The fifth and final week of March 2019 is another beast. Some huge returns with some really brilliant new stuff in here.
Hello, Friends.
Record of the Week is a stunner. Portishead's Beth Gibbons hasn't released new work since 2002's Out of Season collaboration with Rustin Man. In 2014 she was invited to perform with The Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and thankfully this amazing performancewas recorded by Domino, who today release CD, LP and DVD copies of the concert. The recording took place at the National Opera Grand Theatre in Warsaw on November 29th 2014. Beth Gibbons undertook an intense preparation process, including tackling the challenge of learning the Polish original text. Henryk Górecki (1933 – 2010) was a Polish composer of contemporary classical music, believed to be the most commercially successful classical composer in recent times. Symphony No. 3 (Symphony Of Sorrowful Songs) is incredibly powerful and we're delighted that this spectacular performance didn't fade away.
+ Indie Edition LP - Deluxe tip-on gatefold sleeve with mounted 16pp booklet insert and bonus DVD featuring concert film.
International treasure, frontman of Orange Juice, co-founder of Postcard Records and peerless songwriter Edwyn Collins returns with his ninth solo album this week on his own AED label. Badbea (pronounced badbay) is in part inspired by his return to the village where his grandfather lived, and somewhere Edwyn spent time over the years. Big pop bangers with some beautiful moments of introspection.
+ Whilst stocks last, the LP edition ships with a beautiful Letterpress print.
Deforming Lobes is an essential live album from Ty Segall & The Freedom Band. It's an all analog production, recorded live on stage at Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles by Steve Albini (via mobile unit onto two-inch tape!) and mixed with Steve in Chicago at Electrical Audio. Whisper it, but we haven't heard a live album this good in years... using years of his back catalogue as ammunition, this is the blunt-force impact of The Freedom Band in full effect. Utterly lush.
Less than a year after their last album Performance, the ever-prolific White Denim are back with their eighth record Side Effects. Featuring a rotating cast of band members led by James Petralli and Steve Terebecki, it's full of the fizzing energy so synonymous with White Denim live shows. As ever, crunching riffs and deliciously off kilter side steps into soul grooves.
+ Pressed on a very limited indies only clear vinyl edition.
Following on from the critically acclaimed The Road: Part I, James Lavelle's UNKLE returns with the follow up The Road: Part II / Lost Highway.
+ Available as a limited edition triple 180g neon vinyl package housed in a triple gatefold sleeve, with 16 page booklet containing artworks by John Stark and photography by Warren Du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones.
Steve Earle & The Dukes release a really beautiful tribute to the iconic Guy Clark. Really lush live feel to it all (it was recorded in just six days) and Earle and The Dukes all sound on top form.
+ Indie edition pressed on Blue vinyl
Curve of Earth is the debut album proper from Ohtis on Full Time Hobby. The band are formed of Sam Swinson, Adam Pressley and Nate Hahn and although forming several years back, this is their first official, world-wide release. Really lush weird country vibes here... well worth some dedicated time.
Multi-disciplinary artist, composer and vocalist K Á R Y Y N's debut album THE QUANTA SERIESis out this week on Mute and she is marvellous. Recorded over the last seven years, the Syrian-Armenian-American composer pulls in aspects of her world travels to date and presents dense and hugely affecting soundscapes. We're really knocked back by this one.
UK electronic artist and Szun Waves band member Luke Abbott presents a special ten track album to celebrate Piano Day 2019. Music From The Edge Of An Island sees Abbott divert from his typically experimental electronic style to explore a more compositional approach centred around VST (Virtual Studio Technology) instruments. Very pretty and totally consuming.
Matthew Herbert releases a new big band album - The State Between Us. The double album is released on the day the U.K. was scheduled to leave the European Union. Made in collaboration with over a thousand musicians and singers from across the EU, The State Between Us began as a project responding to the triggering of Article 50 and the dramatic shift in the national story that began in June 2016. Massive this.
Eric Copeland follows the first instalment (October '18) with Trogg Modal Vol. 2. Lush beats to lock into with some surprisingly mellow space.
Chris Cohen releases a self-titled LP today on Captured Tracks and it is quietly epic. On the surface it's blurry and lo-fi, but it's brilliantly structured and there is an awful lot going on.
+ Limited indie LP version pressed on 'coke bottle' translucent, light green coloured vinyl.
C Duncan's highly anticipated third album - Health - sees the Scottish multi-instrumentalist ditch his bedroom studio and work with other producers, engineers and musicians for the first time. Another peach of a sleeve too!
+ Limited Indie version comes pressed on 'poplar green' coloured vinyl.
Zefur Wolves return with Truth Is In The Stars. Studio sessions were helmed by producer and former live band member Cian Ciarán (of Super Furry Animals).
+ Very limited edition Berry coloured vinyl.
Following the release of 2018’s acclaimed pair of albums Staccato Signals and Drone Signals, Ben Chatwin returns in with Altered Signals. As the title suggests, Ben has enlisted the talents and imaginations of a host of electronic producers to reconfigure the original ten compositions.
Fresh off the back of her critically-acclaimed album My Name Is Safe In Your Mouth Liela Mossfollows it up with a beautiful collection of rain-themed cover versions. Features a lush take on Scott Walkers It's Raining Today. 😔
Pentagram Home Video returns on Death Waltz with Who's Here? I'm Here, You're Here. LUSH sleazy-club vibes and some absolutely brutal acid jams interspersed throughout its runtime, as well as his usual spooky synth sounds. Not got many of these.
Neither being strangers to collaboration, Marry Waterson and Emily Barker join forces on new work A Window To Other Ways.
Last new one this week is an utter joy. Debut 12" on Rough Trade from A.Swayze & the Ghosts, an exhilarating new garage-punk band from Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. They are comprised of lead singer Andrew Swayze, alongside high school friends Hendrik Wipprecht (guitar), Zackary Blain (drums) and Ben Simms (bass). Lead single Suddenly is backed with the epic, 10 minute jam-fest known as Reciprocation. Rarely have two songs blown us away so totally, can not wait to see what happens next. Very very highly recommended.
As part of their 20th Anniversary celebrations, Strut present the first new volume in their pioneering ‘Nigeria 70’ series for over 8 years, bringing together rare highlife, Afro-funk and juju from the ‘70s and early ‘80s. Nigeria 70: No Wahala: Highlife, Afro-Funk & Juju 1973-1987continues one of the finest compilation series we've ever stocked here at Drift. Spining this with Spring sunshine through our big windows... we got no Wahala.
Pay It All Back Volume 7 is an 18 track showcase of new Adrian Sherwood productions featuring previews of several forthcoming On-U releases, unique mixes, deep cuts, and unreleased tracks from Roots Manuva, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Coldcut, Gary Lucas (Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band), Mark Stewart, Horace Andy and more. No.7 is the long-awaited latest instalment in the legendary On-U sampler series that first emerged in 1984.
Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points', personal collection of global soul, ambient, jazz and folk treasures form the latest in the Late Night Tales series. A real trip this one, features three exclusives to close it out too from Toshimaru Nakamura, Floating Points himself and a spoken word peice from Lauren Laverne.
No... YOU'RE the man... Big reissue today with You're The Man, the first-ever 'lost' Tamla/Motown album from Marvin Gaye. Fifteen of the album’s seventeen tracks are on vinyl for the first time and three tracks are newly mixed by SaLaAM ReMi. The album also includes the rare long LP version of Marvin Gaye’s cancelled Christmas single from 1972, as well as an unreleased vault mix of its instrumental B-side, and new essay by Marvin’s biographer, David Ritz.
Wewantsounds are pursuing an ambitious Akiko Yano reissue program with the release of Japanese Girl, her landmark debut album from 1976. Recorded with no less than Little Feat as the backing band on one side and the creme of Japanese musicians on the other one (including Haruomi Hosono and Tatsuo Hayashi), all when Yano was just 21. A huge record of pioneering pop.
Lastly this week, The Cool Death of Island Raiders is the first in a series of essential back catalogue and long time out of print albums from The Oh Sees / OCS, on their own label Castle Face. Limited colour vinyl pressing of the album first released back in March 2006. Early recordings showing off the weird and woozy psychedelia that the band wound tighter and ever tighter. They are the best man.
Have fun listening through, we'll be doing the same.
- Drift