Domino Vinilo y CD

Review: It's always nice when an album comes with a backstory so genuinely absurd it renders the project a surrealist work of art. Welcome to "I Made A Place", the first fresh material from Bonnie "Prince" Billy in time, dedicated to life's simple and most instinctive pleasures. Because in the face of real adversity overthinking is wasting time. So here's the yarn - Hawaii, January 2018, Will and Elsa, the creatives at work here, are in the midst of an artistic residency when a warning goes off about an impending missile attack. A song is written, "Blueberry Jam"; whimsical flight of fancy laughing in the face of impending Armageddon. Thankfully the "attack" was a false alarm, but it catalysed further work resulting in this album. Complex song craft and enchanting folk instrumentation rooted in what we feel when all is about to be lost.

Review: In November 2022, Cat Power took the stage at London’s Royal Albert Hall and delivered a song-for-song recreation of one of the most fabled and transformative live sets of all time. Held at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in May 1966 - but long known as the “Royal Albert Hall Concert” due to a mislabeled bootleg - the original performance saw Bob Dylan switching from acoustic to electric midway through the show, drawing ire from an audience of folk purists and forever altering the course of rock n' roll. In her own rendition of that historic night, the artist otherwise known as Chan Marshall inhabited each song with equal parts conviction and grace and a palpable sense of protectiveness, ultimately transposing the anarchic tension of Dylan’s set with a warm and luminous joy. Now captured on the live album Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert, Marshall’s spellbinding performance both lovingly honors her hero’s imprint on history and brings a stunning new vitality to many of his most revered songs.

Review: The ninth album by English folk singer Shirley Collins, Archangel Hill, comes as a collection of traditional songs from England, Ireland, Scotland and America. Collins breathes fresh, reanimatory, magic vocal dust into the songs, with her distinctively breathy voice once more imbuing a collective energy into the English folk revival styles of the 1960s and 1970s... and now, perhaps, the 2020s. It's her debut for Domino, who describe Collins as one of the most important voices in the folk revival scene. Naturally, this means Collins' selections reflect her deep knowledge of folk song, with some tracks like 'Hares On The Mountain' widely known among the public, while others are sourced from close personal friends and relatives.

Review: Julia Holter's sixth album, Something In The Room She Moves, is a dreamlike exploration of complexity and transformability, featuring flowing harmonic universes and fluid, water-like melodies. Her vocal register, reminiscent of Siouxsie Sioux, Nico, or Kate Bush, possesses a matchstick intensity, rekindling its own flame through the conversation in her voice. Holter's diaphragm shifts between instruments, creating a continuum of fretless electric bass pitches counterpointing with gliding vocal melodies. Glissing Yamaha CS-60 adds a touch of experimentalism, while her production choices and arrangements maintain a sense of simplicity and refinement. Holter's singing resonates in somatic frequencies, evoking a deep connection between mind and body. With its liquid, ever-changing nature, 'Something In The Room She Moves' invites listeners to immerse themselves in a world of sound that is both ethereal and profoundly human.

Review: Julia Holter's sixth album Something in the Room She Moves might just be the Los Angeles songwriter's best work. In the past she has often explored memory and dreamlike futures but on this new outing she is very much more in the moment throughout. She explains herself hat "There's a corporeal focus, inspired by the complexity and transformability of our bodies." Musically the album mixes fretless electric bass pitches with her unique vocal melodies. The recognisable sounds of the Yamaha CS-60 interweave with more organic wind instruments and add up to a fluid, watery sound that flows smooth and carries you along with it amongst the gorgeous harmonies.

Review: Nico's Marble Index was the first album to establish the German musician's home in the avant-garde; the story of the fashion model turned "legitimate" artist is as old as time, yet is rarely told today. In contrast to her first album, Chelsea Girl, which consisted almost entirely of pop chansons, Nico's sophomore LP here tracks nicely with her working introduction to John Cale in his harmonium era, drawing inspiration primarily from modern European classical music, not three-minute hookcraft. Long out of print, this slow-burner of a critical classic now hears a worthy reissue via Domino.

Review: As part of a new looking back on German art rocker Nico's esteemed career by the indie label Domino, Desertshore chronologically follows The Marble Index, and is her third album, following the prior project's establishing her as an avant-garde artist with one foot in the mainstream, in stark defiance of the the prejudiced poo-poohs that followed her first (baroque pop) album, Chelsea Girl. Desertshore is more of a reconciliation of her prior two projects, bringing back the initial western pop sensibility while now firmly basking in a newfound weirdness-and-she-knows-it. From the opening dark waves of 'Janitor Of Lunacy' to the piano-balladic injection of sadness that is 'Afraid', this is another avant-garde masterpiece by the musician, never justifiably passed over.