VINYL RELEASES:
Akron/Family – River 7″
Atlas Sound – Logos
The prolific Bradford Cox delivers yet again, with his second solo album under the Atlas Sound moniker. Eleven delectable pop delights served up to tantalize & tickle your taste buds. Guest appearances by Noah Lennox (Animal Collective) & Laetitia Sadier (of Stereolab)
Andrew Bird’s Bowl Of Fire – The Swimming Hour
Never before released on Vinyl, the third album from Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire, The Swimming Hour, gets the double-LP treatment on 140 Gram vinyl (45rpm). Now newly remastered under the watchful eyes of Bird himself, this album was produced by Mike Napolitano (Blind Melon, the Neville Brothers, and the Squirrel Nut Zippers) and is the final album to feature Bird’s backing band, Bowl of Fire.
Black Devil Disco Club – The Strange New World of Bernard Fevre
In 1975, before the release of the first Black Devil Disco Club album, Bernard Fevre released an album called The Strange World of Bernard Fevre. Like the first Black Devil album, it was so far ahead of its time that even now, people struggle to believe it was really recorded over 30 years ago. Now Fevre has once again unlocked his magical cabinet and made available new mixes of the original tracks, along with previously unheard compositions. So crisp and inventive are the electronics, so haunting and eternal the melodies, it is as if this music has always existed. Which are new tracks and which come from the same era as the original album, Fevre is no hurry to reveal. For him, there is a single space-time continuum, and where and when individual events occur is of little importance.
Black Heart Procession – Six
Cage The Elephant – Cage The Elephant
Rosanne Cash – The List
Dark Meat – Truce Opium
Athens Georgia’s multifarious psychedelic road warriors Dark Meat have geared up for another get-go of pillage-and-freakout in the name of their newest offering, Truce Opium. A long period of lineup changes, label complications and heavy touring across North America and Europe has focused the band into a diamond-hard and trans formative experience: they’ve trimmed their lineup to a highly-effective and barely-anemic 9-piece, and, in the process, have organically developed an intense and diverse instrumental chemistry
The Depreciation Guild – In Her Gentle Jaws
El Perro Del Mar – Love Is Not Pop
Limited one time 500 pressing only. Comes on clear vinyl! In Her Gentle Jaws is the debut full-length from The Depreciation Guild, available on vinyl for the first time! (Originally self-released in December ‘07 as a free download, In Her Gentle Jaws has already found its way to over 90,000 hard drives. The stir across the internet, as well as in their own backyard, is testament to some breathtaking songwriting and arranging. A musical piece to be heard as a whole saturated in color, and drifting into dream
Fight Of The Conchords – I Told You I Was Freaky
The F*ck Buttons -Tarot Sport
Islands – Vapours
Jonsi & Alex – Riceboy Sleeps
Known primarily for his haunting falsetto and other-worldly presence in Sigur Ros, Jon Thor Birgisson has – together with his partner Alex Somers – been exhibiting artwork and staging exhibitions under the name Riceboy Sleeps for two or three years now. The album Riceboy Sleeps is human in a profound and verging on spiritual way. It says nothing, literally, and yet living through its 68-minutes you emerge feeling much has been revealed. Its slowly evolving abstract landscapes are both edifying and life-affirming. The record works as a whole, and exists in a contemplative dream-state, unconstrained and mesmeric, seemingly outside time
Nouvelle Vague – 3
OOIOO – Armonico Hewa
Armonico Hewa is OOIOO’s sixth full-length album and first record in over three years! Armonico Hewa is a mind-melting combination of stylistic reference points that can only be described as some kind of tribal psychedelia that is oddly spiritual and alarmingly urgent. OOIOO is an all-female outfit headed by Yoshimi, a founding member of Japanese experimental psych innovators Boredoms. The band will be touring the US in support of this release. OOIOO is one of the most enthralling, adventurous and unique bands in modern music
Rain Machine – Rain Machine
Rain Machine is a startling new musical venture from Kyp Malone, known to many as guitarist-singer for soulful art rockers TV On The Radio. For Rain Machine, Malone takes the roots influences that have always bubbled beneath the surface in TVOR – blues, gospel, even African music – and brings them to the fore. Performing all the parts himself (with the addition of some soulful female vocals), Malone has fashioned a deeply personal journey through modern life, looking back, as TVOTR so often does, on the weight of the history behind us. The result is a communique from the soul – if the Rolling Stones stripped away the glitz to find their emotional core on Exile on Main Street, then Malone has performed the same rite here, in all its murky, mercurial glory. Rain Machine will surprise some TVOTR fans and stun others, but all will be transported by this dense, spiritual music
RJD2 – 2002 – 2010 (3 LP Box)
Spiral Stairs – The Real Feel
After a five-year absence, Pavement guitarist and Preston School of Industry mainman Spiral Stairs (Scott Kannberg) returns with a heart-on-sleeve (but occasionally tongue-in-cheek) song-cycle about his complicated personal life. Spiral maintains his trademark melodic whoops and Flying Nun guitar licks, but overlays a layer of melancholy and wisdom, as well as a touch of Peter Green blues
Sufjan Stevens – The BQE
The XX – XX
The Xx unique make-up is an inadvertent second nature marriage of 2009’s urban/guitar tribes, in one corner fluttering new wave indebted reverberation, in the other, plumes of post-dubstep sub-bass and figuratively, their defining core of rich R&B vocal textures. The enveloping vocal partnership of Romy and Oliver is one that would’ve dropped-jaws in any decade this century, and set amidst a shivering soundscape of beats and plucks, their bedroom-reared concrete-soul is being justly heralded as the UK’s most original and treasured alt. pop artifact of late
Richard Youngs – Under Stellar Stream
CD RELEASES:
Atlas Sound – Logos
Bauhaus – Mask (Omnibus edition)
Bauhaus – In The Flat Field (Omnibus edition)
These re-mastered Bauhaus sets include the full-length albums, a second disc of the non-album singles, previously unreleased demos and alternative versions plus a newly mixed 1981 live show on the third disc. This Omnibus Edition is presented as a limited edition box set with the three CD’s in Japanese-style papersleeves, reproducing the original (gatefold) vinyl cover art, accompanied by a 48 page book that traces the development of the album with rare memorabilia and photographs and contains the complete lyrics
Converge – Axe To Fall
Dark Meat – Truce Opium
Doveman – The Conformist
Doveman is Thomas Bartlett and a select group of collaborators. On his latest album, The Conformist, those players include Sam Amidon, Nico Muhly, Glen Hansard, Norah Jones, Beth Orton, Martha Wainwright and members of The National. The Conformist marks his 3rd proper album as Doveman. A progression from previous efforts, The Conformist retains the melancholy, whisper quiet, night time music feel of his previous records, while adding a more upbeat undercurrents like sing along choruses, drum machines and synths and the arranging and playing prowess of close friends Nico Muhly and The National
El Perro Del Mar – Love Is Not Pop
Jay Farrar & Ben Gibbard – One Fast Move Or I’m Gone (Deluxe CD/DVD also available)
Jack Kerouac was a literary rock star, lionized by his fans. He was called the avatar of the Beat Movement, a new voice of his generation. But along with sudden fame and media hype came his unraveling. The new film, One Fast Move or I’m Gone – Kerouac’s Big Sur, takes us back to the cabin he retreated to in the Big Sur woods, the Beat haunts of San Francisco and New York City for an unflinching look at the compelling events his book is based on. The story unfolds through Kerouac’s prose, first-hand recollections from Kerouac’s contemporaries, as well as writers, poets, actors and musicians who have been deeply influenced by Kerouac’s unique gifts.Appearing in the film are Sam Shepard, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, S.E. Hinton, Donal Logue, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Hunter and many more. The stunning, High Definition visual imagery is set to original music composed and performed by recording artists Jay Farrar of Son Volt and Benjamin Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie
Fight Of The Conchords – I Told You I Was Freaky
The Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport
Get Back Guinozzi! – Carpet Madness
Kings Of Convenience -Declaration Of Dependence
Declaration of Dependence is a wonderful record for a lot of reasons. For one, Eirik Boe is equally comfortable talking about the record’s “serious ideas” and laughing about its “hi-brow Bossa Nova” moments, while his partner Erlend Oye is clearly thrilled by making “the most rhythmical pop record ever that features no percussion or drums.” A captivating listen from start to finish, Declaration of Dependence is the Norwegian duo’s most mature record yet, a summer breeze of a record tinged with wistful lyricism and intimate grandeur
Maps – Turning The Mind
Nouvelle Vague – 3
OOIOO – Armonico Hewa
Alec Ounsworth – Mo Beauty
debut solo release from celebrated singer/songwriter Alec Ounsworth, who earned acclaim with his band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. The album was produced by veteran musician/producer and fellow Philadelphian Steve Berlin, who initially suggested a New Orleans setting for recording. Working with some of that city’s most storied musicians, including George Porter of The Meters on bass, Ounsworth has crafted a collection of songs that pick up where Clap Your Hands Say Yeah leave off
Elvis Perkins In Dearland – The Doomsday EP
Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson – Summer Of Fear
As acclaimed as Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson’s debut was when it finally received a proper pressing in 2008, the effort was meant to be a glorified demo. Summer of Fear is what happened six months later, as life alternated between darkness and light, and spare bedroom songs blossomed into speaker-popping arrangements of sweeping strings, honking horns, and chords that cut so deeply they’re bound to leave a mark. Produced by TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone.
Russian Circles – Geneva
Spiral Stairs – The Real Feel
Sufjan Stevens – The BQE
The Veils – Nux Vomica
White Denim – Fits
Richard Youngs – Under Stellar Stream
Richard Youngs’ latest solo work for Jagjaguwar is a collection of neodruid hymns and chants for the minutiae of homelife and fatherhood – poetic transcendance through repetition and a focus on the (seemingly) micro. Once again proving himself a master of minimalist composition, Youngs also takes leaps forward as a lyricist on Under Stellar Stream, reminiscent of the list incantations of Allen Ginsberg. With this comes a change in Youngs’ voice, now less pleading, deeper and more assured. In these atonal, spatial arrangements, each phrase is granted the room to work into the cerebral cortex
