Fire Vinyl & CDs

Review: The world lost one of the all-time great indie songwriters when The Chills leader Martin Phillipps passed away in 2024. The New Zealand jangle-pop pioneers started out in the 80s, writing memorable melodies and beautiful harmonies and went on to have a career lasting more than 40 years. They helped coin the 'Dunedin sound' - a catch-all name given to the indie scene in the university city of Dunedin in the remote east coast of the South Island of New Zealand - a place that punched way above its weight in terms of cultural relevance and great indie music for its size. This release comes as a reminder of their greatness and includes a whopping 20 songs (it's a double LP and on gold(!)) from the band's early years revisited. As is often the case with tireless creatives, there's a vault of unfinished work that often never gets completed. Philipps dedicated moments at the end part of his life to fleshing out these song ideas, resulting in their completion nearly 40 years after they were written. 'If This World Was Made For Me' is the first song to be unearthed from this collection and is as beautiful as indie psychedelia gets with Philipps' vocal harmonies transcendent in their splendour.

Review: Jangle pop pioneers The Chills came out of the Dunedin scene in the 80s, which grew to become one of the most important movements in indie rock history, largely thanks to the output on the Flying Nun label, which The Chills were apart of when they first started out. The Chills had their own Brian Wilson in Martin Phillipps: a prolific songwriter with an ear for melody and harmony up there with the best that's ever been. Sadly, he passed away in 2024, but this album is released as a reminder of just how good he was and it's a timely balm for the grief felt within the indie rock community. The songs here come from work Phillipps did shortly before he died, where he opened his vault of unfinished songs that he started early in the Chills' career and fleshed them out to finally release them all these years later. We can assure you; it's been well worth the wait. Sublime stuff.

Review: Memorial Waterslides marks the debut of Memorials, a collaboration between Verity Susman and Matthew Simms, formerly of Electrelane and Wire. This album is a surreal exploration of pop music, blending timeless songwriting with avant-garde sensibilities. Drawing from a wide range of influences from Broadcast and Portishead to Yo La Tengo, Memorials crafts a panoramic soundscape that feels both familiar and refreshingly new. The album's tracks are rich with imagery, evoking visions of a lost future and dreamlike past, each contributing to a swirling, cinematic atmosphere. Produced entirely by Susman and Simms, the record's sound was shaped by their reel-to-reel tape experiments, initially developed for their live performances. This playful and experimental approach results in a engaging mix of psychedelic rock, folk, and analog electronics. Following their successful 2023 soundtracks and a European tour with Stereolab, this a bold and imaginative journey into the unexpected, balancing the esoteric with the melodic.

Review: Los Angeles-based Monde UFO - a shadowy collective helmed by multi-instrumentalist and producer Ray Monde - has a well-earned reputation for being one of music's more hard-to-pigeonhole acts, with their two previous albums variously mixing and matching elements of improvisational jazz, dream pop, Latin rhythms, space rock and lo-fi experimentalism. They're on a similarly breezy, blurred-at-the-edges tip on third album Flamingo Tower, attractively sashaying between jazz-flecked, string-laden dream pop ('Samba 9'), richly percussive post-punk jazz ('119', with its subtle nods to Tony Allen and Ginger Baker's infamous drum battle in support of Fela Kuti), cinematic noir-jazz (the effects-laden excellence of 'Solitaire') and much more besides.

Review: Countless bands sing about mind-altering substances, but none capture the experience quite like Spacemen 3. By combining the Suicide ethic of one-chord blues with maximalism, they simulate the infinite layers of a trip with a sound that is often imitated but never replicated. The reissued A Perfect Prescription exemplifies this, showcasing the beautiful stages of a high - from energetic and hazy highs to downbeat and drone-y lows. The album kicks off with the energetic 'Take Me to the Other Side,' representing the initial rush of a high. It seamlessly transitions to 'Walkin' with Jesus,' evoking endless ecstasy and then each track acts as a plateau of the phase it represents, with the album oscillating between jittery excitement and warm drone. Songs like 'Feel So Good' and 'Things'll Never Be the Same' contrast minimalism with maximalism, creating a layered, immersive experience. Spacemen 3's genius lies in their ability to craft a drug story like no other, blending minimal chord changes with a sheer amount of sound. A timeless, sonically amazing achievement when it dropped in 1987 - things were never the same after this.

Review: Alternative rock pioneers Throwing Muses are one of the earliest allies of Pixies, touring together as some of 4AD's few American bands. They were outperformed by Pixies commercially, but that's not what Throwing Muses are about: they continue to be much loved and continue to provide us with earnest, deeply artful songs. This new album, out on the brilliant Fire Records, was largely written by the band's Kristin Hersch on Moonlight Beach in Encinitas, California - hence the title. The songs were then taken to Steve Rizzo's Stable Sound Studio in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, where beautiful cello parts from Pete Harvey were fused in with acoustic guitars. Hersh might call Harvey the star of the show, but the haunting melodies of her voice, particularly on 'Summer of Love', are achingly beautiful. Throwing Muses remain a beacon of light.