THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2024 EXCLUSIVE AND WILL BE AVAILABLE INSTORE ON SATURDAY APRIL 20TH ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

IF THERE ARE ANY REMAINING COPIES THEY WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE ONLINE AT 8PM ON MONDAY APRIL 22ND.

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2024 EXCLUSIVE AND WILL BE AVAILABLE INSTORE ON SATURDAY APRIL 20TH ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

IF THERE ARE ANY REMAINING COPIES THEY WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE ONLINE AT 8PM ON MONDAY APRIL 22ND.

Angels With Dirty Faces is a haunting album from a tortured soul. Unrelenting oddly enough itís a beautiful albumî PITCHFORK (8.2/10) ìTricky has been redefining his rhythms, adding skittering jungle loops and hardcore hip-hop beats to his trademark dub-warped trip-hop. On top of that, heís expanding his sonic palette, adding cheap synthesizers and avant-garde guitarists to create a nightmarish junk-pile of hip-hop, dub, electronica, rock, and gospelî ALLMUSICìA renegade Brit B-boyís caustic, lyrical declaration of selfÖ. trip-hopís mongrel daddy found his hip-hop soulî ROLLING STONE Trickyís 2nd most sought-after vinyl LP, repressed for the first time, exclusively on orange coloured vinyl. The 2LP includes 2 tracks not included on the original CD release: Peyote Sings + Taxi. Martina Topley-Bird is once again on vocal duties but also featured are English singer-songwriter PJ Harvey (on ìBroken Homesî), Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian (on ìCarriage for Twoî) plus Marc Ribot adds his twisted guitar lines to a number of tracks. Continuing Trickyís penchant for covering hip-hop tracks ëAngelsÖí features a cover of Slick Rickís ìThe Moment I Fearedî. A success across Europe, in AUS and NZ, it also sold over 100,000 units in the USA.

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2024 EXCLUSIVE AND WILL BE AVAILABLE INSTORE ON SATURDAY APRIL 20TH ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

IF THERE ARE ANY REMAINING COPIES THEY WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE ONLINE AT 8PM ON MONDAY APRIL 22ND.

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2024 EXCLUSIVE AND WILL BE AVAILABLE INSTORE ON SATURDAY APRIL 20TH ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

IF THERE ARE ANY REMAINING COPIES THEY WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE ONLINE AT 8PM ON MONDAY APRIL 22ND.

The Verve's compilation album of B-sides and outtakes, No Come Down celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2024, to mark this UMR will be releasing it on vinyl for the very first time. With outtakes from the band's debut album A Storm in Heaven sessions. ìBlue" is a different (vocally upfront) "USA Mix" - released to coincide with Verve playing Lollapalooza Festival Chicago in 1994, this also features acoustic versions of "Make It Till Monday" & "Butterfly", "Gravity Grave" is the live recording from the bands first ever Glastonbury performance in 1993. This LP is pressed on black vinyl with printed inners.

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2024 EXCLUSIVE AND WILL BE AVAILABLE INSTORE ON SATURDAY APRIL 20TH ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

IF THERE ARE ANY REMAINING COPIES THEY WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE ONLINE AT 8PM ON MONDAY APRIL 22ND.

In front of an adoring sold-out crowd in Los Angeles, The Weeknd brings fans up-close with this intimate and epic special concert event, exclusively on HBO. Cinematically captured to bring viewers onstage and in the audience, The Weeknd: Live at SoFi Stadium offers a front-row seat to the versatile artist's thrilling 95-minute setlist ñ which includes such #1 hits as "Starboy," "Blinding Lights," "Can't Feel My Face," "I Feel It Coming," and so much more. With his mesmerizing dancers, spectacular lasers, and explosive pyrotechnics, The Weeknd (winner of four Grammys, 20 Billboard Music Awards, and six AMAs, and nominated for an Emmy) brings down the house ñ and your living room ñ ahead of the performer's highly anticipated star turn in HBO's upcoming drama series The Idol. Never before on vinyl

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2024 EXCLUSIVE AND WILL BE AVAILABLE INSTORE ON SATURDAY APRIL 20TH ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

IF THERE ARE ANY REMAINING COPIES THEY WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE ONLINE AT 8PM ON MONDAY APRIL 22ND.

8 Page Booklet - Blue / Red vinyl Sometimes regarded as the most complete Who Best Of, this version with a replica of the original 8-page booklet and pressed on Coloured vinyl (Pink and Green) was mastered by long time Who engineer Jon Astley and cut by Miles Showell at Abbey Road

Some bands struggle to transcend their initial mythos, those stories that introduce them to the public eye. But The Dead C is a notable exception. They appeared in 1986 under a cloud of mystery, their unconventional location (South Island, New Zealand) helping to fuel their erratic sound. Name-dropped through the nineties by groups like Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo, they gained influence and acclaim but never strayed from their original mainlined performing technique, which can sound like chaos to the casual listener.

What kind of a world greets them and their new album Unknowns in 2020? New Zealand culture is better known throughout the world, not to mention a low-virus paradise. Yes, isolated as in the past, but this time for being a nation of efficacy in tackling a public health crisis. But what about the rest of the world? The music of Mssrs. Robbie Yates, Bruce Russell and Michael Morley endures, partially because their errant sounds, once so alienating, now feel like they’ve been made flesh in a large part of the modern day world.

Continuing to delve inwards for inspiration with tin ears towards trends, styles and technique, The Dead C forge onward. Unpolished, dusty and gritty, these three have again taken two guitars and drums, a combo which has less to say than ever, and leave the listener stunned. Unknowns has Morley slurring over spiraling dissemblance, with tracks ricocheting from intense to assaultive to drained, yet consistently magnificent. As reliable as ever, The Dead C are firmly grounded as an unassailable Truth.

TRACK LISTING

1. Grunt Machine
2. Still
3. The Sky Above
4. Glitterness
5. The Field

The Orielles on The Goyt Method: Our concept for The Goyt Method was birthed from our interest in cybernetics, improvisation and experimental electronic music. We wanted to zoom out of ‘Tableau’ (the band’s third album released in 2022) and disconnect all the pieces, rearranging them in new ways to create variations of songs, which encapsulate the whole record. We left this part of the process completely down to chance, adopting an online roulette wheel to choose our stems. This way of creating music was familiar to us from spending a lot of time remixing and record collecting, gaining an invested interest in deep listening and avant-garde electronic music.

The name itself comes from the initial location in which we remixed with Joel Patchett, a wintery and freezing cold Goyt Mill. From here, we coined the term ‘Goytism’ or ‘to Goyt’ which was basically our way of describing the process of repurposing and resampling acoustic sounds through digital production, making them unrecognisable from their original source.

The photograph on the sleeve was taken in winter 2020, our first visit to the Mill studio, our first Goyt session. 

TRACK LISTING

Side A:
1. Tableau 001
2. Tableau 002
3. Improvisation 002
Side B:
1. Tableau 003
2. Tableau 004 

TVAM self-released his much-acclaimed debut Psychic Data in the autumn of 2018, something of a cult-classic, the album joined the dots between Suicide’s deconstructed rock ’n’ roll, Boards of Canada’s irresistible nostalgia and My Bloody Valentine’s infinite noise. Psychic Data spawned an ‘Album Of The Day’ at BBC 6Music whilst signature tune ‘Porsche Majeure’ featured in HBO’s smash-hit ‘Succession’.

Fast forward the VCR to 2022, High Art Lite takes a different tilt to its predecessor by emphasising the immediate and the personal.The colours are blown-out and the brightness is cranked up.TVAM’s take on role models, fictional movie character tropes, and fables of good and evil, are all tackled with the same suspicious cynicism but this time with an urgent belief in the human condition.

A heady mix of Black Mirror’s modern fables, JG Ballard’s gated communities of sun-drenched wealth, and Mulholland Drive’s boulevard of broken daydreams, High Art Lite offers an all-inclusive package of redemption.

High Art Lite is the first-ever Dinked Edition collaboration with Invada Records.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Future Flesh
Every Day In Every Way
Club Nautico (Part 1)
Piz Buin
Double Lucifer
Shallow Ends
Side B
Semantics
Say Anything
Host
Club Nautico (Part 2)
High Art Lite

TVAM self-released his much-acclaimed debut Psychic Data in the autumn of 2018, something of a cult-classic, the album joined the dots between Suicide’s deconstructed rock ’n’ roll, Boards of Canada’s irresistible nostalgia and My Bloody Valentine’s infinite noise. Psychic Data spawned an ‘Album Of The Day’ at BBC 6Music whilst signature tune ‘Porsche Majeure’ featured in HBO’s smash-hit ‘Succession’.

Fast forward the VCR to 2022, High Art Lite takes a different tilt to its predecessor by emphasising the immediate and the personal.The colours are blown-out and the brightness is cranked up.TVAM’s take on role models, fictional movie character tropes, and fables of good and evil, are all tackled with the same suspicious cynicism but this time with an urgent belief in the human condition.

A heady mix of Black Mirror’s modern fables, JG Ballard’s gated communities of sun-drenched wealth, and Mulholland Drive’s boulevard of broken daydreams, High Art Lite offers an all-inclusive package of redemption.

High Art Lite is the first-ever Dinked Edition collaboration with Invada Records.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Future Flesh
Every Day In Every Way
Club Nautico (Part 1)
Piz Buin
Double Lucifer
Shallow Ends
Side B
Semantics
Say Anything
Host
Club Nautico (Part 2)
High Art Lite

Celebrate 5 of Tom Waits’ albums from the Island years, all of which have had an incredible impact on music history.

All remastered to HD audio.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Lucky Day Overture
The Black Rider
November
Just The Right Bullets
Black Box Theme
'Tain't No Sin
Flash Pan Hunter/Intro
That's The Way
The Briar And The Rose
Russian Dance
Side B
Gospel Train/Orchestra
I'll Shoot The Moon
Flash Pan Hunter
Crossroads
Gospel Train
Interlude
Oily Night
Lucky Day
The Last Rose Of The Summer
Carnival

Celebrate 5 of Tom Waits’ albums from the Island years, all of which have had an incredible impact on music history.

All remastered to HD audio.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Lucky Day Overture
The Black Rider
November
Just The Right Bullets
Black Box Theme
'Tain't No Sin
Flash Pan Hunter/Intro
That's The Way
The Briar And The Rose
Russian Dance
Side B
Gospel Train/Orchestra
I'll Shoot The Moon
Flash Pan Hunter
Crossroads
Gospel Train
Interlude
Oily Night
Lucky Day
The Last Rose Of The Summer
Carnival

'Foom label head Benjamin Freeney reworks Tim Burgess & Peter Gordon's restless, psychedelic epic, "Temperature High" into three new forms (two cuts for the dancefloor, and one ambient interlude), rearranging the rich source material of the original (metallic field recordings from the New York subway, Peter Gordon's original Korg bassline reincarnated in sub-bass form, Tim Burgess' ethereal vocal cut-up into new patterns) and fusing it with new percussive and melodic elements. The original track was featured on Tim Burgess & Peter Gordon’s Same Language, Different Worlds album from 2016, with contributions from Arthur Russell's close collaborators Peter Zummo and Mustafa Ahmed, as well as Factory Floor’s Nik Void.'

TRACK LISTING

1. Temperature High (Benjamin Freeney Cold Light Dub)
2. Temperature High (Benjamin Freeney Interlude Dub)
3. Temperature High (Benjamin Freeney Warm Blood Dub)

Put simply, this is the DESCENDENTS' earliest material, representing a "lost" pre-MGTC album. Most of these songs have not been heard—until now.

Formed in L.A.'s South Bay in 1978, DESCENDENTS began as a power trio featuring bassist Tony Lombardo, drummer Bill Stevenson, and guitarist Frank Navetta (d. 2008). The band recruited vocalist Milo Aukerman in 1980 and began establishing themselves as major players in the Southern California Punk movement. Over the years, the band has sustained a potent chemistry and shared vision, further cementing them as punk legends.

In 2002, the original four-piece lineup — Frank Navetta, Tony Lombardo, Bill Stevenson, and Milo Aukerman — got back into the studio to finally record their first-ever songs. The songs were written by the band from 1977 through 1980, before recording the Fat EP (1981) and the Milo Goes to College LP (1982).

Every element of DESCENDENTS' genre-creating sound is here: Stevenson's hyper-caffeinated surf-beats, Lombardo's intrepid bass, Navetta's crunching attack, Aukerman's impassioned, infinitely relatable singing—and all those great melodies and harmonies.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: '9th & Walnut' offers the essential missing link in the Descendents history, before their 1982 breakthrough classic 'Milo Goes To College'. It's a richly rewarding listen, with moments aplenty of that classic early skate-punk sound, and a great insight into the development of one of the most well known US punk acts.

TRACK LISTING

Sailor's Choice
Crepe Suzette
You Make Me Sick
Lullaby
Nightage
Baby Doncha Know
Tired Of Being Tired
I'm Shaky
Grudge
Mohicans
Like The Way I Know
It’s A Hectic World
To Remember
Yore Disgusting
It's My Hair
I Need Some
Ride The Wild
Glad All Over

A singular group of experts issues a notice of extraordinary urgency in the vicinity of various atmospheric phenomena, which are partially localized and, above all, of high intensity. Yet the sun shines with strength over the Neapolitan favela. 'Allerta Meteo' is the first album of sparkling sonics by The Funkin' Machine Collective and the newest release of Periodica Records? Pegaso Series, comprising a cross-section of jazz and funk sounds, with bright colors that are good for any season, whether rain or shine. The voice of Andres Balbucea - the binding soul of the opera - is supported by the unmistakable flow of Speaker Cenzou during the vibrant ''L'ora d'o Groove'', accompanied by the performances of Roberto Porzio on the synthesizers, Alessio Pignorio and Riccardo Betteghella on the guitars, Vincenzo Lamagna bass guitar, Andrea De Fazio drums, Paolo Bianconcini on percussions, and the extraordinary participation of Pietro Santangelo in the cinematic ''Django'' and Jeroen Verberne on Trombone in ''Rafiki''. An authentic wave of warm notes destined to overwhelm the most observant listener, the first-hour followers, and all the citizens.

TRACK LISTING

1. Prufesso
2. Django (Fischio)
3. Rafiki
4. Allerta Meteo
5. Affittacamere
6. Ll'ora Do Groove
7. Pataturk

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

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

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

STAFF COMMENTS

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

TRACK LISTING

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

Tasha’s second album, ‘Tell Me What You Miss The Most’ mingles pockets of introspection with wide, expansive, marveling at what’s yet to come. Born and raised in Chicago, Tasha is a musician who writes songs that take loving and longing seriously. Whether dwelling in the sad thrum of an impending break up or the dizzying, heart thumping waltz of new infatuation, here is an album that traces one artist’s relationship to herself in love. Full of deep, invigorating inhales and relieved, joyful exhales, Tell Me What You Miss The Most is an exquisitely crafted breath of much needed air.

Tell Me What You Miss the Most isn’t just a catalogue of tenderness it’s also a showcase of Tasha’s growing and formidable musician-ship. “When I made Alone at Last, I had only been writing songs for two years. I hardly even knew what kind of song writer I was. But this record feels much stronger as far as a representation of my songwriter and musicianship,” says Tasha, adding “I did feel like I was piloting it in a way that I haven’t really felt before.”
“I was inspired by a distance I felt from myself,” says Tasha of the album, “the writing was kind of born from this desire to get back to an intimacy, or honesty, with myself.” Other inspirations include kissing, long drives in nature, her mother, and “winter and all that it allows (being alone inside, wrapped up in something warm, feeling things deeply.)” Her list of inspirations is a collection of types of touch; fleeting affectionate touch, the brush of a knit blanket, the bracing grip of feeling one’s own skin twinned in a palm. So too does the album veer in and out of touch with Tasha herself, tracing tenderness and loneliness, the paradox of feeling held and utterly abandoned at once.

“Tasha makes wondrous, gentle soul that advocates for self-care.” – Pitchfork.

“Genre fluid like Lianne La Havas and Jamila Woods, with decorative-but-unobtrusive guitar work and electronics, Tasha roots her songs in a conversational poetry that hits like heart pangs.” - NPR Music.

“Her gentle, resplendent songs are a salve for those who struggle to find space to be themselves.” - Chicago Reader.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Bed Song 1
2. History
3. Perfect Wife
4. Sorry’s Not Enough
5. Love Interlude
Side B
1. Dream Still
2. Burton Island
3. Lake Superior
4. Year From Now
5. Bed Song 2

Tasha’s second album, ‘Tell Me What You Miss The Most’ mingles pockets of introspection with wide, expansive, marveling at what’s yet to come. Born and raised in Chicago, Tasha is a musician who writes songs that take loving and longing seriously. Whether dwelling in the sad thrum of an impending break up or the dizzying, heart thumping waltz of new infatuation, here is an album that traces one artist’s relationship to herself in love. Full of deep, invigorating inhales and relieved, joyful exhales, Tell Me What You Miss The Most is an exquisitely crafted breath of much needed air.

Tell Me What You Miss the Most isn’t just a catalogue of tenderness it’s also a showcase of Tasha’s growing and formidable musician-ship. “When I made Alone at Last, I had only been writing songs for two years. I hardly even knew what kind of song writer I was. But this record feels much stronger as far as a representation of my songwriter and musicianship,” says Tasha, adding “I did feel like I was piloting it in a way that I haven’t really felt before.”
“I was inspired by a distance I felt from myself,” says Tasha of the album, “the writing was kind of born from this desire to get back to an intimacy, or honesty, with myself.” Other inspirations include kissing, long drives in nature, her mother, and “winter and all that it allows (being alone inside, wrapped up in something warm, feeling things deeply.)” Her list of inspirations is a collection of types of touch; fleeting affectionate touch, the brush of a knit blanket, the bracing grip of feeling one’s own skin twinned in a palm. So too does the album veer in and out of touch with Tasha herself, tracing tenderness and loneliness, the paradox of feeling held and utterly abandoned at once.

“Tasha makes wondrous, gentle soul that advocates for self-care.” – Pitchfork.

“Genre fluid like Lianne La Havas and Jamila Woods, with decorative-but-unobtrusive guitar work and electronics, Tasha roots her songs in a conversational poetry that hits like heart pangs.” - NPR Music.

“Her gentle, resplendent songs are a salve for those who struggle to find space to be themselves.” - Chicago Reader.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Bed Song 1
2. History
3. Perfect Wife
4. Sorry’s Not Enough
5. Love Interlude
Side B
1. Dream Still
2. Burton Island
3. Lake Superior
4. Year From Now
5. Bed Song 2

If TEEN’s 2016 album Love Yes was a bursting, harmony-infused synthpop thesis on embracing love, then its follow-up, the even more joyous and melodic Good Fruit, is its opposite, a look at what happens after love fades. The Lieberson sisters—Teeny, Lizzie, and Katherine—have, with their fourth album, crafted a dynamic, hook-stuffed take on the oft-trodden breakup album; as on prior releases, there are frequent meditations on death, capitalism, and womanhood.

The sisters—and Boshra AlSaadi, a longtime TEEN member who left a year into songwriting to focus on her own music—spun together Good Fruit in a few places, over roughly a year, as they aimed to break free of the notorious write-record-tour cycle. At a week-long session in Montreal in February 2017, they began working on “Radar,” a Lizzie-penned ballad that explores a previously unmentioned formative trauma. Another Montreal week in April 2017 birthed a large chunk of Good Fruit, and a five-day expedition in upstate New York led to “Putney,” a slinky, bassy bop that deals with how projected ideals and personal fantasy play into sex and misogyny.

“Runner” came last, arising from an environment where the sisters surely feel the most comfortable: New York, the city where they’ve lived for over a decade. Perhaps the album’s most bursting, beatific, synth-driven track, “Runner,” which reflects on fleeing a relationship as a partner wants to become closer, jelled just before the album was completed, in an NYC home studio belonging to TEEN collaborator Miles Francis.

While recording Good Fruit, the sisters employed a self-described “reductive approach,” strove to create space within their songs, and, for their first time, self-produced the album (save a few co-productions from Francis, who also played on some songs). These techniques explode the glistening, sprinting glamour of “Only Water,” a deceptively upbeat number about death and the loss of a loved one. They inform Good Fruit’s handful of ballads too, including “Pretend,” which rings with a vast, unsettling static fuzz even as Lizzie beautifully recounts the disappointment of realizing a partner wasn’t all she’d built them up to be.

When love fades, TEEN soars. “A lot of what ties Good Fruit in...is forging new paths for ourselves and letting go of old ways of doing things,” Teeny says. The band’s intentional amendments to its longtime formula have resulted in its most mature, nuanced, and exhilarating statement yet.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: The synth gods have been good to us this week not only delivering the psychedelic sounds of Pond, but gracing us with the off-kilter funk and shimmering synthetic soul of 'Good Fruit' from the ever-superb 'Teen', comprising of Lieberson sisters Kristina, Katherine and Lizzy. Shining sidechained synths, driving percussion and swooping melodies all topped with beautifully harmonised athletic vocal lines.

TRACK LISTING

1. Popular Taste
2. Ripe
3. Only Water
4. Radar
5. Connection
6. Luv 2 Luv
7. Shadow
8. Runner
9. Putney
10. Pretend

If TEEN’s 2016 album Love Yes was a bursting, harmony-infused synthpop thesis on embracing love, then its follow-up, the even more joyous and melodic Good Fruit, is its opposite, a look at what happens after love fades. The Lieberson sisters—Teeny, Lizzie, and Katherine—have, with their fourth album, crafted a dynamic, hook-stuffed take on the oft-trodden breakup album; as on prior releases, there are frequent meditations on death, capitalism, and womanhood.

The sisters—and Boshra AlSaadi, a longtime TEEN member who left a year into songwriting to focus on her own music—spun together Good Fruit in a few places, over roughly a year, as they aimed to break free of the notorious write-record-tour cycle. At a week-long session in Montreal in February 2017, they began working on “Radar,” a Lizzie-penned ballad that explores a previously unmentioned formative trauma. Another Montreal week in April 2017 birthed a large chunk of Good Fruit, and a five-day expedition in upstate New York led to “Putney,” a slinky, bassy bop that deals with how projected ideals and personal fantasy play into sex and misogyny.

“Runner” came last, arising from an environment where the sisters surely feel the most comfortable: New York, the city where they’ve lived for over a decade. Perhaps the album’s most bursting, beatific, synth-driven track, “Runner,” which reflects on fleeing a relationship as a partner wants to become closer, jelled just before the album was completed, in an NYC home studio belonging to TEEN collaborator Miles Francis.

While recording Good Fruit, the sisters employed a self-described “reductive approach,” strove to create space within their songs, and, for their first time, self-produced the album (save a few co-productions from Francis, who also played on some songs). These techniques explode the glistening, sprinting glamour of “Only Water,” a deceptively upbeat number about death and the loss of a loved one. They inform Good Fruit’s handful of ballads too, including “Pretend,” which rings with a vast, unsettling static fuzz even as Lizzie beautifully recounts the disappointment of realizing a partner wasn’t all she’d built them up to be.

When love fades, TEEN soars. “A lot of what ties Good Fruit in...is forging new paths for ourselves and letting go of old ways of doing things,” Teeny says. The band’s intentional amendments to its longtime formula have resulted in its most mature, nuanced, and exhilarating statement yet.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: The synth gods have been good to us this week not only delivering the psychedelic sounds of Pond, but gracing us with the off-kilter funk and shimmering synthetic soul of 'Good Fruit' from the ever-superb 'Teen', comprising of Lieberson sisters Kristina, Katherine and Lizzy. Shining sidechained synths, driving percussion and swooping melodies all topped with beautifully harmonised athletic vocal lines.

TRACK LISTING

1. Popular Taste
2. Ripe
3. Only Water
4. Radar
5. Connection
6. Luv 2 Luv
7. Shadow
8. Runner
9. Putney
10. Pretend

I’m going to set Carpe Diem as my alarm for the next week and see how that makes me feel. It will be replacing an alternation of Werewolves of London and Baby, It’s You. After a week the familiarity might feel kind of insane but kind of nice. Ad nauseum to the coffee. Yeah! Terry is into repetition. Terry often feels like the daily grind but set inside a Loony Tune. They can be slightly nasty and violent, but funny at the same time. I laugh at Terry riffs a lot. The lyrics are droll, yes, but have you heard the riffs? It’s like they’re tickling you. It’s like Terry has got his great big fingers under my arms. But this is all part of a strangely conceived plan. I would almost say that Terry is highly conceptual. Possibly the most conceptual band I’ve been around, possibly in my whole life. Like… what’s really going on here? Why am I listening to jingles and feeling so moved?

My favourite songs on Terry’s new album ‘I’m Terry’ (the band’s third record in three years), are Under Reign, it’s a creepy one, sandwiched between other new faves The Whip and Crimes. There’s a theme of dominance and submission here, but kinda unremarkable and ignorable, like knowing you're enslaved by your streaming service but just gently putting that out of your mind for another week. Terry is domesticity. Terry romances the mundane. This is how romance ekes out a triumph amidst mundanity. That’s what Billy Bragg’s New England and Squeeze’s Up The Junction do. Terry’s suburban escapism moment is Ciao Goodbye. Listen to Ciao Goodbye on an arterial road under the yellow streetlights of a weeknight. Terry has never been this beautiful. Terry may never be beautiful again, definitely not on this record. The next song is psycho.

That’s what I like about Terry, there are few rules in Terry’s world. They seem to make a song out of whatever sounds good to them. I literally don’t know what they’ll do next. They aren’t a genre study. The only stylistic consistency is in their hat wear. I’ve never been in a band like this. I’ve been in a band that simultaneously studied genre and also hats. But never only hats. Have you noticed the reggae undercurrent in Terry? There is one. This is good. Terry are kinda like Steely Dan or 10cc. Both bands make me queasy after a certain point. Terry probably also make me a bit queasy, singing about police beatings and nationalism and all that. But they’re not out to hurt you. They’re like the kindly bearer of bad news. There’s some awful shit going on in this country. Terry knows. Terry puts it in terms that speak to me. It’s a tragicomedy. I want to laugh and sometimes I want to consider crying. But I don’t think I will. I’m pretty certain Terry isn’t perverse, they’re just the harbinger of the encroaching perverse world. I’m pretty certain Terry wants to be my friend, and your friend. Our friend, Terry. Lee Parker, 2018. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: With the recent reissue of the Moldy Peaches' eponymous lo-fi indie opus, they've reignited a previously roaring fire for clanging guitars and crashing drums, and it just so happens that Terry are the 'If They Could Play Their Instruments' version of the aforementioned. A similar whimsical sensibility, but underpinned with the tuneful twists and turns of a band know what makes a perfect progression. Brilliantly balanced and delivered.

TRACK LISTING

01. Carpe Diem
02. Bureau
03. The Whip
04. Under Reign
05. Crimes
06. Oh Helen
07. Jane Roe
08. Fortress
09. Ciao Goodbye
10. For The Field

Now for a trip into an impossible land, generated on a hacked copy of Populous, wrought out of melting circuitry and bootlegged YMO LPs, projected on early green screen and filled with failed CGI from the Waterworld era. Panagiotis Melidis and Stathis Kalatzis are Territroy, the newest member of the Dekmantel family, and the creative insanity behind the newest UFO release, "Skulls & Plants". Now, I don't recall taking a massive dose of 4-AcO this morning with my cornflakes, but that may well have happened, as this is one trippy listen. At various points EBM, tropical house, machine voodoo and shamanic breaks are twisted, warped and frazzled, all achieving the demented sound signature of this lunatic Grecian duo. Rhythms collapse, stutter skip and slur, crispy distortion coats otherwise healthy melodies and oddly exotic idents flutter across the landscape, though you could never be certain they were there. Highly psychoactive electronics and primal rhythms for fans of Helena Hauff, Detlef, Lena Willikens and the Silk Road.

TRACK LISTING

Delirium Vivens
Wax Smiles
Non Sayers
Sleeping Fury
Instar
Upside Down Sinner
I Meant You, Not You
Their Menads
Bold Like A New Sun (Ft. Olympia)
Prosopagnosia

Tourist Kid's first release for Melody As Truth. Recorded in Perth and Melbourne between 2016 and 2017. Though the idea of movement between two places could be a somewhat romantic afterthought, a more palpable sense of dislocated unease creeps up on the listener throughout the album.

On "Discourse II", stutters of digital trash segue seamlessly into a plateau of serene, glassy ambience – and on "Bacterial", the hiss and sting of rehashed foley seems to dance around a plaintive, oh-so delicate piano solo. These striking contrasts are deftly managed, playing upon notions of digital noise and ambient, while never feeling weighed down by the limits of reference or gesture. Indeed, numerous touchstones to Tourist Kid's earlier work – and to that of contemporaries – are synthesized and expanded upon to great detail and atmosphere. "Crude Tracer" sits in its own adeptly nuanced and assured space.

Tourist Kid's production encompasses all manner of tangible and otherworldly sounds as a vehicle to explore something far more intriguing than a simple instrumental fetish – so much so that the overwhelming sting of blasted detritus or a broken and bent vocal is capable of eliciting such delicate impulses as glistening, heart-wrenching piano chords. It's a unique – and very special – kind of beauty that Tourist Kid gracefully achieves with "Crude Tracer”. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Patrick says: Jonny Nash embraces the burgeoning Aussie ambient scene for the latest Melody As Truth release, inviting Tourist Kid to open our eyes and align our chakras. Shifting, shimmering and beautifully intangible, ‘Crude Tracer’ filters dreamlike compositions through the most delicate static, resulting in a truly ephemeral experience.

TRACK LISTING

1. Example
2. Discourse II
3. Learn
4. Variegare
5. Know
6. UV Bleacher Tangent
7. Bacterial
8. Petrol 

Originally released on Blue Candle Records in 1977, Steppin' Out by the 13th Floor is a true treasure that deserves a cherished place in the collection of every soul and funk connoisseur. This long-awaited reissue brings back the original magic, preserving the essence and impact it had on the music scene.
Its profound influence on bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers is undeniable, solidifying its status as an essential gem in the annals of musical history.

Now, with this reissue, you have the opportunity to experience the same captivating rhythms and infectious melodies that captivated audiences decades ago. Are you ready to awaken your boogie spirit and infuse your living room with the long-lost spark of the mid-seventies? Brace yourself for an immersive experience as you surrender to the timeless grooves and soulful vibes that will transport you to a bygone era of musical enchantment. Allow the music to ignite your soul, reigniting the vibrant energy of the past
and instilling in you an irresistible urge to groove like never before.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1 Sweet Thang
A2 Teffany
A3 Time And Place
A4 Hang Loose
A5 Steppin' Out
Side B
B1 Sweet Lovely Girl
B2 Get Up
B3 Leanin
B4 Rise

What happens when two of the best in their game go on tour together? Record a 7" EP to accompany said tour..

The 5.6.7.8's and The Masonics (including Miss Ludella Black) have been friends for longer then they can remember. In 2022, The Masonics joined The 5.6.7.8's on their five-night UK tour, with Ludella Black joining both groups onstage too.

Alexandra Sauser-Monnig and Amelia Meath have been yodeling together for upwards of fifteen years – in the backseat of a Prius while on their first cross-country tour, on back porches and backstages. It’s what led them to Fruit, their debut release as The A’s – a joyous ten-song collection spanning genre and decades, with interpretations of traditionals, lullabies, and an original song, it weaves between the weird and the wonderful. “Why I’m Grieving,” originally recorded by the DeZurik Sisters, was the inspiration for the A’s existence. The A’s reach into the past to hold hands with the DeZurik Sisters, two farm girls from rural Minnesota who taught themselves to yodel amongst all their animals, in a continuing celebration of the tradition of folk eccentricity and whimsy.

The A’s played their first show together in 2013 after Sauser-Monnig first moved to North Carolina, where Meath had been living at the time, but it wasn’t until summer 2021 that they thought seriously about making Fruit. They decamped to Sylvan Esso’s Chapel Hill studio, Betty’s, for two weeks in the midst of a balmy and blooming Carolinian summer. They rehearsed during the day, deconstructing yodeling parts phonetically and staring absurdly into each other’s eyes as they practiced tongue twisting harmonies - and recorded in the nighttime, candles lit, a flickering glow against the windows framing the violet twilight outside.

“There was a lot of giggling during the session,” Sauser-Monnig explains. “At one point I was getting a tangle out of my hair and was like, oh, my God, that sounds really cool – the sound of my hands in my hair. And then I thought, what if we recorded hair for a percussion track? And then it just sort of snowballed.” Across the record, the A’s employ a bizarre-o ghost orchestra of strange noises that are percussive and melodic. The credits include nylon shorts, string (singular), hair, shoes, ice chunk, gravel, frog sample, and shoelace, among other unexpected makeshift instrumentation. The backing band is built out by a more traditional group of players: saxophone from Sam Gendel on “Copper Kettle,” backing vocals from Jenn Wasner (Flock of Dimes, Wye Oak) on “When I Die,” string arrangements from Gabriel Kahane on “He Needs Me,” and more.

Fruit is made up simply of songs the A’s love to sing – there are lullabies and love songs; “He Needs Me,” written by Harry Nilsson and first released by Shelley Duvall in the 1980 Popeye film; traditional ballads like “Swing and Turn Jubilee,” “Copper Kettle” and closer “Buckeye Jim,” a multiplying song about frogs and nature. The sole original track to appear on the album is the penultimate “When I Die,” written by Meath. It contains both wishes and instructions for the celebration of her death, a low synth bubbling beneath Sauser-Monnig and Meath’s voices. It’s a collection of ten seemingly incongruous songs, but with the throughline of Sauser-Monnig and Meath’s vocals and sense of humor working in tandem, they fit together into a cosmic yodeling-folk masterpiece. Fruit feels like blowing the dust off a precious artifact of decades past, but also winking and modern. Sauser-Monnig sums up their ethos on the project succinctly: “If it doesn’t make you cackle or cry, it doesn’t belong.”

TRACK LISTING

01 He Needs Me
02 Swing And Turn Jubilee
03 Wedding Dress
04 Why I’m Grieving
05 When The Bloom Is On The Sage
06 My Poncho Pony
07 Go To Sleep My Darling Baby
08 Copper Kettle
09 When I Die
10 Buckeye Jim

Irish indie rock band The Academic are very excited to announce details of their new album, “Sitting Pretty” . The album was produced by Nick Hodgson at Snap Studios in London. Sitting Pretty is an album about navigating life in your 20s; the uncertainties and the ever-shifting sense of self. “It’s about the entrance into true adulthood and how that can alienate you from yourself, making you feel like you’re playing a supporting role in your own life,” the band explain. “In one moment feeling 100% certain about everything, only to become overwhelmed with feelings of aimlessness and lack of direction in the next.” 

Garage-punk-soul, somewhere between Make-up and Huggy Bear.

Discos Perdidos - which translates as Lost Records - is a new series started by Lisbon label Paraiso, dedicated entirely to releasing archival music that, for a reason or another, never saw the light of day. The first outing on this adventure into the unknown is by none other than the legendary Portugal-born, London-based techno instigator The Advent aka Cisco Ferreira. The three tracks on this EP were written in 1998 and were meant to be released on a label that another Portuguese techno legend - Jiggy - meant to start running, but other projects got in the way. Fast forward to early 2023, Jiggy showed the Paraiso crew the DATs containing these gems - immediately entrancing - and both him and The Advent agreed to give Discos Perdidos the honours of putting them out. Titled "Shiolas", this three-tracker opens with "Don't Do It", a relentless techno banger that, albeit its four to the floor drum pattern, feels swingy thanks to cleverly programmed percussion and claps. A concise but extremely effective bassline and synth lead guides the energetic smasher, with cut-up vocals, timely placed filters and hi-hats giving it a final shimmer. It's followed by the Piano Mix, with an equally strong and raw arrangement and a new element - an alien, sound-sculpted piano that gives it an extra sense of urgency. The closing track "Jacker" has more abstract leanings, although similarly dancefloor-ready, featuring an off-kilter yet driving conversation between stabs and bells in a display of expertly crafted dubby yet visceral sound design. A piece of dance music history is recovered - techno is now a story told more accurately.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Primal techno shirt-lifters of the prime-era DJ Rush / Jeff Mills ilk. Nice to see these early 00s sounds making a come back. See also: Max Watts, Kettama, David James Drume etc.

TRACK LISTING

1. Don't Do It
2. Don't Do It (Piano Mix)
3. Jacker

‘Do To The Beast’ is the first new album by The Afghan Whigs in over a decade and a half. Founded in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1988, the band has long stood out from its peers, with their savage, rapturous blend of hard rock, classic soul, and frontman Greg Dulli’s searing angst and obsessions.

The new album is both a homecoming - it marks their return to Sub Pop, for whom the Whigs were the first signing from outside the label’s Northwest base - and a glimpse into the future of one of the most acclaimed bands of the past twenty five years.

‘Do To The Beast’ is an appropriately feral title for one of the most intense, cathartic records of Dulli’s entire career. It adds fresh twists to The Afghan Whigs canon: there’s the film noir storytelling of ‘Black Love’, the exuberance of ‘1965’, the brutal introspection of ‘Gentlemen’. However, the album exudes a galvanized musical spirit and rhythmic heft that suggest transcendence and hope amidst the bloodletting.

Recorded in LA, New Orleans, Cincinnati, and Joshua Tree - a virtual map of the band’s past and present homes, the album features Whigs co-founders Greg Dulli and John Curley, along with the core band of guitarists Dave Rosser and Jon Skibic, multi-instrumentalist Rick Nelson and drummer Cully Symington. Also featured are soul iconoclast Van Hunt, Mark McGuire (Emeralds), Johnny ‘Natural’ Nagera (Usher’s musical director), Alain Johannes (Queens Of The Stone Age, Arctic Monkeys), Clay Tarver (Bullet LaVolta, Chavez), Dave Catching (QOTSA, Eagles of Death Metal), among others.

STAFF COMMENTS

Laura says: Greg Dulli and co return in fine style with this swaggering blend of rock'n'roll angst, classic r'n'b and soul. A dark and uncompromising tour de force.

The Afghan Whigs are set to release their first studio album in five years, How Do You Burn?, on 9 September. How Do You Burn?, the ninth studio album from The Afghan Whigs, finds the band in peak form, making the most vaulting and thrilling music of their lives. The album is virile, ready-for-action, and finds frontman Greg Dulli as swaggering, enigmatic and darkly charismatic as ever, and singing up a storm.

The album reaches corners of sound that, twenty-six years after the band's inception, find them at an apex. Referencing Warren Zevon, Prince, and Zeppelin all while plugging in to the soul and R&B influences that have always set them apart, The Afghan Whigs are at a precipice of greatness. Says Dulli, “I’m beginning to see there are a million places we can go. I feel virile, ready for action, and I want to keep stalking greatness.” 

TRACK LISTING

I’ll Make You See God
The Getaway
Catch A Colt
Jyja
Please, Baby, Please
A Line Of Shots
Domino And Jimmy
Take Me There
Concealer
In Flames

Twelve tracks of late '70s dubs from Bunny Lee's house band, all on Studio One rhythms. The Aggrovators classic line up includes Aston and Carlton Barrett, Robbie Shakespeare, Santa Davis, Chinna Smith, Ansel Collins, Tommy McCook etc.

The Aints! comprise Ed Kuepper, Peter Oxley, Paul Larsen Loughhead, Alister Spence & Eamon Dilworth.

Formed in 2017 The Aints! original brief was to recreate the sound and energy of The Saints, the band co-founded by Kuepper in 1973, as they celebrated 40 years since the release of that band's groundbreaking debut (I’m) Stranded in 1977. With such talent at play though, it wasn’t long before this inspired five piece created material of their own. An album The Church of Simultaneous Existence, comprised entirely of Kuepper originals written in the period 1969-1978, was was released internationally to much fanfare and was a hit with fans and critics alike.5-6-7-8-9 is the next release from The Aints!

A 5-track mini-LP comprising alternate versions of album tracks Goodnight Ladies (single edit) and Country Song in G (acoustic) plus reworked versions of tracks from Kuepper’s 50 album strong catalogue including Memories Are Made Of This (The Saints, 1978) Laughing Clowns (Laughing Clowns, 1980) and Hang Jean Lee (Ed Kuepper & The Kowalski Collective, 2007).

TRACK LISTING

GOODNIGHT LADIES (I HEAR A SOUND WITHOUT) (SINGLE EDIT)
HANG JEAN LEE
MEMORIES (ARE MADE OF THIS)
THE LAUGHING CLOWNS
COUNTRY SONG IN G (ACOUSTIC)

“Rock music in the seventies was changed by three bands —the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and The Saints.” - (Bob Geldof)

THE AINTS! THE CHURCH OF SIMULTANEOUS EXISTENCE

Forty years after the release of one of the great Australian debut albums of all time Ed Kuepper returns with a brand-new band and a brand new contender for the title.

When the heavily lauded, heavily influential first incarnation of The Saints split in 1978, Ed Kuepper, the sonic architect and primary songwriter of the original band and their three albums: the proto-punk classic (I’m) Stranded (1977), the r’n'b infused Eternally Yours (1978) and the brass-laden genre-defying Prehistoric Sounds (1978) left behind a plethora of unreleased material, however, rather than attempt to salvage what could have been Kuepper chose to move on forming the legendary Laughing Clowns performing and recording in Australia and the U.K. from 1979 through 1984 before embarking on an ARIA award winning solo career that has kept him touring and recording steadily since 1985.

Come 2017 though, and the 40th anniversary of The Saints seminal debut Kuepper was persuaded it was time to revisit and celebrate the music of his youth. Recruiting like-minded souls in Sunnyboys bassist Peter Oxley, drummer Paul Larsen Loughhead (The Celibate Rifles / The New Christs), jazz pianist Alister Spence and trumpeter and brass arranger Eamon Dilworth the band performed as The Aints! Play The Saints (’73 - ’78) covering Kuepper’s tenure with the band and all the classics including This Perfect Day, Know Your Product, Swing For The Crime and (I’m) Stranded to large crowds and a hugely appreciative response. But rather than purely recycle those formative songs Kuepper began to introduce the new-old material to an audience eager to hear what else Kuepper had been sitting on since 1978. A further positive response from the music department of the ABC saw these two iconic Australians join forces and bring to light what is in essence, the long lost fourth album by The (original) Saints. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Red Aces
2. The Church Of Simultaneous Existence
3. You'll Always Walk Alone
4. You Got The Answer
5. Country Song In G
6. Elevator (A Song For Barking Lord Jeff)
7. This Is Our Summer
8. Winter's Way
9. S-O-S '75
10. Demo Girl Part 2
11. Good Night Ladies (I Hear A Sound Without)
12. The Rise And Falls Of James Hoopnoch Eefil 

Nearly twenty years into a career that has seen Jimmy LaValle exercising his creativity across the realms of film scoring, sound collage, and electronic / rock music, via instrumental and vocal-driven compositions alike, LaValle and The Album Leaf are poised to deliver yet another sonic triumph with 2016’s Between Waves.

Born out of a thorough reinvention of LaValle's creative process and approach, Between Waves is The Album Leaf's first proper full-length record in over six years and the first to be recorded and produced as a complete band, and was written with greater emphasis on the group dynamic. The album displays multifaceted, meticulous sound design, a keen ear for balancing disparate influences, and the strongest senses of dynamics, rhythm, and composition The Album Leaf has displayed to date. From the moody evolution of "Glimmering Lights" to the wistful trip-hop stylings of "New Soul" and beyond, Between Waves is a gorgeous collection of euphoric melodies and emotionally charged, multi-instrumental driven soundscapes from the longstanding innovators. This is intelligent, beautifully composed music at its most inventive, most confident, and most impressive.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Well this is different isn't it? Not like 'It doesn't sound like The Album Leaf' different, it definitely does, but with an urgency previously unheard. I'm a big fan of LaValle's mellow Rhodes-based compositions (the recent reissue of 'In A Safe Place' was one of my record-buying highlights of recent times). The Rhodes is still present here fortunately, but it is backed with thumping drums in places, glitchy snares and giant swells, all topped off with silky vocal refrains. Pristinely produced and exciting from beginning to end. Rich and luxurious. Like a Creme Egg, but better for you.

TRACK LISTING

1. False Dawn
2. Glimmering Lights
3. New Soul
4. Back To The Start
5. Wandering Still
6. Never Far
7. Lost In The Fog
8. Between Waves

Jimmy LaValle’s The Album Leaf has spun from solo outlet to full band and back in its nearly 25 years. His acclaimed catalog spans releases for labels such as Sub Pop, City Slang, Relapse, and others. He also composes music for film and television, scoring over 20 projects (narrative features, documentaries, and TV series) since 2009. The cinematic sensibilities of The Album Leaf were present from the beginning. His 1999 debut introduced the start of a signature sound: melodic and meditative electro-organic soundscapes constructed with guitar, percussion, Rhodes, and field recordings.

His seventh full-length LP, and first since 2016, arrives in 2023 via Vancouver’s Nettwerk Records. FUTURE FALLING finds LaValle working with an array of musicians, shaping slightly darker, more spacious, and synth-driven songs with contributions from Bat For Lashes, Kimbra, and many others. The music registers a shade darker and more synth-driven than most moments in his acclaimed catalog, a bridge between shadowy, cerebral terrain and dreamy precision pop, where softly percussive frameworks meet shimmering sound design and emotive instrumentation.

LaValle sees the construction of FUTURE FALLING as less conventional than past work. Contributions were done remotely with a “throw everything at it” mindset, making LaValle the arranger of layers from all over: drums, synths, horns, violins, voice, and more. LaValle created a pastiche of these layers and elements; in some cases even moving vocal takes to new tracks entirely. Without the in-the-room dynamics, he had more time to experiment, adding and subtracting ad infinitum. The album opens on “PROLOGUE,” an evocative, slow-building instrumental that rides a pattern into a symphonic sea of static. Keys and horns glide atop the rhythmic pulse of “DUST COLLECTS,” setting the contemplative scene for “AFTERGLOW,” the record’s most pop-minded performance. Here Kimbra, the Grammy-winning New Zealand singer-songwriter, renders a striking recollection of past love as percussive elements shimmer and swirl.

A plaintive piano line moves throughout “Cycles 19.9” encircled by light ambient washes, both a valley between two peaks and a powerful composition in its own right. “Future Falling” follows; with origins tracing back to 2015, the track embodies the full sonic journey LaValle has taken. All the hallmarks of The Album Leaf — melodic builds, vivid sprawl, tonal shape-shifting — assemble to a blissful finish. For the next stretch, “Cycles” begins with a uneasy Rhodes loop that builds and erupts into a wall of texture paving its way into “Give In,” where LaValle models a movement that begins subtle and measured before curving up with skyward, percussive bursts (“Stride”) and settling back down to the album’s back-half centerpiece, “Near” featuring the acclaimed English artist Natasha Khan aka Bat For Lashes. “Do you feel me near?” she sings into a mist of widescreen synths and soothing, distant drum beats as if searching through the dark.

TRACK LISTING

1) Prologue
2) Dust Collects
3) Afterglow (featuring Kimbra)
4) Future Falling
5) Breathe
6) Cycles
7) Give In
8) Stride
9) Near (featuring Bat For Lashes)
10) Epilogue

Thee Alcoholics are the brainchild of Rhys Llewellyn, a longtime Rocket Recordings alumnus whose background leans as heavily into the bassbin-shaking realms of electronic music as it does the tinnitus-inducing world of howling, cranked-up ampstacks. Not content with hammering drumskins for numerous floor-shaking records on the Rocket discography from the likes of Hey Colossus and The Notorious Hi-Fi Killers, he’s also been responsible for brain-rearranging electronic works under the Drmcnt and Acidliner monikers. Thee Alcoholics, however - which initially gestated as a result of Rhys himself wanting to pursue the somewhat hostile sound in his own head during lockdown - maps out a collision course between all of the above.

Cranky and cantankerous yet lysergically aligned, Feedback is mesmeric rock with swagger, warped into sci-fi shapes by the spirit and sonics of bass and soundsystem culture. The psychedelic shapes here are redolent of the ur-klang of The Fall and the monolithic lurch of The Heads, the motorik malevolence less an uplifting trip to the heavens than a drill down to the earth’s core. Discernible in these jackhammer beats, grimly murmured vocals and delirious dirges to certain heads may be the trash futurism of Chrome, the decomposed stomp of unsung legends Earl Brutus and the electro-punk attack of Six Finger Satellite, yet all of the above co-ordinates are waylaid effortlessly by a balls-out intensity and a fearsome intent on aural oblivion at all costs. Feedback may be elemental and primal, yet this is no psych comfort-blanket nor retro-fetishism, rather a repetition-driven journey headlong into intimidating territory unknown. Get on board, and strap yourselves in for a bumpy ride. 

TRACK LISTING

01. What’s The Crack? (What’s The Story?)
02. Baby I’m Your Man
03. Sweetheart
04. It’s So Easy
05. Pity Me
06. Feedback
07. You’re The Zero
08. Se23
09. Dumb & Happy

On his manifold fourth album, acclaimed songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen contemplates kinship the ways sex and violence stitch and sever the ties of family, faith, and society with skewering satire and affection alike. Bloodlines compiles thematically related but disparate recordings from miscellaneous sources both theatrical and historical: two songs written for plays; two full-band reprises of selections from Juarez; the irreverent hellfire-hitchhiker-on-highway ballad “Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy” (featuring Joe Ely); and the poignant eponymous ode to the arteries of ancestry and landscape (the debut recording of eight year-old Natalie Maines, later covered by Lucinda Williams).

Since 1970, when they met in Allen’s studio in his hometown of Lubbock, Texas, one of songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen’s great foils and friends was the sometimes cantankerous but always brilliant art critic and writer Dave Hickey, with whom he sparred on topics musical, visual, and beyond (and to whom this reissue is dedicated in memoriam, in the wake of his passing in 2021.) Hickey, a fellow Texan paddling against the currents of the hermetic New York centric art world, was an accomplished songwriter in his own right, and

he and Terry pushed each other to refine their respective practices. In 1983, the two were thick as thieves brothers in blood and Hickey’s wry but big-hearted presence haunts the history and periphery of Bloodlines, the album Terry released in June of that year.

Hickey’s commercial doubts notwithstanding, critical recognition was not in short demand. In a 1984 review of Bloodlines, the L.A. Herald Examiner called Allen “one of the most compelling American songwriters working today … making the most unique art-pop of our time,” elsewhere comparing him not only to Moon Mullican and Jerry Lee Lewis, but also to the Velvet Underground and Philip Glass (probably the first time that unlikely quartet ever appeared together in one sentence). In 1983, against all odds, such sentiments were growing in underground prominence, as Allen’s records gained a fanatical word-of-mouth following they weren’t easy to find in those days.

Recorded piecemeal at Caldwell Studios in Lubbock, in sessions spanning August 1982 through January 1983, Terry self-released it, like all his previous records, on his own Fate Records imprint. Despite his frustration with the protracted timeline and some anxiety about the correspondingly higher budget, the production on Bloodlines courtesy, once again, of master guitarist Lloyd Maines is slicker, cleaner, and more dynamic than prior efforts, and it reached a broader audience than ever before. UK label Making Waves reissued it in 1985, facilitating semi-reliable European distribution for the first time as well as a 1986 UK tour, on which the great BJ Cole filled in for Lloyd on pedal steel.

No veteran country songwriter sounds more attuned to the national mood. His songs still feel like little guidebooks for staring down a harsh universe.
– The Washington Post

It has always been a fool’s errand to frame Allen in terms of other artists there was nobody like him before he showed up, and the subsequent 40 years have been equally light on plausible peers. – Uncut

TRACK LISTING

A1. Bloodlines (I)
A2. Gimme A Ride To Heaven Boy
A3. Cantina Carlotta
A4. Ourland A5. Oh Hally Lou
B1. Oh What A Dangerous Life
B2. Manhattan Bluebird
B3. There Oughta Be A Law Against Sunny Southern California
B4. Bloodlines (II)

Recorded exactly two years after acclaimed visual artist and songwriter Terry Allen’s masterpiece Lubbock (on everything), the feral follow-up Smokin the Dummy is less conceptually focused but more sonically and stylistically unified than its predecessor it’s also rougher and rowdier, wilder and more wired, and altogether more menacingly rock and roll.

Following the 1973 Whitney Biennial, in which songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen and fellow iconic artist Horace Clifford “Cliff” Westermann both exhibited, Allen maintained a lively long-distance correspondence and exchange of artworks and music with Westermann, whose singular and highly influential art he admired enormously. In a February 1981 letter to his friend and mentor, written shortly after the late 1980 release of his third album Smokin the Dummy, while he and his family were living in Fresno, California, Terry explains the genesis of the album title: Westermann died shortly after receiving this letter, enclosed with a Smokin the Dummy LP, the minimalist black jacket of which Allen suggested that Cliff fold into a jaunty cardboard hat if he didn’t like the music. That response was unlikely, since Westermann loved Terry’s music, calling his debut record Juarez (1975) “the finest, most honest and heartfelt piece of music I ever heard.”

The Panhandle Mystery Band had only recently coalesced during those 1978 Lubbock sessions, Lloyd Maines’s first foray into production. Through 1979, they honed their sound and tightened their arrangements with a series of periodic performances beyond Allen’s regular art-world circuit, including memorable record release concerts in Lubbock, Chicago, L.A., and Kansas City. Terry sought to harness the high-octane power of this now well-oiled collective engine to overdrive his songs into rawer and rockier off-road territory.

His first album to share top billing with the Panhandle Mystery Band, Dummy documents a ferocious new band in fully telepathic, tornado-fueled flight, refining its caliber, increasing its range, and never looking down. Alongside the stalwart Maines brothers co-producer, guitarist, and all-rounder Lloyd, bassist Kenny, and drummer Donnie and mainstay Richard Bowden (who here contributes not only fiddle but also mandolin, cello, and “truck noise theory,” the big-rig doppler effect of Lloyd’s steel on “Roll Truck Roll”), new addition Jesse Taylor supplies blistering lead guitar, on loan from Joe Ely (who plays harmonica here). Jesse’s kinetic blues lines and penchant for extreme volume were instrumental in pushing these recordings into brisker tempos and tougher attitudes. Terry was feverish for several studio days, suffering from a bad flu and sweating through his

clothes, which partially explains the literally febrile edge to his performances, rendered largely in a perma-growl. (By this point, he was regularly breaking piano pedals with his heavy-booted stomp.) Like the album title itself, the songs on Smokin the Dummy ring various demented bells. The tracks rifle through Terry’s assorted

Obsessions especially the potential energy and escape of the open road, elevated here to an ecstatic, prayerful pitch and are populated by a cast of crooked characters: truckers, truck-stop waitresses, convicts, cokeheads, speed freaks, greasers, holy rollers, rodeo riders, dancehall cheaters, and sacrificial prairie dogs, sinners seeking some small reprieve, any fugitive moment of grace.

A reigning deity of a certain kind of country music since the mid-70s.
– The New York Times.

The kind of singular American artist who expresses the fundamental weirdness of his country. – The Wire.

TRACK LISTING

A1. The Heart Of California (for Lowell George)
A2. Cocaine Cowboy
A3. Whatever Happened To Jesus (and Maybeline)?
A4. Helena Montana
A5. Texas Tears
B1. Cajun Roll
B2. Feelin Easy
B3. The Night Café
B4. Roll Truck Roll
B5. Red Bird
B6. The Lubbock Tornado (I Don't Know)

‘Rejoice’ is a very special collaboration between Tony Allen, the legendary drummer and co-founder of Afrobeat, and Hugh Masekela, the master trumpet player of South African jazz. Having first met in the 70s thanks to their respective close associations with FelaKuti, the two world-renowned musicians talked for decades about making an album together. When, in 2010, their touring schedules coincided in the UK, the moment presented itself and producer Nick Gold took the opportunity to record their encounter. The unfinished sessions, consisting of all original compositions by the pair, lay in archive until after Masekela passed away in 2018. With renewed resolution, Tony Allen and Nick Gold, with the blessing and participation of Hugh Masekela’s estate, unearthed the original tapes and finished recording the album in summer 2019 at the same London studio where the original sessions had taken place.

‘Rejoice’ can be seen as the long overdue confluence of two mighty African musical rivers – a union of two free-flowing souls for whom borders, whether physical or stylistic, are things to pass through or ignore completely. According to Allen, the album deals in “a kind of South African-Nigerian swing-jazz stew”, with its roots firmly in Afrobeat. Allen and Masekela are accompanied on the record by a new generation of well-respected jazz musicians including Tom Herbert (Acoustic Ladyland / The Invisible), Joe Armon-Jones (Ezra Collective), Mutale Chashi (Kokoroko) and Steve Williamson.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Relishing in the top ring of the pyramid we find emperors Tony Allen & Hugh Masekela in primo form; whipping up a dazzling eight tracks of afro-beat mayhem that few can rival. Especially poignant and arresting following Masekela's death a couple of years ago; it's a delight to see the musician on top of his game till his dying breadth. They don't make em like they used to!

TRACK LISTING

1. Robbers, Thugs And Muggers (O’Galajani)
2. Agbada Bougou
3. Coconut Jam
4. Never (Lagos Never Gonna Be The Same)
5 Slow Bones
6 Jabulani (Rejoice, Here Comes Tony)
7 Obama Shuffle Strut Blues
8 We’ve Landed

‘Rejoice’ is the classic collaboration between Tony Allen, the legendary drummer and co-founder of Afrobeat, and Hugh Masekela, the master trumpet player of South African jazz. The record, released to great acclaim in March 2020, became the first posthumous release from Masekela, and the last release from Allen, who sadly passed away a month later.

For this Special Edition, World Circuit have gone back to the original 2010 mixes and added previously unheard parts from the 2019 sessions to create 8 reimagined bonus mixes. The CD and LP releases also feature a booklet with sleeve notes and photos.

Having first met in the 70s thanks to their respective close associations with Fela Kuti, the two world-renowned musicians talked for decades about making an album together. When, in 2010, their touring schedules coincided in the UK, the moment presented itself and producer Nick Gold took the opportunity to record their encounter. The unfinished sessions, consisting of all original compositions by the pair, lay in archive until after Masekela passed away in 2018. With renewed resolution, Tony Allen and Nick Gold, with the blessing and participation of Hugh Masekela’s estate, unearthed the original tapes and finished recording the album in summer 2019 at the same London studio where the original sessions had taken place.

‘Rejoice’ can be seen as the long overdue confluence of two mighty African musical rivers – a union of two free-flowing souls for whom borders, whether physical or stylistic, are things to pass through or ignore completely. According to Allen, the album deals in “a kind of South African-Nigerian swing-jazz stew”, with its roots firmly in Afrobeat. Allen and Masekela are accompanied on the record by a new generation of well-respected jazz musicians including Tom Herbert (Acoustic Ladyland / The Invisible), Joe Armon-Jones (Ezra Collective), Mutale Chashi (Kokoroko) and Steve Williamson.

TRACK LISTING

Disc 1:
1. Robbers, Thugs And Muggers (O’Galajani)
2. Agbada Bougou
3. Coconut Jam
4. Never (Lagos Never Gonna Be The Same)
5. Slow Bones
6. Jabulani (Rejoice, Here Comes Tony)
7. Obama Shuffle Strut Blues
8. We’ve Landed

Disc 2
1. Robbers, Thugs And Muggers (O’Galajani) (Cool Cats Mix)
2. Agbada Bougou (Cool Cats Mix)
3. Coconut Jam (Cool Cats Mix)
4. Never (Lagos Never Gonna Be The Same) (Cool Cats Mix)
5. Slow Bones (Cool Cats Mix)
6. Jabulani (Rejoice, Here Comes Tony) (Cool Cats Mix)
7. Obama Shuffle Strut Blues (Cool Cats Mix)
8. We’ve Landed (Cool Cats Mix)

Lock yourself into the beat, but don’t become prisoner to it. The techno pioneer Jeff Mills understands that only too well. In his quest to liberate himself from the tyranny of the sequencer, Mills couldn’t wish for a better partner than the father of Afrobeat.

Many consider Tony Allen to be one of the greatest drummers alive. In the last thirty years, his signature mix of Nigerian roots, polyglot jazz and no-fuss funkiness has spread like a virus, infecting the work of artists as diverse as Damon Albarn, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Moritz Oswald. Jeff Mills is a titan of the electronic dance scene and a tireless innovator, who helped to give birth to the 1980s Detroit techno scene before going on to compose electro symphonies, soundtracks and sonic odysseys inspired by futurism and space travel, working with visual artists, choreographers, classical orchestras, even astronauts.

His collaboration with Tony Allen is another rhythmic conversation in a long and well-established discourse, but a special one too: “It really is a pure collaboration, not just through music, but in our minds and spirit as well.” The same goes for Tony Allen. He has already collaborated with quite a few electro artists during his long career but this is something else. “The difference is that Jeff can play with me, whereas the others cannot play with me. I can only play with them, but they cannot play with me…yunastan?”

The pair first shared a stage in December 2016, at the New Morning in Paris. Their live shows have become a rhythm summit without equal, a chance to witness two of the world’s most innovative beat-makers, supplemented by the Moogs and synths of Jean-Philippe Dary, fusing past and future into an intense, seamless present where digital and analogue, jazz and electro, Africa and America, the source and the delta, become one.

In some ways Allen and Mills have already fashioned their own sovereign self-designed state, one where improvisation, creativity and instinct reign. It’s rooted in Africa, yes, but like the music of Art Blakey, it goes beyond Africa, beyond America, beyond the force-fields of history and the structures of technology. That’s all the excitement - to get on board with two of the world greatest living masters of rhythm, set the controls for the heart of their spinning world, and boldly go into the unknown.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Locked & Loaded
A2. Altitudes
B1. On The Run
B2. The Seed

The genius that is Tony Allen departed this mortal world in April of 2020, but not without leaving an unmatched legacy that crossed oceans and borders, bridging cultures and forging a sound that changed music. As the drummer for Fela Kuti's revolutionary Africa 70, Allen's polyrhythmic drumming defined Afrobeat. His contributions as an artist and cultural ambassador left an indelible impact on every genre of popular music, from Techno to Jan to Rock and Hip-Hop. Tony Allen's music stands as an ongoing testament to the interconnected musical relationships and dialogues across the African diaspora, and their lasting influence on how we listen. For Jazz Is Dead producer Adrian Younge, it is no small honor to share new music recorded with the drummer revolutionary Tony Allen. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Ebun
2. Steady Tremble
3. Oladipo
4. Don't Believe The Dancers
5. Makoko
8. Lagos
7. No Beginning
8. No End

World Circuit Records has made its reputation by producing some of the finest albums of the past three decades. The label is best known for the Grammy-winning Buena Vista Social Club album (and associated solo artists Ibrahim Ferrer, Omara Portuondo and Rubén González), which is the biggest selling world music album of all time and has contributed to the phenomenal rise in popularity of Cuban, as well as Latin American, music.

World Circuit is also home to a number of revered African artists including the late Tony Allen (whose Afrobeat-jazz collaboration with Hugh Masekela ‘Rejoice’ was released to great critical acclaim in March 2020), iconic blues pioneer Ali Farka Touré (whose classic Grammy-winning ‘Talking Timbuktu’ album, recorded with Ry Cooder, brought the label early international acclaim), Malian divas and social activists Oumou Sangaré and Fatoumata Diawara, master kora player Toumani Diabaté, the illustrious Orchestra Baobab and musical iconoclast Cheikh Lô. 

TRACK LISTING

A1 Secret Agent
A2 Ijo
A3 Switch
B1 Celebrate
B2 Ayenlo
B3 Busybody
C1 Pariwo
C2 Nina Lowo
C3 Atuwaba
D1 Alutere
D2 Elewon Po

When did Tony Allen’s There Is No End become my album of the year? July 24th, Night & Day cafe, DJing. I had just put needle to groove on “Rich Black”, naively unprepared for the bass to meet the bar’s booming soundsystem - and then it HIT! The dancefloor was probably fearing for its life, but I was in love.

A collaborative hip hop masterpiece, There Is No End has a real exploratory feel to it, which (as Allen’s spoken word introduction points out) is the whole purpose of the album - to push, to innovate, and to move, through music. With various up-and-coming singers, rappers, and poets lending their talents to each song, the tracklist reads like a supergroup of Next Big Things: there’s Lava La Rue’s no-nonsense flow and controlled beauty, The Koreatown Oddity’s comic images and hard-hitting home truths, Ben Okri’s inspired mess of creationist myths, fairytale tropes, and apocalyptic visions, and Sampa the Great’s unnerving, vocoded whisper loops - and that's just a fraction of the mavericks on mic duty here.

All this is to say nothing of the drumming. “Brilliant” would be a gross understatement of just how diverse and original Allen’s beats are - by turns claustrophobic, metronomic, wild, and stuttering, the drums make each song as distinct and… well, brilliant, as the vocals do. Throw swampy bass synths, thickly affected backing vox, and a smorgasbord of tuned percussion into the mix, and what you get is There Is No End: a dizzying swan-song by one of music’s great innovators, and a glimpse into hip-hop’s bright, bright future.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: There are very few drummers (no shade on drummers here) that would be well known of their own accord like Tony Allen is. Having been consistently inventive and undeniably brilliant throughout his life all the way up to his 2020 masterpiece with Hugh Massakela, 'Rejoice', it's really no surprise that this Posthumous release is chock-full of wonderful rhythmic surprises, and has a lineup of perfectly chosen guests. A fittingly wonderful album from one of the greatest (and original) Afrobeat drummers of all time.

TRACK LISTING

CD (14 Tracks)
Tony’s Praeludium
Tony Allen

Stumbling Down
Tony Allen Featuring Sampa The Great

Crushed Grapes
Tony Allen Featuring Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon

Très Magnifique
Tony Allen Featuring Tsunami

Mau Mau
Tony Allen Featuring Nah Eeto

Coonta Kinte
Tony Allen Featuring Zelooperz

Rich Black
Tony Allen Featuring Koreatown Oddity

One Inna Million
Tony Allen Featuring Lava La Rue

Gang On Holiday (Em I Go We?)
Tony Allen Featuring Jeremiah Jae

Deer In Headlights
Tony Allen Featuring Danny Brown

Hurt Your Soul
Tony Allen Featuring Nate Bone

My Own
Tony Allen Featuring Marlowe

Cosmosis
Tony Allen Featuring Ben Okri + Skepta

There’s No End
Tony Allen

2LP (12 Tracks)
There Is No End
Tony Allen

Rich Black
Tony Allen Featuring Koreatown Oddity

Coonta Kinte
Tony Allen Featuring Zelooperz

One Inna Million
Tony Allen Featuring Lava La Rue

Stumbling Down
Tony Allen Featuring Sampa The Great

Crushed Grapes
Tony Allen Featuring Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon

Gang On Holiday (Em I Go We?)
Tony Allen Featuring Jeremiah Jae

Mau Mau
Tony Allen Featuring Nah Eeto

Très Magnifique
Tony Allen Featuring Tsunami

Hurt Your Soul
Tony Allen Featuring Nate Bone

Cosmosis
Tony Allen Featuring Ben Okri + Skepta

My Own
Tony Allen Featuring Marlowe

'Hypnotise' is the spellbinding new single from sampler slayers, The Allergies. Who, once again, build funky new worlds out of dope beats and loops from their wild and wonderful record collections.

Here, the Bristol-based duo break new ground, sampling the incredible Deli Sosimi and heading out on the housier side of things, working a deadly dancefloor 4/4 around their signature soulful stylings.

Pulsing kicks and playful percussion keep the pace, as euphoric Afrobeat horns and insistent vocal lines build the energy in the room.

It's a captivating cut, made for discerning DJs and discos. But, as soon as you let the infectious double bass-led groove hit you, you'll mesmerised by the music.

'Vamonos' on the flip laces old school boogaloo and salsa samples with sizzling hi-hats, claps, and club-ready breaks. It's an anthem for beach bodies, holiday heroes, and sun-seekers, hell bent on escaping the rat race.

TRACK LISTING

1. Hypnotise
2. Vamonos (feat. Andy Cooper & Marietta Smith)

Acid Jazz presents the long-awaited reissue of The Aloof’s cult classic final LP ‘This Constant Chase For Thrills’.

Formed in 1990, The Aloof were a pioneering electronic act, playing and touring with the likes of Massive Attack and Leftfield. After three albums with the Warner EastWest, they forged their own path, releasing ‘This Constant Chase For Thrills’ on their own Screaming Target label.

Despite highlights ‘Doing It For Money’ and ‘Painted Face’, as well as ‘So Good’, which featured in the US version of ‘Queer As Folk’, the album didn’t get the coverage it deserved upon release.

Within a dark and moody atmosphere, there is definite Ibiza and Balearic feel to the record, showing a band with a positive DIY spirit.

TRACK LISTING

So Good
Doing It For Money
Good Morning World
Sold
Tearing Up Inside
Infatuated
D.I.R.M. Version
The Beach
Painted Face

Second album from Irish band The Altered Hours. Having previously recorded in Anton Newcombe’s Berlin studio for their debut singles & ending up in the infamous Funkhaus studios to lay down what would become their debut album ‘In Heat Not Sorry ’, the band decided once again to change the approach & take their new songs back to the privacy of their own studio space on the outskirts of Cork City. The new LP ‘Convertible’ is the result of countless late night/early morning sessions that took place over the past 2 years. Choosing to self produce and engineer this record was a conscious choice as the band felt an urge to take what they had learned on the road & in various studios previously, and condense all of this energy back into the boiling pot of their own rehearsal space.

The group have been a part of some exciting movements since the beginning and their path has been an organic one. They quickly became known in their hometown for taking over an ex-government building in the heart of Cork city, turning into a studio and creating a hub for the scene that surrounded them. The years that follow shine a light on the relentless energy of this group and unwavering love for playing shows anywhere & everywhere It’s been a wild ride for The Altered Hours so far & their music keeps evolving & growing as the experiences build. This is a group with the spirit of music deeply ingrained in them and a passion for making rock music something that you can believe in.

Their second full length album ‘Convertible’ is a window into the band’s idiosyncratic tendencies, a closer look into how their writing & sound continuously moves forwards while somehow remaining rooted in their own unique world all at once. The Altered Hours seem born to be an underground affair, something that they wear with pride and this album is a wonderful culmination of their DIY upbringing, their unfiltered rock ‘n’ roll spirit along with a confident stride into personal songwriting.

TRACK LISTING

1. You Are Wrong
2. All Amnesia
3. Thistle
4. Love You
5. Radiant Wound
6. Street Sinner
7. Stratocaster Dreamcatcher
8. 7 Years 

The Amazing stay just out of focus. On their fifth album, In Transit, they once again perform the unlikely trick of making music that is both dreamlike, drifting across the consciousness, as well as perfectly constructed. While In Transit shares the sense of mood of many of singer and founder Christoffer Gunrup’s favourite bands – the Cure, My Bloody Valentine, Flaming Lips – it never drifts away into self-indulgence. At the heart of it all, beneath the washes of guitar, the woozy reveries, are sturdy, intensely melodic songs. You hear that from the very start of the album, when Pull slides into view, slide guitar casting shapes and shadows across the arpeggios beneath, while lightly jazzy drums propel the song forward and Gunrup mournfully whispers his barely audible lyrics, before the song ascends into a refrain that sounds like every emotion combined.

That combination of melody and mood comes from the way the songs are made, and the interaction between Gunrup and his fellow members, Reine Fiske (also of Dungen, guitar), Moussa Fadera (drums), Alexis Benson (bass), and Frederik Swahn (keyboards and guitars). Gunrup writes alone, in what he calls “a very disgusting process. It’s just me in my underwear on my couch.” He emerges with a complete song – “the intros, the outros, the melodies, all the chords” – which he takes to the band, imagining they will play it just as he imagined. Except they never do. “They can feel rather than hear what needs to be done,” Gunrup says. “They do pretty much what they please.”

Yet In Transit does not sound self-indulgent. Gunrup’s songs are the very heart of In Transit, and the musicians’ playing always serves them, rather than overwhelming them. On For No One, you can hear the subtlety of their interaction, which is not what one might expect to say of a song in which whistling feedback provides the core of its climax – it’s only at the end you realise how cleverly it has transformed from what begins as fingerpicked near-folk into something very different.

As one might expect, Fiske’s guitars are at the heart of The Amazing: gorgeous tones and textures, sometimes fed through layers of distortion, sometimes kept clear and clean, to convey melody in the most direct way. “He has a sound and a way of playing that not many guitarists do – he’s all about emotion, which is great,” Gunrup says. Benson se Convirtio Completamente Furiosa, just short of 10 minutes long, Fiske displays the full range of his talents. It’s an extraordinary song, beginning with Gunrup’s voice, a lazy sigh, telling of “being caught up in a deadly boring place”, over a gorgeous, circular guitar pattern for two-and-a-half minutes, before hypnotic, swirling instrumental section built on a melancholy arpeggio takes up another two-and-a-half minutes. Gunrup’s voice returns, a little more urgent. Then the song apparently stops – only to return with Fiske playing a furious, squalling solo, a shriek of rage and despair. For the other side, listen to Rewind, a song so simple and gorgeous it sounds as though it has existed forever, in which the playing is resolutely unshowy, yet devastatingly emotive, with one simple hook – a single high note repeated in each phrase – that proves the power of well-deployed restraint.

It doesn’t come as any surprise to learn that Fiske is obsessional about his equipment. A few years back, The Amazing’s practice space was robbed, and their equipment stolen, all bar Fiske’s Stratocaster. “Afterwards we went for a beer,” Gunrup says. “We sat there in silence and felt blue. But the person who was most upset was Reine. He was so much more upset than us, he said, because what would have happened if they had taken my guitar? He couldn’t even comprehend what would have happened to him.”

But there’s so much more to The Amazing than guitar histrionics. “The drummer comes from a jazz background, so he doesn’t do what is expected, which I love.” A mention of Black Sabbath’s Bill Ward having the same background, and adding the same swing sets Gunrup off excitedly talking about a film of an early Sabbath live show. He identifies the common thread between Ward and Fadera: “Someone else would do something you had heard a thousand times before, but he won’t.”

Maybe that freewheeling element is what causes Gunrup to name “playful” as the adjective he most associates with the music of The Amazing, rather than the more obvious “melancholy”. “That’s something I feel, but maybe it doesn’t come across in the records at all. But playful – and, I don’t know, I guess it could sound a bit blue occasionally, when the vocals are there. That to me is what makes it fun to play.”

On In Transit, Gunrup’s voice is mixed a little higher than before. Snatches of lyrics gain clarity, drifting across the music like clouds. Yet you wouldn’t say he had been placed front and centre, and that suits him. “Lyrics are important to me,” he says. “But I am extremely uninterested in coming across lyrically. That is nobody’s business. If people enjoy the way the vocals interact with the music, that’s good. If not, I don’t care.” Much of his favourite music shares the quality of the vocal being a texture rather than conveying a message, he says. “If you listen to Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, I can make out maybe 11 words in one song, but I love that album more than any album ever made.

“If there are words I don’t hear, I can decide for myself what they’re saying and I like that. With 99.9% of all music made in this world the lyrics are, oh, so fucking dumb and boring and stupid. There’s no point in me adding to that stupidity. They are important to me, but you can decide for yourself.”

Work on In Transit began as soon as The Amazing’s last album, Ambulance, was finished. That’s when Gunrup began writing the 11 songs – stretching over 71 minutes – that make up the new record. He wrote quickly, then took them to the band, who recorded them piecemeal in (Fredrik) Swahn’s studio in Stockholm. “We started pretty soon after the last album was released, and did bits and pieces here and there,” Gunrup says. “It’s been forever.”

While The Amazing aren’t the kind of band who insist every album has to sound radically different from the one before. They change incrementally, adjusting and refining their sound rather than revolutionising it. Changes Gunrup had thought were dramatic – like the greater use of chorus pedals and organ on their third album, Picture You – turned out to be minor. This time, the development from Ambulance is a slightly fuller sound. “The last album was just basic tracks and vocals and that was pretty much it.” He ponders for a moment. “I was convinced the last album was better because the songs were better. But now it’s the other way round. This has got more stuff on it: more vocals, more overdubs.”

For all Gunrup’s self-deprecation, for all his unwillingness to reveal secrets and his desire to talk down his desire to deflect attention from himself, The Amazing is something he needs to do: it’s his purpose. He laughs and says that without music, “I maybe would not have killed myself, but I would have been even more boring than I am” – but he is compelled to make music, incredible music, which is why he never stops writing songs. And then he connects with the other four members to create something extraordinary. It’s about that combination, those people, playing those instruments.

“That is the essence of it, so when we all connect in a song it’s pretty nice to be in that room. That’s therapy. I pretty much see everything we do – being on my couch, the recording process – as this therapeutic thing. I don’t necessarily think we go into the studio to do this, this and this, I just want to be with those four guys and play.”

‘Ambulance’ sees The Amazing continue their journey to a place where music is free of restrictions. Despite reflecting Chris Gunrup’s often bleak worldview, the music is expansive and beautiful, marked by playing that’s as much free jazz as rock - pure music without any showiness.

The songs unfold slowly, without a traditional verse / chorus structure, spinning gauzy webs of shimmering mystery with their own inimitable dynamic of sinuous, swirling guitars; rich, ambient basslines; crisp percussion and restrained, church-like, keyboard textures. The stately tempos suggest a room full of shadows desperately reaching out for intimacy but never quite making the connection. The songs brim over with tension and more implied release than actual relief.

Gunrup is known for his reluctance to talk about his process and prefers to let the music speak for itself and if 2015’s ‘Picture You’ was brighter, exploding outward to explore the limits of experience, ‘Ambulance’ is much more intimate. The mix denser and darker, the instruments pressing closer, crowding each other, imploding inward to reconnoitre the uncharted distances that exist between us, even in life’s most intimate moments.

Sharing members with Sweden’s psych forefathers Dungen, the album delves into the hidden recesses of the heart, finding inner space to be just as expansive as the midnight sky. It was recorded in just a few days in one tiny room at Stockhom’s Buller & Bäng studio.

The Amazing’s drummer, Moussa, is one of Sweden’s top jazz drummers and has also played with Rodriguez and Jose Gonzalez.

The video for lead track ‘Ambulance’ features Ross Marquand (AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’).

Previously the band have performed on The Late Show with David Letterman and toured with Tame Impala.

“The Amazing specialize in a beauty that isn’t airbrushed or slick or antiseptic, it’s elemental rock - earthy, molten, aquatic, but using each of their qualities to soothe rather than destroy or intimidate.” - Pitchfork

TRACK LISTING

Ambulance
Divide
Blair Drager
Tracks
Floating
Through City Lights
Moments Like These
Perfect Day For Shrimp

"Future Dust" is an album that retools rock’s dark past for the present day while having an absolute blast. Loose blues grooves, religious references and falsetto backing vocals abound on songs that explore issues including social media witch hunts, eating disorders and depression, but never lose sight of a singalong. The Amazons were the most hotly tipped band of 2017 and followed through with their debut album reaching #8 in the official chart.

STAFF COMMENTS

Mine says: Big melodies, big vocals, The Amazons are bound for big things... 'Future Dust' is stadium rock in the making.

TRACK LISTING

Side 1
1. Mother
2. Fuzzy Tree
3. 25
4. The Mire
5. Doubt It
6. All Over Town

Side 2
1. End Of Wonder
2. Dark Visions
3. 25 (reprise)
4. Warning Sign
5. Georgia

Hello

Matt here. Just wanted to reach out and let you know a few things about the record you’re about to, or are already listening to!

How Will I Know If Heaven Will Find Me is a record largely inspired by the long distance relationship I’ve been in over the last couple years, and more specifically, the 7 months spent apart in 2020. The album was largely written in the converted attic I live in, in the centre of Brighton.

The songs that went on to make up this record were originally only to be shared between me and my girlfriend. You can imagine, after a few months, that phone calls and Whatsapp and FaceTime begin to wear a little thin, especially in the face of not knowing when we’d be reunited. Writing and sharing music became a way for me to feel like I retained some kind of power, to bridge the distance between us.

As a band we were already halfway through writing a very different record, but it became apparent, the more and more I shared these songs with the boys, that this was the story we wanted to tell.
Sonically, we wanted to make a record that kicked back against the confines of our houses and bedrooms. We wanted to make music powerful enough blow the roof off and transport us somewhere else. Lots of artists made records to match the slower pace of life over the last couple years which was cool, but we never stopped dreaming about festivals and life and energy and community. I hope that’s reflected in the music.

We’ve been incredibly lucky to work with some of our heroes on this album. I expressed to Jim Abbiss (who produced the record) and Craig Silvey (who mixed it) that The Amazons wouldn’t exist without their work, so many times, I’m sure it became slightly irritating. But it’s true and it feels kind of full circle for us.

We’ve been in the Fiction and Universal family now for nearly 7 years. We’ve worked with a lot of incredible minds and huge hearts and we are so grateful to have had the opportunity to grow as artists. Each of the last 2 records we’ve released up to this point have been unique adventures and we’ve learnt so much. For us, this record represents the accumulation of all that work and experience, but also the start of a new adventure, that we hope will be the best yet. We’re so excited to have you on the journey and we hope you like the record!

See you soon.
Matt, Joe, Chris and Elliot. 

For Forever, The American Analog Set's 7th full length (and their first album in 18 years) has arrived after nearly a decade of writing and recording.

For Forever folds time and space. While the sounds and stories will be recognizable to fans, they arrive with considerable bruises incurred on the journey from Set Free until now.

For those unfamiliar with The American Analog Set, this should be a simultaneously dark and vibrant introduction. Troubled lyrics permeate throughout, and the accompanying sounds are occasionally damaged and snarling. Not all things languid and dreamlike from past records have been abandoned or forgotten, but the dreams represented here are darker.

While the previous eras of the band are referenced, they are carried forward and incorporated without a hint of patronizing nostalgia. For Forever is a document of a group that acknowledges their past while they advance into new territories and evolve.

This release is entirely new material and is not connected to the forthcoming Numero reissues of the band's first three records.

TRACK LISTING

A1 Camp Don’t Count
A2 Screaming For Vengeance
A3 Konika And Maliko
B4 Over The Jeans
B5 Long Limbs
B6 By The Bridle
C7 For Forever
C8 Mick Turner
D9 The Quiet Dark
D10 Gin Shakes
D11 Mountain

Lo-fi, low budget, and low key, The American Analog Set’s suite of hypnotic, neo-psychedelic, Texas sloth-kraut LPs appeared briefly on Austin’s Emperor Jones label and slunk quietly into the sprawling indie underground as the old millennium crested. Gathered here are 'The Fun Of Watching Fireworks', 'From Our Living Room To Yours', and 'The Golden Band albums', garnished with period b-sides, outtakes, and demos. Remastered from the original analog tapes, this early-career spanning 5xLP box includes lyrics, photos, and ephemera from the before times.

TRACK LISTING

LP1 - The Fun Of Watching Fireworks
1. Diana Slowburner II
2. On My Way
3. Gone To Earth
4. On The Run’s Where I’m From
5. Dim Stars (The Boy In My Arms)
6. Trespassers In The Stereo Field
7. Too Tired To Shine II
8. It’s Alright

LP2 – From Our Living Room To Yours
1. Magnificent Seventies
2. Using The Hope Diamond As A Doorstop
3. Blue Chaise
4. Where Have All The Good Boys Gone
5. White House
6. Two Way Diamond I
7. Two Way Diamond II
8. Don’t Wake Me

LP 3 – The Golden Band
1. Weather Report
2. A Good Friend Is Always Around
3. It’s All About Us
4. A Schoolboy’s Charm
5. The Wait
6. New Drifters I
7. New Drifters II
8. New Drifters III
9. New Drifters IV
10. The Golden Band
11. I Must Soon Quit The Scene
12. Will The Real Danny Radnor Please Stand?

LP 4 – Nine Legend Road
1. Diana Slowburner II
2. High Fidelity Vs. Guy Fidelity
3. Magnificent Seventies
4. Waking Up Is Hard To Do
5. Dr. Pepper
6. The Only Living Boy Around
7. It’s All About Us
8. On My Way
9. Thin Fingers
10. Living Room Incidental #2 / The Corduroy Kid

LP 5 – Nine Legend Road
1. Where Did You Come From?
2. Too Tired To Shine I
3. Queen Of Her Own Parade
4. Mellow Fellow
5. You Don’t Want Me To Arrive, Do You?
6. What Are We Going To Tell Guy?
7. Where Did You Come From (Reprise)

The Amorphous Androgynous return with the symphonic, 40-minute prog space-rock concept album ‘We Persuade Ourselves We Are Immortal’. The album contains 5 epic parts, featuring the legendary Peter Hammill (the Van Der Graaf Generator) on vocals alongside a host of musicians including: Paul Weller (piano and guitar), Ray Fenwick (Spencer Davis Group/Ian Gillan) on lead guitar, Brian Hopper (Caravan/Soft Machine) on sax. The Chesterfield Philharmonic Choir and a 25-piece live orchestral string section round out this sumptuously-recorded album.

‘We Persuade Ourselves We Are Immortal’ opens with the 13-minute epic of the title track (written with Peter Hammill and Paul Weller). The themes of mortality/immortality are then musically and conceptually catapulted to the far-flung corners of the AA sonic multiverse over 40+ minutes. Channelling A Space Odyssey, the dystopian choirs and moog of ‘Hymortality’ crash full-force into the John-Bonham-like drums of ‘The Immortality Break.’ Meanwhile, ‘Synthony On A Theme of Mortality’ lives up to its name, utilizing the classic 70s Yamaha CS80 synth before progressing to a female wailing aria against classic vintage guitar rock. The whole cosmic trip cascades finally into the harp daydream reverie, choir and romantic strings of ‘Physically I’m Here, Mentally Far, Far Away.’

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: With Peter Hammil in tow, TAA elevate their already psychedelic cosmic sound into stratospheric new realms - ascending through celestial stages of divinity until pure being is presented in all its godlike glory.

TRACK LISTING

1. We Persuade Ourselves We Are Immortal
2. Synthony On A Theme Of Mortality
3. Psych Recap
4. Hymortality
5. The Immortality Break
6. Physically I’m Here, Mentally Far, Far Away

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

Collectors Limited Edition Double Vinyl for Record Store Day 2014 * Hand Numbered 750 Units

A special collector's double vinyl of 'The Cartel' by the Amorphous Androgynous exploring psychsploitation (where psychedelia meets blaxploitation) on their 'MONSTROUS BUBBLE' soundtrack series.

Features original tracks from The Cartel Vols 1&2 written by the Amorphous Androgynous plus remixes by Youth, DJ Food, Black Light Cinema, Cranium Pie, Lost In Edit and by the Amorphous Androgynous themselves. Also includes 'WHERE DOES THE EVIL GO ?' featuring Alisha Sufit (Magic Carpet) on vocals and BANKSTERS which features Noel Gallagher on bass and guitar.

TRACK LISTING

Disc 1
1. The Chaser (Black Light Cinema Remix)
2. City Of Regrets (Broadcast Of Variants Remix)
3. Where Does The Evil Go
4. Tunnel Vision (DJ Food Remix)
5. Billionaire
6. Bugged (Virgil Howe Remix)
7. The Watch Man
8. The Killin' Spree
9. The Costa Rican Cartel
10. Visiting The Visitor (Seafar Remix)
11. Out About (Mikey Rowe Remix)
12. Wasp (Blood Solution) (Youth Remix)

Disc 2
1. Banksters
2. The Bug
3. Regrets (Re-edit)
4. Radio Break (NMESH Re-mix)
5. Wasped (Cranium Pie's Baking Research Centre Remix)
6. 1 000000 (Cranium Pie's Baking Research Centre Remix)
7. The Wasp
8. Bankster Island
9. The First Billion Is The Hardest
10. Regrets And The Damage Done (Lost In Edit Re-mix)
11. The Rat
12. Opium Smiles

The Amorphous Androgynous unite their award-winning psychedelic compilation series ‘A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble (Exploding In Your Mind)’ with their symphonic new single ‘We Persuade Ourselves We Are Immortal’ (taken from the forthcoming album ‘Listening Beyond The Head Chakra‘) to create this latest instalment of the Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble series. It features a host of luminaries such as Peter Hammill -vocals (Van Der Graaf Generator), Paul Weller - piano and guitar, and erstwhile members of The Spencer Davies Group and Ian Gillan Band – as well as Soft Machine on lead guitar and sax. The Chesterfield Philharmonic choir and a full string section also make an appearance. Finally, the series features a number of collaborations and remixes (including bands Atomic Simao, Higher Peaks, Regal Worm, Cobalt Chapel) creating one helluva progtronic psychedelic trip through the Amorphous Androgynous samplerdelic multiverse.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Lutine Bell
2. Gunter & His Evil Soul Sacrifice Orchestra Play Back Mass A GoGo
3. Hymortality Part 1
4. Physically I'm Here, Mentally Far, Far Away
5. In Madness Reigns
6. Hymortality Part 2
7. Somos Inmortales Nos Persuadimosi
8. Everything Is Easy With A Little Persuasion
9. Gravity Bong
10. Our Dominion
11. The Persuader
12. Synthony On A Theme Of Mortality Excerpt Part 2
13. Counting Down The Time Part 2
14. Tomorrow, Time & Immortality

Emotionally and musically intense, 'Little Earthquakes' shows that the piano is as much a rock & roll instrument as the guitar. Tori Amos's debut (if one disregards 'Y Kant Tori Read', as one would be well advised to do) is at once listenable and challenging; she takes on every topic, from sex to gender to religion, in an uncompromising manner. Her music appears gentle at first, but this appearance is deceiving, as one quickly learns upon listening to the wrenching "Crucify" or the almost violent "Precious Things." By the time the album gets around to "Me and a Gun," sung hauntingly by Amos without accompaniment from her piano, the juxtaposition of Amos' sweet voice and the emotional complexity of her lyrics is both familiar and shocking.

Celebrating 30 years of Tori Amos’ debut solo album ‘Little Earthquakes.’ Amos became the voice of a generation of young girls when she delivered her first solo record in 1992. Each of the tracks on Little Earthquakes painted an evocative picture, and the album delivered 5 singles: “Crucify,” “Silent All These Years,” “Winter,” “China,” “Me and A Gun.”

The album has already received the deluxe treatment in 2006, and this 2-LP is the first time the tracks have been remastered for this format, lovingly remastered by Jon Astley at Abbey Road Studios. In 2022, to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the record, Z2 announced a graphic novel of the album. 

TRACK LISTING

LP 1
Side A
Crucify (4:58)
Girl (4:06)
Silent All These Years (4:11)
Side B
Precious Things (4:26)
Winter (5:41)
Happy Phantom (3:13)
LP 2
Side A
China (4:59)
Leather (3:12)
Mother (6:59)
Side B
Tear In Your Hand (4:38)
Me And A Gun (3:44)
Little Earthquakes (6:52)

Here’s what we said about this album on it’s original release in 2003, and it still stands up today. One of the most original singer songwriters of her generation and one of the most gifted pianists too. "Scarlet's Walk" features her finest songs since "Under The Pink" and will please all the converted and maybe open up a few eyes and ears as well. There's a return to a simpler piano sound with the only other instruments on many tracks being bass and drums. Over 74 minutes long it's an epic voyage for the listener as well as 'Scarlet'.

Released in the immediate aftermath of the runaway success of The Breeders’ platinum-selling second album ‘Last Splash’ and the Pixies calling it a day the first time round, The Amps are an important part of the Kim Deal canon.

First intended as a solo project, The Amps instead grew into a fully-fledged band with Jim MacPherson from The Breeders joining on drums and Dayton, OH musicians Luis Lerma and Nate Farley on bass and guitar respectively. Releasing just one album, ‘Pacer’, in 1995 and after a whirlwind of touring with the likes of Foo Fighters, Guided By Voices and Sonic Youth, Kim returned them to the shelf, leaving behind one of her most intriguing chapters.

A glorious record whose charm has only grown since release, ‘Pacer’ captures Kim energised by a new band and no pressure, recording with purpose in seven studios with a different engineer each time. The resultant record is both raw and undeniable, with Kim’s songwriting arguably at its most cryptic and personal. Don’t be fooled by its casual lo-fi veneer too, underneath lies one serious record that never dips or lacks purpose. With this first vinyl repress on 4AD, ‘Pacer’ is finally getting the reappraisal it richly deserves

'The Art of Losing' is the second album from Welsh multi-instrumentalist The Anchoress (aka Catherine Anne Davies), following up on her critically acclaimed debut album, 'Confessions of A Romance Novelist', which was named amongst the Guardian critics' Albums of the Year, won HMV's Welsh Album of the Year, Best Newcomer at the PROG awards, and a nomination for the Welsh Music Prize. Written and produced by Davies, the new album features guest performances from James Dean Bradfield (Manic Street Preachers) and drums from Sterling Campbell (David Bowie, Duran Duran) along with the mixing talents of Dave Eringa (Manics, Wilko Johnson) and grammy-award winner Mario McNulty (David Bowie, Prince, Laurie Anderson).

'The Art Of Losing' ambitiously navigates the topic of loss in all its forms and was written and recorded during an unfeasibly busy few years as Davies found solace and purpose in a range of projects whilst navigating her griefs. Most recently this came via the release of her collaborative album 'In Memory of My Feelings' with Bernard Butler (on Pete Paphides' label Needle Mythology), duetting with the Manic Street Preachers on 'Resistance Is Futile', and being personally invited by The Cure's Robert Smith to perform at his Meltdown Festival. She also brought a new generation of ears to legendary Scottish rock band Simple Minds, where she spent much of the last five years appearing on the 'Big Music' (2015) and 'Walk Between Worlds' (2018) albums. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: 'The Art Of Losing' shows a superb grasp of melody and drive while still retaining the more nuanced songwriting and groove, reminiscent of recent shop hitters, The International Teachers of Pop or the superb new Róisín Murphy LP. Davies maintains the quality of her previous outing, pushing things a little further and that little bit more danceable. Superb.

TRACK LISTING

CD
1. Moon Rise ( Prelude ) ( 02:51 )
2. Let It Hurt ( 03:37 )
3. The Exchange Feat. James Dean Bradfield
4. Show Your Face ( 04:27 )
5. The Art Of Losing ( 04:07 )
6. All Farewells Should Be Sudden ( 05:02 )
7. All Shall Be Well ( 01:39 )
8. Unravel ( 04:05 )
9. Paris ( 02:01 )
10. 5AM ( 04:02 )
11. The Heart Is A Lonesome Hunter ( 04:06 )
12. My Confessor ( 03:56 )
13. With The Boys ( 05:57 )
14. Moon ( An End ) ( 02:52 )


LP X 2
1. Moon Rise ( Prelude ) ( 02:51 )
2. Let It Hurt ( 03:37 )
3. The Exchange Feat. James Dean Bradfield
1. Show Your Face ( 04:27 )
2. The Art Of Losing ( 04:07 )
3. All Farewells Should Be Sudden ( 05:02 )
4. All Shall Be Well ( 01:39 )
1. Unravel ( 04:05 )
2. Paris ( 02:01 )
3. 5AM ( 04:02 )
4. The Heart Is A Lonesome Hunter ( 04:06 )
1. My Confessor ( 03:56 )
2. With The Boys ( 05:57 )
3. Moon ( An End ) ( 02:52 )

LP X 2 + 7"
1. Moon Rise ( Prelude ) ( 02:51 )
2. Let It Hurt ( 03:37 )
3. The Exchange Feat. James Dean Bradfield
1. Show Your Face ( 04:27 )
2. The Art Of Losing ( 04:07 )
3. All Farewells Should Be Sudden ( 05:02 )
4. All Shall Be Well ( 01:39 )
1. Unravel ( 04:05 )
2. Paris ( 02:01 )
3. 5AM ( 04:02 )
4. The Heart Is A Lonesome Hunter ( 04:06 )
1. My Confessor ( 03:56 )
2. With The Boys ( 05:57 )
3. Moon ( An End ) ( 02:52 )
1. Unravel ( 7" Mix ) ( 03:34 )
1. Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky ( 03:09 )


3 CD Set
1. Moon Rise ( Prelude ) ( 02:51 )
2. Let It Hurt ( 03:37 )
3. The Exchange Feat. James Dean Bradfield
4. Show Your Face
5. The Art Of Losing ( 04:07 )
6. All Farewells Should Be Sudden ( 05:02 )
7. All Shall Be Well ( 01:39 )
8. Unravel ( 04:05 )
9. Paris ( 02:01 )
10. 5AM ( 04:02 )
11. The Heart Is A Lonesome Hunter ( 04:06 )
12. My Confessor ( 03:56 )
13. With The Boys ( 05:57 )
14. Moon ( An End )
1. Show Your Face ( Original Keys Demo ) ( 04:24 )
2. The Art Of Losing ( P Dub Alt Mix ) ( 04:06 )
3. Unravel ( P Dub Alt Mix ) ( 04:04 )
4. The Heart Is A Lonesome Hunter ( Original Demo Version ) ( 04:01 )
5. Show Your Face ( P Dub Alt Mix ) ( 04:24 )
6. With The Boys ( Original Demo Version ) ( 05:34 )
7. All Shall Be Well ( Instrumental Version ) ( 01:41 )
8. Paris ( Instrumental Version ) ( 01:56 )
9. Unravel ( Original String Demo ) ( 03:28 )
10. The Exchange (Dictaphone Writing Demo)
11. Let It Hurt ( Dictaphone Writing Demo ) ( 01:57 )
1. The Exchange Feat. James Dean Bradfield (Hinako Omori Remix)
2. Unravel ( Cross Bone T Remix ) ( 04:32 )
3. Show Your Face ( Worriedaboutsatan Remix ) ( 04:59 )
4. The Art Of Losing ( Jermaine Soul Remix ) ( 04:33 )
5. The Exchange Feat. James Dean Bradfield (Jermaine Soul Remix)

Garnering comparisons to John Grant and Lana Del Rey, The Anchoress's concept driven compositions have been the talk of the music press in 2016. PROG magazine - who've nominated her for best-newcomer at their awards - went as far as proclaiming her debut album as "...Kate Bush's 'Hounds Of Love' updated for the 21st century."

Multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, PhD & producer Catherine Anne Davies (who also plays in the live line-up of Simple Minds) sums up her album's overall concept as, "Partly a concept album narrated by the titular potboiler author, partly a series of imaginary character pieces, and partly a deeply personal outpouring from someone who's been through a fair amount of personal hell."

Whichever way you choose to describe The Anchoress' compelling debut 'Confessions Of A Romance Novelist '(co-produced by Mansun's frontman Paul Draper) one thing's for certain, this is something truly different.

TRACK LISTING

Long Year
What Goes Around
Doesn't Kill You
You And Only You (feat Paul Draper)
One For Sorrow
P.S. Fuck You
Popular
Bury Me
Intermission (Notes To The Editor)
Waiting To Breathe
Chip On Your Shoulder
Confessions Of A Romance Novelist
You And Only You (Acoustic Version)
Bury Me (Acoustic Version)
Long Year (Acoustic Version)
Popular (Acoustic Version)
What Goes Around (Acoustic Version)*

*CD Only Track

Following the raft of "Best of 2021" plaudits for 'The Art Of Losing', Welsh songwriter & producer The Anchoress announces the vinyl EP release of acoustic versions of tracks from her critically- acclaimed record. 'The Art Of Losing - Acoustic EP' is out on January 20th 2023 via Kscope & features a stripped back piano version of 'Show Your Face', 'Let It Hurt (String Quartet Version)' & acoustic versions of 'All Farewells Should Be Sudden' & 'The Art Of Losing' plus a solo piano take on 'The Exchange' & a special French language version of 'Let It Hurt'. Catherine Anne Davies aka The Anchoress says: "As an album that was designed to be listened to on headphones as an intimate journey into the physical & psychological landscape of grief, it's been fascinating to tackle these acoustic reworkings & explore new textures & arrangements that strip back the songs to their essential skeletons. I hope fans will find a new connection to the core of the songs within these acoustic versions & be excited to own them on vinyl for the first time."

TRACK LISTING

1. Show Your Face ( Piano Version )
2. Let It Hurt ( String Quartet Version )
3. All Farewells Should Be Sudden ( Acoustic Version )
4. The Art Of Losing ( Acoustic Lounge Version )
5. The Exchange ( Solo Piano Version )
6. Let It Hurt ( French Version ) ( Bonus Track )

The coming together of these two emo-pop bands signifies the first release in a Split EP series from Vagrant Records. Three strong songs from each band makes this an easy-to-assimilate treat. Superdrag showcases a handful of songs and The Anniversary contribute three new creations too.

North Carolina’s The Annuals have had a whirlwind ride. They released their first album, "Be He Me", in 2006 while each of their six members were only around nineteen years old. Bloggers, critics, and fans alike fell in love with the album. Two years later, they released their second album "Such Fun". The Annuals are currently embarking on their most dynamic and creative project yet, a 2010 EP release "Sweet Sister", which has been written, recorded and produced entirely by its founder, Adam Baker, in the band’s own hometown recording studio. "Sweet Sister" encompasses the pure energy that Annuals are known for: the quirky experimentalism, the intrinsic pop sensibility, the impeccable production, and the boundless independent spirit. It is electrifyingly alive, and promises to be yet another highlight in this young band’s successful and blossoming career.

TRACK LISTING

1. Loxtep
2. Turncloaking
3. Sweet Sister
4. Holler And Hawl
5. Flesh And Blood

Recorded throughout the spring of 2010 by frontman and first time producer Martin Colclough, "Lifeline" is the album that everybody believed The Answering Machine could make. A departure and a knowing deviation from the sound that established the band on 2009’s angular debut "Another City, Another Sorry", "Lifeline" is a unique, intelligent and diverse LP. Stylistically extensive, the album clicks between moments of post rock magnificence to glitch-driven programming; at once inhaling a varied catalogue of influences and exhaling a body of work that will top End of Year polls.

After working with producers from London and New York, writing songs in Tokyo, demoing in sky scrapers and honing ideas in Brooklyn, it became obvious that ‘home’ was the perfect place to pull "Lifeline" together. The cliché goes that record producers are the so-called ‘fifth member’ of the band but Manchester’s The Answering Machine decided to keep things simple and opted for an actual member of the band to produce their second album. After several successful remix projects, frontman Martin Colclough decided to step up to the role. What followed was not an expensive studio, engineers or remote location; instead the band opted for their underground practice room in the city centre. From six feet under they emerged with their lifeline.

While journalists stalked the streets murmuring buzz words and hailing the new ‘Manchester scene’ The Answering Machine were hard to find. They were in fact below the city campaigning for change, creating a record that is far removed from people’s expectations of them, peeling all the layers of what journalists and fans had deemed them to be and avoiding being caught up in any industry onslaught on their city. They stand alone and by doing so have rediscovered themselves, their identity and uncovered a new sound. Central to this regeneration has been the acquisition of a number of vintage synths passed down from the Factory Records band Repetition. These, along with pump organs and acoustic guitars, opened up a new and more collaborative way of writing for the band.

There are no gimmicks, stories or press angles for The Answering Machine on their second album campaign. This is because what the band have created and achieved is truly remarkable and therefore the ONLY thing worth writing about. Musically eclectic, textural and complex, lyrically sophisticated, honest and striking "Lifeline" is a very special record; the first great record of 2011. It documents a band reborn, a band who have taken the model of Radiohead and The Beatles before them, determined to make a record that sounds nothing like their last. They have succeeded with a grace and elegance all of their own.

STAFF COMMENTS

Laura says: Sadly, The Answering Machine have decided to call it a day, but they bow out in style with the release of the Limited Edition vinyl version of this album.

TRACK LISTING

1. My Little Navy
2. Lifeline
3. Animals
4. 3 Miles
5. Romantic And Square
6. Anything Anything
7. Hospital Lung
8. Rules
9. Video 8
10. So Alive
11. The End

The Antlers release ‘Familiars’, their fourth studio album and first since 2011’s ‘Burst Apart’. (In between, they released the ‘[together]’ and ‘Undersea’ EPs.) ·

‘Familiars’ was recorded, produced and engineered by the band at their Brooklyn studio and mixed by Chris Coady (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Future Islands, Beach House) and follows 2011’s critically lauded ‘Burst Apart’, which The Sunday Times described as “some of the most beautiful music in years” and The Independent heralded as “a spine tingling triumph.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Absolutely gorgeous, mellow record.

TRACK LISTING

1. Palace
2. Doppelgänger
3. Hotel
4. Intruders
5. Director
6. Revisited
7. Parade
8. Surrender
9. Refuge

Highly anticipated record from New York's beloved act The Antlers, their first new music in seven music Perhaps what distinguishes Green to Gold from the rest of The Antlers’ canon is its arrival at a kind of quiet normalcy after a number of rather anxious records. Conceived and written almost entirely in the morning hours, Green to Gold is the easily their most luminous record to date. Following 2014’s Familiars, it looked unsure as to whether there would even be another Antlers album, after the onset of singer and primary songwriter Peter Silberman’s auditory problems.

Affecting his left ear, it was a condition that left him struggling to cope with commonplace noises. He was subsequently diagnosed with lesions on one of his vocal cords, requiring surgery for their removal and vocal therapy to retrain his voice to sing. Following a relocation to upstate New York and the 10th anniversary tour of 2009's 'Hospice', Silberman was rejuvenated and rediscovered the impulse to create new Antlers music. Of Silberman’s unique vocals, The Guardian wrote “His multi-octave voice is as intense as Jeff Buckley’s or Anohni’s, but it’s vulnerable without being precious or cloying” The first LP pressing is on ltd edition gold vinyl (represses will revert to black vinyl) September 2021 tour TBA, including two shows at EartH, London plus shows in Manchester and Edinburgh

TRACK LISTING

1. Strawflower
2. Wheels Roll Home
3. Solstice
4. Stubborn Man
5. Just One Sec
6. It Is What It Is
7. Volunteer
8. Green To Gold
9. Porchlight
10. Equinox

Originally released in 1995, "A Life Full of Farewells" is The Apartments' third album. Released only two years after the legendary "drift", this hushed album filled with melancholy ballads once again displays the writing talent of Peter Milton Walsh. Over a quarter of a century later, these majestic compositions, these silky arrangements, this delicate pop engage us with new emotions. Here the nuances are subtle and the musician's demons seem for a time abandoned, leaving room for a new serenity. Reaching full musical maturity, "A Life Full of Farewells" 'is a centerpiece of Australian discography, now unearthed and released for the very first time in vinyl format. Australian vinyl mastering legend, Don Bartley, who also mastered the original 'A Life Full of Farewells' CD, mastered the album for vinyl. Also features a guest appearance by Chris Abrahams from The Necks.

Based in Sydney, Peter Milton Walsh and his band, The Apartments, are acclaimed by critics and fans alike all over the world. Peter Milton Walsh formed The Apartments in Brisbane, 1978, and left Australia for New York a few years later, and relocated to England when The Apartments were signed by Rough Trade. But before leaving Australia, Walsh was sought out by Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, of Brisbane's most critically adored band, The Go-Betweens. Having been offered an 8-album deal by Beserkley Records, Forster and McLennan asked Walsh to join The Go-Betweens as their fourth member in late 1978. The union was, however, short-lived, as the deal with Beserkley fell through. Grant McLennan famously said of their different personalities, "Walsh is night, we are day. We're sun, he's rain." In and Out of the Light is a classic Apartments album, with songs, lines and melodies coming back to you long after the music has stopped playing. The album came together in a new way for The Apartments. Recording began in Sydney, at the end of winter of 2019. Working a few hours a day, one or two days a week, the album was finished in the summer, with the final mix completed the day before coronavirus lockdown hit Australia in 2020.

Peter Milton Walsh and bass player Eliot Fish worked with producer Tim Kevin in his Marrickville studio in Sydney, while French Apartments, Natasha Penot and Antoine Chaperon, recorded their parts in various studios in France. English drummer Nick Allum worked in London. In and Out of the Light (their 7th studio album) again features Chris Abrahams from The Necks on piano. The vocal and piano for We Talked Through Till Dawn were recorded live in one take with Peter singing as Chris played piano. Miro Bukovsky, who played on No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal, again plays flugelhorn and trumpet. In 2015, The Apartments surprised fans by re-emerging -after over a decade of silence-with No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal, an album that saw a new audience drawn to The Apartments music. By year's end, readers and critics of French music magazine Magic named No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal #1 Album of the Year. Five years later, In and Out of the Light is the highly anticipated album that will once more appeal to existing fans and new ones as well. The Apartments exquisite instrumentation and beautiful harmonies and Peter Milton Walsh's impressionistic storytelling work together beautifully on In and Out of the Light. Here are eight songs to get lost in-for a day, for a week, for a lifetime.

TRACK LISTING

1. Pocketful Of Sunshine
2. Write Your Way Out Of Town
3. Where You Used To Be
4. What's Beauty To Do
5. Butterfly Kiss
6. We Talked Through Till Dawn
7. I Don't Give A Fuck About You Anymore
8. The Fading Light

Aggressive in yer face Iggy-style guitar onslaught, impressive and unrelenting.

"Peregrine" is: Spacious, thick, brooding, joyful, explosive, and back and forth, yet somehow seamless at the same time. It carries tones and sounds (at times) as stormy and spooky as the album's theme / storyline lends.

Considered to be one of the titans in the original second wave of emo bands, TheAppleseed Cast rose to the spotlight in the late 90's and early to mid 2000's, with a string albums, including Low Level Owl I & II, and non-stop touring, earning them high critical praise and a loyal following. Their influence can be heard in countless contemporary bands such as Chvrches - whose lead singer is a self-proclaimed super fan, Basement, Mewithoutyou and so many more.

While fanship continues to grow with each new incarnation from the band, time between albums has also grown a bit over the last 10 years. Despite lineup changes or time between, Crisci is still focused, as much as ever, on touring and continuing to produce the innovative landscape of music the band is known for.

Features current and ex-members of Chain & The Gang, Pygmy Lush, and The Shirks. Moody lo-fi garage rock.

Coasting into town on fumes, late and not speaking to each other because nobody would stop to ask for directions,The Ar-Kaics take their cues from the first wave of ‘60s punk — American teenagers taking cues from the British Invasion, in turn taking cues from pilfers of the hinterland originators — with the added vantage of several subsequent decades worth of wayward balladeers, no names and psychedelic rock hangovers.

The Ar-Kaics have been delivering their off-brand, spot-on garage rock originals out of Richmond, VA, via a flood of small press singles and a s/t debut album - all of which have since become highly desirable in the collectors market - and several successful DIY tours across the lower 48, with shows in Canada and Europe to boot. Since, they've drifted around some, gotten and lost jobs, opened a record store and label, and started families.

In the summer of 2015 the group hooked up with Wayne Gordon and Mikey Post, of Wick Records to record a couple tracks at the Daptone Records' House of Soul - resulting in 2016's critically acclaimed - Just My Life b/w It's Her Eyes 45.

After the success of their debut single on Wick, plans were hashed to record their sophomore full-length, which took place over three days in the Spring of 2017, at Adrian Olsen's Montrose Studio in Richmond, VA.

Produced by Wayne Gordon (Black Lips, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion), and Mikey Post (Reigning Sound, The Jay Vons) the fruits of the heady three day retreat produced the forthcoming Long Player, "In This Time"...a low-brow journey through the Teen-Beat sounds of the 1960's...and beyond! From the opening, crude thud of "Don't Go With Him", the Velvet Underground tinged swagger of "She's Obsessed with Herself", the breezy, late-period psych of "Long Way Down", to the unpretentious, sap-free balladry of "It's Her Eyes" - The Ar-Kaics flex their deft understanding of the subtle intricacies that defines bonafide Garage Rock.

In spite, the band remains, taking its time with In This Time, void of professionalism or self-preservation, just an unquenchable thirst to lap it up and pass it around — the good stuff that is — before it’s all gone.

TRACK LISTING

1. Don't Go With Him
2. Some People
3. No Vacancy
4. She's Obsessed
5. Sick 'n' Tired
6. Cut Me Down
7. Distemper
8. It's Her Eyes
9. What You Do
10. You Turn Me Bad
11. In This Time
12. Long Way Down

In 2015, Dan Auerbach entered the studio with Leon Michels, Nick Movshon, Homer Steinweiss, and the late Richard Swift (who passed away in 2018) to record The Arcs' debut album Yours, Dreamily in a handful of freewheeling sessions over two weeks. Now, more than 7 years later, those same sessions became the bedrock on which the surviving members fleshed out the anticipated follow-up album, Electrophonic Chronic, a collection of psychedelic rock, gritty funk, and heady, soulful grooves.

The Arcs was formed when Dan Auerbach enlisted Leon Michels, a multi-instrumentalist who was part of the studio crew on Auerbach’s GRAMMY-nominated production projects for Dr. John and Lana Del Rey – "I just wanted to do my thing and get extra weird." Auerbach headed into the studio with Michels, Movshon, Steinweiss, and Swift, and made their debut Yours, Dreamily, which was recorded in a handful of freewheeling sessions lasting less than two weeks and released in September 2015.

Those same sessions produced a second unfinished album worth of tracks, the bedrock on which the surviving members fleshed out the highly anticipated follow-up album, Electrophonic Chronic.

"Like a cigarette flicked on a stream of gasoline. The snarling melodies, warbling horn lines and in-the-pocket beats transport listeners into the album's pulpy world of '70s exploitation films and gritty biker-gang movies." - NPR

Produced by Dan Auerbach and Leon Michels, and mixed by the legendary Tchad Blake. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Keep On Dreamin’
2. Eyez
3. Heaven Is A Place
4. Califone Interlude
5. River
6. Sunshine
7. A Man Will Do No Wrong
8. Behind The Eyes
9. Backstage Mess Interlude
10. Love Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
11. Only One For Me 

The Armed return with their first new album in over three years and Sargent House debut, ULTRAPOP. The album reaches the same extremities of sonic expression as the furthest depths of metal, noise, and otherwise "heavy" counterculture music subgenres but finds its foundation firmly in pop music and pop culture. As is always The Armed's mission, it seeks only to create the most intense experience possible, a magnification of all culture, beauty, and things. The band goes on to explain, "crafting vital art means presenting the audience with new and intriguing tensions sonically, visually, conceptually. Over time and through use, those tensions become less novel and effective and they become expectations. The concept of "subgenre" becomes almost the antithesis of vitality in art itself a fetishization of expectation. ULTRAPOP seeks, in earnest, to create a truly new listener experience. It is an open rebellion against the culture of expectation in "heavy" music. It is a joyous, genderless, post-nihilist, anti-punk, razor-focused take on creating the most intense listener experience possible. It's the harshest, most beautiful, most hideous thing we could make."

ULTRAPOP follows their recent contribution to the Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack “Night City Aliens” and 2018’s critically acclaimed album Only Love, which landed on ‘Album of the Year’ lists from The Atlantic, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Vice, Stereogum, and many more. The album was co-produced by the band's own Dan Greene in collaboration with Ben Chisholm (Chelsea Wolfe) and features contributions from Mark Lanegan, Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age, A Perfect Circle), Ben Koller (Converge, Killer Be Killed, Mutoid Man) and many more. Kurt Ballou (Converge, High on Fire, Russian Circles) remains at the helm as executive producer.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ultrapop
2. All Futures
3. Masunaga Vapors
4. A Life So Wonderful
5. An Iteration
6. Big Shell
7. Average Death
8. Faith In Medication
9. Where Man Knows Want
10. Real Folk Blues
11. Bad Selection
12. The Music Becomes A Skull

The Armed return with their new album Perfect Saviors, the first new music since 2021 breakout release ULTRAPOP. Providing a full accounting of album contributors for the first time, Perfect Saviors was produced by the band’s Tony Wolski along with Ben Chisholm and Troy Van Leeuwen, with contributions from Julien Baker, Sarah Tudzin, Mark Guiliana, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Eric Avery, Stephen Perkins, Josh Klinghoffer, and many more. The album was mixed by Alan Moulder. Vocalist Tony Wolski offered this statement on the album: “Too much information has made us dumb and confused. Too many ways to connect have inadvertently led to isolation. And too much expectation has forced everyone to become a celebrity. Predictable primal dangers have given way to newer social ones. And the result is a world that is confounding and terrifying but ultimately still beautiful. We hope this record is exactly all of that, too. Perfect Saviors is our completely unironic, sincere effort to create the biggest, greatest rock album of the 21st century.”

Perfect Saviors is the conclusion of a trilogy of albums examining and dissecting what constitutes “pop culture” in a world of limitless information and access. Using “pop music” loosely as a format in which to express these ideas, each album used composition and presentation as a way to challenge these questions further. Perfect Saviors is the ultimate product of this evolution. Using one of the world’s most well-known mixing engineers to create a beautiful album fully immersed in the language and world of pop through the inherently unique, extreme, and perverse lens, The Armed communicate their art.

TRACK LISTING

1. Sport Of Measure
2. FKA World
3. Clone
4. Modern Vanity
5. Everything's Glitter
6. Burned Mind
7. Sport Of Form
8. Patient Mind
9. Vatican Under Construction
10. Liar 2
11. In Heaven
12. Public Grieving 

The Armed are set to release Ultrapop: Live at the Masonic Temple, an incredible live soundtrack from the band’s narrative-driven concert film of the same name. The album and film were captured in the opulent chapels, imposing asylum rooms, full-size indoor handball courts, halls (and more) of the mysterious Masonic Temple of Detroit; a 550,000 square foot fortress in the heart of the city. Ultrapop: Live at the Masonic features breathtaking, hyperactive performances of tracks off The Armed’s break-out album Ultrapop, selections from their second LP, Only Love, the Cyberpunk 2077 single “Night City Aliens” and culminates in the ultimate catharsis with the entire collective converging for the devastating closer ”On Jupiter.”

The Armed’s latest album Ultrapop, released in April of 2021, received acclaim across the board, gaining the highly coveted Pitchfork Best New Music and praise from The New Yorker Magazine, Vulture, Stereogum, Revolver. AV Club, Fader, Bandcamp, Entertainment Weekly, Interview Magazine, and so much more. Reaching the same extremities of sonic expression as the furthest depths of metal, noise, and otherwise "heavy" counterculture music subgenres, it finds its foundation firmly in pop music and pop culture. A joyous, genderless, post-nihilist, anti-punk, razor-focused take on creating the most intense listening experience possible, and now with Ultrapop: Live At The Masonic, the most intense live experience possible.

TRACK LISTING

Off Jupiter (dan Greene's Theme)
Ultrapop
Twiin Ascension
All Futures
Masunaga Vapors
An Iteration
Average Death
Mother (gold Jade's Dream)
Night City Aliens
Fortune’s Daughter
Where Man Knows Want
At The Moment Of Being Heard
On Jupiter

Tompkins Square's recent double-LP, Imaginational Anthem vol 8 : The Private Press shed light on forgotten, impossibly rare guitar recordings spanning several decades. Tom Armstrong's The Sky Is An Empty Eye is the first of several reissues planned by Tompkins Square of full albums by artists featured on IA8. Armstrong's self-released LP from 1987 sports blissed out acoustic numbers like the one featured on IA8, along with some electric workouts and even a deep pysch vocal tune. Tom's main mode of distribution for the album was handing the LP to drunken patrons at a bar in Pinos Altos, NM. Now Tompkins Square makes it a bit easier to acquire.

In his own words, today : I was born in Elmhurst IL, lived there 29 years. Had a brief career playing open mikes and bars for tips, drinks and nominal cash payments, even gave some guitar lessons. In 1984 I was offered a half partnership in an engineering firm in Dallas, so I moved to Texas. Made a big pile of money. My wife bought me a Tascam 4 track recorder for my birthday, I went crazy with it. Recorded a bunch of melodies that had been rattling around my brain since I was 8 years old. Liked what I heard, decided to make an LP. It wasn't too hard to track down a studio to master my 4 tracks. By this time I was an old hand at graphic design for promotional material, so I designed the cover myself. Handed the albums out to business associates, as promotional material for other business interests, at a drunken open mike at a bar in Pinos Altos, NM. I continued to record for about another 10 years, blues rock, pop. Really refined my recording skills. Still play once in while, but I'm an old fart now, with all the baggage that entails.

TRACK LISTING

1 White Pines
2 The Thing
3 Dream Waltz
4 Burleske
5 Keller
6 The Sky Is An Empty Eye
7 Winter Lament
8 Mama's Baby
9 Bebop
10 Thunder Clouds

West Midlands math-rock trio The Arm return with this four track EP hot on the heels of their acclaimed debut on Speedowax. On "He Builds Bombs", The Arm have stepped up the intensity with a relentless assault of frenzied rhythms, razor-edged guitars and acid-damaged electronica.

An intensely quiet trip inspired by Tarkovsky movies, Feldman’s long works and essentialist jazz. It sees Arthurs expand his long-time duo with pianist Richard Fairhurst to a trio with the inclusion of Finnish percussionist Markku Ounaskari. Fragile and deep, mysterious and nocturnal, romantic and entrancing. There was a striking, yet entirely coincidental proximity between these new tunes and the folk pieces Ounaskari had earlier recorded with his Kuára-trio on ECM.

For ‘One Year’ Arthurs kept reshaping the scores, from changing comparatively minor details to turning entire arrangements upside down. Since the bulk of the original material comprised of fragments, he was able to shift sections from one piece to the next in search of their ideal position. The inspiration had come from film: “I was deeply impressed by how Tarkovsky edited his masterpiece ‘Mirror’. He had no story, no plan, no storyboard. He just shot a lot of material and then, for two years, he had these clothes lines in his house and was putting together the scene into different forms until he had the movie.” 

TRACK LISTING

Evergreens
Pyörähdellen
Verklöstert
Liepnitz In Ruhe
S. Unterwegs (CD Only)
One Year/Song
Rising (CD Only)

An intensely quiet trip inspired by Tarkovsky movies, Feldman’s long works and essentialist jazz. It sees Arthurs expand his long-time duo with pianist Richard Fairhurst to a trio with the inclusion of Finnish percussionist Markku Ounaskari. Fragile and deep, mysterious and nocturnal, romantic and entrancing. There was a striking, yet entirely coincidental proximity between these new tunes and the folk pieces Ounaskari had earlier recorded with his Kuára-trio on ECM.

For ‘One Year’ Arthurs kept reshaping the scores, from changing comparatively minor details to turning entire arrangements upside down. Since the bulk of the original material comprised of fragments, he was able to shift sections from one piece to the next in search of their ideal position. The inspiration had come from film: “I was deeply impressed by how Tarkovsky edited his masterpiece ‘Mirror’. He had no story, no plan, no storyboard. He just shot a lot of material and then, for two years, he had these clothes lines in his house and was putting together the scene into different forms until he had the movie.” 

TRACK LISTING

Evergreens
Pyörähdellen
Verklöstert
Liepnitz In Ruhe
S. Unterwegs (CD Only)
One Year/Song
Rising (CD Only)

The new release from Top Sounds Records honours one of the mid 1960’s most revered cult bands with the label’s first single artist long playing record and CD – the ARTWOODS!

The ARTWOODS – Art Wood, Derek Griffiths, Malcolm Pool, Keef Hartley and future Deep Purple organist Jon Lord – recorded for Decca, Parlophone and Fontana from 1964 to 1967 and their Decca back catalogue in particular has been well documented by retrospective re-issues and compilations. The thirteen canvasses in ‘Art’s Gallery’ however are sourced completely from three live radio sessions that the ARTWOODS recorded for the BBC during 1965 and early 1966 and were not known to still exist. The British Broadcasting Corporation saved a number of tracks the group played for the Beeb and these have since appeared on the Cherry Red ‘Steady Getting It’ set, the rest of the ARTWOODS’ radiophonic output however was not kept by the BBC with the tapes being erased or junked. Thanks to diligent home taping by a particularly keen fan at the time, the ARTWOODS’ music for radio on ‘Art’s Gallery’ can again be heard in public for the first time in over fifty years. And besides welcome live takes of familiar favourites such as ‘Oh My Love’, ‘She Knows What To Do’ and ‘Don’t Cry No More’, there’s a spoil of cool numbers that the band never committed to disc. There’s the upbeat jazz of ‘That Healin’ Feelin’ and ‘Smack Dab In The Middle’, the slow burning blues of ‘How Long, How Long Blues’ and ‘Black Mountain Blues’, the soulful grooves of ‘Out Of Sight’ and ‘I Got A Woman’ and the pure mod suave of ‘Comin’ Home Baby’ (and more!).

The music has been restored to the highest possible standards from the only known surviving reel to reel recordings and Top Sounds feel sure there’s a splendid time for all to be had from a visit to ‘Art’s Gallery’!

A limited edition in both formats!!!!

Named after a line taken from the great Edinburgh poet Norman MacCaig’s Praise of a Man, Tommy Ashby’s stunning debut album ‘Lamplighter’ distills the idea that after someone significant enters your life, the light they pass on will spread and illuminate others. Once that light is lit, it never really goes out. The album is a sincere and touching meditation on relationships; familial and friendships, the romantic and the unspoken. Capturing snapshots of people, places and moments in time, the work beautifully illustrates the effect that a person can have on your life and reflects on how the important relationships in our lives shape us; “It depicts all the people who were lamplighters in my life”.

After swapping a one-bed flat in London for the big skies, reed beds and sunsets of rural Suffolk, Tommy found himself writing about relationships with family and friends, along with a sense of place and its significance. Recorded in a series of secluded retreats tucked away in the hidden corners of the UK, an affinity for location and nature permeates the record. You can hear the trickle of streams in the woods of the Scottish Borders, birds spinning off the sea-cliffs of Zennor in Cornwall and the misty autumn chill of days spent recording in Suffolk and Pembrokeshire. Throughout ‘Lamplighter’, Tommy reminisces over many fond childhood memories of wandering wild Scottish woodlands with his parents, his grandma’s enthusiasm for naturalist poetry and folk music or nights spent sneaking into pubs and bars to play the blues with his dad. As the album unfolds the songs muse over these memories. You get a sense that Tommy is trying to come to terms with how these personal connections have changed over the years and how they’ve come to shape him as an individual.

TRACK LISTING

1. Running
2. My Old Man
3. Moonflower (Best Friend)
4. Closer
5. When Love Goes Dark
6. Floorboards
7. Not That Far To Go
8. A Beautiful Day
9. Safe And Sound
10. Lifeline
11. Which Way The Wind Blows
12. Weigh Me Down
13. Comeback Kid

Andrew Weatherall never wakes up in the morning and decides to start a new album that day. Instead, recording music is a continuous process usually working with different collaborators and seeing where the muse takes him. Somewhere down the line the rewards of a collaboration will coalesce into a body of work between thirty minutes and an hour long and he will put a call into the Rotters’ team to say he has a new release ready to go.

We were visiting the studio catching up on new tracks in various states of readiness when he offered up some remixes of tracks from his recent “Ruled By Passion…” he’d been sent by fellow musicians. Tim Fairplay, Andrew’s partner in The Asphodells, Sean Johnston from A Love From Outer Space and Scott Fraser live and work in the area and all popped in at various points.

Andrew’s black book reads like the who’s who of contemporary music but rather than plunder it for remixers he’d let drop the idea of a remix with friends and neighbours. These plus a couple a swaps with musical friends who were new to the concept of remixing, gave Andrew an hour of music he thoroughly enjoyed listening to.

It goes without saying none of the tracks are duds but our ears always prick up when Justin Robertson’s take on “Beglammered” ups the heart rate or Daniel Avery’s own unscrewing of “… the Axis” ruffles the neck hairs. We’ve stopped arguing in the office about which is the best track. They all are.

On this album Andrew Weatherall has partnered with Timothy J. Fairplay as The Asphodells. Their friendship goes back to Tim’s time with Battant in the latter part of the 2000s with Andrew helping out on production. Tim has been responsible for a number of independent tracks variously on Astro Lab Recordings, World Unknown, Bird Scarer, Emotional Response and Magic Feet. He has played live across Europe including at Fabric in London and Robert Johnson in Germany and DJs at regular Glasgow night Crimes of the Future with Scott Fraser.

Musically the album’s yet another game changer. Andrew has left behind the rock and roll leanings of Wrong Meeting and A Pox on the Pioneers and looks back over his shoulder to the purer electronics of the Kraftwerk-inflected Two Lone Swordsmen but without the sparse introspection that characterised those times. Now the music is saturated in repetitive beats overlaid with sinuous melodies played out over whole tracks. Songs still feature but sound haunted, guitars still ground the tracks but are more resonant. John Betjeman’s ‘Late Flowering Lust’ sits surprisingly comfortably alongside AR Kane’s ‘A Love from Outer Space’ but ultimately it’s Weatherall and Fairplay that imbue the album with it’s own sense of a journey through a time and space that only dimly reflects our own.

TRACK LISTING

01. Beglammered
02. Never There
03. Skwatch
04. Another Lonely City
05. Late Flowering Lust
06. Late Flowering Dub
07. We Are The Axis
08. One Minute's Silence
09. Quiet Dignity Of Unwitnessed Lives
10. Love From Outer Space (Version 2)

'All you need to make an album is a girl and a gun.' Jean Luc Godard. Sex, death, rock-n-roll. The Assassinations is a band, an album and an idea. Is there any more appropriate name for a rock'n'roll band during a decade in which suicide bombs, ethnic cleansing, and kidnapping have become like muzak on the TV news. The Assassinations is rock-n-roll that revels in the signs of the times. The band also has two asses in its name. The Assassinations is latest incarnation in the career of Berlin music legend and agent provocateur Ghazi Barakat. A mainstay of the city's underground music scene since the early 90s, Barakat was the founder and singer of garage noise outfit the Golden Showers. He also performed as part of 'Give Up', a Digital Hardcore-affiliated band with Shizuo's David Hammer and Cobra Killer's Annika Trost. The nine tracks on "Future Blasts From The Past", which is the first release on Barakat's new label Hashishin Records, were recorded between 2006 and 2007 with engineer and producer Tico Zamora at his Polytrash studios in Berlin. Barakat roped in a selection of able friends and conspirators: Tim Gane of Stereolab, Fred Bigot (aka French art-techno one man band Electronicat), Taylor Savvy, Nicole Morier from Electrocute and, most extravagantly a brass ensemble from the Himalayas (Hindulam Ensemble).

Formed in Dundee, Scotland in 1979, the Associates were comprised of vocalist Billy Mackenzie and multi-instrumentalist Alan Rankine.

Built on an eclectic mix of influences and interests ranging from art rock to glam and disco, the duo found early success with their debut record 'The Affectionate Punch' in 1981. Their second studio album 'Sulk', released in 1982, was the group's definitive statement, a fascinating blend of lush, new romantic popcraft and dark, surreal cabaret stylings. Upon its release, the album was voted the album of the year by Melody Maker. Billy Mackenzie recalled before his death in 1997, “Sulk was a real liberation. It had the essence of what I’m about. I realized I could create my own sunshine.”

"The five songs that make up the 'Tremble' EP are a continuation of thought from our latest full length record, 'Tones of the Sparrow', returning to the root 1990s sound when The Asteroid No 4 began. Early '90s British Indie & Shoegaze are infuences we wear on our sleeves proudly. Lately, each band member has been bringing various songs, sections of songs, melodies, chord progressions, and more to the table for a truly collaborative and strong songwriting process."

TRACK LISTING

Tremble
Dandelion
Sky Blue
Bad Fruit
Hollyhock Way

A new project from Pete Astor (The Loft, Weather Prophets, Wisdom of Harry, Ellis Island Sound) and Ian Button (Death in Vegas, Papernut Cambridge, Go Kart Mozart), The Attendant started in the strange days of March 2020, using off-grid electronics to frame Astor’s poems.

The record comes in numbered, signed, hand-stamped and embossed sleeves, along with a full lyric and photo booklet.

The six tracks comprise the three, sold-out lathe cut singles that were released last year.

TRACK LISTING

A
1.Music On
2.Opening Lines
3.Goodbye 21st Century

B
1.Teenage
2.Magnificent Aunt Mary
3.Adventurer Star

The Auteurs fourth and ultimately final album, How I Learned To Love The Bootboys was released in July 1999, a 3-year gap since their previous release, After Murder Park, a period during which Luke Haines released albums as part of Black Box Recorder and under the guise of Baader Meinhof.

This expanded edition, compiled by Luke Haines, features 40 tracks including key b-sides and rarities plus 5 previously unreleased tracks. The second disc features the band’s final gig recorded at London School Of Economics in November 1999. This is the first time it’s been on CD, having been briefly available as a download previously.

“On listening to '...Bootboys' again, I'm actually surprised how focussed it sounds. There's a straightforward 'pop side' and an unstraightforward 'experimental' side. My only regret is not putting more on the album – really stretching it out and making it a sprawling double, songs like 'Breaking Up' and 'Get Wrecked At Home' were far too good for B-sides.” Luke Haines 2014

TRACK LISTING

1: THE RUBETTES
2: 1967
3: HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE THE BOOTBOYS
4: YOUR GANG, OUR GANG
5: SOME CHANGES
6: SCHOOL
7: JOHNNY AND THE HURRICANES
8: THE SOUTH WILL RISE AGAIN
9: ASTI SPUMANTE
10: SICK OF HARI KRISNA
11: LIGHTS OUT
12: FUTURE GENERATION
13: GET WRECKED AT HOME
14: BREAKING UP
15: POLITIC
16: ESP KIDS
17: JOHNNY AND THE HURRICANES
18: FUTURE GENERATION
19: SCHOOL
20: ESSEX BOOTBOYS
21: THE RUBETTES (ACOUSTIC)
22: 1967 (ACOUSTIC)
23: SOME CHANGES (ACOUSTIC)
24: LIGHTS OUT (ACOUSTIC)
25: BAADER MEINHOF
26: MEET ME AT THE AIRPORT
27: BURN WAREHOUSE BURN / THERE'S GONNA BE AN ACCIDENT
28: BACK ON THE FARM
29: BAADER MEINHOF 2
30: UNSOLVED CHILD MURDER
31: 1967
32: THE RUBETTES
33: HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE THE BOOTBOYS
34: YOUR GANG, OUR GANG
35: HOW COULD I BE WRONG
36: BUDDHA
37: AFTER MURDER PARK
38: LIGHT AIRCRAFT ON FIRE
39: LENNY VALENTINO
40: FUTURE GENERATION

By day John Stirratt and Patrick Sansone sell thousands of albums and tour the world as members of indie juggernaut Wilco, while lending their writing, playing and producing abilities to dozens of high-profile recordings. But by night these renowned pros are able to sit down, relax and create something special that comes straight from the heart of why they pursued music as a career - and that's the Autumn Defense.

After releasing 2007's The Autumn Defense on their own Broadmoor label, Stirratt and Sansone have teamed up with North Carolina's Yep Roc Records to release their latest full-length effort, "Once Around".

For the past nine years, this pair of Southerners-turned-Chicagoans has quietly been nurturing the reverent, classic pop of the Autumn Defense. Though the outset of the band saw Stirratt handling the bulk of the songwriting while Sansone lent his talents to production, the duo has steadily evolved into a partnership in both respects. From 2000's debut effort "The Green Hour" to the critically lauded, salt-of-theearth folk rock of 2003's "Circles", the Autumn Defense developed its late afternoon kickback sound like a fine wine develops and deepens - with time.

"Once Around" is a formidable tapestry of thoughtful, intricate sunshine wrapped around a core of timeless, experienced songwriting. It's the kind of record that needed to be made, for the audience but also for the artists. The result is a distinctly Autumn Defense record, full of lush melodic textures, invitingly delicate pop arrangements and frequents nods to the AM gold, soul and radio rock that dominated the group's formative years.

Broken Horse present the self titled and 3rd album by Wilco offshoot The Autumn Defense (John Stirratt and Pat Sansone of Wilco). After the release of their second album in 2003, The Autumn Defense, multi-instrumentalists John Stirratt and Pat Sansone, realized that there was indeed an audience for their Simon & Garfunkel/Bread influenced soft-rock that they hadn't truly appreciated, and like most things took some time to develop. "The Autumn Defense" is the culmination and continuation of what the band has reached for in the last two records, from the Philly-soul of "Feel You Now", to the baroque "Estate Remains", the bossa "City Bells" to the classic Southern-California sound of "We Would Never Die." Playing this album next to Wilco's Sky Blue Sky which followed "The Autumn Defense" a few months later, it becomes clear how integral both Stirratt and Sansone are to the current Wilco sound in what is looking likely to be it's most successful and enduring line up.

Building on the sample-based approach of their classic albums "Since I Left You" and "Wildflower", but stepping boldly into new terrain, "We Will Always Love You" is the new full length masterpiece from The Avalanches. Check the cover for a photo of Ann Druyan (Director of the Voyager Golden Record Project), her cosmic love story with Carl Sagan inspiring this body of work.

An exploration of the vibrational relationship between light, sound and spirit, We Will Always Love You doubles as “an exploration of the human voice” and a spiritual reckoning via the big questions “who are we really? What happens when we die?’”. So says Robbie Chater, who alongside bandmate Tony DiBlasi and collaborator Andrew Szekeres has moved beyond the party-up exuberance of The Avalanches’s youthful music to a tender, reflective sound infused with hard-earned life wisdom.

If there’s a single spark for We Will Always Love You it’s the story of the love affair between Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan: “science communicators” whose writings and TV programs brought the ever-deepening mysteries of astronomy and astrophysics to the mass audience. Chater was profoundly moved by the fact that the couple’s romance was captured and carried into space, thanks to the Voyager Interstellar Message Project. Druyan served as Creative Director in charge of curating the Golden Record: earthling music and assorted terrestrial sounds gathered for the contemplation of any alien civilisations that might be out there and be advanced enough to construct a playback system.

Originally, Druyan was set to be a presence on We Will Always Love You: a studio was booked to record her telling her own story. That never transpired, but Druyan “gave us permission to use her photo on the album cover,” says Chater. “We photographed it off a static-y television set and ran it through a spectograph to make the cover image. So that was a beautiful way that Ann could still be part of the record. We turned her into sound and back again”

Sampling remains at the core of The Avalanches sound, but alongside all of the sample ghosts, We Will Always Love You features an array of living guests who contribute vocals and lyrics: Blood Orange, Rivers Cuomo, Pink Siifu, Jamie xx, CLYPSO, Denzel Curry, Tricky, Neneh Cherry, Sampa the Great, Sananda Maitreya and Vashti Bunyan and many more exciting collaborations to be revealed over the coming months. The Avalanches’s music has always dripped with melody, but because of this expanded role for guest singers and writers, We Will Always Love You is their most song-oriented album yet.

“For us, to make the same record again, no matter how well executed, wouldn’t have been satisfying," says Chater. "We were looking to do something that would open up possibilities for the future. Take a bit of a left turn that frees us up to do whatever we want to next.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Patrick says: Inspired by love, humanity, space and at least 6,000 sample-able records, 'We Will Always Love You' sees The Avalanches return in record time for a third album The album dips into hip hop, disco, house and electronica with all the warmth, wit and wanderlust we've come to expect from the Aussies.

TRACK LISTING

01. Ghost Story (feat. Orono)
02. Song For Barbara Payton
03. We Will Always Love You (feat. Blood Orange)
04. The Divine Chord (feat. MGMT & Johnny Marr)
05. Solitary Ceremonies
06. Interstellar Love (feat. Leon Bridges)
07. Ghost Story Pt. 2 (feat. Orono & Leon Bridges)
08. Reflecting Light (feat. Sananda Maitreya & Vashti Bunyan)
09. Carrier Waves
10. Oh The Sunn! (feat. Perry Farrell)
11. We Go On (feat. Cola Boyy & Mick Jones)
12. Star Song.IMG
13. Until Daylight Comes (feat. Tricky)
14. Wherever You Go (feat. Jamie Xx, Neneh Cherry & CLYPSO)
15. Music Makes Me High
16. Pink Champagne
17. Take Care In Your Dreaming (feat. Denzel Curry, Tricky & Sampa The Great)
18. Overcome
19. Gold Sky (feat. Kurt Vile)
20. Always Black (feat. Pink Siifu)
21. Dial D For Devotion (feat. Karen O)
22. Running Red Lights (feat. Rivers Cuomo & Pink Siifu)
23. Born To Lose
24. Music Is The Light (feat. Cornelius & Kelly Moran)
25. Weightless

In a collage of fuzz guitars, tuning radios, pitched up soul samples, pitched down exotica records, and a whole lot of background chatter, The Avalanches return after an unprecedented 16 year wait. Created by the band’s core duo - Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi – "Wildflower" is nothing less than The Beach Boys’ "Smile" reimagined in the Daisy Age - a mind-bending cartoon road movie that’s best viewed with closed eyes and an open mind. Unmistakeably the work of Australia's sample kings, "Wildflower" is a Technicolor kaleidoscope of everything great and groovy about music, blessed with the warm and dreamlike aesthetic we first fell in love with on the sublime "Since I Left You". A throwback to those halcyon days when artists made albums, as opposed to a couple of radio singles and eight tracks of filler, The Avalanches sophomore LP drifts from one track to the next, taking us on a tripped out tour of downtown Melbourne in the summer time.

Lead single "Frankie Sinatra" divided the critics on its initial release, making a marmite statement with its oddball calypso samples, oompah brass and unhinged lyrics from Danny Brown and MF DOOM. Here, nestled comfortably between the gorgeous summertime soul of "Because I'm Me" and the sampledelic disco of "Subways", the track makes perfect nonsense. The inner city synth pop of "If I Was A Folkstar" strolls through the sunshine like a laid back relative of Cut Copy's "Bright Like Neon Love", while the spectral "Colours", featuring some heavily treated vocals from Mercury Rev's Jonathan Donahue, is as dreamy and doped up as pop music gets. Elsewhere Ariel Pink, Father John Misty, Warren Ellis (Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds)  and Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bundick make cameos, as does Biz Markie on the light-hearted, full stomached old school hip hop of "Noisy Eater". The dusty sixties soul of "Harmony" leaps out the grooves in the middle of a succession of dreamy sketches (in a day-glo Dilla style) before the triple threat of "The Wozard Of Iz", "Over The Turnstyles" and "Sunshine" form the apex of an outstanding LP. "Kaleidoscopic Lovers" and "Stepkids" serve up a pair of pastoral love songs before the driving haze-gaze of "Saturday Night Inside Out" leads us off into the sunset with the widest smile of our lives. Against all odds and expectations, The Avalanches have done the impossible, following up an instant classic with a second album which is even better than the first. If we have to wait another sixteen years for the next one, at least we'll be waiting in the company of two flawless records. 

TRACK LISTING

01. The Leaves Were Falling
02. Because I’m Me
03. Frankie Sinatra
04. Subways
05. Going Home
06. If I Was A Folkstar
07. Colours
08. Zap!
09. The Noisy Eater
10. Wildflower
11. Harmony
12. Live A Lifetime Love
13. Park Music
14. Livin’ Underwater (Is Somethin’ Wild)
15. The Wozard Of Iz
16. Over The Turnstiles
17. Sunshine
18. Light Up
19. Kaleidoscopic Lovers
20. Stepkids
21. Saturday Night Inside Out
22. Frankie Sinatra (Extended Mix)

Few first wave California punk bands burned as brightly as The Avengers. Formed in San Francisco during 1977’s Summer of Hate, they swiftly ascended to the top of the West Coast scene and earned the coveted support slot for The Sex Pistols’ final concert in January 1978. The Avengers’ frenetic performance at Winterland made quite an impression on Pistols guitarist Steve Jones who offered to record the group. From the Jones produced sessions, “The American In Me” remains an unmistakable anthem. Embodying the punk zeitgeist, singer Penelope Houston fiercely declares, “Ask not what you can do for your country, what’s your country been doing to you.” The original White Noise EP version of “The American In Me” is paired with “Uh-Oh,” featuring Jones on piano and bravely demonstrating Me Too sentiments four decades earlier. Comp-only track “Cheap Tragedies” closes this reimagined lost-single set. The American In Me perfectly captures The Avengers’ dynamic power —frustration, style and passion forged into some of the most pivotal sounds of punk’s formative era. 

TRACK LISTING

1. The American In Me
2. Uh-Oh
3. Cheap Tragedies

Inclusive outsider pop mavericks and Antifolk legends The Awkward Silences return with their eponymous 4th album and their first release in 5 years. Off-kilter Daniel Johnston-esque pop songs inspired by Ian Dury and Iggy Pop. Produced by Jon Clayton (The Monochrome Set, Subway Sect), The Awkward Silences is their catchiest, most unusual and most personal work to date. Led by songwriter, author and disability campaigner Paul Hawkins, The Awkward Silences combine cleverly off-kilter Daniel Johnston-esque pop songs with energetic and inspired live performances pitched somewhere between Ian Dury, Iggy Pop and the Flaming Lips. Having cut their teeth at the infamous Blang nights at the 12 Bar Club back in the late 00’s, The Awkward Silences built up a dedicated following amongst the UK Antifolk Scene before taking on the mainstream with regular BBC Radio1 & 6Music airplay, festival slots up and down the country, and a celebrity following including the likes of Mark Radcliffe, Huw Stephens and Graham Coxon*. Owing to a combination of mental health issues, bereavements, disability activism and other real life complications, the band retreated from the public eye following the release of 2015’s Outsider Pop.

2018 saw the bands first foray back into the spotlight with a triumphant set at Kendal Calling, spurring them back into the studio to record the new album. The Awkward Silences will also feature on ‘Scratchcard’, Blang Records forthcoming 15 year anniversary compilation (due October 2020). More recently, Hawkins has been in the music press for his work with disability charity Attitude Is Everything and their new initiative Beyond The Music, aimed at improving employment opportunities for disabled people in the music industry. As a disabled musician himself, Hawkins is passionate about improving access for deaf and disabled performers, gig-goers and professionals. All Awkward Silences self-promoted gigs have captioned lyrics for anyone who can't hear them. Paul is very happy to hear from disabled musicians who'd like some advice or a chat. * Graham Coxon was once mistaken for Chris from the band, and ended up getting punched as a result. We think he is a fan. Quotes - ‘Laden with pure charisma’ NME // ‘An ace antifolk superstar’ Time Out // ‘I haven’t been able to get Paul Hawkins out of my head for the last 4 days’ Huw Stephens 

TRACK LISTING

1 Quantum Physics
2 Getting Ready For My Life To Begin
3 There’s Nothing More Obnoxious Than A Self-Made Man
4 Everybody Loves Organised Fun
5 Other People Die
6 Count Each Mistake
7 The Medical Model
8 Everything Will Probably Be Fine
9 Pretending To Be Fine
10 The New World