The first new releases of 2021, a set of killer new titles for your consideration.
Hello, Friends.
Our first Record of the Week for this new year is Introducing..., the super smooth debut from Aaron Frazer. Although it's the first under his own name, Frazer will be known to you as co-singer, drummer and songwriter with Durand Jones and the Indications. Produced by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, it's a pretty timeless soul record with some really lush flourishes of gospel and doo-wop.
+ Available on a limited edition Translucent Pink Glass vinyl pressing.
Welfare Jazz is the smashing return of Swedish post-punks Viagra Boys, and my word do we love this band. Against the jazz-infused spitting and thrashing around, the prominent styling has always left glimpses of who is really underneath. Welfare Jazz is about digging into that, it goes further than before, looking at toxic masculinity, our burning societies and primarily at the ‘Boys themselves.. Full on, pounding and stacked full of highlights.
+ Available on a limited edition White vinyl pressing.
Nailah Hunter's Spells is absolutely stunning. The debut release by the Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist and composer is pure magic, six songs concerned with spells and "unique sonic place(s) forged by imagination and incantation". She really has weaved something quite incredible.
Includes a 12" x 12", 8-page colour spells booklet with paintings and incantations. This vinyl release includes exclusive audio on the B Side that takes the running time up to just over 25 minutes. So much happens, it's perfectly short and sweet.
Songs for the Drunk and Broken Hearted is the thirteenth album from Passenger, the multi-award winning song-writer who famously started his career busking. Pre-COVID songs of heartbreak. All physical packaging is made from 100% recycled material and whilst stocks last, the LP edition includes a signed artwork card.
Brighton-based Hilang Child returns on Bella Union with his second LP Every Mover. A collection of songs that progress form intimate and fragile to really quite epic. A great motorik drive to the big bits and some really cosmic tones.
+ Available on a limited edition Red vinyl pressing.
We have a really nice triplet of traditional and primitive guitar on the Brighton based Worried Songs label this week, with Matthew J Rolin's self titled LP, Tennessee-born multi-instrumentalist Joseph Allred's The True Light and Chicago resident Eli Winter's (who we first heard on Ryley Walker's excellent Imaginational Anthem series compilation) The Time to Come.
We highly recommend that you find some time to get into all three of these.
We're still fully getting our hands on the Pavement reissues, but joining the racks this week we have the superb fifth and final(?) studio album Terror Twilight. The Nigel Godrich-produced LP is full of high-production maximalism, but overall hints at where they all - Malkmus especially - wanted to go on their own. Like pretty much everything they ever did, it remains essential.
Lastly this week, Blue Note ease us in 2021 with a couple of stone-cold classics from the vaults. Pianist McCoy Tyner's Tender Moments features Lee Morgan amongst others and includes tracks dedicated to John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. Also part of the incredible-sounding 'Tone Poet Audiophile Vinyl Reissue Series' is trumpeter Donald Byrd's Byrd In Flight, which really does have an epic line up and opens with the iconic Ghana.
- Drift
