2020s 289 Items

Continue As Amery is the debut album by Montreal-based artist Amery. Formerly recording under the moniker Alpen Glow, Continue As Amery sees the songwriter step out into a bold, colourful world full of pop hooks, snagging feelings of abandon and the mornings after.

Amery Sandford began releasing as Alpen Glow in 2020 after years playing in punk groups in Newfoundland and as half of Montreal pop duo Born At Midnite (Arbutus). Recorded in Montreal by David Carriere (tops, Marci), Patrick Holland, and Kristian North, Continue As Amery is a blast of melodic joie de vivre. On her debut Sandford brings her punk and DIY credentials into sharp focus on 8 perfect pop odes to city living, making mistakes and figuring it out as you go along. Suffuse with powerful imagery and an almost uncanny talent at spinning out hooks brimming with humour and spirit, Amery’s soundworld is informed by friendship, experience and by her day job as a renowned illustrator and visual artist. Beginning Alpen Glow in a spirit of fun and now shedding the alias, Amery’s ready to hotwire the nite.

Switching seaside ambience for a sound shaped by inner-city living, Atelier’s second full-length studio album, Lights
Towards The Exit, channels the mood of a sleepless cityscape.
Lights Towards The Exit is Atelier’s second full-length studio album. After the release of Varsam Court at the end of
2019 on Lossless, run by mentors and friends Mathias Schober and Thomas Herb, the duo experimented with different
ideas in the studio, and at the start of 2020 a common thread began to appear between a few of the tracks which laid
the foundation for the sound of their second album.
Both Alexander and Jas moved to Berlin in the period before the release of Varsam Court from their hometown of Cape
Town, South Africa, where their first album was written and recorded. Moving provided some challenges, particularly
with what was the most essential equipment to bring from their previous studio set-up, but those limitations proved to
be useful in incorporating new instruments and techniques to the recording process.
Lights Towards The Exit was written and recorded in different spaces in Berlin – from bedrooms in apartment blocks to
three different studios across the city. The different locations all had a specific ambience – such as 4th- and 5th-floor
bedrooms with busy street views; a studio with no windows in a typical old Berlin backyard complex forever under
threat of being sold and gentrified; and a bigger studio with windows on the opposite side of the corridor overlooking the
backyard of a mechanic workshop. The final details and edits were completed in Atelier’s current studio, in a
contrasting area surrounded by office blocks, plazas, 9-5ers and, most importantly, their friends and colleagues.
Swapping the mountains, sea and seclusion for tall buildings, backyards and a new community, Lights Towards The
Exit channels the sensation of being surrounded by people, but still feeling like you're on your own. The album was
written through three years of cold winters, sweaty summers and a period where the world stood still during the
pandemic. Frustrated with the cease of momentum, but still optimistic, Atelier disappeared from public view,
abandoning social media to focus on recording, songwriting and experimentation.
It was a difficult time: the duo longed to perform and continue producing music, and the imposed limitations sometimes
felt like an impossible obstacle. Ultimately, though, this would provide unexpected inspiration and influence the sound
and direction of the new album.
The sound of Lights Towards The Exit is not a departure from their first album, but a progression: influenced by the new
surroundings in the duo’s adoptive city, Atelier’s second album is an ode to first-time experiences, new languages,
challenges, club culture and the shift from youth to maturity, as well as a balm to those stuck somewhere in between.
The overall sound is a lift not in tempo, but in energy, matching the openness needed to make a new start in a new
place.

All tracks written, produced, arranged and performed by Atelier - Jás Miszewski & Alexander Inggs
Mastered by Mathias Schober, Artwork by David Kochs , Cover Photography by Alexander Inggs
A&R: Mathias Schober & Thomas Herb

A runway leading into the night sky, accompanied by the sea breeze. Barber IN THE Livingroom, a 5-piece city pop band from Fukuoka, will release their long-awaited second album (pink vinyl)!

Barber IN THE Livingroom is a 5-member city pop band based in Fukuoka that has become a hot topic with its soulful singing voice and groovy rhythm section, along with a jacket drawn by Hiroshi Nagai. Continuing from last year, the long-awaited second album "Moon& Palms" will be released at "citypop on Vinyl 2024"! If the debut album "Barber IN THE Livingroom" was a landscape of daylight and mirages, "Moon & Palms" is a landscape of lights and nighttime flights flowing from dusk to night. Like the previous album, this album was produced remotely, and the songs and sounds spun by the members far away become five birds, gliding over skyscrapers, over the city, and soaring beyond the horizon of the ocean...a song that evokes the image of... is being knitted.

Benny Sings‘ first song on Stones Throw was a cover of “Passionfruit” originally by Drake. Some six years and three albums later, we’ve finally decided to put it out on vinyl. Side A is a cover of Christopher Cross’ 1979 classic “Sailing”, which Benny released late last year. Quantities are limited, so grab yours now. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.

2LP black, 180g, printed jackets w/ printed inner sleeves,
40 page booklet,
folded 24”x 36” poster,
in a slipcase

Sunk in quicksand, doused in prosecco and soundwaves of glitches and Croatian choons, Bolka
is stuck in the raw state of desire. This love came into being under the sad ceilings, bearing traces of fantastically naive melodies shredded by claws of intruding noises of the artist's debut EP. And yet, radical sensitivity and optimism on the new EP do not remain just on the beach. Žiadzasamy (loosely translated as Yearningforus) include love songs about love read in cards, about overcoming insecurity, about scratching up the slippery walls of reality towards the dream source of warmth that only SHE possesses. Syrupy pop tunes in "nech sa ti páčim" ("i hope you like me") are led by a nursery rhyme about the complex embrace of infatuation, from the head down to the shoulders, knees and toes of the desired person. The sound wizard of peculiarities goes by the motto "let anything I wish for come true", whether it's his white buttocks shining in the dark sea or him sweeping past barefoot in search of seafood delicacies, and the same is heard in his music where euphoric and childish moods sink arbitrarily to the depths of corroded and distorted rhythms of anxiety. "A smutek utek" ("and the sadness is gone"), though, sets a new direction for the Bolka's musical piece; after a slow mo deflation of the balloon of hopes, after wallowing in oozy and sticky blend of delirious melodies, Bolka gets to spin the wheel of the real Balkan soap opera.

"More, mám ťa veľmi rád" ("sea/man, i like you very much") is the pinnacle of absolute infiltration and absorption with infatuation and suddenly, the amusing nods to stereotypical Croatian hits make it clear that all the joy and high spirits do not stem from holiday idleness. In žiadzasamy, Bolka indulges in the ideal notion of love that is closer to reality with each passing kilometer, impatiently speeding up the Latin tempo in the hyper-pop escalation in order to venture into the most radical decision – that all will end well. Žiadzasamy is hedonism injected right into one's vein, an ashtray always aglow with a lit cigarette and a musical burst of new-born love that sets the Bolka's sound world on a single course: from siesta to fiesta, and so on and on.