VINYL OF THE MONTH
Ed O’Brien Blue Morpho (Transgressive)
The last thing theartsdesk on Vinyl thought it needed was a solo album from Radiohead’s guitarist but Blue Morpho, Ed O’Brien’s second album, spikes expectations. The opening “Incantations” is fab, a low-rolling, bongo-tastic thing hazed in mysticism, like a particularly stoned offcut from Plant & Page’s No Quarter project. The album was, apparently, a healing exercise for O’Brien, who was having brain doldrums. It feels that way, lightness touched with sadness, like that thing Zen Buddhists say about trying to feel sadness without being sad. Side One floats along this path, it shimmers, then Side Two grows more forceful, with the percussive messiness of “Teachers”, before settling to tonal waftiness, then closing with the sunshiney “Obrigado”, a woozy (sort of) rock song. Thoroughly original and nothing like Radiohead, it’s a fine album that opens up the more you listen to it. Psychedelic too. Comes on gatefold with art inner sleeve and a 12” x 24” poster.
VINYL REVIEWS
Metric Romanticize the Dive (Metric Music International)
Canadian pop-rockers Metric had a patch of global success 10-15 years ago but their music’s only grown better as the years pass. “Doom Scroller”, from 2022, is one of the songs of the century, Gen-Z’s “Weekender”. Singer Emily Haines describes their latest album, their tenth, as “about the romance of a less than perfect life," which gets theartsdesk on Vinyl onside at once. Their tenth album effectively melds synth-pop and indie, with a dash of slick FM radio production. Sometimes their music can be too slick and candied but Romanticize the Dive is BIG POP that’s desperate and contagious. Drop the needle anywhere. Comes in silver inner sleeve with a 10” x 10” photo/lyric insert
Manuela Ultraviolet (Lost Map) + Tom Ashforth They Don’t Make Them Like That Anymore (Krautpop!)
Two albums by songwriters who take eccentric paths to their destinations. Manuela Gernedel’s debut album, eight years ago, turned a few heads, hence, possibly, why her second is co-produced by Franz Ferdinand’s Nick McCarthy and features input by members of Stereolab and Mystery Jets. The Austrian singer has a unique voice, kind of creepy-cute, child-like but spiked with a nasal knowingness. She speak-sings and she sings too, her words painting strange imagery, such as the surrealist “Hyena”, or try this from “Lullux”: “Waxy skinned drunks falling apart into biscuit-sized pieces, puzzling themselves back together again”. Happily, it all sits within a framework of baroque odd-pop,
catchy yet queasy. It works well and is more-ish. Comes with 12” x 12” photo/lyric insert. Cornish indie label Krautpop! give us the debut album by Tom Ashworth, an English musician based in Germany, who works with Brit-based lyricist Paul Bareham. It’s quirky bedroom pop telling strange stories of misfits and weirdos, catchy and bizarre, as if Wire, Pulp, Robin Hitchcock and Momus joined forces and pretended to be ELO.
The Beach Boys The Pet Sounds Sessions Highlights (Capitol) + Suede Sci-Fi Lullabies Vol.2 (Demon)
A couple of albums that poke about two very different bands’ histories. First a deep dive into Pet Sounds, one of the most written-about albums of all time (the Wikipedia page, alone, is over 4000 words long). It’s a set of songs that made even The Beatles check their game. It’s two records on splattery green’n’white vinyl in gatefold, with lots of info, and is really for completists (albeit they likely already have its contents on a 1997 CD boxset celebrating the album). Rather like Peter Jackson’s Get Back film about the Beatles Let It Be sessions, but aural rather than visual, it offers a window into the process, replete with random babblings of band members and extraneous studio noise. I am not sure who’d listen to it but, if you really want to get under the hood via vinyl, it’s a one-stop
shop. A more user-friendly set is Suede’s second collection of B-sides and bonus cuts, Sci-Fi Lullabies Vol.2, originally released on Record Store Day 2025. It’s a two record collection that trails the band’s non-album songs from 1999’s Head Music to 2022’s Autofiction. It contains tasty fare such as the atypical 1999 B-side “Let Go”, a rolling rock jam, and the delicate, doomed ballad “Heroin”, alongside more Suede-ish indie air-punchers like 2013’s “Darkest Days”, with the fan-bait finale being the previously unreleased, opulent slowie "Blinded", originally a contender for Autofiction. It’s a set that showcases a band avoiding autopilot.
Zoh Amba Eyes Full (Matador)
The few who’ve heard of Zoh Amba will know them as an avant-garde saxophonist, but her debut album for Matador Records sees them head into new terrain. She’ll be supporting Courtney Barnett on tour in the States this summer and her rough-edged folky ethos is a good a reference point for songs such as “Southern Soil”, but much of this has more in common with PJ Harvey’s punk-ish angst. Amba chews their words, voice vulnerable, child-like, desperate, wobbly and raging, as guitars plough up the turf behind. Sometimes Sonic Youth even spring to mind. Amba executes musical about-turns well and, if they continue to pursue this course, attention will gather. Comes with lyric inner sleeve.
Mekons Horrorble (Mekons vs Tony Maimone in Dub Conference) (Fire)
Whenever I cross paths with Mekons, they’re doing something interesting. As is the case with this rejig of last year’s Horror album. The Mekons – or Mekons as they now have it – consistently write songs whose sweetness often belies their biting lyricism, sarcasm or other commentary. They came from punk but have long been a folk band who dip into any style they fancy, and Tony Maimone was bassist in tricksy proto-punks Pere Ubu, thus Horrorble isn’t a dub album in the sense that Adrian Sherwood might have recreated it. There are enormous bass boshers such as “War Economy” but, at other times, as on the bright-eyed “Sanctuary”, it’s as much about rebuilding the song so that different aspects are revealed, offering a freakier listening experience. It’s a cracking listen that never dulls,
Andy Blade Ain’t That a Shame EP (Antenna) + Andrew Jim Gannon Bon Boys Will Break Your Heart (Andrew Jim Gannon) + Andrew Jim Gannon As the Years Roll Back (Andrew Jim Gannon) + Colourbox/Air Miami The Official World Cup Theme/World Cup Fever (4AD) +
A handful of singles. Andy Blade was lead singer of underage Seventies London punks Eater but has built himself a cult solo career since. The Ain’t That a Shame EP is a 7” tribute to the late Brian James (of The Damned and more), via songs that Blade wrote with him (and Mark Laff of Generation X) in 1978. The lead song is a re-recording, a tuneful sliver of messy hedonic romanticism in the vein of The Only Ones crossed with Lords of the New Church (another James band). It’s lovely; better, in fact, than James’s 1979 original. The other songs are original 1978 recordings, “Lying Again”, a banged-out punker, and “Death Awaits”, a more interesting nugget. Comes on “berry coloured” vinyl in a gatefold cover, well-illustrated by one Elle P. Hertfordshire musician Andrew Jim Gannon has
had an unlikely career. He first drew attention working with rapper Giggs on his Let Em Ave It album, then became On Man, an electronic maverick on the Fabric-affiliated Houndstooth label. Now, under his own name, he’s promoting his Hydrate Those Folds album with a couple of limited-edition singles on transparent scarlet vinyl in hand-painted black sleeves. Foregrounding his own vocals, both are melancholic affairs; the 10” “Bon Boys Will Break Your Heart” is the more striking, 4/4 dance-pop, Balearic, in its original Eighties sense, with his cracked, forlorn vocals to the fore. On the flip US experimentalists Xiu Xiu make it gnarlier but not too much. “As the Years Roll Back” is whispery electro-downtempo and similarly broken-sounding. It makes one look forward to hearing the whole album. And so to the World Cup. 4AD Records celebrate by re-releasing one of the greatest football-themed songs of all, albeit it’s an instrumental. Colourbox’s “Official World Cup
Theme”, from 1986, bottles the elation of a vital goal into a deathlessly joyful electronic stomp. I played it to death long, long ago but that shouldn’t stop others indulging. On the flip is Washington DC alt-rockers Air Miami’s “World Cup Fever” which is more of a snippet than a song and, in any case, was in honour of the 1994 World Cup, where England didn’t qualify, so the less said, the better. If I’ve played “The Official World Cup Theme” to death, everyone else has played Baddiel, Skinner & Lightning Seeds’ “Three Lions” but it, nonetheless, receives a timely reissue on red vinyl. Divisive due to its ubiquity, I can recall a time when it sounded fresh and even poignant.
Oral Habit A Broken Chord (Krautpop!) + Snüff Silly Not Silly (Wild Honey)
Two that fly out of the traps with garage punk attitude. Oral Habit are a Brighton band dipped deep in Sixties trash. The vocals on their debut album have that gulp-reverbed Cramps-y feel, while the music charges and chugs, hiccups and snarls. They're unafraid of stylistic twists, for instance “Matter” is a ballad swamped in over-amped strum while “Thin Trippin” is their self-proclaimed attempt at Madchester baggy but is so coarsely rendered it becomes its own thing. On marbled yellow vinyl in photo/info inner sleeve, it’s bold
and bangin’ and I can’t wait to see them live. Padua trio Snüff, via the reliable Italian label Wild Honey, are not to be confused with the (also good) British punks (who don’t have an umlaut over the “u”). Their second album takes Darling Buds/Primitives-style catchy, femme-fronted indie pop and runs it through a noisy rock’n’roll ringer, slam-dancing it into the moshpit. The lyrics have substance too. Comes on transparent green vinyl in photo/lyric inner sleeve.
Richard Bundy & Anna Phoebe From the Edge (Claypipe Music)
When London small press-styled label Clay Pipe Music put out vinyl, it’s time to pay attention. Their releases are carefully conceived and realised, usually in very limited runs. They major in themed thoughtful instrumental outings. Composers Richard Bundy and Anna Phoebe earn their keep in the worlds of film and TV but From the Edge is a labour of love, built on recording in spaces in and around Dover, then weaving the whole into two pieces, one per side. They went everywhere from an early 19th century staircase within the famous White Cliffs to the strings of the Sacconi Quartet recorded in the medieval St Edmund’s Chapel. Phoebe’s violin leads but, especially on Side B’s “Unspiralling the Rock”, electronics add trimmings and oomph. Comes on salmon pink vinyl in typically elegant Clay Pipe sleeve in info inner sleeve
Various Dressed in Black: Goth Divas From the Dark Side 1941-2025 (Ace)
Just the other day theartsdesk had Cathi Unsworth writing about this two-record compilation which she curated, based on her book Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth, focusing on the female. Check that here. The album is a fine thing indeed, touching on the post-punkers we immediately think off – Siouxsie & The Banshees, Diamanda Galás, Lydia Lunch – but, mostly, looking to gothic sensibility prior to the modern, from Bobbie Gentry’s perfect country mystery “Ode to Billie Joe” to The Shangri-La’s “Dressed in Black” to Juliette Greco and even Billie Holiday, as well as inheritors of the mantle such as Anna Calvi and the Cardiacs-affiliated Mummy. Others on board include The Cramps, Shirley Collins, Nina Simone, Cocteau Twins, Danielle Dax and The Velvet Underground, the whole in impeccable photo/info inner sleeves where Unsworth gives background. If your hair was ever crimped, this is a must.
Graham Reynolds The Portcullis (Fire) + Acid Arab Resonance (All Night Long)
Two albums that take electronic music somewhere different. Graham Reynolds is a Texan composer who works in film, theatre and dance but, as part of the Weird Walk Record Cult, a group supporting offbeat releases, he’s created a “dungeon synth” set themed around his own family history, going back to Launceston Castle in Cornwall in the time of Richard I. He’s said the tracks, whose names are olde worlde references, are exercises in imagining lost long-ago times. With or without such background information, the listener is presented with spooked instrumentals that occasionally offer sweet motifs but, as often, gloop down to sinister clatter and metallic crunch. Different and intriguing. Comes on neon
green vinyl in art inner sleeve. Acid Arab are a Paris-based French-Canadian unit who do for the music of the North African diaspora what Balkan Beat Box once did for another region. Which is to say, pump it up for the 21st century dancefloor. Their fourth album does not disappoint, showcasing a plethora of vocalists, including Yasmine Hamdan, on songs that belly dance and techno-jump with equal verve. Every tune’s a whopper. On two records, there’s plenty to get stuck into. Their clubbiest yet and possibly their best too
Laurie Anderson with Sexmob Let X=X (Nonesuch) + Roberta Flack The Montreux Years ((BMG) + Allen Toussaint Songbook (Craft) + Rainbow In Concert 1976 Live in Dusseldorf (Edsel) + Blur Live at the Budokan (Parlophone)
How about a bunch of live albums? First a triple set in multiple gatefold, recorded on a 2023 tour Laurie Anderson did with New York deconstructionist jazzers Sexmob. Anderson drifts into the conceptually improvised to the extent her live work is sometimes more interesting than engaging but there’s juice on Let X=X. It combines the expected exercises in ambient noodle and wry philosophising with songs from throughout her career, including Eighties fare such as “From the Air”, “Gravity’s Angel”, and even “O Superman”. There’s even an eight-minute reimagining of Lou Reed & Metallica’s “Junior Dad”. The latest in the
Montreux Years album series, which collates performances from the archives of the late Montreux Jazz Festival founder Claude Nobs, is Roberta Flack, four sides in gatefold. She’s a good fit, rendering her Seventies prime via loose, easy arrangements. “Killing Me Softly With His Song” and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”, of course, but also material such as a magnificent ten minute wander round Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” (a song she covered in 1973). At her best, as proved here, Flack, who died last year, was mellow
yet mighty. Allen Toussaint, who died in 2015, was the epitome of New Orleans, songwriting, producing and playing for a who’s who of that city’s best. The reissued 2013 album Songbook arrives on gatefold double, a performance at Joe’s Pub in New York in 2009. Solo on piano and chatting when he fancies, he plays through his own material, the likes of “Lipstick Traces (on a Cigarette)” and “Southern Nights”, alongside covers such as “St James Infirmary”. It captures a sophisticated master in the autumn of his years, holding
court with a welcoming crowd. A couple of months ago, theartsdesk on Vinyl’s Record Store Day Special reviewed a record of a concert in Köln, Germany, recorded on 25th September 1976 by Richie Blackmore’s heavy rock kingpins Rainbow. Now a set arrives recorded two days later at Dusseldorf’s Philipshalle. The RSD review is here, and pretty much everything written applies to this triple set, including that “it’s an object lesson in
Seventies rock as tight, ballsy and invigorating”. Blur and Britpop were never my bag but those into all that will welcome the Record Store Day limited edition reissue of Live at the Budokan, originally only available on CD in Japan. Recorded in November 1995, just after they’d released The Great Escape, it’s a peak Britpop snapshot. They ram-raid through their set with unbridled zip. It’ll never be my thing but it’s retro pop-rockin’ is raucously peppy. Comes on double in gatefold.
Ambrose Akinmusire & Mary Halvorson Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings (Nonesuch) + Steven Bernstein/Steven Bernstein & Scotty Hard ResoNation Trio/Ultra Resonance (Royal Potato Family) + Kenny Barron | Ray Drummon | Ben Riley Live in Brecon: So Many Lovely Things (Elemental Music)
Three very different jazz outings. First, abstract-leaning trumpet player Ambrose Akinmusire, together with New York avant-garde guitarist Mary Halvorson. The result is as freaky as you’d imagine. One piece has looped shrieking, another indulges in tone music, Akinmusire often uses his instrument to create breathy hissy noises rather than traditional playing. Whenever it settles to sweet-on-the-ear, they throw in an angular hand grenade to keep listeners on their toes. It’s more fun that you’re imagining. Another jazzer taking their
work into the experimental zone is Steven Bernstein, a hardy perennial New York brass player who’s worked with everyone from Lou Reed to Woody Allen. His latest project is to take a set of lively elastic improvisations made with bassist Steve Colley and drummer Nasheet Waits, which appear on sides one and two of this two record set, and give them to Scotty Hard, a producer associated with the intersection of jazz and underground hip hop, the results appearing on sides three and four. Bernstein was driven to this by hearing the dub version of a Burning Spear album. He and Hard attempt similar alchemy. They do well. It helps that the originals are playfully offbeat, staying away from formal jazz modes. The remixes are suitably stoned-out brain-fryers. A welcome exercise which arrives with 12” x 12” photo/info insert. For those who want something more usual, New York
Barcelona enterprise Elemental Music unearths a set recorded at the Brecon Jazz Festival in summer 1995 by pianist Kenny Barron, bassist Ray Drummond and drummer Ben Riley. All three are or were behemoths of 20th century jazz (Drummond and Riley are no longer with us), masters who, between them, played with almost every big name from the era. Spread over two records in gatefold, they run the gamut from a 12-minute “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top” to a couple of Thelonious Monk cuts and some of Barron’s own. For proper jazz buffs (which I’m not), it’s a well-mastered, virtuosic, rediscovered treat.
Juli Deák Brisk (Thanatosis Produktion)
Juli Deák is a Hungarian flautist who recorded this debut album in a Budapest church. When you hear the words “flute album”, it’s not inspiring, but Brisk is. Deák creates looping squiggles of overblown flute motifs that (I’m presuming) are layered using electronics, the clicks of her keys adding percussive rhythm. The result is akin, sometimes, to Philip Glass and other American minimalists, relentless, driving, repetitive, but, at the same time, addictive. Fans of Koyaanisqatsi may enjoy it. However it was made, it’s elevational music, special and different. Once the mind has settled to its moments of shrillness, the music reveals itself. Unique and ground-breaking.
George Thorogood and the Destroyers The Baddest Show on Earth: Greatest Hits Live (Craft) + Jason Ricci & The Bad Kind 13 Hours (Gulf Coast) + Taj Mahal & The Phantom Blues Band Time (Resonatin’/Thirty Tigers)
A new seven-tracker shows off US bar blues-rock monster George Thorogood hammering out live versions of old favourites, from his own much-loved, riff-tastic “Bad to the Bone” to a ten minute stroll through rhythm’n’booze classic “One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer”. He reanimates jump blues for a beer-swilling crowd with aplomb. It doesn’t claim to be ele
gant but it packs welcome wallop. Jason Ricci inhabits adjacent territory but goes for slink rather than bosh, and his lyrics are a wirier proposition. The opening cut on his new album is a takedown of modern life’s travails, “Sick of This Shit”, with the bisexual Ricci firing barbs at Trump's USA, while elsewhere he showcases his trademark harmonica skills while wife, Kaitlin Dibble, tells a moody yarn of love’n’drugs. 13 Hours doesn’t reinvent the blues but pushes it somewhere lyrically refreshing and, on the title track, boasts spectacular guitar play. Comes on dirtied white vinyl. Finally, we take things down a notch or two
with an album by octogenarian blues royalty Taj Mahal, except that it’s not really new, it’s taken from 2010 sessions, and is an easy-going set with the title track an unreleased Bill Withers song. His voice sometimes has a Louis Armstrong feel and his band form round him like a cuddle. Warm and relaxed, it’s not essential but is one of the last original blues dons enjoying himself. Comes on gatefold.
Arvo Pärt Alina (ECM)
I came late to Estonian composer Arvo Pärt but have friends who found his pared-back pieces a great discovery in the ambient electronic era. "Für Alina" is regarded as Pärt’s 1976 breakthrough bridge to what he would go on to do. It’s combined here with “Spiegel im Spiegel”, the whole put together from hours’-long guided improvisations in a Frankfurt church in 1995 by pianists Alexander Malter and Sergej Bezrodny, violinist Vladimir Spivakov, and cellist Dietmar Schwalke. Arvo Pärt takes Satie’s feel and moves it inwards to somewhere isolated yet illuminated. Comes 12” x 12” four-page photo/notes booklet.
ALSO WORTHY OF MENTION
Liz Lawrence Vespers (Chrysalis): Singer Liz Lawrence’s fifth album has rightly been receiving plaudits as an understated yet pin-sharp response to grief. She lost her sister suddenly to an accident, and the shock of it seams the album, peppering the bouncy strum-pop of “Black Ulysses”, or foregrounded on quieter more melancholic songs. It’s the way Lawrence weaves her specificity of experience into the lyrics that makes the album, the everyday little things alongside the ambush of big feelings (“Making you cry, well, that’s a sister’s privilege/If anyone else tried, they wouldn’t get away with it”). It’s that rare thing, a sad album which is not morose. It’s one you want to hear again.
Chant Artist Collective Relics of Tree Worship (in Dub) (Balance): Daniel Morrell is one of the progenitors of the movement against climate change and ecological disaster. He was the man who originally coined the term “carbon neutral”, and is a bridge between big business and environmentalism, responsible for much tree-planting. He’s also part of the Chant Artist Collective who, led by dub monsters Youth and Gaudi, and featuring the likes of Lee “Scratch” Perry and Black Grape’s Kermit. Their two record set on splodgy scarlet eco-vinyl is a limited-to-500 Record Store Day affair that only landed with theartsdesk on Vinyl some time later. It’s a celebration of trees and forests via sturdy, danceable Nineties-style crusty festival dub-dance, the kind of thing old heads would have heard at Club Dog parties, laced with echoing vocals snippets and found sounds. It’s not throwaway, it’s bonged-out, mesmeric and chunky, and features inner sleeve and outer sleeve art by the late Jamie Reid.
Various Stax Does the Beatles (Craft): The raw southern soul of Stax only sounds better with time (especially compared to the mass or horrid bar bands that cover it). This release opens with a case in point, an alternate take of Otis Redding’s version of “Day Tripper” that’s almost punk in its stomping urgency. The rest of the eight-track set finds it hard to live up to such an opener. Nonetheless, from Irma Thomas’s live jazz bar take on “Yesterday” to Isaac Hayes sprawling Rotary Connection-style unpacking of “Something” (replete with fiddle) to instrumental versions of “Eleanor Rigby” and “Hey Jude” by Booker T & The MGs and The Bar-Kays, respectively, it’s a jolly compilation. Comes in info inner sleeve (with shirt essay by Richie Unterberger).
Warning Rituals of Shame (Relapse) + Lunatic Soul Transition II (KScope): A couple on the prog spectrum that are digestible, nonetheless. Warning are a British cult rock band and doom metal pioneers. They split up and reform every few years. Their previous two albums were released in 1999 and 2006 so Rituals of Shame has been a while coming. To my ears it doesn’t really sound like doom; the guitars are suitably slowed-down to a dirge but the feel is different, due to frontman Patrick Walker’s piercing, theatrically mournful singing and bleak lyrics. It’s different, and therefore interesting; I’d be fascinated to know who listens to it. Comes on plum-coloured vinyl in photo gatefold with a 12” x 12” photo/lyric insert. Lunatic Soul is a project of Polish rocker Mariusz Duda, of big-in-mainland-Europe outfit Riverside. KScope Records, always curators of fringe material (they gave The Anchoress her break), go back to Lunatic Soul’s 2020 album Through the Shaded Woods, and present three tracks from it in remixed instrumental form, as well as the previously unreleased “Realm of the Weeping Willows”. The sound is somewhere between Mike Oldfield, electronic spliff music and Irish folk-rock. Admittedly, such a combination sounds appalling but there’s conviction to this and enjoyment to be had. Comes in info inner sleeve.
Pixies Complete B-Sides 1998-1997 (4AD) + Swallow Blown (4AD) + Michael Brook Cobalt Blue | Live at the Aquarium (4AD): A gaggle of material from the 4AD archives, starting with a collection of B-sides from one of their best-known bands, Pixies. In chronological order, it starts with 1988’s “River Euphrates”, B-side to “Gigantic”, and ends with a bunch of invigorating live cuts which formed the flips to their final two 4AD singles (which were a cover of The Jesus & Mary Chain’s “Head On” and, in 1997, four years after they split up, a package built around their old song “Debaser”). Along the way are corkers such as a death metal-adjacent version of “In Heaven” (the Lady in the Radiator song from Eraserhead), the twangy UK Surf version of “Wave of Mutilation”, and their Spanish language take on The Yardbirds' “Evil Hearted You”. Played from top to tail, it thrills. If a contemporary band put out a set this feisty, they’d be the talk of indie-land for years. Who knew that shoegaze would be the most sought-after music of the 2020s? 4AD, possibly. The kids now love the stuff. Good timing, then, for a collection by early-Nineties duo Swallow to appear on “milk vinyl”, containing their sole album, Blow, alongside oddments and remixes EP Blowback, and a couple of previously unreleased “sleepers”, given a side each (one of them the only recently completed title track to the album). Singer Louise Trehy makes Miky Berenyi of Lush sound like Joe Talbot of Idles but that’s the whole point. Their songs combine her singing with equally gossamer wafting guitar. I can take or leave some of it but other tracks have aged well, like Chapterhouse, such as the twinkling “Lacuna” or the narcotic dub of “Peekaboo”. It’s pressed fat and comes on three records. Finally, ambient guitar wizard Michael Brook, before he moved to LA and became a successful Hollywood composer on films such as Brooklyn, The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Into the Wild. Back in May 1992 he was playing through his new album, Cobalt Blue, at its London Zoo Aquarium launch, a set now rediscovered and well-mastered to transparent vinyl over two discs. The original Cobalt Blue featured Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois and, during the same period, Brook worked with Jon Hassell, Harold Budd and Robert Fripp. These names tell you what you need to know. It’s from the post-Orb age but has more in common with ambient music’s earlier phase, the kind of music one might hear in your local astral alignment emporium. It’s twinkly stuff.
Penelope Trappes Opus Novum: A Requiem Reworked (One Little Independent): Last year the experimental Brighton-based singer Penelope Trappes released A Requiem, a cello-led exercise in illbient gloom that some found cathartic. The album is now picked apart and reconstituted by remixers ranging from Saint Etienne to Gazelle Twin, Julia Holter to Stephen Mallinder, alongside others such as Café Oto sort Klara Lewis, and Slovakian drum & bass producer Smote. Given the broad musical landscape of these artists, it’s a more ear-interesting listen than the original but less tonally consistent (which suits this listener). Comes on transparent vinyl with an intriguing 20-page, witchy, black’n’white booklet/fanzine entitled “Violet of Fen”.
Millie Jackson A Moment’s Pleasure (Southbound) + Pink Floyd 8-Tracks (Columbia): A couple from the 1970s, starting with 1979’s A Moment’s Pleasure by an on-a-roll Millie Jackson. Coming off the back of Get It Out’cha System (reviewed here last month) A Moment’s Pleasure saw the sass-mouthed singer dipping into disco, leading with a solid cover of Boney M’s “Never Change Lovers in the Middle of the Night”. The album wasn’t the hit it might of been for a variety of timing reasons outlined in the extensive inner sleeve notes, but it contains hip-swinging wah-wah whoppers such as “We Got to Hit it Off” and “”Once You’ve Had It”. Later in the year she would release her defining concert album Live & Uncensored but this one’s a treat too. She was defining feminist sex positivity for women in pop before it was even a thing. Many owe her much. 8-Tracks is a kind of on-vinyl Greatest Hits for Pink Floyd fans, possibly ones who have their albums on CD, but fancy a record that brings these stand-outs together (“Wish You Were Here”, “Money”, “Another Brick in the Wall Pt.2”, “Comfortably Numb”, etc),. The big sell, outside that, is a three-and-a-half minute Steven Wilson edit of “Pigs on the Wing”, which, on the 1977 album Animals, was just offered as snippets. It’s a small, unexpected addition to this behemoth band’s catalogue.
Future Island From a Hole in the Floor to a Fountain of Youth (4AD): US indie-electro-pop act Future Islands fire out a 20th anniversary celebration of their off-piste career. On gatefold double on orange and blue vinyl, it’s a set of deep cuts deriving from before and after their game-changing 2014 appearance of The David Letterman Show. There’s an appeal to the way they combine desperate romanticism with new wavey synth-pop. Songs here run the gamut from Joy Division-esque to OMD-esque to numbers that sound like Joe Cocker fronting early Tame Impala. It’s hard to argue with a cuts as sweetly longing as “Cotton Flower”. My album came with a hearteningly boys-next-door-having-fun Future Islands newspaper, the In Evening Times.
Thomas Bangalter Mirage (Warner Classics/Erato) + Nobuo Uematsu Merregnon: Heart of Ice (Decca): Two very different soundtrack albums. First, ex-Daft Punker Thomas Bangalter’s music for a ballet by Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet. When I heard he was doing this, my heart sank, as I thought he’d do that thing of proving he’s a “proper musician” via tedious orchestral music. But, no, he surprises with a techno-flavoured seven-part plummet into dubby ambient minimalism, somewhere between Pole and Steve Reich, with a smidgeon of gamelan abstraction. It would fit comfortably into most IDM collections. Merregnon: Heart of Ice, on the other hand, isn’t actually a soundtrack, but sounds like one. The creator of the hugely successful Final Fantasy videogame’s “sound world”, has composed a stand-alone suite which immediately makes one think of Prokofiev’s Pete and the Wolf, with actress Alice Vikander popping up, here’n’there, to relate the story of a wooden robot called Kjugo in a Pinocchio meets Narnia meets anime yarn. Frothy and straightforward, it feels as if it’s aimed at kids rather than theartsdesk on Vinyl.
Rosa Walton Tell Me When It’s a Dream (Transgressive) + Eaves Wilder Little Miss Sunshine (Secretly Canadian): Two albums by singers who give their pop a candied alternative twist. I really thought Let’s Eat Grandma were going to blow up huge. Maybe they will one day as, happily, they remain an ongoing concern, but their three albums of oddball pop never reached beyond the lower end of the Top 40. This year both members released debut solo albums. Jenny Hollingworth in January (as Jenny On Holiday) and now Rosa Walton. I’ve not heard Hollingworth’s, but Walton’s is straightforward indie with a smidge of synth. It never goes anywhere new or dramatically exciting but is tuneful and bubbly, her distinctive voice, thin but sweet, to the fore. For completists, there’s one tune with Hollingworth. Comes in photo/lyric inner sleeve on bright blue vinyl. Eaves Wilder is a London singer making grunge-pop that’s unaffected and fizzy. Lyrically, she keeps it simple but nifty. You can’t argue with a song like “Just Say No”, a bouncy diss to controlling men. Lovely sign-off in the thank-you’s on the photo/lyric inner sleeve; “Thank you to the boy I was seeing when I was eighteen who called me Little Miss Sunshine which made me realise how little he knew me because I was a massive bitch at the time.” Cultural arbiters of taste will focus on the “nepo-baby” aspect as she’s the daughter of successful writers Caitlin Moran and Peter Paphides but, judging from this debut, she has solid songwriting chops (and, no, they're not my mates).
Deniz Tek The Beat (Wild Honey): Deniz Tek is one of the guys behind Seventies band Radio Birdman, the Australian outfit who were punk rock before punk was invented. Now US-based, his latest solo album is a tribute to drummer Ric Parnell, who died in 2022. It’s based on cuts they jammed together in 2016. Together with bassist Bob Brown and his wife Anne, these are resurrected to a meaty set of twangy, Detroit-tinged rock with lyrical attitude, but also the wry lived-in feel of a Septuagenarian. It’s more striking than I was expecting, as befits a memorial to the British drummer who was in Seventies rockers Atomic Rooster and proto-punks The Deviants, but is best-known as the exploding drummer Mick Shrimpton in This is Spinal Tap (“Well, as long as there’s sex and drugs, I could do without the rock’n’roll”). Comes on scarlet vinyl in photo/info inner sleeve.
Various Promise Me Delight: Italo Disco and European Pop from the Golden Age (Ace): For those ancient enough to remember, holidays in Europe in the 1980s were flavoured by arch four-to-the-floor Euro-pop in clubs, bars, and on the radio. This compilation gathers together an expertly chosen selection, which runs the gamut from the throbbing original of Laura Brannigan’s huge hit “Self Control” (by RAF) to a relentless Soft Cell-ish take on Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” (by Massimo Barsotti DJ.) This isn’t the cosmic disco of Italy’s Adriatic Coast, pre-empting the acid house explosion, it’s way cheesier, mostly closer to music one associates with British gay clubs, songs that sound like a fusion of Hazell Dean and Erasure, hi-NRG kitsch, but there’s also a smattering of robo-pop fusing gorgonzola with futurism. Comes on double with a wealth of pics and sleeve notes.
Mattias de Craene | Black Koyo Mattias de Craene | Black Koyo (WE.R.F.): Belgium seems to have a thriving scene wherein global roots music fuses with local scenes. Brussels group Black Koyo, with Moroccan heritage, play their own intense take on the call’n’response gnawa folk style which, under the auspices of producer (and saxophonist) Mattias de Craene is placed in an electronic sound-bath that amplifies hypnotic qualities, adding tones and touches, but never losing the central intent of looping the brain to the elsewhere. Well worth a listen, this one, for roots-meets-jazz head-music sorts.
Tinlicker Dreams of the Machine (Remember the Future/PIAS): Who’d have thunk that trance populists Above & Beyond’s label Anjuna Beats would become one of the 2020s more pricy and collectable. It’s where Dutch trancers Tinlicker began their album career but album number four sees them elsewhere. It’s a double on info gatefold and contains a suite of numbers that revel in vocal big room trance, female vocals aiming for the ethereal, full of big swishing synth chords, MDMA uplift, not big on actual substance but tuneful and rich in Mediterranean beach club clout.
Casablanca Drivers Protocol (Mattan/Arts & Crafts): Paris-based Corsicans Casablanca Drivers also utilise electronics but are much closer to an indie band. Their second album features vocals and guitars but is equally likely to be driven forward by acid lines and machine drums. Songs such as “Garage” come in somewhere between Soulwax, Ed Banger Records and some of those Nu Rave bands from a decade ago. Overall, it’s not as catchy as it wants to be but still has enough heft to hold the ear and legs at a festival.
Ian Dury Lord Upminster (Demon): Aside from “Spasticus Austisticus” 1981’s Lord Upminster sees Ian Dury on a creative and commercial downswing. He’s only three years from a chart-topping hit but this album didn’t even make the Top 40 and is mostly phoned in (unsurprising as he and Chaz Jankel wrote it in the space of a few hours). It was recorded in Jamaica with the rhythm section of Sly & Robbie, which is to its advantage, but Dury’s lyrics are mostly lame. Not an unpleasant listen but, aside from the aforementioned song, not a memorable one either.
Freyja Garbett Sowden House (Earshift Music) Cinematic Australian jazz composer Freyja Garbett gets together with Brendan McNamara, whose Team Bondi games company is behind the acclaimed L.A. Noire franchise. The album was originally put together with a Seventies-set L.A. Noire spin-off in mind, but is now a stand-alone musical piece. An imaginary game soundtrack, then. Spread over four sides of vinyl, it ranges from jazz-funk to trip-hop-ish fare to the John Barry-esque, all of it exquisitely orchestrated and tight. It’s an oddity, but a classy one, that could be safely be filed next to the best library music.
Sandscape Phenomenology (Octopoda): Listening to Phenomenology, the debut album (I think) from UK duo Sandscape, one is taken on a journey into muffled psychedelic undergrowth. It’s like trip hop cross-bred with the most blurry found-sound musique concrète, the slurred vocal stylings frontwoman Eliza Shaddad bathed in fluff-on-the needle sonics created by producer Daniel Sonabend. Wonked-out head music for the horizontal. And I mean that as a compliment. Comes in art-photo inner sleeve with 12” x 12” 12-page art-photo booklet.
Super Furry Animals Precreation Percolation (Strangetown): Super Furry Animals fans are in for a treat with a collection that pulls together their first two EPs. The vinyl includes these eight songs but the CD, which drifts into wonkier territory, adds many more, including four recorded with the band’s original singer Rhys Ifans, who went onto a successful film acting career. Side A is the Llanfair... (In Space) EP and Side B is The Mood Droog EP, both originally on Welsh indie Ankst. The set combines rock, punk, psyche and strummy Seventies-ness in a juicy manner. It’s easy to see why Creation Records signed them soon after. Comes in art inner sleeve with a 12” x 12” lyric insert that also has a densely written and enjoyable history of the band’s early days singer Gruff Rhys (eg “By early 1994 the name Super Furry Animals was coined by Ifans after seeing it written out in cloud form in the sky. Daf was there and can verify”).
Clover County Finer Things (Thirty Tigers): Carrie K has worked with “Stick Season” star Noah Kahan and can clearly hear something going on in the work of singer Clover County whose debut album, Finer Things, she produces. Clover County is the stage name of Amanda Schiano, who hails from the musically storied city of Athens, Georgia. It’s well-chosen because it sounds both soft and substantial, just like her music, a thoughtful, very American concoction that treads lightly between country and pop, a box of chatty girl-next-door snapshots, string-laced, strummed and warmly delivered, as if you were in a room at a house party with her at about 2.00AM when she suddenly produces an acoustic at just the right moment. Comes on white vinyl in photo/lyric inner sleeve.
Gary Marks Crossroads (Lantern Heights): Gary Marks is best-known as a cult artist who released albums in the 1970s which combined elements of jazz and folk. A socially conscious songwriter, his music has things in common with Tim Buckley but also with Elton John. He never fancied engaging fully with the music business. Instead, after his early albums, he created a body of work off on his own. For Record Store Day this year he gathered 14 songs from across the decades and released them as Crossroads. There’s much here that’s not for theartsdesk on Vinyl, too proggy and earnest, but his piano-led work, at its best, has a very human poignancy.
MOMO Tum Tum Tum (Agogo): You may not have heard of MOMO. Even Discogs lists at least ten other Momo’s before it gets to our one, London-based Brazilian Marcelo Frota, but he’s been releasing music for 20 years. His latest tips its hat to tropicália and is a tightly knit set that, on songs such as “Vermelho e Rosa” and “Dream of Samba”, showcases luscious songwriting chops. There’s some lovely trombone work from Rozie Turton, but the whole thing is of a piece, a sweet-natured, bubbly collection ripe for warm weather listening.
David J Tracks From the Attic Revisited (Independent Project): As one of those weirdos who prefers the Eighties lyserica of Love and Rockets to Bauhaus (don’t start), I always welcome a dip into the mind of David J. A couple of years ago he released a bunch of old demos that had been sitting unheard for decades (Tracks from the Attic). Now he gathers 10 of these together and revitalises them with a new band and, sometimes, new lyrics. It’s not essential stuff, but he sounds in very good cheer, like he’s having a blast, and its contagious, especially on opener “I Wish Those Spacemen Would Come”. Arrives in Independent Project’s usual smart envelope packaging.
AND WHILE WE’RE HERE…
- Big-in-Scotland femme-popper Girli (London singer Amelia Toomey) is up to her third album. It’s called It’s Just My Opinion and comes on bright blue vinyl in photo inner sleeve and die-cut outer sleeve, with a set of six colourful 12” x 12" art/lyric inserts, one side per song. She’s a chewy lyricist, proudly feminist and bisexual, but, while her mainstream electro-pop boasts verses with musical heft, the choruses are over-saccharine.
- Brighton-based Brazilian Lau Ro combines swirling guitar patterns with spaced-out production on his second album Lau, which appears on Mexican Summer Records. Tinted with a jazzy lushness but also stringed-up and, on occasion, sunnily stoned, it’s laidback, lovely and ready for summer lounging.
- Des Rocs – Danny Rocco to his mum – is a fixture of the New York scene, both solo and as a member of his now defunct outfit Secret Weapons. He’s one of those who supports all the big rock bands when they hit town and they welcome his high energy sets warming up the crowd. His latest is To Hell and Back on Sumerian and it’s a blast, coming on like early Queen, when they were a heavy rock band, but with a touch of Aerosmith riffiness and a modern production feel. Comes on gatefold in photo/lyric inner sleeve on vinyl that looks like two splodgy Mars’s wandering across a white sun
- Kiefer Sutherland seems generally a good egg so I’m not inclined to do that thing where we moan because film stars won’t stay in their lane. He’s also well into his musical career. It’s clearly not a passing fancy. Then songs on his latest, Grey, on Maple Creek Records, are a damn sight better than the FM country-rockin’ Bloor Street of 2022, which is his only other album I’ve heard. He sounds like he’s been through a few downs (his legendary dad died in ’24), and they’ve added a reflective hurt to his lyrics which enriches the songs. If you’re after Americana by a Hollywood star, you could do a whole lot worse. Comes in photo/info inner sleeve and, good on him, his face appears nowhere.
- Belfast singer-songwriter Joshua Burnside has also suffered a loss, a good friend from a drug overdose, which heavily flavours the heartache that bleeds through his latest album It’s Not Going to be OK on Nettwerk Music. His sound is pared-back, folk-ish, unpretentiously constructed, conversational, with a cello effectively adding melancholy where needed. He sounds like he’d hold an audience in thrall, but it’s not one for me. Comes in lyric inner sleeve which also explains the bereavement and backdrop.
- Don Williams passed sway in 2017 but a set of songs have been unearthed and revitalized by his son Tim and his longtime co-producer Gareth Fundis, with some partly re-recorded with members of his touring band. The title is Epilogue | The Cellar Tapes, and it’s on Craft Records. Williams was a kingpin of balladic, lovey-dovey country redolent of BBC 2 smoothery of the Seventies and Eighties. There are moments, such as a jolly, hoedown-ish cover of Rodney Crowell’s “Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight”, but most of it is for devotees. Comes with a 12” x 12” insert containing biographical background details.
- On her fourth album, Swedish singer-violinist Sarah Parkman continues to push folk into out-there spaces. It’s called Aster, Atlas and is on Supertraditional Records. It’s a big listen, encompassing material ranging from electronic abstraction to choral composition to enormous orchestrations redolent of Sarah McLachlan’s more bombastic fare. Mostly, though, led by her Swedish vocals and chat-singing it’s an ever-morphing adventure painted of a wide sonic palette, coming in somewhere between the more outré work of Gazelle Twin and Bat For Lashes. It’s in gatefold in photo/info/lyrics inner sleeve.
- More from Wild Honey Records this month. The Peawees are a punk-fuelled rock’n’roll band from La Spezia, Italy. To celebrate their 30th anniversary, last year, they released a boxset, Food For My Soul, which contained all six of their albums plus a seventh disc, More Scraps, which contained a live-wired selection of B-sides , off-cuts and other bits’n’bobs. It now receives a stand-along release in photo/info inner sleeve. It’s a lot of fun. They can do rockabilly but are far more interested in writing tight power-pop nuggets that must be fab in a sweaty cellar.
- Composer Dylan Mattingly was born into a musically hyper-achieving Californian family and he’s now adding to their cache of cultural weight. On his new album, The Wild Heart on Nonesuch Records, he showcases his intense, driving style, retuning piano and harp on three pieces drawn from other works, all performed by New York ensemble Contemporaneous (conducted by David Bloom). You know the way church bells sound when they all peal together and meld into each other? That’s what Mattingly does with the instruments. It’s looping, but not in that Glass/Reich way. There’s also a pushiness to it that’s percussive, and singing from Iarla Ó Lionáird, bringing further Celtic flavour to what’s an already Irish-sounding piece. It is fascinatingly different. Comes with a densely printed 12” x 12” insert of explanatory notes.
- Monica Queen is a fixture of Glasgow’s indie scene who, along the way, has played with Belle and Sebastian and (less fortunately) Snow Patrol, as well as releasing solo material. She first came to public attention with the band Thrum, and Fire Records, ever home to the underheard, now disinter their 1994 debut album Rifferama, which comes on like a cross between Patti Smith and Crazy Horse at their punkest. No bad place to be.
- A snarky mini-album arrives via Kent’s always entertaining Property of the Lost label. It’s by local post-punk outfit Moron Butler and Yorkshire jazz mavericks Vipertime and it’s called Vipertime & Moron Butler. It’s a six-track one-off born of them playing together in Hastings and consists of Moron Butler’s Troy Osmond rant-poeting in a 2026 beatnik-meets-Chumbawamba style over a busy stew of spiky guitar and some great sax work. Comes with an A4 lyric sheet.
- Italian producer Francesco Lo Giudice appears with his third album in five years under his Alsogood moniker. It’s entitled 1000 Smiles and digs down into smooth jazz tinted with an instrumental hip hop feel. Sunny and flutey and easy, it’s too jazzual for theartsdesk on Vinyl but fans of the more watery output of Stones Throw, Gilles Peterson, Tru Thoughts et al may dig it.
- Also on the laidback jazz tip, but more interesting, is the debut album from Cornish four-piece Susannah Sail. Entitled Are You Alright?, it appears via Kroustpop!, a sister label of Krautpop!, mentioned elsewhere on this page. A six-track mini-album, it takes the jazz form and mingles it with a seasoning of indie bite, with singer-trumpeter Rosie Gardner’s airy vocals sealing the deal. When Gilles Peterson gets it right, this would be on his agenda. Comes in photo/lyric inner sleeve.
- Hardy perennial Norwegian jazz guitar kingpin Eivind Aarset, a player who’s worked with a everyone from Ray Charles to David Sylvian, earned his reputation by kicking at genre envelopes. His latest album, as Eivind Aarset 4tet, is Strange Hands, on Jazzland Records, and he continues to do so. This time he leans into rock guitar timbre, sometimes to the extent of hitting proper rock-out jamming but, more often, floating off with spacier fare (the flutey “Deep Green” is particularly notable in the latter vein). Comes in art inner sleeve.
- Max Vanderwolf is s scenester and player, festival coordinator and more, and in recent years, under his surname, he’s been recording cult albums that showcase an offbeat talent, harking back to the likes of sonically opulent heads such as Harry Nilsson and Todd Rundgren. His latest, Songs You’ll Never Hear, on Another Record Label, continues this, boasting orchestrally large songs with prog tendencies and lyrics critiquing “the state of things”.
- Christopher Tignor is an American musician who moved from post-rock explorations, a decade or more ago, into more formal classical styles. His new album, Bleeding Past the Edges, on his longterm home, Western Vinyl Records, is a stern string-led affair, forlorn in tone, a sombre slice of carefully considered modern classical that feels like a high-end black’n’white indie film about a central character declining from a terminal illness while the world tips hopelessly towards environmental collapse.
- Will White is the younger brother of Felix and Hugo White of The Maccabees, and has sometimes played keyboards for the band, as well as being a part of the siblings’ 86TVs project. His debut solo album, It’s Easy to Let the Thoughts Gain Ground, which arrives via Shoreditch creative hub State51, is a contemplative affair, sat midway between singer-songwriterly and something more indie rock, leaning closer to the latter. The lyric inner sleeve has a beautifully written short story on it, possibly autobiographical, a love story, short, sweet, funny, lively and sad. If he ever becomes an author, I will be there.
- Alynda Segarra’s Hurray For The Riff Raff project has gone through many incarnations in their two-decade career. Their output usually takes folk or rock and adds a twist, sometimes abstract, to it. They’re not an easy band to pin down, in terms of genre, but their latest release, Live at the Old Town School of Folk Music, on Nonesuch Records is. A double set that comes with a 12” x 24” poster of the band, it reminds of primetime Dinosaur Jr or, in places, Neil Young’s Weld album, but, of course, with Segarra’s emotive voice at the centre.
- You can’t fault Eighties mod Hammond don James Taylor for ambition. He recently released a classical solo piano album and now, with James Taylor Quartet, he gives us medieval prayer chants nailed to his funkin’ grooves, featuring Benenden Chapel Choir very much to the fore. Entitled Te Deum and on Acid Jazz Records, it’s hard to imagine who this is aimed at but it’s an ebullient listen, nonetheless.
- Theartsdesk on Vinyl is sent a lot of ambient-ish modern classical. I suspect this is because, in the streaming world, it’s a hugely popular style, faceless “chill music” for our stressful world and all that. I’m into ambience that floats me somewhere but everyone’s constant need to becalm themselves is becoming increasingly tedious. Swedish pianist composer Peter Sandberg, however, waylays my imminent rantings with a reverb, in-the-room-feel piano set called Temporary Existence of Humans, on RPM records. It does not do anything spacey or new but its sweet nature effectively delivers happy chemicals for busy brains.
- The second album from female Dublin duo Lemoncello is Perfect Place on Claddagh Records. First off, this album has a great cover, which I very much hope was taken from life and not PhotoShopped. The pair create a folk music that’s deep dipped in electronica and painted with modernism and a smattering of pop. Warm and harmonic, it’s easy to imagine this particular cocktail taking seed with the wider public. Comes in lyric inner sleeve.
- Jim Keller is a mate of Tom Waits and he sounds like a mate of Tom Waits on his new album Vinylly on Continental Song City Records (he even has Tom vouch for his music on a cover sticker). He’s a player in the US music biz, working behind the scenes, but had a Billboard Top 10 hit way back in 1981 (the Cars-ish “867-5309/Jenny” with his band Tommy Tutone). No deeply serious album could be called Vinylly and, indeed, these lived-in, bar-bluesy songs, fronted by Keller’s croaky of voice, are far from po-faced. They are, instead, wryly witty and world-weary, recalling some of Robbie Robertson’s solo fare. Comes in photo/info inner sleeve.
- The band Valtos sound like they would give a green field festival a work-out. Their third album continues their journey into ways that Celtic music might combine with electronic throb. It’s titled The Last Light and is on Island Life Records. In places it reminds this writer of Dreadzone, and in other places Clannad, but is a too Delerium-style trancey for sweep theartsdesk of Vinyl.
- In principle the music of Norwegian outfit Gangar should be ace. They combine their native folk music, notably using the Hardanger fiddle, with metal-flavoured heavy rock, but their second album Dreng, via the combined forces of Heilo Records and Sounds Like Gold, is an acquired taste. As a teenager I could never stand Big Country’s way of making their guitars sound like bagpipes and something about Gangar is bringing that back. If I was at Download I might have a headbang to them but, cold, on record, it’s not persuasive.
- The debut album from Kentucky country singer Colton Bowlin is called Grandpa’s Mill and arrives via Thirty Tigers Records. He has C&W lyrical skills, and the proper sense of mournful nostalgia for a lost time when things were simpler and better I could listen to this stuff all day, well, for one day a fortnight, maybe, and he has enough rock edge to push it the roadhouse. Comes on rich purple vinyl in info inner sleeve.
- Theartsdesk on Vinyl does its best to give all independent releases some coverage, as long as we have at least one positive thing to say. If you wanna see slatings, go check out one and two star reviews on theartsdesk’s Disc of the Day. But I’m struggling with Will Samson’s Sing Again album on Human Chorus Records. How’s this: if you enjoy that falsetto vulnerability thing that Bon Iver/Fleet Foxes do, with a slight John Grant twist, this may be for you. Comes on transparent vinyl.
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