A genuine lost and unreleased full-length LP from one of the most mysterious figures of early Italian electronic sound and library music. A missing puzzle piece in the small discography of experimental tape and synthesiser music by the composer known only as Lamartine recorded (but never pressed) in 1974 by the archive that bought you the work of Daniela Casa and the wildest electronic experiments of Alessandroni, Giuliano Sorgini and Fabio Frizzi. Having sat in the can for over 40 years the similarities to the likes of Cluster, Tom Dissevelt and the Radiophonic workshop have yet to be recognised and celebrated.

The name Lamartine was a true mystery of library history.

In keeping with the habitual culture of library music the name Lamartine was very likely to be one of many creative nom de plumes designed to disguise the true identities of the artists – even the likes of Morricone and Bruno Nicolai had their own shrouded monikers (Leo Nichols and Leo Flag respectively). Having faded from the memories of the ex-employees of the defunct production music departments at CAM and RCA, the truth behind this uncelebrated electronic pioneer remained a mystery for over 30 years. As enthusiasts began to unravel the pseudonyms of other composers such as Tomassi and Alessandroni via cue sheets, invoices and interviews, suspicions around Lamartine being of non-Italian origin rose to the surface with rumours that he or she was most probably of German, Dutch or English decent due to his distinct similarities to artists like Kid Baltan from Holland, various electronic artists from the outskirts of the krautrock scene or British tape music composers such as Basil Kirchin or David Cain. All of whom had firm relationships with the international library music scene.

Although most of the records made for the RCA 1000 series were also repackaged for syndication in France via the April Orchestra series, it was unusual that Cronache Dal Mondo didn’t benefit the same service, bringing into question the fact that Lamartine may have secretly been a big name artist legally contracted to exclusive territories or simply the author of music that was too challenging for wider consumption. Even searching for other unconfirmed aliases within the huge independent Italian library network, based of musical similarities or pure speculation, rendered little answers convincing unsatisfied fans that Lamartine had carefully covered his tracks or let the birds eat the breadcrumbs.

It wasn’t until 30 years later that the Italian independent production music label Flipper - the parent company responsible for the imprints Union, Octopus, Flirt and Deneb amongst others - decided to digitise its catalogue that a gleam of hope via a sealed, misfiled master tape shone through the trees. While putting a small archive of back-up recordings through the baking (emulsifying) process the archiving team at Flipper found the name “Lamartine” written on a single tape box with the name 'Reportage' and corresponding legal papers pertaining to a little known Italian conductor and composer for stage and popular song named Mr. Radicchi. Fabio Di Barri at Flipper accounts that throughout the extensive paperwork at Flipper the music of Radicchi or Lamartine was never licensed out for synchronisation and doesn’t appear on any of the associated labels discographies. After cross-referencing track times and titles Fabio could also reveal the full name of the artist to be that of Odoardo (aka Eduardo) Radicchi – a senior member of the Italian music scene from the same generation as Nino Rota, Giorgio Gaslini and Gian Piero Reverberi. 

The late discovery of 'Reportage' by Lamartine provides vintage electronic music enthusiasts with a wider vista of the development of the genre in Italy. The aforementioned names make up a small but closely associated and like-minded family of pioneers exploring a new direction with solo recordings in a very unique industrial capacity. Rendered in the hinterland between Italian cinema’s penchant for psychedelic rock and the onset of the synthesiser music and Italo disco movements later in the decade, these artists and their records represent the laboratory projects that researched the capacity of electronic music before it swept the nation’s media quite unlike anywhere else in the world. Lamartine - once an anonymous, dubious, genius in the library micro-genre - can now be named and recognised as a unique artist with a distinctive sound, adding new colours to the vibrant palette of Italian studio artists and painting a wider sonic picture of the evolution of Italian pop and film music and we believe to understand it.

The Italian library liberation front keeps growing - the genre that keeps on giving. It’s time for artists like Lamartine to name and claim their places in electronic music history.

TRACK LISTING

Congresso Al Terzo Mondo
Disoccupazione
Corteo Della Speranza
Morte Del Mediterraneo
Desideri Di Pace
Riarmo Nucleare
Sceicchi A Congresso
Fame E Orgoglio
Angoscia Universale
Depurazione Del Mare
Soluzioni E Speranze

Across their career Lamb Of God grew from basement shows and grimy DIY venues to headline arenas. The New Wave of American Heavy Metal architects earned a reverence akin to musical forefathers (and road companions) Metallica, Slayer, and Megadeth. "For millions of headbangers, Lamb Of God are simply the most important contemporary metal band in the world," Guitar World observed. Timeless songs like "Laid to Rest," "Redneck," "Walk with Me in Hell," and "Now You've Got Something to Die For" became anthems in the heavy metal songbook, with gargantuan vocals born from both righteous anger and devotion, and unrivaled riffs for the ages.

Now, the Grammy-nominated goliath follows 2020's self-titled slab with a vicious new testament. Riding high on an insatiable drive, a focused collective camaraderie, and a creative renaissance saluted by the likes of Rolling Stone and NME, Lamb Of God returned to longtime producer Josh Wilbur (Megadeth, Korn, Avenged Sevenfold) and carved the gloriously unhinged Omens into sonic stone.

Even as D. Randall Blythe (vocals), Mark Morton (lead guitar), Willie Adler (guitar), John Campbell (bass), and Art Cruz (drums) enjoy one another's company and chemistry like never before, Omens is possibly the angriest Lamb Of God album yet. Densely muscular, soaked in unnerving spite, with a pessimistic eye toward inner struggles and global affairs alike, Omens is a furious entry in the catalog.

Most of the album was recorded live in the studio, including Blythe's vibrantly unhinged vocal attack. Morton and Adler's riffs threaten, challenge, and devastate. Cruz and Campbell's unstoppable rhythms lurch and beckon. Having shined on 2020’s Lamb Of God, Cruz injects even more nuance and personality into his playing across Omens’ songs.

It's a potent, palpable energy Lamb Of God first tapped when they shoved heavy metal into the new millennium with New American Gospel (2000). As the Palaces Burn (2003) joined Rolling Stone's Top 100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time. Ashes of the Wake (2004) was the first Lamb Of Gold album certified gold by the RIAA, a feat once all but impossible for a contemporary extreme metal band.

Sacrament (2006), Revolver's Album of the Year, went gold as well. The raw and organic malice of Wrath (2009) began the band's enduring relationship with Wilbur. Both the diverse Resolution (2012) and the explosive VII: Sturm und Drang (2015) debuted in the Top 5 of the Billboard 200.

The 2020 self-titled set, their first new material in five years, added instant classics "Memento Mori" and "Resurrection Man" to the repertoire, alongside eight more monster tracks. Revolver, Metal Hammer, Loudwire, and Consequence included Lamb Of God on their year-end Best Albums lists. The momentum continues with Omens, arguably the band's most aggressive and ambitious yet.

The hardcore fire at the heart of Lamb Of God still burns as hot as the 12-foot flames blazing the stages on their co-headlining trek with Megadeth, appropriately called "The Metal Tour of the Year." Even as the state of the world descends, the state of the union for Lamb Of God remains strong.

While many of their contemporaries have suffered from 'difficult fourth album' syndrome (or havn't even got that far!), Lamb are back with what are their finest set of tracks to date! The songs and Louise Rhodes vocals are allowed to shine through the dense, multi-layered pastoral-electro-acoustic sounds creating a richly textured set of tracks.

Lambchop are back! Their new album, For Love Often Turns Us Still (in short FLOTUS … yes FLOTUS), arrives just in time for the bands' 30th Anniversary and in time for one of the most tumultuous years in history; not least in American history. Kurt Wagner is still painting musical miniatures as well as dramatic landscapes like no-one else right now. Though this year something is different, the fragile songs are as much about the tiny details of living in a struggling neighborhood in Nashville, which faces new challenges, as it is about the grand scheme of things without naming them.

Musically, the devil is in the details. The stylistic sound of Lambchop is thriving but it’s made out of pieces unheard of before. 2016 is a new chapter for a lot of people and a lot of bands and is certainly a new chapter for Lambchop, returning with their most ambitious and important record to date. Be surprised and be carried away by this quiet and beautiful masterpiece where it’s intensity rings louder than sirens.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A slightly more electronic sound on this newest one from Lambchop, while retaining the same languid vibes and hazy-day melodies. Vocoders and smooth synths nuzzle up next to drifting ambience, silky drums and echoing guitar plucks. While their delivery has changed a little, this is all still clearly the Lambchop we know and love. Turn it up and get the (winter) barbecue out.

TRACK LISTING

1. In Care Of 8675309
2. Directions To The Can
3. Flotus
4. JFK
5. Howe
6. Old Masters
7. Relatives #2
8. Harbour Country
9. Writer
10. NIV
11. The Hustle

Back in 1994, when Lambchop first lurched lackadaisically into public view, they seemed to many people freakish, outlandish, destined at best for the pages of photocopied fanzines and the graveyard hours of specialist radio stations. A sprawling collective of Nashville musicians —eleven were credited on the sleeve of I Hope You’re Sitting Down / Jack’s Tulips, one of them apparently responsible for “open-end wrenches” —they’d named themselves after a sock puppet, inexplicably given their album two titles, and stuck a painting on the cover of a small, barefooted child holding a dog whose cock and balls are on proud display. Perhaps to counteract this bold depiction of canine masculinity, the inner sleeve offered a black-and-white shot of what the more refined sometimes call a “lady garden.” The back cover offered a painting detail of a wedding dress. So far, so weird.

Where Lambchop brought us was somewhere so singular and bewilderingly gripping that — to perhaps no one’s greater surprise than the band themselves, whose homeland remained baffled for quite some years to come — the album ended up in British music paper NME’s Top 50 Albums of the Year. In case anyone were to consider this an anomaly, France’s similarly influential Les Inrockuptibles placed it at number 25 on their own list. Not bad for a band who had gathered since the mid-1980s, once a week, purely for pleasure, in that smoky, dimly lit basement. Not bad, either, for a record whose sessions were initially only expected to produce enough material for a handful of 7 -inch singles. Disheveled yet tender, anarchic yet intricate, I Hope You’re Sitting Down / Jack’s Tulips instead provided the springboard for a career — still ongoing, despite repeated reinventions, and still compelled by stubbornly freakish, outlandish intentions — during which Lambchop’s ever-changing line-up has continued to confound expectations. Wagner, meanwhile, remains one of our most cryptic but crucial voices, an authentic poet of the magical banal. Sure, it was weird here, but it was wonderful, too. Over a quarter century later, it still is.

TRACK LISTING

A1 Begin
A2 Betweenus
A3 Soaky In The Pooper
A4 Because You Are The Very Air He Breathes
B5 Under The Same Moon
B6 I Will Drive Slowly
B7 Oh What A Disappointment
B8 Hellmouth
C9 Bon Soir, Bon Soir
C10 Hickey
C11 Breathe Deep
C12 So, I Hear You're Moving
D13 Let's Go Bowling
D14 What Was He Wearing?
D15 Cowboy On The Moon
D16 Or Thousands Of Prizes
D17 The Pack Up Song

To those who embraced 2000’s Nixon—Lambchop’s fifth album, whose luscious country soul grooves provided the sprawling Nashville collective with a significant British breakthrough that even found them selling out London’s 2,500-capacity Royal Festival Hall—the deceptively gentle Is a Woman, delivered two years later, administered a quiet but compelling shock. Gone almost entirely was frontman Kurt Wagner’s euphoric, Curtis Mayfield-esque falsetto, replaced by a tranquil, contemplative vocal style; and instead of the joyfully warm brass arrangements that had encouraged Zero 7 to remix “Up With People,” one of Nixon’s standouts, pianist Tony Crow now took center stage, teasing out gentle, ingenious melodies. The contrast was acute.

To discover the true spirit of Is a Woman, however, one need only listen to the remarkable “My Blue Wave,” one of the band’s finest recordings to date. Here, Wagner depicts a world of helpless tragedy in which comfort can nonetheless be found in the smallest of gestures, as he journeys from the contented sight of his pets—“You lay around the house… Just bones and squirrels inside your head”—to recollections of a devastating phone call from friend and bandmate William Tyler: “And William called and tried to tell me / That his sister’s boyfriend has just died / He’s not sure what to do / And I’m not sure what to tell him he should do / Sometimes William, we’re just screwed / In my blue wave.”

Fifteen years later, Lambchop continue to confound and astound in equal measures, but this startlingly private song captures the magic of Is a Woman at its most distilled. With their sound consistently shifting and surprising, the band’s line-up has morphed and adapted repeatedly since then, but the lingering mood of lachrymose but compassionate elegance of “My Blue Wave” helps explain why this extraordinary, idiosyncratic record is now considered to be one of the band’s finest. As Wagner himself asks on “Bugs”: “Think of things and how they got this way / Way above the rest / Isn’t this the fucking best?”

TRACK LISTING

A1 The Daily Growl
A2 The New Cobweb Summer
B1 My Blue Wave
B2 I Can Hardly Spell My Name
B3 Autumn's Vicar
C1 Flick
C2 Caterpillar
C3 D. Scott Parsley
D1 Bugs
D2 The Old Matchbook Trick
D3 Is A Woman

The ever-modest Lambchop boss presented ‘Is A Woman’ to Cityslang with these words: "Here's my new album. I hope you'll like it. It's a bunch of samey, downtempo stuff that doesn't really seem to go anywhere." Little did he know. Is A Woman broke Lambchop to the same place on the European continent where Nixon had previously taken the band in the UK. It was instantly recognized as a modern classic and described by one famous German critic as "one of the best albums ever made". We couldn't agree more.

PRESS: quotes from original release:

‘Another mature masterpiece from America's finest.’ AOTM 5/5 – Uncut

‘It's a brave and curious record that, as on 'Bugs', occasionally resembles Willie Nelson fronting Labradford.’ 8/10 – NME

‘A strange delight of a record.’ 8/10 – Popmatters

‘A record that urges you to lean closer to the speakers in order to fully hear everything that is being played and sung.’ – The Wire

‘These gradual pleasures fly in the face of today's pop/rock hardsell, for sure, but inexorably you are drawn into Kurt's world.’ 4/5 - Mojo

TRACK LISTING

1. The Daily Growl
2. The New Cob Web Summer
3. My Blue Wave
4. I Can Hardly Spell My Name
5. Autumn's Vicar
6. Flick
7. Caterpillar
8. D Scott Parsley
9. Bugs
10. The Old Matchbook Trick
11. Is A Woman

MR. M is Lambchop’s eleventh album on City Slang and documents the band at its best, it encapsulates one of the most profound moments in Lambchop history. Kurt Wagner turned away from music and picked up his brushes to paint his way out of a funk that followed the premature death of friend Vic Chesnutt, who the band backed on 1998’s The Salesman and Bernadette. Incidentally the paintings, thickly layered black and white portraits forming a series called Beautillion Millitaire 2000, feature on the album sleeve and throughout the full artwork-

“As I worked, I was approached by Mark Nevers (former full time band member & producer for the likes of Andrew Bird and Will Oldham) with the idea of making another Lambchop record. He had a concept of a sound and a method that worked with the tone of my writing. His idea was a kind of ‘psycha-Sinatra’ sound, one that involved the arranging of strings and other sounds in a more open and yet complex way. It was a studio creation, not a type of recording based on band performance, and this was a radical approach for us. I felt Lambchop had one more good record in us, and this time I was going to do things as directly and true to my desires as possible.”

The resulting album stretches out as sonically as promised. It was recorded at Nevers’s Nashville Beech House studio cum bungalow with the usual core of musicians- Scott Martin (drums), Matt Swanson (bass), Ryan Norris (guitar, organ), Tony Crow (piano), William Tyler (guitar). Guests include original cofounder Jonathan Marx, Cortney Tidwell (who shared vocals on 2010’s KORT project) and fiddler Billy Contreras (who has worked with all from Charlie Louvin to Laura Cantrell) - spectacular string arrangements shared between Peter Stopschinski and Mason Neely.

TRACK LISTING

1. If Not I'll Just Die
2. 2B2
3. Gone Tomorrow
4. Mr. Met
5. Gar
6. Nice Without Mercy
7. Buttons
8. The Good Life (is Wasted)
9. Kind Of
10. Betty's Overture
11. Never My Love

Nixon was released in 2000 and immediately enshrined by the British music press. Uncut named it album of the year, Mojo ranked it 10th, and Q was still doing their lists alphabetically. The NME called Nixon “near to perfect” and the Guardian said that the band was “reinventing American music.”

Meanwhile, most people in America continued to have no idea who Lambchop were. (“I don’t think [Nixon] made much of an impression on anyone over here,” Wagner told a seemingly baffled interviewer in spring, 2001.) Lambchop’s take on America—sly, tender, mysterious but mundane—is less a realist’s portrait than a surrealist’s impression: funnier, more pathetic, more improbable than what actually exists. In 2007 I met a German man named Frank who told me he loved seeing the band overseas because it meant getting to sit in a plush, quiet room while drinking tons of beer and listening to Lambchop, which I guess he imagined Americans were mellow enough to actually do.

Nixon is still an improbable album. The band never sounds like they’re trying very hard and yet every song breaks some convention or another. Despite its showbiz arrangements, the music is tenuous and weird (a contrast that the band toyed with again on 2012's Mr. M), and Wagner’s falsetto—usually the most vulnerable part of a man’s singing range—sounds less like a Romeo than some karaoke loser scrapping for the mic at last call. He says he regrets ever calling Lambchop a country band, and with good reason: Nixon isn't the music of the people, it's the music of the people who showed up, said hello, stood in the corner and left without saying goodbye. (When an interviewer asked Wagner how he felt about the album’s overwhelming reception in the UK, he said, “I’m not sure that’s something to be proud of. I think there are other things in your life you could be more proud of. Like having kids.”) If there's a connection to country, it's spiritual: Nixon finds its humor in self-deprecation and its soul in things broken and left behind.

TRACK LISTING

A1 The Old Gold Shoe
A2 Grumpus
A3 You Masculine You
A4 Up With People
B1 Nashville Parent 
B2 What Else Could It Be
B3 The Distance From Her....
B4 The Book I Havent Read
B5 The Petrified Forest
B6 Butcher Boy

Kurt Wagner's signature brittle baritone is back, but that doesn't mean we're going to get a nostalgic Alt Country album. Showtunes is a continuation of Lambchop's explorations of new sound worlds and opens up another chapter. Each track is an exciting journey with an uncertain destination.

With Showtunes, as he has done so many times throughout his varied and fascinating career, Kurt in late 2019 was experimenting with something new. He took simple guitar tracks and converted them into midi piano tracks. It was a revelation that from those conversions he was able to manipulate each note and add, subtract, arrange the chords and melody into a form that didn't have any of the limitations he had with his previous methods of writing with a guitar.

Removing these limitations led to a surprising new sound, something akin to showtunes but with edges sanded down and viewed through Kurt's own specific lens. it's a genre he was none too fond of with the exceptions of a few Great American Songbook type of stuff or some of the works of artists like Tom Waits, early Randy Newman or even Gershwin or Carmichael. “I’d always wanted to make songs with a similar feel but my skills were limited until now” says Wagner.

“Anyone can be in Lambchop (so long as they behave themselves)” - Kurt Wagner.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Another wonderfully mournful, rich outing from lambchop here, leaning heavily on the slow-country roots of their early work but imbued with a heartbreaking tentative unease. Jazzy horns and slow upright bass licks help to lend a levity to proceedings, but still results in a thoroughly beautiful and unsettling whole.

TRACK LISTING

A1. A Chef's Kiss
A2. Drop C
A3. Papa Was A Rolling Stone Journalist
A4. Fuku
B5. Unknown Man
B6. Blue Leo
B7. Impossible Meatballs
B8. The Last Benedict

Kurt Wagner found himself in Minneapolis in the sweltering summer of 2021, in a decommissioned paint factory turned practice space, when everybody was still kind of looking at everybody else as a potential source of disease. He entrusted himself to this piano player, Andrew Broder, and his mad genius of a production partner, Ryan Olson. “Ryan and Andrew, they’re like two sides of my personality,” Wagner says. “And if you put them together as a team, they represent me.” This would be the first time Wagner let somebody else -not to mention somebody else without any sort of a connection to holy, old Nashville - produce a Lambchop record.

It was in that decommissioned paint factory in Minneapolis, watching a bunch of burnout freaks play their instruments, that Wagner found his way to writing The Bible. The sessions reminded him of those long-ago days at the Springwater Supper Club in Nashville, when he first brought the afterparty back to his house. But maybe because he wasn’t the one making the afterparty rules this time, the music on The Bible is more unpredictable than it’s ever been on a Lambchop record. Jazz careening into country, into disco, into funk, and back to country. This is Lambchop’s new album - born in a new place, but out of a process that he first discovered back home in Nashville, the one that helped him find his own voice in the first place. Amen. This is The Bible.

TRACK LISTING

A1. His Song Is Sung
A2. Little Black Boxes
A3. Daisy
B1. Whatever, Mortal
B2. A Major Minor Drag
B3. Police Dog Blues
C1. Dylan At The Mousetrap
C2. Every Child Begins The World Again
C3. So There
C4. That's Music

Side D. Etching (No Music) 

In the fall of 2019, Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner had a unique idea: In lieu of going on what would become an economically disastrous tour, he would invite the band to Nashville to make a record as a way to provide them with similar financial support and realize something tangible in the process. Each band member was tasked with choosing one song for the band to cover, and leading the recording session to completion each day. Wagner says, “My idea was to see what might happen if I removed myself from the process and the content as much as possible. In doing so, what surfaced were elements that have always been there but maybe got overshadowed by my songwriting and process.”

Recorded December 2–7, 2019, at Battletapes in Nashville, TN, and produced, engineered, and mixed by Jeremy Ferguson (with the exception of “Reservations” which was co‐mixed by Ferguson and Matthew McCaughan), TRIP sounds like a culmination of the band’s older work and current work. There’s a looseness and freedom that recalls their older sound mixed with a group sophistication and innovation derived through the process of playing together for so long. The title TRIP refers to the circumstances surrounding its creation and the endeavor of “touring” itself. “It also seems to describe a life in music and the situations we created in our life as a band over the years,” Wagner adds. “It’s been a trip…”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Some absolutely classic tracks here, and all presented in Lambchop's trademark moroose melodicism. It's equally haunting and tender, a brilliant illustration of how refined the band's processes have become, and most of all, a great listen.

TRACK LISTING

Side A:
1. Reservations (13:00)
2. Where Grass Won’t Grow (6:24)

Side B
3. Shirley (4:35)
4. Golden Lady (6:42)
5. Love Is Here And Now You’re Gone (3:28)
6. Weather Blues (3:26)

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Lambchop’s 1998 album ’What Another Man Spills’ has been pressed to vinyl for the first time after it’s original release 20 years ago! Remastered from the original DAT and featuring refreshed artwork.

What Another Man Spills (1998) represents a milestone in Lambchop’s career, but not in the modern sense of a ‘landmark’ release. Building on foundations that had once sounded almost literally creaky, it expands upon the tentative manoeuvres they’d undertaken with the previous year’s Thriller (1997) and gestures confidently towards its brassy successor, Nixon, which would arrive in 2000 to wild acclaim and previously unimaginable commercial success.

Liner notes by Kurt Wagner himself.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Interrupted
A2. The Saturday Option
A3. Shucks
B1. Give Me Your Love (Love Song)
B2. Life #2
B3. Scamper
C1. It’s Not Alright
C2. N.o.
C3. I’ve Been Lonely For So Long

Originally from Brighton, the two piece are Phoebe Lunny (Vocals/Guitar - she/they) and Lilly Macieira (Bass - she/they) plus drummer Banksy*. They’ve made a name for themselves through unforgettable live performances and support from the likes of Variety Magazine, BBC Radio 1, NME, The Line Of Best Fit, KEXP, Consequence, Evening Standard, CLASH, So Young, and recently covered Kerrang! Magazine alongside Sleater-Kinney, bagged a nomination for Rolling Stone UK’s Rising Stars Award, and even Iggy Pop is a fan.

TRACK LISTING

A1. God’s Country
B1. Body Of Mine

"The Secret of Letting Go" is Lamb's 7th studio album, written and recorded in the space of a year between their home-studio in England’s South Downs and in India and Ibiza. Continuing to push the sonic envelope, title track, "The Secret of Letting Go" was written in the moment the band decided they were splitting up and holds the corner for their endless experimentalism.

TRACK LISTING

1. Phosphorous
2. Moonshine
3. Armageddon Waits
4. Bulletproof
5. The Secret Of Letting Go
6. Imperial Measures
7. The Other Shore
8. Deep Delirium
9. Illumina
10. The Silence In Between
11. One Hand Clapping

They've enrolled the help of some famous friends for this latest entry into the leftfield / downbeat / future funk / electronics selection of modern music. Arto Lindsay, Michael Franti, Scratch Perverts etc. Splendid.

It's a Piccadilly debut for Dutch production Lamellen here, who join the ever swelling ranks of the Dekmantel family with a five tracker of atmospheric, emotive and groovy Balearic house. Keeping true to the original island ideal, the duo barely break a sweat over 100bpm, keeping it easy and breezy as they provide the perfect soundtrack for sundowners the globe over. 
A tranquil and trippy opener, "Horse Massage" calls to mind the cosmic explorations of Farbror Resande Mac, all space port idents, sparkling sequences and slow moving bass tones. "Spider" ups the tempo to a comparitive sprint (though still in reality glacial), injecting a little 80s Italo funk into the bassline, toughening the percussion up a bit and adding some glassy mallet tones for a nu disco-tinged heater. "Oyster" takes the intensity back down, savouring the same nebulous vibrations as the opener, but with a fresh Oceanic twist - think A Vision Of Panorama and you won't be too far away. 
So far so 4/4, and the duo throw us a curious curveball with the skipping rhythm, tropical bubble and chiming chords of proggy pearl "Railrunner". We're back in the deep to close as the duo deliver "Pippo Denemarken" a downbeat shuffler decorated with insistent organ tones and bright and glassy synths. Luscious stuff from the Dekmantal debutants.

STAFF COMMENTS

Patrick says: The eagle eared selectors at Dekmantel introduce us to more fresh talent, namely Dutch duo Lamellen, who drop the tempo and up the groove for a quintet of synth heavy Balearic jams. Cocktail killers folks.

TRACK LISTING

1. Horse Massage
2. Spider
3. Oyster
4. Railrunner
5. Pippo Denemarken

Liz Lamere has announced her debut album Keep It Alive via In The Red. After collaborating with late partner Alan Vega (Suicide) for over three decades on his solo work, and starting out playing drums in punk bands, she is releasing her own music. All of the music and lyrics were written and performed by Liz Lamere. It was recorded in her lower Manhattan apartment during lockdown, engineered by her and Alan’s son Dante Vega Lamere in the same space where the Suicide singer constructed his light sculptures. They emerged with a riveting set of songs that are charged with an irrepressible lust for life and the feel for the contagious hook. The album was then co-produced and mixed by Jared Artaud and Liz Lamere, with Ted Young engineering the mixing sessions and Josh Bonati mastering.

“There’s something very magical about creating music in the same environment where Alan created his visual art,” notes Lamere. “His energy is pervasive and is inevitably infused in the recordings.” She continues: “We were living through unprecedented times and Keep It Alive took adversity and uncertainty and turned it into a message of resilience and empowerment.”

The album courses with the defiant energy that motivated Lamere through her early double life as both Wall Street lawyer and downtown New York musician before meeting and falling in love with Vega led to her becoming his manager, creative foil and keyboard manipulator on solo albums beginning in 1990 (Deuce Avenue, Power On To Zero Hour, New Raceion, Dujang Prang, 2007, Station, IT) and recently released lost album Mutator that launched the Vega Vault she curates with Jared Artaud. After Vega passed away in July 2016, Lamere found it cathartic writing down thoughts and observations in notebooks. Simultaneously, she and Artaud started collaborating, overseeing the mastering of IT and then co-producing and mixing Mutator; and during this time they naturally discussed an alliance on the solo album she knew would be forthcoming.

Keep It Alive is an homage to a song on Vega’s New Raceion album that has significant meaning for Lamere. It was one of the key lines she would chant on stage, becoming a staple of live performances with Vega. The vision behind the album is about preserving your own inner fire. Lamere commented “Alan always encouraged me to make my own music, and I’ve waited until the time was right as I’ve been dedicated to preserving Alan’s vision and building his legacy.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Lights Out
2. Stand
3. Sin
4. Heat Beat
5. Subway Cyanide
6. Cruise Screen
7. Freedom's Last Call

This is a super follow-up to his much-loved debut and whilst the warm, woody soulfulness of primetime Van Morrisson still shines through there's enough new ground covered to prove that he is indeed a major talent in the making. There's country and blues to add to his rustic soul music, this time with echoes of John Lennon or even Ryan Adams. There's some unsettling, sparse stuff here too; it's an occasionally challenging as well as a comforting listen. Fans are going to love this record!

Grammy Award winning artist Ray LaMontagne is set to release his eagerly anticipated, eighth studio album 'MONOVISION' via Columbia Records.

The 10 track album sees Ray not only writing and producing the album once again but also includes added duties of engineering as well as performing all the instruments for the tracks. 

Grammy Award winning singer-songwriter Ray Lamontagne releases his seventh studio album on 18th May, via Columbia Records.

Written & produced by LaMontagne, this nine song album includes the singles "Such A Simple Thing" & "Paper Man".

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Lamontagne brings us his newest LP, with tender folk stylings subtly woven amongst the stunning acoustic balladry, all accentuated with Lamontagne's heart-melting vocals.

TRACK LISTING

1. To The Sea
2. Paper Man
3. Part Of The Light
4. It's Always Been You
5. Let's Make It Last
6. As Black As Blood Is Blue
7. Such A Simple Thing
8. No Answer Arrives
9. Goodbye Blue Sky

Emerging from a generative paradox of laser precision and fluid dynamism, "Metallur" fuses percussive, metallic force with warping tempos and a field of ethereal resonance and debris.

The result is an insurgent, elemental, time-smearing of hyperspace, where 'tellurian beats merge with alien glossolalia and vocal samples blip tesseracts of human affect into a ghostly, melodic aether'.
Music for a crushed infinity. AD93 as often their remit, presenting to us the future through a dystopian lens. Fans of Autechre seriously need to check this! 

TRACK LISTING

A1 - Surface Light
A2 - Metallur
B1 - Meszthread
B2 - Tris
B3 - At The Bay

We're back with another Lance Ferguson 7" single pressed in collaboration with seminal Japanese record store Jet Set, following up on last summer's killer Brazilian Rhyme/Sweet Power Your Embrace 45!

This time getting the it's two selections from the second volume of Lance's Rare Groove Spectrum series, the stellar take on Azymyth's Voo Sobre O Horizonte (Fly Over the Horizon) and Ferguson's instrumental take on an all-time Balearic classic, Carly Simon's Why.

Cut loud to 7" wax and served in a polybag with Japanese insert. We won't have many of these so get in quick!

TRACK LISTING

1. Voo Sobre O Horizonte
2. Why

Domenico Lancellotti's SRAMBA reaches back to the roots of samba whilst completely revamping its blueprint, indoctrinating guitar and percussion-led rhythms with analogue synthesisers, courtesy of album producer Ricardo Dias Gomes.

The majority of SRAMBA was recorded over two months in The Cave - Domenico's home studio in Lisbon, the city both Brazilian ex-pats reside in, where the arrival of a couple of Russian-designed synths purchased by Ricardo influenced the direction of their initial experimentation: "Ricardo had these instruments, modular machines" remembers Domenico, "and I had my guitar, some percussion instruments. On the first day we started making sounds and recording them, and songs started to appear, sambas started to appear."

The son of a renowned samba songwriter, at home Domenico would watch his father play and compose. At parties, the adults would hand his father a tamborim (a small tambourine) and ask him to play along. "I grew up inside samba, it's my roots", he says. "For me, everything is samba, I bring it into whatever style of music I am making".

Domenico and Ricardo instantly saw how the synthesisers were not at odds with the sambas they were playing, instead they had a similar sound to its typical percussion instruments (ganza, repinique, surdo, tarol). What's more, they saw a connection with roots samba, the samba that existed before bossa nova and samba jazz came along. This was rhythmic samba, with grooves that could go on ad infinitum. "It's samba de clave, geometrically structured" says Domenico. "It's ostinato samba", adds Ricardo.

"Diga" is a great example of what their proposal is capable of, as what begins as a glitchy machine whirring into action soon turns into a glorious samba in which the gurgles and scratchy beats coming from the analogue equipment only add to the arrangement. Likewise, on "Tá Brabo" it's an aching melody from one of the synths that gives the guitar rhythm its needed counterpoint, and shows how the duo's greatest accomplishment is not in invention alone, but in creating a great samba album. It's an album that can go from the opening track "Ere" with its reverberant bass thud, mantra-like vocals and staccato rhythms to the string-accompanied "Nada Sera de Outra Maneira", a swooning samba that pays tribute to the Brazilian ensemble Tamba Trio, who along with Tom Zé's Estudando O Samba, Domenico names as the biggest influence on their treatment of samba.

Other important reference points are made clear on "Um Abraço No Faust". One of three instrumentals on the album its title riffs off a JoãoGilberto song, "Um Abraço no Bonfá", but whereas JoãoGilberto was giving a hug (um abraço) to bossa nova guitarist Luiz Bonfá, Domenico and Ricardo are giving theirs to the German avant-gardists Faust. "Quem Samba", with its horn section and dramatic melody give a whiff of Domenico's Italian ancestry, while "Descomunal" is devoid of rhythm whatsoever, guest vocalist Tori singing over a bed of electronic drums, cello and swirling synths, that highlights the duo's unwillingness to stick to a particular formula.

Both Domenico Lancellotti and Ricardo Dias Gomes are revered names within Brazilian music over the past 20 years. As a member of the +2's, with Moreno Veloso and Kassin, Domenico released a trio of albums on Luaka Bop in the early 00s that pioneered a new Rio samba sound with elements of funk and psychedelia. With Veloso and Kassin he would later form Orquestra Imperial, a big band intent on reviving ballroom (gafieira) samba, and that has worked with guest vocalists such as Seu Jorge, Elza Soares and Ed Motta. SRAMBA is his fourth solo album. Multi-instrumentalist Ricardo Dias Gomes first came to notice as a member of Caetano Veloso's band Cê which helped reinvigorate Caetano's career with a sound influenced by British new wave. As well as collaborations with Lucas Santtana, Negro Leo and Thiago Nassif, and work with his own group Do Amor, he has released a series of acclaimed solo albums that reveal a restless music-maker.

SRAMBA is a glorious showcase of the duo's style, uniting Domenico's playful lyrics and rhythmic, samba-rooted songs with with Ricardo's assured accompaniment of unorthodox textures and instrumentations. It may be a new language for samba, machine samba (samba de máquina), but as Domenico says, "samba da máquina is samba".

TRACK LISTING

1. Erê
2. Um Abraço No Faust
3. Diga
4. Aterrizar
5. Tá Brabo
6. Mole
7. Nada Será De Outra Maneira
8. Quem Samba (feat. Marcia)
9. Descomunal (feat. Tori)
10. Florescer

First album in 6 years from the acclaimed Arabic/Psychedelic avant-garde big band. Recorded/produced by Radwan Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart, Suuns, Matana Roberts) and with featured guest Nadah El Shazly. Renowned Montreal / Cairo composer Sam Shalabi returns with his exhilarating and utterly genre-bending big band Land Of Kush. The trenchantly-titled Sand Enigma bristles with defiant exuberance, restless creative energy, and electrifying cross-cultural expression - the band's most accomplished, acute and accessible album to date (though don't expect 'easy listening' from this boundary-pushing hydra-headed entity). Sand Enigma is a wildly diverse and hugely compelling tour de force of modern composition that pulses with emotion and experimentation, blending avant-garde, psychedelic, Middle Eastern, out-jazz, electronic, and improv/free music tropes to stunning effect.

The 75-minute opus captures a band on fire, flowing through composed set-pieces, improvisational turns, harmolodic gestural and textural interplay, bursts of fervent groove, and fearless, feral experimentation. While the bounty of heavy-hitting instrumental players are too numerous to call out here, Sand Enigma notably features two new Land Of Kush collaborators, both of them leading lights of Cairo's burgeoning avant-electronic scene: Nadah El Shazly and Maurice Louca. As Alan Bishop of Sublime Frequencies raves: "Shalabi raises the bar for modern psychedelic music with Land Of Kush, weaving a seamless montage of styles in a transcendent way that is rarely, if ever, achieved." As with previous works, the music on Sand Enigma shifts between instrumentals and vocal-led pieces, with various singers taking the lead on different songs including long-standing Kush members Elizabeth Anka Vajagic, Katie Moore, Elizabeth Lima and the newly drafted Tokyo-toMontréal émigré Maya Kuroki. Sand Enigma notably features two new international collaborators and leading lights of Cairo’s burgeoning avant-electronic scene: Nadah El Shazly (vocals) and Maurice Louca (keys/synths). 

TRACK LISTING

1. Aha
2. Domyat 1331
3. Safe Space
4. Broken Maqams
5. Sand Enigma
6. Ssssss
7. Recuerdo
8. Bone Mass I
9. Bone Mass II
10. Bone Mass III
11. Ana
12. Trema
13. Dol
14. Tensor

Following several visits to the city over the years, Osama (Sam) Shalabi moved to Cairo in 2011, arriving at an apartment one block from Tahrir Square, in the midst of Egypt's 'Arab Spring'. Shalabi describes The Big Mango, his new and phenomenal work for his Land Of Kush big-band, as "a love letter to Cairo" framed by "the beautiful, surreal madness of the city…as joyous, horrific, historical events were unfolding". The opening six minutes, a slowly brewing stew of free-improvised instrumentation, electronics, wordless vocalizations and oblique sexuality/sensuality, are an inimitable destabilizing strategy of Shalabi's that serves to introduce most of the instrumental voices and the montage of genres that will form the rest of the work, while also invoking the album's deeper conceptual preoccupations: gender, sexuality and the status of women as a culture unleashes seismic/revolutionary energies with the real possibility of attendant shifts in civil society and political structure. In combination with the peaking intensity and electricity of Shalabi's compositional vision, The Big Mango coheres, sparkles and soars: a distillation of the sonic trajectory Land Of Kush has been charting for the past five years.

TRACK LISTING

1. Faint Praise (3:24)
2. Second Skin (5:42)
3. The Pit (Part 1) (7:30)
4. The Pit (Part 2) (2:15)
5. Sharm El Bango (4:22)
6. Mobil Nil (5:47)
7. St Stefano (4:34)
8. Drift Beguine (6:41)
9. The Big Mango (6:48)

Sound collages and loops mix with etheral noises to create a mellow post-rock ambience.

15 track compilation album from the Land Of Nod highlighting the band's choice cuts since their inception in 1997. "Reality Channel" includes tracks from the group's four albums on the UK label Ochre Records, "Translucent", "Timeless point", "Archive:02" and the current UK album "Inducing The Sleep Sphere". This also includes the full three track session recorded for Slobodan Vujanovic's show on B-92 radio show in Serbia.

Lizzie Powell has always been a risk-taker. As the creative force behind the influential Canadian outfit Land of Talk, the Montreal-based songwriter has over the past 15 years amassed a catalog of four unimpeachable albums that stretch the boundaries of indie rock. But Performances, their fifth LP, feels like a total reinvention: an unflinching statement from an artist who’s not afraid to say how they feel. Though it trades muscular guitar rock for understated piano, it’s still the most urgent, cathartic, and personal release of Powell’s career so far. “It's the weirdest, mightiest little record I've made since I used to write music on my four-track when I was 14,” says Powell. “I needed to make a love letter to my teenage self by being more vulnerable and doing all the production myself.” Here, they doggedly value their own intuition over anything else to make their most rewarding album yet. 

Performances is a defiant and resonant blow against expectations and outside pressure. It’s an LP showcasing an artist without constraints and allowing themself to be radically honest. “The album title is very literal,” says Powell. “I'm performing what's in my brain but I'm tired of performing femininity for the music industry, femininity in my life, respectability, and vulnerability. I'm trying to grow out of these and break out of these roles in my life.” Powell’s fearlessness as a songwriter has already led to Land of Talk boasting an unmistakably essential discography but with this album, they find the perfect opportunity to give themself the grace to truly double down on their own vital sensibilities. They usher the songs every step of the way from demoing to producing, imbuing each track with immense care and unfiltered feeling. 

“This is me reclaiming Land of Talk as it always has been,” says Powell. “Every record we've made has just been one step closer to me figuring out how I want to make a record myself. I might not ever make an album like this again, but I just felt like I owed it to myself to try.” 

TRACK LISTING

1. Intro (high Bright High)
2. Your Beautiful Self
3. Fluorescent Blood
4. Marry It
5. Rainbow Protection
6. Clarinet Dance Jam
7. Sitcom
8. Semi-Precious
9. August 13
10. Pwintiques 

First Seance’ is the debut album by Land Trance, a new collaboration between Liverpool-based experimental musicians Andrew P.M Hunt and Benjamin D. Duvall, originally released via Forest Swords’ Dense Truth label in May 2020. Sharing rehearsal rooms, houses and band-mates for over a decade across Merseyside, the duo developed their respective practices in tandem with each other – Duvall delving into percussive ensemble composition as the founder of the acclaimed Ex-Easter Island Head, Hunt exploring the possibilities of songwriting, synthesis and texture as Dialect (with a release for RVNG - Under~Between - due March 2021) and leader of art rock band Outfit. Working together as Land Trance, they utilise spontaneous electroacoustic improvisation and studio-as-instrument post production to explore the inner and outer reaches of each other’s musical vocabularies.

Recorded in spaces including a bedroom overlooking Concert Square, the thumping epicentre of Liverpool nightlife, and pieced together in the home studio they share in a converted embassy, tracks here oscillate between vocal-led ecclesiastical yearning (Transcript, Chilean Miners) and ecstatic assemblages of sound (Beach Mystery, A Raft), always suggesting a palpable sense of geography with an allusive sense of place. Using zither, drum machine, music box, dictaphone, synthesiser and melodica amongst other sonic sources, through the course of the album threads of potential narrative and association circle like the rods of a mobile. ‘First Seance’ elevates deceptively simple materials and means with vivid imagination and bold compositional strategies, transcending the intimate scale of bedroom recording and DIY sound creation. It presents a wholly original set of musical environments, and a compelling document of intuition, friendship and artistic curiosity.

TRACK LISTING

1. Regulate 06:43
2. Beach Mystery 02:45
3. Chilean Miners 05:21
4. Transcript 03:55
5. A Raft 08:23
6. Velarde 03:12
7. First Seance 09:40
8. Yardang 05:04

Daniel Land's new album, "Out of Season", is his most ambitious record to date, a series of reflections on history, memory, and post-Brexit Britain, which was inspired by his return to the landscapes of his youth – the rugged, underpopulated west coast of Somerset. The album was written and partly recorded in Daniel’s studio in a static caravan, overlooking the coast, during the period when the UK was tearing itself apart over its relationship to Europe.

"I didn't set out to write about Brexit", Daniel says, "I have a kind of horror of political music. But I couldn’t escape the atmosphere of the time – this strange, distorted version of ‘Englishness’ in the national psyche. I’ve always been interested in memory and nostalgia; Brexit illustrates the dangers of taking seductive, possibly false memories at face value”. Songs like “White Chalk”, “Island of Ghosts”, and the album’s title track, represent a series of attempts to reclaim an older, more peculiar idea of England which, Daniel says has been “Lost in the nationalist mythmaking of the past decades” – the island of misfits and outsiders exemplified by the works of Derek Jarman, for example, whom Daniel was rediscovering while working on the album. “I must have read 'Modern Nature' ten times over the years”, Daniel says. “What I love about Jarman is that he had a deep, abiding love for England, but it was a very complicated, critical and a very queer kind of love. That was very much my mood, going into the making of this album”.

Like Jarman’s work, "Out of Season" probes national identity whilst also displaying resolutely queer themes throughout. Daniel’s voice – once described by The Guardian as "The spawn of Elizabeth Fraser and Anthony Hegarty” – is less heavily reverbed than before, bringing to the fore his often-confessional lyrics, inspired by the frankness of modern queer poets like Andrew McMillan, Seán Hewitt, and Ocean Vuong. A lyrical highlight is the gorgeous “Southern Soul”, a deceptively straightforward recounting of a decades-old hookup with a closeted guy from his hometown which, Daniel says, “Serves as a metaphor for everything I’m talking about in the album”. And in keeping with the album’s nods to the heroes of gay literature, Daniel’s self-styling of the album as a “Dream Pop Album on National Themes” deliberately references the full title of Tony Kushner’s era-defining play "Angels in America", whose central character is namechecked in the hook-laden “Lemon Boy” – a song which must surely stand as Daniel’s most deliciously pop moment yet.

Lauded by Mark Radcliffe, Guy Garvey, Tom Robinson, and many others, Daniel Land makes music that, in the words of BBC Radio 1, "You can't help but think the late John Peel would have loved".

TRACK LISTING

01. Alison
02. White Chalk
03. Lemon Boy
04. Island Of Ghosts
05. Another Year Older
06. Southern Soul
07. Out Of Season
08. Idlewild
09. Put Your Broken Arrows Down
10. Summerhome By The Sea
11. Wolf Moon

Wewantsounds is delighted to reissue for the first time Harold Land's classic LP 'Damisi,' recorded in Los Angeles for Bob Shad's Mainstream Records and released in 1972. Featuring Buster Williams (b), Ndugu (ds), Bill Henderson (keys) and Oscar Breashear (tp) the album was recorded at a crucial time when Land was shifting to a more spiritual sound. The session is a superb mix of Funk and modal Jazz and feature the monster groove "In The Back, In The Corner, In The Dark" as well as the deep, meditative track "Pakistan". The album is reissued in its original gatefold sleeve adding never-seen session photos, with newly remastered audio and a 2-page insert including new liner notes by Kevin Le Gendre

TRACK LISTING

1. Step Right Up To The Bottom
2. In The Back In The Corner In The Dark
3. Pakistan
4. Chocolate Mess
5. Damisi

“the band has an intimate urgency that uncrosses arms and impels involvement, and their sound invokes the Band if they had Dirty Projectors' skewed sense of song structure." PITCHFORK.

"This is the part of the song when we come together." Adam Schatz's voice rings out in the flickering candlelight of Manhattan Inn. Last summer, he began a monthly series in the Greenpoint bar's piano-anchored back room, built to bring his friends together to play music. And Schatz – who plays in Man Man and Father Figures, co-produces Winter Jazzfest, founded Search & Restore, and has wielded his saxophone on numerous stages and on recordings for bands like Vampire Weekend (see "Diane Young) and Those Darlins – has a lot of friends. But on this warm summer night, the man that energizes so many NYC scenes stood on a piano bench, gazing somewhere only he could see, and declared his own: "There's no before. There's no after. There's only this." This is Landlady. The song was "Above My Ground," a disarming sing-along anthem and a wide window into Schatz – the songwriter, the multi-instrumentalist, the vocalist.

Over the past three years, Landlady has evolved alongside its busy leader, self-releasing Keeping To Yourself in 2011 and solidifying into a striking five-member lineup that includes Mikey Freedom Hart (Sinkane, Albert Hammond Jr., Bleachers), Ian Chang (Son Lux, Matthew Dear, Father Figures), Ian Davis, and Booker Stardrum. Landlady’s new album and Hometapes debut, Upright Behavior, is out this summer. "I've never heard music that hit my heart and my brain quite like this," said Hometapes co-founder Sara Padgett Heathcott, who discovered a kindred spirit in Schatz and a gateway to timelessness in Landlady's music. "Paul McCartney, Je Lynne, Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Sly Stone, maybe even Frank Black – these are the names that echo around the canyon that Schatz walked me into with a few rough recordings sent to me last year." A chance meeting of the two at SXSW, where Schatz joined Akron/Family and Matthew E. White on stage at Hometapes' Friend Island event, evolved into a mission to share Landlady's music and the universe that surrounds it.

"Landlady are that rare band where the notion of genre seems downright laughable," wrote I Guess I'm Floating after seeing Landlady's multiple knockout performances at SXSW, which included a special performance of George Harrison's All Things Must Pass at Hometapes' Eighth Annual Friend Island. The band, including special guests like Kelly Pratt (Arcade Fire) and Jared Samuel (Sean Lennon) vividly recreated the classic album, bringing the spirit of Schatz's Manhattan Inn series to Texas for a temporary-yet-eternal moment.

TRACK LISTING

01. Above My Ground
02. Dying Day
03. Girl
04. Under The Yard
05. The Globe
06. Upright Behavior
07. Maria
08. Fine
09. Washington State Is Important
10. X-Ray Machine

Debut from "the purveyors of the elephantine riff" and the first release on the newly formed Loudspeaker label. The band appeared on a Metal Hammer sponsored tour last year and toured with loads of the UK's up and coming hardcore bands. The sound that the band have captured can be described as post hardcore but without the nu-metal tag.

“I think most of it takes place in dreams,” Caleb Landry Jones says of his debut solo album, The Mother Stone. “I’m talking more about dreams than I am about what’s happened in the physical realm. Or I’m talking about both, and you’re not sure what’s what.”

Caleb Landry Jones was born in Garland, Texas in 1989 and comes from a long line of fiddle players. Three, maybe four generations back, on his mother’s side. His grandfather wrote jingles for commercials, his mother was a singer-songwriter who taught piano lessons in the house, and his father was a contractor who did a lot of work for the Dallas music-equipment retailer Brook Mays and knew a guy if you needed a bass or a banjo. But Jones is not sure if you can hear any of this in his music and he does not play the fiddle.

Jones has been writing and recording music since age 16, around the same time he started acting professionally. Played in a band called Robert Jones for a minute, lost his guitar player to higher education, moved into his own place, and broke up with somebody, at which point the songs really started coming hard and fast.

“I started playing guitar and playing more keys,” he says, “and then started writing record after record after record after record, because I didn’t know what to do with myself. It was a good way of healing. And it felt like as soon as I started doing it, it felt like it needed to happen all the time.”

In the ensuing years he’d spend a lot of time carrying unrecorded songs around in his head like goldfish in a bag, waiting for a chance to record them in marathon sessions in his parents’ barn. “You gotta play the songs every day, or every two or three days, to keep ‘em,” he says. “Otherwise I forget them.” Sometimes the ideas fuse together, one chapter to the next; this is how songs grow into sevenplus-minute epics like the ones on The Mother Stone. His back catalog is around seven hundred songs deep— a whole discography of full albums, most of them unheard outside the barn, at least for now.

TRACK LISTING

1. Flag Day / The Mother Stone
2. You’re So Wonderfull
3. I Dig Your Dog
4. Katya
5. All I Am In You / The Big Worm
6. No Where’s Where Nothing’s Died
7. Licking The Days
8. For The Longest Time
9. The Hodge-Podge Porridge Poke
10. I Want To Love You
11. The Great I Am
12. Lullabbey
13. No Where’s Where Nothing’s Died (A Marvelous Pain) 
14. Thanks For Staying
15. Little Planet Pig

Loneliness, isolation, alienation, the need for connection and community. The salient themes of our times resonate with a haunting, predictive and vital power on the third album from London four-piece Landshapes. Released through Bella Union this November, Contact is an album that digs deep into the past, looks ahead to the future and burns with vivid life in the present, where its mind-expanding soundscapes, beguiling melodies and resonating emotions exude a tremendous in-the-moment vibrancy.

The title speaks clearly to the album’s themes, as intended. As Luisa Gerstein (vocals, synths) explains, “The working title for a long time was ‘Collapse’, but when we came around to naming it, and having the conversation from our respective isolation, we wanted to give it a name that was more hopeful, and about connectivity. Dan suggested ‘Contact’ and it clicked - Contact with each other; contact with the wider world amidst its unravelling; music feels like a really essential part of that right now.”

After the voyages of self-discovery on their 2013 debut, “Rambutan”, and the wide-open reach of “Heyoon”, Contact pays testimony to Landshapes’ questing spirit. Recorded live at Soup Studios when it was in Limehouse, the album’s freshness reflects a strict resistance to, says Luisa, “over-cooking in the studio”. New tools helped flesh out the soundscapes, Jemma notes: “actual synths”, a Boss Dr Rhythm drum machine, and fresh guitar pedals enrich the sonic palette without gratuitous studio interference. Meanwhile, storied sound wizard and producer Kwes became, says Heloise, “sort of a fifth member”, helping to take the songs “to a new realm”.

As Jemma says, “We had a strong idea of wanting to keep a raw feel to the work, and that we wanted external ears to play a guiding influence and add a new voice once we had built the foundations. The sense of previous preciousness was something we could dispose of, as we had more confidence in our ability to play and write. I think it made us bold.”

Landshapes, then: reach out, make contact.

TRACK LISTING

1 Rosemary
2 Siberia
3 Drama
4 The Ring
5 Real Love Is Dead
6 I'm Mortal
7 Dizzee
8 Let Me Be
9 Just A Plug
10 Conductor

As their previous incarnation (Lulu & The Lampshades) they’re probably best known for the viral cup song ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’ (over 3 million hits and counting on YouTube), but in the ensuing period Landshapes have undergone a considerable musical metamorphosis.

The band have learned and grown together - four distinctive personalities jostling and pulling, each with their own set of influences and sensibilities, an unlikely alchemy which comes together and makes sense.

Broad brushstrokes, big sounds and mournful melodies forged a new soundscape, so when a typo accidentally billed them as Landshapes it seemed an appropriate description for an altogether new sound, and an altogether new band.

Landshapes is the sound of four people in a dingy practice room, building on accidents, listening over and reworking obsessively until every band member is satisfied. An unconventional and serendipitous process it might be, but it’s crucial to Landshapes’ overall sound.

Sex O’Clock, which is previously unreleased on vinyl, was planned for release before Anita lane’s untimely death earlier in 2021 as a 20th anniversary edition of the her timeless album. Initally released in 2001, Sex O’Clock was produced by Mick Harvey, featuring co-writes with various Bad Seeds, along with unique interpretations of other songwriter’s tracks including Gil Scott-Heron’s searing ‘Home is Where the Hatred Is’.

Known for being one of the most creative forces to come out of Melbourne’s post-rock scene, Anita came to London in 1980 with The Birthday Party. Credited as a co-founder of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds, Lane exerted a strong influence over the band and co-wrote the universally acclaimed ‘From Her To Eternity’ and the haunting ‘Stranger Than Kindness’. Whilst also collaborating with the likes of Barry Adamson, Einstürzende Neubauten, Die Haut and Mick Harvey on his celebrated Serge Gainsbourg albums. First time on vinyl with lyric inner sleeve, also available on CD with lyric booklet.

TRACK LISTING

1 Home Is Where The Hatred Is
2 The Next Man That I See
3 Do That Thing
4 I Hate Myself
5 A Light Possession
6 I Love You, I Am No More
7 Like Caesar Needs A Brutus
8 Do The Kamasutra
9 The Petrol Wife
10 Bella Ciao

"Home Decor", the sixth full length album from New York born, Los Angeles based ambient / jazz / downtempo musician Danny Scott Lane, drops on WRWTFWW. 500 copies worldwide, housed in a heavy 350gsm sleeve with an artwork from 3D virtual designer Lucas Barbuzzi.

Danny Scott Lane’s heartwarming 10-track affair is its very own kind of nostalgia-tinted modern chill out music, a silky cocktail of 80s synths and exotica seduction gently carried by Matt Elliot Gooden’s sensuous saxophone. Dare we say ambient smooth jazz? Add hints of italo, minimalism, and fusion, and you there you have it: "Home Decor", a perfect soundtrack for cozy situations, one last drink on the balcony, strolls by the beach, relaxing, thinking back, possibly even gardening and cooking something delicious.

Highlights such as "Champagne Spill", "Baby’s First Balcony" and "Twin Bed" are not to be missed and should allow for a bit of (well-deserved) breathing in the tumultuous times the world is going through. "Home Decor", indeed a rare gem to soothe the mind, body and soul.

- For fans of ambient, smooth jazz, minimalism, exotica, saxophone, comfy pleasures, slow cooked meals, and seducing cocktails.

- Limited edition vinyl of Danny Scott Lane’s sixth full length album featuring saxophone by Matt Elliot Gooden and an artwork by 3D virtual designer Lucas Barbuzzi.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Louche and languid modern jazz with a seriously sensuous vibe throughout. Almost hinting at vapourwave but with much more stable context. Bit of a masterpiece that's bound to escape the mainstream. Gerronit!

TRACK LISTING

A1. Champagne Spill
A2. Baby's First Balcony
A3. Hurry Out
A4. Whose Oasis
A5. One Left
B1. A Window Let The Breeze
B2. Cube
B3. Miracle
B4. Twin Bed
B5. Fold

"Shower" is the brand-new album by New York born, Los Angeles based ambient / jazz / downtempo musician Danny Scott Lane, following the recently released and very well-received cozy soundscape, "Home Decor". 

Continuing to gently push (caress?) the boundaries of chill out music, smooth jazz, and comfy electronica, "Shower" draws inspiration from 'the feeling of a steamy shower shared with a stranger after a night on the dancefloor', a warm immersive affair for the mind and the body. This latest funky auditory experience once again invites Matt Elliot Gooden’s soothing saxophone, and this time also welcomes the vibrant beats of drummer David Ruiz. Organic, discreet in the most relaxing and elegant ways, and just the right amount of sexy - Lane’s new creation offers the finest in audio cocooning.

As you tilt your head back and close your eyes, let the hot and dripping sounds of "Shower" transport you to a world of sonic serenity. Feel the rich textures and appeasing harmonies wash over you, enveloping your senses in pure musical bliss.

"Shower" is the first new release by WRWTFWW Records made with biovinyl, a sustainable alternative to traditional vinyl. Biovinyl replaces petroleum in S-PVC by recycling used cooking oil or industrial waste gases, resulting in 100% CO2 savings in bio-based S-PVC production. Furthermore, it is 100% recyclable and reusable, embracing the circular economy ideology.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Three Is Company
A2. A Shower At Six
A3. Share
A4. Must Have
A5. Star Thing
B1. Spy On Me
B2. Shower Dance
B3. 11PM
B4. Smells Like Flowers
B5. Showering Sad

‘Blues Funeral’ is the new Mark Lanegan Band record, the first since 2004’s ‘Bubblegum’, recorded in Hollywood, California by Alain Johannes at his 11ad studio. In the mean time, he’s been busy working with the likes of Isobel Campbell, Twilight Singers, Gutter Twins and Soulsavers. Here, the music was played by Johannes and Jack Irons with appearances from Greg Dulli, Josh Homme et al.

The awesome ‘Gravedigger’s Song’ kicks things off, with it’s pounding, claustrophobic beats. The tempo slows for the next track ‘Bleeding Muddy Water’, with it’s soulful, pulsing groove. In fact, the whole album ‘grooves’ to varying degrees, from slow and soulful, to Kraut-ish metronomy, to almost funky – yes really! There’s a lot going on here, and it’s taken me a good few listens to get to grips with it, but as ever, Mark’s dark tales, delivered in his distinctive gravelly tones have won me over.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Gravedigger’s Song
2. Bleeding Muddy Water
3. Gray Goes Black
4. St. Louis Elegy
5. Riot In My House
6. Ode To Sad Disco
7. Phantasmagoria Blues
8. Quiver Syndrome
9. Harborview Hospital
10. Leviathan
11. Deep Black Vanishing Train
12. Tiny Grain Of Truth

Featuring 15 original tracks and boasting some stunning guest appearances, "Bubblegum" is simply one of Mark Lanegan's (Screaming Trees singer and Queens Of The Stone Age member) best albums, a stunning dark americana journey full of tales of remorse and loneliness delivered by his unique and emotive gravel-edged voice. Musical assistance on "Bubblegum" comes from luminaries including Queens Of The Stone Age bandmates Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri, PJ Harvey (who provides vocals on "Hit The City" and "Come To Me"), Afghan Whigs and Twilight Singers' Greg Dulli and Ween's Dean Ween amongst others.

‘Field Songs’ is the fifth solo album by Mark Lanegan, released in 2001.

TRACK LISTING

One Way Street
No Easy Action
Miracle
Pill Hill Serenade
Don’t Forget Me
Kimiko’s Dream House
Resurrection Song
Field Song
Low
Blues For D
She Done Too Much
Fix

‘Field Songs’ is the fifth solo album by Mark Lanegan, released in 2001.

TRACK LISTING

One Way Street
No Easy Action
Miracle
Pill Hill Serenade
Don’t Forget Me
Kimiko’s Dream House
Resurrection Song
Field Song
Low
Blues For D
She Done Too Much
Fix

Mark Lanegan first rose to fame with his band the Screaming Trees in the '90s. Like other noted artists Lanegan has carved out a strong identity of his own as a vocalist and songwriter informed by the blues but willing to take his darkly poetic sensibility wherever his muse was pointing him, from hard rock to electronica.

At the time, The Screaming Trees had recently disbanded and Lanegan was in the early years of his solo offerings (at this point he had released a mere five solo albums). The songs on Houston (Publishing Demos 2002), were written, recorded, then shelved until now, with the release of this12-song collection of previously unreleased demos via Ipecac.

Justice Records' Randall Jamail produced the album. Art was done by The Mekons' Jon Langford.

TRACK LISTING

1. No Cross
2. Two Horses
3. When It's In You (Methamphetamine Blues)
4. High Life
5. I'll Go Where You Send Me
6. Grey Goes Black
7. The Primitives
8. Blind
9. Halcyon Daze
10. Nothing Much To Mention
11. A Suite For Dying Love
12. Way To Tomorrow

‘Whiskey For The Holy Ghost’ is the second solo album from Mark Lanegan, originally released in 1994.

The album builds upon the roots-music foundation Lanegan established with his debut ‘The Winding Sheet’.

Released during the grunge explosion of the early 1990s, ‘Whiskey For The Holy Ghost’ showcases Lanegan’s growing maturity as a songwriter and vocalist. Lyrically, Lanegan continues to delve into the darker side of the human experience on songs like ‘Borracho’ and the biblical ‘Pendulum’.

Dan Peters of Mudhoney guests on the album, playing drums on the songs ‘Borracho’ and ‘House A Home’.

TRACK LISTING

The River Rise
Borracho
House A Home
Kingdoms Of Rain
Carnival
Riding The Nightmare
El Sol
Dead On You
Shooting Gallery
Sunrise
Pendulum
Judas Touch
Beggar’s Blues

‘Whiskey For The Holy Ghost’ is the second solo album from Mark Lanegan, originally released in 1994.

The album builds upon the roots-music foundation Lanegan established with his debut ‘The Winding Sheet’.

Released during the grunge explosion of the early 1990s, ‘Whiskey For The Holy Ghost’ showcases Lanegan’s growing maturity as a songwriter and vocalist. Lyrically, Lanegan continues to delve into the darker side of the human experience on songs like ‘Borracho’ and the biblical ‘Pendulum’.

Dan Peters of Mudhoney guests on the album, playing drums on the songs ‘Borracho’ and ‘House A Home’.

TRACK LISTING

The River Rise
Borracho
House A Home
Kingdoms Of Rain
Carnival
Riding The Nightmare
El Sol
Dead On You
Shooting Gallery
Sunrise
Pendulum
Judas Touch
Beggar’s Blues

‘The Winding Sheet’ is Mark Lanegan’s 1990 solo debut. It showcases his adept skills as a lyricist and his deep, soulful voice.

Highlights include ‘Mockingbirds’, ‘Ugly Sunday’ and the haunting ‘Wild Flowers’.

The late Kurt Cobain lends vocals to ‘Down In The Dark’ and for the folk classic ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’ Cobain contributes guitar and vocals and Krist Novoselic plays bass. Nirvana would later also cover ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’ on their ‘Unplugged’ album.

‘The Winding Sheet’ was produced by Jack Endino, Lanegan and Mike Johnson.

TRACK LISTING

Mockingbirds
Museum
Undertow
Ugly Sunday
Down In The Dark
Wild Flowers
Eyes Of A Child
The Winding Sheet
Woe
Ten Feet Tall
Where Did You Sleep Last Night
Juarez
I Love You Little Girl* (Vinyl Only Extra Track)

Over the last decade, Lanegan and Garwood have worked in tangent on 2013’s Black Pudding as well as on Lanegan’s solo records (Garwood contributed to 2012’s Blues Funeral and 2017’s Gargoyle after which he toured as part of Lanegan’s band). Writing and recording was split between studio collaboration and sharing music between Garwood’s home in London and Lanegan’s in Los Angeles. Elsewhere, technology helped make the duo’s transatlantic working relationships relatively easy.

“Over the years, we’ve recorded together and apart. This time, I started this record alone, with many animals as company,” says Garwood. “It flowed, I set to work and out it came. Our music is instinct, there is not much talking about it, just creating. I think that if you are at peace with your work, and feeling it right, it flows, and can feel ‘easy’. Music isn't meant to be hard. Though sometimes it can burn you to ashes. Making music for a singer, so they can inhabit it with a song means hitting the right soul buttons. There is no hit without a miss. It is a healing record, for us the makers, and for the listeners. It grows natural. We are gardeners of sonic feelings.”

While Black Pudding put Garwood’s mercurial guitar centre stage, With Animals is constructed from a different set of tools. Analogue and dust flecked, it sounds like Lanegan and Garwood have been holed up in a ’60s recording studio while the apocalypse rages outside. Tracks sit on loops that sounds like they’re straight out of There’s A Riot Goin’ On while sparse melodies nod in the direction of British electronic producers like Burial or Boards of Canada. Which is not to say it sounds like any of those things – this is a weird world all of their own design.

The record’s 12 songs are spectral and sinewy, often defined by the spaces in between the sounds. A ghost’s whistle weaves itself around a pulsing single note on Lonesome Infidel; Feast to Famine’s hard luck story floats above a guitar part so strung out and washed with distortion it’s become barely recognisable. It’s soul music for anyone who’s long since left the crossroads.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Brimming with morose energy and perfectly measured songwriting, an album from these two veterans was never going to be anything but mindblowing, and here we have it. Lanegan and Garwood have managed to meet perfectly in the dark ether between their two styles and 'With Animals' is every bit the perfect fusion.

TRACK LISTING

1 Save Me
2 Feast To Famine
3 My Shadow Life
4 Upon Doing Something Wrong
5 L.A Blue
6 Scarlett
7 Lonesome Infidel
8 With Animals
9 Ghost Stories
10 Spaceman
11 One Way Glass
12 Desert Song

‘Somebody’s Knocking’ is the eleventh album from Mark Lanegan. The album pulsates with energy echoing the punch of Eighties garage metallers Raw Power and the sweep of brooding atmosphere concreted by late Joy Division. With his love for electronic dance dating back his youth, tracks on ‘Somebody’s Knocking’ act as a callback to these days whilst simultaneously signifying a definitive shift in his sensibilities and very approach to songwriting.

It’s unsurprising then that ‘Somebody’s Knocking’ was cowritten by Rob Marshall - of Exit Calm and collaborator on 2017’s Gargoyle - alongside Martin Jenkins of electronica project Pye Corner Audio. In Lanegan’s own words, he approached working with the two “from the perspective of a fan.” This is unsurprising; Lanegan’s love for European dance music even led to Jenkins contributing album remixes for both 2015’s ‘A Thousand Miles Of Midnight’ and 2017’s ‘Still Life With Roses’, Pye Corner once again proving to be the perfect foil for Lanegan’s more overtly electronica infused approach.

Mostly recorded in LA over an eleven-day session, ‘Somebody’s Knocking’ is a shift in perspective for Lanegan, showcasing his maturing approach to songwriting and remaining instinctive, elusive and unflinchingly honest.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Lanegan's newest outing is full to the brim with gritty, southern rock drive and the undeniable musicality we've come to expect from him over the past 30 years, only this time we get the more electronic-leaning production of Martin of Pye Corner Audio and Rob Marshall of cooking vinyl, a match made in music heaven.

TRACK LISTING

1 Disbelief Suspension
2 Letter Never Sent
3 Night Flight To Kabul
4 Dark Disco Jag
5 Name And Number
6 Playing Nero
7 Radio Silence
8 Penthouse High
9 Paper Hat
10 Stitch It Up
11 Gazing From The Shore
12 War Horse
13 She Loved You
14 Two Bells Ringing At Once

There’s a singer with a voice 50 fathoms deep and the consistency of vitrified teak, who has been known to go to extremes in search of a song. Across continents, over oceans, through multiple time zones. From West Hollywood to... Tunbridge Wells. A long way – but Mark Lanegan knows the directions.

Early in 2016, Mark was at home in Los Angeles, working on some ideas for what might turn into his next album. He wasn’t too thrilled by what he was coming up with. Then he got an email from a friend, an English musician named Rob Marshall, thanking Mark for contributing to a new project he was putting together, Humanist. The pair first met in 2008, when Marshall’s former band Exit Calm supported Soulsavers, who Mark was singing with at the time. Now Rob was offering to write Mark some music to return the favour.

“I was like, Hey man, I’m getting ready to make a record, if you’ve got anything?’” Mark recalls. “Three days later he sent me *10 things… !”

In the meantime, Mark had written Blue Blue Sea, a rippling mood piece that he thought might be a more fruitful direction for his new record, and had the idea for a song called First Day Of Winter that felt like an apt closer. “It’s almost always how my records start,” he explains. “I let the first couple of songs tell me what the next couple should sound like, and it’s really the same process when I’m writing words. Whatever my first couple of lines are tell me what the next couple should be. I’ve always built things like that, sort of like making a sculpture I guess. Start with the raw material and let that point me in the direction I want to go. So, once I was pointed in that direction, the music that came from other sources, from Rob, I just went for the ones that helped me build this narrative that I had started already.”

Within an hour, Mark had written words and vocal lines for two of the pieces Rob had cooked up at Mount Sion Studios in Kent and pinged through the virtual clouds to California. Rob's music fitted perfectly with the direction Mark had been pondering: in essence, a more expansive progression from the moody Krautrock-influenced electronica textures of his two previous albums, Blues Funeral and Phantom Radio. Eventually, Rob Marshall would co-write six of the songs on the new Mark Lanegan Band album. “I was very thankful to become reacquainted with him,” Mark deadpans.

The remainder of the album was written, recorded and produced by Lanegan's longtime musical amanuensis Alain Johannes at his 11 AD base in West Hollywood. Everything was done and dusted within a month, unusually fast by Lanegan’s recent standards. Both Blues Funeral and Phantom Radio unfurled at leisurely pace over several months. But this time Johannes had only a fixed window of opportunity due to his ongoing touring commitments as a member of P.J. Harvey’s band. But Mark was sufficiently happy with the material to move swiftly, a reflection of contentment with his abilities as a singer and writer, which have now produced a huge body of work spanning a period of more than 30 years: whether it be his own solo records, or collaborative recordings with others, or going back to his legendary first band, the Screaming Trees.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Lanegan and band do it once again with this, the brilliant 'Gargoyle'. A more upbeat outlook than previous iterations, channelling the spirit of 60's psychedelia, stadium rock, downbeat folky moments and good ol fashioned songwriting talent. Brilliant.

TRACK LISTING

Death’s Head Tattoo
Nocturne
Blue Blue Sea
Beehive
Sister
Emperpor
Goodbye To Beauty
Drunk On Destruction
First Day Of Winter
Old Swan

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER"Mark Lanegan-primitive, brutal, and apocalyptic. What's not to love?" NICK CAVE"A stoned cold classic" IAN RANKIN'Mark Lanegan writes like he sings, from the pained heart of a damaged soul with brutal honesty' BOBBY GILLESPIE"Powerfully written and brutally, frighteningly honest" LUCINDA WILLIAMSA ROUGH TRADE AND MOJO BOOK OF THE YEARFrom the back of the van to the front of the bar, from the hotel room to the emergency room, Mark Lanegan takes us back to the sinister, needle-ridden streets of Seattle, to an alternative music scene that was simultaneously bursting with creativity and saturated with drugs. He tracks the tumultuous rise and fall of Screaming Trees, from a brawling, acid-rock bar band to world-famous festival favourites with an enduring legacy, and tells of his own personal struggles with addiction, culminating in homelessness, petty crime, and the tragic deaths of his closest friends.

Gritty, gripping and unflinchingly raw, SING BACKWARDS AND WEEP is about a man who learned how to drag himself from the wreckage, dust off the ashes, and keep living and creating. 'The most brutally honest rock memoir imaginable' DAILY TELEGRAPH

When considering any great work of art, be it a painting, a novel, or a piece of music, it’s natural to wonder what might have inspired it: ‘the story behind the song’. Mark Lanegan’s new album, Straight Songs Of Sorrow, flips that equation. Here are 15 songs inspired by a story: his life story, as documented by his own hand in his new memoir, Sing Backwards And Weep.

The book is a brutal, nerve-shredding read, thanks to Lanegan’s unsparing candour in recounting a journey from troubled youth in eastern Washington, through his drug-stained existence amid the ’90s Seattle rock scene, to an unlikely salvation at the dawn of the 21st century. There’s death and tragedy, yet also humour and hope, thanks to the tenacity which impels its host, even at his lowest moments. As Lanegan writes near the end: “I was the ghost that wouldn’t die.”

Today, Lanegan is a renowned songwriter and a much-coveted collaborator, as adept at electronica as with rock, constantly honing his indomitable voice: an asphalt-laced linctus for the soul. While the memoir documents a struggle to find peace with himself, his new album emphasis the extent to which he came to realise that music is his life.

“Writing the book, I didn’t get catharsis,” he chuckles. “All I got was a Pandora’s box full of pain and misery. I went way in, and remembered shit I’d put away 20 years ago. But I started writing these songs the minute I was done, and I realised there was a depth of emotion because they were all linked to memories from this book. It was a relief to suddenly go back to music. Then I realised that was the gift of the book: these songs. I’m really proud of this record.”

Straight Songs Of Sorrow combines musical trace elements from early Mark Lanegan albums with the synthesized constructs of later work. The meditative acoustic guitar fingerpicking – provided by Lamb Of God’s Mark Morton – on Apples From A Tree and Hanging On (For DRC) echo 1994’s Whiskey For The Holy Ghost. Yet one of that record’s touchstones was Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, echoed in the new album’s opener I Wouldn’t Want To Say, where Lanegan extemporises *à la Ballerina over musique concrète wave patterns generated by his latest favourite compositional tool, a miniature computer-synth called the Organelle. The lyric clings onto the music, emulating his book’s queasy momentum: *“Swinging from death… to revival.”

“That song is the explanation, the beginning and middle and end of that entire period of time,” Mark says. “The encapsulation of the entire experience, book and record. So I started with that.”

Lanegan affirms that every song references a specific episode or person in the book, albeit some more explicitly than others. Hanging On (For DRC) is a loving ode to his friend Dylan Carlson, genius progenitor of drone metal and a fellow unlikely survivor of Seattle’s narcotic dramas. “I was always unhappy, and he was the guy who was always smiling, even through my crazy schemes that eventually got both of us into a lot of trouble.” The richly cinematic mood of Daylight In The Nocturnal House, meanwhile, paints a more impressionistic scene: factory smoke, rain, a phone call from *“somebody’s grand-daughter”, who’ll *“pay to make somebody crawl/And send you to heaven.” The singer’s perspective is ambiguous. “I got into a lot of shady business in those years,” Lanegan says.

Longtime observers will recognise some familiar recurrent themes. Death. Destruction. Bad behaviour. In the case of At Zero Below, all in the same song. “Yes, I did burn someone with a cigarette,” Mark says. “Yes, I did spit in somebody’s face – maybe more than once in my life. Stuff I’m not proud of. That song is also about one of my many ex-girlfriends who is no longer with us. It’s all linked to the book.”

At Zero Below features two of the album’s many stellar guests. Singing admonitory harmonies with himself is Greg Dulli, another ’90s alt-rock veteran, Lanegan’s erstwhile partner in mischief and fellow Gutter Twin. The song’s incantatory fiddle is played by The Bad Seeds’ Warren Ellis. No lesser figure than Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones provides Mellotron on the serpentine Ballad Of A Dying Rover (*“I’m just a sick sick man/My days are numbered”). Aside from mandolin, all Daylight In The Nocturnal House’s cobwebbed atmospherics are by Portishead’s Adrian Utley. Ed Harcourt is Lanegan’s pick for album MVP (“He’s all over it – everything that he plays, piano or Wurlitzer, becomes magical”), with special mention to bassist Jack Bates, son of Peter Hook; that duo make especially distinctive contributions to Churchbells, Ghosts a bleakly humorous lament to the drudgery of life on the road (*“I’d ask somebody for a quarter/If there were someone for me to phone”).

Ketamine is a numb blues, with Lanegan shadowed by Cold Cave vocalist Wesley Eisold, who inspired the album’s only overt drug song (ironically, about a drug that Lanegan has never actually taken). “Wes is good friends with Genesis P-Orridge,” explains Mark, “and he said the last time he saw Gen she was in a hospital bed, saying to this priest, ‘No thank you sir, I don’t need any last rites, but if you have any ketamine that would be perfect.’” He laughs. “So I immediately wrote that song and had him sing on it. There’s drugs throughout the record – they’re rife in Bleed All Over – but that song was the only real specific one.”

The material on the last two Mark Lanegan Band albums had Lanegan’s words set to music by various other sources. But aside from the Mark Morton collaborations, Straight Songs Of Sorrow was built from the ground up by Lanegan alone, aided by producer Alain Johannes, his longtime consigliere. Only two other songs have shared credits, and even these stay in-house: Burying Ground and Eden Lost And Found were co-written by Mark’s wife Shelley Brien, with whom he also duets on the Rita Coolidge/Kris Kristofferson-style ballad This Game Of Love. “Let’s put it this way,” says Mark. “Every girlfriend I’ve ever had, for any amount of time, left me. All the good ones left me! Until my current wife. It was great to sing that with Shelley, it really shows she’s a great singer. And it has a depth of emotion that I’m not used to. This is a more honest record than I’ve probably ever made.”

A crushing twin-song centrepiece proves that. First, Stockholm City Blues, a sparse, beautiful, strings and finger-picking meditation on the remorse code of addiction (*“I pay for this pain I put into my blood”). Then, the seven-minute epic Skeleton Key, a supplicatory confessional (“I’m ugly inside and out there is no denying”) that also provides the album title. It’s a remarkable performance from a man whose punishment for plumbing the depths was simply to continue further along the road. “My wife called that my ‘redemption song’,” says Lanegan.

And indeed, there is a happy ending to this story. Just as his book closes with the hero overcoming adversity and turning, battered but cleansed, towards a new day, so Straight Songs Of Sorrow closes with Eden Lost And Found. *“Sunrise coming up baby/To burn the dirt right off of me,” marvels Lanegan, with his words echoed by Simon Bonney of Crime & The City Solution, an all-time hero. “I wanted to make a positive song to end this record, because that’s the way the book ended,” Mark says. “And what’s more positive than to have your favourite singer sing with you?”

Straight Songs Of Sorrow feels both definitive and unique, a culmination of its creator’s arc yet also indicative of the energy that drives him onto future horizons. No wonder Lanegan is proud.

“I do feel this is something special for me, something honest,” he says. “’Cos records are not real life, man – in case no one told ya. They’re just a fake version of life!” Mark Lanegan laughs. “Well, at least you have one now that’s a little closer to being real. Unfortunately, it’s by me.”

Keith Cameron.

TRACK LISTING

1. I Wouldn't Want To Say
2. Apples From A Tree
3. This Game Of Love
4. Ketamine
5. Bleed All Over
6. Churchbells, Ghosts
7. Internal Hourglass Discussion
8. Stockholm City Blues
9. Skeleton Key
10. Daylight In The Nocturnal House
11. Ballad Of A Dying Rover
12. Hanging On (For DRC)
13. Burying Ground
14. At Zero Below
15. Eden Lost And Found

Mark Lanegan has teamed up with multi-instrumentalist Duke Garwood to release Black Pudding via Heavenly Recordings.

Lanegan, never one to shy away from unique collaborations, has previously worked with Isobel Campbell, Greg Dulli and as a member of The Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age and Soulsavers. "Duke Garwood is one of my all time favorite artists," said Lanegan. "Working with him has been one of the best experiences of my recording life." Lanegan and Garwood met a few years ago while playing on the same bill and Garwood was a frequent opener on Lanegan's recent European tour.

Garwood has often been described in the press as Lanegan's "spiritual cousin across the Atlantic waters." He has been widely praised as a master bluesman, with The Quietus saying "The combination of Garwood's murmured vocals and the sound he gets out of his guitar - which ranges from a rolling, loose finger-picking to shuddering howls of feedback - has a hypnotic effect" and The Mirror dubbing him as "London's leading exponent of the wheezy broke-down blues."

Black Pudding was recorded at Pink Duck Studios in Burbank, California by Justin Smith (Tegan & Sara, The Hives) and mixed by his Queens of the Stone Age associate Alain Johannes.

Lanegan's chief compositional tool on Phantom Radio was his phone – specifically an app called Funk Box. “I didn’t bother to hook up my 909 and 808 this time,” he says, “because the app had ’em. I’d write drum parts with it then add music with the synthesizer or the guitar.” The album grew organically from these synthetic roots, taking in Mark’s ongoing love of Krautrock and also an ’80s new wave show on Sirius satellite radio, his favoured aural companion as he drives around Los Angeles. “They have a few good shows but the ‘80s one in particular I like,” he says. “That’s the music that was happening when I started making music. And although the Trees drew on Nuggets psychedelia, 13th Floor Elevators and Love, we were actually listening to Echo And The Bunnymen, Rain Parade, the Gun Club. A lot of British post-punk. We loved that stuff. I just waited until I was in my late forties before I started ripping it off.”

Lanegan’s generous collaborative spirit sees him deliver an excellent co-write with British guitarist Duke Garwood, with whom he made last year’s dustbowl-desolate Black Pudding, and who now offers the music for I Am The Wolf, a Lanegan signature tune. Mark’s favourite song on the album, meanwhile, is Torn Red Heart, an intensely tender meditation for a broken heart that’s like The Velvet Underground’s Pale Blue Eyes orchestrated by Angelo Badalamenti. He also has a special mention for Floor Of The Ocean, which balances sheer catchiness with a deceptively bleak lyrical reflection on a life lived on the hard shoulder: “Clear eyes, can’t avoid the searchlight/Hope that they don’t find me/Find me where I’m lying.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Harvest Home
2. Judgement Time
3. Floor Of The Ocean
4. The Killing Season
5. Seventh Day
6. I Am The Wolf
7. Torn Red Heart
8. Waltzing In Blue
9. The Wild People
10. Death Trip To Tulsa

Lanegan's chief compositional tool on Phantom Radio was his phone – specifically an app called Funk Box. “I didn’t bother to hook up my 909 and 808 this time,” he says, “because the app had ’em. I’d write drum parts with it then add music with the synthesizer or the guitar.” The album grew organically from these synthetic roots, taking in Mark’s ongoing love of Krautrock and also an ’80s new wave show on Sirius satellite radio, his favoured aural companion as he drives around Los Angeles. “They have a few good shows but the ‘80s one in particular I like,” he says. “That’s the music that was happening when I started making music. And although the Trees drew on Nuggets psychedelia, 13th Floor Elevators and Love, we were actually listening to Echo And The Bunnymen, Rain Parade, the Gun Club. A lot of British post-punk. We loved that stuff. I just waited until I was in my late forties before I started ripping it off.”

Lanegan’s generous collaborative spirit sees him deliver an excellent co-write with British guitarist Duke Garwood, with whom he made last year’s dustbowl-desolate Black Pudding, and who now offers the music for I Am The Wolf, a Lanegan signature tune. Mark’s favourite song on the album, meanwhile, is Torn Red Heart, an intensely tender meditation for a broken heart that’s like The Velvet Underground’s Pale Blue Eyes orchestrated by Angelo Badalamenti. He also has a special mention for Floor Of The Ocean, which balances sheer catchiness with a deceptively bleak lyrical reflection on a life lived on the hard shoulder: “Clear eyes, can’t avoid the searchlight/Hope that they don’t find me/Find me where I’m lying.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Harvest Home
2. Judgement Time
3. Floor Of The Ocean
4. The Killing Season
5. Seventh Day
6. I Am The Wolf
7. Torn Red Heart
8. Waltzing In Blue
9. The Wild People
10. Death Trip To Tulsa

‘I’ll Take Care Of You’ is the fourth solo album by former Screaming Trees vocalist Mark Lanegan. It features Lanegan’s interpretation of songs from a wide variety of songwriters, including Tim Rose, Tim Hardin, Booker T. Jones and Buck Owens. ‘I’ll Take Care Of You’ also includes the traditional song ‘Little Sadie’.

‘Scraps At Midnight’ is the third solo album by Mark Lanegan. It was produced by Mark Lanegan and longtime collaborator Mike Johnson. ‘Scraps At Midnight’ could arguably be considered the final instalment of a trilogy of albums (preceded by ‘The Winding Sheet’ and ‘Whiskey For The Holy Ghost’) which feature the songwriter’s interpretation of American roots music set to troubling lyrics that explore themes of loss, sin and redemption.

TRACK LISTING

Hospital Roll Call
Hotel
Stay
Bell Black Ocean
Last One In The World
Praying Ground
Wheels
Waiting On A Train
Day & Night
Because Of This

Mr and Mrs Norlander aren't ashamed of their affiliations, no they're not (to my knowledge) masters of a sado-masochistic cult (but being a little masochistic helps when you listen to this) they are out and proud pomp-rockers. Using the ex-Dio and Black Sabbath drummer Vinnie Appice and Mark Boals from Yngwie Malmsteen's band, Lana rips through the fabric of the cosmos at a hell of a pace, but still has time for some tender ballads like "(Life Is) Only A Dream" - 'I've seen years of joy and years of sorrow / Everything good is worth the wait / Today is only yesterday's tomorrow / You're the master of your own fate'. I can't argue with that.

Nonesuch releases on vinyl, for the first time, k.d. lang’s 2008 landmark album, Watershed, which represented the first time she assumed the role of producer, as well as writer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist. As the title suggests, it represents a milestone in lang’s groundbreaking career.

As with any challenge she’s met in her unparalleled career, lang is a natural behind the boards in the studio. Watershed has an intimate feel and a sophisticated sound that highlights the warmth in lang’s voice, the maturity of her songwriting and the simple beauty of her arrangements. The Grammy Award-winning artist draws on her wealth of experience with an impressively wide range of genres to fashion a revealing portrait of the artist at that time. She explained that “Watershed is like a culmination of everything I’ve done – there’s a little bit of jazz, a little country, a little of the Ingénue sound, a little Brazilian touch. It really feels like the way I hear music, this mash-up of genres, and I think it reflects all the styles that have preceded this in my catalogue. I didn’t feel the need to be genre-specific because this experience felt so wide open.” The New York Times observed ‘Few singers command such perfection of pitch. Her voice, at once beautiful and unadorned and softened with a veil of smoke, invariably hits the middle of a note and remains there.’

lang recorded Watershed in Los Angeles with such longtime collaborators as keyboardist Teddy Borowiecki, guitarist David Pilch and pedal steel player Greg Leisz, plus special guests the trumpeter Jon Hassell and banjo virtuoso Noam Pikelny (The Punch Brothers).

TRACK LISTING

1. I Dream Of Spring
2. Je Fais La Planche
3. Coming Home
4. Once In A While
5. Thread
6. Close Your Eyes
7. Sunday
8. Flame Of The Uninspired
9. Johanna
10. Upstream
11. Shadow And The Frame
12. Jealous Dog

Second album from West London, singer-songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist, Oscar Lang. A split from his childhood sweetheart sent Lang spiralling, dramatically changing the course of the follow-up to the psychedelic-tinged fuzzy-rock of his 2021 debut Chew The Scenery at the same time as driving Lang into the most creatively fruitful period of his short career. The diversion has resulted in Look Now, an astounding record that makes Lang’s previous output sound like he was just testing the waters. Chew The Scenery and three melodically-breezy EPs that preceded it introduced Lang as a songwriter of rare talents but here is where he really lays down a marker, emerging with an album that takes in playful hooks, poignant lyricism, orchestral swells, ba-roque-pop instrumentation, a record that’s expansive but never overblown, intimate at the same time as being epic. It is his definitive artistic statement.

TRACK LISTING

A Song About Me
Everything Unspoken
Crawl
Leave Me Alone
Blow Ur Cash
Circle Line
Take Me Apart
On God
One Foot First
When You Were A Child (feat. Molly Payton)

Langan, Frost & Wane is the collaboration of three songwriters, writing in the folk tradition and drawing candidly from the folk revival of the mid-twentieth century. It began as a vessel for Brian Langan (Langan) and RJ Gilligan (Frost) to explore a territory they otherwise had no outlet for in their music. While Langan's past work with The Swims and Needle points was geared more towards well-crafted pop and boogie, Frost's output from Meddlesome Bells and Dark Web was heavier, more riffs - more punk. It was in Langan, Frost, & Wane that they found a common ground. As work on the album began, themes emerged. What is it that allows a song to be playful, yet somber? How can the music tell a story on its own, apart from words? It was the same territory that the wild raucous flutes found on early Incredible String Band occupied, or better still, the second half of Donovan's A Gift From A Flower To A Garden.

They set about to capture it. Frost ran a small studio and field recording label in Philadelphia, Bells Records, allowing the duo to dive into different tracking arrangements and experimentations, building out each song organically over a period of time. After wrapping up a season of sessions, Frost suggested Nam Wayne (Wane) to Langan as a possible third collaborator. Wane and Frost had been trading folk songs for some time and it became clear he was on a similar quest. After an evening of impromptu song writing among the three it was settled, and the project solidified. The group is driven by Langan and Frost's finger-plucked melodies on guitar, complimented with found sound, instrumentation of the Middle and Far East, India, the Mediterranean, and Appalachia. It is the belief of these songwriters that they succeeded in what they set out to do. This body of work is the culmination of those long hours spent searching for what is not lost, but perhaps sometimes forgotten

TRACK LISTING

1. Perhaps The Sourcerer
2. The Dandelion
3. Falcon Ridge
4. The Ballad Of Babe & The Devil
5. King Laughter
6. Everyday Phoenix
7. Frozen Shell
8. Learn The Names Of The Plants
9. Libra Moon
10. The Alchemist Of Hazy Row
11. The Weaver & The Traveler
12. Orange Magick
13. Everwing
14. She Walks Alone
15. Diomyria

Spiritual Jazz paths always open up unexplored dimensions, this is the clear impression revealed by this superb and ambitious first double album by Lina Langendorf and her new band. The Swedish saxophonist (OK Star Orchestra, James Yorkston, Nina Persson & The Second Hand Orchestra) seems to be blowing in the lesson of the great sacred monsters of the instrument such as Wayne Shorter, Pharoah Sanders or Archie Shepp, but revising it in a melting pot of bolder contaminations. The secret lies in embracing different musical traditions and genres in the flow of a futuristic, psychedelic sound in constant metamorphosis. Ethio Jazz may marry Mali Blues, Afro Beat, Scandinavian melanolic melodies and tonalities from the Mandinka tradition. Everything, however, is focused toward a lysergic fury of rhythmic euphoria. Acid keyboards draw astral and hypnotic grooves, kaleidoscopic carpets, exotic intergalactic and satellite patterns; a hymn toward the Cosmos that still smacks of Sun Ra-like solar myths and Mulatu Astatke's East African winds. Co-produced with Sing a song fighter.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Being compared to Wayne Shorter, Pharoah Sanders or Archie Shepp must be quite a lot to get your head around when you're an up and comer. But I can see how Langendorf United have garnered such grandiose comparisons. This is ace!

Carted off to Muscle Shoals, Alabama under the cloud of dark politics, Welsh-born, Chicago-based punk-rocker-turned-Americana musical icon and revered visual artist Jon Langford and a band of alchemists and merry-makers filed into NuttHouse studio, a one-story former bank building in Sheffield, AL, the day after the 2016 election and four days later emerged with Four Lost Souls.

It's an album of pure Americana - not just because of where it was recorded, or that many of its players helped put Muscle Shoals on the musical map, but because it is beyond the news of the day. It goes to a place where the differences between country, soul, blues, and rock and roll are blown aside by the warm, languid breezes. The music has no time for such petty details because in the moment, in that place, was the sound of sweet agreement. 

'Lost on Land & Sea' is Jon Langford's Men of Gwent third album for Country Mile Records - The band spent time locked away in a rural mid Wales studio recording every track 'live' with minimal overdubs

Taking local stories and individuals from their hometown, Newport. The 12 songs weave in and out of a mostly true but partly imagined landscape where all the characters are set adrift at the mercy of the tides of time. The cover art by Jon Langford returns the infamous Newport Cherub (the town emblem on the old bridge) from Manchester back to Newport after the Stone Roses borrowed it for the cover of their 'Love Spreads' single in 1994!

TRACK LISTING

1. Commercial Street
2. The Last Murenger
3. How Bright Are The Stars? 
4. Ruby
5. Mrs Hammer's Dream
6. Tenby Boatman
7. Honest Ken
8. Encounted With A Selkie Off Llangranog
9. River Daughter
10. Ghost Light
11. Lost In The Wentwood 
12. Black Gold At Six Bells

Just one year on from their debut album, Langkamer return with new EP ‘Red Thread Route’, a freewheeling testament to the highs and lows of the road. Written whilst touring the UK and Europe, it’s a more kinetic turn for the band, one that amplifies their trademark blend of slacker rock and old Americana.

From the anthemic twists and turns of lead single ‘Total Motion’, to the soft country reverie of ‘So Long Little Rock’, in every song you can feel the listless locomotion of a band in transit. At times crawling, at times careening, it’s a dynamic, indomitable record, one that reveals Langkamer’s prowess in every riff and rhythm.

The EP sees Langkamer join forces with several stalwarts of the Bristol music scene. Willie J Healey and Clara Mann lend their unmistakable vocals, while production was deftly handled by the dynamic duo of Alfie Tyson-Brown (Katy J Pearson) and Jack Ogborne (Bingo Fury).

Moreover, as a bonus, the vinyl edition of ‘Red Thread Route’ comes with the double A-side of ‘Teeth’ and ‘Soul Bucket’, released at the beginning of this year.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A beautiful suite of country-tinged indie gems from Langkamer, with a couple of notable guest appearances. Athletic bass licks and swooning guitar weave around each-other, resulting in a rich and complex audio tapestry. A lovely record.

TRACK LISTING

1. Balsedreef 02:12
2. Total Motion (ft. Willie J Healey) 02:10
3. Hamlet 02:13
4. Running The Reds 03:42
5. Cotton Evening (ft. Clara Mann) 02:34
6. So Long Little Rock 02:26

It's clear from the starting notes of Langkamer's debut West Country that there is a wealth of influence swimming around the gruffly uttered vocals and lightly driven guitar squeals, but it ends up being really unlike anything i've heard before. There are echoes of The Dodos in the insistent percussive blasts and jaunty, multi-part overlaid vocals but it's more country than that.. it's a sound that is wrought skilfully from a modern musical landscape that is more focused on the skilfull blending or stylistic juxtaposition of many different elements. 

'Humdinger' for instance could easily be a Damaged Goods smash, with garage-y hooks and 12-bar structure, but it's imbued with a jubilant and playful lightness which for me turns it from a great record with an attitude to something a bit more well-meaning and fun. Pieces like 'Mountain Lion' have the off-kilter indie syncopation of Moldy Peaches or Pavement but move away from the sometimes purposefully shambolic nature of the aforementioned (who I love as well, by the way) with a brilliantly written selection of genuinely tuneful pieces that ooze melody throughout. 

This is a beautifully done selection, and would be a great live show to watch too. Big tip on this one. 

TRACK LISTING

1. The Return Of Little Big Man 02:38
2. Humdinger 02:35
3. Sea Mills 01:11
4. The Earthquake 02:58
5. Mountain Lion 03:25
6. Polly You Should See Me Now 02:25
7. Wine Of Wild Orchids 01:02
8. Marathon 03:35
9. Van Pelt 01:15
10. The Ugliest Man In Bristol 03:04
11. Acker Bilk 03:58
12. Up Shit Creek 05:17

“Lankum are the darlings of Dublin’s 300 year-old folk scene.” Colin Irwin – The Guardian

Lankum are one of the most talked about bands to come out of Ireland in decades. They are a Dublin four-piece who combine distinctive four-part vocal harmonies with arrangements of uilleann pipes, concertina, accordion, fiddle and guitar. Their repertoire spans humorous Dublin music-hall ditties and street-songs, classic ballads from the Traveller tradition, traditional Irish and American dance tunes, and their own original material. The band comprises of brothers Ian and Daragh Lynch along with Cormac MacDiarmada and Radie Peat. When not on tour Ian lectures in Irish Folklore and musical traditions in University College Dublin, while Cormac and Radie grew up as champion traditional players, on the fiddle and concertina, respectively. Yet Lankum are not purely trad themselves, in the same way The Pogues were more urban music. Rough-hewn and raw, they’re the edgiest thing in Dublin right now.

Having spent the last number of years performing as ‘Lynched’ a play on Ian and Daragh’s family name Lynch, the band decided that they would no longer continue with the name due to the unavoidable implications that it has in regards to acts of racist violence. Their new name comes from the ballad ‘False Lankum’, as sung by the Irish Traveller John Reilly Jr.

The band was originally formed by brothers Ian and Daragh Lynch in the early 2000’s, and has since progressed through a number of incarnations, culminating in the four-piece group playing today. The release of their album 'Cold Old Fire' and a subsequent appearance on the BBC television programme, 'Later... with Jools Holland' cemented their reputation as a band that successfully crosses genres. Lankum are busy breathing new life into old music.

Although an acoustic group whose repertoire is fundamentally based on traditional song, influenced by legends such as Frank Harte, Planxty, The Dubliners and the Watersons, subtle traces of the group’s collective influences can be detected, ranging from American old-timey music to krautrock and drone.

False Lankum follows their 2019 breakthrough album The Livelong Day, which paved the way for critical and commercial success, earning them that year’s RTE Choice Music Prize (the Irish equivalent of the Album of the Year Grammy) and the #8 spot on NPR Music’s Best Albums of the Year list. Drawing on traditional folk songs, Lankum put their own dark, distinctive mark onto each, leaning into heavy drones and sonic distortion that imparts new intensity and beauty into each track. This record sees the band cement their breakout from the folk genre, creating bold, contemporary music that may be fashioned from traditional elements but is firmly new, sitting comfortably alongside Rough Trade labelmates like black midi and Gilla Band. False Lankum also features two original tracks, ‘Netta Perseus’ and ‘The Turn’, both penned by the group’s Daragh Lynch.

‘Go Dig My Grave’ was discovered by Lankum’s Radie Peat who learned the particular version on the album from the singing of Jean Ritchie, who recorded it in 1963 on the album Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson at Folk City. It is a member of a family of songs which seem to be largely made up of what are known as ‘floating verses’, originally composed as stanzas of various different ballads, some of which date back as far as the 17th century.

“'Our interpretation of the traditional song Go Dig My Grave is one that centres around the emotion of grief – all-consuming, unbearable and absolute” explain Lankum, “A visceral physical reaction to something that the body and mind are almost incapable of processing. The second part of the song is inspired by the Irish tradition of keening (from the Irish caoineadh) – a traditional form of lament for the deceased. Regarded by some as opening up ‘perilous channels of communication with the dead’, the practice came under severe censure from the catholic church in Ireland from the 17th century on.”

From the start, Dublin’s Lankum planned for False Lankum, their fourth record and third for Rough Trade, to feel like a complete piece – a progression and a journey for the listener. “We wanted to create more contrast on the record so the light parts would be almost spiritual and the dark parts would be incredibly dark, even horror inducing,” they explain. The album’s 12 tracks, composed of 10 traditional songs and two originals, show the four-piece using a new palate to colour their sound in an increasingly experimental way, alongside longtime producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy.

TRACK LISTING

1. Go Dig My Grave
2. Clear Away In The Morning
3. Fugue I
4. Master Crowley’s
5. Newcastle
6. Fugue II
7. Netta Perseus
8. The New York Trader
9. Lord Abore And Mary Flynn
10. Fugue III
11. On A Monday Morning
12. The Turn

Dublin fourpiece Lankum release their new album ‘The Livelong Day’. Made up of brothers Ian and Daragh Lynch, Cormac MacDiarmada and Radie Peat, Lankum have gained worldwide acclaim for their first two albums and captivating, often euphoric live performances. ‘The Livelong Day’ successfully blends alternative folk and psychedelia. Lankum honour the sacredness of traditional Irish tunes but allow them to metamorphose, to grow and breathe like the heavy, ancient breath of the Uilleann pipes which seethe beneath the tracks of their third studio album (and second with Rough Trade). “Drone is a big part of traditional music because the Uilleann pipes are indigenous to Ireland, so we’re ramping up that history and taking it as far as we can.”

This is the idea found at the core of the universe created in ‘The Livelong Day’; expanding and emboldening that which is already playing out in history. Alongside the traditional songs on the record, there are two originals, the haunting ‘Young People’ and the tragic beauty of ‘Hunting The Wren’. With ‘The Livelong Day’, Lankum are about to fully cement their reputation as one of the most unique and talked about groups to emerge from Ireland in decades.

TRACK LISTING

The Wild Rover
The Young People
Ode To Lullaby
Bear Creek
Katie Cruel
The Dark Eyed Gypsy
The Pride Of Petravore
Hunting The Wren

Two years on from the critically acclaimed Until The Colours Run, Lanterns On The Lake return with their third full-length record Beings. It marks another leap in the band’s development as they expand their range, pushing the envelope of their signature atmospheric rock and scaling new heights of absorbing song-craft.

Work on Beings began in February 2014, hard on the heels of successful tours of Europe and North America. It proved to be a productive period. “The ideas came effortlessly and in abundance,” vocalist Hazel Wilde says of the writing process. “At first we had no expectations, no prescribed ideas of how we wanted the songs to turn out. We were just writing and playing together because that’s what we’d always done.”

This was made possible by their setup, working in splendid isolation; writing, rehearsing and recording in their Newcastle rehearsal room meant the results were undiluted by outside influence. Imaginatively produced and mixed by guitarist Paul Gregory, it’s also his experience that helped yield such compelling results. This allows Beings to move seamlessly from airy, chiming beauty to dense, forbidding soundscapes - sometimes in the same song - while still feeling like the product of a cohesive unit, retaining the band’s spark. “We wanted it to be more raw,” Wilde says of the record. “At its darkest points, we wanted it to feel like you’d dived into the deepest part our dreams and were taking a look around. At its lightest we wanted it to feel like you were coming up for air.”

Opening song ‘Of Dust and Matter’ strikes just such a balance. The band’s most sinister moment yet, it prowls out of a burble of radio static and feedback, propelled by ominous piano chords as its menacing pulse builds to a tumbling climax of almost discordant, warped guitar parts and the fractured drumming of Ol Ketteringham. “In my greatness I vowed to destroy all I am,” Wilde sings. “It brings out the best in me.”

It’s an interesting early lyric, and it soon becomes apparent that this is a braver, more headstrong Lanterns on the Lake, a band now less about floating on water than racing across land, eager and with points to prove. Often their melancholy necessarily turns to action. “Fractured lives like faultlines, unto the breach my friends if you will” is Wilde’s call to arms on ‘Faultlines’, a critique of austerity, as the band turn in a cavalry charge with her voice as the clarion call.

Wilde's lyrics also shudder with evocative and often surprisingly dark imagery in songs that attempt to understand the world around her, built from charged moments of universal insight. “There is a sense of the need to connect to something; the need to find meaning,” she says of the material. “There’s such frustrating injustice in the world, yet this feels like a time of disconnection where we’re encouraged to celebrate the shallow side of culture. This record carries that sense of yearning for something greater.”

This gives Beings immediacy, depth and resonance as it touches on community, love, culture, politics and self-examination, and our own place and limitations within each. “I want to walk with the brave, give me a good day, I want to feel human” Wilde sings on the graceful ‘I’ll Stall Them’, exploring the importance of connection, kinship and reconciliation.

Beings is the engrossing product of a band operating in total harmony to the point where their music creates its own idiosyncratic world whilst also distilling outside concerns into it. The horizons open to Lanterns on the Lake are now as broad as the sweep of these beautiful songs.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Starker, darker but still really beutiful, the Lanterns'third is an engrossing listen.

It’s strange – not to mention fundamentally disconcerting - to live through turbulent times. Yet as many feel like the world is slipping out of control, artists are enlivened as they seek to make sense of the shifting sands. Hazel Wilde of Lanterns on the Lake is now a songwriter necessarily emboldened. On Spook the Herd, the band’s fourth record, her voice and preoccupations rise to the fore like never before. In tandem, the band break new ground on a set of songs that are direct and crucial.

Wilde does nothing less than dive headlong into the existential crises of our times. Beginning with the record’s title - a pointed comment at the dangerously manipulative tactics of ideologues - its nine songs turn the microscope to issues including our hopelessly polarized politics, social media, addiction, grief and the climate crisis.

The world is brought into focus, but Wilde’s style is not declarative. She also proves herself a songwriter possessed of a rare talent for finding the personal contours to contemporary issues, fully inhabiting them to make them real. Recorded as live where possible, the band’s natural touchstones of gauzy dream-pop and monumental post rock still float in the air, but listening to Lanterns on the Lake now feels like actually sitting in the corner of the room as they play. As guitarist and producer Paul Gregory says of approaching their fourth album, “There was a sense of release in terms of what kind of music we felt we could make. The idea of what kind of band you’re supposed to be really disappeared. It was great; you felt you could do whatever you like.”

TRACK LISTING

1. When It All Comes True
2. Baddies
3. Every Atom
4. Blue Screen Beams
5. Before They Excavate
6. Swimming Lessons
7. Secrets & Medicine
8. This Is Not A Drill
9. A Fitting End

This self-produced fifth studio album follows 2020’s Mercury nominated Spook the Herd. Its nine songs are existential meditations examining life’s possibilities, facing the hand we’ve been dealt and the question of whether we can change our individual and collective destinies.

Singer and songwriter Hazel Wilde has no doubt that motherhood fundamentally shifted her perspective. “Writing songs requires a certain level of self-indulgence, and songwriters can be prone to dwelling on themselves,” she says. “Motherhood made me aware at having a different stake in the world. I’ve got to believe that there’s a better way and an alternative future to the one we’ve been hurtling towards. I’ve also got to believe that I could be better as a person, too.”

Mixed by the band’s guitarist Paul Gregory, in the bedroom of his home in North Shields, there is a sense of time and place that runs deep throughout this record. Given some of its themes, a biting irony is found in an entire previous version of the record being discarded. Mental health struggles and personal problems in the band had a big impact on how the initial version took shape. “Despite trying everything we could to make it work we reached the point where we just had to stop” Wilde explains. Drummer Ol Ketteringham parted ways with the band, something Wilde says was “heartbreakingly difficult as we were and still are extremely close”.

The band scrapped nearly a year’s worth of work, regressing to song demos with just Wilde performing with a single instrument as they began again with Radiohead’s Philip Selway joining the album sessions on drums. “Philip brought an energy to the songs that reignited our belief in them,” says Wilde. “Within a few weeks we had a whole other version of the album and things felt very different,” Wilde continues. “We had changed the destiny of the record.”

It’s a heartening idea. Despite the difficulties in its genesis, Versions of Us is the most empowering album yet from the band. In exploring whether we can change fate or are doomed to repeat the same mistakes in life, this powerful collection of songs ultimately alights on hope. 

TRACK LISTING

1 The Likes Of Us
2 Real Life
3 Vatican
4 String Theory
5 Thumb Of War
6 The Saboteur
7 Locust
8 Rich Girls
9 Last Transmission

Jessy Lanza's second album 'Oh No' is addressed to her own constant nervousness. The pressure of music making, which used to calm her nerves, has led to a whole new world of contingencies that stoke the anxiety mill. The exclamation 'Oh No', for Jessy, marks yet another incident of randomness interrupting her tranquillity. All of which seems at odds with the confidence and spontaneity of this second album.

Made in her hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, with production partner Jeremy Greenspan from Junior Boys, the plaintive, reverb drizzled mood of the first album has all but given away to a more direct, self-assured and joyful set. As with many artists whose hometown lie off the usual network of cultural hotspots, 'Oh No' is driven positively by the idea of making music that isn't inspired by where she lives. Instead, the album resonates more with the philosophy of experimental pop of Japanese 80s electro outfit Yellow Magic Orchestra and Jessy's breathless, pitched vocals are reminiscent of YMO collaborator Miharu Koshi. Playfully laced with cascading arpeggios, crispy drum machines and breezy songs, 'Oh No' has an infectious energy that has been brewing in her live shows since her first album. As Jessy says ‘I want to make people feel good and I want to make myself feel good’.

The album oscillates between the languid, coiled, arpeggiated slow jams of ‘New Ogi’, 'Going Somewhere', 'Begins', 'Could Be U', 'I Talk BB' and the low slung 808 groove of 'Vivica', where Jessy’s vocal gymnastics run wild over minimal drums and synths, and the catchy upbeat boogie of ‘VV Violence’, ‘Never Enough’, 'Oh No' and the high point of 'It Means I Love You’ which has a sparse addictive bounce with a pitched up vocal refrain and a nod to Shangaan electro. The trials of dealing with nervousness are also encrypted into the artwork, such as the plants that recur in the sleeve and videos. As Jessy remarked, "I became obsessed with surrounding myself with tropical plants. I've been convinced that the air quality in our house is slowly killing us. It might sound crazy but the plants have made a huge difference." Anxiety and botanical remedies or not, 'Oh No' is a bold second album from Jessy and a marked step forward for her sound.

TRACK LISTING

A1. New Ogi
A2. VV Violence
A3. Never Enough
A4. I Talk BB
A5. Going Somewhere
B1. It Means I Love You
B2. Vivica
B3. Oh No
B4. Begins
B5. Could Be U

‘All The Time’, Jessy Lanza's first album since 2016's ‘Oh No’, is the most pure set of pop songs that she and creative partner Jeremy Greenspan have recorded, reflective and finessed over time and distance. Innovative juxtapositions sound natural, like rigid 808s rubbing against delicate chords in ‘Anyone Around’, subtle footwork flutter giving a nervous energy to ‘Face’, unusual underwater rushes underpinning ‘Baby Love’.

The songs also sound more “live” than ever before. Jessy’s voice is treated, re-pitched and edited on songs like ‘Ice Creamy’ and gestural sounds seem to respond to her lyrics in songs such as ‘Like Fire’, which reward the listener on repeated plays. More than previous albums, the lyrics on ‘All The Time’ became an important focus for Jessy too, channelling the negativity of anger and frustration arising from some significant changes in her personal situation into the text. These lyrics sometimes process raw feelings, which aren't obvious to begin with, but are soon felt, standing in stark contrast to the cushioned settings of the music. ‘All The Time’ has ended as a triumph and an abstracted diary of a sometimes difficult, but enduring friendship and creative relationship, and it’s their best work yet.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Jessy Lanza has made many waves in the music world, finding a perfect home in the home of off-piste electronic adventures, Hyperdub. This one sees Lanza in a more playful mood, encompassing aspects of synthpop, future beats and r&b. It's a beguiling and exciting listen, and a superb return for Lanza.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Anyone Around
A2. Lick In Heaven
A3. Face
A4. Badly
A5. Alexander
B1. Ice Creamy
B2. Like Fire
B3. Baby Love
B4. Over And Over
B5. All The Time

On 'Love Hallucination' Jessy Lanza is in control as a songwriter and producer, flexing her skills in the studio and rebuilding her sound, taking chances with production and energy in all directions, from club-ready, to downbeat and sultry, with the theme of trusting yourself in the moment and using intuition as a compass driving the record forward. ‘Love Hallucination’ is the sound of an artist in bloom, an album of big emotions and big songs, with direct, personal lyrics, such as the upbeat but panicked opener 'Don't Leave Me Now' and the 2-step drama of 'Midnight Ontario', or 'Limbo', an ear worm disco stomper about produced with Marco 'Tensnake' Niermeski. Also featured as co-producers are David Kennedy (Pearson Sound), adding slick arrangements for the club, long-time collaborator Jeremy Greenspan (Junior Boys), and Paul White. ‘Love Hallucination’ is a bold and immediate record from Jessy Lanza, her most clear, authentic and best to date.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Jessy Lanza brings us her most flamboyant, widescreen release yet, with soaring synths and scattered percussion beautifully brought together into a startlingly modern soundclash of R&B, synth-pop and driven dancefloor electronica. A big stylistic leap forwards for Lanza, and another banger for one of the best labels in the alt 'tronica business.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Don’t Leave Me Now
A2. Midnight Ontario
A3. Limbo
A4. Casino Niagara
A5. Don’t Cry On My Pillow
B1. Big Pink Rose
B2. Drive
B3. I Hate Myself
B4. Gossamer
B5. Marathon
B6. Double Time

Step into a journey through time with Lapa Dula's debut album "Agua", proudly presented by the Early Sounds team. “Agua” is a sonic and aesthetic collage, a tribute to the sounds and memories of Naples and its surroundings in the vibrant cultural and social scene of the mid 1980s, not just a reflection of producer’s Alessandro La Padula childhood memories, but also a nod to the myths and legends of Partenope. Written between Rome and Naples and co-produced by label head Pellegrino, "Agua" is the latest addition to the imprint’s distinctive Mediterranean sound, blending funk, Latin, world music, and disco. With songs like the Balearic title track "Agua" and the nostalgic ode to rural life "Sibilla", also inspired by the myth of the Sibyl of Cumae, this album takes you on a journey of emotions and experiences. From vernacular "Scemanfu", a fun play on the French expression 'je m'en fous' (I don't care), to the contemplative "Navigante", dedicated to those who have found solace in the sea or in the virtual world, and the final track "Baibai", inspired by the adventurous and licentious affairs of English nobleman Sir Nathaniel Thorold, who lived on the island of Capri, each song tells a story and adds a piece to this mosaic of sounds, images, and places.

TRACK LISTING

Agua
Navigante
Sibilla
Ojni
Baibai
Scemanfu

British producer of exalted electronics Lapalux (aka Stuart Howard) returns to Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label for his fourth album. The title ‘Amnioverse’ is “a sort of portmanteau of the amniotic sac and the universe that revolves around notions of fluidity: that birth, life, death, and rebirth is a never ending continuum.” He channels these ethereal ideas through a new and ever-expanding modular synth set-up, effortless spanning tempos and balancing space and texture, injecting human emotion and layering recordings of weather, wind, rain and fire, to invoke an elemental, celestial feel. For fans of Actress, Burial, Andy Stott, Oneohtrix Point Never.

TRACK LISTING

Oblivion
Voltaic Acid
Momentine
Earth
Hellix
Thin Air
Limb To Limb
The Lux Quadrant
Amnioverse
Esc

Lapalux knew where and how his sound should change with a second album. As a result, 'Lustmore' feels like a record as compulsively inspired and meticulously crafted as you’re likely to hear in 2015.

'Lustmore' is loosely based on the experience of hypnogogia, a transitional state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep. Listeners familiar with his 2011 debut, 'Nostalchic', will know that Stuart Howard’s woozy, infectious rhythms, enveloping textures and unfamiliarly familiar melodies conjure that territory perfectly.

'Lustmore' sees the young producer take another stride forward. Opener "U Never Know," which features another masterful vocal turn by Andreya Triana, sets the tone for the album. “The line ‘I don’t think you’ll know’ describes the mysterious limbo like state between waking life and sleep,” Howard says.

The sleazy, yearning throb of "Puzzle" is unmistakably sexualised. “It’s a lovelessness,” Howard says, “searching for something more lustful and fleeting. It’s a very visual song for me. It’s about a sort of seedy, underground desire, like an old bar that used to have class, getting slowly seedier, to keep up with the demand for exploitation and filth. I think it sums up the whole feel and mood of the record,” Howard says. "That kind of sultry, seedy undertone and the pieces of the puzzle not fitting together properly, as if in a state of limbo where you don’t know where you are, but there’s something strangely comforting about it.” Those words could well be a credo for Lapalux's wider musical vision.

The sound palette used in making the album was carefully crafted to sound retro futuristic and otherworldly, having sounds in there that would accompany a Bladerunner, or 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Whenever I think about the album I think about the bar scene in The Shining,” Howard says. “There’s something about that strange, hallucinatory psychological madness that relates to the music, both in the making of the actual record and the way it sounds.”

Studying old film soundtracks was a hugely important process for the making of the album. “I really focused on making this album an imaginary visual experience. You can almost see these imaginary movies play in your head when you listen,” he says. “That’s something that I really started to work into my music - the idea of creating imagery and characters, storyline, and emotion.” It’s a process that has certainly worked: 'Lustmore' is imbued with an emotional narrative that never loosens its grip on the ear.

In a world in which upstart DIY talent is flooding the gates of electronic music, a few recent voices have been so strong as to be startling. Lapalux - AKA 25-year-old Stuart Howard - is certainly one such. As singular as a brilliant artist always should be, his instinctive understanding of the atmospheric power of texture grips the ear immediately on listening. 'Nostalchic' is his debut album, mission statement, and the climax of many years of studying his craft. The amalgam of words that make the title is aptly, and perhaps knowingly chosen. The album evokes nostalgia without ever sounding nostalgic, and Howard may have had his tongue in his chic when he added the second half of the title. The album is his most focused document to date, adding his beloved R&B and soul into elements of house and hip hop, all with the trademark Lapalux finish; infectious, lopsided swing and achingly deep texture.

TRACK LISTING

IAMSYS (Tape Intro)
Guuurl
Kelly Brook
One Thing (Feat Jenna Andrews)
Flower
Swallowing Smoke
Without You (ft Kerry Leatham)
Straight Over My Head
Dance (ft Astrid Williamson)
The Dead Sea
Walking Words
O E A (ft Kerry Leatham)

Originally released in 2013 and now repressed on crystal clear vinyl, “Nostalchic” is the debut album by British artist Lapalux aka Stuart Howard. Emerging during an era in which upstart DIY talent was flooding the gates of electronic music, Howard’s voice was singular, as a brilliant artist always should be. Flying Lotus was quick to recognise his startling talent, as Howard’s shot-in-the-dark demo email to Brainfeeder Records was immediately answered by the label head himself, who quickly moved to sign him. Now considered a classic of the era, “Nostalchic” is a record characterized by its devastating emotional force, melding his beloved R&B and soul into elements of house and hip hop, all with the trademark Lapalux finish: infectious, lopsided swing and achingly deep texture.

TRACK LISTING

1. IAMSYS - Tape Intro
2. Guuurl
3. Kelly Brook
4. One Thing (feat. Jenna Andrews)
5. Flower
6. Swallowing Smoke
7. Without You (feat. Kerry Leatham)
8. Straight Over My Head
9. Dance (feat. Astrid Williamson)
10. The Dead Sea
11. Walking Words
12. O E A - Tape Outro (feat. Kerry Leatham)

British producer and longstanding member of Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder family, Lapalux releases his new album ‘Ruinism’, featuring collaborations with vocalists JFDR (Gangly / Pascal Pinon / Samaris)’, Louisahhh, Talvi; GABI and Raphaelle Standell-Preston (Braids).

‘Ruinism’ is all sonic wreckage and rubble created using only hardware and real instruments. The sound simultaneously destroys and redeems itself across a tight and formidable forty-eight minutes.

For fans of Flying Lotus, Mount Kimbie, Nosaj Thing, Gold Panda.

TRACK LISTING

Reverence
Data Demon (ft GABI)
Petty Passion
Rotted Arp (ft Louisahhh)
Falling Down (ft JFDR)
Displacer
4EVA (ft Talvi)
Essex Is Burning
Flickering (ft JFDR)
Running To Evaporate
Phase Violet
Tessellate

British producer and longstanding member of Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder family, Lapalux releases his new album ‘Ruinism’, featuring collaborations with vocalists JFDR (Gangly / Pascal Pinon / Samaris)’, Louisahhh, Talvi; GABI and Raphaelle Standell-Preston (Braids).

‘Ruinism’ is all sonic wreckage and rubble created using only hardware and real instruments. The sound simultaneously destroys and redeems itself across a tight and formidable forty-eight minutes.

For fans of Flying Lotus, Mount Kimbie, Nosaj Thing, Gold Panda.

TRACK LISTING

Reverence
Data Demon (ft GABI)
Petty Passion
Rotted Arp (ft Louisahhh)
Falling Down (ft JFDR)
Displacer
4EVA (ft Talvi)
Essex Is Burning
Flickering (ft JFDR)
Running To Evaporate
Phase Violet
Tessellate

This is the debut release from Wakefield based label Philophobia Music. It's also the second release from Lapels. "Painted Skeletons" finds Lapels sounding more epic than previously, whilst the double A-Side track, "Last Great Civilisation" is a harder proposition, being the bands most direct recording to date. If you're looking for a comparison then a scuzzy Pavement might fit the bill. Good stuff!!

Seven track EP from this Manchester based band. Inspired by rock and metal bands from the 60s through to the present day, they combine their influences with elements of hardcore metal, rock and punk and add to this their own sense of timing and personality.

Rudolf Langer (formerly of Tyndall) and Peter Preu teamed up to create Lapre as a vehicle for their adventures in sonic experimentation. They set about capturing their nocturnal rehearsal room sessions on tape, Langer on synthesizer and Preu on guitar. With the exception of a solitary single and a few extremely limited cassette runs, Lapre released no further material during their active phase. It was not until 2018 that their works became accessible to a wider audience, when Bureau B released the Auferstehung retrospective, drawing on tracks from 1983 to 1984.? Banzai, the second collection of Lapre recordings, follows up by concentrating on their creative output from the years 1985 to 1987. A well-kept secret at the time of its inception, this music was barely audible beyond the borders of Berlin's underground scene. It thus gives us great pleasure to give these tracks the attention they ultimately deserve, more than 30 years later.

Wilde Club Records, the Norwich-based label that launched the career of The Catherine Wheel and formerly home to many John Peel favourites announces its first release in over 4 years. Lapsed Pacifist are a 6-piece ferocious jagged indie-rock/metal outfit, with influences from Earthtone 9, At The Drive In, The Deftones, Mars Volta. Phnom Penh are more indie janglists, with the chamber pop feel of Ballboy, Camera Obscura or Belle & Sebastian.

Produced in collaboration with Jessy Lanza, Paul White, Greg Abrahams and regular collaborator Joe Brown, Lapsley’s third album is an intimate but universal exploration of those Cautionary Tales that - eventually - may also prove the making of you.

As eclectic as it is unguarded, the album is a form of therapy in the truest sense: a talking cure and a hauntingly beautiful confession, resulting in a thrilling yet soulful work of love, loss and growth.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Throbby bass, sleek vocals and sidechained synth sweeps are exactly what you'd expect from Lapsley but 'Cautionary Tales' runs effortlessly through the fringes of bass music, R&B and modern IDM as well as the perfectly accomplished sleek synth-pop we've come to know and love. The vocals here are vocoded and twisted around the instrumentals, sometimes unrecognisably but always with a keen ear on production. Lovely.

TRACK LISTING

1. 32 Floors
2. Hotel Corridors
3. Paradise
4. Close To Heaven
5. Dial Two Seven
6. Nightingale
7. War And Peace
8. Levitate
9. Smoke And Fire
10. Pandora's Box
11. Lifeline
12. Say I'm What You Need

Southport-raised, London-based 19 year old singer, songwriter and producer Holly ‘Låpsley’ Fletcher releases her debut album ‘Long Way Home’ on XL Recordings.

The twelve track album features new versions of her previous acclaimed releases ‘Hurt Me’, ‘Falling Short’, ‘Painter’ and ‘Station’, as well as brand new single ‘Love Is Blind’. Sitting somewhere in the intersection of the Venn diagram that includes Adele, Rosie Lowe and James Blake in the outer circles.

‘Long Way Home’ documents a turbulent time in Låpsley’s life - a period in which she revelled in her new-found music career as it took her from Liverpool to London to Los Angeles and back again. “It’s an autobiography of my emotions and events over the past year,” she says. “Everything that’s happened, I’ve channelled in some way into a song - whether that’s the theme of a long distance relationship, or something that he’s said, or the way that I’ve felt, or an argument. I only revisit the memories of that relationship when I go into the studio. I think it’s helped me, to be able to collect everything for those moments when I’m writing. I think that’s what’s driven this album.”

Låpsley’s determined views on her own production have ensured her involvement in every element of these songs, a fact that in the early days seemed to confuse many of the producers she met. “They didn’t want to listen to me,” she says, “or they think a girl’s just there to add a top line, or they come to the table with ideas already. Straight away if I come in to a studio and someone says ‘I’ve written something for you’, then I’ll just walk out. I don’t care. I’m not there for that.”

For the bulk of ‘Long Way Home’ she worked with XL’s in-house producer Rodaidh McDonald. “This album wouldn’t be how it is if it wasn’t for Rodaidh,” she says. “He’s at the top of the thank yous.” There were two tracks recorded with Paul O’Duffy, a producer she admired because “the way that he thinks is different to anybody else. He’s not tainted by a commercial idea, it’s so creative and beautiful and what I aspire to be like in the future.”

TRACK LISTING

Heartless
Hurt Me
Falling Short
Cliff
Operator (He Doesn’t Call Me)
Painter
Tell Me The Truth
Station
Love Is Blind
Silverlake
Leap
Seven Months

Through Water is the follow up to Lapsley's 2016 album Long Way Home, one of that year’s most acclaimed debuts. Released while she was still a teenager, Long Way Home featured Låpsley’s breakthrough moments ‘Station’ and ‘Falling Short’ and spawned one of the biggest club tracks in recent years (DJ Koze's edit of "Operator") as well as inspiring a new generation of electronically minded songwriters including Billie Eilish, who namechecked it as a key influence on her sound.

Through Water is without doubt Låpsley’s most accomplished work to date, written and recorded during her transition into young womanhood. With Låpsley as the major producer and songwriter, the ten songs (whittled down from over one hundred) reflect her newfound confidence, clarity and self-awareness as an artist, documenting a wealth of personal experiences and coming-of-age stories set against a thematic backdrop of water, climate, weather and the elements.

TRACK LISTING

Through Water
My Love Was Like The Rain
First
Ligne 3
Our Love Is A Garden
Leeds Liverpool Canal
Sadness Is A Shade Of Blue
Womxn
Bonfire
Speaking Of The End
Online (bonus 7” Only)

The first new Låpsley music since debut album "Long Way Home", which across its four tracks expresses a newfound confidence and glimpses the brave new direction her life and work are taking. Intimate and heartfelt but with expansive and expressive lyrical content; the songwriting prowess, combined with the finest modern production techniques (especially vocal layering) create an arresting and
magical piece that glimmers in the clear Winter crispness.

Comes in a screenprinted reuseable poly bag sleeve, with photography by Maisie Cousins.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Poised electronics merged with sincere and layered vocals maketh a pretty arresting combo here as Lapsley finds her stride for XL.

TRACK LISTING

My Love Was Like The Rain
Eve
Ligne 3
Drowning

Another fine single on the excellent Jonson Family Records. This time, from this Scottish band who sound like Tom Waits mixed with Black Heart Procession. Limited to 300 copies in hand stamped sleeves. These are gonna be big! So don't miss out.

A collection of brand new studio recordings, recorded by Davey Jewell (Peaking Lights / Flaming Lips) and mixed by Carlos Niño (Leaving Records). A magical mixtape of tracks that run the full gamut of Laraaji music, from blissed-out percussive jams to reflective vocal hymnals to trance-inducing drones. A perfect Laraaji entry point on his never-ending creative journey through inner light. Available as an 8-track double vinyl LP (with digital download card) and 10-track double CD with ‘Bring On The Sun’ on the first disc and a bonus disc of ‘Sun Gong’, the previously vinyl-only pre-cursor to the main album.

Laraaji is a musician, mystic and laughter meditation practitioner based in New York City. He began playing music on the streets in the 1970s, improvising experimental jams on a modified autoharp processed through various electronic effects. Brian Eno saw him playing one night in Washington Square Park and invited him to record an album for his seminal ‘Ambient’ series (‘Ambient 3: Day Of Radiance’, released in 1980). Laraaji went on to release a prolific series of albums for a wide variety of labels, many of which he recorded himself at home and sold as cassettes during his street performances.

In recent years he has had his career celebrated extensively, with two All Saints retrospectives - ‘Celestial Music 1970-2011’ and ‘Two Sides Of Laraaji’ - as well as reissues on Glitterbeat and Leaving Records / Stones Throw. He has also collaborated with a new generation of underground musicians such as Sun Araw - their recent album ‘Professional Sunflow’ (Superior Viaduct) being the fruit of the live shows they played together in 2014.

TRACK LISTING

Introspection
Harmonica Drone
Enthusiasm
Laraajazzi
Change
Reborn In Virginia
Open The Gift
Ocean Flow Zither

‘Sun Gong’ (2CD Only)
Sun Gong No.1
Sun Gong No.2

A collection of brand new studio recordings, recorded by Davey Jewell (Peaking Lights / Flaming Lips) and mixed by Carlos Niño (Leaving Records). A magical mixtape of tracks that run the full gamut of Laraaji music, from blissed-out percussive jams to reflective vocal hymnals to trance-inducing drones. A perfect Laraaji entry point on his never-ending creative journey through inner light. Available as an 8-track double vinyl LP (with digital download card) and 10-track double CD with ‘Bring On The Sun’ on the first disc and a bonus disc of ‘Sun Gong’, the previously vinyl-only pre-cursor to the main album.

Laraaji is a musician, mystic and laughter meditation practitioner based in New York City. He began playing music on the streets in the 1970s, improvising experimental jams on a modified autoharp processed through various electronic effects. Brian Eno saw him playing one night in Washington Square Park and invited him to record an album for his seminal ‘Ambient’ series (‘Ambient 3: Day Of Radiance’, released in 1980). Laraaji went on to release a prolific series of albums for a wide variety of labels, many of which he recorded himself at home and sold as cassettes during his street performances.

In recent years he has had his career celebrated extensively, with two All Saints retrospectives - ‘Celestial Music 1970-2011’ and ‘Two Sides Of Laraaji’ - as well as reissues on Glitterbeat and Leaving Records / Stones Throw. He has also collaborated with a new generation of underground musicians such as Sun Araw - their recent album ‘Professional Sunflow’ (Superior Viaduct) being the fruit of the live shows they played together in 2014.

TRACK LISTING

Introspection
Harmonica Drone
Enthusiasm
Laraajazzi
Change
Reborn In Virginia
Open The Gift
Ocean Flow Zither

‘Sun Gong’ (2CD Only)
Sun Gong No.1
Sun Gong No.2

As the new wave of New Age begins to gain momentum, All Saints present a new series of 12" featuring modern reinterpretations of forgotten classics from original ambient masters. The first part of this project sees a quartet of modern practitioners of electronic healing sounds reimagining four pieces from the back catalogue of New York's experimental visionary Laraaji. Beginning his career improvising trance inducing jams on a modified autoharp, Laraaji was discovered by Eno, studied with Satchidananda and invented laughter meditation while releasing a prolific discography of new age sounds. Within the recent recontextualisation of that oft maligned genre Laraaji has found a new audience among some Piccadilly shop favourites including Jonathan Wilson and Sun Araw, both of whom invited him to join them on tour. It's the latter who features on this 12", combining his trademark stoned skew with the celestial vibrations of "Tilturn" for a strung out trip into the realm of experimental dub. Elsewhere, Spectrum Spools' Bee Mask injects a dose of bass weight into the cystaline chime of "Cave", Ela Orleans creates the first psyche/breaks hybrid with a driving take on the melodic pulse of "Kalimba" and Motion Sickness Of Time Travel cleanses us with the purifying drone of "Space".

The definitive collection of Laraaji’s earliest works, Segue To Infinity compiles his 1978 debut Celestial Vibration and six additional side-long studio sessions from previously unknown acetates from the same period. A lengthy essay by Living Colour’s Vernon Reid chronicles the origins of Edward “Flash” Gordon, illustrated with dozens of previously unpublished photographs that capture this beautiful and elusive young artist. Full of discovery and wonderment, Segue To Infinity is a miraculous chronicle of new age’s most fabled artist.

TRACK LISTING

1. Bethlehem
2. All Pervading
3. Ocean
4. Koto
5. Kalimba
6. Segue To Infinity
7. Kalimba 2
8. Kalimba 4

Large Plants started as a solo project for Jack Sharp, the singer and guitarist for Wolf People. It was spurred on by a writing frenzy during the lockdown of 2020 when Sharp played and recorded all the parts for what would become the debut single, La Isla Bonita and the first album The Carrier. In summer of 2021 the tracks were mixed by songwriter Chris Cohen (formerly of Deerhoof & Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti).

Large Plants’ songs are immediate, heavy psychedelic rock belters filtered through a haze of analogue tape flutter. Sharp’s voice has an eerily distant and delicate tone that lends a strong folk sensibility to the album; like the scent of winter mornings and fresh soil mixed with the whiff of petrol. Though the songs are generally three-minute gems, they are lyrically more like ancient ballads; peopled with tragic youths, witches, lovelorn troubadours and femmes fatales. Sharp is now touring Large Plants as a four piece along with Ed Taylor on drums, Ollie Taylor on bass and Joe Wooley on guitar with dates booked so far at OSLO, Hackney -17th April and The Betsy Trotwood, Clerkenwell 5th May

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Swooning, progressive psychedelia from Jack Sharp bringing to mind the loose garage wooze of BJM or heady echoic psych a-la Jefferson Airplane all tinged with Ghost Box's distinctive and almost ever-present tape-distressed aesthetic. A beautiful addition to the label and a wonderful full-length for the Large Plants. A superb addition to any collection.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Carrier
2. No Difference
3. Don't Let Me Let You Down
4. Never Seen
5. How Far
6. Wreckers
7. Hold Onto
8. I Lie Awake
9. Marceline
10. The Witch

After a remarkable two-year run that saw them earn a GRAMMY® Award nomination for their studio album, Venom & Faith, and chart-topping success of their 2020 album, Self Made Man, Larkin Poe, comprised of the Atlanta-bred, Nashville-based sister duo Rebecca and Megan Lovell, are gearing up to release a covers album named Kindred Spirits.

Coming up in a family of music lovers, a lot of the songs Megan and Rebecca have always gravitated towards learning have been with them since childhood; they started a YouTube series dedicated to paying tribute to their musical heroes in 2015 that unexpectedly took off and when fans began requesting recorded versions of the songs, the sisters started daydreaming about how an interpretive album might take shape. In recording Kindred Spirits, their admiration for the artists who originally wrote and performed the songs blossomed into an even deeper reverence.

Bringing these songs into the studio, stripping them back to the bones and recording them live and raw, felt like a ritual. Megan and Rebecca are grateful for the experience of making this album and grateful to the Kindred Spirits who have come before them and written the soundtrack of their lives. Music is a bridge that can connect generations across time.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. HellHound On My Trail
2. Fly Away
3. Rockin’ In The Free World
4. (You’re The) Devil In Disguise
5. In The Air Tonight
6. Nights In White Satin

SIDE B
1. Who Do You Love
2. Take What You Want
3. Ramblin’ Man
4. Bell Bottom Blues
5. Crocodile Rock

After a remarkable two-year run that saw them earn a GRAMMY? Award nomination for their last chart-topping studio album while touring the world from Nashville to New Zealand and back again, Larkin Poe have returned with what is undeniably their most wide-reaching, artistically adventurous, and self-determined work to date. Once again taking the producer reins and releasing on their own Tricki-Woo Records label, Self Made Man sees the multiinstrumentalist sister duo, comprised of the Atlanta-bred, Nashville-based Rebecca and Megan Lovell, pushing their music and message towards hitherto unexplored terrain, inspired by their epic world travels yet still powerfully rooted in the creative heritage of their beloved American South. From the thunderous power of the album-opening "She's A Self Made Man," through the nostalgic "Tears of Blue to Gold" and fierce Chicago blues of "Scorpion," to the front porch jubilation of "Easy Street," the album is ambitious in both its eclectic, energetic sound and its resolutely welcoming mission, its universal lyrical approach fueled by tradition, invention, and Larkin Poe's remarkable ability to touch the hearts and souls of their fellow humans worldwide.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. She’s A Self Made Man
2. Holy Ghost Fire
3. Keep Diggin’
4. Back Down South
5. Tears Of Blue To Gold

SIDE B
1. God Moves On The Water
2. Every Bird That Flies
3. Scorpion
4. Danger Angel
5. Ex-Con
6. Easy Street

This album was recorded at Larkins' landmark hometown show to 2000 rapturous fans. Frontman Josh Noble says, “We are very proud to present a recording from our live show at the Albert Hall in Manchester. It felt like everything we had done so far as a band had kind of led to this moment. We’ve played almost every venue in town over the past few years and we’d always joked about playing Albert Hall, half-expecting it to never happen."

“Our first show was in a pub to just 30 people just around the corner from the Albert Hall so to get to this point and to have so many people who want to see our music live is surreal. This tour has showed us what it means to be a part of this band and to finish at home was perfect. To every single person that came, we can’t even express how much we loved the show. What you hear is what we played on the night and hopefully this gives you an idea of what’s to come.” Larkins are on a meteoric rise as one of the most exciting and in-demand bands to emerge from Manchester in recent times and are recording their debut album with producers Dan Nigro (A-Trak, Sky Ferreira, Lewis Capaldi) and Andrew Dawson (Kanye West, Fun, Kid Cudi).

TRACK LISTING

Are We Having Any Fun Yet?
Sugar Sweet
Pink & Blue
Hit & Run
The Place
The Tale Of Cassandra
River Bed
Wasted Years
TV Dreams
Pieces
Something Beautiful