“Running out of Sounds” may be an ill-advised song title for a band celebrating the 20th anniversary of its first album; this is especially true for musicians who have treated their debut as a sacred blueprint for all the records that have followed. So give Silversun Pickups some credit: They spend their seventh album, Tenterhooks — which contains a song with the aforementioned title — circling through the same sounds they’ve mined for two decades, blissfully oblivious to the irony.
Not that Silversun Pickups act as if they’re middle-aged on Tenterhooks. Unlike so many rock bands with members facing their 50s, they don’t embrace new fashions in a frantic attempt to remain relevant. Nor do they spend the record gazing at the past and mulling their own…
Category: indie
When Ulrika Spacek released their debut record The Album Paranoia in 2016, there was no reason to believe the band was capable of far more than the psych rock sound that had made them popular in the London scene. What a difference a decade makes: In the years between The Album Paranoia and now, the band moved past psych, developing real experimental muscle via krautrock and post-Radiohead electronic melancholia. They were always decent musicians, but time and age brought with them the confidence to experiment and the discipline to make sure the experimentation always served the song. They’ve never sounded more self-assured than on EXPO, their fourth full-length record and best to date.
EXPO succeeds because it is expertly balanced.
From the moment we are born, we begin the long walk home. Elizabeth and Beverly and Glenn-Copeland started down the path together nearly half a century ago, and have been trailing it since, hand in hand and song by song. Together, they’ve made a life sharing their unselfish hearts-ones too large for earthly configuration-through art and community, encouraging us all to take our own dance down the road with elemental love and grace.
Now, as Glenn lives with a version of Dementia known as LATE, their walk has taken on a different weight. Out of this season comes Laughter In Summer, an album the couple made together-realizing, before long, that it was a love letter to one another: a tender ledger of memories, shared devotion, grief and joy.
“Femcels! Femcels! Femcels!” Rowan Miles and Gabriella Turton cry over speedy video-game bleeps, sounding like they’ve just won the lottery. “You are listening to The Femcels, we don’t have sex ever!” In this deranged parody of the life of two sexless young Brits, having greasy hair and scuzzy teeth sounds like so much fun. I Have to Get Hotter is an audio cartoon — with charmingly disheveled, pixelated production and doofy spoken-word passages about feeling like the “indiest girl at school.” In “You’re Gay and You’re in Love With Me (Please Let Me Touch Your Boobs),” only the second-longest song title, the girls reminisce on an afternoon at a Counter-Strike tournament, with its fetid odor of “incels and hotdogs.” “Rowan, if you want a girl to like you, you just…
Nothing about this album suggests that it’s a debut. Shaking Hand’s eponymous introductory shot is so assured it sounds as if an awful lot of groundwork has preceded its appearance. As it happens – beyond live shows – the only thing paving the way was a single issued last June.
Shaking Hand are a Manchester trio: Ellis Hodgkiss (bass), Freddie Hunter (drums) and George Hunter (guitar, vocals). They deal in a guitar-centred art-rock with touches of Slint and Tortoise, and a muted math-rock feel. There are also hints of Field Music around the time of their 2010 Measure album and a muzzy, out-of focus psychedelic sense of distance – the latter trait emphasised by George Hunter’s distracted, this-close-to-flat singing style and the hard-to-parse…
… The UK-based Phil Tomsett, who otherwise issues material under The Inventors of Aircraft name, is a supreme crafter of atmospheric electronic-ambient music, and the 13 soundscapes he’s spread across the two discs uphold that reputation. Tomsett helpfully provides preambles to bring clarity to the two parts, details that in no way detract from the listening experience. The idea behind Noise Print has to do with shadow selves and the different versions of ourselves that make up who we are. Beyond the self we present to the world, there are shadowy ones we don’t share or only do with select individuals plus parts deeply buried that we struggle to identify and understand. One might think of Noise Print, then, as an aural, print-to-tape document of…
Nature is a collaborative album by guitarist/composer Fred Frith and drummer/percussionist Karen Stackpole, focusing on improvised soundscapes featuring gongs and guitar. The 4-track, 45-minute album blends avant-garde, modern classical, and ambient styles.
…Stackpole has spent decades exploring the expressive potential of gongs, scrap metal and resonant percussion, developing a highly personal language of texture, dynamics and extended technique. Her work draws rich harmonics from tamtams and metal surfaces using an array of custom and unconventional implements, producing soundworlds that move fluidly between abstraction, rhythm and atmosphere. Alongside solo performances, Stackpole has…
Charming Disaster sings from a haunted Victorian boudoir, hung all round with silky luxury and velvet comfort and wreathed in scent that might be old fashioned perfume, or, alternatively, poison. The duo of Ellia Bisker and Jeff Morris, from Brooklyn, floats through macabre storylines and lavish, steam-punk arrangements, their music sweet and disturbing and faintly archaic. This seventh and latest album, The Double, explores the nasty side of dopplegangers, twins, clones and partners in crime. Here, bad news comes in twos.
Consider “Gang of Two,” a tipsy waltz giddy on its own huffed fumes. Stylish, lushly arranged, utterly unrepentant, the song circles a doomed, damned partnership between two petty crooks, observing, “It’s hard to say goodbye/when…
Bloody Head have been lurking at the fringes for some ten years now, occupying a greasy, hard-to-clean crevice where noise-rock and psychedelia begin to intermingle. In this time they’ve tottered, threatened, collapsed and cajoled, their unexpected incursions akin to having a mysterious, slightly cracked ‘character’ glom onto you at the pub. Like said pub weirdo, they charm and bemuse and recount tall tales, all while a violent sense of mania flickers intermittently behind the eyes.
Bend Down and Kiss the Ground comes hot on the heels of last year’s excellent Perpetual Eden, and hews close to that album’s rangier, slightly-more-streamlined sound. Things remain ugly and warped, but they’re keeping up their attempts at sprucing and spritzing: submitting…
…”Microwave,” the 1989 track from Japanese singer Kyoko Koizumi, opens with a plasticky creak and a kitchen timer ring. Adding in crunchy guitar samples, a thudding drum machine and a house-inspired keyboard solo, the chart-topping vocalist embraced the playful spirit that defined Japan’s experimental ’80s genre, known as techno kayō, or techno pop. Positioned on the B-side of the new vinyl-only compilation, Techno Kayō Vol. 1: Japanese Techno Pop 1981-1989, “Microwave” proves that this sometimes-underestimated genre still has the power to surprise.
Lovingly compiled by Toshihito “Dubby” Maeyama (owner of Onda records) and Antal Heitlager (co-founder of Amsterdam’s renowned Rush Hour label), Vol. 1 sets out to establish…
As an artist who tries to present your art in more forms than one, there are so many obstacles in front of you, particularly if you try to present a certain concept or concept through it. It not only requires a ton of talent but also hours of hard work to make something sensible out of it.
Producer, singer, rapper, and visual artist Quadeca is one such artist who started out by presenting his work through YouTube, whose previous work which slowly took him to a spot at last year’s Coachella Music Festival. Now, Quadeca is coming with his latest concept album and a feature film Vanisher, Horizon Scraper, through which he presents a concept, as he puts it, “about a man who sets sail alone in search of freedom but is unknowingly drifting toward destruction”.
…Now 56 years old, Nobukazu Takemura’s first album in ten years knot of meanings is a natural (and more mature) extension from his early works like Child’s View (1994), Child and Magic (1997) and Funfair (1999). In knot of meanings, he evolves within and away from “tinkertoy electropop,” a genre he has pioneered and developed for the last three decades. While he has changed, Takemura still nonetheless marshals creative force through the memory of youth.
Over two decades ago, Dusted reviewed Takemura’s Sign and described Takemura’s style as a “sort of cartoonish hip-hop that your stuffed animals might listen to if you left the room, Toy Story style.” Of course, so much in the world has shifted since then, including Takemura.
What if insomnia were a great black black ball of smoke, drifting above thoroughfares, slowly unfurling into ovoid shapes before spreading its tentacles across the land? What if it were to descend upon the general populace, creeping insidiously lower and lower until it cloaked local buildings and was inhaled by those below? What if it became virtually indistinguishable from the night? Yuki Murata’s video for Takahiro Kido‘s title track may be seen as a metaphor, but the subject might be extended to depression, apathy, or even the state of the world today. The music follows suit: foreboding, patient, enveloping. On this track, Kido is joined by other members of Anoice, who will reappear throughout the set. Insomnia contains tracks with the full band and…
Black Doldrums’ set at the 2025 Fuzz Club Festival is being immortalised on wax with this super-limited live album release. The London-based band founded by Kevin Gibbard and Sophie Landers fall somewhere between dark neo-psych intensity and gothic post-punk melancholy that’s all the more powerful live on stage.
Their first appearance at the Fuzz Club Festival – which takes place every year at the Effenaar in Eindhoven, the Netherlands – was in support of their latest studio album ‘In Limerence’, released in late 2024. Their discography-spanning set comprised five tracks from the new album (‘Hideaway’, ‘In Silence’, ‘Dying For You’, ‘Tarantula’ and ‘Painting Smiles’), two from their 2022 debut full-length Dead Awake…
Scott McCloud (Girls Against Boys, Soulside, Paramount Styles, AGRIO) release his debut solo LP Make It To Forever via God Unknown Records. Starting in the late Eighties Scott was the guitarist for Washington DC’s post-hardcore band Soulside (Dischord) before moving to NYC and co-founding Girls Against Boys (Touch & Go, DGC) in the Nineties.
The album was recorded by Dimitris Dimitriades at Zero Gravity studios in Athens, Greece and initially conceived as an experiment and time capsule, stripped down raw recordings on acoustic guitar and voice with minimal adornment. Over time, and several visits to Athens, the song sketches were fleshed out with a variety of musical guests with the intent of maintaining the vulnerable…
Though little-known in America prior to 2000, Thee Michelle Gun Elephant formed in Japan back in 1991 and began playing raucous garage rock & roll inspired by the Stooges, Thee Headcoats, the Who, and MC5. Futoshi Abe’s thrashy guitar riffs propel the fast-paced, hard-hitting tunes over the driving rhythms of Kouji Ueno’s thick bass grooves and Kazuyuki Kuhara’s heavy backbeat. Yusuke Chiba’s mod, raspy vocals, alternately sung and screamed out mostly in Japanese, hold the whole thing together with a rough-as-rock-gets swagger.
Initially, Thee Michelle Gun Elephant’s sound was derived from British punk and blues. The band recorded their first EP, Wonder Style, in 1995. They soon followed up with their debut album, Cult Grass Stars, recorded in London with…
In January 2021, unassuming clubbers looking for a Saturday night out at Taipei’s FINAL might’ve been surprised to encounter Taiwanese drone-doom duo Scattered Purgatory flooding the room with noise, in what was billed as their last performance. Yet the duo had already been toying with the boundary between the city’s rock and electronic scenes; guitarist Lu Jiachi, who cut his teeth in the stoner rock band Sleaze, dabbled in deconstructed club music throughout the late 2010s, eventually putting out tracks for local labels like JIN, OverMyBody, and Sea Cucumber. Five years after that cacophonous “farewell” show, the band is back with an album that builds on their foundation of Earth-esque guitar-and-bass rumbling, incorporating more bite-sized song…
Portland-based duo Natural Magic’s II was the final vinyl release that Keith McIvor aka JD Twitch put into production before his untimely departure in late September ’25.
“Having been a long time lover of everything krautrock, space rock, experimental and psychedelic it seems more than fitting that he leaves us this LP as his parting gift; because this sublime album is all these things wrapped up into one and much more.
The album’s opening track “Galaxy Builder”, with its driving tempo, monolithic bass and screaming guitars might give the impression we’re about to hear a Neu for the 21st Century, but no, by the 2nd track we’re already on the first of several wild detours into uncharted territories…