Coming on twenty into their run as one of Austin’s most consistently inventive rock bands, White Denim’s 13 feels less like a reset and more like a snapshot of everything they’ve learned how to do and how comfortably they can shift between those ideas. The band has always pulled from a wide range of influences, but here that approach is pushed even further. It’s a dense, groove-focused record that draws on rock, funk, soul, country, and more. The result is a record that moves quickly, sometimes abruptly, but rarely loses its footing.
“(God Created) Lock and Key” sets that tone early. The song shifts through a few different sections without warning, moving from tight, controlled guitar lines into looser, more unstable passages. It feels deliberate rather than chaotic…
Tag Archive: Bella Union
When deary, the dreampop three-piece composed of Ben Easton (guitar), Dottie Cockram (vocals, guitar) and Harry Catchpole (drums), named their debut album Birding, it wasn’t just as an homage to our feathered friends, they were referencing the sense of expansion, wonder, and abandon their music evokes. They chose the title to draw attention to the direct impact humans have on the world around us, whether that be nature, or ourselves.
“I got really into reading about birds and all these historical stories and poetry about them,” says singer/guitarist Dottie. “You find these beautiful images of birds that represent hope, but they’re also animals. Some of them, like vultures and crows, are a sign of death to some people. They represent all these different…
“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…
Life feels a bit of a grind at the moment. Every news headline seems to suggest the world’s going to hell in a handcart, and rain has become an almost constant fixture during the early weeks of 2026.
So, as an antidote to indie navel gazing, here comes Brighton quartet Congratulations with a debut album that feels like a big day-glo shot of adrenaline. The four-piece have spent the last couple of years building a name for themselves as a band with a live show defined by chaotic energy – it’s not unusual to leave a Congratulations live show after witnessing frenetic ‘running on the spot’ dancing performed by a group in matching jumpsuits.
So can the frazzled, sweaty atmospherics of a Congratulations gig be accurately recreated…
The follow-up to Terrapath, the band’s debut album, Flare finds prog-, math, and jazz-rock-injected indie rockers Plantoid pushing their shape-shifting sound in even more directions. It was again produced by sometimes live member Nathan Ridley, who helped them both stretch their stylistic palette and settle down their tendency toward abrupt changes, instead staying with moods for a little while longer.
This has resulted in some lengthier track times, with four of the nine songs here passing the six-minute mark. It has also contributed to spacey, atmospheric entries like the daydreamy “Slow Moving,” whose elongated, sustain-suffused design doesn’t feel the need to burst into a more uptempo jam. A song like “The Weaver” is…
After lending her versatile skills on stringed instruments (guitar, charango, violin, koto, etc.) to the alternative music scene of Iceland for some time, Ólöf Arnalds released her first solo album, the spare, delicate, and maybe a little magical Við og Við, in 2007. Over the next seven years, the elfin singer/songwriter delivered three more albums that were increasingly expansive, with electronics, electric guitars, and drums contributing to the fanciful, part-acoustic alt-pop of 2014’s Palme. A decade-long break from recording followed during which time, among other endeavors, Arnalds worked as a copywriter, raised her kids, started an artist-led cultural space in Reykjavík (Mengi), and married frequent collaborator Skúli Sverrisson. When she finally returned to…
Although Unfold in the Sky may be the first album by the solo project of Penelope Isles‘ Jack Wolter, it’s worth noting that Cubzoa (derived from “Cubozoa,” a class of box jellyfish) actually pre-dates the band and served as its launching point in the mid-2010s. He returned to Cubzoa while staying at his family’s home in Cornwall during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, then completed work on the project’s full-length debut after returning to his longtime base of Brighton. That affectionate return to the coast inspired the album’s recurring water theme, one of several components of a highly trippy, immersive set of electro-acoustic art rock that ultimately exceeds the “side project” status. Also inspired by COVID isolation and bands such as…
Modern Nature’s songs exist within a sunny fog, all soft contours and elliptical inference. Wistful choruses drift by, occasionally bolstered by shadowy CSNY-style harmonies, as phrases emerge and recede, widely separated by pauses. It’s all very languid and impressionistic on the surface, but carefully structured underneath. The crisp minimalism of drum and bass pushes forward but quietly, like a krautrock rhythm section swathed in batting. Two guitars play at each other with lucid precision, not in sync, not even really in conversation, but approaching the same problem from different directions.
The Heat Warps is Jack Cooper’s sixth album as Modern Nature, following stints in similarly serene but prickly outfits Ultimate Painting and Mazes.
A Sober Conversation is the work of a master songwriter, one who knows how to achieve their goals. As the album’s nine tracks pour from the speakers, comparisons come to mind: 20/20 and Smiley Smile-era Beach Boys, Lindsey Buckingham, the early solo years of Todd Rundgren.
But nothing sounds quite like any of these – spikiness is never far. The initially dreamy opening track “The Tent” is punctuated by squalls of noise. Next, on the sumptuous “Two Legged Dog,” dense, overstated keyboards contrast with the jaunty melody. Part of the point seems to be undermining anything which might lean into tranquillity. A song beds in and, then, bam: it’s knocked off balance.
Considering that every album so far by the US-raised, Manchester-dwelling…
Very few music lovers would welcome a drummer-less universe, yet solo ventures by percussionists tend to be an acquired taste. Even if you are drawn to the skins, drums taking centerstage can be strong medicine, so it will probably be a relief to most listeners that Goddess, while devised by a drummer, owes nothing to such purism. Nor is the project a ruse to move a band member traditionally sat at the back to the foreground, in an act of egotistic overcorrection, harking back to the days when Ringo and Keith went solo in search of the acclaim traditionally afforded their frontmen.
Fay Milton, formerly of Savages, is one of the most expressive and exuberant drummers of her generation, a fact not altogether obvious on Goddess, where the drums are mostly…
It takes hope to be resilient in the face of losing control. Ezra Furman’s latest album, Goodbye Small Head, is intrinsically brave. It’s full of the optimistic guiding light that is hope, especially as it’s plagued by dark subject matter. In a press statement, Furman candidly explained that these twelve songs delineate a loss of control through means conventional and not: weakness, heartbreak, mysticism, drugs, and living in society with your eyes wide open.
On the latter, this arduous second Trump term has already caused unfortunate global uncertainty to set in for transgender people, of which Furman has blossomed as such in recent years. By the circumstances of when these recordings emerged, Furman’s ruminations here are so important.
In 2023, at age 73, film director Sally Potter released Pink Bikini, her singer/songwriter debut album. Its songs revolved around her growing up a young female activist and rebel in London during the 1960s. Potter is well known for composing and recording her own film scores — Orlando, The Tango Lesson, The Roads Not Taken among them — and her musical pedigree dates to the 1970s with Lindsay Cooper’s various groups including the Feminist Improvising Group.
Anatomy, from Bella Union, is a song cycle that charts “the passionate love, destructive human behaviours, spiritual longings, physical dependencies and rampant exploitation that make up our turbulent love affair with the planet we inhabit.” She enlisted Marta Salogni as…