‘Black Duck’ captures a band already deeply in tune with one another. The threepiece supergroup consists of Douglas McCombs, Charles Rumback and Bill MacKay. Each has a distinct musical voice that is instantly recognizable yet blends seamlessly with one another - their time performing together, playing to the moment and reading each other and the spaces they’re in formed a fluency between the trio which allows them to follow each other down winding paths and short tangents alike.

Black Duck’s debut is a testament to that fluency, an expedition led by three veterans into alluring worlds bathed in myriad splendours. ‘Black Duck’ is a gallery of sonic tapestries, unbound by any genre constraints. Black Duck redefine what two guitarists and a drummer can do; pieces move from breezy shuffles to stormy blues rumbles to gorgeous textural drones.

Playing entirely improvised live sets for years helped develop the trio’s acute senses for one another, knowing precisely how to listen to the others and bolster whatever direction they move in. In the short time the trio have played together, they have performed at Big Ears Festival and alongside acts like Yo La Tengo. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Of The Lit Backyards
2. Foothill Daze
3. Delivery
4. Second Guess
5. The Trees Are Dancing
6. Thunder Fade That Earth
7. Smells
8. Lemon Treasure
9. Light’s New Measure

Pitchfork awarded ‘Sons Of’ an 8.3 and a spot in their Best New Music category in their review written by Philip Sherburne.

The first full length collaboration from two artists who have expanded the field of rock through their work over the last three decades, both as individuals and in their time together in The Sea and Cake.

John McEntire is known for his work as a musician playing with Tortoise, Jim O’Rourke, Stereolab and others. Owner and operator of Soma Electronic Music Studios, he is also known for his pioneering work as a producer and engineer, working with Stereolab, Archer Prewitt, Yo La Tengo, Bright Eyes, The Fiery Furnaces and Chicago Underground, among many others.

‘Sons Of’ finds two master craftsmen working at the nexus of pristine production and skilful improvisation, forging compelling narrative arcs into glistening metropolises of infinite pulse. The resulting sound is one of transformative fluidity; each passing beat marking a sense of familiarity while the surrounding atmospheres are in constant flux. Ever-shifting tonalities and magnetic grooves propel the music with persistent momentum without feeling hurried buoyed by the steady pace, creating the framework that allows space for new sounds to breathe and evolve.

TRACK LISTING

1. A Ghost At Noon
2. Crossing At The Shallow
3. A Yellow Robe (Part 1)
4. A Yellow Robe (Part 2)
5. A Drink At The Banquet
6. Ascending By Night

Alison Chesley is an unparalleled cellist and composer who has been making boundaryless music for nearly three decades under the moniker Helen Money. From her work in Verbow to her solo releases, extending to her work as a highly sought after collaborator with Jarboe, Bob Mould, Steve Albini, Neurosis and many more, Chesley has remained a singular voice and a pioneer in expanding the scope and perception of the cello. Will Thomas is an active composer for commercials, TV, and film (GvsE, CSI, The Haunted Swordsman). He has also contributed to several of Helen Money’s solo albums and an ongoing collaboration with Roger Eno. Trace marks Thomas’s and Chesley’s first fully collaborative album, synthesizing their myriad skills as songwriters, performers, and sound artists into vivid, profoundly moving music.

Helen Money and Will Thomas are masters of invoking emotional atmospheres. Their music paints in vibrant hues with outlines blurred, often using dense layers of processed instruments and textural ambience as a backdrop for harmonic tension and melodies. Trace is thrillingly cinematic. Each piece tells a compelling story through ratcheting suspense, twisting shifts, unfurling arcs, and blissful repose. “I don’t compose with a storyline in mind,” says Chesley. “I search for a feeling – a sound. It’s often not until the very end of the process that I realize what I was trying to express.” Chesley’s cello and Thomas’s synthesized textures converse with one another with a sense of curiosity. They each use their highly developed means of conveying emotion through sound and their collaborative natures to accentuate the emotional arc of the compositions. After years supplementing each other’s music and the long isolation of lockdowns, their collaboration’s conversational approach is rich with the electricity of old friends reconnecting. Chesley notes, “I was feeling grateful to be able to do this with someone I had worked with for so long – to be in the studio together again.”

Trace is a masterclass in sound design. Chesley’s formidable skill as a cellist and composer ground the compositions with rich organic sounds of cello and bow. Thomas’s equally deft hand manipulated electronics, keyboards create potent frameworks that bolster the sense of mystery and searching across the album. “Thieves” applies a jittering rhythmic pulse and sampled cello harmonics that tug forward anxiously before distorted cello thrusts transform the piece into something more resolute. The duo of “Half Asleep” and “Half Awake” act as companion pieces, using lush arrangements of cello and piano, each intoning atop steady chordal figures that sound distant and familiar, like meeting a friend in a dream. Chesley and Thomas pursue harmony and discord in equal measure. A thrum of foreboding blurs the lines between their instruments on “Boulevard in Silence,” which embodies wisps of shadow and the cowl of nightfall. Industrial crashes and obliterated bass textures subsume “Tilt” and the gorgeous timbres of “Glass Shattered” swim in waves of dissonance without resolution. “Trace” moves from gentle nudges to a hypnotic thump as the piece grows more rhythmically and sonically dense; each deviation rewarding with unexpected textures and sounds.

Chesley and Thomas’s unique voices as composers remain discernable and present throughout the album, but Trace is a celebration of connection of collaboration with an acute sense of details and the power they convey. On Trace, the duo utilize timbre, tone and dynamics as essential tools in crafting stunning emotive narratives. Together, the duo wield sound with inquisitive aplomb, burrowing into each other’s sonic aesthetics and unearthing irrefutable beauty. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Someone Out There
2. Thieves
3. Half Asleep
4. Boulevard In Silence
5. Abandon
6. Trace
7. She Never Suspected
8. Half Awake
9. Tilt
10. Glass Shattered
11. The Wheel

Markus Popp is endlessly curious, and his music as Oval is delightfully inventive. Since pioneering albums in the 90s ‘systemisch’ and ‘94diskont.’, Oval has continually excavated new spaces in electronic music, leaving an indelible mark on the landscape.

New album, ‘Romantiq’, finds Popp delivering his most light and delicate tones to date. Like the plucking of harp strings, Popp’s organic and playful approach to sound is warm and bright. Oval continually, confounds with his ability to conjure such lithe, evocative sonics from software. 

‘Romantiq’ evolved from an audio visual collaboration with digital artist Robert Seidel for the grand opening of the German Romantic Museum, where a huge outdoor projection covered the museum building. Popp sought a more expansive definition of the romantic, conjuring flickering images that glitch, evolve and collapse in on one another - opulent neo-chamber music lit by the paradoxically heart-warming screen glow of social media flirtations.

Popp crafted dozens of short vignettes that each sought to evoke a specific mood or emotion. Processed period instruments trace luxuriant spaces that shift from low-lit chambers to glistening palatial grandeur, glitching through past, present and future. Swelling atmospheres emerge like perfume, rich scents flooding the senses before evaporating on the breeze. ‘Romantiq’’s musical oxytocin is made from ancient instruments processed and edited by a modern electronic master with the utmost deftness and delicacy.

TRACK LISTING

1. Zauberwort
2. Rytmy
3. Cresta
4. Amethyst
5. Wildwasser
6. Glockenton
7. Elektrin
8. Okno
9. Touha
10. Lyriq

On Garden Party, Rose City Band’s country psychedelic rock evokes the wide-open spaces of the American west and free spirits who call it home. Lead by acclaimed guitarist and vocalist Ripley Johnson, Rose City Band are some of the best players in contemporary rock: pedal steel guitarist Barry Walker, keyboardist Paul Hasenberg, bassist Dewey Mahood (aka Plankton Wat), drummer Dustin Dybvig, and features Sanae Yamada of Moon Duo on Synthesizer. At its inception Rose City Band focused on what songwriter Johnson calls “porch music”. Recorded largely at Center for Sound, Light, and Color Therapy in Portland and mixed by John McEntire, Garden Party features guest appearances by Moon Duo bandmates John Jeffrey on drums and Sanae Yamada on synths, as well as Rose City Band live performers Hasenberg on keyboards and Walker on pedal steel. With the musicians in his life in mind, Ripley’s porch has opened up for each player to step into. Despite being tracked primarily as a solo endeavor the recordings capture the twists and bends of a fully realized ensemble, and in a nod to bands such as the Grateful Dead it doesn’t stop there. “The songs won’t really be finished until we play them on the road,” says Johnson. Like all great music, Garden Party taps into the listener’s emotional center and takes them to their happy place – their sunny spot. The album is an invitation to recalibrate, a joyous ride where the band’s sounds surround and embrace you. Ripley says it best: “I always like when an album starts in one place, and ends in another” What a beautiful journey it is.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Another languid slice of new country from the brilliant Rose city Band. Evoking a sense of hazy road trips and bristling summer sunshine, these pieces flow and bloom from dusty lounge jazz into full groove-led psychedelic territory. Another smash hit from Johnson & co.

TRACK LISTING

1. Chasing Rainbows
2. Slow Burn
3. Garden Song
4. Porch Boogie
5. Saturday’s Gone
6. Mariposa
7. Moonlight Highway
8. El Rio

Power trio Dommengang deliver heavy psych rock on new album ‘Wished Eye’. The album delivers super tasty, dirty guitars, serpentine psychedelic grooves, and propulsive drumming with gleeful abandon. Guitarist Dan ‘Sig’ Wilson switches from explosive to expansive on a knife’s edge, laying down wailing hooks before evaporating into bristling fuzz. Bassist Brian Markham and drummer Adam Bulgasem (Black Mountain)’s foundations play with time, galloping forward or stretching out into the cosmos. ‘Wished Eye’ is an expression of the sheer joy of making music together.

For fans of Blues Creation, Earthless, High Rise, and Acid Mothers Temple.

TRACK LISTING

Runaway
Society Blues
Last Card
Myth Time
Little Beirut
Blue & Peaceful
Petrichor
Wished Eye
Flower

Liturgy transcends the traditional parameters of what constitutes a rock band. Founded by Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, Liturgy is a part of a shared discipline of composition, art, and philosophy that thrives on exploring the spaces between.

Liturgy’s signature use of rhythmic complexity and repetition are exponentially amplified to maximalist proportions on ‘93696’ ‘93696’ was recorded by Steve Albini at Electrical Audio and mixed by Seth Manchester at Machines With Magnets. Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix has remained at the vanguard of New York’s art world, composing music for art installations, as well as developing her own, and taking part in, guest lectures and producing her own philosophical lecture series, as well as a film in November 2020 tied to Liturgy’s fifth studio album.

Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix and Liturgy have been featured as the artist in-residence at New York City’s Issue Project Room several times, recently debuting ‘93696’’s title track and presenting her opera Origin of the Alimonies. “The band knows its virtues and works them hard: density, repetition,development, perversity, integration, catharsis.” - New York Times

“Liturgy is a unique heavy metal band that takes a cerebral approach to the form without stinting on any of the force that makes it so potent.” - The Wall Street Journal.

TRACK LISTING

1.  Daily Bread
2.  Djennaration
3.  Caela
4.  Angel Of Sovereignty
5.  Haelegen II
6.  Before I Knew The Truth
7.  Angel Of Hierarchy
8.  Red Crown II
9.  Angel Of Emancipation
10.  Ananon
11.  93696
12.  Haelegen II (Reprise)
13.  Angel Of Individuation
14.  Antigone II
15.  Immortal Life II

Mats Gustafsson is a key character in the modern jazz scene as a world-renowned saxophone player, and has collaborated with countless artists including Sonic Youth, Neneh Cherry, Peter Brötzmann and Merzbow.

Joachim Nordwall has been creating psychedelic electronic music since the late 1980s, and has been in groups such as The Skull Defekts and Alvars Orkester, with work credited alongside Aaron Dilloway, Mika Vainio, Kevin Drumm, Christine Abdelnour and John Duncan.

Nordwall founded and runs the lauded record label iDEAL Recordings, operating at the cutting edge of experimental and electronic music, and hosting festivals, exhibitions, concerts, and club nights.

The duo create a sense of vast, three dimensional auditory expanses. “This is where acoustics and analogue synths meet. It is unique music. Unheard Vibes. Perfect for special venues and good PAs” - Gustafsson and Nordwall.

TRACK LISTING

1.  THERE ARE SOME WORLDS WHERE ALL DREAMS DIE (en Glad Stund)
2.  THE DAY OF DAYS WAS THERE (vardag)
3.  LOVE SHOWS IN HER SMILE: IT IS CONFIDENT (panik)
4. THEIR NEW LIFE WAS THEIR FINAL LIFE (vilse)
5.  BIRDBRAIN (olle ångest)
6.  HIS FINGERS, MOVING IN THE AIR, PRODUCED A SOFT ORGAN-LIKE MUSIC (långtråkigt)
7.  OH, SAID THE STRANGE MIND, YOU WANT ME TO THINK FOR YOU (det Blir Aldrig Bättre)
8.  HER EYES…WERE LIKE COLD FIRES (slut)

‘To The Forest To Live A Truer Life’ is a deluxe LP with fully artworked custom design inner sleeve. All copies come with a poster insert designed by YoshimiO. Jacket design by lauded Japanese designer Ooido Syoujou.

YoshimiOizumikiYoshiduO is comprised of YoshimiO (Boredoms, OOIOO) and modular synthesist izumikiYoshi.

YoshimiO uses the piano as her primary instrument here for the first time, alongside her singular voice. Her every move is bent, stretched, and mutated by IzumikiYoshi’s modular synthesizer into cascades of brightly colored waves and dotted constellations of sound.

YoshimiO, previously known as Yoshimi P-We, is a founder and drummer for Japanese rock band Boredoms, vocalist and multiinstrumentalist of OOIOO, and a member of supergroup Free Kitten alongside Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon.

IzumikiYoshi is a highly regarded synthesist, having contributed synthesizer, sampler, and programmed midi instruments on Boredoms classics ‘Vision Creation Newsun’ and ‘Super æ’.

YoshimiO worked as a session player and vocalist on The Flaminig Lips’ acclaimed album, ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots’, which was named after her.

TRACK LISTING

1. YofuyO
2. YO Me
3. YoY 7
4. OmimiO
5. YosunnyO
6. Sun19
7. Mini YO
8. Niminya
9. Mull
10. 1.yoO
11. 33yOng

‘nature morte’ is BIG BRAVE’s first Thrill Jockey release, following ‘Leaving None But Small Birds’, a collaboration with The Body. ‘nature morte’ was recorded by Seth Manchester at Machines with Magnets.

BIG BRAVE have a singular voice in heavy music, honed over five albums, four on Southern Lord. Their most recent, ‘VITAL’, was in April of 2021.

TRACK LISTING

1. Carvers, Farriers And Knaves
2. The One Who Bornes A Weary Load
3. My Hope Renders Me A Fool
4. The Fable Of Subjugation
5. A Parable Of The Trusting
6. The Ten Of Swords

Sightless Pit is Lee Buford (The Body) and Dylan Walker (Full of Hell), two unparalleled artists at the forefront of redefining heavy music.

‘Lockstep Bloodwar’ is Sightless Pit’s sophomore album, following the band’s acclaimed debut ‘Grave of a Dog’, which featured Lingua Ignota, as well as The Body and Full of Hell’s collaborative album, ‘Ascending a Mountain of Heavy Light’.

The album includes eclectic and celebrated guest artists, including Gangsta Boo (Three 6 Mafia), YoshimiO (Boredoms), Frukwan (Gravediggaz), claire rousay, Midwife, Lane Shii Otayonii (Elizabeth Colour Wheel), Foie Gras, and more.

TRACK LISTING

On A Knife (feat Midwife)
Calcified Glass (feat YoshimiO & Gangsta Boo)
Flower To Tomb (feat Lane Shi Otayonii)
Lockstep Bloodwar
Low Orbit (feat Frukwan & Industrial Hazard)
False Epiphany (feat Claire rousay)
Shiv (feat Crownovhornz)
Morning Of A Thousand Lights
Futilities (feat Foie Gras)

Oozing Wound are comprised of members Zack Weil (guitar, vocals), Kevin Cribbin (bass) and Kyle Reynolds (drums).

The members of Oozing Wound are veterans of Chicago’s underground scene, having played in Cacaw, Unmanned Ship, ZATH and Bad Drugs

TRACK LISTING

Bank Account Anxiety
Total Existence Failure
The Good Times (I Don’t Miss ‘Em)
Hypnic Jerk
Crypto Fash
Between Cults
Chudly
Midlife Crisis Actor
Old Sludge
Face Without Eyes

15 years after the album’s release, ‘City Of Echoes’ is now available in a deluxe 2LP edition, newly remastered by Josh Bonati and featuring a full LP’s-worth of bonus material, including original album demos, alternate takes, and pieces originally only available on the rare ‘Pink Mammoth’ EP.

‘City Of Echoes’, originally released in 2007 by Hydra Head Records, marked a paradigm shift for Pelican. Coming off the heels of the glacial ‘Australasia’ and their even more expansive and acclaimed follow-up, ‘The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon The Thaw’, their third album is a study in precision.

Inspired by their non-stop tour schedule following ‘The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon The Thaw’’s release, the quartet composed ‘City Of Echoes’ to be a lean powerhouse of non-stop melodic hooks and lurching rhythms that reflected the energy of live performance.

Guitarists Trevor Shelley de Brauw and Laurent Schroeder-Lebec trade crisp riffs that twirl in opposition before thundering together in monoliths. The sheer amount of potent interplay between the two, often borrowing from disparate edges of rock and metal at a whim before completely transforming, is mind-boggling. Bassist Bryan Herweg and rhythm section compatriot / drummer / brother Larry Herweg lock into a wider array of grooves than ever before. Their considered bedrock guides the band’s dynamics into some of the ensemble’s most tender moments as well as their most ferocious.

Recorded by Andrew Schneider at Electrical Audio Cover. Art designed by ISIS and SUMAC founder Aaron Turner, with photography by Robin Laananen.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: One of my favourite post-metal bands of all time, Pelican so seeing this beautiful LP again a full FIFTEEN years after its original release is a big treat. Churning grooves, walls of sound and cathartic, doom-laiden noise. Unlike 'The Fire In Our Throats...' and 'Australasia', we see a lot more melody and melodic-leanings on this LP, and though they were both classics, the lightening of the instrumental palette works wonders for them. Ace.

TRACK LISTING

Bliss In Concrete
City Of Echoes
Spaceship Broken - Parts Needed
Winds With Hands
Dead Between The Walls
Lost In The Headlights
Far From Fields
A Delicate Sense Of Balance

Lightning Bolt’s ‘Earthly Delights’ receives a much desired reissue and is now available for the first time since 2009 as a double LP.

Packaged in a full colour gatefold-style jacket, ‘Earthly Delights’ features vibrant artwork and custom etching on Side D, designed by Brian Chippendale. Includes a digital download card.

Available to independent retailers on Sea Glass coloured vinyl.

‘Earthly Delights’ is the metal album to Lightning Bolt’s genrestraddling discography, using the signature speed and volume reminiscent of past releases while centring around growling chords and monolithic rhythms commonly found in the foundations of metal.

Throughout their career, Lightning Bolt have toured the world, performing at numerous festivals, including Coachella, ATP, Pitchfork Music Festival, Austin Psych Fest and FYF Fest, to name a few.

Brian Chippendale has collaborated with artists including Björk, Boredoms, Andrew W.K. and Lee “Scratch” Perry.

In 2017, Brian Gibson developed the video game, ‘Thumper’, with his own company, Drool, which would go on to be awarded Apple’s Design Award in 2019, and be included in IDN’s Best of 2016.

“... beneath all the noise and fury, there are bona fide songs here, driven by giddy singalong melodies that settle into maddeningly tight runs and rhythmic loops then spin off into chasms of freeform noise...everything is focused on the extraordinary physicality of their sound: spasmodic, psychedelic, heavy, loud and lifeaffirming.” - The Guardian

“The whole point of their music is hypnotic repetition, magical moments sprouting from endless reiterations. They could stretch out further, but they’d likely lose access to those mini-epiphanies... Lightning Bolt are happy to grind out an eternal present, and few can dig deep into a moment quite like them.” - Pitchfork

TRACK LISTING

Sound Guardians
Nation Of Boar
Colossus
The Sublime Freak
Flooded Chamber
Funny Farm
Rain On Lake I’m Swimming In
S.O.S.
Transmissionary

Hot on the heels of the sold-out limited EP, ‘Was It Ever Real?’, The Soft Pink Truth release super catchy, sexy contemporary disco banger, ‘Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This?’. Throughout the ten songs of the album, the provocation to go deeper prompts promiscuous moves across the genres of disco, minimalism, ambient, and jazz, sliding onto and off of the dancefloor, sweeping higher and lower on the scale of frequencies, engaging both philosophical texts re-set as pop lyrics and wordless glossolalia.

Daniel’s romantic and musical partner MC Schmidt and friend Koye Berry play piano, Mark Lightcap (Acetone, Dick Slessig Combo) plays acoustic and electric guitar, Jason Willett (Half Japanese) plays bass, Nate Wooley plays trumpet, Brooks Kossover (Drugdealer) plays flute, John Berndt and Andrew Bernstein (Horse Lords) play saxophone, and shakers, shekere, tumba, triangle and cajon parts are played by Cuban percussionist Ayoze de Alejandro Lopez. There are chamber instruments as well: harpsichord by Tom Boram, harp by Obadias Guerra, Irish harp by Una Monaghan and, on many tracks, lush string arrangements by Turkish arranger Ulas Kurugullu for violin, viola, and cello that recall the Love Unlimited Orchestra found on classic Barry White albums.

Sidestepping retro kitsch but paying homage to highly personal interpretations of disco such as Arthur Russell, Don Ray, Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, and Mandré, or the jazz funk of Creed Taylor and CTI Records. Its emphasis on slowly morphing deep house grooves will also appeal to fans of DJ Sprinkles, Moodymann, and Theo Parrish.

Gorgeous artwork designed by Robert Beatty, known for his work with artists such as Tame Impala, The Flaming Lips, The Dream Syndicate, Thee Oh Sees, Neon Indian, and Oneohtrix.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: An alluring mix of moody and avant disco with rich, head-turning instrumentals which almost trip into live deep house jams. Somewhere between Manchester's See Thru Hands, The Rotating Assembly and 40 Thieves. Mega!

TRACK LISTING

Deeper
La Joie Devant La Mort
Wanna Know
Trocadero
Moodswing
Sunwash
Joybreath
Deeper Than This?
Toot Sweet
Now That It’s All Over

'VMAK' is the first ever solo album by acclaimed bassist Douglas Andrew McCombs.

McCombs is one of the most highly regarded bassists / guitarists working today, known for his pioneering band Tortoise, his bass playing in Chicago’s Eleventh Dream Day, and his innovative instrumental group Brokeback. He has released albums with guitarist David Daniell and collaborated with the likes of Tom Zé to Yo La Tengo, Stereolab to Daniel Lanois. In addition to being the touring bassist for The Sea and Cake, McCombs has somehow found time to form a new trio Black Duck with guitarist Bill MacKay, and percussionist Charles Rumback.

Douglas McCombs’ ‘VMAK’ is a window into one of the most distinguished and distinct voices in guitar music for the last three decades, effortlessly stretching the boundaries of the guitar while staying firmly grounded by blissful, uncanny melody.

McCombs’ debut solo album is a mix of improvisation, textural explorations and recurring melodic themes. The album title was lifted by the well-travelled McCombs from one of the visas packed into his current passport, the stamp a reminder of how far his music has taken him - literally all over the world. Not since McCombs’ solo outlet Brokeback blossomed into a full-fledged rock unit has his singular approach to solo guitar playing been exhibited in such striking detail. Taking after Brokeback’s classic ‘Morse Code in the Modern Age: Across the Americas’, ‘Two To Coolness’ is a piece that McCombs refined through a series of improvised performances and features Calexico drummer John Convertino, as well as singer / guitarist / synth player Sam Prekop (also of The Sea and Cake). ‘Green Crown’s Step’ was largely improvised working through melodies and patterns. The stately ‘To Whose Falls Shallows’ reshapes three key themes that Tortoise and Brokeback fans will find to be signature McCombs, buoyed by fellow Brokeback member James Elkington (Tweedy), who also engineered and mixed the album.

On the album, McCombs plays with spare instrumentation and primarily plays electric and acoustic guitars as well as the Bass VI, drawing out textures that stretch the scope of his instruments. McCombs’ work is pastoral and expansive, his playing is refined and nuanced, and his melodies often bely his admiration for Ennio Morricone as his guitar imbues endlessly sprawling fields of the Midwest with the same sense of magic. It is a true pleasure to hear him perform in such an intimate way. This is an absolute essential for followers of McCombs and newcomers alike, as the album lays bare his influence on each of his groups as well as firmly stakes McCombs as a force all his own.

TRACK LISTING

Two To Coolness
Green Crown’s Step
To Whose Falls Shallows

‘Still, Here’ emphatically makes the case for Marisa Anderson’s profound artistry, each piece intimately revealing a new aspect of Anderson as a player and as a human being navigating the path laid before her.

Marisa Anderson’s ‘Still, Here’ is for the listener an alchemical salve, the work of a gifted player with an exceptional ability to convey the complexities of the human experience through composition.

Marisa Anderson is one of the most eminent guitarists working today. Her lucid, eloquent approach to guitar music and composition has established her as an unparalleled artist and an insightful, coveted collaborator. Anderson’s work draws on a mosaic of folk musics and lives in conversation with myriad musical traditions.

“[Anderson] the solo guitarist creates truly borderless music, fusing the diverse global traditions she favors without drawing too much attention to the act of juxtaposition.” - Pitchfork

TRACK LISTING

In Dark Water
The Fire This Time
The Low Country
Night Air
Waking
The Crack Where The Light
Gets In
La Llorona
Beat The Drum Slowly

Following their collaboration on the acclaimed ‘For Organ and Brass’, released on Subtext, new album ‘I get along without you very well’ expands on the duo’s intoxicating exploration of meditative, spiritual sonics in unexpected ways.

It is a beautiful meeting of two friends and inventive musical minds, resulting in the most affecting and surprising of pop albums. From its opening notes, ‘I get along without you very well’ delights in subtle tensions and contradictions.

Ellen Arkbro and Johan Graden embody the limitless curiosity and fearless innovation of the Swedish and Berlin new music scenes they inhabit. Arkbro is a composer and musician whose work has been presented around the globe at prestigious institutions such as the Barbican in London, GRM in Paris and the Kölner Philharmonie in Köln.

Graden is one of Sweden’s most sought-after pianists, moving freely between classical music and the European contemporary jazz scene. Currently living in Amman Jordan, he is an active member of the Jordanian experimental pop scene.

‘I get along without you very well’ is a daring statement from two of the most progressive voices in contemporary music. In allowing themselves to be at their most vulnerable - with each other, their collaborators and with listeners - they have created some of their most powerful work to date.

TRACK LISTING

Close
Out Of Luck
All In Bloom
Never Near
Temple
Other Side
Love You, Bye
Waqt

Lightning Bolt redefine here what it means to be DIY. An utterly singular band in every way, unbridled creativity and energy propel them well past most categorical boundaries, least of which is the boundary between band and audience. Theirs is an immersive experience - a sound so huge it can swallow us all.

“... it is hard to believe that all the glorious chaos of Lightning Bolt - a stalwart of the big noise-punk scene - is being made by only two people, the bassist Brian Gibson and the drummer and vocalist Brian Chippendale. Mr. Gibson and Mr. Chippendale toss back and forth gigantic metal riffs and giggly high notes, creating rainbows of dissonance.” - New York Times

TRACK LISTING

King Kandy
Baron Wasteland
Oblivion Balloon
Fly Fucker Fly
The Soft Spoken Spectre
Salamander
World Wobbly Wide

Available on vinyl for the first time in 10 years, with new cover design by the band’s Tim Rutilli. “Uniting where you come from - your roots - with what you strive to be or what you reinvent yourself to become - crowns,” explains Tim Rutili. “At the bottom of these songs are the memories and images you sift through in the process.”

TRACK LISTING

Pink And Sour
Spider’s House
Sunday Noises
The Eye You Lost In The
Crusades
A Chinese Actor
Alice Crawley
The Orchids (Psychic TV)
Burned By The Christians
Black Metal Valentine
Rose-Petal-Ear
3 Legged Animals

Mouse on Mars are recognised as one of Germany’s most defining and versatile electronic music projects. With their anarchic mixture of sound that oscillates between uncontrollable chaos and meticulously arranged structures, Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma have forged a unique musical language which is readily decomposed by the unpredictability of its myriad mutations. Free from schools of thought, genre conventions andfrom the constraints of the music establishment, they have worked under the Mouse On Mars alias for 24 years, mapping their own idiosyncratic trajectory through a no man’s land between pop, art, club music and the avant-garde.

TRACK LISTING

Mine Is In Yours
Wipe That Sound
Spaceship
Send Me Shivers
Blood Comes
The End
Detected Beats
All The Old Powers
Evoke An Object

Glenn Jones is a unique player in the world of solo guitar music. Steeped in both American Primitive guitar music as well as rock and experimental music, Glenn Jones creates rich sonic tapestries with a distinct and stirring voice.

Endlessly curious, Jones has spent the better part of four decades exploring the boundaries of expression and storytelling with the guitar and banjo.

On ‘Vade Mecum’, Jones draws on his personal history to tell stories with elaborate musical detail and emotional weight.

Exploring the complexity of personal experience, emotions and our shared histories, ‘Vade Mecum’ finds Jones painting his music in boundaryless colours, captivatingly vivid.

TRACK LISTING

Vade Mecum
Forsythia
Base Harbor Head
Black & White And Gray
Each Crystal Pane Of Glass
A Handful Of Snow
Kathy Maltese
Ruthie’s Farewell
John Jackson Of Fairfax, Virginia
Away

Multi-instrumentalist Sally Anne Morgan tills the soil of old timey music, folk practices old and new, and psychedelia to sow music that reaches out beyond its roots.

‘Cups’ dives headfirst into the waters of the Morgan’s unconscious mind and plumbs those depths for swells of fertile brilliance and awe.

In stark contrast to the traditional and pop-informed structures of her previous album, ‘Thread’, ‘Cups’ adopts a free-flowing approach intuitive and receptive, brimming and shifting and changing across a fragile equilibrium of pieces both improvised and composed.

The fluid pieces twirl from pensive, looped fiddle to tiptoed banjo to patient, sunny parlour guitar arpeggios to droning dulcimer and a litany of percussive ripples with gentle ease.

By distilling her most immediate inspirations into layers of sparkling timbre and buoyant rambles, Sally Anne Morgan’s ‘Cups’ builds a sense of community from within, like a back porch jam with her own subconscious.

“Meditations on folk music, rather than the thing itself, stern and cerebral at times, but intermittently lush and beautiful... [‘Cups’] captures essential bits of folk music, frames them in stark, repeating ways, and makes us look at them differently.” - Dusted Magazine

“[‘Cups’ is] a totally charming album that bares the unspoiled essence of its creator, a thoroughly engaging artist forging her own singular path upon the resilient precepts of the past.” - No Depression

“Morgan has created a record that’s a meditative idyll... If you need a bit of spiritual realignment, then ‘Cups’ is a necessity, a moment of peace in a punishing world.” - Raven Sings The Blues

“breathtaking, string-laden psychedelic folk” - Brooklyn Vegan

TRACK LISTING

Night Window
Prune
Hori Hori
Pythagoras
Sandbox
Through The Threshold
Home Soup
Angeline
In Come A Bee
Word For World

Available on vinyl for the first time since its original CD-only release in 2007.

The closest of relationships gives its members space to expand, change, develop and play. Tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson and drummer Hamid Drake have just that kind of partnership, one that has seen them periodically move apart and work extensively on other fronts - Anderson tending to the recent relocation of his major jazz venue the Velvet Lounge; Drake in a dizzying array of globetrotting ensembles - but always returning to the fold, digging in together and checking out what’s been learned in the interim.

Over the course of some three decades, the master saxophonist and the prodigy percussionist have continued to reconfirm their commitment to their joint project.

TRACK LISTING

Planet E
Strut Time
For Brother Thompson
Sakti/Shiva
From The River To The Ocean

The music of Dewey Mahood is steadfast in its pursuit of transcendence.

For the past two decades as Plankton Wat, Mahood has contoured his melodic guitar playing into wholly transfiguring pieces.

His fluid compositions apply ethereal, elastic textures to grounded rhythmic grooves that recall the cosmic and the earthly in equal measure.

‘Hidden Path’ is an album built on reflection and discovery, turning the thrill of exploring obscured passages into inward revelations.

Originally presented as a limited cassette in 2017, and now presented on vinyl for the first time, remastered by Amy Dragon, ‘Hidden Path’ is a distillation of Mahood’s musical practice as a way of life, a patient celebration of the unexpected, unhurried and exhilarating.

TRACK LISTING

The Inward Reflection
Dream Cascade
A Window In The Mirror
Hidden Path
The Everflowing Stream
Solitude Amongst The Trees
Awaken
Fields Of Remembrance

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

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

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

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

TRACK LISTING

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

The Body and BIG|BRAVE are both bands possessed with an unequalled ability to convey overwhelming weight with simplicity, repetition and detailed sonic atmospheres; artists who continue to alter the definition of what it means to be a heavy band.

The Body are consistently prolific while increasingly ambitious as untethered producers and collaborators. BIG|BRAVE shape sound with dense waves of guitar and feedback, minimalist and hypnotic crashes and emotionally exacting vocal melodies. In collaboration, The Body and BIG|BRAVE shift the gravity of their compositions to woven layers of percussion and unspooling guitars that sprawl through stark frameworks of earthy folk.

Their debut collaborative album, ‘Leaving None But Small Birds’ distils the two ensembles’ pioneering approach to heavy music into psalms for the forgotten, threnodies of lost love and odes to vengeance.

Recorded, mixed and produced by Seth Manchester at Machines With Magnets (Liturgy, Battles, Mdou Moctar) and mastered by Heba Kadry (Björk, David Bowie).

“Emotionally coherent but tricky to categorize. BIG|BRAVE are the sound of the raw unconscious, turned up loud.” - Pitchfork

“The Body have become one of the most interesting and difficult to pin down groups in extreme music.” - Rolling Stone

TRACK LISTING

Blackest Crow
Oh Sinner
Hard Times
Once I Had A Sweetheart
Black Is The Colour
Polly Gosford
Babes In The Woods

Guitarists Marisa Anderson and William Tyler distil deeply rooted and varied traditions into distinctive voices all their own. Anderson and Tyler are each unyielding in their desire to extend through those traditions and the confines of ‘guitar music’ to craft music at once intimate and expansive, conversational and transcendent.

The duo’s debut collaborative album tethers together their singular voices into unified narratives that glisten, drive and sway. On ‘Lost Futures’, Anderson and Tyler’s guitars dance through lush arrangements and pastoral duets serpentine and reverent. 

‘Lost Futures’ takes its name from writer Mark Fisher’s cultural theory of the loss of potential futures, the hopes and ideals which once felt inevitable but have since been interrupted. Anderson and Tyler’s use of textural drones, rhythmic repetition and harmonic shifts embody the building tensions of uncertainty created by profound loss: loss of life, experience, companionship, compassion. Across ‘Lost Futures’, Anderson and Tyler mold their instruments into breathtaking panoramas of blight and bliss. Each movement contains a dense biome of transportive sound. 

The duo’s music together reckons with mounting pressures as well as the joy of newfound friendship and gratitude for being able to play together. In tandem, Marisa Anderson and William Tyler have composed a work of remarkable breadth, brimming with resplendent odes of solace.

Marisa Anderson and William Tyler are both prolific solo artists. Tyler has also toured with groups including Lambchop and Silver Jews and Marisa has contributed to recordings by Beth Ditto, Sharon Van Etten and Circuit Des Yeux among others. 

‘Lost Futures’ features guests Gisela Rodriguez Fernandez on violin and Patricia Vázquez Gómez playing quijada.

Package features artwork by Sam Smith. LPs include artworked inner-sleeve featuring photography by Marisa Anderson.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Both Marisa Anderson and William Tyler have impeccable form for crafting gorgeous acoustic guitar anthems, ranging from the beautiful simplicity of Anderson's plucked acoustic to Tyler's country-tinged Americana anthems, so I really couldn't imagine a better combination than the two of them. It works perfectly here with each artist's own voice coming through wonderfully while accentuating each-other perfectly.

TRACK LISTING

1. News About Heaven
2. Lost Futures
3. Pray For Rain
4. Something Will Come
5. At The Edge Of The World
6. Hurricane Light
7. Life And Casualty
8. Haunted By Water

Jan St. Werner is one-half of legendary electronic duo Mouse On Mars. Werner records music as well under the name Lithops and has released records with Oval’s Markus Popp as Microstoria. Jan has collaborated with a wide range of artists from Mark E Smith and Stereolab to The National.

Kid Millions, aka John Colpitts, is a prolific drummer, known for his work in Oneida and frequently performs with Laurie Anderson and Marnie Stern. Colpitt’s past collaborations include Philip Glass, Royal Trux, Boredoms, White Hills and Spiritualized. Under the moniker Man Forever, Colpitts collaborated with acclaimed groups So Percussion, Greg Fox, Tigue, Yo La Tengo and more.

Together, the works on ‘Imperium Droop’ are a joyful listen and an exhilarating foray into the unknown; Kid Millions’ (John Colpitts) tireless rhythms and subtle gestures mirror Jan St. Werner’s boundless textural palette and together drive each piece towards transcendence. Exploring a liminal space between improvisation and composition, the duo expand their musical dialogue beyond the physical limitations of space and time.

LP is available on opaque purple with white coloured vinyl with art by Frieda Luczak, whose designs have been featured on many classic Mouse on Mars albums.

“Kid Millions has become a ubiquitous force in a constantly changing scene.” - New York Times

“Mouse on Mars have never let their concepts eclipse the music; part of the pleasure of the duo’s output is its very inscrutability... the sounds beckon in their mystery.” - Pitchfork

“Mutant, microtonal... [Jan St. Werner] explores one area of sound with great intensity and nuance” - Uncut

“Experimental percussion genius” - Village Voice on Kid Millions

TRACK LISTING

Color Bagpipes
Apotropaic
Laffen’ Death
Hexaco Inversion
Dark Tetrad
Astral Stare
Nuclei Melodies
Sorrows And
Compensations

Rose City Band is celebrated guitarist Ripley Johnson. A prolific songwriter, Johnson started Rose City Band to have an outlet to explore songwriting styles apart from Wooden Shjips and Moon Duo, where he is often not the lead songwriter. Rose City Band allowed him to follow his musical muses as they greet him and not be bound by the schedule of bandmates and demands of a touring group. Stepping out from behind the psychedelic haze that envelops his other output, Rose City Band’s lean yet richly textured arrangements lay bare the beauty of his songcraft. On Earth Trip, Johnson reveals more of himself than ever before, coloring the project’s country-rock twang with a melancholic, wistful undertone. It charts a journey of personal growth and introspection with surprising honesty, from pining for summers spent with friends to meditations on space, stillness and the splendor of the natural world. It continues Rose City Band’s celebration of summer warmth and the great outdoors, seen from a new vantage point, and with newfound appreciation for the freedom and joy that nature provides.

Earth Trip was written during a period of sudden shocks and drastic lifestyle changes for Johnson. Forced to cancel extensive touring plans for 2020, the guitarist found himself home for an extended period for the first time in years. No longer in constant motion, he was able to experience and enjoy the simple pleasures of home life, of being in one place: hikes in nature, bathing outside, and waking with the dawn. Forming new connections to his surroundings, from tending to a garden to sleeping out under the stars, Johnson found hope and healing in a more mindful relationship with the natural world.

Themes of recalibration and finding personal space are equally mirrored in Earth Trip’s lean production. Recorded at his home studio in Portland and mixed by Cooper Crain (Bitchin’ Bajas, Cave), Johnson makes deft use of space while experimenting with new sonics. Shimmering pedal steel, woozy harmonica melodies, and stately piano enhance the album’s introspective tone without ever clouding arrangements. Psychedelic elements that nod to Johnson’s other projects and influences still appear throughout, but hover at the edge of perception, a subtle halo adding colour and texture to Johnson’s songwriting rather than taking centrer-stage. He elaborates: “I told Cooper I was trying to capture that feeling when you take psychedelics and they just start coming on - maybe objects start buzzing in the edges of your vision, you start seeing slight trails, maybe the characteristics of sound change subtly. But you’re not fully tripping yet. He got the idea right away and his mix really captures that feeling.” Johnson’s lithe guitar playing throughout treads a fine line between country and cosmic, taut melodies spiralling out into long reverb trails or free-form solos buoyed by a breeze, radiating summer warmth.

Through its daring honesty and masteful arrangements, Earth Trip cements Johnson’s place as a singular songwriter of inimitable skill. It’s message of mindfulness and our interconnectedness to the environment expands on a long country and blues music tradition that draws a symbiotic relationship between storyteller and the land, capturing the beauty of the natural world while also emphasising our responsibility in preserving it for future generations.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Rose city band go full country! Slide guitars, lap steel and tasteful reverb coalesce into a brilliantly evocative and wonderfully produced distillation of that Rose City sound into a country shell. It's a testament to Ripley Johnson's skill that his sound can be so successfully transplanted into a different shell while retaining everything that made him so great in the first place. Lovely stuff.

TRACK LISTING

1. Silver Roses
2. In The Rain
3. World Is Turning
4. Feel Of Love
5. Lonely Places
6. Ramblin’ With The Day
7. Rabbit
8. Dawn Patrol

Colleen is an aboundingly inventive composer and artist. For two decades Cécile Schott, as Colleen, has crafted welcoming, enchanting, and bewildering music. The multiinstrumentalist and vocalist’s timeless compositions make use of carefully selected tools to mold memories into transcendent splendor. The Tunnel and the Clearing finds Schott at her most vulnerable and confident, invoking contemplative and swirling organ processed through analog electronics, steady drum machine syncopations and her distinctive voice. On an album centered on processing the complicated washes of emotion through tribulations and revelations Colleen presents a vision of breathless clarity.

The Tunnel and the Clearing was developed over a period of transformative change. Colleen began work on the album in 2018 but was all but halted by extreme fatigue from a previously undiagnosed illness. Years of treatment and adjustment eventually led to relocating to Barcelona, soon followed by lockdowns and then the dissolution of her longtime partnership. Reflecting on these cumulative experiences she reimagined her compositional practices, spending months in near complete silence. Says Schott, “Never before had I felt so profoundly the power that music has, through harmony, melody, rhythm and sound itself, to express the whole range of human emotions.” The resulting seven pieces investigate the complex, at times contradictory relationship between excitement and fear, anger and understanding, struggle and triumph, all focused on a reconstruction of the self.

Colleen’s albums are unified by distinct and personal instrumentation, built around music boxes, viola da gamba, or electronics, they somehow all remarkably share a dreamlike modern quality. For The Tunnel and the Clearing Schott restricted herself to using analog electronic instruments including the Elka Drummer One, the Roland RE-201 Space Echo and Moog Grandmother synth, coupled with Yamaha organ keyboard. Stunningly, Colleen achieves the rich emotional intricacy and the lush density of textures on The Tunnel and the Clearing through almost entirely live performance and processing. These detailed and affecting compositions mirror Colleen’s grappling with her own psyche. Schott elaborates “I found direct correspondences between my internal discourse, its obsessive, frantic attempts at making sense of what I could not understand, and the music I was making, with motifs functioning as questions and answers, doubts and assertions.” Clicks, hums, warbles and throbs emulating our evolving internal worlds, an “emotional noise.” A musical journey through the tunnel toward the clearing at its end. The Tunnel and the Clearing is a work of lucid reverence, a constellation of marvels suspended in air.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A beautifully produced juxtaposition of Space Lady-esque echoing vocal shards and slowly pulled organ swells, flickering drum machines and psychedelic reverb, 'The Tunnel..' is both brilliantly propulsive and warmingly lysergic, ending up somewhere between an arm-waving midday festival slot and loose, chillout room ambience. Really lovely stuff.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Crossing
2. Revelation
3. Implosion-Explosion
4. The Tunnel And The Clearing
5. Gazing At Taurus - Santa Eulalia
6. Gazing At Taurus - Night Sky Rumba
7. Hidden In The Current

Mouse on Mars, the Berlin-based duo of Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma, approach electronic music with an inexhaustible curiosity and unparalleled ingenuity. ‘AAI’ (Anarchic Artificial Intelligence) takes their fascination with technology and undogmatic exploration a quantum leap further.

Emerging from a primordial ooze of rolling bass and skittering electronics, hypnotic polyrhythms and pulsing synthesizers propel the listener across the record’s expanse. Hidden in the duo’s hyper-detailed productions is a kind of meta-narrative.

Working with AI tech collective Birds on Mars and former Soundcloud programmers Ranny Keddo and Derrek Kindle, the duo collaborated on the creation of bespoke software capable of modelling speech; text and voice from writer and scholar of African Studies Louis Chude-Sokei and DJ/producer Yağmur Uçkunkaya were fed into the software as a model, allowing Toma and Werner to control parameters like speed or mood, thereby creating a kind of speech instrument they could control and play as they would a synthesizer.

The album’s narrative is quite literally mirrored in the music - the sound of an artificial intelligence growing, learning and speaking. This exploration of artificial intelligence as both a narrative framework and compositional tool, allowing the duo to summon their most explicitly science-fiction work to date.

Original artwork by Casey Reas, inventor of the computer graphics language Processing.

Recently, Mouse on Mars received the 2020 Holger Czukay Prize for Pop Music.

Mouse on Mars have been regularly streaming performances throughout 2020, partnering with organizations like Goethe-Institut, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Conditions of a Necessity and others and will continue these in 2021.

TRACK LISTING

Engineering Systems
The Latent Space
Speech And Ambulation
Thousand To One
Walking And Talking
Youmachine
Doublekeyrock
Machine Rights
Go Tick
The Fear Of Machines
Artificial Authentic
Machine Perspective
Cut That Fishernet
Tools Use Tools
Loose Tools
Seven Months
Paymig
Borrow Signs
New Definitions
New Life Always Announces Itself Through Sound

As Plankton Wat, Dewey Mahood uses his considerable guitar prowess to deliver an album that encompasses both the wild, seeking energy of free-improvisation and the deliberate arrangements of more traditional composition.

With his deft and stylistically varied playing, Plankton Wat’s ‘Future Times’ escapes psychedelic tropes and chemical fuelled alterations and instead celebrates an escape into the natural world.

‘Future Times’ taps into psychedelia’s counter-cultural heritage as music for protest, liberation and imagining new ways of being in this world.

“Pastoral drones and swirling psychedelia” - Pitchfork

Known for his guitar prowess in modern psychedelic music, specifically with Eternal Tapestry as well as Edibles, Elephant Factory Galaxy Research and Gärden Söund among others.

‘Future Times’ was recorded at Mahood’s home studio Solar Commune, with additions from Dustin Dybvig (Horse Feathers & Edibles) and Victor Nash (Flash Hawk Parlor Ensemble). Features Ash Dybvig on flute.

TRACK LISTING

The Burning World
Nightfall
Modern Ruins
Dark Cities
Teenage Daydream
Sanctuary
Future Times
Defund The Police
Wind Mountain

Over the course of two decades The Body - Lee Buford and Chip King - have consistently challenged assumptions and defied categorization, redefining what it means to be a heavy band.

On ‘I’ve Seen All I Need To See’, they test the boundaries of the studio to explore the extremes and microtonality of distortion to find its maximal impact.

Their most incisively bleak album to date, a towering monolith of noise, Buford’s booming, resolute drums paired with King’s obliterated guitar and howl.

Course, bristling distortion contorts every instrument, with samples of spoken word, cymbals, toms and King’s already noxious tone emerging from layers of feedback.

Features guests Ben Eberle (Sandworm) and Chrissy Wolpert (Assembly of Light Choir).  Recorded with long time engineer Seth Manchester at Machines with Magnets (Lightning Bolt, Battles, Daughters) and mastered by Matt Colton (Sumac, Brian Eno, Uniform, Sunn O)))).

The Body have collaborated with many, including Full Of Hell, Thou, Uniform and Bummer.

“The distortion has this ability to envelope you, and not push you away. It has this strange kind of beautiful timbre... once you give into the sheer power of it, and let it take you on a ride then it becomes this whole other kind of sonic experience.” - Matt Colton

TRACK LISTING

A Lament
Tied Up And Locked In
Eschatological Imperative
A Pain Of Knowing
The City Is Shelled
They Are Coming
The Handle/The Blade
Path Of Failure

The music of Black To Comm is as powerfully intoxicating as it is subtly unnerving. The solo project of shapeshifting German producer and sound artist Marc Richter, his mastery of sonic manipulation is matched only by his astounding clarity of vision.

Following the acclaimed ‘Seven Horses For Seven Kings’ released just a year ago, ‘Oocyte Oil & Stolen Androgens’ applies Richter’s wild imagination to an exploration of the human voice, standing as some of his most immediate and affecting music to date.

Each of his phantasmagoric works is meticulously constructed from an omnivorous array of smudged samples and other sonic detritus, painstakingly collected by Richter from across the history of recorded music or his immediate environment and altered into beguiling new shapes. Sound sources seem tantalizingly familiar and yet often just out of reach, flickering at the edges of the subconscious.

TRACK LISTING

Gustav Metzger As Erwin Piscator, Gera, January 1915
Stolen Androgens
Oocyte Oil
Gepackte Zeit (für Hanne Darboven)
Rataplan, Rataplan, Rataplan (Arms And Legs Flying In The Air)

The music of Emil Amos is at once intimate and expansive. Under the name Holy Sons, as well as with bands Om, Grails and Lilacs and Champagne, Amos harnesses boundless sonic textures to embellish delicately crafted songs, he plays the bulk of the instruments and sings the majority of the vocals throughout the album and is joined on a few pieces by drummer Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth).

His music balances cues from classic and indie rock traditions with tenderness and sense of foreboding through unparalleled artistry. Holy Sons’ ‘Raw and Disfigured’ showcases Amos’ mastery of songcraft through a seemingly impossible combination of subtle yet potent gestures, bold arrangements and resolute vulnerability.

Recorded at Sonic Youth’s studio Echo Canyon West, ‘Raw and Disfigured’ stands as Amos’ most ambitious and comprehensive album yet, a panoramic gallery of songs as beautiful as they are crushing.

TRACK LISTING

The Loser That Always Wins
Lady Of The Hour
Cast Bound King
Hand That Feeds
Permanent Things
Four Walls
Held The Hand
Lost In The Fire
Transformation
Slow To Run
Reach Out And Touch Something
Cóiste Bodhar
Nights Like This
Up On That Hill
Backslider’s Wine
Bloody Strings

The Quickening is an improvised work guided by emotional intuition and an ability to spin collective experience into music of potent and boundless beauty.

Jim White and Marisa Anderson instrumental voices’ are unmistakable and spellbindingly lyrical. Anderson unravels global guitar traditions into atmospheres all their own through improvisations and transforming melodic lines. While White implements an array of sticks, brushes, and techniques that imbue each rhythmic percussion passage with its own distinct personality. Together their melodic flourishes cascade and twist upon one another, at times trading conversational exchanges, and at others drifting in unison as if lost in the same train of thought.

White and Anderson share an abounding appetite for musical exploration. White, as a member of Venom P Stinger, Dirty Three, and Xylouris White, is well known for his creative and idiosyncratic drumming. His singular abilities have also led to collaborations with Cat Power, PJ Harvey, and Bill Callahan among others.

Anderson’s prolific output as a solo performer, her mastery of traditional folk and blues forms and her abilities to make them entirely her own has established her as one of the most exciting and forward-thinking guitarists of the last decade.

White and Anderson’s considerable technical skills are used in the most inventive and unconventional manner on their debut duo recording, The Quickening. The duo’ friendship and shared explorative nature inform these warm and daring improvisations. Their remarkable performances take the listener on a journey of exuberant discovery.

The idea of a collaboration developed while on the road together in 2015, Anderson playing solo and White playing with Xylouris white. The Quickening began at the Portland studio Type Foundry in late 2018, where the duo initially agreed to meet and improvise and record. Happy with the recordings, the duo headed to Mexico City and into Estudios Noviembres, a time capsule of a studio from the 70’s that had been largely closed before some young engineers took it over. The “slight disorientation” of working in less familiar environments mirrored their willingness to plunge headfirst into exploring new sonic territory together. Anderson purchased a new nylon string Ramos-Castillo guitar from a Mexican luthier just ahead of recording which leant to the spontaneity of “The Lucky” and “The Quickening”. The duo did not rehearse or perform together prior to the recording sessions; as White puts it, “it’s good to suspend disbelief at this stage of playing.”

TRACK LISTING

Gathering
Unwritten
The Lucky
The Other Christmas
Song
Last Days
Diver
The Quickening
Pallet
18 To 1
November

In just over a year since their initial inception, Eye Flys have established themselves as a force beyond reckoning. Their debut full-length ‘Tub of Lard’ is stunningly potency full of piss and vinegar, scientific in its ability to pulverize everything in its path. Due in part to the considerable pedigree of the band’s line- up (including members of Full of Hell, Backslider, Triac), the East Coast-based quartet chew through steel-barbed riffs and off-kilter rhythms with exponential force. Their 2019 debut EP ‘Context’ set an early precedent for just how lean and ruthless they can be. On ‘Tub of Lard’, Eye Flys launch that potential into 10 songs of maximum impact that find both raw power and subtlety in their simplicity.

For fans of Unsane, Cherubs, The Melvins.

TRACK LISTING

Tubba Lard
Guillotine
Predator And Prey
Not Ready For Tomorrow
Reality Tunnel
Nice Guy
Chapel Perilous
Extraterrestrial Memoradum
BLS
Perception Is Gamble

Sightless Pit may be a new name in heavy music but its members are some of the most groundbreaking artist of the genre. Lee Buford (The Body), Kristin Hayter (Lingua Ignota) and Dylan Walker (Full Of Hell) recorded their debut ‘Grave Of A Dog’ at Machines With Magnets with Seth Manchester (The Body, Lightning Bolt). Fans will recognize immediately Buford’s singular percussion and production, Walker’s venomous howl and Hayter’s virtuosic voice. The three share a bleak vision of existence and a willingness to follow each other into the musical abyss. Sightless Pit are a group of expansive ideas, extensive experience working together and shared vision. Over the course of the eight tracks the trio reflect the extremes and emotional weight of their world view through elegiac dirges, driving beats and explosive crescendos. Together, three strong voices unite to create a work of remarkable clarity of expression of enormous sorrow, futility and, most of all, beauty.

TRACK LISTING

Kingscorpse
Immersion Dispersal
The Ocean Of Mercy
Violent Rain
Drunk On Marrow
Miles Of Chain
Whom The Devil Long
Sought To Strangle
Love Is Dead, All Love Is
Dead

For their seventh full length, ‘Sonic Citadel’, Brians Gibson and Chippendale have done the daring, stripping away some of the distortion mask to reveal the naked pop forms as never before.

Throughout their 25-year history Lightning Bolt have toured the world, performing at Coachella, ATP, Festivals, Pitchfork Music Festival, Austin Psych Fest and FYF Fest, to name a few.

Brian Chippendale has collaborated with Björk, Boredoms, Andrew W.K. and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. Brian’s comics are published with Drawn & Quarterly and Picturebox. Brian is also in Black Pus.

Brian Gibson’s game Thumper, produced by his own company Drool, was awarded the 2019 Apple Design Award, was on Gamespot, Hardcore Gamer and IDN’s Best Of 2016 lists and won countless other awards.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: With the grinding guitars and machinated percussive blasts, Lightning Bolt have always proved an intimating presence. 'Sonic Citadel' sees them embracing more of the rapid-fire punk aesthetic than their more dirgy stoner sludge, and is all the better for the glimmers of melody and old-school thrash-punk fire within.

TRACK LISTING

Blow To The Head
USA Is A Psycho
Air Conditioning
Hüsker Dön’t
Big Banger
Halloween 3
Don Henley In The Park
Tom Thump
Bouncy House
All Insane
Van Halen 2049

Eye Flys brings together the minds of four musicians known for their work in some of the most extreme, blistering bands today. The quartet was initially started by Full Of Hell guitarist Spencer Hazard and former Backslider drummer Patrick Forrest as an outlet to play aggressive music with equal intensity that would contrast the breakneck speeds of their other projects. After asking Backslider bassist Jake Smith to join on guitar and vocals and Triac’s Kevin Bernsten on bass, Eye Flys’ potential for crafting impossibly heavy songs was solidified.

Eye Flys’ debut ‘Context’ was written and recorded just a few short months from the band’s inception, drawing on each members’ considerable experience and driven by the excitement of playing in uncharted territory. This is an album of commanding, lean noise rock absolutely brimming with vitriol.

The direct, raw energy of Eye Flys’ music is simultaneously menacing and intoxicating. Drawing immediate comparisons to bands like Unsane, Cherubs and The Melvins (where they take their name), the quartet’s bludgeoning sound is underpinned by a razor sharp edge. Smith’s vicious lyrics are paralleled by his unrelenting barks with passages like the opening of ‘Weaponize’ literally spat through grinding teeth. Their taut, muscular riffing and pummelling drums lay atop a foundation of deceptively intricate arrangements.

Eye Flys’ ‘Context’ stands as a testament to its members’ abilities to produce music that is as ferocious as it is addictive. In just six songs Eye Flys not only prove their place among their peers but stand out as a force of sheer, immovable power.

TRACK LISTING

Stems
Dosed
Crushing Of The Human
Spirit
Weaponize
The Triumph Of Hagbard Celine
Fuckface

The incomparable duo, Matmos, have done it again! Their new album, Plastic Anniversary, was created using only plastic. Highlighting the crises of convenience, the Duo make music from our refuse. True to form, the band have assembled a promiscuous array of examples of this sturdy-yet-ersatz family of materials: Dominos, Styrofoam coolers, police riot shields, polyethylene waste containers, PVC panpipes, pinpricks of bubble wrap, pills, silicone gel breast implants and most horrifically synthetic human fat. Where did this idea come from? Drew Daniels and M.C, Schmidts own “plastic” anniversary as a couple.

Matmos glide from the tongue-in-cheek fun of “Breaking Bread” (literally smashing Bread LPs) to Cronenbergian body-horror of “Interior with Billiard Balls & Synthetic Fat.” The album is playful and poppy while conveying a very serious message and on the darker implications of ignoring the havoc we are imposing on the earth all for the sake of convienience

A super special limited edition set will come with a sculptural album, embedded with plastic bottles, that while is the actual album, is rendered viruatlly unplayable by the pastic floating within. This edition also includes the album on a exclusive multi color mashup vinyl, a t-shirt, and a bonus track, all exclusive to the box. All proceeds from this special edition will benefit The Ocean Cleanup.

TRACK LISTING

1. Breaking Bread
2. The Crying Pill
3. Interior With Billiard Balls & Synthetic Fat
4. Extending The Plastisphere To GJ237b
5. Silicone Gel Implant
6. Plastic Anniversary
7. Thermoplastic Riot Shield
8. Fanfare For Polyethylene Waste Containers
9. The Singing Tube
10. Collapse Of The Fourth Kingdom
11. Plastisphere

Chicago’s Oozing Wound are a mass of contradictions: weed lovers whose music hits you with its breakneck head banging force. The band deal with nihilism, yet remain addictively fun. Their music is equal parts sludge and thrash, noise and riff-loaded rock. High Anxiety is an unabashed mocking of the madness of modern living, its chemical induced adventures and establishment absurdity, deriding the industrial complex behind established institutions such as NASA while savaging those who deny science. Oozing Wound on High Anxiety are nihilistic pied pipers making us laugh our way to the apocalypse. The album finds guitarist and vocalist Zack Weil drummer Kyle Reynolds and bassist Kevin Cribbin blending their ferocious energy, sonic experiments and blunt lyricism for a pummeling enjoyable head-banger with an irresistible sneer.

On High Anxiety, Oozing Wound’s songs have become more complex, their attacks more ferocious, and bass and guitar lines more captivating. The album was recorded in four days at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio. The trio ripped through live-tracking and overdubs, leaving space to experiment with new sounds and effects. The band, having an affinity for the complexities of prog music, managed to bring prog elements to High Anxiety without sacrificing any of their songs punch. Subtle layers of saxophone, flutes and synths were blended into guitar tones, adding depth and texture without cluttering arrangements. Fist-pumping blasts of whitehot riffing become a Trojan horse for sonic weirdness. The resulting recordings are at once some of their most sonically rich, immediate, and impactful.

High Anxiety drips with a caustic vitriol that is both riotous and intoxicating

TRACK LISTING

1. Surrounded By Fucking Idiots
2. Filth Chisel
3. Tween Shitbag
4. Die On Mars
5. Birth Of A Flat Earther
6. Riding The Universe
7. Vein Ripper

Elena Setién is an artist defined by her vivid songwriting and nuanced compositions. Her music exudes the bold individualism and sense of empathy associated with her homeland of Spain’s Basque region. Setién is a skilled multi-instrumentalist and performed nearly every part on the record save for a few select guitar parts by Steve Gunn. While Elena’s recordings are decidedly pop, she has considerable experience as an improviser. ‘Another Kind Of Revolution’, Elena Setién’s Thrill Jockey debut, is a work of entrancing, effortless beauty.

Setién grew up during a period of political upheaval in Spain, in the Basque region. The turmoil of the post-dictatorship period of the 1980s and the intensive civic actions left her with a sense of duty to fight for progress. Her lyrics throughout ‘Another Kind Of Revolution’ describe the beauty of everyday life and nature and promote the forces of change, not as a burden but as the very source of hope to draw from.

‘Another Kind Of Revolution’ tells its stories through an expansive sonic palette. Pianos and Wurlitzer take on various timbres for each song, trickling in and out of the foreground with Setién’s distinguished voice gently gliding overtop. Careful attention to specific recording techniques and allowing for the slight imperfections in the instruments and amplifiers, bring a depth to the recordings that is both direct and organic. Elena Setién’s work is elemental and bold. Her music bends simple, familiar sounds and compositional forms into thoroughly unique songs. With ‘Another Kind Of Revolution’, Elena Setién continues to defy convention with songs as gorgeous as they are auspicious.

TRACK LISTING

The Wheel That Drives You
Another Kind Of Revolution
Window One
Sail Down The River
Old Jamie
Down The Meadow
Far From The Madding Crowd
We See You Shining For A While
Window Two (For Sigurd And Albert)
She Was So Fair

Endon is a band as mercurial as they are ferocious. Comprised of the quintet of vocalist Taichi Nagura, guitarist Koki Miyabe, drummer Shin Yokota and electronics/noisemakers Taro Aiko and Etsuo Nagura, Endon’s music is contained chaos, bending and colliding genres into one another atop a bed of thunderous distortion, feedback, and unearthly squeals. Vocalist Taichi’s voice embodies an unreal number of personalities with wordless howls seething one moment and agonized cries the next, before desperate gasps for air. It comes as no surprise that they have been credited as the most extreme band in Tokyo.

‘Boy Meets Girl’ was envisioned as a soundtrack to an imagined horror film about love. The core of the ensemble’s song structures are often built around Koki’s fuzz-laden guitar and Shin’s drum bombast which propel torrents of hisses and squelches from Taro and Etsuo. Taichi’s largely lyricless screams, moans and whimpers are potent messengers of the songs’ emotional heft. There lies an ecstatic, excited energy amidst the anarchic defiance Endon's music exudes. Born of the same Japanese scenes that gave rise to the likes of Merzbow and Boredoms, their sound is equally diverse and abrasive. ‘Boy Meets Girl’ demonstrates Endon’s singular faculty to produce music that is at once tortured and transcendent.

TRACK LISTING

Boy Meets Girl
Heart Shaped Brain
Born Again
Doubts As A Source
Love Amnesia
Final Acting Out
Red Shoes
Not For You

Through his output both as a sound artist and through his eclectic Dekorder record label, Black To Comm (Marc Richter) has established himself as a singular voice of new music. His Thrill Jockey debut, "Seven Horses For Seven Kings", is Richter’s most direct and visceral to date.

A relentless sonic explorer, he approaches the studio as his instrument, using sampling, analogue production and digital manipulation to sculpt audio fragments into surprising new shapes. Samples from Richter’s contemporaries like German composer Nils Frahm are bent and compounded with elements of early recorded music and medieval song, creating pieces that transcend time and genre. Richter blurs the lines between organic instrumentation and digital production to the extent that the two become inseparable.

"Seven Horses For Seven Kings" was completed during a particularly prolific period for Richter. Working on a broad range of commissions since his last album - from writing for film and theatre works to composing for art installations, apps and sleep music - generated a flurry of new ideas and influences. Extensive touring would equally come to inform a key shift in Richter’s music, simulating the raw, unpredictable energy of live performances on record. While rhythm has been largely absent from previous Black To Comm releases, here the music seems totally bound to it. The album’s breathtaking pace drives Richter’s music to new levels of intensity.

'Black To Comm is... like an abandoned museum of late-Twentieth Century instruments whose exhibits are still running at half power.' - New Yorker

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Pulsing doom-laiden ambience, rickety industrial echoes and foreboding strings form the backbone to Black To Comm's most evocative and absorbing work to date. Stunning stuff.

TRACK LISTING

Asphodel Mansions
A Miracle No-Mother Child At Your Breast
Lethe
Ten Tons Of Rain In A Plastic Cup
Licking The Fig Tree Threshold
Fly On You
Double Happiness In Temporal Decoy
If Not, Not
The Deseret Alphabet
Semirechye
Rameses II
Angel Investor
The Courtesan Jigokudayu Sees Herself as A Skeleton In The Mirror Of Hell

‘Luck In The Valley’ is the 10th and final album by Jack Rose and is the yardstick by which many contemporary acoustic guitar albums are measured. This 2018 re-issue makes this contemporary classic available again for the first time since 2010.

Jack Rose first rose to prominence with the drone/noise/folk unit Pelt. Pelt can be counted among the early influential new music underground bands such as UN, No Neck Blues Band, Charalambides, Tower Recordings and Six Organs Of Admittance. Along with the influences of John Fahey and Robbie Basho, Rose also incorporated North Indian classical, early American blues, bluegrass and minimalism into his singular style.

‘Luck In The Valley’ came right as Rose’s influence was just beginning to take flight but was sadly his last album before his unexpected death in December of 2009. Still, his music and influence, much like his person, bold, hearty and rooted in traditional American music continues to be a source of reference for guitarists and musicians carrying traditional American music into modern times.

“Jack Rose, Versatile Master of the Guitar” - New York Times

“The energy behind ‘Luck In The Valley’ all emanates from Rose himself: you can almost see his fingers flying across his guitar strings... energy resonates from within his melodies and his songs, giving ‘Luck In The Valley’ a radiance.” - Washington Post

“It’s a big, bold work, just the way Rose was a big, bold guy - confident, honest, and forthright.” - Pitchfork

“Jack Rose is acoustic music... Without ever singing a word. Jack Rose could communicate in a way few musicians can.” - PopMatters

TRACK LISTING

Blues For Percy Danforth
Lick Mountain Ramble
Woodpiles On The Side Of The Road
When Tailgate Drops, The Bullshit Stops
Moon In The Gutter
Luck In The Valley
Saint Louis Blues
Tree In The Valley
Everybody Ought To Pray Sometime
West Coast Blues

The music of Brendon Anderegg is a hall of mirrors, multi-layered and self-obscuring. Largely filtered through Mountains - his pioneering electronic project with Koen Holtkamp - Anderegg emerged as a solo artist in the late 90s. He returns now with ‘June’, a vinyl-exclusive release on Thrill Jockey.

The music on ‘June’ is a complex network of layers, paradoxically a calm and soothing listen. Collapsing history into its own contemporary sonic movements, Andregg’s methodically created work falls in the lineage of electronic pioneers like Bernard Parmegiani and early ambient projects like Tangerine Dream, Popul Vuh and Cluster and puts his solo work in the realm of New Age figures like Michael Stearns and JD Emmanuel. ‘June’ is a singularly beautiful and challenging work that marks the long overdue re-emergence of Brendon Anderegg as a solo voice.

Brendon Anderegg is a Brooklyn-based, Emmynominated composer with clients ranging from Pitchfork to ESPN.

Available only on vinyl, ‘June’ is pressed on virgin vinyl and includes a free digital download coupon.

OOIOO’s seminal album ‘Gold & Green’ is finally widely released on vinyl for the first time. Presented as a deluxe double LP in a gatefold jacket with spot metallic ink and full colour inner sleeves featuring glorious artwork. Pressed on virgin vinyl with free digital download coupon.

OOIOO have always created a musical language all their own. Under the leadership of Yoshimi, a founding member of Boredoms, the group have recorded six albums that have subverted expectations and warped perceptions of what constitutes pop and experimental music.

‘Gold & Green’ features guest appearances from Sean Lennon, Seiichi Yamamoto (Boredoms) and Yuka Honda (Cibo Matto).

OOIOO’s Yoshimi is to release an exhilarating new album this Autumn with her group SAICOBAB, featuring sitarist Yoshida Daikiti, bassist Akita Goldman and percussionist Hama.

“‘Challenging’ music doesn’t get more fun than this.” - NPR Music

“OOIOO traffic in a crafty kind of post-punk primitivism… the synths, power chords, polyrhythmic drumming and wordless chants building into an irresistible, throbbing whole” - The Wire

“An extraordinary band.” - New York Times

“OOIOO is tight, lithe and anything but robotic.” - Washington Post

TRACK LISTING

Moss Trumpeter
Á

Oozing Wound are a thrash trio featuring veterans of Chicago’s underground scene who have played with High On Fire, The Body, Ash Borer, Wolf Eyes, Nazoranai and Black Pus, among many others.

A horrifying concoction of apathy and malaise wrapped in a delectable sheet of hatred drowned in a bath of contempt.

“Oozing Wound are the Chicago trio ripping up the rule book of thrash.” - The Guardian

“Chicago trio Oozing Wound play loud, brash and snotty crossover thrash with a penchant for the kind of big, obnoxious riffs that can’t fail to plaster a huge grin across your face.” - Terrorizer

“Their songs barrel along like Iron Lung bitch-slapping the first Megadeth album or meaty Testament-like guitar gallops infused with an air of frenetic power violence irreverence.” - Metal Hammer

“A whole sweaty, stinking ruck of basement smashing fun” - The Quietus

“So refreshingly anti-bullshit are Oozing Wound that they could conceivably turn out to be the Nirvana of thrash.” - Noisey

TRACK LISTING

Rambo 5 (Pre-Emptive Strike)
Diver
Deep Space
Mercury In Retrograde Virus
Weather Tamer
Everything Sucks, And My Life Is A Lie
Eruptor
Tachycardia
You Owe Me, Iommi
Sky Creep

‘Promises’ is Entrance’s debut for Thrill Jockey Records, featuring four astonishingly unforgettable new songs. ‘Promises’ is the introduction to a fresh chapter in the story of Entrance.

Entrance is the multi-talented singer-songwriter Guy Blakeslee. An artist’s artist, Entrance is a musician with the blues running through his veins. His newest creations add up to a set of rich, cinematic songs featuring expansive orchestration and imaginative storytelling, as unique to himself as they are, at times, evocative of Townes Van Zandt, Scott Walker and Gene Clark.

Among his fans, he counts the likes of Spike Jonze, who featured Entrance’s interpretation of Skip James’ ‘I’m So Glad’ in the film ‘Her’. Players on the EP include Paz Lenchantin (Pixies) and Emily Kokal (Warpaint).

TRACK LISTING

Promises
Answer Within
Waking Up
Make Believe

Grumbling Fur are the UK based duo of Alexander Tucker and Daniel O’Sullivan.

Alexander Tucker’s solo releases on Thrill Jockey include ‘Third Mouth’ and ‘Dorwytch’. A prolific artist, his latest graphic novel, the acclaimed ‘World In The Force Field’, is out now via Breakdown Press.

Daniel O’Sullivan has been at the core of the wildly successful This Heat reconstitution and with Massimo Pupillo of Zu recently realised Laniakea. As part of Norwegian experimental collective Ulver he released the ‘ATGCLVLSSCAP’ album and later this year there’ll be a new album from Æthenor, his ongoing project with Steve Noble and Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O))).

‘Furfour’ is the band’s second release on Thrill Jockey, with previous releases on Aurora Borealis and Latitudes alongside their last highly successful output on The Quietus Phonographic Corporation.

On ‘Furfour’, Grumbling Fur are joined by This Heat’s Charles Bullen and Isobel Sollenberger from Bardo Pond. The band have also recently collaborated with Charlemagne Palestine.

‘Furfour’ gradually emerged over three years of writing and recording at 147 Tower Gardens, the mystical, ivy-shrouded house that Tucker and O’Sullivan once called home.

The band’s music is shaped all this are their long-standing shared musical affections, encompassing orchestrated poptones, collage, dub and beatmaking as well as experimental and drone elements - touchtones might include Faust, Arthur Russell, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Moondog, Michael Nyman, Gate, Syd Barrett, Stereolab, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Ashtray Navigations, CC Hennix and Madlib.

TRACK LISTING

Strange The Friends
Acid Ali Khan
Heavy Days
Molten Familiar
Milky Light
Pyewacket’s Palace
Perfect Reader
Silent Plans / Black Egg
Golden Simon
Sapien Sapiens
Come Down And Watch Them
Suneaters

Jan St. Werner, the well-respected artist and musician known for his solo compositions, his work with Mouse On Mars and art pieces, has created a beautifully rhythmic, instantly gripping work with his new album ‘Felder’.

Werner has created sounds that are listenable and inviting, complex but approachable and, mostly, completely unidentifiable. ‘Felder’ means ‘fields’ in German and here the word refers to conceptual frameworks and subjects and sound fields. Werner mixes organic sounds from French horns and cellos seamlessly with synthesized notes created with one-of-a-kind programs. He builds layers of sound with differing cadences upon one another, creating intricate patterns that connect with each other structurally, rhythmically, semantically and historically. Suggestions of jazz, industrial music, drone and even folk float in and out of the electronic compositions in a seemingly effortless manner; paradoxically, ‘Felder’ was meticulously constructed over the course of four years.

“Music that makes you hyper-aware of your place in relation to it and something that removes you from thinking about yourself altogether” - Pitchfork

Werner has collaborated with Markus Popp (Oval), Mark E Smith (The Fall), Damo Suzuki (Can), the scientist / writer Oswald Wiener and the theorist Siegfried Zielinksi on pieces that were premiered at the Chicago Symphony, Phiharmonie Cologne, Barbican London, Radialsystem Berlin, HAU Berlin, Akademie der Kunste Berlin and the German public radio stations WDR, SWR, BR, and DLF. Werner has also shown works at Kunstverein Munich, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, Museum Abteiberg Monchengladbach, Cubitt Gallery London, Kunsthalle Dusseldorf and Cornerhouse Manchester.

In addition Werner has worked with the visual artist Rosa Barba on pieces premiered at London’s Tate Modern, the MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Reina Sofia in Madrid.

TRACK LISTING

Beardman
Kroque AF
Osho
Foggy Esor Pt. 1
The Somewhere That Is Moving
Slipped Through Heaven
The Abstract Pit
Foggy Esor Pt. 2
Singoth
Rain Deer

‘Ultimate Care II’ is the new album from renowned conceptual electronics duo Matmos (Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt).

Recorded in the basement studio of their home in Baltimore, the album is constructed entirely out of the sounds generated by a Whirlpool Ultimate Care II model washing machine. Like its namesake, the album runs across its variations as a single, continuous thirty eight minute experience that starts with the grinding turn of the wash size selection wheel, and ends with the alert noise that signals that the wash is done. Between these audio-verité book-ends, we experience an exploded view of the machine, hearing it in normal operation but also as an object being rubbed and stroked and drummed upon and prodded and sampled and sequenced and processed by the duo, with some occasional extra help from an ultra-local crew of guest stars (some of whom regularly do laundry chez Matmos).

Dan Deacon, Max Eilbacher (Horse Lords), Sam Haberman (Horse Lords), Jason Willett (Half Japanese) and Duncan Moore (Needle Gun) all took part, either playing the machine like a drum, processing its audio, or sending MIDI data to the duo’s samplers. The vocabulary of the Ultimate Care II, its rhythmic chugs, spin cycle drones, rinse cycle splashes, metallic clanks and electronic beeps are parsed into an eclectic syntax of diverse musical genres. The result is a suite of rhythmic, melodic and drone-based compositions that morph dramatically but remain fanatically centered upon their single, original sound source.

In addition to releasing a string of acclaimed albums over the past 20 years, Matmos have played the uterus and reproductive tract of a cow at the San Francisco Art Institute, canisters of helium at Radio City Music Hall (while opening for Bjork) and John Cage’s personal collection of conch shells at Carnegie Hall.

Matmos have also collaborated and performed with Terry Riley, The Kronos Quartet, Antony Hegarty, William Basinski and Horse Lords.

Three videos will be serviced: one by Baltimore musician Max Eilbacher (Horse Lords, Needle Gun), one by infamous collage artist / plunderphonic cut-up wizard Vicki Bennett (aka People Like Us) and one by Ed Apodaca of San Francisco motion graphics firm L-inc, who created the ‘Very Large Green Triangles’ video for Matmos’ last album.

TRACK LISTING

Ultimate Care II

"Beacons Of Ancestorship" is Tortoise's sixth full-length album, and their first release of new material in five years, since 2004's "It's All Around You". A characteristic Tortoise album is one that traverses an encyclopaedia of styles and reference points, a document of where musical intersections and dialogue are occurring at a given moment in time. "Beacons Of Ancestorship" is no different, with nods to techno, punk, electro, lo-fi noise, cut-up beats, heavily processed synths, and mournful, elegiac dirges. We see these ideas working out in compositions like "High Class Slim Came Floatin' In", an eight-minute track which playfully references the world of ecstatic rave and dance culture with a curiously ambivalent, multi-part suite overlaid with robotic, machine-sounding melodies that stop and start in several different time signatures before the song's ultimate resolution; and again in "Yinxianghechengqi", which begins as a straightforward uptempo math-rocker before steadily accelerating into a wall of fuzzy atonal sqwonk.

Tracklisting
1. High Class Slim Came Floatin' In
2. Prepare Your Coffin
3. Northern Something
4. Gigantes
5. Penumbra
6. Yinxianghechengqi
7. Fall of Seven Diamonds Plus One
8. Minors
9. Monument Six One Thousand
10. De Chelly
11. Charteroak Foundation

Revered Chicago-based instrumental group Tortoise, comprised of Dan Bitney, John Herndon, Doug McCombs, John McEntire and Jeff Parker, have spent 25 years making music that defies description. While the quintet have nodded to dub, rock, jazz, electronica and minimalism throughout their acclaimed and influential six-album discography, the resulting sounds have always been distinctly their own.

It’s a fact that remains true on the hotly anticipated forthcoming new album ‘The Catastrophist’ (Thrill Jockey) and Tortoise’s first studio album in nearly seven years.

Recorded at McEntire’s famed Soma Studios, it’s an album where moody, synth-swept jams like the opening title track cosy up next to hypnotic, bassand- beat missives like ‘Shake Hands With Danger’ and a fantastic cover of David Essex’s 1973 hit song ‘Rock On’ sung by U.S. Maple’s Todd Rittmann. Throughout, the songs on ‘The Catastrophist’ transcend expectations as often as they delight the listen’s eardrums.

‘Rock On’ isn’t the only vocal moment on the album. Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley distinctive tones are on the bittersweet classic soul/R&B vibe ballad ‘Yonder Blue’. this also marks the first time a Tortoise album will feature a guest vocalist singing original lyrics.

‘Gesceap’, the first track premiered from ‘The Catastrophist’, is a stunning seven-minute long, minimalist rhythmic piece, morphing from two gently intersecting synth lines into a pounding, frenzied full-band finish.

There’s a deeply intuitive interplay between the group that comes only from two decades of experimentation, revision and improvisation. At a time when our minds are constantly bombarded by myriad distractions, ‘The Catastrophist’ reminds us that there’s something much greater out there. All we have to do is listen.

TRACK LISTING

The Catastrophist
Ox Duke
Rock On
Gopher Island
Shake Hands With Danger
The Clearing Fills
Gesceap
Hot Coffee
Yonder Blue
Tesseract
At Odds With Logic

Dan Friel creates intense, colourful and intricate instrumentals that, for all their complexity, are melodic pop songs. Equally at home in the DIY scene and the contemporary art world, Friel has been at the forefront of a movement of musicians who create dance music with a clear affinity for the extremes of noise and metal, eschewing the traditional dance clubs and adhering to the ethics of the underground.

On his second Thrill Jockey album ‘Life’, Friel uses his surprisingly small arsenal of gear to distort and manoeuvre his beloved Yamaha Portasound into an expansive sound that is incredibly varied in tone and texture. This toy keyboard, his first instrument, is manipulated beyond recognition to create songs that are frenzied and epic.

‘Life’ also has moments that are incredibly sweet, idyllic, and fragile - sentiments that make perfect sense coming from a new father whose instrument of choice is his childhood keyboard.

All throughout ‘Life’, Friel exploits his intentionally simple set-up to ever surprising effect, using simple electronics to mirror the sounds of guitars, drums and harmonicas. It is an irresistible and genrebending collection of underground anthems.

‘Life’ was written and recorded by Friel at his home studios in Brooklyn and was mixed by Jonathan Schenke (Parquet Courts, Liturgy).

‘Life’ is Friel’s sophomore Thrill Jockey release following ‘Total Folklore’.

“Punchy instrumentals instilled with the raw energy of punk” - Pitchfork

“Full of technicolor chirp, sugar-rush whoosh, and a bucket of adrenaline” - Stereogum

“A merry onslaught” - New York Times

“It’s pretty much bottled raw power” - Tom Ravenscroft, BBC

“Fucking great” - Kurt Braunohler

TRACK LISTING

Lullaby (For Wolf)
Cirrus
Rattler
Lungs
Sleep Deprivation
Life (Pt. 1)
Jamie (Luvver)
Bender
Theme
Life (Pt. 2)

Dommengang are a Brooklyn-via-Seattle rock trio fronted by Pacific Northwest psych mainstay Sig Wilson (Holy Sons, Castanets, Scout Niblett) and Brooklyn musicians Brian Markham and Adam Bulgasem (currently members of Holy Sons’ live band).

While the trio’s affection for electric blues and proto-punk bombast is clear, their music abandons traditional song structures and replaces their recognizable tropes with progressive frameworks. The band’s debut, ‘Everybody’s Boogie’, pivots between gloriously inventive riffs and fuzzed-out experimentation, a combination so potent that the listener hardly notices that they rarely sing.

‘Everybody’s Boogie’ was recorded live in the studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn with minimal overdubs.

Recommended for fans of Pontiak, Endless Boogie, Earthless and Goat

TRACK LISTING

Everybody’s Boogie
Hats Off To Magic
Slow Hat
Her Blues
Wild In The Street Blues
Extra Slim Boogie
Burning Off The Years
Have Luck Will Travel
CC
Lost My Way

'Glitter Glamour Atrocity' is a snapshot of the band in the midst of an incredible burst of creativity, and was recorded during the same sessions that produced 'Heads On Fire' and 'Abstractions & Mutations'. Sonically, it is radically different from anything else coming out of the New York underground at the time, and it set the template for the singular concoction of heavy psychedelic music, krautrock, and a worship of pure sound they have explored in different variations ever since.

Throughout the album the band explores themes of greed, misinformation, war, hypocrisy and their outcomes within the world’s political and economic systems, presenting these weighty topics with the same air of mystic understanding that underpins their music. Glitter Glamour Atrocity includes the song “Under Skin Or By Name,” the longest running staple in the band’s live set, which the band performed in the acclaimed film Only Lovers Left Alive at the request of director Jim Jarmusch. It is one of only two performances in the movie, which is enamored with the music making process and record collector culture.

Following the mood-setting intro track and the meditative bombast of “Under Skin or By Name,” WHITE HILLS settle into the sparse groove of “Spirit of Exile,” an expression of a desire to live apart from a culture that one does not fit into. These songs glow with the burning vitality and passion of free thinkers trapped in the waning years of the Bush administration. Those sentiments are perhaps most compellingly expressed on “Love Serve Remember,” a warped, surreal vision of life after 9/11 seen through the eyes of someone who witnessed the event first-hand, interspersed with a brilliantly edited speech by Bush himself in which he admits “I was a threat to the United States.”

Glitter Glamour Atrocity was recorded with the first iteration of the trio line-up with Dave W on vocals, guitar, synthesizers, and sound collage, Ego Sensation on bass and vocals, and Bob Bellomo on drums. It was recorded at Bellomo’s studio in Passaic, NJ, and produced by Dave W.

TRACK LISTING

01. Air Waves
02. Under Skin Or By Name
03. Spirit Of Exile
04. Distance
05. Somewhere Along The Way
06. Long Serve Remember
07. Passage
08. Glitter Glamour Atrocity

The Soft Pink Truth is the solo alter ego of Drew Daniel, one half of celebrated Baltimore-based electronic duo Matmos.

After a decade of silence in which Daniel concentrated on Matmos and becoming a Shakespeare professor, The Soft Pink Truth is set to release ‘Why Do The Heathen Rage?’, whose subtitle ‘Electronic Profanations Of Black Metal Classics’ reveals its bizarre agenda as an unrequited love letter to a justly divisive genre.

A gleeful queer travesty of black metal’s undying obsession with kvlt authenticity, ‘Why Do The Heathen Rage?’ is also a formally precise homage executed with a scholar’s obsession. With the guitar chord transcription assistance of Owen Gardner (Teeth Mountain, Horse Lords) and a coven of guest vocalists including Antony Hegarty (Antony And The Johnsons), Terence Hannum (Locrian), Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak) and M.C. Schmidt (Matmos), Daniel meticulously transposes the riffs, structures and patterns of black metal chestnuts and deep cuts by Darkthrone, Venom, Mayhem, Sarcofago, Beherit and more into oddly hybrid new forms. Cruising camp absurdity by forcing a sticky tryst between the two mutually incongruous early 90s subcultures of rave and black metal, the results are bracingly strange on first listen but curiously addictive as the album sinks in.

TRACK LISTING

Invocation For Strength
Black Metal
Sadomatic Rites
Ready To Fuck
Satanic Black Devotion
Beholding The Throne Of Might
Let There Be Ebola Frost
Buried By Time And Dust
Maniac
Grim And Frostbitten Gay Bar

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2014 EXCLUSIVE, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

Brand new 16 minute 12“ EP from Glenn Jones pressed on virgin vinyl and packaged in a full colour LP jacket with free download coupon.

Limited to only 1,000 worldwide.

All exclusive, never before released material.

Limited to 120 copies for the UK and Ireland.

TRACK LISTING

Medley : Island III / Against My Ruin
From A Forgotten Session
The Orca Grande Cement Factory At Victorville (with Cian Nugent)

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2014 EXCLUSIVE, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

Classic albums from the early days of Thrill Jockey.

Originally released in 1996/1998 - these have been out of print on vinyl for nearly a decade.

Both albums are being re-issued and will be sold as a 4xLP set.

‘Flemish Altruism’ will feature new/updated artwork.

Both will include download coupons for the first time.

A Minor Forest recently reunited and played a very well received show in San Francisco (with a Bay Guardian cover story)

The band will tour the US in April & May of this year.

Limited to 60 copies for the UK and Ireland.

TRACK LISTING

Flemish Altruism
...But The Pants Stay On
Bill's Mom Likes To Fuck
Ed Is 50
So Jesus Was At The Last Supper...
Jacking Off George Lucas
Speed For Gavin
Perform The Critical
Straw Transfer
Dainty Jack And His Amazing Technicolor Cloth Jacket
Beef Rigger
The Loneliest Enuretic

Inindependence
The Dutch Fist
Erik's Budding Romance
Look At That Car, It's Full Of Balloons
... It's Salmon!
The Smell Of Hot
Michael Anthony
Discoier

D. Charles Speer, aka Dave Shuford, is a founding member of both Rhyton and No Neck Blues Band, and also known for his work with Enos Slaughter, The Suntanama, Egypt Is The Magick #, and Coach Fingers.

On ‘Doubled Exposure’ The Helix take their loose and free country rock boogie and enhance it with the blistering psych Speer explores in Rhyton, and the traditional Greek melodies delved into on the Speer solo album, ‘Arghiledes’ (also on Thrill Jockey).

‘Doubled Exposure’ was recorded by Jason Meagher at the increasingly legendary Black Dirt Studios in upstate New York, where Blues Control, Expo 70, Jack Rose and Psychic Ills have also recorded.

The Helix band member Hans Chew (keyboards) has released solo music on Three Lobed, while Marc Orleans (pedal steel) has performed with Catherine Irwin, Steve Gunn, Meg Baird and Chris Forsyth.

‘Drifter’s Temple’ is Plankton Wat (aka Dewey Mahood)’s second album for Thrill Jockey, following last year’s ‘Spirits’.

Mahood utilized 6 and 12 string guitars, lap steel, bass, organ, and synth to realize these richly detailed songs. ‘Drifter’s Temple’ harkens back to Mahood’s childhood in Northern California, both sonically and conceptually. A loose narrative is woven through these ten instrumental tracks, touching on the Gold Country and Mt. Shasta that populate his native countryside.

The album unfolds with the grace and contour of the landscape that inspired it, with fingerpicked melodies slowly growing to gigantic peaks of lysergic bliss. His guitar style is as far reaching as ever on ‘Drifter’s Temple’, which shows him seamlessly integrating his love of the Appalacian folk music of Dock Boggs and Roscoe Holcomb into the subtle Grateful Dead-isms, nods to 70s cosmic music, and overt Crazy Horse moves he has explored on recent releases.

‘Drifter’s Temple’ features contributions from Dustin Dybvig (Horse Feathers and Edibles), Matt McDowell (Sagas) and John Rau (Royal Baths and Edibles).

Dewey Mahood was a founding member of Eternal Tapestry and has performed in Gärden Söund (with Barn Owl), Edibles, Bloodbiker, and Jackie-O Motherfucker.

TRACK LISTING

Toward The Golden City
Changing Winds
Klamath At Dusk
Nightfall
Empire Mines
Hash Smuggler’s Blues
Dance Of Lumeria
Western Lament
Bread Of Dreams
Siskiyou Caverns

Limited deluxe LP edition (150 copies for the UK, exclusively available to independent retailers) includes a bonus 7” with two unreleased non-album tracks (‘Night Train To Tuscan’ / ‘Believers II’). The 7” is packaged in its own jacket and included with the LP.

Peals is a new band led by William Cashion (Future Islands) and Bruce Willen (Double Dagger), members of two of Baltimore’s most dynamic live bands.

The instrumental music on ‘Walking Field’ was created with acoustic and electric guitars, keyboards, tambourines, toy pianos, and other sonic tools to create a stripped-down, warm living room atmosphere.

The music that sprang from these sessions, simultaneously exultant and cerebral, took the duo into unexpected territory. While the emotional intensity of their other projects is on full display here, a more gentle, melancholic and often abstract expression recalls Robin Guthrie and minimalist recordings from the sonic pioneers of the 1970s German scene - all direct inspirations for Peals as the songs that would become ‘Walking Field’ took shape.

‘Walking Field’ was recorded with no bass guitars or drums - all percussion sounds were generated by contact with guitars and microphones - the emphasis here is placed on texture and feeling.

TRACK LISTING

Floating Leaf
Blue Elvis
Belle Air
Pendelles
Tiptoes In The Parlor
Lonestar
Believers
Koan 1

Peals is a new band led by William Cashion (Future Islands) and Bruce Willen (Double Dagger), members of two of Baltimore’s most dynamic live bands.

The instrumental music on ‘Walking Field’ was created with acoustic and electric guitars, keyboards, tambourines, toy pianos, and other sonic tools to create a stripped-down, warm living room atmosphere.

The music that sprang from these sessions, simultaneously exultant and cerebral, took the duo into unexpected territory. While the emotional intensity of their other projects is on full display here, a more gentle, melancholic and often abstract expression recalls Robin Guthrie and minimalist recordings from the sonic pioneers of the 1970s German scene - all direct inspirations for Peals as the songs that would become ‘Walking Field’ took shape.

‘Walking Field’ was recorded with no bass guitars or drums - all percussion sounds were generated by contact with guitars and microphones - the emphasis here is placed on texture and feeling.

TRACK LISTING

Floating Leaf
Blue Elvis
Belle Air
Pendelles
Tiptoes In The Parlor
Lonestar
Believers
Koan 1

Survival are a New York trio featuring Hunter Hunt-Hendrix (Liturgy), Greg Smith, and Jeff Bobula.

This self-titled debut was recorded by Colin Marston (Krallice, Dysrhythmia) at The Thousand Caves and mastered by Heba Kadry at Timeless Mastering.

‘Survival’ is an album of dark and meditative heavy rock. Syncopated riffs, intricate rhythms and atypical time signatures create dramatic and complex melodic lines that provide a bed for chant-like lyrics. The group operate as a collective, writing lyrics, riffs and singing with one voice. The album is a unique document that harkens back to post-hardcore, Black Sabbath, Magma, Aphrodite’s Child, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Aaron Copeland, The Smashing Pumpkins, and the first wave of math rock.

Survival were formed out of the ashes of Birthday Boyz, whose 2007 tour of China was documented by Vice TV for an instalment of the Music World show ‘Rock Under The Red Flag’.

TRACK LISTING

Tragedy Of The Mind
Original Pain
Freedom 1
Second Freedom
Since Sun
Our Way
Freedom 3
Tragedy Reprise
Triumph Of The Good

Stygian Stride is the solo guise of the New York based musician Jimy SeiTang, who was a member of Psychic Ills and is currently a member of New York experimental / improve / psych trio Rhyton with Dave Shuford (D. Charles Speer & The Helix, No Neck Blues Band) and Spencer Herbst (Messages, Matta Llama). Rhyton released albums on both Thrill Jockey and Three Lobed in 2012.

Stygian Stride is an album of gauzy electronic music reminiscent of Gas and the classic era of Mille Plateaux and Chain Reaction, with nods to Manuel Göttsching, Tangerine Dream and Popul Vuh.

The album artwork was created by Arik Roper (Sleep, Sunn O))), Howlin Rain, Earth, High On Fire, Weedeater).

The album was recorded entirely on analogue equipment, without MIDI synching, at Black Dirt Studios by Jason Meagher (D. Charles Speer, Jack Rose, Expo 70, Blues Control).

TRACK LISTING

Celestial Stems
Hindsight
Drift
Taiga
Athanor Ascension
Fade Into Bolivian

Matmos deliver their first material for Thrill Jockey in the form of ‘The Ganzfeld EP’, which is nearly 30 minutes in length. A new full length album, ‘The Marriage Of True Minds’, is to follow in 2013.

The EP and the album have the same conceptual basis: Telepathy. ‘The Ganzfeld EP’ features two new Matmos tracks that are explicitly based upon psychic session material, and a throbbing minimal techno remix by RRose of the Matmos song ‘You’. Careening from widescreen electronic pop to eerie choral music, the results are eclectic, fun, and disorienting in equal measure. Matmos are one of the most prominent experimental electronic artists of the last decade. Their seven albums have been some of the most significant and acclaimed in the genre, and their high profile collaborations and shows with artists like Bjork and Kronos Quartet have given them definite exposure that extends far beyond the world of heady electronic music.

“Matmos are an innovative electronica duo... playing their tactile and thunderously crunchy work” - The New York Times

“Matmos have always heard symphonies in life’s smallest details, sampling things like thawing streams and liposuction vacuums and building busy pop tapestries out of them” – Pitchfork

TRACK LISTING

Very Large Green Triangles (Edit)
You (Rrose Mix)
Just Waves

White Hills newest and most energized recording to date is bursting with raw energy packed into their most concise songs to date. Fear not long time White Hills fans, there is still loads of killer guitar work and fuzzed out psychedelia on 'Frying on this Rock. The album opens with an under five minute scorcher and closes with a 15 minute track that reminds us why space rock gatekeepers like Julian Cope were very early supporters. The end result, Frying on this Rock, is an invigorating deep space rock album. An album that is at once able to channel the energy born of a collective anger into a swirling psychedelic, brutalizing musical statement that mainlines the thrill of defiance straight to the listener’s heart.

“...White Hills have established themselves as some of America’s foremost proponents of fuzz-driven space rock... Its latest effort H-p1 expands upon the the legacies of Hawkwind, Can, and early Tangerine Dream with synapse-frying deepspace epics” - SF Weekly; “A darkly hypnotic mix of churning guitar, distant vocals and swirling synth drones, this record conjures a riff-heavy psychedelic vibe that picks up where the Velvet Underground and Spacemen 3 left off. Far out.” - Los Angeles Times.

STAFF COMMENTS

Darryl says: More epic fuzz-psyche onslaughts from the current leaders of the pack, the White Hills. Molten guitars and a pummelling rhythm section, create a swirling wave of noise taking space rock to new dimensions.

TRACK LISTING

1. Pads Of Light
2. Robot Stomp
3. You Dream You See
4. Song Of Everything
5. I Write A Thousand Letters (Pulp On Bone)

Thank You could only come from one city, at one moment in time. Like Pere Ubu’s Cleveland and Joy Division’s Manchester, post-industrial Baltimore serves as simultaneous playground, obstacle course, and muse to this show-stealing art-rock trio. Jeffrey McGrath (everything), Michael Bouyoucas (everything), and Emmanuel Nicolaidis (everything) are veterans of a cold era when the Baltimore music scene barely exceeded the carrying capacity of a warehouse elevator. Things change, and the band’s urgent collision of rhythm, melody, and noise has placed them at the creative center of today’s Baltimore renaissance, sharing stages and tours with such acts as Beach House (Sub Pop), Lungfish (Dischord), Celebration (4AD), Dan Deacon (Carpark), Zomes (Holy Mountain), Jason Urick, and Future Islands (both Thrill Jockey).

Launched in 2006 with original drummer Elke Wardlaw (who now resides in Berlin), Thank You carved out a new sound drawing inspiration from the innovative post-punk of This Heat and Swell Maps and the polyrhythmic attack of The Ex and Dog Faced Hermans. Their live shows have become the stuff of (living) legend, a tension-and-release pile-on that drops jaws and leaves organs vibrating; their recordings, crafted with collaborators such as J. Robbins (Jawbox, Yeasayer, Ponytail, and Mary Timony) and Chris Coady (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Beach House, Gang Gang Dance, TV on the Radio), all vital documents of the recent future as performed by six arms and three sets of teeth.

Thank You’s first full-length with new drummer Emmanuel Nicolaidis follows closely on the heels of 2009’s sold-out 12” EP Pathetic Magic. A band that once limited its vocals to hums, grunts, and chants has entered the next phase, delivering a stellar collection of challenging rock-and-roll songs. But Golden Worry eschews easy, anthemic sing-alongs, instead dipping into the vocabularies of Krautrock, post-punk, no-wave, and noise to produce what is at once Thank You’s most melodic and most aggressive record.

Here we have guitars, drums, and vocals -- but also ‘60s Vox organs, harmonica, mini-moog, jaw harp, sampler, and Fender Twin Reverb amps -- all in the service of six hypnotic tracks of Baltimore-built avant-rock. From the first-jangling, then-jagged guitars of album-opener “1-2-3 Bad” to the triumphant swirls and squeals of “Continental Divide” and the dexterously deconstructed instrumental bridge of galvanizing closer “Can’t/Can,” these songs are intricate yet immediate stunners. Attacked with the ecstatic, fierce energy of a Thank You live set – and then perfected in the studio with ears attuned to dub, Eno, 20th Century classical, and Konono No. 1 – Golden Worry is a new world in which we listeners can lose ourselves: the sound of Baltimore at the vanguard as we enter the Two-Thousand Teens.

TRACK LISTING

1. 1-2-3 Bad
2. Birth Reunion
3. Pathetic Magic
4. Continental Divide
5. Strange All
6. Can’t/Can