Noah Kahan on Cape Elizabeth –
“And that EP in particular is such a special story, because it was right at the beginning of the pandemic, and I just made it with my neighbour, a friend of mine, who’s an amazing producer.

We worked on it for a week, and we didn’t really promote it too much — and it kind of became “Stick Season” before “Stick Season” in a lot of ways.

It was a study on a place and a relationship in a place, and it was the first time I’d experimented with telling a story that felt like it had an overarching narrative.

And it was also the first time that I let myself just not care about how it sounded at the end. Whatever the process was, I just wanted it to make me happy. And to see it connect with people really inspired me to write “Stick Season.”

It kind of gave me the confidence to be like, “All right, this niche-specific storytelling stuff can actually connect with people in a more universal way.” I really owe it all to that EP, and it’s still probably my favorite piece of work I’ve made. I just love it.”

Within six days and “without overthinking anything,” Noah Kahan completed the five-track Cape Elizabeth EP which has amassed 200M streams. See the newly repackaged Cape Elizabeth Aqua vinyl as Noah’s “thank you to the fans who stuck around, came to shows, watched my livestreams, and listened.” The vinyl features fan favorite songs “A Troubled Mind”, “Glue Myself Shut” and “Maine”.

TRACK LISTING

1. A Troubled Mind
2. Close Behind
3. Glue Myself Shut
4. Anyway
5. Maine

Elizabeth Parker is a composer you may not have heard of until now. Well here she is, in all her musical glory, having worked for decades at the front line of British electronics, radiophonics, soundracks and more. This is an album full of musical ideas ahead of the curve, with contemporary technology that was to go on and very much shape the future of sound we know now. From classic tape loop techniques to modern sampling concepts you will find dark ambience, drones, beer adverts and drifts into space. This is the first ever Elizabeth Parker LP and represents (with 26 tracks) a very small retrospective of her extraordinarily prolific and commercial output. Not to be missed.

TRACK LISTING

Space Dris
Memory Loss
Siren-call
Harmonisers Of The Spheres
Telepathy Beyond Time
Older Than Time
Congestion Hoe-down
Shadowland
Celandine And Columbine
The Dying Of The Light
Cloud
Darkness At Noon
Future Perfect
The Killing Skies

In a log cabin by Moose Brook in Hardwick Massachusetts is where Mary Remington grew up with her parents and brother. She was always a creative soul, painting and making artworks throughout her childhood and eventually graduating from MassArt. She travelled to farms to work the earth, to stone yards to cut stone, and to the rivers and oceans to dig for clay, finding rich meaning and potent metaphor for her stories and songs. In the summer of 2013 Mary spent a week at the Kerrville Folk Festival and sang her songs to an audience for the first time. This adventure turned her on to the idea that she should share her songs. Now Mary has recorded her first album of original songs with her friends Adrianne Lenker and James Krivchenia of Big Thief and Mat Davidson of Twain. In Embudo was made using full live takes onto a 4-track in a small house edged up along the Rio Grande in Embudo, New Mexico. Featuring: Adrianne Lenker (acoustic guitar, vocals) Mat Davidson (steel guitar, acoustic guitar, electric bass, vocals), James Krivchenia (percussion and engineer) and Mary Remington (vocals)

TRACK LISTING

1. All Words
2. Dresser Hill
3. Mary Mary
4. Fire
5. Green Grass
6. Holdfast
7. Tuesday
8. Mother
9. Wind Wind
10. Water Song
11. Wooden Roads

R. Elizabeth is the recording name of London-based artist and academic Rachael Finney. Every And All We Voyage On is her solo recording project’s second full length and is a focused distillation of her practice in sound art and her knack for pop minimalism. It follows a long sold out release on Where To Now? Records and a prolonged period in which she concentrated on artist residencies exploring her interest in recorded sound and voice. Immediate and natural, Every And All We Voyage On manages to sound joyful while tackling complex themes, handling everything with an improvisatory touch.
The songs are full of air and light; infectious, melodic and off-the-cuff.

Recorded using a single 80s Casio keyboard, reel-to-reel tape manipulation, piano and vocal, Finney’s practice with R. Elizabeth belies a studious attention to detail. Her academic work is often focused on analysing sounds – particularly voice and language – divorced from meaning and R. Elizabeth challenges the listener with overtly emotional tropes: sweeping portmento lap-steel guitar keyboard tones on Back From Ten suggest a nostalgic melancholy when it intersects with the narrator closing her eyes, realising she has nothing left to give. The lilting vocal cloaked in reverb is disarming, with an almost child-like surrender to the undertow of the song. On Tragedy And Trade there’s a rough grace to the mixing with visceral, manipulated tape sounding like the artists’ hands are literally in the speakers wrenching the melodies in mid-air. When it intersects with chants about the “gaps and the silences” it has an eerie, hauntological effect. R. Elizabeth is constantly playing with sound and song: a Wonderland of perceived emotion, the listener’s perception of what they’re hearing constantly in flux, it’s deceptively simple and deserving of repetitive listening.

Cut Piano opens the album and introduces a documentary-feel which the album upholds through-out. It’s the sound of the artist mangling a tape of her own piano recording, twisting it out of shape and suggesting a bend in reality. We’re listening to the artist becoming a ghost in her own machine, a 3rd or 4th generation copy of an emotion rendered a long time ago, chilling and playful at the same time. An Image Is Different bursts out of this with a sunny Casiotone beat, a melodic contrast that also introduces Finney’s vocal. It flitters between a gorgeous repetitive melody ruminating about the nature of reality and a seemingly careless, conversational tone. The effect is joyful, but you don’t really know why. The lyrics instruct someone (you? The artist?) to “go outside and break someone’s neck, make it feel so real” before ending with R. Elizabeth nonchalantly stating “I dunno, to be honest I don’t really care” as if on the phone to someone they’re bored with. It would be jarring if it wasn’t so catchy and uplifting. The title track is a slow-tempo meditation with droning synths providing the background to slow, dragging tape sounds and
grounding, just-out-of-focus vocals bunkering down in the mix. The methodology suggests the work of Broadcast: there’s a loping bassline that propels the track forward but the duet/duel between Finney’s haunted vocal and the soloing tape warble provides aural snakes for the listener’s ear to follow. Spiritual To Symphony is the brightest, most unabashed example of what R.Elizabeth achieves on Every And All We Voyage On. It’s utopian, bright and hypnotic: over a repetitive hook, a double tracked vocal intones a kind of post-structuralist, feminist manifesto: “A different kind of intimacy, a kind of female masculinity, I sense how to be, from vision to visuality.” It’s the perfect example of a piece of music that can be taken on its own terms, enjoyed as pure sound massaging the receptors in the brain or as something that can be dissected, it’s a microcosm of the album as a whole. Effortless and endlessly playful, the album is constantly shifting in and out of focus, from airy imagination to earthy reality. R. Elizabeth invites you to take the sound however you want it. Maybe she doesn’t really care, maybe she does. Who really knows? 

TRACK LISTING

1. Cut Piano
2. An Image Is Different
3. Back From Ten
4. Every And All We Voyage On
5. Spiritual To Symphony
6. Tragedy And Trade
7. Piano Cut

Dancing is songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer and performer Nancy Elizabeth’s third album, and her first new material since 2009.

Nancy wrote and recorded almost everything herself over the course of two and half years in her tiny home studio in Manchester. For the first time Nancy used a computer as a compositional tool alongside her idiosyncratic palette of instruments, including a battered piano, guitar, and her own multi-layered vocals. The end result is more ambitious, more focused and more uplifting than anything she’s done before.

While the adventurous sounds she used create a mesmeric physical effect, the emotional purity of the lyrics is just as powerful . First single ‘The Last Battle’ opens the album, a magnificent introduction to its trove of pure musical delights. A soaring, celestial-soprano array, the song recalls Ennio Morricone and Arthur Lee, building to an irresistible climax.

Featuring artwork created by Nancy herself, the album will be available on CD in a gatefold card wallet, and on limited edition vinyl LP (including a CD of the album).

TRACK LISTING

1. The Last Battle
2. Heart
3. Indelible Day
4. Mexico
5. Simon Says Dance
6. Death In A Sunny Room
7. Debt
8. Shimmering Song
9. All Mouth
10. Raven City
11. Desire
12. Early Sleep

"Wrought Iron" is the second album by Wigan's Nancy Elizabeth, following the success of 2007's "Battle And Victory". Largely focused on piano-led songs (Nancy's instrument of choice this time), the album is a more understated affair than the guitar and harp-centred debut. The quality of the songwriting is stronger than ever, with a more personal, emotional edge to this album. Recorded in a remote corner of North Wales following time spent in rural Spain and the Faroe Islands, the album's arrangements reflect a sense of space and solitude. The album is as much influenced by the minimalism of Arvo Pärt and Steve Reich as by the choral harmonies of Judee Sill and the bare expression of Leonard Cohen's early records. Nancy recorded with James Yorkston on his last album "When The Haar Rolls In", as well as a forthcoming album of traditional folk songs as part of The Big Eye Family Players. She also recently collaborated with Japanese artist Susumu Yokota on his album "Mother", and contributed to the Lal Waterson tribute album "Migrating Bird". "Wrought Iron" should appeal to fans of PJ Harvey's "White Chalk", Talk Talk, Beth Gibbons, Laura Marling, Blue Roses and Alela Diane.

With an intuitive understanding of melody and dynamics, Nancy Elizabeth brings a refreshingly Northern turn of phrase to her debut album, "Battle And Victory". The Lancashire-born singer's down-to-earth songs are brought to life by her warm and unaffected voice. Unpretentious but effortlessly ambitious, Nancy turns the retro, less-is-more aesthetic of the current acoustic revival on its head. Not content with writing and singing all the songs herself, the 23-year-old also plays most of the instruments, including guitar, khim, Indian harmonium, Appalachian dulcimer and bouzouki, amongst many others. The album was recorded in a 17th Century white stone cottage in the remote Welsh countryside, and a village hall outside Manchester, resulting in an intimate, uncontrived gem of a record. Using a minimum of recording equipment, the heartfelt honesty of her songs is revealed, extending to grander, more complex arrangements when the occasion calls, and bringing in friends to add cello, horns and percussion. While her work is never in thrall to any particular artist or genre, Nancy's music calls to mind aspects of artists as diverse as The Incredible String Band, Talk Talk and Led Zeppelin.

Athens, Georgia trio The Low Lows return to Europe in February to promote their new single, "Elizabeth Pier". The title track is taken from their forthcoming album, "Little Tigers". Backed with B-side "Raining In Eva", and the video for "Dear Flies, Love Spider". Their debut album "Fire On The Bright Sky" was released in October. It's a radiant, desperate prom-night of a record, in which stark southern sweetness gives way unexpectedly to great storms of guitar noise. Sheets of dissonance and singer P.L. Noon's arcing wail conjure Galaxie 500 or "Electr-O-Pura" era Yo La Tengo, while bright walls of country narcosis à la My Morning Jacket crumble into climactic, stomping feedback and lush, sad balladry.