On The Beths’ new album, Expert In A Dying Field, Elizabeth Stokes’ songwriting positions her somewhere between being a novelist and a documentarian. The songs collected here are autobiographical, but they’re also character sketches of relationships – platonic, familial, romantic – and, more importantly, their aftermaths. The shapes and ghosts left in absences. The question…
Has there been a busier musician over the last two years? A more prolific artist? More creative? More heroic? Tim Burgess – as self-effacing a band leader, solo star, label runner, repeat memoirist and all-round caffeinated can-do kid as you’ll find – would certainly shrink from that last accolade. “A hero??” he’d likely mutter with…
Take It Like A Man is a fearless confessional featuring 10 emotionally raw tracks from Amanda Shires, produced by the talented gender-fluid singer-songwriter and producer, Lawrence Rothman (Angel Olsen, Girl in Red, Courtney Love). Upon hearing Amanda for the first time Lawrence said: “I was just mesmerized. I thought she was the new Dolly Parton;…
Formed in Bellingham, WA in 1997, Death Cab For Cutie almost immediately entered the ranks of the era’s definitive bands, fueled in large part by the remarkable power of co-founder, vocalist, guitarist, and lead songwriter Benjamin Gibbard’s complex, often bittersweet songcraft. Asphalt Meadows, their tenth studio album, finds them exploring further into their own unique…
black midi’s new album, Hellfire, builds on the melodic and harmonic elements of last year’s Cavalcade, while expanding the brutality and intensity of their debut, Schlagenheim. It is their most thematically cohesive and intentional album yet. Note: The LP is initially available on clear red vinyl with a bonus flexi, exclusive to independent shops. Click…
Her first official album since Hypoxia in 2015, Night Drives opens with some of Kathryn Williams’s most immediately electronic tracks to date, such as the nihilistic ‘Human’, big ballad ‘Answer In The Dark’ with all its bold, layered production, and the dynamic, infectious ‘Radioactive’. Elsewhere, on the likes of ‘Moon Karaoke’, ‘Magnets’ and ‘The Brightest’,…
Freakout/Release is another dizzying high in a multi-decade career that’s seen Hot Chip continuing to innovate and develop a rich, resonant songcraft. And while they continue to operate at peak form, the album also feels like a new chapter for the group – a collection of flesh-and-blood songs that finds the band reaching into the…
A Light For Attracting Attention is the long awaited debut album from The Smile: Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead with Tom Skinner from Sons of Kemet. The 13-track album was produced and mixed by Nigel Godrich and mastered by Bob Ludwig. Tracks feature strings by the London Contemporary Orchestra and a full brass…
Rather than be sent scrambling like so many other musicians on tour or promoting enhanced music, when lockdown clamped in March 2020, Interpol quickly got into a productive mood. Coming from a group whose early work was characterised by Polish knife-wielders and incarcerated serial killers, you might expect Interpol’s pandemic record to be an emotional…
Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand can overpower the strongest among us. Then there are the rare, fertile moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten, complicate…
