Instrumental album from 1983! Having endured no less than three long-players and a brace of singles featuring the caterwauling of Messrs Hampshire and Childish, the Milkshakes’ audience figured it might be time for an instrumental outing. In response the group gave them just that.
But this was to be no run-of-the-mill effort – no Dick Dale-esque surf marathons or Shadowsy twangers are apparent here. These tunes are more rhythm and mood based compositions; occasionally leaning more towards the Link Wray end of the spectrum – as you would probably expect. This IVth album (hence the name) was recorded in 1983 at Oakwood Studios – as were all previous releases – but this was the first in their new facilities in a converted church near Canterbury…
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Live at the Bayou showcases some of the earliest live performances from Bad Brains, and pre-dates the band’s 1982 self-titled debut. A snapshot of the band’s burgeoning beginnings, these previously unreleased recordings from 1980 and 1981 recorded at The Bayou in Washington DC, were captured between the band being unofficially “banned in DC” and relocating to NYC – a historically significant time in the band’s career. This is the first non-jazz release by the newly formed Time Traveler Recordings.
Record Store Day habitues have known and loved producer-archivist Zev Feldman for the almost exclusively jazz projects he has drawn out of secret archives for Resonance and other labels focused on that genre. But he’s always sworn he was…
Described as the “original unedited version” of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, this RSD exclusive release contains 13 tracks, including four that were removed prior to its original release: “Rocks and Gravel,” “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” “Rambling, Gambling Willie” and “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” Yes, those four tracks eventually found their way out to the public, but it’s still fun to hold a somewhat different version of one of his signature albums that almost snuck out into the multiverse. A few copies of this particular “canceled” edition from the early ’60s have been among the most valuable Dylan collectibles there are.
The release this is most comparable to is an RSD version of “Blood on the Tracks (Test Pressing)” that came out in 2019…
What to make of the band that HEALTH have become? To keep up with them these past few years has been an often-dizzying endeavour; they’ve collaborated with everybody from Poppy to Nine Inch Nails, and undulated between refining their punishingly loud brand of industrial noise rock and attempting to tear apart its very esence at the seams by pushing it into uncharted territory – melodic one minute, avowedly experimental the next. Add to this that they’ve carved out what they describe as a “coalition of subcultures” in a fanbase, incorporating everybody from terminally online meme-botherers, to gamers, to enlightened true believers in the Los Angeles trio’s self-described brand of “cum metal”, and you wonder whether there’s another band quite like them.
It’s right there in the name: Thee Reps are passionate about repetition. They hammered the point home on their debut cassette, Minimal Surface. A half-decade later, substantial compositional growth has enabled the NYC-based five-piece to deepen and broaden their approach to music-making.
With Cryptocartography, repetition is now in service to the structure of Thee Reps’ songcraft. They’ve plunged deeper into the sea of iteration and have searched out new waters to explore. Improvisation and chamber music are even more prevalent than before, and the minimalist nests of repetition are even more elaborate. The album’s title alludes to mapping locations that are only rumored to exist; on Cryptocartography Thee Reps’…
…features exclusive remixes from artists such as Midnight Magic, Prins Thomas, and Lindstrøm.
Nora Schjelderup is one of Norway’s leading DJs, and is also the creative force behind Ora the Molecule, who have just released Dance Therapy, which might be the most accessible avant-garde disco pop concept album you’ll hear this year.
Ora the Molecule has existed since around 2015, releasing a series of singles that were compiled on Human Safari in 2021. Human Safari is filled with modern Euro-synthwave, with just enough throwback sounds to conjure up the feel of a lost Thompson Twins album for fans of 1980s technopop.
While Human Safari is technically Ora the Molecule’s debut record, Schjelderup has…
Singer-songwriter Afton Wolfe is arguably the most conceptually artful troubadour that we have heard since Tom Waits. The reference to Waits is rather obvious in Wolfe’s deep, gravelly voice and in his off-the-beaten-track concepts. Yet, Wolfe also possesses the fearlessness of Bruce Cockburn, the intellectualism of Leonard Cohen, the deep woods poetry of the late Malcolm Holcolm, and the dark mysticism and southern Gothic of his native Mississippi.
Ophiuchus is named for a little-known large constellation known as “Serpent-bearer” (most appropriate in the Year of the Snake and in our current society, where deception, deceit, and lying have become commonplace). Wolfe has issued every track as a single, culminating…
On Back to Hermetics and Martial Arts Vol. 1, Belgrade-based collective The Cyclist Conspiracy take the listener on an extraordinary world tour of sound, blending the music of three continents and countless cultures into an engrossing cinematic dreamworld. Previous albums have showcased the troupe’s inspiration from Greek rebetiko, Balkan music and North African beats. Those influences are still very much present on Back to Hermetics, but the Conspiracy’s palette has broadened, and they show mastery of every style they tackle.
The Cyclist Conspiracy is named for a book by fellow Serb Svetislav Basara, in which a clandestine Brotherhood meets in dreams and meditates on the bicycle in order to gain secret knowledge. Members of the band refer to…
Following a four-year studio album silence, famed Cuban singer Raúl Paz returns with a good-natured set that leans into themes of identity and place – ruminating on his 15 years outside his homeland. The album marks his return to the French music scene and comes with his trademark blend of traditional Cuban son, European pop and singer-songwriter music. The project’s name is a playful reference to him being a guajiro, a person from rural areas of Cuba, as well as guajira music, with which he is associated.
On ‘La Mala’, Paz combines a choppy acoustic guitar line, crisp percussion, brass fanfares and an earworm chorus to great effect. He demonstrates his versatility across the record, moving from upbeat numbers like this,…
Juan Pastor‘s Afro-Peruvian jazz outfit Chinchano has undergone personnel changes since its 2014 inception, but the iteration on its fifth album is a keeper. While pianist Stu Mindeman has been with the project from the start, the bass and horn chairs have been occupied by different players. Now, the quintet on Memorias featuring bassist Matt Ulery, tenor saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi, and percussionist Gian Luiggi Cortez Mejía feels like the most perfect realization to date of Pastor’s vision. For the drummer and cajón player, this incarnation offers a “more mature, introspective approach to blending Peruvian music with jazz,” and some of that can definitely be attributed to Laurenzi, whose attack is more smooth than abrasive.
As intimated by the title, the album’s thematic…
Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri have been playing Transylvanian-tinged music together for 15 years, the last half-decade with reeds master John Surman. The trio’s latest release, Cantica Profana – as well as a companion album, The Athenaeum Concert – shows the three improvisors at the top of their form. The collaboration began with 2020’s Transylvanian Folk Songs, a set of tunes based on field research of Bela Bartók. Bartók’s recordings include thousands of melodies, which Ban and Maneri whittled down to just a handful. Most of the ones they chose were originally played by violin, flute, and bagpipes, an orchestration not impossibly distant from the contemporary group’s combination of viola, saxophone/clarinet, and piano.
Mysterious UK-based producer U’s practice qualifies as folk music inasmuch as it is music that has folklore as its primary subject. Quantitatively speaking, though, the remit of his new album Archenfield is wider and more ambitious. U has previously embraced the jagged edges of post-punk and cold, glitchy electronics, but here he leans heavily into ambient, field recordings and plunderphonics to create a detailed folkloric map of Archenfield, a rural region in Herefordshire with a long and at times turbulent history.
Opening track Urchins employs a simple, repeated piano melody on crackling vinyl. It evokes those age-old hauntological themes of distance, time, memory and decay. But just when you think things are wandering unequivocally in…
…Working, for the first time, under her given name rather than the usual moniker of Ale Hop, Alejandra Cárdenas shapes A Body Like a Home and the book of poetry that accompanies it in the form of a memory palace, fills its rooms with generational wounds, then gives each of them their own voice, reciting poignant verses over a porous fabric of electronic timbres, electric guitar, field recordings, and Mexican musician Gibrana Cervantes’s violin drones.
“What is the point of remembering, let alone recording life?”, Cárdenas ponders on the opener ‘On Memory’. Her voice is soft but laden with weariness as she reflects on histories and the cruelty of those who get to write and erase them. “Somewhere, you and I, we met in…
The first Voices from the Lake album has taken on a mythical status, like a Selected Ambient Works 85-92 for the Berghain generation. Donato Dozzy and Neel, already masters of trippy, ambient-leaning techno (once called “headfuck techno”) on their own records, hit on some kind of flow state when they made their collaborative debut LP. This was a cerebral style of techno that sounded like it grew out of the forest floor, where rustling leaves and padding paws took the place of kick drums, and chords moved like swaying branches and trees. Since that album, as good a full-length as the genre has birthed, everything attached to the Voices from the Lake name — EPs, a live album, the occasional remix, celebrated live sets — has strengthened their reputation. With II, the duo…
Peals — the Baltimore-based ambient duo comprising William Cashion (Future Islands) and Bruce Willen (Double Dagger) — released the digital reissue of Seltzer, a rarity previously available only as a 2015 limited-edition cassette. Far removed from the high-energy bombast of their primary rock outfits, Peals focuses on intimacy, loops, and texture. Seltzer serves as a time capsule of the duo’s prolific 2013–2014 period, capturing the “fermentation of improvisation” that would eventually lead to their sophomore LP, Honey.
The release is structurally fascinating. While Side B, “Before and After,” acts as a seamless mixtape of home experiments, Side A documents a unique site-specific collaboration with multimedia artist Zoe Friedman inside Baltimore’s…
Some Other Stories is the second album from South London duo Melanie Crew and Ross Palmer, who are life partners as well as musical ones, and they each supply songs written individually to this 12-song project.
Six songs are credited to Palmer and five to Crew. Palmer’s composition ‘Winning Ticket’ opens the album, setting the mood of quiescence and calm, with lyrics full of resignation: “those who are desperate to win are destined to lose”. He also penned ‘Close the Book’ (“a guilty man who takes the stand to make his last request”), which benefits from contributions on cello by Ben Handysides, and the philosophical ‘Blindly Through the World’. On that song, which is set in a minor key, Palmer ponders “bitter harvests and…
Music’s winding road sometimes takes unforeseen turns. Sam Salmon & the Grand Manan Bandits is one of those projects that seemingly appear out of nowhere, making you glad for such detours. Formed by the members of Canadian punk trio Motherhood (Brydon Crain, Penelope Stevens and Adam Sipkema) and guitarist Keith Hallett, the band share their love for alt-country with their debut album Down for Life. However, the Sam Salmon project had been in development for a long time. The opener, ‘If I Needed You’, is a song originally written in 2013 (if the pandemic also stripped you of your bearings, that’s over a decade ago!), under the telling title ‘Country No. 1’, which remained unchanged until very recently.
“Down for Life” is a fun and to-the-point love…
Well, this is a surprise. Not so much that the Sunderland band should do a Christmas album, mind. Despite their raw and spiky hardcore framework, which channelled heavyweights like Gang of Four and Fugazi, they were always capable of being gentle, dreamlike, flirting with but never tipping over into the whimsical, as on their huge breakthrough cover of Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love”. And maybe even more relevantly, their harmony singing bordered on the choral from the start, something made explicit on their a capella reworking folk songs and their own work on their 2012 Rant album.
No, it’s not a surprise that they’d do this, or do it well. But it to be this good? For the pacing, the fit of the arrangements to the songs, the ability…
There’s a particular brand of madness that occurs when an artist gets bored of their own tricks. Jake Brooks didn’t experience some dark night of the soul; he just got sick of guitar and ran out of cassette tapes. Sometimes the most radical artistic shifts have the most mundane origins, and Factory Reset, Retail Drugs’ third full-length record in fifteen months, is what happens when rage gets funnelled through a laptop instead of a four-track: the sound of someone taking an industrial drill to a server room mid-breakdown.
The album imagines a near-future where you can erase your past self. “Which I guess you can kind of do on the internet, sort of,” Brooks notes with characteristic understatement. This dystopian premise hangs over the record’s…
Yako Trio’s eclectic instincts are fully on display on their latest album, Woven, an even-keeled exploration of genre-bending ambiences filtered through the group’s distinctive lens. The Thessaloniki-based trio — pianist Leandros Pasias, bassist Vangelis Vrachnos, and drummer Giorgos Klountzos Chrysidis — expands into a quintet here with two guest woodwind players: New Zealander saxophonist James Wylie and Athens-born flutist Harris Lambrakis.
This highly listenable session opens with “Mr. McCoy”, a tribute to pianist McCoy Tyner and the invigorating energy of his playing. Written by Pasias, the piece centers around a rich harmonic riff while Coltranean lines surge from the frontline. Swinging underneath with…