A dozen new musical recommendations for you. They’re all really good, so you know.
Hello, Friends.
Our Record of the Week is In Spring, the beautiful mini album from Bristol's Tara Clerkin Trio. The 23 minute, four song collection was recorded in various stages and locations over the last twelve months and is just glorious. Avant-pop and sonic experimentalism, like echoes that slowly shimmer and change shape, similar to ripples in a pond.
Released on the World of Echo label, run out of the excellent shop of the same name.
Tirzah returns this week on Domino with the absolutely delicious Colourgrade. It is such a hazy treat, somewhere between sleep and wake with a flow-of-consciousness and beats. It is just all so beautifully understated, a really amazing headspace. Highly recommended.
+ Available on a limited Transparent Sun Yellow coloured 12” vinyl pressing.
Another big return this week with audiobooks on Heavenly and the pounding Astro Tough. Whereas their debut - Now! (in a minute) - was painted with weirdo pop colours, the palette here is club music. Wildly inventive and still firmly outsiders, this is a joyous collection of irresistible synth-pop bangers.
+ LP is on Eco-Mix Colour Vinyl.
After a week of announcing forthcoming Dinked Editions, it's a real joy to get our hands on a couple this week with the release of two albums we're absolutely wild about!
Modern Fiction is the jangling full debut from Toronto’s Ducks Ltd. Sounding like sonic descendants of The Go-Betweens, there is a warm and vintage analogue hue to the riffs. Lots of melancholic moments and loads of frantic highs, this really is a joy, very highly recommended indeed.
1:2 is the super-dreamy third LP from the San Francisco based Cindy. It's all built on Karina Gill's strumming and singing, whispery and ethereal but with a sense of darkness in the mix. The instrumentation is so deft, like ghostly cobwebs. Special stuff.
Duo Kit Sebastian return on Mr Bongo this week with Melodi and it's a seductive treat! A cinematic sounding tour-de-force of world music, jazz and psychedelia. Just the right amount of nostalgia, très chic!
+ Indie edition includes obi strip and four art cards.
Austin, Texas duo Hovvdy release True Love on Grand Jury Music. Full of bitter-sweet choruses, huge highs and the close harmonies are pretty lush too.
+ Indie LP is pink vinyl.
Texan post-rockers Explosions In The Sky have created a soundtrack to the documentary Big Bend and it's about the most EITS sounding thing possible; "The hour-long film intimately follows the lives of native animals amid expansive aerial views of the iconic desert landscape that makes up one of the grandest natural wonders in the world."
Even without having seen the doc, this is really glorious stuff.
+ Indie LPs are pressed on Sky Blue vinyl.
Love Wash is the lo-fi and totally enthralling solo album from the prolific Mike Etten. Released on Dull Tools (the label run by Parquet Courts's Andrew Savage), it's a great mix of off-kilter and timeless.
Between Days is the last instalment in Kiefer’s trilogy of EPs via Stones Throw Records. The production sure does bubble, lovely stuff.
The Metallica Blacklist celebrates the 30th anniversary and enduring influence of the iconic Black Album. The really out-there interpretations (Kamasi Washington, Moses Sumney) are great, but as good as they are, quite why anyone thought The Neptunes, Dermot Kennedy, Chase & Status or Imelda May covering Metallica was going to be a good idea remains a total mystery. It is all for charity, at least.
I know we said yesterday, but we're still trippin' that Stevie Van Zandt signed copies of his Unrequited Infatuations memoir. We've just started it and it's as glorious as you'd expect.
- Drift
