NEW RELEASES 22.05.20

TIM BURGESS - I Love The New Sky - LP €22.99 (Bella Union) - Limited Transparent Splatter Vinyl - features wonderfully connective songs of everyday minutiae and universal experience, of love and anger, of loss and belonging, all united by elaborate yet natural arrangements and an effortless but deceptively expert way with melody.

BADLY DRAWN BOY - Banana Skin Shoes - 2LP €23.99 (One Last Fruit) - Always one to wear his heart on his sleeve, Gough's ninth album is a truly personal and heartfelt collection of songs, a huge statement of intent and the most glorious, colourful warming, honest pop record you'll hear this year.

THE 1975 - Notes On A Conditional Form - CD €14.99 (Dirty Hit) - **Vinyl Out June 12th (Preorder here)** - The 1975 deliver the follow up to Brit Award Album of the Year winner A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships. The band’s 4th album Notes On A Conditional Form is set to be already the most anticipated album of 2020 and features the lead single People and the Greta Thunberg call to arms album opener, The 1975.

STEVE EARLE & THE DUKES - Ghosts of West Virginia - LP €22.99 (New West Records) - Limited Blue & Yellow Marble Vinyl - In ten deftly drawn, roughly eloquent, powerfully conveyed sonic portraits, Earle and his long-time band the Dukes explore the historical role of coal in rural communities. More than merely a question of jobs and income, mining has provided a sense of unity and meaning, patriotic pride and purpose.

DONNY BENET - Mr Experience - LP€ 23.99 (Dot Dash Recordings) - Limited 'Fruit Punch' Coloured Vinyl - After humble lo-fi beginnings in the Australian art-pop underground, Donny Benét has expanded his cult-like following across the globe with a resonant array of danceable repertoire dealing with love and affection. New album Mr Experience marks a new chapter, informed by a wealth of musical and personal development.

I BREAK HORSES - Warnings -2LP €25.99 (Bella Union) - Limited Clear Vinyl - If I Break Horses’s third album holds you in its grip like a great film, it’s no coincidence. Faced with making the follow-up to 2014’s plush Chiaroscuro, Horses’s Maria Lindén decided to take the time to make something different, with an emphasis on instrumental, cinematic music. That album is Warnings, an intimate and sublimely expansive return that, as its recording suggests, sets its own pace with the intuitive power of a much-loved movie. And, as its title suggests, its sumptuous sound worlds – dreamy mellotrons, haunting loops, analogue synths – and layered lyrics crackle with immersive dramatic tensions on many levels.

JAMES ELKINGTON - Ever-Roving Eye - LP €25.99 (Paradise Of Bachelors ) - Limited Glass Green Vinyl - Chicago songwriter and guitarist James Elkington who has collaborated with everyone from Richard Thompson to Jeff Tweedy to Tortoise recorded his sophomore album at Wilco’s Loft, expanding upon his celebrated 2017 debut Wintres Woma as well as his recent production and arrangement work for the likes of Steve Gunn, Nap Eyes, and Joan Shelley. Casting glances back to British folk traditions as well as toward avant-garde horizons, these brilliant new songs, as accessible as they are arcane, buttress Elkington’s brisk guitar figures and baritone poesy with strings, woodwinds, and backing vocals by Tamara Lindeman of the Weather Station.

OTHER LIVES - For Their Love - LP €22.99 (PIAS) - Limited Crystal Clear Vinyl - Other Lives, the Oklahoma-bred outfit fronted by Jesse Tabish, return with new album For Their Love. The long-awaited follow-up to 2015’s Rituals, For Their Love is a ten-track collection with a nod to the past while progressing positively towards the future.

BLAKE MILLS - Mutable Set - 2LP €23.99 (Caroline) - Grammy-winning producer, composer, guitarist and songwriter Blake Mills releases his new album, Mutable Set via New Deal Records. Mutable Set is Mills’ fourth studio album, crafted as a soundtrack to the emotional dissonance of modern life. The record reflects the push and pull of opposing forces: harmony and eerie dissonance, orchestral crescendos and moments of near silence, melodic yet unresolving chord progressions. The sonically warm album holds Mills’ guitar fingerpicking, gentle piano and melancholy tenor at its center

VARIOUS ARTISTS - Stone Crush: Memphis Modern Soul 1977-1987 - 2LP €41.99 (Light In The Attic) - Stone Crush is the definitive overview of Memphis’ modern soul scene of the post-Stax years. Over a decade in the making, Stone Crush is an expertly curated compilation of these home-grown slices of Memphis stylings, from roller skate boogie to private press soul to bedroom funk—rare sides whose original copies are considered holy grails by DJs and collectors all over. This collection does more than transport us to a time gone by. It helps us hear what couldn’t be heard then.

CHICANO BATMAN - Invisible People - LP €19.99 (ATO Records) - The LA-based quartet follow-up the critically-acclaimed breakthrough Freedom Is Free (2017) with their most sonically-varied and most cohesive album to date. Mixed by Grammy-winning engineer Shawn Everett (Beck, Alabama Shakes) the 12-song set accentuates the group's high spirited synthesis of tropicália, west coast psychedelia and late-'60s/early-'70s soul.

THE AIRBORNE TOXIC EVENT - Hollywood Park - LP €28.99 (Rounder) - In conjunction with Jollett’s memoir, The Airborne Toxic Event has completed an album by the same name, a twelve song concept record which draws from scenes and themes in the book. Incorporating real audio from his family, gospel singers, and orchestral flourishes from violins to timpani to horns, the record is Jollett’s attempt to capture the high hopes of his parents, the dash dreams and difficult times which followed, the confusion of an adult life spent nursing the wounds of childhood, and the ultimate redemption which came from looking inward and finding an acceptance of self and love of family. The record was produced by Mark Needham (The Killers, Fleetwood Mac) at east/west Studios in Hollywood.

PUPPY - iii - LP €16.99 (Spinefarm Records) - Limited Translucent Green Vinyl - Following the release of Puppy’s critically acclaimed debut album, The Goat, the band decided to record in Hackney’s (largely analogue) Holy Mountain Studios, around the corner from the rehearsal space where they first started making music together, to create their third EP, iii.

BLAZE FOLEY - Clay Pigeons - LP €28.99 (Lost Art) - Reissue of the 2011 vinyl-only collection of 12 Blaze tracks released by Secret Seven Records. Compiled from home, studio and intimate live recordings between 1976 – 1988, this ‘Best of Blaze’ sampler features Blaze’s renditions of songs since covered by Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett and John Prine.

MORK - Rota Til Ondskap - LP €22.99 (PEACEVILLE) - The earliest raw recordings of the new rising titans of norwegian black metal, including three additional tracks. Presented on vinyl for the first time

LIT - A Place In The Sun - LP €22.99 (Legacy) - Limited White Vinyl - We Are Legacy reissue the second studio album from Lit. Originally released in 1999 on RCA Records. A 12 song album which includes the singles My Own Worst Enemy, Zip-Lock and Miserable.

AUGUSTUS MULLER (BOY HARSHER) - Machine Learning Experiments - Original Soundtrack - €25.99 (Nude Club) - Limited White Vinyl - Augustus Muller, one half of Massachusetts electronic duo Boy Harsher, releases two original scores through own label Nude Club records. The films, Orgone Theory and Hydra, are Muller’s first foray into scoring. Both films were produced by UK based collective Four Chambers.

CAPITOL K - Birdtrapper - LP €19.99 (Faith And Industry) - Limited Crystal Vinyl - Kristian Craig Robinson, aka Capitol K, is a multi-instrumentalist and record producer with a long history in London’s most interesting under-the-radar music places and spaces. With a musical story like his, you can expect side streams. New record Birdtrapper is “the sound of an initiation rave in a utopian hidden village”, and his latest exploration of Mediterranean audio mythos following from Goatherder (2018)

ANN McMILLAN - Gateway Summer Sound: Abstracted Animal And Other Sounds - LP €30.99 (Smithsonian Folkways)- Ann McMillan did not record prolifically, but she was at the vanguard of electronic composition in New York in the 1970s. A student of groundbreaking composer Edgard Varese, McMillan's primary medium was magnetic tape, which she manipulated to create surreal soundscapes. On Gateway Summer Sounds, her debut album released on Folkways in 1979 and recorded at the legendary Princeton-Columbia Electronic Music Center, she sources sounds from the natural world - frogs, insects, field recordings from the Gateway National Recreation Area in New York Harbor - along with gongs, bells, and a harpsichord to conceive remarkable, hypnagogic compositions. Like the music of Daphne Oram and Pauline Oliveros, her compositions for tape have been overshadowed by those of her male counterparts, but her work is no less revolutionary or vital.

CRAIG KUPKA - Crystals: New Music For Relaxation 2 - LP €30.99 (Smithsonian Folkways) - The sonorous drift of four trombones, like gentle waves lapping at the edge of a celestial shoreline, opens Craig Kupka's second album for Folkways, Crystals: New Music for Relaxation 2. Featuring two side-long compositions for trombone and synthesizer, the album is intended as an aid for meditation, a guided journey inward towards self-discovery. Before its original release in 1982, Kupka and his wife Nancy took these recordings to relaxation classes and dance studios, field-testing them with participants primed for a meditative experience, and received extensive positive feedback. Like works by contemporaries Michael Stearns, Iasos, and Steve Roach, this is healing music that opens the outer reaches of the mind.

FREDDY FRESH - 1996 - 12" €9.99 (Earwiggle) - Techno - Returning to Earwiggle for the first time since one of our early hits (his Midwest Whippersnappers EP with Paul Birken), the inimitable Freddy Fresh provides some choice material from the year 1996, remastered and ready for modern consumption.

THE WEE CHERUBS - Dreaming - 7" €10.99 (Optic Nerve) - Limited to 800 on Coloured Vinyl - Impossibly rare 1984 UK 7" vinyl single, written by a pre-Bachelor Pad's Martin Cotter. One of only three releases by the short-lived Glasgow based indie label Bogaten, although redolant of early Orange Juice in the sound of the A-side, also looks forward to Shoegaze, with a reverb-drenched cover of The Velvet Underground's Waiting For My Man on the B-side

THE WEDDING PRESENT - Once More - 7" €10.99 (Optic Nerve) - Limited to 1000 on White Vinyl - Second single from The Wedding Present that was originally released on Reception Records in 1985.