…features two bonus tracks not on the original album. The bonus tracks, “My Lover” and “I Love(d) New York”, were originally left off the initial release due to vinyl space constraints.
Seven albums in, White Lies continue to evolve while keeping their signature mix of shadowy synth-pop and widescreen emotion intact. Night Light finds the London trio leaning deeper into electronic textures than ever before, with the guitars now playing a supporting role to shimmering synths, pulsing basslines, and Harry McVeigh’s commanding baritone.
It’s a sleek, modern evolution that keeps the band’s DNA intact while exploring new sonic territory. The album bursts to life with ‘Nothing On Me’, a quickfire opener that clocks in at just…
Category: indie
…’Growing Pains (Deluxe)’ features six added tracks, including “Heavy Heart,” and “Tumbleweed,” and four acoustic tracks that were recorded at Second Nature Vintage in Nashville.
Closing in on their 20-year anniversary, LA’s blues and hip-hop-infused indie pop/rock band Andy Frasco & The U.N. continue to mix sharp humor with often weighty issues on Growing Pains, their 10th studio album.
Though the band has always been willing to wade into the occasional deep lyrical waters in the past (though admittedly with plenty of sly humor and subtlety), this new record finds Frasco and company reflecting on growing up and mortality. That is apparent on the album’s first single, the undeniably catchy “Try Not to Die,” ticking…
What is a watch bird? In Jane Weaver’s telling, it’s a remarkable creature that can travel long distances, seek out the lost, and weather great storms. This album, too, is of sweeping scope: it dances through eras and splashes through genres with abandon. Fifteen years on from its first release, and now in an expanded edition, The Fallen By Watch Bird remains as chimerical as it ever was.
Inspired by the nightmares for children that 1970s popular culture enjoyed churning out, The Fallen By Watch Bird recreates the sensation of ancient fables told through a flickering cathode ray. Weaver’s previous albums had been folk-oriented, and this influence is still palpable, but now she merges these impulses with spacerock, prog and psychedelia. Never quite analogue,…
Since the dissolution of Yura Yura Teikoku, Shintaro Sakamoto has refined a solo language built on understatement. Where his former band favoured volatility, his solo records proceed at lower pressure, privileging texture, spacing and grooves that remain deliberately underdeveloped. On his fifth solo album, Yoo-hoo, that approach resolves into a two-part movement, the record gradually shifting from suspension into motion without ever announcing the change. ‘Is There a Place For You There?’ establishes the album’s opening register, its unhurried and blown-out vocal and flattened delivery setting a mood of controlled inertia, melting against, even slowing the beckoning rhythm of Yuta Suganuma’s drums. The early stretch is governed by tactile…
…The expanded digital album includes 11 bonus tracks in total: the three songs from the 2007 ‘End Like This’ EP, four previously unreleased outtakes, and four demos.
Makers is Rocky Votolato’s fourth album, appearing fittingly in line after 2003’s Suicide Medicine, but with a worn resilience all its own. It finds Votolato sounding older and weathered, more content than jaded, and there’s a modest quality to his steady voice that projects words as both sincere and comforting.
Some songs are country-tinged — with touches of harmonica, pedal steel, violin, and piano supporting the focal acoustic guitar — but it’s more that they simply evoke images of rural dirt roads, long walks and quiet autumn nights at home…
The Live at City Gardens EP features a blistering six-song soundboard recording captured live on February 11, 1984, at the legendary punk club City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey.
The EP showcases the band’s raw, electrifying energy as they were on the cusp of releasing their landmark album, Let It Be. The latter tune was a birthday request from Jesperson, who was The Replacement’s manager and the co-founder of the band’s label, Twin-Tone Records, in addition to being Let It Be’s co-producer.
A collector’s item, this 10″ EP was released exclusively as a pre-order bonus alongside The Replacements – Let It Be (Deluxe Edition). It features clear, high-quality audio and includes a rare live performance of the ballad “You’re Getting Married.”
Somewhere in an old mill in Yorkshire, a man – maybe – has been buried under patch cables, feeding electricity through modular synths long enough for the hum to be part of the drizzly landscape. That no one really knows who they are feels appropriate. Their anonymity has become part of the machinery, like an unlabeled switch. Sidings is the latest in a long drift of releases, a third double album that doesn’t move forward so much as nestle deeper into its own circuitry.
The word “sidings” tells us a lot: the quiet track off the main line, where trains go to rest, or wait, or rust. That’s what this record feels like. Music built for those in-between hours when nothing needs doing and no one is expecting you. Where 2023’s Standers felt like slow travel, Sidings feels…
Although Whitney K is widely characterised as being the artistic expedient of itinerant Canadian musician Konner Whitney (see what he did there?), his latest recording venture Bubble feels much more like a band project than his/their previous recordings. Whitney himself is responsible for all the lyrics here but the musical backings are credited to the core band responsible for recording them in their ‘home studio’ in Montreal. This is mostly Whitney himself alongside Josh Boguski, Michael Halls and Avalon Tassonyi, with support from James Perry. There are other supplementary musicians on ‘Bubble’ but for the most part this is the line-up that has worked on Whitney K’s recent records. Here they deliver a raw and restrained set of songs nourished by warm…
Searows’ second album, Death in the Business of Whaling, pries and forces confronting emotions to surface. With the title alluding to lines from Moby Dick, Alec Duckart pieces together the divided forces of life and death, the in-between, and feelings unable to be pinpointed.
Opener Belly of the Whale envelops us into a trance, setting the tone for an album gripping at dark corners. Haunting lullabies meet lyrics of death and solitude: ‘After the plummet, sinking into the grave / I’m left in the stomach at the bottom where I live’. It feels cinematic, with instruments creeping around sparse vocals. Dearly Missed begs us to solve a puzzle ending in tragedy, soundtracked by death knells of blazing guitars. Kill What You Eat similarly builds with lyrics that lash: ‘If I say it’s not really…
When Chilli Jesson first appeared on the cover of NME way back in 2012, it was as one half of the most charismatic, chaotic indie frontman double act since Pete ‘n Carl. Palma Violets, the headline declared, were “the best new band in Britain”. Jesson, their bassist and sometime vocalist, was the effortlessly cool mouthpiece of the operation. But behind the youthful bangers and artfully dishevelled hair, Jesson’s adolescence had been tumultuous. At 14, he lost his father to drug addiction, and it’s this grief that – almost 20 years on – the musician addresses with his new venture, Dead Dads Club.
The project (which follows a short-lived second band, Crewel Intentions, and a previous, eponymously named solo venture) might…
The Lowest Pair is an American folk duo made up of Kendl Winter and Palmer T. Lee, known for their intertwined vocal harmonies and banjo-forward songwriting. Formed in 2013, the pair has built a dedicated following through records that balance traditional folk roots with plainspoken, emotionally direct lyrics. Having a particularly prolific run in their early years, releasing six albums in their first seven years, the pair haven’t released a new album since 2020’s The Perfect Plan. With Always As Young As We’ll Ever Be, The Lowest Pair returns at the start of the year with an album that feels steady, focused, and fully settled into who they are. Now seven albums in, this new album also finds the duo expanding the band’s familiar banjo-driven core with lyrics that discuss…
The warm sounds of folk guitar provide the roots of Tessa Rose Jackson’s first album under her own name, time-travelling from Bert Jansch to R.E.M. to Sharon Van Etten in every strum and squeak. The Dutch-British musician previously recorded as Someone, creating three albums in dream-pop shades, but her fourth – a rawer, richer affair, made alone in rural France – digs into ancestry, mortality and memory.
The Lighthouse begins with its title track. Strums of perfect fifths, low moans of woodwind and thundering rumbles of percussion frame a journey towards a beacon at “high tide on a lonesome wind”. The death of one of Jackson’s two mothers when she was a teenager informs her lyrics here and elsewhere: in ‘The Bricks…
The Necessaries came together in 1978 and in the too-brief lifespan of the band counted among their members, Ed Tomney (Rage to Live, Luka Bloom), Jesse Chamberlain (Red Crayola), Ernie Brooks (Modern Lovers), Arthur Russell (The Flying Hearts), Randy Gun (Love of Life Orchestra).
First championed by John Cale on the strength of Tomney’s songs, Cale produced their first single for Spy Records (under the I.R.S. umbrella) which was released in 1979. With the forward momentum brought about by the single, the band set about tracking demos intended for Warner Bros., but The Necessaries ultimately would sign to Seymour Stein’s Sire Records. These rough demo basic tracks lacked overdubs, mixes and any finishing touches that would have made them…
Julian McCamman is getting a fresh start. Last summer, just a year after his band Blood released their debut studio album Loving You Backwards, the Philly-via-Austin rockers suddenly called it quits. “Blood began with a fervent need to pronounce a particular love and sensitivity with the rage filled defense I felt it deserved,” frontman Tim O’Brien wrote in their breakup announcement. “The music and performance at its best was always a call to rouse ourselves and others to the present, to heighten life for a moment, to expand the potential for a life more deeply felt outside of the show.”
But McCamman, driven by an itch to make something more personal to himself, wasn’t about stay outside of the show for long. Just a week before Loving You Backwards’…
PVA are riotous Londoners, a trio comprised of Ella Harris, Josh Baxter and Louis Satchell, whose experimental electronica has taken (half) a chill pill for album two, No More Like This.
Known for their exhilarating sweat-drenched live sets, their sound engages the somatic. It’s a meeting of jagged danceable electronics, fleshy drones and sultry emotive vocals. The album oscillates between synth pop and club-ready beats with delectable impulsivity.
No More Like This is a rippled watery reflection of PVA’s work so far – familiar yet distorted. Their prior releases, such as their (2020) EP Toner are echoed in the group’s continued musical exploration of queerness and the body. No More Like This is intelligent but not…
British duo Insides made their debut with 1993’s Euphoria, a sensual set of ambient pop songs filled with airy guitars, intricately crafted beats, and provocative lyrics about intimate relationships and emotional tension. The distinctive album was praised by critics and remains a favorite of dream pop aficionados, and the duo have sporadically released new recordings, including the 2021 full-length Soft Bonds.
Insides’ elusive and icy electronic pop explores the darkest, seamiest corners of love and sex – their songs capture the emptiness and hostility that surface when the afterglow fades, ugly scenes punctuated by eruptions of violence, waves of self-loathing and caresses that are cold to the touch. Singer/bassist Kirsty Yates’ vocals…
Part of Rhino’s annual “Start Your Ear Off Right” promotion is a very welcome surprise: a remastered and expanded edition of one of the most underrated albums by British pop/rock band Squeeze.
The release of Play found Squeeze at a crossroads. After a moderately successful reunion in the mid-’80s stalled with the under-promoted Frank in 1989, the band departed longtime label A&M Records, signing with Reprise for a new decade. The ever-changing line-up was once again different, though by subtraction instead of addition: singer/songwriter/guitarists and founders Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook were joined only by bassist Keith Wilkinson and drummer Gilson Lavis. (Keyboardist Jools Holland, whose big band…
Away marks Jo Passed‘s sophomore LP, but leaving it at that perhaps commits the injustice of suggesting Jo Hirabayashi is somehow new to the game. That’s far from the case: the Vancouver-born, Toronto-based multi-instrumentalist and producer holds a long and storied recording resume, beginning as far back as the late-2000s with the post-hardcore outfit SSRIs (later Sprïng) and culminating with the 2018 debut of Jo Passed on Their Prime.
As such, this album is not just the second offering of Hirabayashi’s solo discography, but also the homecoming of a veteran musician after an eight-year hiatus; sporting a new label, a new band, a new city — and, seemingly, a new lease on life. Established fans of Jo Passed will be happy…
