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Slow Reality
Lewis Taylor 'The Acoustic Album' CD
£11.99
Slow Reality
Lewis Taylor 'The Acoustic Album' CD
£11.99
‘The Acoustic Album’ is the seventh album to be released by Lewis Taylor, coming out on his own label Slow Reality (an anagram of his name). The enigmatic singer-songwriter Lewis Taylor returns with his offering for 2023.
‘The Acoustic Album’ sees Taylor revisiting and reimagining sixteen carefully selected songs from his back catalogue, some well-known to fans and some never performed before.
Warm acoustic guitars and lilting pianos abound, as Taylor’s vocals show him in a far more intimate setting than ever before.
Tracklisting:
1. I Dream The Better Dream
2. Betterlove
3. Lovelight
4. Right
5. Feels So Good
6. Bittersweet
7. Lewis IV
8. Is It Cool
9. Numb
10. Damn
11. Can You Feel It
12. No Hope In Here
13. Waves
14. Sheneverdid
15. Worried Mind
16. Keep On Keeping On
‘The Acoustic Album’ sees Taylor revisiting and reimagining sixteen carefully selected songs from his back catalogue, some well-known to fans and some never performed before.
Warm acoustic guitars and lilting pianos abound, as Taylor’s vocals show him in a far more intimate setting than ever before.
Tracklisting:
1. I Dream The Better Dream
2. Betterlove
3. Lovelight
4. Right
5. Feels So Good
6. Bittersweet
7. Lewis IV
8. Is It Cool
9. Numb
10. Damn
11. Can You Feel It
12. No Hope In Here
13. Waves
14. Sheneverdid
15. Worried Mind
16. Keep On Keeping On
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Visit product page →After two critically acclaimed albums (2020’s ‘Now Here’s An Echo From Your Future’ and 2022’s ‘The Rest Is Distraction’), and numerous mini-album, EP and single releases, London-based trio Girls In Synthesis return in May ’24 with their new statement; their third album ‘Sublimation’.
If you thought you knew GIS, think again… they have moved on and created a dark and intense, yet melodic, collection of songs; their take on an angular pop record. Opening song ‘Lights Out’ is split into two distinct sections; the opening a Barrett-esque vocal and guitar lament to sleep deprived anxiety which morphs, via a ‘Faust Tapes’ influenced freeform noise section, into a stomping, high intensity closing blitz.
Tracks such as ‘Deceit’, ‘We Are Here’ and ‘Picking Things Out Of The Air’ see the group at their most melodic to date, minimising some of the chaotic noise elements of their signature sound and bringing to the fore impassioned, soaring vocals and keys melodies.
Their trademark, driving drums and bass foundation is particularly evident on songs ‘I Judge Myself’ and ‘Corrupting Memories’, but is counterbalanced by intense, early goth influenced keyboard lines, bringing influences from late 1970s/early 1980s into focus with the contemporary GIS intensity. Slow-burning tracks ‘I Was Never There’ and ‘The Prefix’ build up tension and atmosphere with sparse arrangements and circular, spiralling outros, while closer ‘A Damning Lesson’ sees the band return to their intense, bludgeoning wall of sound only to send it into a blur of echoing drum machine, reminiscent of the early work of Cabaret Voltaire.
Lyrically, GIS prove themselves head and shoulders above their contemporaries, leaving the pastiche sloganeering and lecturing to those wishing to preach to the converted, and reach inside to bring forth poetic and challenging analysis of the anxiety and emotional turmoil of self-reflection and human relationships.
Booked in for extensive UK/EU touring throughout May and June, the band will be adapting their white-heat live show to bring subtlety and clarity to the new songs from ‘Sublimation’, losing none of their unique and intense performance in the process. Be ready…
Tracklisting:
1. Lights Out
2. Deceit
3. Semblance of Choice
4. We Are Here
5. Corrupting Memories
6. I Was Never There
7. Picking Things Out Of The Air
8. I Judge Myself
9. Subtle Differences
10. The Prefix
11. A Damning Lesson -
Heavee is a Queer Chicagoan DJ & producer with a long history in footwork. His 2022 'Audio Assault' EP on Hyperdub showcased synth-driven, melodic footwork, but ‘Unleash’ goes much further into audio world-building, with a fresh, spongy and citrus-y sound palette and rich, bright chord sequences.Visit product page →
It's minimal, airy, balancing light and dark, sometimes breezy and sometimes clinical. Heavee works simultaneously outside and inside the box, rebuilding footwork's framework and vibe to his own unique specification. Rhythmically, it's dance floor ready, using footwork's 160 template as a springboard for building new drum sounds to express these rhythms, and draws from R&B, rap, jazz and grime, with a sprinkling of bitter-sweet vintage Detroit techno.
‘Unleash’ takes footwork’s “eats all” approach to music and leads it in a fresh direction with a freedom of spirit. It's a strong addition to the footwork cannon and shows that experiments in dance music can be fun.
Tracklisting:
Side A
1. StarSeeker
2. Unlock
3. SearchN 4 ft Babii
4. Bang Bang
5. Can U Feel It
6. Bounce Dat ft PayPal & DanTOG
Side B
7. Unleash
8. See the Sun
9. Whiplash
10. Sumthin Different
11. Heart Fragments
12. Work Me
13. Make it Work
14. Smoke Break ft Homesiick & Takuya Nakamura -
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? -
Recalibrating her singular journey in the British musical landscape with her most open-hearted, direct and intimate collection of material yet. Love In Constant Spectacle evokes spectacular imagery and distills the artists’ vision in its purest form, elevating her inimitable sound and poetic vision to new heights.Visit product page →
Recapturing the melancholy of her early work whilst propelling it forward, she sketches scenes as we watch new colours, shapes and languages emerge and fill the frame. Love In Constant Spectacle sees her take measured steps towards a vivid, dreamlike record, that offers resolve in the face of life’s inevitability.
The foundations of Weaver’s sound are still evident – lush motorik drums, pulsating bass, custom modded synths and exotic fuzz pedals - but the stream is awash with scrabble piece poetry and Letraset lullabies leading to lush escapism, the free abandon that you’d associate with free jazz and the avant-garde.
But, as determined and visionary as Weaver might be, Love In Constant Spectacle wasn’t executed without assistance. Here we find a long mooted unison with Jane’s first ever producer, John Parish (PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding), who has shared Weaver’s process in the surrounds of Rockfield Studios and Geoff Barrow’s Invada studio.
Love In Constant Spectacle is otherworldly, it is both intimate yet distant, a surrealist interpretation of the foundations that make us human – the stories and landscapes it paints are habitats of their own. A voyage into undisclosed pastures, it’s a heartfelt manifesto from an artist that continues to boundlessly evolve with each chapter in her career.
Tracklisting:
Side A
1. Perfect Storm
2. Emotional Components
3. Love in Constant Spectacle -
4. Motif
5. The Axis and The Seed
Side B
6. Is Metal
7. Happiness in Proximity
8. Romantic Worlds
9. Univers
10. Family of the Sun
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