Booter‘s first record is a kind of spiritual sequel to the Weakerthans’ first record. The guitars have a similarly warm and woody tone, lightly sparked with overdrive. That likable, rough-around-the-edges production style makes it easy to imagine you’re there in the practice room as snow blankets a sleepy Winnipeg, their mutual hometown. The songs are short and fast and indicate how both bands would expand their sound on following releases. Lastly, both bands take their time, with “10/10”produced sporadically over two years by none other than Weakerthans collaborator Cam Loeppky.
Connections to the retired indie rockers aside, though, Booter’s is an accomplished record in its own right—and a deeply thoughtful and open one at that. Vocalist and chief songwriter Alannah Walker, who is queer, sings of crushing on straight girls. She laments how dissolved relationships continue to affect us, and contends with modern capitalist struggles while exploring who she is outside of a relationship. Music such as Booter’s doesn’t have the inclination to change the world—but ask any Weakerthans fan if the band changed their life, and the answer will always be yes. Given time, Booter may do the same.
released September 9, 2022
all songs by Alannah Walker, except seventeen by Brendon Yarish
Booter is: Alannah Walker Brendon Yarish Ian Ellis David Schellenberg
Atmos Bloom’s music is all shy smiles across crowded rooms and half-remembered strolls through city parks. The power of these seemingly inconsequential scenes is foregrounded in the Manchester duo’s pastel-hued pop songs, collected in their debut mini-LP Flora. A pandemic project that “bloomed into something a little bit more special”—as their Bandcamp bio winks—Flora may exude the nervous energy of a meet-cute in a florist, but the ease with which Tilda Gratton and Curtis Paterson converse could lull even the most concrete skeptic into believing they’ve been at this for years.
Bouncy pop-punk tracks such as “Daisy” are disguised beneath sheets of reverb. “Picnic in the Rain” (was there ever a more poignant name for a song?) evokes The Cure at their bubbliest. And “Morning Sun”’s languid groove archives the ache that comes when we lose part of ourselves. In a subway carriage already oversubscribed with Cocteau Twins advocates, the self-christened dreamgazers are pushing their way to the front.
Atmos Bloom is the dreamy, gazey duo made up of London-based musicians Curtis Paterson & Tilda Gratton. the project began as a means to escape from a lock-downed world… but later bloomed into something a little bit more special…Like being transported to the early 90’s, warm summer days, curtains closed, The Field Mice playing on a dusty 33 rpm.
When one of today’s best songwriters has a new album, anticipation is high. Julia Jacklin delivers on “Pre Pleasure”, gifting us with her best sounding LP so far.
The production gives extra punch in ‘Love, Try Not To Let Go’, where the anxious rush of the chorus lyric is matched by a crescendo of instruments, before pulling back to the calm of a piano line. It’s a perfect sonic message of Julia’s inner thoughts, that duck paddling madly under water, it hit me for six when I first heard it.
I love getting tangled in her stories, making them my own while also thinking about the stories she tells us with every new work, the chapters of her life. Her compulsion to share and understand herself is such a gift for us to experience as art.
Press Club‘s third record begins with what sounds like a strike of a match and a winding high pitch. It sets the sense of anticipation high for what’s to follow with lead track ‘Eugene’, a song that flares up like a flame hitting something combustible.
The pace barely relents from there with the forward thrust of ‘Coward Street’, the surging rhythm and sneer of ‘Untitled Wildlife’ with its declaration ‘This sunburnt country’s getting burned to the ground’.
There’s barely contained fury, razored exasperation and a firm middle finger defiance that races throughout this taut collection of songs. It’s very much the sound of a band cutting themselves loose, getting shit off their chests, and revelling in running their own race at their own adrenaline pumping pace.
Press Club under exclusive license to Hassle Records Released on: 2022-10-14
I spent lockdown progressively drawing away from lyrical music, favouring droning extended house mixes. Maybe it was a reflection of the monotony and repetitiveness around me or the need to get away from others’ thoughts and feelings.
Hearing Naarm-based Ruby Gill‘s song ‘You Should Do This For A Living’ helped rock me out of this, it’s really that soul-shattering.
Ruby’s cut-through storytelling, evocative wails, and gentle instrumentation were basically my gateway back to listening with intent, and her debut album, “i’m gonna die with this frown on my face” is simply a perfect culmination of that pure talent.
The title track from Ruby Gill’s debut album “I’m Gonna Die With This Frown On My Face” – out now on all platforms.
This is not a record for all occasions, this is music that needs to be felt as well as heard. You should be present for every gloomy moment of “The Real Work”, the third album from Sydney duo Party Dozen, from the doom riff that opens it to the dusty trip hop beat that shuts it down.
Do that and you’ll uncover endless highlights. The psychedelic propulsion of ‘The Worker’ will send you back in time, the creepy ‘Earthly Times’ comes across like Naked City without the pretence, while ‘Major Beef’ sounds like The Budos Band if they were possessed by evil spirits.
Doesn’t matter what you call it – punk, noise, indie rock, metal, shoegaze, jazz – so long as you play it loud and let it take over, you’ll get a whole lot out of “The Real Work”. Oh, Nick Cave’s on there too.
A labour of love and a love of the labour, in The Worker the wild synth, drum, and sax duo, Party Dozen, moved through the Phoenix’s liminal spaces of light and dark, glare and gloom, vibrant and vanish. Flaring, flashing lights, and a little too much smoke machine. “We wanted this track to feel like something you could start your day to. A sonic salutation for the bored and sanitised. And after postponing our ‘Pray For Party Dozen’ Album tour for almost 12 months, ’The Worker’ felt like part cathartic outlay of locked-down frustrations, and part jubilation… finally picking up our tools and getting back to work.” – Kirsty Tickle, Jonathan Boulet (Party Dozen) “The raw energy dynamic between Party Dozen is explosive and alive. I felt like I was watching two planets violently orbit. This production uses Phoenix as the gravity in this equation as our two performers drift inwards the ceiling and light installation by Sam Whiteside collapses in on them to reinforce their sonic super nova.”
Harvey Rushmore & the Octopus is a seducing mix of garage, surf, psych and krautrock. The members of Harvey Rushmore & the Octopus have known each other for more than 15 years and have been active in various bands together. The founders of Harvey Rushmore & the Octopus, Massimo Tondini and Jakob Läser, were former members of the band Navel. From 2011 until 2015, they toured internationally and appeared on radio and television with Navel, gaining the valuable tools that they later used to create this new band.
Harvey Rushmore & the Octopus bring us their third album “Freedomspacecake”. The band has used the pandemic-related touring and concert impossibility to create this album. The result is nine tracks which deal with fears, excesses and the downfall of the world. A bad trip, which threatens the world since a long time. If it goes according to Harvey Rushmore & the Octopus, there is only one remedy: “Freedomspacecake”
The Routes instrumental/psych/western surf sound of the California of the Fifties-first half of the Sixties: two sonic and conceptual worlds apparently irreconcilable with each other, in the minds of many musicians, but not for the Routes. Yes, because the prolific Japanese garage/psych band, led by the tireless talent of the British guitarist/frontman Chris Jack, after giving birth in 2021 to three albums, “Mesmerised” and the instrumentals “Instrumentals II” and “Shave Five”, in this first half of 2022 enjoys having his band record a selection of ten instrumental covers of classics by Kraftwerk, a seminal German electronic band collected in a new album, entitled titled “The Twang· Machine”, which also in the title is inspired by one of the most famous and iconic albums of the Dusseldorf quartet, “The Man-Machine”, clearly honored also in the cover of the album, which sees theRoutes posing to emulate the four Teutonic “machine-men”, who originally released the LP in 1978.
Released on Topsy-Turvy Records (Soundflat) in collaboration with Double Crown Records and Otitis Media Records, “The Twang · Machine” sees the Japanese-Scottish trio try their hand at reviving the various workhorses of Kraftwerk, donating to “The Model”, “Neon Lights” (here in a magnificent and languid rumba version) “The Robots”, “Computer Love”, “Trans-Europe Express”,“Radioactivity” and the other pieces a new life through an intelligent rethinking, rearranging and distorting the original songs, assembling a kaleidoscopic journey through space and time, characterized by a mood of sunny Californian beaches and the ocean now quiet, now stormy to face (in style “A Wednesday as a lion”) the dream of an “endless summer” of Beach Boysiana memory, surf rock,
Dublin five-piece Melts release their debut album Maelstrom produced by Daniel Fox of Gilla Band (FKA Girl Band). The raw, simplistic, primal nature of the early approach remains intact but they have expanded into immersive pulsing grooves
The album gracefully yet potently merges psych rock with touches of post-rock-esque soundscapes, pulsing krautrock, all of which is driven by demented organ wig outs, engulfing waves of heavily textured guitar and a crisp rhythm section.
While they land on a sound that is distinctly their own, their debut occupies something of a middle ground between Spacemen 3 and Primary Colours-era The Horrors. Or, as the band say themselves, something that sounds “driving and fucking stomping.”
Their debut which combines a questing spirit with a dystopian take on the here and now. Musically, whilst traces can be discerned of the dark and magisterial King Crimson of ‘Red’ herein, as well as the yearning cadences of early Yes and the delirious contortions of Van Der Graaf Generator, a whole host of influences made their presence felt in these mournful cadences, joyful solo passages and kinetic freakouts, from ’70s mainstays like Aphrodites Child, Premiata Formeria Marconi and Area to the primitive folk of Robbie Basho and the symphonic soundtrack work of Osanna.
This is the current realm of Birth, San Diego’s most transcendental new band and purveyors of a form of vibrant and electrifying progressive rock that moves beyond time and space itself. In ‘Born’ their debut for Bad Omen Records, the listener is invited on a magic-eye journey through a Castenadean realm in which colours and sounds warp into kaleidoscopic dimensions. Yet far from the trappings of retro chic and fashion-aligned classicism, these five celestial serenades stake their claim in a different headspace to most other exponents of the form. Certainly it’s true that many of the audial shapes manifesting themselves here – the exploratory jazz-rock diversions, Mellotron and Hammond-abetted textures and the rich melancholia of the song-writing – may recall moments from progressive rock’s past, and the listener may be forgiven for losing themselves in a gatefold-sleeved reverie. Nonetheless, this is a band which was thrown into life via the constrictions and temporal shifts of a global pandemic, as well as one which has largely set about chronicling a reality in which the surrounding world appears to be hurrying its own demise.
Birth evolved from Astra, whose two albums for Rise Above Records – 2009’s ‘The Weirding’ and 2012’s ‘The Black Chord’ – had already reinvented classic sonic textures and mind-melds in lucid and intoxicating style. Conor Riley and Brian Ellis nonetheless found themselves seeking out new life and new civilisations. Initially this led to a collaboration with Psicomagia’s Trevor Mast and Paul Marrone, although later Marrone (while he does play on ‘Born’) was replaced by Thomas DiBenedetto (of Sacri Monte, Joy and Monarch) as sparks began to fly in earnest.
Meanwhile, Reilly sums up the themes of songs like “Descending Us” and “The Long Way Down” as “the deterioration of society, transformation, mortality and other fun and positive things”, having found artistic solace in post-apocalyptic books like Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ and Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable Of The Sower’ in sculpting a science-fiction-inspired soundworld in which bleak tumult and skybound rapture could co-exist. “I’m a scientist by trade and I read a lot of dystopian sci-fi, which I believe is relevant to many of the events that have been occurring lately” notes Conor. “These views feed a dark, spiritual and mystical relationship that I have with scientific thought”.
More often that not however, on moments like the heartfelt meditation on impermanence that is “For Yesterday”, as well as “Another Time” which covers a desire to dissociate and escape reality, a fundamental thread running through these songs is a struggle to make sense of and illuminate the trials and travails of the everyday. Whatever the fractious relationship between science and nature, alchemical forces have done their considerable work with ‘Born’, in creating an uplifting album for the ages, 42 minutes in which past, present and future are blurred; an album haunted by earthly concerns even whilst its sonics aim for the stars.
Elegiac mellotron-assisted songcraft, richly melodious abandon and monumental solo passages thus join forces to deliver a third-eye-cleansing blast of vibrant progressive rock, replete with grandiose cinematic scope and psychedelic intensity.
released July 15th, 2022
Conor Riley – Vocals, synthesizer, electric piano, organ, acoustic guitar Brian Ellis– Guitar, electric piano, percussion Trevor Mast – Bass
