From concept to recording, woods calls Aethiopes “one of more symbiotic, feedback-loop processes of making an album that I probably ever had.” He’s right. woods and Preservation’s collaboration is symbiotic in a way that feels ordained; it’s impossible to imagine this album produced in any other way.
On his third full length release Boat Songs, Lenderman shows off a strong wit, mixing in pop culture references to his songs, adding a strength and tenderness when called for. This record has a ramshackle and loose feel to it that is warm and welcoming with a bunch of enchanting twists, revealing a bountiful of pleasures within each song.
While the sound of Jeanines - the duo of Alicia Jeanine and Jed Smith - goes deeper than just an emulation of the Sarah Records sound, with Don't Wait For A Sign, the pair latches on to that deep running vein of wistful, melodic pop. It’s the type of music where you have to say what you have to say in two minutes or less.
Together is new slowcore: heavy, gritty, and more nuanced than its modest low-fidelity predecessors. In today’s musical landscape, recordings like those that first established the genre in the 90s are tired appropriation, and the members of Duster are just too busy to put energy to that. Only a pointed update to form is meaningful.
Their 35th full length record Crystal Nuns Cathedral relies on their modern brand of rock and roll with some added quirks as a nod towards their more experimental history. Much like many of their recent albums, the instrumental quality is clearer and more fleshed out. Pollard’s sugary melodies are the centerpoint of each track.
Bunny challenges its listeners to rethink their view of the world. The album touches on how mundane life can be, how sad missing loved ones can be, and how frustrating everything around us can feel. Yet it choses instead to focus on how you can address these feelings as a way of finding hope within them.
Maida Vale Sessions is a collection of four live sets recorded at the Maida Vale studios at BBC, truly capturing the magic that was the Birmingham band. A mesmerizing compilation of live songs for veterans and new fans alike, this live record showcases songs all pre-Tender Buttons, showing their progress as a band between 1996 – 2003.
Battle Ave are still the mature band they have always been, still making the soothing yet exciting music they are known for. There’s a lot subtlety, but if you listen closely you’ll be amazed by what can be found on I Saw The Egg. They create a welcoming atmosphere of delicacy with the perfect album to relax, brood, or think introspectively to.
How Is It That I Should Look at The Stars thrives on its construction: played in three days in an uninterrupted jam, it gives back the naturalness of a live show, accompanied by lyrics edited in detail. We are accustomed through contemporary culture to seriality, and The Weather Station succeeds to be a point of coherence of her works.
Though Famously Alive’s first three songs—also its pre-release singles—hint at a straightforward listen that filters the psych elements of previous album Twisted Crystal through a poppier approach, the rest of the album is anything but, revealing a band whose restlessness provokes ceaseless transformation the moment a new opportunity arises.
Springtime is considered a supergroup – and rightfully so. Each of these players is a pillar of their craft, a master at their instrument. Their Night Raver EP may only be three songs, but there’s a lot going on: two very disparate longform opuses and one seven-minute improvisation-adjacent rock song.
Talk Soon, Hemlock’s latest self-released album, was recorded in Astoria, Oregon, where Chauffe was living during one year of the pandemic. This work differs from her other projects in its production, collaboration, and fullness. Throughout the seventeen tracks, Chauffe braids in windy field recordings and features a selection of voicemails.
Knowing no melodic bounds, the Peacers’ exceptionally expansive musical palette is apparent, painting in a spectrum of refined subtlety, hypnotic grace, and plangent adventurism. This panoply of hues presents itself in a microtonal, blue note fashion, with chromaticism and a generalized uniqueness of twists-and-turns.
On Picnic in the Dark, Zeiguer does not hesitate to whisk her listener away to a lush, reverberant world of her own design. By blending contemporary indie pop’s structures with vintage drum machines, old Hollywood strings, and dalliances into bossa nova territory, Zeiguer’s become the architect of her own memories.
Mother is The Milky Way is not quite a collection of songs and not quite a soundtrack. Rather, it is a twenty-minute meditative experience in an unambiguously Broadcastian space, with equal parts journey through pastoral psychedelic meadows and whiplash-inducing descent into some of the darkest spaces the band has dared to curate.
Palm Friends’ music has an easy sound to the ear, with each song stepping into another direction, while keeping it recognizable. It’s a hard thing to do across two or three separate releases, let alone within a single EP. Yet, that is exactly what the Minneapolis quartet have done on The Delivery, their latest record.
