Some highly anticipated albums out this week - the return of Aphex Twin after 13 years, the new one from Leonard Cohen (on his 80th birthday), Swedish psych rockers Goat, buttoned up indie nerds Alt-J, the brilliant Perfume Genius, Essex's very own (well half of, anyway) Erasure return, former Stereolab singer Laetitia Sadier has a new one, and loads more. There's also reissues of the highly sought after Zambian psych rock LPs by Witch, Cybotron's techno classic Clear, and The Milkshakes off-shoot The Delmonas.
Plus there's pre-orders for Caribou, The Vaselines, Oasis and Iceage
This week's new releases
Aphex Twin Syro
BUY: CD/3LP from £9.99 Richard D James returns with the first Aphex Twin album in more than a decade and it's rich and thrilling.. He delivers a grand synthesis of retro sounds and wild textural play. On 'Syro's first side the tracks are trademark Aphex Twin - instantly graspable yet endlessly complex, folding detail and experimentation into simple structures. 'Syro' contains audacious explorations on old school genre; pliable environments of total play; an ability to seek out new spaces where none seem to exist; and a sense of burgeoning celebration. The Tuss and Analord series, rather than 'Drukqs' or either of the SAW albums, are the key reference points for the majority of 'Syro'.
Leonard Cohen gets down into the avenues of our dreams and sets a new tone and speed of hope and despair, grief and joy. Cohen here is an astonished lover rocking to the human condition as "the soul unfolds in the chambers of its longing." His legendary basso resonates as never before with a presence and urgency that arises from the very depths of the heart. The clarity and strength of these nine hypnotic songs will have us singing them over and over.
Goat Commune
BUY: CD/LP from £12.99 Goat return with Commune, the eagerly awaited follow up to their astonishing debut album World Music. Commune continues on with World Music’s acidic grooves, hypnotic incantations, and serpentine guitar lines but also introduces a darker, more angry edge to the band, not seen before on previous releases. Starting with the layered percussive groove, Eastern guitar flourishes, it re-establishes the trance-inducing rhythms and exotic blaze of guitar that characterized their debut so well.
Alt-J release their second album, 'This Is All Yours'. The follow-up to 2012's 'An Awesome Wave', which won the Mercury music prize, is released on Infectious Music. The band's 13-track collection will be their first release since shrinking from a four-piece to a trio. Gwil Sainsbury, who co-founded the group in Leeds, left the group in January. LP - Double Vinyl set that will be a random lucky dip of either red, blue, green or yellow vinyl.
Perfume Genius Too Bright
BUY: CD/LP from £11.99 Over the course of two astonishing albums, Perfume Genius, aka Seattle native Mike Hadreas, cemented his place as a singer-songwriter of rare frankness, creating songs that, while achingly emotional, offered empathy and hope, rather than any judgment or handwringing. Sparse, gorgeous and with Hadreas’ quavering vocals often only accompanied by piano, they were uncommonly beautiful tales of a life lived on the dark side – scarred, brutalised, yet ultimately, slowly but surely reclaimed.
Recorded in New York and London and produced by Richard X, ‘The Violet Flame’ follows 2013’s critically acclaimed ‘Snow Globe’ and is the band’s sixteenth studio album release. Formed nearly 30 years ago, the award-winning song writing duo of Vince Clarke and Andy Bell unleashed on the nation a succession of both influential and chart-topping pop anthems of the 1980s and 1990s through to today. A special 2CD of the album features the band performing their greatest hits live at London’s Roundhouse in May 2011.
Laetitia Sadier Something Shines
BUY: CD/LP from £11.99 New solo album from ex-Stereolab singer/keyboardist Laetitia Sadier. ‘Something Shines’ was initially recorded in Switzerland, where Laetitia’s collaborator David collects amazing old keyboards and organs from people who have inherited them but find no space or usage for them. The desire was for the songs of ‘Something Shines’ to alternate between a riveting caress and an invigorating shake. To start from the Earth and to tilt up, towards the sky, before coming back down to the planet again. Additionally, Something Shines is an exploration through Debord’s ‘La Société du Spectacle’ and how it is still up to us to guide and shape our fate, individually and collectively.
Purling Hiss Weirdon
BUY: CD/LP from £11.99 Full-tilt with tunes, aggro riffs, feedback peals, stoned soul-searching, pop turnarounds and magisterial portraits of the go-nowhere lifestyle in abstract, ‘Weirdon’ is also a new-phase Purling Hiss album, using the songwriting and guitar style of Mike Polizze to come up with a quicksilver sound touched on only briefly on previous records. Replete with handclaps, pounding pianos, tambourines and vocal effects, but steeped in guitar roar, Purling Hiss streamlines up nicely, serving the new songs and directions of ‘Weirdon’ while still slamming down hard on your ears like they like to do.
Dead Ghosts Can't Get No
BUY: LP £16.99 The Killer garage psych record sold out super quick last year, now’s yer second chance to own the amazing sophomore record from the top shelf Canadian trippers!!! Deluxe tip-on Gatefold. Killer back from the grave, rave up garage punk outta Canada!!! Deluxe tip-on gatefold jackets on Burger Records. "Jangly-surfer overtones that echo '60s Nuggets-era psychedelic rock." MTV HIVE
The Abigails Tundra
BUY: LP £18.99 Sophomore Album Of Lee Hazelwood-like satanic outlaw country stompers. Highly recommended, follow up to last years' "The Songs Of Love And Despair". Warren Thomas is the low slow voice at the black heart of the Abigails, the band he describes as—and that he correctly asked us to describe as—satanic outlaw country, which explains everything but his love songs and actually even some of the love songs. He was once in the Growlers and the Grand Elegance, but the Abigails are his baby. Their Sound throws itself into a black hole that Skip Spence, Lee Hazlewood and Roky Erickson, Gun Club & Country Teasers all knew too well.
Martyr Privates Martyr Privates
BUY: LP £15.99 Martyr Privates haven’t come here to reinvent rock and roll; they’ve come to show us why we fell in love with it in the first place. Ripping through 9 tracks on their debut LP, the band create a sonic attack that is forceful yet also subtle and beautiful. The record was crafted over late nights in an ex-tyre factory in Brisbane’s north. While the band are expressly interested in rock music, they approach it with care and an interest in creating beautiful soundscapes, similar to their sonic predecessors, Spacemen 3.
Gazelle Twin Unflesh
BUY: CD/LP from £11.99 Nearly three years after her acclaimed debut, Unflesh explores a newfound, adrenalised-Pop style in greater depth - from the bone-chilling, Iggy Pop-inspired 'I Feel Blood', the stark choral lullaby of 'Premonition', to the Prince-meets-Sonic Youth influenced 'GUTS' and 'Still Life'. Far removed from the artist's former dreamscapes, 'Unflesh' presents a stripped down hyper-colour, hyperreality. Conceived in part, as a means of acting out vengeance on her antagonists (the list of which includes teenhood, recurring dreams, and her own body)
Dustin Wong and Takako Minekawa are artistic omnivores, soaking up a myriad of cultural artefacts and styles, savouring bits and pieces and re-contextualising them into entirely delightful and playfully intricate songs. Their songs are imbued with a relentless cheerfulness that belies their technicality, steeped in the history of Japanese pop music and exuding the joy of discovery and exploration. Dustin and Takako are serious musicians not afraid to play it silly. ‘Savage Imagination’ is their second album as a duo and shows their collaboration in full bloom. It is a collection of vibrant pop music, laced with the sounds of video games, radiophonic experiments, and indigenous music from around the world.
Dream Boat The Rose Explodes
BUY: LP £13.99 The Rose Explodes is the lush and percussive sophomore album from Athens, GA psychedelic collective Dream Boat. The band began as a collaboration between Page Campbell and Dan Donahue. Two artists/musicians who were born on the same aquarian day. Together, they bridge several generations of Athens' psychedelic collectives and musical freak families. Page has performed in Hope for Agoldensummer, among other projects for over a decade. Dan, a longtime Elephant 6 collaborator, has penned lyrics for Bear in Heaven, Of Montreal, and Elf Power.
Glass Ghost founding member Michael Johnson is the drummer for Dirty Projectors, and founding member Eliot Krimsky has been recording and performing with Here We Go Magic. LYFE also features Joan Wasser a.k.a. Joan As Policewoman, Nat Baldwin of Dirty Proejctors, and Christopher Tignor of Slow Six and Wires Under Tension. "Weird and mournful yet highly rhythmic, Brooklyn's Glass Ghost offers dance-friendly art pop." Time Out New York. "...a fractured bit of art-pop featuring...intoned falsetto over some spare production and airy beats."Pitchfork
Dan'l Boone Dan'l Boone
BUY: CD/LP from £11.99 Dan’l Boone is Charles Ballas (Formant), Neil Hagerty (ex-Royal Trux, Howling Hex), Nate Young (Wolf Eyes, Regression) and Alex Moskos (Drainolith). The crew convened in Denver, CO to work on the forthcoming Drainolith record and decided to make another record at the same time. Everyone involved seemed pretty dedicated to experimentation and pushing the music forward. Neil and Nate really ran things at the sessions at Uneven Studios. There were lots of electronics that Young would set up and Hagerty would give some direction. Hagerty had various lyric sheets and scores that the group worked with but once the record started to take shape Young became very involved in plotting out the flow of the record.
New Reissues & Compilations
Witch Lazy Bones/ In The Past
BUY: LP £20.99 Archival reissues of the garage-psych Zamrock masterpieces by Witch, on Now-Again Records. The band’s first two, self-produced albums - released in unison with the birth of the commercial Zambian recording industry – are exuberant experiments in garage rock, and are as influenced by the Rolling Stones as they are James Brown. In The Past, their second album, is the perfect follow-up for anyone exposde to the WITCH band through their landmark Introduction.. “Electrified by a diet of James Brown, the Stones and Deep Purple, WITCH were the stadium-filling kings of 70s Zamrock" - MOJO
Cybotron Clear
BUY: Ltd Ed. 12" £13.99 Inspired by a combination of George Clinton's Midwestern funk, Kraftwerk's eclectic synth-pop, Yellow Magic Orchestra's electronic experimentation, and futurist authors like Alvin Toffler and Ray Kurzweil, Michigan's Juan Atkins, Richard "3070" Davis, and John "Jon 5" Housley would form the group Cybotron in 1980. Their sound was an amalgamation of Detroit funk mixed with a post-industrial electronic sound that helped shape the foundation and early evolution of techno music, and the electro-defined funk music of the 1980s. Clear is by far their most influential track, selling over 50,000 copies since its release as a 12" single, and the British avant garde magazine The Wire has referred to the song as a "groundbreaking, first-generation piece of pure machine music."
The Delmonas 5!
BUY: LP £13.99 British garage pop girl group, the Del Monas began life as the Milk-Boilers. If that moniker sounds suspiciously similar to that of the Billy Childish and Mickey Hampsire-led Milkshakes, it’s no co-incidence: The trio got its start by singing backup on the lads’ recordings (and dating the boys in the band). Sarah, Hilary, and Louise took the lead on a rendition of the Beatles’ “Boys” before striking out on their own with a couple of four-song EPs in 1984: Comin’ Home Baby and Hello, We Love You. In both cases, the Milkshakes served as their backing band and Childish and Hampshire wrote most of the originals.
Pre-Orders
The Vaselines V For Vaselines
PRE-ORDER: CD/LP from £10.99 There's that sound again, that Vaselines sound: a winsome sweetness, a touch of melancholy and a lithe, libidinous drive that recalls all the best, coolest rock and roll. Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee's voices intertwine in that ineffable way they have, a sort of highland Nancy 'n' Lee. And those songs: joyous slices of classic pop songwriting brimming with heart and wit. But on their new album V for Vaselines, the guitars are bigger and fuzzier, the beats hit harder and tighter, and the whole affair bursts with punky energy.
You reach a point in life where the question of how to stay at the top of your game looms; the only real solution being, you change the game. Our Love, the new album from Caribou, is the sound of Dan Snaith doing just that. Our Love is due October 6th on City Slang and is the sixth studio album from Caribou. The album features collaborations with Jessy Lanza and Owen Pallett. Our Love is formed around a mixture of digital pop production, hip hop inspired beats, muted house basslines and a love of shuffling garage which are, of course, all filtered through Dan's own unique perspective.
Oasis (What's The Story) Morning Glory?
PRE-ORDER: 3CD/2LP from £15.99 The follow-up to debut album 'Definitely Maybe', is Oasis's biggest-selling album with 22 million copies sold worldwide. It was recorded between May and June 1995 in Rockfield Studios. Released on October 2nd 1995 it spent 10 weeks at No.1, is the 5th biggest-selling album in UK chart history and became the band's breakthrough album in the US where it sold 4 million copies. Remastered Double Heavyweight LP - 13 Track with Download. Remastered Deluxe 3 CD Set - 40 Tracks including all the B-sides plus rare and unreleased Oasis tracks from the 'Morning Glory' era.
‘Plowing Into The Field Of Love’ is the bold and forceful third album from Copenhagen’s Iceage. Channelling the rage and emotion of their tempestuous early releases into finely honed musicianship, ‘Plowing Into The Field Of Love’ features piano, mandolin, viola and organ atop Johan Suurballe-Wieth’s razor-sharp guitars and the lolloping, synchronized rhythm section of Jacob Tvilling Pless and Dan Kjær Nielsen. The record has a clear, uncompressed sound and Elias Bender Rønnenfelt’s desperate vocals are out front, nakedly accountable for the words.
