Philly-based indie pop outfit The Tisburys have slowly been evolving their sound record to record and have landed on a particularly inspired form of modern power pop with Still Life Revisited, their fourth effort.
Musically, the songs are punctuated with horns, synth, and stellar harmonies throughout, while lyrically, the band manages to tackle some pretty lofty themes dealing with growing up, finding your own family, and looking back.
While 2022’s Exile On Main Street had a decidedly ‘90s college rock vibe, you can hear echoes of everyone from Squeeze and Teenage Fanclub to The Hold Steady weaved throughout the new record. Songs like “Forever,” with its impossibly addictive choruses, and…
Category: indie
Torn between shoegaze and drum & bass?
100%WET’s self-titled debut album makes the choice unnecessary: the Copenhagen duo lets you have both.
When producer/guitarists Casper Munns and Jakob Birch formed 100%WET in 2023, they were seasoned veterans. Munns had been in art-rock band Himmelrum, in drum and bass duo Splitscreen, and had also immersed himself in electronic production styles. Birch, for his part, had gained more than 15 years’ experience as a live performer with indie artists and as a member/songwriter of the groups Lovespeed and The Lost Weekend, in addition to having dabbled in experimental music on a solo album.
As students at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory…
It’s been four years since Chicago’s Moontype released their wonderful debut album and in that time they’ve expanded from a trio to a quartet, with singer-bassist and drummer Emerson Hunton saying goodbye to original guitarist Ben Cruz and adding two others in Joe Suihkonen (from related group, Deals) and Andrew Clinkman, of Spirits Having Fun, in 2022. McCarthy also became a more confident songwriter, allowing Suihkonen and Clinkman freedom to explore in their arrangements. I Let the Wind Push Down On Me, which is their first for Owen Ashworth’s Orindal Records, was produced by Katie Von Schleicher and Nate Mendelsohn and expands on the lightly mathy indie rock sound cemented on Bodies of Water. Most notably, synthesizers have…
The term disc rot refers to the gradual deterioration of optical media, particularly CDs and DVDs. Discs suffering from this affliction would bloom with weird splotches like some sort of infernal pox, leaving the media that remains distorted, sickly, blemished and stained.
On their first album in four years, Hair & Treasure – the collaboration between Discrepant label head Gonçalo F Cardoso and Angela Valid’s Alex Jones, with a little help from Kenny Hosepipe this time around – imagines what it might be like if disc rot were infectious, as if their scratchy, patchy folk-inflected electronic music were riddled with some form of parasitic mold.
Scarily enough, this is Hair & Treasure at their most accessible. Previous albums,…
Victoria Winter coos softly in a vortex, her baby-talking sweetness pushing up through blistered waves of guitar dissonance. Shower Curtain swerves and swirls around her, passing shoegaze and heading to the noisiest regions of grunge.
This is the first full-length for Shower Curtain, once a bedroom solo project for Winter, now a full-fledged band. The softness derives, perhaps, from the Brazilian-now-Brooklyn-based singer’s home taping origins, the wall of skree from her new vantage in front of a band.
You can hear both in “Edgar” the late album track dedicated to Winter’s ailing cat. The cut begins in a slithering shimmer of guitars. Translucent layers of sound refract and reflect each other, throwing off rainbows. The bass pads along in fur…
The follow-up to the eclectic, style-ingesting Monsters, Sophia Kennedy’s third album Squeeze Me adopts a relatively straightforward, catchy indie electro-pop — at least musically.
Lyrically, however, it constantly searches for meanings, hidden and not-so-hidden, behind the words and actions of others and circumstances in general; the title Squeeze Me was intended to represent both a desired embrace and an act of violence. Despite featuring simpler arrangements, it still has Kennedy’s characteristic spontaneity and whimsicality, opening with tribal-type drums and what sound like synthetic monkey screeches. That track, “Nose for a Mountain,” takes a small child’s view of a parent, and can’t think of family and friends without thinking of…
On his second album Quit to Play Chess, the singer/songwriter and producer Cola Boyy takes a step away from the shimmering retro disco and soft rock sounds that made him a sensation and instead branches out into all sorts of directions, including R&B, hip hop, retro dance music, reggae, and funk. Sadly, it’s also his final album; he passed away on the same day he approved the final mastering. There’s no sense of sadness found in the music though; it’s a buoyantly joyful expression of Matthew Urango’s musical vison and philosophy of life that is meant to move feet and stir hearts. It succeeds on both fronts. Urango recorded the album in his hometown of Oxnard with the help of a batch of collaborators including co-producer Jared Solomon and MGMT’s…
…Big city life, the fabulous and melancholy new album by Smerz, distils this feeling into a potent moonshine. It’s romantic and itchily excitable music — a mixtape for the long train ride into the city and the delirious cab home, to hum at your retail job while you’re waiting to clock off — and it strikes, immediately, as Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt’s gesamtkunstwerk, a record that synthesizes the fright-night beats of 2018’s Have fun with the contemporary classical experiments of Believer and Før og etter and the arch electroclash of last year’s Allina.
On Big city life, all those paths twist together, creating dazzling formations: lush trip-hop torch songs, swaggering electro grooves, dance tracks that sound like Liquid Liquid blasting into…
Sakte Film (Slow motion) is the sixth and most ambitious solo album of Norwegian, Oslo-based guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, and composer Geir Sundstøl celebrating his tenth anniversary as a solo artist. This genre-defying, with layers of resonant string instruments, flirts with close and far folk traditions, blues, country music, jazz, space music à la Tangerine Dream, and new age.
..Sundstøl has had a rich and varied career, to say the least. Within the HUBRO universe, his music has remained a pillar for years, and Sakte Film is no exception. However, this release embraces a broader scope, with multiple layers of strings that create even more room for resonance and exploration. Sundstøl explains: “What sets this album apart from my previous ones is,…
Thalia Zedek has been a voice of resilience and strength for most of the 21st century, in a solo career that has now stretched to seven full-length albums. Her rough, keening alto carries the hardest of sentiments; her band storms and surges, billowing up under the verses and crashing in release at the choruses. She sounds always real, always besieged, but always sure of getting through. This time in cathartic “Tsunami,” she confides, “You were so certain/that it’s curtains/but I’m not so sure.”
For all her post-punk credentials — Come, Live Skull among the highlights — Zedek has always leaned into sounds more common in Americana. David Michael Curry’s violin was a defining feature of the first iteration of her band,…
Remastered and expanded, featuring ‘Cry Wolf’ b-side ‘The Mirror Is Gone’ and the 5-track pre-cursor EP ‘Inconsiderate Bitch’.
With 1994’s Geek the Girl, Lisa Germano found the perfect balance of her work’s inherent contrasts. On songs like “My Secret Reason,” soft, intricate arrangements surround her raw, whispery vocals and unflinching lyrics, making it even easier for them to get unsettlingly close to you. A largely autobiographical album about a girl’s emotional and sexual coming of age, each of Geek the Girl‘s songs — particularly the title track — fairly tremble with awkward sadness and self-discovery. Shimmering, hesitant songs like “Trouble” sound like they might float off the album, but Germano’s delivery of lyrics like “Little by little…
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment Turin Brakes realised their next record would be their tenth. But when they did, it surely hit with significance. In a 2000 interview, frontman Olly Knights predicted the band would release ten albums – and now, 25 years on from their debut, that vision has come true.
To mark this milestone, Turin Brakes returned to where it all began: London’s Konk Studios, the site of their acclaimed 2001 debut The Optimist LP. Back then, they didn’t fully understand how to harness the studio’s unique sonic potential. This time, they came prepared – enlisting producer Guy Massey to help them capture the room’s character and finally realise its promise. Spacehopper is the result: a warm, reflective, and adventurous album that nods to the past while sounding…
…this new edition runs over two discs with the album being packaged with the ‘Fine Friend’ EP and a great selection of previously unheard tracks and demos as handpicked by the band.
A letdown can still be a strong record. Pale Saints’ second LP In Ribbons (1992) was an instantly memorable gilded masterwork, as texturally splendid as it was jarring and creative. But then enigmatic singer Ian Masters walked, taking his songwriting and bass playing with him, as evidenced by his moody and momentous LP Spoonfed Hybrid. Slow Buildings is nonetheless proof that Pale Saints were wise to carry on with Meriel Barham stepping up to full-time vocalist and former Heart Throbs member Colleen Browne joining on bass. No question, Masters is missed.
Orbital’s second self-titled masterpiece in two years completed the job, initiated by their “green” debut, of evolving classy listening music out of rough-and-ready UK techno – a puerile novelty no more. Where its predecessor carried gonzo nosebleed moments like ‘Speed Freak’, this Orbital completed the metamorphosis into grown-up sophistication: opener ‘Time Becomes’ nods towards avant-garde tape manipulation, while ‘Lush 3-1’s scurrying strings-synth and sublimely rolling melody evoke classical majesty, to a commanding clubland beat.
The latter, plus the eco-nightmare-presaging ‘Impact (The Earth Is Burning) and the ecstatic, Opus III-sampling ‘Halcyon + On + On’, were outright classics of early-’90s dance, and still…
The promise of a Florry show, a now familiar caravan that has been honed over ambitiously trekked zig zags across America and Europe since the release of Dear Life Records debut The Holey Bible, is the redemptive promise and prodigal joy of rock and roll guitar music.
Bred in the crackling warmth of the Philadelphia DIY scene, and forged with the alloys of community action, queer liberation and bedroom poetry, bandleader Francie Medosch and her absolute unit of collaborators have put in the work of sharpening their homespun tools to take up the mantle of the great lip-puckering rock and roll tradition pioneered by the likes of The Band and the Rolling Stones, but with proudly displayed Aimee Mann and Yo La Tengo bumper stickers…
Seattle drone-rock titans Earth release their latest live document, WEM Dominator (Live in London NW1, 2016), an unrelenting display of the band’s seismic force, recorded during their performance at London’s KOKO in 2016. Sharing the bill with legendary heavyweights Neurosis, Earth delivered a set of hypnotic intensity, crushing volume, and towering, glacial beauty.
For over three decades, Dylan Carlson and his ever-evolving ensemble have been crafting tectonic soundscapes that defy convention, forging a path between meditative drone and colossal doom-laden riffs. WEM Dominator is an album of mesmeric modal patterns, it’s a recording that captures the trio’s intricate, slowly evolving euphoria in a period when their experimentation…
“My agent used to tell me: ‘You give people the shits,’” sings Robert Forster, channelling a disaffected thirtysomething rock star on the elegantly wasted ‘Such a Shame’. “Why can’t you be like everyone else? Play the hits.” Too ungainly to follow any kind of conventional career path, too thoughtful to effectively dumb it down, the former Go-Between’s compensation for any financial insecurity has been a career full of charming twists, with Strawberries – recorded in Sweden with a freshly-assembled backing band – perhaps the most uncomplicated and joyous of them all.
If 2023’s The Candle and the Flame was overshadowed by his wife Karin Bäumler’s cancer diagnosis, Forster’s ninth solo LP comes from a more playful place. A duet with Bäumler,…
A former Grange Hill star, a throng of spandex-clad dancers and a man gyrating in what seems to be a studded Roman centurion’s loincloth: Stereolab weren’t exactly playing to their high-minded home crowd the night they appeared on Channel 4’s notorious post-pub variety show The Word. Watch the footage 32 years later, and it’s hard to know what’s more ferocious – the full-pelt version of their 1993 track French Disko or the eye-rolling disdain singer Laetitia Sadier patently has for the whole scene. Yet the urgency transmitted through the cascading harmonies of Sadier and her bandmate Mary Hansen is undimmed, the message – “I say there are things still worth fighting for” – culminating in a single ringing call to arms: “La Resistance! La Resistance!”
