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Just Mustard: We Were Just Here
New album: Very expansive, dynamic, experimental noise rock and dreamy shoegaze abounds in this third LP by the Irish band from Dundalk with howling distorted guitars, clattering echoes and ethereal explosiveness helped by the skilled mixing hands and ears of David Wrench
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Geese: Getting Killed
New album: Dramatic and swaggeringly different - a crazed cauldron of anger, tenderness, the strangely eccentric, surreal and psychedelic, the Brooklyn band’s latest is an experimental odyssey of garage riffs to Ukrainian choir samples, frenzied drumming and prog riffing, with lullabies to explosive mayhem topped by wonderfully weird, wailing and yearning vocals of Cameron Winter
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Léa Sen: LEVELS
New album: A classy, cool, effortlessly stylish, soulful, experimental electro-pop, R'n'B, and trip-hop debut LP by the south London-based French singer, songwriter and producer, whose vocal delivery has a warm, woozy, mellifluous style, with a smudged, muted and soft guitar sound, scattered, subtle electronics, jittering percussion and nuanced, philosophical lyrics
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Femi Kuti: Journey Through Life
New album: The son of the the legend Fela Kuti continues is own legacy, now aged 62, with another vibrant release, and his first self-produced, of stirring, superbly performed afrobeat, positive life philosophy, social justice campaigns, and critiques of Nigerian politics and corruption.
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HONESTY: U R HERE
New album: Moody, dark, atmospheric, cross-genre inventiveness comes aplenty in this debut LP for Partisan Records by the Leeds-based collective who bring a hard-to-define fusion of ambient, restless electronica, shoegaze, goth, abstract industrial, krautrocky momentum, soulful trip-hop and alt-pop
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Cameron Winter: Heavy Metal
New album: Released last month, the Geese frontman’s solo LP is nothing like its title in genre, but a brilliantly eccentric, eclectic, inventive, surreal mosaic of dream-like DIY oddness – blues, folk, pop and psych rolled up in droll humour, existential dread and creative patchwork streams of the sub-conscious and non-sequitur
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Angélica Garcia: Gemelo
New album: A dynamic, colourful, passionate third LP by the Los Angeles pop artist of Mexican and Salvadoran descent here singing mainly in Spanish with operatic pop, cumbia, psychedelia, dance music, with titular translation and theme as ‘twin self’
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Lip Critic: Hex Dealer
New album: A dazzlingly high-octane, white-knuckle ride of a debut album by the New York-based electronica-punk-hip-hop-hardcore-noise-rock band, who push the musical boundaries with express vocal delivery and double drummers
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IDLES return with their fifth album, TANGK
New album: The fierce, rage-filled Bristol post-punk band’s fifth album has an unfamiliar, far more tender but wider selection of sounds, this dynamic range of love songs intriguingly experimental, less shouty, more melodious
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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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Part 1 selection of 2023 favourite albums
Welcome once again to the annual tradition of Song Bar’s favourite album releases of 2023. This is Part 1, and Part 2 is also out here. There’s no such thing as a chart rundown or ‘best of’ here, and these come in no particular order. This is all about quality and innovation …
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Sam Burton: Dear Departed
New album: Very much in the mould of late 60s/ early-70s Harry Nilsson or Glen Campbell – serene, gentle, melancholy, sometimes sublime songs in this second LP by the Utah-born, LA-based singer-songwriter
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PJ Harvey: I Inside The Old Year Dying
New album: Seven years after The Hope Six Demolition Project album, Polly returns with mysterious, experimental, beautiful, alluring release in which she adapts poems from her book Orlam into songs immersed in the otherworld-underworld of her home Dorset countryside, laced with local dialect and unusual acoustic instruments
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Fontaines D.C.’s Grian Chatten debut solo LP, Chaos For The Fly
New album: The Fontaines D.C. vocalist releases a strong, sensitive solo album leaning more towards gentle, wistful, reflective folk, including some echoes of Nick Drake but retaining his strong Dublin flavour, and produced by the brilliant and prolific Dan Carey
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Geese: 3D Country
New album: A brilliant second album following 2021’s Projector by the Brooklyn indie-rock quintet, packed with thunderous rocky, bluesy psychedelic grooves, retro yet fresh, stop-start rhythms, and charismatic deep-voiced delivery of Cameron Winter
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Skinny Pelembe: Hardly The Same Snake
New album: The eclectic experimentalist from Doncaster, aka Doya Beardmore, with roots also in Birmingham and Mozambique, comes up with a powerful, visceral new LP, spanning indie, avant-pop, hip-hop, rock, electronica, gospel and soaring soul
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Blondshell aka Sabrina Teitelbaum
New album: Strong, confident indie rock debut by Los Angeles’ Sabrina Teitelbaum, with a set of powerfully candid numbers of full-on guitar, tender, emotional vocals, wrestling delusion and self-destructive relationships
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And the band plays on … Ezra Collective: Where I'm Meant To Be
New album: Energetic, infectiously positive new album by the outstanding five London jazz musicians, infusing also funk and African influences, and including guests rappers Kojey Radical and Sampa the Great, and singers Emeli Sandé and Nao
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Beth Orton’s Weather Alive
New album: The first album for six years by the British singer-songwriter brings an exquisite fragility and mature beauty, suffused with her delicate, sometimes ghostly vocals and sparse but perfectly weighted instrumentation
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Just Mustard’s second album - Heart Under
New album: Striking, experimental, atmospheric noise music in this second LP by the five-piece band from Dundalk, County Louth, Ireland, who use traditional rock instruments to create juddery, industrial, and surreal sounds
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