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HEAVENLY RECORDINGS
With their inspirations pinballing from Peaches to M.I.A, Courtney Barnett to Janelle Monae, and more, Lynks’ sound is something akin to a club night being thrown in a blender. Each genre touchstone here is hyphenated, and every endlessly quotable couplet takes a surprising turn. Self-written, self-produced, self-effacing and self-aggrandising, the album brings together half a decade’s worth of artistic and personal progression in under 40 minutes.
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: Bonkers, hi-nrg synth-pop from Lynks for their debut LP for Heavenly Recordings, brimming with snapping disco and scuzzy distorted beats, all with the almost robotic vocals smeared over the top. Brilliantly mad, but undeniably catchy and full of groove.TRACK LISTING
1. USE IT OR LOSE IT
2. NEW BOYFRIEND
3. CPR
4. (WHAT DID YOU EXPECT FROM) SEX WITH A STRANGER
5. TENNIS SONG
6. I FEEL LIKE SHIT
7. ROOM 116
8. LEVITICUS 18
9. ABOMINATION
10. LUCKY
11. SMALLTALK
12. LYNKS THINKS
13. FLASH IN THE PAN
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- LP
- £22.99
- Cat Number
- HVNLP208
- Release date
- 22 Mar '24
- Format Info
Black vinyl.
Black vinyl. -
- CD
- £10.99
- Cat Number
- HVNLP208CD
- Release date
- 22 Mar '24
"For me, music contains what words cannot. It is its power to shape these things, and it’s what I hope to find while taking random bits, here and there, from the pitch of each note, their texture, their timbres, massaging and mixing them together until the sound resembles what is inside me. When everything fits together well the words settle in with the music to spread their clues. That’s when the song is ready. I called the album ‘Celebrate' because I danced a lot while creating it. I now feel that I can release it into the air. I hope that it will alight in your hands and ears, keep you company and resonate within you through multiple waves.”
Those multiple waves are Celebrate’s twelve tracks. Collectively, they offer a seamless mix of French and English; analogue electronics, scratchy guitars and tumbling drums; dream pop, woozy Yé-Yé and 1960s and 2020s psychedelia.
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: I was a big fan of Halo Maud's brilliant Je Suis Une île all the way back in 2018, so it was with some joy that I saw her on the new release schedule, and Celebrate has all of the wispy pop charm of that brilliant outing but with more of a focus on grand, orchestral jubilance and airy major-key crescendos. It's a lovely experience, and further cements my love of Maud's work.TRACK LISTING
1. Celebrate
2. Terres Infinies
3. My Desire Is Pure
4. Last Day Song
5. Slowly Surely
6. Catch The Wave
7. Le Ciel Est Grand
8. You Float
9. À Te Voir
10. Iceberg
11. Pesnopoïka
12. Entends-Tu Ma Voix
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- LP
- u/avbl
- Cat Number
- HVNLP222
- Release date
- 1 Mar '24
-
- CD
- £10.99
- Cat Number
- HVNLP222CD
- Release date
- 1 Mar '24
“Chorus is about a coming together of disparate elements. Not in some sort of utopian aesthetic where everything works perfectly, but in the natural flow and state of things,” shares the band’s Jim Rindfleish. “It’s about cosmic compatibility and chemistry: what makes things work? Not just what makes the band work, but what makes good music, art or love? It’s the rhythm of nature”.
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: Mildlife in 'Ridiculously Smooth Psych-jazz Shocker'. If you haven't heard this Melbourne band's previous studio LP's or the brilliant Live In Pompeii reminiscent 'Live From south Channel Island', then now is a perfect time to hear the zenith of their creativity and songwriting capabilities. 'Chorus' is the perfect distillation of the band at their silken best.TRACK LISTING
1. Forever
2. Yourself
3. Sunrise
4. Musica
5. Chorus
6. Future Life
7. Return To Centaurus
-
- LP
- £22.99
- Cat Number
- HVNLP221
- Release date
- 23 Feb '24
-
- CD
- £10.99
- Cat Number
- HVNLP221CD
- Release date
- 23 Feb '24
Much in the spirit of Swilley’s teenage bedroom beatmaking, their debut album Golden Age Of Self Snitching was pieced together largely self-sufficiently, written both remotely and in person, and recorded between a temporary studio space in a health centre and an ad-hoc setup in Swilley’s dining room. A skeleton team of outside musicians contributed additional parts — with Jordan Manly [Mattiel] and Rupert Brown [Roy Ayres, Raf Rundell] on drums, Shaheed Goodie on guest MC vocals for the jagged, spiralling ‘Pump’, and Raf Rundell [The 2 Bears], with whom Revival Season had previously made the Outernational mixtape (“equal parts Prince Paul and King Tubby”) on hand as “vibe consultant”, bringing additional production to a handful of tracks.
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: We noted the similarities in beatmaking here to the recent collaboration between Earl Sweatshirt & The Alchemist, but with the pristine beat-locked percussive flow of B Easy. It's a brilliantly dynamic, scathing bite of old-school hip-hop met with new-school production. Ace.TRACK LISTING
1. Look Out Below
2. Barry White
3. The Path
4. Message In A Bottle
5. Last Dance
6. Boomerang
7. Golden Silverware
8. Chop
9. Propaganda
10. Stars
11. Pump
12. Everybody
13. Eyes Open
14. Love To See It
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- LP
- u/avbl
- Cat Number
- HVNLP220
- Release date
- 26 Jan '24
- Format Info
Black vinyl.
Black vinyl. -
- CD
- £10.99
- Cat Number
- HVNLP220CD
- Release date
- 26 Jan '24
With their debut album, “The Pilgrim, Their God and the King of My Decrepit Mountain”, Tapir! have proven they are more than technically adept at transporting the listener to another realm. You could read the whole album as being an escape from the trappings of the modern material world, a sidestep into a pre-industrial, pre-internet wonderland where creativity and community reign supreme. The narrator of ‘My God’ might suggest to us ‘Maybe it was Maybelline that put you at a loss/That’s my God’, but for Tapir! it is imagination itself that is king.
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: Though the striking minimalism of the cover might carry through to some of the more relaxing pieces on Tapir's debut album, the depth of compositional skill and scope of the album as a whole is breathtaking. Brittle folky guitars and soaring vocals, conceptually rich pieces imbued with intrigue and heart. Stunning.TRACK LISTING
Side A
Act 1 (The Pilgrim)
On A Grassy Knoll (We'll Bow Together)
Swallow
The Nether (Face To Face)
Act 2 (Their God)
Broken Ark
Side B
Gymnopédie
Eidolon
Act 3 (The King Of My Decrepit Mountain)
Untitled
My God
Mountain Song
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- Box set
- £114.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP6SE
- Release date
- 19 Jan '24
- Format Info
3LP boxset + bonus 7" and 28-page booklet.- FREE SHIPPING
- This item has FREE UK shipping!
3LP boxset + bonus... [ + ]
This lavish set follows previous anniversary releases of ‘Foxbase Alpha’ and ‘Tiger Bay’ and includes: a vinyl version of the original album in a gatefold sleeve cut at 45 RPM over two discs in a gatefold sleeve; ‘So Tough - Remains Of The Day’, a 10 track vinyl companion album of rarities and demos, featuring previously unreleased material; ‘Hobart Paving’, a bonus 7’’ single cut at 45RPM; a 28-page booklet featuring new essays and never seen before photos; a poster; and a reproduction of the original press release from 1993.
Rigid box with lift off lid (matt lamination with anti scratch).
TRACK LISTING
‘So Tough’ 2LP
1. Mario’s Café
2. Railway Jam
3. Date With Spelman
4. Calico
5. Avenue
6. You’re In A Bad Way
7. Memo To Pricey
8. Hobart Paving
9. Leafhound
10. Clock Milk
11. Conchita Martinez
12. No Rainbows For Me
13. Here Come Clown Feet
14. Junk The Morgue
15. Chicken Soup
‘
'So Tough - Remains Of The Day’ 1LP
1. Everything Flows
2. Orpington Blues
3. Rainy Day Women
4. Everlasting
5. Johnny In The Echo Café
6. Paper (demo)
7. Last Thing On My Mind
8. Biker Of The Strange
9. You’re In A Bad Way (first Run Through)
10. Castlemaine Avenue
‘Hobart Paving’ 7”
1. Hobart Paving (Alan Tarney Mix)
2. Hobart Paving (Van Dyke Parks Arrangement)
-
- LP
- u/avbl
- Cat Number
- HVNLP3X
- Release date
- 12 Jan '24
-
- 2xCD
- £15.99
- Cat Number
- HVNLP3CDX
- Release date
- 12 Jan '24
Like all great guitar gangs, East Village fell together as a four-piece; having relocated from High Wycombe to London in mid ‘80s, brothers Martin and Paul Kelly on bass and guitar, set on forming a group together, were joined by John Wood (guitar) and Spencer Smith (drums). Wood and the Kellys shared writing and vocal duties; it was an ideal combination, and one of the many charms of East Village is their various song writing voices, a tip of the hat, seemingly, to the 60s folk-rock groups who influenced them.
Originally influenced by garage-rock and freakbeat, the band eventually came through via the same scene as groups like Felt, The Go-Betweens, The Weather Prophets, and Primal Scream. They’d formed as Episode Four, releasing an EP, Strike Up Matches, in 1986, which has gone on to become one of most sought after releases of the C86 era. Their first two singles as East Village, ‘Cubans In The Bluefields’ (1987) and ‘Back Between Places’ (1988), were released on Jeff Barrett’s Sub Aqua label. When it came time to record Drop Out, East Village found a supporter in Bob Stanley, who bankrolled the album sessions until Barrett re-signed the band to his new imprint Heavenly Recordings in 1990. The album that took shape is dusky, heartfelt, lamplit, full of chiming minor chords, close harmonies, rattling organs, all buoyed by a rhythm section that moves as one, steady and elegant. There’s melancholy here, certainly, on songs like ‘What Kind Of Friend Is This’, but also pleasure and freedom, on ‘When I Wake Tomorrow’ and ‘Silver Train’. The group were obsessed with Dylan’s Eat The Document at the time, and the album’s rich with references to the film; Drop Out’s character is also somehow close to the thin wild mercury sound of Blonde On Blonde, and the lambent light of the Byrds’ Notorious Byrd Brothers. In one of life’s gentler surprises, ‘Silver Train’ became an unexpected radio hit in Australia when released there as a single in 1993. The story of East Village seems marked by such unexpected turns and surprising events. None was more surprising for their fans at the time, though, than their onstage split in 1991, leaving an unreleased album in the can. Encouraged by Jeff Barrett the band revisited the tapes two years on and while mixing the album for its posthumous release in 1993 invited Debsey Wykes (Dolly Mixture, Coming Up Roses, Saint Etienne, Birdie) to sing the quietly devastating album closer, “Everybody Knows”, a perfect, sad-eyed sign-off.
Listening now to Drop Out, its timelessness is clear. It could have been recorded by young folk-pop hopefuls in the late sixties, taking their shot at the big time; but it could just as easily have been recorded yesterday, by a group that’s both reverent to music’s past, but forward looking in spirit and temperament. It’s that kind of album. Drop Out’s pop poetry is fully formed, with a singular charm that takes in wistfulness, romance, and good times, and a clutch of deeply moving songs that are overflowing with melody and gracefulness. It’s pretty much everything you’d want from a guitar pop record.
It's also an album that’s slowly accrued its own legend. From its stunning cover art, photographed by Juergen Teller originally for a Katherine Hammett campaign, to the ten perfectly formed songs within, Drop Out’s significance in the scheme of things is such that, a decade ago, it was given a rare 10/10 rating in Uncut magazine, who called the album “the lost classic of its era”. Drop Out comes round every decade or so, each edition introducing new fans to its understated beauty, and this latest reissue is its most elegant and deluxe yet.
The 30th anniversary edition of Drop Out lands in two formats: an LP with tip-on style jacket and four-page insert, designed to partner with the 2019 vinyl reissue of their singles and rarities compilation, Hot Rod Hotel; and a double CD, featuring an extra disc compiling the group’s early singles and alternative versions. This CD edition previously has only been available in Japan, though it now features a new, superior mix of their second single, ‘Back Between Places’. Both feature new, typically eloquent liner notes from writer Jon Savage.
The members of East Village have all gone on to do inspired things: Martin Kelly joined Jeff Barrett at Heavenly and has managed label mainstays Saint Etienne since 1993; Paul Kelly formed Birdie with Debsey Wykes, and is now a renowned film director and graphic designer; both Paul and Spencer Smith played in Saint Etienne’s live band; John Wood moved to China to teach, and released a lovely, understated folk album, Quiet Storm, in Japan in 2006. But with the hazy perfection of Drop Out, they’ve all already etched their names in the firmament.
TRACK LISTING
01. Silver Train
02. Shipwrecked
03. Here It Comes
04. Freeze Out
05. Circles
06. When I Wake Tomorrow
07. Way Back Home
08. What Kind Of Friend Is This
09. Black Autumn
10. Everybody Knows
Bonus CD -
01. Her Fathers Son
02. Precious Diamond Tears
03. Cubans In The Blue Fields
04. Strawberry Window
05. Break Your Neck
06. Kathleen
07. Back Between Places (duff Version)
08. Meet The Wife
09. Vibrato
10. Here It Comes (original Version)
11. Freeze Out (original Version)
12. Violin
13. Barrel Dog
14. Go And See Him
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- 2xLP
- £30.99
- Cat Number
- HVNLP219
- Release date
- 10 Nov '23
- Format Info
Black vinyl.
Black vinyl. -
- CD
- £10.99
- Cat Number
- HVNLP219CD
- Release date
- 10 Nov '23
A 14-track interrogation of the last decade, time spent watching a decaying, fraying Britain visibly buckling in real time while tending to his own battles with mental health. Holmes’ soundtrack to this inquiry is at times claustrophobic, often euphoric, driven by the rattle and snap of analogue drum machines, wild oscillations of droning analogue synths and the voice of Raven Violet which beguiles and commands in a way that could part oceans.
On this record, there are songs of hope for an age of uncertainty; love songs to leap the barricades to and, on ‘Necessary Genius’, a comprehensive roll call of the great and good - those ‘dreamers, misfits, radicals, outcasts’ that we’ve lost and just a few who’ve managed to cling on in the churn of the 21st century. And there are elegiac electronics evocative of an endless Europe where pulsating, crackling rhythm tracks fuse with dreamlike textures and the underground pulse of psychedelic therapy to form something unique that feels nothing less than radical.
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: It's no wonder we (the shop) or we (Manchester) have taken to David Holmes, with the snappy post-industrial synth-gloom of 'Necessary Genius' referencing Tony Wilson by name and by design. It's yet another bit of evidence that Holmes' musical skills know no bounds. Rich, evocative works throughout and produced as you'd expect, perfectly.TRACK LISTING
1. When People Are Occupied Resistance Is Justified
2. It's Over, If We Run Out Of Love
3. Emotionally Clear
4. Hope Is The Last Thing To Die
5. You Will Know Me By The Smell Of Onions
6. Necessary Genius
7. Yeah X 3
8. I Laugh Myself To Sleep
9. Too Muchroom
10. Agitprop 13
11. Stop Apologising
12. Tyranny Of The Talentless
13. Love In The Upside Down
14. Blind On A Galloping Horse
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- Coloured LP
- £22.99
- Cat Number
- HVNLP218C
- Release date
- 20 Oct '23
- Format Info
Transparent pink vinyl.
Transparent pink vinyl. -
- CD
- £10.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP218CD
- Release date
- 20 Oct '23
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: Ooof, what a lovely change of direction for Amsterdam's Pip Blom, brimming with the sort of instrumental loveliness they've done so well in the past but lighetened with a lean towards more carefree synth-pop grooves. It's brilliantly fresh, but without sacrificing anything that made the band so beloved.TRACK LISTING
1. Not Tonight
2. Tiger
3. Red
4. Kiss Me By The Candlelightfeat. Personal Trainer
5. I Can Be Your Man
6. Where'd You Get My Number?
7. Brand New Car
8. Is This Love?feat. Alex Kapranos
9. Fantasies
10. Again
11. Get Back
12. 7 Weeks
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- Coloured LP
- £22.99
- Cat Number
- HVNLP118C
- Release date
- 7 Jul '23
- Format Info
Crystal clear vinyl.
Crystal clear vinyl.
TRACK LISTING
1 Chwyldro
2 Patriarchaeth
3 Calon Peiriant
4 Sisial Y Môr
5 Dawns Y BlanedDirion
6 GolauArall
7 Stwff
8 Y Dydd Olaf
9 FratolishHiangPerpeshki
10 Amser
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- 12" EP
£22.99£14.99- Cat Number
- HVN67412 (JAN24SALE)
- Release date
- 26 May '23
- Format Info
Standard weight black vinyl.
Standard weight black... [ + ]*** REDUCED ***
The name itself comes from the initial location in which we remixed with Joel Patchett, a wintery and freezing cold Goyt Mill. From here, we coined the term ‘Goytism’ or ‘to Goyt’ which was basically our way of describing the process of repurposing and resampling acoustic sounds through digital production, making them unrecognisable from their original source.
The photograph on the sleeve was taken in winter 2020, our first visit to the Mill studio, our first Goyt session.
TRACK LISTING
Side A:
1. Tableau 001
2. Tableau 002
3. Improvisation 002
Side B:
1. Tableau 003
2. Tableau 004
-
- Ltd 12"
- £22.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVN68312 (#RSD23)
- Release date
- 22 Apr '23
A 7-track digital EP released in the back-end of 2022 is released on a 12" for the first time. Featuring 'TILT' reworks from Tame Impala, CC:DISCO!, X-COAST, Daniel Avery, CHAI and Erol Alkan. 'TILT' is the much-loved and acclaimed second album from Confidence Man which came out on Heavenly Recordings in April 2022. Written and self-produced by the band and mixed by Ewan Pearson (Metronomy, Jagwar Ma, Pet Shop Boys, Jessie Ware), the release of 'RE-TILT' follows the band's sold out 2022 headline tour. Starts and lands in time for the summer festival season.
TRACK LISTING
1.1 Holiday (Tame Impala Remix)
1.2 Luvin U Is Easy (Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs Remix)
1.3 Relieve The Pressure (X-COAST Remix)
1.4 Angry Girl (CHAI Version)
2.1 Break It Bought It (CC:DISCO! Dub Mix)
2.2 Feels Like A Different Thing (Daniel Avery Remix)
2.3 Holiday (Erol Alkan OOO Rework)
-
- Coloured LP
- £29.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP204D
- Release date
- 8 Jul '22
- Format Info
Purple with white marbled vinyl.- Includes MP3 Download Code.
Purple with white marbled... [ + ] -
- Coloured LP 2
- £23.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP204C
- Release date
- 8 Jul '22
- Format Info
Clear vinyl.- Includes MP3 Download Code.
Clear vinyl. -
- CD
- £10.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP204CD
- Release date
- 8 Jul '22
“There was one music video [for ‘Tonight’] that I did in the beginning where I line - danced and was wearing rhinestones, and from there it just turned it into this real thing,” she laughs. “Every review would be ‘country - tinged’ whereas actually, there was literally one country song on the record re ally. But I think that’s what’s good about the new record, that I think it’s not what people will expect from me. When people ask me what the new album sounds like, it’s just... a bit different?!”
Happy to wax lyrical about the relative merits of Townes Van Zandt, Elton John and Fugazi within the same breath, there’s always been a lot going on in Pearson’s musical palette (FYI she’d call her debut more of a folk - rock LP, if anything). But though the critics might have skewed the specifics of ‘Return’ - relea sed via Heavenly Records in November 2020 - the acclaim for the album still came pouring in. Having had a previous taste of the industry via a major label project that quickly turned sour, the difference this time around was tangible: praised for “ the arre sting quality of [her] Kate Bush - meets - Dolly Parton vocal delivery” by The Times, labelled as “finding humanity in every moment” by DIY and with lead single ‘Take Back The Radio’ described as “a whoop of pure joy” in the Guardian, amidst the bleak toll of lockdown, something about this curiously optimistic album began to really resonate. “ It was terrifying getting to the point of releasing a debut after making music for eight years, like woah!” she says with an exaggerated grimace (random noises and excita ble gestures are par - for - the - course in a Pearson anecdote).
“But weirdly it feels like it couldn’t have come out at any other time. It felt like everything people were saying to me [during lockdown] was everything that I’d been feeling when I wrote that al bum; it was a very personal album for me, and it was released at a time when a lot of people were in their house, feeling isolated. It was the antidote to a lot of peoples’ lives.” It feels fitting then that, having provided an aural balm at just the righ t moment with her first album, its follow - up should reflect a world brimming with curiosity, back in action and wanting to expand its horizons.
If Pearson’s extracurricular activities in recent months have shown that she can dip a toe into a multitude of g enres - providing guest vocals on Orlando Weeks’ recent album ‘Hop Up’; popping up with Yard Act for a collaboration at End of the Road festival; singing on trad - folk collective Broadside Hacks’ 2021 project ‘Songs Without Authors’ - then forthcoming secon d album ‘Sound of the Morning’ takes that spirit and runs with it. It’s still Katy J Pearson (read: effortlessly charming, full of heart and helmed by that inimitable vocal), but it’s Katy J Pearson pushing herself musically and lyrically into new waters. Written and recorded in late 2021 after a self - prescribed period of down time spent walking, going on daily cold water swims and “just chillaxing massively”, even the credits on ‘Sound of the Morning’ profess a new thirst for experimentation from the sin ger. Joining ‘Return’ producer Ali Chant on desk duties this time was Speedy Wunderground head honcho Dan Carey, who worked with Pearson on some of the album’s grittier tracks. “Dan got a completely different structural, songwriting style out of me which i s what I wanted: something a bit more confident and in your face,” she nods. “He could see that there was a part of me that wanted to branch out, I just didn’t know where and how far to push it, but it was exactly the kind of progression I was looking for. ”
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: While Pearson's voice may draw comparisons to much beloved country singers (understandably), it's in her clever songwriting that her latest outing really shines. There are more woozy, airy moments of jangling indie amongst the heavier progressions and orchestrally intricate compositions, lurching between ideas seamlessly and without losing the melodic thread. Another brilliant success for Katy J Pearson.TRACK LISTING
1. Sound Of The Morning
2. Talk Over Town
3. Riverbed
4. Howl
5. Confession
6. The Hour
7. Float
8. Alligator
9. Game Of Cards
10. Storm To Pass
11. Willow’s Song
-
- Love Record Stores LP
- £20.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- FHVNLP9
- Release date
- 17 Jun '22
- Format Info
Heavyweight vinyl + sticker.
Heavyweight vinyl +... [ + ]
Heavenly Recordings reissue of this hidden gem from Liverpool duo The Sand Band. Originally released in 2011 on Deltasonic, it's a collection of beautifully textured home studio recordings. Wonderful, warm, melodic songs for fans of Michael Head, Shack, The Coral.
-
- LP
- £19.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP187
- Release date
- 22 Apr '22
- Format Info
Black vinyl edition.
Black vinyl edition. -
- CD
- £10.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP187CD
- Release date
- 14 Jan '22
Now, regardless of whether that statement’s true or not… when life’s become a series of long-stretches and welcomed breaks, it’s to no avail that sometimes all it takes to alleviate spirits is the simplest, of experiential indulgences.
Be it the buzz of an overly exhausted tour van, or the green light and smell of sausage rolls in the near Beaconsfield distance... inspiration can be found in the funniest corners of this place we call home; and it’s in the heart of day-to-day simplicities and sprawling services, that we gladly receive Amsterdam’s beamy-grinned, indie-pop powerhouse Pip Blom, back into lives.
Following an extensive touring schedule which saw the Dutch 4-piece roam over field, oceans, and Glastonbury’s John Peel stage following the release of their debut record ‘Boat’, any such cool-cat would be forgiven for wanting to kick back, and indulge in some very appreciated, time off.
As is often the way, such timely-abandon cannot be said for Pip Blom however, who immediately began to gather up all her soaked-up inspirations taken from the road, and manifest a re-energised sense of self, and ritualistic songwriting.
Cosying down in a room of her parents’ house (which she shares with her brother and fellow bandmate Tender Blom), Pip, a self-confessed “fan of deadlines”, set aside three months to write twenty songs- sixteen of which
were to become demos for the band to structure and flesh out, once in the studio together.
It’s at this stage in our indie-fairy-tale that things start to get ever so 2020. Whilst the world was suddenly put on hold as a result of Covid-19, Pip Blom, who’d made plans to return to their favourite ‘Big Jelly Studios’ in Ramsgate, England, were suddenly faced with a very sticky, kind of dilemma. “We’d scheduled to go into the studio in September but summer started moving and there were a couple of countries not allowed to go to the UK anymore... a week before we had to go, the Netherlands was one of those countries”- notes Pip.
Sentimentalities, and pre-established friendships (by way of Grammy award-winning engineer Caesar Edmunds) took president, and the decision was made to pack up their gear and a variety of board games and exercise equipment, all in preparation of a fourteen-day quarantine faced upon arrival in the UK.
In total, three weeks were spent recording what would become the groups sophomore release; a Al Harle engineered love-affair which was self produced entirely by the band and culminated in a legally intimate, fully seated album play-back, to six, of Ramsgate’s most chorus-savvy and ‘in the-know’ residents.
Getting out of their hometown and into an environment which removed all notions of “normality” or personal space, was an atmospheric godsend in terms of motivation; an act which encouraged Pip Blom to re-adjust and buckle down as a unit again, after spending so long in mandatory isolation.
Much like the danceable-realism of Pip’s beloved Parquet Courts, the key to an album well done, is the balancing act of fine-production, and capturing that core live-essence we all miss. “We always play one live track three times and after we then build that track in the studio” says Pip, assembling together amalgamated “live-energies” in order to produce a capsule of environmental-satisfaction, that can be appreciated during any time of day, or life’s little moments.
Actively seeking out moments of creative-authenticity, be it via a slightly out-of-tune guitar or proudly-fuzzed vocals, Pip Blom take us back full circle and introduce us to their ‘Welcome Break’- an eleven-track release which resonates with about as much decisive allure as it’s ‘Boat’ precursor, but this time with a bit more contemporary chaos to boot.
Where ‘Boat’ reckoned as a fresh-faced, yet gloriously fearless game changer, ‘Welcome Break’ is the self-assured older sibling who, with an additional year or two behind themselves, isn’t afraid to speak out, take lead, and instigate a liberated revolution-come-bliss-out.
Lead single’s ‘Keep It Together’ and ‘You Don’t Want This’ are glistening masterclasses in feel-good chorus- the very kind of coming-of-age relatability where a soul would want to let down their hair, stick their arm out the window of their best friends car and roll with the motions in a rapture of soundtracked euphoria, and jangled adventure.
Unhinging genre in our instant-access era of musical snoot, no-one does an enthused-chorus quite like Pip Blom yet much can be said for this gang being far from one-trick-ponies.
Anthemic drifters ‘Different Tune’ and ‘It Should Have Been Fun’ are slow building, amplified highlights. Carrying all the weight of convicted fearlessness on their shoulders, Pip Blom unhinge pre-disposed expectations of crafted alternative like graduates straight outta Kim Deal’s school of rock, whilst closing number ‘Trouble In Paradise’, sets the tone for what will only be the ultimate, set-list once gigs resume again.
With Pip Blom, no mood is untouched nor sense of renewal left behind. The trick to it all? As Pip reveals: “I just really like catchy songs and I feel like that’s something we try to do. I’d classify it as being sentimental – it’s not sugar-happy Pop.... more like ‘Titanic’ pop songs...”
For those of us missing the buzzed adrenaline of communal music exploration, the idea of escapism in cramped and sweaty crevices can seem quite lifeless. If it's a sense of community you’re after then look no further than ‘Pip Blom Backstage’.
Streaming goodness 24/7 as a fan-centric loyalty app, ‘Pip Blom Backstage’ gives access to exclusive news, premium content, and, a chat box for the Pip Blom Backstage community; further cementing Pip Blom as undeniable pals for life as fan-clips, spotify playlists and even a cooking lesson from bassist Darek Mercks, are all made available from the VIP lounge of your own back-pocket.
In conclusion, there're actually thirty-five ‘Welcome Break’ pit stops a weary traveller can make in a lifetime spent on the M1, and it’s associates. Whilst the road’s presently a little less travelled, Pip Blom’s ‘Welcome Break’ is adamantly nothing to do with the present state of affairs. In fact, it doesn’t have anything to do with much at all and that’s the way they like it.
‘Welcome Break’ is but two nouns of which when placed together in context, ring confidently with prowess, intent, and a radiant true-spirit - much like Pip Blom herself.
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: Both thoroughly melodic and swimming with that airy haze we've come to expect from this Dutch outfit, but with moments of distorted heft and crashing post-punk groove, the new one from Pip Blom is every bit the essential purchase. Ram-packed with hooks and brilliantly produced, it's definitely their most accomplished work to date.TRACK LISTING
1 You Don't Want This
2 12
3 It Should Have Been Fun
4 Keep It Together
5 Different Tune
6 I Know I’m Not Easy To Like
7 Faces
8 I Love The City
9 Easy
10 Holiday
11 Trouble In Paradise
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- LP
- £16.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP88X
- Release date
- 17 Dec '21
- Includes MP3 Download Code.
Regan began writing 100 Acres of Sycamore whilst living on the island of Majorca. Regarding the album's composition Regan stated: “I think if you could bottle a bit of the atmosphere and put it into the record, it's there. In saying that, I think it's spliced with walking in the woods in Ireland.”
The album was recorded to tape using analogue methods, with Regan noting, “I just love the sound of it, I love the process. I love the idea that there's a master tape. It's a very potent thing.” Regan and co-producer Sean Read recorded using the same console that The White Stripes used to record their fourth studio album, “Elephant”.
Regarding the stylistic differences between 100 Acres of Sycamore and his previous album, The Shadow Of An Empire, Regan noted, “The last album was kind of like a chrysalis and this is the butterfly. I think sometimes that everyone has to remember that you don't get 'this' without 'that'. This album wouldn't have happened without the last record. The second one wouldn't have happened without the first one. I think sometimes after the first record there might have been a feeling that, because I was on to a good thing, to just repeat it but I wasn't interested in that. It's very important for me to do what feels right at the time.” Regan also noted, "My previous record, The Shadow Of An Empire was me looking out of a window at the world. With this one, it’s a clear look in.”
TRACK LISTING
1. 100 Acres Of Sycamore
2. Sow Mare Bitch Vixen
3. The Horses Are Asleep
4. The Lake District
5. Dogwood Blossom
6. For A Nightingale
7. List Of Distractions
8. 1st Day Of May
9. North Star Lover
10. Woodberry Cemetery
11. Vodka Sorrow
12. Golden Light
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- Ltd 12"
- £12.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVN59512
- Release date
- 3 Dec '21
A side project of Syd from the band and producer Ross Orton, the Minsky Rock remix channels the energy of the primetime Detroit electro of Aux 88 or Cybertron while Paranoid London, the duo made up of Quinn Whalley and Gerardo Delgardo, turn in a bubbling 303 drenched acid workout.
TRACK LISTING
A1. X Paranoid London Remix
A2. X Minsky Rock Remix
B1. X Paranoid London Remix (Instrumental)
B2. X Minsky Rock Remix (Instrumental)
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- Ltd 7"
- £11.99
- Cat Number
- HVN5957
- Release date
- 5 Nov '21
X rides on a sustained attack and gives way to a glorious synth heavy release of a chorus that’s just biding its time for a summer of discontent and dancing. This is the sound of your new favourite band hitting their stride. Count the days ’til you can see them in a field or in a club again.
Self-produced by Syd Minsky and once again mixed by Ross Orton, Y? is a synth heavy assault which picks up where X left off before venturing off into deeper acid-laced territory.
TRACK LISTING
A.X
B.Y
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- Coloured LP
- £22.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP196C
- Release date
- 17 Sep '21
- Format Info
Clear vinyl.
Printed inners.
Download card included.
Housed in hand stickered PVC sleeve.
Clear vinyl.
... [ + ] -
- CD
- £10.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP196CD
- Release date
- 10 Sep '21
- Format Info
Digi-sleeve.
12pp booklet.
Digi-sleeve.
12pp... [ + ] -
- 2xLtd CD/DVD
- £12.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP196CDVD
- Release date
- 17 Sep '21
- Format Info
Digi-sleeve.
12pp booklet.
Contains DVD of Alasdair McLellan film.
Digi-sleeve.
12pp... [ + ]
Marvin Hamlisch was not yet 30 when he wrote those words for the mouth of Barbra Streisand. Even then, Hamlisch was acutely aware that as a narrator of our own stories, the human memory is at best unreliable and at worst mendacious. That same awareness resonates through every bar, beat and breath of I've Been Trying To Tell You, the tenth studio album by Saint Etienne.
The album is made largely from samples and sounds drawn from the turn of the new century, a period that was topped and tailed by Labour's election victory and the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. “It's about memory,” Bob explains, “and how it can fog and play tricks on you. Specifically, it's about the late Nineties, and current nostalgia for the Nineties.”
Formed in Croydon in 1990 by music journalist Bob Stanley with childhood friend Pete Wiggs, and soon joined by singer Sarah Cracknell, Saint Etienne arose within the context of the indie- dance movement of that era but created a unique sound which – albeit accidentally – paved the way for what would later become known as Britpop.
Their earliest albums – 1991 debut Foxbase Alpha and its 1993 successor So Tough – tapped into the collective consciousness by using an accretion of disparate elements - Long Wave football commentary, a snatch of Four Tops vocals or a sample of Dusty Springfield strings, some dialogue from Billy Liar, a melody from a long-forgotten perfume ad – to create a richly evocative memory-world which was specifically British, even when the component parts themselves were not.
The resulting emotion, of course, is bittersweet. Saint Etienne's music has always captured the feeling that the Portuguese call saudade, the Welsh call hiraeth and the Germans call sehnsucht: a combination of homesickness and longing, a melancholy yearning for a time, a place, a person or a mood that can never be revisited.
It's what the Scottish comedian Brian Limond was driving at with the heartbreaking Limmy's Show sketch in which he visits a travel agent and shows them a blurred colour photograph of himself and his friends on a teenage holiday in the Ayrshire resort of Millport. “Can you tell me how I get there?”, Limmy asks the confused agent, who initially tries to sell him a ticket to Millport. “No, not the place,” Limmy replies. “The feeling.” Saint Etienne's 2002 single “Action” expresses a similar desire: “Cos I've been searching for all the people I used to turn to, and all the people who knew the answer... Let's get the feeling again...”
Another constant in Saint Etienne's music has been their understanding of the power of dreams. There's a strand of pop which stretches from The Beach Boys' SMiLE through Saint Etienne to The Avalanches' Since I Left You and beyond which defies the reductive term 'dreampop', and instead evokes the genuine sensation of dreaming: blissful, yes, but also unsettling and disorienting. Saint Etienne's early career masterpiece “Avenue” conjured that realm for seven minutes, and I've Been Trying To Tell You inhabits it entirely. The album ties together these two Saint Etienne threads – memory and dreams – and tells us directly something which has always been implicit in Bob, Pete and Sarah's work: that memory is a dream.
“I spent a lot of last year thinking about optimism for the future,” says Bob, “and the almost total lack of it at the moment. That got me thinking about the last time there was a general optimism in the country and I thought about May 1997, the window between then and September 2001, which it's easy to look back on as some kind of innocent golden age, even if it didn't feel like one at the time. In reality, of course, there was good and there was bad.... Primary schools and art galleries and hospitals were built versus we bombed Belgrade and introduced PFI!”
Reflecting upon that era, and upon the collective (mis)remembrance of it, led to this new Saint Etienne album. “We thought, if you used samples from the late Nineties - the supposedly promising bit between Labour winning the election and September 11th - what would the music be and what could you do with it? Modern nostalgia culture often draws on corporate American Nineties mall culture, but what about British BBC radio culture? Could those sources be used to actually sound like the era, but through the fog of memory?”
Two decades on, a combination of False Memory Syndrome and collective amnesia has grown up around those early New Labour years. The first Blair administration is nowadays viewed variously as a lost golden age, or a period of naïvete, delusion and folly, and a million different shades in between. “YouTube has so many nostalgic clips of slowed-down grainy footage of shopping malls,” says Bob, “often tagged 'liminal spaces' or something like that, post-Burial, post-Mark Fisher, with vaporwave-like music made by people younger than me who see the Eighties and Nineties as a simpler time. I find this fascinating. What you choose to remember or choose to forget... ASBOs and paediatricians getting death threats in Wales... those bits get forgotten.”
Even at the time, a complacent illusion about the Nineties had taken hold, filtered down from Francis Fukuyama's The End Of History, that benign liberal democracy had triumphed forever and there were no struggles left to be fought. And, even at the time, an equal and opposite sense of disillusion had taken hold of Bob Stanley. On the first anniversary of Blair's election victory, Bob went to the Granita restaurant in Islington, where Blair and Brown had famously struck their power-sharing deal, and felt a sense of emptiness which he later described in the first verse of “Heart Failed In The Back Of A Taxi”: “Took a trip down Granita way/Had to go on the 1st of May/Didn't have much to celebrate...”
Saint Etienne have always understood that pop music is the nearest thing we have to time travel, the closest we can get to breathing the air of a different time. On this album, they take that theory to its logical conclusion. I've Been Trying To Tell You uses sounds and samples from 1997 to 2001, evoking the folk memory of the period by using and twisting recordings from the time, re- working them into new songs. “They're all by people you'd have heard on daytime Radio 1 or 2 at the time,” Bob clarifies, “not Boards of Canada or anything.” Opening track “Music Again”, for example, begins with some gorgeously poignant electric harpsichord from a long-forgotten R&B hit.
For the first time, Saint Etienne didn't record together in a studio. The album was completed remotely, in Hove (Pete), Oxford (Sarah) and Bradford (Bob, in collaboration with film and TV composer Gus Bousfield, who contributes to a number of tracks). Communication was handled via Zoom meetings and emails. “We had the idea for the album before the pandemic, and it was surprisingly straightforward.” The results are exceptional. “I'm really excited about the way the album has turned out,” says Bob. “It feels like something brand new.”
I've Been Trying To Tell You has an internal unity, its heartbeat always at the low end of mid- tempo/high end of downtempo, landing at the approximate pace of Tricky's Pre-Millennium Tension (an album released on the very cusp of the era in question). This helps sustain the dream-state.
That hypnagogic sensation is enhanced here and there by the eerie sound of seagulls and garden birds. It's like falling asleep listening to Minnie Riperton's “Lovin' You” and coming a- dreamwake in Kew. This, it turns out, is another turn-of-the-millennium reference. “In the early series of Big Brother,” Bob explains, “when Channel 4 used to broadcast live from the house in the daytime, they'd dip out the sound whenever the housemates talked about real life people, or swore or whatever, and they'd replace the sound with quite avant-sounding field recordings of birdsong.”
The lyrics, too, obey the fractured logic of dreams. Sarah Cracknell sings in short phrases - “here it comes again”, “never had a way to go”, “ruby dust”, “a love like this again” - looped and repeated, rather than a traditional verse-chorus-verse structure. “They are all snatched phrases that could have been used at the time,” Bob explains, “from news items, or songs, or magazines.” The album's centrepiece is arguably “Little K”, the fourth track of eight, a six-minute oneiric ocean which ends with the sound of lazily lapping waves. The words that filter through the haze are ones which define the album: “No reason to pretend. In my reverie, the mind will carry me...”
The reverie has interludes with no words at all, at least not sung. “Blue Kite”, made from backwards strings and synths and bassy beats from the room next door, is entirely instrumental, as is “I Remember It Well” apart from snatches of mysterious voices which evoke childhood holidays. Some tracks, like some dreams, are simply too strange for analysis: the inscrutably- titled “Penlop” (a Tibetan term which translates loosely as 'governor') has a refrain which appears to run “I don't really know you/But I'd like to show you/Chester town/We went all around...”
The accompanying film, which premieres at the NFT in the first week of September and will also be available as a DVD with the album, came about when Bob Stanley contacted Alasdair McLellan after the latter had used Saint Etienne's “Nothing Can Stop Us” in a Marc Jacobs commercial. They met a few times, pre-pandemic, in a cafe under Shipley clocktower. “Alasdair understood the album straight off,” says Bob. “We talked about youth, and the A1, and British identity, and memories of the recent past. He's really made a beautiful film, and it perfectly complements the album. Alasdair's film also taps in to the way we think of our youth, and sense of place, and where we come from.”
McLellan's film – a still from which adorns the album sleeve - is a slow-motion travelogue that takes in “a lifetime's worth” of locations, including Felixstowe, Blackpool, Portmeirion, Avebury, Southampton, Doncaster, Grangemouth, as well as London. It its vignettes, we see a couple breaking up on a Westminster bench, a man skimming stones across the water from an oil terminal, a ballet dancer rehearsing, a raver dancing in the headlights of a Ford Cortina, youths playing in a Yorkshire waterfall, teams meeting in caffs. The album dovetails immaculately with the visuals. When we do hear anyone speak, it's only to recite lyrics from classic Saint Etienne songs, all taken from the Nineties.
The dreamlike mood of the album, and the film, is a statement in itself: namely that memory is a largely fictionalised product of the human mind, rather than a reliable record. I've Been Trying To Tell You – the album, and the film – sifts through those Hamlischian misty watercolour memories of the way we were, and poses the question: was it all just a dream? Saint Etienne have always known the answer. They've been trying to tell you.
Simon Price, 2021
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: While Saint Etienne are well known for pulling together a host of influences into their own particular clever brand of indie, their latest outing is perhaps the most confidently nostalgic tribute yet, crafted from found sounds and snippets of samples from the early 00's, leading to an evocative and wonderfully realised triumph.TRACK LISTING
1. Music Again
2. Pond House
3. Fonteyn
4. Little K
5. Blue Kite
6. I Remember It Well
7. Penlop
8. Broad River
-
- Coloured LP
- £21.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP194C
- Release date
- 2 Jul '21
- Format Info
Indies exclusive green vinyl.- Includes MP3 Download Code.
Indies exclusive green... [ + ]
Now, based out of Oakland and Los Angeles, Stuart collaborates within many Jazz, Hip-Hop, and Experimental music scenes. His works include compositions for the NPR podcast Snap Judgement, along with co-writes and production with various groups including: Brijean, Bells Atlas, Meernaa, Luke Temple, Jay Stone. Dougie Stu’s Familiar Future is a uniquely jazz-attuned album that is soulful and ethereal. It draws inspiration from artists and producers like Lonnie Liston Smith, Charles Stepney, David Axelrod, and Alice Coltrane. Stuart has arrived at a sound that harkens back to the golden era of soul jazz and R&B, while still sounding contemporary.
The band features the immediately recognizable guitar stylings of Jeff Parker (Tortoise) who was one of Stuart’s biggest influences growing up in Chicago, Maya Kronfeld (Georgia Anne Muldrow, NYEUSI) on Fender Rhodes, Steve Blum (Bells Atlas) on synthesizer, percussionists Brijean Murphy (Toro Y Moi, Poolside), John Santos (Tito Puente, Dizzy Gillespie), and drummer Hamir Atwal (tune-yards). Special guests include Marcus Stephans on Flute, Shaina Evoniuk on Violin, and Crystal Pascucci on Cello. The album was engineered and mixed by Rob Shelton at Tiny Telephone, and he also appears on synthesizer on one song.
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: 'Familiar Future' takes the loose, languid vibes of jazz music and effortlessly transposes it into the drifting world of psychedelia via instrumental funk. Impeccably composed and brilliantly fluid compositions slowly change and morph from loungy relaxation to head-bobbing groove.TRACK LISTING
1. Welcome
2. Familiar Future
3. Wind Chaser
4. Henny
5. Another One For Slug
6. Nostalgia
7. BB’s Birthday
8. Scooter Bistro Number
9. Joy Ride
10. Free Their Ghosts
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- Coloured LP
- £19.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP181C
- Release date
- 9 Apr '21
- Format Info
Initial copies are eco-wax vinyl.
Initial copies are... [ + ] -
- CD
- £9.99
- Cat Number
- HVNLP181CD
- Release date
- 9 Apr '21
Featuring on the cover a striking Keith Haring meets the Green Man image from acclaimed artist and long-time collaborator Ben Edge, the picture was inspired by the folk tale of the giant of Dawson, who is both male & female, human and vegetation and lived in the imagination of Dawson’s Hill, a stretch of South London parkland a stones throw away from Dawson’s Heights, the flats featured on the cover of Raf’s debut Stop Lying.
Edge and Rundell, for reasons they can’t entirely comprehend, concocted a rite which took place the first full moon after this year’s summer solstice (the results of which can be seen in the short film trailer for the album). This involved the giant – also known as Tommy Hill Figure - being created on Dawson’s Hill. “Ben’s been digging deeper and deeper into ancient myths, the green man, all the stuff that’s been co-opted by organised religion,” Rundell explains. All this chimed with him because he is a magnet for signs and symbols. He has been ever since his Mod-loving parents named him after the RAF roundel symbol.
“We’d been talking about this sort of stuff a lot,” Rundell continues. “The rite was about the birth of the new and using the coronavirus as a catalyst for that change, like a full stop to the way things were before. The corona was called the spark in the ceremony, although we’re not being too specific about the virus because this is a thing we hope to do annually.”
This is the backdrop to the album, a record far larger and more confident than its creator could ever have imagined. Unlike his itinerantly created previous records, O.M. Days was entirely recorded in the same Forest Hill studio, with the aforementioned collaborators. “I love collaborating with people – like Lias Saoudi or Andy Jenkins, who are both on this record – that’s where it’s at for me,” Rundell says. “I worked really hard on this one. And although I had no plan about where it was going, I always have a notion about how I want things to sound. I had a particular idea about that.”
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: There's always a considerable amount of rhythmic shuffling when Rundell comes on the stereo (I would obviously dance but am pretty terrible at it, so results in said shuffle). 'O. M. Days' has all of the latent melodicism we've come to expect from Rundell, but with an uplifting, post-pandemic groove sure to get the newly opened clubs moving It's a brilliantly produced and intensely enjoyable listen.TRACK LISTING
1. More U Know
2. Down
3. Monsterpiece
4. Ample Change (feat. Lias Saoudi)
5. Always Fly (feat. Terri Walker)
6. Luxury (feat. Man & The Echo)
7. Miracle
8. The Ides Of Albion
9. Turning Tides
10. Butter Gold (feat. Andy Jenkins)
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- CD
- £9.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP180CD
- Release date
- 13 Nov '20
The songs were strengthened and evolved in a live setting — including in support of Olden Yolk and Cass McCombs on their respective UK and European tours — before being taken to the studio of producer Ali Chant (PJ Harvey, M. Ward, Perfume Genius, Gruff Rhys), where they were captured in their final form. The result is a jewel in the dirt by the side of the highway; ten songs which slide effortlessly between lovelorn country, lo-fi folk and glistening, unforgettable pop.
Having completed a European tour alongside Cass McCombs at the end of last year and appeared at both the End of the Road Christmas party and the Line of Best Fit’s ‘Five Day Forecast’, she returns later in the year for a couple of shows at Sound City in Liverpool and Live at Leeds and a run of headline shows in early 2021.
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: Return is a beatifully upbeat, superbly crafted suite of country-tinged Indie-pop stormers. Some veer a little more towards the introspective, trad country vibes but imbued with a lightness and optimism you rarely hear. Beautiful stuff.TRACK LISTING
1. Tonight
2. Beautiful Soul
3. Return
4. Something Real
5. Fix Me Up
6. Hey You
7. Miracle
8. Take Back The Radio
9. On The Road
10. Waiting For The Day
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- Ltd LP
- £22.99
- Cat Number
- FHVNLP8 (#AUGDROP)
- Release date
- 4 Sep '20
-
- 2xLtd LP
- £22.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP172 (#AUGDROP)
- Release date
- 4 Sep '20
-
- 2xColoured LP
- £25.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- FHVNLP7 (#AUGDROP)
- Release date
- 4 Sep '20
LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.
The 15th anniversary of the debut Magic Numbers album.Released in it's orginal limited format, including the one sided limited 7".The vinyl is Crystal Clear 2LP + 7î Time creates it's own mirror and within it comes new reflections.Fifteen years later I find myself listening and reflecting on our debut album in a way that has also made me reflect upon my life.Just who was I making that record, writing those songs, what did we want, what did we achieve? Perhaps you too will be thinking similar things as you listen and reflect upon your own personal journey, especially if this record soundtracked your life all those years gone by....If you are listening to this for the very first time, may I introduce you to... The Magic Numbers Two families. The Stodart's & The Gannon's. We wanted to create music that was timeless. We wanted to create a band that you could believe in. We wanted to break your heart whilst lifting your spirit. We wanted to make a classic debut album. In 2004 The Magic Numbers were playing live almost every other night around London, making friends that soon grew into a following that spread the word the old school way, by word of mouth.People telling people about this new group comprising of two sets of brothers and sisters, who were singing a kind of country-soul-pop music with three part harmonies.From the outside things seemed to be happening very quickly, but I'd been writing songs and playing empty venues with our drummer Sean for 10 years before this momentum started building, and for us it really was always just a matter of time...but it sure took it's sweet time.Honestly though, it was only when our sisters Michele & Angela brought their magic to the band did anyone start taking notice, as then we discovered a sound.There was an energy between us that was somewhat frenetic, it was powerful, we knew we had something special and unique and because of that it also made us very cautious and protective. Fifteen years ago it felt like we were on top of the world, capable of anything, full of promise, full of innocence but also full of anxiety, still recovering from loss and having nothing.We literally had nothing but each other and this music.So many dreams of ours started coming true, from selling out shows and hearing people sing along to our songs in the crowd, to being given the opportunity to go into the studio by Heavenly.The biggest dream was to make a record.Jeff Barrett & Martin Kelly's belief in the band and myself as a songwriter at that time really gave us that extra confidence and boost that I think every artist needs whether they'd like to admit it or not.So there we were, about to make this record. Going into the studio can be a very daunting experience for a band, especially when the only real experience you've ever had was some home recording with a 4 track.We chose to work with Craig Silvey because we loved him straight away as a person and felt like he understood what we wanted to achieve.He was amazing at putting us at ease and not having us react to that red light fever that sometimes creeps up on you.He wanted to stay true to what he'd seen us do live and just try and enhance that sonically as best as he could. We had a shared vision of not wanting there to be too many overdubs on the record, as the core elements between the four of us when we played live was already telling the story in the way we had arranged the songs.It's funny now to think that we ended up playing these huge festivals with literally a guitar tuner between us as we didn't want anything else to colour the sound of our guitars being plugged straight into our amplifiers. It's always the songs for me that make a great record and we had the songs. My sister Michele & I sat at our mum and dad's and said "Right let's write a song in D major" and I started pulsing on that opening chord and Michele's bass line took us on a journey like they always do, that melodic hooky driving thing that she does is key to what makes this music.We had so much fun writing 'Mornings Eleven' that I feel the spirit of that moment was captured in the song.We never really said it out loud to each other at the time but we both knew we were trying to write our very own 'Good Vibrations' We'd have never thought that it would be the opening song on our debut album. Some of the songs on this album just appeared fully formed.'This Love' in particular was written pretty soon after I had learnt of our grandmother's death in New York, I was heartbroken that I wasn't there for her in those last days especially as she had raised me as a little boy.I can clearly remember playing that opening triplet guitar figure and the words and melody just came pouring out like they were always there, the same thing with 'Which Way To Happy' I remember the feeling of playing catch up to what was coming out.Over the years I've learnt that it's a very rare thing, songs appearing fully formed like that, it still surprises me when they do arrive like a memory of some kind.'Love's A Game' felt like it had always existed, in fact for a very long time I would ask people "But does it remind you of anything?" I don't remember writing 'Forever Lost' at all.I remember playing it to the band and us rehearsing it, having fun with the arrangement but no recollection of writing it. So many songs came from such sad places, the end of a long term relationship, death in the family, feeling so lost and vulnerable, this yearning for something else, to be someone else but I guess unknowingly we disguised it with harmonies and hooks. 'Love Me Like You' was definitely one of those, no one spoke of the meaning of the song when I first played it, we all just dived straight in and started having fun with hooks and skips in the rhythm.It was the baby of the bunch, as it was only written a few months before we began recording, whereas 'Try' was probably the eldest of almost 2 years.Then there's the duet between Angie and myself 'I See You You See Me'.My mum and dad were arguing downstairs and I knew it would only be a matter of time before they would make up and laugh about how ridiculous they were both being.I based the song on that kind of love, one that sees through everything.Angela's voice on that still melts my heart. I'd bought a set of these glockenspiel tone bars from a charity shop in Hanwell one afternoon walking home from signing on at the job-centre and all the way back I was thinking about this much more tender arrangement of a song I'd written called 'Hymn For Her'.The climax of the song on the third chorus was originally how it was all throughout.I remember that day working on it with Michele and Angela as we were so excited about how it turned out we decided to play it live that night to a small few. There's so much love and hope and joy and honesty in this album.So much fun in the arrangements, so much youth and innocence in our voices.It encapsulates a very precious time within the four of our lives.I'm still our biggest fan. Fifteen years later. We're still wanting to create music that is timeless. We're still wanting to be a band that you can believe in. We're still wanting to break your heart whilst lifting your spirit. But we can't ever make that first album again, this is it, we captured that moment in timeÖ..and upon reflection it surpassed all of our wildest expectations. Hope you enjoy listening. Romeo Stodart
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- Ltd 12"
- £8.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVN57312 (#AUGDROP)
- Release date
- 29 Aug '20
LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.
Working Menís Club hotly anticipated, self-titled debut album was due to drop this June, now, for reasons obvious to most of us, it is due October. Looking at the blank space left by the postponement, 18 year old wonderkid frontman Syd Minsky-Sargeant decided to utilise his free time, in lockdown, and capitalise on the creative momentum the band has garnered. The result is a 21-minute continuous ëMEGAMIXí that simultaneously acts as a taster and a condensed electronic reworking of parts of the album. ìOur album would have been released today but we had to push the release back due to Covid. It doesnít feel like a particularly apt time to be self promoting anything at all however we wanted to give something to the people who pre-ordered the album on what would of the original release date,î says Minsky-Sargeant. ìInitially it seemed a bit of a crazy idea to go and remix an album we've just made that isn't even out yet. But once we got into it we were like, ëlet's fucking go for ití. One could of course argue that crazy ideas are whatís needed in such crazy times but, in reality, what has been produced is less of a chaotic and scatterbrain idea and more a coherent artistic statement in line with the bandís perpetual forward momentum. Minsky-Sargeant teamed up with the bandís producer Ross Orton - under the moniker ëMinsky Rockí, a recently started project under which they recently completed a Jarvis Cocker remix - and the pair worked remotely to create the unique reimagining. ìRoss has a studio in Sheffield and I have a bit of one at home. So I would play a synth part and then send him the file over and he'd put it into his computer and then bring it up on a shared screen. I could see his interface and we'd mix it like that. It was like being in the same room.î The result is a ìreinterpretation rather than a remixî says Minsky-Sargeant. Over its seamlessly flowing duration, as it unfurls in hypnotic and infectious grooves - teasing snippets of songs as they weave in and out - the mix plays out like a classic 12î extended mix. Albeit one that takes on different forms and explores new terrain altogether. ìIt takes a number of parts of the album but different versions [and edits] of the songs,î he says. ìI've played new parts on more or less everything. Some tracks I've taken out the guitar parts and re-done them with synths or replaced bass lines with synths.î Thereís something of a northern lineage that can be traced here too, in that the 12î band remixes were something of a mainstay of Manchester bands like New Order and A Certain Ratio, and in a similar spirit, WMC are a new young band pushing, and crossing, the boundaries of where guitar and electronic music can interlink and overlap. ìIt's free flowing and electronic, rather than sounding like a band,î Minsky-Sargeant says of the mix. ìIt gives an insight into what the record is like, as well as the future of the band, but itís also something totally exclusive. It's very much its own thing.î
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- Coloured LP
- £23.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP92C
- Release date
- 17 Jul '20
- Format Info
White Vinyl with yellow, Green and Black splatter LP.
White Vinyl with yellow,... [ + ]
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- 2xLP
- £27.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP178
- Release date
- 8 May '20
- Format Info
Double 180 gram vinyl in a gatefold sleeve with printed inners.- Includes MP3 Download Code.
Double 180 gram vinyl in... [ + ] -
- CD
- £9.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP178CD
- Release date
- 8 May '20
The book is a brutal, nerve-shredding read, thanks to Lanegan’s unsparing candour in recounting a journey from troubled youth in eastern Washington, through his drug-stained existence amid the ’90s Seattle rock scene, to an unlikely salvation at the dawn of the 21st century. There’s death and tragedy, yet also humour and hope, thanks to the tenacity which impels its host, even at his lowest moments. As Lanegan writes near the end: “I was the ghost that wouldn’t die.”
Today, Lanegan is a renowned songwriter and a much-coveted collaborator, as adept at electronica as with rock, constantly honing his indomitable voice: an asphalt-laced linctus for the soul. While the memoir documents a struggle to find peace with himself, his new album emphasis the extent to which he came to realise that music is his life.
“Writing the book, I didn’t get catharsis,” he chuckles. “All I got was a Pandora’s box full of pain and misery. I went way in, and remembered shit I’d put away 20 years ago. But I started writing these songs the minute I was done, and I realised there was a depth of emotion because they were all linked to memories from this book. It was a relief to suddenly go back to music. Then I realised that was the gift of the book: these songs. I’m really proud of this record.”
Straight Songs Of Sorrow combines musical trace elements from early Mark Lanegan albums with the synthesized constructs of later work. The meditative acoustic guitar fingerpicking – provided by Lamb Of God’s Mark Morton – on Apples From A Tree and Hanging On (For DRC) echo 1994’s Whiskey For The Holy Ghost. Yet one of that record’s touchstones was Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, echoed in the new album’s opener I Wouldn’t Want To Say, where Lanegan extemporises *à la Ballerina over musique concrète wave patterns generated by his latest favourite compositional tool, a miniature computer-synth called the Organelle. The lyric clings onto the music, emulating his book’s queasy momentum: *“Swinging from death… to revival.”
“That song is the explanation, the beginning and middle and end of that entire period of time,” Mark says. “The encapsulation of the entire experience, book and record. So I started with that.”
Lanegan affirms that every song references a specific episode or person in the book, albeit some more explicitly than others. Hanging On (For DRC) is a loving ode to his friend Dylan Carlson, genius progenitor of drone metal and a fellow unlikely survivor of Seattle’s narcotic dramas. “I was always unhappy, and he was the guy who was always smiling, even through my crazy schemes that eventually got both of us into a lot of trouble.” The richly cinematic mood of Daylight In The Nocturnal House, meanwhile, paints a more impressionistic scene: factory smoke, rain, a phone call from *“somebody’s grand-daughter”, who’ll *“pay to make somebody crawl/And send you to heaven.” The singer’s perspective is ambiguous. “I got into a lot of shady business in those years,” Lanegan says.
Longtime observers will recognise some familiar recurrent themes. Death. Destruction. Bad behaviour. In the case of At Zero Below, all in the same song. “Yes, I did burn someone with a cigarette,” Mark says. “Yes, I did spit in somebody’s face – maybe more than once in my life. Stuff I’m not proud of. That song is also about one of my many ex-girlfriends who is no longer with us. It’s all linked to the book.”
At Zero Below features two of the album’s many stellar guests. Singing admonitory harmonies with himself is Greg Dulli, another ’90s alt-rock veteran, Lanegan’s erstwhile partner in mischief and fellow Gutter Twin. The song’s incantatory fiddle is played by The Bad Seeds’ Warren Ellis. No lesser figure than Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones provides Mellotron on the serpentine Ballad Of A Dying Rover (*“I’m just a sick sick man/My days are numbered”). Aside from mandolin, all Daylight In The Nocturnal House’s cobwebbed atmospherics are by Portishead’s Adrian Utley. Ed Harcourt is Lanegan’s pick for album MVP (“He’s all over it – everything that he plays, piano or Wurlitzer, becomes magical”), with special mention to bassist Jack Bates, son of Peter Hook; that duo make especially distinctive contributions to Churchbells, Ghosts a bleakly humorous lament to the drudgery of life on the road (*“I’d ask somebody for a quarter/If there were someone for me to phone”).
Ketamine is a numb blues, with Lanegan shadowed by Cold Cave vocalist Wesley Eisold, who inspired the album’s only overt drug song (ironically, about a drug that Lanegan has never actually taken). “Wes is good friends with Genesis P-Orridge,” explains Mark, “and he said the last time he saw Gen she was in a hospital bed, saying to this priest, ‘No thank you sir, I don’t need any last rites, but if you have any ketamine that would be perfect.’” He laughs. “So I immediately wrote that song and had him sing on it. There’s drugs throughout the record – they’re rife in Bleed All Over – but that song was the only real specific one.”
The material on the last two Mark Lanegan Band albums had Lanegan’s words set to music by various other sources. But aside from the Mark Morton collaborations, Straight Songs Of Sorrow was built from the ground up by Lanegan alone, aided by producer Alain Johannes, his longtime consigliere. Only two other songs have shared credits, and even these stay in-house: Burying Ground and Eden Lost And Found were co-written by Mark’s wife Shelley Brien, with whom he also duets on the Rita Coolidge/Kris Kristofferson-style ballad This Game Of Love. “Let’s put it this way,” says Mark. “Every girlfriend I’ve ever had, for any amount of time, left me. All the good ones left me! Until my current wife. It was great to sing that with Shelley, it really shows she’s a great singer. And it has a depth of emotion that I’m not used to. This is a more honest record than I’ve probably ever made.”
A crushing twin-song centrepiece proves that. First, Stockholm City Blues, a sparse, beautiful, strings and finger-picking meditation on the remorse code of addiction (*“I pay for this pain I put into my blood”). Then, the seven-minute epic Skeleton Key, a supplicatory confessional (“I’m ugly inside and out there is no denying”) that also provides the album title. It’s a remarkable performance from a man whose punishment for plumbing the depths was simply to continue further along the road. “My wife called that my ‘redemption song’,” says Lanegan.
And indeed, there is a happy ending to this story. Just as his book closes with the hero overcoming adversity and turning, battered but cleansed, towards a new day, so Straight Songs Of Sorrow closes with Eden Lost And Found. *“Sunrise coming up baby/To burn the dirt right off of me,” marvels Lanegan, with his words echoed by Simon Bonney of Crime & The City Solution, an all-time hero. “I wanted to make a positive song to end this record, because that’s the way the book ended,” Mark says. “And what’s more positive than to have your favourite singer sing with you?”
Straight Songs Of Sorrow feels both definitive and unique, a culmination of its creator’s arc yet also indicative of the energy that drives him onto future horizons. No wonder Lanegan is proud.
“I do feel this is something special for me, something honest,” he says. “’Cos records are not real life, man – in case no one told ya. They’re just a fake version of life!” Mark Lanegan laughs. “Well, at least you have one now that’s a little closer to being real. Unfortunately, it’s by me.”
Keith Cameron.
TRACK LISTING
1. I Wouldn't Want To Say
2. Apples From A Tree
3. This Game Of Love
4. Ketamine
5. Bleed All Over
6. Churchbells, Ghosts
7. Internal Hourglass Discussion
8. Stockholm City Blues
9. Skeleton Key
10. Daylight In The Nocturnal House
11. Ballad Of A Dying Rover
12. Hanging On (For DRC)
13. Burying Ground
14. At Zero Below
15. Eden Lost And Found
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- CD
- £9.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- PIASLL141CD
- Release date
- 20 Mar '20
From thrilling affairs that dissolve into sweaty desperation (Night Chancers) to the absurd bloggers, fruitlessly clinging to the fag ends of the fashion set (Sleep People), via soiled real life (Slum Lord) social media – enabled stalkers (I’m not Your Dog) and new day, sleep – deprived optimism (Daylight), the record’s finely drawn vignettes, are all based on the corners of world Dury has visited.
Baxter says “Night Chancers is about being caught out in your attempt at being free”, it’s about someone leaving a hotel room at three in the morning. You’re in a posh room with big Roman taps and all that, but after they go suddenly all you can hear is the taps dripping, and all you can see the debris of the night is around you. Then suddenly a massive party erupts, in the room next door. This happened to me and all I Could hear was the night chancer, the hotel ravers”.
STAFF COMMENTS
Laura says: Over a pulsing beat, Baxter drawls "I’m not your fucking friend” and with that the tone is set for his sixth album, ‘The Night Chancers’. Since his gently psychedelic Velvets tinged debut, ‘Len Parrot’s Memorial Lift’ back in 2002, Baxter has been gradually honing his style and here amongst the shady, louche characters of ‘The Night Chancers’ he’s hit his stride. His nonchalant downbeat delivery is engaging throughout, as he tells their wayward tales and is countered perfectly by female vocals that at times echo and at others act as a kind of opposing view to his narrative. The whole album is driven by slow-mo beats, languid, meandering basslines and lush strings that create a perfect noir-ish backdrop to the lugubrious tales. You can almost smell the cigarette smoke and cheap aftershave as the neon reflects on the rain soaked pavements.TRACK LISTING
I’m Not Your Dog
Slumlord
Salvia Hog
Samurai
Sleep People
Carla’s Got A Boyfriend
The Night Chancers
Hello, I’m Sorry
Daylight
Say Nothing
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- Ltd LP
- £19.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP167
- Release date
- 26 Apr '19
-
- Ltd LP
- £9.49
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP162I
- Release date
- 26 Apr '19
*** REDUCED ***
-
- Coloured LP
- £23.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP163C
- Release date
- 19 Apr '19
- Format Info
Splatter disc with mirri-board sleeve (first pressing edition only).
Splatter disc with... [ + ] -
- CD
- £10.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP163CD
- Release date
- 19 Apr '19
Stealing Sheep describe Big Wows as “a slow rush”; taking shape over a period of nearly three years spent working out exactly what they wanted it to be and creating an album that levitated their identities as individuals as well as merging them into one unit “We’re each finding our own creative intuition,” says Bex “..and then we come together...and we back each other up" adds Lucy.
Just as the title suggests, Big Wows is both cynical and optimistic: dreaminess and pop dance rhythms are cut With eye rolling vocal styles inflected by heartfelt lyrical messages “We hit upon this conversational-style between the vocals and have alternating lead melodies. There's a sarcastic tone to some of the music but there is always a strong wilfulness to incorporate honest integrity, which is hard to do but refreshing when it finally comes out.”
Side one opens with a burst of shimmery synths as ‘Show Love’ and ‘Back in Time’ lead you heart first into the headier feels of ‘Jokin' Me’ and upbeat bounce of 'Why haven't I?' following into the more progressive grooves for ‘Girl’ then fading out with the narcoleptic comforts of ‘Just Dreaming’. Side two digs deeper into a dreamworld, with the manias and hallucinations of ‘Breathe’ and ‘True Colours’ as well as the gorgeous disillusionment of the title track and ending with an unexpected tropical club banger ‘Choose Like You’.
Running through the whole record is a response to living in a tech era: “We wanted sounds to represent TVs, computers and everyday glitches” says Bex “We started to have this feeling that life is like a game and how you can malfunction when you're blasted with too much information…” As well as composing with traditional instrumentation they also started songs solely on the computer; sequencing, building sounds, drum machines and responding to that non-emotional binary world. “The big challenge,” continues Bex “is making machines sound organic, emotional, finding their flaws. That’s why Delia Derbyshire is so important to us. All the effects that she uses serve to humanise the machines.”
Since the release of their last album, 2015’s surreal and fantastical ‘Not Real’, they’ve been in demand as multidisciplinary public artists as well as musicians – on projects including Wow Machine, which brings to life another more conceptual strand of ‘Big Wows’; in a mechanical light up stage with dancers and live music. This summer they also performed at UK festivals with a 15 strong all-female procession to celebrate the centenary of Suffrage. “Being female has become more of a theme in our work” the band say. “It's obviously always been there but now we're playing with it more conceptually and thinking about empowerment"
This greater confidence and rock-solid aesthetic mean that Stealing Sheep can take greater risks and reap more wonderful rewards. They have a broad range of influences – St Vincent, Michael Jackson, The Knife, Kraftwerk, Drake, Little Dragon - but they remain so resolutely and richly themselves. “We try new things out and we get more confident about what we like.” says Bex. "There’s a really good thing Grayson Perry says about developing your creative intuition. You get to a level as an artist where you know on a gut level what you like and what you don’t like. It takes a long time to feel comfortable in that place, to know your palette, to know you like these drum sounds or whatever it is.”
Lucy is working with a full drum kit now instead of just toms, Emily is playing bass guitar, Bex is making her own synth patches and they’re all using new equipment: they are developing and experimenting and moving forward together. “We wanted the machine sounds to be juxtaposed against a full kit and bass guitar, which we tracked live to feel intentionally loose in places. We like the idea of placing robotic tech next to real life energy.”
The songs began at home or in their studio at Liverpool’s Invisible Wind Factory, laying down the main body of the tracks, then the band worked with various producers – including Marta Salogni (Bjork, MIA, Factory Floor), Andy Smith (Years & Years), Ash Workman (Christine & The Queens, Metronomy) and Joe Wills (video artist for Little Dragon) – as they’ve tried out different mixes and ideas to convey their messages. They also teamed up with 8bit video artist Pastle Castle (Emily Garner) from Leeds, who created a Karaoke video series for the whole album; exploring Stealing Sheep's digital dimension and their shifting identities amidst changing cultural moods and millennial paraphernalia. "It's a crazy time and it's challenging navigating through it, but it's like 'whatever' bring on the BIG WOWS.’
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: I remember being slightly surprised when Dave told me I should give the new Stealing Sheep single a listen a few months ago (Dave and I have canonically opposed tastes in music), and I actually really liked it. Throbbing synths, sugary percussion and huge 80's reverbs but with perfectly precise production and more than a nod to that classic sound of Italo disco. There's no way this isn't going to be a hit, and it deserves every minute of it.TRACK LISTING
1. Show Love
2. Back In Time
3. Joking Me
4. Why Haven't I?
5. Girl
6. Just Dreaming
7. Big Wows
8. Breathe
9. True Colours
10. Choose Like You
11. Heartbeats
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- CD
- £9.99
- Cat Number
- HVNLP156CD
- Release date
- 4 May '18
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: Though I feel like I might be getting RSI from writing about King Giz, amazingly they've managed to smash out yet another killer LP, full of their trademark hooks and off-kilter psychedelic scree. Once again, a completely realised and cohesive collection comes from the KG camp.TRACK LISTING
1. Beginner's Luck
2. Greenhouse Heat Death
3. Barefoot Desert
4. Muddy Water
5. Superposition
6. Down The Sink
7. The Great Chain Of Being
8. The Last Oasis
9. All Is Known
10. I'm Sleepin' In
11. The Wheel
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- LP
- £22.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP152R
- Release date
- 22 Jan '21
-
- CD
- £9.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP152CD
- Release date
- 13 Apr '18
Without doubt set to be this summer’s most joyously exciting new band, they have to be seen to be believed – upfront there’s a statuesque chap clad only in a pair of nothing-to-the-imagination hot pants next to a woman in a custom designed baby-doll dress and shorts combo while behind them lurk two shadowy mute figures on drums and keyboards, each stripped to the waist and veiled secretively in what look like a satanic beekeeper’s hats made of a material so black, the light seems to fall into it.
If Janet Planet, Sugar Bones, Clarence McGuffie and Reggie Goodchild weren’t a band already you’d be snapping at their heels demanding they form one quick-sharp. Fact is, they are, and on Friday 13th April 2018 they release Confident Music For Confident People, their 11-track debut album for Heavenly Recordings.
The band have already offered a glimpse of what’s in store on Confident Music For Confident People – recent tracks Boyfriend, Bubblegum and Better Sit Down Boy were big and brash and bright as hell, like Dee-Lite tooled up and ready for our berserk modern times.
Confident Music for Confident People sets eleven tales of 21st century ennui to irresistible, irrepressible dance music. The opening lines of Try Your Luck (“I must confess/I’ve been sleeping with your ex/’Cos I heard he was the best/I must confess/I never would have guessed he would get so obsessed… I’m not surprised”) set the tone perfectly for what follows.
Here is a set of songs that take the kind of all-consuming interior monologues that bored, disaffected youth are wrestling with the world over and places them square in the middle of the dance floor before adding call-and-response choruses for good measure – it’s the best collection of perfect pop music you’ll hear all year, the perfect embodiment of the characters that made it that somehow manages to be both wildly ambitious and deceptively simple at the same time.
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: 'Don't You Know I'm In A Band' perfectly encapsulates the whole vibe behind Confidence Men, brash, bold and more than a little conceited, they take the stereotypical entitled hilarity of stardom and turn it into a bitingly ironic, brilliantly accomplished synth journey. It's ridiculous, but it's totally brilliant. Heavenly have gone out of their comfort zone on this one, and absolutely smashed it.TRACK LISTING
Try Your Luck
Don't You Know I'm In A Band
Boyfriend
C.O.O.L Party
Out The Window
Catch My Breath
Bubblegum
Better Sit Down Boy
Sailboat Vacation
All The Way
Fascination
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- CD
- £9.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP153CD
- Release date
- 9 Mar '18
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: For all of you who missed out on the Piccadilly Records exclusive beer splattered vinyl version of this, their TWELFTH LP, then here it is brought to you by the wonderful Heavenly records on CD and standard LP. If you haven't heard it yet, then get on it, or they'll have another one out before you get chance.TRACK LISTING
1. Crumbling Castle 10:44
2. Polygondwanaland 03:32
3. The Castle In The Air 02:47
4. Deserted Dunes Welcome Weary Feet 03:33
5. Inner Cell 03:55
6. Loyalty 03:38
7. Horology 02:52
8. Tetrachromacy 03:30
9. Searching... 03:03
10. The Fourth Colour 06:12
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- CD
- £9.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP133CD
- Release date
- 28 Oct '16
Taking inspiration from an esoteric blend – Radiophonic Workshop, Comus, the scores of Bernard Herrmann, John Barry and Ennio Morricone Fairport, COUM, Acid House, Incredible String Band, The Langley Schools Project, The Wicker Man soundtrack and even the direction behind Electric Eden, Rob Young’s book about the development of folk music in the U.K. – by the time they entered Eve Studios in Stockport in October 2015 with producer David Wrench, the band were clear about the direction the album should take.
The result is their most coherent and confident album to date; lushly cinematic, shot through with their most expressive melodies thus far and coated with a ‘sheen’ courtesy of Chris Coady (Beach House, Smith Westerns, Yeah Yeah Yeahs), who mixed the album in LA with some of the reverbs and vocal processors used on Purple Rain, across the 10-tracks strands of ideas appear, sink and re-emerge in an almost modal jazz manner. Clear Shot sees TOY working both in bigger colours and more minutely crafted detail, achieving an altogether higher level of artistry than before.
STAFF COMMENTS
Andy says: Toy released two superb records within a year of each other (2012/13) then vanished for 3! They return with by far their best yet: darker, spookier but somehow poppier, this extends their shoegazey take on psych and garage into a much higher realm. Like the House Of Love but with way more going on. Brilliant.Ryan says: Clear Shot sees TOY working both in bigger colours and more minutely crafted detail, stripping back a little to reveal a bigger picture. This could be their most coherent & confident album to date.
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- CD
- £7.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP104CD
- Release date
- 24 Mar '14
This is the first new music release from Jimi since Doves’s Kingdom Of Rust in 2009 so it’s set to be a very special release indeed.
Jimi on Odludek:
“I wanted to make this mad mixtape… the kind you’d pass back and forth with your mates; eclectic as fuck. That’s the way we’ve all discovered music over the years isn’t it? We join our own dots to make it all make sense. As I got into making the record, it felt like I was proving something to myself, making a point that I could do all this on my own. You know — I can play bass, I can play guitar, I can orchestrate. As the methods changed, the original concept stayed intact. It’s me, powering through ideas, kapow kapow, no pause for breath. It’s not trying to be wilfully eclectic; it’s just a reflection of how I schizophrenically devour music.”
STAFF COMMENTS
Andy says: Everything you loved about the Doves - Jimi is, after all, the main songwriter- but with a more playful, homemade bent. Fantastic.-
- CD
- £9.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP100CDS
- Release date
- 10 Feb '14
STAFF COMMENTS
Andy says: Cool as you like psychedelic pop album, with some massive melodies and trippy sounds.TRACK LISTING
1 Shelter Song
2 Sun Structures
3 The Golden Throne
4 Keep In The Dark
5 Mesmerise
6 Move With The Season
7 Colours To Life
8 A Question Isn't Answered
9 The Guesser
10 Test Of Time
11 Sand Dance
12 Fragment's Light
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- CD
- £8.49
- Cat Number
- HVNLP102CD
- Release date
- 9 Dec '13
Dan Carey sits at the controls once again on ‘Join The Dots’, released via Heavenly Recordings.
As with their debut, ‘Join The Dots’ was recorded mostly live with Carey at the helm, although increased studio time has enabled the band to experiment more with Carey’s laboratory of effects and pre-amps, and embellish the tracks with overdubs.
STAFF COMMENTS
Andy says: As good, if not better than their superb debut. And you can't say that too often! A much more powerful, physical record, but with those shogazery melodies still intact.TRACK LISTING
1. Conductor
2. You Won’t Be The Same
3. As We Turn
4. Join The Dots
5. To A Death Unknown
6. Endlessly
7. It’s Been So Long
8. Left To Wander
9. Too Far Gone To Know
10. Frozen Atmosphere
11. Fall Out Of Love
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- CD
- £9.99
Usually ships within: 2-5 days - Cat Number
- HVNLP98CD
- Release date
- 13 May '13
Lanegan, never one to shy away from unique collaborations, has previously worked with Isobel Campbell, Greg Dulli and as a member of The Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age and Soulsavers. "Duke Garwood is one of my all time favorite artists," said Lanegan. "Working with him has been one of the best experiences of my recording life." Lanegan and Garwood met a few years ago while playing on the same bill and Garwood was a frequent opener on Lanegan's recent European tour.
Garwood has often been described in the press as Lanegan's "spiritual cousin across the Atlantic waters." He has been widely praised as a master bluesman, with The Quietus saying "The combination of Garwood's murmured vocals and the sound he gets out of his guitar - which ranges from a rolling, loose finger-picking to shuddering howls of feedback - has a hypnotic effect" and The Mirror dubbing him as "London's leading exponent of the wheezy broke-down blues."
Black Pudding was recorded at Pink Duck Studios in Burbank, California by Justin Smith (Tegan & Sara, The Hives) and mixed by his Queens of the Stone Age associate Alain Johannes.