A Post-rock staple. Intertwining delayed guitar melodies weave around eac-other, adding layers of simple melodies before bursting into euphoric instrumental bliss. Lengthy solo passages do more to exacerbate the eventual burst of action, heightening the impact and soothing the soul. An absolute unmissable classic.

TRACK LISTING

1. "First Breath After Coma" 9:33
2. "The Only Moment We Were Alone" 10:14
3. "Six Days At The Bottom Of The Ocean" 8:43
4. "Memorial" 8:50
5. "Your Hand In Mine" 8:16

A native of Los Angeles, Henry Franklin came of age while the city was producing a crop of exciting jazz talent. Frankin’s lasting impact on jazz can be evidenced by the long list of legends who sought him out for tours and recording sessions, Stevie Wonder, Bobby Humphrey, Freddy Hubbard, & Pharaoh Sanders to name a few. Franklin’s solo output is best remembered for his two solo outings with the Black Jazz label- “The Skipper” & “The Skipper At Home”. Together, they form one of the most compelling diptychs in the entire post-bop canon. Recognised by his peers and contemporaries, Franklin’s entry for Jazz Is Dead gives the living legend his flowers and recognises the contributions The Skipper has made as one of jazz’s most influential heartbeats.

TRACK LISTING

1. Karibu
2. The Griot
3. People's Revolution
4. Memories Lost
5. Feedback
6. Café Nero
7. African Sun
8. A Song For Sigrid

Founded in 2014, Katalyst Collective has never been one for labels. Rather than strictly a live act, they’ve acted as an incubator for a fresh crop of local talent, helping hone the voices and talents of individual members, while collectively advancing like a phalanx. Each ‘Kat’ writes their own solo material, and everyone contributes and works together on each project, feeding off the communal energy. Leading to the group’s upping collaboration for Jazz Is Dead, Katalyst has poised themselves as the next breakout stars of Los Angeles’ rapidly expanding Jazz universe - a small army of creative firebrands, each burning more brightly together.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Avenue
2. Daybreak
3. Corridors
4. Summer Solstice
5. Juneteenth
6. Dogon Cypher
7. Reflections

When Dead Cross released their self-titled debut in the Summer of 2017, Mike Patton, in conversation with Rolling Stone, said “I’m not some young tough guy trying to prove a point anymore. For me to make a record like this, it’s entirely a musical adventure. I just think it’s fun, and it makes me smile a lot.” Visually, and audibly, Dead Cross is a snarling beast from some of music’s most experimental and dare we say, hardcore, musicians: Dave Lombardo (drums), Michael Crain (guitar), Justin Pearson (bass) and the aforementioned Patton on vocals, but at its core it’s a group of friends having fun, paying homage to the music they love and asking music fans to come along for the ride. It’s that very friendship that brought the band members back together once again and gave us II, their new release out Oct 28th, 2022.

TRACK LISTING

1 Love Without Love
2 Animal Espionage
3 Heart Reformer
4 Strong And Wrong
5 Ants And Dragons
6 Nightclub Canary
7 Christian Missile Crisis
8 Reign Of Error
9 Imposter Syndrome

Dead Letters is the new album from Aqualung - aka songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Matt Hales - his first in more than seven years.

Aqualung first came to attention in 2002 when the debut single ‘Strange & Beautiful (I’ll Put A Spell On You)’ became a surprise UK Top 10 after being discovered via a Volkswagen Beetle advert. While that song created a magnetic allure, the strength and versatility of Hales’ songwriting further enamoured audiences. The debut self-titled Aqualung album reached Gold status in recognition of over 100,000 domestic sales, while the brighter symphonic scope of his second album, ‘Still Life’, led to another chart hit with ‘Brighter Than Sunshine’. By the time Aqualung’s third album, ‘Memory Man’ emerged, glowing comparisons had been made with everyone from Bacharach to Radiohead via The Beach Boys, while his music has featured in ‘Twilight’, ‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘Grey’s Anatomy’.

Collaborating with all kinds of artists - including Lianne La Havas, Bat For Lashes, Mika, Tom Chaplin, Jason Mraz, For King & Country and countless others – Hales’ hectic yet immensely rewarding schedule resulted in huge acclaim, including both an Ivor Novello and a Grammy. No wonder, then, that aside from occasionally briefly resurfacing, Aqualung remained in hibernation.

Hales says, “When I need to work something out I write a song. When I'm overwhelmed by a feeling I write a song. When there's something I need to say but can't say it, I write a song. There were things I needed to say and songs I needed to write for myself and once we were home and the piano was there, I started writing them. At some point I realised these songs were all letters, but not necessarily to be sent. Dead letters.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Here And Now
2. Champion Of The World
3. Fool
4. Imperfect Cadence
5. November
6. Possible Impossible
7. Add Me Up
8. Devotion
9. Bad Dreams

Revered indie trio The Staves' debut album 'Dead & Born & Grown' is celebrating its 10th Anniversary on the 12th November 2022. To celebrate 10 years of their debut album the band will be re-pressing Dead & Born & Grown on recycled colour vinyl.

The album was produced with Glyn and Ethan Johns, who have worked with a plethora of huge artists from past and present between them, including The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, as well as the likes of The Vaccines, Kings of Leon and Kaiser Chiefs. The Staves are three sisters from Watford who share vocal duties in addition to some contributions on guitar and ukelele.

This special-edition recycled vinyl is made from 100% PVC recycled material, using waste material and clippings from previous pressings and are re-used. The result is that each vinyl is unique with its own colour combination therefore the colour you receive will be randomized.

TRACK LISTING

Wisely & Slow
Gone Tomorrow
The Motherlode
Pay Us No Mind
Facing West
In The Long Run
Dead & Born & Grown
Winter Trees
Tongue Behind My Teeth
Mexico
Snow
Eagle Song

Submitted for listener’s approval, …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead present their eleventh album, BLEED HERE NOW…in historic quadraphonic surround sound, giving listeners an immersive listening experience that will take them through a listening journey from one track to the next. Forced into a pandemic-necessitated cancellation of their 2020/2021 tours, the band retreated to lengthy period of doing nothing. After a lengthy period of doing nothing, the band decided to make an album in a way that hasn’t really been done since the 70s - in quadrophonic sound. From the opening bombast of “Our Epic Attempts” to the alternative drive of “Penny Candle” to the thunderous 11-minute opus “Taken By The Hand” this album is unlike anything the band has produced before, equal parts experimental and ambitious, yet still sounding honest and true to what the band is. XI: BLEED HERE NOW was produced by engineer Charles Godfrey alongside Trail’s own Conrad Keely, who also created, directed, edited and produced all of the album’s artwork again.

TRACK LISTING

1. Our Epic Attempts
2. Long Distance Hell
3. Field Songs
4. Penny Candle
5. No Confidence
6. Sting Theme
7. Kill Everyone
8. Growing Divide
9. Pigments
10. Golden Sail
11. A Life Less Melancholy
12. Taken By The Hand
13. Contra Mundum
14. Darkness Into Light
15. Water Tower
16. Sounds Of Horror
17. Protest Streets
18. The Widening Gyre
19. Millennium Actress
20. Salt In Your Eyes
21. English Magic
22. Calm As The Valley

Ali Farka Touré trekked the world, bringing his beloved Malian music to the masses. Dubbed “the African John Lee Hooker,” one could hear strong connections between the two; both employed a bluesy style of play with gritty textures that elicit calm and fury in equal measure. While the influence of Black blues music prevailed, Touré created a West African blend of 'desert blues' that garnered Grammy awards and widespread reverence.

Though he transcended in 2006, Ali’s musical legacy lives on through his son, Vieux aka “the Hendrix of the Sahara,” an accomplished guitarist and champion of Malian music in his own right. On Ali, his collaborative album with Khruangbin, Vieux pays homage to his father by recreating some of his most resonant work, putting new twists on it while maintaining the original’s integrity. The result is a rightful ode to a legend. Ali isn’t just a greatest hits compilation. It’s a lullaby, a remembrance of Ali's life through known highlights and B-sides from his catalog. It is a testament to what happens when creativity is approached through open arms and open hearts. “To me, music is magic, it is spontaneous, it is the energy between people,” Vieux says. “I think Khruangbin understands this very well.” The genesis of the album dates back to 2019, when Khruangbin, coming off their breakthrough album Con Todo el Mundo, was beginning to play to bigger crowds. The record was finished in 2021, as a global pandemic shuttered businesses and forced us to take stock of what Earth was becoming. Indirectly, Ali captures this as a moment of peace within a raging storm, a conversation between past and present without allegiance to suffering. Now, given Khruangbin’s reach as a unit with legions of fans (including the likes of Jay-Z and Paul McCartney), they’re poised to bring Malian music to broader groups of listeners. Ali is a masterful work in which the love surrounding it is just as vital as the music itself, driving it to unforeseen places; Vieux and Khruangbin are spreading the good word to a completely new generation. “I hope it takes them somewhere new, or puts them in a place they haven't felt or heard,” Lee says. “It is about the love of new friendship and making something beautiful together,” Vieux continues. “It is about pouring your love into something old to make it new again. In the end and in a word it is love, that's all.”

First vinyl issue of the sole The Dead Texan album originally released in 2004. Gatefold Sleeve.

“Stars Of The Lid’s Adam Wiltzie presents a collection of drone compositions that he considered too aggressive for his parent band—which means they range somewhere between a whisper and a shout. The sense of cathedral-like reverence is balanced with extreme intimacy.” — 8.2 Pitchfork

“This is quite possibly the best music available for slowly drifting into dreamland. Equal parts intrigue and sedative, The Dead Texan is an elegantly hypnotic album that manages to freeze time in addition to passing it.” —Tinymixtapes

“The Dead Texan remains a remarkably subtle and tranquil work. Disarmingly lovely...” —Textura

Another sweeping album from Stars Of The Lid/A Winged Victory For The Sullen and Aix Em Klemm member Adam Wiltzie, this time under his Dead Texan moniker.

Eleven mini-symphonies of nocturnal psychedelia and reverie-inducing soundcraft, propelled with piano, strings, and Wiltzie's surreal smear of guitars. 

TRACK LISTING

1. The 6 Million Dollar Sandwich
2. Glen’s Goo
3. A Chronicle Of Early Failures Pt One
4. A Chronicle Of Early Failures Pt Two
5. Taco Me Manque
6. Aegina Airlines
7. When I See Scissors I Cannot Help But Think Of You
8. Girth Rides A (Horse)
9. La Ballade D’Alain Georges
10. Beatrice Pt Two
11. The Struggle

My Boy, the third solo record from New Zealand singer/ songwriter Marlon Williams, announces an artist emerging anew. Gone is the solemn, country-indebted crooner with the velvet voice – in his place comes a playful, shapeshifting creature. Following the release of his second album, 2018’s Make Way For Love, Williams’ toured the world, playing major festivals and collaborating with Lorde, Yo-Yo Ma and Florence Welch.

He also forged a fledgling acting career with roles in films The True History of the Kelly Gang and Netflix series Sweet Tooth, as well as a cameo in Oscar winning film A Star Is Born. My Boy parlays this flush of worldly experience into a vivid record as spirited and kinetic as the unfolding life of its performer. “I’ve always explored different character elements in my music,” says Williams. “And the more I get into acting, the more tricks I’m learning about representation and presentation. To get braver and bolder with exploring shifting contexts and new ways of doing things.”

As the pandemic paused global travel, Williams found himself at home in New Zealand, reconnecting with family and friends. Soon new demos and lyrical themes emerged: of self-identity and escapism; tribalism and a gnarled family tree; and ruminations on the role of masculinity and mateship. Co-produced with Tom Healy and recorded at Roundhead Studios in New Zealand, My Boy finds Williams’ leading a new band through a set of genre-hopping tunes: from the cheery sway of ‘My Boy’ and chugging ‘80s noir sheen of ‘Thinking Of Nina’, to the charging synth of ‘River Rival’, and the sultry pop jam ‘Don’t Go Back.’ All this sonic and emotional whiplash is intentional, and ultimately My Boy sees Williams having fun, even while interrogating the behaviors of himself and those around him.

TRACK LISTING

1. My Boy
2. Easy Does It
3. River Rival
4. My Heart The Wormhole
5. Princes Walk
6. Don’t Go Back
7. Soft Boys Make The Grade
8. Thinking Of Nina
9. Morning Crystals
10. Trips
11. Promises

From euphoria to despair, Dead Rabbits' new album 'A Different Place' – the Southampton-based first album since 2016's 'Everything Is A Lie' – takes you on a journey through the ups and downs of the day-to-day. Over three years of cancellations, disappointment and disillusion, global events made the album's creation more difficult than anyone could've imagined. All hurdles overcome, Dead Rabbits' fourth studio LP sees them return with their own brand of heavy-hitting psychedelic rock.

From soft velvet sounds to the raw and explosive, electronic undertones supplement a wall of guitars. On 'A Different Place', vocalist and guitarist Tom Hayes says: "I wanted to create an album that takes the listener somewhere else. Musically I wanted to create something that captures how we as a band actually sound. But within that, each song tells a different story and the music compliments them. I took a reflective look into my mental health. Highlighting just how fine the line is between successes and failures. Typically, external words and actions encourage a greater positive outcome. That's how it works for me, hopefully listeners can feel where I'm coming from."

TRACK LISTING

1) Slowdown
2) Mexico
3) Catch Me Speak
4) Whenever
5) Keep Me High
6) Free
7) Trouble
8) When The Sun Goes Down 

In their relatively brief lifetime, between 1996 and 2002, Hefner enjoyed an incredibly productive four-album, multi-EP career. Their beautiful, concise, intelligent songs earned a fiercely loyal, cult audience and the long-term support of legendary DJ John Peel, for whom they recorded innumerable sessions. Originally released in 2001, their final album, Dead Media, found Hefner reaching out and taking risks. Keen to break free of their indie-folk roots, they cocooned themselves in a home studio with broken analogue synthesizers, antique drum machines and battery-powered amplifiers.

The band’s naivety and guile produced some curiously engaging music, with frontman Darren Hayman’s precise, economic, poetic dissections of quotidian romance draped over awkward, fuzzy beats: something like Cat Stevens covering Warm Leatherette. Dead Media caused confusion at the time and ultimately lead to the band’s break up. However, the songs like ‘Junk’, ‘The Night’s Are Long’ and ‘When The Angels Play Their Drum Machines’ are among Hayman’s most adult and affecting essays and stand out among the finest of Hefner’s achievements. Tracks: 1 Dead Media 2 Trouble Kid 3 Junk 4 When The Angels Play Their Drum Machines 5 Union Chapel Day 6 China Crisis 7 Alan Bean 8 Peppermint Taste 9 The Mangle 10 The King Of Summer 11 The Nights Are Long 12 Treacle 13 Half A Life 14 Waking Up To You 15 Home

TRACK LISTING

1 Dead Media
2 Trouble Kid
3 Junk
4 When The Angels Play Their Drum Machines
5 Union Chapel Day
6 China Crisis
7 Alan Bean
8 Peppermint Taste
9 The Mangle
10 The King Of Summer
11 The Nights Are Long
12 Treacle
13 Half A Life
14 Waking Up To You
15 Home

“There Is Nothing Left But The Enjoyment Of Senseless Destruction” is the first deadly plastic bullet from Dead Normal, a Barcelona-based trio fusing harsh electronics with a confrontational punk aesthetic to devastating effect. Think: early SPK meets 1990s Whitehouse, distorted Scorn/JFK type skullcrushing beats, a sprinkling of deconstructed Mark Stewart/Tackhead-esque mutant groove and a ferocious dual male/female vocal attack reminiscent of Mark E Smith at his most irascible combined with Crass' Eve Libertine at her most acerbic. Push the levels into the red and you're still only half way close to the unique and original hybrid of Dead Normal's punishing sonic assault. Founded in 2016 by Mario (electronics) with Oriol Rosell and Zoë V sharing vocal duties, the members of Dead Normal have a pedigree spanning two decades in the experimental/avant-garde scene, including collaborations with artists such as The New Blockaders and 2nd Gen. Dead Normal have played in Spain, London and Berlin alongside a diversity of acts from hardcore punk to power electronics and synthpop with further live performances to be announced shortly. 

TRACK LISTING

1/Reasons To Not Love
2/When The Shit Hits The Fan
3/The Epiphany
4/Little Tweaker Fuck 
5/The Man Is A Twat
6/Bobby
7/Guilt Hits Harder Than The Truth
8/You Were Good
9/Fully Loaded

It’s the desire to celebrate their sonic bounty that first got Oberst and the band excited about the idea of comprehensive reissues. But this wouldn’t be a Bright Eyes project if a moment devoted to appreciating the past weren’t turned into an opportunity to connect with the future. That’s where the nine companion EPs come in. Or as Oberst puts it, “the supplemental reading” for the primary reissues: One six-track EP per reissued album, each featuring five reworked songs from that album. “My thing was they had to sound different from the originals, we had to mess with them in a substantial way.” Plus one cover that felt “of the era” in which that particular albums was made – a song that meant something to the band at the time. To help the EPs come alive in the fullest way, Bright Eyes called in lots of old friends, like Bridgers, M. Ward, and Welch and Rawlings, as well as new ones like Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1.The Invisible Gardener
2. Patient Hope In New Snow
3. Saturday As Usual
4. Falling Out Of Love At This Volume
5. Exaltation On A Cool Kitchen Floor

SIDE B:
6. The Awful Sweetness Of Escaping Sweat
7. Puella Quam Amo Est Pulchra
8. Driving Fast Through A Big City At Night
9. How Many Lights Do You See?
10. I Watched You Taking Off

SIDE C:
11. A Celebration Upon Completion
12. Emiy, Sing Something Sweet
13. All Of The Truth
14. One Straw
15. Lila

SIDE D:
16. A Few Minutes On Friday
17. Supriya
18. Solid Jackson
19. Feb. 15th
20. The ‘Feel Good’ Revolution

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. If Winter Ends
2. Padraic My Prince
3. Contract And Compare
4. The City Has Sex
5. The Difference In The Shades
6. Touch

SIDE B:
7. June On The West Coast
8. Pull My Hair
9. A Poetic Retelling Of An
Unfortunate Seduction
10. Tereza And Tomas

With Jazz Is Dead Series 2, Younge and Muhammad have once again, together with a roster of world-renowned legends, crate digger patron saints, and an exciting vanguard of young talent, delivered another unimpeachable collection of fresh and captivating recordings inspired by jazz's past, present, and future. There are names that some may already be familiar with, such as Lonnie Liston Smith, Jean Carne, and Tony Allen, and those less so, like Henry Franklin, Phil Ranelin, Wendell Harrison, Garrett Saracho, & Katalyst. What unites each new collaborator is their unbent dedication to remaining original, preserving their creativity, and sharing it with the world.

TRACK LISTING

1. Love Brings Happiness Feat. Lonnie Liston Smith & Loren Oden
2. The Griot Feat. Henry Franklin
3. The Avenues Feat. Katalyst
4.Come As You Are Feat. Jean Carne
5. Sabor Del Ritmo Feat. Garrett Saracho
6. No Beginning, No End Feat. Tony Allen
7. Ursa Major Feat. Phil Ranelin & Wendell Harrison
8. Phoenix Feat. The Midnight Hour

Just found a couple of copies of these mega limited 12"s in the office. 

First come first served.

TRACK LISTING

A So We Won't Forget (Mang Dynasty Version) Remix – Mang Dynasty
B Shida (Bella Suite) Remix – Ron Trent

Just found a couple of copies of these mega limited 12"s in the office. 

First come first served.

TRACK LISTING

A Pelota Remix – Quantic
B Time (You And I) Remix – Felix Dickinson

Just found one copy of this mega limited 12"s in the office. 

First come first served.

TRACK LISTING

A One To Remember Remix – Harvey Sutherland
B Connaissais De Face Remix – Ginger Root

For decades, the voice of Jean Carne has been a crucial part of the American musical landscape, tying together generations of Jazz, Gospel, and R&B artists. Many will recognize Carne from her output in the early 1970s, alongside her then husband Doug Carn, for the lauded Black Jazz label. As a solo artist, backing vocalist, and vocal coach, she has contributed to and collaborated with the likes of Norman Connors, Doug Carn, Dexter Wansel, Phyllis Hyman, Lonnie Liston Smith , Michael Jackson, and many more. At 74, she shows no signs of slowing down. Her latest collaboration with Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge is a clear demonstration of the continuous referencing of the past to illuminate the future.

TRACK LISTING

Come As You Are
People Of The Sun
Visions
My Mystic Life
The Summertime
Black Rainbows
Black Love 

MUNA is magic. What other band could have stamped the forsaken year of 2021 with spangles and pom-poms, could have made you sing (and maybe even believe) that “Life’s so fun, life’s so fun,” during what may well have been the most uneasy stretch of your life? “Silk Chiffon,” MUNA’s instant-classic cult smash, featuring the band’s new label head Phoebe Bridgers, hit the gray skies of the pandemic’s year-and-a-half mark like a double rainbow. Since MUNA — lead singer/songwriter Katie Gavin, guitarist/producer Naomi McPherson, guitarist Josette Maskin — began making music together in college, at USC, they’d always embraced pain as a bedrock of longing, a part of growing up, and an inherent factor of marginalized experience: the band’s members belong to queer and minority communities, and play for these fellow-travelers above all. But sometimes, for MUNA, after nearly a decade of friendship and a long stretch of pandemic-induced self-reckoning, the most radical note possible is that of bliss.

MUNA, the band’s self-titled third album, is a landmark — the forceful, deliberate, dimensional output of a band who has nothing to prove to anyone except themselves. The synth on “What I Want” scintillates like a Robyn dance-floor anthem; “Anything But Me,” galloping in 12/8, gives off Shania Twain in eighties neon; “Kind of Girl,” with its soaring, plaintive The Chicks chorus, begs to be sung at max volume with your best friends. It’s marked by a newfound creative assurance and technical ability, both in terms of McPherson and Maskin’s arrangements and production as well as Gavin’s songwriting, which is as propulsive as ever, but here opens up into new moments of perspective and grace.

Here, more than ever, MUNA musters their unique powers to break through the existential muck and transport you, suddenly, into a room where everything is possible — a place where the disco ball’s never stopped throwing sparkles on the walls, where you can sweat and cry and lie down on the floor and make out with whoever, where vulnerability in the presence of those who love you can make you feel momentarily bulletproof, and selfconsciousness only sharpens the swell of joy.

TRACK LISTING

1. Silk Chiffon (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)
2. What I Want
3. Runner’s High
4. Home By Now
5. Kind Of Girl
6. Handle Me
7. No Idea
8. Solid
9. Anything But Me
10. Loose Garment
11. Shooting Star

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2022 EXCLUSIVE, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

The original 12" single for Big A Little was released in 1980 and featured Nagasaki Nightmare on the other side. Crass decided that the track You're Already dead if more pertinent in today's society, so are creating a brand new 12" which include an exclusive patch or pamphlet, yet to be decided, keeping with the original spirit of Crass

It’s the desire to celebrate their sonic bounty that first got Oberst and the band excited about the idea of comprehensive reissues. But this wouldn’t be a Bright Eyes project if a moment devoted to appreciating the past weren’t turned into an opportunity to connect with the future. That’s where the nine companion EPs come in. Or as Oberst puts it, “the supplemental reading” for the primary reissues: One six-track EP per reissued album, each featuring five reworked songs from that album. “My thing was they had to sound different from the originals, we had to mess with them in a substantial way.” Plus one cover that felt “of the era” in which that particular albums was made – a song that meant something to the band at the time. To help the EPs come alive in the fullest way, Bright Eyes called in lots of old friends, like Bridgers, M. Ward, and Welch and Rawlings, as well as new ones like Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee.

TRACK LISTING

A Spindle, A Darkness, A Fever, And A Necklace
A Scale, A Mirror, And Those Indifferent Clocks
The Calendar Hung Itself…
Something Vague
The Movement Of A Hand
Arienette
When The Curious Girl
Realizes She Is Under Glass
Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh
The Center Of The World
Sunrise, Sunset
An Attempt To Tip The Scales
A Song To Pass The Time

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1.Driving Fast Through A Big City At Night
2. Solid Jackson
3. A Celebration Upon Completition
SIDE B:
4. Falling Out Of Love At This Volume
5. Exaltation On A Cool Kitchen Floor
6. Double Joe

It’s the desire to celebrate their sonic bounty that first got Oberst and the band excited about the idea of comprehensive reissues. But this wouldn’t be a Bright Eyes project if a moment devoted to appreciating the past weren’t turned into an opportunity to connect with the future. That’s where the nine companion EPs come in. Or as Oberst puts it, “the supplemental reading” for the primary reissues: One six-track EP per reissued album, each featuring five reworked songs from that album. “My thing was they had to sound different from the originals, we had to mess with them in a substantial way.” Plus one cover that felt “of the era” in which that particular albums was made – a song that meant something to the band at the time. To help the EPs come alive in the fullest way, Bright Eyes called in lots of old friends, like Bridgers, M. Ward, and Welch and Rawlings, as well as new ones like Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee.

TRACK LISTING

Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)
A Scale, A Mirror, And Those Indifferent Clocks (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)
Arienette
Hypnotist (Song For Daniel H)
When The Curious Girl Realizes She Is Under Glass (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)
A Spindle, A Darkness, A Fever, And A Necklace (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. The Difference In The Shades
2. The City Has Sex (feat. Waxahatchee)
3. Contrast And Compare (feat. Waxahatchee)
SIDE B:
4. Kathy With A K’s Song (feat. M Ward)
5. St. Ides Heaven (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)
6. June On The West Coast (feat. Becky Stark)

Julia Jacklin’s version of ‘Just To Be A Part’ alongside Bill Fay's original.

TRACK LISTING

Julia Jacklin - Just To Be A Part
Bill Fay - Just To Be A Part

Mary Lattimore’s version of 'Love Is The Tune' alongside Bill Fay's original.

TRACK LISTING

Mary Lattimore - Love Is The Tune
Bill Fay - Love Is The Tune

The story begins with Kevin Morby absentmindedly flipping through a box of old family photos in the basement of his childhood home in Kansas City. Just hours before, at a family dinner, his father had collapsed in front of him and had to be rushed to the hospital. That night Morby still felt the shock and fear lodged in his bones. So he gazed at the images until one of the pictures jumped out at him: his father as a young man, proud and strong and filled with confidence, posing on a lawn with his shirt off. This was in January of 2020. As the months went on and the world dramatically changed around him, Morby felt an eerie similarity between his feelings of that night and the atmosphere of those spring days. Fear, anxiety, hope and resilience all churning together. The themes began twisting in his mind. History, trauma and the grand fight against time. Having the courage to dream, even while knowing the tragedy that often awaits those who dare to dream.

While his father regained his strength, Morby meditated on these ideas. And then, he headed to Memphis. He moved into the Peabody Hotel and spent his days paying tribute and genuflecting to the dreamers he admired. In the evening, he would return to his room and document his ideas on a makeshift recording set-up, with just his guitar and a microphone. The songs, elegiac in nature, befitting all he had seen, poured out of him.

Produced by Sam Cohen (who also worked on Morby’s Singing Saw and Oh My God), This Is A Photograph features musical contributions from longtime staples of Morby’s live band, as well as old friends and new collaborators alike. If Oh My God saw Morby getting celestial and in constant motion and Sundowner was a study in localized intent, This Is A Photograph finds Morby making an Americana paean, a visceral life and death, blood on the canvas outpouring. As Morby reminds us early on, time is undefeated. So what do we do while we’re still here? This is a photograph of that sense of yearning.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Morby's latest may have come from a place of heavy introspection, but results in nothing less than a joyful reaffirmation of life through a selection of typically beautiful progressions and evocative vocals. Definitely his most stylistically focused and accomplished work to date, and a most importantly, a hugely enjoyable listen.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. This Is A Photograph
2. A Random Act Of Kindness
3. Bittersweet, TN
4. Disappearing
5. A Coat Of Butterflies

SIDE B:
6. Rock Bottom
7. Five Easy Pieces
8. Stop Before I Cry
9. It’s Over
10. Goodbye To Good Times

On his recent trip into the shop, Golden Lion Sounds main man and Todmorden's unofficial spiritual guide Waka conjured up some back catalogue releases we'd missed and presented them to us in a holy ritual straight outta the northern spell books.

Contained within number five of the Golden Lion series are two magical movements from psychedelic wizards Carlton Melton and Dead Sea Apes; absolute stalwarts at the forefront of the new psychedelic frontier.

With both bands contributing now historical appearances at the Yorkshire venue, it's a great coup for everyone involved to get them onto one of these limited edition 7"s.

"Night Of This World" by Dead Sea Apes shimmers with a nocturnal suspense; tense, hovering drones eventually subsiding to reveal a Pagan-esque guitar motif calling out to the wild in the witching hours.

Carlton Melton deliver a psychedelic afterburner via "Lion's Roar"; turning up the feedback settings and scorching a path through their usual forest haze for this eponymous dedication to the label and venue they've loved performing at.

Splatter-eyes 3D center label. Comes with 3D glasses!

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Psychedelic fireworks and dark forest soundscapes from two titans of the scene. One of the latest clutch of unmissable and highly limited 7"s from Golden Lion Sounds.

TRACK LISTING

Dead Sea Apes - Night Of This World - 07:00
Carlton Melton - Lions Roar - 06:53

Bill Fay has always sung about attempting to understand the most universal questions: those of nature, spirituality, humanity. His songs are “calming hymns for another chaotic time,” he says. His influence can be traced through many artists’ works, so it only seemed right to celebrate this with a collection of newer voices interpreting his timeless tracks.

Originally released in 2010 by David Tibet (Current 93), ‘Still Some Light’ was issued as a double CD, made up of 70’s album demos (Disc One) and 2009 home recordings (Disc Two). This year, for the first time, this collection of recordings will be pressed to vinyl as a double LP with reimagined artwork, presented alongside contemporary reimaginings of the tracks by Julia Jacklin and Mary Lattimore. Bill Fay’s words and melodies remain unaffected by the passing of time and changing trends; and here alongside the original recordings, these reinvented versions still calmly guide us through another moment of chaos.

Toro y Moi’s seventh studio album, Mahal, is the boldest and most fascinating journey yet from musical mastermind Chaz Bear. The record spans genre and sound—encompassing the shaggy psychedelic rock of the 1960s and ‘70s, and the airy sounds of 1990s mod-post-rock—taking listeners on an auditory expedition, as if they’re riding in the back of Bear’s Filipino jeepney that adorns the album’s cover. But Mahal is also an unmistakably Toro y Moi experience, calling back to previous works while charting a new path forward in a way that only Bear can do. Mahal is the latest in an accomplished career for Bear, who’s undoubtedly one of the decade’s most influential musicians. Since the release of the electronic pop landmark Causers of This in 2009, subsequent records as Toro y Moi have repeatedly shifted the idea of what his sound can be. But there’s little in Bear’s catalog that will prepare you for the deep-groove excursions on Mahal, his most eclectic record to date.

The second the album begins we’re immediately transported into the passenger seat, jeep sounds and all, ready for the ride Chaz and company have concocted for us. Seeds of some of Mahal’s 13 songs date back to the more explicitly rock-oriented What For? from 2015. MAHAL was mostly completed last year in Bear’s Oakland studio with the involvement of a host of collaborators, Sofie Royer and Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Ruban Neilson to Neon Indian’s Alan Palomo and the Mattson 2.

“I wanted to make a record that featured more musicians on it than any other record of mine,” he explains. “To have them live on that record feels grounded, bringing a communal perspective to the table.” As a result, Mahal is lush and surprising at every turn, from the cool-handed “The Loop,” which recalls Sly and the Family Stones, to the elastic psych rock of “Foreplay” and the dizzying Mulatu Astatke-recalling of “Last Year.”

Lyrically, the album zooms in on generational concerns, picking up where the Outer Peace standout “Freelance” effectively left off. Bear seems to be surveying the ways in which we connect with technology, media, each other, and what disappears as a result. Cuts like the squishy “Postman” and “Magazine” take a deep dive into our relationship with media in a changing digital world. “It’s interesting to see how we adapt to this new age. We’re so connected, but we’re still missing out on things,” Bear ruminates while discussing the album’s themes. It’s not all introspection. Bear cools things down near the album’s end with the Mattson 2-featuring “Millennium,” a laid-back jam with tricky guitar licks about ringing in new times even when everything else seems upside down. “It’s about enjoying the new year, even when it’s been shitty,” Bear explains. “There’s nothing else to do.” Finding a sense of joy in the face of adversity is embedded in MAHAL’s DNA, right down to the jeepney that literally and figuratively brings the music out into the community. “We know that touring is messed up for now, and large gatherings are a fluke,” he explains. “It’s about the notion of us going out to the people and bringing the record to them.” And with the wide-open atmosphere of Mahal, Toro y Moi stands to connect with more listeners than ever before.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Airy, funky psychedelia from Chaz Bear on the endlessly shifting, beautifully produced 'Mahal'. there are more than whispers of Beck's sugar-sweet drawl, but floating smoothly atop road-trip radio grooves and lysergic melted soul. Lovely.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. The Medium
2. Goes By So Fast
3. Magazine (feat. Salami Rose Joe Louis)
4. Postman
5. The Loop
6. Last Year
7. Mississippi

SIDE B:
8. Clarity (feat. Sofie)
9. Foreplay
10. Déjà Vu
11. Way Too Hot
12. Millennium (feat.
The Mattson 2)
13. Days In Love

As the final chapter in the initial run of Jazz Is Dead releases, Remixes JID010 continues the creative catharsis of an exhilarating new chapter in jazz music. Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad tapped nine iconic creators to reimagine their personal favorites from Jazz Is Dead’s catalogue to-date, who created striking new versions by Cut Chemist, DJ Spinna, Georgie Anne Muldrow, Akili, Shigeto, Pink Siiffu, Dibiase, Natureboy Flako, and Kaidi Tathum. 

TRACK LISTING

01. Marcos Valle - Gotta Love Again (Kaidi Taithum Remix)
02. Roy Ayers - Soulful And Unique (Pink Siifu Remix)
03. Gary Bartz - Soulsea (Cut Chemist Remix)
04. João Donato - Desejo De Amor (Akili Remix)
05. Brian Jackson - Nancy Wilson (Shigeto Remix Feat. Ahya Simone & Dez Andrès)
06. Doug Carn - Windfall (Natureboy Flako Remix)
07. Azymuth - Quite Storm (Akili Remix)
08. The Midnight Hour - Jazz Is Dead (Georgia Anne Muldrow Geemix)
09. João Donato - Liaisons (Dibiase Remix)
10. Azymuth Rendor Do Samba (DJ Spinna Remix)

Originally a duo founded by Sophie Landers (drums/vocals) and Kevin Gibbard (guitar/vocals) but now recently fleshed out to a trio with Matt Holt joining on bass, Black Doldrums deal in a dark, shoegazing psych that melds gothic post-punk with a leather-clad rock’n’roll spirit. Produced by Jared Artaud (The Vacant Lots, Alan Vega), the ‘Dead Awake’ LP arrives following two sold-out EPs (most recently 2019’s ‘She Divine’), tours around the UK, EU and US and praise from the likes of Clash Magazine, New Noise Magazine, Louder Than War, Shindig and more.

Having already cultivated a die-hard following in the psych underground, Kevin and Sophie set to work on their long-awaited debut album in 2020. Their original plans were to travel to New York to record the album with Jared Artaud of fellow label-mates The Vacant Lots however the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns and travel restrictions inevitably put a stop to that. Instead, they recorded the album in London with Artaud producing and mixing the album remotely from Brooklyn. “It made for an interesting collaboration as the distance could have been an obstacle”, Sophie recalls, “but it actually helped creativity as we were more inclined to stay in touch and have really decent phone calls at length discussing the songs in a lot of detail.

We really enjoyed those conversations with Jared about music and all of our influences. I think you can hear on the record that it is a full collaboration.” The more collaborative effort of ‘Dead Awake’ finds Black Doldrums switching gears and adopting a cleaner, more precise creative approach than that of their earlier material: “The idea was to be absolutely brutal with our songs and cut them down to what we only felt was necessary. Up until this point we had been experimenting and were happy with what we had created but we no longer felt the need to hide behind too much reverb and an excessive amount of guitars. It still sounds like us but it has all the elements needed to stand the test of time.” The result is an album that feels colder and more stripped back – the effects are still there but stripped down to their fundamentals so that the songs themselves take precedence over any wall-of-sound deliria.

TRACK LISTING

1) Sad Paradise
2) Into Blue
3) Sleepless Nights
4) Now You Know This
5) Dreamcatcher
6) All For You
7) Runaway
8) Sidewinder

An extension of the two’s chart-topping four-song Texas Sun journey, Texas Moon is an introspective stroll through the dark. “Without joy, there can be no real perspective on sorrow,” says Khruangbin. “Without sunlight, all this rain keeps things from growing. How can you have the sun without the moon?”

Crediting their mutual home state for inspiration, Texas Moon pensively examines Texas’ musical perception, while paying homage to the marriage of country and R&B that’s become synonymous with the lone star state. Propelled by rolling guitar licks, conga and bongo, lead single “B-Side” meditates on meeting in a dream and frolics across the nearing contemplative nighttime state with its longing’s joy.

Elsewhere on Texas Moon, the artists channel a newly intimate musical scope that’s illustrated most dramatically when the spacy sensuality of the minimalistic “Chocolate Hills” leads into the stark spirituality addressed on “Father Father,” a reminder of both acts’ gospel roots. Over a simple rolling guitar figure, Bridges pleads with the heavens—“Look at the mess that I made/Just a man with unclean hands”—only to be reminded of God’s eternal love.

For Khruangbin, one song in particular was indicative of the trust that Bridges put in them. “The song ‘Doris’ is about his grandmother making the transition from this world to the next realm,” says Johnson. “It’s a very somber, very deep record. And when someone places that kind of work into your hands, the last thing you want to do is junk it up, overproduce it, or do too much. We treated it with the respect it deserved, and treated Doris with the respect she deserves.”

“It’s like a short story...,” Lee says of the music. “And it leaves room to continue having these stories together. It’s not Khruangbin, it’s not Leon, it’s this world we created together.”

Upon its release, Texas Sun soared to the No. 1 slot on Billboard’s Emerging Artists Chart along with landing the No.1 on spot on “Americana/Folk Albums,” No. 2 on “Vinyl Albums,” No. 4 on “Top Rock Albums” and No. 6 on “Top R&B Albums.” Significantly, both parties’ musical directions were deeply affected by their time working together on Texas Sun.

Khruangbin’s most recent studio album, Mordechai, moved their own vocals to the forefront, a change they readily admit was a direct result of working with Bridges. Their sound was also tapped for remix/reinterpretation of a Paul McCartney song for the McCartney III Imagined project. Meanwhile, in addition to his genre-defying Grammy-nominated album Gold-Digger’s Sound, Bridges has put out several other challenging, shared collaborative tracks, including work with John Mayer, Lucky Daye and most recently Jazmine Sullivan. Each of the artists appeared recently on Austin City Limits and will tour throughout the new year.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: The last Khruangbin album with Leon Bridges was a perfect distillation of their respective sounds into a familiar sounding, but entirely new concoction. This latest offering continues that effortless melting pot of downbeat, Balearic and soul but with a woozy, crepuscular groove. You really can't go wrong here.

TRACK LISTING

1. Doris
2. B-Side
3.Chocolate Hills
4. Father Father
5. Mariella

Fenne was born in London and moved to Dorset as a toddler, where she grew up in the picturesque English countryside. She was a “free range kid,” as she calls it, after her parents took her out of school for a period at the age of seven. Over the following year, they taught her while the family travelled Europe in a live-in bus. Even after she returned to traditional school at 9, her home education never ended, extending to music. Her mother gifted Fenne with her old record collection, through which she discovered her love for T-Rex and the Velvet Underground and Nico. Soon after she fell for the strange genius of PJ Harvey and came to worship Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, and the richly crafted worlds of Feist, which inspired Fenne to pick up a guitar.

“On Hold,” a tender collection of expressive, open-hearted songs, was Fenne’s first foray into songwriting, written during her teenage years. Writing her own songs was initially a “therapy exercise” for Fenne, who is normally reserved when it comes to talking about her feelings. The album, self-released in 2018, organically found a large audience online, which grew after she opened for Lucy Dacus and Andy Shauf’s North American tours last spring. Surrounding its release, The Line of Best Fit deemed Fenne “a new and extraordinary voice capable of wringing profound and resonant moments out of loss.”

In Fenne’s words, “To have this record physically rereleased is a big deal for me and the person I was when I made it. A lot’s changed since then but these songs and what they’ve given me will remain dependable reminders of beginnings and endings that shaped me as a teenager. For an album whose title is half ‘hold’, it makes sense that now whoever wants to can finally do that again.”

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Car Park
2. Three Oh Nine
3. What’s Good
4. The Hand You Deal
5. More Than You Know

SIDE B:
6. On Hold
7. Top To Toe
8. Bud
9. Brother
10. For A While
11. Car Park (Overflow)

We don’t typically look to pop albums to answer our cultural moment, let alone to meet the soul hunger left in the wake of global catastrophe. But occasionally, an artist proves the form more malleable and capacious than we knew. With Laurel Hell, Mitski cements her reputation as an artist in possession of such power - capable of using her talent to perform the alchemy that turns our most savage and alienated experiences into the very elixir that cures them. Her critically beloved last album, Be the Cowboy, built on the breakout acclaim of 2016’s Puberty 2 and launched her from cult favorite to indie star. She ascended amid a fever of national division, and the grind of touring and pitfalls of increased visibility influenced her music as much as her spirit.

Like the mountain laurels for this new album is named, public perception, like the intoxicating prism of the internet, can offer an alluring façade that obscures a deadly trap—one that tightens the more you struggle. Exhausted by this warped mirror, and our addiction to false binaries, she began writing songs that stripped away the masks and revealed the complex and often contradictory realities behind them. She wrote many of these songs during or before 2018, while the album finished mixing in May 2021. It is the longest span of time Mitski has ever spent on a record, and a process that concluded amid a radically changed world. She recorded Laurel Hell with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland throughout the isolation of a global pandemic, during which some of the songs “slowly took on new forms and meanings, like seed to flower.” Sometimes it’s hard to see the change when you’re the agent of it, but for the lucky rest of us, Mitski has written a soundtrack for transformation, a map to the place where vulnerability and resilience, sorrow and delight, error and transcendence can all sit within our humanity, can all be seen as worthy of acknowledgment, and ultimately, love.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Valentine, Texas
2. Working For The Knife
3. Stay Soft
4. Everyone
5. Heat Lightning
SIDE B:
6. The Only Heartbreaker
7. Love Me More
8. There’s Nothing Left For You
9. Should’ve Been Me
10. I Guess
11. That’s Our Lamp

Say it with me “OX-O-MOX-O-A.”
The Experimental Zenith Of The Grateful Dead!
Featuring the 50th Anniversary remaster of the definitive 1971 band-produced mix.
Original album tracks only, no expanded editions or bonus audio tracks.

The Grateful Dead's third studio effort was also the first that the band did without any Warner Bros. staff producers or engineers hampering their creative lifestyle and subsequent processes. As they had done with their previous release, Anthem of the Sun, the Dead were actively seeking new forays and pushing envelopes on several fronts simultaneously during Aoxomoxoa (1968) -- which was created under the working title of "Earthquake Country." This was no doubt bolstered by the serendipitous technological revolution which essentially allowed the Dead to re-record the entire contents when given free reign at the appropriately named Pacific High Recording facility. As fate would have it, they gained virtually unlimited access to the newly acquired Ampex MM-1000 -- the very first 16-track tape machines ever produced -- which was absolutely state of the art in late 1968. The band was also experiencing new directions artistically. This was primarily the net result of the budding relationship between primary (by default) melodic contributor Jerry Garcia (guitar/vocals) and Robert Hunter (lyrics), who began his nearly 30-year association with the Grateful Dead in earnest during these sessions. When the LP hit the racks in the early summer of 1969, Deadheads were greeted by some of the freshest and most innovative sounds to develop from the thriving Bay Area music scene. The disc includes seminal psychedelic rockers such as "St. Stephen," "China Cat Sunflower," and "Cosmic Charlie," as well as hints of the acoustic direction their music would take on the Baroque-influenced "Mountains of the Moon" and "Rosemary." The folky "Dupree's Diamond Blues" -- which itself was loosely based on the traditional "Betty & Dupree" -- would likewise foreshadow the sound of their next two studio long-players, Workingman's Dead (1969) and American Beauty (1970).

To celebrate the ten-year anniversary of ‘Dead Magick’, Fuzz Club Records are announcing a vinyl reissue of the debut album from Icelandic psychedelic art-rock project Dead Skeletons. In the decade since it was originally released on 11/11/11 via Anton Newcombe’s A Recordings label, ‘Dead Magick’ has come to be seen as one of this generation’s definitive works of neo-psychedelia and had an almost cult-like reverence attached to it. Tours around the UK, EU and USA, major international festival dates and critical acclaim soon followed the album’s release, and it also helped to catalyse a burgeoning underground psych scene to whom ‘Dead Magick’s occult sonic belligerence became a crucial and highly-lauded touchstone. A twelve-track masterclass in “transportative far-out guitar hymnals” (as described by The Quietus’ Luke Turner), the ‘Dead Magick’ double album was an exercise in spiritual rock’n’roll drones shaped by primitive fuzzed-out guitars, repetitive vocal mantras, distorted organs and crashing percussion.

Inspired by bandleader Jón Sæmundur Auðarson’s own diagnosis with HIV, the driving philosophy behind Dead Skeletons (and the wider ‘DEAD’ concept that Jón, aka Nonni Dead, has been exploring since 2003) is defined by the ‘He who fears death cannot enjoy life’ chant heard on the album’s declarative opening track, ‘Dead Mantra’. The underground hit was the first song released by Dead Skeletons – comprising Jón, Henrik Björnsonn (Singapore Sling), Ryan Carlson and Aislinn Van Kriedt (Asteroid #4) – and laid out the band’s intentions from the off: to use music as a means to inspire people to celebrate and cherish life unshackled from fears and anxieties over their mortality. “I created the DEAD concept in 2003 as an idea to use art as a therapy to overcome the fear of death and to enjoy life to the fullest. I had been dealing with the HIV virus since 1994 and wanted to use my art skills to explore this idea further and spread positive messages to help other people in the same position as myself”, the Reykjavik-based artist recalls.

TRACK LISTING

1) Dead Mantra
2) Kingdom Of God
3) Psychodead
4) Get On The Train
5) Dead Magick I
6) Ask Seek Knock
7) Ljósberinn
8) Lifðu!/Live!
9) When The Sun Comes Up
10) Yama
11) Dead Magick II

Marcos and the other Brazilian luminaries Adrian and Ali hosted for Jazz Is Dead, are able to create an entirely different sound and feel using the exact same palette. Throughout the album Marcos sings in his trademark percussive and melodic style (“wa-di-do-bem, ba di da we da bem”), a distinctly Brazilian take on vocalese. Like the sweet and foreign sounds coming out of his mouth, Marcos and the other Brazilian luminaries Adrian and Ali hosted for Jazz Is Dead, are able to create an entirely different sound and feel using the exact same palette. “It was really interesting how we can play the same instruments, listen to the same music and they can still have their distinctly Brazilian flavor that we admire so, so, so much,” Adrian effuses. “And to just hear our influences mix with theirs and to make something brand new is a dream come true.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Queira Bem
2. Isso É Que Eu Sei
3. Oi
4. Viajando Por Aí
5. Gotta Love Again
6. Não Saia Da Praça
7. Our Train
8. A Gente Volta Amanhã

Music exists in movement and change, but before any part of it can be pinned down for analysis, it’s often moved and taken on a new face. The transformation is often driven by culture as forward-thinking people avoid the proverbial paths in search of revolution. Even though our pioneers prophesied that the revolution would not be televised, the message has permeated. It’s spreading like wildfire and leaders are defined by those that speak first: Jazz Is Dead. Music is the universal language and we are the interpreter of sound, a message that has been lost in transcription.

Under Jazz Is Dead, younger artists are elaborating upon conversations started decades ago; jazz icons are utilizing vintage equipment to create new masters with Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad; the same equipment that recorded their coveted catalogs. The vitality embedded in the new masters epitomizes our quest for new life in music: Jazz Is Dead. This compilation features legendary artists Roy Ayers, Gary Bartz, Marcos Valle, Azymuth, Doug Carn, Joao Donato, & Brian Jackson, who will each have their own individual release, working alongside Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad. 

TRACK LISTING

01. Hey Lover (feat. Roy Ayers)
02. Distant Mode (feat. Gary Bartz)
03. Nancy Wilson (feat. Brian Jackson)
04. Conexão (feat. João Donato)
05. Down Deep (feat. Doug Carn)
06. Apocalíptico (feat. Azymuth)
07. Não Saia Da Praça (feat. Marcos Valle)
08. Jazz Is Dead (feat. The Midnight Hour)

In February 2018, Roy Ayers performed four sold out shows in Los Angeles as part of the Jazz Is Dead Black History Month series. It wasn’t until 2020 that fans of Ayers discovered that in addition to those shows, the legendary vibraphone player had also recorded an entire album of new material with Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad.

Over the course of its eight original compositions, written collaboratively by Younge, Shaheed Muhammad & Ayers and recorded at Younge’s Linear Labs in Los Angeles, the resulting album sounds both like an unearthed an unreleased album from Ayers’ classic period in the 1970s (which produced the oft-sampled “Red, Black & Green,” “We Live In Brooklyn, Baby,” “Everybody Loves The Sunshine,” and “Running Away), as well as something startling, new and unexpected. Joining Ayers, Younge & Shaheed Muhammad onthis musical journey are drummer Greg Paul, vocalists Loren Oden, Joy Gilliam, Saudia Yasmein, Elgin Clark & Anitra Castleberry, as well as Phil Ranelin & Wendell Harrison of the legendary Spiritual Jazz label Tribe Records.

The 8 tracks on this album testify to the love not only of a legendary musician’s legacy, but to the vitality & necessity of this music and these sounds in the present era, a thread that will likely run throughout all of the upcoming releases from Jazz Is Dead Records. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Synchronize Vibration
2. Hey Lover
3. Soulful And Unique
4. Shadows Of The East
5. Sunflowers
6. Gravity
7. Solace
8. African Sounds 

Bill Fay has always sung about attempting to understand the most universal questions: those of nature, spirituality, humanity. His songs are “calming hymns for another chaotic time”, he says. His influence can be traced through many artist’s work, and so it only seemed right to celebrate this with a collection of newer voices interpreting his timeless tracks. Originally released in 2010 by David Tibet (Current 93), Still Some Light was released as a double CD, made up of 70’s album demos (Disc One) and 2009 home recordings (Disc Two). This year, for the first time, this collection of recordings will be pressed to vinyl and released digitally, presented alongside contemporary reimaginings of the tracks by Kevin Morby, Steve Gunn, Julia Jacklin and Mary Lattimore. Bill Fay’s words and melodies remain unaffected by the passing of time and changing trends; and here alongside the original recordings, these reinvented versions still calmly guide us through another moment of chaos.

Bill Fay’s Still Some Light was originally released on compact disc as a two CD collection in 2010. Reimagined with new artwork and available for the first time ever on vinyl, Dead Oceans is pleased to present Still Some Light Pt. 1, collecting Fay’s archival recordings from 1970 and 1971. Many of the songs are intimate sketches which were eventually re-recorded for Fay’s self-titled debut and for his landmark album, Time of the Last Persecution. This double LP set includes heart wrenching versions of some of his timeless works, such as “I Hear You Calling” and “Pictures of Adolf Again”, and features equally powerful songs like “Arnold is a Simple Man” and “Love is the Tune,” which only appear in this collection

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A: 
1. Plan D
2. Sing Us One Of Your Songs May
3. I Will Find My Own Way Back
4. Love Is The Tune
SIDE B: 
1. Backwoods Maze
2. The Sun Is Bored
3. There's A Price Upon My Head
4. Time Of The Last Persecution
SIDE C: 
1. Pictures Of Adolph
2. Tell It Like It Is
3. Release Is In The Eye
4. Dust Filled Room
5. I Hear You Calling
SIDE D: 
1. Laughing Man
2. Arnold Is A Simple Man
3. Just To Be A Part
4. Inside The Keeper’s Pantry

The week that guitarists Grace Repasky and Maggie Geeslin turned old enough to drive, Lunar Vacation was officially formed.

Repasky and Geeslin met in the eighth grade and began exchanging musical efforts almost immediately, but that blessed autonomy of first cars meant they could conquer Atlanta’s sprawling suburbs and play to their adolescent hearts’ desire. The pair forged a cluster of demos — just enough to fill a set — and took to as many stages as Atlanta could offer them. Local momentum building, they added classmates Matteo DeLurgio on synth and Connor Dowd on drums to sonically match their songs’ increasingly rambunctious spirit.

Upon high school’s end, Lunar Vacation released a pair of well-received EPs, Swell and Artificial Flavors, and landed support runs for the likes of Remo Drive, Sidney Gish, and SALES. The band nabbed infatuated fans across the US while racking up millions of streams on their independently released music. In more than one sense, Lunar Vacation had graduated.

Back in Atlanta, Geeslin was working in a record store (Criminal Records) when Daniel Gleason of the band Grouplove came in. Following a quick connection and hours of conversation, the members of Lunar Vacation felt Gleason could be one to color in the sound they’d been honing live — melodious guitars swirling atop propulsive, often psychedelic rhythm — and capture it in the studio. The band recorded "Unlucky" with Gleason and released it in early 2020, the song drawing attention as “swoon-worthy” from The FADER, “shimmering … wistful, sun-kissed indie-pop” from American Songwriter, and “equal parts Mac DeMarco and Snail Mail” from Paste Magazine. Lunar Vacation continued recording with Gleason in the producer’s chair.

The band released the first song of the batch in June 2021. “Shrug” garnered praise from the likes of Paste, Brooklyn Vegan, Stereogum, Under The Radar, and NYLON who called it “a jangly guitar song with a very shoutable chorus.” Songwriter Repasky shared, “I look back now and realize that this song was a pivotal moment in delving into self-identity and ultimately identifying as a non-binary person." The melody is buoyant though agitated, its guitars warbling like question marks and lyrics ringing distinctly relatable. Lines like This isn’t how I want to be / I didn't know I could care that much and Invited but I’ll never show / Sit at home playing too much Wilco cut into a listener’s mind and vibrate there, like thoughts of one’s own. There’s a carefree sense of triumph in Repasky’s refrain: Why don't you just shrug it off?

Lunar Vacation will release their highly anticipated debut album ‘Inside Every Fig Is A Dead Wasp’ October 29 on Keeled Scales. Throughout the album, this band boasts a celebratory sound, a reckless sense of ecstasy specific to fluid youth and rock solid friendship. In spite of life’s bits that inspire these songs — some darker than others — Repasky, Geeslin, DeLurgio, and Dowd reliably find the light in the thing. Drawing from early influences like Rilo Kiley and Tame Impala, and landing a little closer to contemporary favorites like Alvvays and Slow Pulp, Lunar Vacation make bright music replete with bliss.

Repasky suggested the band name Lunar Vacation to Geeslin at a show, leaning over at a loud moment to say it. It’s easy to imagine others finding out about the band in this same way.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Purple Dreams No. 4
2. Peddler
3. Shrug
4. Where Is Everyone?
5. Making Lunch (Not Right Now)
6.Cutting Corners

SIDE B:
7. The Waiting Game
8. Mold
9. Gears
10. Anemone
11. But Maybe

“A big part of the project and why I did it,” says Sloppy Jane’s Haley Dahl of her Saddest Factory debut Madison, “Was because it felt similar to being a little kid and buying an outfit that was too big that I’d have to grow into. I really valued from the start that making Madison gave me someone I had to become.” The record, which Dahl first conceived of back in late 2017, is a grand gesture, a statement about big love, and about growing into yourself in the process.

Dahl and her 21 bandmates recorded all of Madison at the Lost World Caverns in West Virginia from 3pm to 8:30am each day over the course of two weeks (they also made four music videos on location during this time). To access the space, they’d enter through the back of a gift shop, down a long tunnel where they’d walk down 200 feet of stairs to reach the entrance. Dahl and her bandmates did this steep walk with a piano. The ceiling of Lost World Caverns is massively high and is a perfect dome. The inside was also 98 percent humidity, leading to both stellar sound and also problems with tuning and gear.

Engineer Ryan Howe sat in his parents Subaru above the cave with his mixing board and computer, and threaded cables down 90 feet through a hole in the ground to the ceiling of the cave. It’s the first time someone has ever recorded an entire album in a cave, and the results are pretty sonically stunning. That alone is a marvelous thing. Madison is an astounding, glorious record of melodrama of the highest order

TRACK LISTING

1. Overture
2. Party Anthem
3. Jesus And Your Living Room Floor
4. Judy’s Bedroom
5. Bianca Castafiore
6. Lullaby Formica
7. Madison
8. Wilt
9. Wonderama
10. The Constable
11. Epilogue

Castles in Space announces first ever vinyl release for Mordant Music’s landmark 2006 release “Dead Air”. Remastered for vinyl with all new artwork from Admiral Greyscale.

Baron Mordant is always present but slightly elusive – not so much hidden as just lurking in the shadows. Remarkably individual, Dead Air sounds like a surreal car crash between Saint Etienne and Throbbing Gristle with the warm tones of Phillip Elsmore taking the place of Cracknell/Orridge. A Proustian madelaine to a particular generation if ever there was one, Elsmore had worked as the voice of Thames TV across the 70s and 80s and his instantly recognisable voice being dropped into this electronic hall of mirrors still plays havoc with your brain. Dead Air’s loose concept of a dead TV station was embellished with a unique design concept from Admiral Greyscale that played with 70s iconography (bizarre wallpaper, the Magpie logo and so on).

Jonny Mugwump, Fact Magazine.

There are moments on Drunk Tank Pink where you almost have to reach for the sleeve to check this is the same band who made 2018’s Songs Of Praise. Such is the jump Shame have made from the riotous post-punk of their debut to the sprawling adventurism and twitching anxieties laid out here. The South Londoner’s blood and guts spirit, that wink and grin of devious charm, is still present, it’s just that it’s grown into something bigger, something deeper, more ambitious and unflinchingly honest. The genius of Drunk Tank Pink is how these lyrical themes dovetail with the music. Opener Alphabet dissects the premise of performance over a siren call of nervous, jerking guitars, its chorus thrown out like a beer bottle across a mosh pit.Songs spin off and lurch into unexpected directions throughout here, be it March Day’s escalating aural panic attack or the shapeshifting darkness of Snow Day. There’s a Berlin era Bowie beauty to the lovelorn Human For A Minute while closer Station Wagon weaves from a downbeat mooch into a souring, soullifting climax in which Steen elevates himself beyond the clouds and into the heavens. Or at least that’s what it sounds like.From the womb to the clouds (sort of), Shame are currently very much in the pink.

This deluxe edition includes the full tracklist as early demos. These previously unreleased versions tell the story behind the James Ford produced album that cemented the band as one of the most exciting in British music today.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Alphabet
2. Nigel Hitter
3. Born In Luton
4. March Day
5. Water In The Well
6. Snow Day

SIDE B:
7. Human, For A Minute
8. Great Dog
9. 6/1
10. Harsh Degrees
11. Station Wagon

SIDE C:
12. Alphabet (Demo)
13. Nigel Hitter (Demo)
14. Born In Luton (Demo)
15. March Day (Demo)
16. Water In The Well (Demo)
17. Snow Day (Demo)

SIDE D:
18. Human, For A Minute (Demo)
19. Great Dog (Demo)
20. 6/1 (Demo)
21. Harsh Degrees (Demo)
22. Station Wagon (Demo)

Nolan Potter is putting us home recording freaks to shame. We had a year of global pandemic to lay out our grand ideas and the sum total of most artists “quar-riffs” wouldn’t push the constraints of a normal band practice (gosh, remember those?)

Nolan Potter, in the meantime, has quietly painted us a beatific masterpiece that veers from the whimsical to the wigged out, deftly weaving an untamed tapestry of sound all the while archly commenting on the present musician’s predicament - and he did it alone. No drum machine clattering in the background amidst tape hiss and 4 track grime here - this is a fully realized, insanely well played, full on rock record that might even one-up his first LP for us, last year’s excellent Nightmare Forever.

The guy’s got more chops than a beauticians’ college across a wide array of instruments - no small feat, and easily overlooked when you leave the lyric sheet and credits on the dining room table. That the songs travel far, wide, up, down, backwards, and gamely spill out over the 5 minute mark with exceptionally loose interludes and diversions is just another marvel in this carnival of aural delights. It’s a gem of a record!

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. One Eye Flees Aquapolis
2. Stubborn Bubble
3. Gregorian Chance

Side B
4. Holy Scroller
5. Preeminent Minds
6. Music Is Dead

FLEXI:
1. Overture For A Short Film

Born in 1999, Charlie Hickey grew up in South Pasadena, just minutes from Downtown Los Angeles. Raised by two singer-songwriter parents, Charlie’s second language was music since day one. As early as grade school, he was making sense of the world through songwriting, and by middle school he was writing, recording and performing songs that attracted a community of collaborators and could silence a room.

A turning point for Charlie came at around the age of thirteen, when he covered a song by then up-and-coming artist Phoebe Bridgers, who was still in high school herself. The two quickly became friends and collaborators, setting Charlie on an exciting new musical path. Years later, Bridgers introduced Charlie to songwriter, drummer, producer and her bandmate Marshall Vore, who noticed something special about Charlie. The two began writing and recording songs together, and soon Charlie dropped out of school to work on his music full-time.

Charlie Hickey’s first proper single is “No Good At Lying.” The Marshall Voreproduced track introduces us to Charlie’s evocative storytelling and features Phoebe Bridgers on backing vocals. “I’m no good at lying / on my back or through my teeth / but I’m good at dreaming / I can do it in my sleep,” he sings over hushed guitars and a whimsical banjo, searching for truth as his unconscious mind runs wild and bleeds into reality. It’s a slow, quiet, and understated peek to the world of Charlie Hickey, who is barely of legal drinking age, but taps into such universal themes that showcase a wisdom beyond his years and exudes promise for what’s to come

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. No Good At Lying
2. Count The Stairs
3. Two Haunted Houses

SIDE B:
4. Seeing Things
5. Ten Feet Tall
6. Notre Dame

Remixes not from, but of the entire outstanding Khruangbin album, "Mordechai"! Personal as ever, the list of remixers has been hand picked by the band, not simply a whose who of hype and click bait.  All have some connection to the band, sometimes personal friendships, musical connections, or simply mutual musical appreciation. Harvey Sutherland and Ginger Roots have both toured with the band, Kadhja Bonet and Ron Trent had their own mutual fan club going on, Knxwledge sampled "White Gloves" on a recent mixtape, Natasha Diggs and Soul Clap’s Eli’s are recent buddy-ups, Quantic is a mutual friend of Bonobo (crucial in the KB origin story), while Laura is also godmother to one of Felix Dickinson’s kids. 

It would be tiresome to detail each and every mix, but rest assured this is an exceptionally executed project. Bolstered by the sincere and detailed sleeve notes, which journey each artists' relationship with their band, a bit about their musical legacy, and why they were chosen. 

'A good remix is when the remixer's sonic fingerprint is present, without sounding forced. It should feel like its own story, with at least some of the same characters as the original' - Khruangbin state on these highly impressive sleeve notes - and each and every track on the album represents such forethought. Very few remix albums are put together with such love, dexterity and sympathy as this one - so much so it's bound to stand as a masterpiece in its own right, just as many of the classic 'dub' LPs did from Jamaica (an influence the band themself have highly creditted in informed their sound). 

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A: 
1. Father Bird, Mother Bird (Sunbirds)
2. Connaissais De Face (Tiger?)
3. Dearest Alfred (MyJoy)
4. First Class (Soul In The Horn Remix)
SIDE B:
5. If There Is No Question (Soul Clap’s Wild, But Not Crazy Mix)
6. Pelota (Cut A Rug Mix)
SIDE C:
7. Time (You And I)(Put A Smile On DJ’s Face Mix)
8. Shida (Bella’s Suite)
 SIDE D:
9. So We Won’t Forget (Mang Dynasty Version)
10. One To Remember (Forget Me Nots Dub)

Kansas City trio BUMMER mirror the absurdity of modern life with a balance of dark humour, dejected nihilism and righteous fury. Their music spills out in torrents of skull-crushing riffs, gargantuan bass and caustic howls delivered at breakneck speed with gleeful abandon.

Following their split 7” with long-time friends The Body, which teased a more focused, lean sound for the group, ‘Dead Horse’ hones BUMMER’s auditory desolation and scathing gaze to laser-point precision.

In eleven short vignettes the quartet lay waste to everything in their path, penning a vitriolic overview of life in the American Midwest, a surprising blend of onestar Trip Advisor review and insightful cultural critique.

“[BUMMER] puts the ‘power’ in power trio as they play a raw and primal form of aggressive music that splits the difference between ‘Bleach’-era Nirvana and the early, primitive thrash of Slayer. It’s aggressive and inyour- face, but doesn’t skimp on melody, making their songs memorable. So, there is power and a bit of precision to what they do. A whole lot of volume, too.” - New Noise Magazine

TRACK LISTING

JFK Speedwagon
Barn Burner (You Boys Quit Whippin’ Those Whips)
I Want To Punch Bruce Springsteen In The Dick
E1M1
Donkey Punch
Juice Pig
Kid Spock
Quadruple ZZ Top
False Floor
Magic Cruel Bus
Rareware

Friends! I am so pleased to announce A Night At The Little Los Angeles - the 4-track version of Sundowner. Recorded at home and in my back shed - aka The Little Los Angeles - in suburban Kansas during the summer and winter seasons of 2017 and 2018. This is quite simply the sound of me alone in a room with a four-track to catch my songs as they fell out of my mouth. When I later went into a proper studio to make Sundowner my goal was to capture the essence of these initial recordings, and here you will now have access to the very essence I was chasing. In many ways, this feels like a proper album to me, as it’s my initial attempt to capture the Kansas sunset and put it into sound, where as Sundower was an attempt of an attempt. I love and am proud of them both, of course, but am happy to - for the first time - share this vulnerable side of my songwriting process with the public. Many of my favorite recordings have been made inside of an artist’s home without regard of the outside world, but instead deep in their own world that they’re creating in real time. And with that - I’d like to invite you into my own little world here and now and ask you to please....step inside of....and spend A Night At The Little Los Angeles! - Kevin Morby

****** Sundowner is Morby’s “attempt to put the Middle American twilight -- its beauty profound, though not always immediate -- into sound.” Released in fall 2020 on Dead Oceans, Morby’s distinctively conversational and reflective writing style was received with open arms and was beloved by fans and critics alike. Pitchfork lauded it as “a vision of the Midwest that feels mythical and enormous.” Sundowner’s vision was further fleshed out in comprehensive features in Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Stereogum, The FADER, Vice, Aquarium Drunkard, and more. In addition to traditional music publications, Morby appeared on Adult Swim’s Fishcenter and Office Hours with Tim Heidecker. Morby also made his network television debut on CBS This Morning, where he performed the songs “Campfire” and “Sundowner” as part of a special joint performance with his partner and fellow songwriter Katie Crutchfield, aka Waxahatchee.

TRACK LISTING

1. Campfire (4-Track Version)
2. Sundowner (4-Track Version)
3. A Night At The Little Los Angeles (4-Track Version)
4. Wander (4-Track Version)
5. Velvet Highway (4-Track Version)
6. Valley (4-Track Version)
7. Brother, Sister (4-Track Version)
8. Don’t Underestimate Midwest American Sun (4-Track Version)
9. Provisions (4-Track Version)
10. U.S. Mail (4-Track Version)

Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge are best known for their collaborations with vocalists and MCs, but these two multi-instrumentalists and producers excel in their ability to conjure musical moods with or without vocal accompaniment.

Similarly, the musical legends that these two handpicked to collaborate with across this series are all jazz legends equally at home crafting unadorned compositions as they are collaborating with vocalists.

This 2LP collection presents exclusive instrumental versions of songs originally released on the Jazz Is Dead albums; Roy Ayers JID002, Marcos Valle JID003, Gary Bartz JID006, and João Donato JID007.

More than the previous eight Jazz Is Dead releases Instrumentals JID009 delivers on Adrian and Ali’s original promise of showcasing the music made with their heroes, laying bare the inspired compositions created when different generations of musicians come together to collaborate in the studio. For nearly all of these songs, Adrian and Ali began with sketches and elements of songs that they developed alongside the featured musicians live in Adrian Younge’s Linear Labs studio located in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Hey Lover Feat. Roy Ayers (Instrumental)
A2. Oi Feat. Marcos Valle (Instrumental)
A3. Visions Of Love Feat. Gary Bartz (Instrumental)
A4. Aquarius (Why Do You Cry) Feat. João Donato (Instrumental)
A5. Soulful And Unique Feat. Roy Ayers (Instrumental)
B1. Isso É Que Eu Sei Feat. Marcos Valle (Instrumental)
B2. Nao Negue Seu Coracao Feat. João Donato (Instrumental)
B3. Sunflowers Feat. Roy Ayers (Instrumental)
B4. Queira Bem Feat. Marcos Valle (Instrumental)
C1. Day By Day Feat. Gary Bartz (Instrumental)
C2. Gotta Love Again Feat. Marcos Valle (Instrumental)
C3. Forever More Feat. João Donato (Instrumental)
C4. Synchronized Vibration Feat. Roy Ayers (Instrumental)
D1. Viajando Por Ai Feat. Marcos Valle (Instrumental)
D2. Gravity Feat. Roy Ayers (Instrumental)
D3. Não Saia Da Praça Feat. Marcos Valle (Instrumental)
D4. Beauty Feat. João Donato (Instrumental)
D5. African Sounds Feat. Roy Ayers (Instrumental)
D6. A Gente Volta Amanhã Feat. Marcos Valle (Instrumental)

The Forbidden Dance label is marking their first year of existence and with already top-notch names (Vick Lavender, Alton Miller, The Mechanical Man) with the first three releases, they are celebrating the one year mark with another global gem, disco and house finest - Ilija Rudman! Where Wild Horses Go is conveying an unquestionable sense of 80’s electro and synth boogie filled with smooth and heavily reverberated rhythmics drenched in strong snares. Aligned with catchy and spaced-out disco pads, the album is riddled with ever strong analogue elements processed in a light, quirky and summerish way but with enough groove in some tracks easily applicable on the dancefloors in the late hours. Dead Horse Gang is a brainchild music band/brand by Ilija Rudman dedicated to cinematic dance concept laying on the Los Angeles funk attitude, Art Of Noise perception of sound and raw 12-bit grooves making a statement of mid 80’s culture with surf vibe of California summer. “Dead Horse Gang Music is more than music, it’s a way of life, a way of thinking, a path to a maximum freedom of the one, who can accept it.” -Ilija Rudman

TRACK LISTING

A1. Three Four Amazing
A2. We Hold The Light
A3. Your Smile Is Shotgun
A4. Where Wild Horses Go
A5. Demons Race (theme) 
A6. After The Gold Rush
B1. Over The Hill
B2. Broken Home (Lost Son's Diary)
B3. Black Marble
B4. Exodus Theme
B5. Ministry Of Lost Souls (outro Theme)
B6. Riders Of The Secret Gardens

Acid Dad is an American alternative-rock band composed of singer-guitarists, Vaughn Hunt and Sean Fahey, and drummer, Trevor Mustoe. Vaughn first started recording the band in his Bushwick, NY basement releasing singles “Brain Body” and their first EP “Let’s Plan a Robbery.” Appearing live in the New York City rock scene in 2016, Acid Dad quickly moved to a world stage with their self-titled debut album, released by Greenway Records in 2018. During 2020, the band spent their time building a new studio space in Queens, NY, while continuing to independently produce all their own music, art and even building their own guitars.

With a new space and vision, the band produced their second LP, “Take It From The Dead,” set to be co-released in June 2021 by Brooklyn’s Greenway Records and psych powerhouse LEVITATION’s label, The Reverberation Appreciation Society. “Take It From The Dead” features an array of different influences ranging from 90’s neopsych, modern post-punk and 70’s rock-n-roll. Acid Dad has crafted a record that sounds new, yet feels nostalgic. In contrast to their earlier work, they make use of slower tempos and expand their sound to include songs that are both more intricate and more hypnotic. To accompany the new record, the band spent the last year collaborating with video artist Webb Hunt, producing psych and glitch art videos that form a visual counterpart to the dreamy distortions of their sound.

TRACK LISTING

1. Searchin'
2. BBQ
3. RC Driver
4. She Only Eats Organic
5. Good Time
6. Smile You're On Camera
7. 2 Face
8. Djembe

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

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

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

TRACK LISTING

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

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

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

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

Magic, miracles, ghosts, world leaders; these days it seems there is little left to believe in. Lies outweigh truth and even truth can be dangerous. Raising everyone’s spirits Already Dead – the fourth album and the first for nine years from Willy Mason - explores honesty and deception, anonymity in the digital age, good intentions with unexpected consequences, freedom, colonialism, love, god, and purpose because, its storyteller says, now is the time to restore some much-needed faith.

“Already Dead is a spiritual state to aspire to; it is freedom from the trappings and inhibitions of one’s ego, culture, and mythology. It is freedom and love and freedom to love in the face of death,” tells Willy of the philosophy behind the writing. “It’s about the necessary destruction of one’s mythology; mythology of species, sex, race, nation, self. It’s about the pain and tragedy that comes with such destruction, but also about the freedom, possibility and opportunity for reconciliation; reconciliation with the natural world and with each other.”

Already Dead arrives at a time when certain words must be said. It is a quest for love in a society which fears and discourages it; for truth and justice in a society which prioritises convenience and profit. “I ended up diving so deeply into this record because it felt at the time, like the only way I could hope to do some good for somebody,” Willy says. “All the concern and care I have for people, fear, frustration and sadness, all came pouring out."

Sparkling opener ‘Youth On A Spit’ is one of Willy’s heaviest tracks to date; “I feel no pain I’ve already bled / You can’t kill me I’m already dead,” he taunts, through double-sided declaration of invincibility before embarking upon a biting, bold, and caring tour through the purgatory of life in 21st century North America; reaching for Heaven “The Truth is Love/The Truth is Life/The Truth is Sowing Paradise'', whilst preparing for Hell, “Things we’d do to each other/I’m worried to discover” (Gilded Lie). All the while pleading and appealing to one’s nation as if to a wayward lover; “oh my country/you were born/as a branch from a tree of thorns/of poison apple poison tree/you’ve fallen far but roots run deep” (Oh My Country). Even those considering themselves above suspicion cannot hide: “Wilfully ignorant/a false equivalence/smitten with shame/a pawn in the game” (One Of The Good Ones).

Voyaging across the cracks of a bleak and crumbling landscape, beauty begins to blossom as Already Dead casts new shades of meaning when applied to a society and culture teetering on the edge between reinvention and dissolution. Hope, without promise, develops into its own suspended resolution with ripping album closer ‘Worth It’ and looks towards reaching a definitive destination after the soldiering on of early LPs Carry On (2012) and If the Ocean Gets Rough (2007); “The seed and the sowing/the need and the growing/the hope and the hatred/the faith and the sacred/the thief and the servant/the fazed and the fervent/I Know It’s Worth It”.

After seeing the world on countless tours and supporting independent music communities, Willy’s next move looks to be even greater. “Already Dead captures the feeling of these times and I’m trying to give people encouragement, whatever that may be or look like,” he says. Here lies unquestionable truth; life might be uncertain, but to be Already Dead is just the beginning.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It's been a long wait since the last Willy Mason LP but 'Already Dead' perfectly epitomises what we've come to know and love from Willy. Brimming with folky restraint, but imbued with a cinematic intensity, these are cleverly written and brilliantly played earworms.

TRACK LISTING

1. Youth On A Spit
2. You’d Like To Be Free
3. Gilded Lie
4. Reservation
5. Oh My Country
6. Slowslide
7. One Of The Good Ones
8. Outwit The Devil
9. If There’s A Heart
10. Worth It

One happy thing to be grateful for during otherwise trying times is finally getting to hear and enjoy new work by a man whose music is familiar to millions even if his name is less so. Indeed, Gil Scott-Heron continues to cast such a wide shadow that even many of his biggest fans often seem to forget that there's another name next to his on the bulk of his albums, the name of a man teamed up with Gil as a teenager and proceeded to ride out the decade as his writing partner, keyboardist, arranger, and bandleader for their Midnight Band. That man's name is Brian Jackson.

His considerable backlog of unheard material reveals a stillenergetic and still-vital icon of the music wing of the Black Liberation movement. Prepare to hear from a musician whose work has contributed to the enhancement of all our lives in some form or another with the latest installment of the Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge’s Jazz Is Dead series.

"Brian Jackson is the first album we recorded for Jazz Is Dead. He set the tone for the entire label,” reflects Younge. “He turned our aspirations global. We never knew what this could all be, but with his inspirational character and musicianship, he led us on the right path. We are forever indebted to this icon.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Juicy, crazy-good amalgamation of three jazz greats getting right at it and totally in the pocket. With African, specifically Ethiopian moods and modes and a fearless, experimental approach throughout - this is fiery hot jazz music you need to PLAY LOUD!

TRACK LISTING

A1 / 01. Under The Bridge
A2 / 02. Mars Walk
A3 / 03. Young Muhammad
A4 / 04. Nancy Wilson
B1 / 05. Baba Ibeji
B2 / 06. Duality
B3 / 07. Bain De Minuit
B4 / 08. Ethiopian Sunshower

Private Space, the group’s third album, is a previously untapped vibe at the heart of The Indications. Pushing beyond the boundaries of the funk and soul on their previous releases, Private Space unlocks the door to a wider range of sounds and launches boldly into a world of synthy modern soul and disco beats dotted with strings. It’s an organic, timeless record that’s as fresh as clean kicks and familiar as your favorite well-worn LP.

Developed after being apart for much of the year, Private Space is creatively explosive and delights in upending expectations. Its 10 tracks are both an escapist fantasy and a much-needed recentering after a tumultuous 2020. Throughout, The Indications highlight a collective resiliency – as well as the power of a good song to be a light in the darkness.

Durand Jones and The Indications have long provided the soulful soundtrack for such deep thoughts, both on stage and on your turntable. But as the world slowly resets from the chaos of the past year, Durand Jones and The Indications’ Private Space is arriving at just the right time.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It was always a brilliantly inventive maelstrom of sound emanating from a Durand Jones release, bridging the (admittedly small) gap between funk and soul, but this time sees them broaden their horizons into a wonderfully realised and perfectly weighted groove-laiden disco masterpiece. A stunning and completely essential outing.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Love Will Work It Out
2. Witchoo
3. Private Space
4. More Than Ever
5. Ride Or Die

SIDE B:
6. The Way That I Do
7. Reach Out
8. Sexy Thang
9. Sea Of Love
10. I Can See

Debut album from Dead Nature, the solo project of former Spring King singer and prolific producer (The Big Moon, Calva Louise, Circa Waves, Dream Nails, Genghar, Police Car Collective) Tarek Musa.

Producer and songwriter Tarek Musa has for a long time placed himself at the centre of other artists’ worlds, helping to hone sounds and build scenes through his production work for artists such as The Big Moon, Genghar, and Dream Nails, Calva Louise, Police Car Collective - as well as providing remixes for the likes of Circa Waves. As BBC Radio 1's Jack Saunders noted recently on-air, "we owe a lot to him out here... he's putting the passion from [Spring King] into the future of the alternative music that we love." With Dead Nature, Musa allows himself to step back from his role as architect for others and set about pursuing his own creative impulses.

Throughout Watch Me Break Apart, internal anxieties are made external, and re-purposed into a carnival of multi-coloured, fuzzed-up indie-pop. The strain of social media and a whirlwind news-cycle compound on the album’s cartwheeling title track, pairing thoughts of sleepless nights with isolated imagery (“A car waits at the lights, no one’s in the driver’s seat / In the ocean stands a tree”). "50 Foot Wall" and the paradoxically light-hearted "Hurricane" were both written against the backdrop of a growing climate crisis, and "Ladlands" zeroes in on social and political struggle, the rate at which change is happening, and the reality-warping nature of the echo-chamber.

TRACK LISTING

1. Watch Me Break Apart
2. Hurricane
3. 50 Foot Wall
4. Borrowed Heart
5. Falling Down
6. Red Clouds
7. Rivers
8. Nothing Is Gonna Change
9. Ladlands 

Cult of Dom Keller will release their fifth album, ‘They Carried The Dead In A U.F.O’, on May 21st via Fuzz Club Records. Since 2007 the British band have been leaving a trail of sonic fever dreams, dark psychedelia and experimentalism that beats with a heavy industrial heart and the forthcoming LP sees them conjuring their heaviest and most adventurous work to date. Channelling recent limitations and turning them to their advantage, Cult of Dom Keller found themselves radically altering their creative approach and morphing their sound into a whole new beast. On this LP the band hone in on an industrial noise-rock sound that is pushed to the brink. On 'They Carried The Dead In A UFO', the band said: “We managed to create our most experimental and exciting album to date without being in the same room together. U.F.O. was recorded, mixed and produced by ourselves, meaning we had total control over every noise on the record.

This was the exact record we wanted to make: Experimental and playful; moments of light and pure dark... we wanted to f*ck with the listener and pull them in with moments of beauty and chaos. We hope you enjoy the trip!” Cult of Dom Keller have long been at the forefront of the contemporary British psych scene but their notorious reputation also extends much further afield too. They’ve done several tours around the UK, Europe and US and shared the stage with greats like Roky Erickson, Spectrum, Silver Apples and The Sisters of Mercy, as well as contemporaries like The Black Angels, Fat White Family, Sleaford Mods and Temples.

TRACK LISTING

1) Run From The Gullskinna
2) Lyssa
3) Cage The Masters
4) She Turned Into A Serpent
5) Infernal Heads
6) Psychic Surgery
7) Amazing Enemy
8) Last King Of Hell

Kojaque follows his critically acclaimed cult concept record, Deli Daydreams, with an expansive, urgent debut album. In this landmark debut, Kojaque mines both his emotional interior as an artist, and the external forces of a love triangle barrelling towards chaos. Town’s Dead is a mind-bending, explosive and expansive trip, documenting a tumultuous love triangle that unfolds across New Year’s Eve in a place where gentrification poses as much a threat as the violence of street dealers.

Sonically, the record smashes any previous expectations, stretching an aural palate that leaps from rage to solace, from clattering musical combustions to tender ruminations. The tremendous scope and scale of Town’s Dead demonstrates an artist utterly untethered to assumptions about what a particular voice or genre should be, and instead explores radical musical territory. Dark corners of parks, bedrooms, clubs, streets, and psyches are excavated, and pouring over the rubble is an artist who refuses to conform, unafraid of the vulnerabilities that are exposed when the voice rings true, because there’s just no point in being anything else. Kojaque is part of a new wave of Irish artists flooding the world with blistering and sophisticated literature, film and music - ideas and work that emerged from a social revolution stonewalled by late-stage capitalism. Welcome to that state of mind, where the path less travelled is the only one worth taking.

TRACK LISTING

1. Heartbreak
2. New Year, Who’s This? (Interlude)
3. Town's Dead
4. Wickid Tongues
5. Shmelly
6. That Deep
7. Black Sheep Part I
8. Rover
9. Jinty Boy Blues
10. No Hands
11. Part II
12. Sex N’ Drugs Feat. Celia Tiab
13. Fallin For It
14. Coming Up
15. Casio Feat. Maverick Sabre
16. Curtains 

From the moment she began writing her new album, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner knew that she wanted to call it Jubilee. After all, a jubilee is a celebration of the passage of time—a festival to usher in the hope of a new era in brilliant technicolor. Zauner’s first two albums garnered acclaim for the way they grappled with anguish; Psychopomp was written as her mother underwent cancer treatment, while Soft Sounds From Another Planet took the grief she held from her mother‘s death and used it as a conduit to explore the cosmos. Now, at the start of a new decade, Japanese Breakfast is ready to fight for happiness, an all-too-scarce resource in our seemingly crumbling world.

Jubilee finds Michelle Zauner embracing ambition and, with it, her boldest ideas and songs yet. Inspired by records like Bjork’s Homogenic, Zauner delivers bigness throughout -- big ideas, big textures, colors, sounds and feelings. At a time when virtually everything feels extreme, Jubilee sets its sights on maximal joy, imagination, and exhilaration.

It is, in Michelle Zauner’s words, “a record about fighting to feel. I wanted to re-experience the pure, unadulterated joy of creation…The songs are about recalling the optimism of youth and applying it to adulthood. They’re about making difficult choices, fighting ignominious impulses and honoring commitments, confronting the constant struggle we have with ourselves to be better people.”

Throughout Jubilee, Zauner pours her own life into the universe of each song to tell real stories, and allowing those universes, in turn, to fill in the details. Joy, change, evolution—these things take real time, and real effort. And Japanese Breakfast is here for it.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Japanese Breakfast has an uncanny knack to sit right at the intersection of so many genres, while simultaneously defying them all. 'Jubilee' comes across as a celebration, taking the tried and tested sounds of synthpop and soul and fusing them with a wealth of influence from all over the musical spectrum, resulting in a gloriously well produced and uncannily uplifting end product.

TRACK LISTING

1. Paprika
2. Be Sweet
3. Kokomo, IN
4. Slide Tackle
5. Posing In Bondage
6. Sit
7. Savage Good Boy
8. In Hell
9. Tactics
10. Posing For Cars

The band’s most experimental album, Anthem Of The Sun was an unprecedented mix of studio and live recordings stitched together to create a hybrid. More than fifty years later, it remains a pinnacle of psychedelic music. It also marked a departure for the band, as they began to channel their creativity into longer jams on songs like “Alligator” and “Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks)” – two live staples of the Dead’s early days. During this period, the band included: Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann. The LP features a remastered version of the 1971 mix, mastered by Grammy®-winning engineer David Glasser from the original analog master tapes.

Cardinal Fuzz and Feeding Tube Records are proud to present a long awaited reissue of Dead Sea Apes & Black Tempest – The Sun Behind The Sun. This re-issue is presented in a reflective Mirri Board reflective outer sleeve. Manchester’s Dead Sea Apes and Godalming’s Black Tempest engage in a mind meld of galactic proportions on this; both band’s first outing on vinyl.

Both entities weave together seamlessly as Grey Alphabets recalls Goblin’s giallo soundtracks, whilst Wilder Penfield pulses with post-punk metal-loid Harmonia kraut vibes. Side 2 is given over to the 25+minute Heliopause - a dubby astral meditation, where Oneida meet Tangerine Dream in an elongated Komische drift. For fans of: Harmonia, Oneida,Goblin, Mogwai, Tangerine Dream.

Vinyl reissue of Future Sound of London’s seminal album, "Dead Cities". Marking 25 years since its original release this cult album is pressed on vinyl for the first time since its 1996 release.

“Herd Killing” and “We Have Explosive (Herd Killing mix)” both feature several samples from the Run DMC album Tougher Than Leather. Title track “Dead Cities” contains a vocal sample at the beginning of Laurence Fishburne from the film Deep Cover. Single “My Kingdom” features a vocal sample of “Rachael’s Song” (aka “Rachel’s Song”) by Vangelis, from the Blade Runner soundtrack .

The album charted in the UK top 40 with “My Kingdom” & “We Have Explosive” both entering the UK singles chart in the top 15.

A deadly mix of warped breakbeats, cinematic moods and adrenelin-triggering sfx and synthesis; it's world's apart from the acid house revellry of "Papua New Guinea" and a much more challenging, if rewarding and immersive experience...

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Herd Killing
Dead Cities
Her Face Forms In Summertime
We Have Explosive

Side B
Everyone In The World Is Doing Something Without Me
My Kingdom
Max
Antique Toy

Side C
Quagmire/In A State Of Permanent Abyss
Glass

Side D
Yage
Vit Drowning/Through Your Gills I Breathe
First Death In The Family

The shadow that Gary Bartz casts over the last six decades of progressive Black music, and his continued dedication to same, makes him a logical and very welcome contributor to the Jazz Is Dead label. An alto saxophonist steeped in the history and tradition of his instrument who is also restlessly experimental and not prone to purism of any kind, he enjoys both the respect and admiration of his peers and the hero worship of several generations after him – including Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, which inevitably led to Gary Bartz JID 006.

A look at his body of work reveals dalliances with bebop, hard bop, free jazz, spiritual jazz, soul jazz, jazz-funk, fusion and acid jazz, all while resolutely remaining unmistakably Gary Bartz. There's early work with Eric Dolphy and McCoy Tyner in Charles Mingus' Jazz Workshop, work with Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, a stint in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, and also one with Miles. There's his groundbreaking and highly influential Ntu Troop albums of the early ‘70s and his jazz-funk work including two classic albums with the Mizell Brothers, one of which supplied A Tribe Called Quest with a sample that was smooth like butter. And while on the subject of samples, the Bartz catalog has provided hip-hop and other genres with a rich source of them, and artists who have gone to his well when producing beats also include Black Sheep, Jurassic 5, Casual, RPM, Warren G, Photek, Statik Selektah, Chi-Ali, 3rd Bass, Showbiz, ZTrip, Young Disciples, and many others.

The socio-political content of much of Bartz’s work, particularly during the early ‘70s, is another factor that has captured the attention of and influenced many. He was wide awake to the pressing issues of his day, which sadly haven't changed much in a half-century—long before the term "woke" was ever coined—which adds continued relevance and resonance to albums like the two Harlem Bush Music LPs. Speaking his mind and expressing thoughts and feelings lyrically and vocally were a consistent aspect of his work during this era, but even with all this there's always still a space within Gary's oeuvre for the celebration of simple and beautiful basic truths. “Working with Gary Bartz epitomizes the ethos behind Jazz Is Dead,” says Younge. “He’s a luminary that has contributed so much to music culture, for decades. His musical ability is expanding with age and we’re honored to be a part of his world.”

"Day By Day" brings Bartz full circle by placing him in a more modern context which he contributed to creating in the first place. It takes certain sonic cues from Muhammad's old group, A Tribe Called Quest, while also calling to mind neo-soul a little bit. But the icing on the cake is the unexpected and gorgeous vocal chorus which is like the sun coming out and which once again harks back to an element familiar to Mizell fans. With its propulsive bassline steadily prodding the track along, "The Message" is strongly rooted in classic ‘70s modal jazz and serves as the spiritual and emotional centerpiece of the album. The instrumental interplay and textures would have been perfectly at home on the Black Jazz label even though there's also a certain almost intangible postmodern, 21st century approach to that style, perfectly in keeping with Bartz's well-known tendency to look forward, not backwards.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Spiritual Ideation
A2. Visions Of Love
A3. Black & Brown
A4. Blue Jungles
B1. Day By Day
B2. Distant Mode
B3. The Message
B4. Soulsea

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S., Chastity Belt’s Annie Truscott descended into a state of mourning. Her plan had been to join her partner, Jay Som’s Melina Duterte, as violinist on tour, a privilege rarely afforded since both maintain busy road schedules, and for Truscott, the prospect of spending most of the year in a van wasn’t met with exhaustion so much as exhilaration. At long last, she’d be making a living playing music, no side hustle needed. The cancellation of the tour represented a sidelined dream. Routine was born of this disappointment. Like the phoenix rising from the ashes, Truscott and Duterte’s collaborative project offers a glimpse of the creative possibilities that can emerge from a state of defeat. Written and recorded over the course of a month in Joshua Tree, Routine’s lush debut EP And Other Things finds the couple trying on new roles. Truscott, who plays bass in Chastity Belt, wrote the bulk of the material and sings on the EP, while Duterte, normally a band leader, used the project as an opportunity to, in her words, “Take the backseat,” as accompanist, producer, and engineer.

Duterte describes the making of the EP as “seamless.” In the mornings, Truscott sat outside of the cabin in the not-yet-blazing sun and worked out chord progressions on guitar while Duterte slept in. Staring out at the horizon, Truscott could see a smattering of houses and the sharp outline of a mountain range, but overall the property felt remote, far removed from home in Los Angeles. On long walks Truscott admired the recently bloomed spring flowers and pondered the legacy of friendships and experiences that made her. “I spend a lot of my time thinking about the people who’ve impacted my life,” she says. “Routine gave me an opportunity to explore those relationships through music.” It was on one of these walks that Truscott began writing “Cady Road,” a contemplative, country-tinged pop song that urges listeners to sit in the discomfort of the present moment. “Relax/ It’s fine/ You don’t have to know this time,” Truscott sings on the chorus, reflecting on the unsuredness that gripped her in those early days of the pandemic. Duterte joins in harmony, giving a song about being alone with your thoughts a collaborative dimension. “In Annie’s songs I hear a yearning for something just out of reach, something unachievable,” Duterte says. “She’s such a great singer, so it felt good to just layer instruments to make her vision for it feel fully fleshed out.” That impulse is heard vividly on “Cady Road,”where an abundant arrangement accompanies Truscott, replete with the spry notes of a banjolele. A true collaboration requires trust, intimacy, and patience, three elements that cohered almost mystically in the process of making this EP.

“Melina is the most calming presence. She’s so good at sitting with silences in a conversation and just observing,” Truscott says. The quality not only makes Duterte a good partner, but also a good bandmate and producer. “Calm and Collected” is a tribute to that enviable ability to maintain serenity amidst the chaos of experience. Though it was written in Joshua Tree, Duterte and Truscott recorded it in the attic of their home in LA, where Duterte set up a studio in the free time afforded by the pandemic. The song is the quietest of the collection, a gentle ode underscored by atmospheric swaths of synth that swaddle the listener. “I think of And Other Things as a series of vignettes,” Truscott says. “We aren’t telling one story here, we’re telling a series of short stories that people can hopefully relate to.” Asked how it feels to offer the EP up to the world during a time of major uncertainty in the music industry, Truscott offers only one word: “Cathartic.”

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Cady Road
2. Numb Enough

SIDE B:
3. Song 5
4. And Other Things
5. Calm And Collected

There are moments on Drunk Tank Pink where you almost have to reach for the sleeve to check this is the same band who made 2018’s Songs Of Praise. Such is the jump Shame have made from the riotous post-punk of their debut to the sprawling adventurism and twitching anxieties laid out here. The South Londoner’s blood and guts spirit, that wink and grin of devious charm, is still present, it’s just that it’s grown into something bigger, something deeper, more ambitious and unflinchingly honest.

The genius of Drunk Tank Pink is how these lyrical themes dovetail with the music. Opener Alphabet dissects the premise of performance over a siren call of nervous, jerking guitars, its chorus thrown out like a beer bottle across a mosh pit. Songs spin off and lurch into unexpected directions throughout here, be it March Day’s escalating aural panic attack or the shapeshifting darkness of Snow Day. There’s a Berlin era Bowie beauty to the lovelorn Human For A Minute while closer Station Wagon weaves from a downbeat mooch into a souring, soullifting climax in which Steen elevates himself beyond the clouds and into the heavens. Or at least that’s what it sounds like.

From the womb to the clouds (sort of), Shame are currently very much in the pink.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: As uncompromising and incendiary as ever, Shame's 'Drunk Tank Pink' takes all of the riotous guitars and pummeling percussion and twists them into a recognisable but refreshing take on their trademark sound. A lot more intricate, elaborate and nuanced, Shame go from strength to strength.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Alphabet
2. Nigel Hitter
3. Born In Luton
4. March Day
5. Water In The Well
6. Snow Day

SIDE B:
7. Human
8. Great Dog
9. 6/1
10. Harsh Degrees
11. Station Wagon

An unparalleled & in-depth artefact of studio projects from the first 10 years of DR.ME studio spanning 560 pages featuring every project we have ever worked on including work for Mick Jagger, The Tate, Domino Records, Tri Angle, Riposte Magazine, Thames & Hudson & Universal. Alongside never before seen posters, record sleeves, identities, books, personal projects & more. Rare behind the scenes photography, exhibitions the studio has both curated and created work for around the world, anecdotes, insights and stories of how certain projects came to pass, rejected and killed work, the definitive DR.ME journey from 2010—2020 all in one place for the first time. 

Elbow finally release the long awaited b-sides album: 'Dead In The Boot' which brings together b-sides and hard to find non-album tracks from the band's lengthy recording career. The release tells an alternative elbow story beginning with the early years, with tracks like 'None One' from the original 'Newborn' EP in 2000, right up to 'Buffalo Ghosts' from last April's 'Open Arms'.

TRACK LISTING

1. Whisper Grass
2. Lucky With Disease
3. Lay Down Your Cross
4. The Long War Shuffle
5. Every Bit The Little Girl
6. Love Blown Down
7. None One
8. Lullaby
9. McGreggor
10. Buffalo Ghosts
11. Waving From Windows
12. Snowball
13. Gentle As

The fourth release from Jazz Is Dead records features Azymuth, one of the bands in Brazilian history, redefining Popular Brazilian Music. Having released almost 20 albums in their career, Azymuth proves to be a consistent source for an innovative mix of jazz, pop, MPB, and electronic music. Composed and produced by Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad and recorded in the Linear Labs analog studio. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Ao Redor Do Samba
2. Sumaré
3. Cat Jump
4. Fall Afternoon
5. Friendship Samba
6. Apocalíptico Feat Azymuth
7. Pulando Corda
8. Queit Storm 

The breadth, detail and care of Tunng’s Dead Club project is a striking thing. “It’s not just a record, it’s a discussion, it’s a podcast series, it’s poetry, it’s short stories, it’s an examination,” says the band’s Mike Lindsay. Tackling the still near-untouchable subjects - grief, loss, the act of dying, where we go, what becomes of those left behind - death is a taboo beyond all others.

Around the time of Tunng’s sixth album, 2018’s Songs You Make at Night, lyricist Sam Genders found Max Porter’s novel Grief is The Thing with Feathers, and was struck by its power. Its viscerality and rawness and rage. Its beauty and love and connection. He passed Porter’s book around his band members.

For months the six band members discussed the subject at length. That they are such a sizeable band, diverse in opinion and perspective, proved helpful: “When all those things come together that’s what makes it Tunng,” says Genders. “And because the subject of death is so powerful for people in different ways, we talked about the kinds of issues it might bring up, that we might need to be sensitive about.”

Firstly, Dead Club is an extraordinary record; contemplative, intimate and celebratory. It includes collaborations with Max Porter, who wrote two new pieces for the album. It draws on the research the band conducted — nods to the Wari people of Brazil who eat their dead, discussions of consciousness and memory, Genders’ visit to a death cafe in Sheffield, and the Swedish art of Death Cleaning. It touches on personal loss, fear, and humour and sorrow and love.

“Trying to turn this whole concept into an album, into music, without it being too sombre and difficult for people to listen to, that’s been the challenge,” says Lindsay. “We wanted it to be colourful and we wanted it to be kind of uplifting. Although some of it’s a lot darker than I was imagining it originally, I think it’s a thought-provoking and emotional journey; it doesn’t make me feel sad.”

It's also a podcast series, produced by the band’s Becky Jacobs and Sam Genders, speaking to those who work in the field of death: philosophers, scientists, frontline workers, and beyond. Philosophers Alain De Botton and A.C. Grayling discuss cultural attitudes towards death, alongside palliative care physician and author Kathryn Mannix, mentalist Derren Brown, forensic anthropologist Dame Sue Black, musician Speech Debelle, and Poetry editor of the New Yorker, Kevin Young. Samples from these discussions in turn appear on the album: Brown’s voice hovers over Fatally Human, Black considers what happens after we die on The Last Day, while on A Million Colours, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib of Tinariwen speaks of the traditions around death of the Tuareg in northern Mali.

There were live events planned of course, collisions of music and readings and art that the band had hoped might prompt conversations about the subject among the audience. Perhaps the hope of this project is not to commandeer grief, to explain it or provide a structure for loss, but to bring a new openness to the subject.

We no longer have the religious script we once had that helped us to deal with death, Genders notes. “And I think a lot of us are struggling to know how to behave around it.” But there are skills we can learn, conversations we can have, cultural baggage we can question, to find an approach that reflects an experience that is “inherently human”, as Genders puts it. “I think in life in general there’s something very powerful in total honesty,” he says. “In being honest about all the different ways that you experience things. Because it’s nearly always the case that you discover everyone’s got the same anxieties, and the same fears, and having the same experiences. And maybe that can be powerful.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Though the idea and the creative process behind 'Dead Club' is significantly different from their usual collaborative approach, it has every bit of the alt-folk charm and bracing mix of electronic and organic instrumentation we saw in 'then We Saw Land' or the brilliant 'Good Arrows'.

TRACK LISTING

1. Eating The Dead
2. Death Is The New Sex
3. SDC
4. Three Birds
5. A Million Colours
6. Carry You
7. The Last Day
8. Tsunami
9. Man
10. Scared To Death
11. Fatally Human
12. Woman

When R.I.P. came crawling out of the sewers of Portland four years ago, their grimy, sleazy Street Doom was already a fully formed monstrosity that quickly infected the minds of everyone it encountered. At the time, none of us expected its depravity to take such fierce hold, and yet, here were are, sheltering in place and/or stealthily creeping through a nightmare dystopia that the 80s sci-fi/horror movies foretold. Dead End is, ironically, a recharge of the band’s sound, bearing influences ranging from John Carpenter films, post-apocalyptic grunge, pro-wrestling attitude and salty lo-fi hip-hop aesthetics to the band’s ferocious heavy metal. During the three years since the 2017 release of their sophomore album Street Reaper, R.I.P. has been busy tightening their sound and their line up while loosening their grip on sanity — touring the west coast with bands like Electric Wizard and Red Fang, and taking Street Doom overseas for the first time for a month long headlining tour of Europe. These years on the road and the addition of a more aggressive rhythm section have allowed the band to fully break free from their influences and deliver on the promise hinted at on their first two releases. For Dead End, R.I.P. worked with legendary producer Billy Anderson, interring onto wax their heaviest and most ambitious album yet. Continuing to move further away from their classic doom influences like Pentagram and Saint Vitus, the band offers a rare blast of originality in a scene rife with formulaic bands. Dead End is a fast and anxious ride where the very idea of doom is put to the test under duress of manic lyrics about death, insanity, and leather, and hook-laden guitar tracks that draw as equally from Nirvana as Black Sabbath.

TRACK LISTING

01. Streets Of Death
02. Judgement Night
03. Dead End
04. Nightmare
05. One Foot In The Grave
06. Death Is Coming
07. Moment Of Silence
08. Buried Alive
09. Out Of Time
10. Dead Of The Night

In the winter of 2017 I moved back to my hometown of Kansas City from Los Angeles. The move was sudden and unforeseen, just as I was tying a bow on the writing process for what would become my 2019 album, Oh My God. I bought a Four Track Tascam model 424 off of an old friend to help me get to the finish line, but much to my surprise and excitement, this new piece of equipment in my all-but-bare home didn’t help complete one album but rather inspire another: Sundowner. The new collection of songs came quickly and effortlessly as I did my best not to resist or refine the songs, but instead let them take shape all on their own.

As the songs kept coming I cleared out the crowded shed that was sitting dormant in my backyard and built a makeshift studio before adding drums, lead guitar and piano to complete the demos. Each day I would teach myself basic recording techniques, watching the channels illuminate and pulse as if the machine were breathing, and then emerge in the evenings as the sun was getting low: - around 5:30 in the winter, when the Kansan sunsets look icy and distant, like a pink ember inside of a display case, and 9 o’clock in the summer, when the sunsets are warm and abstract.

Landing back home felt jarring juxtaposed with a life full of chaos and adventure with my band on the road. But at the very least, I was happy to have - for the first time in my adulthood - a place to close the door, with no temptations other than to work on music and reflect on what I had built since I left. It was a new form of isolation, one I had never explored or expected to experience. Not ready to let go of the hand of the California desert, I spent the winter decorating the best I knew how; with mementos from my previous home, cactus and aloe vera and covering the walls in pinewood - immediately earning my house it’s nickname, The Little Los Angeles.

In January 2019 I contacted my friend and producer Brad Cook to help recreate what I had made in my shed. We chose to work in Texas; we wanted to make sure the record was done far away from any coastline, and in the heart of America. Brad played bass and some keys on the album, but beyond that he encouraged and inspired me to play almost everything else. All lead guitar, proper drums (save the drums on “A Night At The Little Los Angeles”), mellotron and what I believe to be the albums secret weapon - a WWII era collapsible and slightly out-of-tune pump organ - were performed by me. We did, however, bring in James Krivchenia towards the end of the session to fill out the percussion. It was an honor to work with him as he built maracas from pecans and played on the floor of the live room, adding flourish wherever he saw fit.

On the last evening of the session, after everything had wrapped, we all climbed on top of an empty water tower on the property, giving us a view in all directions. To the North you could see an endless Texas, with long wisps of cirrus clouds above the desert floor, and to the South there was Mexico, the recent detention camps only a mile beyond, with large cumulus clouds hovering over, bringing us to an ominous pause. To the West, towards the setting sun, the two families of clouds merged, holding the last light of the day in purple and orange. Below, a freight train cut the landscape in half as it whistled in the distance.

Almost as soon as the session wrapped, I was off and away on press trips and then proper tours for Oh My God, which came out in April that same year. Sundowner sat inside of a hard drive back at Sonic Ranch and did not see the light of day, until I found myself, as did the rest of the world, stuck inside their home and in quarantine in March 2020. My second year of touring for Oh My God was cancelled. Brad, Jerry and I worked from our respective homes, sending notes back and forth as we worked alone but together to mix the album, and suddenly, just like that, Sundowner was finished.

Songs, like sunsets, are fleeting, and it’s only due to a willingness and desire to catch them that you ever, if even only for a moment, grab a hold of one. When writing Sundowner, I was lucky to have had the Tascam 424 there to help capture both. Sundowner is my attempt to put the Middle American twilight -- it’s beauty profound, though not always immediate -- into sound. It is a depiction of isolation. Of the past. Of an uncertain future. Of provisions. Of an omen. Of a dead deer. Of an icon. Of a Los Angeles themed hotel in rural Kansas. Of billowing campfires, a mermaid and a highway lined in rabbit fur. It is a depiction of the nervous feeling that comes with the sky’s proud announcement that another day will be soon coming to a close as the pink light recedes and the street lamps and house lights suddenly click on. -- Kevin Morby, Kansas, 2020.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It's a blessing in a way, that all of the artists we know and love have had a chance to get through some unfinished work sitting around on their hard drives (obviously the circumstances surrounding it are less than ideal..). Here we have a fully fledged gorgous new album from Morby that just wouldn't have been given the attention it deserved had his tour for the last album gone ahead. Thank goodness it got finished, 'Sundowner' is a triumph.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A: 
1. Valley
2. Brother, Sister
3. Sundowner
4. Campfire
5. Wander
SIDE B:
6. Don’t Underestimate Midwest American Sun
7.A Night At The Little Los Angeles
8. Jamie
9. Velvet Highway
10. Provisions

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

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

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

TRACK LISTING

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

Into The Labyrinth (1993) is Dead Can Dance’s sixth album, one of their most successful releases, its title a reference to the Greek legend of Theseus going into the Labyrinth to slay the Minotaur. It came when Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard had embarked on more individual personal paths, now writing their songs independent of one another, and on separate continents. Engineered and produced by Brendan at his Quivvy Church studio in Ireland, the album is an audiophile benchmark and also noted for being their first without any guests, instead they played all the instruments.

The 2016 LP version is also a double LP like the original release, but comes with brand new cover artwork and an altered track sequence.

Dead Can Dance’s fourth album, The Serpent’s Egg (1988), came during a prolific period for the band, being released just four years after their debut. It was also the first they made at their own studio which, according to Brendan Perry, allowed them to continue to grow in “their own self-proclaimed direction”. A minimal yet rather grandiose record which includes fan favourites ‘The Host Of Seraphim’ and ‘Ullyses’, The Serpent’s Egg is a triumph and perhaps the finest example of where Brendan and Lisa’s diametrically different influences are overcome to form a new, almost synaesthetic whole.

Back in the 80s Dons Savage of Dead Famous People joined her first band Freudian Slips which soon ended so she along with fellow Freudian Slip refugee Biddy Leyland could pursue their own talents. A chance encounter with Flying Nun's spiritual guru, Chris Knox, led to a one-off deal with the label that resulted in a five-song EP, ‘Lost Persons Area’. Moving to London in 1986 the fabled "Flying Nun sound" began making an impact outside New Zealand. The release of near-perfect compilations by The Clean and The Chills except Dead Famous People were a little early for that buzz. Stumbling into a deal with Utility Records, Billy Bragg and legendary manager Pete Jenner. Dons later started singing with new combo, Saint Etienne, her vocals feature on the original version of their cover version hit, ‘Kiss And Make Up’, as well as a cover of Gil Scott-Heron's ‘Winter In America’. Around this same time, Martin Phillipps of The Chills asked Dons requested she sing on ‘Heavenly Pop Hit’. Dons soon returned home to Auckland without an outlet for her music, three decades later Fire tracked her down and the rest is history. Now set to release her new album ‘Harry’, it’s more philosophical than her earlier work. It feels like the right one for a world of apocalyptic pandemic, uncertainty and quarantine. Dons' power over melody and knack for profundity remains unchanged since Dead Famous People's original incarnation. A rare record in a time of musical factionalism and a world divided into camps of willful obscurity and grotesque mockeries of stardom and art, it’s a document of unadorned perfection.

"Bob bought a DFP single which we both really liked, we were drawn to the mystery of the band's name and the melancholy tone of Dons' voice." Pete Wiggs - Saint Etienne.

“There was a sense of excitement that something special was happening." Martin Phillipps – The Chills.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1 Looking At Girls
A2 Goddess Of Chill
A3 Safe And Sound
A4 Turn On The Light
A5 Dead Birds Eye

Side B
B6 Groovy Girl
B7 The Great Unknown
B8 Dog
B9 To Be Divine
B10 Harry

This is Tolouse Low Trax’s 4th solo album Jumping Dead Leafs.
A 38 minutes exorcism, dionysac sexyness fueled with romanticism, made of mechanical incantations mixed with spectral vocals of forgotten imaginary tribes, words from a physicist (Incomprehensible Image), and mystical breathings… To remind you that music is demanding your soul and body, fully. A master irritator, disclosing this talent all the way, down to every chosen title, for the album itself and all of its components (would you put Milk in Water ?). As repetitive or minimalist music may already make some of you feel nervous, it seems more accurate to talk here about primitive music - notwithstanding a non violent anarchism. But those are only words and vain attempts to attach TLT to a region or a family. Neither the burden of classical European music legacy, which eventually lead to pop music, seemed to interfere with his wild mind, and if it is no surprising to hear Bach in German electronic music, there is here a clear statement that you are out of this sirupy prison… For D.W. is a sorcerer. He’s been empirically learning the speaking of trance with years of touring and experimenting with all kinds of audience and venues, from clubs to museums, from Mongolia to Brazil, from his performances with his bands Kreidler or Toresch to solo ones, sustained by a steady limited set up, as the one used when he’s recording : one MPC, rudimentary synths, few effects and a mixer. No sound engineer on stage as only he knows his secret language… Raw dubmaking, leaning towards
hip hop, indubitably underlining here a significant distanciation from his previous industrial inspirations. The bewitchment of this record is operating with no warning from the very first seconds until the last epiphany of Sales Pitch. He is using his knowledge of techno, psychedelism (Inverted Sea), UK bass (Jumping Dead Leafs), only to bring you out of it. We all tend to be slaves, without even being conscious about it, and a balance must be existing between being a slave and showing off. Mr. Weinrich’s answer is unsettling because it is an utter call to this balance, in our world of black and white and political correctness. There is no morality in music… Don’t expect anything else than an unaccountable liberating immediate experience. Don’t expect any kind of music because you are already in the past or the future… From his recording technique mainly relying on one takes, his adoration of mistakes and jeopardy, to the core essence of repetitive music, it is all hereabout being in the present. No ears no glasses. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Patrick says: Dusseldorf's dance floor Derrida comes correct with his first solo album in six years, providing a little club deconstruction for the fringe DJ and haunted home listener! Frankly, no one sounds like Detlef, and as this LP blazes its hazy trail through warehouse smog, dislocated dubspace and an entirely crepuscular strand of psychedelia, it becomes increasingly clear how much we've missed him.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Inverted Sea
A2. Berrytone Souvenier
A3. The Incomprehensible Image
B1. Jumping Dead Leafs
B2. Milk In Water
B3. Dawn Is Temporal
B4. Pulse Skit
B5. Sales Pitch

A lone pair of footsteps meanders down a street in omaha, into the neighborhood bar and then into a near-imperceptible tangle of conversations – about wars, sleepless nights – a surrealist din pushing against the sound of ragtime. Then, as the background quiets, a line rings out clearly: “i think about how much people need – what they need right now is to feel like there’s something to look forward to. We have to hold on. We have to hold on.”

Thus we enter the fitting, cacophonic introduction to bright eyes’ tenth studio album and first release since 2011. Down in the weeds, where the world once was is an enormous record caught in the profound in-between of grief and clarity – one arm wrestling its demons, the other gripping the hand of love, in spite of it.

The end of bright eyes’ unofficial hiatus came naturally. Conor oberst pitched the idea of getting the band back together during a 2017 christmas party at bright eyes bandmate nathaniel walcott’s los angeles home. The two huddled in the bathroom and called mike mogis, who was christmas shopping at an omaha mall. Mogis immediately said yes. There was no specific catalyst for the trio, aside from finding comfort amidst a decade of brutal change. Sure, why now? Is the question, but for a project whose friendship is at the core, it was simply why not?

The resulting bright eyes album came together unlike any other of its predecessors. Down in the weeds is bright eyes’ most collaborative, stemming from only one demo and written in stints in omaha and in bits and pieces in walcott’s los angeles home. Radically altering a writing process 25 years into a project seems daunting, but oberst said there was no trepidation: “our history and our friendship, and my trust level with them, is so complete and deep. And i wanted it to feel as much like a three-headed monster as possible.”

As a title, as a thesis, down in the weeds, where the world once was functions on a global, apocalyptic level of anxiety that looms throughout the record. But on a personal level, it speaks to rooting around in the dirt of one’s memories, trying to find the preciousness that’s overgrown and unrecognizable. For oberst, coming back to bright eyes was a bit of that. A symbol of simpler times, vaguely nostalgic. And even though it wasn’t actually possible to go back to the way things were, even though there wasn’t an easy happy ending, there was a new reality left to work with.

And here, there is a bleary-eyed hopefulness – earnest, emotive recommitments to love appear on “dance and sing” and “just once in the world.” And throughout, down in the weeds features snippets of oberst’s loved ones speaking, in late-night conversations. The fleeting loveliness of intimate moments punctuates the bleakness of the record’s existential crisis, crackling like lightning bugs illuminating the long night.

Down in the weeds is a distillation of a prolific, enduring canon. It’s immediate and urgent, the product of its creators’ growth across a decade apart, as well as the need to make a record together to find solace from loss. Through deliberate, fearless experimentation in process, the trio made the truest bright eyes sound: the sound of a deep bond, of a band coming home, but also a seamless continuation, like bright eyes never went away. It’s the impossible, sprawling mess of human experience that bright eyes has always sought to put to tape, since the beginning – the sound of holding on. Why now? Why not?

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It's been far too long since the last Bright Eyes album, and this one shows why we've missed him so much. Beautifully tender melodies, orchestral swoon and soaring crescendos aplenty. This is a new journey for Oberst & crew, but also warmingly familiar.

TRACK LISTING

Pageturners Rag
Dance And Sing
Just Once In The World
Mariana Trench
One And Done
Pan And Broom
Stairwell Song
Persona Non Grata
Tilt-a-whirl
Hot Car In The Sun
Forced Convalescence
To Death’s Heart (in Three Parts)
Calais To Dover
Comet Song

Khruangbin has always been multilingual, weaving far-flung musical languages like East Asian surf-rock, Persian funk, and Jamaican dub into mellifluous harmony. But on its third album, it’s finally speaking out loud. Mordechai features vocals prominently on nearly every song, a first for the mostly instrumental band. It’s a shift that rewards the risk, reorienting Khruangbin’s transportive sound toward a new sense of emotional directness, without losing the spirit of nomadic wandering that’s always defined it. And it all started with them coming home.

By the summer of 2019, the Houston group—bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, guitarist Mark Speer, drummer DJ Johnson—had been on tour for nearly three-and-ahalf years, playing to audiences across North and South America, Europe, and southeast Asia behind its acclaimed albums The Universe Smiles Upon You and Con Todo El Mundo. They returned to their farmhouse studio in Burton, Texas, ready to begin work on their third album. But they were also determined to slow down, to take their time and luxuriate in building something together. Musically, the band’s ever-restless ear saw it pulling reference points from Pakistan, Korea, and West Africa, incorporating strains of Indian chanting boxes and Congolese syncopated guitar. But more than anything, the album became a celebration of Houston, the eclectic city that had nurtured them, and a cultural nexus where you can check out country and zydeco, trap rap, or avant-garde opera on any given night.

In those years away from home, Khruangbin’s members often felt like they were swimming underwater, unsure of where they were going, or why they were going there. But Mordechai leads them gently back to the surface, allowing them to take a breath, look around, and find itself again. It is a snapshot taken along a larger journey—a moment all the more beautiful for its impermanence. And it’s a memory to revisit again and again, speaking to us now more clearly than ever.

STAFF COMMENTS

Emily says: The international peddlers of smooth, stylish grooves are back, and this time they’ve returned with a slightly revamped sound. They haven’t stopped trawling the globe for sonic inspiration and this could be some of their most eclectic work to date, adding elements of East and West African music to their already diverse sound palette. The vocals are far more present on ‘Mordechai’ than previous albums, but Khruangbin haven’t completely abandoned the deep instrumental format that they started out with. There is plenty of stripped back Cymande style elegance to be enjoyed in tracks like “If There is No Question” and “Father Bird, Mother Bird”. Perhaps one of the prettiest tracks is “One to Remember”, a shimmering dub incarnation of “So We Won’t Forget” which makes for a satisfying self-referential moment. Let’s hope their winning streak endures until they’ve distilled the essence of the entire globe into their singular soundworld.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. First Class
2. Time (You And I)
3. Connaissais De Face
4. Father Bird, Mother Bird
5. If There Is No Question

SIDE B:
6. Pelota
7. One To Remember
8. Dearest Alfred
9. So We Won’t Forget
10. Shida

Phoebe Bridgers doesn’t write love songs as much as songs about the impact love can have on our lives, personalities, and priorities.

Punisher, her fourth release and second solo album, is concerned with that subject. To say she writes about heartbreak is to undersell her blue wisdom, to say she writes about pain erases all the strange joy her music emanates. The arrival of Punisher cements Phoebe Bridgers as one of the most clever, tender and prolific songwriters of our era.

Bridgers is the rare artist with enough humour to deconstruct her own meteoric rise. Repeatedly praised by publications like The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, Pitchfork, The Fader, The Los Angeles Times and countless others, Bridgers herself is more interested in discussing topics on Twitter, deadpanning meditations on the humiliating process of being a person, she presents a sweetly funny flipside to the strikingly sad songs she writes. Fittingly, Punisher is fascinated with, and driven by, that kind of impossible tension. Whether it’s writing tweets or songs, Bridgers’s singular talent lies in bringing fierce curiosity to slimy and painful things, interrogating them until they yield up answers that are beautiful and absurd, or faithfully reporting the reality that, sometimes, they are neither.

Bridgers pulls together a formidable crew of guests, including the Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, Christian Lee Hutson and Conor Oberst as well as Nathaniel Walcott (of Bright Eyes), Nick Zinner (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Jenny Lee Lindberg (of Warpaint), Blake Mills and Jim Keltner as well as her longtime bandmates Marshall Vore (drums), Harrison Whitford (guitar), Emily Retsas (bass) and Nick White (keys). The album was mixed by Mike Mogis, who also mixed Stranger In The Alps. On the album’s epic, freewheeling closer, “I Know The End,” Bridgers orchestrates wails and horns, drums and electric guitar into a sumptuous doomsday swirl, culminating in her own final whispered roar.

This is Punisher in a nutshell: devastating elegance punctuated by a moment of deeply campy self-awareness.

Debut LP from West London singer songwriter Will Westerman.

Your Hero Is Not Dead is the follow-up to his critically-acclaimed Ark EP. Recorded alongside his close friend and producer Nathan Jenkins (A.K.A. Bullion) at first in Southern Portugal before finishing the process in London, Your Hero Is Not Dead is an album about empathy and compassion, struggle and release, and all the ways we contradict and battle within ourselves. The project is full of supremely crafted, groove-hinged songs about moral, political, and ethical grey areas, that find Westerman attempting to resolve external issues by looking inward.

TRACK LISTING

Drawbridge
The Line
Big Nothing Glow
Waiting On Design
Think I'll Stay
Dream Appropriate
Easy Money
Blue Comanche
Confirmation
Paper Dogs
Float Over
Your Hero Is Not Dead

Driving anywhere in Texas can cost you half a day, easy. For example, it’ll take you over four hours just to get from R&B singer Leon Bridges’ hometown of Fort Worth down to Houston, where the psychedelic wanderers in Khruangbin hail from. The state is vast, crisscrossed with rugged expanses of road flanked by limestone cliffs and granite mountains, forests of pine and mesquite, miles of desert or acres of sprawling grassland, all depending on what part you’re in. And it’s all baking under the "Texas Sun" that lends its name to Bridges and Khruangbin’s new collaborative EP.

“Big sky country, that’s what they call Texas,” Khruangbin bassist Laura Lee says. “The horizon line goes all the way from one side to another without interruption. There’s something really comforting about that.”

On "Texas Sun", these two members of the state’s musical vanguard meet up somewhere in the middle of that scene, in the mythical nexus of Texas’ past, present, and future - a dreamy badlands where genres blur as seamlessly as the terrain. It calls equally to the cowboys bootscooting at Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth, the chopped-and-screwed hip-hop fans rattling slabs on the southside of Houston, the art-school kids dropping acid in Austin, the cross-cultural progeny who grew up on listening to both mariachi and post-hardcore out on the Mexican borders of El Paso. All of these things, overlapping in a multicolored melange, purple hues as vivid and unpredictable as one of the state’s rightfully celebrated sunsets.

A journey through homesick reminiscences, backseat romances, and late-night contemplations, the kind of record made for listening with the windows down and the road humming softly beneath you. Like the highways that inspired it, "Texas Sun" is guaranteed to get you where you’re going -especially if you’re in no particular hurry to get there.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A mild departure for Khruangbin here, enlisting soulful maestro Leon Bridges on vox duties, adding a silky overtone to their nigh-horizontal grooves. A superb, hazy dream of an album.

TRACK LISTING

1. Texas Sun
2. Midnight
3. C-Side
4. Conversion

Bill Fay returns with the third album in the celebrated second phase of his recording career. A prime Fay song is a deceptively simple thing which carries more emotional weight than its concision and brevity might imply. There are ten of these musical haikus on Countless Branches, as pointed and as poignant as anything he’s ever recorded. For decades now - it’s almost 50 years since he cut his classic albums “Bill Fay” and “Time of the Last Persecution” - songs like these have been Fay’s ambassadors helping rave reviews and endorsements from the likes of Jim O’Rourke (Tortoise) and Jeff Tweedy (Wilco) which led to a huge revival of interest in his music. He had continued to make music almost every day in the intervening decades. For Countless Branches he’s completed new toplines over some of his cache of backing tracks, most of them 20 to 40 years old.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Brittle and almost entorely unadorned (safe for a guitar and a guitar at most), Bill Fay's crackling voice soars above these perfectly produced and stunningly stripped back Americana gems. Evocative and stunning, this is a gem in an already hugely influential career.

TRACK LISTING

1. In Human Hands
2. How Long, How Long
3. Your Little Face
4. Salt Of The Earth
5. I Will Remain Here
6. Filled With Wonder Once Again
7. Time’s Going Somewhere
8. Love Will Remain
9. Countless Branches
10. One Life

Deluxe LP Bonus Tracks:
11. Tiny
12. Don’t Let My Marigolds Die (Live In Studio)
13. The Rooster
14. Your Little Face (Acoustic Version)
15. Filled With Wonder Once Again (Band Version)
16. How Long, How Long (Band Version)
17. Love Will Remain (Band Version)

Five years on from the release of their previous record, Austin’s beloved art-rock heroes … And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead return with their tenth album – X: The Godless Void and Other Stories. Expansive yet concise, this album nods to the band’s traditional touchstones – the feral scree of Sonic Youth, Rush’s symphonic anthems, the textured bliss of My Bloody Valentine – while morphing effortlessly into newer forms. The synth-orchestral swell of curtain-raiser “Opening Crescendoes” recalls Hans Zimmer and Tangerine Dream, before “All Who Wander” descends from guitar-soaked high drama into simmering, murky psych. Next up, “Something Like This” offers nods to the ethereal songcraft that defined the sound of the legendary 4AD label, before everything kicks in at full pelt with “Into The Godless Void”, as noisy and thrilling an existential anthem as the band have ever put their name to. And this is just the first four songs… Work on X: The Godless Void and Other Stories began in earnest in 2018, after Keely returned to the band’s hometown of Austin following five years in Cambodia. With a new line-up having recently toured the 20th anniversary of their Madonna album, they’re also reverted to the live format of their earlier years, with Reece and Keely alternating between drums and frontman duties – a musical partnership that dates back to their high school days. Appropriately, it all feels fresh.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Opening Crescendo
2. All Who Wander
3. Something Like This
4. Into The Godless Void
5. Don't Look Down
6. Gone
7. Children Of The Sky
8. Who Haunts The Haunter
9. Eyes Of The Overworld
10. Gravity
11. Blade Of Wind
12. Through The Sunlit Door

Back in January, Better Oblivion Community Center, surprise-released their self-titled debut album. The record is available digitally and physically via Dead Oceans. Today, the new band from Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst follow the release with two new songs, as well as a live set for NPR's Tiny Desk featuring stripped-down performances of "My City," "Exception to the Rule," and the album's lead single "Dylan Thomas."

We've only got a handful of these so get in there quick!

TRACK LISTING

Little Trouble
Sleepwalkin' (Daydreamin' Version)

Starting with the following year’s Under Wires And Searchlights, they’ve created an explorative body of instrumental work that’s shifted between electronica, dub, minimalism, avant-jazz and ambient music. Along the way they’ve collaborated with the likes of Jah Wobble, remixed Max Richter and Vök and provided soundtracks for art installations and other visual media. They’ve also had their own music remixed by Biosphere and Japan’s Steve Jansen, among others. The new album offers ample evidence of a band in its prime. Marconi Union still sound vital and original, enthused by the possibilities that music has to offer. “We’ve never wanted to repeat ourselves,” states Talbot. “We’ve made ten albums and have been going for 17 years, but it still feels fresh. That’s been so important for us all the way through. We’re looking to do new things all the time” co-founder Richard Talbot says.

Indeed, the exquisite Dead Air bears only a passing resemblance to its 2016 forerunner, Ghost Stations. The trio have dispensed with beats, brass and guest musicians this time around, opting instead for a more intimate and textural approach, a constantly evolving soundworld of tones and sensory impressions. Dead Air also bears little resemblance to the trio’s initial vision for it. “The album we set out to make had far more of a rhythmic element,” explains Talbot, “ but fairly late in the process, we decided to completely change direction.” This is entirely in keeping with Marconi Union’s guiding methodology. Ideas remain fluid throughout the writing process, until Talbot and bandmates Jamie Crossley and Duncan Meadows ultimately settle on what feels right to them.  As such, Dead Air is a sublime testament to their collective instinct.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Marconi Union have been a constant source of pleasure for me here, with their wonderful capability to imbue any sound with all sorts of majestic overtones and euphoric, airy ambience while still retaining a momentum and sense of progression. Lovely stuff.

TRACK LISTING

A.M.I.D.
Mossfield 
Imbalance
Permafrost
Fractured
Dead Air
Burned

Feathers is the fifth album by the time Washington, D.C. based rock band Dead Meadow. It was released in 2005 by Matador Records on CD and LP now about to reissued by Xemu Records under license by Matador Records. The upcoming release will be an exact copy of the original double vinyl and CD packages with original art and masters. In addition to the reissue this new product will include a "demo rarities CD' that will be included additionally in both the CD and LP releases. This demo CD will include outtakes from the 2004 recording session as well as demos with different song structure/ arrangements and even a couple tunes that were axed off the final album. The fourth full-length studio album by Dead Meadow, was the first to include an additional guitar player with Cory Shane. Previously as well as for the majority of the band's career the DC to LA transplants have been a power-trio at essence. This departure in line up wasn't the only other noticeable difference the band was also shifting from pure 60's-70's heavy psych sounds to a more gentle and layered new-psych sound almost more influenced by dark Brit-pop and early new wave bands like the Cure and Stone Roses but through their own hazy interpretation. The different approach shocked current fans and gained lots of new ones as well as garnering solid underground praise at a much needed and delicate time of Dead Meadow's career. Revered and as equally hated this divisional record would be a landmark in the band's history and important piece of the puzzle that has kept the boys rocking and relevant. 

TRACK LISTING

Side 1

1.Let's Jump In - 4:20 :
2. Such Hawks Such Hounds - 3:19 :
3 Get Up On Down -5:27

Side 2  

1. Heaven - 6:05 :
2. Eyeless Gaze All Eye Don't Tell The Riverman - 7:04

Side 3

1. At Her Open Door - 5:31 :
2. Stacy's Song - 4:06 :
3. Let It All Pass - 5:20

Side 4

1. Through The Gates Of The Sleepy Silver Door - 2:01:
2. Untitled (Sleepy Silver Door) - 13:42

Track Listing CD1 (Original Album):

1."Let's Jump In" - 4:19 :
2."Such Hawks Such Hounds" - 3:19:
3."Get Up On Down" - 5:27 :
4."Heaven" - 6:05 :
5."At Her Open Door" - 5:31:
6."Eyeless Gaze All Eye/Don't Tell The Riverman" - 7:04:
7."Stacy's Song" - 4:05 :
8. "Let It All Pass" - 5:20 :
9."Through The Gates Of The Sleepy Silver Door" -2:01
10."Untitled" (Hidden Bonus Track) - 13:44 Track Listing

CD 2 (Demos):

1. The Whirlings (Feathers Session) - 4:25 :
2. Let's Jump In (LA Version) - 6:21
3. Stacy's Song (Alternate Mix) - 4:18 :
4. Get Up On Down (Basement Demo - 5:26 :
5. Feathers (Basement Demo) - 2:51 :
6. At Her Open Door (Basement Demo) - 4:53 :
7. Let It All Pass (Basement Demo) - 5:15
8. Feathered Fish (Basement Demo) - 2:08 :
9. Eyeless Gaze All Eye (Basement Demo) - 2:20 :
10. Don't Tell The Riverman (Basement Demo) - 4:29 :
11. Stacy's Song (Basement Demo) - 1:50 :
12. Let It All Pass (Early Version Basement Demo) - 4:30 :
13. Such Hawks Such Hounds (Acoustic Demo) - 3:07

Heavy psych experimentalists The Cosmic Dead's eighth album - Scottish Space Race - is set to be released via Riot Season Records and has been mastered by John McBain (Monster Magnet, Wellwater Conspiracy).

The album was recorded in their Glasgow HQ with cosmic sound guru Luigi Pasquini, four sprawling chunks of music recorded live amongst a run of momentous late night festival appearances in the summer of 2018. Scottish Space Race is the first Cosmic Dead release to feature the drumming of Tommy Duffin (Headless Kross) and the lap-steel synthesizer yowls of Russell Andrew Gray (Girl Sweat) alongside long-time cosmicians Omar Aborida and James T Mckay.

TRACK LISTING

1. Portal (20:56)
2. Ursa Major (18:24)
3. Scottish Space Race (11:56)
4. The Grizzard (24:08)

‘Don’t You Think You’ve Had Enough?’ is what Jennifer Clavin asked herself when she hit a turning point in her life. It’s also the title of the new record from Bleached, Jessie and Jennifer Clavin’s first album written from a place of sobriety. That newfound perspective serves as the guiding force, yielding a courageous, honest and sonically ambitious album. It’s a record about fighting both literally and figuratively for your life - and the clarity born from that struggle.

Writing began in early 2018, both in a Los Angeles practice space and with friends and co-writers in Nashville. Producer Shane Stoneback (Vampire Weekend, Sleigh Bells) helped open every door to experimentation, wanting to be exploratory while keeping the sound singularly Bleached.

The resulting album is explosive, grappling with the past; its twelve tracks mark some of the sisters’ most visceral, rawest songwriting to date - and some of their best. The work glimmers with inspiration found in touring with the likes of The Damned and Paramore. That arena-ready pop, incisively catchy, was a palpable influence helping to push Bleached’s sound in a new direction.

TRACK LISTING

Heartbeat Away
Hard To Kill
Daydream
I Get What I Need
Somebody Dial 911
Kiss You Goodbye
Rebound City
Silly Girl
Valley To LA
Real Life
Awkward Phase
Shitty Ballet

“Well, this is the largest amount of people we’ve ever had in a room to watch us, so it feels pretty damn special,” Marlon Williams says, sitting down to the piano during the first night of two sold-out shows at the historic Auckland Town Hall. May 25th, 2018 was special in many respects. Williams had returned home to New Zealand to close a 60-date world tour for his new album, Make Way For Love. He shared the stage with his second family, The Yarra Benders, with the two evenings at Auckland Town Hall serving as a fitting cap after having toured the globe together over the course of two album campaigns.

Across the past several years on the road, the Marlon Williams live show has taken on an almost mystical status — not just for Williams’ extraordinary voice, but also for the hypnotic command he has over an audience, his seamless blending of genres, and the effortless, instinctive relationship he shares with his band. Live at Auckland Town Hall showcases Williams at his finest, performing a set that includes songs from his acclaimed self-titled debut album, as well as 2018’s Make Way For Love, and standalone single, “Vampire Again.” The live album also includes previously unreleased covers of Barry Gibb, Yoko Ono, the late Lhasa De Sela, and a Williams live favorite, “Portrait of a Man” by Screaming Jay Hawkins.

Live at Auckland Town Hall captures an artist both early enough in his career to be humbled by the occasion, and developed enough to present a stunning catalogue of music and quality of performance. As Williams’ first official live release, Live at Auckland Town Hall feels sure to enter the canon of great live albums in the years to come, a dazzling snapshot of Marlon Williams’ musical singularity.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Come To Me
2. I Know A Jeweller
3. Everyone’s Got Something To Say
4. Beautiful Dress
5. I Didn’t Make A Plan
6. The Fire Of Love

SIDE B:
7. Is Anything Wrong?
8. Can I Call You
9. Dark Child
10. I’m Lost Without You
11. What’s Chasing You

SIDE C:
12. Party Boy
13. Carried Away
14. Vampire Again
15. Nobody Gets What They Want Anymore
16. Make Way For Love

SIDE D:
17. Love Is A Terrible Thing
18. Portrait Of A Man
19. When I Was A Young Girl

On her sophomore LP, The Best of Luck Club, 26-year-old Melbourne, Australia native Alex Lahey navigates the pangs of generational ennui with the pint half-full and a spot cleared on the bar stool next to her. Self-doubt, burn out, break-ups, mental health, moving in with her girlfriend, vibrators: The Best of Luck Club showcases the universal language of Lahey’s sharp songwriting, her propensity for taking the minute details of the personal and flipping it public through anthemic pop-punk. Lahey’s 2017 debut I Love You Like a Brother encases Lahey’s knack for writing a killer hook and her acute sense of humor delivered via a slacker-rock package and, in a way, The Best of Luck Club picks up where that record left off.

Lahey co-produced the album alongside acclaimed engineer and producer Catherine Marks (Local Natives, Wolf Alice, Manchester Orchestra), and dives headfirst into a broader spectrum of both emotion and sound through polished, arena pop-punk in the vein of Paramore with the introspective sheen of Alvvays or Tegan & Sara. Here, Lahey documents the highest highs and the lowest lows of her life to date. After a whirlwind of global touring in support of breakout debut I Love You Like a Brother, Lahey wrote the bulk of her follow-up in Nashville during 12-hour days of songwriting. There, she found the inspiration for The Best of Luck Clubís concept: the dive bar scene and its genuine energy.”Whether you’ve had the best day of your life or the worst day of your life, you can just sit up at the bar and turn to the person next to you - who has no idea who you are - and have a chat. And the response that you generally get at the end of the conversation is, "Best of luck", so The Best Of Luck Club is that place.

TRACK LISTING

1. I Don’t Get Invited To Parties Anymore
2. Am I Doing It Right
3. Interior Demeanour
4. Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself
5. Unspoken History
6. Misery Guts
7. Isabella
8. I Need To Move On
9. Black RM’s
10. I Want To Live With You

This is Kevin’s opus - a 2LP concept album on spirituality and religion. Throughout his four solo albums and myriad records of various collaboration, Kevin Morby has recognized in his work the ubiquity of an apparent religious theme. Though not identifying as “religious” in the slightest, Morby—the globetrotting son of Kansas City who has made music while living on both coasts before recently returning to his Midwestern stomping grounds—recognizes in himself a somewhat spiritual being with a secular attitude towards the soulful. And so, in an effort to tackle that notion head-on and once-and-for-all, he sat down in his form of church—on planes and in beds—and wrote what would become his first true concept-album: the lavish, resplendent, career-best double LP Oh My God.

“This one feels full circle, my most realized record yet,” he says. “It’s a cohesive piece; all the songs fit under the umbrella of this weird religious theme. I was able to write and record the album I wanted to make. It’s one of those marks of a life: this is why I slept on floors for seven years. I’ve now gotten the keys to my own little kingdom, and I’m devoting so much of my life to music that I just want to keep it interesting. At the end of the day, the only thing I don’t want is to be bored. If someone wants to get in my face about writing a non-religious religious record? Thank god. That’s all I gotta say.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Although Matt and I agree that the front cover of this looks unbelievably like a topless Dom Kozubik, don't let that put you off. 'Oh My God' is a tenderly delivered and perfectly measured slice of indie songwriting. Morby's ear for a tune and perfectly balanced juxtaposition of tender, brittle balladry and uplifting soulful soothe make this one for every collection.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Oh My God
2. No Halo
3. Nothing Sacred / All Things Wild
4. OMG Rock N Roll

SIDE B
5. Seven Devils
6. Hail Mary
7. Piss River
8. Savannah

SIDE C
9. Storm (Beneath The Weather)
10. Congratulations
11. I Want To Be Clean

SIDE D
12. Sing A Glad Song
13. Ballad Of Faye
14. O Behold

The Dead Kennedys released their first single, “California Uber Alles" in 1979, which started a punk rock revolution in San Francisco and means that 2019 is the 40th Anniversary year of this legendary pioneering punk band. The 40th Anniversary campaign officially kicked off in November on Record Store Day’s Black Friday with a limited edition LP of the 1978 Iguana Studios Rehearsal Demos. This LP was so successful that it actually charted on the Billboard Top 200!

The Dead Kennedys were and still are one of the most influential bands in the history of punk rock. They sold a lot of records, but even more importantly, they helped inspire a million people to start punk rock bands, they were the leaders of the revolution! Their lyrics were political in nature, antiestablishment and anti-authority and they always took a stance for First Amendment Rights. Their live shows were always high energy and powerful and that power is evident in the 3 performances included in “DK 40,”which includes all of their classic songs, including “Holiday In Cambodia.” It has been 15 years since the last Dead Kennedys release, but it will be worth the wait. “DK 40” is a must for any fans of the Dead Kennedys and vintage Punk Rock!

TRACK LISTING

CD
Disc 1:
Moral Majority
I Am The Owl
Life Sentence
Police Truck
Riot
Bleed For Me
Holiday In Cambodia
Lets Lynch The Landlord
Chemical Warfare
Nazi Punks Fuck Off
Kill The Poor
We’ve Got A Bigger Problem Now
Too Drunk To Fuck

Disc 2:
Skateboard Talk+Intro Noise
Man With The Dogs
Forward To Death
Kepone Factory
Life Sentence
Trust Your Mechanic
Moral Majority
Forest Fire
Winnebago Warrior
Police Truck
Bleed For Me
Holiday In
Cambodia
Let’s Lynch The Landord
Chemical Warfare
Nazi Punks
We’ve Got A Bigger Problem Now
Too Drunk To Fuck
Kill The Poor

Disc 3:
Darren’s Mom
Goons Of Hazard
Hellnation
This Could Be Anywhere
Soup Is Good Food
Chemical Warfare
Macho Insecurity
A Growing Boy Needs His Lunch
Forest Fire
Moon Over Marin
Jock-O-Rama
Encore
Stars And Stripes Of Corruption
Second Encore
MTV Get Off The Air
Holiday In Cambodia

LP
Disc 1:
Moral Majority
I Am The Owl
Life Sentence
Police Truck
Riot
Bleed For Me
Holiday In Cambodia
Let’s Lynch The Landlord
Chemical Warfare
Nazi Punks Fuck Off
Kill The Poor
We’ve Got A Bigger Problem Now
Too Drunk To Fuck

Disc 2:
Skateboard Talk+Intro Noise
Man With The Dogs
Forward To Death
Kepone Factory
Life Sentence
Trust Your Mechanic
Moral Majority
Forest Fire
Winnebago Warrior
Police Truck
Bleed For Me
Holiday In Cambodia
Let’s Lynch The Landlord
Chemical Warfare
Nazi Punks
We’ve Got A Bigger Problem Now
Too Drunk To Fuck
Kill The Poor

Disc 3:
Darren’s Mom
Goons Of Hazard
Hellnation
This Coule Be Anywhere
Soup Is Good Food
Chemical Warfare
Macho Insecurity
A Growing Boy Needs His Lunch

Disc 4:
Forest Fire
Moon Over Marin
Jock-O-Rama
Encore
Stars And Stripes Of Corruption
Second Encore
MTV Get Off The Air
Holiday In Cambodia

“When I was writing these songs, every day I would walk on the beach and I was completely alone and overwhelmed by fear...but then I realized how there really aren’t any rules for who you are, who you’ll become, or who you think you need to be. Eraserland is just that. It’s death to ego, and rebirth to anything or anyone you want to be.”

In December 2017, Tim Showalter was uncertain about his next record and the shape it would eventually take. With no new songs written, he was unprepared for the message he would receive from his friend Carl Broemel, the conversation that would follow, and the album that would become Eraserland. Leading off with standout track “Weird Ways” and his powerful declaration of “I don’t feel it anymore,” Eraserland traces Showalter’s evolution from apprehension to creative awakening, carving out a new and compelling future for Strand of Oaks.

Revived by the support of Broemel and his bandmates, Showalter felt the pressure to deliver songs worthy of musicians he had admired long before and after a 2015 Oaks/MMJ tour. So in February 2018, he spent two weeks alone in Wildwood, New Jersey writing and demoing all of the songs that would eventually comprise Eraserland. And in April, he went into the studio to record with Kevin Ratterman at La La Land Studios in Louisville, Kentucky, and with Broemel, Hallahan, Koster, and Blankenship as his band. Jason Isbell also contributed his Hendrix-esque guitar work to Eraserland, while singer/ songwriter Emma Ruth Rundle provided gorgeous vocals. Every song was recorded live, with all musicians playing together in one room and working to bring Showalter’s ideas to fruition. “I remember sitting next to Tim and Kevin listening to the final mixes with tears rolling down my cheeks,” said Hallahan. “From start to finish, this one came from the heart.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Weird Ways
2. Hyperspace Blues
3. Keys
4. Visions
5. Final Fires
6. Moon Landing
7. Ruby
8. Wild And Willing
9. Eraserland
10. Forever Chords
11. Cruel Fisherman

Durand Jones & the Indications aren’t looking backwards. Helmed by foil vocalists in Durand Jones and drummer Aaron Frazer, the Indications conjure the dynamism of Jackie Wilson, Curtis Mayfield, AND the Impressions. Even with an aesthetic steeped in the golden, strings-infused dreaminess of early ‘70s soul, the Indications’ sophomore LP, American Love Call, is planted firmly in the present, with the urgency of this moment in time.

The Indications’ 2016 self-titled debut was the product of friends who met as students at Indiana University in Bloomington, In., recorded for $452.11, including a case of beer. American Love Call, the band’s sophomore LP is instead the record the Indications dreamed of making, fleshed out with strings, backing vocals, and a newfound confidence in songwriting.

Blending a slew of influences from years spent crate-digging, guitarist Blake Rhein says the Indications approach songs in the same way hip-hop producers do, as likely to pull inspiration from ‘70s folk-rock or classic R&B as they are Nas’ Illmatic.

“Did I expect to do this shit once I got out of college? Hell no,” Jones relays, laughing. “Totally not. But this is what God is telling me to do – move and groove. So I’m gonna stay in my lane.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A brilliantly emotive and smoothly contrasting duo of voices over this classic soul, brought to the modern day with crisp, clean production and the perfectly sunny songwiting Durand Jones has become known for. From mournful, lost-love ballads to swinging, dancefloor ditties, this is yet another mindblowing LP from Jones & co.

TRACK LISTING

1. Morning In America
2. Don’t You Know (feat. Aaron Frazer)
3. Circles
4. Court Of Love (feat. Aaron Frazer)
5. Long Way Home
6. Too Many Tears (feat. Aaron Frazer)
7. Walk Away
8. What I Know About You (feat. Aaron Frazer)
9. Listen To Your Heart
10. Sea Gets Hotter (feat. Aaron Frazer)
11. How Can I Be Sure (feat. Aaron Frazer)
12. True Love

Better Oblivion Community Center is a brand new band comprising the formidable talents of Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst, two of the most lauded American songwriters of the past several years. Written and recorded in Los Angeles during the summer of 2018, their self-titled debut album will be released on Dead Oceans in early 2019. The pair first collaborated on Bridgers’ 2017 single, “Would You Rather”, taken from her acclaimed debut album Stranger In The Alps. They teamed up again for a recording of Oberst’s “LAX” in the fall of 2018.

Co-produced by Bridgers, Oberst and long time Oberst/Bright Eyes collaborator Andy LeMaster and mixed by John Congleton, Better Oblivion Community Center features the work of several talented friends, including Nick Zinner (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), and Carla Azur (Autolux, Jack White) among others.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Better Oblivion provides the perfect stage for the juxtaposition of Oberst's rough husky vocals and Bridgers' smooth, ethereal air. Exactly as beautiful as you'd expect from this duo, tender and innovative, full of wonderful heartbreaking moments and perfectly written, wonderfully delivered bliss.

TRACK LISTING

1. Didn’t Know What I Was In For
2. Sleepwalkin’
3. Dylan Thomas
4. Service Road
5. Exception To The Rule
6. Chesapeake
7. My City
8. Forest Lawn
9. Big Black Heart
10. Dominos

Disguised as the meandering outpourings of vacant thought and activity dialed simultaneously from zero and ten. Formed in the cauldron of a fevered mistake resolute. Surrounded by ignorance, dis-interest, and the attention of the carefully self-selected. Recorded and burned through a thousand galaxies of dust and doubt and endless infinite wonder, transforming both time and space. Forever exiled to the very bottom of the world to reflect on the struggling desperate pile above. Recognizing any contribution as miniscule and insignificant when placed within the greatness of the other, the dominant insolent preening satisfied, continually shouting the pre-eminence of the first world order.

TRACK LISTING

1. Staver
2. Waver
3. Laverl