Following the release of their celebrated debut album, 2024’s Triple Seven, noisy, romantic indie stylists Wishy return less than a year later with something old and something new. The compilation Paradise on Planet Popstar brings together their 2023 EP, Paradise, and six new songs dubbed Planet Popstar. Spoiler alert: the latter’s ultra-fuzzy, gushing title track (“Love at the speed of light”) is one of the highlights here.
But first, in case you missed it, Paradise offers five slightly melancholier tracks that demonstrate that Wishy arrived as a concept pretty much fully formed by what was their second EP, with its intriguing mix of boy songs, girl songs, boy-girl songs, hazy dream pop, buzzy shoegaze, bouncy jangle, and rich harmonic palettes…
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…From benders in Seven Sisters and the smell of petrol stations off the North Circular, to mourning drifting friendships and ‘what could have been’, Real Lies’ critically acclaimed 2015 debut saw the electronic duo oscillate between the existential and the quintessential at whim.
Similarly, 2022’s Lad Ash saw a delicate balance between nostalgia-laden reflections (queues outside the fish shop and post-rave disorientation) with musings on self-expression. With We Will Annihilate Our Enemies, Kharas and Pat King continue to carry the torch for modern angst, and learning to love it in the process – pulling from an even broader palette of influences to create their most mature, refined work yet.
Pat King pushes their anthemic sound further.
In 2009, Nick Cave published The Death of Bunny Munro, a darkly comic novel about a sex-addicted salesman. When The Death of Bunny Munro first came out, Cave and his frequent collaborator Warren Ellis scored the audiobook. Now, The Death of Bunny Munro has been adapted into a TV show, and Cave and Ellis did a completely different soundtrack for that, too.
Imagine writing a book and then making its soundtrack twice. You must feel like you’re excelling in all kinds of fields at once. Matt Smith, star of House of the Dragon and Doctor Who, is the man behind Sky Studios’ new UK TV version of The Death of Bunny Munro. Smith is both the series’ star and its executive producer.
Nick Cave does a lot of soundtrack work.
At just over 30 minutes, Birds Drink My Blood makes a statement and then withdraws into the shadows. The second release under this moniker by Bulgarian Angel Simitchiev, the album explores dark ambient textures that are ominous, gritty, and cinematic. Yet, it is remarkable how song-like these tracks are despite being in a genre that typically employs improvisation.
Each piece features repeating themes and motifs – as well as a logical structure – that provide just enough intentionality and familiarity to keep the listener tethered.
As an example, ‘Godhead’ begins with drifting drones, with those in the foreground being harshly textured. As more voices are added, the piece becomes dense and suffocating,…
Luke Cissell always seemed destined for greatness. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, he was a fiddling champion at the age of eight and performed Mozart’s third violin concerto on his first honors recital soon afterward. Relocating to New York after college, he cut his teeth as a session musician for everyone from Ingrid Michaelson to Philip Glass. He performed at many well-known venues in the area, including Carnegie Hall, CBGBs, Radio City Music Hall, and Lincoln Center. While he is currently a teaching artist with the New York Philharmonic, he still finds time to record a slew of wonderfully eclectic albums, and his new one, String Quartets Nos. 1-5 is undoubtedly no exception.
Cissell‘s discography is a curious one, as it encompasses a refreshing brand of eclecticism.
Home is the charming result of a collaboration between Xan Tyler from Glasgow and Amsterdam-based Jonathan Brown, aka Dusty Stray. Both are highly accomplished solo performers who have made several individual albums.
They met through mutual admiration for each other’s work, and their musical partnership has evolved with this project. The album was recorded remotely during COVID, with tracks being sent back and forth and fashioned between their two studios. The fact that they were not together when they recorded Home makes its warmth and intimacy all the more remarkable.
The quality of the mix is delightful, and as a duet, their voices match each other’s perfectly. Both are extremely generous with the space…
Google “Tom Boogizm” and the internet coughs up a blank: a lone Boiler Room set, a now-defunct NTS Radio show, a rarely-tended-to SoundCloud page. A Boomkat one-sheet for Dancin’ in the Streets, the DJ and producer’s latest release under the name Rat Heart, offers precious little clarity, just that he hails from Wigan, a town in the northwest of England. Until recently, the British online music retailer was also the only place one could purchase the record. The likes of Cindy Lee, Alabaster dePlume, and Standing on the Corner have all delayed streaming’s instant gratification with their latest projects, but Dancin’ in the Streets’ relative inaccessibility felt more like a protective measure. Most albums create realms you can enter and exit with a tap; step inside this one, and…
Mike Badger returns with his first studio album in almost a decade. Founder member of The La’s, Badger quit the band before they shot to stardom with the top 20 single ‘There She Goes’. Since then, he’s turned his considerable skills to sculpture, producing album art and videos, and co-founding Liverpool-based Viper Records. It’s all chronicled in his entertaining autobiography “The Rythm & The Tide (Liverpool, the La’s and Ever After)”.
His latest offering, produced by son Ray, gives us 14 mainly upbeat tracks which confirm that he’s not a man for the mainstream. That said, there is plenty to admire here. The opening ‘Ghost in the Machine’ is jangling pop at its best, ‘Wolfman’ is raw psycho rockabilly which deserves to be cranked up to maximum volume.
…includes the full live album, plus four additional tracks.
To celebrate his 2024 sold-out Luck and Strange tour, David Gilmour is releasing his third solo live album, titled The Luck and Strange Concerts. Gilmour was feeling reinvigorated this tour as he played the new album in its entirety, along with a host of his Pink Floyd classics.
The live album offers up 23 songs captured from various dates throughout the brief tour, during which Gilmour played only 21 concerts in Rome, London, Los Angeles, and New York. The compilation release is designed exactly as the show was presented with the songs played in the same order. The album’s pristine audio is part of Gilmour and company’s appeal, as every note…
The grunge explosion that took over the world in the early ’90s exists in iceberg form, with ubiquitously popular bands like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam as the most visible examples of the sound. As with any iceberg, these bands are just what’s most apparent sitting atop a mass of other active and influential but less immediately traceable players. You’re No Big Deal explores the grunge iceberg extensively, collecting over 80 tracks of heavy, ragged, and righteous noise recorded between 1984 and 1994 by some of the most- and least-known acts in and around the grunge movement. The tracks here were curated with help from Mark Arm, whose late-‘80s band Green River starts things off with the crude and metallic “Come On Down.”
Stefano Tanzi is an up-and-coming Italian guitarist with a knack for smooth playing. His debut as leader, Wrong Together, is essentially a tribute to jazz legend Steve Swallow, but it also communicates so much more. With the assistance of Emanuele di Teodoro on bass and Fabio Colella on drums, the trio works with sleek skill. The music is gentle, the tunes are delicate, and yet the sound does not slip away unnoticed. Tanzi moves with grace but remembers to give his audience something interesting to chew on, too.
A mix of more familiar songs like “Ladies in Mercedes” and “Falling Grace” as well as lesser-played compositions, the release simmers in a pleasantly consistent tone. Though a short project at around 35 minutes total,…
On his latest album, The Eternal, LA bassist and composer Billy Mohler applies his signature groovy formulas with a firm grip in the rock music, delivering another striking album of originals alongside a new quartet of influential LA-based musicians. After three albums featuring reedist Chris Speed, trumpeter Shane Endsley, and drummer Nate Wood, his lineup now includes saxophonist Devin Daniels, guitarist Jeff Parker, and drummer Damion Reid.
The album opener, “Those Who Know”, was written for Reid, who stuns with a rock-infused feel in the beat. Mohler sets everything in motion with a dynamic groove, over which sax and guitar flow effortlessly in parallel. Parker’s harmonic support and liquid tremolos stand out,…
Galvanized by his special guest slot across the summer’s Oasis uber-gigs, Richard Ashcroft returns with his first album of new material in seven years. Yet little has changed: on Lovin’ You, he’s only thinking, writing, and singing about the big themes.
Best exemplified by the title of recent single ‘Lover’, the former Verve frontman once more draws inspiration from his undeniably deep love for his wife. But while the subject matter is familiar, musically there are new soundscapes, having returned to one of his favourite tricks: built around a looped riff sampled from Joan Armatrading’s ‘Love and Affection’, the track is all finger-snaps, strings, and a skull-thudding bassline, yet with soul and warmth. Shamelessly uplifting…
Sometimes an artist introduces us to a sound we haven’t heard before, and sometimes to a place we haven’t visited. On Sphaîra, Sara Persico does both. The album honors the aptly named Experimental Theatre, one of eighteen concrete buildings designed to showcase the Rachid Karami International Fair in Tripoli. Unfortunately, when civil war broke out, the project was halted, the buildings left to the mercy of the sea. A UNESCO Heritage site, the domed theatre continues to beguile, though entry is guarded, which makes Persico’s access all the more precious. If we cannot see the dome, we can experience it through her artistic vision. Sphaîra is not only a reflection of the present, but a tribute to history and a sonic story of what might have been.
For two South Londoners, Yawning Portal are oddly enchanted by the American Midwest. Their debut album Anywhere was originally conceived in and around Des Moines, Iowa: a land where AOR rock and country blast out of car speakers on drives across desolate Rust Belt towns and vast Corn Belt farmlands. Jess Mai Walker and Joseph Ware’s artistic and geographic origins seem like a far cry from this distinctly American form of vast nothingness. So why would they travel here to write an electronic album in response to, as they put it, “spending days driving around with no destination… just to get out of the house”? But as a young Ohioan born and raised just outside the Rubber City, these sentiments make perfect sense to me. A drifting odyssey…
Fluxion started releasing music on Chain Reaction in the late ’90s, so he’s always been associated with the dub techno scene, but his music has moved far beyond the boundaries of that particular style, incorporating unique rhythms and textures. Haze continues his run of albums on his own Vibrant Music, and it’s another high-quality set of tracks that explore different sounds and moods.
The mellow, forlorn “Touch” has softly clicking beats and delicate, ringing guitars, while haunting organs glow beneath the dubby vibes of “Magenta.” A rework of “Footsteps” by Arovane and Mike Lazarev adds crackling beats and, appropriately enough, creeping footsteps to the original piece’s porcelain-like piano melody. “Berlin,” the album’s most club-friendly track,…
I Was a King have been at the heart of the Norwegian music scene for the best part of 20 years. For their 10th studio album, the band decamped to Bill Ryder-Jones’ studio in West Kirby just outside Liverpool. As well as being at the helm of the production, Ryder-Jones also contributed piano, harmonium and guitar to the record. The band have said that Ryder-Jones “took the music to new places, and sometimes we got lost. Part of the point of bringing in external producers is that they make something new happen.”
At the core of I Was a King are Frode Strømstads and Lise Frøkedal. This is an album of melodious, elegant songs which wear their influences very much on their sleeve, especially Teenage Fanclub and Big Star. In fact, in the past,…
Tavare began playing together in Berlin in 2020, making stripped-down, minimal music – slow, fragmentary songs with sparse vocal lines and harmonies – evoking both a retro ’90s slowcore sound and contemporary pop forms and structures. The trio consists of Aidan Baker, originally from Canada but based in Berlin for over a decade, who makes music ranging from ambient/experimental to post-rock to drone-jazz, both solo and with various groups, mostly notably the dreamsludge duo Nadja; Tristen Bakker, also from Canada, who makes soft-noise, prog, ambient and punk music as a solo artist and with groups such as VROUW! and Otolitos; and Angela Muñoz who plays with several groups including nunofyrbeeswax, VROUW! and (also with Aidan) Hypnodrone Ensemble.
Just for a Day is the debut studio album by English rock band Slowdive, originally released on 2nd September 1991 by Creation Records.
Just for a Day is Slowdive’s first album, and it shows; when one listens to the magnificent sound of Souvlaki or the brilliant experimentation of Pygmalion, it becomes clear that Just for a Day was only a step toward the greatness they would later achieve. Its sound is quite like Souvlaki’s – swelling waves of flanged guitars, layers of wispy vocals floating in and out of the mix, and sweet lazy pop songs – but the production sometimes turns the band’s plush, sweet sound into the sort of cheap and cheesy pleasantness one might expect from a new age artist. A few tracks hint at the sound that would be fully achieved on Souvlaki…
Iconoclassic Records is headed to the “Dark Side” with the first-ever anthology from the real-life band behind Hollywood’s Eddie and The Cruisers: John Cafferty and The Beaver Brown Band. 16-track collection from the rock-and-roll revivalists whose “On the Dark Side” reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1984 and spent five weeks atop the Mainstream Rock chart and the MTV video charts.
Singer-guitarist Cafferty and The Beaver Brown Band (including Gary Gramolini on lead guitar, Pat Lupo on bass, Kenny Jo Silva on drums, Bobby Cotoia on keyboards, and Michael Antunes on saxophone) had been playing up a storm in their native Rhode Island as well as up and down the Northeast Corridor – Massachusetts…