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Recorded at Soup Studios with producer Simon Trought at the helm, and inspired by the psycho-geography of walks in North London woods and in the forgotten grey hinterland of the city's back streets, Comet Gain's seventh album Paperback Ghosts comes soaked in autumn melancholy. Tender-hearted but not miserable, defiant but not angry, it maintains the delicate balance that has always been Comet Gain's strength.

The album is about ghosts: the half-forgotten spectres of lost loves; the people who live inside their own sepia-tinted memories; the mystical phantom presence of previous owners retained by used books, the paperbacks haunted by old fingerprints. Blending psychedelia, folk-rock, garage muscle and 4am sadness, the songs draw on the esoteric that lies behind the ordinary. All contain a hope or sweetness. Sad Love and other Short Stories is about being haunted by memories of a lost, unrequited love, while in An Orchid Stuck in Her Throat a living ghost reflects on a life of missed chances. Stranger still is Confessions of a Daydream, wherein a mystic mod magician wanders Limehouse conjuring up the ghosts of Margaret Thatcher and flame haired 50s witch goddess Marjorie Cameron to wage a perpetual psychic war in the phantom back streets of broken London, before the defiantly undead John McKeown (The Yummy Fur / The 1990s) pops up at the end to intone some words of wisdom.  

Comet Gain are David Charlie Feck (vocals, guitar), Ben Phillipson (guitar), Rachel Evans (vocals), ex-Morrissey/The Meteors drummer Woodie Taylor (percussion), Anne Laure Guillain (keyboards) and new recruit, Clientele bassist James Hornsey ' a motley group of like-minded romantics, taking pride in an abject failure to care about the normal band model. Inspired at times by early Creation Records, Television Personalities and mod culture, drawing from the same ideals as Dexys, The Style Council and Vic Godard and from the lineage of The Velvet Underground, The Byrds and the 13th Floor Elevators, their mystic anarchist principles blend French New Wave with English kitchen-sink heart. For years they have drifted through scenes picking up people and emotional ties - from Riot Grrrl to acid punks, C86 to lo-fi - yet somehow outliving their peers and in turn inspiring a younger generation of DIY musicians like The Cribs, Love Is All, Veronica Falls, and Crystal Stilts.  

On each album they record, Comet Gain bring together their myriad of influences, creating a cohesive aesthetic between sound, artwork, liner notes and ideas. "Paperback Ghosts" is no different, offering us a glimpse into a haunted half-world with its strings, yearning harmonies, 12-string acoustic guitars and half-focused vision of pianos in reverb, while remaining at heart a pop record, a richly textured affirmation of Comet Gain's twenty-year anti-career.

Tracklisting:
1. Long After Tonite's Candles Are Blown
2. Sad Love And Other Short Stories
3. Behind The House She Lived In
4. Wait 'til December
5. Breaking Open The Head Part 1
6. The Last Love Letter
7. Sixteen Oh Four
8. (All The) Avenue Girls
9. Your Haunted Heart
10. Far From The Pavillion
11. An Orchid Stuck Inside Her Throat
12. Confessions Of A Daydream

The last few years have seen Chicago Footwork rise to international success, and Traxman's debut album - 'The Mind of Traxman' on Planet Mu - played no small part in that. It showcased Cornelius Ferguson's brilliant ability to synthesise the beat digging of classic hip hop with the high-speed abstraction of Footwork's house-derived beat science.

The selection of tracks on this second chapter show a slightly different take on Traxman's abilities. Instead of bringing in concepts from other genres, he simply creates a wider variety of Footwork, made with a minimal, reduced palette. Often just one or two samples are selected and diced into brain-blurring cubist puzzles that bear little relation to their original sources, or anything else for that matter.

A number of the tracks here show off the high-speed micro-edited possibilities of Footwork, that end up bringing the sound closer to a faster, hands-on, mpc-punched version of micro-house, bringing out a jagged, fitful character that keeps you on your toes. Tracks like 'Time Slip' echo SND, but cut with hip hop breaks and flying snares, while 'Blow Your Whistle (Tha Out Of Here Remixx)' chops up a short vocal and whistle noise to ridiculously energetic effect. Other tracks pull on a techno edge, 'Computer Getto's galloping game of hide and seek with Kraftwerk, 'Bubbles'  electronic arcade game blips, or 'Under Cover Jack's 303 groove, remind one of the house origins of this music, while 'Can Nutin Hold Me Back' has a leg in soul's history, with its detached accapella chopped into twitchy choruses. Later on '15146' cuts up barked numbers over sprightly woodwind while 'Gone and Hit that Shit' reduces words to rhythmic shapes, darting around meaning. 'The Edge of Panic' is an unexpected and incredibly aggressive detour into Footwork x Speed Metal that could be a micro-genre of its own. We catch our breath with 'I Wanna Be High' before the album ends with the gentle bass and chopped jazz drums of 'U Got Me Running (Remixx)'. The mind of Traxman dazzles again.

Traxman, a.k.a. Corky Strong, real name Cornelius Ferguson, is a Chicago Footwork veteran whose discography also includes many classic Ghetto House and Juke releases going as far back as the mid '90s with music on labels like the legendary Dance Mania. He's worked as a DJ for over three decades and was a member of the Geto DJz and Ghetto Teknitianz crews alongside two other Footwork scene leaders, DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn. He describes his style as "funky, soulful and a bit eccentric."

With his second release for Planet Mu this year, 'Dream On' is more of a full-length outing for Ital aka Daniel Martin-McCormick and a much more substantial record than the popular and critically acclaimed 'Hive Mind'.

On 'Dream On' Ital takes his experimentation with house and techno forms even further, creating impressionistic deconstructions from the tropes of early house and techno. Sunny chords, laid back drum shuffle and rhythmic vocal loops are picked apart and threaded with a rich psychodrama of delirious textures, tidal chords and uneasy roughness and dissonance.

Having spent over 20 weeks on the road since the completion of 'Hive Mind', 'Dream On' reflects the raw energy of the live show and the touring mindset: the heady, dream-feel of house, cut with both dub's fracturing smear and an understanding of the power of distortion, honed from years working in DIY and noise.

'Despot' starts the album with a trancey bassline punctuated with off-key vocal stabs, the form of the track brutally prized apart with pitch-shifting seasick chords. It's the longest track and and a powerful opener. 'Boi's' mix of stuttering vocal loops, aqueous chords and frantic drums is tainted with sorrow and loss. It's got a nervous energy, always feeling like it's going to topple in on itself, lapsing from ravey propulsion into nauseated hiss and back again.

'Eat Shit (Waterfalls Mix)' is broken and distressed techno in miniature, making the most of distortion and echo to create shimmer and splinters of noise over rough, murky percussion.

The dark center of the album, 'Enrique', strips things back to a cavernous ambience with molasses-slow vocals and a heartbeat drum, building into pulsing tones and scratching noise pulled across the spectrum. Another miniature, 'Housecapella', is deep house smudged and deconstructed into weightlessness; it's over before it begins to drag you in.

'What a Mess' sounds like music rotting; running epic, wilting chords, soaring melodies and hysterical vocals through curdling effects. 'Deep Cut' finishes by rubbing warm, emotional deep house tones, shuffling drums and claps against harsh electric guitar-like drones. 'Dream On' takes you out of the ordinary and drops you into Ital's dislocated dance.

Brighton based producer Alan Myson's Ital Tek project returns to Planet Mu for a second long player.

Meeting dubstep and garage's matrix of sub bass and lurching 2-step rhythms half-way with electronica at its most melodic, 'Midnight Colour' is its name and it's epic. The mood has lightened since his debut 'Cyclical' plus the tempo has dropped to a more languorous 130 bpm creating more space to enfold the melody and texture.

Songs like 'Moonbow' or 'Subgiant' embody an optimistic nocturnal reverie that could count the Black Dog's 'Bytes' album as it's ancestor. In contrast, 'Satellite' has a darker feel with it's New Romantic style synth melodies set to a skeletal rhythm, and 'Black and White's surging, wordless vocals are carried by gentle synths and bass arrangements. 'Strangelove' has a more stepping feel, set to a tough 4/4 beat and 'Infinite' marries throbbing bass with marimba and echoing Timpani crashes. The album fittingly culminates with 'Restless Tundra', a song that features the vocals of Anneka, which feature in sampled slithers throughout many of the tracks, the piece summing up the reflective mood of the album.

The last few years have seen Chrissy working hard on the optimum formula for getting down and having non-stop fun. 'Women's Studies' is an album of party starting, populist mutations with vocal contributions from the Dancehall mcees MC ZULU, Rubi Dan and Warrior Queen, plus rappers Popeye, Coool Dundee and Johnny Moog. It's made with a brazen and unashamed love for dance music, mixing energetic tropes into a sticky tropical punch.

The influence of Ghetto House and Juke from his chosen home of Chicago hangs over the album. From the off, things get fleet-footed on 'Break You Off' with it's night-time atmosphere built from Rhodes chord progressions and sexy vocals over tight, subtle rolling footwork drums and bass; it's like a 160bpm musical massage. Later on 'Bussin Down' continues the footwork influence with a sped-up grooving funk sample, over which DJ Spinn gives the orders. Elsewhere 'Heavy Butt's' seesawing bassline and 8-bit melody gets the message across loud and clear, while the impressionist footwork of 'Jiggle' is probably the most jiggling piece of music ever recorded.

Other tracks such as 'New Juke Swing' mix crunchy drums of the kind you might find on a Teddy Riley production with a bassline of an early grime record while Rubi Dan acts as master of ceremonies¦ 'The Vibe Is So Right', featuring MC ZULU, pits chopped breakbeats against big basslines at funky house speed, which quickly intensify into sharp junglist patterns. On 'Bump Uglies' Chrissy mixes cute girl vocals chopped up over a flat dancehall beat while MC Popeye rides the rhythm making his intentions clear, while the album's poppiest moment 'Sweet Thang' features Coool Dundee and Johnny Moog in an inspired high speed mix of jungle and electro with soul vocals and mcing.

Things get decidedly early 90's with Warrior Queen on 'Under Dress' a strange amalgam of acid and (more) New Jack Swing, with Warrior Queen dropping some filthy lyrics. The 90's revival continues with the 'U Got Me Burnin Up (Club Cirque)' which mixes high speed ravey piano and diva samples with crackin 160bpm juke and hip house vocals from Coool Dundee.

On 'Women's Studies' Murderbot manages to twist underground music forms into a new kind of high quality pop music that's a joy to listen to.

At a party in the late 80s in The Hague, a local DJ by the name of DJ Moortje accidentally dropped a dancehall twelve-inch at 45RPMs, causing chaos in the audience. Not the kind of negative heckling you get when a record is skipped, but the kind of excitement that happens when a movement has been started. This beautiful mistake resulted in Bubbling, a cultural expression of immigrants from The Dutch Antilles and Suriname, a genre that would take these communities by storm in Holland in the 1990s. Jamaican exports such as the Fever Pitch and Bam Bam riddims were double and half-timed, with Cutty Ranks on one hand sounding like a prepubescent chipmunk, the other hand sounding like an evil duppy. Its sound borrowed slave rhythms from Curacao (DJ Moortje's origin), creating a new Caribbean style of music in Europe that ran parallel to London's Jungle scene.

This excitement eventually died down in The Netherlands, and Dutch House became the dominant genre in the late 2000s. There was more money to be made, and bigger parties to be played when your music didn't consist of pitched up dancehall, and bubbling became reserved exclusively for the black and Latin crowds, especially teenagers. However, House in Holland was littered with Caribbean influence, and eventually a new generation of DJs would pioneer a new sound, known as Bubbling House. A group of cousins, DJ's Shaun-D, Master-D, Daycard, and Deschuurman who loved Dutch House but couldn't shake their traditions created a new sound, with hyper Fruity Loop synths over pitched up Dem Bow drums. The sound could be found all over Youtube and regional social media sites, the same way the rest of the global youth were distributing their music from Chicago to Luanda.

Anti-G a.k.a. Kentje'sz Beatsz, an 18-year-old producer from the South Holland city of Delft is of the current Bubbling House generation, but his music often stabs at other realms. Like many of his peers, he takes in the popular styles of the black and Latin communities of Holland: Bubbling, Reggaeton, Dutch and American Hip-Hop, and House, and loads those influence into Fruity Loops on his PC. This often results in all of those genres crammed into 3 minutes of audio, though occasionally he singles one out. The atmosphere is cold and industrial, not-unlike the sound created by UK Grime producers, but with polyrhythms that swing like Funky House. His tracks often can't decide if they're for a rave or a rap show, but in the end sound like the soundtrack for someone getting stabbed in space.

Anti-G Presents 'Kentje'sz Beatsz' is a collection of material made between 2009 and 2010, showing all of the faces of his work. Bubbling Cause Trouble and Crack The Glass! tap into the current club scene of Holland, while tracks such as Reggaeton Man! are his own mutant Dem Bow riddims. It's a trip through Dutch social networking sites such as Hyves, and an example of the experimentation brewing with the current digital youth of the Surinamese and Antillean communities of The Netherlands. These drums may come from the Caribbean, but the synths belong on a space station.

180 gram vinyl in a beautiul gatefold sleeve!

Ireland's best band THE REVELLIONS are back with a brand new album on Dirty Water Records, five years since their eponymous debut.

This is a band that, when seen live, are compelling, winning over audiences instantly, even those who aren't familiar with their pounding psychedelic garage rock'n'roll style of music. Those of you who have their first album and who saw them play live on previous visits to London will be no doubt be counting down the days.

180 gram vinyl in a beautiul gatefold sleeve!180 gram vinyl in a beautiul gatefold sleeve!180 gram vinyl in a beautiul gatefold sleeve!

CD digipak with booklet.
LP + download.

Bob Mould has confirmed June 9 as the release date for his all new studio album, Beauty & Ruin. Described as a compact epic, Beauty & Ruin packs a staggering lifetime's worth of emotion and experience into a 36-minute package sure to be hailed as a landmark addition to Bob's formidable body of work. As with 2012²s Silver Age, Beauty & Ruin finds Bob joined by his longtime band of bassist Jason Narducy and drummer Jon Wurster, who will be backing Bob at this year's SXSW as he debuts Beauty & Ruin material. Prior to that, Bob will wrap up the intimate 25 Years of Workbook mini-tour with a March 6 return to The Late Show with David Letterman and two final sold out shows March 7 and 8 at New York's City Winery, both featuring Narducy and cellist Alison Chesley.

Track Listing :

Side A:  
1. Low Season
2. Little Glass Pill
3. I Don't Know You Anymore
4. Kid With Crooked Face
5. Nemeses Are Laughing
6. The War.

Side B :
1. Forgiveness
2. Hey Mr. Grey
3. Fire in the City
4. Tomorrow Morning
5. Let the Beauty Be
6. Fix It