SEE: Death By Unga Bunga – ‘Egocentric’: don’t be a dick, say Norway’s power punkers
WITH a new album, Heavy Male Insecurity, just around the corner, Norwegian power-pop punkers Death By Unga Bunga have released a video for another come-hither, “Egocentric”, which you can watch below. It’s a bit of a banger, with that trademark DBUB attention to fuzz and melody, all wrapped up in basketball court shenanigans. And there’s intelligence …
TRACK: Panteon – ‘Waking Waiting’: lighter-than-air alt.folk explores the void at the end of the affair
YVONNE AMBRÉE is an artist currently based in Berlin who writes, records and produces music under the nom-de-musique Panteon. She has a particular way with an airy, fragile folk melody and a voice to match, delicate and honeyed, just a touch of the Marissa Nadlers in her velvet swoop. Which is not something to be …
Hannah Peel announces March album: see the video for ‘Emergence In Nature’
HANNAH PEEL is a true renaissance woman and arguably the most musically multifaceted artist at work in the UK at the present time. She’s recently been curating and presenting BBC Radio 3’s Night Tracks; her catalogue, stemming from folky roots back a decade ago, has grown to take in the solo electronic and pop work of Awake But …
TRACK: Graywave – ‘Before’: shoegaze nocturne teases for EP
JUST before Christmas, Backseat Mafia had the absolute privilege of premiering “Like Heaven”, a brilliant surge of dream pop haze and melody from Graywave, the musical project of the West Midlands’ Jess Webberley. We’ll let you into a little secret: she’s a bit ace. Jess is shaping for the release of Graywave’s debut EP, Planetary …
NEWS: Cheval Sombre announces February album for Sonic Cathedral
CHRIS PORPORA makes very, very beautiful and hushed music as Cheval Sombre – and makes it very much at his own pace; he is, as we shall see, very much concerned with the passage of time and all its tricks in the human brain. And he’s just announced the release of a new album, Time …
TRACK: The Damn Straights – ‘Blow It Up’: one minute fifty-eight of lyrical fire
THE DAMN STRAIGHTS: who they? I hear you say. Well, as if proving gestalt theory – if you’ll allow me to don my professor specs a sec, that a transactional whole is indeed more than the sum of its parts – it’s a two-handed, transatlantic collaboration between Exeter’s Adam Gibbons, aka the connoisseur’s modern soul …
PREMIERE: Ted Barnes and Sarah Johns Music Party – ‘Arrangements’: theatrical delicacy from returning Clayhill prodigal
YOU MAY or may not have been blessed enough to have swooned for Clayhill, the cruelly underrated trio who got lumped into the semi-trendy genre ‘The New Acoustic’ by the music press alongside the likes of Lowgold and Kings of Convenience, which definition did them a massive disservice. Seek ye their albums; for further evidence …
ALBUM REVIEW: Jon Mueller – ‘Family Secret’: an immersive drone palimpsest
Family Secret is a journey of deep interiority: it’s implicit that it be served fresh, after dark, suitably lit with no distractions. Clever, eerie and beautiful, it’s an album that will continue to reward you
TRACK: Renée Reed – ‘Fast One’: potent, dreamlike alt.folk from Louisiana
HAILING from Lafayette, Louisiana, Renée Reed has signed for Austin label Keeled Scales and released a single, the impressionistic, delightfully dreamy alt.folk of “Fast One”. Listen below. It’s a many-faceted thing for something as apparently simple as a one-woman-with-guitar folk tune; it has, by turns, a sleepy blurriness, a pillowside intimacy, the sort of mantric guitar …
SEE: Kalbells – ‘Purplepink’: cosmic psychedelic disco to the max
KALBELLS are one of those fun, creative side gigs, an adjunct to another band which, having animated with the spark of lifeforce, has gained a vitality all of its own. The band was conceived as a little place for Kalmia Traver to shake a solo thang, outside of the cute-as, lo-fi Brooklyn pop outfit Rubblebucket …