Indie / Alternative

Perhaps one of the most exciting and anticipated projects in the world of heavy instrumental music is Parlor Greens, a fresh organ trio on Colemine Records! You could say that Parlor Greens are greater than the sum of their parts…however, the individual parts are simply stellar on their own. Tim Carman (GA-20) on drums, Jimmy James (True Loves, formerly Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio) on guitar, and Adam Scone (Scone Cash Players, The Sugarman 3) on organ.Scone is perhaps the most tasteful living organist on planet Earth (and beyond) and to watch him play is to truly watch a master at work. He bends the organ to his will like a true mastercraftsman. He’s a veteran of the soul revival scene, having played on many Daptone recording sessions since their inception, but also has learned from some of the legends of soul jazz: Melvin Sparks and The Turbanator himself Dr. Lonnie Smith. Jimmy James needs no introduction to many as he’s been seen all over the world performing with instrumental groups The True Loves and the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio. Perhaps the most dangerous right hand in all of soul music, his signature funky approach can be identified by even the most novice of music fans, a feat most musicians could only dream of. Tim Carman. The backbone. The pocket. Having cut his teeth touring the world with blues group GA-20, Carman’s expertise in the world of blues shuffles might make him an unlikely candidate to lay the foundation for the funky Parlor Greens, but this debut LP shows otherwise. Steady, heavy pockets and as funky as they come.Parlor Greens started off as an idea before it even had a name. Carman had been chatting with Colemine label boss Terry Cole about their shared love for organ combo records of yesterday on labels like Blue Note and Prestige. Cole said he’d love to have an organ trio be the first project at the label’s new studio, Portage Lounge, located in Loveland, Ohio. So when Carman tapped James and Scone for the session, the stage was set. Carman and Cole had started work a day early to dial in the drum sound, so when the rest of this murderer’s row arrived they hit the ground running. It was instant chemistry. Within the first ten minutes of everyone plugging in, a song was written and recorded, “West Memphis”. And over the next three days, these three maestros conducted a beautiful and soulful symphony straight to tape. As natural and fun as three old friends getting together after a long absence, only this was the first time they had written and performed together. True magic.So this is the result of that session. Eleven cuts. Ten originals. Two sides. All killer, no filler. Straight to the old reliable Tascam 388 tape machine, mixed up nice and dirty for your enjoyment. Parlor Greens are proud to present their debut long player, In Green / We Dream.

Culled from half a decade of home four-tracking, Remote Echoes is a hissy, crumbly, and ungrounded expression of Clay Parton and Canaan Amber's ongoing Duster project. A mix of cassette only demos released under the banners Christmas Dust and On The Dodge, this 14 track album also includes a bevy of previously unissued stragglers. Duster's unique blend of fuzzy guitars, bargain synths, muffled percussion, and hushed vocals anticipated chillwave, mumblecore, and corecore, elegantly illustrating the holy trinity of slacker vices: cigarettes, coffee, and the weed supreme.。

A lingering guitar note. A cushion of a bassline nudging along a hushed cadence unspooling impressionistic poeticism one halting line at a time; the sparse snap of a snare providing punctuation. This is how Boston’s Karate opened their third full-length, 1998’s The Bed Is In The Ocean. Perhaps this was a reaction to the aggressive punk tones that marked their previous album, or maybe they hoped to capture the somnambulant dusk on one of those pristine fall days that make living in a town whose population swells when colleges welcome back students all worthwhile. Then again, Karate never made a point of chasing the same idea twice, and “There Are Ghosts” remains in line with the band’s stylistic intrepidness and unpredictability. Even the group’s lineup appeared constantly in flux. After expanding from a trio to a quartet and employing a dual-guitar attack with 1997’s In Place of Real Insight, founding member Eamonn Vitt hung up his axe to attend medical school. Karate soldiered on as a trio, with mid-stream addition Jeff Goddard’s bass work helping establish a sidewinding path forward through the smoky jazz melodicism and sun-beaten blues brushstrokes that hung in the background of the band’s catalog. In their short time together, Karate helped bolster the national punk ecosystem, a scene in which individual artistic vision was prized but rarely achieved. Their exacting precision and emotive interplay helped recombine the DNA of the dignified grace of slowcore, the hot-and-sweaty atmospherics of the blues, and the high-wire tension of post-hardcore to deliver drawling instrumental curveballs and a furtive riptide climax with a controlled grace on “Outside Is The Drama.” Singer-guitarist Geoff Farina frequently teased out the emotional nuances of each song, his worn-in voice shading in the complexities of his enigmatic lyrics; no matter how difficult it may be to parse his snatched-from-daily-life wisdoms, on The Bed Is In The Ocean Farina sounded like a guy who knew exactly the right thing to tell whoever may be listening. And with Karate’s snaking turns through quasi-punk reveries no one else appeared capable of mustering, it’s comforting to hear it accomplished by a band that knew exactly what they were doing.

An expanded and remastered 25th anniversary edition of the mythical Olympia, Washington, trio's out of print singles and compilation tracks, A Single History 1991-2001 gathers odds and ends from across Unwound's first decade. From their earliest post-hardcore squeals on "Crab Nebula" to the dub-inspired death march of "Behold The Salt," this 23-track double LP fills in the distorted gaps of their initial seven album run."I'd rather eat decomposed fish than listen to this."—Pitchfork

Unbound opens with a single, trembling chord that rises and descends before meeting a warm, beguiling voice, a voice singing in a tradition that’s been heard in this northern river country for millennia. The music that follows is a soulful dialogue between the ancient tradition of powwow singing and a contemporary musical palette. On Unbound, the powwow style of singing is entwined with synthesized voice modulation, and hand drumming is accented with electronic samples and beats — the harmonies and resonances are equal parts cultural and musical. Geographically, Bizhiki is almost wholly a made-in-Wisconsin project, a collaboration between Dylan Bizhikiins Jennings, Joe Rainey and the multi-instrumentalist Sean Carey (S. Carey), who for years has been a secret weapon within the Bon Iver family. Bezhikiins Jennings grew up singing within the powwow tradition, around the Lac Du Flambeau and Lac Courte Oreilles reservations in Central Wisconsin. He now makes his home in Northern Wisconsin, on the Bad River reservation on the shores of Lake Superior. He’s joined on the album by his adopted brother, Rainey, a Red Lake Ojibwe powwow singer from Minneapolis who now makes his home within his wife’s Oneida Nation on the shores of Lake Michigan. The collaboration between these three musicians first began at the Eaux Claires festival in 2015. The festival was being organized on Ojibwe’s ancestral homelands, and the organizers didn’t feel right without the inclusion of the native communities who lived nearby. Bizhikiins Jennings remembers getting an invitation to play the festival and thinking “I wish more people would say this — that instead of reading from some land acknowledgement, that they would say ‘we're gonna give your people space and just invite you to do what you wanna do.’” The open-endedness of the initial invitation and the “let’s just do something together” spirit continues to inform Bizhiki’s process. Recording steadily over the course of years — and between several projects from Bizhiki’s members, including two solo albums (Joe Rainey's Niineta and S. Carey's Break Me Open) – the trio chipped away at an expansive, ambitious and unique record that sounds like no other music being made today. Unbound is a collaboration between a group of singers and musicians at a particular time and place, exchanging ideas in an open-ended dialogue deeply considering the resources that we’re trying to share, generations into the future.

Jim O'Rourke returns with his first new solo album since 2001. All the classic O’Rourke-isms are here, for you musicologist types: percolating banjos, smooth electric leads, organic, kicking drum sounds, the flickering of shakers to the left and right, mellow but ominous woodwinds, sounds that indicate “vintage” (before turning left and running out the door), sonic jokes, sonic tear-jerkers, sonic jerkoffs, all wrapped in spacious yet subtle left to right placement of everything in the picture. There’s moments of low comedy next to high drama and juicy melancholy with a seeming lack of regard for proximity. Plus―sudden surging rhythms! The Visitor is sort of “O’Rourke Does O’Rourke”―Jim re-contextualizing everything he’s done over the years, and throwing out the bullshit. The one thing you won’t hear is his voice―perhaps another O’Rourkian self-examination? Or maybe he’s just saving it for all the name-calling on his next album.

Everything Is Simple arrives four years after its predecessor, Hold You Up, which in turn came five years after Show Us The Fire. Zelienople does not do things in a hurry. Why should it? Operationally and musically, haste has nothing to offer the Chicago-identified trio. They do not rush their time signatures, and they do not rush their albums, because however long it takes is the amount of time necessary. So, what’s necessary? Singer-guitarist Matt Christensen, multi-instrumentalist Brian Harding, and drummer Mike Weis had all been in other bands before they united to become Zelienople in 1998 (the band’s name references a town in Pennsylvania where Harding and Christensen were once stranded while waiting for parts necessary to fix a broken-down car). All of them have all played other music since then. Harding records long-form instrumental music under the guise Ill Professor. Weis has explored ambient sound, studied Korean rhythmic practices, and improvised with Kwaidan and Slow Bell Trio. Christensen is torrentially productive on his own; at the end of April 2024 he had 212 digital releases on Bandcamp, and by the time you read this, there’ll be more. If Christensen is driven by compulsive necessity, Zelienople’s rate of production must be a spoiler, not an enhancer. But the three musicians need each other to make the convergence of ceremonial cadences, echo-laden instrumentation, and mournfully resigned singing that constitutes Zelienople’s music. Still, the making of Everything Is Simple took Zelienople out of its comfort zone. In 2020, Weis left Chicago for Kalamazoo, Michigan, which meant that the band no longer had access to its usual recording refuge in his basement. They turned loss into an opportunity to change their approach. Instead of layering tracks incrementally, they recorded mostly live with two extra musicians, Eric Eleazer (synthesizer, Fender Rhodes piano) and PM Tummala (synthesizer, Fender Rhodes piano, vibraphones). Keyboards and metallophones broaden the sound field around Weis’ patiently perambulating percussion. And instead of clinging, Harding’s basses and clarinets swirl and wreath around Christensen’s apprehensive articulations of the experience of being a quiet person in a menacingly loud cultural moment. Tummala also contributed his engineering skills, which enabled Christensen to step back from recording duties to concentrate on singing and playing, and his studio, which is much more spacious than Weis’ old basement. While the basic tracks went down quickly, a lengthy period of mixing and fixing ensued, followed by the spatially conscious mastering of Slowdive’s Simon Scott, all of which further magnified the effect of being a bigger band in a bigger space. Still, Zelienople wears its expansiveness lightly; Everything Is Simple may loom sonically, but it doesn’t overwhelm the listener so much as give them the space to inhabit a singular realm.

Descending out of the southern night sky through a turbulent cloud of dreams, memory, longing and psychedelia, Saigon Soul Revival’s second full length album — Mối Lương Duyên — represents the latest act in the group’s resuscitation of the raw, heavy and subversive sounds of 1960s and 70s Saigon. Roughly translated to “destiny”, Mối Lương Duyên is a journey through eight original compositions and three soul-stirring reinterpretations of Saigonese nhạc vàng or golden music: the soundtrack to a Saigon once thought lost to history and amnesia. Driven by Western influences rock, bolero, soul, jazz and the rich heritage of Vietnamese ballads, Mối Lương Duyên delivers a seamless blend of genres and traditional instrumentation (Đàn Tranh, Đàn Bầu & Đàn Nguyệt) with themes from across time and space. Nguyễn Anh Minh's seductive vocals glide through this multi-stylistic tapestry of sound, going beyond the universal concepts of love and heartbreak to explore how destiny can be forged through individual experiences... or as she puts it in her own words: "Anything and anyone that comes into your life, every occurrence, whatever comes and whatever goes. It all happens as it is meant to. Whatever you have to face, whoever you love or lose - we must accept it. We can’t choose our physical body, family, happiness or misery, our place in the world, in the universe...but we have the power to embrace and welcome our destiny. In Vietnamese "Mối Lương Duyên" means destiny but it doesn't only refer to love. It can mean many things, for example: How we all came together to form this band." In this way - by being part of the unfolding story - the album also attempts to musically connect the past with Vietnam's evolving future. And the fact that Saigon Soul Revival seems to succeed in this is perhaps also the reason why the song ĐÁM CƯỚI NHÀ EM will be featured in the upcoming HBO Mini-Serie „The Symphatizer“ (directed by Par Chan-Wook (Oldboy) / Robert Downey Junior producer and actor), which is based on the novel of the same name (Pulitzer Prize 2016) by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Lives Outgrown is the debut album by Beth Gibbons featuring 10 beautiful new songs recorded over a period of 10 years, the album was produced by James Ford & Beth Gibbons with additional production by Lee Harris (Talk Talk).

Lives Outgrown is, by some measure, Beth’s most personal work to date, the result of a period of sustained reflection and change — “lots of goodbyes,” in Beth’s words. Farewells to family, to friends, even to her former self. These are songs from the mid-course of life, when looking ahead no longer yields what it used to, and looking back has a sudden, sharper focus.

(Auschwitz is the band name given to express their view on life. It has no connection to Nazism or racism and is not intended to discriminate or degrade any race, group, or individual.)

We are releasing a cassette of 87 minutes of previously unreleased live recordings by Auschwitz. The great band formed by the godfather of the Kansai Underground Naoto Hayashi, has marked 20 years since his passed away.

Side A: Live 81 consists of all unreleased tracks recorded from an exceptional live performance on the unknown date in 1981 and FRIGHT 7 DAYS in August of the same year. The early Auschwitz music is mostly unheard of until now, despite the buzz about impromptu performances featuring free-form guitar intertwined over repetitive beats like German rock, and it finally appears in the spotlight. This showcases that Auschwitz delivered an extremely cutting-edge live performance, similar to the post-punk style that flourished in Europe and the United States during the same period. Some tracks feature vocals by bassist Imanishi and drummer Nakajima and a glimpse of Hayashi’s side as a guitarist. It is a valuable testament to how Auschwitz was born through the chemistry of the musical expertise of these three artists.

Side B: Live 87-93 is a compilation of Auschwitz’s last live performance in Tokyo in 1993, a live performance at EGGPLANT in April 1987 just before the recording of their masterpiece “Rule of Spirit,” and a high-quality live performance from an unknown date, most likely around 1990. Starting with the far too beautiful “Journey Through the Night” in their last live performance, it mainly features songs and versions unavailable on previous live recordings, including the unreleased masterpiece “Ashes of Love” mentioned in the liner notes. Finally, it concludes with the latest track, “No Titled,” which was accessible to listen to Naoto Hayashi’s solo version on the Auschwitz Complete Box.

Sun, sea, and surf rock converge with dreamy hypnagogic pop on 'Dmaot,' the enchanting sophomore album by the guitar-wielding, vocal-harmonising trio, Rasco. Named after Charlie Megira's acclaimed track "At the Rasco" and influenced by iconic artists like The Cramps, Beach Boys, Elvis, April March, and others, Rasco carefully extracts the essence and distinctive sound of sixties surf and garage bands and distils them into a modern and distinctly Mediterranean context. Blending ethereal vocal harmonies with irresistible guitar riffs, Rasco skillfully creates a one-of-a-kind sonic blueprint that sounds like something you dreamed of hearing at Twin Peaks infamous Roadhouse. Electric guitarist Eden Atiya and bass guitar Gaya Wajsman first crossed paths in a smoky cave in Jerusalem, eventually teaming up with drummer Itay Hamudi to form Rasco. Their self-titled debut album, characterised by catchy guitar riffs entwined with mysterious, ethereal vocals, sung in Hebrew, garnered attention and playlistings from the likes of acclaimed pianist, singer, and composer Hania Rani, and Spotify’s editorial team. Rasco’s hypnotic guitar and vocal-heavy sound have earned the group coveted opportunities to share the spotlight on stage alongside global psych bands such as Altin Gun, Boom Pam, and Messer Chups. The trio’s musical journey has taken them on tour in Germany and led to their billing on Cologne's famed c/o pop Festival, solidifying their place in the contemporary psych and surf rock scene. 'Dmaot' (Tears) represents a significant evolution from Rasco's debut, showcasing a darker, and denser side with a shift towards the shoegazing sounds of the '80s. The album, produced by multi-instrumentalist Uri Brauner Kinrot, leader of Boom Pam, pioneers of today’s resurgence in Middle Eastern surf rock and now labelmates on Batov Records, packs a heavier punch while maintaining Rasco's signature hypnotising power. The album delves into dreamlike landscapes, capturing the essence of different scenarios. "Layla" conjures hazy night-drives into the mountains, whilst "Nahar/Rau" reflects prophecies in rivers, birds, and sand. "Suzi Suzuki" is an ode to Japan, and "Louisa" pays homage to Hamudi's Grandma. According to Eden, there's a prevalent theme of "nostalgia for something you've never experienced." Similarly, “Sleeping Sea”, hints at the omnipresent power of the sea, even at its stillest, with its brooding hammond chords and almost C&W guitar, paints memories of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Games”. 'Dmaot' also explores the dichotomy between life in the city and life in the countryside. Eden notes, "It's definitely something to define our songwriting by - the mix between electric heavier sounds and mystical, nature-inspired lyrics”. Commencing with a chime-like guitar motif before the first heavy wave of shoegaze-like tremolo hits, “Layla” alternates with an almost Lynchian pre-chorus, whilst the song earworms its way to your brain. “Nahur Rau” almost screams “garage rock anthem” with it’s clap-accompanied beat group rhythm, and fuzz guitar riffs, but the energetic delivery is balanced by Rasco’s laidback style. It would be remiss to omit mention of the group’s incredible cover of Tears For Fears’ “Head Over Heels”, that seamlessly connects The Smiths, Julee Cruise and the B-52s, in the group’s own haunting style. Rasco is a genre-defying trio that transcends the boundaries of surf rock and psych, creating a mesmerising blend of sound and emotion. 'Dmaot' is a testament to their evolution as artists and their ability to weave a tapestry of sonic landscapes into their own world.

Nearly twenty-five years after disbanding, Gastr del Sol have unpacked their archive, stringing together an alternative view to their genre-melting 1993-1998 run. This assembly of previously uncollected studio recordings and beautifully captured unreleased live performances forms a spacious ode to the flux that was their métier; a further set of reinventions that continue to alter the manner in which we hear music, and literally everything else!

Somehow, Jeremy deVine (self proclaimed Temporary Residence "overlord") convinced us to leave the mild December climate of Austin, Texas and to drive northeast to Baltimore (where Temporary Residence was based at the time) and record what would be our second record and our first for TRL. This was in 2000 and our means of transportation was a barely functioning, deathtrap of a family van loaded with our equipment, our clothes, several bags of snacks and a massive boombox (there was not a working stereo in the van). The trip took us a few days and we think we played some shows on the way there, but the memories are a bit clouded. We found Jeremy's house and knocked on the door. He answered and invited us inside. The place was in shambles. Boxes of records and CDs scattered about, art supplies crammed into every corner. The physical manifestation of our new record label was a shelf made of cinder blocks and a few planks. Also, it was freezing cold. Jeremy informed us that the house had no heat because nobody had paid the bill. We were concerned. We all slept that night in our parkas and hats and gloves. Then Jeremy woke us all up at seven in the morning (Jeremy doesn't really sleep much and apparently doesn't need to) and piled us all into the van. We would be driving to DC where we would be recording the album. Our first actual day of recording was discouraging. We couldn't play any of the songs right and we were all really nervous. The four of us were convinced that we had made a terrible mistake thinking that we could record an album that a label would actually send to stores for people to buy. At the end of the day, we got back into the van and headed back to Jeremy's house. None of us were feeling very good. We then stayed up all night talking with Jeremy. We told him how badly we thought the first day of recording went and how it might be best if we just packed up and went home. He didn't seem concerned. He said he had faith and that he knew that it would turn out alright. Actually, he didn't talk much about this horrible first day at all. Instead he talked about music and movies and art and food and growing up. He made us all laugh a lot. Eventually we fell asleep. Jeremy woke us at seven again and we drove to DC. And things went well. We recorded for the next few days, waking up early, driving to the studio, recording, eating at the famous Ben's Chili Bowl, recording some more, driving back to Baltimore, talking, sleeping, dreaming. Less than a week later, we had a finished record and it was time to go home. We said our goodbyes to Jeremy. We were happy and sad. Happy that we had just recorded a record that we were all excited about. Sad because we had made a new, great friend and we weren't sure when we would see him again. We left. (We scheduled some shows on the way home. One was in Syracuse. The show was in the basement of a house. The police came during our second song and made us stop. The next day our van wouldn't start. We were stranded. We lived in the attic of some kind strangers. For eight full days we read books and watched blizzards and ate Chinese food and went sort of nuts. We almost missed Christmas. But eventually we made it home).

"This-is-a-remix-record-but-not-in-the-traditional -sense angle. Remix tends to imply that a song has been remixed for the dancefloor, radio, etc. These are 'remakes' in which entirely new songs have been written using primarily 'Wedding Song No. 3' (see DC 144) for source material. Features the work of Directions in Music pioneer Bundy K. Brown, as well as man from U.N.K.L.E. Tim Goldsworthy, Tied & Tickled Trio and Tetsua's DJ Your Food."

PJ Harvey’s performance at the Avalon in Boston on November 2nd, 1998, is often remembered as an electrifying and intense concert experience. During this period, PJ Harvey’s live performances were known for their raw energy and emotional depth, with Harvey captivating audiences with her powerful vocals and dynamic stage presence.

Lauded for his contributions to Here We Go Magic and Art Feynman, Luke Temple brings his signature off-kilter grooves and melodies to his new project's debut album Certain Limitations. The trio's sound takes influence from the likes of Dire Straits and The Velvet Underground, weaving together intricate guitar work, and a propulsive rhythm section, with a touch of jazz sensibility that recalls the ECM catalog. A product of serendipity, The Cascading Moms were formed when in need of a band for an upcoming show, Temple brought together Kosta Galanopolous, a collaborator from his Art Feynman project, and Stuart, a musician he already knew in LA. When these three came together to rehearse, a spark ignited, revealing a creative connection that transcended that first show that brought them together.

'Ahora', the new record by Melenas is the exact opposite of "that difficult third album". While other bands might be suffering from a lack of inspiration typical of that delicate creative moment, our Spanish quartet reappears more invincible than ever, reassembled with a collection of dazzling songs, and revitalized with a splendid new palette of sounds that raises the following question: can you make jangle pop and garage rock with synthesizers? Listening to songs like 'K2' or 'Bang' the answer is a resounding yes, because the glorious throb of the analog keyboards that dominate 'Ahora' does not betray Melenas' sound, that bubbling vibration that the guitars provided until now, propelling their songs to the pop heaven. The new textures that vintage synths like the Korg Delta or the Yamaha PSR-36 provide maintain that immediacy, and also imprint fascinating new shades of color by stretching the band's sonic identity, transforming it with new nuances, from the crystalline pop of '1986' to the somber but moving undertones of 'Flor de la Frontera'.


 Moreover, this new wealth of tonalities is in keeping with an album in which Melenas have a lot to say: its title ("Now") aspires to vindicate, according to the band, "the importance of time, to reflect on how we live our everyday lives, with whom we share our moments and how we want (or don't want) to do it". An exploration of their own identity, of their relationships with others, and of the importance of " togetherness, shared feelings and shared action". Their intentions to "convey a moment of halting and reflecting on the present to know what we want to remain and what we need to leave behind" are brilliantly captured in verses such as "El tiempo que pasó ¿a quién se lo dí? / Desde hoy ganaré lo que perdí" (The time that passed, who did I give it to? / From today I will gain what I lost") or the irresistible "Lo bonito se acaba, me dijo mi ama / Este fuego calienta o te puede quemar" (What is beautiful always comes to an end, my mama told me / This fire can heat you up or burn you down). 


At the same time, musically, the new sonic vibes symbolically delve deep into those themes: the concept of togetherness is conveyed in the vocal harmonies, more abundant and elaborate than ever. The concept of time, by means of some astounding sequencers, arpeggiators, and mechanical rhythms. Combined with Melenas' knack for pop, these elements turn many of these songs into an exciting mixture of darker, machine-like shades (the cold wave echoes of 'Flor de la Frontera', the kraut rhythm of 'Bang') with heavenly melodies. All this is woven together with a wealth of dazzling electronic arrangements (check the gorgeous Korg Monologue and Moog textures on '1.000 canciones'!), handcrafted to perfection but played with the energy of a live band, in a very post-punk conjunction of synthesizers with real bass and drums. The outcome includes such wonders as 'Dos pasajeros', 'Tú y yo', or that banger named '1986', which sounds like contemporary pop but is propelled by the same spirit with which new wave bands in the early 80s used analog synths as if they were garage-rock Farfisa organs. Or the beautiful 'Promises', with its synthesizer riff destined to become a neo-synth pop classic. 

Ahora' is the confirmation of a wonderful anomaly that at this point should no longer surprise anyone: the fact that a Spanish band that writes and sings in Spanish is released in the US as part of the prestigious Trouble In Mind label. It also encompasses an enormous desire to 'seize the moment' at a time when Melenas are more in command of their creative powers than ever. Not so much to give a new twist to their music - which is still essentially rooted in a love of pop - but to invest their songs with a new electronic energy and vibe. With these ingredients, let's hope the future holds 1,000 more songs from Melenas.

US-born, Norwegian-Mexican artist and producer Carmen Villain's fourth album Only Love From Now On is out February 25th, 2022 on Smalltown Supersound. The culmination of a build-up that began with a turn in sound evident on 2019's Both Lines Will Be Blue, Only Love From Now On presents Villain’s aesthetic blossoming into something unexpected, benevolent in its composure and altogether luxuriant in its sensuality.If her themes are wide, philosophical, and occasionally abstract, the emotional tenor of Hillestad's music is clear and purposeful. Makes sense that her key musical touchstones are dub, ambient, and cosmic jazz – flexible vehicles for tranquil wonder.Listening to Only Love From Now On is simultaneously comforting and alluringly strange. Partly it’s the contributions of guests Arve Henriksen (trumpet, electronics) and Johanna Scheie Orellana (flutes). Partly it’s the fluidity between instruments – such as clarinets – field recordings, the studio, jam, and careful composition. She calls the process a conversation with sound that occurs in her deliberate attempts to experiment with new methods, like granular synthesis, for her music-making.Only Love From Now On is fueled by the sense of scale in feeling small in the face of things so large, the contemplation of how the biggest impact we can have is in the people close to us, the attempt to make sure that impact is a positive one, and the choice to try to focus on love instead of fear. Hillestad describes it as "wishing to maintain a sense of careful optimism for the future, while on the cusp of something unknown."

Butthole SurfersのドラマーKing Coffeyが創設した〈Trance Syndicate Records〉に3枚のアルバムを残したテキサスのインディ・ロック・バンドであり、1991年から1998年にかけて活動したスロウコアの伝説的存在、Bedheadの1996年のセルフ・タイトル作がリマスタリング仕様で〈Numero Group〉からのリイシュー盤！洗練された煌びやかさよりも、ラフなエッジと白昼夢のようなサウンドを追求した傑作！180g重量盤ヴァージン・ヴァイナル仕様。

Bill Fay is one of English music’s best kept secrets. At the dawn of the 1970s, he was a one-man song factory, with a piano that spilled liquid gold and a voice every bit the equal of Ray Davies, John Lennon, early Bowie, or Procol Harum’s Gary Brooker. He made two solo albums but his contract wasn’t renewed, which left his LPs and his reputation to become cult items. But he never stopped writing, the music kept on coming. Now, in his late sixties, he has produced Life Is People, a brand new studio album that shows his profoundly humanist vision is as strong as it ever was.

Late 2016’s Highway Songs brought Papa M back to us, after many years of silence and several harrowing dances with death for his Id-ego/host body, David Pajo. Now, two years on down the road, we’re all here again to witness A Broke Moon Rises. The five songs of A Broke Moon Rises find David focusing his technique in unknown directions, to find out what he can do with them. When that happens, he finds himself on the very spot where Papa M music becomes alive! We call this, “the sweet spot.” As the quietly funereal march of the opening track resonates with a spare drum beat, we are completely transfixed into the open spaces around the guitars: damn, son — it’s the M-scape! David’s been engineering and mixing his records for years, so the sensation of his sound-thoughts doesn’t entirely surprise us, even in their latest, acoustic anointment. Layers of guitars curl and unfurl, falling away from the center with feathery softness. Slide figures cut through the progressions with a rusty glide. Arpeggiations flicker with light, leading into a change that’ll break on yer ear like a small revelation. Even the sound of Papa M playing in the room, leaning forward or untouching the strings, provides textural byplay in created space. A Broke Moon Rises is meditative in the most active sense, with the unquiet mind leaping from place to place in a static, spartan theater. All of which action makes hypnotic music, perfect for listening.

Nearly twenty-five years after disbanding, Gastr del Sol have unpacked their archive, stringing together an alternative view to their genre-melting 1993-1998 run. This assembly of previously uncollected studio recordings and beautifully captured unreleased live performances forms a spacious ode to the flux that was their métier; a further set of reinventions that continue to alter the manner in which we hear music, and literally everything else!

Sometimes, Mitski says, it feels like life would be easier without hope, or a soul, or love. But when she closes her eyes and thinks about what’s truly hers, what can’t be repossessed or demolished, she sees love. “The best thing I ever did in my life was to love people,” Mitski says. “I wish I could leave behind all the love I have, after I die, so that I can shine all this goodness, all this good love that I’ve created onto other people.” She hopes her newest album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, will continue to shine that love long after she’s gone. Listening to it, that’s precisely how it feels: like a love that’s haunting the land. Love is always radical, which means that it always disrupts, which means that it always takes work to receive it. This land, which already feels inhospitable to so many of its inhabitants, is about to feel hopelessly torn and tossed again – at times, devoid of love. This album offers the anodyne. “This is my most American album,” Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of its private sorrows and painful contradictions. But “maybe it’s beyond witnessing,” she says. At times, it feels like the album is an exercise in negative capability – a fearless embodiment and absorption of the pain of other bodies. When I ask her what the album would look like, if it were a person, she says it would be someone middle-aged and exhausted, perhaps someone having a midlife crisis. But through the daily indignity and exhaustion, something enormous and ecstatic is calling out. In this album, which is sonically Mitski’s most expansive, epic, and wise, the songs seem to be introducing wounds and then actively healing them. Here, love is time-traveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star. Mitski wrote these songs in little bursts over the past few years, and they feel informed by moments of noticing – noticing a sound that’s out of place, a building that groans in decay, an opinion that splits a room, a feeling that can’t be contained in a body. It was recorded at both the Bomb Shelter in East Nashville and the Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles. The album incorporates an orchestra arranged and conducted by Drew Erickson, as well as a full choir of 17 people - 12 in LA and 5 in Nashville - arranged by Mitski. And for the first time, it felt important to Mitski to have a band recording live together in the studio, to create this new sublime sound. Working with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland, the album has a wide-range of references, from Ennio Morricone’s bombastic Spaghetti Western scores to Carter Burwell’s tundra-filling Fargo soundtrack, from the breathy intimacy of Arthur Russell to the strident aliveness of Scott Walker or Igor Stravinsky, from the jubilation of Caetano Veloso to the twangy longing of Faron Young. From the first track, the album introduces and then heals a wound. “Bug Like an Angel” finds the divine in the ordinary, in the boozy drowning of sorrow. The narrator sings from the strange comfort of rock bottom: “sometimes a drink feels like family.” And suddenly, that choir of angels sings: “FAMILY!” This first track introduces a cosmic paradox: “The wrath of the devil was also given him by God.” This is an album in which dark and light exist in the same gesture, the same broken prayer. Like the Buddha inviting the demon Mara in for tea, The Land embraces brutal, daily pain — the necessary toll of transcendent love. In “Buffalo Replaced,” the wail of a freight train replaces the vibrations of the long-gone stampeding buffalo. Here, hope itself is personified, anthropomorphized into a sleeping creature, and our narrator wonders if life would be easier without her. But then, as though in response, “Heaven” offers a beautiful moment of passion, preserved like a fossil in time even though the “dark awaits us all around the corner.” This oasis is aggressively interrupted by “I Don’t Like My Mind,” a song from the perspective of someone in extraordinary pain. They are begging to keep their job, while actively keeping terrible traumatic memories at bay. Without their employment, these memories might take over, consuming them as relentlessly as the cake that they ate one “inconvenient Christmas.” The toggling between hope and despair in these four songs is masterful — the good, the bad, and the ugly in America’s backyard. This mythology continues to deepen with the stunning “The Deal,” in which someone is so burdened by their soul that they beg for it to be taken from them. Soon, the singer’s soul is revealed to be a bird perched on a streetlight. In a coup of songwriting, the narration does not switch into the newly-souled bird’s voice. No, we stay with the soulless “I.” The bird calls down: “You’re a cage without me. / Your pain is eased but you’ll never be free.” This song reinforces the album’s tug-of-war between the intoxication of love and the pain of isolation. Close on its heels is “My Love Mine All Mine,” an instant classic and the beating heart of the album, wherein the singer imagines their love shining down on the earth from the moon, long after the speaker is gone. “It’s just witness-less me,” she sings on “The Frost,” which suddenly takes us from the anticipation of loss right into the aching loneliness of it. On the subject of witnessing, Mitski says: “I’ve always been the person on the outside watching. And I’ve also done that with myself... outside of myself, witnessing myself, watching myself.” She thinks that she might have adopted this habit as a condition of being a woman of color, and that it’s led to the occasional post-apocalyptic fantasy of being the only person left in the world. We talked about Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, in which a man is profoundly alone, with only an archive of old tapes to keep him company. He remembers the seismic event of an old sexual encounter, but now it’s: “Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.” The Land repeatedly offers that same hypothesis. Without love, is there anyone here? After the alien lift of “Star” comes the album’s showdown. “I’m Your Man” feels as inevitable, bloody, and haunting as a Sergio Leone duel scene. The “Man” in the title isn’t some fella proclaiming devotion, Mitski says, but rather the man inside her head, the haunting patriarch who treats her like a dog and can destroy her at whim. Despite his confidence and swagger, he is tracked down by a pack of hounds — who have unionized in the name of catharsis. After this violent reckoning, a Fowler’s Toad calls out in what sounds like a human scream. The night settles into silence. The earth might be uninhabited. We glide into the liberating closer, “I Love Me After You,” in which someone is truly alone but truly free. King of all the land. “I don’t have a self,” Mitski observes. “I have a million selves, and they’re all me, and I inhabit them, and they all live inside me.” Loving all of these selves does not yield the easy burst of a pop song. It’s the “long, complex, deep love, that you can never get to the end of, that’s always evolving, like a person. And there’s just no end to it. It feels like space travel.” The album is full of the ache of the grown- up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It’s a tiny epic. From the bottom of a glass, to a driveway slushy with memory and snow, to a freight train barreling through the Midwest, and all the way to the moon, it feels like everything, and everyone, is crying out, screaming in pain, arching towards love. Maybe this is what our best artists do: take a spaceship into the furthest reaches of pain, in order to bring back the elixir that we already had inside us. The unknowable known of love. “You have to go to both worlds all the time,” Mitski says, by which she means the mysterious world of making and the brutal world of living. This album is an act of hyperlocal space travel. Love is that inhospitable land, beckoning us and then rejecting us. To love this place — this earth, this America, this body — takes active work. It might be impossible. The best things are.

New York psych-pop band Crumb return with AMAMA, their most carefree and open-hearted album to date. A soundscape full of playful and patchwork experimentation — glitchy pitch-shifted vocals, cell phone recordings, nautical blips, sax mouthpiece solos, blasted drum samples, and piano strings dampened with Silly Putty — AMAMA continues to deepen the band’s hypnotic sound in a cohesive line back through 2021’s Ice Melt, 2019’s Jinx, and breakout EPs Locket and Crumb. Without a doubt, AMAMA is Crumb — singer and multi-instrumentalist Lila Ramani, keyboardist and saxophonist Bri Aronow, bassist Jesse Brotter, and drummer Jonathan Gilad — at their most animated. Buoyed by Ramani’s songwriting, at turns poetically abstract and directly confessional, AMAMA culls the strange encounters from Crumb’s touring years, tracing the dizzying path of a group that’s been in movement for nearly a decade. “Crushxd” is an ecstatic requiem for a turtle flattened under the tires of a tour van; “(Alone in) Brussels” finds Ramani in forced isolation in a distant city. On “The Bug,” we’re at a pit stop in a seedy motel, where a critter’s bite leaves a nagging feeling: “It’s always on my mind / it’s just always on my mind,” Ramani repeats over a creeping groove as she wanders the place at night. On “Side by Side,” perhaps the most candid track on AMAMA, frenetic percussion and disorienting, layered synth envelop Ramani as she considers the personal sacrifices she’s made along the way. Even as it explores transient stops and fraught encounters, AMAMA features some of Crumb’s most vulnerable, tender searches for organic connection. “Home is what I want and what I need,” Ramani sings on the clear-sighted opener, “From Outside a Window Sill”—which samples a police radio scan about a flock of geese crossing a bridge in Gowanus, Brooklyn, where Ramani grew up. The title track, “AMAMA,” is an upbeat and hopeful homage to Ramani’s grandmother, her namesake, who sings in Malayalam in the opening sample. The two voices, Lila’s and Leela’s, separated by language and place, intertwine as if on a spotty long-distance call in what is the most direct love song of Crumb’s repertoire. On the album’s closer, “XXX,” laden with distorted, industrial sounds, we finally find respite—a house shared between two lovers, a safe place. In the last moments, Ramani asks: “Isn’t this as good as it can get?” AMAMA exists at the crossroads of psychedelia, pop, jazz, and rock, and cements Crumb as a band uniquely their own. Released independently on Crumb Records and produced alongside Johnscott Sanford and Jonathan Rado in Los Angeles, AMAMA is an incandescent statement about searching for solid ground, connection, and clarity in a life of nomadic upheaval.