Indierock | Alternative Tape 439 Items

Ace Cassette version (with 2 Extra Songs) of the recent LP from contemporary Irish guitarist Jonny Dillon. Beautifully recorded blues / folk guitar pieces. TIP!

Jonny Dillon’s debut acoustic album ‘Songs For A One-String Guitar’ took the listening public by surprise and the critics by storm when it dropped out of the blue on All-City in 2019. It represented a departure for an artist who was renowned for having the Midas touch when it came to coaxing dance floor fire from all manner of hardware. But fortune favours the brave and temporarily setting the machinery aside and following an acoustic path to the waterfall has already reaped rich rewards for Jonny Dillon. He’ll never say it in so many words but here’s a man on a mission: “Fail as I may, I have to go back and try again every time, to wait in hope for a glimpse of the spirit that hovers over the face of the deep, and to keep watch for the Light that shines in the darkness.”

The generosity of spirit which is the linchpin of all great music is something that can neither be cheaply conjured nor ever easily faked, god forbid. It’s the elusive emotional conductor in the spinal cord of sound - a foundational component of that mysterious feeling of connection we as listeners are seeking every time we put the needle on the record or press play on a song. The very essence of the thing we seek, in short. The holy grail. When sweet music hits, it’s the spirit that moves us and it’s both the source of the power within it as well as ultimately the place where it resides inside of us too, once heard. This is how music works. Journeying. Spirit to spirit. From the makers and dreamers of the dream to dreamers in general. The indomitable spirit inherent in the instrumental guitar compositions and distinctive finger picking style of Jonny Dillon is a case in point. This is spiritful music of a rarer kind made by an artist as inherently attuned to the troubling times we are living through as he is to the value of carving out new paths to the waterfall through the medium of sound on our behalf. Boom and there it is. Much needed guidance. A priceless new navigational tool of the imagination to help us all through the maze.

Just like the debut offering, this a path inherently worth following too, every step of the way. This time Jonny’s singular playing style finds true expression in a sound world expertly shaped by a master of the production craft, John ’Spud’ Murphy in Hellfire Studio. Masters at work, times two. Like all dream productions, it quickly assumes three dimensional proportions and becomes a place to go in and of itself, worth returning and retreating to, time and again. On A New Directive From The Bureau of Compulsory Entertaintment, his mode of expression is as clear and impactful as the immediate impression the sound makes on us. His is a strong game. He rises to the occasion and fulfils a great need on our part in so doing. We have to give thanks where it’s due. Balms for the soul are hardly two-a-penny in these challenging times but this is a timely one and of a lasting kind too. In stripping everything back and breaking his sound down into the bare component parts of reverberating steel strings on resonant wood, he has tapped into a kind of universal music of the spheres. It’s in tune with the times and more. Big picture sound with heart and soul to match. The iridescent sound he conjures from that same deep is a joyous thing to behold imbued as it is with a kind of light that never goes out. A dozen jewels adorn this timeless creation, each one a glimpse of eternity. They will shimmer forever. Man gets tired. Spirit don’t.

Dónal Dineen, January 2023.

Everything eventually turns to dust. Everyone knows this, but few want to acknowledge that our time on this mortal coil is fleeting, preferring to remain in stasis, in hopes that "the end" will pass them by. Chicago trio Facs (guitarist Brian Case, bassist Alianna Kalaba & drummer Noah Leger) have been perfecting their brand of intense, cathartic post-punk over the course of four ever-evolving albums, beginning with 2017's "Negative Houses" thru 2021's landmark "Present Tense', which saw the trio dig deep into the gaping maw of a black hole & pulling back whatever debris they could grasp onto. Their newest "Still Life In Decay" comes as an addendum to the last album - a "post-event review" if you will. "Still Life In Decay" starts with a squall of white noise before collapsing into the band already locked into "Constellation"s lumbering groove, with Case's guitar a ghostly presence, appearing & disappearing in washes of gauzy feedback throughout the track. Facs have never been more locked in as a unit, and "Still Life In Decay" is a decidedly more focused effort. The apocalyptic chaos that defined their previous album "Present Tense" is waved away in favor of an examination of events with cumbrous clarity. Facs are a heavy band, but they don't necessarily Feel like one (see side two's "Still Life", where Case's fluttering, melodic guitar lines are buoyed by the insistent, underlying pulse of the bass & drums). As a rhythm section, Kalaba & Leger dance & twist around each other like a double helix, forming the DNA of what makes Facs special. Collectively they approach rhythm from outside the groove as opposed to inside it, creating a lattice where Case weaves guitar lines like creeping vines, which makes the moments on "Still Life In Decay" where the band Does lock in even more powerful. When the guitar punctures the lock-step swing of "When You Say", it hits like a hammer. Case utilizes his lyrics like a person suffering from anterograde amnesia; repeating phrases & holding onto old memories in a desperate attempt to avoid the slide into oblivion. Freeform poetic missives touching on themes of resignation, cynicism, class warfare, and a search for identity & meaning in a crumbling society; A primal desire to hold onto anything in a post-pandemic barrage of sensory overload. The album is a decidedly local affair; recorded once again at Chicago's famed Electrical Audio by renowned engineer Sanford Parker & mixed at his Hypercube Studio in Chicago's Ravenswood neighborhood & mastered by Matthew Barnhart at Chicago Mastering Service.

Girls At Our Best! were one of the greatest and most influential bands to emerge in the early 1980s as part of a new wave of independent acts. DJ John Peel championed them, playing their singles repeatedly and inviting them to record a session for his programme. Wry vocalist Judy Evans and brutal yet melodic guitarist James Alan who’d met at art college in Leeds fronted Girls At Our Best!, the proto-Indie band that formed from the ashes of Alan’s 1977 punk band SOS! Pleasure, the sole album, reached number two in the Indie Chart. It was an album so different from the rest of the post-punk indie pack that you can still play it now and completely baffle new listeners. As John Peel said about Roxy Music, it just doesn’t seem to relate to anything else.

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/ vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet's new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album's ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman's voice slicing through the din. Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It's not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void - somehow - you see everything. The songs on Rat Saw God don't recount epics, just the everyday. They're true, they're real life, blurry and chaotic and strange - which is in-line with Hartzman's own ethos: "Everyone's story is worthy," she says, plainly. "Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating." But the thing about Rat Saw God - and about any Wednesday song, really - is you don't necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it's all in the details - how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen - but it's mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.

Lucky For You is Bully's most close-to-the-bone album yet. It's an album that's searing and unmistakably marked by its creator's experiences, while still retaining the massive sound that Alicia Bognanno has become known for over the last decade. Her fourth album draws from personal pain and the universal struggle that is existing, learning, and moving on-and it's all soundtracked by Bognanno's rock-solid melodic sensibilities and a widescreen sound that's impossible to pin down when it comes to the textures explored. These ten songs are simply the most irresistible Bognanno's put to tape yet, making Lucky For You her greatest triumph to date in a career already packed with them. Work on Lucky For You began last year, when Bognanno brought some in-progress demos to producer J.T. Daly in his Nashville studio to see if they could strike creative kismet. "Authenticity is always on my mind, without even knowing it," she explains while discussing their recording process together. "It was great with J.T., because I could tell he was a genuine fan who wanted to emphasize what's actually good about my writing instead of changing it. I could tell how much he cared about the project, and it meant alot to me." The album came together over the course of seven months, the longest gestation process for a Bully record to date, but that time allowed inspiration to emerge in new ways. The result is a kaleidoscopic rock record spanning punk's grit, the crunchy bliss of shoegaze, explosive Britpop, and the type of classic anthems Bully has been known for. Lucky For You's thematic focus zooms in on grief and loss: The record is largely inspired by Bognanno's dog and best friend Mezzi passing away, at a time when her life already felt as if in metamorphosis. The oceanic first single "Days Move Slow" was written shortly after Mezzi's passing, reflecting the persistence of Bognanno's incisive wit in the face of adversity. "There was nothing I could do except sit down and write it, and it felt so good." And then there's the passionate opening track "All I Do," which kicks in the door with huge riffs atop her lyrical reflections on three years of sobriety. "Once I stopped drinking, I felt like I was still haunted by mistakes and things that had happened when I was drinking, and it's still taking me a long time to forget about that while existing in this house. How do I shed the skin from a path I've moved on from?" In that vein, Lucky For You is a document of perseverance in the face of the big and the small stuff. "I'm so overly emotional and sensitive, it's a blessing and a curse" she says with a laugh, but there's no downside to her expressions of vulnerability on this record; it's the latest bit of evidence that nothing can hold Bognanno back.

Journey through the dreamy and sinister psychedelic universe of Retinal Bloom, the latest album from The Scary Jokes. Liz Lehman confronts threats both external and existential, conjuring a set that simmers with passion and rage. Co-produced with Fire-Toolz (Angel Marcloid), Retinal Bloom is The Scary Jokes’ most aesthetically ambitious album yet, augmenting their trademark bedroom pop approach with distortion, guitar, drums and vintage synths.

Clear w/ Black Liner Cassette.Hey Mercedes' stunning debut Everynight Fire Works cassette reissue on Run For Cover Records. Formed after the break up of Braid by Bob Nanna, Mark Dawursk and Damon Atkinson, Hey Mercedes' brand of emo-influenced alternative rock has stood the test of time as a more melodic but equally-as-important companion to the members' first band. In fact, in the many subsequent revivals of the emo-leaning alt-rock sound of the late-90's & early 2000s, Hey Mercedes is as much an influence on these bands as Jimmy Eat World, The Get-Up Kids, and The Ataris. Everynight Fire Works was originally released by Vagrant Records in October 2001. Remastered in 2016 by JJ Golden (Sunny Day Real Estate, Soundgarden).

An icy wave of distortion. Gristle and bone bass. Incantatory, bloodcurdling poetics. Anna Funk Damage returns to Osare! Editions with a full-length LP, laying down 13 occultist tracks, turbocharged by industrialism, dissolution and heartbreak. The Italian producer more than lives up to his namesake, delivering his signature, genre-destroying blend of experimental-punk-techno and steely dance floor deviance.

Opening with a howl, clatter and smash, on 'Sono Spento’, Andrea Natale takes the shape of a self-annihilating robot, his heavily pitched-down vocals laden in layers of FX. ‘Maybe I’ whirls into a slow build screech while 'Allegri Rimpianti’ joins together organic, pummelling percussion, sharp synth chords, and jangly guitar for a nightmarish trifecta of throbbing noise. Occasionally, Natale's presence falls away entirely, allowing for unadulterated machinic ecstasy to take over. Cogs grind on 'Memoria, Solitudine’, a dark and lolloping track, thrumming with sinister, malicious intent, before 'La Fine’ signs off, lurching skittishly like an anxious, artificially pumping heart.

Interweaving elements of avant-garde ambient, rock, and even black metal, all rewired through a Moog Dfam and a Mother-32 interface, II Corpo Che Si Rompe is powered by unrelenting energy as Natale descends to ever more demonic, punishing depths.

The garage-y psychedelic outsider pop band Being Dead shines bright with their distinctly right-brain songcraft, mischievous humor, and implausibly great vocal harmonies. As they've graduated from curiosity to cult favorites, we've yet to encounter a single person who dislikes Being Dead. Recorded at Radio Milk, producer Jim Vollentine (White Denim, Trail of Dead, Spoon) spit-shines Being Dead's sound without diminishing their weirdo-best-friend vibes. Their penchant for idiosyncratic lyricism and musical unpredictability shines throughout the album as the duo moves between everything from garage rock and pop to Laurel Canyon-style folk.

The 'Baptismal' project started out when Kramer invited me to collaborate with him on a project, and Itend to think in terms of what the listeners are open to hearing these days. In my mind was a recordingthat let the listeners leave the busy mind generated by mainstream media, so I came up with the idea ofa baptism, immersive kind of LP in which the listener would Become totally present with the music. Isuggested to Kramer the title 'Baptismal', and that the tracks would be called 'Gedunk', a comicalreference to the idea of being immersed in water, my own baptism as a child in the Christian faith, theBaptist church. I started by sending Kramer several tracks of Zither-centric music in the length ofindividual LP sides. Kramer would complement the tracks with plush drones and return it to me. Then wewould discuss. Soon we had enough material to move toward completing the album. I performed withpiano keyboard, ZITHER and voice. We collaborated entirely by sending audio files back and forth viaonline transfer. We haven't had physical contact at all during the project, but it went smoothly with someminor suggestions to help us to shape up our navigation til we finally arrived. The album cover wassuggested by Kramer, which I think is very appropriate. The project started in 2022. Mark Kramer, an oldyoung friend. We connected in New York City when he was here in the 80s.-Laraaji, Jan. 2023I met Laraaji by chance in NYC's Central Park one fine summer day in 1985. I'd been thinking about thewisdom vs. the futility of starting my own record company a lot in those days, and as I walked throughone of the parks many tunnels, I heard what I'd recognized to be Laraaji's 'Day of Radiance' playing onwhat i'd assumed to be someone's beatbox. I thought to myself, "How nice it is to be alive in NYC in 1985on a day like this in Central Park and knowing that someone loves this wondrous LP from Eno's ObscureRecords label as much as I do."But when I emerged from the tunnel I saw not a beatbo...

Tapehead City is beyond honored to be teaming up with Epitaph records and bringing you the new Rancid album "Tomorrow Never Comes" on cassette! 16 classic punk rock songs produced by longtime collaborator, Bad Religion guitarist and Epitaph founder, Brett Gurewitz. Carrying the same raw energy since their 1991 inception, this is their 10th studio album and folks.. its really really good!

Duplication info: Real-time Hi-Fi / 24-bit audio / premium ferro.

Madeline Johnston and Angel Diaz became close friends in 2020, regarding each other as a lifeline when things were difficult in their personal lives. This friendship was born from music but quickly became so much more than that. The two met in person in 2021, when Diaz came for a recording residency at Johnston’s studio in New Mexico. It was during this session that they wrote and recorded Orbweaving, in the heat of summer in the arid Chihuahuan Desert.

Orbweaving combines the best parts of Midwife’s “heaven metal” and Vyva Melinkolya’s sentimental, classic shoegaze in a way that distinctively elevates both artists. The record explores themes of hopelessness, calling on a higher power, being alone, and the sublime horror of the natural world. Orbweaving seeks to thematically and sonically create a web like structure—a gauze of sorrow and visceral connective thread.

At night, Diaz and Johnston went herping (a term used by herpetologists to describe looking for snakes and amphibians) along the empty roads near Las Cruces. The asphalt retains heat from the day, and the snakes absorb the warmth by writhing across the pavement.

They found rattlesnakes, roadkill, and orb-weaver spiders.

British garage rock revivalist's 1986 album for Stiff Records' 54321 Countdown affiliate. The Prisoners got their start in the same Medway River delta area of Britain as Billy Childish's Pop Rivets. After the band's demise singer/guitarist/songwriter Graham Day went on to join Childish's Thee Mighty Caesars & eventually formed the Prime Movers, organist James 'Jamie' Taylor went on to form the James Taylor Quartet.

On Domino, Diners has replaced their gentle pop sound with a more bombastic rock and roll approach while maintaining their upbeat positive world view. Diners teamed up with power pop prince Mo Troper and Grammy nominated engineer Jack Shirley to deliver her best record yet.

For Lutalo, creating music is an act of hope in and of itself. Throughout their meticulously crafted folk, rock, and soul, on which theysing and play all the instruments, the Twin Cities-raised,Vermont-based musician embeds golden lines of poetry thatinspire curiosity about the world and empathy for everyone searching for a way through it.After releasing their 2022 debut EP,Once Now, Then Again, Lutaloemerged as a rising talent in the indie world, catching the attentionof Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold and Big Thief's Adrianne Lenker,who invited the young musician on tour. Following a vinyl releasewith that breakthrough project, they are releasing its companionEP,AGAIN, on August 25 via Winspear.On the ambitiousAGAIN, a collection of kinetic indie rock tracks,Lutalo makes bold critiques of systemic oppression, capitalism,and the digital attention economy. Though these topics are heady,their writing always sits at an accessible place of personalintrospection. Like on the arresting single "Push Back Baby," whosefuzzy electric guitar lines twist and unfurl in intricate patterns,Lutalo paints a complex portrait of our current reality that's "rootedin the greed or narcissism of capitalists," they explain. "I'm analyzingthose systems and patterns, and also asking, `Can we continue tonot perpetuate this?' Because it's hurt a lot of people historically. I'mjust asking people to question it."Through their music, but also through their lifestyle that's alternative to America's economic and political systems, Lutalo askslisteners to imagine new possibilities. "I want to help people ques-tion the way they're living," they say, "so we can create a betterreality for us to exist in together."

everything is alive, slowdive's 5th record, is exactly what the title suggests: an exploration into the shimmering nature of life and the universal touch points within it. While there are parts of this record that could sit neatly next to the atmospheric quality of 1995's Pygmalion; everything is alive also manages to break down the boundaries of what's come before it. Spanning psychedelic soundscapes, pulsating 80's electronic elements and John Cale inspired journeys, the album lands immediately as something made for 2023 and beyond. For a genre that is often thought of as divisive, and often warrants introspection, here slowdive show their craft as the masters of it by pushing it outwards, beyond the singular; the end result being a record which feels as emotional and cathartic as it is hopeful.

You can't get Deeper if you're standing still. That's intentional, says the Chicago quartet's Nic Gohl. "Does it feel good when you're listening to this song? Does your body want to move with it?" These are the questions he asked himself as he and bandmates Shiraz Bhatti, Drew McBride, and Kevin Fairbairn were writing and recording Careful!, their third record and Sub Pop debut. "I wanted these to be interesting songs, but in a way where a two-year-old would vibe out to it," Gohl adds. "It's pop music, basically." That "basically" qualifier is working pretty hard, as fans of 2020's Auto-Pain might suppose. On Careful!, they're not reimagining their sound so much as testing its limits. If you want to, you can hear echoes of David Bowie's Low in the snapping rhythm and gray-sky synths of "Tele," but you can also hear a bit of Auto-Pain in the nailed-in, stippling lines being spit out by Bhatti's drum programming and McBride's synthesizer. "Fame" seems to stumble together and nearly fall apart, the dialed-up noise making the beat feel maniacal and a little invincible, the whole thing a series of short, snipped, autonomous gestures that are by now Deeper's trademark. "Build a Bridge" pushes in the opposite direction, using a prickly guitar line to launch into big, smeary art-pop, its emotional palette clear, well-defined, and easy to latch onto. On "Sub," Gohl sings above and below the melody like Ian McCulloch, bellowing and wondering and ruminating and rounding into swaggering confidence that the band rises to meet. It's festival headliner music that still feels like it was written in a garage. That fraternal interdependence is near the center of Deeper's music. The musical and lyrical devotion to mutuality makes this restlessly curious, stylistically broad album feels like the most coherent portrait of who Deeper is. Or, as McBride ultimately frames it, "Careful! is about looking out for one another."

Queer tweemo from the pop fringe of Little Rock, Arkansas's thriving '90s DIY scene. Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts gathers Everyone Asked About You's complete recorded works, including the Let's Be Enemies LP and their two and a half 7"s released between 1997-2000. Remastered from the original DATs for maximum nostalgic crunch, this deluxe 2xLP is housed in a gatefold tip on sleeve and includes a 20-page book crammed with flyers, photos, lyrics, and an extensive essay on this crucial missing link between midwest emo and the Moog synthesizer.

Cashier is a band from Lafayette, LA that plays a washed out, fuzzy blend of shoegaze & indie rock. This two song cassette captures a unique ebb and flow between sonic intensity and harrowing urgency with melancholic flare and a DIY attitude.

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.

Die japanische Band Chai verzauberte die Welt 2017 mit ihrem Debütalbum Pink, einer Sammlung von Songs, die ihren einzigartigen, verspielten Pop vorstellten. Das enthusiastisch-feministische Nachfolgealbum Punk wurde von der Musikpresse und anderen Künstlern hoch gelobt. Das führte zu Wink, das Chai per Remote-Zoom-Sessions aufnahmen - eine Einschränkung, die sich als Stärke erwies, da Mana (Leadgesang und Tasten), Kana (Gitarre), Yuna (Schlagzeug) und Yuuki (Bass und Texte) mit Künstler*innen im Ausland zusammenarbeiten konnten, um ein Werk zu schaffen, das in ihrer internationalen Gemeinschaft Katharsis fand. Im Gegensatz zu Wink kehren Chai auf ihrem neuen, selbstbetitelten Album zu ihren Wurzeln zurück und lassen sich von ihrem japanischen Erbe und der Musik, mit der sie aufgewachsen sind, inspirieren. "Alles, was sich in den Texten widerspiegelt, drückt unsere Erfahrungen als japanische Frauen aus", sagt Mana. Chais Ethos ist das der Inklusion, und die erste Ssingle "We The Female!" - die live aufgenommen wurde, um die krawalligen Auftritte der Band zu würdigen - lädt die Zuhörer zu dieser Mission ein. Während ihrer Tourneen nach der Pandemie, bei denen sie vor riesigen Menschenmengen in Städten wie Santiago, Buenos Aires und Sao Paulo auftraten, wurde Chai klar, dass sie sich ein globales Publikum erschlossen hatten. Chai schrieben das neue Album unterwegs und fanden zwischen den Auftritten im Stones Throw Studio in L.A., in der Ometusco Sound Machine in Mexico City und in der Grand Street in New York Zeit für die Aufnahmen. Als sie erkannten, dass ihre befreiende, ermächtigende Botschaft auch für Menschen außerhalb Japans gilt, überlegten Chai, welche Facetten ihrer Erziehung beim Publikum außerhalb ihres Heimatlandes Anklang finden könnten. Auf Chai schöpft die Band direkt aus dem City-Pop, einem in Tokio entstandenen Sound, der in den 70er und 80er Jahren populär war. City-Pop war eine japanische Interpretation westlicher Lounge-Musik, die Anleihen bei Jazz, Boogie, Funk und Yacht-Rock machte, um einen Sound zu kreieren, der sich zwischen zwei Kulturen bewegte. Während der City-Pop in letzter Zeit über TikTok und YouTube ein US-Publikum gefunden hat, sind Chai mit diesem Genre aufgewachsen. Für die Produktion griffen sie auf ihren früheren Mitarbeiter Ryu Takahashi zurück, der ihre Vorliebe für City Pop, Eurobeat und die Melodien von J-Pop-Künstlern wie Maria Takeuchi teilte. "Sie wollten sich mit ihrer japanischen Identität auseinandersetzen, nicht im traditionellen Sinne, sondern auf diese gefilterte westliche Art", sagt Takahashi. Die Arbeit in gut ausgestatteten Studios ermöglichte es ihnen, mit einer Ästhetik zu experimentieren, die auf einem Chai-Album noch nicht zu hören war.

Joe Sutkowski (Dirt Buyer)'s new album is a documentation of making it to the other side. Sutkowski grew up in New Jersey, and although he lives in Brooklyn now, he remains " an emo kid at heart ," garnering inspiration from bands like My Chemical Romance and Muse, the latter of whose theatrical, dramatic performances inspired the band's own vocal-forward, soaring takes. Initially working together as a duo while Sutkowski and Ruben Radlauer (Model/Actriz) were at school in Berklee, the band's self-titled 2019 debut album was recorded on an IPhone in their practice room on just drums and guitar, and the quietly striking, nuanced stylings earned them accolades far beyond the " fake record label " the two made up to originally release their music. The band's new album, Dirt Buyer II , was recorded in February 2020, and represents a foray into heavier material that marks a deeper shift for the band. Now working as a trio, Sutkowski is flanked by Tristan Allen on bass and Mike Costa on drums, a fellow Berklee grad who cut his teeth playing in bands across Boston including past collaborations with Sutkowski. Half-recorded while the band was on tour with Surf Curse, the record finds Sutkowski reaching out for places, people and beliefs to ground him. Throughout the album he attempts to wrap his head around the idea of fate and how you can brush up against other people and then leave them behind. The songs themselves play with this concept of light and dark intertwined. Oscillating between urgency and cathartic release and more stripped-back elegies, Sutkowski faces the reality that while the people he'd rather forget can still live on through music, he is able to move on at the same time. Half-recorded in his mother and uncle's upstate house where he turned the living room into a studio, he contemplates the beauty and disaster around him - all refracted through visceral visual imagery of how the physical earth meets the unknown to converge in something greater than ourselves. " This is all a living chronicle of all I want to do, which is feel good and be happy ," he admits. " I'm a completely different person now - a better version of myself ." Processing the past, Sutkowksi has emerged with newfound belief, fully intact and with a new path forward to the future.

7" and Tape in Gold or Silver with Poster, Postcard and five Poodle Pins. Destiny decides - golden edition comes with autgraphed postcard. Good luck!

The Cure had been gradually building their U.S. fan base when they embarked on their third American tour to promote their 1984 studio release, The Top. This recording was made on that tour, and features the band during their most defining musical period. Coming off the success of hits like “Let’s Go To Bed” and “Boys Don’t Cry,” Robert Smith and the band had finally come to the point where they could take The Cure’s eccentric, characteristically dark sound and combine it with a more radio-friendly approach.

"What happens when you take stop-start, prog-jazz weirdos Evil Usses and mix them with someone even stranger? Well, Ichi's DIY dada-pop genius isn't going to make things more normal is it?
Witness new combo Ichigo Evil knock at the doors of perception with dayglo skronk and one stringed fiddles. For fans of: Black Midi & Damo Suzuki, Melt Yourself Down, Cornelius." Headfirst Bristol Staff Picks

Massive as Joy Division were becoming, they still played Shit-Holes like this former, partially demolished, cinema in Derby. The old seats were still in place, except for a few that were torn off of their perches to allow dancing, if required. Again, another cavernous sounding audience recording,and again we are treated to a joint band version of "Girls Don't Count" for the rarity value. Due to cancellations, probably due to Ian's failing health, this would turn out to be the penultimate Joy Division performance, before.....well, you know what happened next.

Love + POP is a snapshot of a moment in not-so-far-away time; something fast, loud, moody and a little dangerous. It is, in some ways, classic Current Joys: full of wild ambition, sneaky hooks, and songs that move from concept to completion with prolific speed. But Love + POP also explodes myriad expectations with aggressive, deconstructed production, house music influence, and a guest appearance from Lil Yachty. It is not so much a twist as it is a unique multiverse identity for Current Joys, as Nick Rattigan's set out to "capture this sonic moment and harken back to the way I first released music." The story of Love + POP begins with one of those house parties: the kind that bulldozes your home and, in its aftermath, leaves a wreckage that finds you flattened but also ready to be new. In that mess and mayhem, Rattigan watched Everybody's Everything, the documentary of Lil Peep, and recorded a cover of "walk away as the door slams". But the itch wasn't scratched, and what began as a moment of homage morphed into something bigger, deeper and more fundamental, a point where the seemingly haphazard - in his home, in Peep's process - opened Rattigan up to an entire creative space and a new approach to bending or even detonating genre. Crucially, all of this was recorded at home, in what Rattigan calls a "tribute to the process of creating" in a DIY space. And what began as a singular passion project unexpectedly grew into a uniquely collaborative record for Current Joys. "I've set out to make collaborative records before," Rattigan explains, "but they often end up totally me, with just a couple exceptions. But then this record gave me the opportunity to be extremely collaborative, to let other people write instrumental tracks, sending links around for people to mess with and weigh in on. I sat down to do credits and realized here were all these people and styles and they all came together and worked." Love + POP's cover art is an airbrush/spraypaint rendition of the Wild Heart album cover, which is itself a photo of Rattigan's grandparents kissing. It is sacred in some ways and shredded in others. This idea - the aggressive reimagining of something timeless into a present, finite style - is Love + POP.

Legendary Dublin punk band formed in November 1978 by Maurice Foley (guitar/vocals), which had a number of iterations before disbanding in 1981. The Threat built up a following in Dublin and maintained a heavy reputation through the 1979 and 1980. Playing the legendary Dandelion on a couple of occasions towards the end of 1979 and became friendly with members of the Virgin Prunes and U2. Stano, another friend of the band, bought a synthesizer, purely as a sound generator, and joined them. As a nonmusician, his synth added noise and texture to the band's sound and brought out their experimental side.

This tape of the band's April 1981 gig in Limerick came to us a few years ago from one of the band members drummer Stephen O' Brien and it's been remastered for the perfect cassette experience.