Juno Recommends Rock / Indie / Folk / Metal / Punk / 50s / 60s: May 2023

Review: The word is out, EBTG are back. The long-serving combination of Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt have moved through many phases, from their exquisite indie pop era of the 80s to the chart-topping club dalliances and premier league remixes of the 90s. Now they return with a fresh sound on this, their eleventh album, which feels wholly contemporary as well as carrying on their instinct for heart-rending songwriting, all led by Thorn's unmistakable croon. Lead single 'Nothing Left To Lose' sets the tone with a strident, bass-heavy beat that certainly doesn't try to recreate past glories, and it's still a powerful song first and foremost. This revamped approach yields an abundance of magic moments across the whole of Fuse, a stellar return from long time treasures of British independent music.

Review: American indie rock band the National rach their ninth studio album with First Two Pages of Frankenstein. It makes the start of a new chapter for the hugely popular outfit as they anchor their sounds in evocative melodies and lyrical narratives that are complex and enthralling throughout. The band produced the record at Long Pond Studios in New York with some high-level guests including Taylor Swift, Phoebe Bridgers and Sufjan Stevens. It comes after busy touring years, two back-to-back albums and a period of creative block but suggests that was very much gotten over as it brings plenty of invention and originality.

Review: Australian indie rockers The Church are an example of a band who have continued on strong ever since their inception, releasing a new album every few years or so since their debut in 1980. New single 'The Hypnogogue' is a gothic spectacle for all the somnambulists out there. Laying down a sinister group of layered guitar arps and an off-the-wall music video to boot, we're more than excited to find out what this sinister new iteration of the band's vision promises for the future.

Review: Black Country, New Road marks a new chapter as a six piece with this new album of previously unreleased music. It was recorded by therm at the Bush Hall venue in London, a legendary place where they played six special shows at the end of last year. This follows a busy and sold out run of shows and the success of 'Ants From Up There' as Lewis Evans, May Kershaw, Georgia Ellery, Luke Mark, Tyler Hyde and Charlie Wayne find some of their highest nights. Critical and fan praise followed them everywhere last year and that will only continue with this, we sense.

Review: The year of 1985 is the absolute highpoint of The Cure's long illustrious career - they'd spent two years enjoying the fruit of their first Top 10 single, 'The Love Cats' and hit an incredible purple patch with the Head On The Door album, out that year, which seemed to effortlessly move their sound into pop territory without spoiling their trademark gothic emotional intensity. Hugely adept at dominating large spaces with their large sound - the 12,000 seater Birmingham NEC in this case - this catches a choice selection of tracks from the usual epic set list, spanning pop monsters like 'In Between Days' and 'Close To Me', synthpop-tinged delights like 'Screw', 'The Walk' and 'Let's Go To Bed' and the utterly doom laden 'A Forest' and 'The Hanging Garden'. A reminder of why they were - and continue to be - one of the biggest live draws the world of alternative music has ever produced.

Review: Wednesday is now most familiar for being the hit Netflix series about the dark daughter of the Addams Family, and there is certainly a bit of a creepy vibe to the cover of this new album by her namesake. It is a collection of half-remembered portraits of life in the American south that adds up to a sonic quality - a patchwork of ideas and moments that add up to one cohesive whole. The Ashville quintet explores everything from the happy to the tragic with distorted lap steel, country twang and the vocals of Karly Hartzman cutting through each and every time.

Review: Elena Tonra, Igor Haefeli and Remi Aguilella return as Daughter, the cherished three-piece who very much embody the contemporary sound of 4AD. Stereo Mind Game is their first album in four years (not counting video game soundtrack Music From Before The Storm, and it finds them grappling with love over long distances - a sentiment many can relate to in these post-pandemic years. There's space for introspection and joy, all delivered with the wide-reaching sound and inherent delicacy which has made Daughter so well loved by so many.

Review: The Postal Service is made up of Ben Gibbard, who is of course the singer and guitarist from Death Cab for Cutie and Jimmy Tamborello, who also records as Dntel. They work over long distances and in 2003 dropped their classic album Give Up, which was then reissued and remastered for a 10th-anniversary edition and now comes on special blue and silver vinyl as a 20th-anniversary looms. The album is sweet and charming and mostly electronic with real warmth and some additional vocals from Jen Wood and Rilo Kiley's Jenny Lewis.

Review: Is it rock? Is it metal? Is it synth pop? How about art noise? Someone, somewhere, is trying to pen a thesis on how you define the mighty and mysterious Yves Tumor. Best leave it to them, then. Wonder aside, the Knoxville, Tennessee outsider has finally delivered the follow up to Heaven To A Tortured Mind and it's every bit another masterpiece that grabs listeners by the jugular and challenges them, while delivering exactly what they didn't realise they wanted to hear.
While it's difficult to find much genuinely surprising in music today, the sheer breadth of Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume (Or Simply Hot Between Worlds) is in itself a shock. Over the course of 12 tracks, we hit grinding electroclash ('God Is A Circle'), seductive operatic pop ('Lovely Sewer'), main stage heavy rock ('Parody'), distorted and pained metal ('Meteora Blues'), and high-paced, rousing indie ('In Spite of War'), among other styles, all realised via a unique musical identity some would kill to possess.

Review: The Light User Syndrome was the 18th - yes, 18th, record from legendary alternate outfit The Fall. It came on Jet Records in 1996 at a time when the legendary band leader Mark E. Smith was at his most alcoholically antagonistic. As such it was a difficult time for the band but one that still bore fruit with Smith on most of the vocals but producer and performer Mike Bennett, drummer Karl Burns and guitarist Brix Smith also stepped up to the mic. Angular rhythms feature as always next to funny lyrics and unusually clean production.

Review: Temples are back with a fourth album that stems you into another world. It's a mystical setting with utopian overtones all from the imagination of singer and guitarist James Bagshaw plus bassist Tom Walmsley, keys and guitar man Adam Smith, Rens Ottink on sticks and production from Sean Ono Lennon. Musically, this is a collage of psych and Kraut, dream pop and exotica that all come to life with crystalline melodies and celestial energy. It's an immersive listen from surely the finest and most inventive post-rock band to ever come out of Kettering. The opaque pink vinyl pressing sure is nice, too.

Review: Long-time indie darlings and American dream pop duo Beach House barely ever put a foot wrong, and you won't find a misstep on this, their fifth album, either. Depression Cherry was co-produced by the band with Chris Coady and first came back in 2015. It was written over two years before that and saw the band return to a more simplistic sound with fewer instruments, tunes constructed around a main melody and live drums featuring less than in the past. This was in response to having enlarged their sound as the venues they played grew ever bigger, but dialing it back in was a good move if you ask us.

Review: Los Angeles trio Acetone were one of the most quietly influential bands of the 1990s, blending elements of country, folk, and psychedelic rock into a unique sound that was all their own. Fans of Duster, Mazzy Star or Slint - but for whom a lilting country twang is also a necessary ingredient in the listening pie - will be sated. 1992-2001 collects the band's entire discography, including their legendary album If You Only Knew, which has been out of print for years. Sensitive, plodding and occupying only the haziest of backwaters of memory for most, highlights from this eerie LITA throwback include the tracks 'Germs' and 'Midnight Cowboy'. But all the tracks do the job, to be honest.

Review: ††† (Crosses) are a synthwave band, first formed in 2011 by former Deftones member Chino Moreno, Far's Shaun Lopez and bassist Chuck Doom. Swooping in on the extant enthusiasm for chilling sounds popular at the time, like dungeon synth and witch house - but also bringing in classic synthpop elements from older bands like Depeche Mode - their music took the music press by storm. What was thought to be a short-lived revival of a sound, however, led to them not releasing any music after their debut, until now. 'PERMANENT.RADIANT' stakes a claim for the timelessness of their sound, mixing in trip-hop and rock elements (choice cuts: 'Vivien', 'Sensation') to an already doomy and bleak format.

Review: Here is a CD version of The First Two Pages of Frankenstein, the ninth studio album from The National and as impressively put together as ever. Across the 11 songs contained here, recorded in New York and featuring an array of top notch guests such as Taylor Swift, Phoebe Bridgers and Sufjan Stevens, it marks new territory of sorts with its more emotional melodic content and denser lyrical offerings.