The fourth solo album from Angelo De Augustine, Toil and Trouble exists according to its own quixotic logic, inhabiting a psychic landscape as sublimely mystifying as a fever dream or fairy tale. In creating such an all-enveloping body of work, the Southern California-based artist spent nearly three years working alone and exploring the vast expanse of his imagination. “This album came from thinking about the madness of the world right now and how overwhelming that can be,” says De Augustine. “I used a sort of counter-world as a guide to try to gain some understanding of what’s actually going on here — I had to take myself out of reality in order to try to understand reality.” At turns bewitching and devastating and ineffably lovely, the result is the most visionary work yet from a singular songwriter, revealing his profound capacity to alchemize pain into extraordinary beauty.

TRACK LISTING

1 Home Town
2 The Ballad Of Betty And Barney Hill
3 Memory Palace
4 Healing Waters
5 The Painter
6 I Don't Want To Live, I Don't Want To Die
7 Another Universe
8 Song Of The Siren
9 Blood Red Thorn
10 Naked Blade
11 D.W.O.M.M.
12 Toil And Trouble

Angelo is an EP, named after a car, featuring nine songs Brijean have crafted and carried with them through a period of profound change, loss, and relocation. It finds percussionist/singer Brijean Murphy and multi-instrumentalist/producer Doug Stuart processing the impossible the only way they know how: through rhythm and movement. The months surrounding the acclaimed release of Feelings, their full-length Ghostly International debut in 2021 which celebrated tender self-reflection and new possibilities, rang bittersweet with the absence of touring and the sudden passing of Murphy’s father and both of Stuart’s parents. In a haze of heartache, the duo left the Bay Area to be near family, resetting in four cities in under two years. Their to-go rig became their traveling studio and these tracks, along with Angelo, became their few constants. Whereas Feelings formed over collaborative jams with friends, Angelo’s sessions presented Murphy and Stuart a chance to record at their most intimate, “to get us out of our grief and into our bodies,” says Murphy. They explored new moods and styles, reaching for effervescent dance tempos and technicolor backdrops, vibrant hues in contrast to their more somber human experiences. Angelo beams with positivity and creative renewal — a resourceful, collective answer to “what happens now?”

Angelo the car is a 1981 Toyota Celica they got off Craigslist during their first stint in Los Angeles, where Murphy and Stuart have since settled. “Such a bro-y, ‘80s dude car, it’s been super fun to drive around in a new town,” Murphy says. “He’s older than us, he’s a classic, he’s got a story.” It is a spiritual vehicle with a cinematic appeal, first dropping them off in an alleyway for the scene-setting intro, “Which Way To The Club.” The question is quickly resolved by “Take A Trip” as a cruising bassline mingles with crowd sounds, hand-claps, cuíca hiccups, whip-cracks, even a horse neigh. Brijean have found some club on this cross-dimensional trip — the kind of imagined space or chamber within one’s self capable of “shifting a fraction of who you are,” says Murphy. They wrote the track with the simple intention to be “as free as we could be,” adds Stuart, likening the flip on the B section to a realm unlocked: ”What if the world changed completely? You open the door to a new room.”

Next is “Shy Guy,” a motivational anthem for the wallflowers among us. Murphy sets up the daydream: “We are in junior high, we’re on the dance floor, what’s going down, who is dancing, who is not, how are we gonna make them dance?” The narrator, the MC, hypes up the room as conga-driven rhythms bounce between languid synth and guitar lines. “Show me how to move...I feel something...I know you feel it too,” Murphy sings sweetly, calling back to the opening lines of Feelings, and this time the audience chants it back. It is easy to picture Brijean performing this one — something they only got to do a handful of times until more recently, opening shows for Khruangbin and Washed Out, an experience they found informative. Murphy explains, “It was inspiring to be out there and let loose more. To see how people can expand their expression on stage gave me more liberty with how I viewed my musicianship. My role for so long was to be a backup percussionist, so why would I ever leave the drums, you know? But then after playing all these runs, you see these artists and realize you can, you have permission.”

“Angelo” and “Ooo La La” deliver the danciest stretch in Brijean’s catalog to date. The title track adopts a deep house pulse replete with strings, hi-hats, and kicks. The latter opts for a funkier groove that foregoes verses in favor of warbled hums and extended breakdowns. What follows is perhaps the duo’s dreamiest run, a comedown initiated with the honey-hued interlude “Colors” drifting into “Where Do We Go?”, a tropicália reverie where Murphy contemplates the passage of time and space.

It all culminates in “Caldwell’s Way,” a fond farewell to their Bay Area community — “a part of my life that I knew couldn’t come back,” says Murphy. Above shimmering organ sounds, lush strings, and the birdcall of their former neighborhood, she wistfully articulates the uncertainty of moving on by remembering the characters dear to them. There’s the wisdom of their neighbor, Santos, who refused payment when helping them move out: “I’d rather have 100 friends than 100 dollars.” And the song’s namesake, Benjamin Caldwell Brown, a friend and club night cohort for many years. “I’m only miles away, maybe I’m just feeling lonely,” the line resigns to warm nostalgia, and “Nostalgia” runs the closing credits to this healing and transportive collection.

TRACK LISTING

01. Which Way To The Club?
02. Take A Trip
03. Shy Guy
04. Angelo
05. Ooo La La
06. Colors
07. Where Do We Go?
08. Caldwell’s Way
09. Nostalgia

A Beginner’s Mind began when the two musicians and Asthmatic Kitty labelmates decamped to a friend’s cabin in upstate New York for a monthlong songwriting sabbatical. Watching a movie to unwind after each day’s work, they soon found their songs reflecting the films and began investigating this connection in earnest.

The resulting album is 14 songs (loosely) based on (mostly) popular films—highbrow, lowbrow and everything in between. They wrote in tandem—one person writing a verse, the other a chorus, churning out chord progressions and lyrics willy-nilly, often finishing each other’s sentences in the process. Rigorous editing and rewriting ensued. The results are less a “cinematic exegesis” and more a “rambling philosophical inquiry” that allows the songs to free-associate at will. Plot-points, scene summaries, and leading characters are often displaced by esoteric interpolations that ask the bigger question: what does it mean to be human in a broken world?

Stevens and De Augustine wrote everything with a deliberate sense of shoshin—the Zen Buddhist concept for which the record is named and an idea that empowered the pair to look for and write about unlikely inspiration without preconceived notions of what a film had to say (The I-Ching and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies also served as incentives along the way). The movies became rhetorical prompts, with the songwriters letting their distinct reactions and creative instincts govern their process. The underlying objective was empathy and openness, absent of judgment: to observe with the eyes of a child.

The album’s artwork comes courtesy of Ghanaian artist Daniel Anum Jasper. In Ghana during the late ’80s, a novel “mobile cinema” culture emerged when enterprising film fans screened Hollywood blockbusters in the backs of pick-up trucks using portable generators. To advertise the movies, artists painted alternate posters inspired only by the scant information they had about each film. Sufjan and Angelo commissioned a pioneer of this form—Jasper—to paint a series of new works for A Beginner’s Mind (including covers for three 7-inch singles). Information about the project was deliberately kept vague so that Mr. Jasper could work without restraint.

Sufjan Stevens is an artist, songwriter and composer living in New York. He has released nine widely lauded studio albums and a number of collaborations with fellow musicians, choreographers and visual artists from the New York City Ballet and the celebrated director Luca Guadagnino to his stepfather Lowell Brams and noted dancer Jalaiah Harmon.

Angelo De Augustine is an artist and songwriter living in Thousand Oaks, California—a suburb north of Los Angeles, where he grew up. He has released three albums including his self-released debut, Spirals of Silence (2014), and two for Asthmatic Kitty Records, Swim Inside The Moon (2017) and Tomb (2019).

STAFF COMMENTS

Darryl says: Beautifully combining the distinct voices and instrumental styles of both performers into an intoxicating juxtaposition of folk and tenderly plucked indie balladry. It's haunting in parts, and elsewhere wonderfully melodic, a perfect outing for both performers.

TRACK LISTING

1. Reach Out 3:43
2. Lady Macbeth In Chains 3:42
3. Back To Oz 4:25
4. The Pillar Of Souls 4:04
5. You Give Death A Bad Name 5:11
6. Beginner’s Mind 2:36
7. Olympus 3:07
8. Murder And Crime 3:43
9. (This Is) The Thing 3:13
10. It’s Your Own Body And Mind 2:27
11. Lost In The World 3:20
12. Fictional California 3:03
13. Cimmerian Shade 5:01
14. Lacrimae 2:05

A quiet heartache threads through Tomb. It’s a universal feeling, the kind that piles up over the years and yearns for resolution. The 12 songs came together quickly, out of necessity following his first true heartbreak around Christmas 2017 -- and while Tomb was born from this breakup, the album expanded to explore years of loss and disappointment. Throughout, De Augustine sings of his first love (“Tomb”), attempts to reconcile possible past mistakes (“You Needed Love, I Needed You”), and reckoning with how personal and familial history impacts present and future relationships (“Kaitlin,” “Bird Has Flown”). Like the best albums about heartbreak, Tomb transforms pain into beauty. “This album is at its core a prayer for hope and clarity, and a prayer for love,” he says.

Ultimately Tomb reflects a beginning for De Augustine -- both emotionally and in his career. It’s a motion towards positivity, addressing lost love, the worthwhile cost of honesty, and the ramifications of regret. In the end, Tomb isn’t about burying or hiding something away, it’s about opening the seal and letting something new emerge. The album’s title reveals these sentiments: “Throughout our lives we bury many dead things in our hearts and minds,” he says. “There they go to rest and hopefully are reborn as something beautiful for the world to behold.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Tomb
2. All To The Wind
3. You Needed Love I Needed You
4. I Could Be Wrong
5. Tide
6. Kaitlin
7. Time
8. Somewhere Far Away From Home
9. Wanderer
10. A Good Man’s Light
11. Bird Has Flown
12. All Your Life

Fusing laidback pop sensibility with moody cinematographic soundscapes, David’s newest album D’ANGELO is the sound of a young artist getting in touch with their roots, exploring new landscapes and freeing inhibitions. Where he channelled this journey into ambience on DCXXXIX A.C. – his debut on his own label, 99CHANTS - D’ANGELO has David deconstructing pop atmospheres while in search of his past and reforming them into something deeply moving.

He admits that while his strongest emotions have their roots in his formative years, growing up in the picturesque mountain town of Palestrina outside Rome, he never used those emotions creatively, keeping them private until now. “I had never tried to have a dialogue with myself within the music that I was making,” he explains. “Suddenly there were all these questions about identity, my childhood, and an obsession with truth. Although I was scared to confront these questions – when in your life could you fully answer them? – I had to at least approach them to keep creating.”

D’ANGELO’s spiritual inspiration is rooted in Italy’s rich and complex artistic history, and how certain artists broke boundaries, such as Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, who mastered the art of polyphonic and counterpointed composition during the Renaissance. “I looked at the Italian culture I grew up with, that has always been present since I was a kid.” He says. “I had to start with a deeper study of these artists, composers, and writers who formed the cultural and emotional bonds I feel towards Italy.”

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio painted the realities of the streets over the ideals of the heavens, taking those who blended into the background of the streets and painting them as saints, as figures of ideation. “Caravaggio was a leading inspiration throughout this process. He was someone I looked up to all the time and had so much respect for; someone who was always trying to picture the implacable reality, and not compromising. Having his paintings on one screen – and my DAW on the other – was one part of the process. It was an attempt to soundtrack his art – his reality – in real time.”

D’ANGELO is an impassioned, melancholic album that exists in a space that is not easy to translate into words…but do the words always matter?

"Lucy, put Harry on the horn." And so began the most unique, iconic and absurd series in the history of television. For two glorious seasons we pressed our nose to the glass and watched the strange and beautiful goings on in Washington's weirdest logging town. We looked on in awe as Cooper drank coffee, ate cherry pie and savoured the woodland smells, got close to Audrey but kept a respactable distance. We rooted for Norma and Ed, Harry and Joan, Andy and Lucy, Margaret and her log, and laughed ourselves queasy at James and Donna's hilariously wet highschool romance. We tried to find Laura Palmer's killer, figure out the Red Room and the Black Lodge and work out exactly how Cooper got in touch with Diane. We failed, gave up and enjoyed the goings on anyway. And throughout it all, we were swept along on the thematic perfection of Angelo Badalamenti's sublime score. From the swelling bass and dreamy chords of the title music to the bittersweet beauty of "Laura's Theme", from Audrey's seductive jazz to the smokey sweetness of "Dance Of The Dream Man", the score never put a foot wrong. And now, for the first time in 25 years it's back on vinyl and CD, freshly remastered and properly pressed by Warners ahead of a brand new series! Aces!

STAFF COMMENTS

Patrick says: In a rare triumph of synchronicity, the finest TV show ever made also boasted the best soundtrack ever written. And that gorgeous, glorious, dreamy soundtrack is now available on vinyl ahead of a BRAND NEW SERIES! As lovely as Audrey and as cool as Agent Cooper, this is aces!

TRACK LISTING

Side 1
1. Twin Peaks Theme
2. Laura Palmer’s Theme
3. Audrey’s Dance
4. The Nightingale
5. Freshly Squeezed

Side 2
1. The Bookhouse Boys
2. Into The Night
3. Night Life In Twin Peaks
4. Dance Of The Dream Man
5. Love Theme From Twin Peaks
6. Falling

'Through the darkness of future past
The magican longs to see
One chance out between two worlds:
Fire walk with me...'

Seeming to emanate directly from the dark heart of the Black Lodge, "Fire Walk With Me" is an altogether more brooding affair than the Twin Peaks series soundtrack. The surreal atmosphere and airbrushed shimmer remain, but the melancholic notes, minor key melodies and sustained bass tones are perfectly in keeping with the unending disquiet and foreboding which David Lynch achieved. Badalamenti won a grammy for the title track of this LP and it’s not hard to see why- it’s dangerous, and bursting with smokey jazz thanks to Jimmy Scott. 

D'Angelo's debut album breathed new life into the mid-90s soul / R&B scene, taking inspiration from 70s soul classics, but reinvigorating the sound with hip hop swagger. Recorded using vintage instruments the album ushered in the more organic neo-soul sound, moving away from the crisp electronics of the late 80s / early 90s new jack swing era. Includes the smash hit "Brown Sugar" (has there been a better love song to Mary J?), a cover of Smokey Robinson's "Cruisin'", or the bluesy "Shit, Damn, Motherfucker". A perfect after hours soul seduction album.

This is the first time 'Brown Sugar' has been reissued since 2006!

TRACK LISTING

A1. Brown Sugar 4:22
A2. Alright 5:15
A3. Jonz In My Bonz 5:56
B1. Me And Those Dreamin' Eyes Of Mine 4:46
B2. Shit, Damn, Motherfucker 5:14
B3. Smooth 4:18
C1. Crusin' 6:28
C2. When We Get By 5:48
D1. Lady 5:47
D2. Higher 5:27

'Voodoo' hit store shelves on January 25th 2000, just a few weeks after the New Year celebrations to end them all. But the first great album of the new millennium was born in the 1990s, and its muggy grooves capture the sound of premillennial anxiety. The album is the product of perfectionism, obsession and paranoia. 1995’s debut 'Brown Sugar' had already strategically positioned D’Angelo - born Michael Eugene Archer and Virginia-raised to a Pentecostal preacher father - as the next Hendrix-like deity in black music, after Prince and maybe Lenny Kravitz. But since its release, D’Angelo had become distracted by weed and weightlifting, he’d been shaken by the deaths of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious BIG and debilitated by sophomore pressure. In the interim he’d fathered two children, switched managers and jumped to a new record label.

Though inspired by the birth of his children and trips back to Virginia, 'Voodoo'’s roots are in 1960s, 70s and 80s funk and soul; a nostalgic nod to the ideas and inventions of black music trailblazers powered by avant-garde hip-hop and jazz-influenced rhythms. D’Angleo’s aim, he said, was to reclaim R&B. He wanted to be like Sly Stone, George Clinton and Al Green. And most of all, he wanted to be like Jimi Hendrix. Where does a potently focused young man go to remake 'Electric Ladyland'? New York’s Electric Lady studios, of course: in the same rooms in which Hendrix and Stevie Wonder reinvented music decades earlier, and on the same equipment too. In an era in which soul musicians were obsessing over all things synthetic, D’Angelo was looking to the warm sounds of the past. Electric Lady’s Studio C became D’Angelo’s brand new creative laboratory.

TRACK LISTING

Playa Playa
Devil's Pie
Left & Right
The Line
Send It On
Chicken Grease
One Mo' Gin
The Root
Spanish Joint
Feel Like Makin' Love
Greatdayndamornin' / Booty
Untitled (How Does It Feel)
Africa

In case you haven’t heard, D’Angelo is back. The prodigal son of soul and funk dropped his new album online in December 2014, with no fanfare, no hype and no upfront announcement. The soulternet lit up like a Christmas tree. For one so talented 15 years seems like too long a time to wait between albums (we've had to wait so long 'Black Messiah' has been described as “the black 'SMiLE'”), but D'Angelo had demons to slay, issues to resolve, yada yada yada... (for 15 years!?). Anyway, he's back now, reborn, refreshed and sounding as wonderful as ever. The album cooks up a gumbo of the greats - a dash of Marvin, a sprinkle of Minneapolis, some P-funk pepper and Sly salt, all simmered together to make 'Black Messiah' the tastiest real-soul stew around right now. Essential!

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Ain't That Easy
2. 1000 Deaths
3. The Charade
4. Sugah Daddy
5. Really Love

Side B
6. Back To The Future (Part I)
7. Till It's Done (Tutu)
8. Prayer
9. Betray My Heart
10. The Door
11. Back To The Future (Part II)
12. Another Life