Indie, alternative, and experimental music
Vinyl records a specialty!
Windy & Carl
We Will Always Be
Album of the week
Windy and Carl are back with their first album in three years. Nice to see that there are some people who still take their time over these things. This husband and wife team have created some astounding sonic architecture in the past with their neofolk-inflected minimal-ambient drone. After a surprisingly folky beginning where fragile guitar and mournful vocals over nostalgic crackles carve out an aching sense of pathos, they continue treading...read full review.
Kane Ikin
Contrail
Single of the week
Ooh, this is lovely. On this 7” Solo Andata’s Kane Ikin has astonishingly managed to fit more than 20 minutes of gorgeous relaxing droney ambience. There’s mournful swelling chords over measured twinkles on piano and guitar, with field recordings low in the mix completing the picture. There’s a real sense of stillness and ennui that I’m getting from the final track ‘Short Wave Fade’ especially, but this...read full review.
MJ Hibbett & The Validators
Dinosaur Planet
Well, it’s not every day you hear an album like this one!! What MJ Hibbett and his Validators have done this time is to create a 50-minute full-cast rock opera in which the earth is invaded by dinosaurs. It’s very silly and very ambitious, with a Douglas Adams-esque streak of knowing silliness running throughout. The album is split between radio play-style dialogue that reminds me of listening to Radio 4 as a child, and indie pop so...read full review.
Bardo Pond + Tom Carter
4/23/03
Nearly ten years ago, Bardo Pond got together with their friend Tom Carter of Charalambides fame and spent a single day in April putting together two and a half hours of drawn-out psychedelic meditations. This is totally relaxing, bong-fuelled astral madness from start to finish. It’s reminding me a little bit of that fantastic Eternal Tapestry & Sun Araw collaboration that came out a few months back with these laid back stoner groove...read full review.
Errors
Have Some Faith In Magic
Looks like Reverb Worship and Rock Action have something in common - they both have little to no interest in press releases, hence I’m short on background information to explain the recent transformation in the work of Scottish post-rockers Errors. These lads have always been a good band but something has happened. Maybe it’s ambition, maybe it’s an emerging sense of musical confidence and identity or perhaps it’s just pu...read full review.
Black Bananas
Rad Times Xpress IV
Okay, this is a great record to be ending the day with. Jennifer Herrera’s new band Black Bananas have dropped their debut on Drag City. On here we’ve got indie rock’s original queen of cool showing the kids what’s up with a crazy technicolour mix of ‘80s power pop, funk and psych-rock. Her nonchalant delivery splatters class over everything and there’s shameless wah abuse. There are places that bring to mind...read full review.
Marcus Fischer
Collected Dust
I loved the last album by this chap. I think so far it has been my favourite 12K release and I guess a lot of people agreed as it sold out pretty quickly and has been unavailable for a while now. So I was quite excited about listening to this one! The story behind this one is Marcus ran a blog called ‘Dust Breeding’ where he wanted to do a creative project once a day for a year. These could be photos, field recordings, design, sewin...read full review.
Keith Kenniff
Branches
Keith Kenniff aside from having one of my favourite names in pop music (okay, it’s not pop music) is also known as Helios and Goldmund...ie. he’s a busy lad. Here’s his first album proper under his name (bar a soundtrack called ‘The Last Survivor’ which featured tracks as him and Goldmund). Makes you wonder why you’d do some tracks under one name and some under another? Well Keith’s stuff is more orchest...read full review.
Oren Ambarchi
Audience of One
I never know what to expect from this guy cos he changes styles quite a lot. You never know what each album is gonna be like so he’s one of those artists that needs special attention as I think he makes something for everyone. Even if you’re not a fan of the bulk of his stuff I think there will be one or two records in his repertoire which will make you think ‘Yeah man, that’s pretty sweet’. I think this is one of t...read full review.
Ampersand
20 Seas 4 Oceans
Ah, you know where you are with the Great Pop Supplement, definitely one of the more reliable purveyors of psychedelic pop in recent years. This time round they’re dishing us up a single from the mysteriously-monikered &, who are bucking the current trends by making a ‘60s-inspired slacker pop number that isn’t remotely drenched in reverb! Instead it relies on a charming tune and a friendly shuffling beat to propel itself...read full review.
CWK Joynes & The Restless Dead
8 Selections & Premonitions from the Tower Vol.III
CWK Joynes is a blinding guitar player by all accounts, and on this latest 7” he’s joined by friends including Harrapian Night Recordings to whip up an east-meets-west instrumental frenzy with his frantic fingerpicking very much taking the fore. It’s bringing to mind a more dense and heady take on the mystical psych vibes on brilliant recent Orfanado album. Flip it and there’s more of the same busy spiritual psychedelia w...read full review.
Sunn O)))
ии Void
Southern Lord have decided to reissue this classic of the Sunn O))) canon on 2LP in the usual lush packaging. You know what to expect from Sunn O)))...beatless, loud, bassy, distorted doom delivered at a snail’s pace for full grimness. An agonised trudge through the filth of your subconscious with everything turned up to 11. One point of interest about this record is that the third of the four side-long tracks on offer here is a cover of...read full review.
Yellow 6 / Egsun
Worth Wasting Time
Here’s a CD in a brown recycled cardboard package so you probably know what it sounds like as everything in brown recycled cardboard packages sounds either pastoral or droney right? This one ain’t a collaboration. It’s a split CD with 2 tracks by the 6meister who is travelling a darker doomier path than usual but it still has his instantly recognisable trademark guitar musings there to keep you grounded. Egsun is a name I&rsqu...read full review.
All The Saints
Intro To Fractions
Bit of a genre-hopper, this one. Opening with a barrage of pummelling shoegazey Kraut-psych that stops dead as the vocals come in only to stomp back in even harder, All The Saints clearly aren’t here to piss about. Over the course of this 13-song album they offer us their own twisted take on indie rock, sometimes dropping down to sinewy minimal jams with dubby bass and ethereal, glassy guitars, sometimes aiming driving Cave-esque motorik...read full review.
Expo 70/ Altair Temple
Split
Justin Wright’s Expo 70 is back, this time sharing vinyl space with French duo Altair Temple for a trip headlong into the bonged up psych-drone ether. On Wright’s side we’ve got a jam from the same sessions as his righteous Death Voyage outing, and he sculpts swirling dark masses of sound with heavily effected guitar and Moog, sometimes underpinned by the steady pulse of an analog drum machine. Flip it and Altair Temple deal o...read full review.
RM Hubbert
Thirteen Lost & Found
On his star-spattered new offering on Chemikal Underground, RM Hubbert offers up a selection of dour Scottish pastoral indie songs with a cold and spacious stoicism. The second song has Aidan Moffat chipping in with his usual chat over defeated fingerpicked guitar and...what sounds like a melodica. It sounds like a more Scottish Arab Strap. While the musical guests change through the course of the album, the wistful acoustic fingerpicking remai...read full review.
Ester Elster
Schmattes
First up, I hate reviewing records with earphones on, especially when I’m stuck between the office hi-fi speakers and can hear the record Mikey is reviewing as loudly as my own. Don’t know when we turned into a review factory but there you go, apologies if my evaluations are a little aggravated today. Right - Reverb Worship hit us with two new releases this week with ‘Schmettes’ being the prize addition. As usual, there&r...read full review.
Odessa Chen
Archives Of The Natural World
When I first picked this CD up it had a “review” sticker on the front sleeve. The sticker was obscuring the title slightly, so I thought this LP was called “Chives Of The Natural World” and I thought this was a celebration of all things natural and errmmmm...chive based. Luckily it isn’t a collection of songs with titles like “I’ve Had (The Chive Of My Life)” or “Chive Talkin’”. I...read full review.
Expensive Looks
Dark Matters
A hark back to basics (Ohhh!) from this dance lad Alec Feld, a New Yorker who just loves house music, disco and Ebeneezer Goode (probably). This LP/CD or whatever the fuck you wanna call it, “Dark Matters”, combines a lot of these elements and does feel like a loving homage to early ‘90s raves, Spliffy jeans and euphoric musical dropouts. This album flows seamlessly from one sweet cut to the next. It does sound strangely famil...read full review.
Cuticle
Mother Rhythm Earth Memory
Iowa has some great things going for it. Many a Iowan(?) has left his or her mark on culture in one way or another, such as Grant Wood (the artist who painted American Gothic) and Laura Leighton (actress in Melrose Place) to name but two. It also has some absoloute zingers when it comes to laws (such as...a man with a moustache may never kiss a woman in public, and...one-armed piano players must perform for free)...read full review.