Back catalogue: All genres

Review: Seven Psalms finds Australia's most imperious musical misfit Nick Cave leaving his Bad Seeds at home and teaming up with frequent collaborator Warren Ellis for a limited 10". The spoken word pieces on this record are the result of a daily song writing practice over a week during lockdown - Cave himself describes them as "small, sacred songs," set to appropriately subtle musical accompaniment. Recorded during the sessions for Cave and Ellis' 2021 album Carnage, it's a rich work in its own right that offers a different perspective on Cave's considerable gifts as a soothsayer.

Review: It has been around 13 years since most people will have had a chance to hear much about Chapterhouse. Finishing their reunion tour in 2010, you can't help but feel there was still a fair bit left unsaid even after that. The outfit may not be top on everyone's list of late-1980s and earl-mid-1990s remembrances, but were more than deserving of that final two-year stint on the road, and this reissue package.

Formed in 1987, and immediately lumped in with a then-nascent shoegaze scene, the Reading-born team aren't actually that easy to describe. Dreamy, at times verging on opiate, yes, but arguably bigger, rockier and looser than that might suggest. Here you get two of their final singles, 'Don't Look Now' and 'She's A Vision', alongside two top reworks of 'Deli' - one experimental psych offering, the other bound for Balearic sets.

Review: In all honesty, moving straight from the rousing, slightly grinding wall of sound with which 'We Are The Beautiful' signs off, into the lunging bass of a stomping Spooky dub edit of the same track, is both unexpected and a bit jarring. The noisy end of shoegaze-leaning indie into pared back prog-hued tech house from one of the all-time masters, anyone? But then that's kind of the point we want to celebrate.

Chapterhouse may only just be getting the reappraisal they deserve now, over a decade after their last and rather brief reunion tour (with She's A Vision also hitting our shelves early-2023), but their influence on heads and artists alike was significant. Debut album Whirlpool, for example, remains for many a high point of the entire shoegaze movement. Here are three more tracks to prove that point, and one belting - if sonically isolated - remix.

Review: .Coldplay - where on Earth do you start? On the one hand, snubbed by 'real musos' for their broad crossover appeal and uncanny ability to make every song feel like it was written for the next Richard Curtis movie. Nevertheless, when a band achieves such levels of success, you have to accept there's definitely something in their water. In this case, a deft knack for penning arrangements that invoke feelings as big as the stadiums the tracks themselves were built to fill.
Prospekt's March is a great example, but also spotlights the fact that Coldplay isn't just shorthand for rousing chart-friendly soft rock anthems. Originally released in 2008, and taking plenty of almost-made-it tracks from the studio sessions that led to preceding album Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, this eight-song offering spans everything from hands in the air sing-a-long hits ('Life In Technicolour', 'Lovers In Japan') to achingly beautiful piano solos ('Postcards From Far Away'), sombre brass balladry ('Now My Feet Won't Touch The Ground') and - wait for it - high-production hip hop ('Lost+').

Review: Richard Barratt aka Parrot aka Crooked Man is one of those artists with an indelible sonic fingerprint yet a diverse array of sounds in his arsenal. Here he offers up a pair of different remixes of the same tune, namely Jim v Crooked Man's 'Phoenix' on Vicious Charm Recordings. His Goth Edit is the one for us - a haunting tune with eerie guitar strings slowly unfolding over swirling electronics and smudged vocal sounds. It's perfect for this time of year when Halloween is just around the corner and is another master stroke from the Sheffield wizard.

Review: This new compilation by the (literally) grassroots Spanish label Soil pays tribute to the late incipient goth band Bauhaus - known for their volatile performances, blackened and deathly sound, and later controversial antics. Aiming to highlight the band's admixture of glam with goth, irreverent demeanour, and strange fusions of dub, regional music and post-punk, artists and groups such as Years Of Denial, Selfishadows and Radikal Kuss deliver six curveball takes on Bauhaus' great songs, from 'All We Ever Wanted' to the unmatchable 'Dark Entries'.

Review: The debut full-length (not counting the Beyond Hypothermia compilation that came beforehand) from seminal Massachusetts metalcore/emo/post-rock/alternative giants Cave In, still stands as a monumental work that has maintained its position within the Venn Diagram intersection of a myriad of altering sonics two decades on. Tragically losing bassist/vocalist Caleb Scofield in a car accident in 2018, the band made a much-supported return with last year's phenomenal Heavy Pendulum while enlisting the help of Converge bassist Nate Newton. As the newly reformed group continue to tour the latest opus-like addition to their incomparable legacy, there's a bittersweet aura surrounding the 20 year anniversary of Until Your Heart Stops; both celebrating their enigmatic genre-fluid origins that have been an essential component of why Cave In are still paid such reverence, and a sobering reminder of the loss of such a truly underappreciated artistic voice.

Review: Riding SCORCHING hot on the heels of their recent self-titled debut, fans could be forgiven for expecting more of the same from Champyun Clouds' second long player of
2021. A hodgepodge of cutting-room-floor-fodder and experiments that would've been b-sides or Japan-exclusive CD bonus tracks in those halcyon days of physical formats' golden ages is not what we're getting. Let's save those for a deluxe anniversary reissue
one day. Nah - sheer, unabashed creativity fuels this album; and weirdly enough, they've managed to branch out in interesting ways while also creating an album that is more immediate and banger-centric. Although Nail's eclectic psych-lounge tendencies and
Asa's irreverent poetry and broad Nottingham lilt remain the key touchstones of CC's sound, opener "Check For Silt"s rough drum'n'bass beats offer an immediate and clear sonic progression for the Nottingham duo. The LP ultimately plays a bit like a haunted
jukebox in outer space - with elements of dub, britpop, early house, trippy, blissed-out sunshine pop (reminiscent of mid-90s His Name Is Alive at their most Beach Boys-aping), William Orbit-esque 90s psych-pop electronica, distorted glam rock shuffles and
garage-y funk. There's a particularly great moment of sequencing at the end of the first half where I got lulled into a state of near-euphoria with the Air-like "The Flowered Crown" before getting slapped 'round the face by "I'm Not Right For You", which sounds
like Nile Rogers producing a demo for Sheila & B. Devotion, except he recorded it at the bottom of a well. Sophomore slump? Never heard of him, mate.

Review: Following on from 2020's blistering debut, High Risk Behaviour, self-proclaimed aussie "shed-rock" trio, The Chats, are set to return with the beautifully, aptly titled, Get Fucked. With a batch of new, ludicrously catchy curbstompers detailing the highs, lows, and (especially) in betweens of Australian life, the band admitted simply that the title is designed to instil that same feeling of "woah, no way, cool" in young music fans the same way Green Day's 'Dookie' did for them once upon a time. Check out the gearhead, status hungry critique of latest single, '6L GTR', to prep you for what's sure to be a collection, equal parts cynical and serene.

Review: Lucinda Chua is currently based in South London and is a singer, songwriter, composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist. She crafts elegant and emotive music mainly using her voice and cello, plenty of effects units and draws on ambient for her inspiration. What results is atmospheric and intimate music that is utterly enchaining as this album on 4AD proves across ten tracks that come after she spent an intensive period studying Chinese dance forms. Lead single 'Echo' is a pop song about ancestral trauma that walks a thin line between respect for the past and the hope and freedom of a new future. It's captivating indeed.

Review: Solo is the operative word for Josienne Clarke. Kissing labels goodbye with preceding album, I Promised You Light, and leaving musical partners behind in the process, 2022 saw the artist step out with a bold confidence that seems at odds with the sound she's best known for. Not exactly nervous, but there's certainly always been an air of careful tread about her work.
That's no criticism. Through the use of understatement, from guitars that often form the focal point of her instrumental arrangements, to occasional piano keys and, for the most part, her own voice, she conveys a powerful sense of longing, yearning, and wanting. And yet there's always been an air of redemption and resilience in there, too. Onlines takes all those elements and heightens them, even upping the rockiness on numbers like the wonderfully raw and distorted 'Anyone But Me'.

Review: First released in 2005, Clientele's second effort crystallised their ability to both deal out wistful and reflective indie pop with style and elan and to summon up a peculiarly London-based style of melancholia. Somewhat akin to an collision of the baroque pop stylings of Love with the delicate strains of Luna, yet with its introspective lilt backed up by rich and delicate arrangements, 'Strange Geometry' is equal parts succour and somnambulism - these ballads for the midnight hour being all the more affecting for their understated nature.

Review: Shoegazers and experimental outfit Cloudland Canyon blend ambient, drone, krautrock, psychedelic, house music into their own unique tapestries. The band, led by Kip Uhlhorn, is now back with this new self-titled album which his another widescreen exploration of the cosmic sonic realm. The band is now more than 20 years into their career and for this one embraced the future by collaborating with AI. This allowed them to generate and create "compositions that sound like they are meant for an alternate realm where both beauty and suffering are both present, but not at odds with one another."

Review: Dadaphonic has a key reissue on their hands with Cranes debut album Fuse. The Cranes was a groundbreaking alternative band from New Hampshire that was led by the brother and sister duo Alison Shaw & Jim Shaw. Their popularity grew as the late 80s turned in the early 90s culminating with an opening slot on The Cure's Wish Tour in 1992. Perfectly blending with Cure in many respects, the Cranes would be re-labeled as Dream Pop in retrospect. Fuse was originally put out in 1986 as a cassette only album. Strangely, 38 years later it was still not brought out on other formats. Until now! This album shows the band in its infant stage honing their craft while longtime fans love the rawness of their early days. This album was remastered for this release to celebrate Fuse finally getting a wider release. Fans of dreampop, goth and alternative music will extremely interested in this important release.

Review: Legendary emo indie outfit The Cure have played all over the world in their decorated careers but back in 1996 when they headed to Brazil, it was the first time they had been to the country since 1988. They were there for the 1996 edition of the Hollywood Rock Festival which they headlined in superb fashion and wowed their Latin American fans. Live Lullabies & Other Bedtime Stories is a special recording of that night that comes on nice yellow vinyl and features the likes of signature anthems like 'Boys Don't Cry,' 'Friday I'm In Love,' 'Just Like Heaven' and many more.

Review: A selection plucked from Robert Smith and co's 1984 Washington show, with a neat collection of tracks from what many would see as the band in their prime. The contrast between raw, speedy new wave anthems like 'Boy's Don't Cry' and '10:15 Saturday Night', the epic gothfest 'A Forest' and the cuter pop idiosycracities of 'The Caterpillar' show how quickly the Crawley gang evolved in their early days. Obviously, they had a long way to go after this, but many would say this is The Cure at their absolute finest.

Review: The Cure are one of those bands everyone should know, and do their best to try and see. With their roots in what was a nascent post punk sound, they quickly - like album two, quickly - turned to a darker, altogether weirder and artsier hybrid New Romantic sound before introducing clear pop sensibilities a little later. You can't help but feel they've carved out a completely unique place for themselves in the pantheons as a result. Of course, that's in retrospect and13 studio albums, 30 singles, and 30million unit sales later. But, as this collection of live recordings for broadcasting icon John Peel's BBC radio shows proves, even in their earliest incarnation there was something very different about Robert Smith and comrades. There's not a lot more that needs to be said, really. Perhaps aside from 'buy it'.

Review: Given The Cure's particularly brittle sound in their early years, it's an added joy to hear it compressed with a tape-borne level of saturation for this excellent collection of three radio broadcasts. Disc one is given over to a recording from Philipshalle, Dusseldorf in 1981, capturing the band during their seminal run of early, gothic new wave. Disc two comes a few years later at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle, and you can already hear the evolution of the band while still very much ensconced in their funereal splendour and jangling guitar sound. For a greater leap still, head to disc three and the recording from Praca Da Apoteose, Rio De Janeiro in 1996, which was right around the time they released Wild Mood Swings, and marvel at the evolution of one of the finest bands of the era.

Review: Post-punk pioneers and drivers of the earthy gothic scene, The Cure is one of the UK's most seminal bands. They have a wealth of ever-green and classic hits which have a bittersweet sense of uplifting melancholy to them and never do they sound better than when live. Between the years of 1979 and 1981 they played no fewer than nine times for the BBC and this is a collection of some of the best of it. There are several highlights from various albums during that time and this marks the first vinyl release for some of these versions after various bootlegged CDs in the past.

Review: 30th Anniversary Edition of the Cure's best-selling, Grammy-nominated album 'WISH.' This deluxe 45 track edition - compiled by Robert Smith - features 24 previously unreleased tracks & 4 new to CD tracks across three discs. And that's not to mention their four tracks that appeared exclusively on the mail-order cassette 'Lost Wishes', released in 1993, which have never appeared on CD or digitally, the previously unreleased song 'A Wendy Band', a previously unheard mix of the epic fan favourite 'From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea', five rare 12" mixes, and an unheard live version of 'End' from Paris Bercy in October 1992.

Review: When Eskimo first invited New York-born, Berlin-based Curses to compile Next Wave Acid Punx, they might not have known what they were letting themselves in for. As we reach part Deux, there's no doubt they signed up to sift through a staggering volume of EBM, industrial, minimal wave and electro from the darker side of the dancefloor. Taking in 49 tracks in total, this authoritative collection spreads across three CDs and features old legends like Throbbing Gristle alongside newer wave sonic deviants like The Hacker, with so much more ground covered in between. Consider this monumental compilation a homing beacon for all creatures of the night.