, unafraid to push the boundaries of folk and pop.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: There are moments in 'Flux' of such whimsical beauty that hark back to the early days of American psychedelic folk, with plucking guitars and Dadd's gorgous vox. It's the more soulful pieces here that really impress, soaring and weaving in equal measure, providing a fascinating but cohesive listen. Lovely stuff.

TRACK LISTING

1. Arrows
2. Cut My Roots
3. Beacon
4. Two Islands
5. Language Of Water
6. Animal
7. Palaeontologist
8. Super Moon Machine
9. Knot
10. Two Coiled Springs
11. Connected To The Rock

The new album from Joel Wästberg a.k.a sir Was, “Holding on To a Dream”, is a mesmerising twisting of genres - from classic soul and old-school hip-hop, to beautifully fresh pop structures. The new record is dense with ideas and adventurous, a sonic-leap forth. “I was interested in having a lusher sound, more rich,” Wästberg says. “With the first record I had this idea that I wanted it to sound like an old vinyl record. I wanted this lo-fi, old-school sound. When I realized that I was actually making another album, I felt a bit scared of the whole thing, but it didn’t take me that long to realise that the only thing I could do was to make something that felt really right in my body and soul. I’ve realised that there’s nothing to be afraid of. I’m ready to explore so much more.”

The sense of exploration resonates throughout the record and can be defined by its start and end points. Opening track ‘Fly Away’ begins the expedition, a gleaming reflection of past insecurities as a jump-off point for the next chapter, all subtle beats and stark bursts of guitars that leap out of the mix. Elsewhere, ‘No Giving Up’ is a tender recollection of a past relationship, set to an equally affectionate composition, a glowing example of Wästberg’s growing songwriting skills, while ‘The Sun Will Shine’ showcases another side of Joel’s skillset, a playful production full of inspired ideas and nuances; a Les Fleurseque mellow breeze in the heat of the summer.

The record’s boldest moment is reserved for ‘Deployed’, a collaboration with Little Dragon’s Yukimi Nagano. “Me and Little Dragon go way back. I’ve been hanging out with them for many years, and they were very supportive with my first album,” Wästberg explains. “I remember that Yukimi was always asking me if I was making my own music. One day I was working in my small studio room, and Little Dragon were one floor up. Yukimi knocked on the door and asked if she could listen. I played her some of my songs and she said, “This is great, go out and talk to the world!”. That was before my first album. So having Little Dragon as a feature here makes so much sense.” Beautifully bright and sincere, ’Deployed’ is a perhaps the most vivid pop song that sir Was has released to-date. A heartfelt accounting of relationships, of knowing when to let go and when to fight for them, ‘Holding On To A Dream’, is a dreamy, groovy, lustrous treat of a record. 

TRACK LISTING

Fly Away
No Giving Up
Deployed (feat. Little Dragon)
No More Separation
The Sun Will Shine
Somewhere
Lean Into This
Speak Up
Trust
See U Again
Pin Me Down

When Francis Lung describes his new album as sounding “like a short Mancunian boy single-handedly trying to incite Beatlemania” he’s really not too far wide of the mark. ‘A Dream Is U’ is both bold and enthusiastic, a kaleidoscopic journey informed by the greats but also one that is wonderfully enigmatic, the sound of a multi-instrumentalist tying together all manner of influences into one beautifully cohesive album.

Following on from the home-recorded Volumes 1 + 2 EPs, which contained titbits written during his time in Wu Lyf, ‘A Dream Is U’ is the first fully-realised Francis Lung record, a studio undertaking brought to life with producer Brendan Williams (Dutch Uncles, GoGo Penguin), a colourful patchwork of vision and ingenuity. “Before we started recording I knew exactly what the arrangements were in my head” Francis says, reflecting on the time spent devising his new work. "It was kind of my mission to capture everything as it was in my imagination”.

A beautiful amalgamation of instruments, ‘A Dream Is U’ might fit neatly into the classic pop drawer but it comes with all manner of decoration, from violin and viola, to cello and saxophone. Writing for strings for the first time, Francis was inspired by the likes of Michael Brown (The Left Banke) and Robert Kirby (Nick Drake) and the parts are played by two members of the Hallé Orchestra, while the saxophone was played by Manchester’s jazz saxophonist Sam Healy. “He mostly played stuff I'd written for him,” Francis says, “but the solo at the end of The Lie is all him, with me in the studio trying to direct him by jumping around and waving my arms!”

Initially conceived to outline the different stages of a relationship, from heady early excitement to bitter fall-out, the finished product is intact an assortment of sentiments, scattered like puzzle pieces from an overturned box. “The problem with that theme is that it was too cut & dry and unrealistic,” Francis says now. “You can have all of those feelings in one day in no particular order. It’s more human to me that emotions can come at any time, without any real resolution. I wanted the album to reflect that sentiment.”

The new album is opened and led by ‘I Wanna Live In My Dreams’, a dazzling burst of Ronettes-inspired pop music, a love letter to sleeping, but also a song that buries allusions of real-world melancholy under its jubilant exterior, calling to mind the likes of Stephen Merrit, or later-day Elliott Smith, and their ability to shape moments of sadness into something strikingly pretty. “Songwriting is a bit like writing jokes, you have a setup and a knockdown,” Francis says. “But I really, really want to make music that makes people feel better, not worse. So I’m trying to push that line.”

If that introduction was somewhat understated, the rest of the album isn’t afraid to delve into more mosaic territory, pulling in influences as far-ranging as Big Star and The Beach Boys; Guided By Voices, Olivia Tremor Control, Apples In Stereo. It’s not just a collection of straightforward love songs either. Companionship might be the central weight here but it’s presented in myriad forms. ‘Comedown’ for instance, tells a complex narrative of two people’s drug dependency, and the validation they find in each other’s abuse, alongside gentle piano lines and stirring strings, while ‘Up & Down’ is breezier affair on the surface but actually tells a bipolar love story, chronicling the relationship between two lovers with manic mood swings, the track itself swinging between tender verses and a dramatic chorus.

Touching upon the universal themes of addiction, faith, and love in all of its confusion, ‘A Dream Is U’ is a collection of characters and stories that plays out something like a Harvey Pekar comic strip; an obsessive chronicle of daily lives twisted into new shapes by the unique mind and manners of their narrator. With flashes of striking colour and an ever-present wry smile, Francis Lung has created a debut album that drifts between simple acceptance and exuberant yearning for more. “My favourite part is when it talks about escaping to another universe,” Francis says of one song in particular, Unnecessary Love. “Although it’s a doomed and impossible dream, it’s amusing to me that if we survive long enough it could be a real possibility.”

Perhaps the key to the record, in fact, can be found in its closing track. Written on a toy piano found in a charity shop, ‘The Lie’ is a boldly stirring pop song, projecting Francis’ own statement of intent, to find a way through the fogginess of self-struggle, to accept ourselves as we are. “I don’t like shouting all my lyrics,” he says, “but it feels like 'If you could accept yourself you'd be happy' is a good one to shout. I don’t want to oversimplify the solution to anybody’s struggles but I know that learning to accept myself would help me no end.”

At times boisterous and radiant, elsewhere contemplative and brooding, ‘A Dream Is U’ feels like being awake in dreams, like stepping outside of the daily rotation; like shadows leaving their dancing bodies to waltz away to their own tune.

by tom johnson.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Imagine Elliott Smith backed by Teenage Fanclub in heaven forever, and you having an idea of the chiming, melodic majesty within the grooves of this record. A total delight!

Barry says: From his superb self-released EP's 'Mother's Son' and 'Faeher's Son', it was clear that Francis lung was indeed something special, and that has become even more obvious with the sparkling hazy beauty of 'A Dream Is U'. Channelling the spirit of swooning 70's psychedelia through a Mancunian dream-pop filter, this is a stunning and groundbreaking debut album proper. Essential listening.

TRACK LISTING

I Wanna Live In My Dreams
2 Real
Do Ya
Comedown
Unnecessary Love
A Dream Is U
I Do Believe In U
Up & Down
Invisible
The Lie

School of Language is David Brewis, who also makes music with his brother Peter as Field Music. This is the third School of Language album, following on from Sea From Shore in 2008 and Old Fears in 2014.

This is an album about Donald Trump - his dubious rise in politics, his capricious behaviour while in office and the motley cast of characters he has surrounded himself with.

It’s not exactly a protest record, though it is shot through with anger. It’s definitely not a joke, though some of it is darkly funny. It is a tragedy and it is a farce. The songs are sung from different points of view, almost as if it’s a Donald Trump funk musical. One advisor sells Trump on the idea of a border wall. Another one feels he can’t quit because of the chaos that might follow. Rex Tillerson fumes at his plummeting status. Psychiatrists fret about the President’s mental stability. Hillary Clinton laments her loss. Trump himself brags and equivocates in his own unique, blustering style.

45 was written and recorded in a little less than two months during gaps in the schedule at Field Music’s studio in Sunderland. It was inspired by Bob Woodward’s book Fear, articles in the Washington Post, The New Yorker and The New York Times and by Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight. It was also inspired by James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, The Meters, Otis Redding and Free.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It's an interesting approach to a catastrophic situation, but School Of Language's '45' handles the ridiculousness of the situation with a deserving amount of serious lyricism mixed in with a jaunty, funked-out instrumental focus. The lyrics here really speak volumes, and provide a wry and bleak juxtaposition to the whimsical playful funk.

TRACK LISTING

1. I’ve Got The Numbers
2. Nobody Knows
3. A Beautiful Wall
4. Rocket Man
5. Rex
6. The Goldwater Rule
7. Adult In The Room
8. And Even If I Did
9. Lock Her Up
10. The Best People

A culmination of life and musical experience, uncompromising in its vision, STONECHILD, the new studio album from Jesca Hoop is a self-described “compassion project.” 

Released by Memphis Industries, STONECHILD is Hoop refined and defined. Beautiful, subtle and stark, her fifth album, the follow up to 2017’s highly acclaimed ‘Memories Are Now’, is her best yet. 

Despite being a long-term resident of Manchester, Hoop, has until now, returned to her native California to record. This time round however, “it was” according to Hoop “time to step out of my comfort zone, my safe place”, venturing south to Bristol to team up with producer John Parish (PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding, This is the Kit). Parish’s minimal and purist approach helped clarify Hoop in her ideas and subtly yet effectively realigning her sound. The simplified arrangements draw focus to the fundamental sophistication of the songs. 

While Hoop’s trademark finger-plucked guitar and ethereal textures remain, the songs and their presentation are ever more direct. Parish “was a gentle collaborator until he killed one of my darlings” Hoop jests. “I’ve never been so brutally edited, and I wasn’t shy about expressing my discomfort at the sight of my work on the cutting room floor. He said, you will forgive me, and in some way, I think I actually enjoyed that treatment…being stripped back to the bare basics…albeit painfully”. STONECHILD ventures further into fresh territory with other voices joining the narrative, with Kate Stables (aka This is the Kit) Rozi Plain and Lucius singing the choruses and expanding the sensual depth of the sonic bloom. 

STONECHILD, Hoop says, is intended to “wrap its arms around our human planet spinning in its increasingly precarious wobble”. These rich and curious songs derived from themes of our troubled times speak Hoop’s heart and mind from her empathetic yet tough loving centre point. With writing so fluid, so natural the result is an album where everything is truly meant.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Gorgeous fingerplucked guitar brings echoes of 60's folk, alt-country and modern brooding indie, all wrapped together with Hoop's delicate, prominent vocal talents. Brilliantly textured but smoothly flowing from one idea to another. A masterclass in restraint and songwriting.

TRACK LISTING

1. Free Of The Feeling (Ft. Lucius)
2. Shoulder Charge (Ft. Lucius)
3. Old Fear Of Father
4. Footfall To The Path
5. Death Row
6. Red White And Black
7. 01 Tear
8. All Time Low
9. Outside Of Eden (Ft. Kate Stables And Justis)
10. Passage's End
11. Time Capsule

Rozi Plain has been making music since her brother taught her a few chords on the guitar aged 13. Raised in Winchester, she spent a few years studying art and painting boats in Bristol, where she began collaborating with long-term friends Kate Stables (This Is The Kit) and Rachael Dadd among many others on a thriving local scene. It was there that Rozi made her first two albums, 2008’s Inside Over Here and 2012’s Joined Sometimes Unjoined, each works of deliciously sad and beautiful pop full of heart-wrenching harmonies dotted with unexpected instrumental flourishes. Released in April 2015 on Lost Map and featuring contributions from Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor among others her last album Friend was a deeply meaningful and wonderfully measured ode to memory, place, companionship and music’s remarkable power as an emotional salve. A companion album of remixes, unreleased tracks and radio sessions, Friend Of A Friend, was released in 2016.

STAFF COMMENTS

Martin says: Rozi Plain's distinctive, gentle delivery is the glue that binds this follow up to the sublime "Friends" together - it's a fuller, more coherent release than it's predecessor and no less gorgeous.

TRACK LISTING

1. Inner Circle
2. Swing Shut
3. Symmetrical
4. The Gap
5. Old Money
6. Conditions
7. Dark Park
8. Trouble
9. Quiz
10. When There Is No Sun

Malihini may mean ‘newcomers’ in Hawaiian, but Rome-based duo Giampaolo Speziale and Federica Caiozzo deal exclusively in the music of lived experience and time-honed emotional intelligence, their disarming musical universe never less than distinctive, yet resonating with a confessional, modern European pop sophistication of a kind elsewhere purveyed by the likes of Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jose Gonzalez and Our Broken Garden. Listening to the ten co-written songs that grace Malihini’s exquisite debut album, Hopefully, Again, can sometimes feel like eavesdropping on a couple’s intimate emotional dialogues, such is the ingenuous honesty of the duo’s writing. Yet combined with their minimal, yet opulently textured arrangements (“classic song writing matched with pared-down electronics”, according to Clash), crammed with subtle melodic hooks and an embarrassment of earworm choruses, they transform the personal into the universal with a delightfully unforced eloquence. The bulk of the writing for Hopefully, Again took place during an extended retreat on the Aeolian island of Vulcano, off the coast of Sicily. Images and atmospheres of the sea and ‘blueness’ duly permeate the album’s leanly arranged songs. Swapping these idyllic environs for Mid Wales, specifically the remote Giant Wafer studio in Powys (“it was just us and a few sheep and chickens”, recalls Speziale), the album was recorded quickly, with the duo playing most of the instruments live, abetted once again by producer Richard Formby and long-term drumming amico Alberto Paone.

TRACK LISTING

1. A House On A Boat
2. Hopefully, Again
3. Delusional Boy
4. Nefertiti
5. Giving Up On Me
6. Can’t Stand That
7. If U Call
8. The Snow
9. The Afterdays
10. Song #1

“If there was a mission it was to create something like absurd office funk,” says Stats’ Ed Seed, recalling the birth of his band. He was working a series of banal London office jobs, but rather than switch off or despair, Seed used this conventionally sterile backdrop for creative inspiration. “It was about taking things that are considered boring or are overlooked,” he says. “If you stare at anything long enough, it becomes weird.”

Staring into the infinite oddness of office life was interrupted when Seed “fluked” his way into La Roux’s band - which itself proved a further inspiration for the evolution of Stats. “I'd always been in scrappy indie bands,” he recalls. “Then I met Elly and her crew and thought ‘wow’. This kind of pop music, I always thought it only happened over in Hammersmith, you had to have tens of thousands of pounds and a major label. But I realised you didn’t need a huge budget to make something more stylish than your average band.”

This was a turning point for Seed, recognising he could create his own contemporary version of DIY art pop. “That gave me confidence,” he reflects. “I wanted Stats to be quite theatrical. I wanted it to be strangely glamorous, in a Roxy Music or Pet Shop Boys sort of way. Something that’s glamorous and quite silly. Those bands are very serious about being very silly.”

Debut album “Other People’s Lives”, recorded at RAK studios with the full Stats band (Ed Seed – vox, guitar, John Barrett -drums, Stu Barter - bass, Duncan Brown - guitar, Nicole Robson – keyboards, Iso Waller-Bridge – keyboards, vox) is about investigating the gaps in the stories we tell about our lives. Says Ed, “the world encourages me to experience my life as a narrative: a story in which I am the lead character, going on a journey, moving towards the discovery and realisation of an authentic self. Other people’s lives are presented to me as coherent, relatable stories, full of passion and travel and wonder. But my story makes no sense: it is full of contradictions and formless subplots, and I barely feel like the same actor from one day to the next - let alone find any meaning in it.”

Musically Other People’s Lives is in many ways a time-stamp of a record, something that captures the now, the fleeting, the fickle and the forgotten – like that perfect moment lost on the dance floor. Yet the album avoids being tied to a time and place, ricocheting between 70s art rock, 80s synth grooves and cosmic disco, presented honestly and experimentally via the all-encompassing prism of pop music.

STAFF COMMENTS

Patrick says: Duncan from Dutch Uncles hipped me to Stats a few months back (Memphis Industries fam innit), and I was on board instantly. Following the same absurdist pop route as Fujiya & Miyagi or Yacht, but with a touch of Roxy Music glamour, some Talking Heads vocal nods and a whole lot of DFA-style indie dance grooving, Stats are 2019's answer to Hot Chip, Metronomy and Holy Ghost.

TRACK LISTING

I Am An Animal
There Is A Story I Tell About My Life
Rhythm Of The Heart
Lose It
A Change Of Scenery
Other People's Lives
Raft
From A High Sky
The Family Business
A Man Who Makes The Weather
Never Loved Anyone

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

Pleasureland is the newest work from Canadian-born artist Haley McCallum, known professionally as Haley Bonar for the past 15 years. In 2017, she changed her surname to reflect her maternal family name, now performing under thename HALEY.Stark, minimalist, and melodically entrancing, Pleasureland stands in a class entirely of its own, forging new but not unfamiliar ground for the Minnesota-based artist HALEY.

Harkening back to her 2011 release Golder, which featured two instrumental tracks, McCallum has taken the instrumental concept a few steps further in a bold musical statement which features no vocals. This time, McCallum’s musicianship and artistry take the lead. Transitioning from the erratic, synth-driven intro of "Credit Forever Part 1" into the deeply enchanting "Give Yourself Away", which blends piano melodies in the style of French Romanticism with the production stylings of Brian Eno to build a sonic landscape which is as lovely as it is uneasy.

In the stoner-metal burner "Syrup", McCallum’s lead guitar swaggers lazily over a fuzzed out, intense layer of distortion, featuring long-time collaborator and guitar wunderkind Jeremy Ylvisaker and Low's Steve Garrington on bass. The intimate and devastating "Pig Latin" showcases McCallum’s extraordinary gift for melody, carried by world class saxophonist Mike Lewis (Happy Apple, Bon Iver), tracked live in Haley's bedroom.

Mixed by Shuta Shinoda (Anna Meredith, Ghostpoet), McCallum’s production shines through in a new light. Sparsely interlacing the organic and digital, Pleasureland moves through the gamut of grief, perception, and empowerment, eliciting both the uneasiness of a world shifting unexpectedly as well as the innate capacity for goodness and beauty. Here, McCallum displays her long time mastery of simple and haunting melodies that remain with the listener long after, replacing explanation through words with a pallet of sonic exploration wrapped up into just twenty-seven minutes.

TRACK LISTING

1. Credit Forever Part 1
2. Give Yourself Away
3. Future Maps
4. Syrup
5. Credit Forever Part 2
6. Pig Latin
7. Double Dutchess
8. Next Time (For C)
9. Infinite Pleasure Part 1
10. Infinite Pleasure Part 2
11. Lonely As A Mother
12. Snake Moon

Leeds-based Menace Beach return with news of their third album 'Black Rainbow Sound', which is due out August 31st via Memphis Industries.
New album Black Rainbow Sound is the band's first new material since early 2017’s Lemon Memory, and after a self-imposed break from tour duties, the album exhibits a profound shift in their sound, whilst still mainlining the blasts of noise, visceral power, and timeless pop songsmithery of their previous releases.

Unlike the bands previous records, Black Rainbow Sound came to life in the bands studio, where Liza Violet and Ryan Needham built dense late-night orchestrations from drum machines, synthesizers, loops and guitar noise, before being ripped apart and reimagined by the full Menace Beach cast at The Nave studio in Leeds with co-producer Matt Peel (Eagulls).

Never ones to shy away from an intriguing collaboration, Black Rainbow Sound contains songs featuring Brix Smith of The Fall, and Brix and the Extricated. “The synchronicity of the universe just forced us and Brix together. The very day l finished reading her biography she played us on her BBC 6music show along with a wonderfully out-there monologue of how the song made her feel. I said thanks, we got chatting and it went from there. She’s a burning comet of positive energy”.

On Black Rainbow Sound, Menace Beach continue to explore their own unique aesthetic, venturing much further into a colourful world of bizzaro no-wave analogue synths and static drenched electronic euphoria, which they have been circling for some time.

Lustrous, dizzying, and bursting with cacophonous vintage electronics - the sounds on Black Rainbow Sound act as an otherworldly backdrop for the album's enigmatic lyrics to play out. Celestial conversations, night terrors, love, anti-love, good vs evil, light vs dark, friendly crows, death, depression, and teenage tongues and are all here to absorb; the more introspective topics often hidden in plain sight atop celebratory choruses, and melodic hooks.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Menace Beach go all cosmic on their latest, 'Black Rainbow Sound'. We get clicking CR-78's, throbbing distorted bass and blipping, sample & hold sine waves enriched with heavy guitars and woozy, shimmering vox. Properly lovely.

TRACK LISTING

1. Black Rainbow Sound
2. Satellite
3. Crawl In Love
4. Tongue
5. Mutator
6. 8000 Molecules
7. Hypnotiser Keeps The Ball Rolling
8. Holy Crow
9. Watermelon
10. (Like) Rainbow Juice

Raised by pioneering parents on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, NYC, Odetta’s milieu was a “colorful culture of artistry,” that included early exposure to community activism, renegade film screenings, poetry readings and trips to CBGB's. Inchoate punk and hip hop were aural wallpaper, as were the 45s spinning in the household jukebox featuring her dad’s extensive collection of soul and afrobeat records, as well as her Appalachian mother’s classic country selections. A classically trained violinist with a penchant for back-porch banjo, Odetta combines these variegated sounds of her childhood with her personal passion for folk music and the musicological legacy of Alan Lomax.

Lomax is writ large on Old Rockhounds... at least in spirit anyway. Odetta plays all the instruments on this and her debut 222, which made problematic the changeovers between songs when playing live. Field recordings the singer had collected on her travels were utilized to make such transitions seamless, and so successful was that intermingling of songs and soundscapes that they’ve transitioned into the recording process. It makes for a strangely intimate listen: tingly and a little tipsy: an album for twilight, sitting within the nocturnal hinterland between dusk and somnambulance - candlelit and confidential - a time for stories and secrets.

So far, so old skool. And yet, Old Rockhounds Never Die also embraces modernity without ever sounding incongruous. The mix of manipulated 21st century beats and the musical traditions of centuries meet at a crossroads and consummate their curiosity without inhibition. It’ll probably not surprise anyone listening to the album then that its a co-production. Odetta writes and performs all the songs while her partner Jack Inslee is in the background bringing the digital dark arts. Experimenting with found sounds & foley, the two have developed a sonic vernacular built around playing around with a-typical instruments. Hartman explains: “Many of the beats on the album were recorded in the kitchen: the snare sound is actually a running faucet, or if you hear these glockenspiel bells that's actually a set of kitchen bowls. Other percussive elements include scissors, a pepper grinder and keys on the radiator.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Old Rockhounds
2. Cowboy Song
3. You You
4. Widow's Peak
5. Sweet Teeth
6. Auto
7. Honey
8. Smoke Break
9. The Ocean
10. Spit
11. Freedom
12. Misery
13. Dettifoss
14. Carbon Copy
15. (Still Alive)

Slug return with a brand new album, ‘HiggledyPiggledy’, through Memphis Industries.

Slug is the nom de plume of North East native Ian Black and, whereas acclaimed debut album ‘Ripe’ was made in collaboration with Peter Brewis and David Brewis of Field Music, ‘HiggledyPiggledy’ was composed, produced and played entirely by Black, enabling him to give free reign to his beguiling brand of Dada-rock.

Lead track ‘No Heavy Petting’ was consciously written to be an aggressive album opener, which pokes fun at Black’s own Mary Whitehouse-esque response to the sexualisation of music on television.

The album was inspired by a combination of The Residents, John Carpenter and the soundtracks of Don Cherry (particularly ‘Holy Mountain’) and Masahiko Sato (particularly ‘Belladonna’) plus the Dada art movement which will be self-evident to anyone who’s seen the hilarious and life affirming Slug live experience, replete with ever changing stage wear (snooker players, sailors, 50s jazz combo) and spontaneous crowd participation.

Black intended ‘HiggledyPiggledy’ to be a more minimal affair than debut ‘Ripe’, focussed more on rhythm and percussion. Thematically the record was written against the backdrop of political turmoil but really it’s about the strange life Black leads in his native Sunderland, an autodidact outsider living his life in Wetherspoons arguing with some of the questionable attitudes of locals. Blacks stated aim to “have fun writing truly horrible lyrics,” playing characters “venting in pubs, writing in the character of how some people think and behave.”

TRACK LISTING

No Heavy Petting
Earlobe
Gibberish
Basic Aggression
Lackadaisical Love
Dolly Dimple
Tongue
You Don't Need To Wake Up
Humming And Hawing
Petulia
A Soft Shoe Number
Arbitrary Lessons In Custom
You Are As Cold As A Dead Fish

Since the release of his last record, ‘Imager’, in 2015, a lot has changed for London-born James Mathé AKA Barbarossa. Most importantly, he’s become a father for the first time and made the hugely liberating move from London, the city that had for so long defined him and his sound, to Margate.

‘Lier’, Mathé’s brand new album, is the perfect sonic story to accompany these big life changes and as a result, his most personal record to date. Across the 10 tracks, ‘Lier’ is a hugely uplifting and cathartic record that takes you from the depths of his intricate and wonderful creative mind to the wider wonderful emotions that come with becoming a father.

Picking up where 2015’s ‘Imager’ left off, ‘Lier’ is further electronic wizardry from Barbarossa - one of the UK’s finest song writing talents. This time, his vocal is at the forefront on some of the most accessible pop songs he’s ever written.

‘Don’t Enter Fear’ is the perfect way to introduce the record. Written on the piano in his parent’s house, it encapsulates everything that the whole album represents and is ultimately a reminder to himself not to be scared of the seismic changes in both his own life and the political world around him.

‘Lier’ was written and recorded with Mathé’s producer friend Ghost Culture in Margate with percussion and drumming skills supplied by Joel Wästberg AKA Sir Was and artwork by fellow Margate dweller Tom Vek. The album is focused on the theme of geographic and personal change - ‘Cyclone’, the album opener for example, focuses on the move from city to sea and the calm and space that can bring, whilst album title track ‘Lier’ was inspired by swimming in the Walpole Bay tidal pool.

Inspiration comes from everywhere - ‘Aluminium Skies’ was written in Gothenburg, Sweden whilst James was on the road with José Gonzalez (he plays in the José Gonzalez live band), whilst ‘Thickening Air’ was inspired by the classic songwriters that Mathé obsesses over - Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Brian Wilson and Joni Mitchell.

What unites the songs on ‘Lier’ are central themes of loss, love and confronting who you are as time moves on and things change within and out of your control. By the end of the record you are left with the feeling that when things are simplified, they are at their most beautiful.

TRACK LISTING

Cyclone
Aluminium Skies
Broken Beauty
Griptide
Don’t Enter Fear
Ancient Light
Thickening Air
Lier
Shells
Feel My Sins

The two years since Commontime have been strange and turbulent. If you thought the world made some kind of sense, you may have questioned yourself a few times in the past two years. And that questioning, that erosion of faith - in people, in institutions, in shared experience - runs through every song on the new Field Music album.

But there's no gloom here. For Peter and David Brewis, playing together in their small riverside studio has been a joyful exorcism. Open Here is the last in a run of five albums made at the studio, an unprepossessing unit on a light industrial estate in Sunderland. Whilst the brothers weren't quite tracking while the wrecking balls came, the eviction notice received in early 2017 gave them a sense of urgency in the recording of Open Here.

There probably won't be many other rock records this year, or any year, which feature quite so much flute and flugelhorn (alongside the saxophones, string quartet and junk box percussion). But somehow or other, it comes together. Over thirteen years and six albums, Field Music have managed to carve a niche where all of these sounds can find a place; a place where pop music can be as voracious as it wants to be.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Oh Field music, will your jagged chords and thumping, percussive oddness never grow weary? Apparently not, because here we have another outing that hasn't been off the shop stereo since we got the promo a few weeks back. We're all still enamoured here, and you will be too.

TRACK LISTING

Time In Joy
Count It Up
Front Of House
Share A Pillow
Open Here
Goodbye To The Country
Checking On A Message
No King No Princess
Cameraman
Daylight Saving
Find A Way To Keep Me

Here to remind us that music is not just an audible experience, Minneapolis/New York’s Nadine make melodies that transcend acoustics. Their debut album oh my is collection of sophisticated modern pop songs that resonate in the gaps, the space between deadlines and timelines.

More akin to poetry set to music, Nadine is all about exploring feeling. Whilst most poets revel in the personal, Nadine's process is collaborative whose core is singer Nadia Hulett (part of the loose collective Phantom Posse) and Julian Fader and Carlos Hernandez (both of Ava Luna). The trio's practice is marked by their commitment to playfulness, curiosity, and fluidity.

Nadine's songs have one foot standing firm in pop, but ebb and flow with exploration and experiment. Polyphonic melodies swing and gambol, instrumental layers take generous flourishes and unexpected turns with an ear to the wondrous and occasionally weird, crafting jazz-tinged lounge-pop all held together by Hulett’s characteristic vocals, strong with a sincerity and gentleness that holds the listener. Let go of old ideas. Listen for tricks of the light. What does it feel like?

TRACK LISTING

Side A:
#53
Nook
Ultra Pink
Plinth
Not My Kinda Movie
New Step
That Neon Sign

Side B:
Pews
Contigo
Little Self In The Garden
Can’t Be Helped
Peace In The Valley

The Go! Team have always been cheerleaders for a better world - an outpouring of collective joy in the face of small-mindedness and dismal careerism. They rejoice in the unifying urges and the chance encounters between cultures that lead to something new. They're a band that still has faith in the power of music to make things better. We need The Go! Team now more than ever.

The Go! Team is the brainchild of one man: Brighton-based, melody-obsessed Ian Parton. But its membership has never been exclusive. Throughout the years, The Go! Team has included on its squad-sheet everyone from Deerhoof to Chuck D to a legion of undiscovered Bandcamp singers. Unlike the group's 2015 album, The Scene Between - which was essentially a solo project that followed the dissolution of the previous Go! Team lineup - their fifth album Semicircle sees Ian collaborating with current live players Simone Odaranile (drums) and Angela 'Maki' Won-Yin Mak (vocals), plus original Team members Sam Dook (guitar) and Ninja (irrepressible rapping).

Ian had the idea of a school marching band gone rogue, chucking away their sheet music to blast out Northern soul stompers or Japanese indie-pop swooners or old-school hip-hop jams. "I like the swing and the toughness of marching bands, the physicality of feeling a beater walloping a bass drum," explains Ian, "but I wanted to reclaim them from patriotic or sporty associations. That was the kick-off for this record." But his extensive sample library could only take him so far. To fully realise his vision, he knew he had to reach out and entice a group of unlikely new collaborators into the Go! Team fold.

So Ian made a pilgrimage to Detroit - city of Motown and The Stooges, of musical (and actual) revolution - where he hooked up with The Detroit Youth Choir. Their age was key; he didn't want kids (too twee), but he didn't want adults either, with all their emotional baggage and wariness and tendency to over sing. He also wanted to avoid the religious connotations of a church or gospel choir. "I've always had a thing for gang vocals and group singing, particularly the roughness of community choirs," says Ian. "Normally they might be singing show tunes or whatever, but I like the idea of getting people to do something they wouldn't normally do. I like making things happen that wouldn't otherwise happen. It's always a gamble, but in this case it paid off."

These inspiring sessions began to define the album. The choir's ebullient chanting is all over the opening track "Mayday," a morse-code-inspired soul belter about a love emergency, in the proud lineage of "Rescue Me" and "SOS." They bring the album to a rousing, defiant conclusion on "Getting Back Up." In between, they reveal a little more about themselves on the heart warming "Semicircle Song." When Ian needed a lo-fi R&B vocal for "Chain Link Fence" - kooky and soulful but not slick or drenched in melisma - he approached a Detroit high school. "I love the idea of recording people who wouldn't think of themselves as singers, who perhaps have never been recorded before."

But this is a Go! Team record, so routine is outlawed; there are a multitude of other voices to be heard, sometimes in the course of the same song. Best-known among them is probably Utrecht indie-rocker Annelotte de Graaf AKA Amber Arcades, whose Dutch-accented English lends a unique flavour to "Plans Are A Dream U Organise." Previous collaborator Julie Margat AKA Lispector delivers "Hey!''s breathy French interlude. And sassy girl group kiss-off "The Answer's No - Now What's The Question" is fronted by Houston based Darenda Weaver, a Texan Mod that Ian found on Bandcamp.

The band's own Maki helms "If There's One Thing You Should Know" with panache, and of course no Go! Team record would be complete without an appearance from Ninja, who unleashes a volley of verbal stingers on "She Got Guns." Meanwhile, the charmingly unaffected rapping on "All The Way Live" is sampled from a 1983 "after-school hip-hop project" Ian found on one of his epic crate-digging adventures. He considered asking a contemporary rapper to re-record it, but decided it would be impossible for anyone to unlearn 35 years of hip-hop history. Capturing those moments of authentic joy, unburdened by cynicism and ambition, is what Semicircle is all about.

In keeping with the album's marching band theme, Ian stacked up sousaphones, glockenspiels and steel drums, mic'ing them all from a distance to recreate that gymnasium sound. The effect is a kaleidoscopic cacophony, almost as if the sound itself is bent and refracted in the metallic curves of a trumpet - comforting and intoxicating at the same time. "It's recognisable as a Go! Team record but it takes the sound to a new place."

Although Semicircle isn't bogged down by polemical responses to the issues of today, there are still some valuable life lessons to be learned. Ian emphasizes that the vibrant utopia he and his cohorts have created on their fifth album is not an escapist fantasy but a potentially achievable goal. "It's about reminding yourself of the good things in life," says Ian. "We don't want to be dumbly optimistic and say, 'Hey, isn't everything great!' but there's something to be said for just getting on with it, for getting organised and not letting the fuckers get you down. Party for your right to fight!"

As always, it's good to know The Go! Team are on your side.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: If I had a team, and I wanted them to go, i'd probably just expect them to know that that was their goal, and to do it prompt-free but that's probably what separates me from Ian Parton. Also the fact that i've not just released my brilliant new album, shining with insistent jangling chaos, and he has.

TRACK LISTING

Mayday
Chain Link Fence
Semicircle Song
Hey!
The Answer's No - Now What's The Question?
Chico's Radical Decade
All The Way Live
If There's One Thing You Should Know
Tangerine / Satsuma / Clementine
She's Got Guns
Plans Are Like A Dream U Organise
Getting Back Up

The Cornshed Sisters release their second album ‘Honey & Tar’ on Memphis Industries. It was recorded and produced by Peter Brewis at Field Music’s Studio on the banks of the river Wear.

The Cornshed Sisters are Jennie Brewis, Cath Stephens, Liz Corney (moonlighting from the Field Music band) and Marie Nixon (erstwhile of 90s upstarts Kenickie); four singersongwriters based in Tyne and Wear, who weave together pop, folk, ballad and protest music into a unique and distinctive style.

The Cornshed Sisters have been away for a while (their last album, ‘Tell Tales’, was released back in 2012) but we can probably let them off as they’ve been using the time well, becoming mothers, bringing millions of pounds of funding into major Sunderland arts projects, recording and touring with Field Music and somehow making time to write songs and record this album together.

Drawing on a palette of solo and harmony vocals and a blend of acoustic and electronic instruments, they convey their stories with sensitivity and humour. Their subject matter is love, motherhood, fake happiness, friendship, family, feminism and the increasing complexities of life as you get older but no wiser. The band are proud to write about their experiences as women and their songwriting always has a stark realism to it - as Marie puts it when discussing the track ‘We Have Said This Is Impossible’: “True love is buggering off together in a Ford Focus.”

It’s been almost exactly a year since Weaves released their acclaimed self-titled debut LP, lauded internationally for its exuberant approach to guitar pop and recently nominated for this year’s Polaris Prize. It was a whirlwind year for the band who spent a nearly uninterrupted 12 months on the road, playing festivals across the globe, and touring with their fellow 2016 breakout artists Sunflower Bean and Mitski. Propelled forward by their own momentum, which they corralled like the barely contained energy of their explosive live sets, it was a life changing-experience, and upon returning home to Toronto the band’s leaders, singer Jasmyn Burke and guitarist Morgan Waters, found themselves possessed by an irrepressible burst of creative energy.

Their lawless approach to being a band is grounded on Wide Open by Burke’s songwriting, which is both more focused and more personal than on past releases. Burke writes in disciplined bursts, which on the last record consisted of isolated sessions with a looping pedal and a guitar recorded as voice memos on her iPhone, but this time around she varied her technique, often writing on an acoustic guitar, which expanded her songwriting palette in unexpected directions. Both Burke and Waters half-jokingly refer to the album as their “Americana” record, and while the statement is made with tongues placed firmly in cheeks, the album, without discarding the punky pyrotechnics that defined their first LP, displays an expansive and anthemic quality in songs like the opener “#53” and the sweeping “Walkaway,” that makes the joke ring half true.

The record sees Burke extend herself as a performer - moving more frequently to the center of arrangements and revealing new facets of her unique and powerful singing voice - as the band find ways to interpret the growing diversity of her expression. From the glammy Saturday night strut of “Slicked,” to the stripped-down, pedal steel abetted torch song “Wide Open,” to the searing “Scream,” a warped duet with Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq that likely constitutes Weaves’ wildest recording to date, the album captures a band for whom exploration is a compulsion making a self-assured step into the unknown. 

For their new recording, North East England electronic duo Warm Digits have sharpened up the elements of their sound for a set of crisp, propulsive and melodically rich songs, and for the first time on selected songs have collaborated with some of their favourite vocalists: Peter Brewis of Field Music, Sarah Cracknell of Saint Etienne, Devon Sproule, and Mia La Metta of Beards.

Wireless World is loosely themed around a present-day that teeters between progress and collapse. The band explain, “Our experience of the world and our states of mind are shaped and thrilled by unimaginably exciting leaps in technology, and yet that world will only last for a few moments as we fail to find a way to act collectively on rising temperatures, the failures of democracy and the unstoppable hunger for exploitation of the ground under our feet. This record is our attempt to make music from our experience of this present that teeters between celebration and devastation.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Dynamic Karutrock-inspired breakdowns, soaring synths and dreamlike, hazy shoegazing vocals mix into a euphoric and satisfying melting pot. Brilliant stuff.

TRACK LISTING

Two To Four Degrees
End Times (feat. Field Music)
Wireless World
Always On
Better Friction (feat. Mia La Metta)
Victims Of Geology
Growth Of Raindrops (feat. Sarah Cracknell)
Deluge And Delusion
Fracking Blackpool
The Rumble And The Tremor (feat. Devon Sproule)
Mute Ocean
Swallow The City

Manchester’s idiosyncratic art-popologists Dutch Uncles return with Big Balloon, their new studio album, on 17th February 2017 on Memphis Industries.

Big Balloon is the latest chapter in Dutch Uncles’ brilliantly witty, hip-swiveling, left-field adventures. Taking musical inspiration from Kate Bush's The Red Shoes, Low-era David Bowie, some slightly-less fashionable records belonging to their Dads and East European techno, it's the fifth Dutch Uncles studio album and the follow-up to 2015's acclaimed O Shudder.

Functioning as ten distinct pieces, each tackling a different topic, including austerity cuts, therapy, fried chicken, paranoia and coming to terms with loneliness, Big Balloon is Dutch Uncles’ finest album to date, taking listeners on an exhilarating cerebral journey.

TRACK LISTING

1. Big Balloon
2. Baskin’
3. Combo Box
4. Same Plane Dream
5. Achameleon
6. Hiccup
7. Streetlight
8. Oh Yeah
9. Sink
10. Overton

“Lemon Memory” is, for Menace Beach at least, an exercise in restraint, the fuzz and distortion turned down, a big last chorus avoided. Liza explains, “The one ‘rule’ thing we went into the album session with was to keep in mind that sometimes doing The Opposite is much more interesting”. Liza takes the lead vocal as she does on much of “Lemon Memory”. Indeed, if debut LP Ratworld was Ryan’s record, “Lemon Memory” is very much a Liza record. Ryan explains “Liza got that look in the eye and a head-down-blinkers-on thing, and only a moron would try and get in the way of that. It’s all about keeping those ideas in their purest form and diluting as little as possible.”

Written in Ibiza and recorded in Sheffield with Ross Orton (MIA, Arctic Monkeys, The Fall) “Lemon Memory” is in part an effort to lift a citrus based curse – trust us, it’s a real thing - Ryan and Liza believe was placed on their house, via the hexbreaking power of music. It’s also the sound of a band finding their own identity, edging closer to some sort of grimy truth.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Dynamic swooning rock, pulsing indie anthems and pummelling breakdowns, brilliantly textured choruses, and fantastic counterpoint male/female vocals. A clever and immensely listenable tour de force of emotion and drive.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Give Blood
Maybe We'll Drown
Sentimental
Lemon Memory
Can’t Get A Haircut

Side B
Darlatoid
Suck It Out
Owl
Watch Me Boil
Hexbreaker II

Blue States releases his long awaited fifth album ‘Restless Spheres’ via Memphis Industries.

It’s been nine years since we last heard from Blue States, the moniker for the musical outlet of Andrew Dragazis. Recorded, produced and, for the most part, played by Dragazis at his Lightwell studios in Stoke Newington, London, ‘Restless Spheres’ doffs its cap to the soundtracks of Budd and Morricone, to 60s Greek bands such as The Forminx, to German electronic pioneers Dieter Moebius and Michael Rother and to American minimalist composers Steve Reich and Phillip Glass.

Blue States began nearly twenty years ago with the young, movie soundtrack obsessed Dragazis writing and recording largely instrumental, electronic pieces alone at his parent’s house in Sussex. Music had always been around in his family, his father having been involved in the Greek pop scene of the 1960’s, jamming in Athenian clubs alongside pre-Aphrodite’s Child legends Demis Roussos and Vangelis.

The recordings found their way to nascent electronic label Memphis Industries, who went on to release a succession of 12”s including the smooth electro sweep of ‘The Trainer Shuffle’ and the filmic ‘Yé-Yé’ stylings of ‘Your Girl’. An album, ‘Nothing Changes Under The Sun’, followed in 2000 and became a surprise hit, seeing Dragazis form a band, tour the world, remix Future Sound Of London, work with Roy Wood and sign to XL Recordings. Subsequent albums ‘Man Mountain’ and ‘The Soundings’ saw Dragazis work with more traditional song structures (including ‘Season Song’, the title track of cult Zombie flick ‘28 Days Later’) and collaborate with vocalists Ty Bulmer, latterly of New Young Pony Club and old school friend Chris Carr. 2007’s ‘First Steps Into...’ saw Dragazis revert to working solo and heralded a return to his electronic origins with more extended, free form soundscapes.

On ‘Restless Spheres’ Dragazis draws on all four of his previous albums to create something entirely different, an album imbued with a subtle majesty and hope filled melancholy.

TRACK LISTING

Alright Here
Vision Trail
D-Day
Restless Spheres
Noodle
Statues
Beyond The White Light
Fight The Dying Day
Protect Me Everywhere
Cable Ties
Hiatus

“Haley Bonar’s songs marry fizzy arrangements to cuttingly quotable observations about love, disappointment, identity and the curdling of youth.” - NPR

Recorded on analogue tape at Pachyderm Studios, Minnesota and produced by Haley Bonar and Jacob Hansen, ‘Impossible Dream’ is the follow-up to 2014’s ‘Last War’, which enjoyed widespread critical acclaim and featured in NPR and Village Voice’s Albums Of The Year lists.

‘Impossible Dream’ is Bonar’s most ambitious record to date. Blending scuzzy 1980s indie, new wave angularity and Spectorish reverb, her songs are, as NPR once described, “as relentlessly catchy on the surface, as they are alluringly complex underneath.”

Hypnotic opener ‘Hometown’ shimmers like a Twin Peaks outtake, the shuddering, swirling ‘Kismet Kill’ recalls Mazzy Star, while the soaring synth and pounding drums of ‘Stupid Face’ summons the spirit and melody of ‘Porcupine’ era Echo And The Bunnymen.

Intrepid and diverse, ‘Impossible Dream’ is consistently bold, infectious and inventive.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Huge pop melodies and 80's classic indie vibes pervade on this instantly likeable new album from Haley Bonar. Could be the feel good hit of the summer.

TRACK LISTING

Hometown
Your Mom Is Right
Kismet Kill
I Can Change
Stupid Face
Called You Queen
Jealous Girls
Skynz
Better Than Me
Blue Diamonds Fall

In a little over two short years, Weaves have gone from a collection of voice memos on Jasmyn Burke’s iPhone to establishing themselves as one of the most stridently individual acts to emerge from the Toronto’s fertile and multifaceted DIY scene. Led by the collaborative efforts of Morgan Waters and Jasmyn Burke, the band have built a devoted audience while capturing the attention of the international media with a brand of ebullient, art-damaged pop music as difficult to categorize as it is to ignore.

The group began in a series of sessions in the living room of Water’s Chinatown apartment, where Waters and Burke would record increasingly elaborate demos built from Burke’s phone full of songs. They transitioned to a full band line up in late 2013, adding bassist Zach Bines and drummer Spencer Cole, and quickly set to work recording their debut EP which was released on Buzz Records in the summer of 2014. The EP made an immediate splash, garnering praise from Noisey, Rookie and Spin, and earning Weaves a “band to watch” tag from Rolling Stone. Glowing write ups of the band’s performances at that year’s CMJ from The Guardian and NME followed, cementing Weaves’ reputation as one of the year's most exciting new bands.

Word continued to spread in 2015 with the release of their single “Tick,” ahead of the band’s first European tour, which included dates with Hinds, Dan Deacon and Pissed Jeans, and appearances at Glastonbury and Iceland Airwaves. With their already sterling live show only sharpened by their time on the road, the band returned to CMJ in October and emerged as one of the hottest acts of the festival, earning "best of the festival" write ups from NPR and The New York Times among others, and further building the anticipation for their forthcoming full length.

Weaves have been working on their debut LP for almost as long as they have been a band, tracking with Leon Taheny (Dilly Dally, Owen Pallett, Austra) in sessions that span most of the last two years. Mixed by Alex Newport (Bloc Party, Melvins, At The Drive In) and mastered by John Greenham (Death Grips, Sky Ferreira), the result is an album that traverses the band’s history, exploring every facet of their always adventurous approach to pop music and leaving no idea unexplored. Filled beyond bursting with hooks and possibilities, it’s the sound of a band propelled forward by the thrill of discovering the limits of their sound and gleefully pushing past them. “We’re always trying to push ourselves,” says Waters, “sometimes it feels like bands aren’t necessary, like they’re not the ones pushing music forward, so I think we’re trying to hopefully prove that bands aren’t boring. If we are going to be a band and if we are going to do this guitar, bass and drums thing then we might as well see how much we can fuck it up.”

‘United Crushers’ is POLIÇA’s third full length release and most remarkable album yet. Lead singer Channy Leaneagh and non-touring fifth member producer Ryan Olson wrote the album in Minneapolis in the winter of 2015 and recorded it at the renowned Sonic Ranch Studios in El Paso, TX with their live line up of dual drummers, Drew Christopherson and Ben Ivascu, Chris Beirden on bass. The new album builds on POLIÇA’s signature synthesizer and percussion-heavy sounds with more complex arrangements, tighter grooves and a bigger, crisper hi fi punch.

The record, a tribute to their hometown of Minneapolis, was named after the graffiti tag seen throughout the city as a reminder of its bleak past and uncertain future and is short for “United States of Dreams Be Crushed.” Even at its darkest, the record is musically the band's most upbeat and celebratory. It is a weapon meant to empower the weak, the forgotten, and the disenfranchised; its very creation an act of rebellion in the face of the hopelessness that casts such a long shadow over Middle America's slow urban decline.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: This record, more so than 2014's Shulamith oozes a sort of dystopian dread, displayed through repetitive synth-swells and rippling arpeggios. Though this is in many ways a record about decay, it seems hopeful, like there is something to be gained by adapting. Through adversity comes triumph. This is a bleak yet upbeat offering, dynamic, and exciting.

TRACK LISTING

Summer Please
Lime Habit
Someway
Wedding
Melting Block
Top Coat
Lately
Fish
Berlin
Baby Sucks
Kind
Lose You

'Commontime' is the first album of new songs from North East siblings Peter and David Brewis since 'Plumb' in 2012 and their fifth album 'proper' since their debut in 2005. After four years threading a way through one extra-curricular project after another, the space that Field Music vacated still appears to be empty and Field Music-shaped. No one else really does what Field Music do; the interweaving vocals, the rhythmic gear changes, the slightly off-chords, but with the sensibility that keeps them within touching distance of pop music.

All this is present again but things are different this time. Where 'Plumb' was an album of vignettes and segues, 'Commontime' edges towards what people might call “proper songs”. Field Music have never shown off their unashamed love of choruses quite like they do on this record. Lyrically, Peter and David continue to mine that inexhaustible seam wondering how on earth we ended up here, in this situation, as these people. Over fourteen songs, conversations are replayed and friendships are left to drift. And all the while, that thing you were trying to remember has changed while your head was turned.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: The Brewis brothers return with more perfectly realised funky, melodic, math-pop (and not forgetting 70's rock!?) nuggets. It's an incredible blend that's just built for repeated listens. Possibly their best yet.

TRACK LISTING

The Noisy Days Are Over
Disappointed
But Not For You
I'm Glad
Don’t You Want To Know
What's Wrong?
How Should I Know If You've Changed?
Trouble At The Lights
They Want You To Remember
It's A Good Thing
The Morning Is Waiting
Same Name
Stay Awake

NZCA Lines return with new album ‘Infinite Summer’. It will be the first release for their new label home Memphis Industries (Poliça, Field Music, The Go! Team).

The follow up to 2012’s well-received self-titled album, ‘Infinite Summer’ sees main man Michael Lovett joined by Charlotte Hatherley (Bat For Lashes, Ash) and Sarah Jones (Hot Chip), to create a record that marries sci-fi futurism to personal intimacies. Since NZCA Lines’ debut, Lovett has honed his skills in the studio with Christine & The Queens and touring as part of Metronomy’s live band.

The record unfurls through brooding, sensual beats, dazzling synths and melancholic vocals that take you on a different journey on every track. Whilst ‘Infinite Summer’ and ‘Do It Better’ focus on the idea of an enlarged sun that would bring us joy and terror, there are glimmers of Michael’s personal life running throughout such as standout single ‘Two Hearts’ dealing as it does with long distance connections maintained via satellites and fibre optic cables.

Infinite Summer’s hyper melodicism sees NZCA Lines explore stellar new territories that position them as one of 2016 most enticing and rewarding prospects.

The world of Pure Bathing Culture is not the real world. It’s a world filled with characters like Scotty and The Bubble King and a place called The Ivory Coast that’s not the real Ivory Coast. It’s also a world created for its protagonists, Sarah Versprille and Daniel Hindman, to travel to communicate abstract thought and remember all the things they want to remember. It’s a place where the night is magic and it will transform you.

In the humdrum everyday world, the corporal version of Pure Bathing Culture has for the last few years been growing naturally and at a steady pace. However new album ‘Pray For Rain’ sees them make an evolutionary leap, taking their finely honed metaphysical pop to a new level.

You can hear it in the opening notes of their anthemic title track: in Hindman’s clean yet serpentine guitar lines interacting with the live rhythm section and Versprille’s lucid vocals cutting through it all as she asks: “Is it pleasure? Is it pain? Did you pray for rain?” You can hear it in the sweet pop perfection of ‘Clover’ and the trembling beauty of ‘She Shakes’, a story of two fantasy characters from different worlds being brought to an intense, fragile state through the experience of falling in love.

When it came time to write and record the follow-up to last year’s ‘Moon Tides’, the duo knew what they didn’t want. “We didn’t gravitate towards someone making indie dream-pop records,” Dan said. That was when producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Swans, Angel Olsen, The Walkmen) reached out to the band and invited them to come record with him in his Dallas, TX studio.

It was a taxing yet ultimately rewarding experience when the album was completed. “It was shocking to hear what the finished product was,” Sarah said. “It was like being in a vortex and then we came out with this record.” She adds with a laugh something John Congleton told her when all was said and done: “You were very brave.”

‘Pray For Rain’ is the sound of Pure Bathing Culture transforming from who they were to who they will be, of finding their way, ready to take steps both small and momentous on their musical path.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Gently persuasive synth'n'guitar pop chimes, prettily topped with Sarah Versprille's engaging vocals. Gorgeous.

Indie exclusive bonus cassette ‘Transfatty Acid’ featuring 4 exclusive tracks with every order while stocks last.

New Zealand based The Phoenix Foundation are all set to return with their new and sixth studio album Give Up Your Dreams. It’s a shrewd and vibrant reminder that in The Phoenix Foundation’s gloriously absurd world of Technicolour pop, it’s the challenges you set yourself that reap the greatest rewards. “Give Up Your Dreams could sound like a defeat but it represents something quite defiant, joyous and celebratory” exclaims co-frontman Samuel Scott of the record’s infectious rhythmic driven sound and optimistic feel.

After huge success, sales and awards in their homelands it was 2011’s breakthrough album Buffalo and 2013's colossal double album 'Fandango' that saw the band reach a more global audience - 5 star reviews, ‘Later... with Jools Holland’ and Glastonbury followed. Which brings us to Give Up Your Dreams, the sound of a band with the pressure-off, embracing a freedom to explore and hone their sound at their own pace.

Channelling Fandango’s beauteous side, but this time fuelled by a spit ball of irrepressible energy, Give Up Your Dreams feels like the band’s most contemporary offering yet. With the new addition of drummer Chris O’Connor, the album was written taking its lead from the rhythm section for the very first time; paving the way for an all new creative process. “I was convinced we had to have a different sounding record,” explains Scott’s counterpart singer/guitarist Lukasz Buda. “So we completely removed any trace of acoustic guitar. It was important to leave room for the band to take it somewhere else and make way for a new vitality.”

Recorded within the pow-wow setting of the band’s Car Club HQ in Wellington, it's the first time the band felt totally comfortable and confident in taking on production duties entirely themselves. “The mood when we were recording was so easy, so cordial,” recalls Scott. Taking a free form approach from Chris and bass guitarist/vocalist Tom Callwood’s experiences in the city’s improv and experimental scene, the album’s cosmic vibes are an upshot of utilising gadgets to shapeshift each sound. Whilst synths were always built into the Foundation’s musical make-up, this time around they’re placed centre stage; “we spent a great deal of time messing with an old Eventide H3000. There would be very few sounds we didn’t try to mess with,” says Scott. “We turned all the cool and interesting sounds up loud so nothing was competing in the mix and you can actually hear the trippy shit.”

Thematically and lyrically the group typically took inspiration from various of sources. The dazzling title-track is a frank deglamourisation of life on the road spurred on by a conversation with dear friend, collaborator, and fellow New Zealander Lawrence Arabia. The energetic ‘Mountain’ is the ultimate counterpoint; an afro-kraut groove with layers of Television-inspired guitars and dreamscapes about the 'money men' controlling the world. ‘Playing Dead’ nearly didn’t make it further than the cutting room floor but was revived thanks to the photographs in a 1950s Time Life essay on the Ona people of Tierra Del Fuego in southern Chile and their ghost rituals. Elsewhere in 'Jason' Luke sings about both the mother of his children and his ‘band wife’ (Samuel Scott) being struck down with sciatica and being reliant on string painkillers to function, touching on the fear of ageing in the process. Album closer 'Myth' was inspired by the writings of St. Isidore of Seville who in the 19th Century attempted to compile all human knowledge.

“After 15 years together, this album feels like a total rebirth to us" reveals Buda "it's uplifting feel comes as an act of defiance against all our fears in life.” Take The Phoenix Foundation’s advice then: give up your dreams and good things will happen to you too. Scott concludes “It’s a mantra about letting go, worrying less, and enjoying your reality instead of always wanting more.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: A more muscular, propulsive take on their trademark chiming, Flying Nun style otherness. Tunes still intact!

TRACK LISTING

Mountain
Bob Lennon John Dylan
Playing Dead
Prawn
Jason
Celestial Bodies
Silent Orb
Sunbed
Give Up Your Dreams
Myth

Josh Scott is ready to unveil the unique and stunning fruits of his labour on his self-titled debut album as the distinctively named Aero Flynn - a record that may never have seen the light of day, had it not been for his old friend Justin Vernon of Bon Iver fame.

Up to now Scott may have been living life as an outsider but solid relationships sit at the very heart of his musical make up. Whilst his grandfather played a key influence on his life and new stage name (“I grew up with him and he worships old cinema so I’ve seen every Errol Flynn film,” explains Scott of the reason behind his new guise, “It’s my Narnia.”), his saving grace has become those who surrounded him during the 2000s while attending the University Of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. During that time Scott’s band Amateur Love was the most talked about band in the small college town’s scene.

After struggling with the high expectations thrust upon him (so esteemed was his song writing to those who knew him back then that the ‘Lip Parade’ sited in Bon Iver’s ‘Holocene’ is a direct reference to one of Scott’s earlier songs), Scott disbanded the group, moved to Chicago and stepped further back into the shadows. After being diagnosed with a mysterious autoimmune disease affecting his kidney in addition to crippling untreated depression, he went underground. That is, until now.

Refusing to let Scott go without a fight, Vernon eventually managed to coax him back out of hibernation by establishing a label on which to reissue the one and only Amateur Love album. This was the spark; Scott’s interest was piqued and he began writing and recording what would become Aero Flynn’s deeply personal self-titled debut. The writing for it began in Scott’s empty Chicago apartment and it brilliantly displays a newfound exploration of longform composition techniques and ambiguities rather than the simple versechorus- verse-type song structure he had mastered. Once the songs arrived at Vernon’s April Base Studios in rural Wisconsin (where he and Scott coproduced the self-titled debut together) the songs were stretched and manipulated further into their spaced out ethereal final form.

With a dazzling cast of musicians, including Bon Iver players Mike Noyce, Sean Carey, Rob Moose and CJ Camerieri plus Justin Vernon himself, guitarist Matt Sweeney, pedal steeler Ben Lester and Solid Gold’s Adam Hurlburt, recording progressed well and, over the course of a year, an album that many had spent over a decade waiting for was finally finished.

TRACK LISTING

Plates
Twist
Dk/Pi
Crisp
Tree
Floating
Maker
Brand New
Moon Beams

At the beginning of 2014, Outfit found themselves scattered across two countries and three cities, separated by life and love from each other and from those closest to them. Slowness, the band's second full length on new label home Memphis Industries, is the sound of its five members snatching intensive weeks to plant themselves in one place, with the tensions of touring, moving, and transatlantic relationships still weighing heavy in mind, to create an album with bold presence. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Darryl says: An expansive and elegant sound that hints at a combination of Talk Talk, Field Music, Japan and the Dutch Uncles. Released on the ever dependable Memphis Industries label.

TRACK LISTING

New Air
Slowness
Smart Thing
Boy
Happy Birthday
Wind Or Vertigo
Genderless
Framed
On The Water, On The Way
Cold Light Home
Swam Out

“Melds blue-eyed soul and electronica to addictive effect… exquisite” - The Times

“A great example of someone following their musical instincts into new areas and finding success” - Drowned in Sound

“Mathé employs his soft soul falsetto over juddering beats, double-time drum claps and a synth riff… a revelation” - The Guardian

Barbarossa, the nom de plume of Londoner James Mathé, follows 2013 album ‘Bloodlines’ with ‘Imager’ on Memphis Industries. ‘Imager’ is a cerebral, slow-burning album, tinged with melancholy and an alluring humanism.

Mathé’s musical journey started with folk-tinged balladry that saw him become part of the Fence Collective and subsequently a band member for the likes of José González, Johnny Flynn and Junip. With ‘Bloodlines’ Mathé started to infuse his songwriting with electronic flourishes and now, with ‘Imager’, he completes his transformation into fully fledged electronic soul pioneer.

Working with co-producer Ash Workman (Metronomy, Summer Camp) Mathé builds on the foundations provided by his organic approach to songwriting, to build elegiac electronic anthems that are filled with a simple, poignant immediacy.

‘Imager’ is pervaded with a sense of disquiet, perhaps driven subconsciously by the fact that the spaces where creativity and culture flourish in London are rapidly disappearing; that the artistic communities that Mathé grew up with are being driven out of London due to financial pressures and, as a result, something vital is being lost. Yet while the album deals in displacement and heartbreak, a sense that everything is in flux, there are redemptive moments to stir the soul.

‘Silent Island’ is perhaps the best example of this. Its melancholic refrain “this city holds no beauty for me” giving way to a blissful yet propulsive chorus that suggests creativity will always find a way.

Elsewhere, ‘Settle’ is the sound of dislocation in the big city, a questioning of how to respond to your surroundings as they become increasingly alien.

The languid ‘Home’, which features a guest vocal from José González, is the light to ‘Settles’ shade; its phrase “you’re one of the lucky ones...” providing reassurance and redemption.

‘Imager’ is the sound of Barbarossa stepping out of the shadows and into the limelight as a talent to be reckoned with in his own right, questioning his surroundings, his own creativity and coming up with answers that are compelling, affecting and thoughtful.

TRACK LISTING

Imager
Home
Solid Soul
Settle
Nevada
Dark Hopes
Silent Island
Muted
Human Feel
The Wall

‘Music for Drifters’ is a recording of a newly composed, cinematic score for John Grierson's landmark 1929 film ‘Drifters’ on the UK's herring fishing industry, widely regarded as the first British narrative documentary.

The composition was originally commissioned for a live performance and screening of ‘Drifters’ at 2013's Berwick Film Festival and Field Music (featuring Peter and David Brewis plus original keyboardist Andy Moore) will be performing the score again at screenings of the film across April and May.

Silver colour vinyl, silver board gatefold sleeve.

Limited to 750 copies.

Slug is the brand new musical venture from the mind of Ian Black, a merrily disruptive influence on the North East music for more than a decade. His debut album 'Ripe' is released on Memphis Industries. With Slug, Black wanted to get away from the tinnitus inducing noise rock of his formative bands, letting the idea dictate the song's form and sonic palette. Black says of the album "'what ifs' play a massive part in ripe. what if we use a stoner metal riff and use it like a dub bass part or what if we combined the drumming style of John Bonham with James Brown beat and the squelch bass of Claudio Simonetti and Fabio Pignatelli".

Taking inspiration from film soundtracks (Enter the Dragon, Suspiria), 20th century abstract and minimalist music but also the rock and funk chops of Led Zeppelin, Prince and Funkadelic, the resulting album is concise, unselfconscious, idiosyncratic and exquisitely executed. Animators brothers quay, Phil Mulloy and Jan Svankmajer oblique approaches to subject matter also rubbed off on black and lend the slug album an air of the hypnagogic. 'Ripe' opener grimacing mask tackles how to break the cycle of personal and work related problems. Cockeyed rabbit wrapped in plastic focuses on the rocky foundations of apparently immutable institutions of power. 'Greasy Mind' is the most pop moment on the album that sees Zeppelin matched with 80's Madonna and screaming guitar solos. Running to get past your heart rides a wave of simplicity with a three note distorted bass riff, a one line chorus purely based on the phonetics, bongos and drums recorded with two vocal mics. 'Kill Your Darlings' is a straight to video horror film soundtrack dealing with how, as an artist, you have to avoid treating each creation like one of your kids. The album was recorded at Field Music's Roker studio with Peter and David Brewis on production duties. The Field Music brothers also return the favour for Black who toured extensively with their band as bassist. They play on the album and in the surreally fun yet precision engineered live band where they're joined by Andrew Lowther on bass and Rhys Patterson.

It was playing with Field Music that gave Ian the impetus to start Slug "you cannot be on the road for a year with the guys and not feel inspired. sometimes that helps create a sense of self belief that you can create your own thing.....however delusional that maybe." Slug have made one of the year's most inventive and rewarding debut long players. 2015 is 'Ripe' for their picking.

Lasers through tracing paper, orange tone oscillations, cable access hangover, a K-tel dream sequence, a haunted vision mixer, station wagon-core, straight to video, something in the fog, fluff on the needle, chromakey constellations, a hovercraft on the fret board, faxing a car alarm, a Morse code pep talk, etch a sketch jacknife, a daily Haley's comet, light sound colour motion, a holiday from yourself, Ceefax taking Oracle, second sight summer camp, 360 degree tunnel vision, Chinese whispers by post, the opposite of hula hooping, the geometry of ideas, maxing the minute maid, a teleprompter for your dreams, carry the ten, pathways in patchwork.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Hugely cute indie-pop with an occasional shoegazey bent. Effervescent as ever!

TRACK LISTING

CD Tracklist:
What D'You Say?
The Scene Between
Waking The Jetstream
Rolodex The Seasons
Blowtorch
Did You Know?
Gaffa Tape Bikini
Catch Me On The Rebound
The Floating Felt Tip
Her Last Wave
The Art Of Getting By (Song For Heaven's Gate)
Reason Left To Destroy

LP Tracklist:
A.
What D'You Say?
The Scene Between
Waking The Jetstream
Rolodex The Seasons
Blowtorch
Did You Know?

B.
Gaffa Tape Bikini
Catch Me On The Rebound
The Floating Felt Tip
Her Last Wave
The Art Of Getting By (Song For Heaven's Gate)
Reason Left To Destroy

Six years into Dutch Uncles’ flourishing career, the idiosyncratic artpopologists return with new album O Shudder which sees them further distilling and refining their signature sound, marrying rock bombast with classical arrangements, acoustic instrumentation with smart synthetic pop. O Shudder is Dutch Uncles’ most direct record to date, the sound of a wildly witty band well and truly finding their stride, whilst lyrically tackling the growing pains of being twentysomething in a generic Northern suburbia; according to hip swivelling front man Duncan Wallis, the album covers themes including “pregnancy, social media, terrorism, divorce, sexual dysfunction, job seeking, health scares, doubt, love”.

With O Shudder, Dutch Uncles continue their fascinating, wonky ascent which has seen them play enormodomes with emo punk rock behemoths and self confessed Dutch Uncles acolytes Paramore, supporting and being supported by like minded left-field pop adventurers Wild Beasts, Outfit, Field Music, and Everything Everything, have a burger named after them by one of Manchester’s premiere eateries and prefigure Future Islands’ dance moves meme in their video for 2013 single Flexxin.

The album was recorded with long term collaborator Brendan Williams in three locations; at a studio in the heart of the Welsh valleys, above a Salford pub, ‘The Kings Arms’, (incidentally where C4 comedy Fresh Meat is filmed) and, for the acoustic instruments, in the natural reverb of Salford’s Peel Hall. The band were meticulous in tweaking their synth sounds so they’d fit seamlessly with the harp, xylophone, marimba, string and woodwind sounds that populate the record. Sources of inspiration for the record included The Blue Nile, Kate Bush’s third album, Never For Ever, Igor Stravinsky, Japan and lyrically John Cooper Clarke, Sparks, Ian Dury and Prefab Sprouts’ album From Langley Park to Memphis.

All set to o shudder and stun, and induce plenty of hip swivelling, Dutch Uncles have delivered on their youthful potential and, with O Shudder, solved their own particular Rubix’s cube, bringing their unclassifiable pop music into clear and precise focus.

TRACK LISTING

1 Babymaking
2 Upsilon
3 Drips
4 Decided Knowledge
5 I Should Have Read
6 In N Out
7 Given Thing
8 Don't Sit Back (Frankie Said)
9 Accelerate
10 Tidal Weight
11 Be Right Back

Back in the good old of days of 1990, Color Dream Games released Menace Beach for the then popular NES games console from Nintendo. Imagine skateboarding through a side-scrolling 8-bit world filled with balloons, clowns and disgruntled dockworkers in search of your cute pixilated girlfriend Bunny. It’s from this slightly surreal, esoteric world that this Leeds indie rock revolving cast of local luminaries, headed by Ryan Needham and Liza Violet, draw their name. It’s reference acts as the perfect backdrop to their 90’s American underground and pre-Brit Pop indie; melody heavy, supercharged pop that’s always surprising.

After the success of their EP ‘Lowtalker’ in early 2014, British indie label favourites Memphis Industries snapped Menace Beach up with the band’s debut album in mind. It comes in the shape of ‘Ratworld’, a twelve song assault, a journey through a psyche tinged wonderland, documenting moving away and waving goodbye to the fractured rubble of an unhappy lifestyle. On the title, Ryan says “We’ve created our own grubby little Ratworld to inhabit. Everything is better when it’s a bit grubby and broken”. It’s that dreamy sensation of taking comfort in chaos, looking around at the perfect mess you’ve created and feeling deeply content as it’s yours and no one else’s.

“Among this year's most anticipated British releases” NME
“Like the Shins back when they still had the spark of youth, but with Superchunk’s playful sass and unrestrained crunch” Stereogum

TRACK LISTING

Come On Give Up
Elastic
Drop Outs
Lowtalkin
Blue Eye
Dig It Up
Tennis Court
Ratworld
Tastes Like Medicine
Pick Out The Pieces
Infinite Donut
Fortune Teller

Drawing inspiration from disparate musical and poetic sources, two Mercury Prize nominees have come together in a playful departure from their respective work with Field Music and Maximo Park. Based around text from Paul Smith’s travel writing and Peter Brewis’s chamber-band arrangements, the pair have collaborated on a suite of songs, creating a restrained yet richly descriptive soundworld.

‘Frozen By Sight’ evolved from a festival commission for new work which saw the pair employ the skills of a string quartet and double bass player. Smith says, “We allowed the words to guide where the music was going in order to break free of more traditional pop structures.” Brewis also adds, “We wanted to touch on a point somewhere between composition, songwriting and improvisation, but we also wanted to keep a sense of humour and a sense of the everyday.”

After performing the work at the inaugural Festival Of The North East in late 2013, Smith and Brewis began work at the Field Music studio in Sunderland with David Brewis - Peter's brother - acting as co-producer. Integral to the sound of the record are the distinctive performances of the band: David’s dynamic push and pull on the drums, John Pope’s wandering, melodic bass playing, the precision and drama of Ed Cross’ string quartet and the sonorous palette of Andrew Lowther's tuned percussion. Brewis reinforces the arrangements with smatterings of piano while Smith features as a highly individual singer / guitar player.

The music wraps itself around the words and the places they chronicle. The locations become tangible; from their home towns in North Eastern England to more far-flung destinations. Characters appear, such as the diminutive L.A. streetcleaner going about his work in the song of the same title, or the romantic old couple “digging their forefingers in freshly-soaked sand” in ‘Santa Monica’.

The notion of discovery is everywhere in these songs, with ‘Trevone’ being a perfect example of a visual journey where the wanderer can take a “sidestep and the whole world appears.” Its uncanny Cornish imagery is mirrored by the unusual musical touches that coax the song from a sparse beginning to an uplifting, magical conclusion.

‘Frozen By Sight’ is a rare piece of music that quietly announces the arrival of a potent new collaboration.

The LP features 180g vinyl in a gatefold sleeve with digital download code.

TRACK LISTING

Old Odeon
Santa Monica
Exiting Hyde Park Towers
Barcelona (At Eye Level)
L.A. Street Cleaner
A Town Called Letter
Mount Wellington Rises
Budapest
Perth To Bunbury
Philly
Trevone
St Peter’s

Haley Bonar releases her debut UK album, a nine track collection as relentlessly catchy on the surface as it is alluringly complex underneath.

Haley Bonar was first discovered by Low’s Alan Sparhawk who spotted her at a local open mic club in Duluth, Minnesota and was so impressed he immediately invited her to join them on tour. Which is how, a week later, nineteen year old Haley Bonar, was transformed from college student to ambitious dropout, crammed into a Honda Civic with a guitar and a drummer for company, touring the US opening for Low.

But there is more to this story. In the decade since Haley has released a succession of recordings, each of which have garnered more praise the last, and has seen her collaborate with the likes of Andrew Bird (with whom Haley occasionally plays live) and Justin Vernon (who features on the new album). That’s not to mention the company she keeps in a rotating cast of premium band members including Jeremy Hanson (Tapes ‘n Tapes), Luke Anderson (Rogue Valley), Jeremy Ylvisaker (Andrew Bird, Alpha Consumer) and Mike Lewis (Bon Iver, Alpha Consumer). Now, with her new album ‘Last War’ Haley looks set to find a wider audience.

Much of the joy of Bonar’s songwriting is in the tension between her sparkling melodic sensibility and her deeply ambivalent lyrics. Album opener ‘Kill the Fun’ positively crackles with traces of the Bangles and the Cure at their most pop, as Bonar chronicles her travels with a lover, taking some moments to reveal the nature of the relationship: "You'll be here till morning / You will get back on the plane / Go back to work / where you never knew my name." On ‘No Sensitive Man’ (which features the most Clem Burke drums outside of a Blondie record), she claims "I don't want no sensitive man / I don't want to talk." While on the captivating ‘Heaven’s Made For Two’ Bonar’s daydreaming vocal drifts ethereally as the instrumentation builds from stripped-back beginnings into a country-meets-shoegaze wall of sound crescendo.

On ‘Last War’, the complexities hit as hard as the hooks, a smart, careful balance achieved through equal doses of mystery and charm.

TRACK LISTING

1. Kill The Fun
2. No Sensitive Man
3. Last War
4. Heaven’s Made For Two
5. Bad Reputation
6. From A Cage
7. Woke Up In My Future
8. Can’t Believe Our Luck
9. Eat For Free

School Of Language, aka Field Music’s David Brewis, releases new EP ‘More Fears’ via Memphis Industries.

The EP features new song ‘Days Accelerate’ plus radical reworks of old tracks ‘Marine Life’ and ‘Keep Your Water’.

David Brewis is best known as a member of Sunderland group Field Music though he has been using the nom de plume School Of Language since the ‘Sea From Shore’ album released in 2008.

A pop polymath, the past twelve months have also seen David assemble and play in Eleanor Friedberger’s touring band, do production work for Maximo Park’s recent album and Futureheads-affiliates Rivals, Pea Sea and Frozen By Sight (a collaboration between brother Peter Brewis and Paul Smith), as well as remixes for Dutch Uncles, The Ralfe Band and The Phoenix Foundation.

With brother Peter, David also composed a score for 1929 silent documentary ‘Drifters’ which they performed at the Aldeburgh and Berwick Film Festivals. Field Music remain on hiatus since the release of their Mercury prize nominated album ‘Plumb’ in 2012.

It’s a rare to come across an artist who’s equally skilled in songwriting, singing and production but lone-arranger Jason Quever, better known as San Francisco’s Papercuts, is a master of all trades. That the pocket-sized symphonies of brand new album ‘Life Among The Savages’ are set to see the light of day is through nothing but meticulous focus - due to his whizz-kid knack for instrumental arrangement, Quever often finds himself a sought-after musical collaborator.

As with each Papercuts album to date - 2004’s ‘Mockingbird’, 2007’s ‘Can’t Go Back’, 2009’s ‘You Can Have What You Want’, and 2011’s ‘Fading Parade’ - Quever recorded his latest offering on his Ampex 2” 16-track reel-to-reel in his home studio, Pan American, whittling the record down to its essentials over a two year period. It was there he worked alongside Port O’Brien, Beach House, Still Flyin’, The Skygreen Leopards, and most recently Galaxy 500’s Dean Wareham on their own recordings. “Galaxy 500 was a big influence on my music so it was very special to make a record with him that I’m really proud of,” says Quever. “More importantly, we had a great time doing it.”

Unassuming though ambitious, a life in demand was hardly of Quever’s expectations but such a skill set could never be kept secret for long. “I don’t want to hit people over the head. That’s just not who I am. I don’t necessarily like to be the centre of attention,” he’s often said. Yet ‘Life Among The Savages’ is about to do precisely that. The most concise and lucid Papercuts release to date, it demonstrates a uniquely fresh approach to classic instrumentation through shrewdly combining dreamy baroque pop string arrangements with lighter-than-air vocals via potent production work.

While Papercuts echoes bands like Spiritualized and The Zombies in mood, ambitious orchestration (the title track itself contains an arrangement contribution from Beach House’s Alex Scally) and the high-calibre dream pop of beautifully hypnotic tracks such as ‘Staring At the Bright Lights’, the sound on ‘Life Among The Savages’ is undeniably Quever’s own. Alongside haunting melodies that soar over strings, garagey guitar hooks, piano and mellotron, and energetic bass and drums that never rely on a clichéd beat, it’s impossible to refrain from being spellbound by Quever's unpredictable and chaotic world, whatever that may consist of.

“I like to write short stories, at least have the story in my mind and allude to it... from dystopian short stories to a utopian take on things, being outside looking in, alienation, search for bliss, the chaos of relationships, insanity, suicide...”

Having lost both of his parents and being orphaned at a young age before growing up on a commune, Quever is no stranger to the complexities life can bring. Crediting the four-track he got after his parents died with both helping him cope and inspiring his career, ‘Life Among The Savages’ is the next step in a musical trajectory that’s gently reshaping pop music in the way very few musicians know how.

“Propulsive gorgeousness not dissimilar from what the Concretes were doing in their prime.” - Pitchfork 

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.

“Simultaneously a classic and five billion years ahead of its time” - NME

“Should satisfy fans of Field Music’s tightly wound pop” - Pitchfork

The new School Of Language album is called ‘Old Fears’ and it’s set for release on Memphis Industries.

‘Old Fears’ is a pop record. A place of clipped falsetto, melancholic funk, iridescent electro, shimmering post-punk, futurist prog. A self-contained sphere of strange sensations. Beguiling textures. Lengthening shadows. At times it is both liminal and minimal, at others emotive and external. Ambiguous and ambient. Tantalising and tempered. Modern. Unique. And funny too. “I wrote a lot of notes and they seemed to distinctly split into things to do with love and things to do with fear,” says School Of Language’s David Brewis. “A lot of it has ended up with me looking back at when I was 19, 20 - my formative years. So though I wouldn’t want to call it a concept album it’s definitely themed.”

Here each song has been honed and polished into something pure, like a vast block of marble chiselled down into a perfectly tiny delicate egg of Fabergé-esque perfection. Recorded throughout 2013 in Field Music’s studio on the banks of the River Wear in Sunderland, synth flourishes sit alongside the staccato jarring guitars of ‘A Smile Cracks’ and the metronomic rhythms of ‘Dress Up’. Like a Ballard novel or a George Shaw painting, ‘Between The Suburbs’ offers perhaps the most lyrical and poetic moment, where “Dogs chase patterns, play to attention / Bulbs glare on greasy roads...”

The title track, meanwhile, is reminiscent of the haunting Giallo film scores of Goblin or Kosmische music at its most moving, while ‘Moment Of Doubt’ displays shades of Brian Eno and Robert Wyatt. Other oblique influences come in the form of early Justin Timberlake and N*E*R*D albums, “a bunch of disco records”, Canadian experimentalist Sandro Perri, Dr John, Fela Kuti and Shalamar.

School Of Language is the nom de plume of David Brewis, a member of Mercury prize-nominated pop group Field Music. His first album as School Of Language, ‘Sea From Shore’, was released to wide acclaim in 2008. A pop polymath, the past twelve months have also seen David assemble and play in Eleanor Friedberger’s touring band, do production work for Maximo Park, Futureheads affiliates Rivals, Pea Sea and a collaboration between brother Peter Brewis and Paul Smith, as well as remixes for Dutch Uncles, The Ralfe Band and Phoenix Foundation.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: More jerk-pop brilliance from Mr. Field Music.

“Like DFA 1979 at their most primal” - NME

“Psychedelic boss dons Colourmusic are back and will melt the eyes out of your skull” - Noisey

In keeping with their single minded voyaging between disparate sonic realms, Colourmusic’s greatest influence has always been their own intuition. Take new album ‘May You Marry Rich’, released via Memphis Industries. Described by co-founder, vocalist and guitarist Ryan Hendrix as their “purple album”, it’s an album that takes the four piece’s previous full length, 2011’s ‘My ___ Is Pink’, as a starting point and expands upon it in different and unusual directions.

Formed in Oklahoma in 2005 with British-born Nick Turner, some years after bonding over Aphex Twin during their university days together, Colourmusic expanded to include bassist Colin Fleishacker and drummer Nicholas Ley.

With two previous albums under their belts, ‘F, Monday, Orange, February, Venus, Lunatic, 1 Or 13’ and ‘My ___ Is Pink’, the group have gained a justified reputation for marrying hallucinatory textures and experimental rock tropes with an offkilter take on the world. Anything from writing songs based on Newton’s theory of colour, to songs written at the tempo that people have sex have been explored during their nine years together.

‘May You Marry Rich’ is a darker affair, with its twelve sprawling tracks obsessing over mankind’s seemingly insatiable lust for pure happiness. “It’s about having the option to have anything you want, like a king, and asking whether that would make you happy,” Hendrix explains. “It’s about happiness and a theory that we’re not wired to have contentment as our genetic disposition.”

‘May You Marry Rich’ is a powerhouse of a record, a towering inferno of ideas. “But we’re not pounding these themes into people’s heads,” Hendrix says. “They’re more prompts, to give you a sense and the flavours of what we’re exploring.”

Ontario’s Tokyo Police Club are back with a brand new album ‘Forcefield’.

The album includes the eight minute epic that is ‘Argentina (Parts I, II, III)’, and their most pure pop moment to date, ‘Hot Tonight’.

The new record is the quartet’s first release in four years, following 2010’s hugely acclaimed ‘Champ’.

‘Forcefield’ is perhaps Tokyo Police Club’s most direct statement of intent yet, musically referencing anything from Tom Petty to Smashing Pumpkins, whilst never losing the unmistakable energy that has marked their work ever since their debut mini-album ‘A Lesson In Crime’.

‘Forcefield’ was produced by Doug Boehm (Girls, Dr Dog) and singer David Monks.

Of the new music, Monks notes, “Since writing started for ‘Forcefield’ in mid-2011 there have been so many trends and every kind of ‘wave’. We saw them all come and disappear or change into something broader. It left us wanting to make something that would last. We ended up rediscovering energy and guitars and simple, direct songs. There was certainly a lot of pressure to take the music somewhere new and there were lots of opinions about how to do that, but in the end we blocked all that out and followed our instincts. I think that’s what ‘Forcefield’ is - it doesn’t matter what else is going on out there, the music just has to be honest and have a real feeling to it.

Ontario’s Tokyo Police Club are back with a brand new album Forcefield.  The album includes the 8 minute epic that is ‘Argentina (Parts I, II, III)’, and their most pure pop moment to date, ‘Hot Tonight’.

The new record is the quartet’s first release in four years, following 2010’s hugely acclaimed Champ. Having teased the new album just before the new year with the mesmerizing video for the album’s opening track ‘Argentina (Parts I, II, III)’, Tokyo Police Club have also recently premiered ‘Hot Tonight’ on Pitchfork.

Forcefield is perhaps TPC’s most direct statement of intent yet, musically referencing anything from Tom Petty to Smashing Pumpkins, whilst never losing the unmistakable energy that has marked their work ever since their debut mini-album A Lesson in Crime. The forthcoming album was produced by Doug Boehm (Girls, Dr Dog) and singer David Monks.

Of the new music Monks notes, “Since writing started for Forcefield in mid-2011 there have been so many trends and every kind of ‘wave.’ We saw them all come and disappear or change into something broader. It left us wanting to make something that would last. We ended up rediscovering energy and guitars and simple, direct songs. There was certainly a lot of pressure to take the music somewhere new and there were lots of opinions about how to do that, but in the end we blocked all that out and followed our instincts. I think that’s what Forcefield is—it doesn’t matter what else is going on out there, the music just has to be honest and have a real feeling to it.”

If the last album (‘Glowing Mouth’) from Brooklyn brooders Milagres was an essay on human frailty, composed in a haze of Vicodin from a hospital bed after a climbing accident left lead vocalist Kyle Wilson incapacitated for months, the follow up is about living life - a brave, bold f*ck you to mortality that seeps sex from its pores and dazzles in its gossamer alt-pop. “We could take a trip into a new country,” he teases on ‘Urban Eunuchs’, but forget that.

The only record you’ll hear this year (or any other) to borrow from both ‘Heroes’-era Bowie and Southern rap hooligan Waka Flocka Flame (“I love the way his rhythm tracks just prattle on and on without repeating themselves, somehow never sounding overcomplicated” says Wilson), this new full length release from the band sounds like a trip into another universe, full of trippy analogue synths, manipulated samples, punchy distorted guitars and heavy brass orchestrations.

Painstakingly honest, ‘Violent Light’ finds Wilson wading through his psyche for song matter. “Yesterday my therapist asked if she could hear the music I’ve been working on,” he says. “I’m pretty scared to play her this record because I’m sure there’s some subconscious stuff in there that I really don’t want to confront.”

From the haunting ‘The Black Table’, sparked by a flash memory of his grandfather explaining the destructive power of modern science to him as a child (“we had made plans to see the excellent Arnold Schwarzenegger film ‘Kindergarten Cop’ one day when he got into an explanation of nuclear fission, drawing diagrams on napkins and going into great detail. We missed the film”) to ‘Jeweled Cave’s recollections of a childhood romance with a male friend (“it wasn’t a sexual relationship, but I don’t think you could describe it as anything other than being in love”), there are few more personal, confessional listens to be had in 2014.

Now a four piece, Milagres - completed by producer and bass player Fraser McCulloch, keyboard player Chris Brazee and drummer Paul Payabyab - sound destined for stardom. Until then, Wilson, like all great musicians before their breakthrough, is living a humble existence in his adopted home of Brooklyn. “I work as a waiter in a Michelin star restaurant. I once waited on Lou Reed’s birthday party. David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, Julian Schnabel and Salman Rushdie were all at the table. I was a little bummed that I wasn’t meeting these people in another context,” he says. Should the progressive, forward thinking and life-affirming ‘Violent Light’ find the acclaim it deserves, Wilson could get that opportunity yet.

Supreme Cuts are the Chicago-based production duo Mike Perry and Austin Kjeultes. Having recently announced news of their debut album for Memphis Industries, they now reveal full details of ‘Divine Ecstasy’.

The album extends their productions into the worlds of house music and footwork whilst experimenting with an array of different pop structures.

A host of stellar vocalists feature on the record, including labelmates Poliça’s Channy Leaneagh, up and coming French singer Mahaut Mondino, 16 year old Barbadian wunderkind rapper Haleek Maul and rising Portland R&B crooner Shy Girls.

‘Divine Ecstasy’ works both as a fully immersive experience, designed to be listened to all the way through and also as collection of killer singles, each one different from the last. An exercise in transcendent songwriting, the album addresses the diverse strata of human experience and interaction from the mundane to the supernatural and everything in between.

The title is a reference to an infomercial in which a pastor named Peter Popoff peddles a miracle water that will deliver free money and immerse the buyer in a ‘divine trance’; infer from that what you will.

“The album operates on three levels,” Perry says. “The mundane (taxes and parking tickets), earthly pleasures (sex and drugs), and the higher (god and the universe). The music and lyrics are meant to operate on whichever of those levels you feel comfortable identifying with.”

Early twenty somethings Mike and Austin started making music together in 2011. The pair cite influences as diverse as neo-classical composers William Basinski and Phillip Glass as well as Herbie Hancock, Prince and much of Chicago’s musical cannon - Sam Cooke, R Kelly, Do Or Die, Green Velvet, Frankie Knuckles, DJ Funk, house, booty house and footwork scenes.

Marijuana Deathsquads’ debut album ‘Oh My Sexy Lord’ is set to be released on Memphis Industries.

Marijuana Deathsquads are a gang first, and a band second. The gang have a somewhat unified philosophy on music and the devastating future Marijuana Wars, but no real dogma of any kind outside of those two areas. And nobody is ever really in or out of the gang. You might be a member of Marijuana Deathsquads.

The nuclei of Marijuana Deathsquads is producer Ryan Olson and vocalist Isaac Gale. The rest, all speculation mostly. Stef Alexander (P.O.S.) might be in Marijuana Deathsquads. This one time MDS backed him for a performance at Coachella. People seemed to enjoy that. Poliça drummers Ben Ivascu and Drew Christopherson might be in MDS. Mark McGee might be in MDS. He is super handsome. Har Mar Superstar, Poliça vocalist Channy Leaneagh, Chavez man Matt Sweeney, Jesus Lizard’s David Yow and many many more have possibly, theoretically, participated in Marijuana Deathsquads at various times.

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.

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.

Poliça return with their second album ‘Shulamith’, the follow up to 2012’s universally acclaimed breakthrough debut ‘Give You The Ghost’. 

Founded by vocalist Channy Leaneagh and producer Ryan Olson out of the ashes of Minneapolis collective Gayngs, and featuring Drew Christopherson and Ben Ivascu on drums and Chris Bierden on bass, Poliça’s ‘Give You The Ghost’ was released in April of 2012. Seemingly from nowhere it became one of 2012’s standout debut albums. The band made their UK live debut in June 2012, with two packed nights at the tiny Camp Basement in London, and less than a year later, March 2013 saw the band play a triumphant show to a sold out Shepherds Bush Empire. 

From the flurry of warped metallic electronica and razorsharp groove of opener ‘Chain My Name’, with its stark and rushing refrain, the angular R&B-pop futurism of ‘I Need $’, its sweetly earworm hook belying lyrics of alternately helplessness and defiance, to the gliding, bird’s eye meditation of closer ‘So Leave’, ‘Shulamith’ reaffirms Poliça as one of the most fascinating and vital groups in forward-thinking pop.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: A lot of excitement around this unique band at the moment and they don't disappoint. Album number Two is even better than their debut and it's not often you can say that, is it? Mesmerising.

It's a rare and beautiful thing when a band emerges fully formed, but it makes perfect sense in the case of guitarist Daniel Hindman and keyboardist Sarah Versprille’s Pure Bathing Culture. Having backed folk rock revisionist Andy Cabic in Vetiver, the New Yorkers partnered up and moved west in 2011, settling in Portland, Oregon.

In a short time the duo have created a sound that is undeniably their own: soaring synths, chiming keyboards, and shimmering electric guitars move in lockstep with bouncing drum machines, with Sarah’s crystalline voice floating on top of it all with divine purpose. It’s a sound that looks back momentarily for inspiration - Talk Talk, Prefab Sprout, Cocteau Twins - but then fixes its gaze firmly on the present.

Further developing the sound of their acclaimed four song, self-titled 2012 EP, at the start of 2013 they set out to record ‘Moon Tides’, their first full length album. Again, they chose to work with producer Richard Swift at his National Freedom studio in rural Cottage Grove, Oregon. Throughout 2012 Swift had called on the duo to help him with other studio projects (Versprille sings on Foxygen’s latest album and Hindman adds his sprawling guitar work to Damien Jurado’s excellent ‘Marqopa’) which only helped to cement the threesome’s musical partnership.

Like the earlier sessions for the EP, they worked quickly in the studio and improvised parts around the basic song structures that they’d carefully composed up in Portland. Dan explains, “Pretty much all tracks (vocals and instruments) are all first or very early takes. Richard is kind of a stickler about this and I actually don't go in with a clean, pristine idea of what I'm going to play on guitar or any other instrument for that matter, so there's actually a lot of improvisation as far as performances in the studio go.”

It’s this compassion and warmth in Pure Bathing Culture that set them apart. The music is uplifting. It invites self-reflection. It never feels alienating. ‘Pendulum’ is a perfect mid-tempo album opener that pulses and shines. Other standout tracks from the album - ‘Dream The Dare’, ‘Twins’, ‘Scotty’ and ‘Golden Girl’ - are slices of reverb-drenched, soulful, danceable electropop that musically and lyrically tap into an introspective worship of the natural and psychic mysteries that surround us.

Pure Bathing Culture’s debut album Moon Tides is optimistic modern music for souls who seek to explore the infinite.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Gorgeous dream-pop for fans of Beach House and the like. Perfect for the summer.

TRACK LISTING

Pendulum
Dream The Dare
Evergreener
Twins
Only Lonely Lovers
Scotty
Seven 2 One
Golden Girl
Temples Of The Moon

“Melds blue-eyed soul and electronica to addictive effect.” - Sunday Times · There were plenty of reasons for Londoner James Mathé to simply keep course after the release of his well received debut album, ‘Chemical Campfires’, in 2008 on Fence Records - a flourishing reputation as one of Britain’s most exciting acoustic troubadours, a prominent spot in Johnny Flynn and Jose Gonzales’ backing bands, the roar of applause from the audience at a sold-out show at New York’s Bowery Ballroom still ringing in his ears… but Mathé had other ideas: “I loved the acoustic scene, but knew it was not all I was about,” he remembers. “So I dug out all my old Casiotone keyboards, drum machines and analogue synths and just started writing.”

From the sultry ache of opener ‘Bloodline’ (a nod to Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ “about not picking up the bad habits of the generation before you”, says Mathé), to the Pharrell Williams-inspired urban crunch of ‘Turbine’, all the way to ‘The Load’ (written when Mathé was indulging in his love of Jurassic 5 era 90s hip hop), ‘Bloodlines’ is a brilliantly varied listen that pulls and paws at your heartstrings.

If there’s a gloriously loose, tenebrous feel to songs like the blue-eyed electro-soul ‘Pagliacco’, it might have something to do with the Londoner’s organic approach to song writing. “I just sit down with my dictaphone and make sense of what comes out afterwards. The best stuff usually comes when I’m hungover or not really thinking. The minute I try to be clever with words, it just sounds sh*t,” Mathé laughs. Instead, the album’s lyrics burn with a simple, poignant immediacy and Mathé sings them with touching, soulful grace.

Fandango is the follow up to The Phoenix Foundation’s 2011 album Buffalo. Having made their reputation in New Zealand, Buffalo, their fourth album and the first to be released in Europe, was a critical and commercial hit, and 2011 saw sold out shows across the UK, with a storming set at Glastonbury leading to their UK TV debut on ‘Later... with Jools Holland’.
Fandango, an expansive, ambitious and gloriously rich 78 minutes, was recorded at four studios over 15-months. From opener ‘Black Mould’ (perhaps the first motorik-influenced song about respiratory problems induced by inadequate building standards in New Zealand) to the 18 minute closing behemoth ‘Friendly Society’ (almost certainly the only psychedelic epic named after the Quaker movement and which features Neil Finn and Bella Union signed Lawrence Arabia on backing vocals), Fandango is un-coy about its lofty ambitions in an age of digital disposability.
 
The album draws on the band’s collective love of the rock canon (Dr John, Black Sabbath, The Carpenters, Can, Talk TalK, ELO, Television,), but also from some of music’s more obscure corners (Harmonia, The Clean, Aphrodite's Child, Erkin Koray, Baris Manco, Georges Zamfir, Hayao Miyazaki). Check the balladeering yacht rock of ‘Sideways Glance’, the end-of-the-party psych-folk of ‘Modern Rock’, and ‘The Captain’ a 3-minute slice of melancholic melodic joy featuring the vocal talents of co-frontman Lukasz Buda. ‘Thames Soup’ finds the band stretching the pop tropes of mid 70s FM radio to near breaking point while ‘Evolution Did’ channels Sly and Robbie production into an oblique rant on creationism.
 
The band recorded Fandango partially at Neil Finn’s Roundhead studios, partially at a barn in the depths of the New Zealand countryside (in the middle of winter, fire blazing in the recording studio, cardigans on) but mostly at the band’s own HQ, The Car Club in Wellington. The album was then mixed with the assistance of long-term associate Lee Prebble at The Surgery (earthquake warnings taped to the front door). Lee and the band mined the depths of vintage studio effects in a quest to create new aural chimera.
 
Let’s leave the final word on Fandango to co-frontman Samuel Flynn Scott:
 
"Damn the zeitgeist, I still rejoice in the pan-sexual opulence of a double gate-fold vinyl album. Honestly, I'm thoroughly satisfied that we have made 80 minutes of tripped-out pop oddities that pays absolutely no attention to the short form game of contemporary music. This is Test Match music - maybe it's prog or psyche-folk - whatever it is, it's music that we thought about a lot, worked on a lot and cared about in the minutiae."

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Phoenix Foundation stretch out in a glorious way. Deep and lush!

TRACK LISTING

CD Tracklisting:
A1. Black Mould
A2. Modern Rock
A3. The Captain
A4. Thames Soup
A5. Evolution Did
A6. Inside Me Dead
A7. Corale

B1. Supernatural
B2. Walls
B3. Morning Riff
B4. Sideways Glance
B5. Friendly Society

LP Tracklisting:
A1. Black Mould
A2. Modern Rock
A3. The Captain
A4. Thames Soup

B1. Evolution Did
B2. Inside Me Dead
B3. Corale

C1. Supernatural
C2. Walls
C3. Morning Riff
C4. Sideways Glance

D1. Friendly Society

Amelia Rivas and Christian Pinchbeck aka Elephant.

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

When The Ruby Suns’ main mover Ryan McPhun alighted in Oslo, Norway in the winter of 2010, he knew he’d found an artistic haven. Recently split from his long-term girlfriend and bandmate, on holiday from his adopted home of New Zealand, McPhun was ready for something new.

He’d always been a musical wayfarer, collecting sounds and styles from his travels around the globe and depositing influences and ephemera into three knockout Ruby Suns albums (2006’s ‘The Ruby Suns’, 2008’s ‘Sea Lion’ and 2010’s ‘Fight Softly’). In Scandinavia - amidst its icy architecture and sky-high fjords, not to mention the indomitable gloss-pop that’s the region’s leading export - he discovered the inspiration for this album.

The story of ‘Christopher’ mirrors McPhun’s own coming of age: after a childhood spent in nerdy isolation, hiding away in his bedroom with his guitar while his older sister hosted high school ragers in their parents’ Ventura, CA home; after leaving home and becoming a citizen of the world; after disengaging from the relationship that defined most of his adult life, McPhun has stopped thinking so much and joined the party.

‘Rush’ sets the process in motion, but of all the songs on the album, ‘Jump In’ encapsulates a carpe diem MO - “When you reach the end of the world,” McPhun sings in his tender falsetto, “don't wanna have no regrets and no penitence.”

‘Christopher’s opening song, ‘Desert Of Pop’ - recorded at a friend’s home studio in Oslo, floating on Nord modular synths and ecstatic dancefloor energy - details McPhun’s inebriated encounter with Robyn backstage at a music festival in Cologne, Germany. “Flower among the leaves is what you are,” he sings, his sheepish grin practically bursting out of your speakers, “cold glass of water in the desert of pop.”

Three albums into their career, Manchester’s Dutch Uncles - a group who pitched their tents firmly in pop’s leftfield with their eponymous first album, before releasing their Memphis Industries debut ‘Cadenza’ in 2011 - have made another huge step forward with ‘Out Of Touch In The Wild’.

This is a refined version of Dutch Uncles doing what they do best - making labyrinthine pop of Escher-like complexity and crystal clarity.

“Coming from the generation of bookish Manchester bands striving to throw off Northern Indie’s boorish image, Dutch Uncles look set to graduate at the top of the class” - NME

“The Manchester band returns with a refreshingly intellectual approach to merging guitar-based indiepop with electronic dance” - The Independent

“Dissonant, xylophone-pocked electro-pop - sublime” - The Sunday Times

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Excellent. By far their best record. Watch out Field Music, Dutch Uncles are coming!

Ryan says: The local lads are back with their third album & it's an incredible one! Clever math-pop with intricate, intertwining melodies underneath solid indie-pop songs and intelligent rhythms.

The Scantharies are a new band put together by Anglo Greek musician and producer Andy Dragazis, the artist formerly known as Blue States, who released albums on Memphis Industries and XL Recordings.

Dragazis, who splits his time between London and the Greek island of Evia, came up with the idea of an album influenced by the Greek garage rock scene of the 60s and 70s whilst driving to buy cigarettes with his uncle listening to his old compilation tapes, an eclectic mix of old Greek bands such as The Persons, The Forminx and Aphrodites’ Child, traditional Greek Rebetiko music of composers like Stavros Xarhakos and the mainstream instrumental guitar workings of The Ventures.

The album is an imagined ‘best of’ compilation of a band called The Scantharies, who he imagined bestrode the Greek music scene from the late 60s through to the end of the 70s.

Dreams Island is the island famously visited by The Beatles in the late 60s with their ‘fixer’ Magic Alex. Dragazis imagines that this visit inspired four local Eretrians to start a band called The Scantharies, a play on the Greek word for beetle. The band would morph from a simple guitar led instrumental garage group into a more widescreen and experimental ensemble absorbing more diverse musical influences, becoming increasingly religiously obsessed, before ultimately dissolving in acrimony, overdoses and obscurity.

The fourth studio album from Sweden’s El Perro Del Mar, released on Memphis Industries.

The chiming cymbals, bewitching vocals and downtempo disco vibe of ‘Walk On By’ promise an album of spellbinding intro- and extrospection. Airy, translucent synths meld with languid, otherworldly sounds, making this album soft and hazy, but never forgettable.

From her early DIY releases on the Gothenburg scene - including collaborations with Jens Lekman - through to 2009’s ‘Love Is Not Pop’ album, and recent work with Lykke Li, Gruff Rhys and Chad Valley, El Perro Del Mar aka Sarah Assbring has woven sophisticated late night tales of love and loss. With Assbring returning to the producer’s chair, ‘Pale Fire’ is her most seductive work yet.

The Cornshed Sisters are Jennie, Cath, Liz and Marie.

Guitar pop, folk tales, protest songs, country music, piano ballads and gospel must have all gone into the same soup from which these women supped.

Although unified in their musical tastes, as songwriters and interpreters The Cornshed Sisters display a healthy disregard for unity of subject matter (reminiscent perhaps of Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell or Richard and Linda Thompson). On their debut album ‘Tell Tales’, the ladies tackle waterbabies (‘Tommy’), marriage, men in sequined suits (‘Dance At My Wedding’), gardening (‘If You Were Mine’), soothsayers (‘The Beekeeper’), making pies out of people (‘Pies For The Fair’) and the axis of love and bombs (‘Dresden’).

Drawing on a palette of vocals, assorted guitars, ukulele and piano they convey these ideas with sensitivity and humour. Their four distinctive yet sympathetic voices range far and wide, recalling the emotive tangles of The Band as often as the choral elegance of The Roches yet sung and arranged in their own distinctly English manner.

The Cornshed Sister's debut album ‘Tell Tales’ was recorded and co-produced with Peter Brewis at Field Music’s studio on the banks of the Wear with minimal overdubs, capturing the Sisters in all their dynamic glory.

We were all knocked out by the Frankie Rose and the Outs album from 2010 but are you ready for the new Frankie Rose? – her transformation into a wholly other kind of pop, the reverie and revelation of 'Interstellar', an album that floats free of its maker’s history.
 
So, out with the reverb of the Frankie Rose and the Outs, (and her previous bands) and in with something altogether more glittering and shivering. Interstellar is the confident swagger of a singer and auteur fully aware of how to build the simplest of pop moves into aching, full-blown melodramas, how to grab hold of an emotion and ride its darker waves.

Highlights include "Know Me" a gorgeous piece of widescreen pop, dreamy and driving at the same time and “Night Swim” whose clean, big hooks bring to mind the best of mid-80’s pop – The Smiths, New Order -- without sacrificing any of Frankie's unique melodic style.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Completely different from her super debut, but in its own way just as compelling. This is shoegazey, slightly wonky, deep 'n' doomy, romantic pop.

Field Music (a.k.a. Sunderland siblings Peter and David Brewis) release their hugely anticipated fourth album, 'Plumb', through Memphis Industries.

With 15 tracks crammed into 35 minutes, 'Plumb' remodels the modular, fragmented style of the first two Field Music albums; only now shot through with the surreal abstractions of 20th century film music from Bernstein to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory and with the off-beam funk and pristine synth-rock developed on the brothers' School of Language and The Week That Was albums.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Amazing album! A bit mathy and proggy but the difference with Field Music is it's always poppy! This record sounds like one enormous song with a thousand different parts, all perfectly slotted together like a crazy musical jigsaw. Unbelievable!

TRACK LISTING

1. Start The Day Right
2. It’s Okay To Change
3. Sorry Again, Mate
4. A New Town
5. Choosing Sides
6. A Prelude To Pilgrim Street
7. Guillotine
8. Who’ll Pay The Bills?
9. So Long Then
10. Is This The Picture?
11. From Hide And Seek To Heartache
12. How Many More Times?
13. Ce Soir
14. Just Like Everyone Else
15. (I Keep Thinking About) A New Thing