Tompkins Square
Various Artists 'Imaginational Anthem Vol. 4 New Possibilities'
£12.99
Tompkins Square
Various Artists 'Imaginational Anthem Vol. 4 New Possibilities'
£12.99
The fourth volume of the acclaimed guitar series Features C Joynes, Tyler Ramsey (Band of Horses), William Tyler (Silver Jews, Lambchop) and more Gatefold LP & CD Artwork by Paul Romano (Mastodon)
Since it's first volume in 2005, Tompkins Square's 'Imaginational Anthem' series has introduced many new acoustic guitarists, and unearthed many forgotten legends of the American Primitive genre. Vol 4 strays from the formula by focusing on the present generation of pickers, representing American and English musical traditions. The stunning gatefold LP (limited edition of 500) and CD are created by Paul Romano, best known for his incredible designs for Mastodon.
Since it's first volume in 2005, Tompkins Square's 'Imaginational Anthem' series has introduced many new acoustic guitarists, and unearthed many forgotten legends of the American Primitive genre. Vol 4 strays from the formula by focusing on the present generation of pickers, representing American and English musical traditions. The stunning gatefold LP (limited edition of 500) and CD are created by Paul Romano, best known for his incredible designs for Mastodon.
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CYMBALS 'Light In Your Mind' PRE-ORDER
£11.99
Release Date: 25/08/2017Visit product page →
"Guitar-flecked electro at its most hypnotic and sublime" Sunday Times
”Unfettered adrenalin rush” MOJO (4/5)
“Fun with a capital ‘F’, but there are moments of gravitas too. Not easy to do that” NME (8/10)
Light in Your Mind is the first new material from CYMBALS in 2 years, and their first album since 2014. If the wait seems long for the listener, for those involved in its creation the time in between pulls in a lifetime of unexpected experiences. That Light In Your Mind even exists is a testament to not giving in.
Since their inception, CYMBALS line up has been subject to a great deal of change. Amidst that change there has always existed the songwriting duo of Jack Cleverly and Dan Simons, who formed the band in 2011 with the sole intention of “having fun”.
A noble aspiration, but one that became increasingly hard to realize when the realities of a 9-5 existence started to corrosively rub against the expectations of being in a band that wanted to tour the world. At various points over the last 6 years and across 3 albums, a rotating cast of at least 10 other people have formed some version of CYMBALS.
More still have contributed to Light In Your Mind - Justin Goings and Josh Hefferman both provide drums, while Alabaster DePlume plays saxophone on ‘Fully Automated Luxury’. Producer Kristian Robinson (Capitol K) is a major presence across the album and played a key role in guiding the transition from the band’s sound on their previous record to this one.
The music itself possesses a sedimentary quality, a residue of each contributing member compressed into what it is that band have become. Consistent throughout has been the relationship between Cleverly and Simons. Failing relationships, betrayal, addiction, illness: the emotional challenges were huge.
Thankfully, they were not insurmountable. Second track ‘Car Crash’ addresses that period head-on, a typically effervescent synth line from Simons disguising lyrical content that traverses that fine line between blind arrogance and tortured self-loathing. Like all the best CYMBALS songs, it deals in unexpected contrasts.
Much the same can be said of the structure of the album as a whole, eclectically comprised of melodically memorable pop songs ('Car Crash', 'Talk To Me'), bucolic instrumentals ('My Body', 'Numbers') and longer, pensive songs that explore the space in between ('ASMR', 'I Thought I Knew You'). As final track ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ concludes, a synth loop first heard on the opening track is subtly re-introduced, completing a circle of sorts.
Tracklisting:
1. Decay
2. Car Crash
3. Talk To Me
4. I Thought I Knew You
5. My Body (Winter Mix)
6. Where Nothing Can Be Defined
7. Splitting
8. Euphoric Recall
9. ASMR
10. Fully Automated Luxury
11. Lifetime Achievement Award -
Chelsea Wolfe 'Hiss Spun' PRE-ORDER
£11.99
Release Date: 22/09/2017Visit product page →
“When musicians have this intensity in them, they often get to it sooner and stay put. Ms. Wolfe sounds like she’s using it by choice, not disposition; she can use different kinds of darkness as colour or tincture."
New York Times
“The reigning dark priestess of goth-scarred art rock.”
Rolling Stone
Chelsea Wolfe has announced the release of Hiss Spun, her sixth album, this morning. Following her acclaimed 2015 album Abyss, Hiss Spun is at once dynamic, heavy, and raw. This morning NPR shared the song “16 Psyche,” saying, “Wolfe has always possessed a talent for dynamic song writing, particularly concerning the theatre of the soul. But the masterful "16 Psyche" is a full-on ride, and one that finds her at her most commanding and climactic yet."
Recorded by Kurt Ballou (Converge), the album was conceived as an emotional purge, a means of coming to terms with the tumult of the outside world by exploring the complexities of one’s inner unrest. “I’m at odds with myself,” she explains. “I got tired of trying to disappear. The record became very personal in that way. I wanted to open up more, but also create my own reality.” Hiss Spun features prominent guitar contributions by Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age, Failure) throughout the album, and a guest spot from Aaron Turner (Old Man Gloom, SUMAC) on the song “Vex.”
“What I want is to open up. I want to know what's inside me. I want everybody to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin—to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvellous. I'm sure of it.” - Henry Miller
Digging beneath the mess of the world to find the beauty underneath is perhaps the most consistent theme in Chelsea Wolfe’s expansive discography—a theme that ties together her ceaseless explorations in unorthodox textures, haunting melodies, and mining the grandeur embedded within ugliness and pain. With her sixth official album Hiss Spun, Wolfe adopts Miller’s quest to become empowered by embracing the mess of the self, to control the tumult of the soul in hopes of reigning in the chaos of the world around us. “I wanted to write some sort of escapist music; songs that were just about being in your body, and getting free,” Wolfe says of the album before extrapolating on the broader scope of her new collection of songs. “You’re just bombarded with constant bad news, people getting fucked over and killed for shitty reasons or for no reason at all, and it seems like the world has been in tears for months, and then you remember it’s been fucked for a long time, it’s been fucked since the beginning. It’s overwhelming and I have to write about it.”
Hiss Spun was recorded by Kurt Ballou in Salem, Massachusetts at the tail end of winter 2017 against a backdrop of deathly quiet snow-blanketed streets and the hissing radiators of warm interiors. While past albums operated on the intimacy of stripped-down folk music (The Grime and the Glow, Unknown Rooms), or the throbbing pulse of supplemental electronics (Pain Is Beauty, Abyss), Wolfe’s latest offering wrings its exquisiteness out of a palette of groaning bass, pounding drums, and crunching distortion. It’s an album that inadvertently drew part of its aura from the cold white of the New England winter, though the flesh-and-bone of the material was culled from upheavals in Wolfe’s personal life, and coming to terms with years of vulnerability, anger, self-destruction, and dark family history. Aside from adding low-end heft with gratuitous slabs of fuzz bass, long-time collaborator Ben Chisholm contributed harrowing swaths of sound collages from sources surrounding the artist and her band in recent years—the rumble of street construction at a tour stop in Prague, the howl of a coyote outside Wolfe’s rural house in California, the scrape of machinery on the floor of a warehouse at a down-and-out friend’s workplace. Music is rendered out of dissonance—bomb blasts from the Enola Gay, the shriek of primates, the fluttering pages of a Walt Whitman book are manipulated and seamlessly integrated into the feral and forlorn songs of Hiss Spun.
The album opens with the sickening bang of “Spun”, where a lurching bottom-heavy riff provided by Chisholm and Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens of the Stone Age, Failure) serves as a foundation to a sultry mantra of fever-dream longing and desire. The first third of Hiss Spun—whether it’s the ominous twang and cataclysmic dynamics of “16 Psyche”, the icy keyboard lines, restless pulse and harrowing bellows of Aaron Turner (Old Man Gloom, SUMAC) on “Vex”, or the patient repetition and devastating choruses of “The Culling—all carry the weight of desperation, lost love, and withdrawal. Wolfe’s introspection and existential dread turns outwards to the crumbling world around us with “Particle Flux”, an examination of the casualties of war set against an aural sea of static. White noise is a constant thread through Hiss Spun, with Wolfe finding solace in the knowledge that radio static is the sound of the universe expanding outwards from the Big Bang—a reminder that even dissonance has ties to creation. The electronic thump of “Offering” serves as an ode to the Salton Sea and the encroaching calamities stemming from climate change. The obsession with white noise and global destruction carries over into “Static Hum”, where the merciless percussive battery of Wolfe’s former bandmate and current drummer Jess Gowrie helps deliver the dire weight of a sonnet dedicated to a “burning planet.” By the time the album closes with “Scrape”, Wolfe has come full circle and turned her examinations back inward, reflecting over her own mortality with arguably the most commanding vocal performance in her entire oeuvre.
“The album is cyclical, like me and my moods,” Wolfe says of Hiss Spun. “Cycles, obsession, spinning, centrifugal force—all with gut feelings as the centre of the self.” And it’s an album that Wolfe sees as a kind of exorcism. “I’m at odds with myself... I got tired of trying to disappear. The record became very personal in that way.
I wanted to open up more, but also create my own reality.”
Every Chelsea Wolfe album is cathartic, but never before has both the artist and her audience so desperately needed this kind of emotional purging. Sargent House is proud to release Hiss Spun to the world on September 22nd, 2017.
Tracklisting:
1. Spun
2. 16 Psyche
3. Vex
4. Strain
5. The Culling
6. Particle Flux
7. Twin Fawn
8. Offering
9. Static Hum
10. Welt
11. Two Spirit
12. Scrape -
The Dogs D’amour 'Swingin’ The Bottles : The BBC Radio Sessions' PRE-ORDER
£13.99
Release date: 04/08/2017Visit product page →
The LP is limited to 500 copies worldwide on yellow vinyl.
‘Swingin’ The Bottles’ combines the Dogs D’amour BBC sessions with a live show from the Dominion Theatre in London from 1990.
All new artwork is provided by Tyla and also included are in depth notes and new interviews with the band - this set features exclusive versions of Dogs classics such as ‘How Come It Never Rains’, ‘I Don’t Want You To Go’, ‘Last Bandit’ and ‘Trail Of Tears’ .
The BBC sessions were all recorded around the release of the bands third album ‘In The Dynamite Jet Saloon’ and they feature the classic Dogs line-up of Tyla, Bam, Jo and Steve.
The live recording also joyfully captures the chaos and excitement of their incendiary, edge-of-your-seat live performance
Tracklisting:
1. Firework Girl
2. Wait Until I’m Dead
3. How Do You Fall In Love Again
4. Planetary Pied Piper
5. Everything I Want
6. How Come It Never Rains
7. I Don’t Want You To Go
8. The Kid From Kensington
Live In Concert At The Dominion Theatre 08/12/90 – London:
1. Last Bandit
2. Everything I Want
3. Heartbreak
4. Trail Of Tears
5. How Come It Never Rains
6. Drunk Like Me
7. Medicine Man
8. I Don’t Want You To Go -
Inger Lorre 'Live At The Viper Room' PRE-ORDER
£11.99
Release Date: 04/08/2017Visit product page →
Bundle with Purple 2xLP + 'Snowflake' 7" available.
Purple vinyl - Infamous Nymphs front woman Inger Lorre celebrates how vital her songs still sound today, with a live recording of a sold-out show at the legendary Viper Room.
The set includes classic Nymphs tracks, ‘Sad & Damned’, ode to a serial killer ‘The Highway’ and the mourning swirl of ‘Imitating Angels’, with the addition of a cover of Siouxsie & The Banshees ‘Monitor’.
This live album is raw and primal; tribal, glamorous, witch-y, grunge-y, punk. Inger states, “These songs are the sound of me walking through fire…” Lorre’s cult following has grown in strength of late, with the seminal self-titled debut album re issued by Rock Candy Records and 2 new songs released for Record Store Day. Encouraged by the interest she is recording a new album, tentatively planned for an autumn release.
Often seen as musician’s musician (once dubbed by Jeff Buckley as ‘The Patron Saint of Fucked-Over Musicians’) and having worked with the likes of Iggy Pop and Henry Rollins, sadly Inger’s notoriety often eclipsed her darkly beautiful music. Haunted by the infamy of a band that burned brightly all too briefly, before imploding in a devastation of bereavement, addiction, mental health issues and misguided record company dealings. No one will ever forget the desk pissing incident.
Inger Lorre is a music industry legend. These days Inger Lorre has mostly conquered her own demons - exorcised through art, music and time to heal. What comes next will no doubt be unique as the women herself.
“Inger retains her strength as a songwriter and performer without losing any of her sensitivity, fragility and danger. I always look forward to what she does, it never disappoints” – Henry Rollins
"The Nymphs were a very original underground band with a unique sound and GREAT songs" - Iggy Pop
“Inger Lorre is a magician, a shaman…that kind of witch-doctor ability for live performing” – Eric Avery, Jane’s Addiction
Tracklisting:
1. Rumble
2. Alright
3. Death Of A Scenester
4. Sad And Damned
5. 7B
6. Snowflake
7. Hate In My Heart
8. Wasting My Days
9. 2 Cats
10. The River
11. Imitating Angels
12. The Highway
13. Monitor
