Album review: Various artists – ‘Home – Volume One curated by Ali Tillett’: a beautifully tessellated, warming set of old-skool chillout
Y’KNOW, it’s not just the people out front – the bands, the writers, the DJs – who know a thing or three about music; there’s plenty of people quietly working away behind the scenes who have incredible appreciation and knowledge of the sounds we fall for, too. One such gent is Ali Tillett, who’s deep …
Track: Lady Wray pitches up with soul words of wisdom on her latest 7″, ‘Through It All’
SNARES crack and shuffle, a bass holds it tight with that characteristic Leon Michels melodicism; a backing chorus brings the timeless harmonies, and Lady Wray herself pitches up, lending a classy guitar soul nugget an otherworldly edge. When Leon meets the Lady, magic happens. It’s the new A drop from Virginia’s first lady of retro-modernist …
Album review: Cluster – ‘Cluster 71’: the German electronica scene on the cusp of breaking through, lovingly reissued
AS WELL as hosting a whole stable of contemporary bands that are mainly spinning in the leftfield electronics and synthpop galaxies, Hamburg’s Bureau B has also been doing sterling work in curating the krautrock archive, keeping the torch burning with deep dives into the unreleased tapes of Conrad Schnitzler, reissuing lost gems and offering that …
Album review: Mumble Tide – ‘Everything Ugly’: a short, sweet-as mini-album burst from the insouciant Bristolians on their way to massive things
MUMBLE TIDE have a sweet and unusual back story: the Bristol bedroom pop duo of Gina Leonard and Ryan Rogers first met through a Gumtree ad which singer Gina had placed, looking for a bassist. But there was a proper meeting of minds, they saw that the musical thing they had going on was more …
Album review: Jim Wallis & Nick Goss – ‘Pool’: immersive, ocean-going, pastoral ambience
MODERN NATURE might be flying under your radar, but the Bella Union band who’ve just one full-length and one-mini album to their name – 2019’s How To Live and last year’s Annual, respectively – are someone you should be wrapping your head around, especially if the post-rock pastoral brilliance espoused by Mark Hollis and Talk …
See: If your android’s paranoid, The Boy From Space’s ‘Positive Affirmation For Robots’ may be just the seasonal tonic
ALTHOUGH nominally hailing from the Wiltshire city of Salisbury, The Boy From Space – the trio of cosmic travellers Marshall Ward, Frant, and SuperDave – have far less earthbound concerns. They’ve just released a new digital EP, entitled Positive Affirmations For Robots, in which they look to provide a little holiday season musical relief not …
Track: Swoon for the Mediterranean cafe romance of Violetta Zironi & Ed Prosek’s ‘Come What May’
VIOLETTA ZIRONI is a delicate and lovely cantate from Correggio, in northern Italy’s Po Valley; she’s been releasing digital singles and EPs for nine years or so. More recently she’s been working with guitarist Ed Prosek to produce airy and sunshine-filled lovers’ cafe jazz; music to fall head over heels to on the Adriatic coast. …
Track: The Mother Hips examine a soured, bruised love in the riffin’ roots rock of ‘Clay Mask Clown’
WITH the first recorded cover version of their entire roots-rockin’ career, their cover of Anne Murray’s “I Don’t Want To Drive You Away”, just fading in the dust of the rearview mirror; but the street light glow of their eleventh album, Glowing Lantern, and a run of dates Stateside just cusping the horizon, The Mother …
News: Erland Cooper releases his chorally collaborative ‘Egilsay’ EP: see a making-of film and find out more about his debuting silent movie score performance
MAGISTERIAL Orcadian composer Erland Cooper has released his second choral collaboration with the Shards ensemble, an EP focussing on one of Orkney’s northern islands, Egilsay, featuring four tracks of and about the island with a population of 14. Here at Backseat Mafia we featured a track, the moving, almost holy “Glimro”, at the beginning of …
Track: Belgium’s North African jazz explorers Black Flower drop the perfumed title track of January’s ‘Magma’ for your delectation
THE WORLD of Belgian Eastern jazz outfit Black Flower is a well-woven and beautiful one; the quintet, shortly to unveil their sixth full-length album for Ghent’s rather groove-obsessed Sdban Ultra imprint, with whom they’ve released two of their past three albums this past five years, has today dropped the organ-led souk beauty of “Magma”, the …