ALBUMS

SLOW TOWN CLOCK CROSSING TIDES (SELF-RELEASE)

Words: Matt Young

The contemporary folk songs on Jamie Leven’s new album as Slow Town Clock are delicately crafted and deftly executed. Crossing Tides was written in the Outer Hebridean islands, and the songs draw obvious inspiration from the landscape, wildlife and mythology, with each song associated with a different island.

BONNIE ‘PRINCE’ BILLY KEEPING SECRETS WILL DESTROY YOU (DOMINO)

Words: Lee Fisher

Will Oldham has released so much music in so many incarnations over the last thirty years – perhaps 40, 45 albums? - that it’s somehow impossible to get a reliable fix on what he’s up to even now. His Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy identity is his most prolific and most rewarding but it’s still a slippery beast, likely to show up on records with Scottish folk bands or experimental drone outfits. And you always get the sense with Oldham that even at his seemingly most straightforward and honest, there’s something else going on, some careful construction.

But know this – Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You is an astounding, beautiful record, the equal of its 2019 predecessor I Made A Place, and occupying a pretty similar soundworld. Take teaser track (and album highlight) Bananas – over a fragile, sweetly melancholy melody and some cooing backing vocals, Oldham exclaims his love in the most innocent yet gleefully, warmly sexual way and celebrates how they “dance around in circles in an end-of-times ballet and shit upon the riches other folks have on display”. That’s lovely for you.

Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You was recorded with a small, intimate-sounding band back in Louisville and it sounds cosy and close and like a coming together of true friends (and lovers). There’s a warm, early-seventies-in-the-woods-in-upstate-New-York feel to the sound, tasteful and understated, Scarlet Rivera-style fiddle and occasional organ swells adding texture. Throughout, Oldham sings like he’s passing on eternal truths and wisdom (“Everyone dies in the end so there’s nothing to hide, like it or not, I’m singing destruction, like it or not, I’m happy today!”) and it always sounds sincere and compelling even if he’s putting us on (more and more these days, I suspect he’s not). Even his simplest lines can sound like grand statements carved in tablets, such is the weird authority his voice possesses (a voice that’s never sounded richer and more gorgeous, by the way). There’s a lot of love here, and a desire for simplicity and transcendence, but darkness too: Trees Of Hell is as apocalyptic as it sounds, a blighted folk song that breaks the prevailing mood of bucolic bliss.

Keeping Secrets... gives us a Will Oldham unquestionably full of love, for his family and his music and his life, but there’s trouble too. Of course there is. Beautiful trouble.

Released: 11.08.23 www.bonnieprincebilly.bandcamp.com

Also Out This Month

Be Your Own Pet – Mommy (Third Man Records, 25.08) // Renee Rap – Snow Angel (Polydor, 18.08) // Hozier – Unreal Unearth (Island Records, 18.08) // Public Image Limited – End of World (PiL Official, 11.08) // Hot Milk – A Call To The Void (Music For Nations, 25.08) // Chris Farren – Doom Singer (Polyvinyl, 04.08) // Willie J Healey – Bunny (YALA! Records, 25.08) // The Xcerts – Learning How To Live And Let Go (UNFD, 18.08) // Our Broken Garden – Blind (Bella Union, 25.08) // M.A.G.S – Destroyer (Smartpunk Records, 04.08) // Laura Groves – Radio Red (Bella Union, 11.08) // Andrew Hung – Deliverance (Lex Records, 11.08) // Who Is She? – Goddess Energy (Father/Daughter Records, 25.08) // Stephen Steinbrink – Disappearing Coin (Western Vinyl, 18.08) // Clementine Valentine – The Coin That Broke The Fountain Floor (Flying Nun, 25.08) // Diners – Domino (Bar/None Records, 18.08) // Becca Mancari – Left Hand (Captured Tracks, 25.08) // Ratboys – The Window (Topshelf Records, 25.08) // Teenage Wrist – Still Love (Epitaph, 04.08)

Recording took an equally naturalistic approach; accompanied by Leven’s wife Sophie Wren (vocal harmonies, accordion) and Paul Susans (double bass), John Hirst (vibraphone, percussion, haunted dulcimer) and Dean Parker (electric guitar, mandolin), everything is record live by Julie Bartley at Cupola Studios in Newcastle. The live frisson gives each hushed sound greater importance. Standout tracks include A Giant Hand, Golden Light and closing song The Edge of the Land, which lift the listener into different worlds effortlessly, with canny charm and unhurried pleasure.

Released: 11.08.23 www.slowtownclockmusic.co.uk

MY UGLY CLEMENTINE THE GOOD LIFE (BMG)

Words: Cameron Wright

Pulling together three of Vienna’s big creative forces, Sophie Lindinger, Mira Lu Kovacs and Nastasja Ronck, My Ugly Clementine is Austria’s latest supergroup. This trio of female creatives formed My Ugly Clementine as a way to explore identity, share stories and challenge the norm. While their tracks tackle taboos and raise awareness, the main agenda of the project is to let their hair down and have fun! Bringing in loud guitars and louder choruses, the group aim to provide the summer with a new wave of indie anthems.

Where tracks like No hit the ground running, making a noise and a scene, it’s the tender harmonies and moments of vulnerability that catch my attention. While most of the album falls into a generic indie haze, there’s moments of genuine interest and character still in the mix.

Released: 11.08.23 www.myuglyclementine.com

GIRL RAY PRESTIGE (MOSHI MOSHI)

Words: Cameron Wright

Prestige is the third studio album by London-based female three-piece Girl Ray, which includes a series of tracks that revel in youth, love and the excitement of life. The tracks are all equally light, with gentle vocals breezing over choppy guitars and uptempo drum beats. Prestige is a simple release, using the grooves of the 80s as a soundtrack to an exploration of sexuality, maturity and heartbreak which keeps the tracks engaging.

Where the formula may wear itself out somewhat, with the rudimentary disco grooves blurring into one, the album struggles to beg for repeated listens, yet nearly every track is a treat. Girl Ray are at their finest when their sound is shamelessly euphoric, and this album has plenty of examples of that.

Released: 04.08.23 www.girlray.co.uk

MOVEMENTS RUCKUS! (FEARLESS RECORDS)

Words: Laura Doyle

“Haven’t we had enough of SoCal alt. bands?” said me, moments before Movements took to the stage one dreary post-Covid gig evening last year. Past me quickly ate my words, ‘cause this lot is worth my time – and yours. Hailing from the US, Movements have become, quite paradoxically, a well-established underground band. They appreciate their UK crowds as much as they are appreciated in turn, so the release of their third album RUCKUS! has been appropriately anticipated. With a delectable mix of growling hardcore riffs and strained emo-revivalicious vocals (Lead Pipe), twinkling indie melodies and soft lyricisms (Heaven Sent), and bittersweet self-deprecating anthems that you wish weren’t as relatable as they are (Fail You), Movements’ next moves are sure to be well received by fans new and old.

Released: 18.08.23 www.movementsofficial.com

ART SCHOOL GIRLFRIEND SOFT LANDING (FICTION)

Words: Matt Young

Initially Polly Mackey, pseudonymously known as Art School Girlfriend, opens her newest album with a relatively pacey tune, A Place To Lie, followed up hurriedly by Close To The Clouds. So far so esoterically indie dance. However, getting to Real Life with its more intimate confessional tone we’re now well and truly ‘in it’ as this song slows us down, and shows us the person behind the music, or does it? We could get pretty meta here as it’s still filtered, yet feels more about truth. This song has added strings by Chloe Kraemer and Alfie Johns and intertwined backing vocals from Marika Hackman. It stands out, and even with other songs like The Weeks also skipping and swooning, it’s the broody and beguiling tone of Real Life that stitches all the other tunes together, even as the pace picks up, propelling us forward unable to fully leave everything behind.

Released: 04.08.23 www.artschoolgirlfriend.co.uk

GENESIS OWUSU STRUGGLER (OURNESS/AWAL)

Words: Caleb Carter

Genesis Owusu is fantastic at breakdowns. Breaking down lyrically across break beats, the closing points of his songs are usually their highest. Struggler’s speculative world stages a war between scuttling, panting “roaches” and Gods trigger-happy for judgement day, yet it sometimes feels like these most breathless of moments are just as sonically feared as they are revered.

Opening with the hum of bass guitar and existential barks, it is a little disappointing not to see the genre’s bellwether change course for less grazed grass. Not least because this album of the doomed young has an otherwise thrilling identity, full of red quasar beams, the extraterrestrial, and murky, nebulous futures like skin growths, unfortunately we see less of the warped and the new.

Released: 18.08.23 www.genesisowusu.com

OSEES INTERCEPTED MESSAGE (IN THE RED RECORDS)

Words: Lee Hammond

This is a pop record with a multitude of twists and turns. From opener Stunner you’d assume this was going to be a standard OSEES record. However, it quickly morphs, through the synth punk of title track Intercepted Message, the relentless chanting of The Fish Needs A Bike, to the brilliant Sleazoid Psycho. Underpinned with a driving motorik beat, retaining a similar pace throughout, blasts of synths and stabs of guitars punctuate most tracks. Then Always At Night appears, at complete odds with anything you’d expect from the OSEES. Steeped in synth pop sensibility, Dwyer croons in a manner akin to John Grant; an unexpected but welcome turn on what must be one of the band’s finest albums to date.

Released: 18.08.23 www.theeohsees.com

Holy Wave

FIVE OF CUPS (SUICIDE SQUEEZE)

Words: Matt Young

In a fifteen-year career so far, Holy Wave, fronted by vocalist/guitarist Ryan Fuson, have used the psychedelic, freeform jamming that initially inspired the band’s music to more tacitly focus on the gems in an otherwise soupy mix of sounds. With the pandemic interrupting everyone’s creative mojo, Fuson in particular took the portents of tarot – the Five of Cups representing a forlorn dwelling on the past – and turned it into his muse, a way to be present despite a future uncertainty when he believed. Although the album opens a kaleidoscopic world where Five of Cups, Bog Song and Chapparal all set wonderful aural tones, meandering genteelly, the remainder is left desperately seeking a destination, and instead references sounds from their own past as well as from influential bands they admire.

Released: 04.08.23 www.holywave.bandcamp.com

O )))

4 ))) (THE SUNDROP GARDEN)

Words: Matt Young

((( O ))) is an unpronounceable representation of a Filipino-American singer and songwriter who prefers not to use her birth name. They’ve been steadily releasing music to coincide with the planets full moon cycles leading us to the current fourth album ((( 4 ))). Collectively her music is credited to The Sundrop Garden. Out There opens proceedings with its mix of soft, ethereal tones meeting bass drums and glitchy synths. Vocalisations are reminiscent of FKA Twigs or Grimes. The pre-release focal point Sanctuary ramps up the beat quota, but it’s not until Black Cat and then Don’t Die that we encounter anything different to the slick production gloss and almost structureless meander of the opening few songs. For an album inspired by energy this spends a long time searching it out.

Released: 27.08.23 www.instagram.com/thesundropgarden

THE HIVES THE DEATH OF RANDY FITZSIMMONS (FUGA)

Words: Gus Ironside

Eleven years since the release of their last album, the patchy, self-produced Lex Hives, the Swedish garage punks are back with a new album produced by top Swedish pop producer Patrik Berger (Lana Del Rey, Robyn). Thankfully, long-term fans need not worry about Berger softening the group’s signature sound – this, their sixth album, is a full-blooded return to form. Berger’s skilful production enhances the album’s 12 songs, rather than detracting from their ferocity. As usual with The Hives, the album is front-loaded with its strongest tracks, with a powerful opening salvo of Bogus Operandi, Trapdoor Solution and Countdown To Shutdown setting the tone for a return to the sound of the group’s early triumphs. Easily their best album since 2003’s Tyrannosaurus Hives.

Released: 11.08.23 www.thehives.com

Vinyl Williams

AETERNA (HARMONY RECORDS)

Words: Robin Webb

A psychedelic ethereal seventh album from the LA based musician/artist; imagine being performed to in a vast heavenly hall with resultant reverb and you’re part of the way to rapturous enlightenment of the celestial kind. It’s clear that Williams has a sound he likes; jangly guitars, echoey vocals, shimmering jewels strummed in elysian evermore. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy stands out though, because it has a harder edge and is embellished with the occasional sonic shot weaving in and out of the spheres of your consciousness chased by your laser toting ego. The truly angelic closing track Electric Electric delights also, and is a rather fitting way to end as your waking world slips away with the phasing and echoing guitar.

Released: 04.08.23 www.vinylwilliams.bandcamp.com

BUCK MEEK HAUNTED MOUNTAIN (4AD)

Words: Michael O’Neill

Yes, I am also somehow shocked to discover that the almighty Buck Meek (otherwise known as the abstract sonic extraordinaire guitarist in the prolific, restless Big Thief) has managed to carve out some time between touring the world and cooking up an incredible body of sprawling work, to release yet another solo LP.

I’m not shocked, however, to discover that it is another brilliant release from one of the most boundary-pushing, singular six stringers of the century so far. As with Big Thief, there’s a grand plethora of ear candy here, which serves songs that run the gamut from indie pop to the quality country stylings of the title track. It’s an eclectic and engrossing collection of sonic wonder.

Released: 25.08.23 www.buckmeekmusic.com

HEMI HEMINGWAY STRANGERS AGAIN (PNKSLM RECORDINGS)

Words: Lily Pratt

I would not consider it to be an exaggeration to deem Hemi Hemingway’s hauntingly melancholic album Strangers Again an aural renaissance. His elegantly crafted songs seem to be sculpted from a similar chisel to Jeff Buckley; Hemingway’s soft vocals and weighty pleas too become a mournful musical opera. Tracks such as Green Envy invoke the saxophone which imbues the song with a certain gloomy beauty and dreaminess: “Is she just a friend or is her you’re dreaming of?” Alone In The Morning Alley is made richer by the quiet keys of the piano which steeps the track in soulful enchantment and renders the rest of the album a poetic labyrinth of wonder and musical intoxication.

Released: 18.08.23 www.hemihemingway.bandcamp.com

ANNIE HART WEIGHT OF A WAVE (UNINHABITABLE MANSIONS)

Words: Robin Webb

An unfussy collection of post-punk, synth pop songs that hints at being a jaggedly dissonant indie nod to 90’s giants like Throwing Muses or Belly, but retains a largely sanitised lightness of touch. The album’s lyrics examine the paucity of depth displayed in the predominately specious surface tension of social media affectations and plaudits, as in Stop Staring At You; or the dearth of things that dent darkened emotions in Nothing Makes Me Happy Anymore. Annie Hart set challenges when in the studio to come up with at least three songs per session, and these ten tightly wound tunes are the result; one for those who like their indie pop sweetly sung but with a soft and shadowy outlook.

Released: 04.08.23 www.anniehart.bandcamp.com