🔥 We’re getting hot spinning records. There is a lot on offer.
In a week full of big releases, Wet Leg’s moisturizer sure is a big one! The band’s second album is full of wry menace rather than malevolence, with dirty words and some sharp and barbed lines too. Big pop songs, a great flow, really strong performances, and great production.
+ Available on limited Clear Vinyl and also as an alt sleeve edition.
Die To Wake Up From A Dream is the third album from MF Tomlinson and it really is a lovely thing. Whilst sounding sonically rich and really assured, it has such a lush, homespun quality to it (apparently recorded meticulously one instrument at a time). His voice is really worth the entrance fee alone, a rich baritone full of humour and empathy.
MF will be joining us in person this Saturday (at 3 pm) to play a few songs solo in the shop. Do come and join us.
New Zealand collective The Circling Sun return with Orbits, a richly textured fusion of spiritual jazz, analog electronics, and deep percussive grooves. This one really has been such a spiritual uplifter on the stereo already, drawing inspiration from the mid-1970s jazz of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Yusef Lateef, and the Brazilian influence of Azymuth and Airto Moreira. Sure gets pretty cosmic.
+ Available on limited Green colour vinyl.
Now, the week’s hot ticket is A Tiger's Tale, the debut LP from Terry Cole—founder of Colemine Records—under the name Leroi Conroy. It is just so good! Proper cinematic funk and soul, a dark magic soundtrack with moments of cool breeze too. We’ve gone wild for it, proper crate digger gold.
+ Available on limited Pink and Blue Swirl vinyl.
The sound of West Coast psychedelia emanates from Nottingham this week on Chaos Era by Midnight Rodeo on FatCat. This is no retro facsimile sideshow; they blur all sorts of timbres and styles for something totally grooving. Enjoying this a lot.
Loner is the new LP from much-celebrated producer Barry Can’t Swim, and the decision to drop it in this little blast of heatwave is positively criminal! Supreme sunshine tingle vibes and the odd doof. How is a man supposed to work?
+ Available on exclusive Gold & Red Ink Spot Effect vinyl.
+ Available as a very limited signed white label edition.
Completed shortly before his untimely passing in April 2023, The Fateful Symmetry is the eighth and final solo album from the enduring and iconic Mark Stewart. Stylistically, it is gloriously all over the place, with Stewart in the eye of the storm… naturally!
It did remind us of a bonkers afternoon with him back in Dartington. You can watch Mark Stewart & Gareth Sager in conversation with John Robb over on the Sea Change YouTube channel here.
Bad Dogs is the expansive new LP from Indianapolis trio 81355 (pronounced “Bless”). Some really gorgeous production, with experimental textures blurred into some pretty hypnotic hip-hop.
Also this week: Half Japanese release more upbeat and off-kilter love songs on Adventure. Bright Nights is the very pretty first new music in a decade from Anglo-Australian quartet Allo Darlin’. Raincoats co-founder, filmmaker, and punk icon Gina Birch returns with Trouble, her second solo album for Third Man Records. Serious dubs! A Dawning is the moving collaborative album from Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds and the late Irish singer-songwriter Talos (Eoin French). Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová reconnect as The Swell Season for their first album in 16 years. Los Angeles poet and songwriter Qur’an Shaheed releases Pulse on Leaving Records and it is lush—poppy and bubbling experimentalism.
A reminder that we also have scorching new records this week from Gwenno, Poor Creature, and KOKOROKO, all under the Dinked badge. A pretty proud week for it—do read a little more here.
