Indierock | Alternative Tape 440 Items

What Circus Is This? is the debut LP from Cornish songwriter/producer R. D. Thomas. Produced remotely in 2021 between home studios in London, Cornwall and Sweden.

The record features collaborations with Mickey Smith & Nat Wason (Ben Howard, A Blaze Of Feather) and Rob Hall (Catfish And The Bottlemen) on drum duties. For fans of Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, Phosphorescent. What Circus.. skirts the dreaded singer-songwriter genre, with a mixture of sincerity and self-deprecation whilst making room for a playful dose of irony.

‘Paint By Numbers You’ takes a wry smile at modern concerns. ‘Sugar Coated Brain’ rattles through a 60’s style strum, with tongue in cheek to balance more trademark vulnerabilities of moments such as ‘This Bloom’ and ‘Salt’.

The penultimate track ‘And I’m Gone’ would have made for an obvious bookmark to the LP, but it is perhaps more telling that ‘Numbers Game’ should be the lingering sentiment ; a musing over the contradiction of modern meritocracy, suggesting ‘a sense of humour’ as a suitable tonic.

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.

The third album of the Italian hardcore band known all over the world! The fury of thrash metal combined with punk attitude is the right combination to define this album: it will crush your skull like a ton of bricks whilst embarking on an assault to your eardrums! A true masterpiece of the 80s to own in your collection.

Born in 1967 and former Wrestling Rock'n'Roll One Man Band Activist Lightning Beat-Man (1992-1999) turned into a Primitive Rock'n'Roll Blues Preacher in the Millenium Change and released countless recordings on several labels. 2017 he had a hand full of songs to record this album, the idea was to record it with several musicians and not showing them the songs, they went to the studio and Reverend Beat-Man played the songs on the guitar one time, then they had 2 takes for recording without rehearsal to keep it fresh. Anyway the idea was Free Style and so is that whole Album, the result was a mix of Blues Trash, New Wave Folk and Dark No Wave Garage Punk and Rock'n'Roll. He selected the NEW WAVE from musicians he loved the most at the momentNICOLE IZOBEL GARCIA is From Los Angeles with Mexian roots, a singer that has the gift to connect her voice direct with your heart, she plays an unorthodox organ and plays part of drums and percussion like the devil itself. With her, Reverend Beat-Man plays the most shows as a duet.MARIO BATKOVIC is a classical and kraut avantgarde accordionist. He creates film and game music and has a one man band himself he's a total genius (prodused by Geoff Barrow of Portishead).JULIAN SARTORIUS another Bern original, he's probably one of europs or even worlds most extraordinary drummers these days, he is one of the few drummers that can play his drums as an instrument not just as a machine, he plays a lot of free jazzand improvisation (sophie hunger, colin vallon trio, manuel troller, hans koch, bruno spoerri etc). RESLI BURRI is a legendary Bern musician who has a jam-band together with Mario and Beat-Man - he is a multi instrumentalist who plays in the Dead Brothers, Patent Ochsner , and is a film and circus music writer.

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

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."

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...

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.

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.

There is an entire sub-genre of poetry devoted to rivers and their persistent, meditative flow. Emily Dickinson's ''My River Runs to Thee'' compares them to the cycle of life, while Alfred Tennyson's ''The Brook'' deems them eternal and Kathleen Raine's ''The River'' muses on the dream-state they evoke. For transcendent folk-pop artist Shannon Lay, the river is all of the above: It's the metaphor driving her latest album, the exquisitely uplifting August, which doubles as an aural baptism renewing her purpose for making music. ''I always picture music as this river. Everyone's throwing things into this river, it's a place you can go to and feed off of that energy,'' she says, ''and feel nourished by the fact that so many people are feeling what you're feeling. It's this beautiful exchange.'' The album's name, August, refers to the month in 2017 when Lay quit her day job and fully gave herself over to music. This was her liberation as an artist, and the album is devoted to paying that forward to her listeners. Lay may be the most chilled-out artist you'll ever meet. Despite fronting her tranquil solo act and being a guitarist/singer in the indie-rock band Feels, she never pressures herself to overachieve. Nonetheless, she regularly does: in a glowing review, Pitchfork anointed her last album, Living Water, ''captivating.'' With her life devoted to music, Lay often spends hours a day simply playing the guitar, challenging herself to become better. ''It just feels so good, doing something that is so much bigger than myself. I think so much of music is that, realizing that it's coming from something beyond and you are just the messenger'' says Lay, who took guitar lessons at age 13, which introduced her to Neil Young and The Beatles. After high school, she moved from Redondo Beach, Calif., to Hollywood and joined an indie-rock band. ''It was an energy I needed to release,'' she says. The exact type of energy may have changed, but her drive hasn't. August was mostly written in three months, during Lay's first solo tour for Living Water. ''For the most part, all of the songs were just guitar and voice,'' she says. In keeping with the humbled, contemplative nature of August, most tracks clock-in at three minutes or less. She saved indulgence for the production. ''Some songs as they were had this room to grow,'' says Lay, who recorded the album with her longtime friend, musician Ty Segall at his home studio on the East Side. ''I believe whoever you record with tends to affect the mood of music and Ty really brought this jovial sense that I hadn't really explored yet,'' she says. Also in the mix is Mikal Cronin, who played saxophone on the album's opener, ''Death Up Close.'' ''A lot of my friends who are really tough have admitted that they shed a tear when they hear my songs, and I think that really speaks to the visceral aspect of folk music,'' Lay says. ''It's this ancient form of expressing yourself.'' Think of August as a warm hug for your psyche. ''I want to create as much music as I can,'' she says, ''and leave this spot by the river where people can go sit and enjoy.''

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.

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...

“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

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.

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.