Wendy Eisenberg has spent the past decade as a fixture of independent music and an artist of inspired multiplicity. As a singer-songwriter, improviser,and virtuoso guitarist, the coordinates of their artistry are ever-shifting, from art-rock to jazz to blistering free improv and eloquent folk.

On catalog highlights including 2020’s 'Auto' and the 2024 free-jazz sprawler 'Viewfinder', they’ve made a signature of ambition. After spending the past five years experimenting in different bands, genres, and creative challenges, and following a period of self-confrontation that they liken to a personal exorcism, Eisenberg has arrived at a milestone. The poetic and formally daring folk songs of Wendy Eisenberg comprise their most certain vision yet.

The songs began to take root in 2020 when Eisenberg moved from Western Massachusetts—where they’d lived for a few years after attending Boston’s New England Conservatory—and relocated to Brooklyn. Longing for the pastoral feel of their former home, Eisenberg gravitated towards the warm sounds of country and folk. “The songs are genuinely folk songs,” Eisenberg says of their record. “The production is less about seeing what the guitar might be capable of and more accepting the inherent strangeness of the languages it has spoken for the last century and a half.”

On Wendy Eisenberg, the artist creates their own paradigm with a tight-knit circle of longtime friends and collaborators  - including bassist Trevor Dunn, drummer Ryan Sawyer, and co-producer Mari Rubio (more eaze), who handled pedal steel, synth, and string arrangements—recording often at Eisenberg’s home and bringing a gorgeous ensemble texture to each note. “I was finally around people who accepted me,” Eisenberg says. “Many of the songs on this record were written in that new feeling. I wanted it to be incredibly comforting as it describes some massive changes in self-under- standing and self-regard. It’s about relief.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Eisenberg's music has the timeless quality of being incredibly complex both from an instrumental and compositional quality, BUT ending up sounding incredibly simple. Wonderfully melodic and showing stunning development and scope, but without ever sounding too intimidating to the casual listener.

TRACK LISTING

1. Take A Number
2. Meaning Business
3. Old Myth Dying
4. Another Lifetime Floats Away
5. It’s Her
6. Vanity Paradox
7. Curious Bird
8. The Ultraworld
9. Will You Dare
10. The Walls

We like to believe our lives can be shaped into stories—clean arcs, legible meaning—but life refuses the outline. Instead, it moves bluntly and without apology, indifferent to our sense of order. El Ten Eleven’s 'Nowhere Faster', the duo’s 16th release, was forged within that unease. Across eight tracks, it considers not just nothingness but velocity—the strange urgency that propels us forward even when the destination remains unclear. The 33-minute album slows just long enough to pose the harder questions: what are we running from, and what do we think we can outrun?

'Nowhere Faster' emerged from Kristian Dunn and Tim Fogarty’s longest break from touring and recording in their 23 years together, though “break” is something of a misnomer. Dunn’s famously restless creative pace never slowed. Instead, he began writing for not one but two drummers, handing Fogarty one of the most demanding challenges of his career. The record also marks a first for the band, weaving real strings and piano throughout, deepening the palette of what is already one of their most layered works.

'Nowhere Faster' is not a retreat into nostalgia. El Ten Eleven remains invested in risk and reinvention. The record continues to center Fogarty’s propulsive drumming and Dunn’s bass-driven experimentation: the first four tracks (side A) feature electric bass, while the latter half (side B) shifts to acoustic bass processed through pedals, subtly altering the album’s emotional weight.

Ultimately, 'Nowhere Faster' is an album about reckoning—about time, endurance, and the uncertainty of how long a band, or a life, can last. We are all fumbling toward finitude. The question is not whether we’ll arrive, but what we want to hear on the way there. What will we dance to as the ground begins to shift beneath us? If nothing else, it may sound something like 'Nowhere Faster'.

TRACK LISTING

1. Uncanny Valley Girl
2. Björk’s Alarm Clock
3. Awhile Ago, Alone
4. Last Night In The Kitchen
5. Nowhere Faster
6. You Against You
7. Formerly Fresh
8. So It Goes

A decade ago, Kishi Bashi found himself creatively and emotionally depleted after years of touring behind his acclaimed albums '151a' and 'Lighght'. The orchestral exuberance that once defined his sound had begun to fade, leading him to question his artistic purpose. Out of that exhaustion came 'Sonderlust' (2016), a deeply personal reinvention marked by vulnerability, analog warmth, and spiritual honesty. Stepping away from ornate violin loops, Ishibashi embraced vintage synths and stripped-down textures, creating a record that shimmered with soulful, human energy. Songs like 'Say Yeah', 'Honeybody', and 'Ode to My Next Life' captured both the ache and joy of self-discovery, grounding his lush imagination in lived experience.

Now, with its 10th anniversary reissue, 'Sonderlust' stands as a pivotal work—where Kishi Bashi’s dazzling playfulness gave way to introspection and connection. The new edition features refreshed artwork by original cover artist Ssin Kim, symbolizing growth and renewed perspective. “When you’re younger, the world can feel overwhelming,” Ishibashi reflects. “As you age, you start to see your place in it.” What began as an album of heartbreak has become a timeless meditation on empathy, creativity, and the enduring beauty of being human.

TRACK LISTING

1. M'Lover
2. Hey Big Star
3. Say Yeah
4. Can't Let Go, Juno
5. Ode To My Next Life
6. Who'd You Kill
7. Statues In A Gallery
8. Why Don't You Answer Me
9. Flame On Flame (a Slow Dirge)
10. Honeybody
11. Comin' To You
12. Harpsi Chords
13. M'Lover (Demo-arigato Version)
14. Hey Big Star (Demo-arigato Version)
15. Say Yeah (Demo-arigato Version)
16. Can't Let Go, Juno (Demo-arigato Version)
17. Ode To My Next Life (Demo-arigato Version)
18. Who'd You Kill (Demo-arigato Version)
19. Statues In A Gallery (Demo-arigato Version)
20. Why Don't You Answer Me (Demo-arigato Version)
21. Flame On Flame (a Slow Dirge) (Demo-arigato Version)
22. Honeybody (Demo-arigato Version)

Now the solo project of Jasamine White-Gluz, it’s their first new material for five years and also their debut for Sonic Cathedral. 'Bugland' finds Jasamine Gluz-White teaming up with producer Fire-Toolz (aka Angel Marcloid) to create the aural equivalent of a late-’80s i-D magazine front and back cover, with a non-problematic National Geographic hiding within. It was, at least in part, inspired by White-Gluz’s move to a more rustic area of Quebec, something which also explains the gap between albums.“The wait wasn't intentional,” she explains, “but I think rural living made me tune out the noise of the music biz and focus more inwards, writing and taking my damn time.” The hook-up with Fire-Toolz was inspired. The renowned future fusionist adds not only magical co-production, but other sonic additions /dances /noises /mysticism. “The collaboration really felt limitless,” she enthuses. “I could easily relate to it because Jasamine and I liked a lot of the same music, and I was able to be creative in ways that were freeing as if I was making my own album.” Both spent days driving on empty rural highways listening to the mixes, and it reflects in the final product. With an open ear, many “influence eggs” can be detected by the listener. ‘Garbage Dream House’ is Zooropian without any of U2’s ego baggage. Epic closing track ‘Jelly Meadow Bright’ even manages to meld the out of control saxophone from The Stooges’ Fun House with the chill buoyancy of a high-end spa. Touching on respected, familiar genres and sounds while attempting to advance one’s own isn’t easy but Bugland manages to. What genre is it anyway? Is it even shoegaze when it could live happily on a shelf next to Boards of Canada and Autechre? The right answer is ‘yes’. What a lovely shelf it would be as well. 'Bugland' is a testament to White-Gluz’s evolution and her ability to channel a wide variety of tastes into something cohesive that can descend into fine-tuned chaos, then out of that chaos with ease. 

TRACK LISTING

1.Garbage Dream House
2. Bugland
3. Bits
4. Save The Lobsters
5. My Crud Princess
6. Bather In The Bloodcells
7. I Hate That I Forget What You Look Like
8. Jelly Meadow Bright 

In the ’90s, Jad Fair had five favorite bands and songwriters: Daniel Johnston, The Pastels, Sonic Youth, Teenage Fanclub, and Yo La Tengo. It’s a good list, sure, but what’s most remarkable about it is that, in the course of a dozen years or so, Fair made music with all of them in one form or another.

Jad Fair has been prolific for half a century now, long before the Internet could create a simultaneous and seemingly eternal archive of everything someone with his predilections made. He’s been involved in several hundred titles, at least, many of them out-of-print on tiny labels that do not exist anymore. In fact, one of those collaborations that Fair made in the ’90s—'Strange But True', with Yo La Tengo—has been hard to find, despite its stateside release on October 20th 1998, by Matador Records.

For the first time, the album is being reissued on vinyl by Joyful Noise and Bar/None.

By the time Fair played a party with Yo La Tengo in the mid-’90s, they were all friends, fans, and collaborators, having worked on or released records together. When Fair suggested they all head into the studio, the trio bit. The result, 'Strange But True', is as wonderful, varied, and wild as some enormous lawn of native grasses. This collaborative album showcases the artists’ uncanny range, bringing us back to a time when indie rock was still free to be as weird and unruly as its makers wanted it to be.

TRACK LISTING

1. Helpful Monkey Wallpapers Entire Home
2. Texas Man Abducted By Aliens For Outer Space Joy Ride
3. National Sports Association Hires Retired English Professor To Name New Wrestling Holds
4. Dedicated Thespian Has Teeth Pulled To Play Newborn Baby In High School Play
5. Three-Year-Old Genius Graduates High School At Top Of Her Class
6. Embarrassed Teen Accidentally Uses Valuable Rare Postage Stamp
7. Principal Punishes Students With Bad Impressions And Tired Jokes
8. Retired Grocer Constructs Tiny Mount Rushmore Entirely Of Cheese
9. X-Ray Reveals Doctor Left Wristwatch Inside Patient
10. Clumsy Grandmother Serves Delicious Dessert By Mistake #2
11. Retired Woman Starts New Career In Monkey Fashions
12. Circus Strongman Runs For PTA President
13. High School Shop Class Constructs Bicycle Built For 26
14. Clumsy Grandmother Serves Delicious Dessert By Mistake #1
15. Ohio Town Saved From Killer Bees By Hungry Vampire Bats
16. Nevada Man Invents Piano With 21 Extra Keys
17. Clever Chemist Makes Chewing Gum From Soap
18. Minnesota Man Claims Monkey Bowled Perfect Game
19. Ingenious Scientist Invents Car Of The Future
20. Car Gears Stick In Reverse, Daring Driver Crosses Town Backwards
21. Shocking Fashion Statement Terrorizes Town
22. Feisty Millionaire Fills Potholes With Hundred-Dollar Bills

'Friend Opportunity' is a feat of reinvention that could only come from artists willing to rethink everything. Even though Deerhoof have been around a long time, they're still restless, still hungry for the rush of the new. Not coincidentally, and fortunately for Deerhoof, they've attracted a burgeoning following who absolutely love to be challenged - from album to album, from song to song, from moment to moment.

'Friend Opportunity' will not disappoint them. or anyone else. songs like 'The Perfect Me' have three or four sections of heart-stopping epiphanies of the sublime; 'Matchbook Seeks Maniac' pulls a 99 luftballoons breakdown move in the middle, rocks a brahms interval in the pop-narcotic chorus, and the Beach Boys and the who are all over the mix. 'Believe e.s.p.' opens with Deerhoof's take on get-down funky slinkopation but the next passage sounds like something out of palestrina, and so many of these songs are like a scenic drive that flows seamlessly from one astonishing vista to the next, from wide, shimmering deserts to foggy canyons to staggering, snow-peaked mountaintops.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Perfect Me
2. Choco Fight
3. + 81
4. Believe E.S.P.
5. The Galaxist
6. Makko Shobu
7. Matchbook Seeks Maniac
8. Cast Off Crown
9. Kidz Are So Small
10. Whither The Invisible Birds?
11. Look Away

On the cover of '8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living', the new album by Asher White, The Statue of Liberty is in pieces but not destroyed-- in progress, being built, not yet complete. Her torch is on the ground, her head somewhere out of frame. Before she was a symbol, she was metal, and living, sweating people riveted her together.

The spirit of de/construction characterizes '8 Tips...', White’s 16th LP overall and first since signing to Joyful Noise. Like White's previous albums, '8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living' darts boldly among varied musical styles. Doom metal splits open into bossa nova; psychedelic rock and power pop flip into industrial techno. Each song emerges from its composite parts in the studio: White doesn't draft or demo before recording, but builds out her pieces sculpturally, sound by sound. "It’s forever collage, forever assemblage," she says of her music. "To me, it has more to do with J Dilla, L.A. beat, and musique concrète than pop songwriting." The record's quick turns and vivid contrasts reflect White's cultural voraciousness. A writer, painter, and sculptor as well as a musician, she gathers materials constantly, always digging for new ideas in every possible form. The films of Claire Denis, the novels of Clarice Lispector, and the memoirs of Eve Babitz all funnel into White's reflection of 21st century disaster capitalism.

'8 Tips...' is also White’s first album to have been mixed outside her Providence studio; after recording it herself, she brought tracks to Seth Manchester (Lightning Bolt, Battles, The Body) who gave the album its brawny, unruly charge. "I was interested in making something that serves dually as a self-help book and a chronicle of self-destruction," says White. Overlaying autobiography onto character vignettes, '8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living' wrenches open the idea of apocalypse -- an abrupt disaster rained down on uncomplicated innocents -- and peers inside at its bursting, devastated particulars. Apocalypse is slow and uneven. Nations falter as do individual people, clinging fast to their old, dilapidated self-preservation strategies. What saved you in the past might destroy you in the future. Flip it around, shake yourself loose, ruin the person you've known yourself to be, and you might get the chance to become something else.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Sink Thank You
2. Beers With My Name On Them
3. Why I Bought The House
4. Travel Safe
5. Cobalt Room: Good Work / Silver Saab
6. Voice Memo
7. Like Another Planet Instrumental
8. Country Girls
9. Falls

Though Deerhoof long ago established itself as one of the greatest rock groups ever to stride the earth—and if you think that’s hyperbole, you haven’t spent enough time listening to Deerhoof—the furiously inventive quartet treats each of their new albums as an opportunity for creative rebirth. And yet somehow, they’re also profoundly reliable, a strange but true descriptor for a band so creatively restless. You never know what a new Deerhoof album might sound like, except that it will always sound like Deerhoof.

They are defined by such paradoxes, as 'Noble and Godlike in Ruin' reaffirms. Their latest album is either a portrait of a world descending into monstrous hate, dehumanization, and dollar signs, or a haunting self-portrait of band-as-monster: an intelligent, sensitive, hybrid creature, singing tirelessly of love, but increasingly alienated from that world.

The music is joyful and foreboding, cybernetic and deeply human, all at once. Strings that evoke avant-garde chamber music and classic horror-film soundtracks bounce off guitar and bass lines that chug on impervious to the creeping dread. The drums are sometimes filtered to sound almost electronic, but no computer could come up with rhythms so funky and dynamic, with each minute variation from one snare hit to the next conveying worlds of possibility. Fronting it all is Satomi Matsuzaki’s inimitable alto. A voice of solitude, whose plainspoken calm can seem strangely outside of the band’s maelstrom, even as she contributes to it with her jaggedly precise bass parts. As a first-generation immigrant to the US, she’s never tried to disguise her Japanese accent, or her deadpan, karaoke-esque delivery. On 'Noble and Godlike in Ruin', her sense of remove feels alternately like an expression of loneliness and like a cool provocation to systems of oppression and control. “Kindness is all I needed from you,” she sings on the epic album closer 'Immigrant Songs'. “But you think we’re in your house.” Not long after, the song detonates, its tightly wound art-pop giving way to several minutes of howling noise.

Though the subject matter may be bleak—how could it not be?—the songs carry an implicit note of defiant optimism in their refusal to bow to convention or received wisdom. There’s that famous Dylan Thomas line about raging against the dying of the light: 'Noble and Godlike in Ruin' feels a little like that. The world may be going down, but Deerhoof is going down swinging.

TRACK LISTING

1. Overrated Species Anyhow
2. Sparrow Sparrow
3. Kingtoe
4. Return Of The Return Of The Fire Trick Star
5. A Body Of Mirrors
6. Ha, Ha Ha Ha, Haaa
7. Disobedience
8. Who Do You Root For?
9. Under Rats (featuring Saul Williams)
10. Immigrant Songs

For just over twenty years, Bianca and Sierra Casady have transmuted the love, hardship, and ecstasy of sisterhood into some of the most daring, dangerous, and wildly original music our increasingly sanitized culture has known. CocoRosie has been a project consistently at the musical vanguard, influencing countless musicians while inspiring and creating refuge for the “criminal queers” of the world. Above all, CocoRosie has been a conduit for irrepressible artistic self realization.

'Little Death Wishes' is as open and tenderhearted as anything they’ve ever created. The songs tell a kaleidoscopic story of the generational hardship of women and the shattered realities of their lives, the precarious and precious nature of being human, of being done wrong by love, and a final wish to be unbroken. It boils everything CocoRosie down to its most brutal essence: turning pain into knowledge, sisterhood into polemic, trash into treasure, and recalcifying kitsch and cliché into fresh truths.

The duo’s 8th long player exists in its own musical lexicon. It is both primordial and tawdry, a rich bricolage of dusted-over pop culture signifiers that the sisters contort into their own sense of temporality. Contributing to the avantgarde, yet unbeholden to contemporary trends, CocoRosie collects musical detritus from other times, which they fashion into their own baroque, theatricalized creations. With the sisters’ hands deep in every layer of their music, each song on 'Little Death Wishes' feels transportative and transformative.

“CocoRosie has been the center of our lives for such a long time now,” says Bianca. In those years, the sisters have been infantilized and revered, fetishized and mirrored, misogynized and adored; at times willfully misunderstood by the press—which has failed to reduce the group into mere perverse whimsy. Despite it all, CocoRosie has continuously pursued the bravest and boldest routes, uplifting the rawest, unveiled, and most tender strands of humanity and nudging us towards the light.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Enduringly off-piste gothic indie from CocoRosie, with the duo's 8th album epitomising the sort of bombastic synthy momentum we've come to know from them but with a more thumping, dancefloor drive. As oddball as ever, but with a much more cinematic presentation than we've heard before.

TRACK LISTING

1. Wait For Me
2. Cut Stitch Scar
3. Yesterday
4. Luckless
5. Paper Boat
6. It Ain’t Easy
7. Nothing But Garbage
8. Least I Have You
9. Girl In Town(feat. Chance The Rapper)
10. No Need For Money
11. Pushing Daisies
12. Unbroken

It’s easy to forget just how deeply weird the ’90s were. On a global scale, you had the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact satellites (Sputnik’s Down!). Hundreds of millions of people were thrown to the wolves of economic chaos and misery, and the Cold War that had provided the defining framework for understanding the world over the previous half century suddenly evaporated. Hapless theorists were left to speculate about “the end of history,” even. Confusing! At the local level it was a time when one could sit down with one’s father as he watched NASCAR on TV and hear 'Natural One' by underground music friends the Folk Implosion — their song inescapably employed as bumper music before the next commercial break. Also confusing! One gets the sense it was a little confusing for The Folk Implosion’s John Davis and Lou Barlow, too. They were in the middle of recording 'Dare to Be Surprised', the follow-up to their 1994 debut album, 'Take A Look Inside', when it happened. The KIDS stuff — the handful of songs and instrumental tracks they’d contributed to the soundtrack of the now infamous Harmony Korine/Larry Clark film — had been something of a lark, but it was while recording it at Boston’s venerable Fort Apache that they met Wally Gagel. A happy accident: Gagel happened to be the house engineer on duty the day they showed up, but they found in him someone whose general sensibilities, and, critically, enthusiasm for new wave, matched their own.

The results marked a shift from earlier Folk Implosion efforts. The partnership between Lou Barlow, already an indie-rock veteran with two of the era’s most influential bands in Dinosaur Jr. and Sebadoh amongst his credits, and John Davis, the erstwhile librarian whose skeletal solo work paired elliptical guitar figures with lyrics that evoked the language poets, seemed at first like an opportunity to get silly with it in ways that wouldn’t have sat quite right with their other projects. What came out of Fort Apache was different: mannered, moody, dubby even (they sampled Erik Satie, for crying out loud!). Lacking the budget to go back to the proper studio that the KIDS gig had afforded them, the Folk Implosion settled instead on Gagel’s small recording space in Boston’s South End. There were rules, rules born from frank conversations. No chords. No strumming. No indie rock! They whiled away afternoons in the park writing lyrics, trading lines. And over a year of episodic sessions, a weekend here, a few days there, an album came together. When 'Natural One' blew up it could’ve changed the calculus — the opportunity was there to scrap what they’d been working on and start over with major-label money — but they elected instead to stay the course, confident in the process.

It seems a bit of a shame from this remove that 'Dare to Be Surprised' was destined to live in the shadow of the KIDS soundtrack’s success, but the ’90s were a weird time, and it was sometimes hard to recognize things for what they were. What this was, it’s clear now, is the sound of a band truly finding its feet, and forging something genuinely new in the process.

TRACK LISTING

1. Pole Position
2. Wide Web
3. Insinuation
4. Barricade
5. That's The Trick
6. Checking In
7. Cold Night
8. Park Dub
9. Burning Paper
10. (Blank Paper)
11. Ball & Chain
12. Fall Into November
13. Dare To Be Surprised
14. River Devotion

RIYL: the Melvins, Ty Segall, Pile, Tom Waits, Pinback, Redd Kross, Soundgarden, Trevor Dunn, Butthole Surfers, Nirvana, Mudhoney, Minutemen, The Jesus Lizard, Wipers, Hüsker Dü, Flipper, Meat Puppets.

As he began plotting his new solo album, Dale Crover world-renowned drummer for the Melvins, Nirvana and Redd Kross, and singer-guitarist for Altamont realized that, unlike with his prior two full-lengths, he was starting from scratch. “I didn’t have any songs,” he says, “so I just went on this writing spree.”

The result is Glossolalia, Crover’s third LP under his own name and arguably his most focused statement yet as a solo artist: 11 catchy yet eccentric tracks that move from Nuggets-y garage rock to crafty proto-metal riffage and gorgeously hazy psych-pop, touching on everything from a bad teenage trip to the charms of the late, great Jane Birkin, and featuring input by illustrious guests including Ty Segall, Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil and none other than Tom Waits. What stands out across the record is the sturdiness of Crover’s vision. He’s modest about his ambitions “It’s just kind of like extra credit,” he says, about having a solo outlet apart from his main band but as this record shows, his overall aesthetic hits just as hard as his legendary drum thunder.

TRACK LISTING

1. Glossolalia
2. Doug Yuletide
3. I Quit
4. Blow'd Up
5. Rings
6. Jane
7. I Waited Forever
8. Don't Worry About It
9. Spoiled Daisies
10. Kitten Knife
11. Punchy

On their seventh long player The Breaks – their second for Joyful Noise Recordings – SUUNS are lost in limbo. For some artists, being caught in flux may result in songs that are either naive, out of touch or both, simply as a consequence of being cut off from human civilization. But for SUUNS, a band who have grown more than comfortable in the oblique and the intermediate, it actually had the opposite effect. The Breaks marks the Montreal experimental rock outfit’s most emotionally resonant and tonally rich collection of music to date.

The trio of Ben Shemie, Joseph Yarmush and Liam O’ Neill leans more zealously than ever into their pop instincts. Yet remarkably enough, with that same dauntless abandon, SUUNS have mined a more extreme sonic palette this time around, one that stretches far beyond their core fundamentals as a band. The Breaks finds Shemie, O’Neill and Yarmush gleefully experimenting with loops, synths, samples and MIDI-instruments like a post-millennial Tangerine Dream messing with downtempo triphop beats. O’ Neill took point in the producer’s chair for The Breaks, arranging, structuring and editing many of Shemie and Yarmush’s ideas from sporadic rehearsal sessions into Pro Tools, reimagining the songs over and over during a two-year time frame.

Forged between countless plane rides, road trips, van tours and text threads, The Breaks became a product of endurance and a lot of trial-and-error. It’s a record forged in tight fissions of freedom, where spells of whispered intimacy – like on the stunning ballad “Doreen” – are allowed to branch out into the vast glacial dreamscapes of the album’s majestic title track. It captures SUUNS at their most panoramic, curious and exuberant: a constant relay of being adrift and enlightened anew, geared up to eleven. And guess what: the wheels keep on spinning.

TRACK LISTING

Vanishing Point
Fish On A String
Rage
Road Signs And Meanings
Overture
Wave
Doreen
The Breaks

The latest full-length from Kishi Bashi, 'Kantos' is a work of exquisite duality: a party album about the possible end of humanity as we know it, at turns deeply unsettling and sublimely joyful. In a sonic departure from the symphonic folk of his critically lauded 2019 LP 'Omoiyari' a career-defining body of work born from his intensive meditation on the mass incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II the Seattle-born singer/songwriter/producer’s fifth studio album encompasses everything from Brazilian jazz and ’70s funk to orchestral rock and city pop (a Japanese genre that peaked in the mid-’80s). Informed by an equally kaleidoscopic mix of inspirations the cult-classic sci-fi novel series Hyperion Cantos, the writings of 18th century enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, a revelatory trip to ancient ruins on the island of Crete Kantos ultimately serves as an unbridled exaltation of the human spirit and all its wild complexities.

During the earliest stages of creating songs for the album, Ishibashi’s main intent was to return to his highly eclectic musical roots, in part by tapping into his jazz background and by delving into the dance-rock-leaning sensibilities he previously embraced as co-founder of Brooklyn-bred indie band Jupiter One. But not too long into the songwriting process, he stumbled upon an AI-equipped website capable of composing catchy song hooks based on a Prompt a turn of events that quickly catalyzed the existential inquiry at the heart of 'Kantos'.

Although his ruminations on AI, transhumanism, and humanity’s troubled fate indelibly guided the making of Kantos, Ishibashi nonetheless views the album as “less of a warning about this kind of hubris but more a celebration of the very characteristics that make us human: desire, passion, empathy, and love.” “If there’s anything I want people to come away with when they hear this record, it’s a feeling of excitement about the possibilities of human-created art,” he says. “Even as we’re learning more about all the amazing things AI can do, I think humans will always be one step ahead in terms of our creativity and innovation. There’s still no limit to what we have to offer.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Violin Akai
2. Chiba Funk
3. Late Night Comic
4. Colorful State
5. Escape From Knossos
6. Icarus IV
7. Hollywood Intermission
8. Lilliputian Chop
9. Analógico Brasil
10. Make Believe
11. Call It Off
12. Tokyo Love Story (Love Story Wa Totsuzen Ni)

A song is a song until it isn’t, until it’s pushed to its limits and beyond to become harder, faster and more dissonant. The music on Oneida’s 17th full-length album, Expensive Air, all started as tightly structured, melodic rock songs very much in line with the non-stop bangers of Success from 2022 but along the way, they changed.

Bobby Matador sketched the structures of these songs from his home base in Boston, then sent the demos to Oneida’s New York contingent: Kid Millions, Hanoi Jane, Shahin Motia and Barry London. “We were working out the songs in New York without Bobby. We would start out riding the riffs, and then Shahin and Jane would add wild, out-of-tune licks,” said Kid Millions. “It seemed so perfect.”

Oneida has long straddled gray-area boundaries between the NYC punk/psych/rock world and the art / experimental world, playing at gritty rock clubs and elevated cultural institutions. Oneida’s previous album, Success, came after a four-year hiatus, unleashing the band’s pent up creative energy in a set of catchy, accessible, nearly poppy songs. Song structure remained important in the run up towards Expensive Air, but so was the instinctual, improvisatory interplay that has always been a part of Oneida’s process. The band had been playing live together for two years, sharpening its attack and pushing its songs to go harder, faster and wilder.

The new album expands on what Oneida achieved with Success, but also pushes past it, laying down irresistible song structures then blowing them to psychedelic bits. “I found myself thinking about this record as a darker, looser, louder, counterpart to Success,” he explains. “Both records charge forward from the jump and mix the elliptical with the blunt, and longing with self-mockery. But Success is like laughing in a car gunning carelessly through an ice storm, and Expensive Air is how you laugh at yourself as the car spins into the ditch, or a tree. Same trip, but a little closer to the bone.”

RIYL: The Fall, Dead Kennedys, Dinosaur Jr., The Damned, The Cure, Wire, Peaking Lights, The Clean, ZZ Top, Gene Clark, The Ramones, Sun Ra, Martin Rev, Allen Ravenstine, Horse Lords, Liars, CAN, NEU!, Pram, Minami Deutsch, ESG, Acid Mothers Temple, Erase Errata. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Oneida (especially here) encapsulate the live aesthetic on the recorded medium. There's a clear energy and an excitement that comes through the speakers when you play them loud, and it places you right at the front of one of their gigs. Bracing, punky blasts and excitable bursts of atonal guitar screech abound, you can't help but nod along to all of it.

TRACK LISTING

1 Reason To Hide
2 Spill
3 La Plage
4 Stranger
5 Here It Comes
6 Expensive Air
7 Salt
8 Gunboats

“How the fuck are we going to turn this into a song?” That’s the question Lou Barlow and John Davis have asked themselves since co-founding The Folk Implosion in the early 1990s. Beginning with improvised jams featuring Barlow on bass and Davis on drums, the duo develop their beat-driven pop collages from the ground up. It’s the process they used on their debut cassette, Walk Through This World with the Folk Implosion, and one they’ve returned to 30 years later on their spellbinding, self-referencing reunion, Walk Thru Me.

Separated from their homes in Massachusetts and North Carolina, Barlow and Davis collaborated remotely, flashing back to their early friendship as penpals. A sweaty bass and drums session went down in Barlow’s attic, before they booked studio time with producer Scott Salter (St. Vincent, Spoon, The Mountain Goats).

Contrasts and comparisons are the keys to unlocking Walk Thru Me, and the Folk Implosion as a whole. Beyond the audible differences between Barlow’s soft voice and Davis’s urgent, reedy proclamations,

their approaches to songwriting are strikingly distinct. While Barlow approached his lyrics from a protective paternal perspective (“My Little Lamb”), Davis paid tribute to his late father, shining a light on their complicated relationship (“The Day You Died”). Finally, Davis’s Persian music studies in weekly Zoom lessons inspired him to integrate traditional Middle Eastern instruments such as the setar, oud, saz, and tombak.

“Because we’re so separate, part of this album is me desperately trying to telepathically communicate to John and Scott, who are 700 miles away from me,” Barlow concludes. “A big part of what I consider to be the Folk Implosion is taking disparate things and turning them into pop.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Crepuscular
2. The Day You Died
3. Walk Thru Me
4. My Little Lamb
5. Bobblehead Doll
6. The Fable And The Fact
7. Right Hand Over The Heart
8. Water Torture
9. O.K. To Disconnect
10. Moonlit Kind

Finom's (aka Ohmme) third LP. Not God produced by Jeff Tweedy. Recommended If You Like: The Beths, Soccer Mommy, Palehound, New Pornographers, Melkbelly, Lala Lala, NNAMDÏ, The Breeders, Jeff Tweedy/Wilco, The Roches. Not God is the new album from Chicago’s beloved two-headed monster, Finom (fka Ohmme). You can ask them to go into more detail about the boring reasons why they changed their name, but for now, the answer is going to be polite refusal. No. Co-fronted by Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart, Finom’s influences run vast and varied, and they put a premium on change. Produced by Jeff Tweedy in the Wilco Loft, Not God is a marvel of growth, a progression from the roots of this collaborative band whose history can be traced back to its improvised conception. This is owed in no small part to their hometown of Chicago, the life raft to so many persisters in musical adventurosity. That energy combined with Finom's dramatic vocal and musical gifts puts them in the peripheries of the legacies cemented by The Roches, Roxy Music, the B52s, Kate Bush, Cate Le Bon, and Wilco. Cunningham and Stewart are brilliant harmonizers, but harmony doesn't equate to a utopia. In Finom's maws harmony can also be a fight, holding the line until the volcano erupts. This realistic depiction of a creative relationship jolts throughout the songs of Not God, and brings the whole damn thing to life. Finom are more than one person with more than one dream. But still, they grow together, harnessed by their shared love of pop songwriting, control, chaos, and being generally freaky-deaky. Freaky in that way that is only really fun when you're doing it with a friend. As the globe spins and advancements advance, it can feel essential to return to relationships that make us feel whole, that generate energy of strength and relief. Which puts double the weight on the reality that Sima and Macie continue to pledge allegiance to each other, at the base of the volcano, in the front seat of the car as it pulls off the highway. 

TRACK LISTING

Haircut
Dirt
Naked
Hungry
Not God
A Petunia
Cyclops
Cardinal
As You Are

OOIOO, Blonde Redhead, Guerilla Toss, Rolling Stones, Liars, Marnie Stern, Yoko Ono, Battles. Clear Sun Vinyl. Reissue of Deerhoof’s 2002 album Reveille. First Deerhoof album with guitarist John Dieterich. 

Deerhoof debuts their new guitarist John Dieterich and achieves widespread critical acclaim for the first time. 2002’s Reveille is a defiant expression of artistic rebirth, spilling over with madcap exuberance, apocalyptic imagery, newfound technical confidence belying their no-budget DIY recording methods, and jarring stylistic about-faces in which no two songs sound alike. The contrast of Satomi’s ever-catchy, ever-charming melodiousness with John and Greg’s noisy, cinematic bombast still has the power to thrill and tickle and upset, more than 20 years after its initial release. Includes reimagined cover art with the faint morning glow the band had always envisioned, pressed on clear sun-colored vinyl. Complete lyrics included for the first time, written by Satomi on the center labels. 

TRACK LISTING

1 Sound The Alarm
2 This Magnificent Bird Will Rise
3 The Eyebright Bugler
4 Punch Buggy Valves
5 No One Fed Me So I Stayed
6 Frenzied Handsome, Hello!
7 Days & Nights In The Forest
8 Top Tim Rubies
9 Hark The Umpire
10 Our Angel's Ululu
11 The Last Trumpeter Swan
12 Tuning A Stray
13 Holy Night Fever
14 All Rise
15 Cooper
16 Hallelujah Chorus

Daniel Johnston’s ‘Alive in New York City’: A full performance captured before a live audience in New York City, the city of Daniel Johnston’s dreams. Daniel is at the height of his performing powers, with his solo voice in full poignant bloom. A real time-capsule, each song is a gem rendered in full color by an artist dedicated to his craft. This LP captures him at an unusually happy point in his life, sharing the deepest parts of himself with his audience. We are given a rare glimpse into Daniel’s heart, where the physical rendering he gives over to his lyrics transcends the music and works as a beacon into the tender mind of a genius - grappling with how to love himself and find his place in the world. This 2000 concert recorded and live-mixed by Kramer in NYC happened on a very special night and Shimmy-Disc is proud to present it to the world, along with 18 minutes of bonus material comprised of some of the rarest audio treasures from the Daniel Johnston Archives - a series of “Telephone Demos” created by Daniel specifically for sending to friends over his phone. These little teleplays from Daniel’s pre-”1990” days have never been heard before, so his fans will go wild with joy over this newly discovered and precious cargo from the mind of this one-of-a-kind and irreplaceable Artist.

TRACK LISTING

Frito Lay (Sweetheart)
Frustrated Artist
The Spook
Love Will See You Through
Silly Love
Live And Let Die
You’ve Got To Hide Your Love
Casper The Friendly Ghost
Memory Of Love
Bloody Rainbow
Super Love
Kool-Aid
Folly
Interview (Excerpt)

RIYL: Ra Ra Riot, Thao, Regina Spektor, Andrew Bird, Typhoon.

"Omoiyari" means to have empathy and consideration for others, and act on it. This fall, the American indie-folk multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Kishi Bashi is set to release the companion album to his forthcoming documentary song film, titled Music from the Song Film: Omoiyari. Consisting of two LPs "The Songs" and "The Score" the release showcases what is essentially the soundtrack to Omoiyari, the feature-length motion picture co-directed by Kishi Bashi, aka Kaoru Ishibashi or "K," which is being released via MTV Documentary Films in November.

Focusing on K's own six-year journey of discovery surrounding his research of the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the film is part social justice documentary and part song-film experiment. The album includes K's live improvisations, which are featured in the documentary, many recorded on the sites where the concentration camps stood. Written during and about the artist's transformational dive into his personal identity and serving as a broad survey of the Japanese American experience as well as the incarceration Music from the Song Film: Omoiyari serves as an evocative musical accompaniment to the lessons of empathy and compassion portrayed in the film and highlights the process and power of one of modern indie's most talented musicians. 

TRACK LISTING

Intro At The Piano
Red, White, And Blue
Improvisation At Heart Mountain
Summer Of ‘42 (orchestral Edition)
Improvisation In The Root Cellar
ļ

Peter Hook & The Light celebrate the work of Joy Division live at Manchester Apollo in an amazing set lasting over 2 and a half hours.

TRACK LISTING

Vinyl Tracklisting
Disc 1
Side 1
1. Dead Souls
2. Disorder
3. Day Of The Lords
4. Candidate
5. Insight
Side 2
1. New Dawn Fades
2. She's Lost Control
3. Shadowplay
4. Wilderness
Disc 2
Side 1
1. Interzone
2. I Remember Nothing
3. Atrocity Exhibition
4. Isolation
Side 2
1. Passover
2. Colony
3. A Means To An End
4. Heart & Soul
Disc 3
Side 1
1. Twenty Four Hours
2. The Eternal
3. Decades
Side 2
1. Atmosphere
2. Ceremony
3. Transmission
4. Love Will Tear Us Apart
Disc 4
Side 1
1. Elegia (CD)
2. Cries & Whispers (CD)
3. Regret (CD)
4. What Do You Want From Me? (CD)
5. Vanishing Point (CD)
6. True Faith (CD)
7. The Perfect Kiss (CD)

CD Tracklisting
Disc 1
1. Elegia
2. Cries & Whispers
3. Regret
4. What Do You Want From Me?
5. Vanishing Point
6. True Faith
7. The Perfect Kiss
Disc 2
1. Dead Souls
2. Disorder
3. Day Of The Lords
4. Candidate
5. Insight
6. New Dawn Fades
7. She's Lost Control
8. Shadowplay
9. Wilderness
10. Interzone
11. I Remember Nothing
Disc 3
1. Atrocity Exhibition
2. Isolation
3. Passover
4. Colony
5. A Means To An End
6. Heart & Soul
7. Twenty Four Hours
8. The Eternal
9. Decades
10. Atmosphere
11. Ceremony
12. Transmission
13. Love Will Tear Us Apart

RIYL: Sebadoh, Lou Barlow, Beat Happening, Silver Jews, Daniel Johnston, Guided By Voices, 13th Floor Elevators. The Folk Implosion"s fan favorite 1994 album back in print on LP for the first time in years.

They say there's always something special about the first time and this record is that first time for the Folk Implosion. The band left the acoustic guitars and fragmentary sketch modus operandi of their earlier cassette behind to focus on an eccentric version of home studio craft, held together by a few cheap microphones (including a Radio Shack PZM) and a Tascam cassette 4-track recorder sequestered under the eaves of a 3rd floor, Cambridge Massachusetts double-decker house apartment.

Wood floors and Christmas lights were as much a part of the vibe as an Ampeg VT 40 guitar amp and a small chord organ. The duo would wait until the downstairs neighbor went to work in the morning and then would play until the tunes snapped like a high-pitched snare drum. The setup would close down just before the neighbor came home from work, keeping the peace long enough to see the project through to completion.

Once tracked, the band snuck into Fort Apache studios with Tim O'Heir (producer of Sebadoh's 'Bakesale' LP) early one morning, freeloading off the Sebadoh sessions that were set to get going that afternoon. Tim mixed the songs through a very hi-fi Neve board in a matter of hours with the Tascam sitting right on the giant board like a tugboat keeping time with an oil tanker. The duo hoped that the spirits of ancestors like The Troggs, Devo, Al Green, and The Bee Gees would be pleased with the scent of tribute that arose from the ashes of the pyre. Today, they are pleased to see the Slaps and the Sputniks on view again nearly 30 years later.

TRACK LISTING

1. Blossom
2. Sputnik's Down
3. Slap Me
4. Chicken Squawk
5. Spiderweb-Butterfly
6. Had To Find Out
7. Better Than Allrite
8. Why Do They Hide
9. Winter's Day
10. Boyfriend, Girlfriend
11. Shake A Little Heaven
12. Waltzin' With Your Ego
13. Take A Look Inside 14. Start Again

Joy’All, the fifth solo album from Jenny Lewis and follow up to 2019’s critically acclaimed On The Line (Warner Records) finds the singer-songwriter embarking on a new era in a new town—and on a new label, as she joins the iconic roster of Blue Note/Capitol Records.

“I started writing some of these songs on the road, pre-pandemic... and then put them aside as the world shut down, and then from my home in Nashville in early 2021, I joined a week-long virtual songwriting workshop with a handful of amazing artists, hosted by Beck. The challenge was to write one song every day for seven days, with guidelines from Beck. The guidelines would be prompts like ‘write a song with 1-4-5 chord progression,’ ‘write a song with only cliches,’ or ‘write in free form style.’ The first song I submitted to the group was ‘Puppy and a Truck.’” As the days progressed, the assignments kept coming in and Jenny ended up writing a good portion of Joy’All.

While Joy’All pulls from a bounty of sonic inspiration–from soul to 90’s R&B, as well as country and classic singer-songwriter records the album’s rich and intimate, live sound is the hallmark of eight-time Grammy winning producer Dave Cobb (John Prine, Brandi Carlile, Chris Stapleton, Jason Isbell), whom Jenny met by chance while visiting Lucius at the Historic RCA Studio A in Nashville. A natural kinship developed between the two, and with her arsenal of songs that she had demoed on her iPhone ready to roll, Jenny texted Dave and asked him to produce her new album.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Swooning country guitars, rolling basslines and Lewis' unmistakeable vocals are ever present on her latest LP, Joy'All'. The real lift here comes from the bright joy of proceedings, dealing with some sadness but with a levity and wit that's refreshing, providing a buffer to Lewis' famously deep vocal musings.

Did you know that miracles happen every day? We don’t always see it that way. We look at the state of the world and think, “It’ll be a miracle if we make it out alive.” But miracles are what humans do. We’re Earth’s most inventive and unpredictable species, when we’re allowed to be. Also the most destructive. Miracle-Level is Deerhoof’s mystical manifesto on creativity and trust. It celebrates the infinite small wonders of existence that spontaneously present themselves, when not obstructed by our death-driven masters. Musically, Miracle-Level is vulnerable, brave, and brimming with spicy surprises. Deerhoof’s 19th album is also their their first to be recorded and mixed in a recording studio. Production was entrusted to Mike Bridavsky, at No Fun Club in Winnipeg, Manitoba. This is also their first album written entirely in Satomi’s native language. Deerhoof once again speak in a secret code that only their fans understand, in which hooks abound, and genre is nonexistent.

TRACK LISTING

1. Sit Down, Let Me Tell You A Story.
2. My Lovely Cat!
3. The Poignant Melody
4. Everybody, Marvel
5. Jet-Black Double-Shield
6. Miracle-Level
7. And The Moon Laughs
8. The Little Maker
9. Phase-Out All Remaining
10. Non-Miracles By 2028
11. Momentary Art Of Soul!
12. Wedding, March, Flower

Recommended If You Like: Godspeed.. , Explosions in the Sky, Sigur Rós, This Will Destroy You, Do Make Say Think, Mogwai, Lymbyc System, Tycho, Ratatat, Positive/uplifting instrumental loopage ‘n riffage.

Valley of Fire is El Ten Eleven's most thematically committed record, merging personal anecdotes with the larger ecosystem of the sound. While the album was inspired by organic beauty, its seven songs are still rife with El Ten Eleven's trademark technical flair. This is their 13th record, and it's clear El Ten Eleven have evolved with a cadence similar to the changes time has made to The Valley of Fire itself. The trials of age and experience have ushered in something altogether new. “El Ten Eleven is proof that live looping and programming can rock; and that instrumental tracks can captivate and hold a room’s attention as well as any vocal-led group.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It's always a pleasure to hear an El Ten Eleven LP, I've been a big fan since the starting notes of 'My Only Swerving' from their 2004 debut and 'Valley Of Fire' is probably the closest in post-rock grandeur and melodic beauty to the early days of ETE. Stunner.

TRACK LISTING

1. New Year’s Day
2. Not Even Almost
3. Volsens
4. Two Views Of A Secret
5. White Domes
6. Days Of Our Lives
7. Valley Of Fire

Enter the wonderful world of the amazing TROPICAL FUCK STORM!

Submersive Behaviour is our favorite Australian art-punk combo’s take on the tried and true “covers record” concept. Over the course of 36 minutes, TFS puts their deranged spin on classics by Jimi Hendrix, Middle Aged in the Middle East in the Middle Ages, Men Men Menstration, Compliments to the Chef, and The Stooges.

Guest starring their old kangaroo mates and collaborators Dan Kelly, the Bard of Beenleigh and Aaron Cupples, the Earl of East Gippsland on octopus like strings-man-ship, falsetto and apocalyptic vibes.

Cover art by acclaimed illustrator Plastic Crimewave.

Follow up to 2022’s Satanic Slumber Party collaboration with King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.

TRACK LISTING

1. 1983 (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)
2. Moonburn
3. The Golden Ratio
4. Aspirin (Slight Return)
5. Ann

Feast or famine, Springtime will continue to sow their garden of auditory delights. Despite the global unrest and strict lockdowns that have come to define the past three years, Gareth Liddiard (Tropical Fuck Storm, The Drones), Jim White (Dirty Three, Xylouris White), and Chris Abrahams (The Necks) have continually convened to weave narratives of death, destruction, desire, and devotion. Pulling the threads cast by their eponymous debut, Night Raver offers three character studies rife with the trio's trademark urgency and poetics. To belatedly commemorate the creation of this tour de force trio, Springtime will be embarking on an Australian tour in the coming months. This is a three track EP but album length with over 40 mins of music.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Names Of The Plague
2. Penumbra
3. The Radicalisation Of D

A cinematic ocean of sound. Eerie Wanda's Marina Tadic draws you into her inner worlds on these 11 new songs produced by Kramer (Galaxie 500, Unrest, Ween, Daniel Johnston.) On Internal Radio, the new album by Eerie Wanda, visual artist and musician Marina Tadic welcomes you to her inner world. Guided by intuition, Tadic's songs use haunting, ethereal space, growing whole universes from the seeds of ideas. Internal Radio documents Tadic becoming the artist she wants to be, working through some things, and even exorcizing a few demons.

The result is the most realized Eerie Wanda album yet, building on the project's guitar pop past for a more experimental, other worldly, serious grown-up affair that ventures into sensitive, motional territory.

"Pet Town is delightfully airy; a set of songs that have drifted in on a breeze from some strange and foreign landscape you won't find on any map.” Gold Flake Paint.

“Tadic’s melody here is part of that Brian Wilson lineage … she sets those notes adrift with a casually graceful minimalism… It evokes a pleasant stroll through a city at the moment when night begins to fall on a daydream.” Stereogum.

TRACK LISTING

1. Sail To The Silver Sun
2. NOWx1000
3. Long Time
4. On Heaven
5. Confess
6. Nightwalk
7. Someone's In My House
8. Sister Take My Hand
9. Birds Aren't Real
10. Puzzled
11. Bon Voyage

Tropical Fuck Storm + King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard – need we say more?

Recommended If You Like: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, The Slits, Amyl and The Sniffers, The Drones / Gareth Lidiard, black midi, Iceage, Bad Brains, The B-52s.

Satanic Slumber Party is a collaborative 12” by two of Australia’s finest - Tropical Fuck Storm and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. Pumped full of booze and adrenaline, our heroes offer up 20-minutes of sax skronks, brick-heavy distortion, and punchy riffs. It’s a packed party full of four guitars, three drummers, two synths, bass, harmonica, electronic sax and loads of singers and silliness. It’s like ‘Love Shack’ by the B52’s except more evil.

TRACK LISTING

1. Satanic Slumber Party (18:50)

Recommended If You Like: Can, Tortoise, OOIOO, Sonic Youth, Ty Segall, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Bitchin Bajas, The Cars, Liars.

Experimental psych-punk institution Onedia returns with Success, the band’s most guitar-centric, rocking album in decades. Long straddling the gray area between the NYC punk/psych/rock community and the art/experimental world, the music of Oneida is celebrated for its mix of abstract, atmo[1]spheric sounds and pulsing, hammering anthems. Success finds the band getting to the core of what makes minimal rock music

so good - songs pared back to beat and melody with a limited number of guitar chords. If a song or two gets ripped in half later by a corrosive guitar solo, well, what did you expect? This is Oneida.



“Oneida are the rare experimentalists who can hammer away at a riff or idea incessantly and somehow make it really last.” Pitchfork

TRACK LISTING

1. Beat Me To The Punch
2. Opportunities
3. Low Tide
4. I Wanna Hold Your Electric Hand
5. Paralyzed
6. Rotten
7. Solid

Recommended If You Like: Floating Points, Stars of the Lid, SUUNS, FACS, Peaking Lights, Jerusalem In My Heart. Channeling his background in classical music, SUUNS’ Ben Shemie combines string fractals, manipulated vocals, and synth-powered chaos to bridge the universes of past, present, and future. Over the course of ten tracks, Shemie chronicles a wandering soul tangled in its own dark orbit, searching for meaning in a world of stardust and astral mirages.­ Breathing life into Shemie’s orchestral maneuvers was the Molinari String Quartet, one of Canada's most celebrated contemporary ensembles. Recording the album’s ten tracks in two single-takes, the urgency and dynamism of these compositions can be heard as much felt. The listener can sense the stuttering pulse of Shemie, flanked by five amplifiers and wading in electronic bedlam, as the Molinari Quartet switchbacks measures of strings and chimes.­ Sometimes, the only way to make sense of the world is to travel to its absolute end. While Shemie’s image of a faraway universe is equal parts inspiring and chaotic, he assures the listener everything and everyone is exactly as it should be.

TRACK LISTING

1 The Departure
2 The Eye
3 The Mirror
4 The Future Indefinite
5 The Tower (Part 1)
6 The Tower (Part 2)
7 The Passage
8 The Other Being
9 The Past Continuous
10 The Return

Featuring Squirrel Flower and Liam O’Neill (SUUNS). Recommended If You Like: Mount Eerie, Low, Richard Swift, the Weather Station, Lomelda, Fleet Foxes, Squirrel Flower, L’Rain. Cedric Noel is a songwriter, bassist, collaborator and producer currently based in Montréal, Québec. The newest longplayer from Tio'tiá:ke/Montreal staple Cedric Noel lands with a stunning sense of surety and self. Hang Time stands as a high water mark for a songwriter who's spent the past decade quietly expanding the borders of his music. Longtime fans will recognize the fluid elements of the album’s open-ended rock formations: reflective strumming, soaring choruses, searing guitar lines, subtle bass grooves; all occasionally dissolving into pools of pure ambience. New listeners will find surprises throughout: threads of folk pop, ambient and sound collage fasten the foundations of this expressive whole. However, what’s most striking on Hang Time is Noel’s newfound sense of voice, both literal and metaphorical.

Written primarily in 2017-18 during an intense period of self-reflection, this collection of songs finds Noel wrestling profoundly with his sense of identity, self and place. The album’s material was captured faithfully at The Pines, a beloved downtown Montreal studio whose doors shuttered shortly after amidst the strain of the pandemic. Noel worked closely and patiently with friend and engineer Steve Newton, ensuring the songs had the time and space needed to come fully to fruition. Hang Time features subtle rhythm work from drummer Liam O’Neill (SUUNS) and guest spots from Brigitte Naggar (Common Holly) and Tim Crabtree (Paper Beat Scissors) among others. The album opens in mid-air with ‘Comuu’, a song that implores a becoming-more while hovering triumphantly.

Then follows a suite of songs (‘Headspace’, ‘Keep’, ‘Stilling’) that recall the heart-rending power of y2k-era Low, albeit with a more vigorous beat. On ‘Bass Song’, an intimate duet with musician Ella Williams (Squirrel Flower) that explores the depths of interpersonal constriction. At the crux of the album sits ‘Born’, a deceptively pleasant-sounding song that explores the confounding emotionality of adoption before fading into a distended soundfield.

Throughout the back half of the album, Noel double’s down on this commitment to his genuine, proud, Black self. The most confrontational track, ‘Allies’ finds him refraining “Are you on my side?” as a trailing guitar solo interweaves a Malcolm X soundbite, eventually engulfing the composition. Glorious lead single ‘Nighttime (Skin)’ traces the artist’s sense of ancestral dissociation through to a triumphant moment of pride in self-acceptance. Throughout Hang Time, Noel finds a way to ask hard questions (both of the listener and himself) in ways that are compassionate, open and honest. The ebb and flow of tension and tenderness that moves within these tracks helps to grow the heart and redefine what Black music can be in 2021.

TRACK LISTING

1. Comuu
2. Headspace
3. Keep
4. Stilling
5. Bass Song
6. Born
7. Dove
8. A Hold On Losing
9. Okayokay
10. Allies
11. Nighttime (Skin)
12. Hang Time
13. Cozy

RIYL: Explosions in the Sky, This Will Destroy You, Do Make Say Think, Mogwai.

Defying expectations is standard operating procedure for El Ten Eleven. Seriously, who would expect two instrumentalists to create such a large and complex sound? But thanks to inventive arrangements and a masterful use of looping, Kristian Dunn (bass/guitar) and Tim Fogarty (drums) developed a pulsating sound full of atmospheric intensity. They’ve also crafted an incredibly durable career, and the duo credit the ongoing interest in their debut album as the foundation for that success. The music of El Ten Eleven has been embraced by fans of many genres - from math rock, to jazz, to lo-fi hip-hop. The duo's sound is sharply evocative in mood and feeling, yet simultaneously abstract and meditative.

The combination of these qualities has stimulated the imagination of the group's fans, and gives space for listeners to assign their own value and meaning to the sounds. "I'm aiming for emotional impact when I come up with songs," Dunn explained. "Does it move me? Does it make me feel something? Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's technically interesting but it doesn't make me feel anything. But I don't want music that's interesting. I want music that's emotionally resonate." 

TRACK LISTING

1. New Year’s Eve
2. Meta Metta
3. The Time Knife
4. Isn’t Everything Enough?
5. Sixteen Circles
6. A Reflection Of A Reflection

Recommended If You Like: Pedro The Lion, The Sea and Cake, David Bazan, Major Murphy, Kurt Vonnegut & Guided by Voices. For ten years now, I’ve understood “Oscillate Wisely” as a play on the Smiths’ instrumental “Oscillate Wildly”--itself, of course, a pun on Morrissey’s muse, Oscar Wilde. This is not to say that anything about Mike Adams and his band reminds me of the Smiths (especially­Morrissey), as much as the idea that rock bands like Mike Adams At His Honest Weight take shape more or less as a thesaurus of past ideas--winking at them, borrowing them like a library book, checking them out from across the room, cloning them.

But the best stuff is more ineffable, far more than just cut-and-paste. There’s a weird grandeur to Adams' music, starting with that fully formed, geekily majestic 2011 debut LP Oscillate Wisely, that I don’t hear in anything else, before or since. A sense that Adams is guiding his listeners toward a cosmic joke so personal, so inscrutable, so funny (“funny”), if you give him your attention. It's in his blood, I think. He's not Oscar Wilde, but a uniquely Midwestern type of deeply sincere romantic and dyed-in-the-wool goofball cast from the mold of Hoosier icons like Letterman and Vonnegut.

He doesn’t want to believe in anything, he didn’t create this body, he­loves­a parade.­ It’s all in fun, but it gets so personal. Onstage, Adams is gregarious and playfully self-effacing, a college town denizen telescoping backwards to the brief early 90s moment when “college rock” entered the corporate suite, and performers forced to become showmen retreated to the comfort of their native tongue: irony.­And­Oscillate Wisely­has demonstrated for a decade that earnestness and sarcasm are as intricately bound in rock and roll's­lingua franca­as hang-ups and chill hangs. I’ve never heard any musician summon everything I love about being from Indiana so perfectly. And I’m­fucking­old. Eric Harvey.

TRACK LISTING

1 Bad Weather
2 Skeletons In The Cloner
3 I Don’t Want To Believe In Anything
4 I’m Not Worried
5 Sunrise
6 Don’t You Blanket When That Happens
7 I Did Not Create This Body
8 IIIIIIIII Love A Parade
9 It’s All Been Done You Said
10 You’ll Have Me As Long… 

Debut album from Australian Supergroup feat. Jim White (Dirty Three, Xylouris White), Chris Abrahams (The Necks), & Gareth Liddiard (The Drones, Tropical Fuck Storm). Recommended If You Like: Will Oldham, Protomartyr, New Testament-era Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Mark Lanegan, Richard Hawley, A Vegas lounge act from another planet. As the world continues to plunge into a fiery blaze of calamity, the Southern Hemisphere’s air warms, its leaves glow green, and the damp earth jolts awake. Springtime is coming to Australia, and it will be ushered in by three sonic shamans who are no strangers to our ears.

Springtime’s self-titled debut combines free jazz, poignant lyricism crafted alongside renowned Irish poet Ian Duhig aka Gareth Liddiard’s uncle and improvisation to craft austere portraits of a world paralyzed by shellshock. It’s as monstrously ravishing as it is clumsy in its elegance. Words run into each other with little regard for one another’s injuries. There are sounds which come out of nothingness to wallop and brutalize their fellow sounds. The live recording of Will Oldham’s “West Palm Beach” is treated with love and respect and would certainly be met with open arms by its author. Across the span of seven tracks, Liddiard incants with wild-eyed fury as White and Abrahams lay down stuttering strings, fizzling electronics, and feathery piano melodies. It is within these raving abstractions that one may find an answer to the enduring question, “What fresh hell will this new season bring?”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: You don't get much better member lists than that of Springtime, consisting as it does some of the biggest names in the Australian underground. Classical leaning in parts, but mostly hovering somewhere between the instrumental maelstrom of Dirty Three and the fractured ambient passages of Nick Cave / Warren Ellis with a vocal swagger reminiscent of Shane McGowan. Intense, evocative and unforgettable.

TRACK LISTING

1 Will To Power
2 The Viaduct Love Suicide
3 Jeanie In A Bottle
4 She Moved Through The Fair
5 The Island
6 West Palm Beach
7 The Killing Of The Village Idiot 

Over eighteen boundless albums as experimental as they are pop, Deerhoof has continuously quested for radical sounds and daring storytelling. 2020’s Future Teenage Cave Artists explored fairytale visions of post-apocalypse, welding intrinsic melodies with absurdist digital recording methods. Its sequel Love-Lore, a live covers medley, channeled futurist mid-century artists Parliament, Sun Ra and Stockhausen, to name a handful into a patchwork love letter to the anti-authoritarian expressions that inspire the band.

Galvanized by the challenge of unifying many styles of music, Deerhoof landed on their next record’s concept: baroque gone DIY. Actually, You Can is a genre-abundant record that uses technicolor vibrancy and arpeggiated muscularity to offer a vital shock from capitalism’s purgatorial hold. “In the United States now, to be a moral person means to be a criminal, whether it has to do with a general strike or forming a union or Black Lives Matter protests,” clarifies Saunier of the album’s countercultural embrace of liberation. “If you follow the rules, you’re guilty. That’s the spirit we were trying to express: an angelic prison bust, a glamorous prison bust.” It’s a condemnation of America’s mundanity, replacing violence with the heartfelt power of mutualism.

With state lines and oceans separating band members, Deerhoof not only reinvented their sonic and thematic credo, but also their recording process. Deerhoof’s players are not strangers to home-recording their individual parts, and have long embraced composing via file trading. But 2020’s halt to touring kicked off their longest separation from playing together, foregrounding new priorities. As the group’s combined demos became increasingly layered, bassist and vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki put her foot down, insisting the new album should replicate concert energy. Visualizing the quartet on huge stages with past tourmates Radiohead and Red Hot Chili Peppers, Saunier fugue-arranged his bandmates’ complex demos into songs to make an audience smile and dance. He sought out far-traveling delays, heavy playing, and unique panning to evoke the power of outdoor music. Matsuzaki scrutinized spots that would betray the conceit, eliminating anything that took away from the sound of onstage grandeur. “We spent so much time imagining playing together in the process of recording, it’s almost like a false memory of us playing this music together,” Saunier marvels.

For Deerhoof’s members to continually uncover new corners of their own talent requires deep wells of gratitude, not only for each others’ creativity but for the freedom their career affords. But by embracing each other’s art with curiosity, Deerhoof authors a musical alphabet that continues to astound and inspire, a unique lexicon expanding limitlessly with each album. For new listeners and decades-long devotees, Deerhoof’s electrifying, generous approach to collaborative worldbuilding on Actually, You Can is an emboldening call to support our communities with renewed strength, infinite love, and the resilience to keep exploring.

TRACK LISTING

1. Be Unbarred, O Ye Gates Of Hell
2. Department Of Corrections
3. We Grew, And We Are Astonished
4. Scarcity Is Manufactured
5. Ancient Mysteries, Described
6. Plant Thief
7. Our Philosophy Is Fiction
8. Epic Love Poem
9. Divine Comedy

Recommended If You Like: The Slits, Amyl & the Sniffers, Sonic Youth, Lightning Bolt, Captain Beefheart, The Drones / Gareth Lidiard, black midi, The Birthday Party / Rowland S. Howard, Bad Brains.

Most of us have lived some inner Tropical Fuck Storm over this past year and a half. Even for a band that’s made a career out of crafting songs attuned to political and social crisis, there was a new bleak in the air for Tropical Fuck Storm, what the band calls “give-a-fuck fatigue.” The third album from the avant-punk quadaptly titled Deep States mines familiar ground as well as new cultural terrains, while digging deeper into the subjective state of contemporary panic.

While not quite a protest album, Deep States comes complete with Q drops, nods to the January 6th Capitol Riot, a riff on pizzagate, MAGAs squaring off with Antifas, waterboarded Martians, dangerous cults from Heaven’s Gate to The Shining Path and, not to be outdone, Romeo agents who bed us at night only to betray us by morning. We live in a world in which the bizarre has become the normative, and Tropical Fuck Storm plumbs that paradox. That said, the band is far too wary of the self-importance attached to songs in the didactic mode.

“We make pop records,” frontman Gareth Liddiard says, “that don’t deny we’re all in a bit of trouble here.” What makes Tropical Fuck Storm so great is the intersection between their dark but satiric storytelling and musical arrangements intent on perverting received canons and wisdoms. These are songs as experiment, advancing and retreating at their own idiosyncratic, deeply unsettling pace. They hang on the slant beat and slide into jazzy, distortion-packed jams so tumultuous they’d make Charlie Mingus proud. Musically, Deep States goes wherever it wants, riffing on pop, R&B, Talking Heads-style new wave, Delta blues, Tom Waits, and some of the band’s hip-hop favorites such as Wu-Tang Clan and Missy Elliot. Barriers aren’t just broken, they seem to have completely fallen away.

In this present moment, parts of the world are opening up, or trying to. But Tropical Fuck Storm is here to remind us that many of our most urgent political and social problems have been around a long time now. Same as it ever was, as another genre bending band once sang. As the signs of the latest crisis subside, and the dull ache of awareness with it, Deep States is here to remind us that there is no foreseeable end to human folly, nor, fortunately, to the creativity that resists it. Over the past few years we’ve all heard the noise in our own heads. Tropical Fuck Storm has made music of it.

TRACK LISTING

The Greatest Story Ever Told
G.A.F.F.
Blue Beam Baby
Suburbiopia
Bumma Sanger
The Donkey
Reporting Of A Failed Campaign
New Romeo Agent
Legal Ghost
The Confinement Of The Quarks

Recommended If You Like: Tomberlin, The Cranberries, Barrie, Kacey Musgraves, Japanese Breakfast, The Weather Station, Slow Pulp, Lala Lala, Big Thief.

First full length since Almost (2018). Featuring Julien Baker.

After 2018’s critically acclaimed Almost opened The Ophelias to a world beyond their Cincinnati home, the indie rock quartet craved a return to a sense of community. The band members no longer lived in the same city bandleader Spender Peppet (she/her) and new bassist/longtime music video collaborator Jo Shaffer (they/them) live in New York, while drummer Mic Adams (he/him) and violinist Andrea Gutmann Fuentes (she/her) remain in Ohio. When it came time to record the candid, expansive Crocus, The Ophelias purposefully focused on the experimental, communal spirit that fueled their first record.

Crocus was recorded at night in a converted “2000 percent haunted” Masonic lodge, which surely had an effect on the album’s ability to weave darker tones through the taut song structures. Engineer John Hoffman kept spirits high at The Lodge KY, ensuring the Ophelias had the freedom to experiment in the grey area between pain and rebirth. Despite The Lodge’s eerie nature, the ghosts remain personal, finding Peppet facing herself and her own truth without blinking. Through songs equally infused with references to the Bible and The Twilight Zone, The Ophelias extract mystic emotion out of the spaces between their past, present, and future.

The four core Ophelias members provide a wide-reaching exploration into genre, emotion, and sonic textures over the course of Crocus. That expansiveness shines on album highlight “Neil Young on High,” a track that finds Peppet’s firefly vocals backed by harmonies from Julien Baker. On “Spitting Image” Gutmann Fuentes leans hard into country swing, showing her range as a violinist while a chorus of voices sing the taunting “ha ha ha” hook below her. Shaffer’s bass intertwines seamlessly with the drums on “Becoming a Nun,” which explodes into feedback and punk-inspired textures beyond what The Ophelias have previously created.

Peppet’s direct delivery of intimate lyrics draws you in - detailing the murky line between the things we mourn and the things we remember. “Crocus represents that state of flux, between dreaming and reality or internal reflection and external action. I had to wring this out of my chest,” and as a listener you immediately identify with her. The Ophelias’ growth has been marked -- so much has been transformed and rebuilt. Crocus is a safe haven, built with trust, love, and the assuredness that comes with growing up.

TRACK LISTING

1 Crocus
2 Sacrificial Lamb
3 Neil Young On High
4 Vapor
5 Spirit Sent
6 Biblical Names
7 Mastermind
8 Becoming A Nun
9 Spitting Image
10 Under Again
11 The Twilight Zone
12 Vices

Recommended If You Like: Acetone, Chad VanGaalen, Duster, Built to Spill, The Olivia Tremor Control, Spirit of the Beehive. “Essential Aliens” is the 10th Helvetia album. Helvetia is the solo project of Jason Albertini from Duster. The songs on “Essential Aliens” were recorded over the last year in Jason's basement. Helvetia resides in Portland, Oregon but was formed in Seattle, Washington in 2005 after Duster first went on hiatus. Since the band’s inception, Jason has continued to employ a rotating cast of band members and collaborators, which now includes Steve Gere and Samantha Stidham. Steve and Jason also played in Built To Spill together from 2012 until 2018.

In 2019 Duster started playing shows and recording again. During this time Jason started writing what would become This Devastating Map. Released at the beginning of August last year, Post-Trash called it ‘a constantly shifting project that takes experimental lo-fi into brilliantly colored psych directions with a concise glow.’ Then the pandemic took hold. With normal life at a standstill and unable to hang with his bandmates, Jason focused his energy on his daughter’s homeschooling schedule, and recording. He focused on finishing one song a day and was soon honing in on a brand new album. “Essential Aliens” takes all the elements of the Helveti.

TRACK LISTING

Side 1
1. Not So Infinite Life Of Weird (2:25)
2. Crooks Go In The Ground (2:06)
3. New Mess (2:10)
4. Jumper (1:42)
5. Claw (2:57)
6. That Strange Pull (1:05)
7. Rock On The Ramp (4:20)

Side 2
1. Star Hinged Trap (2:18)
2. Caroline Stays/The Al Snatch (2:27)
3. Why Am I Missing (2:07)
4. The Echo Creek (2:36)
5. Does It Go Backwards (2:21)
6. Better Get Gifted (2:12)
7. Skit 8 (2:15)

Spoken word recordings from Gregory Corso, Tina May Hall, Sam Lipsyte, Christine Schutt, Gary Lutz, Allen Ginsberg, Dawn Raffel, Jason Schwartz, Kathryn Scanlan, Scott McClanahan, & Terry Southern. About 40 years ago, in a record shop on Long Island during a weekend visit there to see my parents, i found a double-LP that looked like something i should definitely buy. It was called "BIG EGO", by the The DIAL-a-POEM POETS. On the cover was a picture of John Giorno (a great poet Ed Sanders had turned me on to) on a NYC rooftop with Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, and two kids. It cost $2. I bought it and rushed back to my parents house, where i still had my old turntable in the basement, not far from my Jimi Hendrix and Zappa Crappa posters, and my framed portrait of John Cage.

My copy of Eno's "Discreet Music" was still on the turntable, having been left there years before, when i'd fled Long Island for good. I lifted it from the platter, gently slid it back into its sleeve, like a priceless religious artifact, and put Side A of the Dial-a-Poem LP on. I almost lost my mind while listening to it. The next day i went back to the same record shop looking for more DIAL-A-POEM LP's. i found two. One had a long list of names on the back, some famous, and some i'd never heard of before. I bought both LP's, and an hour later, for the first time in my life, i was exposed to the art of Laurie Anderson, whom i'd never heard of before. This was 1978. Her contribution was a piece called "Time To Go". It changed my life. Or at least, that’s how I remember it. I was just a kid, so there were a lot of moments like that, around then. Nowadays, these moments can be had in seconds, with a click of the cursor. That evening, as i sat alone by my imaginary campfire (ie; that record player in my parents basement), i promised myself that someday, somehow, i would embark upon a WORDS & MUSIC project that might move people the same way i was moved when i first heard Laurie, and Robert Wilson & Christopher Knowles, and Burroughs, and Ginsberg, and Corso, and Anne Waldman, and John Ashbery, and the great Charles Olson, and so many others.

Words, for the very first time, had wielded the same power as music. And it was visceral. Just like music. It ran deep. It was a FEELING. John Giorno died in 2019, but he kept poetry alive like nobody's business. I was lucky enough to have spent some time with him in the early 1980's, when i was briefly a member of The Fugs, and often found myself surrounded by those Ginsberg called, "...the greatest minds of my generation". Ed Sanders (who'd ushered me into that scene) once told me that when he came to NYC, it was easy to go to a cafe, or to St Marks Church, and hear Burroughs, Corso, Ginsberg, and all the greats, reading their poetry. He said that even if you were just a bum on the street, you could just walk right up to them, and start a conversation.

They were totally accessible, if they were in the right mood at that particular moment. So i was shocked when Sanders told me he didn't approach any of them, not even once, til he'd been going to their readings for nearly ten years. "For almost a decade, I went to every reading, every lecture, every panel discussion. But I never went near them. Never approached them. Not even once", Sanders told me. "For ten years, all I did, was listen." It took me four decades, but ... better late than never. I finally made WORDS & MUSIC, Book One.

TRACK LISTING

Side A

1. Army
2. The Extinction Museum
3. Home Land
4. An Unseen Hand Passed Over Their Bodies
5. It Collects In Me

Side B

6. At Apollinaire’s Grave
7. Fresh, Blood
8. Jackal Pattern
9. Vagrants
10. James
11. Surrealist Dialog / A Proclamation

As a band who has been around for thirteen years and toured all corners of the world, there comes a point when the veil of mystique must be fully lifted. Up until now, experimental rockers SUUNS have revelled in mystery like a silhouette disappearing into the mist, releasing albums that rest comfortably in ambiguity, detachment and innuendo. But lately, the band appears to be more comfortable coming clean with their own inner workings. That newfound sense of ease is undeniable on SUUNS’ fifth full-length album The Witness – their first for Joyful Noise Recordings.

Self-recorded and self-produced over the majority of 2020 – a year of strife, solitude and reflection –The Witness finds the band holding a magnifying glass over their own default state of playing and performing. It’s a swift departure from previous album Felt, which harvested haphazard ideas in their embryonic, demoed versions, as if letting loose a glorious fireworks display into the heavens. The Witness, meanwhile, pours SUUNS’ music into a more intricate mold, compelling the band to embrace the vibrancy of their live performances and urging vocalist Ben Shemie to approach his lyricism with unabashed directness.

“There’s something interesting about the idea of a collective witness, being a witness to the time we’re living in now,” Shemie reflects. “And the connectedness of what we all have in common. But also, literally: bearing witness to all sorts of things and how that desensitises you. There’s a recurring line that comes back on the record: ‘I know that you’ve seen it too.’ It kind of comes down to being true to yourself and acknowledging what is and isn’t real.”

Perhaps unintentionally, SUUNS have always been a strangely intimate band, and with The Witness, they themselves became aware of the extent of this. Though the world is becoming a more distorted, confusing place, The Witness extends a sonic lifeline to latch onto, one bolstered by years of friendship, chemistry and trust.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: 'The Witness' is without a doubt, Suuns' springboard into mainstream consciousness. While their previous outings were undeniably well done, it's here we get to see their inventive leap into soaring synthpop and scattered electronica, while still hearing myriad elements of their original sound.

TRACK LISTING

Third Stream
Witness Protection
C-Thru
Timebender
Clarity
The Fix
Go To My Head
The Trilogy

During the mid-1980s heavy metal music was under attack on multiple fronts. Tipper Gore's Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) was fighting metal in the halls of congress, while Christian evangelists like Bob Larson waged war on the music from the pulpit. Their messaging was effective, convincing some parents that metal music would turn their children into sex-crazed, suicidal satanists. Metal records were forbidden in households across the United States, creating space for the rise of a new market within the music industry. It was in the midst of this culture war that Christian metal emerged in American popular culture.


The Los Angeles-based band Stryper became the face of Christian metal when their 1986 album To Hell with the Devil went platinum, earning the band Grammy nominations, and regular rotation on MTV. Stryper's unprecedented success inspired a generation of young Christian metalheads. Electric Jesus tells the story of one of those groups, a fictional teenage Christian metal band called 316. Set in 1986, the film offers an affectionate look at '80s Christian youth culture as it documents 316's journey from playing bible camp talent shows and church lock-ins, to performing at Christian music festivals and hardcore metal nightclubs. Any decent fictional rock biopic requires a convincing soundtrack, and Electric Jesus' director Chris White found the perfect collaborator in Daniel Smith. Smith is a prolific figure in indie rock, having worked under the Danielson moniker (and its variations- Danielson Famile, Brother Danielson) over the past two decades. Smith is known for his highly unique vocal style, which is characterized by the frequent use of a screeching falsetto. Serendipitously, this sound overlaps perfectly with the screaming falsetto vocals of hair metal. Smith also brings a nuanced sensitivity to the film's source material. His father is a prominent Christian music songwriter, and Smith's own work carries a deeply spiritual perspective. Smith's experience brings a credible authenticity to the project. While the lyrics were handled by director Chris White, Smith composed, or co-composed all of 316's original music and the results are spot-on. While composing for Electric Jesus, Smith immersed himself in the hair metal music of his youth, binge-listening to a steady rotation of bands like Ratt, Twisted Sister, and Motley Crew.


In addition to the music of 316, the Electric Jesus soundtrack features new material from Smith's Danielson projects featuring four new proper Danielson songs (including the fantastic sunshine pop of Danielson's Beach Boys-influenced "You Can Fly"), plus a track from Steve Taylor & the Danielson Foil, and instrumental score by Smith's "Familyre Friends". The soundtrack also contains music Smith composed for 316's black metal rivals Satan's Clutch, and Bloody Mass. But it's the music of 316 that forms the centerpiece of this 21 track release. All of 316's songs are expertly voiced by actor Wyatt Lenhart, who is also the onscreen frontman of 316. The chemistry of this ensemble is best experienced on the album's lead single, 316's hilariously bombastic "Commando For Christ" one of the most brilliant send-ups of metal music since This Is Spinal Tap. The magic of what Smith and his crew have done here is to create a set of music that speaks to all of these responses. They clearly understand the inherent absurdities of hair metal, while also conveying a sincere affinity for the style.

TRACK LISTING

1 316 - Commando For Christ
2 Danielson - You Can Fly
3 Familyre Friends - Vacation Bible Bop
4 Bloody Mass – Love
5 Danielson - Passing Through The Wall Of Flame
6 316 – Barabbas
7 Danielson - Heavenly Metal
8 Familyre Friends - Do The Barabbas!
9 Soul Exhumation - Beat You Off
10 Familyre Friends - Arcade Reigns
11 316 - Love Comes Down
12 316 - Girl (I Love Jesus Too)
13 Sarah Wember & 316 - This World Is Not My Home
14 Familyre Friends - Have You Ever Had A Girlfriend?
15 Satan's Clutch - All Hail Hell
16 Joy Explosion - We Just
17 Steve Taylor & The Danielson Foil - Ecstatic Delight
18 Danielson - Come And Save Me
19 316 - Makes Me Wanna Sing
20 Familyre Friends - We All Went Commando
21 Fleming & John - Don't Toss Us Away

After decades on the road and the never-ending hustle of life as an artist, Lou Barlow has tapped into a new confidence in the chaos. In 2021, the concept of balance feels particularly intimidating. Now more than ever, it’s clear life isn’t just leveling out a pair of responsibilities. Instead, we’re chasing after a flock of different ideals with a butterfly net. On Barlow’s new solo album, Reason to Live, he has come to an understanding of that swirl rather than trying to contain it.

As a long-time indie legend, Barlow has found a life akin to a middle-class musician. In recent years, he’s moved from Los Angeles back to Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife and three kids. And yet rather than settle into a comfortable malaise or yearn for the open road, Barlow’s strengthened urgency finds a way to merge the two instincts. Reason to Live is shambolic and grand yet intimate and doting, warmly acoustic and crackling with grit. “I had been struggling for a way to connect both my home life and my recorded life, but this record is the first time I've integrated that,” Barlow says. By folding the many facets of his life into one package, Reason to Live radiates with a renewed balance and calm.

That comfort in complexity shines through even in the recording process, with select songs having origins in decades past and others written in the early stages of 2020.

The multitude of whirring messages of Reason to Live are united by Barlow’s roiling multilayered arrangements and the understanding that change is inevitable--and that it can bring you a new reason to live in the darkest times. “This album is me really opening up, and the album follows that through its many different themes,” he says. “Some of my other work could be almost claustrophobic in its insistence on being all tied together but there’s space for people to live inside these songs.”

After albums with Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr., Folk Implosion, and under his own name, listeners may have felt they knew the construction of a Barlow song, even that they knew Barlow himself. “People have this vision of me as this heartbroken, depressed guy, but this record feels so true to who I am, to this rich life I now have full of people I love,” he says. “The songs culminated over the last five years to show that music has returned to its central comforting role in my life. Now I’m home.”

TRACK LISTING

1 In My Arms
2 Reason To Live
3 Why Can’t It Wait
4 Love Intervene
5 Privatize
6 I Don’t Like Changes
7 Clouded Age
8 Over You
9 How Do I Know
10 Cold One
11 Thirsty
12 Maumee
13 Lows And Highs
14 Paws
15 Tempted
16 All You People Suck
17 Act Of Faith

Recommended If You Like: Regina Spektor, Dolly Parton, Fleet Foxes (or something like Fleet Foxes), Jeff Tweedy, Dougie Poole, The idea of Kishi Bashi going Americana.

Over the last several years, the critically acclaimed composer and adventurous multi-instrumentalist Kishi Bashi has travelled frequently to Montana and Wyoming to work on Omoiyari, a “song film” about Japanese internment during WWII. The experience was potent for Kishi Bashi, who conducted research for the film (and 2019 album of the same name) by speaking to internment camp incarcerees and descendents. These conversations led to him reflecting on his own identity as a Japanese-American while laying the foundation of his forthcoming Emigrant EP.

Along with the brutal history and harsh climate of the American West, Kishi Bashi also sensed a hope and potential, compassion, and resilience. In Emigrant EP, he celebrates these qualities. Arranged and recorded over the last year, the six tracks serve as a time capsule of the 2020 condition and a continuation of the concepts explored in Omoiyari. What’s more, they find Kishi Bashi rewriting musical tradition in the image of his own experience, further embracing his love for roots music and violin fiddling. Meditating on the anxieties of the COVID-19 pandemic, the comforts of nature, the pains of resource-fueled conflicts, and the resiliency that emerges from struggle, Emigrant EP is steeped in the past while it looks to the future. “I want to understand the history, but also dive in and really try to humanize it,” he says. “I’m trying to show how we’re all the same type of human being. We have the same desires and needs, to protect our loved ones and also to celebrate the everyday.”

TRACK LISTING

1 Cascades
2 Wait For Springtime
3 Laughing With
4 Early Morning Breeze
5 Those Days Are Gone
6 Town Of Pray

Rat-a-Tat-Tat! Is that the sound of the reaper knocking on your door to collect your soul or Dale Crover hammering out another distinctive drum fill? There are pretty good odds it's the latter; between 36 years (and about as many full-lengths and EPs) as drummer/bassist for the Melvins and his contributions to acts as varied as Altamont, Peeping Tom, Redd Kross, Shrinebuilder, and a little band called Nirvana, he's built quite the body of work. In 2017, he added a proper solo album to his extensive catalog, Fickle Finger of Fate. Now he's followed that with Rat-a-Tat-Tat! Crover takes the solo thing seriously: he wrote the album while on the road and provided vocals, drums, guitars, vibraphone, and miscellaneous percussion. Just like the last album, recording took place over at Toshi Kasai's Sound of Sirens Studio in beautiful Sun Valley, CA. Kasai recorded and mixed it again, as well as co-producing it with Crover under the sobriquet Deaf Nephews. Celebrated graphic designer (and regular Melvins cover artist) Mackie Osborne created the striking album art, just as she did for Fickle Finger. So what's different this time around? Crover assembled an actual band to help him out. Redd Kross bassist Steve McDonald asked Crover to open for Redd Kross, Crover asked McDonald to play bass for him, and the rest is history. It'd be difficult for even the multi-talented Crover to put on a live show by himself without one of those one-man-band contraptions. In addition to McDonald, Kasai (ex-Big Business, Plan D) helps with keyboards, synths, jawharp, and backing vocals. Mindee Jorgensen (Dangerously Sleazy) sits behind the kit live and contributes additional drumming and some sweet saxophone skills here.

His former Altamont bandmate Dan Southwick plays bass on 'Tougher,' a track Crover cowrote with Kasai. Some pieces of the songs may sound familiar to the 127 completists who grabbed the limited-run lathe cut record Piso Mojado, a collection of experimental drum weirdness. Although insanity certainly abounds on Rat-a-Tat-Tat!, there are also some surprisingly poppy moments. Crover claims 'Shark Like Overbite' may be the poppiest song he's ever written. It's also the puppiest: it was inspired by the three dogs he's had over the years. A few tunes ('I Can't Help You There,' 'Kiss Proof World') harken back to his Pacific Northwest lineage. That said, 'Tougher,' 'Supine is How I Found Him,' and 'New Pharaoh' careen right off the dial. It's an eclectic mix, one that draws on song fragments he's had for years. It still feels cohesive and uniquely Dale Crover. But then, who would expect anything other than the unexpected? The opportunity knocks to hear more Dale Crover jams; be sure to answer

TRACK LISTING

1. Moclips
2 I Can’t Help You There
3 Tougher
4 Stumbler
5 Shark Like Overbite
6 Supine Is How I Found Him
7 I’ll Never Say
8 New Pharaoh
9 Untrue Crime
10 The Bowie Mix
11 Piso Mojado
12 Kiss Proof World

Tim Melina Theo Bobby, Joan of Arc's final album, might be their most personal and adventurous to date, culminating the band's many inspired, divergent sounds into one self-reflective, conclusive statement. Joan of Arc always felt like an experimental intersection of its members interests. As prolific of a band as they have been, none of the albums sounded the same, none of the albums imagined themselves as too big to fail in the name of trying something new. They always felt like more of a collective than anything else. A smattering of gifted contributors, fighting their way through their own creative whims. Their shows, a type of controlled chaos.


A chaos that required a close and gentle ear, or else one might miss the delicate daggers of lyric woven into the walls of sound, the walls of slow movement. It is good to determine your own endings; for yourself, but also for the sake of whatever comes next. To have the band going out on their own terms, still steeped in their own sound—melancholic, but biting; cynical, but also witty; a sonic forest that is both comfortable, but also a little treacherous. We are used to mourning moments like this, letting go of a beloved band. But a listener can hear in this album that these people still love making music together. They’re still excited by how far they can push each other creatively. And to know that and still decide that you have given all you can give as a band is a real gift. It is better this way, to lay a project down at the feet of fans, and listeners, and have it treated with joy, and not sadness. Musicians owe growth to themselves, they owe exploration, and excitement, and eager noise-making to themselves. Whatever fans get out of that, at the end of the day, is something we should all be grateful for. And in the case of Joan of Arc, we got over two decades of it. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Destiny Revision
2. Something Kind
3. Karma Repair Kit 
4. Creature And Being
5. Land Surveyor
6. Feedback ¾
7. The Dawn Of Something
8. Cover Letter Song 
9. Rising Horizon
10. Upside Down Bottomless Pit. 

RIYL: Explosions in the Sky, Sigur Ros, Do Make Say Think, Mogwai, Russian Circles, Minus the Bear.

Experiencing an unexpected tragedy or loss often provokes a period of self-reflection, a time to contemplate one’s own place and purpose in the world. That was true for El Ten Eleven’s Kristian Dunn. When a beloved family member passed, Dunn found his own reflections on life emerging in the music he composed. Those expressions led to the creation of Tautology a sonic meditation on the arc of human life, composed in three parts.

Over the course of three discs, Tautology is, in Dunn’s words, “a representation of life from the teenage years, through middle-age, until the end of life.” The sounds on the album echo Dunn’s own experiences, veering from aggressive metallic riffs to blissful ambient soundscapes. And while there are shared melodies and harmonies through all three records, each one has its own distinct qualities: Tautology I, which represents adolescence, is angsty, aggressive and occasionally depressive; Tautology II is head-noddy and mid-tempo, and represents middle age; while Tautology III, quiet and ambient, represents one’s golden years.

Tautology is not a typical rock album, and El Ten Eleven are not a typical rock band. For seventeen years the instrumental duo of Dunn (bass/guitar) and Tim Fogarty (drums) have flourished outside the accepted norms of rock orthodoxy, releasing eight full length albums and four EPs, and performing over 750 live shows. Utilizing inventive arrangements and a masterful use of looping, El Ten Eleven create a sound much bigger than the sum of its parts. Joyful Noise Recordings will digitally release each of Tautology’s three discs, individually and in sequential order, beginning May 1st, with a physical 3LP release on September 18, 2020.

Dunn explains there’s no right or wrong way to listen to Tautology, suggesting that a deep dive into the full project will yield rewards. “I think someone could listen to any one of the discs by themselves and have a really great experience—even if they didn't know about the others. But if they do want to go deeper, I think there will be a lot of interesting stuff to discover. It works symbolically and it all connects. I think this is the best record we've ever done.” 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Having been at the forefront of two-man post-rocking for some time now (their self titled debut was, and still is one of my favourite albums), it was a delight to see this triple LP covering all the ground they've touched on in the past 10 years or so. Starting off a lot more driven and gradually rolling towards tender, shimmering post-rock,this is a true impression of just how varied El Ten Eleven can be. Lovely.

TRACK LISTING

1 Entropy
2 With Report
3 Jejune
4 Moral Dynamite
5 Division
6 Lassitude
7 Besotted
8 Shimmer
9 Nocturne
10 The Silent Bell That Rings
11 Half Mast
12 Queen’s Gambit
13 Growing Shorter
14 Farrago
15 Caducity
16 You Are A Piece Of Me, You Are A Piece Of Her
17 Aubade
18 Shimmered
19 Let's All Go Out Like Francis
20 Senescent
21 All Of This Bliss Doesn’t Come Without A Price

Polymath percussionist Thor Harris inaugurated Thor & Friends in the autumn of 2015 after five years of touring as the percussionist of iconic avant-rock ensemble Swans. The project is intended as a vehicle for experimentation with the conceptual vocabulary of American Minimalism collaborating with a rotating cast of Austin-based musicians. The ensemble has three core members, Thor Harris, Peggy Ghorbani and Sarah 'Goat' Gautier — with its line-up expanding and contracting with the flux of compositional and improvisational contexts. Thor & Friends draws on classic Minimalist composers, including Terry Riley and Steve Reich, but also amalgamate such diverse influences as Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, Moondog and The Necks around a polyrhythmic core of mallet-struck instruments, primarily marimba, xylophone and vibraphone.

Circling these core motifs are shifting streams of everything from processed pedal steel and analog synthesizer to violin, viola, stand-up bass, clarinet, duduk and oboe. Thor & Friends, '3’ is, naturally, the band's third LP. Initially put out as part of Joyful Noise Recordings, 2019 Artist in Residence, it is now being released far and wide through Joyful Noise. Thor writes, "This record was made over several years and in many locations. Only by the grace of the brilliant Jeremy Barnes was it all sewn together into this fantastic tapestry of sound you are lucky to now behold." Musicians who played on this record include, Jennifer Wasner, Tuvan throat singing is Soriah, Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost of A Hawk and a Hacksaw, John Dieterich from Deerhoof, Thierry Amar and Tim Herzog from Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Adam Torres, Michael Gira, Jarboe, Stine Janvin Motland, John Congleton and many others. 

TRACK LISTING

1. As Above So Below (feat. Jenn Wasner, Soriah)
2. Lonely Dee
3. Tucson (feat. Michael Gira, Crystal Fulbright)
4. Jarboe Walks In The River (feat. Jarboe)
5. Falling (feat. Jarboe, Stine Janvin Motland, Soriah)
6. Stine And Her Animals (feat. Stine Janvin Motland)

Polymath percussionist Thor Harris inaugurated Thor & Friends in the autumn of 2015 after five years of touring as the percussionist of iconic avant-rock ensemble Swans. The project is intended as a vehicle for experimentation with the conceptual vocabulary of American Minimalism collaborating with a rotating cast of Austin-based musicians. The ensemble has three core members, Thor Harris, Peggy Ghorbani and Sarah 'Goat' Gautier - with its line-up expanding and contracting with the flux of compositional and improvisational contexts.

Thor & Friends draws on classic Minimalist composers, including Terry Riley and Steve Reich, but also amalgamate such diverse influences as Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, Moondog and The Necks around a polyrhythmic core of mallet-struck instruments, primarily marimba, xylophone and vibraphone. Circling these core motifs are shifting streams of everything from processed pedal steel and analog synthesizer to violin, viola, stand-up bass, clarinet, duduk and oboe. Thor & Friends, '4' is the band's fourth LP. Initially put out as part of Joyful Noise Recordings, 2019 Artist in Residence, it is now being released far and wide through Joyful Noise. Thor writes, "Thor & Friends is a collective of musicians. Some players are classically trained, others are punk musicians with no reading skills, just spirit and will. Through friendship and musical collaboration, this album brings together Craig Ross, Alan and Mimi from Low, Bill Callahan, and Jolie Holland; strings from the likes of Mollie Fischer, Travis Weller, Lindsey Verrill, Andrea Calderon, and Nino Soberin; and even more instrumentation from Jeff Johnston on saw, Christopher Cundy, Andrea Belfi, and Adam Harding." 

TRACK LISTING

1. Mystery Train (feat. Low, Jolie Holland)
2. Dies In Paris (feat. Bill Callahan)
3. Uber Driver
4. The Other Last Straw
5. I Told You They Were Lying
6. Saint Belfi
7. Off Her Meds

There's an obvious chemistry emanating throughout Ohmme's music that's so tangible it can only come from a decades-spanning friendship. Songwriters Sima Cunnningham and Macie Stewart formed their unbreakable bond performing throughout the fringes of Chicago's many interlocking communities, collaborating with titans from the city's indie rock, hiphop, and improvised worlds. But together, along with drummer Matt Carroll, they've stretched the boundaries of what guitar music can do starting with the band's experimental 2016 self-titled EP and their adventurous debut 2018 LP Parts. Now their longstanding partnership culminates with the stunning and muscular follow-up Fantasize Your Ghost. Ohmme formed in 2014 as an outlet for Cunningham and Stewart to explore an unconventional approach to their instruments.


"That's the whole genesis of the band: us walking up to our guitars and saying, 'how can we make this noisemaker do something different?'" says Cunningham. But as their musical collaboration strengthened, bringing Parts and intensive tours with acts like Wilco, Iron & Wine, Twin Peaks, and more, the band's scope and focus has also broadened. "Grinding on tour last year for so long, it can alter your mental state where you have to think about your life in a different way than you would if you're home. A lot of the songs stemmed from just thinking about all of the possibilities that life could be and could take," says Stewart. The commanding single "3 2 4 3" tackles the terrifying realization of needing to make a change. Their deft scene-setting and the way their disparate voices blend together heightens the song's inherent anxiety. These moments of emotional clarity fill Fantasize Your Ghost.


Written across 2019, early sketches of the album's tracklist were demoed at Sam Evian's Flying Cloud Studios in upstate New York. "That's where we really started to see the record come together," says Cunningham. The sessions were intensely collaborative and open, the product of long, existential conversations between Stewart and Cunningham in the van about their lives and how to channel the anger they were feeling about the state of the world. Tracks like the driving opener "Flood Your Gut" underwent several revisions with Ohmme uncovering several new directions the song could go before finishing it. Fantasize Your Ghost was recorded over a six day session in with indie rock journeyman producer Chris Cohen and captures the astounding magnetism and ferocity of their live show.


Fantasize Your Ghost encapsulates the thrilling and sometimes terrifying joy of moving forward even if you don't know where you're going. It's an album that asks necessary questions: When life demands a crossroads, what version of yourself are you going to pursue? What part of yourself will you feed and let flourish and what do you have to let go of? This is a record of strength, of best friends believing in each other. Unapologetic and brave, Ohmme are ready to figure it all out together.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Over the few years they've been recording, Ohmme have clearly perfected their brand of rhythmic indie rock into the perfectly hypnotic distillation we hear today. Elements of Americana, White Stripes-esque blues rock and hypntoic synthy kosmische. It's a melting pot indeed, but one that works flawlessly. That groove!

TRACK LISTING

1. Flood Your Gut
2. Selling Candy
3. Ghost
4. The Limit
5. Spell It Out
6. Twitch
7. 3 2 4 3
8. Some Kind Of Calm
9. Sturgeon Moon
10. After All

'Sorry You Couldn't Make It' is the long awaited "country album" from the legendary Swamp Dogg. Recorded in Nashville, featuring John Prine, Justin Vernon, Jenny Lewis, and others. Jerry Williams’ aka Swamp Dogg first love was country music, listening to it as a Navy family kid growing up in Portsmouth, Virginia. “My granddaddy, he just bought country records out the asshole,” Swamp remembers. “Every Friday when he came home from the Navy yard he’d stop off and get his records. His first time performing on stage, in fact, was a country song at a talent show when he was six years old: “I did Red Foley’s version of ‘Peace in the Valley.’”

While the 77 year-old Williams’ most enduring persona is the psychedelic soul superhero Swamp Dogg a musical vigilante upholding truths both personal and political since 1970’s immortal album, Total Destruction To Your Mind he will tell anybody who will listen that he’s considered himself country this entire time. “If you notice I use a lot of horns,” Swamp says. “But actually, if you listen to my records before I start stacking shit on it, I’m country. I sound country.” Swamp began his professional singing career as Little Jerry Williams back in the ‘50s before working as an A&R man for Atlantic Records in the late ‘60s. His biggest hit is actually a country song: 1970’s “Don’t Take Her (She’s All I Got).”

Written with his best friend Gary U.S. Bonds. Following 2018’s critically acclaimed, Ryan Olson-produced Love, Loss, And Auto-Tune his first LP to debut on 11 Billboard charts (including at #7 on 'Heatseekers’) and his first chart ink since his 1970 song “Mama's Baby Daddy's Maybe”. Sorry You Couldn’t Make It allows Swamp to finally dive into the sound he grew up playing. With the support of Pioneer Works Press, they recorded the album at Nashville’s Sound Emporium with Olson as producer once again, and backed by a crack studio band led by Derick Lee, a keyboard virtuoso who worked as the musical director of BET’s Bobby Jones Gospel Show for nearly four decades. Nashville guitar firebrand Jim Oblon combusts his way through lead duties, while frequent collaborator Moogstar and special guests Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), John Prine, Jenny Lewis, Channy Leaneagh and Chris Beirden of Poliça, and Sam Amidon join the action throughout

TRACK LISTING

1 Sleeping Without You Is A Dragg
2 Good, Better, Best
3 Don't Take Her (She's All I Got)
4 Family Pain
5 I Lay Awake
6 Memories (feat. John Prine)
7 I'd Rather Be Your Used To Be
8 Billy
9 A Good Song
10 Please Let Me Go Round Again (feat. John Prine)

Tall Tall Trees is the pseudonym of songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Mike Savino. Moving to New York in the early aughts with aspirations of being a bassist in the city's vibrant jazz and experimental music scene, Savino soon switched his focus to banjo and writing songs, resulting in the eponymous 2009 debut, Tall Tall Trees. In the decade since, Savino has toured non-stop, pioneering a world of psychedelic electric banjo music, captivating audiences with his loop-based one man shows, as well as alongside frequent collaborator, Kishi Bashi. 'A Wave of Golden Things', his fourth studio album, opens with the distant crow of a rooster and takes off in a dust cloud of swirling banjo, drums and bass. The lead off track, "The Wind, She Whispers," quickly evolves from a droning mountain melody into full-blown banjo funk, setting the precedent for an album of unexpected turns. Though the banjo is heavily featured, the influence of Pink Floyd and Cat Stevens can be felt as much as banjo mavericks Earl Scruggs and Bela Fleck. Savino, who self-records and produces his music, abandoned the heavily-layered textures of 2017's 'Freedays' for a more organic, stripped-down approach, leaving his distinct voice and thoughtful lyrics as the centerpiece.

Despite the sparse arrangements, Savino still manages to evoke the sonic imagery and pastoral landscapes that have often been hallmarks of Tall Tall Trees albums. Each of the eight songs that make up 'A Wave of Golden Things' suggest a world unto itself, from the cosmic country-tinged, "Ask Me Again," to the sprawling underwater lullaby "Deep Feels." Opting for an immersive experience over a traditional studio, Savino set up residence and a mobile recording rig on a hemp farm in the Appalachian mountains outside of Asheville, North Carolina, where he now resides. Recorded in just under three weeks, with much of it arranged on the spot, the album maintains a sense of immediacy, celebrating raw performance over perfection. "I'm giving up on my expectations, let them go and see where it takes us," Savino sings on "Expectations," almost seeming to revel in this experimental process. Savino's voice, left unadorned, can be simultaneously gentle and strong, at times sage-like in delivery. On the album's closing title track "A Wave of Golden Things," his soft spoken meditations on mental health reflect a new maturity in his song craft and singing. As the song develops, Savino's voice gains confidence and his whisper becomes a fragile cry, neither full-throated nor fully secure, but at home in a warm bed of upright piano and echoing tape delay. "We all need a little peace and love right now," he sings as if he's at the end of his breath.

Recommended if you like: Sturgill Simpson, Grateful Dead, Tallest Man On Earth, Kishi Bashi, Paul Simon, Vampire Weekend. 

TRACK LISTING

1 The Wind, She Whispers
2 Expectations
3 Happy Birthday In Jail
4 Ask Me Again
5 A Number Of Signs
6 Deep Feels
7 Seven Shades Of Blues
8 A Wave Of Golden Things

Recommend If You Like: DEERHOOF (!), Blonde Redhead, Sonic Youth, Stereolab, Animal Collective, Liars, Lightning Bolt // “...the best band in the world...” Pitchfork // Deerhoof and Joyful Noise Recordings will issue the first ever vinyl edition of the band’s third LP, Halfbird. Originally released in July 2001 by Menlo Park Records, Halfbird is 14 tracks of playful absurdity and pummeling energy, featuring founding member Greg Saunier (drums - guitar - vocals); Satomi Matsuzaki (vocals - bass); and Rob Fisk (guitar). 2019 sees the 25-year anniversary of Deerhoof being a band. To celebrate the occasion, three labels that have worked with Deerhoof over the course of their expansive and colorful career will each reissue one of the first three Deerhoof LPs: 1997's The Man, The King, The Girl (Polyvinyl); 1999's Holdypaws (Kill Rock Stars); and 2001’s Halfbird (Joyful Noise Recordings). 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: One of Deerhoof's classics gets the reish treatment, and the timind couldn't be better. What else could you want in these troubling times than a slab of grooving, psychy noise rock.

TRACK LISTING

Halfrabbit Halfdog
Six Holes On A Stick
Red Dragon
Trickybird
The Man The King The Girl And The Spider
Witchery Glamour Spell
Queen Orca Wicca Wind
Sunnyside, Carriage
Littleness
Xmas Tree
Rat Attack
The Forty Fours 
Halfmole Halfbird.

Yoni Wolf has spent the last two decades traveling the remote sonic terrain where underground hip hop, avant-pop, and psych-rock meet. On AOKOHIO, Yoni Wolf condenses the essential elements of WHY? into a stunningly potent musical vision. Co-produced by Wolf and his brother Josiah, the record presents a rich palette of musical voices that emerge and disappear into a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of sound. And while AOKOHIO features many notable guest contributors, from Lala Lala's Lillie West, to Nick Sanborn and Amelia Meath of Sylvan Esso, the listener's attention remains squarely directed on Yoni's voice and vision. AOKOHIO finds Yoni rethinking fundamental aspects of his approach to creating and delivering his music. The album is presented as six movements comprised of two to four songs each, with some segments appearing as brief fragments that dissolve within seconds.

The concept of sharing AOKOHIO in segments over time has been preserved with the release of an accompanying visual album-with the first three segments directed by Sundance award-winner Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, who is also the mastermind of the overarching video project. AOKOHIO feels like a consequential addition to the WHY? catalog, possibly even an artistic turning point. But its creator remains circumspect when asked to comment on the album's significance within his discography, instead preferring to characterize the work as the latest iteration of his deep commitment to his artistic practice. "I have no idea if this record is good or not," Yoni says. "But I never really know. I know that I've never written a song that's indispensable to the American songbook. But in terms of what it is, it's a piece of art. I put blood, sweat, and tears into this album, and struggled through the creative process as I always do. As far as where this sits with the rest of my albums? I can't answer that. I just know that my career is a lifelong career, and I'm working it. Every time it feels right, it makes me feel good." 

TRACK LISTING

1. Apogee
2. The Rash
3. Peel Free II: I’ve Been Carving My Elbows, I Might Just Take Flight.
4. Reason
5. Deleterio Motilis
6. Stained Glass Slipper III: Please Take Me Home, I Don’t Belong Here.
7. The Launch
8. High Dive
9. Mr. Fifths’ Plea
10. Good Fire IV: The Surgeon Nervously Goes On, He Never Claimed To Be God.
11. Narcissistic Lamentation
12. Krevin’
13. The Crippled Physician
14. Ustekinumab V: I Want To Live With Conviction, In Silence And Diction.
15. My Original
16. Rock Candy
17. Once Shy VI: Though I’m Tired, I’m Still Trying.
18. The Shame
19. Bloom Wither Bloom (for Mom) 

Highly anticipated second album, 1.5 years after their critically acclaimed debut LP. Featuring members of the now-defunct band The Drones. RIYL: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Nick Cave, The Slits, Protomartyr, The Drones, Gang of Four, IDLES.

“I've invented fake news as a genre of music,” Gareth Liddiard observes with a laugh. He's talking about “Maria 63”, the closing track on Tropical Fuck Storm's sophomore LP ‘Braindrops’. The song takes aim at the once-marginalized alt-right conspiracy theories that now seem to be a driving force behind the rise of fascism in global politics. “It may be the most stupid song ever written,” Liddiard jokes. He's wrong, “Maria 63” is emblematic of Tropical Fuck Storm's keen ability to mine the extreme edge of pop culture's periphery for potent musical and conceptual spice.

Tropical Fuck Storm were formed around 2017 in the city of Melbourne, Victoria along Australia's south-eastern coast. The band released their debut long-player A Laughing Death in Meatspace on Joyful Noise Recordings in 2018. Each of the band's four members bring considerable experience to the group. Liddiard and Fiona Kitschin were part of the long-running and critically-acclaimed act The Drones, while Erica Dunn and Lauren Hammel have performed in a variety of well-received projects. Perhaps it's that wealth of rock and roll experience that allows Tropical Fuck Storm to so expertly deconstruct and distort the genre's norms.

“Everything we do, we try to do it in a weird way. The whole album is full of weird beats, and just weird shit everywhere,” Liddiard explains. He cites Doc at the Radar Station-era Captain Beefheart as a key sonic touchstone, and Braindrops certainly shares the Captain's penchant for pounding abstract grooves. Tropical Fuck Storm have achieved a uniquely off-kilter sound on Braindrops Liddiard partly credits this to the group's use of unconventional equipment, “We use lots of techno gear to make rock and roll because rock and roll gear is boring, and all sounds like Led Zeppelin.”

Liddiard's own description of Tropical Fuck Storm's sound is nearly as interesting and evocative as the music itself. He describes the LP's title track as “Fela Kuti in a car crash,” and talks of creating a sonic atmosphere that “sounds like chloroform smells” for “Maria 62”. A recurring theme on Braindrops concerns the various ways the human brain can be manipulated and controlled for exploitative gain. The bracing “The Planet of Straw Men” is a study of human behavior inside the social media comments section, a place where otherwise reasonable people are seen gleefully engaging in psychotic chest-thumping rhetoric. Listening to Braindrops is a jarring and exhilarating experience, full of pulsating grooves, dissonant experimentation, and unsettling dystopian plot-lines. Braindrops is an unrelenting work, from an unrelenting musical ensemble. “Tropical Fuck Storm is a full on thing,” Liddiard offers. “Everything we do, we do it to death.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A completely nuts, clashing collection of fragmented melodies and post-punk spirit, encompassing psychedelic freeform, spoken word vitriol and arty noise into a confounding but strangely addictive listen.

TRACK LISTING

1. Paradise
2. The Planet Of Straw Men
3. Who’s My Eugene?
4. The Happiest Guy Around
5. Maria 62
6. Braindrops
7. Aspirin
8. Desert Sands Of Venus
9. Maria 63

Recomend if you like: The Magnetic Fields, Ween, Ava Luna, Speedy Ortiz, Guided By Voices, Bloodhound Gang. “20 tracks, all hovering around the one-minute mark, toggling between bedroomy croonings and punk-slanted scrappiness.” Stereogum. We would like to introduce you to the playful fearlessness that is Coughy. Coughy began as a late night recording experiment at a performing arts summer camp, formed by two musical associates — Julian Fader (Ava Luna) and Andy Molholt (Laser Background & Speedy Ortiz). As I recall, when they first sent me these recordings, their email read less like a demo pitch and more like, “hey- check out what we made!”, without any expectations of JNR releasing it whatsoever. I remember my initial response was something like, “thanks for sending and thanks for acknowledging that there is zero chance we will release y’alls weird side project.” But fast forward about 6 months, and Coughy is the only thing I want to listen to… I just kept coming back to it. I came to find out that Andy and Julian created these songs by challenging each other to write one minute "tiny songs", and packing as many logical twists and turns into the confines of 60 seconds as possible. This approach made for some carefree, honest and meaningful music - which I found is a great antidote to the crippling Trumpian negativity I encounter on a daily basis. Having now listened to the album about 800 times, I think I may have identified what is so special about this band: There is a magic earnestness in Coughy’s music. So much music these days is so desperately trying to achieve something... The majority of bands seem to be formed with the intention of attaining a particular “sound” before the first note has even been played... Not these guys. This is straight from the playful heart of creation. Which doesn’t mean they exist in a vacuum without influences. These guys clearly come from the world of lo-fi indie rock, and it shows. But I think the fact that they both already have their “real bands” freed them up to do whatever they wanted with this music, free of consequence. And that is the reason I love it even more than their “real” bands. Take a listen to Ocean Hug and prove me wrong. 

TRACK LISTING

1 F
2 G
3 N
4 V
5 P
6 O
7 T
8 E
9 M
10 L
11 I
12 H
13 K
14 B
15 X
16 U
17 A
18 W 
19 S
20 C

Debut album from Jenny Pulse (fka Spa Moans) and Tim Kinsella (Joan of Arc, Cap’n Jazz). First electronic music from Tim Kinsella. Recomend if you like: Black Moth Super Rainbow, Eartheater, HEALTH, Spa Moans, Cap’n Jazz, Joan of Arc… "Good Fuck is the byproduct of collaborative conscious alignment. We jammed sometimes, usually late at night with a couple drinks in us, never bothering to record. And we'd tweak various setups while making lunch or getting ready for work. But mostly we talked about what it would be, defining the parameters.

For months we talked and talked about it. We spent most nights DJ'ing for each other or checking out shows, identifying and refining what we were drawn to, where we found surprising cracks or overlaps. Then finally we packed the car and drove 13 hours to The Millay Colony in upstate New York: an artist's colony in The Berkshires, miles down a private road, next to 100,000 acres of national forest. And when we arrived, off-season and empty, we found it under four feet of snow.

Our process was compressed into a single week in uninterrupted isolation, so we developed a working system to keep us moving and intuitive, trading tracks back and forth on a schedule. For the lyrics we agreed on 12 books we thought most relevant and came up with various systems to collapse and collage them into each other in different combinations. And packing up after the end of the week, we were stunned by the results Of course there were snags, technological and psychological. And of course we threw a good amount away. But what was left was not the result of trying to write songs, but the effortless evidence of what emerged when we got clear in our intentions and then just let it out." Tim Kinsella…… 

TRACK LISTING

1. We Keep It Light
2. En Garde
3. Jenny Dreams Of Pies
4. Nick, Celibate
5. Fawn
6. Spring Song
7. Gold
8. Saint Francis
9. Shadows
10. Physics
11. Secret Meetings 
12. Stacking Oranges

For Dutch/Croatian songwriter and visual artist Marina Tadic, Pet Town represents time well spent in one’s own shell. Her second LP as Eerie Wanda (and first for Joyful Noise Recordings), Pet Town is a stripped down spectral manifestation, anchored by Tadic’s wistful lyrics and self possessed vocal delivery. Mixed by producer Jasper Geluk, the album is perched in warm, homespun recordings live drums are replaced with handclaps, finger snaps, and a Roland-CR 78 drum machine, enhancing the music’s tactile and intimate headspace. Using minimal recording techniques, Tadic shaped these ten songs on sheer intuition, while drawing inspiration from solitude: how it can be both a state of euphoria but also one of loneliness of inner meditation and outer yearning.

Echoing the sonorous gleam of West Coast pop, opening song "Pet Town" initially sounds like a love letter to one’s hometown, as both a tangible and emotional sanctuary. Between the lines, Tadic grapples with the sudden absence of shiny beacons that once enriched her life. "Hands Of The Devil" casts spells of attraction with its hypnotic flamenco cadence, whereas the humdrum amble of "Sleepy Eyes" evokes a rude awakening from those very spells. Tadic is still left guessing how Pet Town came to be, exactly. “I wrote the songs over a period of time spent inside my shell, and I needed that time. Not escaping it brought me a lot of growth.” Like some mysterious shamanic voice from the future, Eerie Wanda hushes turbulent peaks and valleys into a comforting, deft equilibrium. “I love to think I'm connected with some other dimension which sends me the songs and I can catch them if I'm in the right zone.” 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Warm and intimate, Eerie Wanda is the counterfoil to the loud and chaotic musical world of today. Easily drifting between stripped-back psychedelic folk, worldly rhythms and rich, anthemic indie. It really is a beautiful mix of sounds, and one put together with Tadic's trademark skill.

TRACK LISTING

1. Pet Town
2. Big Blue Bird
4. Rockabiller 
5. Magnetic Woman 
6. Moon 
7. Sleepy Eyes 
8. The Intruder
9. Couldn't Tell 
10. Hands Of The Devil 
11. Truly.

A Laughing Death in Meatspace, delivers a fraught vision of algorhythmic apocalypse. Featuring Gareth Liddiard and Fiona Kitchin from Australian heroes The Drones, Tropical Fuck Storm is an end-of-days consciousness-stream across nine seething tracks. The debut dive-bombs into the realms of mortality and immortality, moralizing and amorality; the passing of time, and how little we have left. These are lurid songs, urgently told through Gareth Liddiard's barbed and byzantine lyricism, abrasive guitar slashes, drum adrenalin, raunchy bass and electronic undercurrents.

They're raging, rapscallion, and funny, lyrically delving into everything from internet shaming to the kuru “laughing death” disease of the PNG highlands to Russian chess great Gary Kasparov’s portentous loss to an IBM computer. Live, Tropical Fuck Storm are a force of nature, conjuring chaos at every blistering performance, with zero shits to give for corporate music hegemony. "Kneel down by the advertising, don’t you make a single false move" calls out the female chorus of Fiona Kitschin and Erica Dunn echoing the dismay of our time as we bear witness to the sinister seductions which social media surveillance has entangled us. A Laughing Death in Meatspace doesn’t show us the way out of this situation, but it howls along with us as we peer into the maelstrom ahead. 

TRACK LISTING

1. You Let My Tyres Down
2. Antimatter Animals
3. Chameleon Paint
4. The Future Of History
5. Two Afternoons
6. Soft Power 
7. Shellfish Toxin
8. A Laughing Death In Meatspace
9. Rubber Bullies. 

Recommended If You Like : Melvins, SWANS, Dale Crover, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mogwai, David Lynch.

In September 2015, The Lemonheads invited us to join them on a short West Coast tour. A week before we were scheduled to leave, our drummer Murph had to drop out. Bonnie and Steve had already purchased their flights from Melbourne to LA so we were committed to playing these shows, but the thought of trying to find another drummer to emulate Murph's parts just felt wrong. We decided to throw away our planned set list of "Murph songs" and instead enlisted Aniela Perry to join us on electric cello for some very slow, cinematic and open-ended interpretations of “our songs.” We all really enjoyed playing these shows, and experiencing the songs opening themselves up, with space to stretch out and breathe and be as long as they wanted to be. It was a very freeing experience, so much room for improvisation from night to night. After the tour we decided to document these new renditions, so we booked a day at Toshi Kasai’s Los Angeles studio and recorded our set live.

Along with some epic drumming and percussion by the legendary Dale Crover (Melvins), we also welcomed the beautiful Thor Harris (Swans) into the family, who added tubular bells, gongs and additional percussion to our new version of "Without." "I Am Nothing" is not an Electric Wizard cover, but rather takes its name from the spoken word performance by another talented Melbourne family friend, Elissa Rose, who added her poetry to the improvised instrumental section we started our set with each night. And last but not least, another Aussie member of the Dumb Numbers family, Geordie Stafford from Golden Bats, added some crushing elemental guitar to "Sometimes." We sincerely hope you enjoy the music, and recommend listening at night with some mood lighting, incorporating the experience into your night-time ritual. 

TRACK LISTING

1 I Am Nothing / Sometimes 16:05
2 Without / Dissolution 12:36

Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s, Elliott Smith, Neil Young & Big Star. Richard Edwards felt almost human when he returned to Los Angeles to record songs for what became Verdugo. It’s the follow-up to the Indiana singer’s 2017 album Lemon Cotton Candy Sunset, a beautiful, personal release that was deeply unpleasant to make. Not only was he afflicted at the time by an intestinal ailment that often left him unable to stand, let alone sing, his marriage fell apart midway through making the album. If Lemon Cotton Candy Sunset ended up being a record about letting go, Verdugo is the album where Edwards pulls himself up after falling down.

“The making of it was kind of my recovery from all the stuff,” says Edwards, who worked again with producer Rob Schnapf (Elliott Smith, Beck) in L.A. “I went back and wasn’t as sick, so making the second one, and finishing it, was a much, much more joyous event.” Verdugo features 10 new songs that showcase Edwards’ considerable and longstanding talent as a writer, and also a new way of singing: Edwards’ chronic pain meant finding a vocal approach that didn’t make him feel like throwing up. “I sing in a half-falsetto high range that came out of not being able to belt stuff out for a year,” Edwards says. His new vocal style deepens the air of melancholy on the atmospheric “Strange,” takes on a wistful cast on “Beekeeper” over subtle drums and a distinctive guitar part, and is lifted aloft on a soaring blend of guitars, drums and backing vocals on “Minefield.” “They kind of disappear in this weird sky sonically now, because of this range,” he says.

“They don’t feel rooted anymore, they fly all over, and that falsetto — if you’re looking at it as a picture, it goes higher up in the room than it used to.” This is Edwards’ second solo album after more than a decade leading the Indianapolis band Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s, which he founded in 2004. When health problems made touring with Margot impossible, Edwards turned inward and began writing songs “loosely inspired by all one learns, and fails to learn, while dealing with one’s own mortality,” as he wrote in a piece for Talkhouse. Verdugo is completely Edwards, the result of an agonizing stretch of dissolution and, over time, regeneration. Best of all, it’s not an end point, but merely the next station on a continuing journey. “It’s somewhere between that last record and what will happen after that, and what was going to happen before,” he says. “It comes from three years of having to get really quiet, and figure out what grows out of that.” 

TRACK LISTING

Gene
Beekeeper
Minefield
A Woman Who Can’t Say No
Howlin’ Heart
Olive Oyl
Something Wicked
Tornado Dreams
Strange
Pornographic Teens

Oneida has been a cornerstone of the Brooklyn underground for nearly two decades. Always evolving, the group has been a beacon of musical exploration and enthralling unpredictability, gaining legendary status among heads that know and expanding the limits of what it means to be a rock band. With a discography spanning over a dozen full-lengths, plus live releases, EPs, singles, and limited one-offs, Oneida has demonstrated a mastery of collective improvisation, off-kilter songwriting, complex composition, and everything in between. In 2011 Oneida lost its home base, its studio dubbed the Ocropolis in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, due to the pervasive gentrification and over-development of the neighbourhood that was once a thriving arts community.

After watching the Monster Island building that housed the Ocropolis transform into a pile of rubble, the band began an intense period of exploration and discovery, retreating from the studio in favor of the stage, and birthing a panoply of limited, uncompromising releases that documented the band’s continuously unfolding journey. Six years after the release of A List of the Burning Mountains, the final emission from the Ocropolis, the band will release their newest studio creation Romance, their first album for Joyful Noise Recordings and a record marked by wild eclecticism, even for a group known for its shape-shifting nature. Recorded over several years in various locales, the 11 songs on Romance are built around deeply developed long-arc rhythm/phase concepts, noise, yearning, blind guitar rage, longing, the lurch of dying electronics, and a multi-modal embrace of human fallibility and artifice. From the crackling synth-led opener “Economy Travel” to the expansive 18-minute epic “Shepherd’s Axe,” Romance is an album in constant flux.

On “Bad Habit” the band employs phasing between organ and guitar to great, disorienting effect, while the primitive riffs of “Cockfight” offer a contrasting vision of rock minimalism. Listen closely on “Lay of the Land” and you will hear constant rhythmic development, with drummer Kid Millions eschewing repetition in favor of morphing patterns of hi-hat and snare. As with all mystery, Romance reveals more through closer attention and multiple listens. Oneida, always formidable in the live environment, will be touring throughout the year.

Kid Millions remains one of the most in-demand drummers in New York, exploring the outer reaches of percussion music with his own Man Forever project, as well as playing with Laurie Anderson, Royal Trux, and People of the North with Oneida compatriot Bobby Matador. Bobby also takes part in the psych-pop duo Nurse & Soldier, and recently formed yet another duo called New Pope. Guitarist Shahin Moita is a co-founder of underground stalwarts Ex Models and Knyfe Hyts. Through it all Oneida remains a powerful collective voice, a propulsive force for wildness and excitement, with Romance heralding the return of the epic, artful ballad version of the journey. 

TRACK LISTING

Economy Travel,
Bad Habit,
All In Due Time,
It Was Me,
Good Lie,
Lay Of The Land,
Cedars,
Reputation,
Cockfight,
Good Cheer,
Shepherd's Axe.

Produced by Alex Somers (Sigur Rós, Jónsi). Features members of The Drums. Sound Of Ceres = formerly Candy Claws. Features short story by Alastair Reynolds. The mysterious tale of The Twin, the second full-length from Sound of Ceres, exists in myriad permutations, too: a new album, a mesmerizing live show, videos, an Alastair Reynolds short story... and others in-between. While their 2016 debut Nostalgia for Infinity responded to the hugeness of time and space, now Sound of Ceres explore the strangeness of being just one human outcome amidst an infinitude of possibilities.

The adventure begins with one of the great works of 20th century German literature, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. As Ryan Hover read the tale of Hans Castorp (named for one of the twins of Gemini), whose life as a shipbuilder gets sidetracked by a visit to a rest home in the Swiss Alps, new chords, melodies, and lyrical ideas seized his imagination. Elements from the novel – the snow and isolation of the mountains, echoes of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a fixation with the number seven – took on a new form as the fantastic universe of The Twin took shape. Karen Hover and Ryan gave voice to early versions of the songs, exploring the sound of words even as they teased out lyrical ideas. Rough sketches were dispatched to bandmates Derrick Bozich, Jacob Graham, and Ben Phelan, and then Ryan fashioned their instrumental contributions into new arrangements.

But just as Hans in The Magic Mountain undergoes a great transformation as from the flatlands through the narrow gauge to the Alps, The Twin underwent great changes as it began to travel – in this case, to Iceland. Ryan, Karen, and Jacob arrived at the Reykjavik studio of producer Alex Somers (Sigur Rós, Julianna Barwick) with the original mixes of what seemed like more-or-less finished songs. And then they went through a different door. Guitars andharpsichords gave way to more analog synthesizers and melodic percussion. As the music’s dynamic range grew wider, timbres chilled, and more layers of vocals were woven into the background, a new twin of The Twin emerged. Hints of ‘60s exotica, ‘70s AM radio, and even symphonic grandeur weave through layers of rippling synths and shifting rhythms. Ideas drawn from the past and future fold together, creating a sound that exists outside any particular time or trend. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Gemini Scenic,
2. Humaniora,
3. Outer Century,
4. The Trance,
5. Rhatikon Chain,
6. Io Scenic A/B,
7. The Twin,
8. Mercury's Moods,
9. Solar Mirror 9,
10. Eden V. 

Freedays is almost in a way a debut album. Mike Savino's previous two albums, still having the songwriting stamina to welcome any music lover in, were birthed in a collaborative band setting. In 2015, Savino took a much-needed respite from New York City, where he had spent a decade and a half honing his craft, and assumed the role of sole caretaker at an abandoned health retreat nestled in the green mountains of North Georgia. The Bird's Nest, as it was called, completely surrounded by national forest, provided the freedom and space to work without time constraints or interruption.

Composed and recorded over a period of eight months, Freedays tells the story of a man in transition and documents an artist alone at the crossroads of the life he has and the one he wants. The album begins with "Backroads", which drops the listener into a darkened forest amidst a chorus of wailing coyotes and quickly takes off on a midnight drive. Tracks like "Being There", "A Place to Call Yo ur Own", and "CLC" provide an honest look into the author's thought process and decision making. Although it's often hard to imagine, most of the sounds on the album are experiments with the banjo, and they all reflect the innovative musings of one of the freshest sounds to come out of the Appalachians in decades

TRACK LISTING

1. Backroads
2. A Place To Call Your Own
3. Being There
4. CLC
5. Lost In Time
6. SeagullxEagle
7. The Riverbend
8. So Predictable
9. Freedays

Twenty years now there’s been this thing, our band, Joan of Arc. We have shifted shapes and modified our approaches quite a number of times in the course of twenty years. And we’ve done so always aiming to stay true to ourselves at that moment, by instinct and with conscious intent. This time, it took us a long time to figure out how to start back up. We threw away a lot of songs and started over, over and over. But here’s the thing: We are getting better at being ourselves. So many of the postures of youth just fall away with time. Most bands break up by that point, or become caricatures of their younger selves. Because money is tricky, or I should say, it comes to be that energy is tricky to muster after all of it goes into the basics of sustaining yourself.

Every day, at some point, it occurs to me that Richard Brautigan killed himself at the age that I am now. But I got this community of weirdo collaborators to lean on that he never had. We’ve never had an audience that gets any validation of its coolness through liking us. We’ve mangled, juxtaposed, and collaged too many elements for that social contract. But we trust each other. This time, finally, we trusted each other enough to throw all the songs away, to even throw away every preconceived idea about which one of us should take position at which instrument. We hit Record and played, and our collective tastes emerged. And they, our tastes in the moment, were the only standards in all the expanse of the stupefying and beautiful unknown universe, that we regarded as relevant in the least. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Smooshed That Cocoon
2. This Must Be The Placenta
3. Stranged That Egg Yolk
4. Full Moon And Rainbo Repair,
5. Cha Cha Cha Chakra,
6. Grange Hex Stream,
7. Two-Toothed Troll,
8. New Wave Hippies,
9. Never Wintersbone You,
10. F Is For Fake,
11. Ta-ta Terrordome.

In 1974 Jad and David Fair teamed up to form a band called Half Japanese. The route was simple, at first. If one pounded on drums the other could squeeze sounds from an electric guitar. There were no other band members to stay in tune with, so there was no particular reason for them to worry about tuning the guitar in a traditional manner or learning traditional chords. They were free from the start to express their music in their own way. They traded off the guitar and drumming rolls. Whichever one sang the words also played the guitar and the other one drummed. For a couple of years they wrote, recorded and performed this way, without the convention of more members. When they did decide to expand they went big. They first thought of recruiting an outside drummer, so that both could play guitars at the same time.

In 2014 Jad and David stripped things back to the roots. They went back to recording as a duo. One sang and played guitar, the other one drummed. 40 years had passed, but they slipped right back into the original roles and churned out a number of breath-stealing songs. 40 years later; 40 years better. One pick, two sticks and heart-warming vocals...... That's all they needed; two brothers, still rockin' the same damn deal! 

Recorded in Joshua Tree, CA, "Command Your Weather" sees Big Business return to its original two-man lineup of Jared Warren and Coady Willis. It's a haunting dream about the struggle for dominance of will over the power and unpredictability of nature. Or it's just a really great rock record, it depends on how weird you're willing to get. But you've never had so much fun being crushed in the cogs of the universe's great machine, that much is for sure! I mean, there's no law against having a couple cold beers while we all burn in the fire of time, am I right?!

Recorded by Dave Curran of UNSANE/PIGS/BIG BUSINESS' previous record fame. Founded in 2003 in Seattle, WA., Big Business has spent the last 13 years touring the world and making records. In 2006 Jared and Coady joined forces with the Melvins and moved to Los Angeles. Performing as members of the Melvins and staying autonomous as their own band, they have been there ever since. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Last Legs
2. Regulars
3. Father’s Day
4. Blacker Holes
5. Popular Demand
6. Own Throats
7. Send Help
8. Diagnostic Front
9. Horses

Announcing "Overjoyed", the first album in 13 years from legendary punk band Half Japanese. One of the most influential bands of all time, Jad Fair and Half Japanese spearheaded the DIY and Lo-Fi movements, influencing countless bands such as Sonic Youth, Neutral Milk Hotel, Daniel Johnston, and perhaps most notably, Kurt Cobain (who ranked Half Japanese amongst his top 50 favorites, had them open the "In Utero" tour, and was wearing their t-shirt when he died). Without exaggeration, Half Japanese is one of the most important bands in the history of music. "Overjoyed" was recorded and produced by John Dieterich of Deerhoof, and ranks amongst the best albums of the band's catalogue.

STAFF COMMENTS

Darryl says: After 13 years away, Half Japanese return to the scene with 'Overjoyed'. And they prove themselves to be as vital as ever, melodic indie-punk that keeps them ahead of the pack.

TRACK LISTING

1. In Its Pull
2. Meant To Be That Way
3. Brave Enough
4. Do It Nation
5. The Time Is Now
6. Our Love
7. Shining Star
8. Each Other's Arms
9. Overjoyed And Thankful
10. We Are Sure
11. As Good Can Be
12. Tiger Eyes

RIYL: Randy Newman, Paul Simon, Kishi Bashi, Van Dyke Parks, music!

Lewis and Addison Rogers are brothers who make pop-music together. When they do this, they go by the name Busman’s Holiday. Lewis plays guitar, and Addison plays his modest drum kit, complete with suitcase bass-drum. Independently, the brothers have performed with artists such as Jens Lekman (Addison drumming and providing backing vocals on his recent tour) and Sleeping Bag (Lewis was the original guitarist). “A Long Goodbye”, the first proper album from Busman’s Holiday was recorded by Mark Lawson (Arcade Fire) and mixed by Drew Vandenberg (Toro Y Moi, Kishi Bashi). The band has been featured on WNYC’s Radiolab.

TRACK LISTING

01 Bones I
02 Child Actor
03 Hoped To
04 Death
05 Alone
06 Not Alone
07 Baby Blue
08 World
09 We Are We
10 Bones II

Announcing 'Golden Tickets' - the latest mini album from WHY? The Wolf brothers' pop-inflected psychedelic folk-hop was nominally referred to as hip-hop at the beginning of their career. At this point - certainly on 'Golden Tickets' - the project has outgrown any easy genre-categorization. With the musical eclecticism, pop-twist, and experimental bent of artists like the Flaming Lips or Beck. WHY? shimmers on this album in vibraphone stippled, sweetly riffed songs with characteristically gut-wrenching subtext.

TRACK LISTING

1. Hunter Van Brocklin
2. Banana Mae
3. Fogg
4. GM Hearts AB
5. Murmurer
6. Dropjaw
7. Peta Godfrey

Stripped-down, unblighted, bedroom pop songs... about girls. "Women Of Your Life" is the intimately facile sophomore album from indie-slackers Sleeping Bag. The Bloomington, Indiana based trio is spearheaded by Dave Segedy, who is the group's drummer, songwriter and primary vocalist (that's right: a drummer who writes and sings all the songs!). Specializing in simple and honest songwriting, Malkmus-deadpan vocal delivery, and unusually addictive melodies, Sleeping Bag craft songs that are at once familiar and fresh. The band's debut s/t album was released on Joyful Noise in August 2011, receiving praise from Under The Radar, Impose Magazine, Village Voice, RCRD LBL, and My Old Kentucky Blog.

With their second album, the trio have matured in the ways one might expect: songs are a bit longer, lyrics a bit more personal, and arrangements more developed. But all of Sleeping Bag's signature elements are well represented throughout: the heartfelt ("In The Pocket", "Still Life"), the playful ("Allison Cole", "Saturday Night") and the unbelievably catchy ("Soccer Ball", "Walk Home"). Segedy's effortless melodies, accompanied by the distinctively jangling guitar work of Lewis Rogers and the tastefully minimal bass of David Woodruff, combine to form a sound that summons the energy and earnestness of 90s rock, while sidestepping throwback territory. Familiar influences are organically reconstructed into relevant,
captivating pop. These are instantly accessible songs which gain surprising depth with each obsessively repeated listen.

TRACK LISTING

1. Women Of Your Life
2. Soda You
3. Soccer Ball
4. Allison Cole
5. In The Pocket
6. Nightmare
7. Saturday Night
8. Coco
9. Still Life
10. Walk Home..

Deriving their name from information reading proteins on the cell surface of the brain, this northern California duo creates strikingly original prog-influenced / semi-improv soundscapes from their secluded Mt Shasta studio. Musically the sound can be reminiscent of everything from Can to Sonic Youth, to early Floyd and Coil. The instrumentation is diverse, yet focused; some-what minimalist yet always interesting. Receptor Sight has developed as a vehicle to push musical boundaries while dually serving as a sort-of consciousness exploration. If you allow it, this album will take you places far beyond the normalcy of reality. With "Cycles And Connections", the groups sophomore effort, Receptor Sight has come into their own sound; and admirably, not a single computer or synthesizer was used in the recording of this album. Expanding upon their influences of psychedelic rock, Receptor Sight has created a sound which has yet to be truly categorized. Synchronicity is the theme here, a coincidence of sounds that, once they are played, seem to be meaningfully related. The energy which permeates the universe will flow from your speakers.