album news
News: Stones Throw announce second album from Richmond, VA’s DJ Harrison – get low-slung with the excellent lead single, ‘Be Better’
RICHMOND, Virginia producer and multi-instrumentalist DJ Harrison is set to release his first full set for Stones Throw in four years, with Tales From The Old Dominion due in the first week of December; and with a first taster, the low-slung out-there funk rumble of “Be Better” landing right now, it looks set to be …
News: Beirut to release a double set of early and rare material, ‘Artifacts’, in the spring; delight in ‘Fisher Island Sound’
ZACH CONDON’s gorgeous Beirut are set to release an overview of their early years next spring – a project whch has burgeoned from a collection of early EPs into a full-on, 26-track set. The collection, Artifacts, began to grow in ambition as Zach went digging through the archives. He picks up the thread: “When the …
News: Anita Lane’s ‘Sex O’Clock’ gets a 20th anniversary reissue come December; hear her Gil Scott-Heron cover, ‘Home Is Where The Hatred Is’
BAD SEEDS founder member and smouldering, potent artist in her own right, Anita Lane left us far too young this April, at the age of 61; her on-off solo career had never really received the sales it should’ve been accorded, and she remained underappreciated, seemingly having slipped from view in recent years. But Mute are …
See: A Certain Ratio tease for their November remixes set with a Dan Carey take on ‘Down & Dirty’
THERE’S to be no rest for the wickedly, insistently, incisively funky: A Certain Ratio, with the deservedly acclaimed ACR: Loco (our review, here) and a slew of excellent postscriptual EPs under their belts this past year, paying tribute to Denise Johnson, Andrew Weatherall and just generally deep and insistent, exploratory funk listening – and a …
See: Far Caspian drops the hushed guitar thrill of ‘Questions’, announces his debut album and a European tour
THESE days based in Leeds, the grand capital of God’s Own Country, Yorkshire, but hailing from the rural south-western corner of Northern Ireland, Joel Johnston returned home to put together his October debut album, Ways To Get Out, to revisit past selves, the musical diet he grew up on, remember the ways he himself got …
See: Devendra Banhart and Noah Goergeson unveil an expansive, meditative ‘Refuge’ double set for August; come float within ‘Into Clouds’ and ‘In A Cistern’
THEIR first meeting may have been entirely inauspicious – the one enquiring of the other whether in fact he was, indeed, a French drug dealer – but once that initial barrier was overcome, the twin, surging talents of acid folk scion Devendra Banhart and minimalist composer and producer Noah Georgeson became firm friends; collaborators. And …
See: Table Scraps come firing back with ‘Threads’ ahead of a post-apocalyptic September set
BRUM’S garage-psych-doom power trio Table Scraps have, like the rest of us, been busy frying their heads and kicking anxious heels indoors for like: doesn’t it feel like forever now? But they’ve also been busy with the guitar, bass and drums and things, because the lockdown league is one you can play your way out …
Track: Ulrich Schnauss & Mark Peters drop the glimmer of ‘Hindsight is 20-20’, with a September completion of their three-album cycle in hand
HAILING from two great port cities – Kiel, on the German Baltic coast, in the case of Ulrich Schnauss, and Liverpool, in the case of erstwhile Engineers guitarist Mark Peters – these two musicians are united in a musical approach that’s always touched upon a hazy shoegaze from various exploratory angles and looks forward, outward. …
See: Bureau B tease for the Faust boxset with unreleased cine footage from Gunther Wüsthoff to accompany ‘Fernlicht’, from the mythical ‘Punkt’ album
WITH the recent news that Hamburg’s excellent imprint Bureau B is marking the half-century of Faust with a box set entitled Faust 1971-1974 in October (and already available to order – for details see below, as this isn’t the sort of thing you’d want to delay on), the label has this very morning released a video for …
News: Andy Bell announces his GLOK debut album proper; dive into the electro gleam of ‘Maintaining The Machine’
HAVING released a series of vinyl format singles, the Ever Decreasing Circles triptych, following his superb album from last autumn for Sonic Cathedral, The View From Halfway Down, and also last year’s Dissident Remixed set of rerubs from his electronic alter-ego GLOK, Andy Bell has proved himself as industrious as he is ever curious and …