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.
Adrian
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“Hey hey, my my, indie-pop can never die,” as Neil Young didn’t quite sing. From the boom years during the 1980s and into the 1990s, through a lower-profile but still fecund 2000s to 2010s and into the ongoing revival of the 2020s, the combination of independent-mindedness and a deep-seated love of melody, has sustained a cross-generational thread. The following three releases – one archival and two brand new – convincingly confirm this somewhat comforting sense of continuity and survivalism, whilst also capturing the internal diversity of it all.
...deeply omnivorous plundering from whatever sources serve the band’s collectivist broken mirror reflections upon the world. A modus operandi that is also visually illustrated by a none-more-fitting front cover image.
...this is a collection that casts a spell across any continental boundaries through its stunningly intimate yet deceptively intricate arrangements and desolate but dreamlike atmospherics.
Evocative, enigmatic and enthralling throughout, for a collection that took years to mature on Glen Johnson’s home studio hard drives this is far more than just a digital cupboard clearance exercise, which should certainly be recognised as one of his finest curatorial creations to date.
For all the anarchic trappings that proceed Australia’s profanity-framed Tropical Fuck Storm, there is clearly a lot more craft and imagination at play when the enterprise is examined up-close, as this first full-length release for a new home at Fire Records attests. As the quartet’s fourth LP-sized outing in all, Fairyland Codex bares the hallmarks of finding a creative sweet spot, between swampy sleaziness and more imaginative intricacies.
The Past Is A Garden I Never Fed, the first release for Fire Records from Donaldson’s addiction-primed enterprise, which rounds-up a choice compendium of previously digital-only non-album cuts, inside signature ‘same-but-different’ packaging.
Precious Recordings is clearly in it for an Olympic marathon, albeit with a few sprints along the way. Hence, following on rapidly from a still-fresh trio of seven-inch singles from newbies and returnees, comes two ten-inch outings, bringing fresh sounds from veteran players and a near-forgotten aural slice of the past, respectively.
...two epics-within-themselves .. a pair of expansive CD / digital-only outings from reliable combinations of creators and curators, from the scene that never sleeps.
Acting as the latest ambassadorial outing from the Bedroom Suck community and following on from 2018’s enigmatic eponymous LP under the somewhat off-putting Cyanide Thornton moniker, Birding Out captivates as an idiosyncratic creative deposition from its own little corner of the world.
Entering a realm where the laws of latter-day rock and pop physics don’t really apply, this second self-billed long-player for the label -- from the artist formerly known as Ziggy Heroe -- trades in the suave and sophisticated side-alleys that largely became forgotten about since The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and their peers rewrote the rules of engagement in the latter-half of the 1960s
Once more on to the fertile fields of the DIY electronica scene we go, cutting a path to search for the most interesting of musical crops that grow and regenerate at exponential rates…
Segmenting its sequencing between six quite lengthy instrumentals and three song-based collaborations, Swallow unapologetically and assuredly bridges the gap between Ride’s formative basilica-ceiling scraping epics and the post-rock world the group part-inspired through the interregnum years.
Having delivered two top-drawer albums already this year from this side of the Atlantic – in the form of recorded outings provided by The Gentle Spring and Brian Bilston and The Catenary Wires (see Freq reviews passim) – the indie-pop renaissance operations of Skep Wax now enter a creditable new co-release arrangement with the US-based Slumberland Records for two like-minded East Coast ensembles.
Having hooked-up as a low-key instrumental explorer super-duo of sorts in recent years — under the moniker of Whin – the Glasgow-based Martin John Henry (De Rosa, Jewel Scheme, Henry and Fleetwood) and Robert Dallas Gray (Life Without Buildings, Even Sisters) unpack themselves again for near-simultaneously dispensed solo albums via Gargleblast and through self-released arrangements respectively. Whilst both releases feature varying degrees of supportive intermingling from the pair, they plough determinedly divergent furrows.
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.
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.
...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.