NEWS: Cabbage announce 13-date UK tour for May
CABBAGE, Mossley’s marauding Mondaysesque gang of sprawling tunesters, have announced a tour, necessarily and unfortunately ‘rona-delayed, in support of their forthcoming album, Amanita Pantherina. The album’s out on Friday week, September 25th; but it’ll be almost a full year by the time the lads are unleashed from their Pennine fastness to run riot on stages …
SEE: Sophie Jamieson – ‘Release’: a stunning folktronic search for feeling
FIVE YEARS away from music – but Sophie Jamieson has lost not a jot of her musical acuity. A recording session all that time ago collapsed leaving Sophie uncertain after her lauded debut EP, Where; self-doubt built upon self-doubt and she retreated. But she’s dusted herself down, going on tour with Charlie Cunningham across Europe …
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 …
ALBUM REVIEW: A Certain Ratio – ‘ACR Loco’: taut Mancunian future funk and effortless electronic pop
“THIS album is a culmination of everything we’ve ever done,” says A Certain Ratio’s Jez Kerr. “We’ve got some real momentum at the moment.” He’s talking about A Certain Ratio’s first album in 12 years, ACR Loco, which drops this week. Excited much? You wouldn’t bet against a musician so steeped in the groove; A …
ALBUM REVIEW: Various Artists – ‘Sunrise On The Blues: Sun Records Curated By Record Store Day Vol. 7’
SAM PHILLIPS’ Sun Records imprint is arguably the first truly great label of the modern era. It was founded in Memphis in February 1952 by Sam, Alabama born, who lived through the great American depression and who cut his musical teeth at the Muscle Shoals radio station WLAY, which didn’t categorise its music by colour …
TRACK: Hear Vaughan’s ‘BitCrushed’: downtempo electropop concerning the pains of love
THOMAS HARVEY is a young English singer-songwriter bringing alt.pop grace and intelligence to his songwriting as a voice for the young UK queer community. He’s not afraid of a downtempo melodic pop number shot through with piercing lyrical precision, as demonstrated by his latest single, the empowered but regretful lament of “BitCrushed”. Take a listen …
TRACK: Leron Thomas’s ‘Endicott’: outrageously leftfield P-funk
LERON THOMAS – the man who oversaw last year’s LP Free for a certain James Newell Osterberg (OK, OK … Iggy Pop to me and thee) has come out from behind the faders to carve some pretty immaculate leftfield funk grooves. He’s dropped a new and seductive quirky thang for Lewis Recordings, “Endicott”, on which …