PREMIERE: JR Samuels – ‘Doomer’: fine porchside guitar soli outta Philly
JR SAMUELS has been involved in the indie and underground scenes of the North-Eastern United States for the better half of a decade now. While resident in Ithaca in New York’s Finger Lakes back in 2015, he tickled the six strings in fine lofi outfit Izzy True and also steered the good ship Sweet Baby …
SEE: Tune-Yards’ ‘nowhere, man’: brilliantly freakish stop-motion and a rousing groove
MERRILL GARBUS and Nate Brenner’s excellent, genre-busting, rousing Tune-Yards have released a brilliantly freakish stop-motion animation for their new track, “nowhere, man”. It’s bright, groovy, offbeat, spacious, eccentrically paced, passionately sung: in short, everything you need a Tune-Yards’ tune to be. And that accompanying video … Merrill and Nate are caught giving it the Chaplin …
SEE: Lou Hayter – ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’: sophisticated electropop for Skint
YOU MAY know Lou Hayter better for her work with London electro collective New Young Pony Club before they contracted into acronym; but get people to shuffle up on the elegant, intelligent electropop sofa inside your brain, because it’s gonna be so rude of you not to offer Lou a seat once you wrap your …
ALBUM REVIEW: Hugar – ‘Music For The Motion Picture The Vasulka Effect’: graceful ambience for art documentary
HUGAR is the exploratory Icelandic music project of Bergur Þórisson and Pétur Jónsson, a pair of talented musicians hailing from Seltjarnarnes, which rejoices in the fact it’s the smallest town in the nation. Their collective name: it translates from the Icelandic, quite simply, as “Minds”. They’ve had a quietly stellar upward career curve, working at …
ALBUM REVIEW: The Heliocentrics – ‘Telemetric Sounds’: trippy as hell Afro-psych grooves
THE HELIOCENTRICS have been working away on a rarified astral plane of musical fusion for more than a decade and a half now – and frankly, if you’re a crate-digger on any kind of level, whose musical tastes range multifariously, they’re the kind of band whose wax should be sat in that little favoured stack …
ALBUM REVIEW: Kris Drever – ‘Where The World Is Thin’: a fine, open and wise set from Orcadian folk star
IF YOU’RE a gig veteran, whichever your chosen poison in terms of bands or genres, I bet you can in one sphere break down your gig experiences thus. Some bands you see – maybe that upcoming, hotly tipped support, you turn to your friends at the end of the night and say: “Yeah, quite fun …
TRACK: A Lily – ‘Slept Through The Storm’: complex minimalism for a dark time
JAMES VELLA is, like the rest of us, concerned with the horrifically dark period we’re living through right now: the anxiety, the mental privations. The storm. We all need to find a way through: on October 16th, under his recording pen-name A Lily, he releases an album advocating his complex and seductive musical approach to …
TRACK: Kid Acne – ‘Stand Tall’ / ‘Stay Golden’ (Hashfinger remix) – crisp lyricism from limited ‘Fresh To Death’ mixtape
SHEFFIELD’S Kid Acne is up in your (Ford Orion) grille with a fantastic new mixtape, featuring seven remixes from last year’s excellent Have A Word album for Lex. Fresh To Death is out digitally, sho’; but why settle for that when you can have the full dayglo pink TDK mixtape experience? He brings the fantastic …
SEE: Le Volume Courbe – ‘Fourteen Years’: Charlotte returns with brilliant quirkiness
WENDING my way through a particular tributary of my record collection the other day, I came across a lovely, lofi 7″, characterised by the mint and cream swirl artwork of Alan McGee’s post-Creation imprint, Poptones; it was Le Volume Courbe’s quirky folk tune, “Papillon De Nuit”, an idiosyncratic and alluring essay in pigeon coos, downhome …
TRACK: Adam Stafford – ‘Diamonds Of A Horse Famine’: an eerie, dream-state blues
ADAM STAFFORD, Song, By Toad’s rather excellent Falkirk folk guitarist, has just released the title track of his forthcoming LP Diamonds of a Horse Famine for your delectation. And a very fine and atmospheric, dreamstate rattlin’ blues it is. Cop a listen below. It’s another track culled from a notebook of half-finished ideas that Adam …