downbeat Archives - Backseat Mafia

Track: Tycho & Ben Gibbard’s positivity anthem ‘Only Love’ gets a woozily halcyon remix from Brijean

SAN FRAN breaks producer Tycho has been working cross-genre of late with Benjamin Gibbard, frontman of acclaimed US indie outfits Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service – not that…

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Album review: Various artists – ‘Home – Volume One curated by Ali Tillett’: a beautifully tessellated, warming set of old-skool chillout

Y’KNOW, it’s not just the people out front – the bands, the writers, the DJs – who know a thing or three about music; there’s plenty of people quietly working…

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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…

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Album review: Scrimshire – ‘Nothing Feels Like Everything’: expansive, opulent soul-jazz with a real beating heart

ALBERT’S FAVOURITES is a label bringing the sounds of the South London scene to the world with heart; genuine heart, and care, and soul, in all iterations of that word.…

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See: James Alexander Bright gets it on with Fink for ‘Sundown’: keeping the rays alive as the chill bites

AUTUMN has well and truly bitten; any Indian summer which we may have had is now truly receding in the rear-view mirror; drizzle has become the lingua franca. Time to…

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See: James Alexander Bright cools the July heat as he invites you to ‘Drink This Water’

!K7’S lo-fi rural psychedelic soul scion James Alexander Bright has emerged into the height of summer to slake our thirst with the Shuggie Otis-style leftfield chill of “Drink This Water”:…

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See: Pie Eye Collective feat. Hector Plimmer – ‘Flibbers’: gloriously subaquatic, rollin’ breaks for a dancefloor in Atlantis

PIE EYE COLLECTIVE is the solo project of Bristol-born, London-based sound scientist Matthew Gordon, who melds elements of ambient, broken beat, dub-techno and hip hop, all refracted and discoloured via…

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See: Barnaby Keen – ‘Trust Me’: a little languorous neo-psych sunshine

LONDON singer-songwriter and producer Barnaby Keen brings a little languorous neo-psych sunshine into our lives with his second single as just himself, “Trust Me”, out now on all digital streaming…

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See: The lyric video for psych-pop songwriter Barnaby Keen’s ‘Lay Our Cards’

LET’S welcome to the grand pantheon of recorded music a debuting (at least solo) songwriter and a new label: firstly Barnaby Keen, who has, on the evidence of “Lay Our…

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See: The Harpoonist & The Axe Murderer – ‘Forever Fool (Post-Apocalipstick)’: a late-night stoner chillout reimagining

A VANCOUVER duo who met by chance at a jobbing jingle recording session some decade and a half ago, the curiously named The Harpoonist & The Axe Murderer soon discovered…

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