Bassist and composer Vilhelm Bromander has reconvened the players from 2023's In This Forever Unfolding Moment and they are now trading as The Unfolding Orchestra, taking the previous ideas and extending them, creating four very different long-form pieces that allow the talented musicians to play against one another and push themselves a little bit further than the last release. There are a few changes of personnel, but on the whole it is the same group and that familiarity gives them a greater sense of adventure, covering far more ground than before.
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Fear Street: Prom Queen splits the difference between its twin target audiences of ageing VHS-weaned gorehounds and their phone-thumbing teenage descendants with [pullthis id="axe"]a big axe[/pullthis] and a mordant smirk on its face. Its thrills are cheap, and it panders to your basest requirements; but then the exact same thing could be said about a Netflix subscription.
As we near the end of Glaciers, so the pieces grow sparser, a lugubrious atmosphere of impending doom is upset by the most incredible vibe shimmer and the two instruments as they circle one another collapse into one another’s arms, spent for now and drifting away, becoming more and more distant, leaving the listener with echoes of what came before
Precious Recordings pushes things even further with a back-to-back payload of early-summer releases. Featuring newbies and returnees delivering wares with a variety of provenances, here follows a breakdown of what the label now has vying for our shelf space.
The list of instruments on guitarist Geir Sundstol's sixth album for Hubro is as long as both my arms. This inventive selection of widescreen soundscapes utilises all manner of guitar-adjacent instruments and straddles an interesting space between Ry Cooder-esque introspection, Ennio Morricone-like sweeps and Eastern tonal influence.
Barring a change of heart in his unimaginable dotage, Tom Cruise gives us one last hurrah for his team of super-spies whose average workday includes falling out of planes, climbing on the outside of a skyscraper, or almost drowning in a gigantic washing machine.
The title is pretty hilarious and the album artwork of emojis disintegrating into a murky computer soup had me wondering what it would be like if each symbol that people use had a soundtrack. Would it be anything like this or the complete opposite? There is only one way to find out; so allow the tentacles of the Ancient Psychic Triple Hyper Octopus to slowly reel you in.
For those who have been following her lateral art-pop manoeuvrings as far back as 2009’s tentative Mind Raft EP, the freshly-dispensed Ready For Heaven should feel like a logical and satisfying refinement of the pathways that started taking proper shape on 2015’s The Expanding Flower Planet solo debut album and which have evolved over subsequent releases, whilst still being packed with invigoratingly fresh ingenuity.
Kranky The title of this meditative collaboration between guitarist Michael Grigoni and Mark Nelson trading as Pan American feels like a comment on the current state of the world order. Michael’s other role as assistant professor of religion gives an indication of the reflective nature of the pieces on offer here. Merging Mark’s guitar, mandolin and synths with Michael’s pedal steel, lap steel and dobro, they strike out […]
Babak Anvari directs Hallow Road with the thwarted urgency of helplessness, obviating any need to cut away to the accident itself, or to punctuate with exterior shots of the car speeding by, blowing up a tiny tornado of dead leaves in its wake. With such intense and convincing actors at his disposal, he makes an unnerving virtue out of the physical limitations he’s imposed on himself.
If you like hazy guitar improv, this is solid. Four lengthy crafted excursions dusted in a ghosting of late ’60s psychedelia and geologically pinned to a Neolithic underground burial complex in Malta.
Given its largely banal story and undeniable visual flair, the obvious conclusion to draw is that Hurry Up Tomorrow is a 105-minute music video. Although director Trey Edward Shults works very hard indeed to shoot and cut the offstage action like a thriller, he drenches so much of it with a purple rain of pulsating epileptic light that it has a soporific effect which no amount of frantic cocaine-rush editing can awaken us from.
...his trust in and familiarity with the players comes across well in the live aspects of the recording process. It is that voice which you are buying into though; a stentorian baritone that also has warmth and vulnerability. Allied to the often reserved but flexible backing and with the addition of Ruth's sweet vocal counterpoint, this latest album sheds new light and shows a new way forward.
I’m Being Good are back with their somethingth album, and what a number something is. Difficult to describe IBG without reference to a bunch of ’90s bands, but for my money they’ve always had a wit and laconic element that’s missing from your Polvos and Truman’s Waters.
Each of the pieces here comes from a different perspective, using similar ingredients to create a very different feel, as if each track was a mini-soundtrack in its own right with the common thread being AVAWAVES’ collective imagination.
...a return-within-a-return from visual artist and onetime pastoral-psych legend Mark Fry. Having previously brought 2011’s baroque-tinged I Lived In The Trees (with backing assistance from The A. Lords) and 2014’s soothingly lush South Wind, Clear Sky to the 2L catalogue, after a decade or so’s gap arrives the meta-anointed Not On The Radar.
Angle Shades is the new moniker for the Richard Jones Trio whose previous album, itself entitled Angle Shades, was a joyful take on the jazz piano trio format. A couple of years has passed and the trio of Richard on piano, Joshua Cavanagh-Brierly on bass and Johnny Hunter on drums has re-entered the studio to see what further magic can be summoned.
After more than a decade away, the disembodied spectre of Death returns to haunt a new shoal of hapless victims by masquerading as a series of stylishly mounted and entertainingly ridiculous ‘accidents’. In an attempt to freshen its foul breath, this time the filmmakers have gone big AND gone home – the initial premonition of mayhem that kicks everything off takes place decades in the past, therefore our conceptual baddie decides that entire generations of a family need to be wiped out.