4AD
Album Review: Big Thief – ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You’
Crikey, but Big Thief have had a busy COVID. 4AD’s Brooklynite indie darlings issued their fourth album, ‘Two Hands’ (billed as the “earth twin” to their hugely successful ‘U.F.O.F.’) in October 2019, and they’re already back with a twenty-track, 84-minute, monster of an album, ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You’. When you add …
Album Review: Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard and Jules Maxwell’s new album ‘Burn’ is an enthralling cinematic vision that mesmerises
Australian duo Dead Can Dance (consisting of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry) were an extraordinarily innovative band signed to the legendary 4AD label (becoming their highest selling artists), fusing medieval music with gothic undertones and ambient textures. The band has disbanded and reformed over the years since it began in 1981 – the most recent being the release of the album …
Track: Dead Can Dance members Lisa Gerrard and Jules Maxwell collaborate with producer James Chapman (MAPS) in exquisite new single ‘Noyalain (Burn)’ and announce new album
Australian duo Dead Can Dance (consisting of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry) were an extraordinarily innovative band signed to the legendary 4AD label (becoming their highest selling artists), fusing medieval music with gothic undertones and ambient textures. The band has disbanded and reformed over the years since it began in 1981 – the most recent …
NEWS: Bing & Ruth release digital remix EP of ‘Species’: hear a harp-laden take on ‘Badwater Psalm’
AS WE approach the end of this accursed year and begin to summate the best of it – and more than any year as a species, thank the good lord above for the human gift for creative abstraction and catharsis – it’s an absolute dead cert that Bing & Ruth’s wholly immersive drone study Species …
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 …
Album Review: The Lemon Twigs – Songs For The General Public
Whether through the saccharine, nigh operatic heights of early track “Beautiful”, or the gruff bark of recent single “Moon”, The Lemon Twigs have frequently flung their vocal abilities to gratuitous lengths. With the first track of Songs For The General Public, this metamorphosis goes yet further still, with Brian D’addario letting out an Iggy Pop-type …
TRACK: The Lemon Twigs – ”No One Holds You (Closer Than The One You Haven’t Met)’: arch songwriters’ take on soured romance
BRIAN and Michael D’Addario, the brothers and musical prodigies who dazzle us mere mortals as The Lemon Twigs, are tantalising us with another taster from their forthcoming third full-lengther for 4AD, Songs For The General Public. “‘No One Holds You (Closer Than The One You Haven’t Met)” like everything the D’Addarios touches, it crams more …
SEE: U.S. Girls – ‘IOU’: classic pop craft caught in the studio
THE NAME may have originated in a casual joke all those years ago, but Meghan Remy’s U.S. Girls project fashions a very true and lovely music, bringing those classic vocal tones she has to intelligent pop music – and by pop, we of course mean pop as in Carole King, as in St Vincent. Pop …
SEE: Becky and the Birds – ‘Paris’: awesome Swedish future soul
LEAVING aside the Anglophone countries, there’s a cast-iron case that no other country has engaged with the world of post-1955 popular music quite like Sweden. There’s that acronymical band, two As, two Bs; you’ve probably heard the odd tune by them. But look past them at Avicii, Lykke Li, First Aid Kit, The Cardigans, The …
ALBUM REVIEW: Bing & Ruth – ‘Species’ – majestic and meditative
SOMETIMES the cliches can ring true. It’s a marriage made in heaven. Take 4AD, Ivo Watts-Russell beautiful stable, which has given us such moments as … well, Victorialand. Need we say more? Take also then, New York’s David Moore, who had quietly – and quietly again is le mot juste here – been making beguiling, …