album news
See: Blue States – ‘Plain Sight’ feat. Rachael Dadd – a step into folktronica from Andy Dragazis ahead of his sixth album
BLUE STATES, the lovely downbeatz project of Sussex’s Andy Dragazis, is following last year’s necessary and expanded repressing of his classic album Nothing Changes Under The Sun with another peek into the world of his new album, his sixth and also first in six years; come inside and twirl with the complex atmospheres of “Plain …
Premiere: The Jazz Butcher – ‘Time’: RIP, Pat, but there’s one final album in store and a celebratory gig in Camden this weekend
THE JAZZ BUTCHER is one of those artists who make indiepop kids of a certain generation go misty eyed, and with good reason; Pat Fish, the man behind the jazz despatching curtain, as it were, was an all-round gentleman of the whimsical song, someone you’d definitely find in the kitchen at parties; sometime indie television …
See: The ghostly soundtrackery of The Arteries of New York City’s ‘Capable’; the album’s on its way to a full release
NO, AND you’d be forgiven for thinking it with the name they trade under, but the experimental ambient duo The Arteries of New York City isn’t some semi-psychogeographical project arising from dérives across that city from Queens or Yonkers or somewhere in the Five Boroughs; the project instead has its roots our side of the …
Track: Spanish ambient explorers Suso Sáiz and Menhir combine for the deep, pristine drift of ‘Alike’ ahead of their album for Spirituals
HE MAY Not be quite as familiar a name on these shores, but in Spain Suso Sáiz is something of an Eno figure; a pioneer of ambient and minimalist music in the country, he’s released something like 28 albums of beautiful and exploratory music since his 1984 debut, Prefiero El Naranja (‘I Prefer Orange’). He’s …
Track: Erin Rae glides into an album and tour in the new year on the psych-country of ‘Candy & Curry’
WITH a sweet, hook-laden but straighter country-pop number, “Modern Woman”, dropping last month, Nashville’s Erin Rae has revealed a more gossamer, delicate psych-folk side to her forthcoming third album in the lighter-than-air “Candy & Curry”, sprinkled with a little retro synth and possessed of a real Margo Guryan harmonic feel; you can swoon for that …
See: North Carolina’s Owen FitzGerald invites you to his outsider country confessional, ‘Bismuth, The Last Gentleman’
HE’S a gentleman of the leftfield country music scene, is Durham, North Carolina’s Owen FitzGerald who, after appearing in the music world as Jokes&Jokes&Jokes awhile, has returned to his ‘government name’ – the name under which he snuck out two fine if lyrically troubled and akimbo albums digitally in 2015, Tight Gyre and Pointer. That …
Track: North Carolina’s Boulevards sings an addiction siren song in ‘Better Off Dead’ – an album follows in February
WE’RE born of the good earth, and thence shall we return. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Mud to mud. It’s that thick, wet, good earth of home that keeps up a siren song to songwriter Jamil Rashad, who trades in and around the musical frontier posts as Boulevards; time and time again he leaves …
Track: As Oldham’s TikTok sensation Seb Lowe releases his debut mini-album, delight in the rollicking Pennine lyricism of ‘iPhone’
WITH something like a hundred thousand-plus followers over on shortform video app TikTok, bard of the Oldham streets Seb Lowe is working from the ground up with a fascinating and absolutely necessary line in acerbic socio-political commentary on the state we’re in, AD 2021 – and one in which he leaves us less tech-compliant old …
See: Matchess invites us to embrace meditative drone and transcend the flesh in the practise of ‘Almost Gone (Excerpt)’
WHITNEY JOHNSON has been releasing albums exploring really gorgeous deep inner space in song and sound for a number of years now as Matchess. Her journey in this guise began in 2015 with the downtempo ambience of Somnaphoria, vocodered vocals, clock-ticking beats, swirls and aural glitter to put The Orb to shame in the cosmic …
News: Psych legends LOOP return with their first album in 32 years; see the immaculately acid strobe-fest of ‘Halo’
I REMEMBER the first time I fell down the LOOP rabbithole, as an uninitiated 17-year-old in love with the jingle-jangle sound of early Creation Records, grappling with the situationist excellence of Bogshed and Stump; finding my way into The Fall’s This Nation’s Saving Grace with a whole armful of questions for Mark E Smith. In …