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The Reds, Pinks and Purples: The Past Is a Garden I Never Fed
New album: The San Francisco indie-dream-pop-shoegaze band fronted by Glenn Donaldson release a new LP of jangling guitar and beautifully wistful songs, centred around small talk and everyday water cooler moments with an mischievous but heartfelt delivery and a finely tuned sense of pathos and irony
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Tropical Fuck Storm: Fairyland Codex
New album: The Melbourne quartet return with a fourth LP of unique, acerbic, eclectic post-punk and dadaistic psychedelia – droll, dark, menacing and humorous, here themed underworld of fateful characters facing the collapse of society
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Lucy Gooch: Desert Window
New album: Hovering and evolving in its own delicious, delicate, ghostly hinterland between folk, classical, jazz and ambient electronica, this exquisite debut by the British singer and composer from York is an ethereal, mesmeric tapestry of layered voices and acoustic instruments
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Deradoorian: Ready For Heaven
New album: Quirky, creative, clever, eclectic, lo-fi experimental pop by the American singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist and former Dirty Projectors member Angel Deradoorian, with a new LP about the erosion of humanity, and mental struggles in the ongoing degrading age of destructive capitalism
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The Nightingales: The Awful Truth
New album: With sharp turns of phrase and pace, the legendary Birmingham post-punk band fronted by Robert Lloyd return with meatily rich riffs and rhythms, and a collection of wittily ironic songs on social injustice and current affairs like a musical news broadcast
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Throwing Muses: Moonlight Concessions
New album: The veteran Rhode Island alternative rock and post-punk band fronted by Kristin Hersh return with an 11th studio album with a strikingly different sound - a stripped back, almost-unplugged acoustic release of restrained but haunting powe
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Jane Weaver: Love In Constant Spectacle
New album: A gorgeous new LP by the Merseyside artist, with her distinctive blend of tender, melancholic synth-pop, but here also some avant-garde jazz and gently surreal, newer pastures of otherworldly, vivid psychedelia, and a first guest producer in the form of the excellent John Parish
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Favourite LPs of 2023, Part 2.
Welcome once again to the annual tradition of Song Bar’s favourite album releases of 2023. This is Part 2, and Part 1 was yesterday. There’s no such thing as a chart rundown or ‘best of’ here, and these come in no particular order …
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Bas Jan: Back To The Swamp
New album: This third album by the quartet fronted by singer and harpist Serafina Steer, is another wittily droll, darkly humorous collection about love and modern life’s absurdities and mundanities, with influences from The Pet Shop Boys, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Kate Bush, Heaven 17 and even a referential shake of Salt N Pepa
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Vanishing Twin: Afternoon X
New album: Mesmeric, meditative, mercurial – an experimental, dream-like release by the London trio of singer and multi-instrumentalist Cathy Lucas, drummer Valentina Magaletti and bassist Susumu Mukai with folky electronica, minimalism, cosmic post-punk and psychedelic pop
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Death & Vanilla: Flicker
New album: The trio from Malmö, Sweden return with another selection of smooth, delicate, vintage Moog synth dream pop and psych-folk, more upbeat than 2019’s Are You A Dreamer, but still creating a musical “melancholic utopia”
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I am a rock: Pictish Trail’s Island Family
New album: Johnny Lynch returns with a beautifully eclectic release and an alternative love note to his adopted Hebridean home the Isle of Eigg – psych folk, acoustic pings and crashes mingling with dance electronica in this search for the euphoric in the bucolic wrapped in the eccentric
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Marta Del Grandi’s debut album Until We Fossilize
New album: This delicate, beautiful debut by the Italian singer from Milan with a jazz background infuses her songs with folk and classical and eastern elements in an LP inspired by the Greek myth of Amethyst who defies the patriarchy
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Vanishing Twin’s Ookii Gekkou
New album: After 2019’s brilliant The Age of Immunology, a wondrously evocative and playful new LP by the London-based psychedelic experimentalists tinkering with krautrock, jazz and the avant-garde with sprinkles of Sun Ra to Alice Coltrane, Martin Denny and Ennio Morricone
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Jane Weaver’s 11th album, Flock
Album review: The Liverpool and Widnes-raised artist returns with a mesmeric and uplifting 11th album that takes a variety of elements - electronica, psychedelia and acid folk morphing into fabulous alternative pop record that really takes flight
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Virginia Wing’s fourth album Private Life
Album review: Offbeat, eclectic, meandering electronica with oodles of oddball sax and percussion mark this absorbing and original fourth album by the Manchester trio with commentary addressing issues from consumer capitalism to social media and misogyny
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Rats on Rafts
Album review: This third album by the alternative post-punk band from Rotterdam is a conceptual journey into the id punctuated with rhythmic kabuki modal mood swings, thunderstorms, digital beeps, traffic noise echoing The Fall and Snapped Ankles
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This week’s selection …
Album reviews roundup: This week’s selection includes a surprise but strong return for the Aussie rockers, three innovative debuts in in hip hop, pop and folk, and an outstanding series of instrumentals by a Welsh guitarist
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The latest mesmeric musical nine
Album reviews roundup: This week’s selection mixes deep emotions with philosophy, evolution with the elemental, with a mixture of folk, pop, electronica and indie, and including drone music featuring five ancient church organs
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Nine more delights to peruse
As well as a powerful Run The Jewels release raising funds for protester legal rights, this week’s selection is packed with excellent independent bands’ work, especially The Nightingales, plus Brigid Dawson, Sports Team, The Stroppies and more
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