Album Reviews
Droppin’ Knowledge: World Premiere – Rapper Hernon & Producer Frowns Share Their New Album Masterplan, Discuss Its Creation
The artists discuss their new album and share it with Backseat Mafia. Virginia rapper Hernon and Toronto-based producer Frowns met the way many artists meet each other today, on social media. After exchanging some direct messages on Instagram, they began to collaborate on a project together, their new album, Masterplan. While the process of creating …
ALBUM REVIEW: Cabbage – ‘Amanita Pantherina’: Mossley marauders aim for the jugular on their second
MOSSLEY – you pronounce it Mozzley, chaps, hard S – is a small milltown up in the hills north west of Manchester, where the soil gets thin, the rushes spring through the steep meadows; where Manchester as a greater conurbation gives up its last and prepares for the bleak moors of Yorkshire ahead. It’s also …
Premiere: Divest – Time Well Spent
There’s something in the Scandinavian air that’s producing some pretty special music. This time around, it’s Divest, a Norwegian indie pop band that are premiering their new album ‘Time Well Spent’ on Backseat Mafia. This is as far as you can get from a bleak Nordic winter: it’s bright, sparkling summery pop that canters forth …
Album Review: Mildlife – ‘Automatic’
Phase, the debut album by Australian band Mildlife, was a bonafide word of mouth discovery upon its release in early 2018. It’s mellow combination of groove propelled psychedelic jazz and disco, performed with a nod to Kosmische, Balearic, Scandinavian and Adriatic favours, caught a wave with a snowballing swell of support that united various scenes’ …
Droppin’ Knowledge: Public Enemy – What You Gonna Do When The Grid Goes Down? – Review
Unfortunately, Public Enemy is not in full effect on its latest album, an exercise in righteous nostalgia, not righteous anger. This week, Public Enemy releases its latest long player, What You Gonna Do When The Grid Goes Down?. It is the iconic rap group’s fifteenth studio album, and marks a return to Def Jam Recordings. …
Album Review: Death Bells – ‘New Signs Of Life’: post-punk and emo-infused rock
THE NEW album from Australian duo Will Canning and Remy Veselis, aka Death Bells, is a fusion of post-punk and emo-infused rock. The band has become a more concrete two-person pairing since its formation in 2015, culminating in the twosome making the bold move to up sticks from Sydney, Australia, and transfer 7000 miles to …
ALBUM REVIEW: Sing Leaf – ‘Not Earth’: wide-eyed psych-indie-electro bliss
NAIVETY. It’s one of those words whose power has been denuded by an overuse of a certain conjugation of it. Much like ‘awesome’, the non sequitur of teens across the English-speaking world, naivety has come to mean fey, unwise, easily led. Sing Leaf, the recording pen-name of Toronto’s David Como, is naive in all the …
MIXTAPE REVIEW: Blue Hawaii – ‘Under 1 House’: your deep house cassette pet
BLUE HAWAII: now there’s a name that conjures up a blissful vision of lazy heat and crystal-clear waters, especially for me sat in subfusc September Britain. And the same appeal of vision would apply, you’d think, to a duo one of whom is working out of Montreal, Quebec. Blue skies, bluer waters. A lightness of …
ALBUM REVIEW: Yves Jarvis – ‘Sundry Rock Song Stock’: a thrilling solo quirk-psych vision
WHEN historians of future days come to write up the glowering all-round evils of 2020, they will, hopefully, take note of one glimmering shaft of light through the fog-plague; how great the sphere of quirky Canadian music has been this year. There’s been another sonically luxuriant missive from Montreal’s Braids in the shape of Shadow …
ALBUM REVIEW: Olivier Alary and Johannes Malfatti – ‘u,i’: beautifully humanist post-classicism, listening to the world talk to itself
ISDN, fibre-optics, the web. Sharing platforms, Skype, Facebook, Zoom; instantaneous transmission, the world shrunk to a pebble’s dimension. Our modern world, and especially the broader swathe of this fractured year 2020 would be unimaginable without it. And the latest offering from FatCat’s ever-intriguing leftfield imprint, 130701, a collaboration between Montreal-based Toulousain Olivier Alary and Berlin’s …