Slow, unfussy, and largely instrumental, 'Orphans' finds Art Feynman turning inward. Conceived as “music to do other things by,” the album is designed to live alongside daily activity, coloring the atmosphere without demanding focused attention. It moves through a space like wind chimes, less something to follow than something to feel. These are intimate, solitary explora- tions, sketches that feel less composed than discovered, yet they carry a quiet emotional clarity. Where Feynman’s past work often leaned on intricate grooves and dense interplay, 'Orphans' is disarmingly still, patient, and comforting.

As the album begins, you can almost picture Feynman hunched over a 4-track, tracing melodies on a small Casio, following instinct wherever it leads. Opening track 'Soft Reminder', unfolds with a gentle organ line that's equal parts melancholy and curiosity, its tones lingering in the air rather than pushing forward, settling into the room as easily as it invites quiet reflection.

Elsewhere, 'Soup Song' channels a kind of homespun minimalism, its insistent organ pattern recalling the early, exploratory spirit of Terry Riley’s 'A Rainbow in Curved Air'. 'Always In Need of Something' nods toward the playful, searching qualities of Francis Bebey, its cyclical phrasing suggesting a quiet, human restlessness beneath the surface. Throughout, tones and textures gently accumulate, shaping an atmosphere as much as a set of discrete compositions, subtly shifting the emotional temperature of whatever space they inhabit.

Late-album centerpiece 'Ice Bath', one of the few vocal moments, offers a subtle thesis: “It slowed me down / That’s what I needed / For a new beginning.” The song feels like a turning point, an acceptance of stillness as a necessary condition for change. It dissolves seamlessly into 'The Condition of New Things', a gorgeously skeletal electric guitar piece that lingers in open space, each note placed with careful intention, recalling some of Jeff Parker’s solo work.

Closing track, 'Plastic Flowers', drifts in on vocoder-softened vocals and a fragile bed of guitar and synth. “To trick the eye but still touch the heart,” Feynman sings, a line that quietly frames the album’s ethos. Like light shifting across a wall over the course of a day, these recordings may be modest, even illusion-like in their simplicity, but their emotional resonance is undeniable.

TRACK LISTING

1. Soft Reminder
2. Biggo
3. Soup Song
4. Always in Need of Something
5. Apples
6. Heels of Life
7. Cinder
8. Freedom Wide
9. Ice Bath New Beginning
10. The Condition of New Things
11. You Lined Him Up
12. Asleep at the Window
13. Plastic Flowers

With a 2021 GRAMMY win for his work alongside Esperanza Spalding, composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Corey King has quietly become one of contemporary music’s most versatile voices. His career spans collaborations with artists as varied as Milton Nascimento, Gil Scott-Heron, Bonobo, DJ Premier, and Iggy Pop, shaping a sound that moves fluidly between jazz, soul, experimental songwriting, and cinematic composition. On 'Change the Wind', King brings that range into a focused, deeply personal statement. Written across years of upheaval and transition, the album balances intimacy with scope, moving between quiet reflection and expansive, full-band arrangements.

Themes of resilience, clarity, and emotional recalibration run throughout, giving the record a sense of cohesion that feels lived-in rather than conceptual. At its core is a profound sense of devotion and vulnerability, most clearly felt in 'R.M.K', a luminous piece inspired by the birth of King’s daughter. Without lingering on narrative detail, the song anchors the album emotionally, setting the tone for a body of work concerned with care, responsibility, and the fragility of connection. Elsewhere, King explores love, doubt, and personal growth with a light but steady touch, favoring mood and movement over explicit storytelling. Musically, 'Change the Wind' is rich without being dense. Warm piano, layered vocals, and chamber-like brass arrangements are threaded through with broken-beat rhythms and subtle electronic textures. At times the record leans into groove and propulsion, with Afrobeat-informed passages and dynamic horn sections, while elsewhere it pulls back into sparse, intimate spaces.

Contributions from close collaborators, including Spalding and trumpeter Takuya Kuroda, add depth without overwhelming the album’s cohesive feel.
Rather than spotlighting individual tracks, 'Change the Wind' reveals itself as a complete listening experience, one that unfolds gradually and rewards attention over time. It is a record about steady transformation, about finding clarity within motion, and about holding onto something human in the midst of constant change.

TRACK LISTING

1. R.M.K.
2. Distant Ray
3. Spyder
4. Worms
5. The Damndest
6. Off the Embankment
7. Did We See That Coming
8. Ill-will to Goodwill
9. Annapurna

Christopher Tignor’s 'Bleeding Past the Edges' stands as a deliberate counterpoint to today’s AI-driven music landscape, placing the human hand firmly at the center of creation. Working from a small studio filled with violin, tuning forks, pedals, and custom software, Tignor has developed a performance system that behaves less like a machine and more like a living instrument. Rather than relying on loops or backing tracks, he generates each piece in real time, capturing and reshaping sound as he plays.

Bowed violin lines expand into layered patterns, percussive strikes trigger evolving structures, and even a single tuning fork can unfold into a full harmonic field. The result is an immersive, orchestral sound created live by one performer navigating a tightly interwoven system of gesture, timing, and code. Every element begins as a physical action and remains tethered to it, giving the music a sense of immediacy, risk, and presence that carries throughout the record. Across the album, Tignor moves fluidly between rhythm-forward compositions that treat the instrument as a percussive engine and more melodic works rooted in the violin’s expressive core. Lead single 'Weight of Words' highlights this balance, unfolding with a sense of narrative clarity that reflects Tignor’s approach to composition. He often describes these pieces as “short stories,” with melodies acting as the central thread, guiding each work through shifting structures and emotional arcs.

The title 'Bleeding Past the Edges' points to moments when the music pushes beyond its original design, when structure loosens and sound spills outward. Tignor likens the process to “a man on a wire act,” where careful preparation meets the possibility of real-time transformation. Though the systems are rigorously developed, each performance retains an element of unpre- dictability, allowing the music to continually evolve.

Over the course of ten LPs released via Western Vinyl and New Albion, Tignor has earned wide recognition across classical and experimental circles. The Guardian has called him “absurdly talented,” while Bandcamp highlighted his “sheer technical mastery,” and The New York Times has noted his rare ability to seamlessly integrate computers with acoustic instruments in live performance. The Wire has further praised his compositions for their fluid, evolving structures. Beyond his solo work, Tignor has collaborated with artists such as Rachel Grimes, Helios, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, John Congleton, and This Will Destroy You. His background bridges multiple disciplines, with a PhD in composition from Princeton University, an MS in computer science from NYU Courant Institute, and a BA from Bard College, where he studied with poet John Ashbery.

With 'Bleeding Past the Edges', Tignor brings these threads together into a work that feels both rigorously constructed and vividly alive, a record that foregrounds performance, physicality, and the enduring expressive power of human-made sound.

TRACK LISTING

1. Weight of Words
2. Shadow Purposes I. Patterns of Goodbye
3. Shadow Purposes II. Path to an Unlit Horizon
4. Shadow Purposes III. New Tectonics
5. Shadow Purposes IV. The Blue Cascades
6. Shadow Purposes V. A Sea Lit by Stars to Swallow Us
7. Blood and Black Ink
8. Decision Tree

"Sometime in 2020 I listened to Canto Ostinato for the first time, and my enthrall- ment with the piece had begun. I was transfixed by its particular amalgam of harmony, repetition, and pacing. By the spring of 2023 I had constructed and released my own solo interpretation, and I assumed at that point my working relationship with the composition had run its course. But I underestimated its magnetism. The following year I was back in its grips, having been invited by Metropolis Ensemble’s Andrew Cyr to expand on the foundation I had laid with the piece. Soon I was in Brooklyn, on a newly-formed team of six with Cyr and the members of Sandbox Percussion, thrilled to be helping architect a brand new large-ensemble arrangement of Canto Ostinato for a summer solstice perfor- mance at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. We did so, our cohort growing to include the students of The New School’s Sandbox Percussion Summer Seminar, as well as composers David Leon, Ben Wallace, and Ledah Finck and the Bergamot Quartet. It was a day we will all remember—sweeping, dreamlike, and what felt like a quintessential culmination. But even then... the piece still beckoned, and it became imperatively clear that this new orchestration called for the embarkment on a studio album—a permanent document of our now-collective ardor. Refined over a year and recorded in New York, 2025, this performance recasts the piece anew in a towering framework of mallet percussion, woodwinds, strings, and piano. It is our truest attempt at conveying Canto’s beauty and magnitude in all its kaleidoscopic harmony, dynamism, tension, and release. I stand once again in awe of Simeon ten Holt’s monumental creation, and to be a thread among this particular sonic fabric is one of the great pleasures of my musical life. I don’t assume we might be so fortunate again... but who knows..."
- Erik Hall

TRACK LISTING

1. Sections 1-16
2. Sections 17-30
3. Sections 31-40
4. Sections 41-55
5. Sections 56-73
6. Sections 74-87
7. Sections 88-90
8. Sections 91-94
9. Sections 95-106

For years, Cactus Lee has quietly built a singular body of work, playing honky-tonks around Austin while releasing records at a steady, self-driven pace. 'Lee’s Dream', his second album for Western Vinyl, feels like the natural distillation of that journey—written on the road, refined at home, and shaped by the push and pull between devotion to music and devotion to family.

Conceived during a monthlong solo tour through the Midwest and South, the songs began as sketches written in vans and motel rooms, sparked in part by a visit to Guy Clark’s reconstructed basement at the Country Music Hall of Fame. Returning home to personal upheaval, Kevin Dehan turned inward, writing songs that balance restlessness with resolve, longing with responsibility.

Recorded at Fort Horton Studios with producer Billy Horton, 'Lee’s Dream' leans into classic country forms and Sun-era sensibilities, guided by touchstones like John D. Loudermilk, Glen Campbell, and early Gordon Lightfoot. Finished with contributions from a close circle of collaborators, the album feels communal and lived-in—joyous and melancholy in equal measure. Rooted in Texas imagery and country folklore, 'Lee’s Dream' plays like a familiar fever dream, honoring tradition while quietly bending it to Dehan’s own unmistakable voice.

TRACK LISTING

1. Baltimore
2. Easy Money
3. By Sunday
4. Dead Dillo
5. Lee's Dream
6. Bad Luck
7. Lone Star
8. Seeing Spots
9. Fool's Gold
10. Valentine

On 'Hungry Animal', Luke Temple continues to trace the invisible lines between the personal and the cosmic — between what we feel, what we observe, and what we inherit simply by being alive. The album reunites Temple with Doug Stuart (bass) and Kosta Galanopoulos (drums), the core of his Cascading Moms ensemble, whose instinctive chemistry anchors the record’s balance of rhythmic precision and melodic drift. Together they shape a sound that feels handmade and fluid, deliver- ing sharp observations in soft focus.

The album opens with 'Clean Living', a tenderly libidinous groove, unraveling purity myths and self-discipline — less a confession than a celebration of the futility of striving for perfection in a flawed world. From there, 'Echo Park Donut' shifts into the memory of an unsettling vignette drawn from a violent incident outside Temple’s Los Angeles home. The band moves with a quiet pulse beneath the story, suggest- ing both detachment and the surreal intimacy of fear.

The title track, 'Hungry Animal', grounds the album’s broader questions: how well can we really know one another, or ourselves? Temple’s lyrics circle around the idea that we are animals among animals, driven by instinct and affection alike. It’s both playful and philosophical, one of the record’s emotional centers.

Temple’s bandmates bring an understated mastery to these pieces. Stuart’s melodic, infectious grooves converse fluidly with Galanopoulos’s drumming, which breathes life into each song even as it gently propels them forward. The trio’s interplay feels both weightless and deeply rooted — commanding the listener’s attention and empathy without ever forcing it.

With 'Hungry Animal', Luke Temple and the Cascading Moms create a world where reflection becomes rhythm and consciousness gains texture — a record of quiet revelations and deliberate grace.

TRACK LISTING

1. Clean Living
2. Echo Park Donut
3. Hungry Animal
4. Loose White Paper
5. Shake Me Awake
6. Bed Time For Eddy
7. Love Means Light Year
8. Early Spring
9. Emotional Volley
10. One Heavenly Body
11. One Zero

There is a certain solace to be found in minimal music—a contemplative joy that emerges through sustained repetition and subtle variation. 'Solo Three', the slyly absorbing new album from Michigan-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Erik Hall, embodies that hypnotic charge while boldly reimagining a distinct selection of contemporary classical works.

Hall’s affinity for minimalism began decades ago, when as a jazz-studies drummer at the University of Michigan he first encountered Steve Reich’s 'Music for 18 Musicians'. The piece altered his trajectory completely. Years later, amid a creative lull, he revisited that formative work by attempting a solo reconstruction. Working alone in his home studio, Hall painstakingly recreated Reich’s intricate, interlocking architecture—supplanting the piece’s orchestral palette with instruments he had on hand—and performing every part himself without loops, programming, or sequencers.

That recording, released on Western Vinyl in 2020, arrived during the fraught early months of lockdown and resonated deeply with listeners. Pitchfork praised it for making “a minimalist standard freshly thrilling to revisit,” and it won the 2021 Libera Award for Best Classical Record. Even Reich himself wrote to congratulate Hall, saying he had “reinvented the piece.” With 'Solo Three', Hall brings this trilogy to a sweeping close. Instead of focusing on a single composition, he weaves together multiple works by several visionary composers: Glenn Branca, Charlemagne Palestine, Laurie Spiegel, and a return to Steve Reich.

The result is a rich, varied homage to American minimalism—at once reverent and exploratory. Branca’s 'The Temple of Venus Pt. 1' unfolds in oscillating organ and prepared piano; Palestine’s 'Strumming Music' becomes a meditative blur of felted piano and guitar; Spiegel’s 'A Folk Study' is recast with acoustic warmth in lieu of electronics; and Reich’s 'Music for a Large Ensemble' closes the album with a 16-minute, kaleidoscopic rush of overlapping melodies and jubilant rhythmic patterns. True to his method, Hall performs and records every part himself, layering instruments one by one like sonic bricks. The approach is deeply human and quietly defiant in an age of faceless automation. “It’s just so much more compelling to actually play every note,” Hall says. “Those micro-differences between takes create a sort of living, breathing magic.” That living, breathing magic fills every corner of Solo Three. It’s both a reverent ode to the composers who shaped Hall’s musical identity and a vivid reminder that minimalism’s hypnotic beauty—its patience, precision, and quiet emotional power—still speaks urgently to the present moment.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Temple Of Venus Pt. 1 (Glenn Branca)
2. Strumming Music (Charlemagne Palestine)
3. A Folk Study (Laurie Spiegel)
4. Music For A Large Ensemble (Steve Reich)

Benefit compilation featuring contributions from well-known artists including Alan Sparhawk, Oneohtrix Point Never, Lambchop, Marisa Anderson, Lonnie Holley, Bonnie Prince Billy, Dirty Projectors, William Tyler, Tim Heidecker, and many others.

All proceeds will benefit two Texas-based organizations, American Gateways and Casa Marianella, providing no-to-low-cost legal services, food, shelter, access to health care, and other essential services to immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers.

TRACK LISTING

1. Alan Sparhawk - No More Darkness
2. St. Panther - Everybody Is
3. Oneohtrix Point Never - Country
4. Benjamin Booker - A Place For Us
5. Lambchop - Afterburner
6. Quin Kirchner (feat. Tekle Mezghebe) - Home
7. Marisa Anderson - No Place To Rest My Head
8. Y La Bamba - Wrong Crowd
9. Lonnie Holley - A Border Is Just A Space...
10. Bonnie Prince Billy - The Autumn Wind (no. 71)
11. Erik Hall - Parallels
12. Dirty Projectors - One Hundred-Twenty Dollar Song
13. William Tyler - 13 Lakes
14. Aisha Burns - All That I Know
15. Anjou (feat. I. Nova) - Un Trayecto Largo
16. Heather Woods Broderick - White Sage
17. Tim Heidecker - Alone Until I'm Home

Pullman is a studio-born acoustic supergroup that emerged from Chicago’s post-rock milieu in the late ’90s, uniting Ken “Bundy K.” Brown (Tortoise/Directions in Music), Curtis Harvey (Rex), Chris Brokaw (Come), and Doug McCombs (Tortoise/Eleventh Dream Day); drummer Tim Barnes later joined, solidifying the group’s core lineup. They debuted on Thrill Jockey with Turnstyles & Junkpiles (1998), a hushed, live-to-2-track collection of interwoven guitars that critics likened to John Fahey, Leo Kottke, and Gastr del Sol. Their follow-up, Viewfinder (2001), expanded the palette with percussion, subtle electric textures, and multi-track layering, while maintaining Pullman’s rustic, cinematic restraint.

Across both albums, the band became a touchstone for acoustic, song-adjacent instrumental music: folk in spirit, post-rock in method, and timeless in tone. Two decades later, Pullman return with III, an album forged in friendship and resilience. In 2021, Barnes went public with his diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s at age 54. Even as his condition progressed, he and Brown began working almost daily, often remotely, with a wide circle of collaborators from Barnes’s musical past. What began as a single contribution for a compilation gradually blossomed into a full Pullman record, completed between 2021 and 2023. Edited and mixed by Brown, with early input from Barnes, III carries forward the group’s signature intimacy and space while embodying the spirit of community that has always defined their work. Both a continuation of Pullman’s singular aesthetic and a testament to the sustaining power of music, III drifts with the quiet weight of memory, persistence, and grace.

TRACK LISTING

1. Bray
2. Weightless
3. Thirteen
4. October
5. Valence
6. Kabul

Magical Thinking, Farao’s third studio album, unfolds as a layered journey through loss, longing, and transformation. Evoking the title and spirit of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, it moves through the quiet terrain between denial and acceptance—where grief is not solved, but carried. These are songs of rebuilding and resilience, shaped by themes of grief, motherhood, and the essential rituals that sustain us when clarity fades.
Recorded between Oslo and Berlin, the album pulses with ’90s R&B flair, ’80s disco shimmer, and the contemplative sweep of spiritual jazz—anchored throughout by Farao’s intimate vocals and intricate arrangements. From the opening shimmer of “Waiting for You,” where heartbreak is dressed in sequins and a groove evokes Robyn and Chaka Khan, the record invites us into a world where longing is made luminous.

On “Spiritual Garden,” named after a fleeting Janet Jackson lyric, Farao crafts a humid, narcotic R&B reverie. Timbaland-style percussion and silky basslines cradle her zither’s unexpected textures, conjuring a meditation on abandonment and the fragile reclamation of self-worth. When “Dreamy Ride” glides in—where Aaliyah’s cool meets Dorothy Ashby’s cosmic harp—the album slips into nocturnal motion, an R&B fantasia for 2 a.m. city drives, her zither weaving through the mix like a guiding star.

The playful synth-jam “Hey Ladies” and a bold reinterpretation of Brandy’s “Full Moon” lighten the mood midway through. The former is a cheeky, one-minute homage to Destiny’s Child; the latter, a nighttime elegy that drapes a beloved classic in deep bass and glimmering synths. Then comes “Xiang Xiang,” an intimate interlude built around a whispered voice-note from a friend—reminding us of the real-world bonds grounding Farao’s lush sonic universe.

At the album’s center is the title track “Magical Thinking,” which directly references Didion’s memoir. Here, pulsing synths and drifting vocals trace the blurred terrain between presence and dissociation. It’s followed by “Endelig” (“finally” in Norwegian), a deep exhale—a minimal, spiritual jazz interlude that offers the illusion of resolution. Farao then teams up with ambient pioneer Laraaji for “Voice Continues,” a spacious, fourth-world-inspired meditation where zither, layered vocals, and synth textures form a sonic tapestry mapping the lingering traces of maternal love across generations.
“Tschüssi” (a breezy German goodbye) becomes a vessel for something far weightier: a farewell laced with looping memory and emotional disorientation, built around a ghostly fragment from Farao’s track “Marry Me.” The album closes on a hazy, merciful note with “Sleep It Off,” a lullaby for the overwhelmed—a final permission to rest, to let go, to simply lie down. Not a promise of healing, but a compassionate pause in a record defined by yearning and illusion

TRACK LISTING

01 Waiting For You 3:37
02 Spiritual Garden 3:48
03 Dreamy Ride 3:58
04 Hey Ladies 1:14
05 Full Moon 4:26
07 Magical Thinking 3:33
06 Xiang Xiang 0:20
08 Endelig 1:33
09 Voice Continues 4:20
10 Tschüssi 3:36
11 Sleep It Off 1:33

On her debut EP Future Perfect, British-American songwriter Jenny Hirons sings of childhood visions and capitalist superstructures, of speeding down narrow country lanes and gently disappearing into the ether like a dream fulfilled. Throughout five muted pop tracks recalling Sakamoto & Hosono, Bowie & Eno, Hirons conjures pop fantasy and confronts reality with bright-eyed steeliness.

The title Future Perfect refers to actions which shall be completed. Having absorbed the musical debut of Jenny Hirons, the attentive listener will have found themselves with a feeling of time well spent. Lyrical analysis being entirely optional — upon inspection a multiprismatic picture of life viewed from all points in time emerges — a child imagines adulthood, an adult returns to autonomy, a voice from another place looks back on a child's fantasies of the future. The effect of these songs is anything but ponderous, however. Hope, aspiration, overcoming are the takeaways, and musically the tone is a reflection of the artist herself — wry, cerebral, poised, entirely charming.

Hirons cites Astor Piazolla, the Beach Boys, Elliot Smith, Deerhoof, and Rachmaninoff as musical influences. (For those who don't know, Piazolla is an accordionist.) Hirons is also a deeply accomplished visual artist and designer. The product of several years of tinkering, Future Perfect is also a breakup record, an unemployment record, an uncertain future record. Having now made it out into the world, Hirons looks back to a time when "music was the economy of our hearts", and forward to a future allowed to shape itself however it may be, "carried home in all directions."

TRACK LISTING

1 Vertigo 4:32
2 Being The Cause 3:14
3 TV Sermon 3:54
4 The Rabbit Hole 3:06
5 Future Perfect 3:10

Ava Luna’s self-titled album marks a grounded and introspective evolution for the Brooklyn quartet. Now consisting of Carlos Hernandez, Julian Fader, Ethan Bassford, and Felicia Douglass, the band returns after a long hiatus with a stripped-down sound centered on drums, bass, and dual vocals. This back-to-basics approach, a shift from the "cosmic" feel of their previous 'Moon 2', is rooted in shared NYC experiences and the rhythms of everyday life.

Themes of exhaustion, community, and precarious joy emerge across tracks like 'Lasting Impression', about job-weariness, and 'Math Money Job', a playful chant on reunion and embodiment. Julian’s drums and Ethan’s bass drive the album, inspired in part by Soul Coughing’s raw sampling style, heard on tracks like 'Frame of Us'. Vocally, Carlos and Felicia move as one—blending, harmonizing, and fragmenting with intent, especially on 'Archive'.

Though minimalist at its core, the album’s sound is lush and textural, enriched by congas from reggae legend Larry McDonald, piano, samples, and guitar noise. Songs like 'Social Diving' and 'My Walk' reflect personal and urban histories, while 'Your Man' and 'Fancy' speak to resilience and dignity. The result is Ava Luna at its most honest and refined—a portrait of NYC and of a band still evolving, still urgent.

TRACK LISTING

1. Math Money Job
2. Frame Of Us
3. Lasting Impression
4. Fancy
5. Social Diving
6. Your Man
7. Roof
8. Archive
9. Tacos El Bronco
10. My Walk
11. Game Level

Brooklyn band Wilder Maker’s principal songwriter, Gabriel Birnbaum says that the group’s latest full-length, 'The Streets Like Beds Still Warm' follows “an overall formal asymmetry, like dream logic.” It is richly textured, moody, and deep and is as distinctly narrative as it is literally experimental. To call it a concept album, as big as that term is, would actually be to sell it short. It is, in fact, only the first part of a concept trilogy that tells the tale of one long night in the city, from dusk to dawn. The album follows a lonely narrator as he drifts down avenues and in and out of bars and hospital rooms. If this sounds a bit noirish, that’s because it is. “Film noir detectives always start out looking immaculate, but by the end of the film they have a torn collar, a black eye, their slacks are stained, and they’ve started slapping people around in desperation,” Birnbaum says. “Are they the good guy anymore? I find this fascinating and I love the visual cues reflecting the internal landscape.”

While there are no visual cues, per se, on 'The Streets Like Beds Still Warm', the record owes a great debut to cinematography. Impressionistic swirls of effected guitar, drums, and saxophone support Birnbaum’s husky and worldweary baritone croon which sometimes echoes Bill Fay. But at times, in all its dim-lit barroom storytelling, one may think of Tom Waits. It’s a comparison that threatens both to mislead and sell short, but it’s difficult not to see things while listening to 'The Streets Like Beds Still Warm' –– perhaps a slowly swinging Tiffany lamp just above the narrator’s head as he’s a little more than half-drunk, scrawling a brilliantly poetic, antiheroic tale on a bar napkin. Be assured, though, this is not 'The Heart of Saturday Night' and it’s not 'In the Wee Small Hours'. In fact, 'The Streets Like Beds Still Warm’s musical precedents come from distinctly different corners of the musical universe. The band draws direct influence from the work of alt-jazz contemporaries Anna Butterss and Jeff Parker as well as ambient progenitor Brian Eno. 'The Streets Like Beds Still Warm' is, holistically, a statement of nocturnal and hypnotic storytelling –– a matter of both style and substance. Birnbaum’s investment in the narrative, which ultimately deals in humanity, is reflected by the dreamlike way the tunes themselves unfold. It could not work any other way. Deeply felt and finely focused, undeniably listenable but difficult to pin down, 'The Streets Like Beds Still Warm' is beautifully strange –– and it feels like just the kind of thing likely to receive the praise it deserves a decade down the road.

TRACK LISTING

1. Strange Meeting With Owls
2. Skewered By The Daystar
3. It Was A Flood
4. Atlas On His Day Off
5. Turn SIgnal
6. And You Want To Be My Dog
7. Secret Weather
8. A Tavern Poem, Passed From Mouth To Mouth
9. Another Bullshit Rodeo
10. They Laugh That Win
11. Escape Artist
12. Darkness Leaning Like Water Against The Windows
13. The Moon Says
14. Hores & Hero
15. Demon Confrontation
16. Fixing The Past Is A Sucker's Game
17. Sea & Swimmer

Shrunken Elvis is a Nashville-based trio formed by Spencer Cullum, Sean Thompson, and Rich Ruth—three seasoned musicians united by a love of genre-defying instrumental music. The group emerged from long European drives, winter jam sessions, and a shared commitment to making music guided by instinct rather than ambition.

Cullum, an East London-born pedal steel guitarist, has played with Angel Olsen, Lambchop, Miranda Lambert, and Billy Strings, while releasing two solo folk-psych LPs on Full Time Hobby. Thompson came up in Nashville’s DIY scene with Gnarwhal and Promised Land Sound, later touring with Margo Price and Skyway Man. Ruth, under the name Rich Ruth (Third Man Records), creates immersive solo work blending spiritual jazz, ambient, and post-rock.

Their origins trace back to a 2022 European tour behind Cullum’s solo album. Crammed into a VW Passat with a compact setup of guitars, pedal steel, and synths, they began composing on the road—shaping a shared musical language that carried into winter sessions back in Nashville. Recording around a space heater in a shed studio, they captured the spirit of those travels with spontaneity and trust. Their debut album aims not to spotlight individual prowess, but to let the instruments merge into something entirely new. Embracing a “no goals, just ideas” mindset, they created music that feels unforced, exploratory, and alive. Rooted in kosmische, jazz fusion, electronic, and ambient traditions, Shrunken Elvis draws inspiration from Alice Coltrane, Michael Rother, Pat Metheny, Ashra, and KLF—along with visual influences like ECM album covers and the films of Kurosawa and Bergman. Mixed by Jake Davis (William Tyler) and featuring artwork by Max Kinghorn-Mills (Hollow Hand), their debut is a quietly urgent, deeply collaborative record—music made without expectation, but full of purpose.

TRACK LISTING

1. That There's A Strategy
2. Marina Pt.2
3. Mu REceptors
4. K-House
5. Eggs On Plastic
6. An Old Outlet
7. Sun Pillar
8. Every Faint Rustle
9. A Broken Cat

'Layers of Afternoon' is meant to reflect a certain experience of time—something both tangible and vague, felt yet not easily described. These moments often emerge in patterns, sometimes brief, sometimes sustained, but always formative. We recognize their uniqueness, yet something subconscious in us yearns to identify and indulge in these patterns. Perhaps we avoid discussing them for fear of sounding mundane or inconsequential, yet they return to our memories often, offering collective comfort.

For Keith Kenniff aka Goldmund, language does little to convey these experiences; only art and music seem to come close to capturing what makes them special. Kenniff explains, “My aim for the music in 'Layers of Afternoon' was to find this in-between place and write from there, hoping to communicate my experience of the world as ideal—free from goals, musical training, or emotional complexity. I wanted to visit this space and let the moments float freely within the act of creation.” Working with violinist Scott Moore, Kenniff crafts a sonic landscape that lingers between nostalgia and fleeting presence, allowing listeners to drift through the blurred edges of memory.

TRACK LISTING

1. The One Who Stands Still
2. Our Times
3. Darnley
4. We Begin Anew
5. Long Memories
6. Before I Sleep
7. Touch OF Silver
8. One Of The Two
9. The Broad Belt Of The World
10. Especially So
11. Prosody
12. All Nature
13. Evident
14. Spring Of The Pine

“Evil is very real and having its way, and love is also real and hasn’t lost yet.”

That’s how Activity’s Travis Johnson described their third album, 'A Thousand Years In Another Way'. A friend had asked why these songs seemed to capture the strange, heavy feeling of being alive right now better than anything else—and that was his answer. The album doesn’t try to explain this time we’re living in; it simply feels like it. It’s a mix of violence, alienation, and tenderness—reflecting the surreal, dreamlike (or nightmarish) rhythm of daily life.

Across ten songs, Activity blends experimental rock, electronics, and found sounds with a sense of paranoia, flickers of hope, and a warped reality. Working with producer Jeff Berner (of Psychic TV), the band manipulated sounds and played with room acoustics to create a feeling that’s disorienting—like the air is thick and the walls are listening.

Coming out of a period of uncertainty, the Brooklyn-based quartet—Travis Johnson, Jess Rees, Bri DiGioia, and Steven Levine—pieced the album together from fragments: clipped samples, looping guitar lines, ghostly melodies. Rees, DiGioia, and Johnson share vocal and writing duties, shaping a record that feels both deeply personal and strangely alien. There’s a constant sense that things could shift or fall apart at any second—nothing stays one thing for long.

'A Thousand Years In Another Way' might not offer answers, but it captures the feeling of right now better than most. And maybe, it sounds a bit like your world too.

TRACK LISTING

1. In Another Way
2. A Piece Of Mirror
3. We Go Where We're Not Wanted
4. Your Dream
5. Good Memory
6. Scissors
7. Heavy Breathing
8. Her Alphabet
9. I Came Here To Harm You
10. A Beast

Elori Saxl's soundtrack for the VR film 'Texada' is an exploration of the smallness of human existence within the grand scope of geologic time, mirroring the film's exploration of Texada Island's limestone-rich landscape. Saxl, inspired by her own experiences of island life on Madeline Island, assembled a soundscape that captures both the vastness of Earth's ancient processes and the intimate moments of human existence. Using analog synthesizers, baritone saxophone (performed by Henry Solomon), and processed field recordings of water and rocks, she created ambient layers that evoke cycles, waves, and the transformative forces of nature.

The score begins with an exploration of Earth's origins and the emptiness of a rocky planet before life emerged. This foundation grows into pieces like 'The Quarry', where the central geological feature, limestone, takes on a dynamic presence. As loops and rumbling textures evoke the rise and movement of stone over millennia, as abstracted creatures spiral upwards, full of life. The album concludes with 'The Most Special Place', which serves as a final bridge between the cosmic and the intimate, leaving a lasting impression of how deeply human lives are intertwined with the ancient geology beneath our feet.

Saxl’s compositional process itself mirrors the themes of transformation and cycles. Working with limited time and resources, she recorded Solomon’s saxophone parts early in the project, later repurposing fragments through re-pitching, stretching, and digital effects. As she explains, "I experimented with bringing out the human character of the saxophone by highlighting breath and imperfections while also pushing it into an alien/unrecognizable/bigger world through digital processing and effects." The result is a soundtrack that feels both organic and otherworldly, capturing the grand scope of Earth's timeline while remaining grounded in human emotion and connection.

TRACK LISTING

1. How Big Is Time
2. It Happened Once
3. The Quarry
4. It Will Be Gone ADM
5. The Most Special Place

Rindert Lammers' debut album is a heartfelt exploration of gratitude, blending personal narratives with cinematic imagery in a serene and soulful ambient jazz style. Inspired by Japanese cinema and the raw authenticity of YouTube confessions, the album captures a mood of introspection and appreciation. Central to the album is the track "Thank You, Kirin Kiki," which draws from a powerful scene in the film Shopliers. Lammers explains "It's one of my favorites. The Japanese actress Kirin Kiki plays the grandmother of a ‘chosen family’, all of whom have fled or lost their own families in some way. In this scene, one of her last scenes before her (real) death, Kirin Kiki (the grandmother) looks at her family and says, 'Thank You!' twice towards the children and the sea. Kirin Kiki improvised these words on the spot, and it's such a poignant moment in the film, but also indicative of her impending death. I found the gratitude so moving it fit perfectly with the gratitude I found in the voice clip from "Thank You Hiroshi Yoshimura. "The fourth song, "Thank You Hiroshi Yoshimura," opens with a voice clip that acts almost as the protagonist of a film, reflecting on a turbulent time of sleeping in parks and on the streets. This voiceover was inspired by a comment on a Hiroshi Yoshimura video on YouTube that began, “This album reminds me of...” Lammers noticed the deeply personal responses le on these videos, so he recorded various similar YouTube comments from people around the world, initially intending to set them to music. Though much of this idea evolved, this particular voice clip remained a central influence, ultimately inspiring a cinematic journey within the album. "Summer in Shibuya" sets the scene as a trailer, "Opening Credits" introduces the narrative, and "Closing Credits" gently brings it to a close. While there’s a Japanese and Tokyo theme running through the tracks, Lammers doesn’t view the album as a tribute to Japan or Tokyo specifically—he’s never visited and admits to knowing only fragments of the culture. Yet he's drawn to Japanese environmental music and is an avid Murakami reader, seeing Japan as a powerful, visual inspiration in his mind’s eye. In a way, the album is also his “thank you” to the beautiful art that Japan has shared with the world.

R.I.Y.L.: Nala Sinephro, Sam Gendel, Shabaka, Alabaster De Plume, Jeff Parker, Carlos Niño.

TRACK LISTING

01 Summer In Shibuya
02 Opening Credits
03 Thank You Kirin Kiki
04 Thank You Hiroshi Yoshimura
05 Closing Credits

Cactus Lee is Texas music at its core, a blend of Austin nightclub vibes, and dusty dancefloor energy. A project helmed by prolific Austin songwriter Kevin Dehan, Cactus Lee reflects a deep love for Texas country songwriters, interwoven with the bold spirit of outlaw and outsider influences. With a sound that is at once childlike, dreamy, and sharply witty—reminiscent of icons like John Prine and Tom T. Hall—Cactus Lee has carved a distinctive niche in the music world since its inception in 2019. Over six albums, including two releases in 2023, a live album, and multiple EPs, Dehan’s songwriting and self-recorded efforts on a four-track have been the foundation of a constantly evolving project.

On the new self-titled album, Cactus Lee, the songs delve into themes of love, loss, family, and self-discovery, offering fleeting snapshots of characters and moments steeped in an inviting Texas charm. Opening track 'Rabbit' introduces a love-struck yet elusive protagonist, brought to life through Bukka Allen’s accordion and Adam Amram’s infectious rhythm. 'Sister' is a tender promise of better times and shared moments, perfect for open roads and breezy days. With its saxophone and steel guitar interplay, 'Roll Maggie' explores the gamble of love as a thrilling game of chance. 'Got A Heart Like Rainwater Blues' celebrates the unyielding bonds of a family on the run, infused with a bluesy resilience. 'Lorelei' paints an enigmatic portrait of a captivating figure, set to the sway of doo-wop harmonies. 'The Fiddler' captures the hypnotic magic of a dance floor, anchored by a haunting viola solo. Closing the album, 'Twenty Dollars' is a deeply personal ode to Dehan’s daughter, Jolene, encapsulating her strength and beauty with heartfelt simplicity.

Through evocative lyrics and thoughtfully textured instrumentation, Cactus Lee’s self-titled album rearms Kevin Dehan’s ability to distill the essence of Texas twang into songs that resonate far beyond the Lone Star State.

TRACK LISTING

1. Rabbit
2. Sister
3. Roll Maggie
4. Runaway
5. Rico
6. Hotel New Orleans
7. Got A Heart
8. Lorelei
9. The Fiddler
10. Twenty Dollars

Way Through is a collaborative album by Toronto musicians Chris Cummings, Joseph Shabason, and Thom Gill (as Cici Arthur). Inspired by moments of discovery in familiar places, the album's title reflects the feeling of uncovering hidden paths in life. Musically, it blends mid-century influences like Jobim and Sinatra, with producer-instrumentalists Shabason and Gill crafting lush, expansive soundscapes. Featuring a 30-piece orchestra led by Owen Pallett, the album brings a grand scale to Cummings' intimate, reflective lyrics.

The project began in 2020 when Cummings lost his job and turned to full-time music for the first time in his life. His collaborators tailored the arrangements to showcase his understated vocal delivery against sweeping orchestral backdrops. Songs like 'Cartwheels for Coins' and 'Prior Times' explore themes of regret and emotional complexity, contrasting the grandeur of the music with Cummings' quiet introspection. Tracks like 'Damaged Goods' provide upbeat moments with doo-wop harmonies, while the cinematic closer 'No Fight Or Flight' emphasizes the filmic quality of the album. Through its orchestral richness and deeply personal lyrics, Way Through captures the tension between ambition and realism, offering a poignant reflection on life's unpredictable journey.

Album features and was co-produced by Joseph Shabason. String arrangements by Owen Pallett. Thom Gill has written songs for Chaka Khan, in addition to contributing to albums by The Mountain Goats, Owen Pallett, Joseph Shabason, Bernice, and many others.

TRACK LISTING

01 Way Through
02 All So Incredible
03 Cartwheels For Coins
04 Stolen Joy
05 Damaged Goods
06 Prior Times
07 Felt In An Instant
08 No Fight Or Flight 

FOR FANS OF: Alex G, Mitski, Jim O’Rourke, Mk.gee, Cornelius.

Since writing 2022's The Consistent Brutal Bullshit Gong, Market’s Nate Mendelsohn has become more entrenched in the Brooklyn, NY music community, producing the recent Frankie Cosmos and Dougie Poole albums, performing in Vagabon and Sam Evian, and recording with Yaeji and Lady Lamb. These experiences with adventurous artists likely resonate with fans of records like Pet Sounds, Fantasma, Insignificance, Blonde, or XO. Well I Asked You A Question's aforementioned sonic palette wonderfully melds the physical and the synthetic: sampled orchestras duel with real orchestras (“Fantasy”), a robot’s spoken word duets with a choir of humans (“Around”), and blasts of noise “solo” over traditional rock instrumentation (“Rachel’s Getting Married”).

Though many of the sounds on the record are augmented and fractured, Mendelsohn still worked with the Market band, consisting of Stephen Becker, Natasha Bergman, and Duncan Standish, to build out the songs.

He wanted “musical accidents with frayed edges left in still a group of people, in a room, playing songs.” Beyond the core band, world-expanding contributions came from Katie von Schleicher, Mike Haldeman (Moses Sumney, Alto Palo), Justin Felton (L’Rain, Strugglin’), Rose Droll (Feist, Art Feynman) and Helen Newby with engineering by Adam Hirsch (Sam Amidon, Stephen Steinbrink).

Well I Asked You a Question is ambitious and complex, but Mendelsohn tempers those goals by aiming at heart, toward the very human. Lyrically, it’s an exploration of speaking, asking, responding and the muddled nature of talking to one’s self versus interacting with others. In his words, he’s alternately “escaping the noise of the world by going inward” and “escaping the noise of the brain by going outward.” Whether swaddled in sound or absorbing the errant thoughts it carries, we’re along for the ride.

“...conjures up the spirit of stuff like Neutral Milk Hotel. I think it’s very rare to find indie songs that can really... bring out certain emotions in you the way this one does. It makes you feel melancholic but also optimistic at the same time. Very special.” JAMES ACASTER via THE NEEDLE DROP.

TRACK LISTING

01 Well I Asked You A Question
02 Apple
03 Around
04 Sertraline
05 Water Spilling Test
06 Rachel Getting Married
07Fantasy
08 Bigger Problem
09 On The Bar
10 Reason To Shout

A classically trained vocalist with a self-taught instrumentalist's spirit, Shara Nova has been releasing spellbinding music as My Brightest Diamond since 2006. Over the years, the band has released five groundbreaking albums, each showcasing a different musical landscape while always centering on Nova's distinctive voice.

Her journey took an unexpected turn in July 2023, when within hours of learning about Sinéad O'Connor's passing, a fierce storm plunged her Detroit home into darkness. As the city held its breath, Nova sat with her guitar, reflecting on O'Connor's iconic SNL performance where she repurposed Bob Marley’s "War" to address child abuse, urging viewers to “fight the real enemy.” Inspired by this act of artistic courage, Nova poured her emotions into a raw demo – the title track "Fight the Real Terror" – which opens the album in its original form.

Traveling from her home in Detroit to Chicago, Shara worked with Tom Schick at Wilco’s studio, The Loft, for five days. Initially expecting to re-record everything, she was surprised when Tom insisted on keeping the raw demo material. The week was spent overdubbing, with Shara playing bass for the first time, alongside pianos, guitars with gizmotrons, and re-amping some original guitar parts recorded in her studio.
More than just a collection of songs; Fight the Real Terror is a call to action, and a testament to the transformative power of music. Nova's powerful vocals and genre-bending compositions are simultaneously intimate and expansive, urging listeners to confront their fears, embrace their vulnerabilities, and fight for a better world.

TRACK LISTING

01 Fight The Real Terror
02 Rocket In My Pocket
03 Even Warriors
04 Imaginary Lover
05 Rule Breaker
06 Safe House
07 Have You Ever Seen An Angel
08 Sublime
09 There’s No Place
10 I Saw A Glimpse

Ex-Here We Go Magic frontman Luke Temple emerges with a new project, Luke Temple and The Cascading Moms. Debut album, Certain Limitations. Lauded for his contributions to Here We Go Magic and Art Feynman, Luke Temple brings his signature off-kilter grooves and melodies to his new project's debut album Certain Limitations. The trio's sound takes influence from the likes of Dire Straits and The Velvet Underground, weaving together intricate guitar work, and a propulsive rhythm section, with a touch of jazz sensibility that recalls the ECM catalog.

A product of serendipity, The Cascading Moms were formed when in need of a band for an upcoming show, Temple brought together Kosta Galanopolous, a collaborator from his Art Feynman project, and Stuart, a musician he already knew in LA. When these three came together to rehearse, a spark ignited, revealing a creative connection that transcended that first show that brought them together.

The album's lead single, "I Can Dream," originally appeared on Art Feynman's Half Price At 3:30. However, after reworking it with the Cascading Moms, the song took on a new life. This reinvention exemplifies Certain Limitations' core concept: a collection of songs honed and reshaped through the improvisations and collaborative spirit of three musicians creating and exploring a new sonic world.

TRACK LISTING

Certain Limitations
Church Street
I Can Dream
I Will Not Kill
It's All About Timing
Sandy's Dead
Second Half
Softly

Hello! Tim here. My band is called Strand of Oaks. This is my eighth record and it’s called Miracle Focus.

I spent over three years building Miracle Focus. In the midst of writing, I became a painter and spent two seasons acting on a television show (Mayans MC). The dichotomy of painting for days in my garage and then flying out to LA to play a villainous biker on TV was one of the most thrilling experiences of my life.

The idea of Miracle Focus was born out of one simple concept: to make people feel good. Throw in a healthy mix of Ram Dass, yoga, Freddie Mercury, Alice Coltrane, and Beastie Boys, plus over a year of writing and building the extremely dense architecture of the songs, and Miracle Focus was born. The result is FUN, wild, rhythmic music filled with synth layering and mantra-like lyrics intended to uplift and hopefully bring some light to whoever listens.

In many ways, this record is a love letter to bliss. Through meditation, I found a way to connect with something greater, a positive force that allowed me to write music as a manual towards a more love-focused life. And the miracles I refer to aren’t asking the universe for anything; it’s just acknowledging and celebrating this complex beautiful moment that we all get to share. It will be gone, it will re-emerge as something new, that will be gone, repeat....repeat... repeat…this eternal cycle. My most sincere hope is that whoever listens might through sonic osmosis experience a similar joy.

Sending peace and love. Thank you for your time. Tim.

TRACK LISTING

More You
Communication
Ananda
Future Temple
Party At Monster Lake
Switched On
Navigator
Ascend You
Fantasy Wranglers
Miracle Focus 

R.I.Y.L. The Lemon Twigs, Foxygen, Richard Swift.
Jonathan Rado was 1/2 of the Jagjaguwar duo Foxygen.

One of the most in-demand producers in indie rock, and one half of Foxygen, Jonathan Rado’s recordings for The Killers, Father John Misty, The Lemon Twigs, Whitney, and Weyes Blood devour the canon, and return something distinctly modern. On For Who The Bell Tolls For, Rado’s first solo release in ten years, the producer unveils a refined version of his signature sound, intricately sculpted by anthemic maximalism and good old-fashioned studio magic.

The album is an exercise in mournful maximalism, transforming the mythos of American pop music into a vibrant meditation on death. The spirit of late producer Richard Swift Rado’s friend and mentor can be found across the collection, imbuing tracks like “Easier” with a tangible sense of loss, and Swift-ian turns of phrase. On other songs, such as the addictive “Don’t Wait Too Long,” Rado paints an arena-ready production with streaks of longing and hopelessness. In many ways, For Who The Bell Tolls For is a musical ode to Swift, nodding to the late producer’s legacy with homespun epics that straddle the line between joy and grief.

Recorded at Electric Lady Studios, New York and Sonora Recorders and Dreamstar II, Los Angeles, the album features appearances by Rado's frequent collaborators, including The Lemon Twigs, Brad Oberhofer, Andrew Sarlo, Jackie Cohen, and Kane Ritchotte. Despite this esteemed lineup and the gargantuan sound of the record, For Who The Bell Tolls For is a solo album at heart. Rado plays the studio like an instrument, his distinct voice present in every nook and cranny of the structure. This presence can be easily detected in every project that the artist touches, but it’s never sounded so honest, so shimmering, or so Rado as it does here.

TRACK LISTING

1. For Who The Bell Tolls For
2. Don’t Wait Too Long
3. Easier
4. Blue Moon
5. Farther Away
6. Walk Away
7. Yer Funeral

R.I.Y.L. Fever Ray, Juana Molina, Oneohtrix Point Never, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Cocteau Twins. A Flor de Piel, the new album from singer-songwriter and composer Maria Monica Gutierrez (aka Montañera), is a meditative journey of self-discovery across oceans, time, and the traditional confines of genre. Originally from Bogota, Colombia, Gutierrez began the album as a way to explore her identity after a difficult move to London left her feeling untethered in a strange new place. The result is an examination of the immigrant’s experience through a rich sonic lens of ambient pop textures, inspired by sources as disparate as Colombian traditional music, traditional Senegalese music, and whalesong from the depths of the Atlantic.

The album begins with the title track “A Flor de Piel,” Gutierrez’s indelible vocals floating above a vast expanse before being joined by deep, silky bass and the plucks of a koto-like stringed instrument. “The song was inspired by traditional Japanese music,” Gutierrez explains, “It’s about making my heart a little lighter; I know that inside of me I can be as light as mist in heat, I can be fragile as the song of a sparrow.” That sentiment perfectly encapsulates much of what makes A Flor de Piel so special. The album comes with a message of healing for all people, without forgetting the centuries of struggle and hurt that form the bedrock of modern society. The track “Santa Mar,” for instance, is inspired by the musical traditions of afro-pacific women in Colombia, and the crucial role that they play as peacebuilders in the region. Backed by a hypnotic beat, the song features contributions from marimba player Cankita, alongside Las Cantadoras de Yerba Buena, an all-female vocal group that utilizes traditional Afro-Colombian music to preserve their history and promote peace. Standout track “Como Una Rama” is a futuristic take on bullerengue, a traditional style of music and dance originally developed by Maroon communities on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Deeply affecting, the song combines Gutierrez’s indomitable voice with electronics that recall Steve Reich's rhythmic minimalism. “Cruzar,” the final track on the album, feels almost like a lullaby, with a meditative harmonic style and trance-like vocal melody. “The lyrics,” Gutierrez explains, “are a personal reminder of what is important to me: healing, letting go, breathing, evaporating, forgetting, changing, crystallizing.”

Across the 40-odd minutes of A Flor de Piel, Gutierrez triumphs at recontextualizing traditional sounds and sentiments into a modern form using synth-based and electronic textures. It’s a fitting representation for the personal struggles that the artist endured during her move to London. Rather than dwelling solely on the past Guitierrez uses A Flor de Piel to summon the strength of past generations, and forge a new path forward. As she describes it, “The album has accompanied me through inner journeys of finding myself in a new territory of redefining myself, of remembering who I am in a strange place.” As we drift towards an increasingly frightening and uncertain future, perhaps Montañera’s A Flor de Piel is exactly what we need: something to give us strength, to bring us peace, and to accompany our journey into a strange new place. 

TRACK LISTING

A Flor De Piel
Vestigios
Santa Mar
Tú - El Borde De Mi Arista
Como Una Ram
Bajar
Me Suelto Al Riesgo
Un Día Voy A Ser Maripos
Cruzar

Until now, Art Feynman the eccentric alter ego of accomplished producer Luke Temple has strictly been a solo act, a way for the artist to explore surprising sonic landscapes without the burdens of identity. Slightly twisted takes on Kosmische musik, worldbeat, and art pop can all be found scattered across the Art Feynman discography, but with his new album Be Good The Crazy Boys, Feynman fully immerses himself into pools of collective madness.

Unlike his first two albums, Crazy Boys was recorded live in the studio with a full band, a first for Feynman, capturing a spirit of restless anxiety that recalls the most frenetic work by Talking Heads, or Oingo Boingo at their darkest. Despite these callbacks, the collection remains firmly rooted in modern concerns, with songs about fearing the end of the world and struggling with FOMO narratives that would be relatable if they didn’t sound so completely unhinged.

With Be Good The Crazy Boys, Art Feynman proves to be more than just a character. He represents the part of the modern collective consciousness that’s struggling to maintain balance in a toxic, chaotic world. In less skilled hands, that concept could result in a very somber listen. Fortunately, when Art Feynman gets his hands on the chaos of the modern age, it simply makes you want to dance.

TRACK LISTING

01. Early Signs Of Rhythm
02. In CD
03. Therapy At 3pm
04. All I Can Do
05. He Dances Light
06. Passed Over
07. Chasing My Life
08. Desperately Free
09. I Do

The Art of Surrender marks a return to life, sown from primal impulses and hard-won emotional truths. Unrestrained melodic rapture soars above a relentless kick drum, speaking a need to move, to dance, to love. The music is as ambitious as its origins are personal. Tignor plays with scale, crafting multi-movement epics alongside one-minute miniatures. The smallest, most fragile violin gestures, where the finger barely touches the string to extract natural harmonics exist side by side with angular, exotic melodies, asymmetric rhythms, and rapid-fire string crossings.

On this LP, Tignor digs even more deeply into the violin and its technicolor reimaginings under his electroacoustic treatments. Christopher Tignor is a composer, violinist, lecturer, and software engineer. His emotionally charged scores and unique focus on live, performance-based electroacoustic practice has won acclaim within both the classical and experimental communities across 10 LPs on the Western Vinyl and New Albion record labels. He creates the live performance software he uses, shared freely.

As a composer he has written and recorded work for ensembles including The Knights, A Far Cry string orchestra, and Brooklyn Rider string quartet, performing alongside them at premiere venues including Carnegie's Zankel Hall. As a string arranger he has worked with Helios, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, John Congleton, This Will Destroy You, Meshell Ndegeocello, and several other artists at the boundaries of popular music. This music breathes, swoons and swoops elegiacally, in the same way a crack symphony might on a good night.

TRACK LISTING

01 Any Way To Reach You
02 Ritual Of A Thousand Limbs
03 O­-Centered Hearts
04 Forms In A Flame
05 She Comes In Waves
06 Would That I Could 

For Fans Of: Elliott Smith, Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear, Sufjan Stevens.

In 2019, Stephen Steinbrink discovered a short YouTube video of a street magician who approaches a highschooler walking home in Barstow, California. “Here, let me show you my idea,” he says, as he places a quarter on the kid’s hand. The magician performs some relaxed flourishes, and the coin vanishes. In silence, the kid stares at his hand at the nothing where there once, indisputably, was something, until his wonder finds a single word: “Cool.” The title of Disappearing Coin, the new album from Oakland songwriter Stephen Steinbrink, comes from this short clip. “When I look at it now,” he says, “I relate to the kid, who’s obviously uneasy in his body, and going through the experience of being a teenager in the early 2000s growing up in a bleak desert town like I did. I also relate to the coin, an inanimate disc of possibility. And I relate to the magician, an absurd facilitator of sending what is tactile and concrete into the wispy conceptual realm.” “I’ve watched it probably a hundred times,” he says. “It cracked me up but also blew my mind open the feeling of wonder I experienced watching this video became a guide as I navigated new ways of staying in the realm of what’s both real and magical.”

Following the 2018 release of Utopia Teased, Steinbrink completed an apprenticeship in the nearly-lost art of Stained Glass, becoming a glazier at a studio that over three years, fully restored the enormous 90-year-old windows in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. He committed to his Buddhist study, beginning lay monastic training before the process was thwarted by the pandemic. He dove deeper into music production for other artists, engineering two albums by Boy Scouts released on Anti- Records in 2018 and 2021. Steinbrink delighted in the way these pursuits pulled at the thread of ego’s tapestry and decentralized him from his craft, allow ing him to embody a new role as a creative caretaker engaging in practices that felt communal and restorative.

“As I slowly began writing for myself again, I tried to imbue my new songs with this sense of playfulness and wonder I felt while exploring these other interests.” He says. Feeling unlocked from the pressures of perfection that he often felt in his earlier work, creating Disappearing Coin felt buoyant and healing. “The album feels like an integration of all of my past musical selves zeroing in on the present,” Steinbrink explains, “I felt free to explore new ways of writing, through different perspectives, experimenting with fictional songwriting, visual archetypal language, and total collaboration.” This “total collaboration” was a joyous new venture after years of solo performing and recording.

The album can be seen as a 42 minute session of show and tell, the manifestation of Steinbrink repeating the mantra of “Here, let me show you my idea” to himself over and over. Disappearing Coin is at once a welcome return for the veteran Steinbrink and the debut of a totally new artist, one who has found a new path to himself with new goals of openness, curiosity, and self-acceptance.

“Recalls the magic pop purity of Arthur Russell...its minimalism manages to feel enlightened and transformative.” PITCHFORK.

“Melodic and self-assured. Steinbrink delivers his knotted lyricism with a smooth lilt. STEREOGUM.

TRACK LISTING

01 Opalescent Ribbon
02 If There's Love In Your Heart
03 Cruiser
04 Nowhere Real
05 Pony
06 Glitch Eternity
07 Step's Disappearing Coin
08 Cruiser (Reprise)
09 Cool And Collected
10 Comedy
11 Who Cares
12 Poured Back In The Stream
13 Addicted To A Dream
14 Nowhere Real (Reprise)

On their sophomore album Spirit in the Room, Activity is haunted by technology, the loss of loved ones, capitalism, and humanity's relentless death march towards environmental destruction. Produced by Psychic TV's Jeff Berner, the album is an emotional seance held through an unearthly haze of menacing trip hop, ambient electronica, and synth-based noise rock.

A sense of longing and hopelessness in the face of monumental loss comes through almost instantly on opening track "Department of Blood," in which lead vocalist Travis Johnson sardonically indicts both neoliberalism and "whatever the lord is," beneath a grim collage of processed electronics and a sinister drum machine beat. The David Berman-inspired "Heaven Chords, was written shortly after the iconic songwriter's death, and atmospheric track "Where the Art is Hung," is a haunting lament over the omnipresence of technology and surveillance in the modern world.

Spirit in the Room is no lighthearted journey, but the band's playfulness and obvious natural chemistry keeps the collection from being burdened by its own solemnity. "Unlike the first album, where we'd barely played live before we recorded, we got to take some of the less electronic songs out on the road in the fall of 2021," Johnson explains. "Some tracks had been incubating for over a year in our rehearsals. We could feel them change and open up in a live setting, so when we got back home, we went back to the drawing board on a lot of them. Some got scrapped altogether and we haven't played them since. You get an idea in your head of what it is, but it's something else when you're trying to hold other people's attention. Every part needed to feel earned or necessary." On the one hand, Spirit in the Room is a harrowing journey through a Bosch-like landscape of illness, global capital, and human-caused destruction. On the other hand, it's a room full of friends who are simply trying to make it through the day and process this world we've created. When asked why this album needed to be made, Johnson put it best: "None of us can stand to not make music is all, really." 

TRACK LISTING

01 Department Of Blood
02 Heaven Chords
03 Careful Lets Sleepwalk
04 Where The Art Is Hung
05 Cloud Come Here
06 Ect Frag
07 Icing
08 I Like What You Like
09 Sophia
10 I Saw His Eyes
11 Susan Medical City

In 2019, Lightning Dust broke up. Not the band, but Amber Webber and Joshua Wells the couple at the core of it ended their longtime relationship. In the wake of the split, the two musicians realized that Lightning Dust was still important to them and decided to stay together as an artistic partnership. The experience made them think about nostalgia as a concept and how this sort of longing for the past can be destructive, cancerous, useless. Webber and Wells reconvened virtually in mid-2020 to work together again as creative comrades, sharing some new ideas by correspondence, stitching together their song fragments into the dramatic arrangements now heard across Lightning Dust’s forthcoming new album, Nostalgia Killer.

The album title couldn’t set a more perfect expectation for what the album holds.

Hearing those words together, one might anticipate something harder, more chilly and severe. But what happens is quite the opposite: listeners find themselves wandering into someplace warm, guided by familiar sounds and voices.

Little do they know they’ll soon be flung into a climate unknown. Throw away the old coat–these songs signal a new season. This is a winding and moving album. Sensual, confessional, and free of fences. Each song builds with inexorable force, often pulling back to a whisper before washing over the listener completely. With their wealth of new imagery and the most incandescent flights, Lightning Dust sweeps you away from wherever you happen to be.

Across Nostalgia Killer, Lighting Dust introduces a sound that feels vaguely familiar while forming a mythology all of their own. Although this exact work may not have been created if it wasn’t for the duo’s separation, it would be wrong to simply call it a break-up album. The songs here don’t merely travel that well-trod landscape, they reinvent the scene altogether; after all, sometimes love needs reinventing. Nostalgia Killer is about something that affects us all, which is how we make sense of the world and each other over time and across borders. And far out as always, Lightning Dust is reinvented here magnificently.

Heather was Sharon Van Etten’s longtime collaborator and former band member.On Labyrinth, Heather Woods Broderick serves as our reflective host, subverting expectations of conventional songcraft with impressionistic language and quietly relentless explorations of the human experience that’s at once light and dark, more circular and less linear. “Many of us yearn for stillness and peace, as an escape from the movement all around us,” she explains when asked about the themes of the album. “Yet movement is perpetual, happening all the time on some level. It’s as wild as the wind, yet eternally predictable in its inevitability. It is linear in part, but infinite in its circuitry. Our lives just punctuate it.”

Broderick began crafting Labyrinth in March 2020, when most forms of movement were brought to a creeching halt. The Maine-born, Los Angeles-based songwriter who, in addition to her work as a solo musician, built a life playing and touring with acts such as Sharon Van Etten, Beth Orton, Damien Jurado, and Efterklang was suddenly forced off the road for the first time in her career. She used this disruption as an opportunity to pare down her creation process and construct the scaffolding for Labyrinth in her apartment. Employing only the most crucial tools at her disposal, Broderick found herself opening different artistic doors as she focused on sharpening her recording skills, capturing the majority of the album on her own before finishing the remainder with co-producer D. James Goodwin.

For all of Broderick’s sage lyricism and vocal authority, Labyrinth never provides the listener with any easy answers. If the image of the labyrinth represents the enormity of modern life and the difficulty of navigating it, Heather Woods Broder[1]ick provides a guide to its endless kinetic wonders of being present, aware, and

connected despite its disconnects. She describes the texture of its walls, its indifferent rhythms, and the inherent poeticism of feeling lost amid the dead-ends and unexpected turns. At this point in our history, perhaps that’s all we need to keep moving.

RIYL: Sharon Van Etten, Julien Baker, Julia Jacklin, Weyes Blood.

TRACK LISTING

01 As I Left
02 I Want To Go
03 Admiration
04 Crashing Against The Sun
05 Wandering
06 Wherever I Go
07 Tiny Receptors
08 Blood Run Through Me
09 Seemed A River
10 What Does Love Care

In the fall of 2021, Simeon ten Holt's "Canto Ostinato" was reborn in a 'solo version for seven keyboards'. During the weeks leading up to the birth of his son Lark, Erik Hall moved methodically among the instruments in his recording studio, conducting a multi-track conversation with himself and the piece's score. Ten Holt composed "Canto Ostinato" between 1976 and 1979. The rhythmic motif (ostinato) repeated over its entire length has a limited number of printed notes. It is up to the performers how to play them, for how long, where to place accents, etc. In the score, the composer calls on musicians to interact and evaluate, to fuse sounds and colors into one cohesive musical universe. Then a cosmos is created. You can get lost in that. You want to get lost in that, like in the original live recording with four pianos. "That performance is deeply compelling, almost otherworldly," says Hall. He has always been drawn to music that is based on repetition, harmonically rich, and tonal. He previously added a groundbreaking dimension to Steve Reich's 1976 minimal masterpiece "Music for 18 Musicians", and– as again now with 'Canto'– his motivation is the love of the music itself. "When I first heard the piece, I was captivated." Then the plan emerged to undergo the same focused practice as before. He stacked seven total layers of his 1962 Hammond M-101 organ, a 1910 Steinway grand piano, and a 1978 Rhodes electric piano, each performance informed by those that preceded it. Erik Hall's "Canto Ostinato" lasts for one hour, and from the sheer joy of playing this wondrous composition emerges an elegantly meandering journey. In it, music rises above itself, higher and higher, like a lark jubilating freedom in the sky. 

TRACK LISTING

01 Sections 1-16
02 Sections 17-30
03 Sections 31-40
04 Sections 41-55
05 Sections 56-73
06 Sections 74-87
07 Sections 88-90
08 Sections 91-94
09 Sections 95-106 

For fans of: Tycho, Rival Consoles, Ólafur Arnalds, Jon Hopkins, Corre, Baths, Jónsi, Bon Iver. On Origins Chris Bartels takes on the role of singer-songwriter for the first time under his Elskavon moniker, unveiling a voice that wouldn’t sound out of place next to vocal-forward artists like Justin Vernon, Jónsi, or Baths, who master the balance between conventional songcraft and bold, idiosyncratic experimentation.

Origins is vast yet intimate, fluttering yet cohesive, tattered yet clean, a little like rainfall during sunlight. Shedding the ambient-classical confines of his previous output, the album’s opener and title track, offers a swirling mosaic of acoustic textures that recall the beloved duo The Books, laced with warped vocal utterances flitting in and out of a club-friendly beat. “Origins” is followed by the equally danceable “Coastline,” which drives home the smiling melodies and intricate sound-design that form the spine of Origins, keeping Bartels’ voice in a largely decorative and impressionistic role up to this point. “Blossom and the Void” dissolves the introductory tension as Bartels comes out lyrically swinging, his digitized voice chanting widely over the mutated New Wave-esque anthem. Here, Bartels shows his instinct for dynamics by rising to bombast and quickly dispelling it, making steep yet graceful descents into skilfully delicate sound-design.

Throughout Origins, the patient glacial aesthetic of his previous work is still discernible there are wordless, expansive panoramas that stretch out patiently for minutes at a time and smartly resist the impulse to pack each moment with a persona made even more impactful when Bartels chooses to wield it. At other times, his spokesmanship is woven discreetly into a larger tapestry, like on “See Out Loud” (and its ambient reprise) where Bartels’ voice shimmers from a distance, covering the scene in diffuse splendour. “There is so much warping, mangling, re-sampling, reversing and pitching,” Bartels says of his intricate vocal manipulations. “I printed a lot of the vocal recordings onto a tape machine from the ‘60s, first at one speed, and then I’d halve, or double the speed going back into my computer,” he elaborates, illustrating how this kind of analog processing freed him from his habits. “Sometimes I’d do this multiple times on one recording or layer it gave me such a unique and unexpected sound. At this point, I threw away any inhibition on what type of vocals to have, or not have, on the album.” This newfound freedom is palpable in the peaks of soaring grandeur that dot the emotional landscape of Origins. “All These Years” cathartically reaches one such summit in its second half after laying a path of gently plodding indie-IDM in its first. The cinematic vignette “Dreymur Aftur” provides pause for reflection amid its brisk procession of string plucks and rhythmic synthesizer while marching wordlessly into album closer “This Won’t Last Forever.” Here at the end, Bartels’ guitar playing is laid bare in the mix, skeletally framing a single ribbon of his voice as it unfurls into the atmosphere. Though the track isn’t expressly lyrical, its starkness still exemplifies the new leaf of vulnerability Bartels has turned over on Origins, an album that documents his hard-won evolution from musician, to producer, to composer and finally his confident arrival in the role of songwriter.

TRACK LISTING

Origins
Coastline
Blossom And The Void
North Sole
Vivid
See Out Loud
See Out Loud (reprise)
All These Years
Dreymir Aftur
This Won't Last Forever

For Fans of: Bill Callahan, Adam Torres, Cross Record, Julia Holter, Low, Damien Jurado.

The album’s Texas-based producer John Mark Lapham was a member of Secretly Canadian band The Earlies. Voids employs the vocal talents of Bill Callahan, Emily Cross, Adam Torres, and Julia Holter across twelve genre-fluid, yet impressively cohesive tracks that span baroque dream-pop, filmic ambient, raga-like drones, avant-country, and even spiritual jazz, all imbued with poetic heft and seared by the West Texas sun. It was beneath this same sun that Lapham lost both of his parents, mourned a withering relationship, and shouldered the fallout of the pandemic, turning his life into the rusted-out scraps he then used to build Voids from the ground up.

There is no better narrator for Lapham’s story than fellow Texas resident Bill Callahan, whose iconic delivery perfectly personifies the core themes of Voids. By the time Callahan appears, he does so over a saw-blade drone that sounds like machinery echoing off the corrugated steel walls of a nearby workshop, which then breaks open into a loose yet pained confluence of violin and upright bass that recalls Joe Henderson’s 1974 spiritual jazz album The Elements. On “Dreamless” the album crystallizes into its most straight-ahead moment as Lapham trains his compositional lens on a brilliant piece of pop songwriting. Featured vocalist Adam Torres soars over John Mark’s punctual arrangement of stomping drums and rapturous string-work to anthemic, and gently psychedelic consequence.

Voids concludes with the pleasant clatter of “Circles” wherein Lapham throws all his ingredients into a pot of celebratory catharsis. Drum sets collide with one another gleefully, and harmonized textures scatter and roll about the floor like a dropped bucket of ornate marbles. Lapham’s collage-work, which up to this point has been smartly restrained, comes unglued as he transmutes grief into relief within a moment-of-death montage of aural imagery. Across Voids, that same awareness of tragedy and loneliness is made palatable by the album’s exciting and varied topography, which stands insubordinately against Lapham’s real-life surroundings. The settlers who established West Texas towns like the one he calls home must have done so with a sense of hope despite the hostility of their surroundings, however inevitable the withering. Similar spirits speak through John Mark Lapham’s work, and he welcomes them as fascinating old friends. “That more than anything inspired a lot of what I try to express through Old Fire, faded memories, former glories, places lost in time,” he discloses. “Whatever I was trying to express with Old Fire wasn't finished with the first album, like a story that was only half-read. It seemed like that was only the beginning, and there was a lot more ground to cover.” If there is ground still uncovered for Old Fire after Voids, it's sure to be lush in spite of or perhaps because of the dusty soil beneath it.

TRACK LISTING

01. All Gone [2:11]
02. Blue Star (ft. Emily Cross) [4:07]
03. When I Was In My Prime (ft. Bill Callahan) [5:05]
04. Corpus (ft. Bill Callahan) [4:15]
05. Love Is Only Dreaming [2:45]
06. Dreamless (ft. Adam Torres) [3:08]
07. Don't You Go (ft. Bill Callahan) [4:38]
08. Window (ft. Julia Holter) [4:24]
09. Uninvited [8:22]
10. Memory [5:51]
11. Father As A Child [4:24]
12. Circles [6:57]

For Fans Of: J. Tillman, Phosphorescent, Low, Damien Jurado, Bill Callhan.

“It’s going to be hard to talk about this when it’s done.” So begins A Mold For The Bell, the new album from Colorado singer-songwriter and producer Logan Farmer. What follows that enigmatic lyric is a collection of stark and ambient folk songs, tethered solely by Farmer’s unadorned vocals, acoustic guitar, and moving embellishments from contributors, including saxophonist Joseph Shabason (who also mixed the album) and renowned harpist Mary Lattimore. With the help of Grammy-nominated producer Andrew Berlin (Gregory Alan Isakov), Farmer tracked all of the vocal and guitar parts over two days in the early months of 2021. The tracks were recorded quickly, live in the studio to capture the raw intimacy and immediacy of Farmer’s live performances. The rest of the album’s creation occurred remotely, over texts, phone calls, and emails with Shabason and a handful of other musicians, as wildfires, insurrections and the pandemic raged around them.

“I was working at a bookstore that winter,” Farmer explains, “and I’d walk to my shift every day, obsessing over lyrics and early mixes in a cheap pair of earbuds.” These daily walks would take him past a church, where he’d often stop on the sidewalk and listen to the bells at the top of the hour. “I’ve always loved the sound of church bells, but as the situation worsened, what began as a comfort began to feel ominous, almost threatening.” This experience, along[1]side influences as disparate as Tarkovsky’s film Andrei Rublev and the novels of Olga Tokarczuk, led to a collection of songs that are similarly foreboding, expanding upon the stark and spacious universe of Farmer’s last album (2020’s Still No Mother) to reveal an atmosphere that’s even more oppressively still, like an abandoned Victorian home.

TRACK LISTING

01 Silence Or Swell
02 Cue Sunday Bells
03 Horsehair (feat. Mary Lattimore)
04 Crooked Lines
05 William
06 The Moment
07 Renegade
08 South Vienna

Alverson has released five records as Spokane, and four as Drunk on the label Jagjaguwar. There is a moment on Sides, the new album from Richmond, Virginia-based duo Lean Year, in which a hospital room floor is filled with white chrysanthemums. This imagery, based on an opiate-induced hallucination experienced by vocalist Emilie Rex’s mother as she recovered from surgery, is a perfect encapsulation of the band’s second album: dreamlike and beautiful, yet burdened with cold, stark reality. Sides is a harrowing journey through realms of grief and memory, a meditation woven into a tapestry of synth pads, woodwinds, and Rex’s instantly recognizable voice.

The duo of Rex and Rick Alverson who also works as a film director (The Mountain, Entertainment, The Comedy) originally set out to write an album about conflict, but during the writing and recording process, they were confronted with a number of personal tragedies. Alverson lost both of his parents in rapid succession, Rex’s mother received a cancer diagnosis, and the couple’s beloved family dog, Orca, died. These events transformed the album into an exploration of loss an attempt at processing the painful, complex, and private emotions that bubble to the surface when confronted with death. “We thought we’d do a concept album called Sides where we could reflect on all of the division in the world, and some in our own families, but then COVID transformed everything / everyone, and we suffered our own specific losses. The record became about loss and grief,” Rex explains. “In this way, the title Sides was still appropriate: our individual grief and collective grief, the margins of before and after, the act and feeling of during and enduring. It felt like straddling a threshold between two opposing sides the moment before conflict and the moment after it passes, life and death, the act of living and the memory of the act. Grief feels like a contention between what you knew and what you now know, and often both feel real and unreal at once.”

Sides produced by Alverson alongside Erik Hall (In Tall Buildings) and featuring contributions from Elliot Bergman (Nomo, Wild Belle) and Joseph Shabason (Destroyer, The War on Drugs) has a distinctly cinematic quality, perhaps due in part to Alverson’s other career.Moments of jazz, slowcore, and dirgelike R&B find their way into the sorrowful, ambient suite, lulling the listener into a state of calm while the lyrics speak of ghosts, childhood, and mortality. Despite the gravity of the subject matter, Sides succeeds in mastering a balancing act between pathos and pop. Each song is indelible and haunting, with melodies that have the kind of broad appeal reminiscent of Karen Dalton, Aldous Harding, and FKA twigs.

TRACK LISTING

01 Legs
02 Nitetime
03 End
04 Trouble With Being Warm
05 Panes
06 Bend
07 Bad Woman
08 Marriage Of Heaven And Hell
09 Home

Ask singer-songwriter Gabriel Birnbaum what inspired Male Models – the diverse new album from New York band Wilder Maker – and he'll mention everything from American novelist James Salter and the NBA playoffs to Thin Lizzy and the delicate tightrope of positive masculinity. These reference points might sound arbitrary to the uninitiated listener, but together they provide some insight into the creation of an album that somehow succeeds at being both an apocalyptic novel of ideas and the most cohesive party playlist that you've ever heard. The music of Male Models was recorded live over several days with a core band that consisted of Birnbaum and longtime collaborators Nick Jost and Sean Mullins. Despite his status as the frontman and principal songwriter of Wilder Maker, Birnbaum's voice can only be heard singing lead on five of the twelve songs. The remaining tracks have guest vocalists taking the mic, unveiling an impressive lineup that includes (but isn't limited to) Counting Crows' Adam Duritz, Katie Von Schleicher, and Jordan Lee (aka Mutual Benefit).

Like guests at a strange afterparty, when you hear these accomplished vocalists recount Birnbaum's tales of unrequited love, drunkenness, and desperation, it feels almost voyeuristic, as if you were sitting in a crowded cocktail bar, sneaking glances at nearby tables. "We all listen to playlists a lot, even us album diehards" Birnbaum admits, "I've been keeping an ever-expanding playlist of songs that I never want to skip, with all of these different voices back to back. I wanted to make a record that sounded like a playlist in this way; it became a kind of songwriting challenge for me." Male Models succeeds in capturing the energy of a crowded party and its accompanying playlist without losing the philosophical underpinnings of its concept. Musically, it also changes shape constantly.

Across the 12 songs of the album, listeners will hear electrified soul, heartfelt folk songs, indie rock, and searing barn burners, all of which are expertly tethered by Birnbaum's sardonic and doom-laden storytelling. The band's unique blend of control and playfulness is established in tracks like the pop-oriented 'A Professional' (beautifully sung by Felicia Douglass of Dirty Projectors and Ava Luna) and 'New Anxiety', which Birnbaum wrote as his answer to Springsteen's classic 'Atlantic City'. One of the most energetic songs on the album, 'All Power Must Remain Hidden' is a propulsive jam that, complete with grin-inducing cowbell, wouldn't feel out of place in a rowdy sports stadium.

Perhaps destined to be the most talked-about track on the album, 'O Anna' features Counting Crows' Adam Duritz on the mic. Duritz instantly makes the song feel nostalgic and warm, while Birnbaum's lyrics explore male isolation and social constructs through the metaphor of Michael Jordan's athleticism. The album finishes with the heartbreaking track 'Jason'. Compared to the bombastic affair that preceded it, the song sounds almost oppressively stark and skeletal. Featuring little more than piano and Birnbaum's voice, 'Jason' tells the story of two brothers and their tense reunion after a long time apart.

TRACK LISTING

01 Letter Of Apology
02 A Professional Ft. Felicia Douglass
03 New Anxiety Ft. Mutual Benefit
04 Static Ft. V.V. Lightbody
05 Surfers Trace Ft. Yellow Ostrich
06 All Power Must Remain Hidden
07 Scam Likely
08 Silver Car Ft. Katie Von Schleicher
09 5 Train
10 O Anna Ft. Adam Duritz
11 Against The Numbers
12 Jason 

FOR FANS OF: Big Thief, Parquet Courts, Cate Le Bon, Elliott Smith, LVL UP. On their debut for Western Vinyl, recording engineer and multi-instrumentalist Nate Mendelsohn and his band use lyrical maximalism for the powers of good. Where Market’s previous home recorded releases shifted genre restlessly, on The Consistent Brutal Bullshit Gong Mendelsohn took a core band of longtime collaborators to a house in rural Massachusetts where they carved out space for his words to speak through with humor and intensity. Though he comes from a background in experimental music, Mendelsohn’s ear for pop has prevailed. Certain moments on Bullshit Gong reveal his stranger side, as on the thundering bridge of “Scar,” which sounds like a more unhinged Parquet Courts, or the angular “I Would Do That,” which takes cues from Cate Le Bon.

On the whole, though, this band of close friends insists on directness, their arrangements clear despite the intricacies. Guitars and synthesizers tangle fluidly atop the rhythm section’s tight bedrock, evoking the tenderness and backbeat-centric qualities of Elliott Smith or Big Thief. After college, where he met most of the members of Market, Mendelsohn became an engineer and producer at the Brooklyn studio Figure 8 Recording. Through that community he’s recorded artists like Frankie Cosmos and Wendy Eisenberg, and played with Yaeji, Vagabon, Katie Von Schleicher (who co-produced Bullshit Gong with him), and Sam Evian, who mixed the album. Creating intimacy out of manic self-reflection requires a delicate balancing act, one Mendelsohn tackles with abandon.

His words never skew too poetic or grandiose, and when he invokes the ugly it’s met with a sonic tonality that sets him right again. In tender moments, his voice is often flanked by bandmates Natasha Thweatt or Von Schleicher, who help skew his words toward the universal. Still, Bullshit Gong is an obsessive look inward, one in which Mendelsohn simply asks himself if he is good to those he loves. It’s an act of trust between the artist and the imagined listener he takes with him. 

TRACK LISTING

01 Bag Of Jeans
02 Scar
03 Looking Back
04 Watergate
05 I Would Do That
06 Old
07 Control
08 NBA
09 Therapy
10 Little Wants

Since the release of his last album – 2017’s Finding Shore, a collaboration with Brian Eno – pianist and singer-songwriter Tom Rogerson’s life has undergone a number of dramatic transformations. While writing his new album Retreat to Bliss, Rogerson had a child, lost a parent, and received his own diagno[1]sis of a rare form of blood cancer. The new decade brought him from Berlin to the Suffolk of his childhood, composing profound pieces of minimal songwriting in the church next to his parents’ home.

Rogerson studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music under mentors like Harrison Birtwistle, and he made his live debut as an improvising pianist in 2002, before releasing an improvised record with Reid Anderson (Bad Plus) and Mike Lewis (Happy Apple, Bon Iver) in 2004. He formed the band Three Trapped Tigers in 2007, expertly blending elements of electronic, jazz and noise rock into a cohesive whole. The band earned a reputation for innovative live shows and went on to perform and collaborate with artists like Brian Eno, Deftones, and the Dillinger Escape Plan. It was working with Eno, another Suffolk native, that eventually led Rogerson back to his roots and back to a place where he could write Retreat to Bliss, his solo debut album.

“All my life, the piano has been my constant companion, my confessor, my best friend, and my worst enemy,” Rogerson explains. “I’ve always written music on and for the piano, but it felt too personal, too private to release.”

Indeed, listening to Retreat to Bliss feels almost like eavesdropping, as though you’re crouched in the belfry of a Suffolk church, bearing witness to a form of musical bloodletting. For the first time in his noteworthy career, Rogerson has combined masterful piano playing and subtle electronics with the texture of his own voice, an attempt to express deeply private emotions that were difficult to articulate using instrumental music alone.

“The last few years have brought some struggle, some joy, and a lot of change. My response has been to retreat to what I trust the most: the piano, my voice, and the landscape I grew up in. That’s how the album got its title, and how I came to be ready finally to release a solo record.”

The eleven tracks that make up Retreat to Bliss were recorded by Leo Abrahams (Brian Eno, David Byrne, Grace Jones) over the course of just a few days, a process that emphasized spontaneity and the artist’s own commitment to improvisation.

Secular yet devotional, intensely personal yet profound, the experience of listening to Retreat to Bliss seems to evade characterization. It’s physical and emotional, a glimpse into the mind of an artist who has chosen exposure over withdrawal, who uses his command of the piano to chart an unflinching path forward, never looking back.

TRACK LISTING

01. Descent [5:22]
02. Oath [4:36]
03. Buried Deep [3:31]
04. Toumani [4:04]
05. Drone Finder Part 2 [2:25]
06. Chant [4:32]
07. Rapture 1 [4:08]
08. Open Out Span Wide View [3:47]
09. A Clearing [4:01]
10. Retreat To [6:10]
11. Coda [1:37]

YVETTE conjures atmospheres that are both disturbing and familiar at once, pushing synthesizers, effects pedals, vocal processors, acoustic-electric drums, and midi guitar controllers to their extremes. Singer/multi-instrumentalist Noah Kardos-Fein and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Dale Eisinger think of their music not so much in terms of sound as in terms of feeling. The New York duo uses music both as therapy and a weapon, as an outlet for the stress of the daily grind and a release of the pent up tension that metastasizes only after living in a busy, unrelenting metropolis. How The Garden Grows, the sophomore record from YVETTE, reconfigures the anxiety of the moment into deeply spiritual, wildly aggressive, and frequently beautiful noise music, in the tradition of early post-punk and industrial artists like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and This Heat.

The album was written and recorded over three years, as Kardos-Fein and Eisinger watched developers raze many of their favourite NYC venues. Rather than disappearing into the rubble of the city they love, How The Garden Grows grew out of that chaos. “It’s nearly impossible to compare them to any other band,” wrote Meredith Graves for the Village Voice in 2016. Having gained lasting acclaim for their debut LP Process, the follow-up EP Time Management (both released on GODMODE), and their bewildering, inspirational live show, YVETTE’s near-decade as a band coalesces with this LP. They’ve performed alongside The Rapture, Sleigh Bells, Lydia Lunch, Liars, HEALTH, Liturgy, Factory Floor, Xiu Xiu, A Place To Bury Strangers, Oneida, Metz, DIIV, The Soft Moon, Priests, Dan Deacon, Pissed Jeans, and Thurston Moore. This is YVETTE’s sophomore full-length. Their debut album Process (released on Godmode/Tough Love in 2013) received an 8.1 on Pitchfork, in addition to plenty of other strong coverage. Photographer Tim Saccenti (Lana Del Rey, Run the Jewels, Eminem, Flying Lotus) took some amazing press photos of Noah. Noah co-wrote some songs with Moses Sumney for his 2020 album græ. Press Quotes - "...Yvette managed to recast a music rooted in nihilism and agitation into something approachable and transfixing." Pitchfork // “Yvette channel all the moody intensity and musical discipline of Wire and This Heat, which pushes all the right buttons” Jonathan Galkin of DFA Records for NME // "a noise band with a bit of pop sensibility" Shamir // "Yvette are a noise-rock duo from Brooklyn who manage to turn drilling sounds and drones, the hum and clatter of machinery, into riveting entertainment." The Guardian

TRACK LISTING

01 B61 5:19
02 Contact High 2:07
03 Warm UP 2:44
04 Besides 2:53
05 For A Moment 2:56
06 Close Quarters 6:14
07 Smoke In Your Eyes 2:31
08 Best Intentions 3:20
09 Translucent 2:24
10 Intermission 7:40 

On his debut album Half Mirror, Matthew O’Connell superimposes warm analog synths onto self-described “confessional folk” with a simultaneously cosmic and earthly outcome. Tracked at home in the mountains of North Carolina using a vintage tape delay, electric guitar, and a self-designed synthesizer named ‘Balsam,’ Half Mirror is at once a lonesome push-pull of electronics humanized by folk elements, and folk music made alien by electronic adornments. O’Connell’s own story is just as captivatingly segmented. While growing up on a farm in Palmyra, Indiana, he became obsessed with metal drumming and spent most of his free time practicing in the garage, occasionally recording on four-track tape machines with his brother Joe (Elephant Micah).

Reflecting on those formative years, O’Connell says, “I think that period instilled two things in me: a long attention span, and the ability to work obsessively on something in solitude.” It’s these monastic inclinations that helped form the spirit of Half Mirror. While in college, his interest in math led him to participate in a six-month intensive study program in Budapest, Hungary. There, he continued writing song fragments on a borrowed guitar and fiddling with musical electronics at the Kitchen Budapest a collective of artists, theorists, and coders. In 2011, his interest in electronics and engineering led him to Asheville, North Carolina, where he worked for Moog Music calibrating and building synthesizers, and testing vintage analog delay chips by day. At night he would spend his time building homemade synths and writing songs. It was here in Asheville that he began the bulk of the work on Half Mirror, imbuing his music with the qualities of his environment almost by necessity. O’Connell made a deliberate effort to keep the album's production sparse.

His interest in restraint stems in part from his love of albums like Nearly God by Tricky and Ghost Tropic by Songs: Ohia, both of which feature uncomfortably bare vocals and uncanny production that commands the listener’s attention. Additional inspiration came from Mark Hollis' striking minimalism, and the freeform songwriting of Arthur Russell and John Martyn. Filtering the poetry of fractured, imperfect memories through a lush, yet sparse palette of sounds, Half Mirror evokes a profoundly moody sense of place: the fog heavy in the mountain peaks, the dew present on early morning walks, and the musky smell of rhododendrons in the air.

TRACK LISTING

01 Cold
02 Whitewaterside
03 Watching The Beams
04 Blue Ridge
05 Midday Sun
06 Billowing
07 Ohio
08 Mirror 

Hollie makes up one half of the duo Mint Julep also on Western Vinyl, and the album features performances from Keith Kenniff (aka Goldmund).

Director David Lynch once said “I long for a kind of quiet where I can just drift and dream. I always say getting inspiration is like fishing. If you’re quiet and sitting there and you have the right bait, you’re going to catch a fish eventually. Ideas are sort of like that. You never know when they’re going to hit you.” Inspired by this quote in both name and spirit, Hollie Kenniff’s The Quiet Drift is an ambient gallery of cloudlike synths, seraphic strings, echoing guitars, and other celestial textures guided to cohesion by Hollie’s own wordless singing. Though the album certainly creates (and originates from) the kind of space where Lynch’s proverbial “fish” can be caught, The Quiet Drift is a fitting title for Hollie’s own history, both recent and distant. During the course of the album’s creation, Hollie and her family moved cross-country from an island in Washington state, to an island in Maine before ultimately relocating to Canada. “As a child I visited Ontario year-round,” she explains in her own words. She continues “More than any other landscape, I think the lake, rivers, and woods there left the most enduring impression on me. The landscape and pace of life of these places will always stay with me.” But the reverberant spaces Hollie crafts need no physical headquarters. Instead of conjuring views of nature at the ground level, her sound more readily evokes a top-down perspective, with the distinct features of the land shrinking underfoot as the listener becomes untethered from geography altogether.

The Quiet Drift belongs more to the liminal spaces between life and afterlife, memory and fantasy, landscape and dreamscape, than any mappable locale. Describing her formative years, Hollie says “As a dual US/Canadian citizen who spent my childhood in a rural town one that I haven’t returned to in many years I have a sense of not entirely belonging anywhere. When I was a teenager my close friends were male musicians, so I was also an outsider to the degree that they were wild and anarchic in a way that I wasn’t. I was a quiet book reader and avid music listener who enjoyed being around a creative group. I was also a radio DJ for alternative and punk music throughout high school.” In this light, The Quiet Drift attests that creativity is placeless, and calls into question the stereotype of artists as scene-centric city dwellers. Having come of age in the absence of metropolitan sensory overload, Hollie learned to spot the muse in nature, and within herself, instead of the echo chamber of a frenzied peer group. On The Quiet Drift Hollie Kenniff wholly escapes from such pop-culture feedback loops into transcendent, shimmering realms, and she brings the listener along with her. In this age in which we have all been called to reevaluate our relationship to indoor spaces, and seek refuge in the great outdoors, The Quiet Drift provides an apt soundtrack for such rebalancing.

TRACK LISTING

01 Flourish 4:00
02 Quell 4:45
03 Some Day If Some Day Comes 3:52
04 Four Sides Of The Forest 5:19
05 Under The Loquat Tree (feat. Goldmund) 4:00
06 Sunset Chant 3:19
07 Still Falling Snow 3:54
08 Unfolding (feat. Goldmund) 2:57
09 A Feathered Fog 4:14
10 This Part Of You 3:53

Across eight tracks that mesh spacious, jazz-laced composition with fourth-world and adult-contemporary tonality, Toronto saxophonist Joseph Shabason sketches an auditory map of the transcendence, unity, conditioning, and eventual renunciation of his upbringing in an Islamic and Jewish dual-faith household. The resulting album The Fellowship bears the name of the insular Islamic community Shabason’s traditionally

Jewish parents belonged to from a time before he was even born; a mental and spiritual push-pull which continued shaping, even controlling, his outlook well into his adulthood. As a listening experience The Fellowship follows a chronological arc that spans three generations covering his parents’ early lives, his own spiritual and physical adolescence, and his subsequent struggle to eschew the problematic habituations of such a conflicted past.

On The Fellowship, as on prior albums that bear his name, Joseph Shabason does what only the best instrumental music makers can: tell a story with emotional clarity that conveys even the subtlest of feelings, all without singing a single word. As wordless as ever-- with as complex a theme as ever-- this album may be his most emotionally articulate yet. Most importantly, those lost in the woods of repression and self-doubt that organized religion can be at its worst now have The Fellowship to help guide them into a softer light.

TRACK LISTING

01. Life With My Grandparents 4:51
02. Escape From North York 3:38
03. The Fellowship 5:14
04. 0-13 2:37
05. 13-15 5:10
06. 15-19 7:01
07. Comparative World Religions 3:00
08. So Long 7:07

RIYL: Jason Molina, Bonnie Prince Billy, Bill Callahan, Damien Jurado.

The raw inspiration for Vague Tidings came from a 2006 DIY tour of the 49th state. It was a trip that went off the beaten path sometimes a bit too far for comfort. Now, over a decade later, listeners find Joe O’Connell aka Elephant Micah stationed at a creaky spinet piano, singing about the Alaskan sky. Throughout, his lyrics take a new angle on a pet theme: human encounters with the natural world.

Vague Tidings places these encounters in the American West and, at times, in its sci-fi corollary, outer space. Its imagery draws from the allure of Alaska, the idea of Western prosperity, and the human relationship to wilderness more broadly. Often, O’Connell sings about the goal of capturing and commodifying nature. In poetic sketches of resource extraction industries and dark sky tourism, frontier lust runs amok. Pipelines catch fire and stars disappear, all to the tune of a stark, uncanny Americana. Vague Tidings is a sustained, hallucinatory rendering of this theme. In style, its eight songs follow a switchback path between foggy incantations and mountain anthems. Made with a small cohort of acoustic instrumentalists, the record is rough hewn, but easy on the ears. To put Vague Tidings down on tape, O’Connell assembled some of his favorite musicians in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina area, where he’s lived since 2015: Libby Rodenbough (Mipso) bows and plucks a detuned fiddle, Matt Douglas (Mountain Goats) breathes life into various woodwinds, and Matt O’Connell (Lean Year) sets the pace on a two-piece drum set. Their loose, imaginative playing pushes Vague Tidings beyond the singer-songwriter genre into something richer in texture. Ultimately, this is foreboding but spacious music, with plenty of room for reconsidering life on earth.

Created slowly over a years-long span that encompassed the recording of 2019’s Stray Fantasies, wife and husband duo Hollie and Keith Kenniff deliver In a Deep and Dreamless Sleep, a distinctly hazier chapter of their technicolor pop venture Mint Julep. Where the former album bore a crystalline latticework of defined pop structure, the latter blunts the sharpness and softens the glare, striking a balance between songcraft, and Hollie’s solo material, as well as Keith’s output as Goldmund.

In a Deep and Dreamless Sleep assumes a more aerated form, exuding a heavy fog of shoegaze sensibility, though the infectious pop know-how of its precursor remains firmly intact. “Our previous material tended to be structured largely in a verse/chorus setting,” Keith explains, “but these songs are more free flowing and through-composed with a focus on mood and texture. He continues “A lot of the songs are more stream-of-consciousness than premeditated; we went with first ideas and let them guide the composition rather than planning a definitive road map-- which hopefully lends itself to creating a specific and unique emotional connection.”

Somewhat counter to its title, In a Deep and Dreamless Sleep is rife with dreamworld inclinations in which waking and sleeping, loving and leaving, living and dying, are all interchangeable. The album is imbued with the soft opiation of oncoming love-- or perhaps that’s the mournfulness of a love in its twilight. Or, further still, that feeling is the spousal duo nurturing their love against the backdrop of their busy lives. “Time is a valued commodity, but we make it a point to do this together.” Says Keith. “Mint Julep is a good bonding experience, it's akin to a date night. Our routine is not structured, but we chip away at it, sometimes in long bursts, sometimes in short windows of opportunity.” In a Deep and Dreamless Sleep is a window into an intoxicatingly romantic parallel world the Kenniffs have constructed out of analog synths, masterful sound design, nectar-drenched hooks, and airy vocals that wade way out into a sea of texture. They have managed to hone years worth of date-nights into a 46 minute collection of phosphoric ambient pop which bears a sense of skillful consistency that belies the album’s casual creation. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Having long been a fan of both Helios and Goldmund, i'm very familiar with Keniff's work, but as Mint Julep, with wife Holly, the Keniff's tread a much more dynamic path. It's an intoxicating mix of dream-pop and IDM that is bolstered with a strong melodic focus. Beautiful.

TRACK LISTING

01 A Rising Sun
02 Black Maps
03 Mirage
04 Lure
05 Longshore Drift
06 Pulse
07 Lost
08 In Your Sleep
09 Shores
10 In The Ocean
11 Westerly

Anam is the first collection of recordings by Selah Broderick (b. 1959, Washington, D.C.). Having grown up in a strict Catholic setting, the alternative movements of the late 60's and 70's could not come soon enough for Selah, who's love for art and music eventually sent her traveling around the country, running from a rather chaotic upbringing, in search of quieter ground. She eventually wound up in the Pacific Northwest, where she picked up a gig playing her guitar and singing at a local bar a few nights a week, and it was there in the audience that she met the man who would soon become the father of her children. First pregnant at the tender age of 19, Selah would have to put her musical dreams on hold while she attended to the demands of motherhood. It's no wonder she was so supportive when her three kids all gravitated towards music. While her devoted husband supported the family as a woodworker, Selah carved out her own path as a yoga instructor, in a time when non-western spiritual practices were not so welcomed in the western world. Her devotion to spiritual development would be the guiding force in her life, leading to a formative trip to Tibet alongside Roshi Joan Halifax in the early 2000's.

Her passion for music entwined itself with her work when she created the soundtrack to her own instructional yoga CD, featuring synthesizers, gentle field recordings, wind chimes, and most notably, her enchanted flute playing. Her interest in more meditative sounds infused itself with her background in folk music, and it is somewhere between these two worlds that Anam exists. Consisting of recordings as old as 1979 and as new as 2018, the wide range in fidelity has been embraced for this collection. The recordings were collected by her son Peter Broderick, who carefully wove them together over the years with occasional contributions from himself and sister Heather Woods Broderick. When asked about a potential title for her first album, Selah referenced the book Anam Cara by John O'Donohue, the modern-day Celtic mystic whose work helped her to reconcile her Catholic upbringing with her love for Eastern spiritual disciplines. The title "Anam Cara", meaning "Soul Friend" in Irish Gaelic, was given to a track originally created for meditation, while the album is simply called Anam, or "Soul." You are invited to explore the soul of this beautiful woman.

Pennsylvania native Keith Kenniff's output as Goldmund has established him as one of the preeminent composers of minimal piano-based ambient music alongside peers like Hauschka, Dustin O'Halloran, and even Ryuichi Sakamoto, who himself once described Kenniff's work as "so, so, so beautiful". His recordings tread sincerely along paths laden with dusty timbres, diffuse synthesizer, and soaring string textures tinted by the muted glow of a cloudy analog sky above. On The Time it Takes, Goldmund's newest book of aural polaroids, Kenniff somehow manages to deepen the emotionality of his already affecting project, creating a space in which to unfold the sorrows of a troubling age and revel in the hope and beauty that follow thereafter. In this sense, The Time it Takes tackles grief head-on, unadorned by themes of escapism or pastorality, and marks another entry in an impressively consistent body of work. From the first murmurs of its opener "Day in, Day Out", The Time it Takes calls to mind the cascading nature of mourning.

There's the first tragedy, the loss itself, then the second one, the dissipation of the memory of the thing lost. We start out grieving for a loss directly; years later, sorrow reappears not only for that loss, but for the idea that its meaning is slipping away with each turn of the calendar page. An aged piano thumps gently just beyond an impassable moat of time, its operator's presence is evidenced by the shuffling of pedals and the shifting of mechanisms, and seraphic choirs seep in from places unseen. Kenniff's kindling of piano is gradually set ablaze with synth, choir, and trilling strings provided by his equally emotive labelmate Christopher Tignor. Like much of The Time it Takes, "Respite" is true to its title, but not because it leans on New Age aims of comfort and relaxation. Deeply fervent, it instead reflects the kind of emotional relief that can bring someone to tears if they're lucky enough to stumble upon it mid-crisis. Conversely, the subsequent "Rivulet" crouches in subdued concern and uncertainty amid deteriorated synths that howl down darkened hallways. "The One Who Stands By" approaches a similar sense of subtle menace.

With its lilting arpeggio, pulsing bass, and scraping drones, the piece anxiously marches toward some severe and unresolved dilemma. Earlier in the sequence, tracks like "For Old Times" investigate the serene sides of woe and yearning that form the core sentiments of the album: missed chances to share things with people who've passed on and are forever lost to the past; small internal battles quietly won or lost, but never spoken of; a heavy rain followed by sideways afternoon sunlight that imparts just enough awe to make you feel okay with your unnoticeable role in it all. As if we needed convincing, Kenniff further proves his skill of crafting sound-design vignettes that are personal, private, and hushed, yet simultaneously grand, colossal, and profound. Nostalgia sometimes suffers the role of low hanging fruit for the marketing world, or worse, a symptom of the stunted development of a generation facing backward in a world that moves unrelentingly forward. But instead of engaging in reductive and culpable pastiche, Kenniff dispels any notions of nostalgia's counterproductivity by using our collective memory as just another brush to paint with, thereby wresting his music from any linear cultural timeline. To that end there are few artistic voices as distinct as Goldmund's.

TRACK LISTING

01 Day In Day Out
02 Forever
03 Memory Itself
04 Of No Other
05 Abandon
06 Pavane
07 For Old Times
08 The One Who Stands By
09 The End
10 Respite
11 Rivulet
12 For A Time
13 From One Place To Another
14 The Night
15 The Valley In Between 

After years of success in the world of neo-classical music with his band Balmorhea, RG Lowe took an artistic sharp turn leading to his soulful 2017 debut, Slow Time, which Stereogum called "impossibly smooth." Three years later, Lowe returns with Life of the Body, produced by David Boyle - known for his work with Glen Hansard, Patty Griffin, and Okkervil River. This wide-angle collection of songs invites us to reconnect with ourselves and our world through the senses by illuminating our intrinsic connection with the physical world, and the freedom found therein. Echoing the ardor of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and channeling Talk Talk's Mark Hollis, Lowe asks us each to "feel the wind blow on your face, camerado." At once intimate and epic, opening track "Sorrow" sets a tone of longing and malaise, from which Lowe expands and breaks out of, over the next 8 songs. As the album progresses, he explores myth, desire, love and the mystery of art, concluding with the ethereal, acoustic guitar-driven "Beauty Finds Forever," on which it's clear he's transformed. He's found the deepest nourishment; an enrichment of the soul found through a saturation of his physical senses, an antidote to our anguished age.

TRACK LISTING

01 Sorrow 6:06
02 He Done Her Wrong 4:46
03 Sendai, Unknown 4:26
04 My Body 4:38
05 Soap 2:01
06 Tulip Ave 4:28
07 Salpetriere 3:54
08 Life-World 5:18
09 Beauty Finds Forever 4:28

Supergroup featuring members of Grooms, Field Mouse, and Russian Baths Produced by Jeff Berner of Psychic TV. Mastered by Heba Kadry, known for her work with Bjork, Slowdive, Deerhunter, Japanese Breakfast, Cass McCombs, et al. Activity are an avant four-piece featuring Travis Johnson, and drummer Steve Levine, both from the band Grooms, bassist Zoë Browne from Field Mouse, and guitarist Jess Rees from Russian Baths. Produced by engineer Jeff Berner of Psychic TV, their debut forms a casually menacing framework for lyrical themes of paranoia, exposed character flaws, and the broader human capacity for growth when an ugly truth is laid bare.

Lead single “Calls Your Name,” establishes the record’s spectral aura with nauseated electronic bells, and a relentless Geoff Barrow-esque drum beat beneath a half-sung, half-spoken lyrics inspired by C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel The Great Divorce. In the novel, characters stuck in a grey, joyless conception of hell repeatedly deny opportunities to be taken into heaven, instead making excuses as to why they should remain in their embittered purgatory states.

Allegorically, this speaks to the kind of opportunity for metamorphosis and positive change that’s possible when the depths of disillusionment are reached, an idea which permeates much of the album. Despite recurrent aches of discontentment, each track glows with radiant waves of catharsis while elegantly evoking jubilation and anguish within the same breadth, showing that the two are always around the corner from one another. 

TRACK LISTING

01 In Motion 1:34
02 Calls Your Name 3:58
03 Spring Low Life 5:33
04 Nude Prince 4:20
05 Looming 3:40
06 Earth Angel 4:18
07 The Heartbeats 5:50
08 I Like The Boys 2:32
09 Violent And Vivisect 4:21
10 Auto Sad 3:17

Stray Fantasies marks a deepening of the discography of wife-and-husband duo Hollie and Keith Kenniff under their collaborative moniker Mint Julep, an expertly manicured electric-pop venture that stands in stark contrast to the nebulous and experimental Helios and Goldmund outputs for which the latter member is known (though both members have ambient projects under their own names). Where those projects seek to defy conventional songform through textural, amorphous exploration, Mint Julep gels all the elements with a surprising and impressive songwriting expertise that speaks to the skill and well-roundedness of its creators. Stray Fantasies further proves this by delivering twelve fully crystallized, iridescent pop pearls glimmering with the interplay of synthesizers, pulsing basslines, and punching drums that ballast Hollie's oneiric singing as she unfurls themes of vulnerability, insecurity, and other aching minutiae of love and relationships.

The album quickly establishes its impetus with its opener, Blinded, whose one-two drumbeat, brisk synth arpeggios, and spot-on vocal melodies earnestly tempt descriptions like "iconic" and "anthemic" without a single put-on. The title track follows punctually delivering on the promise of the first, solidifying the energy and ensuring that the duo's passion and urgency isn't about to give way to the lull of a front-loaded suite. When the tempo eases, it does so only slightly on the seductive "White Noise" which palpitates with something subtler than hurt or longing-- something perhaps only communicable by the singular mood Mint Julep have carved out for themselves. The central territory of Stray Fantasies exudes the latent dancefloor sensibilities of Keith Kenniff as a producer exemplified in the club-ready synth-leads of "Just for Today" and the low end kick drum patterns of "Escape" and "Vakaras" both of which strike with harder physicality than anything the duo has done to date (due in part to the engineering of The Shins' Yuuki Matthews). Mint Julep encapsulates a feeling often misattributed to youthfulness, a kind of dark and sensual liberation that most people regardless of age partake in after hours when the sun is down, the mood is thick, and the "adulting" is over for the day. But as the night fades and the sun reapproaches, the mood gets woozy, and the scene is set aglow in the four A.M. half-light embodied by the shoegaze strumming of "Translations". The haze intensifies on "Still Waters" a song whose opening bass throbs tease malevolence before giving way to the shadowy sweetness of a buzzed late-night drive with a new love. Album closer "Iteration" with its gleaming guitars, smiling melodies, and dewey fields of synthesizer emerges like a sunrise, unwelcome only in the sense that you'd hoped the night wouldn't end, still you are thankful for a conclusive moment of reflection. 

RIYL: Alvvays, School of Seven Bells, Tamaryn, Chairlift, Cocteau Twins. 

TRACK LISTING

01 Blinded
02 Stray Fantasies
03 Unite
04 White Noise
05 Just For Today
06 Escape
07 Vakaras
08 As Far As I Can Get
09 Translations
10 No Regret
11 Still Waters
12 Iteration

On Spectre, their 4th album as Lightning Dust, Amber Webber and Josh Wells embrace as their sole-focus what was once a side-project, thus crafting their most refined and powerful album to date. After co-founding and touring with Black Mountain for over a decade, the duo departed from the band to further their own longterm creative partnership. Lightning Dust has evolved noticeably with each release, from the spare, dark folk of their self-titled debut, to the synth and drum machine-heavy 2013 album Fantasy. However, the through-line of their discography has been Wells' deft production tailored perfectly around Webber's modestly iconic voice which stirred Pitchfork write of their 2009 LP Infinite Light that Webber's was "one of the fiercest, most stirring vocal performances of any release this year." In this sense the tracks on Spectre echo the spirits of quintessential rock vocalists like Grace Slick and Beth Gibbons, throughout a collection of songs that range from expertly sculpted folk-rock ear candy, to sparse Judee Sill-esque ballads consisting of little more than piano and voice.

Written during the devastating forest fires that filled her hometown of Vancouver with smoke and a sense of apocalyptic doom, album opener "Devoted To" captures Webber's resilience and determination to reestablish her creative independence as she sings "I will find my way back in even if I never sleep...Gotta find my way back in, it's all that I believe." Propulsive rocker "Run Away" is an observation of the human need for change. Amber explains, "It was written in response to friends leaving their soul crushing jobs. I wanted to write a song that flip-flopped between the glorious freedom they felt upon leaving, and moments of despair that came afterward." Shining an optimistic light on her departure from Black Mountain on the anthemic "When It Rains" Webber sings "Let's celebrate what we've done so far instead of what comes next always ripping at our hearts - it ruins." Wells' impeccable drumming and tastefully restrained synths on the soaring and cinematic "Joanna" offer the perfect backdrop for Webber, as she sings about the demons of her past "I prefer not to see - You shook me inside my memory."

The assuring shuffle of "Pretty Picture", on which Stephen Malkmus shreds, is followed by the booming slacker anthem "Competitive Depression" which features vocals by Destroyer's Dan Bejar. Spectre's dramatic two-part closer "3AM/100 Degrees" brings the album full-circle with a final statement about delusions that manifest in strife, exemplified by the song's final lines "replaying what's behind, made us all scared when nothing was there." 2018 was a whirlwind of new beginning for Webber - going back to school and even trying out a new career. In the end these detours gave her the chance to step back and explore what parts of music were important to protect. "It made me realize that art and music are still my light." She goes on to explain, "Spectre is my journey. It's for all the women warriors that have been battling throughout life looking for a place to express themselves that feels inclusive and inspiring. It's about finding yourself when no one is paying attention and inventing a new way of creating that feels honest and sincere. I truly feel that women, especially as we get older are underrepresented. That was truly the driving force to creating this album." 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Even from opener 'Devoted To', there are a huge amount of influences seeping through the fabric of Lightning Dust's rhythmic psychedelic synth sounds. Dancefloor arpeggios, haunting gothic vocals and synth-pop throbs burst into a soaring jazzy breakdown. The album continues in much the same way, always astounding but rarely disjointed, this is the sound of a band on their finest form.

TRACK LISTING

01 Devoted To
02 Run Away
03 Led Astray
04 Inglorius Flu
05 When It Rains
06 Joanna
07 More
08 A Pretty Picture
09 Competitive Depresison
10 3AM/100 Degrees

The Neon Machine, the 4th album from Austin musician Abram Shook, is a dystopian dance party, and everyone’s invited. Juxtaposed against 2017’s sepia-tinged, quietly reflective Love at Low Speed, the new record’s mix of irresistible beats and slyly humorous lyrics might seem like a 180 at first glance: a giddy, knowing soundtrack to the end of the world. The varied influences of world music and jazz that are present in all his records can still be heard (as in the High-Life inspired guitar work on “My Money”), though here Shook tucks them into the corners and uses them in more subtle ways, giving center stage to a vintage Sequential Circuits Prophet 600, a drum sequencer, and his signature rubbery bass lines.

In Shook’s adept hands, The Neon Machine is full of day-glo danceability even though something slightly sinister lurks beneath the surface; it’s a kind of tour de force synesthesia for the fevered mind. With this record, Shook has traded in his usual gimlet-eyed observations for a playfully cynical sense of humor. Using highly confessional lyrics and deeply personal insight to convey his anger, with the current political climate, he writes candidly about his anxieties, and frustrations toward a country and culture that he’s grown up with, but hasn’t always felt at home in. Full of Prince-esque riffs, Blood Orange-style beats, and David Bowie allusions, The Neon Machine is accessible and adventurous at once. It has as its backdrop a party that’s lasted too long, and the foreground of a narrator full of anxiety and skepticism whose hangover has already begun. The beauty of it lies in its malleability. What appears on the surface to be an effervescent album of pop anthems, with its familiar themes of sex, love and drugs, soon reveals its true heart: the intimate insights of a man, long accustomed to being an outside observer, who has decided to join the fray. “In a lot of ways it feels like the record I’ve always wanted to make.” 

TRACK LISTING

01 Neon Love 4:16
02 Your Time 3:25
03 Cocaine Blonde 3:45
04 Future Hustler 3:38
05 My Money 3:39 
06 Visionary Fiction 4:29
07 Can't Get Away 3:10
08 Sugar Teeth 3:52
09 The Latest Trend 3:34
10 Hot Mess 3:49 
11 Fake It 3:41

Born in a rural upstate NY town of 500 people, Cara Beth Satalino aka Outer Spaces, studied studio composition at Purchase College, where she also met her bandmate and life partner Chester Gwazda (producer of the first three Future Islands albums, and Dan Deacon's Bromst and America, among others). The Baltimore-based artist's new album Gazing Globe documents Satalino's effort to find herself through the creation of her own esoteric world of pop songs. While writing Gazing Globe, Satalino felt lost and listless, after she and Gwazda decided to take a break from their long-term relationship. To deal with her anxiety and self-doubt, and ultimately evolve emotionally and spiritually, she began a daily meditation practice, and writing songs. "I think I was trying to get back to myself and my identity, separate from my relationship," says Satalino. The result of her efforts is a collection of Murmur-era REM-esque power-pop songs, full of catchy guitar riffs, sonical ly juxtaposing her despondent perspective. Press Quotes - “Satalino wears her heart on her sleeve... crafting soft melodies that waver between slightly confessional and deeply personal” Consequence of Sound // “hyper-articulate indie pop” KEXP // “...brimming with delicate, elegantly crafted songs punctuated by incisive lyrics and unexpectedly vivid choruses” Under the Radar // “the record explores life’s transitions through a blend of mellow folk rock and catchy indie ballads” 

TRACK LISTING

01 See Her Face
02 Truck Song
03 Gazing Globe
04 YWLGOML
05 Album For Ghosts
06 TV Screen
07 Telling You Things
08 I Slowly Close My Eyes
09 Paper Flowers
10 Teapot #2

R.I.Y.L. Harmonia, Roedelius, Cluster, Dustin O’Halloran, Goldmund, Popol Vuh, Brian Eno.. Rob Burger’s talents as an arranger, composer, and keyboardist have been nurtured by morethan two decades of contributions to a diverse roster of recognizable names, at the very least including John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, and Iron & Wine with whom Burger presently records and tours.

His new album The Grid combines neo-classical soundscapes, ‘70s kosmische, and jaunts of 20th-century exotica into a completely unique genre-quilt that synopsizes his long musical trek through multiple cities, scenes, and sounds. A lifelong musician, Rob began learning piano at age four and would go on to study under jazz luminaries Max Roach, Archie Shepp, and Yusef Lateef at the University of Massachusetts. As if his formal education weren’t impressive on its own, his informal one consisted of frequent visits to New York City creative hubs The Knitting Factory, and The Kitchen, where Burger became a fly on the wall to the likes of Arthur Russell, David Byrne, and Laurie Anderson (Burger would go on to contribute to Anderson’s 2010 album Homeland). Anderson appears on The Grid’s ninth track “Souls of Winter”).

With the avant-garde door having long been kicked open, Burger relocated to the Bay and made a lasting impression upon the area’s music scene with his group Tin Hat Trio, while furthering his session and film-score work adjacently. When that group disbanded in the early ‘00s Burger found himself back in NYC where playing a Neil Young tribute show would entwine his path with that of Sam Beam (Iron & Wine). From then on, Burger has been an inextricable component of Beam’s live band and discography. Somewhere in the interim the growth of Burger’s family and his yearning for quieter climes led him to Portland, Oregon, where he built a studio, amassed an enviable collection of vintage keyboards, and began sowing the seeds of The Grid. Burger’s mysteriously upturning chord-changes express depth and melancholy without ever fully straying from a sense of curiosity and charm making the somber moments believable and palatable, as indicated in the album’s first moments. The Grid rolls in on a cloud bank of old-world sorrow with its piano and accordion prologue “Alternate Star,” but by the initial note of the second-track “Harmonious Gathering” all the sonic elements, dusty drum machines, choral keyboard patches, and rubberized synth bass seem to be smiling in glorious unison. This song, as well as the title track that shortly follows it, hint at what it might sound like if Harmonia had stayed intact and were scoring A24 films. 

Invitation was conceived on the Oregon coast, an outlier among American landscapes, where vast stretches of empty beach are decorated with silver driftwood and towering pines. It is here among the dunes, tide pools and colossal rock formations that Heather spent her childhood summer day-trips. And it is here that she returned as an adult to construct her newest LP, an album of dreamy baroque-pop that swells and whispers with grand string arrangements, intimately descriptive lyrics, and impassioned songcraft built around earnest piano melodies, painting a lifelike picture of the locale in which it was written.

In the years between her early youth and the creation of Invitation, Heather has played in Efterklang, Horse Feathers, the live bands of Laura Gibson, Lisa Hannigan, and Damien Jurado, and has also been a longtime collaborator and bandmate to Sharon Van Etten. But while this list may seem enviable for an aspiring young musician, any experienced player will know that the life of a touring musician comes with its own sacrifices. Lasting relationships and financial certainty can be tenuous, as can mental stability itself. Feeling this first hand, Heather traded her usual launchpad of Brooklyn for the sleepy town of Pacific City where she would quietly take a job cleaning houses for a cast of local eccentrics, sitting down at the piano in the off-hours to unpack the personal tragedies and triumphs of the intervening decades since her first trips there. Throughout Invitation, floral tendrils of sound design and dynamic strings decorate the edges of each track, propelling the album beyond mere singer-songwriter fare into something altogether more grand and immersive in scope. 

RIYL: Sharon Van Etten, Weyes Blood, Marissa Nadler, Julianna Barwick, Julia Holter. 

TRACK LISTING

01 A Stilling Wind 5:08
02 I Try 4:26
03 Nightcrawler 4:54
04 Where I Lay 3:59
05 Slow Dazzle 4:13
06 A Daydream 1:30
07 White Tail 3:24
08 Quicksand 5:32
09 My Sunny One 3:28
10 These Green Valleys 4:30
11 Invitation 2:30

Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, and currently residing in Beverly, Massachusetts, violinist, vocalist and songwriter Aisha Burns began playing violin when she was 10 years old, and has been touring and recording since 2006.

Soon after moving to Austin in 2005, she gained her start with folk-rock outfit Alex Dupree and the Trapdoor Band, and joined the instrumental ensemble Balmorhea on violin in 2007. After years of secret singing, she released her solo debut Life in the Midwater in 2013. Called "twisting, ethereal...arresting" by Dazed Magazine, and praised for its "delicate intimacy" by NPR, Life in the Midwater explored mortality and relationships with candor and wisdom. Her new album Argonauta, is a collection of songs about her struggle with the grief of losing her mother, while also navigating a new relationship, and ultimately trying to figure out what the new normal is for her life.

Burns explains, “Argonauta is the child of a strange chasm in my life, the space where both unfathomable, debilitating loss and new love and hope reside. In an attempt to process this romantic love, the loss of my mother who lived her life as my confidant and dearest friend, and the hope of someday gaining acceptance of life’s ever-shifting cycles, these songs emerged. I had to write this record to give voice to the depression, anxiety and uncertainty I endured while grieving. 

TRACK LISTING

01. We Were Worn
02. I Thought I Knew You Well
03. Must Be A Way
04. If I
05. Would You Come To Me
06. New Winter
07. Leavin
08. Where Do I Begin

Moving beyond the surf-folk foundations of her debut, on No Fool... Sallee loosens her earthly tether, allowing her songs to float to ever higher altitudes on clouds of loops, immaculate melodies, and hypnotic harmonies, as she sings about aging, the daily grind, and hometown stymie. Moving to Austin in 2013 gave her a new perspective on her hometown of Huntsville, Alabama, which informed the overall vibe of the album. "I think leaving my fairly small hometown and then going back to visit it inspired the feeling I went for on this album. I observed that so many people I knew were content doing basically nothing.

Or that they were scared to try to do anything or leave town, like they felt stuck there." The ¬first few notes of the Daniel Rossen-esque opener “First Song” dutifully establish the surreal and slightly tragic tone of longing maintained throughout the album. The curiously upturning melodies ride out on a rich ambient texture before “Sweet Home Alabama” cuts the fog with a crackling 60's soul loop that's charming and catchy enough to induce a cathartic laugh from the listener. The brightness fades with the frosty and propulsive “A Good Thief Steals Clean,” which features lyrics inspired by the 1971 ¬lm Panic in Needle Park, and the idea of being in love with a heroin addict. “I tend to write from the perspectives of characters in dark situations, even though my songs may sound bright,” Sallee notes of her alluring juxtaposition of sunny production and grim lyrics.

She employs this dynamic again on “Rip O ,” a frenetically percussive song with lyrics inspired by an NPR story about a young Iraqi man who was killed in an ISIS bombing just before moving to NYC to become a professional dancer. Inspired by Terrence Malick's Badlands and Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska," the song “Black Hole" features multi-voice harmonies sung from the perspective of 50's spree killer Charles Starkweather. The hurdles she navigated to record naturally led to ad hoc recording techniques, and endless sonic experimentation, often leading to her use of the computer as an instrument. A tireless worker, and a wellspring of creativity, whatever Caroline Says, we will be listening.

TRACK LISTING

01 First Song 3:55
02 Sweet Home Alabama 3:22
03 Mea Culpa 2:54
04 A Good Thief Steals Clean 2:35
05 Rip O 3:40
06 Black Hole 2:31
07 Cool Jerk 3:03
08 I Tried 3:39
09 Lone Star Tall Boy 3:36

Known respectively for their independent work as Botany and Lushlife, Spencer Stephenson and Raj Haldar selected their collaborative mantle, The Skull Eclipses, when the album became more than just a one-plus-one combination of their individual sounds. The odd title was originally given to a demo beat that Stephenson sent Haldar back in 2014, but it quickly became apt for the subject matter and emotional tone that the album and group took on during creation. “The Skull Eclipses” refers to the philosophy of Solipsism, that nothing veri¬ably exists outside of the human mind, and dually to the idea that knowledge of one’s own mortality makes inner peace unachievable.

Happiness is “eclipsed” by the image of death, classically represented as a “skull”. Accordingly, Haldar’s lyrics are a free-associative discourse on the value of life amid a growing population, Islamophobia misdirected at non-muslims via racist assumption, poverty, pharmaceutical abuse, mortality, mental illness, international conflict, political unrest, police shootings, and the continual failure of the drug-war that began when the album’s creators were just children. Stephenson’s trademark fractalline production, noticeably more grim and aggressive than the tie-dyed psychedelia of his Botany project, provides ample space for Haldar’s shadow-self to break through. Aside from displaying a wider tempo variation than any of Stephenson’s work to date The Skull Eclipses is spun from sonic threads dark enough to border on horror. Songs are glued together with interstitial bad-trip creep-ups: melting choirs, doomsday evangelists, and the Judica-Cordiglia recordings that are purported to have captured the sounds of Russian kosmonauts burning up on reentry.

Broadly, The Skull Eclipses is a post-hip hop album that harmonizes tropes of mid 90's electronic genres-- ambient, downtempo, jungle, & trip-hop-- under a hauntological umbrella. It is the first offering from a project that's as much indebted to Broadcast & The Focus Group as it is to Pete Rock & CL Smooth, but obligated to neither. Up close however, the album is a peer into the shadows by two figures uncontent with blending into the tapestry of modern music, wholly committed to creating experiences over mere content, which is pouring in from all corners of a frustrated and distracted world. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A brilliantly effervescent mix of underground hip-hop, electronic beats, ambient interludes and thumping weirdo drone. It's a beautiful and varied beast, and one that demands your attention.

TRACK LISTING

1. Yearn In¬nite I 1:31,
2. All Fall (ft. Def Rain) 4:34,
3. Angels Don't Mind 2:41,
4. Pillars (ft. Baba Maraire & Felicia Douglass) 4:58,
5. Take My 2:44,
6. Encyclopedia 4:38,
7. Gone (ft. Open Mike Eagle) 4:10,
8. Gun Glitters (ft. Lojii) 4:00,
9. Pushing Up The Hills 3:37,
10. Yearn In¬nite II (ft. Laraaji) 1:31,
11. Spacecrafts In Rajasthan 4:22

Akinetic, the new album from Chicago songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Erik Hall's one-man polymathic project In Tall Buildings sees its creator plunge headlong into allegories of communication, loss, impulse, vice, and mass-denialism. With the addition of producer and engineer Brian Deck (Modest Mouse, Iron & Wine) Hall crashes through the aforementioned subject matter with brightness and lucidity, yielding his most intelligent and focused songwriting yet. Working out of his house with Deck in Pilsen, Chicago, Hall's efforts yield ten tracks of spacious and textured handmade pop, comprising one of the most sharply written and deftly recorded home-studio albums in memory. Where his previous titles were natural documents of his musicianship and songcraft, Akinetic arose from deliberate intent to write in concrete pop forms, lyrically informed by what he observed of modern culture, namely its fixation on technology-driven pseudo-progress at the cost of direct communication.

"Rather than merely dwell in an inviting musical bed," Hall states, "I wanted to write songs with intentionality that would more directly declare themselves to a listener instead of just passively inviting them in." The epilogue “Wake Up” takes classic In Tall Buildings form with fluttering guitar, softly thumping drums, and Hall’s trademark production flourishes. Tape-crushed voices chirp behind the instruments (all played by Hall, as per the rest of the album) as our host poetically urges us to do what the song’s title suggests. The lights slowly fade up on Akinetic showing it for exactly what it is: a crystal clear, well-crafted montage of honest emotion, with pointed social commentary crouching just beneath the topsoil. That this was all achieved by one person playing every instrument, gently guided by a kindred and veteran co-producer, denotes Akinetic as the greatest height yet reached for In Tall Buildings. 

TRACK LISTING

01 Beginning To Fade 3:33
02 Akinetic 4:11
03 Long Way Down 3:28
04 Overconscious 3:47
05 Cascadia 3:39
06 Siren Song 4:24
07 Curtain 3:44
08 New Moon 1:34
09 Days In Clover 3:47
10 Wake Up 4:49

In 2017, the musical term “electronic” is nearly obsolete given the ubiquity of computerized processes in producing music. Even so, the prevailing assumption is that musicians working under this broad umbrella must be inspired by concepts equally as electrified as their equipment. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has demonstrated in her still-blooming discography that this notion couldn’t be further from the truth, and that more often than not, rich worlds of synthesized sound are born from deep reverence of the natural world.

Smith (who by no coincidence, cites naturalist David Attenborough as a contemporary muse) has embodied such an appreciation on The Kid in as direct and sincere a way as possible by sonically charting the phases of life itself. The album, which punctually follows up her 2016 breakthrough EARS, chronicles four defining cognitive and emotional stages of the human lifespan across four sides of a double LP. The first side takes us through the confused astonishment of a newborn, unaware of itself, existing in an unwitting nirvana. Smith’s music has always woven a youthful thread befitting of the aforementioned subject.

Here she articulates it in signature fashion on the track “An Intention,” which serves not only as a soaring spire on The Kid, but on her entire output. There is playfulness here, but it's elevated by an undertone of gravity into something compelling and majestic that is fast becoming Smith’s watermark. The emotional focus of side two is the vital but underreported moment in early youth when we cross the threshold into self awareness. The subject is profound enough to fill an entire album, but rarely makes its way into a single track, indicating Smith’s ambition to broach subtler and deeper subjects than the average composer. This side offers up another highlight in the form of “In The World But Not Of The World” which serves its subject well with epiphanic, climbing strings and decidedly noisy textures over a near-Bollywood low end pulse.

Side three emphasizes a feeling of being confirmed enough in one’s own identity to begin giving back to the formative forces of one’s upbringing, which is arguably the duty that all great artists aim to fulfill. This side ends with the exploratory album cut “Who I Am & Why I Am Where I Am” recorded in a single take without overdubs on the rare EMS Synthi 100 synthesizer. This humble piece of sound design serves as a contrast to side four’s verdant orchestral moments, all written and arranged for the EU-based Stargaze quartet by Smith herself.

This final side represents a return to pure being, the kind of wisdom and peace that eludes most of us until the autumn of life. On “To Feel Your Best” this concept is voiced in the bittersweet refrain “one day I’ll wake up and you won’t be there” which Smith intended to be a grateful acknowledgement of life rather than a melancholy resentment of loss. The song has both effects depending on the mood of the listener, and both interpretations are equally moving. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith belongs to an ilk of modern musicians who are defined by their commitment to creating experiential albums despite the singles-oriented habits of modern listeners, and here she represents her kind proudly. 

TRACK LISTING

01 I Am A Thought 1:54
02 An Intention 4:01
03 A Kid 5:04
04 In The World 3:00
05 I Am Consumed 0:54,
06 In The World But Not Of The World 3:57
07 I Am Learning 3:16
08 To Follow And Lead 4:48
09 Until I Remember 4:23,
10 Who I Am Why I Am Where I Am 5:21
11 I Am Curious I Care 3:45
12 I Will Make Room For You 4:59
13 To Feel Your Best 6:20….

The album title seems to refer to the contrast between what our elders tell us and the perspectives we form out of our own experiences. There's a vacillation between idealism and realism, and it expresses itself musically in the hairpin turns from gentle folk into brazen experimental flourishes, like on “Funeral Potatoes.” The track opens with lilting, somber, Satie-esque piano, but at the halfway point, typical choices of song structure and transition are discarded in favor of a screeching, static-washed loop of violin and feedback that transcends the formality of songcraft, becoming something altogether more daring and collage-like.

The more band-driven songs on 50 Million recall an early-1990’s style of production in the way chorus-twinged electric guitars and tight, papery drumbeats point our mind’s eye to the West Coast sunset, like on the mid-album standout “Gravy Days.” Sallee decorates the background of most songs with hushed humming that could stand alone as a minimalist-ambient choral album, and when employed on her songs, elevates the ¬final product to an astral level. Sallee’s gift lies in pitting the familiar against the unexpected with a delicate assuredness, never compromising the one for the other. These kinds of debuts can sometimes feel like an over-promise of what is to come, but in the case of Caroline Says there's clearly plenty more thread to be unraveled. It'll be a pleasure to see where the next bus ride takes us. 

TRACK LISTING

1 Winter Is Cold
2 I Think I'm Alone Now
3 Funeral Potatoes
4 Streetlights
5 My Fiance's Pets
6 Gravy Dayz
7 Ghost Pokes
8 God Knows
9 Lost Feeling 

The third album from Philadelphia's Nightlands (War On Drugs’ Bassist Dave Hartley), is an exercise in synthetic nostalgia. Each of the nine songs use meticulous choral arrangements and bittersweet pop melodies to evoke a unique type of longing, not for the past, but for a future that once lay ahead but has drifted out of reach. For Dave Hartley, the artistic force behind Nightlands, the answer is found on an inward retreat, away from the cold static of modern life and into the warmth of love and protection. I Can Feel the Night Around Me showcases Hartley's finely tuned ability to layer his voice and conjure some of the most beautiful and elaborate virtual choirs in modern music. If his first two records were vocal layering experiments, his third stands as Hartley's thesis statement: "I was determined to use vocal stacking to enable my songwriting, not shroud or obscure it."

He recorded most of the album alone in a cold warehouse basement, which he affectionately calls The Space -- it's where The War on Drugs formerly rehearsed and stored their equipment. "The dissonance between the sound of the album and the atmosphere in which it was recorded is pretty striking," Hartley says. Indeed the music seems more geographically inspired by the microclimates of the Lost Coast and the moonrises of Big Sur than the post-industrial cityscape of North Philadelphia. Perhaps his periodic westward sojourns and healthy obsessions with mid-career Beach Boys albums and Denis Johnson's Already Dead: A California Gothic were influencing him more than he was aware.

Despite the warm astral vibes of opener “Lost Moon," the song was born in that unheated warehouse basement during a record-setting blizzard. "I wanted to write a song like Jimmy Webb's ‘Wichita Lineman’," he recalls. "But it didn't come out like that at all. I ended up in a lonely and unexpected place, which was a really nice surprise." The massive "Only You Know”, a cover from Dion's Phil Spectorproduced masterpiece Born to Be With You, blends perfectly with the rest of the album's shades of psyched-out doo wop revivalism If there is an outlier on I Can Feel the Night Around Me, it's the exotica-tinged “Fear of Flying,” which Hartley composed with minimalist synth virtuoso Frank LoCrasto before the two had ever even met. Soft tangles of voice wash up on the shore of the song's warbling synth backbone, pushing the album briefly into the sunlight without sacri¬cing its melancholy, late-night vibe. It's the sound of the earth turning, night falling. Soon it will be dark, but there's still light seeping over the horizon. And that's a beautiful thing. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Lost Moon 5:56
2. Depending On You 3:55
3. Easy Does It 4:19
4. Only You Know 4:23
5. Love's In Love 4:09
6. Fingers In My Ears 4:57
7. You're Silver 3:54
8. Moonbathin 5:34
9. Human Hearts 4:03

Two songs on the album feature vocals by Jana Hunter of Lower Dens. The album features members of Woods, Crystal Stilts, Ava Luna, and Hospitality.

In 2010 Nicole Schneit aka Air Waves released Dungeon Dots, an album Aquarius Records called "...pretty much perfect pop music." For her new album Parting Glances, Schneit enlisted friends from Brooklyn's music community to contribute to the record, including members of Woods, Crystal Stilts, Ava Luna, and Hospitality. Additionally, Jana Hunter of Lower Dens contributes vocals to two songs. The album's title comes from the 1986 film Parting Glances in which Steve Buscemi portrays a gay man navigating the difficulties of being in a relationship in Reagan-era New York. More than just identifying with the story, Schneit is interested in the in the lasting effect of the parting glances we share with strangers in our everyday encounters. She explains "You see all sorts of physical and emotional traits on the train. From people puking, making out, screaming, crying, laughing, dancing, grooming, etc. We encounter each other in the thick of our complex lives by simply looking at each other all the time. These glances are mundane and fleeting but also powerfully intimate." The lingering impact of those brief moments seeps into the details and imagery she delivers with energizing hooks and a disarming lack of pretense on Parting Glances. 

TRACK LISTING

01. Horse Race
02. Calm
03. Lines
04. Fantasy
05. Frank
06. Milky Way
07. Touch Of Light
08. Thunder
09. Sweet Talk
10. Older
11. 1000 Degrees
12. Tik Tok 

After spending two years living on opposite coasts and pursuing their own creative projects, Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp returned last spring to set to work on the sixth full-length album from the Rosebuds. Joining up with Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon (a friend and former bandmate who, in a 2011 interview, noted that the Rosebuds make “some of the most important music in the world”), the North Carolina-bred duo spent a week in Vernon’s studio teasing out a batch of songs that effortlessly weave the hooky songcraft of classic jangle-pop, the cagey romanticism of new wave, and a refined yet full-hearted sensibility all their own. Featuring Vernon on guitar and synths - as well as Bon Iver drummer Matt McCaughan and Sylvan Esso's Nick Sanborn on bass, both longtime pals and cohorts of the Rosebuds - the resulting Sand + Silence radiates both a graceful intensity and the loose, joyful energy that comes from making music with friends.

TRACK LISTING

01 In My Teeth 4:27
02 Sand + Silence 5:13
03 Give Me A Reason 4:03
04 Blue Eyes 2:48
05 Mine Mine 3:27
06 Wait A Minute 3:48
07 Esse Quam Videri 3;44
08 Death Of An Old Bike 3:31
09 Looking For 3:08
10 Walking 1:56
11 Tiny Bones 4:12

Flying Fantasy was recorded and mixed by Scott Solter, known for his work with St. Vincent, Superchunk, The Mountain Goats, and many others. As an accomplished 12-string guitarist/composer, Alexander Turnquist was naturally alarmed when the ulnar nerve in his left hand seized up in 2013, but after a surgical procedure he gratefully started the process of learning to play guitar again. His recovery was cut short when not long after the surgery he was hospitalized with meningitis. Though his recovery is ongoing, and he continues to struggle with a weakened immune system and memory loss, he was inspired to soldier on, rather than being deterred by his physical struggles.

Turnquist's latest full-length Flying Fantasy confirms the idea that out of great hardship can come great art. As he wrote the material for the new album it became clear that his sensitivity had sharpened, his empathy magnified, and his sense of purpose blossomed. The unfortunate circumstances he endured ostensibly forced his metamorphosis from a remarkable guitar player to a truly great composer. Much like the butterflies that adorn the album cover, he seems to have changed form and taken flight.

The album opens with the sparse harmonics of "House of Insomniacs", which are soon joined by lush swells of vibes, cello, and even wordless vocals. On the tracks that follow, Turnquist continues to make use of this dynamic sonic pallet, even adding organ, piano, marimba, steel drums, violin, and french horn to the mix. From "Red Carousel", which was inspired by Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, to the somber lilt of the love song "Wildflower", to the truly arresting title track "Flying Fantasy" which uses only 4 open strummed guitars and loops of damaged tape and wire recorders, every note vibrates with life as Turnquist ushers us though his intoxicatingly colorful worlds of sound.

"By embedding both new age and noise-oriented electronic themes into his pastoral pieces, Turnquist unites disparate traditions and ideals, essentially employing sonic counterweights to construct 57 minutes that are as surprisingly dynamic as they are perfectly beautiful." PITCHFORK (8.2) .

TRACK LISTING

1. House Of Insomniacs 7:30
2. Finding The Butterfly 5:46
3. Wild Flower 6:17
4. Red Carousel 8:45
5. Flying Fantasy 6:41
6. Cloud Slicing 2:19

In the wake of their 2011 album "Strange Hearts", the three members of Secret Cities branched off in different directions. Charlie Gokey delved into Roy Orbison's ballads about losers in love while becoming a civil liberties attorney in Washington, D.C. Alex Abnos locked in to New Orleans soul masters like King Floyd & Dr. John as he became a journalist in New York City. And Marie Parker became a teacher in the band's spiritual home of Fargo, North Dakota.

Having met at band camp and on an internet message board, the trio had made music together for nine years without ever living together in the same city. After recording two albums and a handful of singles via email, they decided it was finally time to enter a real studio where they could play and record together in real time. They chose San Francisco's Tiny Telephone studio, where Jay Pellicci manned the controls for a week-and-a-half of the most spontaneous, democratic, and visceral recording of their lives. They emerged with Walk Me Home, an album that finally reflects their live chemistry and their diverging lives and musical tastes.

"The bass is dewey. The harmonies are starlit. The theremin is ripe…The racket they're able to muster together in the process is enough to set them apart from the pack." PITCHFORK.

TRACK LISTING

01. Purgatory; 2:17
02. Bad Trip; 2:24
03. Paradise; 4:24
04. The Rooftop; 2:26
05. Interlude; 1:49
06. Thumbs ; 3:28
07. Playing With Fire; 3:50
08. Walk Me Home; 3:46
09. The Cellar; 4:04
10. Interlude 2; 1:36
11. It ’s Always Summer; 2:45
12. It ’s Always Winter; 3:42
13. Sun Enclosure; 3:30

After years of writing and performing, Ava Luna has refined their doo-wop soul meets punk-as-fuck aesthetic into something bold and glaringly defiant in today's indie music landscape. Following the release of their critically lauded first proper full-length Ice Level, the band spent an intense 2-week period writing and recording in upstate New York. Unlike previous efforts that were meticulously mapped out, the songs that would become Electric Balloon were "…a family effort." according to frontman Carlos Hernandez. For the new album, former Columbia composition student Hernandez relinquished the reins a bit, opting for a more organic approach to writing the material for what would become Electric Balloon. In the wake of Ice Level, Ava Luna's sharp edges have melted away just enough, making it easier to connect with their no-wave grooves and soaring harmonies. Distilling everything from James Chance and ESG to contemporaries like Dirty Projectors and Of Montreal, Ava Luna have landed on an aggressively unique sound that still manages to be accessible.

“…a beaming mix o f ice-cool vintage '80s no wave grooves and extra-lush three-part girl group harmonies …Ava Luna has in fectious, minimalist, ESG-style beats for days.” SPIN

TRACK LISTING

1. Daydream (2:34)
2. Sear Roebuck M&Ms (3:03)
3. Crown (4:50)
4. Aquarium (2:16)
5. Plain Speech (4:32)
6. Electric Balloon (3:00)
7. PRPL (3:49)
8. Hold U (4:13)
9. Judy (4:18)
10. Genesee (3:40)
11. Ab Ovo (4:17)

Debut solo record by Shaun Flemming of the Jagjaguwar band Foxygen.

Joseph Campbell describes a shaman as "person, male or female, who…has an overwhelming psychological experience that turns him totally inward. It's a kind of schizophrenic crack-up. The whole unconscious opens up, and the shaman falls into it." We'll never know the whole truth about what happened when (Foxyen drummer and former Disney child actor) Shaun Fleming moved from the West Coast suburbs to New York, but whatever it was fractured his psyche, opened it up, and gave birth to Diane Coffee.

In 2013, after joining the band Foxygen, Shaun Fleming left the green and golden fields of his hometown of Agoura Hills, CA to become the third roommate in a 700 square-foot, pre-war, closet-free Manhattan apartment. He was welcomed to The Big Apple by a nasty flu virus that drained the last bit of California sunshine out of the skinny, Macaulay Culken-looking 26-year-old's body. As he recovered, cabin fever supplanted the flu, and his relentless creative drive took over. Low on funds and bored out of his gourd, he spent the next two weeks alone in his bedroom writing and recording what would become the debut Diane Coffee LP My Friend Fish. Despite his limited means (using a pseudo drum kit consisting of a snare, one broken cymbal, and a metal pot, recording parts with an iPhone's voice memo app, playing a detuned guitar rather than a real bass, etc)

My Friend Fish sounds fully realized and remarkably polished. From a Donovan-esque song about Sriracha, to experiments with distortion and garage-rock, to songs like "All The Young Girls" in which he gleefully channels Tom Jones with sex-bomb confidence, on My Friend Fish Fleming's spell-casting powers are in full effect, inspiring panty-tossing glee. After you finish listening, you'll wonder as you stretch out in bed and enjoy a cigarette, "Who is Fish?"

TRACK LISTING

1. Hymn (3:23)
2. Never Lonely (3:25)
3. Tale Of A Dead Dog (4:19)
4. WWWoman Is A Sin (3:02)
5. New Years (3:42)
6. All The Young Girls (3:22)
7. When It's Known (3:37)
8. That Stupid Girl Who Runs A Lot (1:57)
9. Eat Your Love (With Sriracha) (2:41)
10. Green (3:37)

Often when you're in your mid-20's heavy realities start to settle in. Relationships that seemed like they'd last forever lose their spark, your aspirations and self-perception shift, you marvel at friends your age getting married and having babies, and you feel powerless and small, realizing that people you've known and loved for a lifetime can suddenly die. It's a serious psychological shakeup, made even more difficult if your frontal cortex hasn't fully matured yet. It's a beast, a mountain, a wall, or as in Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey, a mysterious obelisk that pushes you to evolve…like it or not. For better or worse, parts of us die, new parts come to life, and if we're lucky we emerge smarter, stronger, and more resilient. It's no surprise that for ages we've felt a deep sense of connection with music, art, and films inspired by this metamorphosis.

Aisha Burns' Life in the Midwater provides a snapshot of the rough stuff, but with a delicate sensitivity and wisdom beyond her years. Burns' contributions as the violinist and occasional vocalist for the Austin band Balmorhea belie a nuanced songwriting prowess, and a dynamic and powerful voice. The album's title references a deep dark layer of the ocean that flows far below the surface, and just above what we call the deeps sea. Bioluminescent jellyfish often inhabit this layer of the ocean, emitting mysterious flashes of light despite the risk of exposing themselves to potential predators. Similarly Aisha's songs are dreamlike beacons in the inky abyss…

TRACK LISTING

1. Sold
2. Midwater
3. Shelly
4. Gatekeeper
5. Discerpo
6. Requiem
7. Mine To Bear
8. Destroyer
9. Nothing

After releasing two albums on the indie label Kanine Records, Grooms still hadn't gained enough traction to support themselves with their music and they were understandably ready to call it quits. However, in 2011, impressed with their albums and live shows, author Michael Azerrad invited Grooms to perform at his Our Band Could Be Your Life show alongside St. Vincent, Ted Leo, Wye Oak, Dan Deacon, and WV alumni Dirty Projectors. It was a huge opportunity for the band, and the catalyst for what would become their new album Infinity Caller. Azerrad's enthusiasm and encouragement gave the band’s primary songwriter Travis Johnson the confidence to soldier on, keep making music, and ultimately find peace of mind.

"…a revelation -- dynamic, hooky, energetic!" PITCHFORK

"The ’90s indie rock lashings of Grooms, add a reminder to dust off your Polvo/SY LPs" STEREOGUM 

"...some of the most exciting new sounds the Kings County has to offer.” POP MATTERS

TRACK LISTING

1. Lion Name
2. I Think We're Alone Now
3. Sleep Detective
4. Iskra Goodbye
5. Play
6. Susie Jo
7. Completely
8. Very Very Librarian
9. Sometimes Sometimes
10. Something I Learned Today
11. Infinity Caller

David Wingo is a busy man. In the years since the release of his last record as Ola Podrida, he's written and recorded soundtracks for several movies including Take Shelter (winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2011), MUD (starring Matthew McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon), and Prince Avalanche (starring Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch and co-composed with Explosions In The Sky), both of which are seeing wide release this coming spring/summer. When he had time in between films, Wingo assembled a live band featuring Colin Swietek on guitars, Matt Clark on bass, and David Hobizal on drums and began to bring his new songs in to the band. A first for Ola Podrida, the new album Ghosts Go Blind was recorded to tape in a proper studio, mostly live, with the full band. The resulting songs are energetic and accessible, while Wingo's abstract narratives are more personal and intimate than ever. Throughout the album bittersweet memories of youth are filtered through the nostalgic eyes of a man starting to accept his adult life for the first time. The album opens with last guy at the party pleading for someone to stay with him, and keep the revelry going a little longer. It's an almost cringeworthy desperation, and yet Wingo makes it feel relatable. The final refrain "It's no fun, being alone at the end" takes on a bigger meaning, giving you the feeling his friends have grown up and moved on, leaving him to decide how he'll proceed with his life. By the middle of the album, the character has evolved, now pleading with his partner again, but this time the goal is to stay home and shut out the world.

TRACK LISTING

1. Not Ready To Stop, 5:40
2. Fumbling For The Light, 4:03
3. Washing Away, 4:40
4. Blind To The Blues, 4:32
5. Staying In, 4:06
6. Ghosts Go Blind, 5:12
7. Speed Of Light, 4:07
8. Some Sweet Relief, 4:07
9. Notes Remain, 5:14