A really stacked week with big returns and absolute gems of underground treasure!
Our first Record of the Week for the month of May is Animaru, the debut album from Brooklyn-based songwriter and guitarist Mei Semones. It is absolutely all good vibes only and in this little run of sunshine it has absolutely melted our minds. We’ll spend the rest of the year trying to find the most succinct way to describe it; A sublime blend of bossa nova, baroque pop and whirling pastoral jazz. Honestly, it’s mad good.
+ Pressed on Pink Marble colour vinyl.
The Scholars is the epic new double concept album from Will Toledo’s Car Seat Headrest. Set at the fictional Parnassus University, The Scholars follows a cast of students and staff caught in a loose narrative of life, death, and rebirth. We’ve always really liked him as a songwriter, but there is something so bonkers about the vastness of this album that really won us over. It takes something special to keep our attention across an hour of big pop energy. Great vibes and some dazzling sections.
Norwegian musician Jenny Hval returns this week with Iris Silver Mist and it’s really fantastic stuff. Named after a metallic-scented fragrance by Maurice Roucel for Serge Lutens, the album explores scent as memory, metaphor, and medium. Her delivery is really hypnotic — stuttered prose and the occasional held note that turns it all on its head. The arrangements are also so gripping, weird clicks and pops with horns and synths and all sorts. There is a lot going on, plenty to revisit here.
+ Available on exclusive Pearl colour vinyl.
Blondshell’s second album, If You Asked For A Picture, finds Sabrina Teitelbaum deepening her exploration of identity, relationships, and emotional complexity. Without sounding old necessarily, she pulls in '90s grunge and '80s college rock tones into her own haze. The whole album has a blurry energy, quite reflective with those euphoric crunches keeping it moving forward. Great voice.
Get in quick for a signed bookmark!
+ Available on limited "Model Rocket" Red Vinyl.
Fetch. The. Guitar! What’s the Matter, M Ross? is the new LP from Dayton, Ohio’s M Ross Perkins and we have been enjoying it muchly. Jangling rock and roll with such a charming strut. Everything sounds absolutely mint, and he manages to get really close to some pretty iconic riffs whilst still ploughing his own furrow. It’s very us, we’ve been spinning this plenty.
+ Pressed on a splendid-looking ‘Bouquet Blast’ vinyl pressing.
The week’s darkest trip is Folly, a new collaborative LP from Black Arches with Sexton Ming as part of Rocket Recording’s Black Hole Series. It’s drenched in dark layers of analogue psychedelia — a wild one.
Released by esteemed Birmingham AL record store, Seasick Records, Dogs is the new LP from Cash Langdon of the band, Meadow Dust. A fuzzed-out set of country rock with dry humour and some really sweet melancholy. We like this one.
Down on Them is the first album under their own name from NYC DIY mainstay Paco Cathcart (Note: there are something like fifty albums under the moniker the Cradle). A really curious one, full of smart and surprising songs with beautifully different energy, track for track. Some have swagger, some swoon. It’s really lovely stuff.
Also this week, Writer and film director Sally Potter releases Anatomy on Bella Union and it’s really unique — somewhere between cabaret and a neo-classical bounce. Safe is the new EP from the much-hyped shoegazers New Dad. Lael Neale is in really beautiful voice on her new Altogether Stranger via Sub Pop.
Lastly this week, No New Summers is the first full-length release under his own name in nearly a decade from Dylan Aycock. It is rooted in solo guitar traditionals, but there is such a hypnotic energy and mood when he really gets flying. Somewhere between primitive, experimental and straight-up haunted. A proper gripper, really can’t rate this one highly enough. We always pay good attention to the Worried Songs label, and this is a classic example of why.
