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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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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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Nicely worn: Black Honey’s album
Album review: Refreshing, energetic, upbeat big-chorus fuzzbox indie-pop by the four-piece from Brighton with echoes of big-sound styles ranging from Primal Scream to Girls Aloud to Garbage to Sigue Sigue Sputnik
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Sunburned Hand Of The Man’s latest album
Album review: An eclectic and fascinating album of newly edited tracks by the prolific Boston Massachusetts collective, covering everything from gentle acoustic to thrash metal, indie, psych, electronica, krautrock and everything in between
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Catherine Anne Davis aka The Anchoress
Album review: This emotional release by Welsh singer-songwriter Catherine Anne Davis, her first since 2016’s Confessions Of A Romance Novelist, brings piano-based songs with echoes of Tori Amos mixed with soaring guitar indie pop intensity
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As Days Get Dark, Arab Strap’s seventh album, and their first for 16 years
Album review: Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton’s first album together since 2005 is as brilliant as ever – a mischievous, brooding, blackly humorous, whisperingly sinister and sweary exploration of love, sex, addiction, exploitation and death wrapped in beautiful, poetic music
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Julien Baker: ‘There’s no glory in love, only the gore of our hearts’
Album review: The Tennessee indie artist’s third LP is an impassioned, raw emotion narrative of life falling apart in lockdown, her at times fractured voice and powerful instrumentation capturing a self-excoriating autobiography, stormy chaotic emotions, observations and experiences
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Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: symbiotic
Album review: "A brutal but very beautiful record nested in a communal catastrophe” is how Nick Cave describes this Covid-19 lockdown-inspired release with his longtime Bad Seed collaborator, and so it is
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The Hold Steady have an Open Door Policy
Album review: Brooklyn’s natural lovechild band of Bruce Springsteen and Randy Newman return with their eighth studio album, full of polished, clever lyrics and energy, and if not quite up to 2008’s Stay Positive, deliver everything a fan would hope for
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Casandra Jenkins’s second album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature
Album review: The New York singer-songwriter’s second album is short, but serenely superb – with a soft sheen sound produced by Josh Kaufman, it’s perfectly composed with intelligent lyrics, and profound insights beautifully voiced
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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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Album review: Floating somewhere between semi-acoustic prog-rock, jazz, folk, modern classical and spoken word, the seven-piece experimental London band have long been lauded as the next great thing from the Windmill, Brixton
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Stormy power: the cover of The Besnard Lakes new album
Album review: Elemental, stormy, epic in its scope, the new indie-prog LP from Montreal with soaring guitar textures, falsetto, and strong falling bass lines has echoes of Mogwai and Sigur Rós, and is perfect to take on a winter walk or for a profound fireside evening
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Tamara Lindeman of The Weather Station
Album review: This majestic LP of superb musical maturity.by the Canadian singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman has an undercurrent climate change theme, with deft piano, drums, strings, sax, guitar and a sound sometimes reminiscent of mid-80s Talk Talk
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Ann B Savage: nothing common about this turn
Album review: The London singer-songwriter’s cleverly titled, superb debut is bird-themed, exquisitely beautiful and intimate. It exposes her rich, deep, velvety voice, one that gently warbles snd smoothly soars from a nest of various mostly acoustic strings. Utterly gorgeous
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Album review: Liberating, refreshing, eccentric, with a playfully light touch and flourishes of flute and feminist theory garnish this solo debut by the singer who works with Holly Herndon singer and is half of Italian synth new wave duo Itaca
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Mask
Album review: The south London quartet’s second album has is double-edged woozily beguiling in music and caustic in lyrics, a mixture of shoegaze, postpunk, and electronica with a distinctive sound produced by the groundbreaking Dan Carey
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Palberta’s Lily, Ani and Nina
Album review: A new album of abstract indie charm by the New York trio, at times chugging and spluttering in DIY arrhythmic style like some battered old Citroën 2CV, it also has a sweet sounding shambolic quality that grows on you
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Kiwi Jr.’s second album Cooler Returns, out on Sub Pop
New album: Clever, wry, satirical, topical, inventive upbeat indie by the Toronto quartet with their second album following Soccer Money, who have echoes of Pavement and The Modern Lovers, but with added vim and vigour, keyboards and harmonica
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Buck Meek
Album review: Perfect for a relaxed Sunday evening listen, this laid back second LP by the guitarist from Big Thief is also wry, melancholic, cathartic, naked candlelight confessions of heartbreak, resiliency, charm and enchantment
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