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Silver Synthetic from New Orleans
Album review: This debut album by the New Orleans indie psych rock band is full of bluesy, catchy, snappy tunes and wistful lyrics, shades of 1970s Kinks, Richard Lloyd, Tom Verlaine, Ultimate Painting, Velvet Underground and Teenage Fanclub
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Album review: From traditional folk to original songs spanning continents and centuries, this outstandingly beautiful and emotive album by the American and Italian music and life partners was recorded in lockdown in their adopted Ireland home
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Caoilfhionn Rose
Album review: Sounding like a sunlit landscape of whispering grasslands, this beautiful mix of folk, jazz, ambient electronica and gentle psychedelia comes with the pure, soft, soaring voice of the Manchester singer-songwriter
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Matthew E. White and Lonnie Holley
Album review: This first collaborative release between the Virginia songwriter, producer, and founder of Spacebomb Records and the Alabama sculptor is an experimental fusion of jazz, funk, electronica and exclamatory spoken-word observation
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This Is Really Going To Hurt, the second LP by Flyte
Album review: As beautiful and heartfelt a breakup album as any recently around, this second LP by the London trio is filled with stark irony and moments where things began to go awry, with music that echoes Sufjan Stevens to Elliott Smith to Neil Finn
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Album review: The high-class purveyor of late 50s and 60s vintage soul, jazz, blues and R&B returns with one his best yet, with the shuffle of rhythm, the twang of guitar and the dangle of quiff with those Buddy Holly/Clark Kent looks
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Ballaké Sissoko: Djourou
Album review: This exquisitely beautiful new release from the Malian kora player includes guest appearances from Camille, Piers Faccini, Feu! Chatterton, Sona Jobarteh, Salif Keita, Patrick Messina, Oxmo Puccino, and Vincent Ségal
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La Femme’s third LP
Album review: The French band’s third album is an attractive, energetic mix of classic vintage sounds from 60s candy floss pop to 80s synth new wave, instrumentals that could TV themes, whispery and sensual hip hop, disco and dash of rave
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Ben Howard’s fourth LP Collections From The Whiteout
Album review: After 2018’s Noonday Dream, the British singer-songwriter returns with a collaborative LP with guitarist Aaron Dessner of the National adding other talents that help stretches his styles beyond folk into electronica and beyond
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Godspeed You! Black Emperor: G_d’s Pee AT STATE'S END!,
Album review: The Montreal post-rockers return with their seventh and among their best to date, expressing the all the doom and the defiance of recent times, using field recordings, atmospheric orchestration, drone sounds, swingtime crescendos, and rich layers towers of distorted clarion sound
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Ryley Walker’s Course in Fable
Album review: A 10th album of seven highly agile, experimental prog-jazz acoustic guitar-based numbers deftly performed by the Illinois-born, New York-based singer-songwriter and produced by Tortoise's John McEntire
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Du Blonde’s Homecoming
Album review: Beth Jeans Houghton returns, now under her label, continuing her more recent stripped back formula of great songwriting wrapped in fuzzbox guitar glam rock, this time with guests including Shirley Manson, Ezra Furman, and of Andy Bell of Ride
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Dry Cleaning
Album review: Dry by name, extra dry by delivery, the post-punk south London band’s debut LP, laced with the spoken word vocals by Florence Shaw, is darkly hilarious fusion of stark guitar and stream-of-consciousness sardonicism
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OH NO …
Album review: This 12th album by the Californian experimental electro-pop, postpunk band led by Jaime Stewart may be the most unusual of year, an oddball set of diverse duets with many guests that sometimes has the melodramatic quality of later Scott Walker
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Two peas in a pod: cover art art from Deacon by serpentwithfeet
Album review: An unusually delicate, tender and eccentric affectionately album of gospel-infused R&B about a black gay relationship and friendships, the second by Baltimore-born Brooklyn-based singer Josiah Wise
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Promises more than fulfilled
Album review: This transcendent, astonishingly beautiful work, from a five-year collaboration, culminates in genre-spanning exquisite music over nine continuous movements that could easily top the best of the year
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Sketchy: Tune-Yards
Album review: Rhythmically complex, and restlessly clever, the latest release by California’s Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner wrestles with a variety of issues from gentrification to gender privilege and climate disaster
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Circularities and patterns in nature: Hannah Peel’s Fir Wave
Album review: The electronic music composer’s mesmeric LP is inspired by the cyclical and fractal patterns of nature with access to and reinterpretations of the original music of the celebrated 1972 KPM 1000 series: Electrosonic, the music of Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop
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Wondrous wallowing: Great Spans of Muddy Time by William Doyle
Album review: Inspired by the work of Robert Wyatt, early Eno, Berlin-era Bowie and Syd Barrett, this is intriguingly experimental, challenging but at times beautiful electronica work by the artist previously known as East India Youth
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Ideas constantly sprouting: Chad VanGaalen’s latest album
Album review: An inventively eclectic homegrown release of tasty psychedelia, krautrock and folk by the Calgary songwriter and eccentric animator who uses a huge variety of instruments including his own invented lithophone
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