Cornell Campbell is one of the great voices in Jamaican music, with a career going all the way back to 1959 with hits for Coxsone Dodd's Studio One label, and recording as part of vocal harmony trio The Uniques in the late 60s. Going solo in the early 70s he had a fruitful partnership with producer Bunny 'Striker' Lee, coming up with a series of killer tracks. In the mid 70s he began working with Channel One house band The Aggrovators, who re-cut many of these early 70s hits, remaking them in a tougher, rasta / roots style. It is from these sessions that the dub cuts on "The Gorgon Dubwise" are culled. Featuring the classic line-up of Carlton 'Santa' Davis, Carlton and Aston 'Family Man' Barrett, Robbie Shakespeare, Earl 'Chinna' Smith, Tony Chin, Winston 'Bo Peep', Ansel Collins, Bobby Ellis, Vin Gordon, Tommy McCook and Lennox Brown, these tracks really are at the top of the 70s reggae sound.

One of the sweetest and most idiosyncratic voices in reggae, tenor singer Cornell Campbell also has one of the longest-running careers of any Jamaican recording artist. Taken under Studio One founder Clement ‘Sir Coxsone’ Dodd’s wing at a very young age, Cornell cut his first recordings in 1956, long before ska was even established. He remained based at Studio One for many years (working as a label printer as well as a recording artist), and also voiced sides for King Edwards in the ska years. He then briefly joined the Sensations in rock steady and recorded at Treasure Isle, before moving back to Studio One as leader of the Eternals when reggae arrived, cutting huge hits there such as ‘Stars’ and ‘Queen Of The Mistrel,’ and giving early coaching to Slim Smith, Jacob Miller and bassist Robbie Shakespeare. Joining forces with ace producer Bunny ‘Striker’ Lee in the mid-1970s brought a dramatic new surge in popularity that greatly boosted his profile overseas. The Ropin’ LP was issued on Third World’s Justice subsidiary in 1980—a sub label set up to handle Striker’s product in the UK (though hits like ‘Mash You Down’ and the title track had been handled in Jamaica by Joe Gibbs). One of the album’s outstanding moments is ‘Bandulu,’ an anti-rude boy epic voiced on the ‘Late Night Blues’ rhythm, while opening cover, ‘Just My Imagination,’ has an uncredited toasting portion from Errol Scorcher.

TRACK LISTING

1 Just My Imagination
2 Talk About My Baby
3 Soul And Inspiration
4 Young Love
5 Rope In
6 Mash You Down
7 Free Up The Sensimillia
8 Broken Hearted Girl
9 A Solid Foundation
10 Aware Of Love
11 Bandolo

Following excellent reviews for her recent solo album, 'There Is No Other...', released earlier this year, Isobel Campbell will reissue her third and fourth solo albums, Amorino and Milkwhite Sheets via Cooking Vinyl.

'Amorino' is the third solo album from the former Belle & Sebastian member Isobel Campbell. Obsessed with French New Wave, chanson, vintage European cinema, the beat girls and boys of the 1960’s, White Horses by Jacky, Peter Sellers and the bossa nova of Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto, Campbell, alongside fellow maverick composer and Scottish national treasure Bill Wells set about making their homage to such things. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Amorino
2. The Breeze Whispered Your Name
3. Monologue For An Old True Love
4. October's Sky
5. The Cat's Pyjamas
6. Why Does My Head Hurt So?
7. Johnny Come Home
8. Poor Butterfly
9. Love For Tomorrow
10. There Is No Greater Gold
11. This Land Flows With Milk
12. Song For Baby
13. Time Is Just The Same

Isobel Campbell is no stranger to navigating turmoil. On her previous album, There Is No Other (2020), she re-emerged after a decade of label trouble with a gem of subtly questing psychedelic folk. Four years on, Campbell spreads her net wider on Bow to Love, a soft-spun yet sharp-edged set of reflections on modern crises that doesn’t stop at diagnosing the problems: it goes further to ask how we might progress from our tense, conflicted times.

With all the dexterity the Glasgow-born singer-songwriter and cellist is known for, the result is an album of lambent surfaces and choppy riptides, a deeply personal record for today poised between hope and despair. “The album is about what we’re all in right now, and my response to that and my life as a microcosm within that,” says Campbell, before suggesting how exposing modern horrors might prove purgative. “I think there’s a quote from A Course In Miracles which says, ‘Love brings up everything unlike itself for the purpose of healing and release.’ Maybe these horrible things are coming up and out so we can get rid of them and things can be better.”

Her radar keenly attuned to inequities, Campbell spotlights toxic masculinity on the luminous ‘Everything Falls Apart,’ it’s circling lilt and warm, fretless bass framing a call to unmask patriarchal power in readiness for “a brand new start”. “My elegy to the patriarchy” is how Campbell pitches it, noting how “even the words we use to insult a substandard man will often blame the woman – ‘son of a bitch’, ‘bastard’.” The spellbinding psych-folk of ‘Spider to the Fly’ and ‘Second Guessing’ add themes of “narcissistic abuse” and “repetition compulsion”, lending bite to the album’s take on relationships.

Some songs were first conceptualised in 2016, when Brexit and Trump exacerbated what Campbell describes as “real tension” amongst people. Between its gently jazzy shuffle and cushioning arrangement, the Yoda-esque ‘Do Or Die’ foregrounds fortitude in the face of gnawing anxieties. The rainy-day soul-pop of ‘Keep Calm Carry On’ also started in 2016, when Campbell was staying at her aunt’s flat in Yoker and her then-husband and collaborator Chris Szczech texted her from New York about the Brexit vote. “Chris was saying, ‘It looks like it’s going to happen’ but I was like, ‘No way.’ And actually – ‘way’. It did happen.”

Technology is touched on with first single ‘4316’, an almost robo-folk-pop challenge to the idea of the “transhuman”: the idea that technology might sire a new stage in human evolution. Favouring “honest, decent communication” over AI, Campbell takes a dim view of our “friend, unfriend, block, unblock” culture. “I know what I love and it ain’t that,” she says. “I was talking to an Uber driver the other day and I said, ‘I don’t want to be living in a video game.’ And he said, ‘Well, we are.’ I feel like I’m offering a human element in these transhuman days of artificial intelligence.”

The looping sing-song swing of the title track applies that open, complex thinking to myths about love: “It’s not enough to bow to love” is the full lyric, offering a grown-up take on the matter. “I grew up loving The Beatles and ‘All You Need Is Love’,” Isobel says, “but sometimes love’s not enough. Sometimes love can get a bit wonky. Love brings up everything - good, bad, ugly - and it can push your buttons.”

To close the album, a warm cover of Dire Straits’s ‘Why Worry’ disregards any hipster disdain for Mark Knopfler’s band to find a core of consolation at the song’s heart. “I never really bought into all that hipster stuff,” says Campbell. “If something speaks to me, it speaks to me. My dad had all those records and I would always sing it to myself.”

In making the album, Campbell chose an environment that spoke to her. She recorded and co-produced the record with Szczech in his studio in Los Angeles, sticking with what works through the upheaval in their personal lives. “Chris Szczech and I made this record no longer as a couple. There’s been shit tons going on but then as I tell myself, things come up to be addressed and dealt with.”

The result is an inquisitive, complex and fully matured album from an artist who has travelled long and far. Campbell was first noticed as a teenage founder member of Belle & Sebastian, before she released two dream-folk solo albums under the name The Gentle Waves and left B&S in 2002. Two records under her own name followed, leading to a union with late rock-carved growler Mark Lanegan for three albums of gravel’n’honey Americana duets, where Lanegan would stand aside while Campbell called the creative shots.

A move to LA and a near-decade of label troubles followed; the latter ended with There Is No Other in 2020 before – as Campbell puts it – “the world went down the crapper” for the pandemic. And on Bow to Love, suggests Campbell, the world’s ongoing troubles are clear. “Anyone with two eyes, a brain and a heart can see that people are struggling, and I suppose I have a lot of thoughts about that. And it’s this album.”

An album that also, says Campbell, has thoughts about how the future remains unwritten. “I feel like we’re living in some kind of dystopia, but I think it’s up to us what we buy into and what we react to. We do have a choice, even if sometimes we think we don’t. You can still see acts of great kindness. In all the bleakness, that’s what I hang on to. We are co-creators. Where we go next is up to us.” Mounted with clear-sighted artistry and care, Bow to Love is a light in the dark of uncertain times.

TRACK LISTING

1. Everything Falls Apart
2. Do Or Die
3. Spider To The Fly
4. Second Guessing
5. Bow To Love
6. 4316
7. Dopamine
8. Keep Calm Carry On
9. Saturday’s Son
10. Take This Poison
11. Om Shanti Om
12. You
13. Why Worry

Originally release in 2006, "Milkwhite Sheets" was conceived and recorded in tandem and shortly after "Ballad Of The Broken Seas". It's a piercingly beautiful set of traditional folk songs and originals, on the surface tranquil, with turbulence underneath. More intimate, more deftly twisted than "Ballad…", it draws on broader and more personal influences.

TRACK LISTING

1. O Love Is Teasin'
2. Willow's Song
3. Yearning
4. James
5. Hori Horo
6. Reynardine
7. Milkwhite Sheets
8. Cachel Wood
9. Beggar, Wiseman Or Thief
10. Loving Hannah
11. Are You Going To Leave Me?
12. Over The Wheat & The Barley
13. Thursday's Child

Long awaited new solo album from Isobel Campbell. 

It's been 10 years (yes really) since her last album, "Hawk", which was her third collaboration with Mark Lanegan and 14 since her last solo album, but it's been worth the wait. 

Drawing on everything from the twee indie pop of Belle & Sebastian, 60s pop, and the dark Americana of her Lanegan collaborations, this is an absolute gem of a record.

TRACK LISTING

1. City Of Angels
2. Runnin’ Down A Dream
3. Vultures
4. Ant Life
5. Rainbow
6. The Heart Of It All
7. Hey World
8. The National Bird Of India
9. Just For Today
10. See Your Face Again
11. Boulevard
12. Counting Fireflies
13. Below Zero

‘Under This Hunger Moon We Fell’ is the new album from the uniquely talented, multi-instrumental artificer Lomond Campbell, the third and final instalment of his experiments using tape loops at the heart of his music making process.

The album ranges from soft, delicate atmospheric musings such as ‘Bastard Wing’ and ‘Leave Only Love Behind’ to the dark electronics of ‘And They Are Afraid Of Her’ and ‘Phonon For No One’, which Campbell describes as “akin to a massive machine starting up, like a huge sinister power mobilising”. During its gloomier moments, ‘Under This Hunger Moon We Fell’ buries tonally ambiguous ambience underneath hazy, distorted textures created via the gradual degradation of the tape. It creates a dream-like backdrop with a moody undertone created by deep basslines and hulking percussive elements, blended with orchestral sounds that add an air of humanity.

“Visual beauty, tactility and mesmeric kinetics are just as important to his creations as the sounds their movements facilitate” Electronic Sound

“He’s a bit of a genius I think. Based up in the highlands, maker of machines, music and art” Mary Anne Hobbs (BBC 6Music)

TRACK LISTING

Bastard Wing
Phonon For No One
Sister Rena
The Mountain And The Pendulum
Under This Hunger Moon We Fell
Leave Only Love Behind
And They Are Afraid Of Her
For The Uncarved
Even Songbirds Suffer
Alters

Two of Celtic music's young guns, Malcolm Stitt and Rory Campbell have released a groundbreaking album. In many ways "Nusa" encapsulates what is happening in Scottish music today. Featuring traditional and original tunes it also adds DJ scratching that brings a new dimensions to tracks featuring pipes, whistles, guitar, bouzouki and drums and percussion.

Another name has to be added to the ever growing list of new American singer songwriters that rise above the ordinary, that of Troy Campbell. "American Breakdown" is a great little album totally lacking any pretension and with a simplicity that is its greatest asset.

Originally released in 2012, the second album by the São Paulo-born composer Rodrigo Campos marks a turning point in both lyrical and aesthetic inspiration. “Bahia Fantástica” is the result of the absorption of a then recent influence of soul music (especially Curtis Mayfield) and is in the middle of this path marked by an unlikely geography in the lyrical part (São Mateus, Bahia, Japan) and by an expansion of sound (from samba to the indefinable, with a passage through black American music).

The album turns ten years old in 2022 and exudes vitality. The soul reference takes on a different aroma when it passes through the filter of the composer and his band – formed by Kiko Dinucci on guitar, Marcelo Cabral on bass, Maurício Fleury on keyboards, Maurício Takara on drums and Thiago França on sax: it has Brazilian sauce, hints of afrobeat and a very particular seasoning. The lyrics bear the artist's mark: they project scenes in the listener's imagination and design the characters and environments with their own style of subjective chronicle. Bahia is both imaginary and intimate in Rodrigo Campos’s music.

TRACK LISTING

Cinco Doces
Princesa Do Mar
Ribeirao
Beco
Morte Na Bahia
Sete Vela
Aninha
Jardim Japao
General Geral
Elias
Capitao
Sou De Salvador

The first album from Can and featuring the vocals of Malcolm Mooney, an African American sculptor artist. Possibly the rawest and rockiest of all Can's releases, this combined all the elements of Can, the classic krautrock groove, their shuffling funkiness and the stoned psyche guitar freakouts.

Vocalist Damo Suzuki’s departure from CAN in 1973 had forced the band to re-evaluate their sound. Now with Michael Karoli and Irmin Schmidt sharing vocal duties, the band had also begun drawing on influences from disco and glam. While still remaining staunchly outside the mainstream, they undoubtedly became more accessible to a wider audience, and soon had a huge fan base in the UK. In fact, just a few months after playing the live show found on this double LP (recorded in Lyon in January of 1976), CAN was even on Top Of The Pops!

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A: “The Yellow Side”
1. Citrus
2. Red Hot Indians

SIDE B: “The Cyan Side”
1.Dizzy Dizzy
2. Chain Reaction

SIDE C: “The Red Side”
1. One More Night
2. Vernal Equinox

SIDE D: “The Black Side”
1. More Spree Vitamin C

Although recorded in the late 60s, the material included on "Delay 1968" did not appear commercially until 1981. A collection of cuts featuring early vocalist Malcolm Mooney, these seven songs are among the very first Can ever recorded. As an early insight to the future sound of the krautrock legends this features some essential tracks like "Thief", "Butterfly" and "Uphill".

STAFF COMMENTS

Mine says: If you have always found Can a little too weird and don't know where to start, this one's for you. Delay 1968 is a brilliant but very approachable album by the German Krautrock pioneers. It is by far my favourite and I have yet to play it to someone who doesn't like it!

Recorded in their own Inner Space Studio in 1972, this was yet another landmark krautrock moment. Following on from the genius "Tago Mago" album was never going to be easy, but this was Can working at their peak. Another classic album featuring the genius shuffling drum beat of Jaki Liebezeit, the rhythmic grooves the towering kosmic guitars and experimental almost free-jazz approach. In a word this is magnificent, every home should have one!!!!!

Can was founded in 1968 by Irmin Schmidt, Holger Czukay, Michael Karoli and Jaki Liebezeit who formed a group which would utilise and transcend all boundaries of ethnic, electronic experimental and modern classical music.

This classic album of tracks recorded at the beginning of Can’s life, and features original vocalist Malcolm Mooney.

Thief is now a rejuvenated Can classic having been covered by Radiohead and since then discovered by a new generation of fans.

Can’s powerful influence has never diminished, and their indelible mark is apparent in the bands who freely acknowledge their importance - from Portishead, James Murphy, New Order, Factory Floor, Public Image Ltd, Mogwai, Kanye West and Radiohead - as well as across other disciplines such as visual art and literature.

"Can are impossible to classify and its impossible to ignore their seismic influence on so many diverse musical paths" Richard Hawley
"Can are the most revolutionary band ever" Stephen Morris (New Order)

TRACK LISTING

A1 Butterfly
A2 Pnoom
A3 Nineteen Century Man
A4 Thief
B1 Man Named Joe
B2 Uphill
B3 Little Star Of Bethlehem

“A superb band. One of the best in Britain.” - Stuart Maconie, BBC Radio 6

 “Candidate are Britain’s most tasteful, witty and thoughtful band. Joyous... splices Nick Drake’s pastoral euphoria with West Coast hippie harmonies... thrums like early Fairport Convention.” - Stewart Lee, Sunday Times Album Of The Week

“Like Midlake’s ‘The Trials Of Van Occupanther’, the results blend ancient and modern sensibilities... A well-crafted, engrossing work of the imagination.” - The Independent

“With their beautifully spun vocal harmonies, thoughtful lyrics and alluring melodies, the band recall the likes of Crosby Stills & Nash... while always keeping one foot in the ancient roots of Brit-folk.” - Uncut Magazine

TRACK LISTING

1. Come On
2. Dolphin Racing
3. Saturation
4. Pepper's Ghost
5. Jonathan
6. Walk Aboard
7. Bigger Than Us
8. Widow's Penny
9. Tom And Tracy
10. Matsui Serenade
11. Newfoundland (album Version)
12. How To Never Die
13. Stop

Candy & The Kisses burst onto the Northern Soul scene with "The 81". This storming dancer was unreleased until released on a CD compilation, making this a first time 7" vinyl release. The B side is by Val Simpson, one half of Valerie & Simpson

TRACK LISTING

Side 1: Are You Trying To Get Rid Of Me Baby - Candy & The Kisses
Side 2: Mr. Creator - Val Simpson

Wicked previously unreleased late '80s combination tune from Icho Candy & his brother Prince Junior, who are sometimes confused for each other. On the same rhythm as King Kong's "Agony and Pain" (also repressed this week). Lyrically about the struggle for freedom of the day, as resonant today as it was nearly 40 years ago.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Icho Candy muses on the struggle for the freedom over King Kong's "Agony And Pain" riddim. Its another winner from the selection of Jah Life Time reissues we've been luckily blessed with this week.

TRACK LISTING

A. Free Up
B. Free Up Dub

Following the release of the Can Vinyl Box – the limited edition box set that consisted of 17 LPs housed in a linen wrapped box, Mute are now proud to release the CAN studio albums individually on vinyl. 

The albums were mastered and cut to vinyl by Kevin Metcalfe at The Soundmasters, London. Remasters and vinyl processing was coordinated by long time collaborator, Jono Podmore. 

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Future Days
2. Spray
3. Moonshake

SIDE B
1. Bel Air

Following the release of the Can Vinyl Box – the limited edition box set that consisted of 17 LPs housed in a linen wrapped box, Mute are now proud to release the CAN studio albums individually on vinyl. 

The albums were mastered and cut to vinyl by Kevin Metcalfe at The Soundmasters, London. Remasters and vinyl processing was coordinated by long time collaborator, Jono Podmore. 

The acclaimed Can live series continues with the release of Live In Aston 1977, available via Mute and Future Days (the new EU label created by Spoon Records).

The series was overseen by founding member Irmin Schmidt and producer/engineer René Tinner, who delicately worked on restoring the archival recordings to the best quality for current modern technology. This record captures the band’s 1977 performance in Aston and features Schmidt (keyboard & synths), Jaki Liebezeit (drums), Michael Karoli (guitars), Holger Czukay (wave receiver & spec.sounds), plus Rosko Gee (bass), who appears for the first time in the series.

This release features sleeve notes by former Sex Pistol, Glen Matlock, sharing his first-hand experience of witnessing CAN's live show.

Live In Aston follows the release of Live In Paris 1973, the first in the series to feature Damo Suzuki’s vocals [“…among the greatest documents of their untouchable alchemy…” – Record Collector 5*]; Live In Brighton 1975 [“Pure dynamite… keep them coming” – MOJO]; Live in Stuttgart 1975, [Uncut’s Reissue of the Year, #2 in MOJO’s Reissues of the Year, #7 in The Wire’s Archive Reissues of the Year plus more]; and Live In Cuxhaven 1976, which again featured heavily in the Reissues of the Year.

TRACK LISTING

Vinyl Tracklist
A1 Aston 77 Eins
A2 Aston 77 Zwei
B1 Aston 77 Drei
B2 Aston 77 Vier

CD Tracklist
1 Aston 77 Eins
2 Aston 77 Zwei
3 Aston 77 Drei
4 Aston 77 Vier

“Live In Brighton 1975” is the second album of a curated series of CAN live concerts. Available in full for the first time on triple vinyl, double CD and digitally. Originally recorded on tape, this carefully restored live album comprises the entirety of the show in the format of a story with a beginning, middle and end, bringing CAN’s performance to life. Limited edition triple Gold vinyl in triple gatefold sleeve plus a 2CD edition in card pack with 16 page booklet, both with extensive sleeve notes.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: There's not much I can tell you here that you won't already know.. this is the second wonderfully pressed collection from Can of live performances following 'Live In Stuttgart' that was released in May. There are very few musicians that could pull off this level of out-there musicianship, and this is a wonderful and accurate document of their live legacy. Essential.

TRACK LISTING

A1 Brighton 75 Eins
A2 Brighton 75 Zwei
A3 Brighton 75 Drei
B1 Brighton 75 Vier
B2 Brighton 75 Fünf
C1 Brighton 75 Sechs
C2 Brighton 75 Sieben

Mute and Spoon Records present 'Live In Cuxhaven 1976', the third album of the curated Can live concert series. Available in full for the first time on blue vinyl, CD and digitally.

Originally recorded on tape, this carefully restored live album comprises the 1976 show in the format of a story with a beginning, middle and end, bringing CAN’s performance to life. The series was overseen by founding member Irmin Schmidt and producer/engineer René Tinner, who delicately worked on restoring the archival recordings to the best quality for current modern technology.

These albums have been released alongside a succession of interviews discussing the band’s live shows. The YouTube series comprise interviews with journalist/author Pascal Bussy, Mute’s Daniel Miller, music critic Nick Kent, Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, and Andy Hall and René Tinner who were both involved with recording Can’s live shows.

TRACK LISTING

1. Cuxhaven 76 Eins
2. Cuxhaven 76 Zwei
3. Cuxhaven 76 Drei
4. Cuxhaven 76 Vier

Mute and Spoon Records present the next instalment of the curated CAN live concert series, LIVE IN PARIS 1973—the first in the series to feature Damo Suzuki's vocals.

The series was overseen by founding member Irmin Schmidt and producer/engineer René Tinner, who delicately worked on restoring the archival recordings to the best quality for current modern technology. This record captures the band’s 1973 performance in Paris and features Irmin Schmidt on keyboard & synths, Jaki Liebezeit on drums, Michael Karoli on guitars, Holger Czukay on bass, and Damo Suzuki on vocals for one of his final shows with the band.

Available on double vinyl and 2-disc CD, with exclusive sleeve notes by journalist Wyndham Wallace.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Paris 1973 sees one of the last live shows that the great Damo Suzuki did with Can, and thus sees the band in one of it's most famous shows, in the most coveted lineup. It's perfectly recorded too, and captures the band at their incendiary best. The latest in a stunning series.

TRACK LISTING

A1 Paris 73 Eins (Part 1)
B1 Paris 73 Eins (Part 2)
C1 Paris 73 Zwei
C2 Paris 73 Drei
D1 Paris 73 Vier
D2 Paris 73 Fünf

Live in Stuttgart 1975 is the first of a curated series of Can live concerts available in full for the first time on vinyl, CD and digitally. Originally recorded on tape, these carefully restored live albums will comprise the entirety of each show in the format of a story with a beginning, middle and end, with Can’s performances taking on a life of their own.
Available on triple vinyl and double CD. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: There's really not much that can be said about live Can material that you wouldn't already know, but it's safe to say that this sounds superb and is the perfect recreation of a perfectly sculpted live Can show from the comfort of your own home. An intoxicating and transportive collection, and an essential document of one of the greatest Krautrock pioneers in the biz.

TRACK LISTING

A1 Stuttgart 75 Eins
A2 Stuttgart 75 Zwei
B1 Stuttgart 75 Drei (Part 1)
B2 Stuttgart 75 Drei (Part 2)
C1 Stuttgart 75 Drei (Part 3)
C2 Stuttgart 75 Vier
C3 Stuttgart 75 Fünf

CD TRACKLIST
1 Stuttgart 75 Eins
2 Stuttgart 75 Zwei
3 Stuttgart 75 Drei
4 Stuttgart 75 Vier
5 Stuttgart 75 Fünf

Following the release of the first two parts of CAN’s live series, Mute and Spoon Records reissue a limited edition run of Monster Movie on blue vinyl.

With the sounds of Jimi Hendrix, Captain Beefheart and The Velvet Underground ringing in their ears, Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt left behind their careers in academia to form the influential group in the late 60s. Together with Michael Karoli, Jaki Liebezeit and American singer Malcolm Mooney, they recorded their debut album Monster Movie in a castle near Cologne in 1968. The record was then remastered in 2004 from the original master tape for a CD release. It was overseen by Holger, Irmin and Jono Podmore to refine it to how it was always intended to be heard.

“Monster Movie is an amazing debut” Pitchfork

“Monster Movie, sounds like nothing else released in 1969 - and still acts as a template for the future” Sound Affects

“Had Can’s debut album, Monster Movie, been their only one, it would have assured their place in the history of German music and of rock as a whole” Shindig Magazine

TRACK LISTING

A1 Father Cannot Yell
A2 Mary, Mary So Contrary
A3 Outside My Door
B1 You Doo Right

Following the release of the Can Vinyl Box – the limited edition box set that consisted of 17 LPs housed in a linen wrapped box, Mute are now proud to release the CAN studio albums individually on vinyl.

Released in batches, the first albums in the series to be released are Monster Movie, Soundtracks, Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi.

The albums were mastered and cut to vinyl by Kevin Metcalfe at The Soundmasters, London. Remasters and vinyl processing was coordinated by long time collaborator, Jono Podmore.

Monster Movie is the debut album of Can, recorded and released in 1969. The use of improvisation, experimentation, editing and layering of sounds set a standard for Can's subsequent albums in the early 1970s, which were seminal to the freewheeling avant-garde style dubbed "krautrock" by the British music press.

The album is credited to "The Can", a name suggested by vocalist Malcolm Mooney and adopted by democratic vote. Previously the band had been known as "Inner Space", which later became the name of their purpose-built recording studio. Some copies of the LP bore the subtitle "Made in a castle with better equipment", referring to Schloss Nörvenich, the 14th-century castle in North Rhine-Westphalia where the band recorded from 1968-69.

The 20-minute jam "Yoo Doo Right" was pared down from 6 hours' taping, while the lyrics of "Mary, Mary So Contrary" riff off of Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, a popular English nursery rhyme.

Monster Movie was the only Can album on which Malcolm Mooney performed all of the vocals until Rite Time, 20 years after.

TRACK LISTING

Father Connot Yell
Mary, Mary, So Contrary
Outside My Door
Yoo Doo Right

Cements their reputation for hi-velocity technical brutality, crashing along at a blistering pace ramming ultra heavy two guitar chaos-core into your aching synapses.

This four song EP is the perfect showcase of the band’s precious gift of being able to combine Teenage Fanclub style heart-breakingly gorgeous melodies with the crunching guitar assault of Dinosaur Jr. Their instantly recognisable songs have been making audiences fall completely in love with them across the UK and Ireland. No doubt you will fall too.

TRACK LISTING

A1: Why Don't The Pretty Women Look At Me?
A2: Shubadooba
B1: She's Got A Car
B2: King Of The Monkeys

Brendan Canning is the co-founder of the Toronto supergroup Broken Social Scene that includes members of Metric, Do Make Say Think, Stars and the Grammy-nominated Feist. One of the most enduring and influential alternative bands of the 00s, Broken Social Scene’s ‘You Forgot It In People’ defined the ‘indie rock’ era and paved the way for Canadian acts like Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade. Canning’s third solo album, ‘The Home Wrecking Years’, is his first release with a full band since Broken Social Scene’s 2010 release ‘Forgiveness Rock Record’. The album is released on Arts & Crafts and marks Canning’s first solo album release since 2013’s ‘You Gots 2 Chill’. While that record had been crafted solo in his living room, ‘Home Wrecking Years’ features a few other musicians helping fill out the sound. This includes fellow Broken Social Scene members Sam Goldberg and Justin Peroff, as well as former Stills keyboardist Liam O’Neil.

TRACK LISTING

Book It To Fresno
Vibration Walls
Keystone Dealers
Hey Marika, Get Born
Once I Was A Runner
Nashville Late Pass
Work Out In The Wash
Money Mark
Sleeping Birds Like
Lasers
Baby’s Going Her Own
Way

Heavy, speaker-busting remixes of Pete Cannon & Patrice's derriere themed club track - "Butterfly". Utilizing the catchy vocal chorus, four different producers take the track into jungle, garage and grime / bashment territories - keeping the cutting edge production and foundation shaking bass weight through four inspired remixes.

Pete Cannon deploys an array of gatt gun amens and growling Reeses. Patrice and Sumgii both add eski synths and a shoulder-dropped grime / garage hybrid beat while Traces plays with pitch and bit reduction on a twisted mutant dancehall tweak that sounds like a boiling hot pan about to spill over.

All excellent remixes that'll keep subwoofer-driven dancefloors trembling well into the night... 

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: CrRrRazy jungle ruffage by the Amiga-wielding, bass bin rattling, modern maniac Pete Cannon; who's joined by a thriplet of other contemporary underground heroes for a seriously fresh soundsystem challenger. Big T I P on this one folks!

TRACK LISTING

A1. Butterfly (Pete's Amiga Re-Work) 
A2. Butterfly (Patrice's VIP) 
AA1. Butterfly (Traces Remix) 
AA2. Butterfly (Sumgii's Gutter Flip) 

4 absolutely tearin' Amiga jungle bangers! The packaging alone is worth buying the record for - a retrotastic take on vintage Amiga computer magazines that were rife in the early 90s!

Music-wise expect heavily tiimmeessttrrretched and mangled breaks, growling subs and the odd smattering of hardcore vox twisted to oblivion through the Amiga's infamous sequencing program: Tracker. It's pretty mad to think that the development of jungle was heavily indebted to this piece of software - pretty much the equivalent of when loads of working class Chicago kids discovered the 303 ten years previous. Technology can often inspire and cause serious cultural shifts (just look at the Instagram-centric world we live in today!) but back then, it all seemed so much more creative and revolutionary! 

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Real retrotastic jungle business here by Pete Cannon who unashamedly boasts the virtues of the Amiga's Tracker program, pivotal in the development of the genre during its embryonic phase. It's quite astonishing when you consider how limited the system was in terms of processing power, memory etc. A proper blast of innovation that's left a permanent mark on underground dance culture.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Booyaka
A2. Reaching Out
AA1. Come Rude Boy
AA2. Falling 

“Is that what you wanted, Alfred?” we hear in Miles Davis’ unmistakable rasp at the end of “One for Daddy-O,” making it clear that the legendary (and assertive) trumpeter was not just playing the role of sideman on Somethin’ Else, the sole Blue Note album by Cannonball Adderley. The alto saxophonist was a member of Davis’ band at the time and the depth of their musical camaraderie lifts this session up to rarefied heights throughout, from the breath-taking performance of “Autumn Leaves” that opens the album to the thrilling call-and-response theme of the title track. Pianist Hank Jones, bassist Sam Jones, and drummer Art Blakey round out the quintet on this timeless classic. This Blue Note Classic Vinyl Edition is all-analog, mastered by Kevin Gray from the original master tapes, and pressed on 180g vinyl at Optimal.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Autumn Leaves
A2. Love For Sale
B1. Somethin' Else
B2. One For Daddy-O
B3. Dancing In The Dark

Lasso Yo is the third full-length from Canon Blue, the alter ego of Nashville producer-songwriter, Daniel James. It's been over a half-decade since Canon Blue's previous album, the Efterklang and Amiina-augmented orchestral pop opus, Rumspringa. Six years can feel like a lifetime, and James knows that all too well, and he tells the whole story on Lasso Yo. Conceived during increasingly long periods of isolation caused by increasingly intense bouts of anxiety and depression.

Lasso Yo weaves those difficult personal struggles into a lyrically earnest and musically rich collection of songs. Produced, performed, and recorded by James at Taylor York's (Paramore) house, and mixed by John McEntire (Broken Social Scene, Yo La Tengo, The Sea and Cake), this is not only Canon Blue's most personal record, but also his most profound. For what was undoubtedly a challenging, cathartic record to make, Lasso Yo achieves a kind of weightlessness that betrays the heavy load it carries. It' s this dichotomy that gives the album a curious magic, an unlikely transcendence spawned by an uncomfortable confrontation between James' past and present, and the new shape it gives his future.

TRACK LISTING

1 Beholden (3:52)
2. Tame Birds (4:22)
3. Dedicate (3:32)
4. Take 6 (3:23)
5. Onyx (3:34)
6. Plea Rel (4:01)
7. Carry My Weight (3:44)
8. Back In Town (4:55)
9. Germanium (4:55) 

Following the release of the ‘Can Vinyl Box’ - the limited edition box set that consisted of 17 LPs housed in a linen wrapped box, Mute are now proud to release the Can studio albums individually on vinyl.

‘Out Of Reach’, ‘Can’, ‘Rite Time’, ‘Delay’ and ‘Unlimited Edition’ are the third wave in the series, following ‘Monster Movie’, ‘Soundtracks’, ‘Tago Mago’, ‘Ege Bamyasi’, ‘Future Days’, ‘Soon Over Babaluma’, ‘Landed’, ‘Flow Motion’ and ‘Saw Delight’.

The albums were mastered and cut to vinyl by Kevin Metcalfe at The Soundmasters, London. The remastering and vinyl processing was coordinated by long time collaborator Jono Podmore. Additional titles will be released over the coming months.

‘Out Of Reach’ has been unavailable in any official format since its original release in 1978.

‘Out Of Reach’ is one of Can’s rarest, less-known albums. This is due in a large part to the fact that bassist Holger Czukay left the band and drummer Jaki Liebezeit has a reduced role, leaving most of the rhythm duties to percussionist come-lately Reebop Kwaku Baah.

As on the group’s proper swansong, 1977’s ‘Saw Delight’, new bassist Rosko Gee largely leads the group, and his jazz-inflected playing is marvellous, especially on the centrepiece improvisations ‘November’ and ‘Serpentine’.

Following the release of the ‘Can Vinyl Box’ - the limited edition box set that consisted of 17 LPs housed in a linen wrapped box, Mute are now proud to release the Can studio albums individually on vinyl.

‘Out Of Reach’, ‘Can’, ‘Rite Time’, ‘Delay’ and ‘Unlimited Edition’ are the third wave in the series, following ‘Monster Movie’, ‘Soundtracks’, ‘Tago Mago’, ‘Ege Bamyasi’, ‘Future Days’, ‘Soon Over Babaluma’, ‘Landed’, ‘Flow Motion’ and ‘Saw Delight’.

The albums were mastered and cut to vinyl by Kevin Metcalfe at The Soundmasters, London. The remastering and vinyl processing was coordinated by long time collaborator Jono Podmore. Additional titles will be released over the coming months.

‘Rite Time’ was originally released in 1986. Can got back together with original vocalist Malcolm Mooney to record again.

Revaluated as one of the classic Can albums, they show again how everything changes yet remains unmistakably Can.

Following the release of the first two parts of CAN's live series, Mute and Spoon Records reissue a limited edition run of Soundtracks on clear purple vinyl.

Soundtracks, a compilation of songs Can had composed for different movies, was released in 1970 before the band started work on their second album. This record said goodbye to the band's original vocalist Malcolm Mooney, who features on ‘Soul Desert’ and ‘She Brings The Rain’, to be replaced by Japanese singer Damo Suzuki. Bridging the gap between the improvisatory rock jams of their earlier recordings, Monster Movie and Delay 1968, Soundtracks also laid the foundations for their more electronic and experimental sounding work, such as Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi.

“Intricate and subtle” All Music

“Often overlooked… A good sampling of their more straightforward experiments” Pitchfork

TRACK LISTING

A1 Deadlock
A2 Tango Whiskyman
A3 Deadlock
A4 Don't Turn The Light On, Leave Me Alone
A5 Soul Desert
B1 Mother Sky
B2 She Brings The Rain

Following the release of the Can Vinyl Box – the limited edition box set that consisted of 17 LPs housed in a linen wrapped box, Mute are now proud to release the CAN studio albums individually on vinyl.

Released in batches, the first albums in the series to be released are Monster Movie, Soundtracks, Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi.

The albums were mastered and cut to vinyl by Kevin Metcalfe at The Soundmasters, London. Remasters and vinyl processing was coordinated by long time collaborator, Jono Podmore.

Soundtracks is a compilation album, first released in 1970, consisting of tracks written for film.

The album marks the departure of the band's original vocalist Malcolm Mooney, who sings on two tracks, to be replaced by new member Damo Suzuki.

"She Brings the Rain", originally appearing in the 1969 film Bottom – Ein großer, graublauer Vogel by Thomas Schamoni, was later featured in Wim Wenders' 1994 film Lisbon Story, the 2000 Oskar Roehler film Die Unberührbare and Tran Anh Hung's film Norwegian Wood, released in 2010.

"Don't Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone" features Damo Suzuki's first recorded performance with Can.

In March 2005, Q magazine placed "Mother Sky" at number 48 in its list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Tracks.

TRACK LISTING

Deadlock
Tango Whiskyman
Deadlock (Instrumental)
Don't Turn The Light On, Leave Me Alone
Soul Desert
Mother Sky
She Brings The Rain

Following the release of the Can Vinyl Box – the limited edition box set that consisted of 17 LPs housed in a linen wrapped box, Mute are now proud to release the CAN studio albums individually on vinyl.

Released in batches, the first albums in the series to be released are Monster Movie, Soundtracks, Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi.

The albums were mastered and cut to vinyl by Kevin Metcalfe at The Soundmasters, London. Remasters and vinyl processing was coordinated by long time collaborator, Jono Podmore.

A “landmark release in the history of rock ‘n’ roll” – MOJO Honours List winner of Classic Album Award

“stunning” – John Lydon “sounds only like itself, like no-one before or after” – Julian Cope

“mind expanding” – Q

“The music was like nothing I'd ever heard before, not American, not rock & roll but mysterious and European." – Bobby Gillespie, Primal Scream

Of all the band’s oeuvre, Tago Mago has been most often cited as an influence for a host of artists including John Lydon, Radiohead, The Fall, Ariel Pink, Fuck Buttons, Sonic Youth, Factory Floor and Queens Of The Stone Age. Just last week Geoff Barrow (Portishead) mentioned Can as his favourite and most inspiring band ever (The Quietus).

Tago Mago the first album with Damo Suzuki on vocals, features the Can line up of Holger Czukay on bass, Michael Karoli on guitars, Jaki Liebezeit on drums and Irmin Schmidt on keyboards, and was recorded at Schloss Nörvenich in 1971.

TRACK LISTING

Paperhouse
Mushroom
Oh Yeah
Halleluwah
Aumgn
Peking O.
Bring Me Coffee Or Tea

CANT is the solo project of composer Chris Taylor, better known as the bassist, vocalist and producer for Grizzly Bear. His first solo album, 'Dreams Come True' features Taylor collaborating with George Lewis Jr. (Twin Shadow). Twin Shadow's critically acclaimed record 'Forget' was recently released by Terrible Records (in the US) and was also produced by Taylor.

Soon after finishing work on 'Forget', Taylor and Lewis turned their attention to 'Dreams Come True'. The pair wrote and recorded most of the material in a week and a half in a bedroom connected to the former Allaire Studios, where Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest was recorded. Terrible Records was founded by Taylor in 2009 with Ethan Silverman to devote more time to working with emerging artists.

A master of romantic abstraction, Jefre Cantu–Ledesma is not new to the scene. In fact, he's been releasing a steady stream of music for nearly twenty years. With the brilliant album A Year With 13 Moons, however, the ever–prolific Ledesma appears to be hitting a new high. Or low, depending on how you like to see things.

Using a friend's reel to reel tape player, Cantu employed electric guitar, modular synthesizer, drum machine and concrète sounds from his surroundings at the Headlands, recorded while walking to the studio, cooking in the kitchen, talking with friends, the ocean, films he was watching, driving in a car. Everything was record stereo to tape.

The result is gorgeous, haunting and sprawling. A companion to his last full length LP, Love is A Stream, (Type, 2010), 13 Moons, is a dense, swirling mass.

TRACK LISTING

1: The Last Time I Saw Your Face
2: Love After Love
3: Disappear
4: Mirror Of Past & Future
5: Interiors
6: Pale Flower
7: The Twins / Shadows
8: Agate Beach
9: The Spree
10: Early Autumn
11: A Portrait Of You At Nico's Grave, Grunewald, Berlin (For Bill K.)
12: Remembering
13: Görlitzer Park
14: Along The Isar
15: At The End Of Spring
16: Remains

On the Echoing Green is an elegant work of lush, shimmering sound, rendered with a singular touch by eternal electric romantic Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. In contrast to the haze and hermetic process of previous albums, Green was conceived as a deliberate experiment in clarity and collaboration: “I was interested in trying to bring out more overt pop elements, to let them come to the front and be present. I also have more trust now in letting things happen – trusting other people’s musicianship, and being open to people’s ideas. Eventually, things emerge.” What emerged from this bond are eight rapturous and richly melodic slow dives of swirling guitar, bass, synthesizer, piano, and drum machines, dramatically accented in places by heavenly arcs of voice courtesy of Argentinian singer-songwriter Sobrenadar. Cantu-Ledesma encouraged chemistry and intuition in the studio by beginning the album without any demos for reference; he and his collaborators pursued patterns and hypnotic textures across long-form improvisations until gradually songs began to take shape. This is music of growth and grandeur, of ascent and exploration, played with purpose and passion by a craftsman in tune with the beauty of sound and the harmony of light. In his words: “[This album] feels like spring – things coming alive, blooming, emerging from winter.”

TRACK LISTING

1. In A Copse
2. A Song Of Summer
3. Echoing Green
4. The Faun
5. Tenderness
6. Vulgar Latin
7. Autumn
8. Dancers At The Spring
9. Door To Night

On the Echoing Green is an elegant work of lush, shimmering sound, rendered with a singular touch by eternal electric romantic Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. In contrast to the haze and hermetic process of previous albums, Green was conceived as a deliberate experiment in clarity and collaboration: “I was interested in trying to bring out more overt pop elements, to let them come to the front and be present. I also have more trust now in letting things happen – trusting other people’s musicianship, and being open to people’s ideas. Eventually, things emerge.” What emerged from this bond are eight rapturous and richly melodic slow dives of swirling guitar, bass, synthesizer, piano, and drum machines, dramatically accented in places by heavenly arcs of voice courtesy of Argentinian singer-songwriter Sobrenadar. Cantu-Ledesma encouraged chemistry and intuition in the studio by beginning the album without any demos for reference; he and his collaborators pursued patterns and hypnotic textures across long-form improvisations until gradually songs began to take shape. This is music of growth and grandeur, of ascent and exploration, played with purpose and passion by a craftsman in tune with the beauty of sound and the harmony of light. In his words: “[This album] feels like spring – things coming alive, blooming, emerging from winter.”

TRACK LISTING

1. In A Copse
2. A Song Of Summer
3. Echoing Green
4. The Faun
5. Tenderness
6. Vulgar Latin
7. Autumn
8. Dancers At The Spring
9. Door To Night

Some records aren’t as simple as they seem. Most are capsules of beauty and creative vision, or sublime objects of expression which occupy the abstract realms. But the rare few are also discrete philosophies, realised in sound - a truth brought to the forefront by Mexican Summer veteran, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s, latest venture, Tracing Back The Radiance. A radical departure from pop drenched melodies which have defined his recent efforts, its experimental forms offer a dynamic rethinking of the terms and possibilities of discourse and collaboration - a vast ambient landscape of abstraction, texture, and tone, beneath which lingers a veiled vision, addressing the challenges of our increasingly disassociated age. A slow, delicate meditation - open space punctuated by the restrained harmonics of vibraphone, processing, flute, pedal steel, synthesizer, piano, organ, and voice, Tracing Back The Radiance grew from a few simple piano lines, a need for change, and an evolving process which fell somewhere between conversation, singular vision, and a wild game of exquisite corpse - Cantu-Ledesma acting as contributor, servant, and guiding force to the emerging album’s all-star cast of voices - John Also Bennett, Marilu Donavan, Chuck Johnson, Gregg Kowalsky, Mary Lattimore, David Moore, Meara O'Reilly, Jonathan Sielaff, Roger Tellier Craig, and Christopher Tignor, each responding and intervening from various corners of North America. With nods to historic high-water marks in ambient and electroacoustic music, as well Italian minimalist pioneers like Gusto Pio, Lino Capra Vaccina, and Francesco Messina + Raul Lovisoni, Cantu-Ledesma delves forward with one of his most ambitious, elegant, and exciting endeavors of his career, retaining every bit of the ease and openness in musical language which has guided him across the decades. A beautiful, immersive, melancholic, and contemplative balm for the troubled times in which it was made. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Palace Of Time
2. Joy
3. Tracing Back The Radiance

Essex-born, Liverpool-based songwriter James Canty returns with a new five track EP.

EP title track 'Love' is packed with harpsichords, synthesisers and electronic flourishes, coming across like some amazing future-retro psych-folk experiment. The collection of tracks follows two years on the road across Europe for Canty, with the five songs written and recorded in the home studio of producer and Obscenic Records chief Joe Wills.

TRACK LISTING

Love
Deborah
Strangers
Putney Bridge
Burning Alive

A fantastic debut EP from Dublin's Cap Pas Cap who skilfully combine elements of Sonic Youth, LCD Soundsystem, the Rapture and the Cure to create a wonderful indie-post-punk meltdown. Big news boys and girls, so get on this quick!!

Our Resident Evil vinyl series continues with the action-packed Resident Evil 3 remake, which saw Jill Valentine being hunted in HD by the terrifying Nemesis.

24 tracks have been specially mastered for vinyl and will be pressed onto traditional black heavyweight discs. These are housed in a deluxe gatefold sleeve, with sleeve artwork by Capcom.

The game’s composition team, led by long-time Resident Evil contributor Masami Ueda, also includes Kota Suzuki, Takayasu Sodeoka, Azusa Kato, Ryo Koike, Takumi Saito and Saori Maeda. The score revels in the anxious, atmospheric tension that only Resident Evil titles can generate. This is punctuated by pulsing action cues guaranteed to get the heart racing; and some nostalgic 1999 themes are revisited.

TRACK LISTING

1. A New Threat Is Born
2. Escape
3. The City Of Chaos
4. Coming To Kill You
5. The City Of Ruin
6. Nemesis' Theme
7. Desperate Ascent
8. Free From Fear
9. Fighting In The Flames
10. No Other Way
11. The City Without Hope
12. Invincible Nemesis
13. Battle Against The Beast
14. Save Room
15. Surrounded By Terror
16. Determined To Find Carlos
17. Laboratory
18. Chase
19. Metamorphosis
20. Take Back The Vaccine
21. Every Mistake Has A Cost
22. The End Of Raccoon City
23. Sadness And Regret
24. Staff & Credits

Two of the most exciting young ska'rdcore bands from the UK and USA team up for a special 4-song release. Previously only available on limited coloured vinyl it's now on CD.

Not since the arrival of Snuff on the UK underground scene many moons ago has a UK band made such an impact as Capdown. Playing over 250 gigs a year, recently supporting Less Than Jake on their UK tour, opening Deconstruction 2001 and appearing at this year's Reading / Leeds festivals. This, their latest offering looks set to be one most interesting punk releases of 2001 and eclipses everything the band has done before.

Italy's Really Swing 12” series opens a new chapter here with the first release from Capinera, the brand new project from Leo “Almunia” Ceccanti and Gianni Apicella - if you know those names, you know you can expect deep Balearica, hints of jazz and flagrant Gilmour-isms. 
The two tracker opens with the frankly sublime "Black Flower", a fireside concoction of Methany-style acoustic guitars, detailed percussion and a stoned groove perfect for summer evenings and simple times...and if that didn't sound good enough, the dreamy vocal puts the cherry in your lambic. On B-side beauty "Into The Woods" we move even further into Methany territory with delicate guitars enjoying a snake hipped 5/4 while the gentle bossa rhythm dances into the sunset. 

TRACK LISTING

A1. Black Flower
B1. Into The Woods

If I were to tell you that a band of NYC teenagers who met in 1979 decided to form a band influenced by Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, Eno, Chrome and released a privately pressed record, it would be enough to pique your interest. When you find out the band consisted of a future Supreme Court Justice for Arizona, a Professor of Slavic Studies, a Musician/Documentarian whose family built the Brooklyn Bridge, and an A-list world-famous actor the story goes from being about another rare, privately pressed recording that’s been re-discovered, into something that’s pretty incredible.

Captured Tracks is thrilled to announce the reissue of Capital Punishment’s 1982 sole LP Roadkill. For a band of high school weirdos who actually got their shit together enough to make a completely uncommercial album with no means to sell it shows a lot of determination, persistence and perhaps insanity. But it’s always those kinds of weirdos who go on to do great things – just ask Judge Peter Swann, Professor Peter Zusi, Kriss Roebling and Ben Stiller

TRACK LISTING

01. Necronomicon
02. Roadkill
03. Confusion
04. Muzak Anonymous
05. All Just In Passing
06. Delta Time
07. Creatures Of The Dark (Night)
08. Cosmos
09. John’s Forgotten Land (Parts 1, 2, & 3)
10. Necronomicon (Reprise)
11. Waiting To See You
12. Helen 

Second full length album from this Washington DC trio. For fans of Q And Not U, Delta 72 and Fugazi.

Goatherder is the seventh album from underground London producer Kristian Craig Robinson, AKA Capitol K. Along with everything from Chinese pop to the marching band music of the United Arab Emirates in his early musical vocabulary, the influence of rave, new wave, grunge, and noise-core would collide to create a bold new sound. His early studio experiments gave birth to his debut, "Sounds of the Empire" (Planet Mu, 1999) built upon a heady balance of samples and live sources that placed Capitol K at the forefront of the UK's electronic scene. The follow-up, 2002's "Island Row", was released via XL Records, with lead single "Pillow" becoming a daytime Radio 1 crossover. "Nomad Junk" (2005) combined Asian field recordings into a vibrant psychedelic collage, while "Notes From: Life On The Wire With A Wrecking Ball" (2008) paid homage to London’s squats and free anarchistic artistic spaces of which K was a part for many years. "Andean Dub" (2012) was an exploratory South American-influenced album of heavy synth laden cumbia sound system tracks.

This latest work was developed and recorded in his native Malta, where he built a studio in a cave (a former goat stable). K gathered bamboo instruments collected around the world, including an ancient Quecha reeded pipe (his new-found lead instrument), and various resonating vessels and percussive objects including dry fennel storks collected from Punic troglodyte sites, and atonal flutes built from fresh cut farmland reed. Ritualistic improvisations took place over a series of seasonal visits, awakening genetic memory and plant communication. Back in London the tracks were interfaced and expanded with post-industrial machine beat and bass guitar lock down. Homage is paid to New Age synthscapes, while a spirit jazz overtone arrives from K's recent years as the sonic muscle behind a plethora of luminous albums born in his Total Refreshment Studio. Goatherder follows on from the 2016 collaborative incarnation "Loose Meat" and sonically abridges 2012's Capitol K album "Andean Dub". 

TRACK LISTING

1. Goatherder 3:34
2. Landlocked 4:00
3. Building Fire 4:27
4. Swirling Torrents 3:15
5. Fennel Dance 2:45
6. Field Walk 3:04
7. Island Is Ransacked 2:16
8. Sunset 2:29
9. Plant Communication 3:51
10. Collective Farming 4:09
11. Lament 2:09

Having recorded albums for labels such as XL and Planet Mu, Capitol K returns with full length number six, this time on Faith and Industry. The first track unfolds gradually in classic Capitol K style with the beat-poet driven, nostalgic rave of "Diamond Skys", the energy rises with the deconstructed bossa-nova of "Go Go Go", again influenced by the early days of Beat poetry. Things slow down a little for Steve Lamacq ROTW single "Libertania". Next up, "Acid Favela" takes the gigantic baile funk "Rambo" anthem and mixes in some acid lines and shoe-gazing riffage like only Capitol K can. "Freak" is a progressive hyper-funk freak out over a cut up 2-step rhythm. "Impression", is part two of "Freak", reflecting on a love with a sense of stillness and calm, musically revisiting K's penchant for revealing serene melodies from dictaphone tape cut ups.

Not content with just one 'Revolution', Philadelphia's shape-shifting pop auteurs, The Capitol Years, implore you to embrace their new single (along with the worldwide change afoot) if only by spinning the new track over and over again! Leading up to the release of the full length, "Dance Away The Terror", "Revolutions" is just one instance of ethereal pop on an album that ranges from art noise freakouts to whimsical pop-craft, often in the course of the same song. The Capitol Years began as a bedroom pop experiment, morphed into a bombastic live band of Philadelphian song-obsessed noisemakers, and today continues as one of the city's most beloved groups.

Philadelphia's The Capitol Years return with this new single on new label SOE. "You Can Stay There" is wonderful sunkissed pop that has similar shimmering pop dynamics to The Shins: Melodic, intricate guitars, vocal harmonies, and dreamy vocals. Over on the flip, "1000 Guns" employs the same melodic guitar work, over a lolloping drum beat again topped with gorgeous dreamy vocals. Reminiscent of Piccadilly favourites Ambulance LTD. Lovely stuff!

Garrett T Capps is one bad mofo. GTC is a real hombre. He makes cowboy kraut with his band NASA Country & also lots of Tex-Mex rock n' roll. He is San Antonio's resident cosmic country gonzo honky tonk weirdo freak! And he is a national treasure in Holland. He can usually be found at The Lonesome Rose, the bar he owns in the city he was born in. And now you can hear his iconic debut album, Y Los Lonely Hipsters, on vinyl on Cow Pie Recordings. Garrett T. Capps and his band, The Only Hipsters, recorded and released the nine-track L.P back in 2016.

“It’s good to change up the diet here and there, but I felt strongly that sticking to menudo in the studio would help us achieve the acoustic terroir we were after,” said Capps. “The Only Hipsters and I are all San Antonio guys, and I wanted the music to reflect that. Tex-Mex in the left ear and T-bone steaks in the right ear.” With Songs like “Born in San Antone,” Capps and The Only Hipsters hope to serve up a solid portion of South Texas timbre, complete with heavy steel guitar, accordion, violin, acoustic and electric guitars, organ, bass and drums in various arrangements. This record holds an esteemed spot in Texas cosmic-country releases. 

TRACK LISTING

Bitchin
She Likes Doom Metal
No Reason
Road For Days
Some Times
Don’t Come Around Here
Runnin’ Back
Born In San Antone
Mr. Pike

‘Magneticism II’ features some of the finest ‘live’ performances by Captain Beefheart & his Magic Bands, many being previously unreleased rarities.

Led by California's enigmatic singer/songwriter: Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart), his various Magic Bands were faithful in their pursuit to realise his musical visions. ‘live’ they always shone and these joyously, unforgettable performances make this a truly important collection of work, showing a unique and innovative ring master directing his collaborators in staggering form to ecstatic crowds.

These recordings also give a broad scope of the Captain’s catalogue of work with material from the beginning of his career right up to his final compositions - reminding us today why he is still regarded as one of the most important and influential musician/artists of the Twentieth Century. To quote the Captain: 'If you got ears- you gotta listen'..........

TRACK LISTING

CD VERSION
1 Old Folks Boogie 1966
2 St James Infirmary1966
3 Evil ( Is Going On ) 1966
4 Carson City Poem 1977
5 Dali’s Car 1977
6 Abba Zaba 1977
7 Electricity 1977
8 China Pig 1977
9 Click Clack 1977
10 Harry Irene 1978
11 Well 1978
12 Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles 1978
13 The Dust Blows Forward And The Dust Blows Back. 1980
14 Nowaday’s A Woman’s Gotta Hit A Man 1981
15 Hot Head 1981
16 Ashtray Heart 1981

VINYL VERSION
SIDE 1
Old Folks Boogie 1966
St James Infirmary 1966
Evil ( Is Going On ) 1966
Carson City Poem 1977
Dali’s Car 1977
China Pig 1977

SIDE 2
Click Clack 1977
Harry Irene 1978
Her Eyes Are Blue A Million Miles 1978
Nowaday’s A Woman’s Gotta Hit A Man 1981
Hot Head 1981
Ashtray Heart 1981

Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band returned to England with a new line up on July 5 1975 to appear on the bill with Pink Floyd at Knebworth Festival.

The players : Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet)- Vocals, Mouth Harp / Winged Eel Fingerling- guitar / Ella Guru Davidson -guitars / Drumbo- guitar / drums / Jimmy Carl Black (introduced as Indian Ink) -drums / Bruce 'fossil' Fowler - trombone.

TRACK LISTING

1. Moonlight On Vermont
2. Abba Zabba
3. Band Introduction
4. Orange Claw Hammer
5. Dali's Car
6. When It Blows It Stacks
7. My Human Gets Me Blues
8. Alice In Blunderland
9. Beatle Bones 'n' Smokin' Stones
10. Gimme Dat Harp Boy
11. Electricity
12. I'm Gonna Booglarize You Baby
13. Sam With The Showing Scalp Flat Top (CD Only)
14. Improvisation (CD Only)
15. Big Eyed Beans From Venus (CD Only)

Captain Beefheart's 1967 debut album Safe As Milk introduced the world to a one-of-a-kind visionary whose unique output had no precedent in contemporary music. Beefheart, aka Don Van Vliet, filtered the raw influence of the blues and R&B through his own singular musical sensibility and left-field lyrical wordplay, and surrounded himself with some of the most talented and inventive young musicians around. The result was an album that, even in the heady year in which it was released, sounded like nothing else, and the stage for one of rock's most iconoclastic and idiosyncratic careers.

With backup from the first, and perhaps finest, incarnation of Beefheart's legendary Magic Band (including future solo star Ry Cooder on guitar and teenage drum prodigy John "Drumbo" French), and production from future studio superstar Richard Perry, Beefheart unveils his fully-formed sound and vision on such landmark tracks as "Zig Zag Wanderer," "Abba Zaba," "Dropout Boogie," "I'm Glad" and "Electricity".

This Music On Vinyl edition includes a whole extra album featuring 7 bonus tracks.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Sure 'Nuff 'N Yes I Do
2. Zig Zag Wanderer
3. Call On Me
4. Dropout Boogie
5. I'm Glad
6. Electricity
Side B
1. Yellow Brick Road
2. Abba Zaba
3. Plastic Factory
4. Where There's Woman
5. Grown So Ugly
6. Autumn's Child
Side C
1. Safe As Milk (Take 5)
2. On Tomorrow
3. Big Black Baby Shoes
4. Flower Pot
Side D
1. Dirty Blue Gene
2. Trust Us (Take 9)
3. Korn Ring Finger

Captain Everything are at the forefront of the rejuvenated English punk scene, developing into an act with their own voice and no longer mere copyists of the Fat Wreck sound. Touring with bands like Lightyear, Nerf Herder and Frenzal Rhomb have honed their sound and given them their edge. They've got the same dynamic punk energy, a nice line in ska beats and rhythms but with a power pop catchiness. "It's Not Rocket Science" to see that these fourteen songs are their best yet and will go a long way to cement their reputation as one of the best pop punk bands in the UK!

‘This Is Your Captain Speaking’, by Captain Sensible (a founding member of punk rock legends The Damned), mixes pure punk audaciousness with hints of psychedelia and goth as well as choral music, to create something undeniably ‘Captain’.

The EP features vocal contributions from the band, Dolly Mixture and engineer John Loder’s young daughter Tash. Penny Rimbaud, who wrote the lyrics for the first track, ‘What D'Ya Give’, features on drums throughout.

Tongue-in-cheek and also raw, the EP represents a pivotal moment when two of punk’s original trailblazers joined forces. First released on 7” vinyl, limiting the sound, the new repressing has been remastered for 12” at Abbey Road Studios, allowing this release to be heard as never before.

This, plus enlarged replicas of the original covers, brings new gusto to the already radical sound.

TRACK LISTING

(What D'Ya Give) The Man Who's Gotten Everything?
Oursouls To You
The Russians Are Coming

Captain Sunshine is the alias of Jon Tye, one half of revered cosmic quakers Seahawks. The style shares many of Seahawks deep space aquatic vibes but is if anything even more salt washed and faded, spaced and misted. The Ocean Inside was recorded alone during a particularly long and dark winter voyage. A dose of flu helped create a deep dream state, sometimes unsettling at others blissfully narcotic. The analog tape recordings were later cut and spliced together with occasional overdubs of guitar and vocal to form a collection of celestial tone poems that at times recall early Eno, Vangelis, Joe Meek’s ‘I Hear A New World’ or even Aphex Twin’s selected ambient works. Deep and meditative, warm and enveloping, this is a great album to put on of a clear evening as you stare at the stars, watch the distant ships bobbing on the waves or simply zone out in your favourite place. 
The digital download that accompanies the cassette also includes some exclusive tracks and bonus content plus all the individual tracks.

TRACK LISTING

A1. The Ocean Inside
A2. The Ocean Inside Pt 2
A3. Celestial Dubs
B1. Silver Scene
B2. Moon Mist
B3. Ice Fur Ice
B4. Sunset Shadows
B5. Wind Blows

On March 28th-30th 2022, Car Seat Headrest played three consecutive sold out nights at Brooklyn Steel in New York. An air of celebration, community and showmanship was present, made all the more palpable as the shows were far from a certainty - they took place amidst a year which saw the band having to postpone or cancel a large swath of their North American tour dates due to ongoing health issues.

The three night residency is captured on Faces From The Masquerade - a double album’s worth of live performances that finds Car Seat Headrest at their most playful, exuberant and precision honed. The title alludes to the by now familiar, custom-made gas mask worn by frontman Will Toledo at shows, complete with an expressive LED display for eyes. In addition to the group’s four core members - Toledo, guitarist/backing vocalist Ethan Ives, bassist Seth Dalby and drummer Andrew Katz - they were joined on the tour by keyboard player Ben Roth.

TRACK LISTING

1. Crows
2. Weightlifters
3. Fill In The Blank
4. Hymn
5. Hollywood
6. Bodys
7. Something Soon
8. 1937 State Park
9. Sober To Death
10. Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales
11. It’s My Child (I’ll Do What I Like)
12. Can’t Cool Me Down
13. Beach Life-In-Death
14. Deadlines

Matador Records are thrilled to announce the signing of Car Seat Headrest and the release of ‘Teens Of Style’, with ‘Teens Of Denial’ to follow soon after in 2016.

This prolific artist (also known as Will Toledo) comes to Matador having already crafted an 11-album catalogue of staggering depth, all self-released digitally, gaining him an obsessive following and over 25,000 downloads - all without the muscle of a manager, label, agent, or publicist - until now.

Car Seat Headrest began in 2010 in Will Toledo’s hometown of Leesburg, Virginia. Needing a place of solitude (and soundproofing) where he could record vocals undisturbed, a 17-year-old Toledo set up shop in the family car. Toledo’s catalogue is sharp, literary and culturally omnivorous as it touches upon youth and death, love and depression, drunken parties and 2nd Century theologian. Ever surprising, his lyrical imagery ranges from playful to sexually frank to sorrowful, often within the same song.

After relocating to the Seattle suburbs in 2014, Toledo assembled a line up with bassist Ethan Ives and drummer Andrew Katz. ‘Teens Of Style’ is the first Car Seat Headrest album recorded with a full band and the sound is vibrant and powerful with a wide stylistic range.

On ‘Teens Of Style’ Toledo has taken material from the first three years of the band’s existence and reworked it to generate some of the most realized arrangements to date. Drawing material from ‘3’ (2010), ‘My Back Is Killing Me Baby’ (2011) and ‘Monomania’ (2012), ‘Teens Of Style’ provides a concise overview of the band’s many sonic and emotional facets, with the songs ranging from electronic psychedelia to punky anthems to melancholic acoustic numbers.

The longest track on ‘Teens Of Style’, ‘Times To Die’ is just under seven minutes, applying breakbeat cut-ups and ‘Low Rider’ horns to a groove-driven neo-psych jam with lyrics about Judaism, Hinduism and the record business. Similarly, ‘Maud Gone’ is a wistful 60s-inspired pop number paying homage to Yeats’ unrequited love, while the intricate party track ‘Los Borrachos’ borrows its title from the Diego Velasquez painting.

Car Seat Headrest’s conceptual ambition and stunning songwriting has been apparent since its early days of laptop recording, the scale of Toledo’s vision going far beyond the constricting ‘lo-fi’ term. Now on his Matador Records debut we witness Toledo presenting his intricate ideas with more clarity and refinement than ever, delivering an enthralling collection of songs destined for wide acclaim.

“Toledo’s commitment to giving listeners a direct line to his inner monologue is the kind of thing that inspires hardcore fanhood - the ability to get lost in Toledo’s work is the entire point.” - Pitchfork

“Crazy impressive - catchy, thoughtful, and inventive” - Brooklyn Vegan

“A major new talent… his music is beguiling and easy to get lost in” - NME

TRACK LISTING

Sunburned Shirts
The Drum
Something Soon
No Passion
Times To Die
Psst, Teenagers, Take Off your Clo
Strangers
Maud Gone
Los Borrachos (I Don't Have Any Hope Left, But the Weather Is Nice)
Bad Role Models, Old Idols Exhumed (psst, teenagers, Put Your clothes Back O)
Oh! Starving

Created over the course of four years, Making a Door Less Open is the result of a fruitful “collaboration” between Car Seat Headrest, led by Will Toledo, and 1 Trait Danger, a CSH electronic side project consisting of drummer Andrew Katz and Toledo’s alternative persona, “Trait.” To realize this, the band recorded the album twice: once live with guitars, drums and bass, and once in a MIDI environment using purely synthesized sounds. During the mixing process, the two approaches were gradually combined using elements of each, with additional overdubs.

In this way, Making A Door Less Open sees Toledo embarking on new and imaginative roads to songwriting and recording, placing emphasis on the individual songs, each with its own “special energy,” rather than attempting to draw a coherent storyteller narrative through the album as he has in the past , resulting in his most dynamic and open-ended work to date.

Comprised of Will Toledo, Andrew Katz (drums), Ethan Ives (guitar) and Seth Dalby (bass), Car Seat Headrest has either released 11 or three albums to date, depending on the way you look at it. A prolific songwriter, Toledo took his moniker from making early recordings in the private environment of his family’s car, releasing a dozen self-recorded and produced albums on Bandcamp and building a tight-knit following. Toledo has since gone from an empty five-seater to selling out tours and filling festival main stages. 2015’s Teens of Style was a collection of songs from his early years. The band’s proper Matador debut, Teens of Denial, followed in 2016 and catapulted them to overnight commercial success and widespread critical acclaim, as well as highlighting Toledo as a prodigious lyricist. 2018’s Twin Fantasy, an epic re-imagination of an album originally released in 2011, demonstrated newfound scale, depth and ambition.

TRACK LISTING

Vinyl
Weightlifters
Can’t Cool Me Down
Hollywood
There Must Be More Than Blood
Hymn
Deadlines
Martin
What’s With You Lately
Life Worth Missing
Famous

CD
Weightlifters
Can’t Cool Me Down
Hollywood
Martin
Hymn (Remix)
There Must Be More Than Blood
Deadlines
What’s With You Lately
Life Worth Missing
Famous
Deadlines (Alternate Acoustic)
Hollywood (Acoustic)

Teens of Denial is the thirteenth album in Car Seat Headrest’s (aka 23-year-old Will Toledo) oeuvre, second on Matador, and first to be recorded in a proper studio with a full band and producer (Steve Fisk).

On Denial, Toledo moves from bedroom pop to something approaching classic-rock grandeur and huge (if detailed and personal) narrative ambitions, with nods to the Cars, Pavement, Jonathan Richman, Wire, and William Onyeabor. By turns tender and caustic, empathetic and solipsistic, literary and vernacular, profound and profane, self-loathing and self-aggrandizing, he conjures a specifically 21st century mindset, a product of information overload, the loneliness it can foster, and the escape music can provide.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Boisterous and catchy college-rock anthems with a nod to melancholic folk, skate-punk and everything in between. Teens of Denial is a further expansion of singer-songwriter Will Toledo's already extensive back catalogue. Exciting and heartfelt, and another fantastic outing for Car Seat Headrest.

TRACK LISTING

1. Fill In The Blank
2. Vincent
3. Destroyed By Hippie Powers
4. (Joe Gets Kicked Out Of School For Using) Drugs With Friends (But Says This Isn't A Problem)
5. Just What I Needed/Not Just What I Needed
6. Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales
7. 1937 State Park
8. Unforgiving Girl (She's Not An)
9. Cosmic Hero
10. The Ballad Of The Costa Concordia
11. Connect The Dots (The Saga Of Frank Sinatra)
12. Joe Goes To School 

Will Toledo always knew he would return to Twin Fantasy. He never did complete the work. Not really. Never could square his grand ambitions against his mechanical limitations. Listen to his first attempt, recorded at nineteen on a cheap laptop, and you’ll hear what Brian Eno fondly calls “the sound of failure” - thrilling, extraordinary, and singularly compelling failure. Will’s first love, rendered in the vivid teenage viscera of stolen gin, bruised shins, and weird sex, was an event too momentous for the medium assigned to record it.

On the heels of the smashing success of Teens of Denial, Car Seat Headrest will release a new version of Twin Fantasy. “It was never a finished work,” Will says, “and it wasn’t until last year that I figured out how to finish it.” He has, now, the benefit of a bigger budget, a full band in fine form, and endless time to tinker. According to him, it took eight months of mixing just to get the drums right. But this is no shallow second take, sanitized in studio and scrubbed of feeling. This is the album he always wanted to make. It sounds the way he always wanted it to sound.

It’s been hard, stepping into the shoes of his teenage self, walking back to painful places. There are lyrics he wouldn’t write again, an especially sad song he regards as an albatross. But even as he carries the weight of that younger, wounded Will, he moves forward. He grows. He revises, gently, the songs we love so much. In the album’s final moments, in those apologies to future me’s and you’s, there is more forgiveness than fury.

This, Will says, is the most vital difference between the old and the new: he no longer sees his own story as a tragedy.

TRACK LISTING

2CD TRACKLISTING
CD1 (TWIN FANTASY)
My Boy (Twin Fantasy)
Beach Life-In-Death
Stop Smoking (We Love You)
Sober To Death
Nervous Young Inhumans
Bodys
Cute Thing
High To Death
Famous Prophets (Stars)
Twin Fantasy (Those Boys)

CD2 (TWIN FANTASY - MIRROR TO MIRROR)
My Boy (Twin Fantasy)
Beach Life-In-Death
Stop Smoking
Sober To Death
Nervous Young Inhumans
Bodys
Cute Thing
High To Death
Famous Prophets (Minds)
Twin Fantasy (Those Boys)

2LP TRACKLISTING
My Boy (Twin Fantasy)
Beach Life-In-Death
Stop Smoking (We Love You)
Sober To Death
Nervous Young Inhumans
Bodys
Cute Thing
High To Death
Famous Prophets (Stars)
Twin Fantasy (Those Boys)

The Bon Voyage recordings sound far more mature than the band's earlier music, whilst losing some of the playful insouciance that ran through the first two albums. Strains of ska and chanson complement the latter-day NDW (German new wave) flavoured power pop. After four successful years of extensive touring, new perspectives presented themselves to Carambolage. Having outgrown the somewhat languid Scherben scene and label life at David Volksmund Produktion, the trio upped sticks and headed for Berlin, curious to see what the big city had to offer, namely a close-up view of the pop business. Manne Praeker, former Spliff bass player and Nina Hagen's producer, offered to produce their third record, anticipating a shot at success with a major label. Bon Voyage was recorded in 1984 in Praeker's Mad-Mix studio in Berlin with various guest musicians. Even the pop mag Bravo took note, featuring the punkish North Frisians in a home story. Alas, any aspirations of becoming stars quickly dissipated during the recording process as aesthetic differences came to the fore. In one corner, Britta and Angie were determined to follow the DIY principles of the two preceding albums. In the opposite corner, Manne Praeker and Elfie felt compelled to introduce a stronger element of professionalism and Praeker increasingly weighed into the creative process. "You might say our story practically came to an end with a collision**, just to match our name," Britta Neander recalled in an interview with Tine Plesch. We're happy to report that the girls renewed their friendship after a while. The third record is well worth a listen, a divergent coda to the band's history. Bon Voyage spent 34 years under lock and key before the FUEGO label released a digital version in the year 2019.

Originally released 1980. Carambolage never set out to be a "girl band" but they were one of the first German new wave bands whose members were all female. The punk alliance comprising Britta Neander, Elfie-Esther Steitz and Angie Olbrich emerged organically from the environs of Ton Steine Scherben, friends united by a common interest in musical experimentation. With the first demo tapes in circulation, Burkhardt " Zensor" Seiler organized a gig for Carambolage in the hip Kreuzberg club SO36. At a time when anything that could be labelled "Neuen Deutschen Welle" (German New Wave) was stamped accordingly, the trio played by their own rules.

The eponymous debut album Carambolage, produced by Rio Reiser and R.P.S. Lanrue in the summer of 1980 and released on the Scherben label David Volksmund Produktion, could not be constrained by NDW marketing concepts. Instead, the disc was defined by its "colossal, inventive sound" which fed on Elfie's curiously autodidactic "Fantasiegriffen" guitar style and her "Fresenhagen sparrow" voice, counter-balanced by Angie's organ and inimitable basslines and energized by Britta's relentless drumming. Backed by quirky organ and ragged drums, Elfie spits her lyrics with emphatic simplicity. Once her words are in your head, they stay there.

Tracks like "Die Farbe war Mord" hint at a sense of feminist awareness. Carambolage may not have coined the phrase, but "lipstick feminism" became a thing, consciously playing with feminine clichés and hammering them home in performative fashion, rather than boxing them off. Towards the end of the record, vocals and sound are transcended in the monotone shimmer of "22 rue Chenoise". In the words of Carambolage's "City-Großmarkt" song: "So, ladies and semen, are you ready? Time to go shopping." Their sound was not the only aspect of the group which resulted from experimental tinkering. Keen to have their own space, away from a male-dominated environment, they used cardboard and carpets to build their own practice room inside an old grain silo. Strictly out of reach of the Scherben.

It's fair to say that Carambolage helped to shape the DIY approach which the Riot Grrrls of the 1990s would emulate. Forty years later, it's still mostly men standing on festival stages, but the Carambolage story ought not be consigned to the shelves marked nostalgia. On the contrary, it is a thread which most definitely needs to be picked up. As Julie Miess, who later joined Christiane Rösinger and Britta in the Lassie Singers offshoot Britta (the band) noted so succinctly in her Carambolage text (›Damaged Goods‹, Ventil Verlag): "Role models every seven-year-old girl should have!"

Originally released 1982. On their sophomore album Eilzustellung-Exprès, Carambolage's ranks were bolstered by the arrival of Janett Lemmen, who had deputized for the pregnant Angie on a recent tour. Like its predecessor Carambolage (1980), the record was produced in Fresenhagen by R.P.S. Lanrue and released on the Scherben label David Volksmund Produktion. Like a whirlwind girl gang on the road, the LP revs up with dynamic guitar riffs, indulging their "turned on to the max" sexual desires, before the mood shifts to the deeper realms of life on the Eilzustellung-Exprès (express delivery): melancholy musings on dismaying love affairs, a song about contradictory feelings experienced in childbirth, culminating in a declaration of love for Angie's new daughter Lisa.

The baby was always on board when Carambolage went on tour. The idea of her father Kai Sichtermann (Scherben bass player) taking her on tour would have been too much even for the left-leaning alternative Ton Steine Scherben. Making a mockery of male privilege, Carambolage delivered an album orbiting punk and pop in a classic line-up: Britta on drums, Elfie's snotty vocals and effects-drenched guitar and keyboards, Angie on bass. The trio is augmented by Janett's screeching saxophone on the instrumental track "Maschine" and a squeaky baby sample (Lisa?). "I Remember You" brings proceedings to a close in something approaching Schlager*

File Under Balearic Gabba EP is the first in a new series of serious DJ tools that will encompass remixes, edits, originals and licenses, all with artwork that is a twist on the original Balearic Gabba logo by PlanetLuke. Up first is a new selection of music from core Hell Yeah artists that is unruly, impossible to define, and sure to twist dance floors inside out.

First up is Daniel Klein better known as SIRS, a Berlin-based mainstay with releases on the likes of Live At Robert Johnson. His cut of 'Super Rapido' is a dubbed-out blend of kosmiche chug and tropical percussion. Tumbling synth sequences bring extra colour as the groove builds over nine irresistible minutes.

Then comes Japanese downtempo master Calm with his Mellow Mellow Acid Dub of Sergio Messina & The Four Twenties's 'Sometimes' which is a nostalgic acid daydream and the perfect sunset soundtrack. Melancholic moods and lazy drums sink you in deep as the gentle acoustic guitars keep you afloat.

Label regular and Internasjonal and International Feel associate Fee Fly then comes through with an Estatico Danzante Remix of Pedro Bertho's 'Tornei' feat Mariana Gehring and takes us to the stars on twinkling keys, dusty breakbeats and steamy, worldly vocals that glow as warm as a setting sun.

Last of all is New York maestro and Loose Control Band member DJ Spun with his It's Rong Remix of My Friend Dario's 'Acid Mosquito in a Summer Night'. It finds him serving up a nine-minute excursion into jungle humidity with tribal percussion and jumbled bongos all run through with a spooky and primeval lead synth over lurching drum breaks.

The File Under Balearic Gabba EP brings a whole new dimension to wonky dance floor workouts.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Caramel 3000 - Super Rapido (SIRS Cut)
A2. Sergio Messina & The Four Twenties - Sometimes Remember (Calm's Mellow Mellow Acid Dub)
B1. Pedro Bertho - Tornei (feat Mariana Gehring - Feel Fly Estatico Danzante Remix)
B2. My Friend Dario - Acid Mosquito In A Summer Night (DJ Spun It's Rong Remix)

By 1973 Caravan had moved away from their earlier style and this was one of their heaviest rock recordings thus far. Like all these Caravan reissues they have been remastered and feature extra bonus tracks.

Caravan's mighty 1969 work is the epitome of the prog style known as 'Canterbury Scene'. Huge swirling organ solos, beautiful melodic vocals delivered with a unique 'Englishness' that typified Caravan, early Soft Machine and Hatfield and the North. Like all these Caravan reissues they have been remastered and feature extra bonus tracks.

'Active since the late 1960s, Caravan signed to the Decca/Deram label during the early 1970s. To celebrate Decca’s 90th anniversary, these Caravan classics will be reissued on 180gm vinyl with DL codes. 

In The Land Of Grey And Pink - 1LP vinyl repress of this progressive rock classic from Caravan described by Mojo magazine as “the quintessential Canterbury album”.Caravan are one of the UK’s most acclaimed UK progressive rock bands, active since the late 1960s. This is their third studio album released in 1971 when they were signed to the Decca/Deram label and is considered a high-point of the band’s career. Rolling Stone listed the album as No. 34 on their list of “50 Greatest Prog Rock Albums of All Time” saying it evoked “a Middle Earth sunset, with the music wavering between medieval folk melodies and jazz-savvy musos”. According to AllMusic, the album is “one of the most beloved, and eccentric prog albums of them all” and “probably Caravan’s finest hour”.

One of a series of three long out of print New Orleans funk 45's from Soul Jazz Records.

Chuck Carbo’s ‘Can I Be Your Squeeze’, backed with ‘Take Care Your Homework Friend’, are two of the most infectious break-heavy funk party tunes you will ever hear, written and produced by the legendary Eddie Bo and featuring the awesome syncopated drums of the phenomenal New Orleans drummer James Black.

TRACK LISTING

Can I Be Your Squeeze
Take Care Your Homework Friend

Applying elements of minimalism or electronic music to their compositions, Carcascara's second studio album is deeply rooted in folk, blues or jazz. Borrowing from American primitivism, this acoustic guitar trio based half way between London and Zumaia, stretch the boundaries of tradition with a fluid and developed command of the string instrument.

Coming out 14 years after their self-titled debut, highly recommended for fans of Robbie Basho, Steve Reich or John Fahey.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Makila Da Eroa
A2. Apakipo
A3. Laboa Grúas Y Andamiaje
B1. Aries Resurrection
B2. Sano Bueltatu Maitia
B3. Ciervo, Burro, Txitxarro
B4. Fiona
B5. En Ese Muro De Piedra

Liverpool’s legendary Death Metal pioneers Carcass (who still tour extensively to this day) are often credited with shaping the entire death metal genre. Pushing boundaries with their shocking imagery whilst evolving and innovating with each new album. Originally released in 1989, Symphonies of Sickness the second full-length studio album from Carcass - 10 tracks of relentless Death Metal exploring the subject of brutal animal cruelty in the meat industry

TRACK LISTING

Reek Of Putrefaction
Exhume To Consume
Excoriating Abdominal Emanation
Ruptured In Purulence
Empathological Necroticism
Embryonic Necropsy And Devourment
Swarming Vulgar Mass Of Infected Virulency
Cadaveric Incubator Of Endo Parasites
Slash Dementia
Crepitating Bowel Erosion

Following releases from the likes of These Arms Are Snakes, Lords and Tropics, We Be Records are proud to announce the release of ‘Providence’, the debut full-length album from UK band Caretaker. After a lengthy absence, Hampshire’s Caretaker return with their most expansive and ambitious offering to date.

Boasting a heavier, more progressive sound than on previous excursions, ‘Providence’ captures the intensity of the band’s visceral live performances whilst also offering brooding, fragile guitar pieces which provide brief respite amongst the chaos. Drawing on the raw aggression of acts such as Converge and Neurosis, whilst still accommodating the slow-burning intent of previous post-rock influences like Slint and Mogwai, Caretaker have produced a record that truly represents the full scope of their sound

TRACK LISTING

1. Thousand Yard Stare
2. Martinet
3. Hellion
4. Impasse
5. Providence
6. Rook
7. What We Have We Hold
8. The Outpost
9. Pariah
10. The Upper Air

‘Hoyas’ by S. Carey is a hospitable statement about love, longing and the celebration of knowing it well.

You will find the familiar S. Carey modern classical repetition pushed into the vernacular of electronic music and beat making. This is the warmest electronic music you'll ever know. The beats swing, stutter and pulse while each instrument retains a heightened awareness of its form and function within the larger family of voices.

Each of Hoyas’ songs has its own personality, each part inseparable from the body, and while the results might be surprising to some, they shouldn't be.

S. Carey has historically illustrated a very rare breadth as an artist, not only as a member of Bon Iver, but on recordings of his own, whether from his debut full-length, ‘All We Grow’, performing cover songs, or in remix work.

With Hoyas, Carey's uncontainable talent is hard at work exhibiting some of the deeper colour palettes that music can offer. But most impressively, Carey's talent can now be seen to be growing by leaps and bounds. His range as a singer is progressing into much bolder territories, as evidenced not only on Hoyas’ albums but on the Bon Iver at AIR Studios recordings, where just his voice, Justin Vernon's voice and two pianos mesh perfectly to create an unforgettable performance for the ages.

At its heart, Hundred Acres -- the third full-length album from Wisconsin singer/songwriter S. Carey -- finds him grounded comfortably in his skin, but still with one foot in the stream. More direct than ever, there is a wellspring of confidence in this new batch of songs that lays bare the intricacies of life while keeping its ideas uncomplicated.

Trained in jazz, Carey’s astute musicianship has never been in question nor taken for granted, and the execution of Hundred Acres’ new ideas is seamless. He intentionally unburdened himself from a more complicated instrumentation palate for these ten songs, and, in effect, this modification to his approach brings the content of the work much closer to a living reality. By giving equal status to the indifference of nature and the concerns of a material world -- while employing more pop-oriented structures instead of the Steve Reich- or Talk Talk-ian repetitions of his past work -- a new balance is struck that creates something unique. This in turn provides equal status for the feeling that created each song, and the feeling each song creates. Almost impossibly, there is more air between the bars; Carey and his contributors sway like treetops in the wind, remaining flexible enough that they never threaten to break.

TRACK LISTING

1. Rose Petals
2. Hideout
3. Yellowstone
4. True North
5. Emery
6. Hundred Acres
7. More I See
8. Fool’s Gold
9. Have You Stopped To Notice
10. Meadow Song

Recorded primarily during the perigee-syzygy (also known as the super moon) of August 2014, the ‘Supermoon’ EP from S. Carey is a study in scale, space, and proximity. These songs are a new and closer look into existing works from both S. Carey’s renowned fulllengths - 2010’s ‘All We Grow’ and 2014’s ‘Range Of Light’.

With ‘Supermoon’, Carey has broken these songs down to their essential, acoustic parts with his forever humming vocals laid over top, lilting yet percussive piano and a subtle swath of harmonic strings. You can hear Carey's breath between words and the pat of his fingers on the keys; you can hear the living room in which his family’s baby grand piano sits. These songs are beautiful, intimate and so potently personal. This collection is a stark presentation of S. Carey laid bare, an open invitation for the listener to climb into his world.

One particularly poignant piece is the re-imagined ‘Range Of Light’ closer, ‘Neverending Fountain’, perhaps an apt metaphor for the life of the songs themselves. Says Carey, “The longer you spend with a song, the more you can see it in its pure form.”

‘Supermoon’ also features a heartrending cover of ‘Bullet Proof.. I Wish I Was’ from Radiohead’s classic album ‘The Bends’ and a new song, the EP’s namesake, ‘Supermoon’, which takes its inspiration, like much of Carey’s work, from the natural world around him.

Another source of inspiration quoted by Carey is the excitement of working out arrangements for pre-existing songs on the spot, for various sessions on tour. He brought that spirit to the recording of ‘Supermoon’, which took place over the course of a single weekend.

Already known as an artist of impeccable craft, S. Carey worked with longtime friends and collaborators (Mike Noyce played viola, Zach Hanson engineered, mixed and mastered) to add a chapter to the still unfolding story of Sean Carey as an artist. We can hear the songwriting, singing and performance for what it truly is; understated, true and pure beauty.

S. Carey is the project of Sean Carey of Bon Iver.

‘Supermoon’ is available exclusively to independent retailers and is limited to 200 copies for the UK and Eire.

S. Carey is the moniker of Eau Claire, Wisconsin-based multiinstrumentalist, songwriter, and producer Sean Carey. Over the past decade, Carey has fostered his flourishing solo career via themes of nature and sustainability, songwriting built from jazz beginnings, and heartfelt, emotive lyricism. His latest and fourth album, Break Me Open, is best described in his own words:

In Break Me Open, I confronted darkness, I wrote about fear, I looked at love from different angles, I left it all out on the field. These past couple years have been the hardest of my life: full of grief, loss, and change. I feel like I had two choices. I could run from life, turn away, grow cold, resort to drugs, run and keep running. Or, I could give myself a deep look within. I could dig deep where the pain lives, where fear is festering, to try shed a new skin and come back a better person.Everyone is so far from perfect.This is not a “divorce” album. And while going through that has shook me to my core, leaving me at times, wondering who I am, and where to go, this record is bigger. It’s about love - past, present, and future. It’s about fatherhood - the overwhelming feeling of deep love for my kids and the melancholy of watching them grow up right before my eyes. It’s about accepting my faults and wrongdoings, exposing myself, and trying to know myself better than I did the day before. But above the darkness, it’s a message of hope, honesty, and growth. It’s a call to be vulnerable: Break Me Open.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: 'Break Me Open' is rich with Carey's faultless mastery of melody and tender instrumentation, it is both melancholic and hopeful in equal measure. With perfectly pitched vocals reminiscent of Bon Iver and grand instrumentation that wouldn't sound out of place on Sigur Ros' Takk, What's not to love?

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Dark
2. Starless
3. Sunshower
4. Island
5. Waking Up

SIDE B:
6. Desolate
7. Paralyzed
8. Where I Was
9. Break Me Open
10. Crestfallen

"This 6 song symphony of sound juxtaposed with chaos and long stills of almost nothing starts the only way I’d expect it to. The first track “Ballast” comes in with murderous hits, cracks, and drills. It’s hard to put into words exactly what you are listening to. And, that’s what I love about Mr. Cary’s tracks. But, somehow Jeff has forged a signature sound. I have been listening to noise for awhile now. I haven’t hear anything quite like it.

[3:30] as a full body of work is not just a digitally distorted camero with the gas pedal to the floor going through a time warp. It is dynamic and almost peaceful at times. With tracks like “Phosphor” and “Node” where you find yourself lost in an ambient sound scape of breathed gesters and things off in the distance. I admire Jeff’s way of knowing when to hold back or be minimal in his approach while yet still having some sort of rage you can’t quite pinpoint but you know it’s there and you can feel it and it’s about to burst and you like it.

I have seen Jeff live countless times. I got a chance to see him at one of his most recent performances at Club K where he performed a few of these new tracks live. Being a drummer for over 15 years I tend to latch onto the rhythm of any song I hear. Even in noise I somehow subconsciously makeup a beat I bop my head up and down to. I noticed that I didn’t have to magically make an esoteric drum section for Jeff’s performance. It was already there. Tracks like “1001″ make you feel as a drummer or drum machine is being forced through a grinder with a distortion pedal in the chain.

It’s a very purifying experience listening to Jeff Carey‘s works on [3:30]. It’s not for everyone.. But, it sure is hell for noise enthusiasts like me. But, hey.. If you’ve never listened to a “noise” artist before or haven’t gotten down with that scene. Try it out. You might just like this one." - Gutter Magazine.

The debut album from S. Carey, "All We Grow", is the result of a young lifetime spent immersed in music. As a band member of Bon Iver from the very beginning, Sean Carey witnessed a flip of his formal training to step firmly into a worldwide-touring rock band. His performance degree in classical percussion from the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire and his love for jazz drumming prepared him for a central role in the inspiring force of the Bon Iver live show.

"All We Grow" is a convergence of Carey's Waltz For Debby-era Bill Evans inflected jazz tendencies, and traditional rock band experience, taking leads from Mark Hollis' Talk Talk. It also retests the waters of modern classical composition, investigating the moodiness generated by percussive repetition in a manner familiar to fans of Steve Reich. In his downtime on tour with Bon Iver, Sean would spend time pining for his soul-mate's arms, and in that context, dreaming and composing. During infrequent tour breaks at home he would patiently record these pieces, adding layers each time. Two years later, the parts converged to make an album.

For as much room to breathe as Carey allows his compositions, there are incredibly dynamic moments of bombast held right next to moments of subtle depth and texture. Engineered by Jaime Hansen and Brian Joseph, intermittently at home and at April Base (Justin Vernon's studio outside Eau Claire), "All We Grow" is an all-encompassing headphone experience as intimate as chamber music and as ambitious as a symphony. A classic album born without expectation and met with adoration - a cathartic result of Carey's extraordinary and vibrant life experiences that resonates loss, dreams and heart in a manner so instantly relatable, you feel as though you can touch it.

STAFF COMMENTS

Darryl says: Being a band member of Bon Iver has clearly rubbed off on S. Carey. A subtly stunning and beautifully lush debut album, total ear candy for the headphone listener.

Sean Carey is the drummer of Bon Iver and an acclaimed solo musician in his own right. ‘Range Of Light’ is the follow up to his well received ‘All We Grow’. Like its predecessor, ‘Range Of Light’ deals in hugely beatific, restorative panoramas of beauty. An array of musical light and shade, drawn from Carey’s love of jazz, modern classical and Americana.

TRACK LISTING

Glass/Film
Creaking
Crown The Pines
Fire-Scene
Radiant
Alpenglow
Fleeting Light
The Dome
Neverending Fountain

Sean Carey is the drummer of Bon Iver and an acclaimed solo musician in his own right. ‘Range Of Light’ is the follow up to his well received ‘All We Grow’. Like its predecessor, ‘Range Of Light’ deals in hugely beatific, restorative panoramas of beauty. An array of musical light and shade, drawn from Carey’s love of jazz, modern classical and Americana.

TRACK LISTING

Glass/Film
Creaking
Crown The Pines
Fire-Scene
Radiant
Alpenglow
Fleeting Light
The Dome
Neverending Fountain

Noisy, doom-laden, industrialized sludge here, quite the departure for Ono and a swerveball for the label make no mistake! This collaborative release with Warm Blood puts to disc what was a tape only release from 2012. Cult Cargo features members from my (and label owner Michael Holland's) childhood home of the (sunny!) Rossendale Valley - so you know you're dealing some real freakz here! Sounding somewhere between Suicide, the Cramps and The Fall, the band blend distorted, deadpan vocals, low tuned basslines and a heady mix of machine buzz and fug to dramatic effect. Punk in attitude but stoner in execution, these tracks burn, snarl and drunkardly swagger through their duration, leaving the listener disorientated and uneasy, but always spiritually refreshed. Personal highlights? "Turbo-Hippies" and "Poison" ride that psychotic, Mark E Smith frenzy with aplomb, while on "Yu" and "Night Time Is A Frightful Time" comparisons could be drawn with US psyche luminaries Robodor; apocalyptic, robotized doom. Is that a moody cover of Nirvana I hear in there too?! There's really something for everybody, or rather, nothing for nobody. It's a minority field after all... Recommended.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Holy shit this is one of my favourite Ono releases yet! And a totally different direction for the label. This shit bites harder than an Alsatian on crack rocks! Uncompromising punk-sludge from Rossendale's finest!

TRACK LISTING

1 Yu
2 Poison
3 Night Time Is A Frightful Time
4 Comic Profanity
5 Turbo Hippies
6 Subhuman Sustenance
7 The News Is The Noose
8 Whispers & Echoes
9 Starry-Eyed & Sleepless
10 A Happy Dose Of Homoterrestrial Spirit
11 Circles, Circles & Bigger Fucking Circles
12 My Heaven

Caribou’s sun-kissed psychedelia album turns 15 this year.

Review from 2007:
Caribou, otherwise known as the composer of euphoric, dazzlingly beautiful electronic psychedelia, Dan Snaith, returns with a rousing album, "Andorra". Since releasing the "The Milk Of Human Kindness", The acclaimed album was an affirmation, after the blow delivered by rock relic Handsome 'Dick' Manitoba (who for reasons best known to himself, sued Snaith in 2003 over the use of his previous musical moniker Manitoba, effecting the name change to Caribou), that Snaith's fanbase had remained loyal and what's more, continued to grow.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Melody Day
2. Sandy
3. After Hours
4. She's The One
5. Desiree
Side B
6. Eli
7. Sundialing 8. Irene
9. Niobe

With "Our Love", Dan Snaith made his highly anticipated return to the long player, faced with the unenviable task of following up an undeniable classic, 2010's "Swim". That universally adored album (placed in the Piccadilly Records End Of Year Top 3) saw Snaith complete the journey from the pastoral electronica of his early work as Manitoba, through the woozy hip hop inflected beats of "Milk Of Human Kindness" and "Andorra" to the undisputed champion of leftfield house. "Our Love" sees the producer joining the dots between the synth led euphoria of his dancefloor productions and the polyrhythmic rattle of his Daphni project while offering new take on warm and expansive future soul, while featuring his strongest songwriting to date.

Snaith makes his intentions clear from the off, with album opener "Can't Do Without You" picking up right where "Sun" left off, but with the euphoria turned all the way up to 11 thanks to crescendant synths and heartfelt vocals. Recent single "Our Love" falls into the same camp, pairing emotional vocals and melodies with a skipping garage beat, while organic synths and Owen Pallett's darting strings provide a richly textured backing. The warm analogue sounds of futuristic soul weave themselves deep into the record’s DNA, particularly on "Silver", "Second Chance" (featuring Jesse Lanza's seductive vocals) and "Back Home". These immersive synth ballads form intimate moments of calm between the driving house and garage of "Can't Do Without You" and "Our Love", the Daphni-styled dancefloor diaspora of "Mars" and the raving interludes "Dive" and "Julia Brightly". Snaith's mastery of these diverse styles, and the ease with which he moulds them into his artistic vision is a testament to his mature and accomplished songwriting. Nowehere is this so clear as on the LP finale and crowning moment "Your Love Will Set You Free", which combines the soulful with the driving, the melancholic with the euphoric, bringing the album to a gorgeous bitter sweet conclusion. Ultimately, Snaith has delivered a worthy follow up to "Swim", which is high praise indeed.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Can't Do Without You
A2. Silver
A3. All I Ever Need
A4. Our Love
A5. Dive
B1. Second Chance
B2. Julia Brightly
B3. Mars
B4. Back Home
B5. Your Love Will Set You Free

Caribou follows up the blink-and-you'll-miss-it "Can't Do Without You" 12" with limited single from his forthcoming album; this time hitting us with the title track "Our Love". As you'd expect, the track is a lesson in production for the rest of the mortals out there, as Snaith balances programmed rhythms with a live kit, seduces us with the wooziest synths out there and plays pitch shifted vocals with virtuoso skill. Ostensibly a tale of two halves, this one builds into the kind of peak time monster the dancefloor was made for. The introduction is a emotional affair which sees the producer balancing those trademark ingredients which made "Swim" a classic with a couple of jazzy new additions, while the latter segment of the track is a floor burning rave assault featuring a tasty interpolation of Inner City's "Good Life". It's massive in other words. On the flip, Snaith partakes in a little split personality partying, switching into Daphni mode to mix the shit out the A-side. This one means business right from the off, hitting you with a one-two combo of bubbling analogue basslines like a long lost Virgo Four record before unleashing a full scale percussion assault. Gradually the spectral synthlines and pitch shifted vocals of the original float through the sound field prompting a little hands in the air excitement. This is total floor flaying madness; 100% essential!

Second limited 12" from Caribou. Title track from album plus Daphni Mix.

TRACK LISTING

A. Our Love
B. Our Love (Daphni Rework)

In 2014 Dan Snaith aka Caribou released "Our Love" to overwhelming critical acclaim and massive fan support. Now Caribou returns with his seventh studio album "Suddenly", an album about family and the changes we go though as those relationships evolve. "Suddenly" is the most surprising and unpredictable Caribou album to date. Though it retains the trademark Caribou warmth and technicolour, this album is littered with swerves and left turns, and amazes with its yet unheard nuances, samples and hooks. As Snaith puts it, “these albums are like photo albums for me – when I look back at the old ones, they’re a snapshot of my life at that time, full of people who are close to you”. This is the drive to continue to make Caribou albums. Full bodies of work where Snaith is able to evaluate things, look at those around him and celebrate them. As his passion and joy in music making remains as fresh as ever, "Suddenly" is the purest example of this yet.

STAFF COMMENTS

Patrick says: Exciting times! Dan Snaith is back in the Piccadilly house with a brand new Caribou LP, infusing hook-heavy house jams, hip hop curveballs and sweet synthpoppers with the signature warmth and space of his previous work. I would imagine festival goers of all ages will enjoy losing their proverbials to this in the coming months.

TRACK LISTING

1 Sister
2 You And I
3 Sunny's Time
4 New Jade
5 Home
6 Lime
7 Never Come Back
8 Filtered Grand Piano
9 Like I Loved You
10 Magpie
11 Ravi
12 Cloud Song

If you think you know Caribou, think again. Dan Snaith’s new album, "Swim" is the sound of the musical glass ceiling being blown away. Dan’s latest recording sees him getting busy in the basement with some expertly constructed, rave-tinged sounds that sing with soul. But that’s not all. As a songwriter of considerable standing, Dan has not subsumed his uniquely recognisable touch in an orgy of technical bliss – although, there is plenty of euphoria in the musical alchemy on offer. From Dan’s perspective, he says, 'The most important thing for me with this record was finding my own sonic vocabulary. That’s why I’m proud of this record.'

"Swim" is full of brightly textured, rapturous gems that gleam with astonishing production – and then wrenches at your heart with soulful, thoughtful reveries on the passing of time, family history and the breakdown of relationships. 'There are songs about growing old in a relationship, about divorce and loneliness in old age but the lyrics are generally pretty abstract sketches of what’s going on in the situation in my head', says Snaith. If there is a link to previous album "Andorra", it would be in the ravishing explosions of sound pulsing through album closer "Niobe". A continuum of sorts leads us to 2010, but that finale gives mere hints as to the future Caribou. From the opening effervescent gambol of "Odessa" to the glorious odyssey of "Jamelia", it’s crystal clear that Caribou has made a massive leap forwards, upwards and sideways.

Carlton Melton lead the charge with three new tracks, recorded at the Dome with Brian MacDougall taping it down and John McBain mastering it for vinyl perfection. This is the Melton soaring into the stratosphere with their own take on spaced travel via olfactory motion. Many would simply say "psych", we say "SPACE" and "NO frontiers!", fly on brothers.

Kandodo 3 is the new "nom de plume" for Simon Price's (The Heads) Kandodo project, having roped in fellow Heads' Wayne Maskell (drum patterns and rhythm driving) and Hugo Morgan (bass throb and guidance) to record under the name Kandodo 3. They take up their whole side with one looping soundscape that jitters and skitters into and around patterns of dub and space, this exhilaratating take on an already pre-determined trajectory is as awesome in its scope as it is in its journey, catch a ride! Mastered by Shawn Joseph (Optimum)

Simon Kandodo Price artwork..... 500 copies only on blue coloured vinyl.

Brand new album from Carlton Melton, The San Franciscan four-piece Carlton Melton release "Country Ways", a new jam of gargantuan proportions. Featuring former Zen Guerilla members, Andy Duvall (guitar and drums) and Rich Millman (guitar and synthesizers) alongside Brian McDougall (drums) and John Steuernagel (bass), "Country Ways" is their second album conjuring colossal riff laden dronescapes and parched psychedelically enhanced spacerock creating a mind altering magick carpet ride down the Californian highway.... Loud, uncompromising, and yet not a blundering stoned beast, this album has levels of delicate pastoral San Franciscan psych blowing through the almost freeform spaced noise jam.

Unlike many of their contemporaries, White Hills, Wooden Ships, Cave, Steve Hillage, Bardo Pond, White Noise Sound etc. Carlton Melton are less concerned with the pulse, rhythm, and the groove, as they are with the SOUND, and the VIBE, weaving lush, expansive sprawls of FX drenched psychedelic ambience; drifting more often than driving, huge clouds of swirling wah guitars, and minimal spare drumming, existing more as a pulse, than a beat - the band drift weightless though swirling starlit sonic skies before the descent into trance inducing drones burrowing deep into the earth. Their sound - loose, free, abstract and ephemeral.

Carlton Melton have made two albums since they formed in 2008, and for several reasons these recordings are unique. For one, they were recorded in what is known as a geodesic dome in rural Mendocino County, north of San Francisco. These domes are typically large spherical buildings shaped like golf balls used as homes for the green-minded, greenhouses, theatres or whatever. Carlton Melton's dome is miles away from anywhere and is hollow. The place makes Bron Yr Aur look state-of-the-art, so unequipped to record music is it. Yet the band love it, and its ruggedness is there in the music. Their first album "Pass It On" released on vinyl in 2009 by Mid To late (the band's own label) was proclaimed by J Mascis as his favourite of the year.

STAFF COMMENTS

Darryl says: Carlton Melton are the new avant-psyche gods!! Loose free-psyche vibes that float in cosmic abandonment, more abstract than the Shjips et all, but definitely drinking from the same acid drenched soup.

This will be Carlton Melton's first full length release since 2015’s widely lauded “Out To Sea” double opus, itself a languid drifting of drones and psychedically enhanced riffmongering. Sure, there's been some long EP releases since.. .Hidden Lights in 2017 (featuring the immeasurable drone sike float on “Rememory”) and Aground in 2016 (a companion, the Desert Island weather beaten psych-flow follow up to Out To Sea), now it’s time to soak up...Mind Minerals.

Mind Minerals finds Carlton Melton in fine fettle, all the songs were recorded and engineered at El Studio in San Francisco by Phil Manley on September 3rd and 4th 2016 (except 'untimely' - recorded at the Dome by Brian McDougall), the studio setting suits them -- a logical progression from a weekend’s recording out at the Dome.

Under Manly’s watchful ear/eye, Carlton Melton have created a futurescape soundtrack..,a “3001 Space Oddyssey”. The drums are more pounding and direct than before, the constantly re-assuring bass creates a helping hand to propel you through the clouds of static and shards of electrifying guitar dazzling your horizon. Synths help soothe the sharp edges and lull you into some out of body experience whilst and orchestrated calamitous scree pulls you back…. This is a breathless, yet deep breathing album. It demands full immersion...

Searing guitar piercing the drone with relentless power, the core trio of Carlton Melton; Andy Duvall (drums/guitar), Clint Golden (bass guitar), and Rich Millman ( guitar/synth), have some alchemical bond that’s helped them create a post-rock / psychedelic / freeform organic slab of American Primitivism / space drift , this is unashamed head-music from the melting pot of Northern California.. 5 decades ago this album would have been released on the ESP Disk Label or even Apple…there would have been no helter skelter if the desert Hippies had locked onto these vibes, plug in, turn on, tune out..float free.. Carlton Melton can provide your own aural microdose to reset your Mind / Psyche!!

Andy Duvall plays juno synth on 'the lighthouse'
Special guests:
Phil Manley - juno synth on 'snow moon' and 'sea legs' / Guitar on 'eternal returns' and 'psychoticedelicosis'.
John McBain - guitar on 'electrified sky' and 'way back when' / synth/mellotron/guitar on 'atmospheric river'.

All songs mastered by John Mcbain at JPM mastering.
Cover artwork is “Walls” (2013) by Andy Vogt.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Hypnotic swells of strummed guitars, camouflaged with the scream of a thousand delays fighting a thousand reverbs in space, breaking out into beautifully languid streaks of light in an otherwise foreboding musical landscape. Beautiful, ambient bliss.

TRACK LISTING

01. Untimely
02. Electrified Sky
03. The Lighthouse
04. Eternal Returns
05. Snow Moon
06. A Basketful Of Trumpets
07. Sea Legs
08. Way Back When
09. Climbing The Ladder
10. Atmospheric River
11. Psychoticedelicosis

“Out To Sea” is the most focussed of all Carlton Melton’s recordings to date: the voyage is long; the voyage is joyous.

Leaving their geodesic dome behind, they hitched their magick karpet to San Francisco’s El Studio for a fried weekend in July 2014 with The Fucking Champs / Trans Am’s Phil Manley at the production helm and occasionally contributing to the furore. Phil Manley plays guitar on “Similarities” and synth on “Peaking Duck”

Out To Sea sees Carlton Melton expanding their vision of the psychedelia and free outrock sound of their previous output and push to their furthest horizons using waves of sound - from huge pounding rhythms, outta space riffage, gentle synth wave-riding, pastoral passages, searing shards of molten guitar, smothered ambience and gentle flowing guitar picking – to lap at the shores of your senses.

For fans of: Space travel, the Heads / Kandodo, Faust / Funkadelic, the Kon Tiki Expedition, Parson Sound, Flotation tanks, Bong, Bardo Pond, float on, float on.......

We’re gonna need a bigger boat. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Peaking Duck
2. Wheel And Deal
3. Diamond In The Rough
4. Out To Sea
5. Amfmpm
6. Too Close To Home
7. Similarities
8. It?s Been Summer All Winter
9. The Barrier
10. Perdiddle
11. Realms

On their third album, Carlton Melton elevates their organic, improvised psych-jams to the sonic plane befitting the geodesic dome in which it was recorded, pulverizing all psychedelic hypno-drone that has come before.

Mastered and featuring John McBain (Monster Magnet, Well Water Conspiricy) Photos of Photos sees Carlton Melton take their organic improvised psych-jam to the highest sonic plane befitting the geodesic dome in which it was recorded and pulverizing the psychedelic hypno-drone that has come before. Photos of Photos is a testament of Carlton Melton’s ability to bottle and hone their craft with sincerity – from the lush pastoral sonics of ‘Nor’ Easter’ and title track, ‘Photos of Photos’ the smoldering gargantuan riffs of ‘Space Treader’ and the synth drones and spare rhythms of LP closer ‘Wingspan’. Carlton Melton meld -what could be a heavy indecipherable psychedelic mess - into something louder, more uncompromising and more coherent: 'Melton’s Magick Karpet ride’.

Bonus tracks (available on CD and download) - featuring McBain on guitar/synth/ echoplex - include the full 23 minute psychedelically enhanced drone ‘Adrift’ that peaks and dips as the title suggests and ‘Smoke Drip’ sounds exactly how you imagine a song called ‘Smoke Drip’ to sound. And that is exactly what Photos of Photos is about: the SOUND, the VIBE, a new age drifting, unchartered, across a sonic expanse.

For Fans of: Bardo Pond, Monster Magnet- Tab, Hawkwind - Warrior At The Edge of Time, Parson Sound, The Heads, Clark:Hutchinson - A=MH2.

STAFF COMMENTS

Darryl says: Superb molten drone-psyche that smoulders along in an improv psyche jam style whilst synthy interludes sneak in and out, and humongous riffs slay all before them. Immense!!

Carlton Melton, from Northern California, are now a practising fourpiece in the arts of melted-minds psychedelia. With the added kraut-oomph and sike-flutter of fellow Californian Anthony Taibi (whom you may know as being a member of White Manna, and also DDT with Andy) Rich Millman, Andy Duvall, and Clint Golden have now embellished the Carlton Melton sound. Pushing forward as a fourpiece, the band recorded Resemble Ensemble in July 2021 (just before Andy moved back over East!) at Anthony’s home studio, 3D Light in Freshwater, CA. Anthony did all the recording and mixing. The Melton Magick Karpet settled, and our favourite contemporary sikedelic warlods plugged in, amped up and let it flow.. and flow it does. .from the krautrock fuelled pszych-raga of Prescribed Skies, the fluid dronescape of Elsewhere that welcomes you into its arms with a warming tone, almost a missing Spacemen 3 demo at the feast here… So The Story Grows has the drone scraping through a murk of dazzling feedback and pummel, with the fuller sounding Melton giving the genre a proper wobble, hold on to your brains people… High Alert.. whas this? Synth and guitar interplay jambusting, this is the Melton wigging out and almost interweaving 70s high table rock with some odd and downright perverse synthfunkpunk rhythms.. get weird.. or get wired..or both.. easily done here.. Closing out the album with Route Thirteen is the road trip home.. they’ve been, they’ve massaged and mangled your synapses, plug in the satnav and take the higher-route home.. if you get our drift.. Carlton Melton, starting 2023 in a better place than most, soaring high on their synaptic-dazzling magick karpet…

STAFF COMMENTS

Martin says: San Franciscan trio Carlton Melton have always, and will always be mind melters. Their unique brand of floating psychedelia has both moments of tension and grit as well as soaring, lysergic looseness. Soaring, beautifully rendered and perfectly measured as ever. Classic CM.

TRACK LISTING

1. Prescribed Skies
2. Elsewhere (Need To Be)
3. So The Story Grows
4. High Alert
5. Route Thirteen

Northern California psychedelic sorcerers Carlton Melton are brain surfers, mind trippers, … “psychlists,” if you prefer. The band will take your head for a ride, occasionally rushing at superluminal speeds through a wormhole or gliding softly on a gentle breeze in a leafy glade. Sometimes your brain needs to rage, and sometimes it needs to repose.

For a decade and a half, the band has yo-yo’ed, almost schizophrenically, between these two modes: walloping space jams with furious guitar solos in one hemisphere of the brain and ethereal, feather-light splashdowns in the other. Not to mention a track here and there that builds from the latter into the former.

But with two new releases in 2023, the band has evolved. Whether psych rock or ambient trance, their sound remains driving, organic, and flowing. With the addition of Anthony Taibi (White Manna, DDT), however, the group’s metal freak-outs are Hawkwindier and their droning kraut trances are Spacemen 3-er. In January, the quartet released the playfully spacey Resemble Ensemble, recorded in Taibi’s home studio 3D Light. October now sees the band Turn To Earth, a work with scents of Autumn, a season of death and transition. The cover art evokes a vine-covered, electric crucifix. The sound is, well, earthy but also gritty and striving towards change. The album was recorded in Fall 2022 and now harvested in Fall 2023.

Phil Becker (Terry Gross, Pins Of Light) contributed drums and percussion to a few tracks on Turn To Earth, recording the album at El Studio in San Francisco. With Becker at the helm, the synths have become more prominent (“Cosmicity,” “Roboflow,” “Migration”) and the tone heavier on the doom (“Cloudstorming,” “Unlock The Land,” title track): several moments could even serve as background music for epic dark fantasy films like Conan the Barbarian, Fire and Ice, or Heavy Metal.

As exquisite as Turn To Earth is, Melton are best appreciated as a live act: their recordings as well as their gigs are largely improvised – not so much composed as birthed. And yet their most recent tour ended abruptly and perilously. The group had to cancel its final three shows once members were admitted to Arnhem hospital in the Netherlands. Five years later, reinforcements have strengthened the band and restocked its arsenal of great tracks.

After the rockus interruptus of that 2018 tour and the tantric tease of the intervening Covid lockdown, Melton have some unfinished business. An October 2023 tour is poised to set the freshly minted quartet back onto the stages of Europe and within the cerebral folds of its fans.

Turn To Earth, sure … but keep your head in outer space.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: You know where you are with a blast of Carlton Melton. It's slowly growing psych, with sounds twisting and turning and weaving into a psychedelic monolith. 'Turn To Earth' does not disappoint, it too grows into a soaring grooving behemoth, with the help of White Manna's Anthony Taibi, bringing his airy lysergic groove to the mix of standout musicians.

TRACK LISTING

01. Turn To Earth
02. Cloudstorming
03. Vanquished
04. Cosmicity
05. Canned Head
06. Sundering
07. Unlock The Land
08. Roboflow
09. Last Times
10. Migration
11. Mutiny