Indierock | Alternative Tape 437 Items

Translucent white cassette shell Dolby B noise reduction A download code is included.

Good & Evil finds Tally Hall entering a stripped-back, grittier sonic universe. Transcendental melodies guide them through a mind-bending journey of duality. Available for the first time since 2011, this cult classic is now on vinyl containing an all-new poster, CD & tape, along with a companion 7'' single.

Surf Curse is the indie rock recording project of Los Angeles based songwriters Nick Rattigan and Jacob Rubeck. Seeing Surf Curse live has become a right of passage for disaffected adolescence in the South-West while Rattigan and Rubeck have spent their formatives years between Las Vegas, Reno, and Los Angeles. Nothing Yet is the 2nd Full Length from the band released in 2017.

The majority of the nine slithery songs that comprise supernowhere’s Skinless Takes A Flight were originally cuts that didn’t make their debut Gestalt. But after collectively moving across the country from Burlington, VT to Seattle, WA, the scrapped tracks transformed substantially into florid, at times entrancing compositions. The pulsating “Circles” opens the album with lilted reflections on empathy, breathing in midtempo syncopation with subdued guitar tip-toeing around melodic drumming. supernowhere’s cast of Meredith Davey (bass, vocals), Kurt Pacing (guitar, vocals), and Matt Anderson (drums) share a collective ambition for maximum interplay and collaborative writing, materializing cleanly knotted compositions that evoke vivid dreamscapes and the profound epiphanies drawn from them (“The Hand”, “Ecdysis”). On upbeat “Dirty Tangle” Davey’s voice glides through Pacing’s angular arpeggiations, carving her own rhythmic lane with her distinctive, descanting singing style. "Skinless Takes A Flight" notably would not have come to fruition without the help of engineer Dylan Hanwright (mix. Gulfer, mem. Great Grandpa, I Kill Giants), whom the band met shortly after relocating to Seattle. Hanwright offered up the studio where the album was recorded as a temporary rehearsal and writing space during the pandemic, which in turn gave him intimate familiarity with the music, resulting in an album that was recorded as intimately as it was written. Hanwright helped make the little moments shine too, as heard in the fleeting vocal harmonies on "Augury", or the spiraling chaos in "Basement Window," a further testament to the collaborative, everyone’s-input-matters nature that characterizes supernowhere’s dizzying yet meditative sophomore record.

Superheaven spent the past few years honing their grunge buzzing, and desperate sad sound across four EP's, showcasing and perfecting a talent for writing both jarringly heavy and delicately emotional songs. With high-anticipation, the Pennsylvania four-piece deliver JAR, their debut full-length. Engineer & producer Will Yip's massive production knocks you on your ass from the very first drum hit and snarling guitar riff. The stadium-sound drums, plus pulsing bass and walls of buzzsaw guitars are all mixed with the size and clarity of major label grunge breakthrough records like Nirvana's Nevermind and Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream. Superheaven have delivered a towering rock record and an early contender for album of the year.

Sulk is a nu-gaze band based out of Detroit, Michigan. The band consists of Jake Spencer, Dalton Thorns, Valerie Klaft, and Kyle Allis. Their music is an eclectic blend of alt rock and post punk that heavily harks back to the drowned out, speaker blowing days of 90s shoegaze, with their own take on modern sounds with influences like Diiv, Spirit of the Beehive, Nothing, and My Bloody Valentine.

It’s been said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture (impossible and absurd). But what about singing about movies?

Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine have paired up for a collaborative project that does just that. A Beginner’s Mind is their debut album that contains 14 songs (loosely) based on (mostly) popular films. The source material is highbrow, lowbrow, and everything in between. The music is folksy, sweet, sincere and harmonically effervescent—Simon & Garfunkel with New Age flourishes. This album runs the gamut and has fun with it, even while its songwriters remain fully rooted in the melancholy folk idioms they are known for.

Daniel Anum Jasper, a pioneer of Ghanian movie poster painting, was commissioned to paint a series of new works for A Beginner’s Mind. His paintings are a graphic simulacrum for the same sense of wonder, wordplay, and intrigue that shape A Beginner’s Mind. By transforming old films into vital new songs, Stevens and De Augustine ask us to consider ourselves from a previously unconsidered vantage point — a new way of seeing and hearing — an exercise that’s as necessary and relevant now as it’s ever been.

Stone Temple Pilots live at the Centrum, Worcester, MA on August 22nd 1994. Taken aback by the huge success of their 1992 debut album, Core, and drained by the heavy touring that ensued, this San Diego band almost fell apart before recording its follow-up, Purple. Issued in June 1994, it debuted at #1 in America, cementing their star status. This superb concert was broadcast on syndicated radio two months later, and captures the quartet at the height of their powers, before singer Scott Weilands drug problems derailed them.

Like the many Banded Stilts that spread across the cover of her newest album Flood, Stella Donnelly is wading into uncharted territory. Here, she finds herself discovering who she is as an artist among the flock, and how abundant one individual can be. Flood is Donnelly's record of this rediscovery: the product of months of risky experimentation, hard moments of introspection, and a lot of moving around. Donnelly's early reflections on the relationship between the individual and the many can be traced back to her time in the rainforests of Bellingen, where she took to birdwatching as both a hobby and an escape in a borderrestricted world. By paying closer attention to the natural world around her, Donnelly recalls "I was able to lose that feeling of anyone's reaction to me. I forgot who I was as a musician, which was a humbling experience of just being; being my small self." Reconnecting with this `small self' allowed Donnelly to tap into creative wells she didn't know existed. Soon songs were coming to her in a way she could not control and over the coming months, Donnelly accumulated 43 tracks as she moved out of Bellingen and around the country, often finding herself displaced due to border restrictions and a tough rental market. Though the writing of Flood was an intensely personal undertaking, Donnelly still saw the recording process as one of her most collaborative projects yet. Along with her band members, co-producing the record beside Anna Laverty and Methyl Ethyl's Jake Webb helped to foster an important spontaneity in the studio. With Webb, Donnelly could "dig in" and discover a "forward-leaning sound" she'd been searching for, while Laverty's ability to "capture the piano" and discern the "perfect take" allowed the songwriter to take risks, many of which have clearly paid off. Looking back at the Banded Stilt, Donnelly ultimately appreciates how when "seen in a crowd they create an optical illusion, but on its own it's this singular piece of art." While each song in Flood is a singular artwork unto itself, the collective shares all of Stella Donnelly in abundance: her inner child, her nurturing self, her nightmare self; all of herself has gone into the making of this record, and although it would take an ocean to fathom everything she feels, it's well worth diving in.

Everything about Stefano Pilia’s spiritual journey always seemed to point directly towards ‘Spiralis Aurea’, his astounding 2022 release for Die Schachtel, a deeply resonating piece of art that intertwines traces of sacred geometry, collective experience and elusive connections between nature and human kind. ‘Spiralis Aurea Trio’ adds an extra layer, an opera of sheer beauty and execution, will, force and composure. The original cycle of compositions live and breath, adapted and transformed, taking their initial meaning and depth to new heights, while maintaining the concepts of ‘divine geometry’ and their sacred mystique intact, displaying a deep resonance with works by La Monte Young, Arvo Pärt, Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Terry Riley.

This listing is for a cassette copy of Big Sonic Chill by Sparkler on a blue & green glitter cassette.

Sparkler is a four-piece shoegaze band from San Diego, CA. Drawing influences from the 90's shoegaze movement and harnessing sounds that span from growling distortion to massive swirling textures, Sparkler gives classic shoegaze a new line on life with a modern twist of all natural lemon and lime flavors. The songs cut through the modern take on shoegaze and dig back into the roots where it all began.

Emerald Sea, the third album from New York-based audiovisual project Sound of Ceres, tells the story of how the universe comes to know itself. Rendered in dynamic, ambitious orchestral passages, it forms the basis of future stage performances intended to draw its half-submerged narrative into the visual sphere. In its dreamlike impressions, it could also be the soundtrack to a long-forgotten early musical film - an experience that delighted and transported audiences and then vanished from record, surviving only in the imprint of memory. Written in three acts, Emerald Sea follows two deities who trail each other through the furthest reaches of experience. There is the Universe, all that exists, voiced by performance artist Marina Abramovic. And there is Venus, transformer of matter and avatar of love, sung by the group's lead vocalist Karen Hover (who goes by k). Through a dazzling suite of songs inspired by Les Baxter's midcentury exotica, Maurice Ravel's ballet Daphnis et Chloé, and Gustav Holst's The Planets, Emerald Sea studies intimacy on both an interpersonal scale and a cosmological one. Connection and severance, joy and grief, wonder and bewilderment all tumble through its scope. In the widest frame, the universe begins, meets itself, and ends. In the closest frame, two people encounter each other, grow close, and then separate. These stories are two views of the same fractal. In every intimacy human beings cultivate,every rush of connection, no matter how fleeting, we reenact the universe for ourselves. In its current cycle, Sound of Ceres is Derrick Bozich, songwriter, harpist, and flautist; Jacob Graham, synthesist, costumer, and light designer; K Hover, vocalist, lyricist, costumer, and choreographer; and Ryan Hover, songwriter and producer. They recorded Emerald Sea in collaboration with Jon Sonneberg at Ka-Boom studio in Ohio. It was mixed by Nicholas Principe and mastered by Kramer.

“Culled from three 1985 gigs in the UK during a transitional and transcendent time in the band’s story, Sonic Youth’s The Walls Have Ears appeared / disappeared as a 2LP set in 1986, not just a live album but an artful tapestry full of live experimentation with songs, between-song tape segues, darkness, humor and audio verité. It’s now issued for the first time officially under the band’s auspices.

“The ’85 shows were the second time the band appeared on UK soil, Brits now getting juiced to the mythos of the emerging guitar-slinging American independent underground; an art / punk band from NYC sporting casual attitudes and tees sporting Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, and Prince made some good press copy on top of their bludgeoning stage appearance. Paul Smith of the newly-founded Blast First label acted as an overseas diplomatic envoy for Sonic Youth through their SST years as well as issuing their classic 1988 Daydream Nation outside the USA. However the Smith-produced ‘bootleg’ of their ’85 UK gigs surfaced much to everyone’s surprise, just before Evol was to be released. It turned out to be a marker of the group’s dissatisfaction that ultimately led to the release’s deletion, and the band and Smith parting ways after Daydream.

“In this 2LP set brimming with primitive classics like ‘The Burning Spear,’ ‘Death Valley 69,’ and ‘I’m Insane’ (uncredited on sleeve), segues and live guitar changes ooze together threaded by Madonna tapes and vocal loops off the board (somewhat a necessity for distraction until the band had a full fledged stage crew to prepare guitars). The first two sides of Walls are massive, cavernous, with newly-drafted drummer Steve Shelley. SY tear it up especially on one trash-fi excerpt of ‘Blood On Brighton Beach’ (actually ‘Making The Nature Scene’) from a legendary outdoor gig November 8th where [Thurston] Moore, [Kim] Gordon and [Lee] Ranaldo’s guitars treble-blast dissonant shockwaves over the black-stoned beach of Quadrophenia fame.

“The record’s second slab spotlights an April 1985 at London’s Hammersmith Palais and was one of the final appearances live of Bob Bert on drums, again featuring some molten takes on ‘Brother James,’ ‘Flower’ (listed as ‘The Word (E.V.O.L.)’), and others. This document remains an essential representation of some lean and mean years of the quartet’s throttling march out into the world.” – Brian Turner

“Let’s get something straight. There is no album in the entire corpus of indie rock—not Loveless, not Surfer Rosa, not Psychocandy—that reaches the heights of invention, joy, and magic of Sonic Youth’s sublime fifth album.... The haunted reveries of Sister remain with you for years, even if you only hear them once” — Stereogum.

1987’s Sister was another notch in the band's move away from No Wave, yet still maintained their experimental approach. Gordon, Moore, Ranaldo and Shelley were coming into their own at this point, combining elements of noise, punk and pop. They had also become better songwriters since their previous album, providing better context for their noisier elements and incorporating the dissonance of their earlier releases into more traditional song structures. To quote Stereogum once again, “Sister is the sonic manifestation of refracted light. It’s a record that changes you.”

Smut shines a spotlight on the sounds of the 90s acrossgenres - a record scratch, a spacey synth line, a breakcorebeat - all while maintaining freshness and originality. Thecollaborative project of vocalist Tay Roebuck, guitaristAndrew Min, bassist and synth-player Bell Cenower,guitarist and synth-player Sam Ruschman and drummerAidan O'Connor, Smut have conquered national tours withBully, Swirlies, Nothing, and WAVVES. Based in Chicago, IL,the band hits their stride in `How the Light Felt'. It is anexercise in coping, an electrifying statement of hope in thethick of resounding loss, and a love letter to the peoplethat keep us going. With their powers combined, Smutmeld the songwriting sensibilities of Oasis with the vocaldelivery of the Cocteau Twins - the percussive grooves of...

On October 28, 1991, the legendary post-punk band Siouxsie and the Banshees delivered a electrifying performance at the Zenith in Paris, France. This live captures the band in full flight, showcasing their unparalleled musicianship and Siouxsie Sioux's captivating stage presence.

Manzanita is the common name for a kind of small evergreen tree endemic to California which has strong medicinal properties. It's also the name of the brand new full length by visual artist, writer, songwriter, and musician Shana Cleveland. Subtle, powerful, and unafraid. We can't actually tell you how much we love this record because you'd never believe us, so we'll just say that it is her strongest and most personal album to date. These songs are as strong as the bricks in the Brill building, and seem destined to be covered by others in years to come. Where her previous record, 2019's Night of the Worm Moon (Hardly Art) functions as a collection of speculative fictions equally inspired by Afro-futurist pioneers Herman "Sun Ra" Blount and Octavia Butler, Manzanita concerns the love that loves to love. "This is a supernatural love album set in the California wilderness," Cleveland explains. The combinations of words and song structure are so strong throughout that one hardly notices Cleveland's nimble fingerpicking on first listen, or how much is packed into the arrangements. The lyrics are satisfyingly direct, with the buoyantly whimsical descriptions typical of the 1960s New York School of poetry. It's peppered with the kind of unexpected turns that make the words more modern, and in their spookiness they are more West Coast, as in "Mystic Mine," with its "Mystic Mine Lane, cars rotting away/ I feel so relieved to be/ Back in the country." So much of the pop music we love is propelled by those first blushes of infatuation and lust, but Manzanita concerns the kind of love that one can only experience with time, work, and devotion. Cleveland says: "The songs were all written while I was pregnant (side A) or shortly after my son's birth in that weird everything-has-quietly-but-monumentally-shifted state (side B)," she says. Moving to the country, starting a family, laughing for real at the same joke the thirteenth time you've heard it, surviving heavy shit (this is the first release since Cleveland's successful treatment for a diagnosis of breast cancer at the start of 2022). This is a love album that's somehow populated with the insect world, ghosts, and evil spirits. Sonically, Manzanita sits in a meadow similar to her previous solo records, set back and away from the genre-recombinant garage pop of her band La Luz. This is part due to the fact that there's a different sonic palette in use here. While Cleveland continues to play guitar and vocals; Johnny Goss, who has recorded all of Shana's solo material and early La Luz recordings, and Abbey Blackwell (Alvvays, La Luz) play the bass; Olie Eshleman is on pedal steel; and Will Sprott plays the keyboards, dulcimer, glockenspiel, and harpsichord-little of which would have been out of place on her previous two solo records-Sprott also adds layers of synthesizer infused with the sounds of the natural world.

Shame follow up their wildly acclaimed debut with a James Ford-produced peek into the riddled mind of the band's frontman, Charlie Steen. There are moments on Drunk Tank Pink where you almost have to reach for the sleeve to check this is the same band who made 2018's Songs Of Praise. Such is the jump Shame have made from the riotous post-punk of their debut to the sprawling adventurism and twitching anxieties laid out here. The South Londoner's blood and guts spirit, that wink and grin of devious charm, is still present, it's just that it's grown into something bigger, something deeper, more ambitious and unflinchingly honest. The genius of Drunk Tank Pink is how these lyrical themes dovetail with the music. Opener Alphabet dissects the premise of performance over a siren call of nervous, jerking guitars, its chorus thrown out like a beer bottle across a mosh pit. Songs spin off and lurch into unexpected directions throughout here, be it March Day's escalating aural panic attack or the shapeshifting darkness of Snow Day. There's a Berlin era Bowie beauty to the lovelorn Human For A Minute while closer Station Wagon weaves from a downbeat mooch into a souring, soullifting climax in which Steen elevates himself beyond the clouds and into the heavens. Or at least that's what it sounds like. From the womb to the clouds (sort of), Shame are currently very much in the pink.

Sam Gendel and Antonia Cytrynowicz didn't set out to make a record - it just happened. LIVE A LITTLE, a collection of songs resulting from one late summer afternoon in Gendel's Los Angeles home, is less an album and more a moment. The ten tracks here were recorded mostly in one sitting, fully improvised, in the order in which they appear. It was the first and last time the songs have been played - a snapshot of an idea, an artifact of inspiration, at once both a beginning and an end.At the time of recording, Cytrynowicz was only eleven years old. The younger sister of Gendel's significant other and creative partner Marcella, Cytrynowicz is an artist in her own way. She has no formal musical training, but is the product of a creative family and is someone who makes art the way many kids do - in the purest way, simply because they are moved to. On LIVE A LITTLE, she spontaneously crafted all the melodies and lyrics on the spot as Gendel played alongside her. Cytrynowicz's musicality is sophisticated, strange, and other-worldly, and the resulting record is experimental jazz colliding with some sort of fantasy universe.Because of that, LIVE A LITTLE is a stand-out amidst Gendel's extensive and varied catalog. Over the years, the multi-instrumentalist has been known for his prolific musical output as both a sought-after collaborator and as a solo artist. During 2021 alone he collaborated with Vampire Weekend, Maggie Rogers, Moses Sumney, Laurie Anderson, and Mach Hommy, as well as released Notes With Attachments with Blake Mills & legendary bassist Pino Palladino. In the same year he also released the 52-track Fresh Bread, as well as the follow-up to the acclaimed Music for Saxophone & Bass Guitar with Sam Wilkes. Then Mouthfeel / Serene, AE-30, Valley Fever Original Score, and singles "Isfahan" and "Neon Blue." LIVE A LITTLE, though, exists on its own island. For one, the majority of Gendel's work under his own name skews instrumental, but here the playfulness of his saxophone and nylon-string guitar work...

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever return in 2022 with Endless Rooms, the Melbourne quintet's third album proper. Described by the band - comprised of Fran Keaney, Joe White, Marcel Tussie and brothers Tom Russo and Joe Russo - as them "Doing what we do best: chasing down songs in a room together", Endless Rooms stands as a testament to the collaborative spirit and live power of Rbcf. While initial ideas were traded online during long spells spent separated by lockdowns, the album was truly born during small windows of freedom in which the band would decamp to a mud-brick house in the bush around 2hrs north of Melbourne built by the extended Russo family in the 1970s. There, its 12 tracks took shape, informed to such an extent by the acoustics and ambience of the rambling lakeside house that they decided to record the album there. The house also features on the album cover. For the first time, the band self-produced the record (alongside engineer, collaborator and old friend, Matt Duffy), creating their most naturalistic and expansive document yet. The result is a collection of songs permeated by the spirit of the place; punctuated by field recordings of rain, fire, birds, and wind. "It's almost an anti-concept album," say the band. "The 'endless rooms' of the title reflects our love of creating worlds in our songs. We treat each of them as a bare room to be built up with infinite possibilities."

A return to 80's form, along with his original RCA band (1980-19840), Orrall's 10th album is a love letter to his favorite dive bar, Nahsville's 467 Surf And Gun Club.

'Very sophisticated and relentlessly appealing sunny SoCal folk pop a la Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, the guys who invented it. Fully realized. Absolutely joyful.' - John Hiatt

'Melodic, colorful, emotional. A fun and bubbly trip through our dad's cosmic mind'. - Jeff The Brotherhood

'I've always been inspired by other recording artist's work. Robert Ellis Orrall is a composer who always says something we need to hear. In that way he remains relevant and timeless. His latest offering is no less.' - Michael McDonald

'If there's been a better record to come out of Nashville in the past few years let us know, cause we haven't heard it' - Diarrhea Planet

'reo has proved once again that he's one of the best songwriters in Nashville. This album encapsulates the warm nostalgia of summers spent with friends at 467.' - Daddy Issues