Tough Love Records
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Visit product page →“But into my miserable brain, always concerned with looking for noon at two o’clock"
- Charles Baudelaire (1869)
The Foreign Department is the second album by Astrel K, the solo project helmed by Stockholm-based British ex-pat, Rhys Edwards. Those already familiar with Edwards’ work will likely know him for fronting the cultishly great Ulrika Spacek, and given he operates as the principal songwriter in both projects, much of the same hallmarks of his cathartic, elliptical songwriting are present in Astrel K. Nonetheless, The Foreign Department feels like a rubicon moment of sorts, and the album that Edwards has unconsciously been working towards his entire creative life.As a title, The Foreign Department offers an instructive guide for the listener, framing a life-in-transition/artist-in-exile document that maps two impromptu moves in twelve months for its songwriter: the first from London in pursuit of a relationship, the second between homes in Stockholm as that decade long relationship then suddenly dissolved.
Indeed, diffusion, dissolution and reconstitution feel like appropriate touchstones for its recurring themes. Written amidst the flux of two states, at once isolated from home and then any established emotional anchor, the resulting eleven tracks came to represent a precognitive search for shifting identity and with it forming an unwittingly biographical record. It's commendable and somewhat telling that during this shake up, Edwards somehow landed upon his most realised and original work.With a former life stripped away, there emerged an opportunity to reinvent a sense of self through art, now not just as a writer, but a composer also. Developing the confidence to arrange songs in ways he'd previously considered off-limits, while also taking cues from the opulent string and brass arrangements of records like Mercury Rev's Deserters' Songs and Death of A Ladies Man by Leonard Cohen, Edwards enlisted a range of performers to bring to life the mini-symphonies forming in his head. Perhaps it's inevitable that an album written while facing the consequences of being alone would eventually ossify around the process of bringing people together.
For all its troubled origins, The Foreign Department is a remarkably warm sounding collection. Edwards' lyrics are typically knotty and neurotic, dancing around the poetry of quarter-life anxiety, but the music itself is often joyous and even uplifting, the combination expressing that neat duality of melancholic euphoria.
Lead single, 'Darkness At Noon', likely captures this all best. Named for the French idiom "midi a quatorze heures", the maddening idea of attempting the impossible for the sake of some greater possibly pointless cause, it directly grapples with the opposing notions of wanting and not wanting, of being here and being there at the same time. The conflicting and impossible self. It’s something Edwards addresses in the song at perhaps his most open, opining, “I know I want to be seen, but I hate most of what comes out of me”. And yet here is, putting it all out in the open and on the line, the dialectics of his enlightenment up on show.
Edwards sings variously of crises, "torrid pieces of art", of "houses on fire" and not "having the guts for it", yet these troubling sentiments are framed by seemingly incongruous swelling strings, chirping horns or motorik percussion, creating that sense of pushing forward or floating above, of wrapping your troubles in dreams, a salve for the moments when you get a bit too much for yourself.
Tracklisting:
1. Heavy Is the Head
2. Darkness At Noon
3. By Depol
4. Brighter Spells
5. Firma
6. Birds In Vacant Lots
7. The Foreign Department
8. C Ya!
9. A Rudderless Ship
10. Daffodil
11. R U A Literal Child? -
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'I don't have any repressed emotions that I know of. The world I write about is a jaded version of reality, but where it comes from isn't quite apparent to me yet'Following the release of two self-titled EPs over the past 12 months, AUTOBAHN announce details of debut album, Dissemble, out on 21st August via Tough Love. Dissemble was recorded with Matt Peel at The Nave, a hometown studio situated in the wholly appropriate setting of a disused church. The band co-produced the record with Peel over six intense weeks at the start of 2015, dedicating all of their time to the studio and taking potentially unhealthy cues from the legacy of notorious obsessive, Martin Hannett. The result is an album that pushes the band through various degrees of light and shade, but ultimately into new, unexpected sonic spaces.
'You need to remember all of this world I write about is a warped reality of people I've known or experiences I've been in. I think you can just tell when a bands from Leeds, can't you?'
Motivated by the encouragement of a supportive local scene, AUTOBAHN formed in Leeds in early 2013, and immediately began playing live across the north of England. Those early forays across the Pennines were vital in not only helping the band form their own sound, but also hold a symbolic role in understanding their genesis. The North as both idea and identity is integral to what AUTOBAHN are, where post-industrial landscapes intersect with sudden wide open spaces, a place where community is central, but loneliness can be palpable. There's a dark, oppressive edge to their music, but a hopefulness too. Sisters of Mercy, yes, but also brothers in arms.
'The first track was intended to be a link to the past records. We leave the past behind after that.'
AUTOBAHN first came to the attention of Tough Love via a local support slot with Tampa romantics, Merchandise, and reached the wider world with the release of two now sold out 12's. Those first recordings suggested a classic modern punk band with a penchant for death and glamour, and an impatience to be heard. Time and touring has afforded them the ability to shift gear significantly, and the renewed ambition of Dissemble stands as testament to that. The band were immediately a thrilling live force, but on this album they're wider, more urgent when they want to be, more thoughtful when required. Dissemble is an appropriate title (meaning to conceal one's true motives), because there's something canny at work here. The surface suggests despair, but scratch deeper and the lyrics display a lightness of touch that skewers the over-earnest and overly-serious.
'Dissemble is a twisted romantic view of how AUTOBAHN think: don't take life too seriously'
Life is a joke, but AUTOBAHN aren't laughing. How could they?
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'Melancholy and darkness, and dissonant, uncomfortable music, resonates with us, for whatever reason,' says singer and spokesman Craig Johnson. 'The new record is more melancholy than dissonant. I feel we're just opening up a bit more on this record.'Visit product page →
A sliver of strings, a squeal of feedback, pulsing drums, sheets of steely guitar and sonorous bass, and a rough, declamatory voice - from these primary components, Leeds quintet AUTOBAHN unfurl their second album, The Moral Crossing, which adds more finesse, dynamic and colour to the commitment and energy shown on their 2014 debut Dissemble - an album that Louder Than War described as, 'driving, powerful and passionate - ¦ tapping into addictive darkness of our past and reminding us that that we cannot escape its attractive desolation.'
While Dissemble was made by imagining what the late, great producer Martin Hannett would do, The Moral Crossing is the sound of what AUTOBAHN would do. To capture the new sonic details of the band, lead singer and principal songwriter Craig Johnson, guitarists Michael Pedel and Gavin Cobb, bassist Daniel Sleight and drummer Liam Hilton decided to give up their practice room that doubled as a hardcore/punk venue (which influenced their original sound, as did a love of The Birthday Party) and build their own studio space.
They found a former double-glazing firm, under a disused bridge, in Holbeck (Leeds'red light district), and despite having no experience of such a job, they undertook this feat. It took a year from ripping out the existing contents to finishing the album - which was then mixed in New York by Ben Greenberg, known for his work with the Sacred Bones label.
On top, Johnson taught himself how to make a record after the studio was built. 'I was down there nearly every night,' Johnson recalls. 'It was pretty horrible at times, but worth the pain to have control over everything. We've had the chance to create the sound we want, at times it's more melancholic, and romantic.'
Part of the shift comes from Johnson's newly honed melodies such as Vessel'and Torment', part from a greater use of electronics, such as the synthesiser underpinning a haunting Future', evoking neon-lit rainy-nocturnal rides through a cityscape, likewise the album's title track, which is one song to benefit from the judicious addition of violin and cello. '!'d been listening to classical music, and I'd seen the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra doing Beethoven's Ninth, which was mint, but I felt out of place, that people were looking down at me,' Johnson recalls. 'So, it's good to bring some of that to the record. A couple of tracks, Torment'was one, we ended up replacing the guitars with strings - whatever was best for the song. Like the French female voice in Torment'too, it just felt right.'
This time around, AUTOBAHN decided to create their fearsome depth charges by building the tracks as they went along rather than working on completed songs. As a name, AUTOBAHN has been a bit misleading, as they sound quintessentially Leeds, not Munich or Dusseldorf, but Johnson chose the name because he loved the repetition of rhythm. With Hilton - surely one of the best young drummers alive - driving, Johnson requested they all, 'imagine they were all different part of a machine: a steam engine, say. Again, it just felt right. And then we put it all together. The lyrics came right at the end.'
Johnson's lyrics on The Moral Crossing combine to form a whole: the theme of a birth, 'but that person had no choice in the decision. And then it's about the different outcomes that could happen. Which could be glorious or torturous.'
The words and songtitles suggest more torture than glory - for example, 'A selfless crucifixion / You've nailed in the hard sell' in the manic Obituary': 'Pain out of control' in Torment': 'With your withered hand / Drag me deeper into the fallen ground' in the escalating drama of Fallen'- a word, alongside 'fall', that crops up in several songs. Though Johnson points out that another line from 'Fallen', 'Give a break to that child in the noose' is an example of AUTOBAHN's, 'dark northern humour' (another example was the billboard ad for Dissemble: a hearse, parked outside a funeral parlour, with the band's name in flowers, next to a group of kids holding balloons - ¦)
And though Johnson admits to sudden negative episodes (documented by Low/High', another slowburner that eventually bursts into flames), 'they don't last long. Actually, as a band, we're more optimists. I don't find talking about this stuff as dark', but it's stuff people don't usually want to talk about - execution, rising from the dead, depression, feeling utterly lost and unsure where to go. To understand the moral crossing, to go one way or the other, and how it can change your life. For me, saying this stuff out loud give the feeling that there's a future.'
On Low/High', Johnson sings, 'You're floating higher now / No more discontent' and in the part-spoken word litany that is Creation', 'I want to be there for you / I want to rise on through.' To reinforce the optimistic feeling, gospel singers from the local church sing on both tracks. 'I wouldn't call it holy'but some of the lyrics they were singing were about going to a higher place, even if the whole lyric might contradict that,' says Johnson.
AUTOBAHN have checked their own moral compass, and chosen the hard way - not just building their own studio, but to keep confronting the dark stuff. But their music is infused with the joy of exorcising the darkness: to be there, and rise on through. There is a future, and AUTOBAHN and The Moral Crossing are very much part of it.
Martin Aston, August 2017
Tracklisting :
1. Prologue
2. Obituary
3. Future
4. The Moral Crossing
5. Torment
6. Low/High
7. Execution/Rise
8. Creation
9. Fallen
10. Vessel
Release Date: 03/11/2017 -
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Big Ups' second LP, Before A Million Universes, is at once a fist in the face of complacency and a sonic affirmation to, in Walt Whitman's words, "let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes."
Pretty heady subject matter... Joe Galarraga (vocals), Amar Lal (guitar), Carlos Salguero Jr. (bass), and Brendan Finn (drums), met studying music technology at NYU. Five years later, the city's notorious crucible of garbage, money, and humanity has had a profound and delightful impact on their art.
"Tell me what you're worth / Salary, two weeks off work?" Galarraga screams on "Capitalized," as the bassline frantically roams our conscience like a wet-nosed dog. Galarraga's vocals burn with the heat of a thousand day jobs.
Yet all this righteousness is worth as much as a Che t-shirt if it lacks humility, and more than any of the band's previous work, Before A Million Universes plumbs the depths of self-deception in wickedly clever ways. Who doesn't own a coat made of "The Feathers Of Yes"?
"Count the ideas in my head so I can love every one," our protagonist coos before Lal's guitar tosses lightning bolts through his cloud. "And it feels so warm / wrapped in self-righteous truths."
"Yawp" unspools the exercise in futility that is the overexamined life to the tune of a lumbering giant stomping across a field of insecurities. "How many times can you be poured through the still to the point of perfection? / I've dropped myself through the coils so many times but always come out with something missing / And the proof's so high it makes me dizzy."
The album's emotional and musical core lies in "National Parks," a song Galarraga wrote as a tribute to the sacrifices his mother made to raise him.
We're led through the anger and bewilderment'at his mom's solitary walks through their neighborhood and the selfishness inherent to childhood'and into a coda where you can almost see the sun streaming through the trees of Galarraga's park, drums steady and swelling, a transition in tone and mood that this band has nearly perfected. "I think I saw her say to herself / This is everything I've missed."
Before A Million Universes is Big Ups at their most sincere, urgent, and vital' a salty kiss from the wet lips of Brooklyn's bard.
Tracklisting:
1. Contain Myself
2. Capitalized
3. Posture
4. Feathers of Yes
5. Meet Where We Are
6. Negative (intro)
7. Negative
8. Hope For Someone
9. Knight
10. National Parks
11. So Much You
12. Proximity Effect
13. Yawp -
Visit product page →Brendan Finn, Joe Galarraga, Amar Lal, and Carlos Salguero Jr. met whilst learning about specifications of Cat 5 cables in New York City. Shortly after, they formed a band.
Big Ups blend punk, post-punk, metal, and indie rock into a salty mash that gets stuck to the roof of your mouth. At their brightest, they have been likened to The Descendents, but at their sludgiest, they call to mind bands like Pissed Jeans and The Jesus Lizard, albeit with an Albini-esque metallic clang.Their debut album, Eighteen Hours of Static, was recorded by Charles DeChants in the rock 'n' roll labyrinth known as Excello Recording in Brooklyn over three days.
The album is one characterised by aggressive mood swings. The band slows their usual frantic pace on the burner Wool ' a song about dealing with suffering. They toy with dynamics on white-knuckle grip of TMI, Little Kid, and Fresh Meat. But not to worry ' the mania is still there; first single Goes Black and Atheist Self-Help demand attention with their searing guitars and colossal drums.
Lyrically, the album is a meditation on truth, faith, and science (the record's title is a reference to Carl Sagan's Contact), but like all the best bands, Big Ups don't necessarily have all of the answers, but they'll keep asking the right questions¦Tracklisting:
Side A:
1. Body Parts
2. Goes Black
3. Justice
4. Grin
5. WoolSide B:
1. TMI
2. Little Kid
3. Atheist Self-Help
4. Disposer
5. Fresh Meat
6. Fine Line -
a cosmic, philosophical treatise disguised as an indie rock record. ' PitchforkVisit product page →
Wanna wake up wanting to listen to records / But those old feelings elude me / I raise a toast to the rock n' roll ghost, sings Cymbals Eat Guitars frontman Joseph D'Agostino on the hyper-adrenalized XR, which sounds like a Tonight's the Night outtake recorded at triple speed, with its braying harmonica and spitfire vocal delivery. It's the track that perhaps best captures the spirit of the band's third LP, LOSE, one of coping with abject loss and grief by rediscovering what you've always loved, as difficult as it may be'?the redemptive power of music.
For D'Agostino, this entailed coming to terms with his best friend and musical collaborator Benjamin High, who passed away suddenly seven years ago, just as Cymbals Eat Guitars began recording in earnest. LOSE is a very apropos title because it refers not only to losing Ben, but also it's about a sort of nostalgia, a longing for a time when music meant everything to you and your friends, and it seemed like one great rock record could change everyone's life the way it changed yours, says D'Agostino.
It's about being in mourning for your long-held belief that music could literally change the world. That's the contradiction at the heart of LOSE... You're disillusioned, but somehow you can do nothing else but rail against that feeling mightily and try, once again, to make a record that makes you and everyone else 'wake up wanting to listen to records'. And indeed, the band, rounded out by bassist Matthew Whipple, keyboardist Brian Hamilton, and drummer Andrew Dole, alongside producer John Agnello (Sonic Youth, Kurt Vile), do little wallowing. This is a raucous affair, an Irish Wake, ultimately rooted in nothing less than a celebration of just being alive. What's perhaps most impressive about LOSE is the manner in which D'Agostino comes clean with his emotions, tackling seemingly ineffable mourning without equivocation.
There are no $5 words that you'll have to pull up dictionary.com for... some of the lyrics are directly confessional. Very open, no obfuscation, he explains. I lost my dear friend a while ago and I've sort of been addressing it in song for most of my career, though you probably couldn't really tell until now. It's just a direct expression of grief. I figured if I confronted it head-on on record it'd make for some interesting music.
1. Jackson2. Warning3. XR4. Place Names5. Child Bride6. Laramie7. Chambers8. Lifenet9. Hip Soul -
LP is ltd , colour is called 'blue suede shoes'.Visit product page →
RIYL: Felt, Television Personalities, The Wake, Orange Juice, The Pastels, Young Marble Giants, Veronica Falls.
'angels of light have your souls in a vice / we want to be free / we want to be loved / we want to be kissed from heaven above' David West, Dream on Dreamer
When Tough Love first began putting out records, one of the guiding motivations was to release music that sounds like the music David West makes. We didn't know it at the time, because we hadn't yet heard of him. It's funny how the very thing you're looking for falls into your lap.
If you don't already know of David, and the various guises he performs under, then I'm a little envious, for you have a lot to discover for the first time. Peace or Love, is the second album to be issued under his own name. That can be either your starting point, or your continuation down a road.
The facts: Peace or Love is the follow-up to USA/Australia-based musical artist David West's 2015 cassette release, Drop Out Of Collage. Peace or Love is a collection of songs stemming from wild and free bedroom four-track cassette recordings and personal hard drive sample raiding, with contributions from various musical friends in Perth, Western Australia and SF/LA, California.
West draws inspiration from free-thinking artists of the past and present on this polyphonic platter, from soft indie strumming and free soundscapes, to disco and soul-pop. West currently plays in the guitar pop band Rat Columns, synth-pop project Liberation and post-punk trio Rank/Xerox, and has been in varied acts such as Lace Curtain, Burning Sensation, Total Control and Whalehammer.
If you were feeling particularly grand, you could say that David West has created his own ecology, or you could just say he's a very busy man. I told David over email that Peace or Love feels like an album that was made specifically for me. His reply? 'It is for YOU. And YOU. And YOU. And YOU - ¦Peace or love is the same thing - you want to be free and you want to be loved....but you gotta choose one' This is music from the margins that deserves a place in the middle of anyone's heart. // 'it's peace or love baby / you said it before / that you want it all / it's peace or love, baby' - David West, Peace or Love.
Tracklisting:
1. Untitled
2. Peace or Love
3. Do You Miss Me Around
4. Dream on Dreamer
5. Darkness in My Heart
6. At Pease
7. Darkness in My Heart 2
8. Happiest Man In The Room
9. Au Contraire
10. In Love
11. Darkness in My Heart 3 -
David West is a musical artist from Western Australia based in New York City. He's been active in the shifting sands of underground pop for over a decade. Not dissimilar to the main character in Star Wars, his musical career began in a backwater desert village, in this case, Perth, before he migrated to more glittering metropolises like San Francisco and Melbourne, and finally landing in his current home of New York.Visit product page →
He presently plays in the contemporary outfits Rat Columns, Rank/Xerox and Liberation. In the past he has participated in such groups as Lace Curtain, Burning Sensation and Total Control. DW began releasing eponymous platters in 2015 with the Night People/Happy Endin' full-length cassette Drop Out Of Collage.
This was followed in 2016 by the Peace Or Love LP which featured the radio semi-hit Dream On Dreamer'. DW's move into the "own-name" category of artists came as his other bands began to develop defined identities. He felt that recording under his own name would be an excellent umbrella for both roving experimentation and a more frivolous, post-modern style of pop music that would not fit in the frameworks of his other projects. Also, after crafting band names for over a decade, it was just time.
Cherry On Willow is DW's audio pop vision for 2017. It differs from the last two DW releases by introducing a more collaborative framework, creating the backing group Teardrops - an open ensemble of friends and collaborators, including Bob Jones of Eaters, Louis Hooper of Rat Columns, Mikey Young of Total Control and Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Raven Mahon of Grass Widow, dynamite drummer Griffin Harrison and other supremely talented individuals from the past and future.
The recordings were quite live and spontaneous, hoping to catch some of the magic involved in speed and improvisation, harvesting creative sparks from his musical colleagues and himself.
The album was recorded in various places in the latter half of 2016 - by DW in his practice space in New York City; in a rental rehearsal room in Glasgow; and a garage studio in Guildford, Western Australia, where Rat Columns' recent LP Candle Power was also recorded. Cherry On Willow was recorded quickly and with a 'first thought best thought' philosophy, to capture an old-school pop feeling, with rough edges intact, human movements tracked and uncut. Swiping liberally from various strains of underground pop, glam, rock'n'roll, synth-pop and disco.
RIYL: Felt, The Wake, Orange Juice, The Pastels, Feelies, Belle and Sebastian, Rat Columns.
Tracklisting:
1. Morning Rain
2. Cherry On Willow
3. Joy
4. Love Comes On
5. Time To Forget
6. Reds For The Blues
7. Soft
8. Swan's Beat
9. Call Me Sometime
Release Date: 20/10/2017 -
(250 Black Vinyl).Visit product page →
Display Homes are an Australian three-piece pop band that formed one night in late 2016 at a pool table in Marrickville - Greg and Darrell met Steph, who'd just come back to Sydney from Germany and reckoned she could play drums.
Their first practice involved an abysmal attempt at a cover of Thin Lizzy's "Dancin in the Moonlight'", and they soon realised Steph clearly hadn't been in a band before and Greg shouldn't sing. Regardless, the connection between them all was obvious, and the songs began to crop up naturally.
Just a few months after their first trip to the studio, Display Homes'self-titled debut 7" is being released through London-based record label Tough Love Records on [XXX]. The three songs were recorded in April of this year in David Akerman's studio in Marrickville, and just like all great current Australian music, they were later mastered by Mikey Young.
As far as debuts go, it's effortlessly perfect. In this brief time together, the band have played a host of short and fast shows across Australia, alongside other great locals such as UV Race, Low Life and Orion. Buoyed by the inherent intensity that informs the Sydney DIY music community and a shared love for a wide range of 80s music, Display Homes play discordant pop-orientated post punk with a refreshing lack of self-awareness and lyrical honesty.
In fact, Steph's autodidactic approach to music means the lyrics were formed into songs somewhat unknowingly. As each song originates from a foolish nature and a tendency to improvise songs in any day-to-day situation, the end result is a set of direct, slightly jarring but infectious pop songs.
RIYL: The Au Pairs, Pylon, Priests, XTC, Essential Logic, Bush Tetras, Delta 5.
Tracklisting:
Side A:
1. Climate Change
Side B:
2. Men
3. Bist Du Da -
Visit product page →1. Lawrence
2. I Could Die
3. When You Cry
4. No More Words
5. Nothing More To Say
6. I Lose
7. Cut Up
8. Bury Me
9. Kiss Goodbye
10. Séance On A Wet Afternoon -
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Limited Cream Vinyl / Black Vinyl / CD.
Northern Ireland's Girls Names return this autumn with their third full-length album, Arms Around a Vision, due for an October 2nd release via long-term home, Tough Love Records.
'We look to Europe for inspiration. For romance. For the idea of a better life,' says the band's frontman, Cathal Cully, when discussing the album. 'For me, living in Belfast just makes you focus on your own art.'
True, Girls Names formed in Belfast, but they've long considered themselves a European band. The distinction is important - their vision of Europe is one of weird, labyrinthian histories, blackest-ever-black coffee, and long drives to dismal places. Romantic notions for those of a certain disposition, but behind the thousand-yard stares they've always been a soft-hearted lot. As the title of Arms Around a Vision would suggest, they're all set to let love in.
The band initially came together as a relatively lean two-piece back in the summer of 2010, but over the course of a handful of EPs and three very different albums, they've grown in number and ambition. Their last album, The New Life, was an unexpected underground hit in early 2013, taking the band around the world and garnering much critical praise, culminating in nominations for both the Northern Irish and Irish Music Prizes. Emboldened by the reception to that record, in March they returned with an 11-minute single that was played in full on Radio 1 and, typically, does not feature on their new album. Girls Names like to do things a little differently.
On Arms Around a Vision, they're more widescreen than ever but also more direct and aggressive. The bass, drums and guitars are still there, but so are saxophones, organs, detuned broken guitars and pianos, and even sheets of metal assaulted with hammers. Conceptually, Arms Around a Vision acts as a love letter to European elegance - Italian futurism, Russian constructivism, Germany's Zero Group and both Neubaten and Bowie's Berlin.
Love and pain, romance and fucking. It's all in there somewhere. Grand claims, perhaps, but in an ever bleak world, why not skygaze? The album opens with Reticence', a song in two parts that's half metallic knockout, half midnight swagger. It sounds unlike anything they've ever done before, and is a perfect primer for an album that treads a course between Eno-era Roxy sleaze, Birthday Party dissonance and M.E.S'three R's: repetition, repetition, repetition.
As confident as it sounds, hardship has equally played a role in shaping Arms Around a Vision. 'I'm not starving or anything, but I've practically been living hand to mouth since I was 22,' confirms Cully. 'Most guitar music now is just a playground for the rich middle classes and it's really boring and elitist. We're elitist in our own way, in that we're on our own and you can't fuck with us when we've nothing to lose'. The near-6 minute A Hunger Artist'tackles that subject full on, addressing that age old adage of suffering for one's art.
While the songs aren't narrative-driven as such - the band still generally favour abstraction and ambiguity - there is a consistent underlying message: 'We've got nothing. We've never had anything. And we don't expect to. The only person I ever wanted to impress was myself. I've never got anywhere close to succeeding in doing that until this album. I'm proud of it. I think I can start saying I'm a musician now.'
Tracklisting:
1. Reticence
2. An Artificial Spring
3. Desire Oscillations
4. (Obsession)
5. Chrome Rose
6. A Hunger Artist
7. Málaga
8. Dysmorphia
9. (Convalescence)
10. Exploit Me
11. Take Out the Hand
12. I Was You -
Primitive Desire is an 11-track collection of the first ever studio sessions by Girls Names, recorded in 2009 in Belfast.Visit product page →
It compiles their debut EP originally released on Captured Tracks, the eight songs that originally featured on the long-out-of print You Should Know By Now mini-EP released on Tough Love, and a hereto-unreleased bonus track.
Primitive Desire is exactly as labeled and provides fans with a document of the band's early years as a two-piece, fuelled by a distinct nervous energy and nascent dark edge that would manifest itself much more obviously on subsequent albums.
Tracklisting:
Side A:
1. Blood River
2.Tear Me Down
3. Blood Well
4. Graveyard
5. I Guess
6. Warm Hands, Cold Heart
Side B:
7. Running Scared
8. If I...
9. Oh, Girl!
10. Don't Let Me In
11. Don't Let Me Drown -
It stands to reason that many vital albums come critically close to never being made. The eight-track upshot of doubt, upheaval and financial strain, Stains on Silence by Girls Names is one such release.Visit product page →
Following 2015's blitzing Arms Around a Vision, and the parting of drummer Gib Cassidy just over a year later, the Belfast band suddenly found themselves facing down a looming void.
'There was a finished - and then aborted - mix of the album, which was shelved for six months,' reveals Girls Names frontman Cathal Cully. 'We then took a break from all music and went back to full-time work. We chilled out from the stress of rushing the record and not being happy with it, as well as being skint with no impending touring on the cards and constantly having to worry about rent.'
The stumbling blocks that proved a strain became the album's defining breakthrough.
Recorded in various locations including Belfast's Start Together Studio with Ben McAuley, Cully's home and the band's practice space, spontaneous creation, cut-up techniques and self-editing took centre-stage for the first time.
"We started tearing the material apart and rebuilding, re-editing and re-recording different parts in my home in early Autumn last year,' says Cully. 'When we got them to a place we were happier with we went back into Start Together Studio with Ben McAuley to finalise the mixes to what they are now."
Where AAAV proved a brazen statement of intent, Stains on Silence bounds forth as its feature-length comedown. What could have seen the band buckle became an opportunity for approaching things tabula rasa. During its two-year transmutation, Cully, bassist Claire Miskimmin and guitarist Philip Quinn had a single aim for their fourth album: to make an old-fashioned record clocking in around 30 to 35 minutes in length that made the listener reach straight for repeat.
From the Bang Bang bar-summoning swoon of opener '25'and the submerged disco doom of Haus Proud'to the rapt, dub-leaning Fragments of a Portrait', Girls Names have excelled in their goal by forging an LP of synchronous nuance and defiance.
Marked by the presence of drum machines and programming throughout, these eight masterfully-woven tales are once again commandeered by founder Cully, whose words, understated yet defiant, mine purpose and meaning from the mire ("I want to bathe again, I want to swim again / In a pool of twisting bodies, blackened gold." ' 25').
But while Stains on Silence came critically close to never being made, having lived with it, reconfigured it, and guided its metamorphosis from flickers of inspiration and half-formed schemes, it's both a statement of pure perseverance, and a head-on confrontation with ambivalence that couldn't be more assured. (Brian Coney March 2018).
Tracklisting
1. 25
2. Haus Proud
3. The Process
4. The Impaled Mystique
5. Fragments of a Portrait
6. A Moment and a Year
7. Stains on Silence
8. Karoline
Release Date: 15/06/2018 -
Visit product page →Belfast-based four-piece Girls Names are a singular proposition, both geographically and psychically removed from their contemporaries at home and abroad.
Having released a series of singles and EPs on various independent labels, Girls Names made their first significant impression on the wider world in 2011 with their debut album, Dead To Me, earning plaudits from the likes of Pitchfork, NME and Loud & Quiet amongst a host of others.
The New Life, stands as a brave statement; the mark of the band untying themselves from the past and easing forth into the unknown.
The New Life is a must listen ' NME (8/10)
A minor-chord menace - Q (4/5)
Girls Names is slowly becoming a band for all seasons ' Pitchfork
Girls Names make sadness moreish and hypnotic - The Fly (4/5)
In terms of a band upping their game, it's a bit like when Deerhunter followed Turn It Up Faggot with Cryptograms - Dazed & Confused
The New Life is a frontrunner for one of the best albums of the year so far - Irish Times
Tracklisting:
1. Portrait
2. Pittura Infamante
3. Drawing Lines
4. Hypnotic Regression
5. Occultation
6. A Second Skin
7. The Olympia
8. Notion
9. Projektion
10. The New Life
Bonus Material:
11. Visions
12. The New Life (David Holmes Remix)
13. The New Life (A Jd Twitch Optimo Remix)
14. Projektion (Gabe Gurnsey Factory Floor Remix)
15. Drawing Lines (Mark Van Hoen Remix)
16. Occultation (The Soft Walls Remix)
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Holm is the solo project of Danish multi-instrumentalist Mikkel Holm-Silkjær, and the latest iteration of an impressive musical trajectory that has seen him record and play with Yung, Brooch, Tears, Urban Achievers, and Happy Hookers for Jesus.Visit product page →
At just 23 and with a discography already in double figures, Holm-Silkjær is nothing if not prolific. Yet his work as Holm might prove to be his most complete. While previous projects were often collaborative, all four songs on Dappled, his debut EP for Tough Love, were written, recorded, performed, and mixed by Holm-Silkjær himself in a shared rehearsal space.
This resourcefulness has long been characteristic of the music he makes, defined by an overarching DIY ethos that has also seen him champion the music of others through the two record labels he runs (100 and Shordwood, the latter of which also released the first Holm recordings as a 7") and the organisation of numerous live events in both Aarhus and Copenhagen.
Those familiar with Holm-Silkjær's other music will certainly recognise Dappled as his - that unmistakable metallic vocal, brash chiming guitars, and a preternatural melodic sensibility. Where Dappled differs from previous work, however, is in song structure, most obviously on 'Hope' and 'Grow', the opening and closing tracks respectively.
Though anchored by recurring motifs (not quite choruses!), these are sprawling and explorative songs, matched by lyrics unusually insightful and clear-sighted for someone so young. Take the neat double-meaning in the repeated coda of 'Grow' for example: "I'm growing, growing, growing, this arrangement, it's not in tune".
In that line there's a convenient way of understanding what Holm-Silkjær has arrived at with Dappled - a relatable reflection on finding personal identity through his own ever-evolving music. Holm is, after-all, his own name.
Tracklisting:
1. Hope
2. Dappled
3. Erase and Repeat
4. Grow
Release Date: 04/05/2018 -
Proper Ornaments is the project of James Hoare (Ultimate Painting, Veronica Falls) and Max Oscarnold (Toy, Pink Flames). Debut LP Wooden Head'(FortunaPop 2014) perfected the unique slant of their previous work. James and Max started out writing the follow-up in January 2015.Visit product page →
On Foxhole'they've sliced away a whole stratum of their sound, removing some distortion and lowering the frequency of plectrum strokes to allow more nuanced, piano-led ideas to emerge. The title isn't a reference to Television's jaunty proto-punk record but seems to be more of a dark, protective interior, a head space sketched out on Jeremy's Song'. While their particularly recognisable production style (a bright, frozen counterpoint to the airless mixes one encounters more often) remains, three things stand out as likely reasons for the shift in mood.
By the time they got around to recording again in James'bedroom in Finsbury Park that Summer, the instability around the recording of Wooden Head'(and the five years before) had slid into a deep and seething acrimony. Second, they both bought pianos. Third, when the band, with Daniel Nellis and Bobby Syme joining on bass and drums went to record at Tin Room in Hackney in June, the pinch wheel on the 8 track machine was broken and somehow no one noticed.
All but one recording, The Frozen Stare,'was hopelessly warped, so they went and did it all again from scratch back at James'. 'We ended up doing the whole thing there as the atmosphere suited the direction of the foxhole and we were more comfortable working on it in our own time,' says James. That's why the record has a laid back, conversational, not imposing or anxious feel in my opinion. If Always There'was the most melodically fluid but dimly lit point of the first record, there are another half album of songs here at least that are as strikingly gorgeous and unsettling.
Memories,'Just a Dream,'The Frozen Stare'and When We Were Young'are in this mould, as is the icy, slightly devastated goodbye that closes the record The Devils,'filled out with piano reminiscent of Big Star's Third'or Lou Reed's Berlin'and cracked double bass. What was in evidence in two of their earliest songs - You Still'and Are You Going Blind?' - an understated, poetic play of moral sensitivity against a callous distance, of warmth and hostility, has reached its most sustained expression yet and gives their pop moments of a haunted love song quality along the lines of Del Shannon, Lesley Gore or Roy Orbison.
Bridge by a Tunnel'and 'I Know You Know', on the other hand, share in the breezily abstracted character of 2014 single Magazine,'the later laying a sardonic (non)apology - I know you know, things could've been different/but they're not'over careful daubs of slide guitar. Cremated'is also guitar-lead, and reaches an early apogee of morbid oblivion baiting, while 1969'is a really perfectly recorded grand sweep of sound that recalls Serge Gainsbourg and Harvest'-era Neil Young.
Proper Ornaments hold the attraction of seeming to not try very hard at all and achieve something outstanding nonetheless.
RIYL: The Velvet Underground, Elliott Smith, Veronica Falls, The Bats, Ultimate Painting, Toy.
Tracklisting:
1. Back Pages 2
2. Cremated (Blown Away)
3. Memories
4. Just a Dream
5. 1969
6. The Frozen Stare
7. Jeremy's Song
8. When We Were Young
9. Bridge By a Tunnel
10. I Know You Know
11. The Devils -
LP (transparent yellow vinyl).Visit product page →
Following the release of Foxhole in January of this year, Tough Love will issue on vinyl for the first time The Proper Ornaments debut long-player, Waiting for the Summer: a compilation of their first 10 songs, originally released on CD in 2013.
What they said in 2013 - ¦ Is perfect pop still possible? It's hard to imagine, but the answer is Yes, and The Proper Ornaments are here to prove it. A timeless beauty that reminds us of The Velvet Underground and The Jesus & Mary Chain and yet sounds classic and effortlessly original. Produced by Charlie March of NZCA Lines and featuring ten golden nuggets of pure pleasure. James Hoare and Max Claps formed The Proper Ornaments in 2010.
The first line up included bassist Michael Lovett and Lets Wrestle front man Wesley Patrick Gonzalez. Micheal went on to form NZCA LINES, but Wes remained part of the tag team thanks to a nifty half nelson and the offer of a night in the corner of London's darkest stages and the theft of his organ - ¦.
Tracklisting:
1. Waiting for the Summer
2. Are You Going Blind?
3. Who Thought?
4. Drop Off
5. Recalling B
6. You Still
7. Shining Bright
8. Riverboat
9. Nervous Breakdown
10. Take a Break -
The cinema of the scenes as told from the heart and spirit of the omniscient narrator shines through the awe-inspiring oeuvre of Glenn Donaldson's canonical titan that is The Reds, Pinks & Purples. The storied and esoteric histories of every underserved underdog becomes immortalized in records and poignantly penned paeans that evoke the eras and underachievers that became synonymous with their own respective corresponding localized micro-movements.Visit product page →
Donaldson channels that psychic spirit and journeyman earned wisdom to provide contemporary era rock operas that eulogize tales of infinitely influential rises and falls. Crystalizing the tragic self-celebrating kingdoms of fortunate failures, false heroes, music press deities of limitless deceit, hometown dive gods and humanity in the grips of all its romanticized wonder and woe — the latest sortie of the sensational and spectacular takes aim at the threads of hope and an untethered abandon into the intimacy and dualities of idolatry and isolation with Unwishing Well.
Ever since its emergence from the harried late 2010s — The Reds, Pinks & Purples have become the absolute encapsulation of Donaldson's own proliferation and prestige. From a musical legacy that chronicles a long list of minor successes and major tragedies; Glenn distills the timelines of distinction from yesterday, today, tomorrow and whatever may be into a musical phenomenon that embodies something more than all of its analogous inspirations.
Beyond the clamor about the retro cult pop artistic allusions and tropes that can be found in those spirit expanding kaleidoscope chord chimes; Donaldson takes you on a guided tour through the San Francisco underground movements that would have been, could have been or perhaps never were at all from the start. The Reds, Pinks & Purples’ coveted catalog inadvertently, consciously or unconsciously, offers an authorized and anonymous history of imperfect and ambitious debutantes, dilettantes, auteurs, et al.
The lauded visionaries whose volition informed the big money touring stage headliners, but only enjoyed a fleeting jaunt through the glorious corporate clad carnival canopies from the touring circuit routes and tech funded festival tent tabernacles. Unwishing Well is a eulogy for the buzz bands that crashed, the wily one hit wizards, and omnipresent (and often uninspired) eternal aesthetes who work the lucrative outlets of licensing media markets.
Glenn pulls no punches with the promiscuity of the pop machines and their exploited propped up brand ambassadors on the cutting "Your Worst Song is Your Greatest Hit" that tangles with the lumbering and inescapable creatives and careerist trajectories that trade in boardroom playbooks and verticals. Expressions and influencers break out into the collective commissaries of commerce exhibitionism on “Public Art”, to auditing the forums of fandom that pertain to developed affinities and the roads to rabid infatuation with the obsessive in earnest, “Learning to Love a Band”.
And while the Glenn spins many yarns on the under-appreciated secret histories of DIY, Unwishing Well offers cathartic hymns of modern malaise. Sighing in lamentation of regressive trends, “What’s Going on with Ordinary People'' balks with concern over contemporary states of devolution, while “Faith in Daydreaming Youth” questions what vestiges of hope and valor can be found in the new vanguards of political bodies that govern the world’s sovereign daydream nations.
The dustbins of dastardly discontinuity are imbued with desire and grief on the dramatist tragedy of “Dead Stars in Your Eyes”, to basking in the discarded ditches of the damned below in voids of obscurity on “Nothing Between the Lines at All”. The human addiction to languishing in anguish, misery and negativity tussles, tosses and turns on “We Only Hear the Bad Things People Say”, the penultimate ode to inherent human infallibility as Donaldson rides the audience out into the gilded sunset glow of “Goodbye Bobby”.
The central set piece of Unwishing Well revolves around the title track that wrestles with wellness and wishes tempered by the sobering reality of ultra pragmatic skepticism. Donaldson shows the audience where the dream falls short, an indictment on the fickleness of wants and the life/work/art balances of making it all work. It's the group that never makes it, the idea that never gets off the ground, the recognition that never arrives, the raise that is never awarded, nor the promotion to the next ladder rung that remains laughably inaccessible. Glenn has the gift of bridging the divide between the hunger artist, their adoring cult public and the common threads that connect these local and global communities through the humanist cause of collective commiseration.
As increasingly found in the continued adventures of The Reds, Pinks and Purples canon — Glenn circles the drain of surrendering to unabashed sentimentality in passions worthy of being showcased as the top headlining spot that your favorite revered then later reviled pop act never even had the chance to claim or ascend. Unwishing Well uplifts and uproots the undercurrents that carry the commonalities between the spectators and the spectacles. Donaldson pays homage in heart to everything and everyone that never got their due or to the lucky ones that made the grade, but paid an ultimate price.
The cycle of these pop vignettes depict successes and failures in the same sentences, existing within the same stanzas, where the stories of making it and breaking it operate as events that live on different sides of the same coin. Unwishing Well is a reflection of us, the icons we adore, the Adonises we worship, the false prophets that proselytize the edicts from theses cults of personality, the fallouts, the third acts and the artistic fabrics that spool these sub-sects of artful dodgers into the stuff of legend.
Tracklisting:
1. What’s Going on with Ordinary people
2. Learning to Love a Band
3. Unwishing Well
4. Faith in Daydreaming Youth
5. Your Worst Song is Your Greatest Hit
6. Dead Stars in your Eyes
7. Nothing Between the Lines at all
8. Public Art
9. We Only Hear the Bad Things People Say
10. Goodbye Bobby
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