ALBUMS

Jack Aaron Greensmith

A NEVER-ENDING SEA (SELF-RELEASE)

Words: Robert Nichols

4.5 / 5

PJ HARVEY I INSIDE THE OLD YEAR DYING (PARTISAN)

Words: Lee Fisher

Some records take time to reveal their wonders and these are the ones that stay with you. I Inside The Old Year Dying – Harvey’s first new material in a decade – is definitely, defiantly one such. It’s a unique and brilliant record but it’s going to be tough to explain exactly why. First off, it sounds unlike anything she’s done before. There are nods to previous releases – the riff on Seem An I (probably the most typically Harvey track here) could be a ragged take on the one from Good Fortune, for example – but this album goes to some very new, strange places. Take opener Prayer At The Gate: it starts with a Spacemen 3 shimmer that builds to a buzzing, menacing wall of feedback as the song goes on, and there’s a claustrophobic intensity to it. Her vocals are barely recognisable – higher, for sure, but with some entirely fresh quality. At times it’s near impossible to distinguish between her voice and that of John Parish. That doubling and blending of vocals is even more pronounced on the following Autumn Term, their voices entwining over looping drums and samples of kids playing. The effect is deeply disquieting. On All Souls, it’s like the tape has decayed, Disintegration Loops-style. A Child’s Question, July is a demented folk jig, Harvey intoning lines like “tell me who has licked the twoad?” in her most Dorset voice as drums circle and a frantic riff repeats. And closer A Noiseless Noise assaults you with abrasive guitars over an insistent Wipe Out drum pattern. None of this sounds much like anything else in her catalogue. Lyrically, Harvey is still in Orlam territory – scraps of Dorset dialect, passages that mix the prosaic (school buses and packed lunches) with the rural wyrd (like Max Porter’s Lanny). There’s certainly none of the direct commentary of the last couple of albums.

Everything about this album is intimate – almost too intimate, like you’re watching something you shouldn’t be privy to through a keyhole – and it’s often simply, even sparsely, arranged. There’s an incredible attention to tiny details throughout: you have to be supremely confident to do so little. It’s a brave, possibly alienating release for someone in Harvey’s position, but it’s a deeply personal, deeply inspired work of mystery and wonder.

Released: 07.07.23 www.pjharvey.net

Also Out This Month

Dexys – The Feminine Divine (100% Records, 28.07) // Local Natives – Time Will Wait For No One (Loma Vista, 07.07) // Treeboy & Arc – Natural Habitat (Clue Records, 07.07) // Mahalia – IRL (Atlantic Records, 14.07)

// MADMADMAD – Behavioural Sink Delirium (Bad Vibrations, 21.07) // Claud – Supermodels (Saddest Factory Records, 14.07) // Ten Tonnes – Dancing Alone (Absolute, 28.07) // Georgia – Euphoric (Domino, 28.07)

// PWNT – Play What’s Not There (Acrophase Records, 28.07) // Darlingside – Everything Is Alive (Thirty Tigers, 28.07) // Oxbow – Love’s Holiday (Ipecac Recordings, 21.07) // Alaska Reid – Disenchanter (Luminelle Recordings, 14.07) // Oscar Lang – Look Now (Dirty Hit, 21.07) // Penguin Cafe – Rain Before Seven (Erased Tapes, 07.07) // Upper Wilds – Jupiter (Thrill Jockey, 21.07) // Jaye Jayle – Don’t Let Your Love Life Get You Down (Pelegic Records, 14.07) // James And The Cold Gun – S/T (Loosegroove Records, 21.07) // Julie Byrne –The Greater Wings (Ghostly International, 07.07) // Susanna – Baudelaire & Orchestra (SusannaSonata, 28.07)

North East artist Jack Aaron Greensmith stands at a crossroads, contemplating, acoustic in hand. His album is full of inner battles, outer landscapes, and time and tide ebbing away. It’s a lonely journey from the bedroom where the album has been recorded as a stripped-back return to his acoustic roots. Will he break out from the comfort, safety and security of those four walls? Will the never ending sea that surrounds be a sea of opportunity or restraint, the open water of foreboding and anxiety?

Deploying a deliberately restricted palette, Jack Aaron Greensmith’s broad bush strokes are applied through rhythmic strumming and dark, tremulous vocals. The songs have simple construction and restricted lyrics, meaning a sudden up or down turn in mood possesses real potency. A memorable album of naïve charms.

Released: 01.07.23 www.linktr.ee/barberjack2695

4 / 5

DAMON LOCKS & ROB MAZUREK NEW FUTURE CITY RADIO (INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM)

Words: Ikenna Offor

On their debut collaborative LP, Damon Locks and Rob Mazurek rekindle an endearing chemistry honed over years of creative collusion. Armed with both Locks’ idiosyncratic penchant for collagic interpolation and Mazurek’s bewitching electro-kissed grooves, the Chicago duo deliver a bombastic set that boasts an undeniably vibey aural experience. Brimming with supple soundbeds, head-spinning flourishes, and some serious knock for your buck, New Future City Radio – which, with its indelibly stunning sonic malleability, deftly subverts genre expectations rather than treating them as immovable formulae – aces both the headphone and stereo test with flying colours. Sure, the more experimental moments might not be for all tastes, but there’s more than enough to keep true heads dipping back in time and again. Get familiar!

Released: 28.07.23 www.facebook.com/intlanthem

BLUR THE BALLAD OF DARREN (PARLOPHONE)

Words: Tracy Hyman

Hauntingly beautiful and melancholic at times, Blur’s new album is best consumed whole to fully enjoy its contemplative story of retrospection. A chartered history from the early days, the first track, The Ballad, lives up to its title with soaring strings and a heartfelt poignancy, before Coxon’s spiky discordant guitars punch forward in St. Charles Square, leaning towards the quirky punk-infused Blur of old.

The highlight, The Narcissist, is beautiful and uplifting, carefully crafted with messages of hope: “I won’t fall this time”. Strings and brass throughout highlight the slower tracks; Avalon has highlights of magic in the chorus, and the gentle waltz of Far Away Island is moving and wistful before The Heights brings the album to a gentle close.

Released: 21.07.23 www.blur.co.uk

LUKAS NELSON & PROMISE OF THE REAL STICKS AND STONES (6ACE RECORDS/THIRTY TIGERS)

Words: Lee Hammond

Yet another excellent album from Lukas Nelson & Promise of The Real, Sticks And Stones is a record with a bit of everything, from the swaggering Americana of the title track, through to songs like Ladder Of Love that wouldn’t be out of place in a honky-tonk. Lukas’ songwriting ability shows through in abundance on this record.

Every track has a brilliant hook that will stay with you for days after, particularly Alcohollelujah. Sticks And Stones covers all your typical country bases; drugs, alcohol, love and loss. Wrong House and Icarus are by far the standout tracks for very different reasons – one about love, the other the hilarities of mushrooms. By far Lukas Nelson’s best work to date.

Released: 14.07.23 www.lukasnelson.com

THE HOLY FAMILY GO ZERO (ROCKET RECORDINGS)

Words: Robin Webb

Pagan rituals drift upon us...unassuming, sinister, awash in mysticism, an intense maelstrom of unnerving gut wrench, and that’s just the first track, Crawling Out! Veering on the dark side of psych folk as a whole, revelling in its own ritual, brazenly sacrificing everything within chanting distance. And then The Watcher seduces you into a mental haze, while the Hell Born Babe cavorts, snaking into your lug-holes, deceptively funky. The album largely takes its inspiration from cult author Brian Catling’s Vorrh, where the dense forest full of everything past and present reverberates in a verdant psychedelic miasma, obscuring, barely discernible and yet gloriously bathed in noise. It took a few goes but now I’m totally lost in the undergrowth.

Released: 21.07.23 www.theholyfamilyuk.bandcamp.com

SNÕÕPER SUPER SNÕÕPER (THIRD MAN RECORDS)

Words: Lee Hammond

Nashville collective Snõõper provide a tirade of short, sharp tracks on debut record Super Snõõper. Only one track surpasses the two-minute mark, with many coming in under one.

Early on, Fitness provides an aggressive punk sound, whereas Music For Spies has more of a garage edge. Blasts of synths appear throughout, alongside huge riffs and pounding drums underpinning ferocious vocals. With Microbe and Inventory edging towards the hardcore side of things, there is lots of variety here.

It’s closing track Running that really provides something completely at odds with the rest of Super Snõõper; a dance punk track that wouldn’t be out of place on an LCD Soundsystem record, it’s a fitting end to a bonkers debut album!

Released: 14.07.23 www.snooper7.bandcamp.com

THE CLIENTELE I AM NOT THERE ANYMORE (MERGE)

Words: Trev Gibb

I remember where I was when I first heard We Could Walk Together and Reflections After Jane, laying on the grass in The Meadows in Edinburgh, lost in their meanders through perfect images of love, loneliness, alienation and the city. I Am Not There Anymore by The Clientele weaves a similar silken thread of reflective, gentle and elegiac ballads, echoes of familiar refrains and beautiful chord changes punctuated with chamber pop, cello and beats broken by jazz, classical inflections and spoken word. Highlights include Fables Of The Silverlink, Garden Eye Mantra, Lady Grey and the Lennon-esque Dying In May.

Released: 28.07.23 www.theclientele.co.uk

LITTLE DRAGON SLUGS OF LOVE (NINJA TUNE)

Words: Robin Webb

An album of highly produced, earnestly sophisticated indie dance grooves that jiggle in drum ‘n’ bass, nods briefly to techno, dips into disco and then hops to the pop. An appearance from JID on Stay also lends a distinct RnB vibe. Stand out tunes include Kenneth, and its funky bassline which has a positive ‘it will pass vibe’; the blissed out Glow, featuring previous high value collaborator Damon Albarn; and the album closer Easy Falling, which floats in an easy Ibizan pool.

It’s the Swedish band’s seventh album with designs firmly set on a pop universality that, though doesn’t have the gravitas of some electro dance acts cited as Little Dragon’s influences, it is nonetheless an accomplished slab of wax that sets for a satisfactory summer soundtrack.

Released: 07.07.23 www.little-dragon.net

CURRENT AFFAIRS OFF THE TONGUE (TOUGH LOVE RECORDS)

Words: Robin Webb

An efficient and distinct debut album by the Glasgow/Berlin band borne of many in the ever-burgeoning UK post-punk/indie scene. My immediate thoughts were of early career Siouxsie as a direct comparison, most evident in the opener No Fuss; indeed vocalist Joan Sweeney only differs in outlook, where positivity can be an interesting personal guide to modern living.

Musically, songs like Right Time & Riled are certainly goth-tinged yet jangly enough to avoid the heaviest of eyeliner and back-combed hair of my youth. Don’t expect a clone Banshees act either, they are rather uniquely reviving a much loved genre with an angular edginess that will be on display in Newcastle at Lubber Fiend on 29th July. Gannon, get gannin’!

Released: 14.07.23 www.currentaffairs.bandcamp.com

ME LOST ME RPG (UPSET THE RHYTHM)

Words: James Hattersley

Sometimes haunting, sometimes devastating; always brilliant. The atmospheric electronicscape of Me Lost Me’s new album RPG oozes with a dystopian folk that perpetually displaces you throughout time.

Insatiably cinematic, Jayne Dent, the composer behind this project, threads together an eclectic collection of ambient noise and art pop to a transcendent marvel. Rambunctious rhythm drops in Heat!, a cacophony of horns on Collide and Festive Days’ sinisterly playful strings, all lay foundation to Dent’s meandering and soaring vocals, stunningly shown on Mirie It Is While Summer I Last.

Inspired by unreal worlds of paintings and video games, RPG succeeds in concurrently existing as the real and imaginary world, full of tradition, wonder and curiosity. Mesmerising neo-synth storytelling from an omnipotent oracle.

Released: 07.07.23 www.melostme.com

PALEHOUND EYE ON THE BAT (POLYVINYL RECORD CO)

Words: Amelia Neri

Palehound’s latest album is an unvarnished, no-frills and frightfully relatable ode to relationships. Driven by El Kempner’s raw and emotive songwriting, Eye On The Bat is a cathartic tour de force that expresses both the danger of fantasy, and the pain of growth beyond a heartbreak.

Threaded within sinewy and off-kilter guitar riffs, the record captures the immediate and pays attention to the details that can build or break a relationship. From the desperation that is Good Sex, to the chaos of Independence Day and the guilt in My Evil, Eye On The Bat sees Kempner fearlessly bear their soul to the listener. It is an aching and heartfelt note on vulnerability and, for that reason, arguably Palehound’s best album to date.

Released: 14.07.23 www.palehound.com

3.5 / 5

STRANGE RANGER PURE MUSIC (FIRE TALK)

Words: Matt Young

Having spent considerable time deep-diving into electronic production since their 2019 release Remembering The Rockets, New York’s Strange Ranger flex these new techniques from the outset on Pure Music.

The album is a self-admitted indulgence and obsession with My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, meaning there’s a heady barrage of guitar squall, but this is carefully pierced with disco and house beats. The prevailing sound is one of clubby haze and myoclonic jerk, a startled mix of cinematic familiarity. Blue Shade takes skittering dance rock and Issac Eiger’s baritone into Violator-era Depeche Mode, while both Rain So Hard and She’s On Fire reflect back melancholic dancefloor euphoria, breakups and the solitary journey home. Dazed In The Shallows’ rapturous groove closes the album exhilarated, however temporary that high might be.

Released: 21.07.23 www.strangeranger.bandcamp.com

WREN HINDS DON’T DIE IN THE BUNDU (BELLA UNION)

Words: Amelia Neri

Sincere, inquisitive and softly existential, Wren Hinds’ fourth studio LP marks a fresh chapter for the Cape Town native as he navigates fatherhood and contemplates what it truly means to be human. Driven by the Hinds’ illustrative songwriting, Don’t Die In The Bundu is a sublime anthology of gently flowing, dappled and poetic notes on fatherhood and fortitude.

Throughout the record, the singer-songwriter’s mellifluous vocals dance over each track and mingle with dreamy, acoustic-led instrumentals, creating a vibe that is both otherworldly and grounded.

Effortless and flawlessly executed, with each track being a treat to the ear, I’m convinced that Hinds has mastered the rare art of creating albums that are simultaneously full-bodied and subtle; an effect that few are able to achieve.

Released: 21.07.23 www.wrenhinds.bandcamp.com

SAM BURTON DEAR DEPARTED (PARTISAN RECORDS)

Words: Elodie A. Roy

The cover of Sam Burton’s second album seems an homage to Bob Lind’s Since There Were Circles (1971). Like the elusive Lind, Burton has remained a misfit and a wanderer. He’s not found his home yet, although still hopes to get there some day.

The Californian songwriter, also a member of retro folk rock band Sylvie (alongside Marina Allen), clearly is a revivalist. But there is no cynicism, no self-knowing irony to it. He inhabits the past naturally, as if he truly belonged to the age of Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly. He magically croons away, singing about love and death in sweet, sincere tones. I could never quite place him – and maybe that’s why his music has come to intrigue me so much.

Released: 14.07.23 www.samburtonmusic.com