Indierock | Alternative Tape 446 Items

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.

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."

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.

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."

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.

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.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard's Demos Vol.2 have been surfed out in an attempt to reconcile exquisite demo recording and vaporised lo-fi electronica. Music To Eat Bananas 2 is a venture in Oceanic Rock or Space Rock. We encourage you to peruse and support this online styling between a kilometres-underground ambient-glitch producer, and Melbourne's cultural icons of kaleidoscopic creation and willpower.

The latest album by Bachi Da Pietra in duo; the most extreme (and also the most pop) and champion of paradoxes: memorable songs that form a concept dedicated to early eighties Metal hybridized with black music, obsessively tribal. For a concept like "Necroide" ending up on cassette is its death, or its new life.

"The New World" is the second album by Bologna Violenta. Released for the first time in 2010 by Bar La Muerte, it is a record that in just over 20 minutes tells in a grotesque way the atrocities of the world in which we live. The extreme sound is underlined by samplings that bring to mind the narratives that accompanied the much reviled world movies of the 60s in which the oddities of the human being followed one another on the screen between the serious and the humorous, between the horror and the eroticism, between news and fiction, seamlessly.

Winspear is pleased to announce the release of their first label compilation, Winspear Volume 01. This collection features a selection of the label's most notable tracks from their catalog, songs by Barrie, Divino Niño, Slow Pulp, Video Age, and others.

While kolezanka's previous album, "Place Is," was aboutlife on the road and the people you meet living out of asuitcase, the new album is all about being alone at home.The voices that you hear in your head when you rememberwhat it was like to hang out with friends; the drinks sharedand the stories remembered. Recorded at Pulp Arts (Pearl and the Oysters, Quintron and Miss Pussycat) and mixed/ mastered by Jonathan Schenke (Parquet Courts, The Drums, Snail Mail). FOR FANS OF: Broadcast, Stereolab, Cate Le Bon, Cocteau Twins..."This album deserves to make kole¿anka one of the most talkedabout names in new music today." - Secret Meeting //"Moore's vocals are spellbinding over a dream-pop concotion"- Stereogum

Finding beauty, where one wouldn’t suspect it in the first place. Discovering music, where there used to be only sound a moment before. Forming an orchestra out of everyday surroundings, the main thing out of the incidental, the fulfilling momentary situation out of the profane togetherness. All of this is part of the goal, meaning and sense of Oh No Noh, the project of Leipzig based guitarist, robot programmer, magnetic tape crumpler and composer Markus Rom. All of this floats and shines through "Kanzi", the second Oh No Noh album to be released on November 18th, 2022.

There's a kinetic energy about anything this band does: a level of care, precision and attention to detail that nearly twenty years into their existence, continues to elevate and set them apart. This four-song offering is no different—from the self-recorded and produced songs down to the design and packaging.

For The Driver Era, music can't and shouldn't be forced. The band, formed by brothers Ross and Rocky Lynch in 2018 while on tour with their former group R5, aims to embrace the present moment, creating songs that reflect each experience and feeling as it comes.

It's a philosophy that pervades all of the duo's releases, from their debut Summer Mixtape (expected to release later this summer) features the band's two new tracks - the Rolling Stone- backed 'Keep Moving Forward' and lead single 'Malibu', inspired by summertime escapism.

In between polishing off the new songs and hitting the road, Ross is also a critically acclaimed actor (he drew rave reviews for his title role in the serial killer biopic My Friend Dahmer and recently starred in Netflix's The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina).

"Even my subconscious is self-conscious," Okay Kaya sings on "Inside Of A Plum", giving us a sense of the mental state she entered while making SAP, an album she wrote, performed, engineered, and produced alone, sometimes spending weeks at a time without social interaction. This is a concept album about consciousness in which Okay Kaya focuses her trademark combination of abstraction and wit on what happens to her mind unaccompanied, on her tendency to feel less like a human and more like the sticky secretion of a tree. After releasing her Spellemann Award winning album Watch This Liquid Pour Itself in January of 2020, Kaya left her home in New York and moved to Europe to create and show her various interdisciplinary exhibitions. Among others, she made an installation that amplified music made underwater and an interactive sculpture based on Jungian sandplay therapy for children. Between her exhibits, Kaya recorded through lockdowns by herself in the loaned studios of generous friends. SAP first grew from the first single "Spinal Tap" about Kaya wandering in Berlin, tree-touching. "Sap reminds me of the bodily functions I need to remember to do, like sleep. One might say it `resinates.'" The album was further inspired by Ketamine Therapy which is discussed in "The Inside Of A Plum." Kaya explains, "The doctor said this treatment grows literal physical branches in your brain." As she experimented with ego death, the subject of her song "Jazzercise", Kaya found herself writing in the voices of fictional characters she'd encountered in other people's stories. In `Jolene From Her Own Perspective,' she imagines Dolly Parton's nemesis responding to her song. In `Origin Story,' Kaya writes as a mythical goddess frustrated with her creation myth. In `I've Spent Forever Planning A Crisis,' Kaya responds to Cassavetes' film A Woman Under The Influence writing from the perspective of the story's children. Okay Kaya's investigations of mind-body come along with sexy dance beats, unpredictable interlocking synths, delicate soft guitars, and close-to-the-mike R&B whispering. But Kaya likes her falsettos cracking and her soul-inspired hooks careening wildly, a beautiful chaos that somehow fits together. When she returned to New York, Kaya was excited to collaborate again, to get friends to "bless the record." She invited friends to Gaia Studios in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to sing or play an instrument. Most songs on the album unfold with guest performances from artists as varied as deem spencer, Taja Cheek of L'Rain and Adam Green of The Moldy Peaches. Just as the recording process began with isolation and ended with friends, SAP starts with the internal and leads outside to romance, to lovers who serve as funhouse mirrors, reflecting Kaya back to herself from different angles. In "Pearl Gurl" Kaya harmonizes with her multi-tracked second self and sings her uncertain conclusion: "If love is not the answer, it's one hell of a question."

Owing to a focused period of growth as a home recordist and producer, there is a distinct, refreshing current that charges outtakes from “bad summer”, the latest full-length album from Philly-via-Portland’s cool original (fka cool american). What under other circumstances might have been a string of homespun indie rock songs is instead an energized pop-focused collection of tracks born from what Nathan Tucker describes as “the contrast between total formlessness and rigid claustrophobia”. As heard almost immediately on album opener “monad, no windows”, an electric atmosphere envelops outtakes from “bad summer”. Pitch-shifted vocal samples and previously-scrapped drum recordings fill out the overture, setting the table for a patchwork of repurposed, resampled ideas shaped into songs that rarely end up in the same place they started. The unhurried and sentimental “i just need a second” boasts the full spectrum of cool original’s songwriting prowess: foregrounded, infectious melody over subtly chopped and screwed drums comprise the foundation for Tucker’s own take on a classic road song—a marked contrast to “breaking my own rules”, an experimental pop number unlike any previous cool original work. Similar contrasts abound throughout outtakes, making for a listening experience that’s equal parts rejuvenating and unpredictable.

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.

Julien Ehrlich and Max Kakacek could hear the staggering differences in the songs they were writing for their third album as Whitney, Spark _ the buoyant drum loops, the effortless falsetto hooks, the coruscant keyboard lines. They suddenly sounded like a band reimagined, their once-ramshackle folk-pop now brimming with unprecedented gusto and sheen. But could they see it, too? So in the ad hoc studio the Chicago duo built in the living room of their rented Portland bungalow, a shared 2020 escape hatch amid breakups and lockdowns, Julien and Max decided to find out. Somewhere between midnight and dawn every night, their brains refracted by the late hour and light psychedelics, they'd play their latest creations while a hardware store disco ball spun overhead and slowed-down music videos from megastars spooled silently on YouTube. Did their own pop songs _ so much more immediate and modern than their hazy origins _ fit such big-budget reels? "We'd come to the conclusion we weren't going to be filming Super 8 videos to this stuff anymore," Julien remembers with a grin. "How about something more hi-fi, cinematic?" When the footage and the tunes linked, Julien and Max knew they had done it, that they'd finally found Whitney's sound. Spark reintroduces Whitney as a contemporary syndicate of classic pop, its dozen imaginative and endearing tracks wrapping fetching melodies around paisley-print Dilla beats and luxuriant electronics. What's more, Whitney reduces three years of extreme emotional highs and lows into 38 brisk but deep minutes, each of these 12 tracks a singable lesson in what it is they (and, really, we) have all survived. The recalcitrant ennui of opener "nothing REMAINS," the devastating loss of "TERMINAL," the sun-streaked renewal of "real Love": However surprising it may sound, Spark is less a radical reinvention for Whitney than an honest accounting of how it feels when you move out of your past and into your present, when you take the next steps of your lives and careers at once and without apology. Spark maintains the warmth and ease of Whitney's early work; these songs glow with the newness of now. Listen closely, and you'll notice frequent references to smoke and fire throughout Spark, itself a double entendre for inspiring something new or burning down the old. Max and Julien were indeed in Portland for the Fall of 2020, when smoke from nearby fires choked the city at record levels. It was terrifying and tragic, but they pressed on. "We found a way to live while the world was burning/Real life was caving in," Julien sings almost merrily during "back THEN," an anthem for finding out what's on the other side of hardship. In these dire days, scientists speak increasingly of serotiny, an evolutionary miracle that causes some trees to release seeds only amid a season of fire. That is how Spark often feels _ Whitney's circumstances were so fraught on so many levels that they hung "the past_out to dry" and began again, finding a fresh version of themselves, their relationship, and their band after the blaze. Max and Julien are back in Chicago now, sharing a cozy walkup with a little studio, where they're already building songs for the next Whitney album. They're both in happy romances, too. Now that they let the past burn, everything is new for Max and Julien. Spark is not only Whitney's best album; it is an inspiring testament to perseverance and renewal, to best friends trusting each another enough to carry one another to the other side of this season of woe.

Smash cut to Kiwi Jr.'s third album, Chopper, overseen by trusted pilot Dan Boeckner (Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs) on storied Sub Pop Records. Turning nocturnal with necks mock turtle, our Local Kiwi Jr. takes neon flight off the digital cliff - like The Monkees starring in Blade Runner; like Michael Mann directs Encino Man. Ten songs with synth shimmer, zen gongs with yard strimmer. The signs along the highway read "less BAR, More Noir AHEAD." Ah, those late summer, Joe Strummer, Home on the Range Rover Blues. There's a melancholy to all forms of flight, and the view out the Chopper is as hazy as it gets: mission-oriented, both stealth and self-realized. This album is decidedly (yet almost secretly) anti-patio-sunscreen-Beach Boys bachelor cruise sing-a-long. Sure, these songs let a little light through the blinds, but they sting insomnia, corrupt mayors, Kennedy Curses, sex tapes, and deer rifles. Chopper is the bird's eye view of the big event - a real nighttime character of oil stain, film grain, search light, night flight. It is muscular and fragile; loud yet quiet: both an observer and somehow the observed spectacle itself. What was slack in the slacker phase, got tauter, with lacquer glaze. Slick gloss, rightened wrongs; murdered boss, promoted pawns. With Boeckner transmitting high-voltage shocks upon every reach for a familiar instrument, Kiwi Jr. expands the palette with string machine song, synthesizered oblong, and Dentyne Classic Menthol vocals from area soprano Dorothea Paas (US Girls, Badge Epoch Ensemble) like the missing piece all along. Kiwi Jr. brings the Chopper to a new space, demilitarizing the technology just like flasks, aviators, and cargo shorts. Graceful in the air above, but when the Chopper lands, there's chaos on the ground. Kiwi Jr. shout, "Look Out!" When it gets close, it'll blow the hat right off of your head. Hold onto your hats, Babies. Kiwi Jr. is Jeremy Gaudet vocals and guitar, Brian Murphy guitar, Mike Walker bass, Brohan Moore drums, and everybody played a little bit of keyboard.

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.

Maine’s psychedelic fountainhead Matt LaJoie traffics in a multitude of mind-expanding entities (ML Wah, Herbcraft, Cursillistas, Endless Caverns, etc) but even by his standards Thick Air is a heady sphere. Longform improvisations on a Yamaha Pss-270 and loop units born of deep listening and higher consciousness, channeling notions of French mystics and astral planes. Pillars Of Creation takes its title from the iconic 1995 Hubble Space Telescope photo, and radiates a similarly interstellar mood. Bass tones wobble in spiral patterns beneath slow blooming arcs of celestial keys, like dawn breaking on some nameless gaseous moon. Gradually a gravity takes hold, drawing its disparate harmonic cosmos into a unified field, bound by some vast astral unknown. LaJoie cites intuition and accident as foundational to the Thick Air genesis, trusting the freefall process of creation and decay, motion and miasma. Tweaking presets through banks of FX in pursuit of a levitational singularity, soaring and swimming through solar winds, forever unfolding and unfound.

Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand can overpower the strongest among us. Then there are the rare, fertile moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten, complicate and explain each other; the songs that comprise Angel Olsen's Big Time were forged in such a whiplash. Big Time is an album about the expansive power of new love, but this brightness and optimism is tempered by a profound and layered sense of loss. During Olsen's process of coming to terms with her queerness and confronting the traumas that had been keeping her from fully accepting herself, she felt it was time to come out to her parents, a hurdle she'd been avoiding for some time. "Finally, at the ripe age of 34, I was free to be me," she said. Three days later, her father died and shortly after her mother passed away. The shards of this grief - the shortening of her chance to finally be seen more fully by her parents - are scattered throughout the album. Three weeks after her mother's funeral she was in the studio, recording this incredibly wise and tender new album. Loss has long been a subject of Olsen's elegiac songs, but few can write elegies with quite the reckless energy as she. If that bursting-at-the-seams, running downhill energy has come to seem intractable to her work, this album proves Olsen is now writing from a more rooted place of clarity. She's working with an elastic, expansive mastery of her voice - both sonically and artistically. These are songs not just about transformational mourning, but of finding freedom and joy in the privations as they come.

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

Amazing Spector-ian power pop from this great Oakland group helmed by Mario out of From Bubblegum To Sky/Ciao Bella. Bandmates Bill and Becky add plenty of punky punch, and the tunes are pure hand-clapping, foot-stomping pop perfection. Excellent!

Artsick was formed in June 2018 when Christina Riley was feeling "artsick" and writing songs, but missing the inspiration and excitement of collaborating with her old band, Burnt Palms. Christina was soon joined by Mario Hernandez (Kids On A Crime Spree, Ciao Bella) on drums and Donna McKean (Lunchbox, Hard Left) on bass and a band was born. Following up their terrific 2018 7" single they are back with their debut album "Fingers Crossed," a thrilling, compelling and downright fun record that surveys a vast swathe of indie and indiepop history, from DIY progenitors like Dolly Mixture through the punkier side of C86 (think Talulah Gosh, Fat Tulips) to the 90s K Records-centered International Pop Underground and straight through more recent exemplars like Vivian Girls and Colleen Green. Across its 11 songs "Fingers Crossed" is packed with great songs and memorable moments, indelible melodies and heartfelt lyrics. Christina says that she was "always been drawn to fuzzy guitars, melodies with emotion and songs with urgency" and that is readily apparent on every moment of this excellent album.

Tragic Tiger's Sad Meltdown is Heavenly aka Tiger Hutchence-Geldof's debut album of sorts, cut from cassette tapes of rehearsals mixed with snippets of field recordings. Recorded with contributions from Nicholas Allbrook (Pond), Scarlett Stevens (San Cisco), India Rose & Jacob Diamond.
"I made this cassette in the living room of our house in Fremantle, a seaside town in Western Australia. I had always been shy to sing with others but moving across the world and my ex-boyfriend Nick had given me some bravery. Something about living closer to nature meant I felt creative and open hearted. It was as if the wide open landscape of Australia had finally given my heart enough space to open properly. The recordings are actually just recordings of our rehearsals, I never feel set in how song is meant to be so they usually just come out of me in the moment. My friends playing along with me are luckily all very empathic players and we found a way to play with one another without any structure or plan. It was really moving to create with so much freedom and understanding. Most of the songs are about my sister Peaches who I lost as a teenager so singing them aloud felt very potent but my band always made me feel held"