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Miranda Lee Richards
Existential Beast 5:48
Ashes and Seeds 3:15
On the Outside of Heaven 5:18
from Existential Beast 2017
Miranda Lee Richards' fourth album, Existential Beast, follows 2016's Echoes of the Dreamtime by just a year, a quick turnaround for a songwriter who's gone several years between records in the past. It comes with a lusher presentation, too, edging deeper into psychedelic folk-rock while hanging onto a country influence and her distinctly Laurel Canyon-esque sound. It's also, at least in part, a protest album, with songs motivated by the 2016 U.S. presidential election...
The Paperhead
War’s at You 2:18
The True Poet 4:50
from Chew 2017
The Paperhead's third album, Africa Avenue, was where it all came together for the Nashville trio. Their retro-psych sound reached its full bloom, while they also added other elements to the mix like a little country-rock and some swanky bossa nova. These few left turns sprinkled in amidst the dreamy pop-psych freakouts turned out to be teasers for the band's next album. On 2017's Chew, they rip up their playbook and treat the record as if each song were a different AM radio station circa a mid-'60s dream world that only exists in the mind of retro bands like the Paperhead. It's a pretty fun place to touch down, full of wacky juxtapositions and a kitchen-sink approach to arrangements that always keeps the listener guessing...
Holly Golightly
Hypnotized 3:53
I’m Your Loss 4:00
Satan Is His Name 4:20
from Do the Get Along 2018
Garage rock legend Holly Golightly began her reign in the early '90s and spent the following decades churning out countless volumes of searing, attitude-heavy '60s-modeled big-beat rock & roll. Even the 11 years between 2004's Slowly But Surely and 2015's Slowtown Now! weren't signs of Golightly slowing down, as the break from solo albums was spent producing upwards of eight albums with her side project Holly Golightly & the Brokeoffs. Her 11th proper solo album, Do the Get Along, doesn't differ greatly from any other entry in her massive catalog, but that doesn't suggest stagnation in any way. With one of the more distinctive and expressive voices in garage rock, Golightly sounds every bit at the top of her game as she has on the majority of her albums, leaning even harder on the smoky atmospheres and simmering scorned-lover narratives that mark some of her most electrifying work... Throughout Do the Get Along, Golightly demonstrates her knack for restraint and effortless charisma. She breaks no new ground over these 12 songs, but in the case of an artist with this much mastery of her work, more of the same is happily welcomed.
Fabienne Delsol
See How They Run 3:10
Door Knob 3:14
No Love To Give 2:06
Ladder 3:27
from Four 2019
After taking a long break from recording, Fabienne Delsol returns with another light-hearted and snappy album that combines the hookiness of the beat group boom, the drama of vintage French pop, and the murky swirl of psychedelia. Her previous solo albums were helmed by Liam Watson at his famed Toerag studio; this time around Delsol takes half the wheel, with the studio's engineer Luke Oldfield also steering. They get a sound that's a little less reverb coated and a bit snappier, bringing Delsol's sound a little closer to the modern era. Not close enough to be be bland or slick; just enough to make the album sound less like a long-lost curio. As before, the songs are split between newly written tracks and covers of decades-old obscurities, both sung by Delsol in her sophisticated style...
Dead Horse One
Echo Street 3:41
Falling 4:12
Gaze 3:19
from The West Is the Best 2019
Since forming in 2011, French combo Dead Horse One have amassed a tidy catalog of LPs, EPs, and scattered compilation appearances, all bearing a pretty consistent merging of shoegaze and dream pop disciplines. Hailing from the southern French city of Valence, the quartet is clearly rooted in the school of '90s forebears like My Bloody Valentine, Swervedriver, and Ride... American producer John Loring, whose hazy stamp was evident on 2016's Season of Mist, returns to the producer's chair on the group's third full-length, The West Is the Best. A familiar outgrowth of their two previous albums, Dead Horse One know their way around a wistful, melancholic melody and ably provide the evocative framework of their chosen genres. The hushed vocals shared by bassist Ludovic Naud and guitarist Olivier Debart are generally buried deep into the mix of textural guitar squalls and keyboards that traverse the entire album...
XXXTentacion
Train Food 2:44
BAD! 1:34
STARING AT THE SKY 1:25
from Skins 2018
A gift to fans (or quick cash grab, depending how one views it), Skins exists primarily for loyal XXXTentacion devotees. Clocking in at less than 20 minutes, this posthumous collection offers a jumble of ideas, fleeting emotions, and stream-of-conscious freestyles, centered around the swirling darkness within the late rapper...
Sunshine & the Rain
Let's Go 3:05
I'm Not Your Girl 3:35
Going the Wrong Way 3:25
from In the Darkness of My Night 2017
Following the 2014 dissolution of their highly regarded psych outfit, the Black Hollies, husband-and-wife team Justin and Ashley Morey set out on their own, reformatting themselves as Sunshine & the Rain, a spiky, lo-fi garage pop duo working somewhat in the vein of Cults or the Raveonettes, but with a bit more sonic bite. After introducing the project with a 2015 7" single, the New Jersey band cut its debut full-length at Sonic Youth's Echo Canyon West studio and hired indie guitar hero Jon Spencer to produce. Released by the Black Hollies' longtime label Ernest Jenning Record Co., In the Darkness of My Night is a stripped-down, toothy rock record with a minimalist approach. Like the girl group sound that serves as their essential blueprint, the melodies are simple and straightforward, but the Moreys still manage to squeeze a lot of clamor and attitude out of their limited setup. Spencer's touch is apparent in the album's overall gritty rock aesthetic, but the frequent use of primitive-sounding drum-machine rhythms also puts them in the sonic lineage of electro-punk pioneers Suicide...
L.A. Takedown
L.A. Blue 3:40
Bad Night at Black's Beach 2:50
City of Glass 5:18
from II 2017
Following a cassette on Burger Records and a self-titled LP consisting of a single 41-minute epic, II is the third release by Aaron M. Olson's L.A. Takedown project, and the first recorded with a full band. The group take their name from a 1989 made-for-television crime thriller, and they aim to re-create the soundtracks of that era, but of course it doesn't sound like an exact facsimile. The group twist Krautrock and prog influences into their sound, and the arrangements and rhythmic patterns are complex and a bit suspenseful, but they still have a generally easygoing, beach-friendly feeling. The full-band upgrade means that there's less of an emphasis on synthesizers here than on past L.A. Takedown recordings, and a much more fleshed-out sound...
Roine Stolt's The Flower King
Lost America 9:50
The Alchemist 6:57
Rio Grande 7:49
from Manifesto Of An Alchemist 2018
With Manifesto of an Alchemist, guitarist/ vocalist/composer Roine Stolt looks all the way back to his 1994 solo date, The Flower King (hence the singular band name). His list of collaborators on this ten-song, 70-minute outing includes proper Flower Kings' members bassist Jonas Reingold, guitarist/vocalist Hans "Hasse" Fröberg, and Michael Stolt on bass and vocals, with Marco Minnemann (from Stolt's other collaborative project, the Sea Within) Max Lorentz on Hammond organ, Zach Kamins on assorted keyboards, Rob Townsend on reeds and winds, and Nad Sylvan on lead and backing vocals. Stolt claims that this is both a new and old album; most of these songs were developed from riffs, melodies, and arrangement ideas from more than a quarter-century of demos and notebooks grafted on to newly composed parts, most of which were created in the studio. Perhaps because of the treasure trove of older material he rummaged through, Manifesto of an Alchemist was completed exceptionally fast: it took only a month from first recordings to final mix. That quick turnaround time presents listeners with a clash of impressions. First, it is uncharacteristically "raw" sounding. The artist told an interviewer that, "A lot of the guitar work is actually my spontaneous 'demo' guitars ... I didn’t want to process ideas too much...."
Buke and Gase
Stumbler 3:26
Derby 2:30
Eternity 4:36
from Scholars 2019
If you remember Buke and Gase as that experimental duo who play the instruments they built themselves, you might want to adjust your expectations before listening to 2019's Scholars, their first full-length album after a five-year recording layoff. In their previous work, Aron Sanchez and Arone Dyer constructed their music around two instruments of their own creation, the buke, a large, six-string relative of the ukulele played by Dyer, and the Gass, a fusion of the guitar and the bass used by Sanchez. However, while both instruments are part of the mix on Scholars, this time around the duo have pared back on organic instrumentation and jumped deep into electronics...
Cherry Glazerr
Wasted Nun 3:18
Self Explained 3:36
Stupid Fish 4:13
from Stuffed & Ready 2019
The winding path of Cherry Glazerr's evolution began with bandleader Clementine Creevy writing strange and often juvenile songs as a teenager and just several years later had moved through phases of quirky garage grunge to arrive at the cold, polished sheen of third album Stuffed & Ready. Always centered around Creevy's increasingly dark musings, each album has upped production and more accurately dialed in a re-creation of '90s grunge angst. The muscular power chords and hyperconfident thrust of 2017's Apocalipstick were a far cry from the spooky songs about grilled cheese sandwiches and house pets that the band started out with, and Stuffed & Ready pushes further in the direction of '90s-modelled loud-soft alt-rock. Nowhere near the garage punk outbursts or naïve pondering that earlier versions of Cherry Glazerr reveled in, the ten songs here use gloomy guitar blasts and mid-tempo rhythmic attacks as a steady framework for the distant, angular moods of Creevy's songs...
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