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

Review: Sufjan Stevens is nothing short of an enigma. Capable of shapeshifting in almost unfathomable ways, he's the sort of artist that can release a spellbinding and technically astounding collection of piano duets, written to score a ballet, but give tracks names like 'And I Shall Come To You Like A Stormtrooper In Drag Serving Imperial Realness'. High brow while totally accessible, his back catalogue to date is one for which you'd struggle to find anyone who doesn't appreciate, once they've taken the time to listen. Here we are then, mere months after the aforementioned song and its parent album landed, getting to grips with another very different beast. Javelin certainly shares in the beauty that ran through its predecessor - Reflections - but whereas the last LP was relatively minimalist, here things are often the opposite. Big, rousing, 1960s-70s style pop numbers, soulful journeyman acoustic with backing chorus, theatrical soft rock and plenty more besides.

Review: Effective communication relies on being succinct. Boygenius clearly know this given their track record for naming things. 2023 saw the trio - Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus - drop their debut album, The Record, and now, a few months down the line, we have The Rest: an EP made up of the other bits that didn't quite make said LP.

If you're completely new to the band, then let's start by saying these offcuts that didn't fit would put many a group to shame, which tells you just how good the full record is. Here, though, we have the lo-fi, dream-indie-pop crackle and fuzz of 'Black Hole', a track of huge emotional resonance, heartfelt, heartbroken yet hopeful semi-folk on 'Afraid of Heights', and the delicate, tender, and incredibly personal letting go balladry of 'Voyager', just for starters. Sublime confirmation Boygenius are your new favourite thing.

Review: Everyone's favourite dream pop slow-jammers Cigarettes After Sex return with two new singles on a single 12" record. On the heads, we've got 'Bubblegum', a kinky but mournful head-plodder, which concerns the object of their affections taking on a Russian-roulette-ish approach to sex and relationships. The tail-side's 'Stop Waiting', meanwhile, is ever-more hypnotic, and clearly intends to be the hidden gem of the two. You'll hear a slightly brighter and more optimistic song than the A-side, but it's still deeply morunful, with Greg Gonzalez singing of the faded memories of cut ties, sunscreen and summer dresses.

Review: Goth heroes Fields Of The Nephilim's second album The Nephilim was realised 35 years ago by Situation Two and Beggars Banquet in 1988. Recorded in a former courthouse in the Somerset countryside, it has not been re-pressed since then and now comes on special golden brown vinyl with, of course, their most celebrated track and the rather epic 'Moonchild' (which hit number 28 in the UK charts) included alongside three other new bonus cuts. Influential frontman Carl McCoy twisted metal and electronics in his work after he first formed the band in Stevenage, Hertfordshire. This album was their best work and still stands up today.

Review: The Smiths captured close to the end of their career by the BBC at the National Ballroom in Kilburn, West London. Promoting The Queen Is Dead and the rich rush of different non-album singles that fell between it and final LP Strangeways here We Come, this broadcast recording - which was also used for the live album Rank - features the re-slimmed down classic four-strong Smiths line up, leaner and meaner than the five piece with additional guitarist Craig Cannon that had toured previous album Meat Is Murder. A string of great singles - 'Ask', 'Bigmouth Strikes Again' and 'Panic' among them - populate the tracklisting, as well a typically brutal execution of 'The Queen Is Dead' as their dramatic opener. It's hard to find a moment in their all too brief stint together when The Smiths are not on top form, but this truly is a peak of peaks.

Review: Word of a sixth album from Big Thief comes with their latest track 'Vampire Empire'. First debuting live on Stephen Colbert's Late Show in March 2023, its lyrics express an inner conflict at "vampire empires", of the tendency for relationships to err towards toxic, parasitical and contingent mindsets and a rallying cry for infinite and unbroken loves. A fixture of their many live shows for at least a good few years now, we're pleased to finally be seeing the official release of this gem.

Review: The third, controversial final album from Seattle's Nirvana should require little to no introduction. Repressed, remastered and redefined again and again, the Steve Albini-produced, mainstream-eschewing swansong has become one of the ugliest left-turns the 90's grunge scene ever spat up, and the subject of much heated internal fan debate over which is the definitive version. Celebrating its 30-year anniversary with a super-deluxe box set, boasting eight LPs made up of additional live performances as well as a myriad of memorabilia from the In Utero era, for the more lackadaisical collectors, there's this single LP gatefold pressing in a premium 'tip-on' sleeve similar to 2021's reissue of Nevermind, which comes with a bonus 10" of b-sides also featured on the monstrous deluxe edition.

Review: National Album Day celebrates some of the best full-lengths ever and you'd be hard-pushed to argue that REM's Automatic For the People is not one of those. This edition of it is a special limited edition 180 g yellow vinyl that will remind you of some of the maudlin American rocker's best bits. The album itself is now well over 30 years old but is still thought to be one of the best albums of the 90s. It came after their breakout album Out of Time and did not disappoint, going on to be certified four times platinum in the US thanks to featuring some of the band's biggest hit singles 'Nightswimming,' 'Man on the Moon' and 'Everybody Hurts.'

Review: Paint My Bedroom Black is Holly Humberstone's hotly anticipated debut album; a coming-of-age story reflecting the singer-songwriter's experiences of touring, loneliness, friendship and love. From the dark and haunting ballad 'Antichrist' to the upbeat homesickness-inducer 'Room Service', hers is a contemporary opus flaunting collaborations with modern pop icons like Finneas, Matty Healy, and Phoebe Bridgers. Humberstone channels an array of influences and images, from teen dejection to lo-fi bedroom balladry, sure to soon hook the collective attention of a diverse pool of listeners.

Review: Here's a blast from the past for Decca and Adam & The Ants alike. Many people have many ideas about what Adam & The Ants sound like, but they confounded expectations from their very first single when they shared 'Young Parisians' with the world in 1978. As Adam Ant later described, their sole single for Decca confused everyone who thought they were a punk band, which was entirely their intention. As a lilting, swinging slice of jangle pop, it's not at all what most would expect of the band, but it's brilliant in its own unique way.

Review: You need real confidence to take on a back catalogue of The Velvet Underground's caliber. Of course, it definitely helps if your band were contemporaries of sorts, knocked about in similar circles in the heady New York City scenes of the early-mid-1970s, and subscribed to Village Voice (and impressed their editorial team even before you got signed). All this means you don't redo tracks with borrowed nostalgia or vibes, but instead have first hand experience of what helped make them what they were at the time. So here we are then, Big Apple alt rock & rollers The Feelies turning their hands to the work of Lou Reed et al, paying homage to an outfit that had a huge influence on them in the first place. And they do a fine job, straddling the delicate line between reworking and completely rethinking anthems from 'Venus in Furs' to 'Sunday Morning', carefully managing to make each their own without forgetting what made these songs so incredible in the first place.

Review: The world was stunned by Sinead O'Connor's untimely death, but in such periods it's only right to cast our minds back over her huge body of work and be reminded of her talent. It's no surprise to see her seminal early albums getting reissued and 1993's Universal Mother is right up there with her most cherished works. In typical O'Connor style the album opens up with a quote from prominent feminist Germaine Greer, but the album was in fact a relatively grounded, direct affair with plenty of accessible grooves from the rolling 'Fire On Babylon' to the spiritually charged 'Thank You For Hearing Me', reportedly written about her relationship with Peter Gabriel.

Review: Proud Sheffieldian Richard Hawley - so proud he has taken a popular local greeting as the title for his best of album - could well be the artist that Alex Turner of The Arctic Monkeys is morphing himself into. Either way, he has done it all from Mercury Music Prize and BRIT award nomination to four UK Top ten Albums and collabs with the likes of Pulp, Paul Weller and Elbow. He has curated this collection himself with long-term collaborator Colin Elliot and it takes in hits from across his 20+ year career - some are well-known, some are tender gems, some are hidden delights from his early years you may have missed. A much-needed album, frankly.

Review: The experimental supergroup Vanishing Twin - named after its founding member Cathy Lucas' experience of the eponymous "syndrome" after her identical twin sister was absorbed in utero - have kept up a steady stream of danceable dream pop, cantankerous-contemporary-cosmic, and prodding post-punk since at least 2015. Now their newest album Afternoon X seeks again to break the mould, having been built upon "a vast constellation of instruments, samples, and unclaimed sources", conjuring comparisons to David Axelrod and Scott Walker. Though the songs throughout still get at that feeling of janky dreaminess that Vanishing Twin always nail, it's this reclamation of long-disused cultural reference points - a musical-ideal version of squatting, if you will - that makes this album special.

Review: A band who never stood still from the moment they emerged in the punk explosion, Siouxsie & The Banshees were a vital force in alternative British music whose legacy is still being understood now. By the time they reached their final album, 1995's The Rapture, they had assimilated punk, goth, pop and chamber music into a compelling whole which gave producer John Cale plenty to work with. One listen to the epic scope of the album's title track proves the point on a stirring 11-minute arc of orchestration and unsettling undercurrents. If it was a lot to take in on release, it's aged beautifully and now sees reissue as a double blue vinyl edition for National Album Day 2023.

Review: As part of a wider Cranberries reissues bundle, the Irish dream pop favourites' third album To The Faithful Departed is here reissued as an vinyl edition. The 1996 album features the later singles 'Salvation', 'Free to Decide' and 'When You're Gone', and while these were by no means such gargantuan successes as the likes of 'Zombie', they still dominated the rock and indie charts at the time. The 3CD deluxe edition offers the a selection of demos from the recording sessions in Paris, plus unreleased outtakes, early mixes, and and 12 live pieces recorded on the band's 1996 Free to Decide tour. This comes with an extensive booklet about the making of the album based on interviews with the remaining members of the band.

Review: Who doesn't love the White Stripes? One can quite predictably measure a band's impact on commercial music history by way of just how many full-blown reissues they've released, many of which aim to repackage and represent albums to their fullest, most honest effect. By that metric, this ubiquitous duo are more than certainly going down in history; Elephant, the Stripes' fourth album, is lent the sonic perfection and signature packaging it deserves, with Analogue Productions and Third Man Records teaming up for the ultimate reissue edition here. They present in UHQR format on Clarity Vinyl this modern rock cornerstone, limited to 10,000 copies. It comes with gold foil numbered jackets, housed in a premium slipcase with a wooden dowel spine.

Review: In the many-sided legacy Sinead O'Connor left in her wake, there were many surprises and anomalies which benefit from a fresh appraisal since her tragic passing. Her 1992 album Am I Not Your Girl? had a mixed reception on its release, as she paused on her contemporary dance-tinged pop production to indulge in big band and torch song covers. Similarly to Bjork tackling 'It's Oh So Quiet', it was a divisive move in a career full of them, but in the fullness of time these sincere pieces are but another vehicle for O'Connor's incredible voice, proving she was as versatile as she was forthright. A one of a kind talent, never to be repeated.

Review: This year's National Album Day is throwing up plenty of great reissues of some truly classic long players from several different genres. This one from UMR brings Hole's Live Through This back to the fore on lovely translucent pink vinyl. It was the American alternative rock band's second studio album and came back in 1994 at a time when grunge and punk rock were the prevailing styles of the day. Their take on it here saw them move away from the hardcore and unpolished sounds of their debut towards more refined melodies and song structures. It was packed with righteous anger which is still very much fun to listen to even now.