While the record has a great sense of cohesiveness overall, a massive amount of collaboration took place at every stage of the record. Gary Canino is the mastermind behind Dark Tea, but twenty two people worked on the album in total. Among them, eight people had a hand in recording, mixing, producing, and mastering Dark Tea.
Over the course of just sixteen minutes, singer-songwriter Hannah Read strums her way through a series of vignettes that delve thoroughly and unflinchingly into the heart of what it means to feel for another. Each track is brief yet perfectly measured, quiet yet self-assured, delicate yet unyielding.
Spiral Wave Nomads reach a little further, drawing influence from free improvisation, jazz, noise, raga, folk, and ambient music, mapping out a vast galaxy of guitar swirls, bass bellows, and drum storms. Eric Hardiman and Michael Kiefer combine their powers to quilt together a delicious menagerie of tunes.
The singer-songwriter plays his cards with a deep authenticity of authorship and puts his creative soul in dialogue with themes such as death, loneliness, and war. Radcliffe's vision, through the delicate sounds of guitar, cello, and effects created by the eccentric pedals, makes us feel in relation to the earth, to the terrestriality.
Over the course of eleven years and six albums, Keiron Melling, Dave Spurr, and Pete Greenway formed behind Mark E. Smith as the final and longest iteration of The Fall. After Smith’s passing, they recruited Sam Curran for vocal duties and formed Imperial Wax, the name being a nod to the first album they all played on together as The Fall, and have put out their first album Gastwerk Saboteurs.
A sort-of supergroup, Acquaintances boasts members who have played with The Ponys, The Poison Arrows, Don Caballero, Ted Leo + the Pharmacists, Titus Andronicus, and Thumbnail. The band’s latest album sounds like a group of lifers jamming in a room. They know that they’re now the older guys in the crowd, but they can still write spiny, intelligent, driving rock ‘n’ roll.
On the whole, in the shape of... doesn’t latch directly onto any single genre. So Totally comically tagged “fuck a genre” on the album’s Bandcamp page. They’ve drawn influence from a wide range of subgenres and experiment with creating massive walls-of-sound, incorporating field recorded clips, and blurring contrasted audio qualities together.
The power of She Keeps Bees lies in the nuance, the understated. It’s Jessica Larrabee’s vocals moving like smoke over Andy LaPlant’s kindling crackling drum beats. It’s intimate music. A quiet rage that is intoxicating, inviting the listener in, leaving them unguarded for the jabs and barbs that come their way through the music.
2016’s Marked for Death was hard to follow, and Emma Ruth Rundle certainly rose to the challenge with her latest solo record, On Dark Horses. Out on Sargent House, the album is lyrically lighter and musically heavier than its predecessor, concerning itself with themes and symbols of racing, running, and the freedom of wide open spaces.
