Review: Aaron Fletcher and Tim Parkin are 77:78 and they dropped their debut album back in 2018 during a heatwave. It was perfect timing for a record that is scorched and red hot throughout with its throwback 60s beat pop sounds all rich in big hooks and English psychedelia. There are an array of deep and beautiful harmonies throughout the record, elements of tumble down dub and plenty of fragile vocal sounds. Standout include the likes of 'Papers' and the most metro of the lot, 'Love Said (Let's Go).'
Review: Toronto's Alvvays return for a much anticipated third album five years after their breakthrough record, Antisocialite. As the story goes for so many bands, the last few years have thrown a number of curveballs their way, but they stepped into the studio with Shawn Everett in October 2021 and laid down their new tracks in immediate, urgent fashion. You can hear Everett's touch all over the production, bringing vibrant textures and subtle details into their sound, but at the heart this remains a vehicle for shimmering, electrically-charged songwriting. On Blue Rev Alvvays stake their claim in the premier league of modern day indie rock, and on the strength of these fourteen songs, who are we to argue?
Review: LA threesome ASHRR aka lead vocalist Steven Davis and producer-musician-vocalists Josh Charles and Ethan Allen are back with a brilliant new album for Ralph Lawson's superb 20/20 Vision Recordings that finds them working by the old mantra of 'art for art's sake'. This effortlessly eclectic record collides electronic soul, post-punk, space disco and indie-dance and is rich in melancholic melody, hazy, late-summer moods and late-night dancing. The vocals bring an indie edge to jangling delights like 'Please Don't Stop The Rain' while 'What's Been Turning You On' is a laidback and languid groove for lazy sessions.
Review: The new Bauhaus BBC Sessions release hears British goth pioneers Bauhaus at their most vital, documenting the three-year period that they swept the airwaves like vampire bats with a hearse's worth of recordings made for UK radio. Spanning early post-punk urgencies to the relatively more textured darkness of their later work, these sessions were recorded for shows hosted by John Peel and David Jensen, flapping through alternate takes of 'Double Dare', 'In the Flat Field', and 'Third Uncle'. Together with a recent vinyl reissue of a 1983 performance at the Old Vic in London, which snapped a shot of Bauhaus at the peak of their dramaturgic snarks, both releases provide a compelling, rough-edged, bouffant counterpart to their studio albums, before goth went bird's nest: Bauhaus live and direct, with all the mood, menace and momentum fully intact.
Review: Captured in San Francisco in December of 1982, only over six months before their original dissolution in July of the following year, this live performance from gloom maestro goth rock pioneers Bauhaus leans heavily on material from their (at the time) two-month old third full-length The Sky's Gone Out including their opening cover of Brian Eno's 'Third Uncle' and 'Silent Hedges', as well as 1981's career height sophomore classic Mask, with cuts such as 'In Fear Of Fear', 'Kick In The Eye', and 'Hollow Hills' making appearances. Some love is shown to their debut In The Flat Field with the inclusion of 'Spy In The Cab', but most noteworthy is that the set features an early live unveiling of 'She's In Parties', which wouldn't see release for another four months with the band breaking up just a week before the single's adjacent album Burning From The Inside would drop.
Review: Sunshine Hit Me is the debut album from the British band The Bees. A testament to summery jovialty and DIY ingenuity, the album is as raw and earthen as it is soulful, with the band at the time only made up of founding members Paul Butler and Aaron Fletcher, who wrote, performed and recorded the album alone using a home studio in Butler's parents' garden on the Isle Of Wight. Don't be confused by the LP's normative categorisation as "indie rock"; deft listeners can hear everything from reggae to neo-soul in this one, flaunting the pair's impressive musical education going into its making.
Review: London based black feminist punk trio, Big Joanie, are set to follow up their exceptional 2018 debut, 'Sistahs', with a much more nuanced, dynamic collection of material on the upcoming sophomore effort, 'Back Home'. Produced and mixed by Margo Broom (Goat Girl, Fat White Family), the new project showcases an expansive push in every sonic direction; embracing the lo-fi, fuzzed out din of their Nirvana and Husker Du influences with increased abandon, while the strong pop sensibilities are more flagrant and emboldened this time around. A balancing act between grungy dance-punk, and wistful yet authentic pop, elevated by razor-sharp wit and earnest vulnerability, 2022 appears set to be the year that Big Joanie become a commonplace name in all the right circles.
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.
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