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Saturday, January 9, 2021

Far Caspian - (2018) Between Days 12''

 

Dance To The Radio ‎– none 

Far Caspian’s debut EP is ready to whisk listeners into the clouds: Awash with hazy guitars and faraway vocals, the plaintive and dreamy Between Days (November 19, 2018 via Dance to the Radio) marries nostalgia and disconnect in a stirring display of vulnerability. In evoking the emotional magnitude of solitude, loneliness and wandering, the Leeds-based band have created a thing of striking resonance and beauty.
Formed this January, Far Caspian are very much the new kids on the block, to say the least. The four-piece consists of frontman and guitarist Joel Johnston, Jof Cabedo (drums and vocals), Alessio Scozarro (bass and vocals), and Nath Sayers (guitar). Though their story is just beginning, they’ve managed to make quite an entrance – earning early acclaim from critics on both sides of the pond as they splashed onto the music scene with melancholy tones and poetic lyrics.
If dwelling in your own dark, ruminative space is the current trend, then Far Caspian are a shoe-in for this season’s “it” band. Joel Johnston’s heart-heavy lyrics depict the natural turbulence of a life in transition: From the artist’s move from Ireland to the UK, to matters of love, purpose, and well-being, Far Caspian embed themselves in the throes of change.
And yet, almost in spite of itself, Between Days appeals to a wide swathe of listeners and situations. “I think we’ve ended up with a batch of songs that all have their own character,” Johnston, who also produced the EP, shared via press release. “Listen to this when you’re feeling low, when you’re late-night driving on a road trip, when you’re getting ready for a date or just with a friend.”
EP opener and title track “Between Days” sets the scene with its propellant beat and intoxicating sonic haze, immersing listeners in a rich, mellow slumber. The rhythms intensify on “Blue,” as Johnston somberly sings of acceptance and moving on. “The Place,” rich with catchy harmonies and a drowsily fun chorus, showcases the band’s ability to build up to big crescendos.
Penultimate song “Let’s Go Outside” is Far Caspian’s most successful release to date, putting their full character on display through wondrous melodies that fill the space with fresh hope and warmth – even if the lyrics themselves focus on homesick themes.
Concluding with “Finding My Way Home,” Far Caspian bring us down from the clouds in style: Dynamic highs clash with subtle lows as the band evoke a sense of the “new” and “unknown.” For the first time, we feel some excitement float into the mix – and with that sense of renewal and looking up, Between Days ends.

Emma Gatrill - (2017) Cocoon LP

 

 Willkommen Records ‎– WILLKOMMEN021

 Emma Gatrill is a multi-instrumentalist based in Brighton, UK. Her debut, 2012’s Chapter I, was a poignant collection of songs based around her then-latest acquisition – the harp. Subtly accompanied by various members of Brighton’s Willkommen Collective, her intricate harp playing coupled with a unique vocal fragility drew comparisons to Björk and Joni Mitchell as well as her friends and co-conspirators Rachael Dadd and Rozi Plain.

By the time the album came out, she’d already played clarinet in Laura Marling’s band on Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage, made up part of Broken Social Scene’s horn section on a run of UK dates and toured all over Europe as part of Sons Of Noel And Adrian. Since then she’s been touring and collaborating with kindred spirit Kristin McClement and as a member of Matthew & The Atlas.

In amongst it all, Gatrill somehow found time to develop her own live show beyond the simplicity of Chapter I; augmenting her harp and vocal with ambient analogue synths and drum machines using foot controllers, as well as introducing accompanying guitar atmospherics from label-mate Marcus Hamblett.

Five years and hundreds of live shows with dozens of different bands later, her larger-scale live ambitions fed back into the writing and recording process for Gatrill’s forthcoming second album, Cocoon.

The album showcases a huge leap forward in scope and imagination. The harp, tender vocal and unique take on classic songwriting are still at the core of Gatrill’s sound, but the arrangements draw from a much wider and often darker sonic palette – from orchestral strings to monosynths, drum machines to tap shoes and Casio keyboards to vibraphones.

Gatrill’s circle of influences has widened too – on Cocoon Emma draws from the joyful experimentation of Juana Molina and the intelligent pop and texturally rich arrangements of Julia Holter and My Brightest Diamond.

While the songs are more honed and focused, the lyrical content is broader. Philomela explores Greek mythology to the backdrop of tumultuous strings and thunderous drums and Robin tackles climate change set to chamber pop orchestration; while universal concerns of loss, isolation, hope and togetherness tie the album together.

The album was mixed by Dan Cox whose work for the likes of Laura Marling, Thurston Moore and Florence and the Machine lead to him being named Breakthrough Engineer Of The Year at the Music Producer’s Guild awards.

Dylan Moon - (2019) Only the Blues

 

Rvng Intl. ‎– RVNGNL57 

 Only the Blues is an introduction deferred, and it is the debut album by Dylan Moon. Across its 35 minutes, we are rarely made to understand what, exactly, the source of Moon’s blues is, how that feeling has mutated, or whether there is a life beyond the small rooms and cramped spaces where this music was made. If not opaque, this first meeting with Moon is at least hazily translucent.

This makes Only the Blues something of an esoteric response to an age of radical transparency. Broadly speaking, Moon works in the field of folk music. But from this pasture, he glances pathways to digression; seeking scenic routes and counterintuitive cartography, trusting that even the most aimless trip becomes lucid if the foggy details are documented well enough.

On this trip, images spill from Moon, and most of them seem foreboding. We are given the sense - both from his lyrics and from the viscous mood he creates, using electronic manipulation to send his songs down compositional egresses, from which they emerge with a mysterious residue - that things have not been going well. Even the most saccharine memories, dancing before a freshly lit fire or hanging out with childhood cartoons come to life, feel caked with a hidden history.

Moon studied electronic production and sound design at music school, and then moved to Los Angeles in hopes of working in the film industry. While simultaneously graduating from pop to psych to prog to beat-making, he returned to traditional songwriting on the west coast, working out his ideas over a pair of self-released EPs. He also stumbled upon an ancient drum machine with scratched contact points and seventy years spent under restless thumbs, finding a kind of sonic entropy in its past-futurist rhythm signals that serve as Only the Blues’ spiritual center.

The album was recorded in Moon’s bedrooms in L.A. and Boston, small spaces made more claustrophobic by the soundproofing he hammered into the doors and the bedding he leaned against the walls. A single soul, spinning away (and out) in a cramped room: It’s a state of mind — and being — that Moon used his formal training to refine across Only the Blues. This is an album ornate with so many musical ideas to express that it teeters between ecstasy and anxiety.

Tamaryn - (2019) Dreaming the Dark

 

Dero Arcade ‎– none 

TAMARYN has been crafting gothic dreampop and soaring shoegaze records for the better part of a decade. With each subsequent release she has both expanded her sonic palette and playfully deconstructed it, the project itself an iconoclastic exploration involving a variety of collaborators and genre-melding that has spanned three previous albums, an EP and a handful of singles. While 2015’s lush Cranekiss marked a synth-inflected left turn for the artist, Dreaming the Dark pushes her sound even further. It’s simultaneously her hardest, darkest record and still somehow her most accessible, landing squarely in the sweet spot between between pop and post-punk. Produced by and co-written with JORGE ELBRECHT (Ariel Pink, Frankie Rose, Wild Nothing, Gang Gang Dance), the nine tracks on Dreaming the Dark represent an emotional and aesthetic evolution, the front and center guitar washes and foggy ennui of her earlier records giving way to crystalline beats, synths and lyrical narratives aimed directly at the jugular. While the record still occasionally mines a 4AD-adjacent musical palette—all manner of Cocteau Twins gauze, her Kate Bush meets Tears for Fears level vocality and melodic guitar lines that might have swirled off of a mid-80’s Cure record—Dreaming also pack a hefty emotional wallop. The album flirts with the aesthetics of classic '80s synthpop while playing at the fringes of hip hop production and forward-thinking electronica.

Dean Wareham & Cheval Sombre - (2018) Dean Wareham vs. Cheval Sombre

 

 Double Feature Records ‎– LP-DBL 0015 

 Dean Wareham and Cheval Sombre bill their new collaboration as “western dream-pop,” which isn’t such a strange pairing: western-style songs have always had a dreamlike air. From Sons of the Pioneers through Hollywood’s singing cowboys to Marty Robbins and Johnny Cash, tunes like “Blue Shadows on the Trail,” “El Paso” or “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” offer a romanticized vision of the Old West, with dual emphases on manly self-reliance and tender longing for home. Wareham and Sombre (the project of Chris Porpora) co-opt the sentiments and add hazy musical arrangements to match on 10 songs drawn from the western-music canon and more contemporary artists, including Bob Dylan, the Magnetic Fields and Townes Van Zandt.

Wareham has considerable dream-pop credentials, having played in Galaxie 500 and Luna—touchstone bands for fans of atmospheric guitars and quavering vocals. Porpora is less well known, but Wareham has played on his albums and released Cheval Sombre’s self-titled 2009 LP on his own Double Feature label. They make a potent duo, giving more defined musical structures to the sometimes amorphous nature of dream-pop, and creasing the songs with a taut edge. The twosome tilts the balance more toward pop, but there’s still enough western here to make these songs sound like modern updates of what had been a bygone musical tradition.
The musical arrangements play up the sense of dreamy fantasy. Backed Britta Phillips of Luna and Dean & Britta, Anthony LaMarca from the War on Drugs and Will Halsey of Sugarcandy Mountain, Warham and Sombre employ chiming guitar arpeggios, soft-focus wordless backing vocals and understated ornamentation. Tightly coiled tremolo guitar and whistling add atmosphere to “Wand’rin’ Star,” written for the stage (and, later, movie) musical Paint Your Wagon. There’s an eerie keening from what sounds like a singing saw on another movie song, “My Rifle, My Pony and Me,” which Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson performed in Rio Bravo in 1959. Steel guitar underpins the lonesome air of Van Zandt’s “Greensboro Woman,” and muted piano chords and quiet acoustic guitar give the Magnetic Fields’ “Grand Canyon” a stately feel.

Wareham and Sombre take turns singing lead, a curtain of reverb adding depth to their vocals. That hypnotic, from-a-distance sensibility accentuates trebly electric guitars and booming tom-toms on Robbins’ “A Bend in the River,” and lends an otherworldly feel to the traditional “Wayfaring Stranger,” which mixes in majestic ’60s-style folk-rock vocal harmonies worthy of the Mamas & the Papas. Wareham sings that one, his voice still clear and appealingly plaintive. Sombre’s vocals have a darker cast, and he tends to murmur as if he’s sharing deep secrets, especially on Dylan’s “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” and Blaze Foley’s wistful “If Only I Could Fly,” which Merle Haggard recorded on his 2000 album by the same name.

A dream-pop icon teaming up with a protégé on an album of western(-ish) songs is probably not a collaboration anyone was looking for, but if Dean Wareham vs. Cheval Sombre was unexpected, it also turns out to be unexpectedly satisfying. They sing well together, they picked interesting songs to interpret and they perform them in a way that is reverent without feeling too earnest. Sounds like a dream.

Temple Of Angels - (2019) Cerise Dream 7''

 

Funeral Party Records ‎– FP034 

Los Angeles-based dream pop act Temple of Angels are back with “Cerise Dream”, their first single of 2019. The new song follows the release of their sophomore EP Foiled and debut US tour in 2018 which saw them sharing the stage with the likes of Iceage, Beach Fossils, Boy Harsher, and John Maus.

“Cerise Dream”, along with its B-side Breathless showcases the band diving into more a melodic direction, creating the perfect soundtrack for the summer days ahead. This is music to fall in love to, and with, capturing the same shimmering pastel daydreams of the Cocteau Twins on Blue Bell Knoll, and Heaven or Las Vegas, or The Sundays via Reading, Writing and Arithmetic—music from a time of unbridled optimism and sincerity, when goth, shoegaze, and alternative rock blended together in warm reverie.

Carla dal Forno - (2019) Look Up Sharp

 

Kallista Records ‎– KALLISTALP001 

 Carla dal Forno announces her second full-length album, ​Look Up Sharp​, on her own Kallista Records.

The London-based artist enters a new era in her peerless output pushing her dub-damaged DIY dispatches to the limits of flawless dream-pop. In a transformative move towards crystal clear vocals and sharpened production, Look Up Sharp is an evolutionary leap from the thick fog and pastoral stillness of her Blackest Ever Black missives, You Know What It’s Like (2016) and The Garden EP (2017).

Three years since her plain-speaking debut album, the Melbourne-via-Berlin artist finds herself absorbed in London’s sprawling mess. The small-town dreams and inertia that preoccupied dal Forno’s first album have dissolved into the chaotic city, its shifting identities, far-flung surroundings and blank faces. Look Up Sharp is the story of this life in flux, longing for intimacy, falling short and embracing the unfamiliar. Dal Forno connects with kindred spirits and finds refuge in darkened alleys, secret gardens and wherever else she dares to look.

In her own territory between plaintive pop, folk and post-punk dal Forno conjures the ghosts of AC Marias, Virginia Astley and Broadcast through her brushwork of art-damaged fx and spectral atmospheres. The first half of the record is filled with dubbed-out humid bass lines, which tether stoned hazes of psychedelic synth work as on ‘Took A Long Time’ and ‘No Trace.’ These are contrasted with songs like ‘I’m Conscious and ‘So Much better’ that channel the lilting power of YMG and are clear sequels-in-waiting to dead-eyed classics like ‘Fast Moving Cars.’

The B-side begins with the feverish bass and meandering melody of ‘Don’t Follow Me,’ which takes The Cure’s ‘A Forest’ as its conceptual springboard. It’s the clearest lyrical example since ‘The Garden’ of dal
Forno’s unmatched ability to unpick the masculine void of post-punk and new wave nostalgia to reflect contemporary nuance. Look Up Sharp reaches its satisfying conclusion with ‘Push On’ - dal Forno’s most explicit foray into an undiscovered trip hop universe between Massive Attack and Tracey Thorn. The album’s last gasp finds personal validation in fragility: ‘I push on / I’m the Place I’m Going,’ a self discovery lifted by reverberant broken beats and glass-blown vocals.

Adding further depth to Look Up Sharp are the instrumentals, which flow seamlessly between the vocal-led pieces. ‘Hype Sleep’ and ‘Heart of Hearts’ drink from the same stream as The Flying Lizard’s dubbed-out madness and the vivid purple sunsets of Eno’s Another Green World. While ‘Creep Out of Bed’ and ‘Leaving for Japan’ funnel the fourth-world psychedelia of Cyclobe’s industrial-folk into the vortex of Nico’s The Marble Index.

Conceived as a whole, Look Up Sharp is a singular prism in which light, sound and concept bend at all angles. A deeply personal but infinitely relatable album its many surfaces are complex but authentic, enduring but imperfect, hard-edged but delicate. A diamond. Look up sharp or you’ll miss it.

Zoon - (2020) Bleached Wavves

 

Paper Bag Records ‎– PAPER128LP 

The opener on Zoon's debut album, Bleached Wavves, sounds like a familiar shoegaze prologue. Titled "Cloud Formations," it sounds like something My Bloody Valentine or Lilys might have come up with, with hypnotically swirling, textured guitars that meet and diverge in blissful dissonance.

While Bleached Wavves continues the path set out in its intro — featuring textured guitars that glide and crash in a collage of reverb and delay effects — it also blazes new trails in shoegaze, particularly in the way it implements sounds from traditional First Nations music, an inventive mixture Daniel Monkman cheekily calls "moccasin-gaze."

The most ambitious example of this mixture comes on "Was & Always Will Be," which features a layered, gauzy hum, jingly percussion, resonant drums, and voices singing in refrain — a breathtaking kaleidoscope of sound that uses shoegaze's blueprint for something totally new.

Because Monkman's influences are wide, the sounds on Bleached Wavves are varied, but never beyond cohesion. On the title track, guitars whirr and pulse, recalling MBV, and on "Light Prism," they plink and wail, like something off a Slowdive record. The influence is clear, but it's not distracting: both tracks feel like astute observations of the genre, honing in on its elements to subtly evoke nostalgia, longing and hope.

Bleached Wavves is rich with emotion, offering a nuanced account of Monkman's own journey of pain, sobriety and healing. Much of this journey is implied even in the band's name, which is derived from the Ojibwe word Zoongide'ewin, meaning "bravery," "courage" and "the Bear Spirit."

On "Infinite Horizons," as drums echo, collaborator Jesse Davidson says, "This is my attempt to reveal our truth in your language," before describing how he understands his past pain as strength: "strength of oneself, strength in numbers, strength to protect my people and our future from the pain your ancestors cut into our DNA. With one last journey into the sun let the fire be the ritual. Cleanse my spirit from this underserving pain."

The standout closer, "Help Me Understand," whirls with a haze of guitars and thrumming traditional drums, creating an expansive, looping soundscape that seems to transcend shoegaze. Like much of Bleached Wavves, it's intricate and subtle, familiar yet inventive, and rich with layers of life and sound. Zoon's debut album is nothing short of remarkable.

BlackieBlueBird - (2018) Ghost River

 

 T&E Records ‎– 1014

 Copenhagen’s dream pop duo BlackieBlueBird arrive with their debut album “Ghost River”.

BlackieBlueBird are the vocalist Heidi Lindahl and the composer Nils Lassen; together they create delicate torch songs of reverb and echo that captivate the listener with resonating guitars, lap steels, mandolins and a choir of mermaids that sporadically embraces Heidi’s golden voice. The echoes of love and longing, hellos and deceiving goodbyes live within her unique and clear vibrato.

GHOST RIVER symbolizes a subterranean river of memories that flows beneath our cities while on the surface we live our lives behind walls, among buildings and clamorous streets, ever pursuing our hopes and dreams. Unaware that deep within we are influenced by the GHOST RIVER, we fulfill what lies in our destinies as tiny twigs floating along the flow of a gentle water stream.

Resembling a dream, GHOST RIVER is an album that dwells in a drumless, cinematic atmosphere filled with romantic soundscapes of yearning desire and melodic choruses that caress the ear in a liberating and cathartic way.

Routine Death - (2019) 2 Weeks to 4 Months

 

 Fuzz Club Records ‎– FC113V12 

‘2 Weeks to 4 Months’ is the second album from Gothenburg-via-Texas duo Routine Death, comprised of Lisa and Dustin Zozaya. The album fuses shoegaze-y psych-pop and lo-fi electronics to create something that’s at times mesmerising and atmospheric and at others, distorted and unpredictable. The new album arrives following their 2018 debut album Parallel Universes and a summer of live dates that included a short tour with Wooden Shjips and performance at Fuzz Club Eindhoven 2019.

Lisa and Dustin – two musicians from Sweden and the US respectively – met whilst Dustin was on the road with his previous band Holy Wave. Now married but still separated by 7000 odd miles, the pair began working on music together to bide the time and give them something to channel themselves into collectively. After a few years spent recording things in their bedrooms and sending them forwards and backwards via WeTransfer, in 2018 the duo released their first set of songs as Routine Death: a debut album called ‘Parallel Universes’.

Just over a year on and they’re back with another collection of songs which, Dustin says, picks up where the last left off: “2 weeks to 4 months is the second part of this whole thing. There are some similarities to the last record, Lisa and I wrote and recorded it separately for the most part. It’s a collection of songs that are pretty reflective and cohesive of a certain period of our lives. When I started to look at all the work we’d done I realized it was one linear piece.”

Ai Aso - (2020) The Faintest Hint LP

 

 Ideologic Organ ‎– SOMA034

 Ai Aso’s immaculately crafted form of minimalist pop music skirts the edges of tensity with the manner and with the skill of a tight rope walker, calmly balancing repeatedly at every step, with a combination of surety and the risk of a slip, a fall, and an unknown uncoiling of events. Aso's capacity to capture, or inspire, the tension and attention from within the listener and observer are quite pronounced. At Aso's concert the performance constantly teeters near the brink, a sharpened awareness in the hall emerges from all observing, with the will of that most delicate balance. On “The Faintest Hint” she brings a meta level to the proceedings, the dream of a singer in a bright sunlit room in the centre of the density of the society, simply and precisely searching for single ideas, single tones, a sense of sensuality and even a dream of a grandeur (rock dream) emerge. A stillness prevails, even a sharp set of instances of dreaming, melancholia, nostalgia… or even saudade. The album was recorded, mixed & mastered by Soichiro Nakamura at Peace Music between 2018-2020. Atsuo and I joined these sessions as producers, and moreso as catalysts, yet also became the skeleton of a band on the album (with the tender touch). The legendary Japanese rock band Boris accompany Aso on two pieces. A faintest hint of sharpness and la tendresse féroce quickly erodes into a fine brief cloud of the purest crystalline dust.

Beach House - (2018) 7

 

Sub Pop ‎– SP1240 

While Beach House's sound has always focused on hypnotic melodies and Victoria Legrand's rich vocals -- and likely always will -- they've found different ways to explore this potent combination on each album. Legrand and Alex Scally delivered some of their most dramatic experiments on 2015's Depression Cherry and Thank Your Lucky Stars, which presented a surprising amount of sides to their music even as they stripped it down to the basics. If possible, they're even more committed to change on their aptly named seventh album. To make 7, Beach House opted to work with Sonic Boom instead of longtime producer Chris Coady; brought their live drummer James Barone into the studio; and recorded songs as soon as they were done writing them instead of waiting to record all of them at once. This creative liberation resonates on every track, whether Scally and Legrand build up the instrumentation or pare it back, touch on their familiar sounds or invent new ones. 7's sequencing spotlights just how wide its range is, juxtaposing songs that sound wildly different, but equally like Beach House. The galactic whoosh of "Dark Spring" -- a key example of Boom's influence -- sounds all the more vast next to "Pay No Mind," the band's warmest, most down-to-earth love song yet. Similarly, "L'Inconnue"'s blissful call-and-response contrasts nicely with the edgy "Drunk in LA," where the beats and synths evoke rain-slicked streets and city lights. Then there are the songs that feel completely new: with its warping synths and enigmatic vibe, "Lemon Glow" gives the Beach House mystique a sci-fi update, while the sleek "Black Car" incorporates hints of dance and R&B without sounding like the duo is chasing trends. "Dive" is another standout, shifting from rainy-day contemplation to speeding down the road with the windows down in a way that's seamless and exhilarating. Elsewhere, Legrand uses 7's eclectic sounds as an opportunity to experiment with different lyrical perspectives that add depth to the album's dreamy surfaces, as on "Girl of the Year," where its cavernous sweetness echoes its tale of a young woman famous for self-destruction. Throughout 7, Beach House feel more concerned with capturing moments fully rather than conforming to notions of what a cohesive album is. That these songs sound like they came from different albums is ultimately more refreshing than disorienting, and the excitement that courses through each track is palpable. Scally and Legrand could have only made 7 at this point in their career -- not only do they have the skill to change things up, but the wisdom to know how and when to do so.

Beach House - (2015) Thank You Lucky Stars

 

Sub Pop ‎– SP1142

 Thank Your Lucky Stars is our sixth full length record. It was written after Depression Cherry from July 2014 - November 2014 and recorded during the same session as Depression Cherry. The songs came together very quickly and were driven by the lyrics and the narrative. In this way, the record feels very new for us, and a great departure from our last few records. Thematically, this record often feels political. It's hard to put it into words, but something about the record made us want to release it without the normal "campaign." We wanted it to simply enter the world and exist.

Carlo Giustini - (2019) Custodi

 

 Lontano Series ‎– LONTANO-TP05

Is it possible to capture the sound of a state of being, of a memory, of a past sensation?
Is there a possibility to translate a thought which once was into vibrational waves?
Behind this concept is based much of this work, this research carried out in the early autumn days of 2018.
The spark that started this research came by chance, or rather this spark was manifested to me in a place full of heavy memory, full of words, rich of dense and contradictory emotions. It was mid-August and I was at the local central bar in my neighborhood in Sant’Angelo. At the bar counter I happened to hear a tale that struck me in particular: a gentleman holding a glass of merlot told a friend the story of the tragic end of the custodians of Villa Letizia:
Villa Letizia is an ancient Venetian villa located inside the national park of the river Sile, a structure of the 18th century located right in front of my house, a villa which I see every day from my window while I have breakfast in the...