SEE: Ailsa Tully – ‘Parasite’: a bass-led tune with masked lyrical steel
HAILING from Welsh border country, Ailsa Tully is a singer-songwriter whose instrument of choice, the bass, brings a new slant to the crowded sphere of singer-songwriting. We fell pretty hard for her first single for Dalliance Recordings, “Drive”, back around Hallowe’en, noting that bass-led thing it possesses evoked “… a sweeter Breeders … her bass …
NEWS: Telex announce ‘This Is Telex’ comp for Mute; see ‘Moskow Diskow’
BELGIAN synthpop originators ‘n’ pranksters Telex have announced they’re going into partnership with Mute, the very first realisation of which is a career retrospective in This is Telex, a new 14-track compilation, featuring new mixes of 12 classics from the oeuvre and a brace of previously unreleased tracks. This is Telex will be released on limited …
TRACK: Bill Stone – ‘Purple’: lost psych-folk nugget gets a reissue
YOU MAY think we’ve been there, got the T-shirt, seen it all where it comes to long-lost psych singer-songwriters of the Sixties and Seventies. Yep, we’ve adored and come to revise the place of history for artists like Bill Fay, Vashti, Gary Higgins; Linda Perhacs. They’re embraced, lauded, careers rejuvenated. We’ve mined it dry; we …
SEE: The Lottery Winners feat. Frank Turner – ‘Start Again’: begs to be sung with a can aloft
JANUARY – I mean you could paraphrase Malcolm Middleton, at the time formerly of Arab Strap here, who had some choice and entirely memorable words to say of autumn in a vein which seems to capture the grind and the dark admirably. And this year’s opening month; well, bit of a shocker in most senses, …
TRACK: Rutger Hoedemaekers – ‘Not For That Hour, Nor For That Place’: modern composition with electronica glimmer
RUTGER HOEDEMAEKERS is the most recent addition to 130701’s almost obscenely strong and talented stable of artists working at the forefront of modern composition. You may not yet have come across him, even if you are an aficionado of modern composition; but if you are amongst that number, you’ve heard him collaboratively in the work …
SEE: The Underground Youth – ‘For You Are The One’: dark romance and the swing of the violin
THE UNDERGROUND YOUTH, Manchester-forged and currently Berlin-based – and can’t you so hear that city bleeding through their sound? – have today released the video for the gravel-voiced, folksy swing of “For You Are The One”; untucked collars and suits, late-night card tables and spirits, cigarette smoke and dark romance in the veins. You can …
ALBUM REVIEW: Yvette Janine Jackson – ‘Freedom’: two suites of free expression of the Black experience
If real, unafraid, powerful sonic architecture, dialogue and expression is your thing – and in terms of consciousness, maybe it should be – then this record is essential. But enter steeled and go carefully, friend
SEE: The lyric video for Drive-By Truckers’ ‘Tough To Let Go’
IT’S AN album that came out of nowhere; Drive-By Truckers’ The New OK grew from a lockdown EP, something to occupy crack musicians after their last album, The Unraveling, collecting together some pretty powerful odds and ends from those Memphis sessions, including a fiery ‘n’ fun run-through Ramones’ “The KKK Took My Baby Away” as …
PREMIERE: bolomite jr. – ‘Ants’: hallucinatory soundscapery from Philly
BEN CALHOUN is, by day, a carpenter in the construction industry, keeping body and soul together with a craftsman’s skill; the better to set up him up for when he slips inside that phone box, swiftly changing to emerge in his experimental soundscaper guise as bolomite jr. And here today at Backseat Mafia, we’re pleased …
Bleach Lab announce EP for March – hear the blissful glide of ‘Old Ways’
FORMED up in the wooded hills of Buckinghamshire, since relocated south of the Thames, Bleach Lab have an appreciation of the good things; think the Cocteau Twins, think Mazzy Star, think glimmer and shimmer, languid vocals spreading loving and lovelorn vocals over guitar chime. All the good things. Despite 2020 sending a viral tornado through …