Celebrating seven years together, Time and Time Again is the fourth release by The Cookers since the group’s recording debut, Warriors (2010).
The band’s all-star lineup, who first rose to prominence in the late ’60s and early ’70s, was initially formed by trumpet player David Weiss, who also serves as musical director. In addition to Weiss, the septet features the muscular frontline of trumpeter Eddie Henderson, tenor saxophonist Billy Harper and alto saxophonist Donald Harrison (replacing Craig Handy), with pianist George Cables, bassist Cecil McBee and drummer Billy Hart manning the blue chip rhythm section.
Drawing upon their varied experiences, the ensemble members split writing duties, effectively summarizing the entire spectrum of the jazz…

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…continuum in the process. Although hard bop-influenced post-bop is the unit’s forte, most of these musicians have also worked in cutting-edge avant-garde settings; their forward-looking tendencies imbue the project’s straight-ahead sensibility with a bold, modernistic aesthetic.

With five of the seven members contributing tunes to the session, there is ample stylistic diversity on display, ranging from breakneck swingers (“Double or Nothing”) and swaggering blues (“Slippin’ and Slidin'”) to majestic waltzes (“Three Fall”) and opulent ballads (“Farewell Mulgrew”). As seasoned veterans, their spirited performances convey the informality of an old school blowing session, tempered by an awareness of formalized song-craft. The arrangements are rhythmically tight and harmonically sophisticated, but supple enough to demonstrate the band’s freewheeling rapport, with ample room for each member to shine.

Working as a true collective, no one player dominates the session, although Harper’s commanding tone and assured phrasing lifts the bandstand when he takes center stage, with quicksilver cadences underscored by the nimble rhythm section, whose fluid interplay is a marvel of triadic interaction. Lending credence to its title, Time And Time Again expertly conveys the palpable commitment of these elder statesmen to push beyond preconceived boundaries and move the music forward, while acknowledging the innovations of the past.

Personnel: Billy Harper: tenor saxophone; Eddie Henderson: trumpet; David Weiss: trumpet; Donald Harrison: alto saxophone; George Cables: piano; Cecil McBee: bass; Billy Hart: drums.

Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker’s new album Nothing Can Bring Back the Hour consolidates and develops some of the themes and ideas presented on last year’s critically-acclaimed Fire & Fortune to create a gorgeous and compelling record which sets new standards for contemporary UK folk music.
The album opens with Silverline, a slow ballad about seeking silver linings in the dark clouds of a relationship. The lush string arrangement foregrounds an area of Ben’s musical direction which has grown and blossomed since the last album, the pizzicato strings and John Parker’s delicate double bass are particular highlights.
The short but sweet A Simple Refrain displays another expansion of Josienne and Ben’s musical palette with its introduction of guest vocalist…

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…Sam Brookes (solo performer and in The Ballina Whalers) in an achingly lovely duet in which Ben’s fingerstyle acoustic guitar underpins an immaculate string arrangement.

Samantha Whates, who’s worked extensively with Josienne and Ben in the past, provides backing vocals on It Would Not Be A Rose and the blending of her and Josienne’s voices is simply gorgeous against the gentle rise and fall of the strings above Ruairi Glasheen’s soft and steady percussion. Ben’s acoustic guitar solo is outstanding, concise yet expressive and perfectly capturing the mood. The traditional I Wonder What Is Keeping My True Love Tonight is something of a standard in folk music but Josienne and Ben’s version, just acoustic guitar and voice, brings their own vision to it, creating a spellbinding rendition that will stand the test of time with ease.

The Tangled Tree is another highlight: a truly contemporary piece with a huge and spacious sound yet entirely in keeping with the overall mood of the album. Josienne’s voice shines through the multitracked choir of Samantha’s backing vocals like the sun through the clouds over Jim Moray’s crisp, clear piano and a sensuous double bass – but what really catches my ear are Ben’s reversed electric guitar phrases. It’s a sound not often heard (and rarely done well) but here it’s an absolutely perfect choice, due as much to Ben’s mastery of both the guitar and studio techniques as to the duo’s uncanny knack of finding the right sound at the right time in the right place.

Setting a lyrical regret to a musical reverie, I Never Learned French tiptoes into the small hours with a beautifully understated vocal by Josienne, around which Nick Malcolm’s muted trumpet dances gracefully to a string arrangement as lush as black velvet. Moving Speeches lifts the tempo with a tasteful country-flavoured tune complete with banjo and skittering percussion, although any temptation to break out the cowboy boots and start line-dancing around the living room is thankfully held in check by a well-placed chamber folk string arrangement and some lovely wordless backing vocals from Josienne.

The atmospheric Mainland (listen below) opens with the ominous growl of strings against a field recording of waves breaking on a distant shore, over which a sequence of wordless vocals moan like mythological sirens before a distant electronic sequence and Ben’s heavily treated guitar appear. Josienne’s emotive vocals are both chilling and filled with sorrow while Ivan Mendola’s drums are dramatically powerful but restrained. This is the most experimental song on the album and to my mind it’s a resounding success, pointing to a possibly fruitful area of musical exploration in the future.

A brace of traditional songs follows: first up is The Queen Of Hearts which captures the sense of lyrical heartache in a way which is in keeping with the courtly spirit of the original while making the most of contemporary technology, by the simple but highly effective method of overdubbing Josienne’s recorders to create the effect of her accompanying herself. Ben’s crystal acoustic guitar parts and an exquisite string arrangement are the proverbial icing on the cake on a version which, in my opinion, knocks Martin Carthy’s otherwise definitive 1965 version into a cocked hat. The traditional ‘warning song’, Let No Man Steal Your Thyme, continues the contemporary treatment with musical drones and distant, treated percussion like breaking glass. The introduction of a horn section to add punctuation is an inspired idea and the interweaving voices sound almost otherworldly. This, too, is an outstanding cover which – again, in my opinion – knocks spots off Pentangle’s famous 1968 version.

Josienne’s slow ballad Now You Know is enveloped by a sweeping string section over Ben’s immaculate guitar; Josienne and Samantha’s vocals entwine seamlessly as Jim Rattigan’s French horn weaves gently through the background. Earth And Ash And Dust introduces Pete Truin and Jamie Doe – the other two-thirds of The Ballina Whalers – on backing vocals for an almost choral piece underpinned with clever use of treated guitars; if stained glass had a sound, it would be like this. The album draws to a close with the appropriately titled Epilogue: Water To Wine, lyrically a slightly apprehensive look into the crystal ball of an uncertain future, its billowing strings appearing and reappearing over an introspective trio of piano, double bass and percussion to make a fitting conclusion to the record.

The History of Apple Pie‘s debut album, Out of View, was an impressive bolt of shoegaze energy, memorable songcraft, and production savvy that staked a claim for the band in the rush and tumble of groups revisiting that very specific style. Following up impressive first albums is always a tricky proposition, one that not a few of the original shoegazers found hard to manage.
On their 2014 record, Feel Something, the History of Apple Pie do a fine job of delivering a second album that has much of the same sterling properties as their debut, while giving their guitar noise with sugar-sweet melodies some tweaks here and there, just enough to serve as a progression instead of an unwanted stylistic leap into mediocrity. Bandmember Jerome Watson is once…

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…again in the producer’s chair, and he does a nice job of scaling back on the group’s previously established avalanche of sound in favor of a more precise and subtle approach that pays off with a wider variety of feelings and atmospheres. Songs like “Puzzles” and the super-poppy “Tame” are well served by less cacophony-filled arrangements, and the songs that are supposed to be loud and ragged sound even more so when balanced against the album’s calmer moments. Like on the debut, the range of guitar tones and effects the band uses is varied and perfectly chosen to suit the song, and Stephanie Min’s vocals are even stronger this time. She carries songs like the lilting “Snowball” with her airy tones, but can also give some real meaning to the slower, deeper songs like “Just Like This,” which ends the record in a drifting cloud of melancholy and Hammond organs. The guys in Ride would have been proud to call that song theirs; the rest of the original shoegazers would no doubt feel the same about other songs on the album. Like their debut, Feel Something is a throwback to a brief shining moment when noise and melody met in a quick burning blaze of inspiration, but more than that, it’s a continuation of that era done with skill and energy equal to — if not greater than — those who were there first.

Like the sci-fi warriors they always wanted to be, Chrome were a band that never seemed to fit in with the times, whatever the time happened to be; conjuring a warped vision of the future that anticipated industrial culture while also looking back to the noisy primitivism of the Stooges and the Silver Apples, Chrome were glorious misfits, aliens who could exist on this earth for decades without sounding entirely comfortable in their new home.
Almost 40 years after they released their first album, Chrome thankfully still sound like interstellar oddballs armed with electric guitars and malfunctioning electronics, and 2014’s Feel It Like a Scientist is a remarkably effective evocation of the sound and style of Chrome’s late-’70s albums Alien Soundtracks and Half Machine Lip Moves.

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This new edition of Chrome does have an aural fingerprint of its own — drummer Aleph Omega has a more organic sound than the late Damon Edge, and D.I.Y. technology has improved enough to give this album much cleaner surfaces and crisper production than the sometimes clanky tone of the band’s early work. But the collision of hard rock guitars (courtesy of leader Helios Creed) with non-melodic synth patterns, crashing drums, and various electronic sounds and distorted vocals will be lysergic manna for those who loved this band’s early work. Feel It Like a Scientist not only simulates the approach of the classic Creed/Edge era with impressive accuracy, it generates a palpable excitement that’s a powerful reminder that, in an increasingly eccentric world, Chrome is still as bracingly weird as ever. Feel It Like a Scientist may have a more recognizable context than Alien Soundtracks did in 1978, but Creed’s commitment to Chrome’s vision is as strong as ever, and the results will put a demented grin on the face of longtime fans. Judging from this music, Chrome are still lost in space, and who would want it any other way?

Stay Lost is White Violet‘s second album, and while it expands things just a bit on the first, 2012’s Hiding, Mingling, it still works out of the same template of wistfully melodic and melancholic bedroom dream pop, seemingly at times as weightless and gently enveloping as fog.
White Violet is built around the vision, songs, singing, and guitar playing of frontman Nate Nelson, and his view of things is a bit like that of a late-night chillout version of Paul Simon, being literate, self-examining, and gentle as slipping into a dream of leaves falling. No, Stay Lost is definitely not an album one would toss on at a dance party, but it might be a good one to toss on while cleaning up the place the next morning. Its fluid, melancholic pacing has just enough energy…

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…and groove to go with a first cup of coffee, but beware, Stay Lost doesn’t ever really hit second gear, mostly because it doesn’t intend to. This is neo-dream pop, plain and simple, music made for soothingly sad dreaming, wishing, and hoping. It goes down easy, light as sleep dust. The winsome opener, “Weighs,” finds Nelson musing on what weighs down on him, while “Autumn Grove” is moody, easy-shaking late-night groove-pop. The most upbeat thing here, “Fernandina,” an account of a 24-hour love story, sounds like elegant and melodic garage rock done after a bottle or two of cough syrup, and it’s gorgeous at points. The closer, “Thankfully,” is a blue-collar look at beloved places and towns wrapped up in waves of dream pop atmospherics. Gentle and easy as honey at midnight, the general mood of Stay Lost is consistently one of wishing and yearning, and it all washes over the listener like moonlight falling on a pillow.

Sophie Cooper is a West Yorkshire based musician influenced by psychedelic pop, weird noise and drone, whose main interest is in experimenting with conventional song writing. Cooper’s music is written to reflect her life and more often than not is inspired by the people around her. The songs have a dreamlike quality, with sounds and vocals drifting in and out of clarity. Cooper has been making music since her early teens and has been in a string of acts including Cooper Jones and Leopard Leg. This past year has seen her release two albums on the Exotic Pylon and Tor Press labels.
Sophie Cooper on Our Aquarius: Our Aquarius is the first release I’ve made since moving out of London to the Calder Valley which, if you listen carefully, you can definitely tell…

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…because my accent has completely changed and there’s loads of reverb because the room I now record in is a lot bigger than the old dolls house I was sharing.
I’m especially pleased with how the words have worked out after making the decision to no longer be scared of listeners actually being able to hear what I want to sing about. There’s even a lyric sheet with the physical release and I encourage folks to sing-along if they fancy it.
I’ve retold a personal story on each track, deep and meaningful or otherwise. There are a couple about my holidays last year, an instrumental about my childhood, one about walking back home a bit worse for wear, that kind of thing. I could talk you through each one in greater detail over a pint sometime but it’d be a bit like my Mum’s mate John going through his holiday slides. Better to go through them yourself and linger on the ones you want to think about longer.

1. Blessing Angel and the Roses
2. Wlstanetone
3. Klias Wetlands
4. The Moon Hit me in the Face
5. Palembang Hantu
6. Finger Trace Song (For AB)
7. Our Aquarius

The kora — a West African harp with twenty-one strings and a gourd resonator — is more than an instrument when placed in the hands of a master like Mamadou Diabate; it’s a means for storytelling, a tool for expression, a uniting musical force, and a historical repository.
Over the course of his previous albums, Diabate has managed to broaden the scope of the kora’s language and associations while remaining true to its traditions. He incorporated the blues and Bambara music with traditional Malian sounds on his debut — Tunga (2000); he united Malian and Indian musicians, creating a unique cultural hybrid on Strings Tradition (2008); and he took the instrument on a more modern journey with…

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…Courage (2011). With each of his albums, Diabate manages to further his own skills while expanding the kora’s musical role in myriad ways. Here, he does it again, going it alone and delivering one vibrant performance after another.

Diabate’s awe-inspiring virtuosity as a solo performer first came to light on his second album—the Grammy-nominated Behmanka (World Village, 2005). But it was the Grammy-winning Douga Mansa (World Village, 2008) that significantly raised his profile. On both of those albums, Diabate focused on traditional music with personalized inflections, spinning stories and telling tales through his playing. That, after all, is the very nature of griots—West African artist-storytellers that maintain an oral history of their people through their work. Here, the scales don’t tip as far to the traditional side as in the past, but the balance is still there. Diabate spins his own yarns, touches on contemporary modes of expression, and visits some Malian classics (“Nahcouma”). His virtuosic approach to the instrument, serving simultaneously as accompanist and soloist, allows him to create a steady flow of thought. He builds hook-laden passages interspersed with cascading runs, creates gently flowing episodes, and consistently radiates joy.

Jason Richmond, who co-produced the album with Diabate and released the record on his own imprint, also deserves a good deal of credit; he presents Diabate’s kora with stunning clarity, allowing the musical wisdom of this griot to shine through.

Guitar god Johnny Marr will release his sophomore solo album, Playland, on October 7th via Warner Bros. Speaking exclusively to NME, the former Smiths guitarist said it was a continuation of his last album, written while on the road in the past two years. Unlike its predecessor, which was made between Berlin, New York and Manchester, Playland was recorded in London at Tritone Studios near Tower Bridge and will come out on the same day as lead single “Easy Money”.
“It was deliberate to work in London,” said Marr. “Where you work definitely affects how it sounds and seeps into the music, and I’ve developed a really good feeling for London in the past couple of years, I like the frenetic atmosphere.” The title was inspired by “Homo Ludens”, by Dutch…

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…historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga. ‘Homo Ludens’ translates as ‘Man The Player’, or ‘Playing Man’. As with ‘The Messenger’, it was produced by Marr and his co-producer/band member Doviak, mixed by Claudius Mittendorfer in New York and mastered at Abbey Road by Frank Arkwright, who has in the past worked with Arcade Fire, The Smiths, New Order, Joy Division, Coldplay, Oasis and Primal Scream.
“The album’s main themes are the atmosphere of the city, and the preoccupations of the people who live in them; those preoccupations being consumerism, sex and anxiety, or distraction and transcendence from those things,” he says.
Of the autobiographical songs on the album, Marr says “25 Hours” is about the realisation he had as a child of having to do something to escape the life that was laid out in front of him, and features the lyric “Being chased by the priests and the freaks who are hunting me down with attitude/The heat and the bricks are falling on me like doom”.
He says: “I was immersed in the Catholic school system and an oppressive upbringing, looking at a life of having to consort with people that I didn’t want to be around. I realised you need to find some escape to break out of that, and that’s when I realised art was a way of escaping, in my case the music I was making or wanted to make. I would’ve been eight or nine, and I knew I just needed to escape the life that I was in. I got a sense of what might be my destiny if I didn’t do that.”
He describes “Dynamo” as a “love affair with a building”, inspired by his ongoing interest in psychogeography, the study of an environment’s effect on the behaviour of the humans within it.
“It might happen when you look up at a building, modern or old, on a clear summer day, big blue sky behind it filled with jet streams, and not being able to help think of stories that go with it all. I’ve been interested in the city and the people in it since I was a kid, it has this romantic attraction I just clicked with. Then when I was older I started reading more about it and got into the philosophy behind it. Of course, when you’re writing about something like that, it often works out that you’re writing about a person too.”
“The Trap”, meanwhile, is about “how we try to hide what we’re really communicating with each other”, and “Easy Money” is about greed, “which is everywhere, but you see so much more in the city”.

1. Back In the Box (3:05)
2. Easy Money (4:05)
3. Dynamo (3:59)
4. Candidate (4:50)
5. 25 Hours (3:35)
6. The Trap (3:24)
7. Playland (4:41)
8. Speak Out Reach Out (4:04)
9. Boys Get Straight (3:02)
10. This Tension (4:01)
11. Little King (3:14)

Torn Hawk is the audio project of producer and video artist Luke Wyatt. Over the past couple of years, Wyatt has unfurled a serial tapestry of content arguing for a reconciliation of aesthetic irony with compositional sincerity and emotional vulnerability. Let’s Cry And Do Pushups At The Same Time is Wyatt’s most recent full-length statement as Torn Hawk, and marks the onset of a more emotionally manipulative and sonically confident direction.
It’s difficult to neatly categorize Wyatt’s genre-refracting productions, which formerly have found a home on L.I.E.S., Not Not Fun, Rush Hour’s “No Label”, 1080p, and several other labels, including his own imprint Valcrond Video. The nuts & bolts of Let’s Cry’s eight tracks are built…

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…from live guitar, drum machines, junky synths, and layers of acid-washed samples. Wyatt smears the disparate elements of each track into a cohesive whole that transcends the (banality) (thrift-store dustiness) of each: the result is a series of heart-tuggingly confessional watercolors, framed with cinderblocks and distressed leather.
In the foreground of each track, Wyatt’s guitar moves between the shag carpet meditations of Manuel Göttsching, the digital delay jangle-grid of The Chameleons, the sunstroke saturation of Medicine, and the modal wankery of Tom Verlaine. Throw in the unabashed melodrama of something a sax might do on a Don Henley hit, and you get a better idea of Torn Hawk’s sensibility.
Movies and television also leave an undeniable impression on this album, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed Wyatt’s parallel video efforts, which he calls “Video Mulch”. The influence of film scores comes through in the inspirational mood cues of tracks like “Afterprom”, which presents a bouquet of guitar scrawls wrapped in a black garbage bag, and “Because of M.A.S.K.”, which would sit perfectly over the end credits of a rom-com set within the subculture of identity theft.
Elsewhere, “She Happens” takes the precarious tenderness of a brand new love affair and holds it over the edge of an audio cliff by the scruff of its neck; “Acceptance Speech” evokes the feel-good podium glow of awards-show public masturbation; and “Under Wolf Rule” balances threat with inspirational thrust: it’s the ideal soundtrack to decapitate to, and then thoughtfully consider the floral arrangements that are to be placed around the heads. Closing out the album, “There Was A Time” hovers in the strip mall of emotions between the storefronts of regret and expectation, expertly evoking the temporal hang-ups that feed or defeat our day-to-day happiness.
As its title suggests, Let’s Cry grapples with the duality of internal conflict and persona construction. It’s a theme that also ties in with Wyatt’s aesthetic interest in “parodying toughness”. In his visual presentation, Wyatt often presents a South Florida machismo in tandem with a vulnerable, self-help softness. It’s this kind of playfully sincere doubling that Wyatt thrives on; he is committed to making music that pumps you up and tugs at your heart stuff – he is making music for you to work out and weep to.

01 I’m Flexible
02 She Happens
03 Afterprom
04 Return to The Pec Deck
05 Acceptance Speech
06 Because of M.A.S.K.
07 Under Wolf Rule
08 There Was a Time

“Morals” on second record You’re Nothing marks an important moment in the history of Iceage. Inspired by Mina Mazzini’s “L’Ultima Occasione” and the 1960s Italian pop music lead singer Elias Bender Rønnenfelt was listening to, “Morals” saw Iceage delve into a form of songwriting that was alien to the rest of their previous output. The track, with its stop-start drums, would come alive at will rather than bludgeoning us from the start. Furthermore, it saw Iceage add new instrumentation into their sonic palette – in this case, the piano. With the aid of hindsight, one could say that those minor piano chords found on “Morals” signaled a sea change in Iceage’s songwriting. And on third record, Plowing Into the Field of Love, Iceage have unearthed a newfound dynamism and grandeur to their…

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…songs, bolstered by the use of instruments such as trumpets, violas, mandolins and pianos. While there are some minor mixing/production issues with the addition of the new instrumentation, Iceage, on a whole, have created a beautiful third record.

With one look at the tracklisting of Plowing Into the Field of Love, one is immediately taken aback. At 48 minutes in length, with tracks pushing the five-minute mark, it’s a stark contrast to début New Brigade and You’re Nothing, which both fell short of thirty minutes in their total playing time. The question to pose however is whether these new songs are worthy of their extended length and whether they pack as much punch as their shorter previous work. The answer is a resounding yes to both of those questions. The collection of songs found on Field Of Love, use their extended playtime to enable Iceage to explore their darkest recesses, and find texture and gorgeous dark tones to heighten the confusion, aggression and self-loathing found in Rønnenfelt’s characters on Field Of Love. Iceage no longer solely seek for fast-paced aggression but over the course of tracks like “Stay”, “Glassy Eyed, Dormant and Veiled” and “Forever”, there is a new found dynamism as they play with mood, tempo and volume. They continually toy with an audience who are prepared for and willing them on to press the accelerator. And as these tracks rise and fall, the payoff that comes with the bursts of fury is increasingly satisfying and heightens the mood and emotive force of many of the personal songs found on Field Of Love.

The expansive new sound is seen from the off, on album opener, “On My Fingers”. Initially opening with a chugging rock’n’roll guitar, the track unfolds to the sound of pianos and violins caressing Rønnenfelt’s threatening call of “flee in my shackles, I’ll be coming after you”. There is a sense of the cinematic to “On My Fingers” and it is unsurprising to find that Rønnenfelt has often cited soundtracks as an inspiration in interviews. “How Many” with its galloping drums invokes images of classic Western cinema, while “Forever” walks (successfully) a tightrope between post-punk introspection and Spaghetti Western grandeur with its brilliant Morricone-esque trumpets. Album closer, and title track is arguably the most accessible and expansive track Iceage have ever written. With its near-sing-a-long chorus and strummed acoustic guitars, it is as close to an anthem as Iceage are likely to ever write.

Iceage also experiment with sounds from a variety of genres. Britpop riffs are apparent on “Abundant Living”, while the extremely playful and hilariously tongue-in-cheek, “The Lord’s Favourite”, features head-turning country guitars. “Against the Moon” features Rønnenfelt crooning “pissing against the moon” over a backing track that is similar to the opening of The Horrors’ “Endless Blue”.  To get the full impression of “Against the Moon”, imagine Rønnenfelt slumped against a piano, tuxedo-shirt unbuttoned, with bow tie slung open around his neck. But with all this talk of expansion and grandeur, the record is still inherently Iceage. “Simony” for example is a classic fast-paced Iceage track, and when the chaos does comes in songs, for example in “Let It Vanish”, it is delivered with the conviction and aggression of their previous records.

On Field Of Love, Rønnenfelt’s vocal also takes new form and packs greater emotional intensity. Throughout New Brigade and You’re Nothing, his vocal, with its characteristic snarl, would act as the final hard-hitting blow to the chaos that surrounded it. His vocal cords however now strain with increased longing and desperation. He has learnt to manipulate his vocal to coincide with the lyrical content and tone of songs – for example in “How Many” his character’s self-examination and dissapointment is matched with an equally desperate vocal before being juxtaposed against a frustrated growl of “how many”. Furthermore, it could also be argued that Rønnenfelt is attempting conventional singing for the first time in Field Of Love. When he does sing, for example, on “Simony” there are shades of Robert Smith within his voice.

High in the mix, there is also new clarity to his vocal. This is in part due to the production of the record but also due to the new structure of songs. Where before his vocal may have been lost in the chaos that surrounded it, slower segments of songs allow for Rønnenfelt’s words to have the greatest impact that they have ever had. And on Field Of Love, his words are rightfully given the honor to be centre stage. Partially self-referential with impressive characterization, Rønnenfelt eloquently and quite poetically tackles subjects ranging from debauchery to self-loathing and acceptance. While sometimes veering on the overtly mystical (“Some men would question why you would feed an animal with champagne” on “Plowing Into The Field Of Love”), his love of language can be seen in abundance throughout Field Of Love. And his character’s need for acceptance and majesty is wonderfully realised on “Forever” with the use of metaphor and grand images – “Just below the surface/the surge is keeping me adrift/but then I leap into the heavens/reveal myself to everyone/to astonish and amaze”. He furthermore tells tales of relationships, such as in “Glassy Eyed, Dormant and Veiled”, where he takes on the voice of both father and son in what seems a tumultuous relationship culminating in a chorus where Rønnenfelt spits, “I am an absent father/Glassy eyed, dormant and veiled”. How much we can look into that as being Rønnenfelt addressing his own past is open for debate. Yet there is also quite the comic within Rønnenfelt, and “The Lord’s Favourite” contains his most humorous lyrics to date with references to “cheap sweat-smothered make-up” and “one hundred euro wine”, before proclaiming himself “the lord’s favourite one”.

Rønnenfelt has often discussed influence in interviews. As mentioned, “Morals” was inspired by much of the 1960s Italian pop music he had compiled at the time of recording You’re Nothing. And more recently he has discussed the importance of Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses and Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. However, in order to harness influence without falling into the realms of pastiche, there has to be a strong sense of intuition – of how and when to use influences appropriately. And there is the sense that Rønnenfelt does not yet fully understand his or his band’s power of intuition. He rather nonchalantly states in an interview with Pitchfork Media, “if a song needs a piano, we’ll add a piano”. Iceage are therefore seemingly unafraid of experimentation and to play with sounds and instrumentation they discover in the process of creation. And Plowing Into The Field Of Love, acts as an extraordinary documentation of this process, where influence and intuition have come together in perfect union, allowing Iceage to expand without losing their core. In turn, they have matured to find catharsis in texture, dynamics and control rather than fast-paced adolescent aggression.

What’s left to say about Weezer that hasn’t already been said? Well, probably for one, that they’ve gone and released a new album – and it’s really rather great. See, Rivers Cuomo and co have a bloody good case for being the most unfairly maligned band in history.
Back in 1996, the now seminal ‘Pinkerton’ was written off on release; “juvenile”, “aimless”, and “a bit much”, they said. Yes, that’s the same ‘Pinkerton’, that five years later, the self-titled ‘Green’ album couldn’t, apparently, hold a ‘Hash Pipe’ to, and just about everything bar the equally deified self-titled ‘Blue’ album have been benchmarked. Despite, you know, the ‘Green’ album being really very good. And ever since, that’s been the pre-written script.

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Whatever Weezer do, however great ‘Green’ and ‘Maladroit’ are, whatever flashes of genius ‘Red’, ‘Hurley’ and even ‘Make Believe’ hold within – Weezer’s new work is dismissed. “It’s not as good as…”, and so it goes.
Of course it shouldn’t go. Bar the massive mis-step of 2009’s ‘Raditude’, Weezer haven’t ever released a bad record. And ‘Everything Will Be Alright In the End’ is fucking brilliant.
In short, it sounds like Weezer. Those magic chord changes, the wiry guitar licks, Rivers Cuomo’s awkward, faltering vocals – these may be brand new songs, but they’re all so immediately familiar that, as the title may suggest, they create one almighty aural comfort blanket. There’s even a point during ‘Eulogy For A Rock Band’ that’s so immediately evocative of that moment your favourite band first made sense that it’s near-on tear-inducing.
There’s ‘Go Away’, the adorable collaboration between Cuomo and Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino; ‘Da Vinci’ with its with its killer chorus line “even Da Vinci couldn’t paint you / and Stephen Hawking can’t explain you”; the heartfelt ‘Foolish Father’; the rather odd ‘Cleopatra’; the gloriously familiar tropes on which at least part of their reputation was built (‘Ain’t Got Nobody’, ‘Lonely Girl’). There’s more than a few nods to their past creative climates (“don’t want my music to be less well known than my face,” he sings on ‘I’ve Had It Up To Here’, see also ‘Back to the Shack’, and, we’re told ‘The British Are Coming’). And it all sounds definitively Weezer in the best possible way.
And then there’s the ‘Futurescope Trilogy’. Eight minutes of largely instrumental bombast isn’t the usual way to end an album brimming with stellar power-pop. But here, what could quite easily have become boring self-indulgent guitar wankery somehow makes complete sense. Because it makes no sense at all, yet forms some strange, Wyld Stallyns-esque counter-point to ‘Blue’ closer ‘Only In Dreams’. They climax in a not dissimilar way; where one is introspective, the other, ‘Return To Ithaka’, explodes in the most brilliantly batshit way.

01. Ain’t Got Nobody (3:21)
02. Back To The Shack (3:05)
03. Eulogy For A Rock Band (3:25)
04. Lonely Girl (2:50)
05. I’ve Had It Up To Here (2:49)
06. The British Are Coming (4:09)
07. Da Vinci (4:06)
08. Go Away (3:14)
09. Cleopatra (3:12)
10. Foolish Father (4:32)
11. I. The Waste Lands (1:56)
12. II. Anonymous (3:20)
13. III. Return To Ithaka (2:18)

Bay Area psych pop duo Peaking Lights (comprised of husband and wife Aaron Doyes and Indra Dunis) release their fourth studio album, Cosmic Logic, on October 7th via Weird World/Domino Records.
The follow-up to 2012’s Lucifer was recorded in Los Angeles alongside producer Matt Thornley (of DFA Records).

According to a press release, the LP is a “heady brew of dub, kraut, minimal house, disco and pop influence all rendered in the inimitable Peaking Lights fashion. This time round, however, the band have gone for a more concise, lean approach — abandoning some of their previous work’s psychedelic sprawl for a more pure pop experience thanks to the sounds designed by Aaron himself.”

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01. Infinite Trips 3:08
02. Telephone Call 4:05
03. Hypnotic Hustle 4:23
04. Everyone And Us 3:44
05. Little Light 4:18
06. Dreamquest 3:48
07. Eyes To Sea 3:55
08. Bad With The Good 4:28
09. New Grrrls 4:47
10. Breakdown 4:38
11. Tell Me Your Song 4:45

The effervescence of youth can work wonders on a debut album but how often does such vim dissipate on subsequent works? Edinburgh’s We Were Promised Jetpacks are, perhaps, this formula in reverse. Their keenness to barrel out an uptempo number on 2009’s These Four Walls was exuberant but at times unfocused, whilst 2011 follow-up In the Pit of the Stomach cut a similar path but showed much more promise.
With Unravelling, We Were Promised Jetpacks have delivered on that promise with a tact that trades in their over-zealousness for a more restrained but, crucially, more satisfying sound. Better production certainly helps, improved musicianship and song writing are no bad back-ups either, but a keener sense on when to hold back means…

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…the subsequent sonic peaks on Unravelling are all the more satisfying. From the fist-clenching howl of Keep It Composed to the brooding burr of an Aidan Moffat-led Moral Compass, Unravelling is pure sinew where once there was fat.

Fans get another opportunity to dig into Deep Purple‘s Mk III era with release of the oft- bootlegged Graz 1975, long considered the best concert performance ever by Ritchie Blackmore, David Coverdale, Glenn Hughes, Jon Lord and Ian Paice. The show has never been officially released in its entirety. Graz 1975 was recorded on April 3, 1975 in Austria almost exactly a year after ‘Live in California 74,’ which saw reissue earlier this spring.
By this point, however, Deep Purple had come to focus almost exclusively on Mk III recordings, only including two songs originally sung by Ian Gillan: ‘Smoke On The Water’ and ‘Space Truckin’.
Unfortunately, that didn’t turn out to be a sign of longevity. In fact, Graz 1975 chronicles one of this lineup’s final shows, as Ritchie Blackmore would…

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…exit after just two more dates.

1. Burn (7:51)
2. Stormbringer (5:08)
3. The Gypsy (5:23)
4. Lady Double Dealer (4:31)
5. Mistreated (14:40)
6. Smoke On The Water (9:43)
7. You Fool No One (12:15)
8. Space Truckin’ (20:22)

The Whitest Boy Alive and Kings of Convenience frontman, Erlend Øye is back with first full-length solo effort since 2003’s Unrest: Legao, released by Bubbles Records, label founded by Øye and Marcin Öz in 2006.
Actually Legao was scheduled to come out in May. But Erlend took it easy and now the warm and easy-going songs will light up our autumn days.
The Caribbean sounds, for instance in Whistler and in the melodic reggae piece Fence Me In come from Icelandic roots reggae band Hjálmar who offered their studio in Reykjavik to record the album.
Beside the above-mentioned influence, Erlend drew inspiration from simple and harmonic Italian music from the ’60s (he lives in Sicily since 2012) and lovers-rock from the ’80s. ‘Legal’, pronounced…

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…Legao, means great or cool in Portuguese and the LP indeed has some great moments with its balanced mix of retro hammond organs, quiet percussions and tender synth lines. Erlend‘s sonorous voice tells us daily-life-wisdom like ‘Every ladder ends somewhere / Better time its steps with care / Don’t be the one who waits to long / Turns around and finds it gone’ in the jazzy Garota.

Even though Erlend appears as a solo artist right now, he didn’t leave the white kingdom of convenience. His songs are musical antihypertensives: reduced, light, midtempo invitations to drift and to forget all the mad rush. Some tracks on the new record are greatly arranged like Rainman or give personal insights like Bad Guy Now. Some others fail to linger in the memory because they are a little bit too similar, a little bit too harmless.

It was in the mid-’70s that the first underground compilations of obscure ’60s garage rock gems began to circulate, and collections of little-known power pop, disco, and old-school hip-hop tracks have been making the rounds for years, so the fact it has taken roughly two decades for folks to start unearthing the overlooked artifacts of the grunge explosion of the late ’80s and early ’90s is a bit surprising.
But the folks at Soul Jazz have finally taken the flannel shirt by the horns and compiled No Seattle: Forgotten Sounds of the North-West Grunge Era 1986-97, which collects 28 tracks from 23 bands with roots in the Pacific Northwest who were playing various stripes of alternative rock during the years when grunge went…

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…from a fanzine catchphrase to last year’s marketing scheme. Thankfully, compiler Nick Soulsby has put his focus strictly on independent bands, and this collection is devoted to acts who grew organically out of the Northwest scene rather than those who rolled into Seattle hoping to get signed in the wake of Nirvana’s breakthrough (though the booklet does include a helpful sidebar, “Six Degrees of Nirvana,” which explains how several acts were connected to Kurt Cobain and pals, and notes that all 23 groups had at least one member who played on a bill with Nirvana, which demonstrates how tightknit this scene was).
That most of these bands are all but unknown outside their home turf suggests these folks were grunge’s B-team, but there are a few bands that could and should have gone further, including Starfish (crashing poppy grunge produced by Bob Mould), Thrillhammer (hard and heavy with a dash of math rock), Medelicious (noisy pop with solid hooks and buzzy guitars), My Name (chant-along punk with bent hard rock guitars), Calamity Jane (sounding like the unholy spawn of Tad and early Hole), and Treehouse (“Debbie Had a Dream” has all the earmarks of a breakout single). Even the lesser bands are instructive of the overall aesthetic of the scene, especially the influence of metal and hard rock (particularly Helltrout and Attica, the latter featuring original Nirvana drummer Aaron Burckhard) and the undertow of arty influences (most audible in Small Stars, Same 18, and Pod). It doesn’t flow quite like the Nuggets box set, but No Seattle does a pretty good job of documenting its time and place, and at the very least reveals there were a handful of worthwhile bands that managed to avoid the glare of the media during Seattle’s days as the center of the rock universe.

1. Starfish – This Town [02:10]
2. Vampire Lezbos – Stop Killing The Seals [03:16]
3. Nubbin – Windyyy [02:35]
4. Saucer – Jail Ain’t Stoppin’ Us [04:00]
5. Machine – Blind Man’s Holiday [02:54]
6. Medelicious – Beverley [03:06]
7. Hitting Birth – Same [04:34]
8. Nubbin – Wonderama [02:42]
9. Crunchbird – Woodstock Unvisited [02:56]
10. The Ones – Talk To Me [02:44]
11. POD – 123 [08:02]
12. Thrillhammer – Alice’s Place [03:26]
13. Yellow Snow – Take Me For A Ride [03:57]
14. Helltrout – Precious Hyde [02:31]
15. Bundle Of Hiss – Wench [04:25]
16. Starfish – Run Around [02:24]
17. Thrillhammer – Bleed [03:48]
18. Chemistry Set – Fields [02:50]
19. My Name – Voice Of A Generation Gap [04:26]
20. Small Stars – It’s Getting Late [03:53]
21. Shug – AM FM [03:38]
22. Treehouse – Debbie Had A Dream [04:30]
23. My Name – Why I fight [03:51]
24. Soylent Green – It Smiles [01:45]
25. Kill Sybil – Best [04:01]
26. Calamity Jane – Madgalena [03:04]
27. Saucer – Chicky Chicky Frown [03:46]
28. Attica – The System [03:14]

Kiasmos is all about the slow build. The venture has been more or less resigned to the backburner for the last several years, as collaborators Ólafur Arnalds and Janus Rasmussen busied themselves with more principal projects (piano-led solo work and synth-pop act Bloodgroup respectively). But, finally, the two musicians have carved out enough time in their schedules to indulge their mutual passion for low-key electronica – and the resulting album unfolds in a suitably unrushed fashion.
Lit opens Kiasmos with atmospheric synths, metronomic percussion and a two-note piano refrain; the elements added and subtracted steadily to subtle but compelling effect. It’s characteristic of the album’s blend of minimal techno and neo- classical, a combination that interlaces digital…

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…components (programmed beats, loops) with acoustic (piano, finger clicks); the pristine with the comfortingly imperfect. With echoes of the gentle, pastoral quality of Four Tet’s early albums, Kiasmos is understated almost to a fault but nevertheless immersive.

Starting with 2007’s brilliant The Moonstation House Band, singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist David Vandervelde began a slow-burning career, offering the world a look at his bounding and hook-heavy music, melodic but swaggering indie rock styled heavily after the thick riffs of T. Rex and the wanton weirdness of Bowie. A follow-up album came the next year but then things got quieter on the Vandervelde front. Over the next six years, multiple moves, the sudden death of long-time friend and collaborator (and former Wilco member) Jay Bennett, and the dissolution of his marriage all kept Vandervelde busy, not to mention sitting in with other acts and doing production work on other artists’ recordings. Out of the wake of those six years between new material comes Shadow Sides,…

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…a third album that steps toward more refined, gleaming pop sounds. The glam rock reference points of chugging guitars and sleazy Marc Bolan-isms in the vocals are further in the background here, replaced by Beach Boys-esque stacks of vocal harmonies on opening track “Where Are You?,” one of a few tunes where Vandervelde slips into breezy, Pacific Ocean tones. “More Than God” also employs this more spiritual take on yacht rock, with soft layers of falsetto harmonies playfully interacting with rubbery basslines and warbling guitar tones. All of Shadow Sides was recorded using the archaic means of a portable cassette four-track, a far cry from the big-budget studios or even lower-cost digital home-recording setups most of Vandervelde’s peers make their albums with. The slightly dusty sounds come through in an unexpectedly full spectrum considering the lowbrow recording setup, and the album sounds unique for the production alone. Vandervelde also sounds like he’s expanded his scope in the years between albums. His lazy, heavy guitars feel more and more like signature sounds here, but the newfound concentration on layered harmonies, subdued drum machines, and more subtle, sad-hearted songwriting sets the album apart from anything he’s done before. “One More Time” stands out especially in all of these ways, with high-pitched harmonies lingering over gentle chord changes and creeping distorted guitar leads rising and falling in the mix. The album is certainly mellower, more thoughtful fare than earlier work, but Vandervelde resists the temptation of making a self-indulgent breakup record. Instead, the ten tunes that make up Shadow Sides sound like an impossibly well-made demo from a band that only exists in strange dreams. It’s devotional and brokenhearted without ever losing sight of hope, and manages to have fun even when asking difficult questions or exploring the darker corners of Vandervelde’s mind.

Hailing from Copenhagen, Denmark, singer and pedal steel guitarist Maggie Bjorklund has only been active in music for just a few years. In that short time, however, she’s made some famous friends, having toured with the likes of Jack White (she also played on Lazaretto), X’s John Doe and Exene Cervenka, and Howard Gelb. In turn, she recruited some equally big names for her 2011 debut, Coming Home, namely Mark Lanegan and members of both Calexico and the Posies.
Bjorklund once again turned to her sizable Rolodex when it came to to begin work on her sophomore album, Shaken, due out October 14th via Bloodshot Records. The 11-track effort includes cameos from drummer John Convertino (Calexico), Portishead bassist Jim Barr, guitarist John Parish…

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…(a frequent PJ Harvey and Sparklehorse collaborator), and many more.

Shaken was written and recorded during a particularly turbulent time in Bjorklund’s life. “My mother died. I wrote a big part of the material while going to the hospital every day and helping her on her last road to the end. Watching a human wither and die is one of the strongest things I have witnessed. That little gap between the life before and the life after this event, happened by chance to be the exact time of this album taking shape. That moment holds some fundamental truths if we dare to explore them. I chose to stay with it and let it happen.”

According to a press release, the resulting LP is “full of potent memories and emotional outpouring, as translated into the warm but dark sonic textures. Much of the music here – whether instrumental or with vocals – flows like lucid dreams, with the listener visualizing the scenery via detailed aural talisman. Shaken takes its shape from that magic that is created when a group of musicians play together and collectively interpret a singular vision, which in this case, was mending a grieving heart.”

One of the album’s many guest stars appears on its lead single, as Lambchop frontman Kurt Wagner lends his vocal talents to “Fro Fro Heart”. Alternating lead, Bjorklund and Wagner’s distinctive croons work well together when juxtaposed; the more lithe tones Bjorklund serve as a great balance to the bass-laden and brooding notes Wagner achieves. Where they meet, though, generates a profound sense of longing and mourning, further heightened by the dusty organ and deliberate guitars waltzing in the background.

Some blues and jazz artists enamored of vintage styles go out of their way to sound rough and raw in the belief it makes them seem more “authentic,” as if great artists of the past regularly earned a following by sounding as if they could barely play.
Luke Winslow-King, thankfully, believes in no such foolishness; on his fourth album, Everlasting Arms, he steps out like a gentleman of the blues, one who can play with force and feeling and pick with no small ability, but sounds just as much at home in the front parlor as at the juke joint on the other side of town. This speaks to Winslow-King’s versatility, as he can play an easygoing jazz-based number like “I’m Your Levee Man” just as convincingly as he can tear into the rollicking Delta fury of “Swing That Thing” or the Latin-meets…

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…-New Orleans swing of “La Bega’s Carousel.” Winslow-King isn’t a show-off on guitar (OK, he does strut a bit in “Interlude I [As It Goes],” but he doesn’t wear out his welcome), but his rhythm work is always solid, and when he eases into a solo, it’s invariably clever, tuneful, and to the point, and suits the tenor of the tune. Winslow-King is also a fine singer, with a clear, polished instrument and a flexible sense of phrasing that can bend with the demands of his eclectic repertoire without sounding like he’s trading one cliche for another when he changes directions. He has a fine vocal partner in Esther Rose King, and they deliver a pleasing duet on “Wanton Way of Loving,” while Winslow-King’s various accompanists deliver performances that are expert while respecting the songs. And Winslow-King’s songwriting is every bit as impressive as his vocals and instrumental work, especially on the atmospheric “Last Night I Dreamed My Birthday” and the high-stepping “Cadillac Slim.” Luke Winslow-King may sound like a gentleman on Everlasting Arms, but one listen to this album will convince you that when it comes to music, nice guys really can finish first.