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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COME December 1980, and The Clash brought their all-encompassing ambition to bear on the triple-disc, 36-song Sandanista!, taking in dub, rockabilly, jazz, disco, hiphop, reggae and more. One of the singles to be spun off from the album was the open and funky “The Magnificent Seven”, which reached no.34 in the UK charts. And now, …

A stateswoman of female musical discourse takes the Christmas song tradition and makes of it something thoughtful, intelligent and nuanced

NOTTINGHAM’S finest, Tindersticks, are all set to release a new album in 2021 on City Slang, their home for most of the past decade; and they’ve dropped their first single, paying homage to one of the lost greats of Eighties’ British post-punk and indie – Dan Treacy, and the Television Personalities. They’ve decided to take …

AS THIS most hellishly viral year’s eyelids droop and it prepares to exit stage left, the masterful Jon Hopkins has brought some beautiful piano catharsis and grace for our troubled brains as he drops a cover of Thom Yorke’s “Dawn Chorus”. The track features on Thom’s most recent solo outing, Anima. It was recorded in one …

I CAN’T be the only one who noted that December 18th was the 25th anniversary of the release of that swingin’, knowin’, cheesy-easy version of “Wonderwall” by Mike Flowers Pops and uttered a ripe Anglo-Saxon expletive. F**k. How exactly did that happen now? A quarter-century? As Haruki Murakami said: “The past increases, the future recedes”. …

TWO THINGS about New Zealand’s King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard: one. They’re immense, ass ‘n’ tousled locks-shaking fun. Two. Christ, they’re prolific. Their cup of creativity runneth o’er. Twenty-three albums in eight years, if you follow the Discogs tally of these things – a mere three this year, slackers – but that’s only if …

PORRIDGE RADIO are drawing down the curtain on 2020 with one final, fine salutation: their own contribution to the vein of alternative Christmas songs which Low kicked off back in ’99 with that mini-album that made Yule songs cool again. It’s entitled “The Last Time I Saw You (O Christmas)”, it’s out via Secretly Canadian, and …

OUR DEEPEST Americana poet Bill Callahan put together his latest album, Gold Record, really quickly, and previewed it over those long, lazy lockdown summer days with the neat idea of dropping a track every Monday afternoon leading up to its eventual September release. Loose and freewheeling it may have been, but that doesn’t take anything …

ERLAND COOPER wraps up a year in which he’s brought us much light, creativity and joy with one final aural missive, the choral EP, Eynhallow, out today on Phases. Hether Blether, the concluding chapter of the Orkney Trilogy, seduced everyone who came into its welcoming arms in June, with its delicacy, its history, its cultural …

ALEC OUNSWORTH’S Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are following up the double whammy of October’s twin single drop, “Thousand Oaks”/”Hesitation Nation” (which we adored here) with the beautiful and elegiac “Where They Perform Miracles”, from forthcoming new album, New Fragility. It’s intimate, has that beautiful, tremulous voice and bodes exceedingly well for the album, his first since …