After leading the cult performance art collective Lazarus Kane, Ben Hambro took a more introspective, lyrically driven approach with vegas water taxi. Their debut album, 'Things Are Gonna Be Alright', was self-released in November 2023—a beautiful yet jarring collection of songs capturing the chaos and contradictions of your twenties.

The album is getting reissued with its first-ever vinyl release via PNKSLM Recordings on June 13, 2025. The reissue includes four exclusive bonus tracks recorded live at The Windmill. Hambro, who's also collaborated with artists such as Katy J Pearson, continues to craft music that resonates and surprises.

TRACK LISTING

1. Creative Director Blues
2. Dog Race
3. Jukebox
4. Six Music Dads
5. Twenty Year Cycle
6. Shout
7. Get Clean
8. Modern Love
9. Get Clean (Live)
10. Birkenstocks (Live)
11. Six Music Dads (Live)
12. Creative Director Blues (Live)
13. Modern Love (Live)

At long last, our unofficial companion piece to "Rocks & Mountains" sees the light of day. Another mystical dubplate tune by an unknown artist, "Warrior" developed a reputation among the most dedicated students of dubplates. The mysterious artist credit comes from a master tape box labeled with several Sly & Robbie dubplate tunes, in fact the very same tape which yielded our "Rocks & Mountains" master! However, part of the tape had been erased and re-used, so only a few seconds of the tune remained! It was heartbreaking, but enough to keep us hunting for the tune. It's now a few years after that near miss, and we finally secured a crisp master to bring this tune out. Hard, minimal, dubplate style roots from Sly & Robbie at Channel 1. Ciddy Bop, who are you?

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: As promised, the Digikiller reissue campaign continues in fine fettle, with this stone cold, rootsy system slayah from Ciddy Bop. Tough, with a militant riddim, and those eerie piano stabs taking right to the yard. Unmissable, really.

TRACK LISTING

A. Warrior
B. Version

Part 2 of our 1980 Taxi showcase, and it's heavier than the first. Here is one of Sly & Robbie's most loved productions, in its initial raw dubplate form. In August 1980, this raw cut of the haunting lovelorn classic first started to make its way out there on dubplate, in this spare, cavernous heavy mix without the synthesizer and syndrum sounds that would eventually adorn the final released mix. As tapes of these type of early mixes made for sound systems more often than not were not saved or archived, we're overjoyed to have located this one and brought it out. Like our previous Viceroys Taxi releases, this is some of the heaviest music of its day, in its pure initial form like you would have heard Shaka or other serious sounds playing thru the end of 1980.

TRACK LISTING

A. Heart Made Of Stone - Raw Cut
B. Heart Made Of Stone Raw Dub

Rahaan heat on Yellow Taxi - one of the Hot Biscuit subsideries. Pretty sure this is a new cut, as it features Gregory Carmouche & Cherrelle CheriSoul Sullivan on the credits.  

"It Is What It Is" is a seriously engrossing disco cut. Tamed beautifully for the mid session, it rides a steady bass and percussion groove, decorating it tastefully with organ licks, trumpet parps and this nagging vocal hook that really gets inside your head. A proper groover, make no mistake. We've vocal and instrumental mixes, both working the arrangement into slightly alternative frenzies. Gotta say, this is pretty mind blowing stuff from Rahaan and everyone involved. You don't wanna sleep on this! 

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: As well as being an absolute whiz on the cutting table, Rahaan is known for some expert production chops too. Here he collaborates on a new original number that's pure mid session energy. Cowbells, timpanis, killer vocal hook, simmering white hot throughout. So good.

TRACK LISTING

1.Original Version 08:16
2.Vocal Remix 08:26
3.Instrumental Remix 06:09

Wildly creative free-form L.A. singer-songwriter and multi instrumentalist Laena Myers releases her highly anticipated debut solo album, ‘LUV (Songs Of Yesterday)’. Released on Taxi Gauche Records, the 11-track collection is the first to feature the genre-spanning composer, in-demand session player/singer and classically trained violinist putting her own name to her recordings.

Formerly known as Laena Geronimo and L.M.I. / Laena Myers-Ionita, Laena is perhaps best known as lead singer, songwriter and guitarist of critically-acclaimed and internationally touring rockers FEELS, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. She’s also known for her time as bassist for goth-punk band Numb.er as well as the Motown-inspired pop outfit The Like, and as the go-to-violinist for a myriad of artists from the L.A. music scene and beyond - contributing to released recordings by John Frusciante, Jhené Aiko, Ty Segall, Shannon Lay and The Allah Las to name a few.

Describing herself as “An awkward, shy kid who played in the Jr. Philharmonic Orchestra of California and wore headphones blasting NIN, The Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth all the time”, Laena cut her teeth in a busking band, performing purely improvised material on street corners in Hollywood and spent the entirety of her young adulthood as a supporting player in countless L.A. bands - at times as many as five simultaneously, while working full time and sleeping in her car during lunch breaks.

Inspired as much by the soft weight of Hope Sandoval and Patsy Cline’s dramatic powers, Patti Smith’s poetic punk and Nico’s avant-garde musings as she is by contemporaries like Angel Olsen, Aldous Harding and Cate LeBon, her musical roots run deep. She is the daughter of American drummer Alan Myers (DEVO, Skyline Electric, Jean Paul Yamamoto) and Romanian singer/songwriter and visual artist Greta Ionita (Babooshka).

As a solo artist, Laena's punk background of guitar-based songwriting and swagger merges with her innovative classical/experimental roots and love for singing ballads, and this is shown throughout ‘LUV (Songs Of Yesterday’), leading to a depth of emotion that cuts to the heart of even the most hardened, revealing a more tender side to her vocal and lyrical prowess over lush string arrangements.

The album’s opening track ‘LUV’, with it’s only lyrics “When I say I’m in love you best believe I mean love L.U.V.” is a nod to The Shangri-Las and New York Dolls, and was used to evocatively soundtrack fashion brand CELINE’s Spring 2020 campaign. “Half the songs on the album are about relationships in which I thought I was in love - true love - but it turned out to be something else”, Laena explains, “so ‘LUV (Songs of Yesterday)’ seemed a fitting title: sounded like love, looked like love, but it wasn’t real love.”

“The overarching theme of the album is strength in vulnerability” Laena explains, “it’s a collection of songs that were too personal and dreamy for FEELS, songs of haunted love, melancholy and hope, selected and woven together with instrumental segues and field recordings into a whole experience.”

The record’s first single, ‘Give ‘Em Hell’, written six months after her father passed away, is about keeping the flame alive and having the courage to believe in yourself. “We were very close” she says. “One night before I got on stage he stopped me and said “Give ‘em hell, kid”, and this phrase has become a mantra to me, to not hold back and give it my ALL. Many of these songs come from heavy times”, she continues, “but there is always the glimmer of a brighter tomorrow. Reach out when you need to, move through the gears and you’ll come out the other side.”

The songs contained in ‘LUV (Songs Of Yesterday)’ are picked from over the course of a decade, written purely from a place of honest expression and filled with texture, depth, and meaning. They were recorded between tours mostly in sweltering summer bedrooms by friend and co-producer Scott Cornish (Angel Olsen, Big Thief, No Age), and mixed during the pandemic. The album features Laena’s vocals, guitar, bass, and violin playing and huge-sounding, lush string arrangements supplemented with drums and percussion by Nick Murray (Cate Le Bon, White Fence, Thee Oh Sees), synths by Jeff Fribourg (Numb.er, Froth), lap steel by Cole Berliner (Kamikaze Palm Tree), and sax by Gabe Flores (Grave Flowers Bongo Band), as well as field recordings — birds singing at daybreak, footsteps and bells making their way into a cave, the wind on a peak in Angeles National Forest. 

TRACK LISTING

1. LUV
2. Pulsar
3. Bouquet
4. Give Em Hell
5. Reflectors
6. Strong
7. The Choir
8. Splendour
9. Kitchen Humming
10. About A Thing
11. I Wouldn’t Mind

Defamator is the long-time-coming debut project of 24-year-old Chloe Gallardo. It tells a story of betrayal in love and friendship and the painful reality of overcoming love lost and former heartbreak. Drawing influences from artists such as Broadcast, Grouper & My Bloody Valentine Gallardo adds her own haunting, folk-style vocals and hyper-specific lyrics to create a sonic unique to her. A style that she describes in her words as “dark shoegaze bedroom indie pop”.

Album opener “Bloodline” epitomises this bittersweet modus operandi. 15 seconds into its dainty acoustic strum , Gallardo adamantly sulks “I’m fucked up” - the salvo of a lyric about feeling like a family disappointment. As the track lifts up into a cascading gaze-pop rush, recalling the likes of Bachelor and Snail Mail, we’re blessed with a pristine elegance that belies the song’s raging core. “I have always written music this way.”, she says of this fundamental contradiction. “It’s funny because I try so hard to write darker-sounding songs and they always come out way too pretty. So, I’ve resorted to writing the most gut-wrenching and intense lyrics to compensate.”

Written mostly during peak-pandemic times in Gallardo’s bedroom - (“you can hear how scared and alone I was.”) - the songs that made their way onto Defamator arose from a concerted period of healing. Drawing from the teachings of therapy, the songwriting process gave her the means to channel some deeply entrenched emotional scars.

This venting of anger is implicit throughout the record. The album’s title - Gallardo’s own neologism - uses the concepts of “defamation” and “defamatory speech” to innovate a kind of pejorative accusation. As a result, it is like we are actively listening to Gallardo forcefully take command of her past. Of the title track she explains: “The song Defamator is about someone who spoke untruthful things about me in order to manipulate me and the way people perceived me and I felt that was an underlying theme in most of the album.”

Recorded at Jazzcat Studios in Long Beach California with Jonny Bell (Hanni El Khatib, Adult Books, etc.) Defamator marks Gallardo’s first time in a “legitimate recording studio”. And it shows. Bell’s production is vital moving part here. There’s more stripped back affairs - ‘There Will Be Blood”; ”The Way’ - songs which gently seethe and purr like Grouper’s spectral dream-pop; Gallardo’s fluttering folk-ish voice gloriously pushed to forefront.

TRACK LISTING

1) Bloodline
2) God Is Dead
3) There W`ill Be Blood
4) Defamator
5) (Untitled)
6) New Jersey
7) To See You Go
8) The Way
9) Last Dance
10) New Jersey (Reprise) 

Cannot recommend this LP more for fans of Moon Duo, Spacemen 3 and Black Angels.

Following a much needed hiatus Harvey Rushmore & The Octopus release their third studio album, a heady mix of garage, psych and Krautrock.

‘Freedomspacecake’ is the band’s 46 minute dystopian and fuzz-soaked answer to a world tripping over one disaster to the next with the sting of the thrilling ride.

The members of the band have known each other for over 15 years - Massimo Tondini and Jakob Läser, were former members of the band Navel – and as with fellow veterans of psych rock such as The Heads and Wooden Shjips they plough a tantalising locked groove.

TRACK LISTING

1. Plastiq
2. Speedmaster
3. The Wiper
4. Bakerman
5. Rainbow Machine
6. Trip In The Mountain
7. Spacegarage In Your Head
8. Harvey Stardust
9. Freedomspacecake

Fresh from the twisted machinations and fertile imagination of Cumbrian-born, London- dwelling artist and seer Natalie Sharp, ‘Trifle’ is a gallery of grotesquery not recommended for either the nervous of disposition or lactose intolerant. Arriving from a nocturnal world of sex and skullduggery, urban alienation and costumed ritual, these irreverent and outlandish ditties exist on a unique psychic realm in which profane and profound happily step out together on the lash.

Whether chronicling the drama and drudgery of the night bus, inhabiting a magical fantasy landscape or delving deep and dark into her own psyche for inspiration, Sharp’s tales and travelogues arrive at a unique environ equally rich in the caustic and the cosmic. Lurking somewhere between the eldritch diva manifestations of Diamanda Galas and the wry reflections of Victoria Wood, yet equally driven by a magpie spirit and conceptual chutzpah redolent of Leigh Bowery and an acidic wit damaged by John Cooper Clarke, Natalie Sharp’s brainchild here engineers a collision between the high-maintenance and the kitchen sink that’s a feverish spectacle to behold. Along with her co-conspirators Philip Winter (Wrangler/Tuung) and Will Kwerk, Sharp decamped to the splendid isolation of the otherworldly Bodmin Moor studio of Benge (John Foxx & The Maths/Wrangler) to sculpt these serenades, surrounded by vintage analogue equipment and sci-fi paperbacks.

There, a unique and deliriously disconcerting confection took shape, equally informed by post-punk angularities and electronic experimentation - as on the opening clarion call ‘Home’ or the salacious ‘Knicker Elastic’ - not to mention torch song visions and choral reverie, as on the ethereal ‘Dribble Wizard’ and the poignant closing lament ‘Nowhere’, yet with dramatic panache, abundant absurdity and emotional impact to offer at every turn.

TRACK LISTING

1/Home
2/Knicker Elastic
3/Bijoux Boy
4/When The Water's Cold
5/Nowhere
6/Dribble Wizard
7/ Mr Coral
8/Shame
9/Cornflakes
10/Hammered In Homebase

Swiss indie-rock band 7 Dollar Taxi give out blasts of 60s beat music clashing with 80s post-punk, all freshly and colourfully wrapped up in a British manner and with a garage attitude that makes established bands look like greenhorns.

The Vichy Government were established on Valentine's Day 2002 with their debut live performance the following May Day. Since then they have been daubed with a reputation for antagonistic, anti-consensus pop and their agit-cabaret live show has become a thing of legend. The spartan musical landscapes crafted by Andrew Chilton, (Keith Richards of the Yamaha Portsaound) vary from ethereal to infantile and come laced with more hooks than an MFI warehouse. They provide a unique setting for Jamie Manners' sneering but heartfelt vignettes about life.

Two years after their last long player, Taxi return with another fine set of tracks for our listening pleasure. Mixing up soul, nu-jazz and electronics they create a subtle, atmospheric home listening LP.