Album review: Matchess’s ‘Sonescent’: an irresistible flow of experimental, meditative drone recollection and conscious absence

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Album review: The Jazz Butcher – ‘The Highest In The Land’: one final pop postcard from Northampton’s foremost gent

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Album review: Black Flower – ‘Magma’: a perfumed souk of North African psych jazz from the Lowlands quintet

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MOSSLEY  – pronounced Mozzley – high up where the Pennines lurch high and wild, right out on the north-eastern fringes of Greater Manchester, has spawned a looming, mist-blurred collective known in whispers, from Delph to Dobcross, to beset weary travellers with hard and chaotic, baggy funk, lyrics chomped and spat, guitars sprawling, the better to …

WHEN the going gets tough … You know the rest. A summer that’s bust more than a few consciousnesses has proved the right conditions for Austin, Texas’s Craig Clouse, who records fractured drone-psych with a dancefloor edge as $hit & $hine, to lay down deep frazzled psych groove, which we can lose ourselves in come …

IT COMES grooving in on an early glam kinda riff, that hook-laden chug you got in Bowie’s “Suffragette City”, bluesy and low-slung, propelling along on a fuzz guitar. Jeremy himself – for tis him; Jeremy Tuplin, suave psych-folkster who’s come up to town the better to ready himself for the launch of his new album, …

Aberdeenshire’s Kevin Allan releases his second LP of this most universally fraught year today, August 7th. Valentine’s Day brought us ‘Separate Lives’, which was necessarily championed by Stuart Maconie on his 6Music Freakzone. ‘In Monochrome’ is an absolute stunner, we find. Raw, chilled, unblinking in the face of life, Kevin makes promises no answers. But what he does do is communicate with you, proffer you emotional information; learn alongside him. ‘In Monochrome’ is unflinching and visionary; it’s one of the essential albums of 2020, sayeth us here at BSM.

“THIS is the best song I’ve written, I think; real simple and clean,” says Sing Leaf’s David Como of the single he’s just released, “Easy On You”.  “I wrote it while still living in the city [Toronto], an apartment in the trees near High Park.  “People below us would howl and rage at each other …

HANNAH PEEL, the Irish-born, Yorkshire-resident artiste who moves freely between folk, classical and retrotronica, finding beautiful nuance in each, is to release her soundtrack for the new Channel 5 psychological thriller The Deceived, which has been airing this week. The Deceived is a four-part drama written by Lisa McGee, the authorial talent behind Derry Girls. …

OVER the past couple of years and one very warmly received LP, Duke Spirit member and Bella Union solo artiste Liela Moss  – watch your vowel placement with care, folks – has carved herself something of a niche for a strong and dark pop draught, heady with intensity, 80s’ melodicism, courage and a complete willingness …

THE WORLD of 60s’ and early 70s’ electronica was full of fascinating, creative mavericks: scientists, polymaths, creatives, all deeply fascinated by the weird things that were happening with the pure and random sound of circuitry. Foremost among them was the Canadian Mort Garson, who began his career with the fantastic space age astrological trippiness of …

AFTER yesterday’s powerful live stream in solidarity, remembrance, rage and consciousness-raising marking the 75th anniversary of the devastating nuclear destruction of Hiroshima, politically acute Super Furry Animal Cian Ciarán today releases the single-cut version of the track from that six-hour stream, “Are You Down With Me”, in which wordsmiths Jehst and Wibidi use speech as …

JOHN DWYER’S Osees – yep, that’s another letter gone – are the hardest working, most adrenaline-fuelled garage-punk guitar toters in the business. If you’e ever been blessed enough to see them live, you’ll know the guitars are scuzzy, fuzzy and murderous; the twin drums metronomic; the attack and power rapturous. And the ever nominally contracting …