Tough Love Vinyl & CDs

Review: DIY pop titans the Reds, Pinks & Purples take aim at the threads of hope with untethered abandon on their new album Unwishing Well. With the project helmed up by songwriter and musician Glenn Donaldson and backed up by collaborators Thomas Rubenstein, Lewis Gallardo, Daniel Pearce and Kati Mashikian, the new LP is a romantic sadcore memory-dive, fleshing out a 90s leftfield pop quintessence and lending it a contemporary production edge. Touchstones like The Go-Betweens, The Smiths, Magnetic Fields and Felt lend well to a terrific outpouring of emotion over ten tracks, which is remarkably frank in its admission of the worst foibles of the music industry and the metaphor for life evoked in this (read: 'Your Worst Song Is Your Greatest Hit').

Review: Four piece outfit The Umbrellas call themselves "renegade romantics" and they are adept at making irresistible indie pop hymns. 2021 marked the year they dropped their successful breakout debut album and in the wake of that they went on national tours and got plenty of critical acclaim. Fairweather Friend is the difficult second album that didn't prove so and brought yet more lush and candied melodies with confident guitar, great vocals and plenty of studio finesse. Not bad for a group that met at San Francisco record emporium Amoeba Music.