In January 1984, The Colourfield released their eponymous debut single. It stalled just outside the Top 40, a better fate than that awaiting its follow-up, ‘Take’, a few months later, which barely made the Top 75 at all. It was a markedly different reception to that afforded frontman Terry Hall’s previous enterprises, both of which had been successful from the get-go: The Specials’ debut single ‘Gangsters’ was a Top 10 smash, while The Fun Boy Three debuted in the Top 20, the British public having chosen to ignore the fact that ‘The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum’ was wildly uncommercial.
But the fans that were happy to send that gloomy stew of lumbering percussion, needling organ and lyrics about famine, nuclear war and…
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Jackie West has a feathery soft voice, the kind of instrument that might not wake you up fully if you heard it in your while asleep but rather inclines to infiltrate your dreams. This second full-length, the second also to be released on her husband Dan Kniskowy’s Ruination record, makes an impact without excessive volume or drama. It sheathes cool-toned melodies in delicate layers of vocal and instrumental sound.
West says she wrote and recorded Silent Century as a mostly solitary effort, one that allowed her to examine and incorporate the dialogues that played out in her head. It is populated by many voices, then, but also the same voice, or perhaps the same person in many different ways. Thus, the heady country holler of “Overlooking…
“Half of my whole life is gone,” Mike Hadreas sighed on the opening of Perfume Genius’ 5th album, the high-water mark Set My Heart on Fire Immediately. Though that may sound like an expression of regret, Hadreas sang it with a kind of guarded optimism — opening a door into a record that gleefully documented life’s contradictions through odes to connections to the self and others.
On Glory, Perfume Genius’ latest, Haderas is once again mulling the grand arc of his existence. He ponders “my entire life…” on “No Front Teeth” before pausing. Then, he confesses: “It’s fine.” On the nervy, agoraphobic “It’s a Mirror,” he admits, “My whole life is/Open just outside the door.” He’s isolated, stuck inside his own agonizing thought patterns, and he knows something…
Joseph Oxley has long made music that feels like tuning in to a pirate radio station broadcasting from the 1990s. As TVAM, his go-to staples are saturated guitar, acid keys, dreamy shoegaze-frayed vocals, and beats like the stamp of a thousand Doc Martens.
Ruins, however, flicks the dial towards something far more personal, its once-bright palette now refracted to near-monochrome.
The emotional shift is immediately obvious. “Comfort Collar” opens with a heavy-footed pulse and a smear of synth like blue neon through rain-streaked glass. It’s oddly comforting in that slightly seamy way a goth disco can be. From there, the record moves through titles like “The Gloom,” “In Memory” and “The Haunted,”…
Following a pair of albums that found Toronto’s cootie catcher developing and corralling a charmingly impulsive indie sound that draws on garage pop, lo-fi slacker rock, new wave, jangle pop, and more, Something We All Got marks the band’s Carpark Records and proper studio debut, and it’s their most accessible set of songs yet. Having said that, the group’s whimsical practice of injecting far-flung timbres and effects into their songs, as well as a certain flat-tire wobble in their performance style are both joyously still in play. The generous 14-song track list begins with “Loiter for the love of it,” which sets the stage with claves, woodblocks, and harmony vocals from two of the quartet’s three rotating singers (Nolan Jakupovski, Anita Fowl, and Sophia Chavez)…
In life and art, strong emotional reactions and restraint are frequently placed at odds with one another. A decade that has felt unmoored at best and marked by upheaval – dotted with climate events that have wrought havoc on different locales and been quickly forgotten – has inspired plenty of bold artistic responses. For Maria BC, an artist whose work has covered dark folk and goth territory and who has explored the potential of different electronic elements, the impulse to respond to these environmental pressures by being louder, denser, more aggressive would seem natural. However, on their third album, Marathon, they have instead pulled back sharply on the production, and these decisions build a low-simmering, tense mood in a gentle guise.
This latest release from Stephen O’Malley consists of two organ drones, each more than 20 minutes, recorded on Les Grandes Orgues at Église Saint‑François, Lausanne.
This 18th-century instrument had been twice updated and expanded. The pieces were played by O’Malley, Kali Malone, and Frederikke Hoffmeier in December 2021.
O’Malley is best known as a co-founder of Sunn O))), where his measured yet high-volume approach helped define a major sub-genre of 21st-century drone and doom metal.
Across projects, collaborations, and commissions, he continued to push into more diverse forms. As a consequence, this pipe-organ recording serves as a logical extension to his works rather than a detour.
When Voxtrot reunited in 2022, it didn’t feel like a nostalgia grab. The Texas indie band, which first gained traction in the mid-2000s with a pair of self-released EPs and a strong debut album,came back with renewed purpose. Dreamers in Exile is their first full-length in nearly twenty years, and instead of trying to recreate their early jangle pop sound, it shows what happens when a band reunites with more experience and a clearer perspective. Recorded at bassist Jason Chronis’ Haunted Air Studio in Lockhart and mixed by Dean Reid, the album is catchy and poignant.
Opener “Another Fire” lays out the record’s approach right away. The guitars still jangle, but there’s more weight behind the lyrics. Ramesh Srivastava reflects on identity, history,…
British singer/songwriter Bill Pritchard has been on a path just outside of the limelight since he began releasing solo albums in the late ‘80s. Occupying the time-honored role of “your favorite musician’s favorite musician,” Pritchard’s thoughtful, storytelling tunes have been championed by other artists, and placed by critics alongside the introspective and clever styles of Lloyd Cole, Robyn Hitchcock, and the like. Pritchard’s 1991 album Jolie was a landmark for him, as its pop-friendly arrangements and heightened production approach from the Lightning Seeds’ Ian Broudie made it one of his most well-received records. Though Pritchard never strayed completely from a pop sound, he’s also experimented with different sides of his songwriting; exploring somber piano balladry…
The Sheepdogs have now been in an amazing groove of producing upbeat, West Coast-leaning blues-rock for over twenty years. Their trademark sound manages to embrace the paradox of being both nostalgic and contemporary. Keep Out of the Storm fits in perfectly to their catalogue: it feels both familiar yet fresh. It’s a great listen. The songs are plainspoken, melodic, emotionally direct and more concerned with feeling authentic than being literary. Where there’s grit, there’s also an underlying optimism.
The album begins with Nobody But You, a song about romantic commitment, two people simply being, no plan, just mutual dependence. The expression of love is simple and affecting: “Every time I see your face / I get a smile that I can’t…
Pet Shop Boys release a Blu-ray/CD of their concert film Dreamworld: The Greatest Hits Live at the Royal Arena Copenhagen. The film captures the spectacular stage show of the Pet Shop Boys tour with dazzling visuals and a bumper set list packed with classic hits, including “West End Girls,” “Suburbia,” “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money),” “Left To My Own Devices,” “Rent,” “Domino Dancing,” “Love Comes Quickly,” “Always On My Mind,” and “It’s A Sin.”
The film was recorded at the Royal Arena in Copenhagen in July 2023 as part of Pet Shop Boys’ critically acclaimed Dreamworld: The Greatest Hits Live Tour. Directed by the renowned David Barnard, the film was captured using a 14-camera 4K shoot to ensure an immersive experience for viewers.
Motorpsycho has always been of the opinion that the most interesting stuff happens in any art form before it is formatted and settled. In rock music, this phenomenon peaked in and around 1970, and it is in this period that the best heavy music was made, simply because the rules weren’t set, there were no tropes yet, and there were no clichés to fall back on. The Gaia II Space Corps is an album of tunes that don’t quite sound like heavy metal or hard rock, but clearly is reaching for some of the same qualities. It is post-psychedelic, pre-metal music, and is probably as close to making a true blue ‘classic hard rock’ album Motorpsycho ever will come.
The Gaia II Space Corps is a short, concise, catchy and exciting album, continuing…
On February 19 only, director Morgan Neville’s documentary Paul McCartney: Man on the Run enjoy a limited theatrical release. Then, on February 27, the film arrives on Prime Video for home streaming. At a running time of almost two hours, it chronicles McCartney’s artistic rebirth in the 1970s in the aftermath of The Beatles’ breakup, including the rise of Wings, via archival footage, Linda McCartney’s photographs, and new interviews with Paul and the McCartney family as well as Sean Ono Lennon, Mick Jagger, Chrissie Hynde, and others. Coinciding with the Prime Video release on February 27, MPL and Capitol release a soundtrack album.
The one-disc, 12-track collection draws on recordings spanning Paul’s 1970 solo debut McCartney (“That Would Be Something”) through…
First released in October 1974, the album was a conceptual piece based upon the theme of a travelling circus and was recorded at Chipping Norton Studios in England. The studio had been the location of the recording of the band’s previous album ‘Remember The Future’, issued in 1973. For Down to Earth the band opted for a more direct approach to their music and sessions saw contributions from a horn section and legendary vocalist P.P. Arnold.
By the time ‘Down to Earth’ was released in Europe, ‘Remember The Future’ had become a top twenty US hit and the band travelled to the States to embark on a successful tour. A second US visit followed in the spring of 1975 to promote ‘Down to Earth’. The band enjoyed huge success…
Lala Lala‘s Lillie West has come a long way from the DIY grunge-inflected debut Sleepyhead to her absolutely standout fourth offering, Heaven 2. Its club-ready, saxophone-led opener ‘Car Anymore’ evokes Destroyer alongside ‘Trans-Europe Express’, as if it’s carrying her away from the past on a high-speed train.
This metamorphosis began right at the end of her breakthrough sophomore album The Lamb back in 2018, on the closing track ‘See You at Home’, which sealed West’s personal shift. “So we’re working with water / I promise I’ll drink it ’cause it’s all I’m allowed to”, she sang under Sen Morimoto‘s tender saxophone, making one of many promises to stay sober after giving up drinking. As we can see now, it worked, and…
…includes a bonus disc of demos and two previously unreleased B-sides from the original sessions, “Comin’ To You” and “Harpsi Chords”.
The third solo album by K Ishibashi under his Kishi Bashi moniker, Sonderlust comes with a tweak to his sound, a footnote on the title, and some emotional baggage. The title is a play on the recently invented word sonder from the Web’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Essentially, it refers to the realization that any random stranger has a life experience as vivid as one’s own. As for the baggage, Ishibashi has admitted to suffering marital woes while working on the album, a fact that affected its tone and especially lyrics, which are often colored by uncertainty. It may also have altered his creative process, given…
“I don’t remember yesterday, but I remember when I was eight years old.”
The opening lyrics of “Sure & Steady,” Gained / Lost’s second track, underline a core concern of UK indie stalwarts The Wave Pictures’ 20th (!) album: the passage of time, what can and cannot be remembered, what may or may not have a bearing on the here and now. A look at the images collected for the Exile On Main Street-style sleeve of Gained / Lost confirms what’s going on.
Thematic considerations aside, The Wave Pictures have a fondness for American musical archetypes. Despite guitarist and singer David Tattersall’s Edwyn Collins/Vic Goddard-esque voice, he and the band – Jonny Helm (drums) and Franic Rozycki (bass): a female vocalist who is…
There’s an undertone of disappointment in Heavenly’s happy, peppy, tootling power pop, a sense of vulnerability and ache even in the bubbliest cuts. “Excuse Me,” an early single, is about as affirming and positive as garage pop can get, with bashing drums and ecstatic bursts of guitar strumming, but it centers around the wistful lyric “Excuse me, I thought you were someone else/they’ve been on my mind.”
This is the fifth album from the Oxford twee-pop mainstays, a band that formed out of the remnants of C86 outfit Talulah Gosh, around songwriter Amelia Fletcher, her brother Matthew on drums, Peter Momtchiloff, Cathy Rogers on keyboards and Rob Pursley on bass. Heavenly’s main run happened in the early to mid-’90s, the first…
In one of his most enduring songs, Johnny Cash likened love to a burning ring of fire. Originally penned by his soon-to-be-second wife, June Carter, “Ring of Fire” gave romance a tangible feeling, a concreteness that could easily be pointed to, a sensory depth and explicative character. Combined with Cash’s signature baritone, that ineffable feeling is rendered even more tactile. There’s a reason it has become routinely recognized among the greatest love songs and as a classic in the country canon.
Love songs are a familiar character in songwriting, but Big Thief guitarist Buck Meek frames his own love songs through his subject’s unfamiliarity. On Meek’s “Ring of Fire,” not to be confused with the aforementioned Cash staple,…
Known for their revolving door policy, this time around Nothing frontman Nicky Palermo and guitarist Doyle Martin are joined by drummer Zachary Jones, Best Coast’s Bobb Bruno on bass, and Cam Smith on guitar. It’s the latter trio’s first time on a Nothing release, but they come together to make what could become the most complete iteration of the band yet.
A Short History of Decay presents as a confrontation of the past: grunge-infused opener ‘Never Come Never Morning’ tackles Nicky’s abusive father, while the record is bookended by ‘Essential Tremors’, on which he writes about his genetic neurological condition. This heavy sandwich is filled by what’s largely classic Nothing – the shoegazey sound they’ve made…