Think of Tired Hearts, the new album from rising, indie-pop trio BAILEN, as a highly charged electrical field. Opposite charges attract, similar charges repel, and the current is set in motion. On this, their second full-length album for Fantasy, the New York City based siblings, Daniel, David, and Julia Bailen heighten the musical tension, and deliver a dazzling set of songs that incisively navigates the space between the heart’s expectation and the head’s sober reality. A masterful follow-up to BAILEN’s accomplished debut, 2019’s Thrilled To Be Here, Tired Heartsbeats with empathy, vulnerability, and resolve.

Produced by Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee) and recorded at his home studio in Durham, North Carolina, Tired Hearts’ taut, synth-driven tracks are centered around BAILEN’s radiant harmonies and futuristic arrangements furthering the group’s exhilarating avant-pop evolution.

By way of example, the dopamine saturated “Nothing Left To Give,” and the high-wattage New Wave dance track “Call It Like It Is,” seem destined for playlisting greatness. The evocative “These Bones,” a touching parable of reconciliation and the alluring “Love You Blind,” connect with assured simplicity. Meanwhile, the title track’s dramatic sonics skillfully underscore an aching portrait of betrayal, the dreamy folk-ballad “Relic” recalls the best of early-period Bee Gees, and the stunning “BRCA” gracefully unties a complex knot of familial anxiety, guilt, and acceptance.

On Tired Hearts, their exquisite new album, BAILEN learns how to dream in the face of life’s uncertainty and in the process, moves forward aware, resilient, and hopeful.

TRACK LISTING

01. Tired Hearts
02. Nothing Left To Give
03. These Bones
04. Leave Me Wanting More
05. Here We Are Again
06. Call It Like It Is
07. Change Your Mind
08. Love You Blind
09. Relic
10. BRCA (Nothing Takes Me Down)
11. Shadows
12. Hiding 

Black Rainbows is a musical project inspired by the objects and artworks collected by Theaster Gates at the Stoney Island Arts Bank in Chicago. Situated at the Great Grand Crossing neighborhoods of Chicago's South Side, Stoney Island Arts Bank is a cathedral to Black Art, a curated collection of Black archives comprising books, sculpture, records, furniture and problematic objects from America's past. As well as being a site for archive, the Arts bank is also a place for convening. Bailey Rae attended The Black Artists Retreat there in 2017 and performed in the space.

Wide ranging in it's themes, Black Rainbows' subjects are drawn from encounters with objects in the Arts Bank. Taking us from the rock hewn churces of Ethiopia, to the journeys of Black Pioneers Westward, from Miss New York Transit Queen 1957, to how the sunset appears from Harriet Jacobs' loophole.

Black Rainbows explores Black femininity, Spell Work, Inner Space/Outer Space, time collapse and ancestors, the erasure Black childhood and music as a vessel for transcendence.

The project will be released in various iterations - live performances, books, visuals, lectures, exhibitions, and more.

Sonically, the album is a multi-genre mix of the progressive R&B, neo soul sound that will be familiar to fans but it also contains rock, jazz and electronic elements.

The album was produced by S.J. Brown and Corinne Bailey Rae.

TRACK LISTING

1. A Spell, A Prayer
2. Black Rainbows
3. Erasure
4. Earthlings
5. Red Horse
6. New York Transit Queen
7. He Will Follow You With His Eyes
8. Put It Down
9. Peach Velvet Sky
10. Before The Throne Of The Invisible God

Big Crown Records is proud to present Zero Grace, Liam Bailey’s sophomore album on the label. Following the success of 2020’s Ekundayo album, the tried and true chemistry of Bailey and producer Leon Michels (El Michels Affair) is on full display again as they take the sound they established and push it further. On Zero Grace they lean more into the bleeding heart singer-songwriter side of Liam. The result, much like Bailey himself, is impulsively honest without reserve.

Born and raised in Nottingham, England, the son of an English mother and 2nd generation Jamaican English father, Liam will admit his early childhood was fairly chaotic and fi­lled with "all the cliche racism that happens when people started mixing up in the '80s in England." Liam got his early influences from his mom’s record collection. Bob Marley and Dillinger, Stevie Wonder and The Supremes, The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix would eventually shape the singer/songwriter we know today. Fast-forward to 2005, Liam is in London performing at every open mic and acoustic night he could, hustling with hopes of landing a record deal. It was through this time that Liam fi­rst teamed up with Michels, musician/producer luminary, and the co-founder of Brooklyn's own Big Crown Records.

Liam flew out to New York and those fi­rst sessions together produced the now classic tunes “When Will They Learn” and “I’m Gonna Miss You” which still gets spins at Reggae spots around the globe and were co-signed by heavy hitters like David Rodigan & Don Letts.That first trip to NYC brought a lot of industry attention to Liam, including being noticed by a just-famous Amy Winehouse who heard one of Liam's apartment-made, lo-­ recordings, and liked what she heard. Regardless of the audio quality, Liam's particular sound shone through—all guitar, warm-rough and genuine soul.

Eventually Liam signed to Polydor and wound up bumping against the typical major label industry obstacles. They already had an idea of the Liam they wanted to make, promote, and push. With the typical large advance enticement, Liam did his best to trust that path. "Maybe I can make it work,' that's what you're thinking," Liam remembers, "but, you quickly fi­nd out that you can't."

Zero Grace is full of freedom and love, in fact, working with Leon Michels and Big Crown Records has encouraged Liam to be himself. On album opener “Holding On '' Bailey speaks to his observations & fears when looking out at the world in front of him and also to the dedication it has taken to get on the other side of his personal trials & tribulations. “Dance With Me" is an instantly infectious two-stepper that nods to those incredible soul records that were coming out of Jamaica during the early Reggae days.

Bailey steps into the dance with hopes of finding a new love and pulls us all out on the dance floor with him. “Disorder Starts At Home” is another close to the chest tune that addresses the dif­culties he struggles with from his early chaotic childhood and his progress in getting past them. "Mercy Tree" is a powerhouse of Reggae Rebel Music. Bailey addresses the racial tensions that plague humanity and encourages everyone to step up and do their part to help foster equality. What starts out as a declaration of injustice turns into a call for action and an inspiration for hope.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1 Holding On
2 Dumb
3 Sekkle Down
4 Boy
5 Dance With Me
6 Disorder Starts At Home
SIDE B
7 Mercy Tree
8 Sour Wine
9 Canary In The Coal Mine
10 Winter Is Within Thee
11 I Got No Answers
12 Light Up The Darkness

I Tried Words began with words, mostly words. Moriah Bailey laid the lyrics out on several pages. The words were crafted over many months with feedback from Bailey’s sister and input from the growing melodies and body of music that began to take shape around those words. The contributing musicians, Sarah Reid (violin), Ryan Robinson (percussion), and Ricky Tutaan (guitar), recorded their own parts and sent them to Bailey. The result is lush, intricate arrangements that complement a solid base of harp and vocals.

The album explores dualities: yes/no, future/past, darkness/light, giving/taking, masculinity/femininity, wants/needs. It is in part about Moriah Bailey’s struggle to learn healthy boundaries but also about the harmfulness, complexity, and entanglement of many social boundaries.

With I Tried Words, Bailey relies less on experimental sounds, and instead, lyrically focuses on her struggles to understand and make sense of definitions and expectations of femininity. It explores these themes through an intimate narrative of losing oneself in a relationship and struggling to find a way out of the relationship.

The album ends with a triumphant goodbye and joyous new beginning in “Not Staying”. She sings: “I contorted my body and stretched myself thin to form a bridge between now and when. So, as I'm gathering my strength to say goodbye, please quit saying I should've tried.”

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Wishful Thoughts
2. A Late Spring
3. The Downpour
4. So You Say…
SIDE B:
5. The Ocean LIfe
6. My Father’s Words
7. My Mother’s Words
8. Not Staying

Isolated at the rural fringe of Northern California, Bailey’s Nervous Kats took Shasta County by storm in the early ’60s. Combining surf, rock n’ roll, exotica, and R&B, the Kats were a teenage dream draped in Magnatone amplifiers and crisp white polo tees. Their self-titled—and only—LP came at the dead end of the band’s run, issued on Orville Simmons’ one-shot Emma imprint in 1965. The mid-century modern LP of your dreams.

TRACK LISTING

1. Surf Express
2. Cobra
3. First Love
4. Five Fingers Of Scotch
5. Chong
6. Pandora
7. Simba
8. Traveling Sam
9. I Don’t Know
10. Prophecy Of Love
11. Devil’s Run
12. Northwind

"Feels Like Home" is Jessica's fourth full length album, and is the most refined example of her musical vision to date. Jessica combines folk acoustic guitar, droning guitar, gossamer vocals and piano filgrees to create a lush, mysterious world. Beautiful stuff!

Kranky was a bit surprised earlier this year when Jessica Bailiff contacted them and asked they wanted to preview her new album for possible release. They had no idea she had even been working on an album, let alone had completed one, and they were rewarded with a listen to her most compelling album to date.

After being in Europe for 5 weeks as a touring member of Boduf Songs, Jessica Bailiff spent much of 2011, writing and recording At the Down-Turned Jagged Rim of the Sky in her spartan home studio. Sequestering herself through the hot summer months until finished, she then passed the tracks on to her friend Odd Nosdam for final mixing.
*Down-tuned, distorted bass guitar adds a new color to her palette, but familiar ones also come into play: fuzzed and delayed electric guitar, organ, piano, cello, and drums. Noisy pop-tinged love songs nestle slyly in a bed of off-kilter lullabies and dark, metallic waltzes.

No need to recycle descriptives like “lo-fi” or “hushed vocals” - these are spurious words. This is another intimate collection of songs recorded entirely by Jessica at home, in a room next to where she sleeps. If you listen carefully, you might hear her dreaming.

TRACK LISTING

01 Your Ghost Is Not Enough 
02 Take Me To The Sun 
03 Sanguine 
04 If You Say It 
05 Violets & Roses 
06 This Is Real
07 Goodnight 
08 Slowly 
09 Firefly

After her first two highly acclaimed albums recorded with Low, Jessica Bailiff's third album is a massive leap forward. The album has a much more acoustic focus than her previous two, with beautiful ambient interludes, violin, piano, tin whistle, smeary guitars and even sitar.

"Laughing Boy", the second solo album from Matteah Baim, was recorded in Chicago, where it was produced, arranged, and mixed by Baim with engineer Jamie Carter. Expanding on the sounds hinted at with her previous band, Metallic Falcons, and her first solo record, "Death of The Sun", Baim has created her most lush and beautiful recordings yet with "Laughing Boy". Matteah Baim was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1996, at the age of 17, she moved to California to study painting and drawing at the San Francisco Art Institute. After graduating, Baim moved to New York where she met Sierra Casady. In 2005, the duo began to write music together and formed the 'soft metal' Metallic Falcons. Voodoo Eros released their first record, "Desert Doughnuts", in 2006, recorded in Brooklyn, New Mexico, and Chicago, with performances by Antony, Devendra Banhart, Jana Hunter, and Greg Rogove. After the Metallic Falcons disbanded, Baim moved to Los Angeles and began writing and recording material (both at her Venice Beach home and at Chicago's CarterCo studio) for "Death Of The Sun". She spent the next two years touring and writing material for "Laughing Boy", working on music for several films, and exhibiting drawings.

All too often, rare records suck ass. Yeah they're rare, and only wotzizname from wherever the fuck has a copy, but they tend to be average variations of well known jams, with their scarcity merely a novelty.

But then there are records like this, popping up out of nowhere only to blow your musically obsessed mind! From a quick scan of the centre label, you'd be forgiven for thinking this is your standard Chicago acid track, desireable only for the posibility of a few motivational spoken word cuts. When you whack the platter on the player however, you experience something very different indeed. A spiritual journey through cosmic keys and subtle percussion, which vibrates at your very core, enriching your soul with every passing moment.

Frustrated at her students' lack of cultural awareness, Miami-Dade public school teacher Dr Mary Sullivan Bain recorded ‘Do You Know Black History’ in 1985, self releasing it as a single for educational purposes. Original copies didn't make it much much further than Florida’s public school libraries and the record has been shrouded in mystery up until now. Produced with no label constraints, this cross-genre grail sits comfortably in many boxes... 808’s, bass synths, deep chords, live percussion and effects dubbed into the mix. The production leans towards the electronic diy framework that informed the local sound on the Miami south side. The vocal side offers an inspirational account of Black history, full of passion and pain, while the instrumental side strolls through outer space and Ibizan sunset, sounding exactly like the kind of sublime ambient cut you'd find on a battered old Café del Mar. Reissued officially for the first time ever by Backatcha, this is a total one of a kind.

TRACK LISTING

A. Do You Know Black History
B. Do You Know Black History (Instrumental)

With a musical timeline dating back to her early childhood, Laura Baird is an exceptionally talented multiinstrumentalist and singer-songwriter, best known for her projects with her sister, Meg, as The Baird Sisters, and guitarist Glenn Jones. Baird’s own sound stems from the Appalachian folk tradition, and she connects to it via family lineage—her great-great uncle I.G. Greer’s folk recordings for the Library of Congress are a large influence. Also woven in are classical composers like Bach and Satie, and modern day musicians such as Opal and Yo La Tengo.

With this debut solo album, I Wish I Were A Sparrow, Baird plays odes to the traditions from which she learned, combining Appalachian balladry and the roughness of old field recordings, but there is also a dose of dreaminess and solitude that captures sleepy central New Jersey. This is where she departs from tradition, leaving the communal origins of folk music to capture the singular self. The lyrics also present an amalgam of old and new, with half of the songs, including “Dreadful Wind and Rain” and “Pretty Polly,” being passed down from the folk tradition, and the other half, including “Wind Wind “and “Love Song From The Earth To The Moon,” coming from Baird’s own hand. While the most salient part of her previous Baird Sisters project was the melding of familial voices and various instruments, Baird’s solo effort is centered around the combination of her virtuosic banjo playing and prominent but airy vocals. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It seems now that winter is drawing in, the record labels think we all like to put a blanket on, have the fire blazing and listen to some lovely folk music. Now that I mention it, it sounds lovely, and even moreso if Laura Baird can be the music in question. Not too frantic, but driven and melodic plucking banjoes flicker over pulled strings and Baird's haunting vocals.

TRACK LISTING

1. Wind, Wind
2. Dreadful Wind And Rain
3. Cuckoo
4. Love Song From The Earth To The Moon
5. Pretty Saro
6. Bats
7. Did You Come Here Alone?
8. Pretty Polly
9. Hay In The Wagon
10. Home Is Were You Are
11. Poor Orphan Child
12. Twin Sisters

Meg Baird’s songs are rarely made up of tidy stories. In fact, for Meg, mystery itself is often the medium. With ‘Furling’, Meg’s fourth album under her own name, she explores the breadth of her musical fascinations and the environments around them - the edges of memory, daydreams spanning years, loose ends, loss, divergent paths, and secret conversations under stars. ‘Furling’ moves through these varied spaces with the slippery, misty cohesiveness of a dream - guided by an ageless, stirring voice that remains singular and unmistakable.

Since co-founding the beguiling and beautiful Espers in the mid-aughts amid Philadelphia’s fertile underground music community, Meg’s solo recordings have constituted just a fraction of her work.

Her first solo LP, the disarmingly out-of-time ‘Dear Companion’ (2007), saw her carve a quiet, sunlit space away from the flickering swirl of Espers. Since her last solo releases, ‘Seasons on Earth’ (2011) and ‘Don’t Weigh Down the Light’ (2015), Meg has lent thunderous drumming, lead vocal, and poetry to Heron Oblivion (Sub Pop) on an album that garnered praise from the New York Times and made Mojo’s Top Ten Albums Of 2016 list. She collaborated with harpist Mary Lattimore on the mesmerizingly hazy ‘Ghost Forests’ (2018). She’s played drums with Philadelphia scuzz-punks Watery Love (In The Red, Richie Records) and explored her deep familial folk roots in the Baird Sisters (Grapefruit Records). She also contributed her vocal arrangements to albums from Sharon Van Etten, Kurt Vile, Will Oldham and Steve Gunn, and toured with Angel Olson, Dinosaur Jr., Bill Callahan, Thurston Moore and Bert Jansch, among others.

Yet ‘Furling’ is the album that most irreverently explores the span of her work and musical touchstones. It showcases her natural tether to 1960s English folk traditions. But it also reveals her deep love for soul balladry, the solitary musings of Flying Saucer Attack and Neil Young shackled to his piano deep in the foggy pre-dawn, dubby Bristol atmospherics, the melancholy memory collage of DJ Shadow’s ‘Endtroducing’, and the delicious, Saturday night promise of St. Etienne.

‘Furling’ was primarily recorded at Louder Studios by Tim Green (Bikini Kill, Nation of Ulysses, Melvins, Wooden Shjips). Additional piano and vocal recording were captured at Panoramic Studios in Stinson Beach, CA with Jason Quever (Papercuts). It was mastered in Brooklyn by Heba Kadry, who mixed Bjork’s ‘Utopia’ and mastered albums for Slowdive, Cass McCombs and Beach House.

For all its adornments, ‘Furling’ remains deeply intimate. The entire album was performed by Meg and her long-time collaborator, partner, and Heron Oblivion bandmate Charlie Saufley. While her prior solo work hinted at more expansive horizons, ‘Furling’ explores the idea of Meg Baird as a band much more freely. Venturing beyond the musical confines of fingerstyle guitar, she plays drums, mellotron, organs, synths, and vibraphone over her piano and guitar foundations. Her distinctive, simultaneously elegiac and uplifting vocals, meanwhile, connect surreal dream montages, graft sunshine sonics to swooning mediations on romantic solidarity in trying times, and weave odes to the simple gestures of friendship - and the loss of family and friends.

This rich sound world makes the songs a varied bunch: ‘Twelve Saints’ mates Pacific sunset ambience and Pink Floyd pastoral to a meditation on mortality and escape. The infectious and kinetic ‘Will You Follow Me Home’ contemplates hope and longing through the looking glass of a Jimmy Miller-era-Stones strut. And in the closing piece, ‘Wreathing Days’, language disintegrates over tone clusters that feel somewhere between falling and flying.

‘Wreathing Days’ also reveals much about Meg’s mastery of contrast - situating the dear and delicate adjacent to chaos. And while it’s true that some songs on ‘Furling’ grapple with humanity’s existential unknowns in stark terms, they primarily revel in the mysteries that hide in nature and humanity at their most ordinary. ‘Furling’ lives in the notion that whole universes of experience, enlightenment, elation and ecstasy can bloom in these corners.

TRACK LISTING

Ashes, Ashes
Star Hill Song
Ship Captains
Cross Bay
Twelve Saints
Unnamed Drives
The Saddest Verses
Will You Follow Me Home?
Wreathing Days

Beginning his career as a club DJ and disco producer in the early-70s in his native Boston, Arthur Baker moved to New York City in 1981 and in the summer of 1982 produced one of the genre-defining early hip-hop tracks "Planet Rock" by Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force. This began an illustrious career that has seen him work with artists including Bruce Springsteen, Diana Ross, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Al Green, Pet Shop Boys, Quincy Jones, New Order, New Edition, Hall & Oates, Neneh Cherry and Damon Albarn. Looking for the Perfect Beat will tell Arthur's unique and inspiring story in his own words and features unheard stories about many of the world's best and most successful musicial figures, which together form a portrait of a man who has been quietly influencing the sound of popular music for over fifty years.

Although Chet Baker and Bill Evans were both highly lyrical and introspective players who could have made a fabulous partnership, they only ever recorded together on a couple or so occasions. By the time the recordings here were made, Chet Baker had been a star for less than a decade and this wholly instrumental album presents him accompanied by other great jazz stars with whom he would also rarely play and record with again.

"Chet Baker's penultimate session for Riverside produced an all-star lineup to support him, including jazz heavyweights Pepper Adams, Bill Evans, and Kenny Burrell. Each of them makes important contributions to the session. A good place to hear Baker's special way with the horn is made even more attractive with the presence and contributions of top jazz artists." - ***** Dave Nathan, AllMusic

TRACK LISTING

Alone Together
How High The Moon
It Never Entered My Mind
'tis Autumn
I Talk To The Trees
If You Could See Me Now
September Song
You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To
Time On My Hands
You And The Night And The Music 
Thank Heaven For Little Girls

Craft Recordings reissue not one but four classic, remastered titles from legendary jazz artist Chet Baker. The albums comprise Baker’s entire output as a leader for the renowned jazz label Riverside - all recorded and released between 1958 and 1959: (Chet Baker Sings) It Could Happen to You, Chet Baker in New York, Chet and Chet Baker Plays the Best of Lerner and Loewe.

The recordings, which feature such icons as Bill Evans, Johnny Griffin and Kenny Burrell, have all been cut from their original analog master tapes by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio and pressed on 180-gram vinyl at RTI.

A superb 1988 quartet studio performance recorded just three months before Chet's death. Originally issued on the Norwegian label Hot Club Records and long out of print, this is the first time that this historic session appears worldwide on vinyl, including three alternate takes that were absent from the initial release.

Includes 12-page LP size booklet with previously unpublished photos from the actual sessions, plus specially prepared essays by the original producer Jon Larsen and music writer Brian Morton.

Chet Baker: trumpet (also vocal on 'How High The Moon)
Philip Catherine: guitar
Egil Kapstad: piano
Terje Venaas: bass

Studio Sysmo, Paris, February 17 & 18, 1988.

TRACK LISTING

Disc 1
Side 1
1. Skylark
2. If You Could See Me Now
3. The Bird From Kapingamarangi
4. How High The Moon
Side 2
1. Makin; Whoopee
2. The Ballad Of Buttersmile
3. Body And Soul
4. Alice In Wonderland

Disc 2
Side 1
1. Blamann, Blamann
2. Children's Waltz
3. Love For Sale
4. My Foolish Heart
Side 2
1. I Want A Little Girl
2. Body And Soul (alt,tk)
3. If You Could See Me Now (alt.tk)
4. Makin; Whoopee (alt.tk)

The complementary talents of Chet Baker (1929-1988), both as a trumpet player and as a singer, are now well known, and Will MacFarland's original liner notes for the 10- inch LP Chet Baker Sings, on which he compared Chet with Louis Armstrong, still seem quite appropriate. Both his trumpet and his voice are extensions of the same musical personality, and once you have become familiar with both facets of Baker, you expect to hear them both.

This album was initially issued in 1954 as a 10-inch Long Play containing eight songs. Its success soon led to it being reissued as a 12" LP, with the addition of material from later 1956 sessions. On all of them Chet is backed by Russ Freeman on piano, who was a member of the trumpeter's regular group at the time. This edition presents all the songs from the 12" LP plus one bonus track from the same period, 'Just Friends'.

TRACK LISTING

That Old Feeling
It's Always You
Like Someone In Love
My Ideal
I've Never Been In Love Before
My Buddy
Just Friends
But Not For Me
Time After Time
I Get Along Without You Very Well
My Funny Valentine
There Will Never Be Another You
The Thrill Is Gone
I Fall In Love Too Easily
Look For The Silver Lining

21st Century troubadour Hak Baker - following his critically acclaimed debut album 'World's End FM' - releases new EP 'Nostalgia Death Act I'. 'Nostalgia Death' is about looking to the future and "succeeding ourselves" rather than "tunneling into hubs shrouded in nostalgia... it’s dangerous, moreish and comfortable." Do old habits really die young?

TRACK LISTING

1. No Control!
2. Nameless
3. Boys X Girls
4. Blender
5. Nostalgia Death
6. Everybody's Dyin’
7. Prometheus (Live)
8. LUVLY
9. Poems

The debut album from London's finest, Hak Baker - 'Worlds End FM' represents the war in Hak's mind, the culture war on the streets of London and the individual battles of his community - from his mother to his brother to his best friends. In a year that will see Hak perform alongside Pete Doherty at The Royal Albert Hall, Jamie T at Finsbury Park & his own headline UK & Germany tours, the campaign has already garnered support from Rolling Stone, NME, Clara Amfo, Steve Lamacq, Jamz Supernova & partnerships with Dr Martens, Fred Perry, Fender, FIFA & Hugo Boss to name a few. Previous highlights include performing on Later with Jools, Glastonbury 2022 (Other Stage), the first artist ever to play at the BBC's new Eastbank site, selling out two Village Underground shows & been championed by the likes of Clara Amfo, Jack Saunders, Sian Eleri, Tom Ravenscroft, Jo Whiley, Huw Stephens & Charlie Sloth.

TRACK LISTING

1. World’s End FM
2. DOOLALLY
3. Windrush Baby
4. Collateral Cause
5. Bricks In The Wall
6. Full On
7. Babylon Must Fall (MC Grindah Skit)
8. I Don't Know
9. Run
10. Telephones 4 Eyes
11. Watford’s Burning (Connie Constance Skit)
12. Brotherhood
13. Luv U Bro (Big Zees Skit)
14. Dying To Live
15. Almost Lost London
16. The End Of The World 

Recorded in the early 2000s, Bakr's music fuses the pulse of Libyan pop with R&B and hip-hop influences, bringing the energy of Benghazi to the dance floors of New York in the early 2000s. Cheb Bakr's sound is a unique blend of styles that captures the essence of two worlds and includes production and vocals by Ahmed Ben Ali.

Our journey with Cheb Bakr's music began when Yousef Alhoush, whose father Najib Alhoush led The Free Music from Libya, generously lent us boxes of cassettes to digitize. With the help of a journalist traveling from Tripoli to Cairo, we brought the tapes and a high-quality deck to Egypt. For three days in a hotel room on Zamalek island in Cairo, we sifted through nearly 100 tapes, finally landing on several from Cheb Bakr that dated back to the late 1990s and early 2000s. His albums stood out for their fresh, genre-defying sound—Bakr's vocals flowed effortlessly over R&B and hip-hop beats with touches of jungle and drum and bass percussion, creating a fusion that crossed cultural and musical boundaries.

Returning to Berlin, we took a deeper dive into the digitized tapes, identifying bands, singers, and producers that excited us. In the process, we noticed familiar rap verses on a few of Bakr's tracks—verses by none other than Ahmed Ben Ali, who was about to release an album with Habibi Funk. When we asked Ahmed about his connection with Bakr, he explained that they'd collaborated closely at Jamaica Studios in Benghazi, with Ahmed even producing some of Bakr's songs.

Despite having lost touch for years, Ahmed helped us reconnect with Cheb Bakr through mutual friends. Their reunion took place in Bakr's living room, where we joined them on a video call to discuss Bakr's career and his influences. He explained how he sought to reinterpret eastern Libyan folk sounds for a new generation, blending them with contemporary genres.

This 45 marks the beginning of our work with Cheb Bakr, offering a glimpse into his unique musical style, with a full album to follow at a later date. The release includes two standout tracks that showcase Bakr's dynamic range. Side A features "Samh Almea'ad," a reinterpretation of a 2003 New York classic with Bakr's signature spin. Since our first listen in that Cairo hotel room, it's been played at every Habibi Funk set without exception. Side B, produced by Ahmed Ben Ali, features "Rjana Lamta," a track that hints at American influences alongside a nod to Ahmed's "Dameek Majeb." Bakr's artistry ties these contrasting elements into an original, dancefloor-ready track that remains as captivating today as it was two decades ago. As always, this 7" release comes with a booklet detailing some of the Cheb Bakr story. Samh Almea'ad will be out on vinyl December 6th.

Licensing info: These songs were licensed from Cheb Bakr. We pay the licensing partner 50% of the profits of this release. Only project related costs are deductible from the gross income, research and travel costs come out of our own share. Publishing was not included in our agreement (We feel it's important to be transparent about these deals, therefore we will include these infos in all future releases).

TRACK LISTING

1. Samh Almea'ad
2. Rjana Lamta

A band who are at the forefront of Rio de Janeiro's artistic renaissance, they channel influences of Brazilian 60s Tropicália, 70s psychedelia and MPB to create a nostalgic, yet joyfully, avant-garde sound. The band is comprised of four distinct characters, each one an incredible talent in their own right and each with impressive credentials in the Brazilian Independent music scene. Central to the resurgent Rio de Janeiro musical community, the quartet of Dora Morelenbaum, Julia Mestre, Lucas Nunes and Zé Ibarra thrive in a group dynamic. They formed Bala Desejo to play collaboratively for a festival date in 2021, but when that show became a victim of pandemic shutdowns the idea for an album project materialised.

'Sim Sim Sim', which translates into English as 'Yes Yes Yes', weaves through a fusion of genres, taking twists and turns as it progresses. There is Tropicália, MPB, rock, samba-canção soul-funk and reggae in the mix. It possesses many of the qualities of a classic album from Brazilian music's golden era of the 60s and 70s, but also manages to sound very now, which is not an easy task to pull off. As solo musicians, they have worked and collaborated with Brazilian icons Gal Costa, Caetano Veloso and Milton Nascimento to name but a few. Bala Desejo feels like a natural extension of what came before, taking the baton from these luminaries, adding their unique spin and moving the sound forward. When we first heard Bala Desejo, we were blown away. Their epic theatrical live shows leave audiences stunned and they are the band we had always been hoping to find. A modern- day Novos Baianos or Mutantes, but definitely not an imitation. They celebrate their influences, but are an innovative group, and consequently, they have created one of the finest records to come out of Brazil in recent years. A truly sensational debut!

TRACK LISTING

1. Embala Pra Viagem
2. Baile De Mascaras (Recarnaval)
3. Lua Comanche
4. Clama Floresta
5. Dourado Dourado
6. Nana Del Caballo Grande
7. Nesse Sofa
8. Lambe Lambe
9. Passarinha
10. Sim Sim Sim
11. Muito So
12. Cronografia (O Peixe)

Germany's premier proponents of handsome soft pop Balcony DC make a long overdue appearance in the good ship Piccadilly with gorgeous sophomore LP "Puma Pride". Taking a playful approach to their art, Chistoph Mü and Denny Thiele practise a particularly post-modern version of pop music, equally indebted to the sensual funk of Prince, slacker antics of Mac Demarco, lo-fi soul of Blood Orange and arch-vaporwave of Macintosh Plus.

Sounding like a glimpse of a future I want to live in, the eight cuts slink and shimmy through futuristic pop with a charming surprise around every corner. Syrupy beats and erogenous bass keep their own jaunty time in the rhythm section, lo-fi guitar licks burst out from beneath the dry-ice mist of synthesis and those falsetto vocals coo right into your ear - pillow talk for the valium generation. Currently getting maximum approval ratings from Ryan Horsebeach, Mine, Millie and yours truly (Patch), this is deeply dope folks.

TRACK LISTING

A1. How To Deal With Love
A2. Appetite
A3. Eglantine
A4. OK
B1. How Could I Not?
B2. Mirror
B3. Bonfire 2009
B4. Humming Bird

One of the more unexpected - if worthwhile - by products of the 21st-century underground American folk revival is a renewed interest in solo acoustic guitar music. Spare, haunting, pastoral sounds have struck a new chord, and the names John Fahey and Takoma are hip again. Matt Baldwin, raised in California's rustic Pacific Grove, educated in the alternative mecca of Berkeley, sits in the center of this quiet, swirling scene. He is the visionary wildcard of today's solo guitar music, the ambitious fever dreamer, the serpent in the grass. Unlike many of his peers, he looks beyond the traditions of Fahey (whom he calls 'a teacher', not a god), bringing portentous and progressive elements into his music, alongside a dreamy country lilt. He covers krautrock legends Neu! ("Weissensee") and metal Vikings Judas Priest ("Winter"), and culls inspiration from prog heroes yes on the closing epic "Rainbow". His music comes on like a creeping moss, verdant but threatening, comforting yet unsettling.

A classic Vee-Jay side from 1965 that originally sneaked out on the Bay Area Wee label. The original goes for around £100, the second Wee press for £75, while the Vee-Jay version is 50 quid a throw. That said, copies are few and far between these days.

Featuring an upbeat, brass-powered Temptationslike harmony with a call and response, a deep sax wail and a piano motif pushing it forward towards a glorious middle eight that breaks into a Gospel roll out.

Powered by Ric-Tic-like drum rolls; a euphoric soulful classic split into two essential parts.

The Ballads were a four-piece from Oakland, across the bridge from San Francisco, featuring Freddie Hughes, who would later sign to Wand. The band themselves almost made it, charting in 1968 with the Willie Hutch-produced ‘God Bless Our Love’ but this earlier recording is the business.

Both sides remastered from the original sound source.

TRACK LISTING

I Can’t See Your Love (For The Tears In My Eyes) Pt.1
I Can’t See Your Love (For The Tears In My Eyes) Pt.2

A$AB Mob affiliate Marty Baller, started his career out as A$AP Ferg’s hype man, before becoming a serious solo artistic his own right. The last year and a half has seen Baller steadily building up to the release of ‘Baller Nation’ with co signs from A$AP Mob and support tours with the likes of Future. ‘Baller Nation’ is Marty’s second mixtape, following 2016’s ‘Marty G Raw.’ The concise 10 track tape sees Marty upping the stakes, with confident lyrics, big trap beats and an all start features list including A$AP FERG, Rich The Kid, Rob $tone and Smooky Margeilaa. Omerta Inc will be bringing Marty Baller’s ‘Baller Nation’ to vinyl for the very first time, to celebrate the 1st anniversary of the albums original release. Limited to 150 copies pressed onto 180gm cocaine white vinyl. Each copy will be individually hand numbered in gold pen and come housed in a high quality matte finish sleeve with original artwork

TRACK LISTING

1. First Quarter
2. Gladys Knight (ft 5Am & Reese LAFLARE)
3. Do My Thing (ft Madein-TYO)
4. I'm On The Moon
5. Slick Talk (ft Rob $tone)
6. Like Mike (ft A$AP Ferg, SMOOKY Margielaa & Aexyz)
7. Send Em My Way (ft A$AP Ferg)
8. Rambo (ft Rich The Kid)
9. Nothing Wasted
10. Throw The Money Away

'Patterns' is the 15-song follow-up to Kelsea Ballerini’s GRAMMY-nominated 'Rolling Up The Welcome Mat'. Again teaming with producer/songwriter Alysa Vanderheym, the 30-year-old multiple Country Music Association award winner has delivered a song cycle that embodies the next chapter in a life completely embraced. Beyond her 'Cowboys Cry Too' duet with Alternative sensation Noah Kahan, she explores what it means to move on, fall in love, stay in love, hate love, exhale love - and face her own patterns, good and bad.

Written with Vanderheym, Songwriter Hall of Fame inductee Hillary Lindsey, Songwriter of the Year GRAMMY nominee Jessie Jo Dillon and Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild, Welcome Mat’s vulnerable intimacy is met with some of the most intoxicating melodies that reach across genres. Atmospheric, sunny, rhythmic and whispered, 'Patterns' balances self-discovery with an album one can blissfully surrender to.

TRACK LISTING

Tracklist TBC:
1. Track 1
2. Sorry Mom
3. Track 3
4. Track 4
5. Track 5
6. Track 6
7. Track 7
8. Track 8
9. Track 9
10. Track 10
11. Track 11
12. Cowboys Cry Too (with Noah Kahan)
13. Track 13
14. Track 14
15. Track 15

Leisure Rodeo is the new album from Scott Ballew, following up 2021’s surprise debut Talking to Mountains. Born in Austin in the early 80’s Ballew eventually drifted out west to California, where he made a name for himself as a film director. At the age of 30 he ended up back in Austin, got sober, picked up the guitar and started writing songs. Most of those songs ended up on Ballew’s debut, but he kept writing and refining his craft, eventually ending up with ten tracks for a follow up album. Picking up where he left off, Leisure Rodeo features world-weary vignettes in the vein of Townes Van Zandt and Jerry Jeff Walker set to rustic country-folk arrangements. Frequent collaborators Jesse Woods, Shane Renfro (RF Shannon), Jesse Siebenberg, and Todd Hannigan are back, joined by special guest appearances from Ryan Bingham on “Border Kid” and Erika Wennerstrom (The Heartless Bastards) on “Convenience Store World”. Highly anticipated new album from Scott Ballew, featuring contributions from Ryan Bingham, Erika Wennerstrom (The Heartless Bastards), Jesse Woods, and Shane Renfro (RF Shannon). 

At the start of 2024, Acid Jazz announced a long-term collaboration with cult club troupe The Ballistic Brothers.

After a sell-out 7” of the classic ‘Blacker’, and a series of digital releases, came the reissued ‘London Hooligan Soul’ in April.

Originally consisting of Ashley Beedle, Rocky and Diesel of X-Press 2, with contributions from keyboard player Uschi Classen - David Hill of Nuphonic would join for Volume 2 - each member has had storied roles in UK club music.

The Ballistic Brothers are a unique product of time and place. A place where a generation of clubbers sought the many routes and possibilities of the burgeoning London dance scene.

’ The Ballistic Brothers vs. The Eccentric Afros (Vol. 1)’, originally released on the ‘On Delancy Street’ label in 1994 was a club smash. It sat somewhere between a mini album and a 12” EP. The reality is - a lot like 'London Hooligan Soul' - it was its own thing.

For the first time, it will be presented in a full-spine outer sleeve, with a beautiful recreation of the original graphics by The Unknown, and the music restored and remastered from the original master DATs.

TRACK LISTING

1. Nyx 2
2. Gangstalene
3. Ushi’s Groove
4. And It Goes Like
This
5. MCF 2870
6. Blacker
7. Valley Of The Afro
Temple
8. Grover’s Return

Comprising of Darren Rock, Darren House and Ashley Beadle (of XPress 2), alongside David Hill and Uschi Classen, they combined their talents on a series of mysterious vinyl releases in the heady days of the London club scene. If you were part of a clubbing tribe in the early/mid ‘90s - any clubbing tribe - you will have danced to the Ballistic Brothers.

TRACK LISTING

1. Portobello Café
2. Come On
3. Soho Cab Ride
4. I’ll Fly Away
5. Jah Jah Call You
6. Mark’s Lude
7. I Don’t Know
8. Sister Song
9. A Beautiful Space
10. Steppin’ Into Eden
11. Peckings
12. Uschi’s Lament

The definitive biography of Shane MacGowan, fully updated to include Shane's final months and the response to his passing. Punk protagonist, legendary drinker, Irish musical icon. The complete and extraordinary journey of the Pogues' notorious frontman from outcast to national treasure.

A Furious Devotion vividly recounts the experiences that shaped the greatest songwriter of his generation, including the formative trips to his mother's homestead in Tipperary and the explosion of punk which changed his life. As well as exclusive interviews with Shane himself, author Richard Balls has secured contributions from his wife and family, and people who have never spoken publicly about Shane before: close associates, former girlfriends and the English teacher who first spotted his literary gift. Nick Cave, Aidan Gillen, Cillian Murphy, Christy Moore, Sinead O'Connor and Dermot O'Leary are on the rollcall of those paying tribute to the gifted songwriter and poet.

This frank and extensive biography includes many previously unseen personal photographs.

Bella Union warmly introduce us to their latest star signing, Belgian MC, producer and musician Baloji. His music stands at the crossroads of African music, traditional and afro-american music (soul, funk, jazz) discovered through the culture of sampling and electronic music (trance, deep house) which has its roots in part in the region of Belgium where Baloji grew up. Baloji means “man of science” in Swahili, but during the colonial period, that meaning shifted to “man of the occult sciences and sorcery”. By placing his resilience at the centre of his work, Baloji reconciles all these influences to enrich his projects. Baloji is a poet, composer-lyricist, scriptwriter, actor and performer, video artist and stylist, and '137 Avenue Kaniama' is his most complete release to date.

TRACK LISTING

1 Glossine (Zombie)
2 L'hiver Indien - Ghetto Mirador
3 Bipolaire - Les Noir
4 Ensemble (Wesh)
5 Spotlight
6 Soleil De Volt
7 Ciel D'encre
8 Peau De Chagrin - Bleu De Nuit
9 L'art De La Fugue - Le Vide
10 Passat & Bovary
11 La Derrière Pluie - Inconnu à Cette Adresse
12 Kongaulois
13 Tropisme - Start-up
14 Tanganyika

Fourth album from the acclaimed Belgian quintet.

‘Fever’ follows the band’s self-imposed hiatus, a break that saw frontmen and writing partners Jinte Deprez and Maarten Devoldere pursuing different individual interests from both a personal and creative perspective that has ultimately led the band to fashion their most cohesive album to date.

On reconvening the band had no plans, just a simple desire to better their previous works and to further the band’s story. Both primary songwriters agreed on a less serious vision leaning towards a looser, refreshed sound - less melancholic but retaining their unerring ability to create a hookladen armoury.

TRACK LISTING

Fever
Changes
Wrong Faces
Whatchu Doin’
Phone Number
Entertainment
I’m Never Gonna Let You
Down Again
Grapefruit
Wrong Vibration
Roller Coaster
You’re So Real

Balthazar are the brainchild of songwriters Maarten Devoldere and Jinte Deprez. Meeting as teenage buskers, the two embarked on a whirlwind writing partnership that led to the quick formation of the band and initial acclaim in mainland Europe. Resisting the temptation to cash in on that wave of interest, Balthazar took the best part of five years to record their debut album, experimenting with different genres and approaches until they were sure that they had the sound they were looking for.

With ‘Rats’, that sound has been honed to a focus on melody and subtlety, avoiding the current fashion for bombast to create songs that burst forth in horns or sweep by on strings, underpinned with delicate rhythms that draw on both the pair’s love of the work of Serge Gainsbourg and Leonard Cohen and the hip hop production of the likes of Dangermouse.

TRACK LISTING

Oldest Of Sisters
Sinking Ship
Later
Joker's Son
The Man Who Owns The
Place
Lion’s Mouth (Daniel)
Do Not Claim Them
Anymore
Listen Up
Any Suggestion
Sides

Belgium’s sophisticated yet sometimes worldweary indie superstars return with their fifth album and follow up to 2019’s ‘Fever’.

Further pushing on from ‘Fever’’s shift into more soulful waters, ‘Sand’ presents a more cohesive body of work that flirts with a soulful indie vibe and an at times almost slow disco undercurrent, the two singles ‘Losers’ and ‘On A Roll’ perfectly capturing the mood.

Back when you could go to gigs the band were at the point where they were selling out the Scala in London and commanding decent size crowds regionally (especially Brighton, Bristol, Manchester and Glasgow).

TRACK LISTING

Moment
Losers
On A Roll
I Want You
You Won’t Come Around
Linger On
Hourglass
Passing Through
Leaving Antwerp
Halfway
Powerless

After spending a few nights in a beautiful old castle near Brussels at the start of 2021 (following lockdown), Belgian art-poppers Balthazar returned from their stay with Sand Castle Tapes, a documentary and live concert filmed by Heleen Declercq and co-produced with HolyShit sessions. They released Sand Castle Tapes as a digital EP on 24th September 2021, featuring 10 songs from the film; 8 songs reworked from the album and two jams. On 29th April 2022, Balthazar are releasing Sand Castle Tapes for the first time in physical format as a single LP.

The band say of the stay: “You only get to fully understand an album when you start playing it together, the relaxed circumstances lead to a whole other way of interpreting the songs than we would have for a live show. It’s refreshing, it’s very human.” 

TRACK LISTING

1. On A Roll (Sand Castle Tapes Version)
2. Powerless (Sand Castle Tapes Version)
3. Jam 1 (Sand Castle Tapes Version)
4. Moment (Sand Castle Tapes Version)
5. You Won’t Come Around (Sand Castle Tapes Version)
6. Linger On (Sand Castle Tapes Version)
7. Jam 2 (Sand Castle Tapes Version)
8. Losers (Sand Castle Tapes Version)
9. Halfway (Sand Castle Tapes Version)
10. I Want You (Sand Castle Tapes Version)

Afrika Bambaataa & Soul Sonic Force “Planet Rock” 12-inch re-issue on glow-in-the-dark vinyl (Limited edition of 1982 copies) B-Boy anthem from 1982 lights up any dancefloor…literally! First time ever on glow-in-the-dark vinyl! Fresh off Bambaataa’s historic donation of his vinyl collection to the Cornell University Hip-Hop Collection and the Fall 2014 “Renegades of Rhythm” tour by DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist celebrating his unparalleled contribution to hip-hop, Get On Down celebrates the song for which the Godfather of Hip-Hop is best known: 1982’s “Planet Rock,” a Kraftwerk-meets-Bronx-B-Boy anthem. Renowned the world over as a never-fail floor-filler, this new 12-inch pressing of the single is pressed on glow-in-the-dark vinyl for the first time ever. Although Bambaataa may have gotten top-billing on the release, it was a team effort, with crucial contributions by a team including DJ Jazzy Jay, Afrika Islam, Arthur Baker, John Robie, a Roland TR-808 drum machine (aka Planet Patrol) and of course MCs Mr. Biggs, G.L.O.B.E. and Pow Wow. This edition is housed in a clear, custom-embossed Get On Down poly-bag to let the glow show through.

Produced by Graham Sutton (These New Puritans, Bark Psychosis), 'Birthmarks' is New York band Bambara's ffth, and best, studio album.

A wild, musically adventurous suite of songs that follows a host of lost characters caught in a multi-generational cycle of love, violence and rebirth.

TRACK LISTING

1. Hiss
2. Letters From Sing Sing
3. Face Of Love
4. Pray To Me
5. Holy Bones
6. Elena's Dream
7. Because You Asked
8. Dive Shrine
9. Smoke
10. Loretta

DREAMVIOLENCE is BAMBARA’s full-length follow-up to their acclaimed debut EP Dog Ear Days (2010). After playing countless deafening shows in their hometown of Athens, touring the US in sweaty house shows and sharing bills with Iceage, Grimes, Liturgy, A Place to Bury Strangers, and Parts and Labor, BAMBARA decided to leave their beloved Athens and move to a basement apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn for a change. Here they practiced, slept and recorded for the majority of 2012. Following the release of a Kate Bush cover and a 10 minute improv noise EP RINGS early in the year, BAMBARA began to work on DREAMVIOLENCE.

With a minimal recording set-up and little sunlight, the band was able to completely capture the dark, grimy, noisy sound they are known for while maintaining the lush beauty that glues it all together. Reid’s voice croons and snarls the fragmented images of the city. Blaze and William’s driving rhythm section plows and swings through the dirge of vocal noise with furious power. BAMBARA doesn’t want you to get comfortable inDREAMVIOLENCE. They prefer to send you through vortexes of haunting noise before you reach the dreamy euphoria waiting in the wreckage.

TRACK LISTING

1. All The Same
2. White Dresses
3. Bird Calls
4. Hawk Bones
5. Young Mother
6. Nail Polish
7. Train Daze
8. Bar
9. Divine Teeth
10. Z
11. Breaker
12. Blonde
13. Disappear

Upon ‘Swarm’’s 2016 release, Brooklyn-based Bambara had been honing their noise-rock brutalism since forming in Athens, Georgia in 2009. On ‘Swarm’, their second full-length, the band began to pull their approach into sharp focus, and the result was a foundational triumph.

After the pure noise experimentation of their 2013 debut, ‘Dreamviolence’, here the band began to develop many of their later trademarks. Marrying the maniacal ravings of The Birthday Party and the brutality of early Swans with the tangled roots-punk of The Gun Club, the spotlight started to fall on vocalist / guitarist Reid Bateh’s lyrics as well as the ‘Spaghetti western’ atmospherics that would come to the fore to such effect on later releases such as ‘Shadow On Everything’ and ‘Stray’.

For fans of Bambara’s visceral and pummelling performances, which led to extensive touring opportunities along rising star contemporaries such as Gilla Band, Algiers, and IDLES, before earning the band their own headlining slot on multiple international tours, ‘Swarm’ will serve as a sort of missing link. Now, for the first time ever, live-set favourites such as the brooding ‘An Ill Son’, the flawlessly dynamic ‘Black’, and the pop-snarled ‘All the Ugly Things’ can be listened to at a level of audio fidelity on par with the band’s later recordings.

Tiny Mix Tapes praised ‘Dreamviolence’, the band’s first LP, by saying that “complete, utter anguish has never sounded this good.” ‘Swarm’ made it sound even better. With these 12 songs, Bambara proved that sometimes the only way to confront a fucked-up world is to sink to its level. As Henry Rollins succinctly summed it up at the time, this is a “REALLY cool record.”

“‘Swarm’... is a beautifully dynamic nightmare.” – NPR

“Since 2008, Bambara have reined nigh-unintelligible noise into something more artfully restrained, but the wildness remains intact.” - Pitchfork

“Bambara hail from Athens, Georgia, famously home to REM and The B-52’s, but what they do is far noisier, angrier, scarier. They sound like a band always on the lookout for something bigger.” - The Quietus

“Bambara write chaotic songs held together with formless washes of noise and anxious vocal drones, crafting pallid but vibrant pieces that thrashed with... mutant energy.” - VICE

TRACK LISTING

Clearing Out The Weeds
Her Sister Touya
An Ill Son
Black
Like Waves
I Don’t Mind
Filled Up With Night
It’s Nothing
All The Ugly Things
I Can’t Recall
In Bars
As Her

BAMBOO (Nick Carlisle - keyboards, production, also of Peepholes / Katy & Nick) & Rachel Horwood (vocals, electric banjo, also of Trash Kit / Bas Jan) announce their third studio album "Daughters Of The Sky", on Upset The Rhythm.

The album was written and recorded over a two year period where ideas and arrangements were allowed to slow-cook and develop over time, in contrast with the last album "The Dragon Flies Away" which came together relatively quickly for the duo. The music comprises the usual (for Bamboo) mix of Horwood's flawlessly resonant folk cadence and Carlisle's pristine synth production, whilst TR808 drum machines and samples lock together with acoustic drums, themselves often given the "Tony Visconti" Eventide Harmoniser treatment of Berlin-era Bowie albums. Ancient ARP synthesisers and Mellotron flutes and horns sit next to contemporary digital sounds and samples in a hauntological tapestry over which Horwood can intone her sometimes mournful, often uplifting vocals.

The first single taken from the album, "Weeping Idols", reflects upon a recurring theme of religious dogma and spiritual entrapment, and is accompanied by a stunning video shot by Jack Barraclough around the North Coast of Northern Ireland, taking in the Giant's Causeway and the Kinbane Castle ruin. Carlisle's infectiously colourful synth riffs and pop production, featuring sun-burst harp playing from Brighton-based singer/multi-instrumentalist Emma Gatrill, contrasts sharply with the darker tone of Horwood's lyric, jarring in a way reminiscent of "You Have Placed A Chill On My Heart" by The Eurythmics.

Although "Daughters Of The Sky" breaks away from the storybook concept format of The Dragon Flies Away, in that sense being more similar to Bamboo's debut album "Prince Pansori Priestess" (2015, ★★★★★ - Record Collector Magazine), there are still recurrent themes that run through the album such as motherhood, the cyclical nature of life, emancipation and liberation. "Branches dancing, bud stems growing, fibres swaying, arms unfurling" Horwood sings in The Deku Tree, a song which roots motherhood in nature's eternal cycle of birth and death. In the title track we see two perspectives of women spanning time and geography, Horwood drawing inspiration from the personal and also political. In 1917 a Russian match stick worker looks out of her window dreaming for a better life; in 2019 a Filipino maid in Hong Kong yearns to return to the children she has left behind. Both share a revolutionary spirit, protesting and fighting for a new world.

What might be the centrepiece of the album, "East Of The Sun / West Of The Moon", an 11 minute epic, begins with a serene, desolate ambient intro which eventually transports us over the waves to some unknown land. Here we track the journey of a displaced people who are rejected from pillar to post, prevented from crossing over political lines, judged by fellow humans by their few differences over their myriad similarities. "And we all walk a different pace, though we end up in the same place" sings Horwood, as the song's new-found rhythm seems to break apart again and slowly splinter away in different directions, the fragments hanging in the air as a new section emerges featuring a rare lead vocal from Carlisle.

Bar the brief instrumental coda "Tenebrae", the album ends on an optimistic note with "A World Is Born", an upbeat song of renewal. Horwood sings of the creation of a new world for a new generation, out of the ashes of a society stagnating under the collapsing weight of late capitalism. Saxophones provided by Emma Gatrill (her second guest appearance on the album) answer each vocal line in call and response style over more harmonised drums reminiscent of Bowie's "Low". Carlisle originally wrote the music following the death of Bowie, and Horwood added some Prince-like backing vocals (Prince having been name-checked in the title of the first Bamboo album). Although her lyric makes no reference to the loss of these giants, their influence hang over the song in a way which can only add to the sense of hope and rebirth, a sense which is indeed felt throughout the album.

TRACK LISTING

01. Diamond Springs
02. Weeping Idols
03. Daughters Of The Sky
04. Memories All At Once
05. Off-World Colony
06. East Of The Sun / West Of The Moon
07. The Deku Tree
08. Under Larches
09. A World Is Born
10. Tenebrae

New record from rising stars Bambounou and Priori. Tantalizingly crisp textures meeting driving club kinetics and focused sound design for a techy yet playful escapade into nocturnal body movement. Nicely balancing the squelchy sounds and ice cold synthesis of electro with the cerebral headspace of hypnotic techno and the propulsion of acid house. Recommended!

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: New school tech from the French-Canadian axis. Killer!

TRACK LISTING

Crush
Bubble Mechanics
Polyester Mood
Dub Affectif

Banabila returns with a second LP release on Knekelhuis. The renowned Dutch producer is up there among the stars when it comes to ambient music and the so-called ‘fourth world’ legacy. On this eleven-track album, we witness soul-wrenching, kraut-tinted, and early-yet-modernist electronics.

Coming from his heart, these imaginative recordings center around otherworldly voices – fictional characters chanting in a made-up language, imbued with a captivating spirit, transcending linguistic barriers. Through remarkable complexity and technique, 'Unspeakable Visions' is full of sonic textures, together evoking a layered, emotional arc.

While the track 'Rattles' still references the artist's first album on Knekelhuis, 'Echo Transformations', the style of most other tracks departs towards an intriguing new mix of both pop-infused songs and gloomy abstraction, balancing between a sense of anticipation and desolation.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Real trippy weirdness with moments of cerebrum-popping brilliance. Granular sound design, fractal glitches, manipulated organica... A truly immersive long player for your next mushroom ritual.

TRACK LISTING

Viva Voce
Vowels Of Love
Darker And Darker
Hometapers Tricky Universe
So Far Yet So Near
Your Words Against Mine
Rattles
Little Star
AI Brainfire
Sounds From An Unforgettable Place 1 (Uv Remix)
Unspeakable Visions

Ever since he released his music in the early '80s Michel Banabila has been hard to pinpoint to a specific genre or style. His musical output includes jazz, experimental cut-up electronics, world music (especially influenced by the Fourth World music as developed by Jon Hassell), New Age, eclectic pop tunes, music for dance or other stage projects, and soundtracks for TV. Some listeners may have found it difficult throughout the years to find their way in this versatile output.

For this particular release, Bureau B chose a different approach. Instead of archiving early works from the 1980s, Wah-Wah Whispers focuses on Banabila's more recent output. It is a collection of works showcasing many facets of his music: a journey visiting the minimal and cinematic sample scape, contemplative ambient / fourth world scenes and more. The album ends with a kaleidoscope of atmospheres gradually building up to a noise climax.

There are some records that you come across that sound like you’ve discovered an unearthed gem from a previous decade; a lost moment in musical history that has cruelly been sat gathering dust in a record shop for years. From the opening seconds of Bananagun’s “Do Yeah” - which stirs to life in an intoxicating blend of 1970s afrobeat, fuzzed out psychedelia and immersive pop - this very much feels like the case of discovering something special. However, rather than being a decades old find, this track comes from a brand new Melbourne band. With the aim of merging the proto-garage rhythmic fury of The Monks with the tropicália grooves of Os Mutantes, the band soon forged a sound that was as loose and unravelling as it was focused and taut, with an aim of creating a real sense of place and environment.

“We didn't want to do what everyone else was doing,” the band say. “We wanted it to be vibrant, colourful and have depth like the jungle. Like an ode to nature.” There’s a deeply percussive element to the band’s psychedelic ode to mother nature, touching upon Fela Kuti-esque repetitions, exotica, jazz and 1960s pop-rock. Much like a lot of the influences it filters into its own unique spin on it all, it’s intended as “music for the people” - a unifying groove that spans genres. Even the seemingly innocuous band name has an underlying message of connectivity that matches the universality of the music. “It’s like non-violent combat! Or the guy who does a stick up but it’s just a banana, not a gun, and he tells the authorities not to take themselves too seriously.” This extends to the underlying message of their debut single too: “try to love and not hate because you’re the one who has to carry it around.” Do Yeah 7”

TRACK LISTING

1. Do Yeah
2. Top Cat
3. Crane In The Tiger's Mouth

To say that the intervening 4 years since the arrival of their debut album had been tumultuous for Melbourne/Naarm’s Bananagun would be an understatement. Released during the height of lockdown in the summer of 2020, the group were forcibly “scattered” following the release of The True Story of Bananagun. Australia’s ultra-strict lockdown rules - declaring it illegal to travel beyond a 5km radius - made it nigh on impossible for the band to get together at all, with the only rehearsals requiring them to sneak past military checkpoints undetected.

Coinciding with this too was a great period of personal change for the band’s guitarist/vocalist/flautist, and songwriter Nick van Bakel.“ "I had a myriad of mountains to be crossed which was pretty challenging” he explains. “so I just cocooned into lots of spiritual side quests and soul seeking. Band members were travelling etc so it was ages before we got through the stop-start stop-start phase and regained some band momentum…”

This climate of upheaval does not go unheard on the band’s long-awaited follow-up, ‘Why is the colour of the Sky?’. While it’s by no means a pessimistic work - far from it - it’s an album that departs from the ultra-slick bursts of sunshine-pop and afrobeat that defined ‘True Story… ‘, and muddies the waters with a heavy blend of incendiary jazz and freak-beat experimentation. It’s Bananagun alright, but braver, bolder and more mysterious than ever…

With the only conscious musical dictum being that percussion and groove was brought “to the fore” - and, boy, is this album groovy - the band decamped to a Button Pusher studio Preston, Melbourne with equipment “on par with any 60's studio”, tracking with minimal takes - ‘warts’ n’ all’ - battling through the temperaments of analogue mixing equipment late into the night under the assertion that these more traditional methods provided “the most, organic pure way to record”. Also imperative was to manipulate the social conditions in which the takes were performed and nail the ‘vibe’ during recording: “It was all “attitude towards life and esoteric stuff, natural law, how energy transfers, sounds, chemistry between people”, explains van Bakel, “trying to foster an environment together where we can make some magic, capture the phenomena of energy and soundwaves interacting with each other in the room. And that was definitely what we wanted it to sound like - pro human”.

In many ways, “pro-human” captures the radical quintessence that Why Is the Colour of the Sky? is fulsomely jazz-shuffling towards. For a record that recognises, in it’s every breath and sinew the humbling, restorative and life-affirming power of collective creative endeavour - it’s also a work that resists an ever more technologically-driven and isolating world that can feel ever more dehumanising in its quests for ‘perfection’. A theme directly addressed in ‘Children of the Man’ with it’s “Robo-sapien” lyric, it’s a thread that runs across the entire record:
“I feel like a lot of human nature and tradition is worth preserving because we've probably evolved to be this way.”, van Bakel notes, “[Why is the Colour…] is all just about not losing your head and being over stimulated by the ‘goggle box’; the need for spirituality and nature; the need to be able to communicate and share ideas and adapt in a rapidly changing world without being judged and profiled. The preservation of human needs, so we don't all get homogenised and isolated and poisoned to stupidity and obedience. “
And what better way is there to feel human than by laying down a dynamite groove, or nine?

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Woozy, dreamy psychedelic business here from Melbourne's Bananagun. Channelling the spirit of early Floyd / Syd Barrett into a modern distillation of folk, rock and folk. there are moments here that feel disorganised and loose, only to come together perfectly into a perfectly formed patchwork of emotion. Wonderfully loose, low-slung psychedelic rock.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Brave Child Of A New World
Children Of The Man
Those Who Came Before
Feeding The Moon
Gift Of The Open Hand

Side B
With The Night
Hippopotamusic
Free Energy
Wonder Part I
Wonder Part II

Bananarama celebrate over 40 years at the top with the release of ‘Glorious - The Ultimate Collection’. With 40 tracks selected by Sara and Keren themselves, the album revisits every decade of the band’s career, with hits including ‘Cruel Summer’, ‘Venus’, ‘Love in the First Degree’, ‘Only Your Love’, ‘Preacher Man’, ‘Move in My Direction’ and more, along with two new singles, ‘Feel The Love’ and ‘Supernova’.

TRACK LISTING

LP (Transparent Red)
Cruel Summer (3am Mix)
Robert De Niro’s Waiting
Venus (Boys Noize Rework Edit)
Love In The First Degree
Preacher Man
Movin’ On (Disco Chic)
Move In My Direction
Look On The Floor
Love Don’t Live Here
Stuff Like That
Looking For Someone
Favourite
Masquerade
Forever Young
Feel The Love
Supernova

2CD / 3LP (Transparent Gold)
Really Saying Something
Cruel Summer
Robert De Niro's Waiting
Venus
More Than Physical
A Trick Of The Night
I Heard A Rumour
Love In The First Degree
Only Your Love
Preacher Man
I Could Be Persuaded
Movin' On [Disco Chic]
Last Thing On My Mind [Electrified]
Every Shade Of Blue
Take Me To Your Heart
Prove Your Love
If
Crazy
Move In My Direction
Look On The Floor (Hypnotic Tango)
Feel For You
Lovebite
Love Comes
Love Don't Live Here
Seventeen
Extraordinary
Baby It's Christmas
Now Or Never
La La Love
Stuff Like That
Looking For Someone
I'm On Fire
It's Gonna Be Alright
Favourite
Masquerade
Forever Young
Running With The Night
Cruel Summer (3am Mix)
Feel The Love
Supernova

'Do They Know It’s Christmas?' is a single by Band Aid, a charity supergroup founded in 1984 by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure. To commemorate 40 years since the original recording, a newly compiled CD and vinyl reissue will raise vital funds for the Band Aid Trust.

The reissue features the original 1984 version, and subsequent Band Aid 20 and Band Aid 30 versions, plus the 2024 Ultimate Mix – an extraordinary new edit by Trevor Horn which mixes together vocals of the many artists who have recorded the song over the decades into one seamless whole.

Here on one record are the finest voices and the greatest musicians of British rock n roll history.

TRACK LISTING

1. Band Aid – Do They Know It’s Christmas? – 1984 Version
2. Band Aid 20 – Do They Know It’s Christmas? – 2004 Version
3. Band Aid 30 – Do They Know It’s Christmas? – 2014 Version
4. Band Aid – Do They Know It’s Christmas? – 2024 Ultimate Mix
5. Band Aid – Do They Know It’s Christmas? – Live At Wembley Stadium, 1985

The apotheosis of Band Of Holy Joy's bile toward today's pathetic state of affairs will be released shortly – a blistering remix of "The Devil Has A Hold On The Land" from their last album, Neon Primitives. Remixed by Youth (Killing Joke bassist, Paul McCartney collaborator, producer of Melanie C and U2!), who was so taken by the song as to remix it gratis, the remix will be part of a series of 23 discrete 7" 45s by Jon Langford of The Mekons and an assortment fellow travellers from around the globe. Dreams Take Flight transitions from political discourse into a post-virus rebirth of human relationship and the inevitable fumblings of the society's psychological reconstruction over the forthcoming year. Have you ever wondered what purpose your joy or my pain? All those moments shared together to be washed away by the rain . . . Have you ever doubted our super hipster being love-in at all? Just a pair of urbane fools passing through waiting for our call . . . Take a leap into the great unknown. Almost perversely heart-on-sleeve, Johny Brown and compatriots have never fitted well within a particular scene - nor have they ever seem to try.

Although recorded under the existence of quarantine and a healthy amount of paranoia, in search of the joy of greatly hindered collaboration, the band has opted to turn over each song to a different visionary video artist for an exhibition which will take place for a week at London's Gallery 46 beginning at the end of February and open to the public. The video exhibition will subsequently be available online, before the album's release. While still featuring some of the band's strongest songs, Dreams Take Flight has a strange film-like ambience in parts, almost as if planned as a soundtrack, a thought mirrored in Inga Tillere's sublime, dream-like sleeve, best seen in real life. "A Leap Into The Great Unknown" and "Notes From A Gallery" will likely be heard as too disarmingly direct for radio, and the videos will likely never see the entry door to MTV, but Dreams Take Flight will ultimately be considered a masterwork of clarity in a confused, contentious time.

TRACK LISTING

1. This Is The Festival Scene 
2. A Leap Into The Great Unknown 
3. That Magic Thing 
4. When Love Is Not Enough 
5. On Set Romance 
6. Notes From A Gallery 
7. The Rhythm Of Life 
8. A New Clear Vision 

Band Of Nowhere is a new constellation project by Juanjo Sánchez, together with other collaborators with whom he had previously worked. It is worth mentioning Bob Drake on drums, former member of the legendary formation Thinking Plague (also on Hail, 5UU's, The Science Group) who has also mastered the project from their studio in the Midi-Pyrénées and also to mention the guitarist Jordi Cabayol (Camino al Desván) both Juanjo and Jordi began their career in a significant band of Barcelona of the early eighties, such as Entr'acte.

The becoming of Juanjo Sánchez would take him to other latitudes as a member of Alondra Satori and without losing the lighthouse of his city, he would collaborate with other outstanding musicians such as Quicu Samsó (Koniec, Macromassa).

The fluidity and chromaticism of his previous album Gonza Magilla is still perceived in here, but in a much more electrified way with guitars that are sometimes expansive, other times exuberant wrapped up with contagious synthesizer modulations and very marked rhythms. The production and especially the arrangements are fantastic with those special presences of synthesizers that are not common around here.

Its original improvisation and experimentation is skilfully adjusted by Juanjo Sánchez, giving a much more playful result with unexpected combinations, very much in continuity with a certain European Art Rock such as Aksak Maboul, Etron Fou, Zamla,The Work or the mischievous resonances of The League of Gentlemen; all this mapping the sound transit, to an unpredictable and vibrant non-place.

Housed in it's original hand made artwork with the little upgrade twist of silk-screen printing textured grey cardboard and including a insert colour with photos and text provided by Juanjo Sánchez.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
Calling All Beginners
Fleeing To The Poles
Ashes
Rouler Ma Bosse
Sunday Machinery

SIDE B
Lucid Dreams
Twisted Maze
Rolla Bolla
Chinese Forecast

Produced by Gil Norton (Pixies, Foo Fighters, Patti Smith) and recorded in Rockfield Studios, By Default is the sound of a group on the sharpest form of their career, more engaged and focused than they’ve ever been. The follow up to 2014’s Himalayan, from the English trio - made up of Russell Marsden (guitar, vocals), Emma Richardson (bass, vocals) and Matt Hayward (drums) – the new record came about via a conscious decision from the band to take a step back from their relentless world-wide touring schedule (having never spent more than a month off the road in the last 2 years) to decamp to and write songs in a Southampton Baptist Church-cum-makeshift HQ. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Black Magic
2. Back Of Beyond
3. Killer
4. Bodies
5. Tropical Disease
6. So Good
7. This Is My Fix
8. Little Momma
9. Embers
10. In Love By Default
11. Singing
12. Something 

With seminal producer Nick Launay (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Arcade Fire, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds) at the helm, Band Of Skulls deliver an album which will cement their rock credentials, combining trademark raucous blues riffs, masterful musicianship and faultless vocal harmonies in an album full of raw power and beautiful melodies.

After the success of 2011’s ‘Sweet Sour’, which hit the UK album chart at No14, the band have toured worldwide, with full throttle live shows earning them a reputation as one of the most accomplished, exciting live bands around. In the last year they have shared the stage with Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Black Keys, The Dead Weather, Queens Of The Stone Age and Muse.

Band Of Skulls are performing at the top of their game; 2014 looks set to catapult the band to the forefront of the British music scene. ‘Himalayan’ is one of the most anticipated albums of the year.

‘Love Is All You Love’ was recorded in London’s Miloco Studios, The Smoakstack studio in Nashville, and in the Southampton studio of Band Of Skulls founder members’ Russell Marsden (guitar, vocals) and Emma Richardson (bass, vocals). Following the amicable departure of drummer Matt Hayward, Russell and Emma started the writing process for the record in 2017 and quickly accumulated a host of new songs. It was a free and experimental process mixing electronic and live instruments, working quickly, getting ideas down, then moving on.

Work then switched to The Toyshop studio at Miloco to collaborate with Richard X, known for his innovative production with artists from Pet Shop Boys to Goldfrapp to Sugababes, whose ‘Freak Like Me’ was one of the standout singles of the 2000s. Richard X encouraged Band Of Skulls new spirit of experimentation, pushing the combination of live and electronic as mixing the two was creating interesting dynamics. Once the writing was complete the band decamped to Nashville to record the live element of the record with Eagles Of Death Metal’s Julian Dorio on drums.

All these elements added a heavy punch and power to ‘Love Is All You Love’, especially on the unrelenting ‘Carnivorous’ and short sharp shock of ‘That’s My Trouble’. ‘Cool Your Battles is more widescreen, while ‘We’re Alive’ has a heavy dance pulse with a touch of melancholy. The song ‘Love Is All You Love’ focuses on the groove and keeps the feel of when they tracked it live in Nashville. This song in particular seems to encapsulate the sentiment of the whole record.

“This record is tough and tender with a rebellious spirit,” say Emma and Russell. “It is a positive record. It looks to what is possible and how a little love and human kindness can help bring about positive change. We drew on personal experiences, changes in our situation, and couldn’t help but be affected by what has been going on in the world politically, culturally and environmentally. Attempting to overcome that sometimes powerless feeling by creating and connecting with people and making something new.” 

TRACK LISTING

1. Carnivorous
2. That’s My Trouble
3. Love Is All You Love
4. Not The Kind Of Nothing
5. Cool Your Battles
6. Sound Of You
7. Thanks A Lot
8. We’re Alive
9. Speed Of Light
10. Gold

Deluxe CD Bonus Tracks:
1. In Colours
2. Heavenly Creatures
3. Dying Day 

Bandante feature George Vjestica of Nick Cave's Bad Seeds, and triumphs in it's direct no-nonsense approach, be that with the heavy rocking vibes of the A side or the anthemic acoustic balladry of the flip. 'Bang Bang' shoots off the starting line with classic single-note riffage and pummeling drum kit, backed with heavy AF distorted guitar chords and gruffly shouted vocal refrains. 'My Friend' is a much more pensive number, with acoustic guitar jangling behind booming bass, and Vjestica's vocals. A wistful ode to companionship, and a suitably beautiful tribute. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A brilliantly classic 7 of two sides this one. The heavier rock and roll clatter of the A-Side versus the wistful acoustic number on the flipside. Both are beautiful but in completely different ways, and really display the songmanship of such a talented bunch. Brilliant.

TRACK LISTING

A. Bang Bang

B. My Friend

Bandjo is Jacob Haage and Fredrik Johansson from Stockholm, responsible for more of that shimmering psychedlic / Balearic sound the Swedes seem to do oh-so well. What’s unique about Bandjo though is that while their songs are full of sand and seagulls (and seagulls full of sand), there is a strong sense of the foreboding also at play. “You & The Sun” is a late afternoon at the shore turning to storms. The sky has gone ominous as the wind whips your hair and the waves crash fiercely, echoing the lightning in the distance. The calmness of the lazy afternoon is a distant memory as nature moves around you at double speed. Quick, hammer in that windbreak!

These two tracks from Mike Bandoni and Chip Wickham have been a long time coming. These two stable mates from the 'Craig Charles Fantasy Funk Band' have been discussing a collaboration for years and now; it's finally in the bag!

Mike brings his trademark killer funky Drums (Recorded by the legendary Malcolm Catto), Percussion, Rhodes, Bass and vintage Guitar vibes to the party whilst Chip delivers some sublime and highly complimentary work on sax and flute.

Infinity Pool sounds like a long lost Bobbi Humphrey meets Bob James composition with the flute taking centre stage underpinned by what can only be described as mammoth funk grooves on every other instrument. A true modern Jazz Funk classic with just a fraction more Funk than Jazz!

Get It! is a cool number with a phenomenally infectious groove and a hook that stays in the brain for days! Think early Kool & The Gang. You'll be humming these hooks day and night! Chip again raises the bar further with some sublime flute and sax work and is ably joined by Eoin Grace on trumpet to deliver that full fat section accompaniment that so completes this composition.

Both tracks are equally at home listened to through headphones or pumping loudly through a sound system in a club at your best Funk and Soul events.

Both tracks are getting plenty of radio play so it's likely to shift quickly! One for the collection and a must have. Limited to 500 copies.

TRACK LISTING

1. Get It (feat. Chip Wickham)
2. Infinity Pool (feat. Chip Wickham)

2021 marks the 50th anniversary of The Band’s fourth studio album, ‘Cahoots’. On December 3, Capitol/UMe will release the newly remixed and remastered album in variety of formats to celebrate this iconic and influential album.

‘Cahoots’ was the fourth studio album, and last album of original material for four years.

The front cover painted by New York artist/illustrator Gilbert Stone Back cover features a photograph portrait of the group by Richard Avedon.
Features guest vocals from Van Morrison (on “4% Pantomime”)

TRACK LISTING

Life Is A Carnival
When I Paint My Masterpiece
Last Of The Blacksmiths
Where Do We Go From Here?
4% Pantomime
Shoot Out In Chinatown
The Moon Struck One
Thinkin’ Out Loud
Smoke Signal
Volcano
The River Hymn

Stage Fright is the third studio album by Canadian American group the Band, released on August 17, 1970. Engineered by Todd Rundgren and Glyn Johns, it features two of the group’s best-known songs, “The Shape I’m In” and “Stage Fright”, both of which showcased inspired lead vocal performances (by Richard Manuel and Rick Danko, respectively) and became staples in the group’s live shows.

TRACK LISTING

1. The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show
2. The Shape I’m In
3. Daniel And The Sacred Harp
4. Stage Fright
5. The Rumor
6. Time To Kill
7. Just Another Whistle Stop
8. All La Glory
9. Strawberry Wine
10. Sleeping

"The Band's first album, Music from Big Pink, seemed to come out of nowhere, with its ramshackle musical blend and songs of rural tragedy. The Band, the group's second album, was a more deliberate and even more accomplished effort, partially because the players had become a more cohesive unit, and partially because guitarist Robbie Robertson had taken over the songwriting, writing or co-writing all 12 songs. Though a Canadian, Robertson focused on a series of American archetypes from the union worker in "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)" and the retired sailor in "Rockin' Chair" to, most famously, the Confederate Civil War observer Virgil Cane in "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." The album effectively mixed the kind of mournful songs that had dominated Music from Big Pink, here including "Whispering Pines" and "When You Awake" (both co-written by Richard Manuel), with rollicking uptempo numbers like "Rag Mama Rag" and "Up on Cripple Creek" (both sung by Levon Helm and released as singles, with "Up on Cripple Creek" making the Top 40). As had been true of the first album, it was The Band's sound that stood out the most, from Helm's (and occasionally Manuel's) propulsive drumming to Robertson's distinctive guitar fills and the endlessly inventive keyboard textures of Garth Hudson, all topped by the rough, expressive singing of Manuel, Helm, and Rick Danko that mixed leads with harmonies. The arrangements were simultaneously loose and assured, giving the songs a timeless appeal, while the lyrics continued to paint portraits of 19th century rural life (especially Southern life, as references to Tennessee and Virginia made clear), its sometimes less savory aspects treated with warmth and humor." - All Music.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Just as good as the first, maybe without the same impact. Includes the world-classic "The Night They Drove Old Whiskey Down".

TRACK LISTING

1. Across The Great Divide
2. Rag Mama Rag
3. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
4. When You Awake
5. Up On Cripple Creek
6. Whispering Pines
7. Jemima Surrender
8. Rockin' Chair
9. Look Out Cleveland
10. Jawbone
11. The Unfaithful Servant
12. King Harvest (Has Surely Come)

Released on the 22nd September, 1969, the eponymous second studio effort by The Band is a concept album, with the songs focusing on people, places and traditions associated with an older version of Americana. It was recorded in the pool house of a home rented by the group in the Hollywood Hills which was once owned by Judy Garland, Wally Cox and, at the time the group worked there, Sammy Davis, Jr. According to Robbie Robertson, the location was chosen to give the songs a Basement Tapes–like feel in what was termed “a clubhouse concept.”

The album includes many of The Band’s best-known and critically acclaimed songs, including “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” which Rolling Stone named the 249th greatest song of all time. The magazine also ranked the album number 45 in their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Time magazine included it in their unranked 2006 list of the 100 greatest albums.

Robert Christgau, who spent 37 years as the chief music critic and senior editor for The Village Voice, declared it better than Abbey Road, which had been released four days following, writing that The Band’s LP is an “A-plus record if I’ve ever rated one.”

The album is preserved in the National Recording Registry and is also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

TRACK LISTING

1 Across The Great Divide
2 Rag Mama Rag
3 The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
4 When You Awake
5 Up On Cripple Creek
6 Whispering Pines
7 Jemima Surrender
8 Rockin’ Chair
9 Look Out Cleveland
10 Jawbone
11 The Unfaithful Servant
12 King Harvest (Has Surely Come)

Bandulu's outstanding longplayer called "Repercussions". Originally released on Foundation Sound Works in 1996! The 2025 version on Rawax
includes a new mastering. Highy recommended!

TRACK LISTING

A1. Long Count
A2. Episode 7
B1. Recent Past
B2. Serial Operations
C1. Paranormal Channels
C2. Contingency
D1. Ishmalite
D2. Advirus

During the five years since the release of their first EP, Bane have grown into the leaders of the new hardcore movement. "Give Blood" is undoubtedly Bane's most commanding and highly anticipated release to date. The album was produced and engineered by Brian McTernan (Cave In, Hot Water Music, Snapcase) and this really is a truly intense experience for the listener.

EP compilation of essential UK house cuts recorded between 1987 - 1990. TIP!

Before British house and techno found its’ distinctive groove at the turn of the 1990s, one act led the way: Bang The Party, a trio who emerged from London’s vibrant underground party scene in the mid 1980s and proved, beyond any doubt, that UK producers could make music every bit as magical as the pioneering productions put forward by their counterparts in Chicago, Detroit and New York.

By the time long-running DJs and party promoters Kid Batchelor and Leslie Lawrence joined forces with trained engineer Keith Franklin at legendary North-West London reggae studio Addis Ababa in 1987, they’d spent years as DIY dance music activists in Britain’s capital city. They channelled these experiences and their love of imported house and techno sounds into a new project, Bang The Party, in the process becoming the first British act to appear on Transmat, a reflection of the quality and authenticity of their music.

The latest Rush Hour Reissue Series release offers a snapshot of some of the numerous gems nestled in the Bang The Party catalogue, delivering a much-deserved celebration of one of Britain’s most significant early acid house collectives. It features four fully remastered cuts recorded and released between 1987 and 1990 – on-point and far-sighted club workouts that sound as fresh and timeless now as they did when Britain was sweltering under its infamous ‘second summer of love’.

Fittingly, the EP begins with ‘I Feel Good All Over’, the group’s ground-breaking debut single. Dedicated to their home city and one of the earliest UK interpretations of house music, the track exists in the grey area between Chicago house and New York ‘garage house’ – all jaunty organ stabs, jacking Windy City beats, restless bass and soulful vocalizations. ‘Jacques Theme’, which follows, originally nestled on the B-side of that single release. An early, acid-flecked expression of hip-house with a British twist, breakdance-friendly bongo patterns and a dose of Larry Heard-inspired deep house dreaminess, the track remains an under-appreciated classic whose rap verses reflect the popularity of hip-hop in London at the time.

1988’s ‘Release Your Body’, Bang The Party’s most celebrated early release, was reissued in the United States by Transmat, reflecting the strong working relationship between Derrick May and Kool Kat Records’ Neil Rushton. A hypnotising affair propelled forwards by sweat-soaked drum machine beats, jacking fills and an addictive bassline, the track offers another near perfect distillation of the band’s Black American musical influences while delivering something genuinely new and fresh.

Rounding off the EP is a choice cut from Bang The Party’s sought after 1990 album Back To Prison. Doused in the star-lit synth sounds of the Motor City with jaunty organ stabs inspired by the kind of New Jersey jams championed at East Orange institution Club Zanzibar, ‘Let It Rip’ is a superb slice of deep house soul featuring a lead vocal every bit as emotive as anything laid down by Robert Owens. Like the rest of Bang The Party’s output, it has stood the time better than anything laid down by their London contemporaries.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Real nice vintage house music from London during that embryonic period. Still cutting the mustard today, this one's remained quite scarce and under appreciated until now.

TRACK LISTING

I Feel Good All Over
Jacques Theme
Release Your Body
Let It Rip

“Chiroptera” is the soundtrack of 'Acte 2 : Retour à la Caverne', a creation by JR with Thomas Bangalter and choregrapehed by Damien Jalet. It was performed in Paris in front of the Opéra de Paris (Opéra Garnier) on November 12th, 2023 by more than 150 dancers. 

Side A is a wild tour de force of sound design and synthesis which I'm sure would have soundtracked the accompanying theatrics wonderfully. On the flip, the 'solo intro' is a somewhat more subdued affair. I'm assuming given the title, introducing the piece slowly into its environment. 

TRACK LISTING

Face A :
1 - Chipotera
Face B :
1 - Chipotera (Solo Intro)

Bangkok formed in late 2004 and with a set of songs echoing a diverse range of influences, Bangkok have created a sound that acknowledges their northern heritage while retaining the band's unique style and beliefs. Imagine a hybrid of the Doves and Embrace, with Axl Rose on vocals.

Acid Jazz present a new collaboration between Chris Bangs and Mick Talbot, ‘Back To Business’, celebrating the mod club jazz sounds that are at the backbone of their DNA.

DJ and Producer Chris Bangs first coined the term ‘acid jazz’, and has produced records for Galliano and Paul Weller, alongside his own project, Quiet Boys.

Mick Talbot was a founding member and keyboardist of The Style Council with Paul Weller. He has since played with Galliano, Dexys Midnight Runners and Candy Staton.

Having previously recorded together in Yada Yada and Soundscape, ‘Back To Business’ marks the first Bangs & Talbot collaboration for years. Vital for mod collectors and beyond.

TRACK LISTING

Sumthin’ Else
Surf’N’Turf
How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)
Stingray (Live At PJ’s)
Kookie T
It’s Alright (Instrumental)
Leela’s Dance
Blue Jeans
Goody Goody
Pick’N’Mick’s
Jerk Chicken
Blues Walk

Acid jazz legend Chris Bangs returns with 'Dream World a brand new album for 2024 – a characteristic font of latin jazz from the maestro producer.

Bangs is known for originally coining the term ‘acid jazz’ – a movement which subsequently morphed into the label – as he and likeminded DJs (including Gilles Peterson and Eddie Piller) began to combine jazz, soul and rock-fusion with the prominent sounds of acid house in the late ‘80s
.
The album draws influence from the Mizell Brothers, Wayne Henderson and George Duke – the latter providing direct inspiration, with a cover of ‘My Soul’ opening the record and serving as the first single.

The tracks see some new collaborators in the Bangs ranks – including Argentine keyboardist Luciano De La Rosa, Italian Massimo Morganti on trombone, Chile’s Juan Pi Salvo on trumpet, and Fabio Tiralongo on sax – making it a truly global production.

Self-described as ‘pure labour of love’ by Bangs himself, the album is a further expansion of his remarkable sound and vision, and his own ever-expanding dream world of (acid) jazz that moves far beyond genre-casting.

TRACK LISTING

1. My Soul
2. Dream World
3. En Cielo
4. Better Days
5. Riding On The Storm
6. Starship
7. Alegria
8. Mozambique
9. Sugar Slam

Devendra Banhart was born in Houston, Texas, and moved with his mother to her native Caracas, Venezuela, when his parents separated. The family relocated to Los Angeles during his teenage years; it was there that he learned to speak English, skateboard, and play music. Banhart first began to perform in public while attending the San Francisco Art Institute. He has since lived in New York City, Paris, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, where he currently resides.

Banhart first attracted international notice with his 2002 debut album, Oh Me Oh My… The Way the Day Goes By the Sun Is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs of the Christmas Spirit – a collection of recordings he had made for himself. Subsequent albums include Rejoicing in the Hands (2004), Niño Rojo (2004), Cripple Crow (2005), and Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon (2007), and What Will We Be (2009). Mala, his Nonesuch debut, was described by Q as a ‘career-best’ and by the Wall Street Journal as his ‘most concise, hushed and winsome effort to date’. Banhart has collaborated with fellow musicians including Anohni (formerly known as Antony) and the Johnsons, Beck, Vashti Bunyan, Os Mutantes, and Vetiver. He also has performed with both Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, and was part of a David Byrne–curated concert at Carnegie Hall.

An accomplished visual artist, Banhart’s distinctive, minutely inked, often enigmatic drawings have appeared in galleries all over the world, including the Art Basel Contemporary Art Fair in Miami; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels; and Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2015 Prestel published I Left My Noodle on Ramen Street, a collection of his of drawings, paintings, and mixed media pieces. He has created the cover art for most of his records, and in 2010 his artwork and packaging for What Will We Be was nominated for a Grammy.

Ape in Pink Marble, Devendra Banhart’s ninth album, was written, produced, arranged, and recorded in Los Angeles by the singer/songwriter/guitarist with his longtime collaborators Noah Georgeson and Josiah Steinbrick, both of whom also worked on Banhart’s most recent album, Mala (2013). 

TRACK LISTING

1. Middle Names
2. Good Time Charlie
3. Jon Lends A Hand
4. Mara
5. Fancy Man
6. Fig In Leather
7. Theme For A Taiwanese Woman In Lime Green
8. Souvenirs
9. Mourner’s Dance
10. Saturday Night
11. Linda
12. Lucky
13. Celebration

Last spring, Devendra Banhart and Noah Georgeson started to make a record that was like nothing they had made before — an ambient album that would be both a haven from a suddenly terrified world and a heartfelt musical dialogue between two artists who have been friends and collaborators for over two decades. Refuge is an album of profound meditative beauty which offers the listener a much-needed sense of peace and renewal. But while it was recorded in 2020 its roots go back much further — all the way to the start of their friendship and, beyond that, to the shared sounds and ethics of their childhoods.

Devendra grew up in Venezuela while Noah, six years older, is a native of Nevada City, California. But as they got to know each other, they realised that they had a similar history in the New Age subculture of the 1980s: a world of meditation, Eastern music, the Bhagavad Gita and The Whole Earth Catalog. Childhood memories were coloured by the aromas of health food stores and the sound of New Age labels like Windham Hill Records. Noah, whose production and mixing credits include Joanna Newsom and the Strokes, came on board as co-producer of Devendra’s 2005 album Cripple Crow and they have been working together ever since.

It was while making Devendra’s 2019 album Ma that the pair finally decided to make their ambient record. Despite complicating logistics, 2020 created an emotional craving for music with this contemplative, therapeutic quality. Inspired by both memories of the past and the needs of the present, Refuge is an act of companionship and generosity which gives the listener room to breathe. “We’re hoping to create a sense of comfort and coming back to the moment,” Devendra says. “It’s really important to have a little bit of space between us and our anxieties and impulses. What you do with that space is up to you.” Dorian Lynskey May 2021

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A: 
1. Book Of Bringhi
2. A Cat
3. Rise From Your Wave
4. Peloponnese Lament

SIDE B:
5. In A Cistern
6. Into Clouds
7. For Em

SIDE C: 
8. Three Gates
9. Horn In Deep Night
10. Sky Burial

SIDE D:
11. Asura Cave
12. Aran In Repose
13. Lament Return

Flying Wig is an album of recurrent dualities; a can of paradoxes, a box of worms. The redwood and pine-surrounded cabin studio where Banhart was “constantly listening to The Grateful Dead” somehow birthed something slick, modernist, city pop-adjacent and Enoesque.

Banhart's eleventh record, it's the actualisation of a “precious friendship” with the acclaimed solo artist, multi-instrumentalist, producer and Mexican Summer stable-mate Cate Le Bon — a coming together prophesied by the mirror-image titles of their early solo albums (Banhart’s 2002 Oh Me Oh My to Le Bon’s 2009 Me Oh My) and a tenderness built on crude haircuts (“we finally met, soon after she was cutting my hair with a fork and that was that”) and home-made tattoos — but never previously translated into the recording studio.

“It’s about transmuting despair into gratitude, wounds into forgiveness, and grief into praise,” - the product of a ritualistic creative practice that melts down and re-casts as it mulls, the stuff of sadness beautified as it changes shape — culminating in a record that “sounds like getting a very melancholic massage, or weeping, but in a really nice outfit… if I’m going to cry, I wanna do it in my best dress.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A silk-smooth melting pot of neo-soul, woozy Balearic and city pop, all topped with Banhart's syrupy vocals. There are hooks aplenty, but they sit beneath waves of reverb-drenched keys, guitar and bursts of trill brass.

TRACK LISTING

1. Feeling
2. Fireflies
3. Nun
4. Sight Seer
5. Sirens
6. Charger
7. Flying Wig
8. Twin
9. May
10. The Party

So It Started There chronicles the life and career of drummer Nick Banks, and how he came to be in one of the UK's most iconic and beloved bands: Pulp. Beginning with his childhood in Rotherham, Nick recounts his personal and musical journey through the genres, first as a punk, then as a goth; how it all started when he was first inspired to pick up the sticks by Sex Pistols drummer, Paul Cook.

Flash forward to the eighties, Nick has been playing in a handful of Sheffield groups and spies an ad from his favourite band, Pulp, in a local club. He pays Jarvis and the gang a visit and the rest is history. From there, Nick describes his growth as a professional drummer and musician, the trials and tribulations of chasing success in the music industry, touring triumphs and horrors, the band's journey from relative obscurity to becoming a global sensation, and the process of writing and recording their most famous albums.

Bantam Rooster has been kicking out it's own brand of cathartic messed up rock 'n' roll for some time now. Fourteen tracks of primal sophistication and their best album yet.

Night School is extremely proud to work with Billy Bao and Munster to present Lagos Sessions. “Experimental; Conceptual? That’s what these sort of things are usually called, when references are anything but immediate: in the feeling, hearing, and seeing, especially by many. Even more troubling, when the accustomed in us gets ajar... We lack articulation of the seemingly unfamiliar! Even at that, I think the most charitable review of this live electronic exploration will suggest the four sections bordering on insanity. How else? Even when not a few self-styled patriots were booking their flights out of the country, with an election looming to signal the end of a nation, and a band of modern day faith-heads detonating grenades in every other street corner, two dreamers swim against the currents and sneak through the lagoon into the country collecting inputs of derelict art; of garbage can noise; of hooting; honking horns on screeching brakes squelching tar; rackety generator booms? For an imagined program! What’s that? Who, what do these doods think they’re doing with Lagos?! I’ll call it rebirth. That simple. How to find a centre here? The output? The hum-drum of the street’s daily accent compels the sense of the immediate, the terrestrial; and then those primitive, primeval-seeming echoes of the earliest beginnings of the big bang and its wave-sound simultaneously releasing Sun Ra’s reverb sensation of end time! This should not be danceable but these guys are suggesting the possibility of rhythm in the inchoate. Believe me, you can’t miss the Lagos Faaji, Sakara flow, Awurebe, Afrobeat slices; its jazz, highlife/ Euro- Afro funk/rock/rap and seedy night echoes too. But in their otherworldly dimension. No matter the accolades, I will encourage a therapy of some sorts to the creators of this production.” Sola Olorunyomi, poet, bassist, co-editor of Glendora Review Kunle Tejuoso, Jazzhole, Lagos.

Lagos Sessions featuring: Billy Bao, Ambido, Diana Bada, Duro Ikujenyo, Mark Ido, Oduyomi Isaiah Oluseye, Joel Isioma Okoh, Orlando Julius, Mendo, Emeka Ogboh.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A bizarre but brilliant glitched-journey through hip-hop, experimental rock, electronica, afrobeat percussion aspects, and spoken word. Immersive and disconcerting, intense and exciting.

bar italia are the London based three-piece of Nina Cristante, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton.

‘The Twits’ was recorded by the trio over eight weeks from February 2023 in a makeshift home studio in Mallorca, and was mixed by Marta Salogni. It finds bar italia’s economical yet evocative songcraft taking raucous, mystic, unkempt, occasionally sinister, and wholly committed turns. Songs like “my little tony”, with its in-the-red riff and excitable hooks, the cathartic four-on-the-floor of ‘world’s greatest emoter’ and the festival tent psychedelia of “Hi-fiver” need little in the way of exposition – these are exhilarating rock songs, if wayward and strange.

Other moments see the band’s increasingly signature, three-act mini-dramas moving into previously uncharted territory. Cristante, Fehmi and Fenton can each manifest a different melody, mood, and cadence – at times overlapping and linear, at others unexpectedly divergent – often within the space of thirty seconds, a tag team rooted in shared language and kinship. “Jelsy”, for instance, plays out like a conversation between friends over wistful, buzzing country blues, the alternating voices at points comforting, wry and hopelessly yearning. The sinuous, slow-burning waltz of “twist” stands out in its bare lyricism and seems to invite each band member’s individual take on a confessional.

While Tracey Denim was notable for its compact 2-3 minute compositions, horizontal and open-ended tracks like “Shoo” ebb and flow, moving from reptilian dive-bar soloing to a palpitating two-note piano coda. ‘glory-hunter’ takes playful twists and turns before ending up somewhere entirely different from where it started. “Real house wibes (desperate house vibes)” and “que surprise” imply sleepless, noirish misadventure, while at the other end of the light spectrum, “sounds like you had to be there” features some of the band’s most sweetly optimistic musical gestures yet. Closer “bibs” is a rare instance where all three can be heard in unison, as a procession of ghostly chords and lacerating feedback bookends the group’s most adventurous and rich set to date.

Released in May, bar italia’s Matador debut ‘Tracey Denim’ followed a string of word-of-mouth releases on Dean Blunt’s World Music label and received widespread attention from publications including The Guardian (“one of the albums of 2023 so far”), The Times (“excellent debut album”), The Observer (‘Artist To Watch’), NME ("a lasting impression that’s all of their own making"), The Quietus (“endlessly evocative”) and Pigeons And Planes (“quickly establishing themselves as one of the most enticing upcoming bands”). Single “Nurse!” was playlisted on BBC 6 Music and received spins from BBC Radio 1, Absolute Radio and NTS. The release was accompanied by a UK tour, culminating in a sold-out headline show at the ICA in London, which The Spectator described as “transfixing… They just make their beautiful, off-kilter music, and let you unfold your own stories on top”.

STAFF COMMENTS

Liam says: We've absolutely fallen in love with Bar Italia here at Picc HQ, so we were over the moon when we found out that they'd be releasing their second LP of 2023. And what a banger it is! Mega tunes and no bullshit, Bar Italia have honed and polished their sound even further. You won't get a better one-two punch than 'Tracey Denim' and 'The Twits' in the indie-sphere right now. So what you doing? Get on both!

TRACK LISTING

1. My Little Tony
2. Real House Wibes (desperate House Vibes)
3. Twist
4. Worlds Greatest Emoter
5. Calm Down With Me
6. Shoo
7. Que Suprise
8. Hi Fiver
9. Brush W Faith
10. Glory Hunter
11. Sounds Like You Had To Be There
12. Jelsy
13. Bibs

bar italia, the London trio of Nina Cristante, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton, have announced details of their new album ‘Tracey Denim’, which is released on Matador Records.

‘Tracey Denim’ was recorded and produced by bar italia with mixing from Marta Salogni. It features the single “Nurse!” which was released in March to acclaim, and described as “a hypnotic post-punk ballad” (The Guardian) and “narcotically arresting” (Pitchfork).

Over the last two years, bar italia have released two albums, an EP and several singles on Dean Blunt’s World Music label, leading to much word-of-mouth, sold out headline shows, and festival performances at Pitchfork Music Festival London, by:Larm, OUT.FEST, Le Guess Who?, and End Of The Road.

STAFF COMMENTS

Ethan says: On ‘Tracey Denim’, bar italia sound like a 90s underground-American-indie outfit that miraculously discovered Britpop one day, and then were immediately whisked through time and space to a pristine recording studio in the 2020s. And the result is absolutely brilliant!

There’s a ‘slacker’ approach to this band’s whole aesthetic, with their loose performances and inconsistent lower-case approach to titling. That is, in everything except the immaculate production, where they manage to pull off some incredibly unique drum sounds and edgy guitar tones while still remaining light and gentle. There’s the silvery hi-hat powering through “guard”, the guttural bass defining “Horsey Girl Rider”, and fuzz-tinted power chords on “Punkt”. Everything here has a definite Sonic Youth edge, or maybe a more-relaxed Modest Mouse would be more appropriate. It’s all wrapped up in a very tongue-in-cheek gen-z humour, best exemplified through their digs at Kate Nash through Track 7’s stupidly-long title.

All this gushing about the band and I haven’t even mentioned what sets them apart from all the sub-par 90s throwback bands. Their unique selling point is the Beatles approach to vocals, which is to say lead vocals are distributed between all band members at a fairly equal rate. “Missus Morality” is a beautiful exchange between Nina Cristante’s alto range and Jezmi Tarik’s deeper, tenor timbre. The two then duet on tracks like “changer”, and the band even bring in Sam Fenton for a trio on tracks such as “Friends”.

TRACK LISTING

1. Guard
2. Nurse!
3. Punkt
4. My Kiss Era
5. F.O.B
6. Missus Morality
7. Yes I Have Eaten So Many Lemons Yes I Am So Bitte
8. Changer
9. Horsey Girl Rider
10. NOCD
11. Best In Show
12. Clark
13. Harpee
14. Friends
15. Maddington

Carl Barât & his new band The Jackals announce the release of their debut album Let It Reign through Cooking Vinyl Records on Monday 16th February.

Let It Reign was recorded in LA and London and was produced by Joby J. Ford (The Bronx) and features guest musicians, such as Beastie Boys percussionist Alfredo Ortiz on Glory Days. "I actually started making this record solo, but the long and short of it is I just didn’t like my own company," says Carl, adding that he soon realised that he wanted to get a new band together.

Rather than call up some old mates to recruit for The Jackals, Carl decided to post a few ads online asking if there were any likeminded souls out there who wanted to try their luck at playing with him. The response was overwhelming, with thousands of people replying. Carl adds "I was lucky, because I found a bunch of people who genuinely fit together as a gang."


TRACK LISTING

1: Glory Days
2: Victory Gin
3: Summer In The Trenches
4: A Storm Is Coming
5: Beginning To See
6: March Of The Idle
7: We Want More
8: War Of The Roses
9: The Gears
10: Let It Rain

Carl Barât & his new band The Jackals announce the release of their debut album Let It Reign through Cooking Vinyl Records on Monday 16th February.

Let It Reign was recorded in LA and London and was produced by Joby J. Ford (The Bronx) and features guest musicians, such as Beastie Boys percussionist Alfredo Ortiz on Glory Days. "I actually started making this record solo, but the long and short of it is I just didn’t like my own company," says Carl, adding that he soon realised that he wanted to get a new band together.

Rather than call up some old mates to recruit for The Jackals, Carl decided to post a few ads online asking if there were any likeminded souls out there who wanted to try their luck at playing with him. The response was overwhelming, with thousands of people replying. Carl adds "I was lucky, because I found a bunch of people who genuinely fit together as a gang."


TRACK LISTING

1: Glory Days
2: Victory Gin
3: Summer In The Trenches
4: A Storm Is Coming
5: Beginning To See
6: March Of The Idle
7: We Want More
8: War Of The Roses
9: The Gears
10: Let It Rain

“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.

“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

“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

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

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

Barbatuques, a well-known Brazilian group of body percussionists, adapted "BaianaÌ" back in 2005 (first released on the "O Seguinte EÌ Esse" album) and since then it became a staple of their concerts.

The original is a modern folk song from Bahia composed by Maria do Carmo Barbosa, but it was the mouth harp sound and the stomping beat on the Barbatuques' arrangement that imprinted its trademark sound. A couple of years ago, Jan Schulte, the german producer known for his taste for tropical drums (and also for using a few different aliases), heard the song and decided to add an extra punch to it for his DJ sets: more drums, taken from a library record of 'drumdrops' (hence the title).

Now for the first time "BaianaÌ" is issued on vinyl. It marks the second volume of the "Brasingles" series, a new series on Selva Discos dedicated to releasing loud 12" singles with the original song on the A side and a rework on the B side, to please both the DJ, dancer and the home listener in equal measure! Limited copies - much needed HEAT for any dancefloor. TIP! 

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Highly in-demand, Wolf Muller's 'drum drops' have become the stuff of dancefloor legend. Here he applies the formula with aplomb to this, already quite crazed, uncategorizable joint from Bahia (it's a state in Brazil if like me, you were perplexed!).

TRACK LISTING

Baiana
Baiana (Wolf Muller Drum Drop)

Barberos are from Liverpool and make the sort of driven, angular psychedelic noises that Battles and And So I Watch You From Afar excel at. It is a riotous, jagged beast, slathering with reams of grooving distorted bass, punchy percussives and sliding synth squeals, enriched with otherworldly echoes. It is forceful, surprising and as heavy as you get without killing the groove. Barberos are a talented bunch, and know how to make a stone-cold groove. Killer melodies, thundering percussion and an absolute riot. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Barberos kill it with this collection of off-kilter jams, otherworldly cosmic squeals and soul-shaking groove. Killer math-rock. Essential.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Return Of The Ladius
2. The Ladius
3. Timur
4. Hoyl
5. Concerto (Reprise)
6. Akropolis
7. Obladden

Four beguiling tracks of atmospheric, occasionally acid folk flavoured, melodic > freakout shifts, taking in tips of the hat to Popol Vuh (check Miri’s beautiful vox on “Angel”), Amon Duul and fellow countrymen Acid Mothers Temple and Kikagaku Moyo amongst others.

Formed in 2019, this three-piece consists of Kazuki Toneri (guitar, sitar), Miri (bass, flute, vocals), and Koh Hamada (drums, percussion). Each member is well-versed in music, film, and various other arts, drawing inspiration not only from experimental, psychedelic rock, and noise music but also from art across the world, both past and present. Their music weaves solid, architectural elements with destruction into a dark and gloomy soundscape, is often described as "dark psychedelic."

They released their first album, 'Way Down East', in 2021. In 2022, they relocated to London, where they performed on UK tours and at festivals. Having already played nearly 50 live shows, they are gaining attention in the local scene. Their latest EP, 'Viscum' was released in June 2024. 'Barbican City of Tokyo' is a compilation of tunes previously consigned to digital release only that label head, Dom had free rein to assemble an EP from, which luckily the band wholeheartedly agreed upon! …and all four tracks appear on vinyl here for the first time.

TRACK LISTING

1. Reconquista
2. Abandon
3. Angel
4. The Innocent One

The musical vortexes of Caterina Barbieri rewire time and space. Listening to the Italian composer and modular synth virtuoso has felt like traveling at light-speed and slow-motion all at once since 2017’s breakthrough doublealbum Patterns Of Consciousness. 2019’s acclaimed Ecstatic Computation pushed even further with the lead single “Fantas”, where a haunting melody hurtling towards its supernova climax felt like witnessing the life and death of a burning star. Far beyond any new age trope or modern synth trend, her music stands alone in its ecstatic intensity and cataclysmic emotional impact. Marking the debut album on her new label light-years, Barbieri now delivers her most profound work yet — a journey through inner-space as vast as a universe and as intimate as a heartbeat. The Spirit Exit opens and we fall in.

Spirit Exit is Caterina Barbieri’s time machine, primarily composed with a modular synth rig she thinks of more like a mechanical fortune teller. Whereas previous releases were constructed on lengthy tours, capturing only snapshots of continually evolving works,

Spirit Exit represents the producer’s first album fully written and recorded in her home studio amidst Milan’s two-month pandemic lockdown in 2020. It was during this extended isolation she found inspiration from female philosophers, mystics and poets spread across time, but united in their strength at cultivating vast internal worlds. St. Teresa D’Avila’s foundational 16th century mystical text The Interior Castle, philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman theories and the metaphysical poetry of Emily Dickinson act as thematic anchors throughout Spirit Exit, imbuing a life and death gravity into the composer’s most perception-altering music to date.

More than any release before it, Spirit Exit crystallizes Barbieri’s densely layered, blindingly bright synth arrangements while introducing stunning new elements that feel as if they’ve always belonged. Strings and guitar flawlessly thread into the composer’s web of modular patches, while her revelatory singing voice often cuts right through them. Melodies remain Barbieri’s great passion and obsession — she thinks of them as knots she’s trying to untangle, existential metaphors formed through tensely spiraling arpeggios — and on Spirit Exit they grow as large as planets before cracking into atoms. Parts of one song can haunt another. The synth progression unraveling through “Knot Of Spirit” is reborn on “Broken Melody”, an explosive peak with vocals that flash like a lightning storm. The sweeping “At Your Gamut” perfects the producer’s dramatic, slow-burning openers, but in her first ever use of sampling, it later gets crushed, accelerated and unrecognizably transformed into the ghostly hook surging through “Terminal Clock” — an otherworldly sound rushing across what feels like the artist’s first track for a dancefloor.

Caterina Barbieri’s music has always transported listeners, its perpetual movement achieved through complexities that needn’t be solved, but simply felt. Spirit Exit articulates that endless ascension — destination unknown, resolution always just out of reach — with a newfound humanity. It’s the result of a one-of-a-kind artist deeply reflecting on what music means to them, only to return with an even greater understanding of what it can be. As the album closes on “The Landscape Listens” — a song that approaches death with all the gentle grace of Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” — it brings to mind the full line of Emily Dickinson’s poem “There’s a certain slant of light”. “When it comes — the landscape listens / Shadows — hold their breath.” Spirit Exit is a special kind of seance, an album so otherworldly and inexplicably moving it leaves even its ghosts in a stunned silence.

TRACK LISTING

A1. At Your Gamut
A2. Transfixed
B1. Canticle Of Cryo
B2. Knot Of Spirit (Synth Version)
C1. Broken Melody
C2. Life At Altitude
D3. Terminal Clock
D4. The Landscape Listens

The album (featuring all new material) draws on the fine musical heritage of Barclay James Harvest whilst bringing the BJH legacy up to date with expansive compositions and thoughtful lyrics. The band’s roots in rural north-west England are explored on the album’s title track, along with another extended piece, ‘On Leave’. The album also includes the recent digital single ‘Unreservedly Yours’ and ‘Ancient Waves’, a song performed live in more recent times.

TRACK LISTING

1. If You Were Here Now
2. Ancient Waves
3. In Wonderland
4. On Leave
5. The Real Deal
6. On Top Of The World
7. Unreservedly Yours
8. North
9. The End Of The Day

12 tracks from Oldham's finest prog rock exports Barclay James Harvest at £5.99 who can complain.

Peter Barclay recorded at home and produced two barely-released albums, 1990’s dreamlike Acceptance and 1992’s synth pop What Kind Of World, winning over the few who heard them. But fame outside his small circle was not to be, and Barclay was lost in the late-’90s crest of the AIDS epidemic. Rediscovered for a new generation, this is queer music at its finest.

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2014 EXCLUSIVE, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

180 gram LP (part of a trilogy – complete on RSD 2015). Bardo Pond follow up last year’s RSD release ‘Rise Above It All’ with the second of a trilogy of RSD exclusive releases. Continuing their exploration and interpretation of existing tracks, this time they turn their attention to ‘Ride Into The Sun’ by the Velvet Underground and ‘Here Come The Warm Jets’ by Brian Eno. The results are astounding and in the case of ‘Here Come The Warm Jets’ wonderfully surprising, with Isobel’s voice embellishing a rendition of startling Bardo pop. Loosely formed in 1989 by guitar wielding art student siblings, Michael and John Gibbons, Bardo Pond became a reality in 1991 with the addition of vocalist and flautist, Isobel Sollenberger, bassist, Clint Takeda and drummer, Joe Culver (replaced in 1999 by trainee librarian, Ed Farnsworth). Bardo Pond are the flagship band of Philly's "Psychedelphia" space rock movement, which also included the likes of Aspera, Asteroid No. 4, the Azusa Plane, and tangentially the Lilys. They favour lengthy, deliberate sound explorations filled with all the hallmarks of modern-day space rock: droning guitars, thick distortion, feedback, reverb, and washes of white noise.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ride Into The Sun (The Velvet Underground)
2. Here Come The Warm Jets (Brian Eno)

Critical praise from Pitchfork, Clash, The Wire, Q Magazine and more upon release. New inverted LTD edition artwork. Fire re-issue Bardo Pond’s eponymous eighth studio album from 2010, their debut for Fire from way back when. A lysergic brain wrestler in which the Pennsylvanian drone outfit perfect their modal sound. Teasing the artistry of LaMonte Young and Terry Riley into a guitar shaped cauldron, the album’s compulsive reverbed guitar shapes slowly simmer behind Isobel Sollenberger’s esoteric vocals “Like hearing a tannoy at a station in the voice of Jesus.” The Quietus. A claustrophobic stuttering raga interlocks with their psychedelic leanings best exemplified on ‘Cracker Wrist’ which sounds like something that’s intentionally always just about to happen/and/or spin back in time. Featuring lengthy fully nurtured play offs between the quintet ‘Bardo Pond’ is a heady statement that’s like the most wholesome kind of vegan-friendly mushroom trips. Pitchfork reckons they’re “playing fuzzed out stoner dreams.” Vice’s musical brother Noisey likens them to “Fugazi On Acid.” Allmusic intervenes with: “These are epic, soaring psychedelic ambient power-drone rock noise melodies where partially buried, distant female vocals are laced throughout a roaring, murky/sludge guitar soundscape

TRACK LISTING

1 Just Once
2 Don’t Know About You
3 Sleeping
4 Undone
5 Cracker Wrist
6 The Stars Behind
7 Wayne’s Tune

New double LP compilation ‘Melt Away,’ cataloguing late-90s rarities and outtakes from a creative apex in the band’s career, released together on vinyl for the first time. Album highlight 'The Trail', originally recorded for the ‘What’s Up Matador’ compilation, dissolves six minutes into a moment. Blink once and you’ll miss it. Blink twice and the wallpaper might start to move.

TRACK LISTING

1. Olive Skin
2. Tapir Dub
3. Son Of Dispersion
4. Anadamide (Complete)
5. Shadow Puppet
6. The Division Of Nature
7. The Trail
8. Long Ride
9. Despite The Roar
10. Highlands

Following the long-since sold out repress of ‘Amanita’ in 2021, Bardo Pond will release a remastered edition of their classic 1999 LP ‘Set and Setting’ on purple vinyl, featuring the eleven-minute opener 'Walking Stick Man' and the single 'This Time (So Fucked)'.

TRACK LISTING

1. Walking Stick Man
2. This Time (So Fucked)
3. Datura
4. Again
5. Cross Current
6. Crawl Away
7. #3

Debut album from Manchester-via-Italy singer, songwriter and guitarist Julia Bardo.

Produced and mixed by Younghusband’s Euan Hinshelwood, the record firmly establishes Bardo’s musical adventurousness and prowess, and marks a cathartic and self-affirming moment for an artist who found her voice by realizing it's been there all along.

The album is best summed up by the woman who wrote it all: “Bauhaus, L’Appartamento is about loneliness, solitude, separation...but also unconditional love,” Bardo reveals of the record’s overarching themes. “Family, emotional dependency, mental health issues, feelings of emptiness and numbness, feelings of not being enough, inability to be in control of my own emotions, self-doubt, self-reflection, past traumas and dealing with them.”

Named after the apartment complex she lived in when demoing the album’s recordings, but with an Italian twist.

Follows the release of two EPs, Phase and The Raw EP, which saw her experiment further with her wistful and mysterious sound to become the alternative pop artist she is today.

Her musical journey began in Brescia in Northern Italy, where she sang and wrote lyrics for a local band between shifts at her father’s bar. A free spirit craving new inspiration, she relocated to Manchester and it was here she developed her striking style as a solo musician before also meeting and joining post-punk band Working Men’s Club. Never losing her strong desire to have full creative control over her music, she returned to become a solo artist again.

STAFF COMMENTS

Emily says: Julia Bardo: Local talent alert!! Gorgeous, off kilter pop songs which have more bite to them than you might expect. Sonorous vocals and deft melodic interplay met with moments of jangling dissonance. FFO Cate Le Bon and Aldous Harding!

Following the reissue of ‘Hex’ in late 2017, Fire Records reissue Bark Psychosis’ second studio album ‘///Codename:Dustsucker’ (2004) “which finds the band in remarkable form” (Pitchfork). Arriving ten years after the band disbanded, the long-awaited and criminally overlooked follow up brings with it an evolution of their sound. Their experimentations are layered with blissed out electronics, shoegaze, post-rock and jazz are still at its fore as are Sutton’s crystalline vocals. Languid and brooding, the soundscapes are dark and sustained while their “trademark cocoon of limpid, rippling guitar figures and jazzy adornment is buffeted by sharp leftward turns” (Uncut). Recorded in Graham Sutton’s East London DustSuckerSound studio between 1999 and 2004, it features contributions from Talk Talk sticksman Lee Harris and ‘found drumming’ from ex-band member Mark Simnett. 

TRACK LISTING

1 From What Is Said To When It's Read
2 The Black Meat
3 Miss Abuse
4 400 Winters
5 Dr. Innocuous / Ketamoid
6 Burning The City
7 INQB8TR
8 Shapeshifting
9 Rose

“The Best Post-Rock Album Of All Time” Fact Mag // “Their influence is pervasive” The Quietus // “Mysterious, haunting, and breathtakingly visionary” Allmusic // The recent release of Jeanette Leech’s book ‘Fearless: The Making Of Post-Rock’ (Jawbone Press) celebrates post-rock and its origins. Finding new inspiration, bands were beginning to experiment with techniques as the digital age took over. A case study in her new book, Bark Psychosis were one of the most innovative bands of their time and as legend has it, saw the first use of the term ‘post-rock’ by music critic Simon Reynolds. Following several singles and EPs, the avant-garde soundscapes built around drones and samples of 21-minute stand-out track ‘Scum’ arrived just two years before their seminal debut ‘Hex’ (1994).

Frustrated by the mainstream, ‘Scum’ was a huge statement that set them apart from the beginning. Bark Psychosis’ sound was born out of their improvisations at makeshift studio within St John’s Church in Stratford. Taking a year to complete ‘Hex’ left the band on the brink of collapse and by the time of its release they had dissolved. Hailed as a masterpiece, it’s “mysterious, haunting, and breathtakingly visionary” (Allmusic). Breaking down their songs and rebuilding them in the studio brought distinguishing ambient soundscapes and an atmospheric experimental sound. Last year Fact Magazine deservedly gave the album further recognition with it claiming top spot in their ’30 Best Post-Rock Albums Of All Time’.

Following ‘Hex’ and the disintegration of the band, Graham Sutton went on to create seminal Drum ‘n’ Bass as Boymerang and hugely acclaimed production work for the likes of These New Puritans, British Sea Power, Silver Apples, Jarvis Cocker and East India Youth. He revived Bark Psychosis at the turn of the millennium, eventually releasing another album, the equally extraordinary ‘///Codename: Dustsucker’ Newly remastered in 2017 from the original analog tapes at Metropolis Studios by Graham Sutton and Stuart Hawkes, and reissued officially for the first time

TRACK LISTING

1. The Loom
2. A Street
3. Abscent Friend
4. Big Shot
5. Fingerspit
6. Eyes & Smiles
7. Pendulum Man

Techno comes in all shapes and sizes, and few recent outfits embody that truth more obviously than Berlinʼs Barker & Baumecker. One operates as Barker/Voltek and the other as nd_baumecker. Both solo projects exhibit unconventional takes on techno inflected by the influence of other genres, from glitch to dubstep to ambient and beyond.

Titled “Transsektoral”, the album name refers to the duoʼs ambition to travel across the entire spectrum of electronic music. Thatʼs what they do on the LP, bridging a seemingly impossible gap between the dubby blobs of ambient opener “Sektor” to the effervescent bubbling of the epic closer “Spur,” like happy hardcore unravelled and disassembled into a soothing afterword worthy of someone like Dntel.

These are machinistic creations that swell with organic respiration and lush life, despite their artificial origins. The album jumps from garage-leaning bouncy house with “No Body” to exuberant tonnes-heavy off- kilter house (“Buttcracker”) where bubbles of caustic acid send the track into overdrive - yet none of these shifts quite feel like the gigantic stylistic leaps they represent. Instead, theyʼre smoothed out into something altogether pleasant and listenable, the album itself sharing each trackʼs own gentle sense of development and build-up.

Thatʼs largely due to careful sequencing: for every stretch of twitchy funk like “Schlang Bang” - where hi-hats and snares swim against a sea of topsy-turvy basslines like in difficult backstrokes - or the pumping liquid grooves of “Trans_it,” there are brief but texturally rich interludes like the sleepy-eyed “Tranq,” which rumbles reassuringly below a palette of twinkling synths. The album has an ebb-and-flow that makes its eccentricities enjoyable rather than obnoxious. And eccentric it is, particularly on mid-album highlight “Crows” (reworked for the single “A Murder of Crows” earlier this year) where what sounds like a blaring horn fanfare lights the dark passage of rustling snares - a startlingly unexpected turn that quickly becomes natural.

By the time we get to the end of the album, the simmer becomes nearly unbearable and finally boils over with the aweinspiring “Silo,” the track that betrays the duoʼs Berghain heritage (Barker runs the clubʼs Leisure System night, Baumecker is a booker for the club and long serving resident DJ there), where hissing hats get lost in a wringer of ropy vicegrip basslines and violent whiplash kick drums. Itʼs almost the albumʼs one concession to conventionality. Itʼs a perfect distillation of the overall aesthetic that Barker & Baumecker reveal with “Transsektoral” - it makes perfect sense in execution, but put it on paper and itʼs nearly incomprehensible, not to mention sprawling. Itʼs enough to make you wonder what kind of magic they did to put it together in the first place.

TRACK LISTING

01. Sektor
02. Trafo
03. SchlangBang
04. Crows
05. Tranq
06. NoBody
07. Trans_it
08. Databass133⅓
09. Buttcracker
10. Silo
11. Spur

Recorded live to tape at Toerag Studios, London in January 2015.

The Toerag Sessions is a collection of solo versions of my songs, recorded live to 2-track tape at Toerag Studios in London with grammy-winning producer Liam Watson (The White Stripes - Elephant).

Over the last few years, in between touring with my bands The Red Clay Halo and Vena Portae, I've played lots of solo shows. Often people will come up to me at the end of those shows and ask if there is any way to get hold of recordings of the songs as they've just heard them - just me, my guitar and my harmonica.

Up until now, that hasn't been possible, but with The Red Clay Halo currently on hiatus after their final tour last year, I took the opportunity to go in to the studio to record this selection of songs from my back catalogue. Many of these songs are the ones I usually choose to play at solo shows, with a few additions. The songs go right back to my first UK band the-low-country, through all my albums with The Red Clay Halo, and including a brand new song, 'Anywhere Away', written last year as the theme to the forthcoming British movie Hec McAdam (starring Peter Mullan and Keith Allen).

TRACK LISTING

1. Little Deaths 03:21
2. Nostalgia 03:48
3. Sideline 03:27
4. Disappear 02:55
5. Letters 04:19
6. Home 03:58
7. All Love Knows 03:54
8. The Dark Road 03:56
9. Lord I Want An Exit 04:18
10. Blackbird 02:52
11. This Is How It's Meant To Be 03:54
12. Anywhere Away 04:03

Dark Murmuration of Words contends with a modern era built on racial and gender inequality, poverty and slavery, environmental exploitation and the climate crisis, finding them all connected by the dark shadow of patriarchy, pursuits of power, and the suppression of history. “Finding meaning becomes challenging with the deafening clamour of social media in this age of fake news,” she says, “but it’s important to try discerning the patterns, learning to pay attention to things closer to home as well as to overwhelming global issues.” Referencing Emily Dickinson’s assertion that “If you take care of the small things, the big things take care of themselves,” Barker draws connections between the familial, the local, and the global: a mother sings to her unborn child, asking for its forgiveness on “Strange Weather”, “Where Have The Sparrows Gone?” looks outside an apartment window and imagines a post-apocalyptic birdless London, and a monument to a Confederate general comes alive for a “how-I-got-away-with-it” confession on “Machine.” Throughout A Dark Murmuration of Words, all of our choices, our unspoken prejudices, our carelessness, connect us to the whole, but becoming aware and honest on a local, personal scale, can begin to effect change, allow for healing, and tease out beauty from chaos. “Like the starlings in a murmuration, where the movement of each individual bird is related to just seven of its closest neighbours,” Emily Barker says, “none of us are aware of the fluctuating shapes being created by the flock.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Emily Barker is exactly what we need nowadays, a wash of politically charged lyricism, but enclosed within a calming, serene shell. Brittle guitars and Barker's strong but smooth vocals coalesce into a soaring and meditative whole.

TRACK LISTING

1. Return Me
2. Geography
3. The Woman Who Planted Trees
4. Where Have The Sparrows Gone?
5. Strange Weather
6. Machine
7. When Stars Cannot Be Found
8. Ordinary
9. Any More Goodbyes
10. Sonogram

Sweet Kind of Blue is her first full studio album since 2013's critically lauded Dear River and marks a new sound for Barker as she returns to the soul and blues influences that first inspired her to become a songwriter and musician.

Emily Barker's new album was recorded at Sam Phillips Recording Service in Memphis with Grammy winning producer Matt Ross-Spang (Jason Isbell, Margo Price) and an allstar cast of Memphis session players.

Emily Barker is best known as the writer and performer of the award-winning theme to BBC crime drama Wallander starring Kenneth Branagh. She has released music as a solo artist as well as with various bands including The Red Clay Halo, Vena Portae and Applewood Road. In 2015 she composed her first full feature film soundtrack for Jake Gavin's Hector, which won a Scottish BAFTA for its lead actor, Peter Mullan.

TRACK LISTING

Sweet Kind Of Blue
Sister Goodbye
Sunrise
No. 5 Hurricane
If We Forget
To Dance
Crazy Life
Over My Shoulder
Change
More!
Underneath My Honey Moon

**The Deluxe Version Has A Bonus CD With Other Tracks