Whilst arguably having missed a few opportunities, Touch is nevertheless a roundly decent latter-day Tortoise record that reassures us that the internal alchemical artistry – even if not as effervescent as it once was – retains a distinctive potency. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait for another best part of a decade to find out if there is more left in the shared sonic tank.
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Building on the dictaphone rawness of Matt Loveridge’s Atworth release as MXLX comes a devotional enrichment minus the tape hiss atmospherics, eight tracks that delve deep into the hammered soul of the piano.
The encore gives some of the release the audience have been craving, a delirious bagpipe-led trance concoction, which drifts just the other side of the line between Dionysian and line-dancing. Even the band seem a little surprised, as if this had come from somewhere they hadn’t previously been prepared to go. The King Arthur is a bit like that sometimes.
A slowly evolving space full of tapering shapes and vortexed growth. Mr York adding flute to the modular carpet Steve Davis and Kavus Torabi supplied. A rich and heady concoction, edged in feathery floating viewpoints and ashened in peppery paper cuts.
Harris Dickinson takes full advantage of his mushrooming acting career by making a writing / directing debut with this defiant and supremely tightly wound drama about Mike, a former prisoner struggling to rebuild his shattered life despite a mess of obstacles threatening to trip him up no matter how hard he tugs at those fabled bootstraps.
Why they aren't playing to at least a few hundred people per night is a complete mystery, but they clearly enjoy their peripatetic lifestyle... enjoying the enthusiasm of those people that made an effort on a Tuesday night. It was one of the best things I have seen in a long time; the joy, the intensity, the love for the songs and respect for the audience all added up to an unforgettable evening and long may they continue.
Spread across ten tracks, Four Ways To The Sun highlights Georgia's warm, mysterious voice and paints her imagery in a balm of soft focus jazz and folky flecks. It is a dreamy, ethereal sound that opens the album with a voice that has a depth but sounds cool; languid.
It is always a pleasure and a journey of discovery to receive a new Bobby Conn album and even after nearly thirty years of releasing his personal yet immensely memorable missives, this latest, his second for relatively new home Tapete and first since 2020’s Recovery is a real game of two halves and quite the curveball.
Experimental pianist and composer Johnny Richards is probably best known for his part in Shatner’s Bassoon, but has done plenty of other genre pushing collaborations. For his latest, he teams up with Bad Plus drummer Dave King and by a series of transatlantic transactions, they have stitched together a suite of ten personal and complex pieces that required Johnny’s piano to be treated in various ways to provide an extraordinary array of sounds and textures.
Venturing once more into the overflowing world of wires, elemental sounds and wordlessly channelled conceptualism brings us to three more new things from electronic explorers from across the globe.
Another well-chosen but overlooked group reconvening with a release on Computer Students is Knoxville, Tennessee's New Brutalism who, as the name may suggest, purvey a sharp modern high-intensity take on punk rock that melds a kind of Chicago dynamism with LA ire
Cusping the halo of consciousness, Rosa Arruti AKA Nad Spiro conjures up a sonically charged space full of moth-like flutters and abstracted transits on Limbo Channel. An investigative inventory of sibilant vocals and murmuring otherness that flutter-flowers your skull in broken orbits and Coil-like elves.
...chill out and really feel the music move around you. This collection, the first to really embrace the ethos of the nights, brings together some favourites of those involved and runs the full range from sleepy drift to more funky groove and is a great reminder of what was special about this period.
...continuing to approach the sound horizontally was the breakthrough he needed to bring the album to its inevitably longitudinal conclusion. Instead of a singular piece lasting an LP’s length, we are given the pleasure of listening through four variations of the soma-induced trance brought about by the brave new world of Synestopia
At this point in the lifespan of Sloan, a new studio album is not really about reaching out to new audiences. It’s much more about sustaining creative consistency and keeping the Canadian power-pop institution’s adherents attached.
...conjures up ten windswept songs of yearning and love with a voice that is warm and worn but bright like the desert sun. Mostly on acoustic guitar or piano with some string embellishments, the songs echo through the desert canyons, moving languidly, shimmering guitar often sparing through the thin desert air.
Everyone’s favourite ersatz heavy metal band is well and truly put back together for a sequel to one of the cultiest films ever cultivated, 1984’s groundbreaking and enormously influential mock-rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. They’re strapping on their axes and slogging through their greatest hits one more time, aiming their satirical rapiers at a music industry that’s since changed beyond all recognition.
With songs generally written by trumpeter Gabriel Alegria or sax player Laura Andrea Leguia, those instruments tend to be at the forefront, but they are only a part of a series of ever-evolving soundscapes which with the wonderfully sinuous Mario Cuba on bass and Hugo Alcazar on drums with Freddie Lobaton adding percussion really swing.