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.
Album review
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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.
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.
...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.
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.
“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.
Over the course of the next year, the band evolved a unique musical style: stripped-back and heavily focussed on rhythm, powered by new equipment including the crunchy Maestro Fuzz-Tone pedal, and embellished with unusual instrumentation such as the banjo, which more than one observer has seen as being as integral to their unique style as was the jug to that of The 13th Floor Elevators.
Alone on piano, synth, harmonium, autoharp and drum machine, the album veers between three different recording sessions and switches from pensive echo-laden minimalism to deliberately mis-stepped but more elaborate pieces that show a unique approach to keyed instruments.
The eerie pull of Sky's otherworldly atmosphere was ignited by Eric Wetherell's soundtrack that for its time felt futuristic. Butterings of tensive harpsichord along with glockenspiel, timpani and cello that verged towards the experimental...
...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.
The sounds of the animals and the environmental ambience of the place infuse the opening track and the curls of fiddle appear like breath from the reindeer's mouths as the light touch of snow across the landscape obscures the steaming bodies. Sounds scatter and sprawl against a circular vibes motif and a wider selection of creatures makes an understated appearance. You feel lost in the open spaces, the Hardanger fiddle's waver surprisingly gentle, its comfort in the forbidding landscape clear.