Mr Thing returns with his 2nd release on Friday's Funky 45 after the 1st one Cool V sold out almost immediately! (repress coming soon) This time out Marc crafts a couple of 2 steppers to warm up your winter dancefloors. Side A is a nice flip of Cherelle & Luther's Saturday Love and side B a lovely version of Michael Wycoff's Looking Up To You - you know how the last one went - don't sleep!
“Godzilla just walked into the room. People just stood there with their eyes and mouths wide open.” To hear Randy Holden describe the audience’s reaction in 1969 to his solo debut performing with a teeth-rattling phalanx of 16 (sixteen!) 200 watt Sunn amps is about as close as one will get to truly experience the moment heavy metal music morphed into existence. However, at last Riding Easy have unearthed the proper fossil record. Population II, the now legendary, extremely rare album by guitarist / vocalist Holden and drummer / keyboardist Chris Lockheed is considered to be one of the earliest examples of doom metal.
Though its original release was a very limited in number and distribution, like all great records, its impact over time has continued to grow. In 1969, Holden, fresh off his tenure with proto-metal pioneers Blue Cheer (appearing on one side of the New! Improved! Blue Cheer album and touring for the better part of a year in the group), aimed for more control over his band. Thus, Randy Holden - Population II was born, the duo naming itself after the astronomical term for a particular star cluster with heavy metals present. “I wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before,” Holden explains. “I was interested in discordant sounds that could be melodic but gigantically huge. I rented an Opera house for rehearsal, set up with 16 Sunn amps. That’s what I was going for, way over the top.” And over the top it is. The six-song album delves into leaden sludge, lumbering doom and epic soaring riffs that sound free from all constraints of the era. It’s incredibly heavy, but infused with a melodic, albeit mechanistic, sensibility.
Troubles with the album’s release bankrupted Holden, who subsequently left music for over two decades. It was bootlegged several times over the years, but until now hasn’t seen a proper remaster and has yet to be available on digital platforms. “The original mastering just destroyed the dynamics of it,” Holden says. “They flattened it out. Now we got a really nice remaster that should be the closest thing to the original recording.”
Black Version[13,40 €]
Da bossman Tripmastaz delivers two cuts of "Politics As Usual" a summer-themed track in classic golden-era house style – full of positivity and sunshine beams.
On the B-Side "Coffee Smack 4 Dat Azz" balances the EP with Tripmastaz’s signature crunchy beats and gutta flows for the real heads – hits like a perfectly brewed cup of coffee. "Scarp" wraps up the record nicely with proto-digger vibes and fun acid basslines.
And the cherry on top: for the collectors, this time around we pressed just 50 copies on green marbled vinyl – a true gem for the heads.
Summer is here.
New York-based producer Kurilo opens Tripsitter Records’ debut vinyl with "Take the Excitement", a hypnotic blend of rumbling bass and spacey synths. It's an immersive soundscape, perfect for both psychedelic journeys and late-night afterhours.
Next up, KVRK delivers a mind-bending techno cut—an intense, pulsating ride that feels like crossing an event horizon. Relentless and otherworldly, it transports listeners into uncharted sonic territory.
On the flip, Spain’s T.S.O channels '90s tech house with a bass-heavy roller full of nostalgic flair and modern groove. It's a confident dancefloor weapon, bridging classic vibes with a contemporary edge.
Closing the release, Jubley shifts into darker territory. With punchy percussion and eerie textures, his track oozes tension and atmosphere. A bold departure from his usual style, it’s a gripping end to a standout first release.
Straight out of the local mud of the city of Antwerp comes dancing this next Souvenirs from Imaginary Cities slab of free-flowing bits of electronic wonder : Schönen Abend by Simon B. Just in time to ease you out of this endless winter and right into springtime. Like the previous hit by Purple Uncle, this flower takes some time to bloom and fill up your head and body with it's ear wormy fragrance.
It's hazy and cinematic, makes you think of Italian electronic pioneers and their library magic, Patrick Cowley's School Daze and Haruomi Hosono in some kind of gothic manner. It's quite stripped and lush at the same time, rhythms like minimal mechanics make you fly above the river and land just outside reality. It's a nice place where soft jazz tingles right around the dark corner, and that particular mix of exotica and melancholia — the trademark of this port city's best electronic auteurs is definitely in the air. The river still shines, but she’s deeply poisoned. The old town has lost every bit of fresh air but keeps on digging for old gold. This bitter pill is served with delicacy and lightness, the wound is dressed up seductively — feet in the mud, head in the air. Stuff is sensuous, with quiet places reminding of the good side of those times when the big wheel stopped turning ever so madly. A strange quietness whistles through the leaves. Some things take time to unfold. In or out of C.
Four years in the making, this is the solo debut LP of Simon B, a longtime contributor to Antwerp's improvised music scene (Groovecats Deluxe, Wij Blij Trio ). Primarily a double bass player, he also has a deep-felt passion for offbeat electronica and the rainbowy side of American minimalism, which takes front here. The smoky voice on the last track belongs to Nina-Joy Thielemans, Nina-Joy is part of Particals, a trio working with live electronics and field recordings, releasing an lp on Ultra Eczema later this year. Furthermore, you can hear the tenor and soprano saxophone of Adia Van Heerentals on 4 tracks, deepening out Simon's naturally flowing compositions and playing around with his melodies. You may know her from Bodem and her strong presence in the Belgian jazz scene lately.
Simon's electroacoustic experiments — using a clarinet and some outboard effects — were important tools in finding the very specific colour of this record. There's this airy character, like wind blowing through old layers of bricks and over the river, anchored with a deep sense of bass, gathering ages of dust and memories in these eight elegantly wobbling tracks, forming a perfect whole that’s really coming together in one deep listening from A to Z.
The centrepiece is perhaps Come to Me, instrumental and reprise with vocals, but no fillers on this one. Every part of the mystery is needed to come to its end and back again. It's a record that works in the morning, to open up a day and in the quiet corners of the night, with it's sleazy quirkiness, smiling towards you from the right corner of the eye. A perfect compagnon for your long-form wandering habits, light reflections on a wet surface obsessions, coffee slurping in the morning and the forgotten art of beachcombing. Quite essential these days, witnessing a world going apeshit.
Domino Records haben mit Upchuck eine rohe Punk-Wucht aus Atlanta unter Vertrag genommen. Die fünfköpfige Band um Sängerin KT entstand 2018 aus der lokalen Skater:innen-Szene – laut, wild und kompromisslos.
Mit „Plastic“ legen sie nun ihre erste Single beim neuen Label vor: ein wütender, knapp zweiminütiger Ritt durch schrammelnde Gitarren und aufgeladene Vocals. Produziert wurde der Track von Ty Segall, gemastert von Heba Kadry und visuell in Szene gesetzt von Ian Cone. Inhaltlich dreht sich alles um den verzweifelten Versuch, in einer künstlichen Welt echte Verbindungen zu finden.
Der Rolling Stone brachte ihren Sound nach einem SXSW-Gig auf den Punkt: „Everything explodes.“
OOOOH! by Alex Bad Baby Lukashevsky with Cocoa Corner (2025)
Celebrated veteran of Toronto’s music scene, known for his boundary-pushing approach to folk and avant-garde music, twists rock music into strange and brilliant new shapes with the help of young jazz players, U.S. Girls, and his own immensely talented son.
OOOOH! is hard on the outside and soft on the inside. Made in the spirit of unity,
humanity, and poetry — disobediently renouncing the glory of personal triumph for the
generosity of an honest experiment. On the last track of the album you’ll hear “Or do you only ever never want to make a single enemy? / That’s not freedom or humility / It’s nothing, honestly.” Oooh, that's a bad baby!
A celebrated Toronto songwriter and performer, Alex Lukashevsky has always been disobedient. Which simply means, nothing is off the table when he’s looking for his
poetic voice; when trying to find the realest I of the teller. As he sings on the lead track “that musician that’s dead” The musician is radical/ it’s the world that’s demented/ listening with their eyes, the music looks dented/ they’re over-represented.
OOOOH! was recorded in January 2024 at Sound Department in Toronto, engineered by Patrick Lefler (ROY), mixed by Grammy-nominated producer Matt Smith. All the songs were tracked live off the floor in two days, with one extra day for recording vocals, to keep the recording fully alive and breathing. As leader of Deep Dark United, as a solo performer, and a sideman in Brodie Wests’ Eucalyptus and Luka Kuplowsky’s Ryokan Band, Alex has been an outsized influence on the Toronto music scene that spawned acts like Broken Social Scene and Owen Pallett. (Pallett, who has toured with Lukashevsky, went so far as to record an entire album’s worth of Alex’s songs, backed
by a full orchestra.)
Lukashevsky has approached each of his albums and projects as something completely new, using only the musical boundaries he creates with each song. Even when he
has recorded songs with nothing but his voice and his own acoustic guitar accompaniment, the results are never “stripped down” or “back to basics,”
Gong! How do you get to heaven / have fun! have fun!
It’s cool to approach music as a game of “spot the influence”; Burt Bacharach-meets-Black Flag; Lana Del Rey-meets-LCD Soundsystem etc. Glorified mash-ups are promising because of their conversational nature. But they can turn us into hyperboreans; blowing cold air beyond ourselves while doing what we can to remain warm. To devise a game or a narrative is to have a winner and a loser, but we all know that just as you win/ so you lose. And does anything really change? Alex Lukashevsky and Cocoa Corner are more at ease drawing blind contours or playing an old game like consequences. They let things add up without knowing particularly how. Cognition is recognition.
Lukashevsky, in addition to writing all the songs, plays guitar and sings on OOOOH!, doing both in ways that are soulful and spikey at the same time. Joining him on guitar and vocals is his oldest child, Charlie Lukashevsky, who, at 23, is already a talented performer and songwriter in his own right. Cocoa Corner also includes Aidan McConnell, an in-demand drummer and composer, Jack Johnston, a jazz bassist and Barry Harris acolyte, and percussionist Evan Cartwright (The Weather Station, U.S. Girls, Cola, Tasseomancy), who plays steel pan and marching drum.
Working with his son and with other younger musicians is central to the album’s
unpredictable aesthetic. It reinvigorated the sound in unexpected ways. Lukashevsky says, “I had to reconsider my own instincts. I had to deal with being 99 years old.”
In addition to these performers, the album includes a tasty contribution from Meg
Remy, the visionary musician and producer who is the leader of the critically acclaimed
project U.S. Girls. Remy duets with Lukashevsky on the imagistic and sprawling album
closer “things keep happening.”
About that album title: OOOOH! is taken straight from “that musician that’s dead” an
arch and unhinged comment on the exertion required to navigate a lifetime of music making.
Lukashevsky’s delivery of that one emotive word is a kind of cultural posture, but also a
hundred percent primitive expression. The impact is never less than visceral. His vocal
delivery ranges through rich baritone blues to keening falsettos to a kind of sprechstimme that periodically steps out from the music to grab the listener’s shirt. He
doesn’t sound too nice, but he is sincere. When life gives you lemons lament.
For OOOOH! his first official full-length album since 2012’s Too Late Blues, (a collection of knotty-yet-effervescent tunes built upon the enchantingly serpentine harmonies of Lukashevsky and his vocal collaborators, Felicity Williams (Bahamas, Bernice) and Daniela Gesundheit (Snowblink, HYDRA)), Alex has once again broken apart and rebuilt his own approach to music. Or rather (because that sounds too over-determined), he
has allowed his music to build itself into strange new shapes that only fleetingly and
coincidentally, but happily, resemble anything that might be called rock and roll. There is some editorializing within the song’s lyrics— Lukashevsky even cheekily contributes to the “spot the influence” game with the line “Muddy Waters, Rite of Spring!” a funny preemptive strike against anyone already reaching for some variation of avant-blues to describe what the song is up to here. In fact there are many names checked on this record (literally and in spirit); they are the lily pads that trace the path of this expression! Palestrina, Peter Pears and Benjamin Brittain, Andrés Segovia, Stravinsky, Lotte Lenya, Alice Coltrane, Skip James, Chuck Berry, D’Gary, Betty Carter, Mukhtiyar Ali, Chuck D, Yoko Ono, Hailu Mergia, David Bowie, Jane Siberry. rhythm is a skeleton mansion / haunted by melody / feckless prodigy / the world is under a spell / cast by some demon angel / Practice day and night / Try as hard as hell / no one can sing that well Musicians are often worried by the way in which they are prepared to fail rather
than how they would like to succeed; it’s such a deep concern that it tempers their creativity and shackles their process. Current cultural proclivities, tend to comfort a certain kind of artistic failure and abnegate another kind. How many testimonials, full of heartfelt care and investment, have you heard for Taylor Swift, and yet a craftsman like Chris Weisman is often dismissed easily as though he’s doing something anti-social. what’s throwing itself in my ears and my eyes / arrogant devil ad hominem christ.
The music you will hear on this recording veers off in multiple directions at once,
and features a rock and roll spirit with a divergent heart. This is no sclerotic clomp of the Average Rock Song, but in fact a flood of humanity in all its darkness and moodiness and unpredictability. If most performers make songs that are like sports cars or pickup trucks to drive around, Lukashevsky has built something more akin to a rowboat in a tree: it’s weird and beautiful.
Born Osborne Ruddock in Kingston in 1941, he grew up around High Holborn Street in Kingston, before moving to the new Waterhouse district in 1955. His electronic genius grew from working and fixing radios and TV sets. A natural progression led to working with amplifiers, and starting his own sound system, 'Tubby's Home Town Hi-Fi'. A very competitive games i the late 60's. You were as good as the EXCLUSIVE records you played.
Tubby discovered during his time cutting discs for Duke Reid's Treasure Isle set up, that by dropping vocals/instruments in and out of the backing tracks, you could invent new versions of existing old tunes. These early versions tried and tested on his sound system went down so well that he invested in a four track mixing console with delay echo effects, sliders and phasing units and so began King Tubby's 'Studio Of Dub' at 18 Drummlie Avenue, Kinston 11 , Jamaica...His Home.....
This is where all the producers would bring their tracks for Tubby to put his magic over. Most tracks that came out in Jamaica from here on in would carry a 'Version' on it's B- Side more than likely a Tubby Dub.
One of the producers who used him the most was Bunny Striker Lee, who's labels Jackpot, Justice and Attack all carried Tubby's mixes/versions on their flip sides.
Our collection here, all taken from original master tapes you might have heard the tracks before but not these versions....Lost in the vaults till now. So sit back and enjoy the dub master at work.
RESPECT.... JAH FLOYD
Track 1 CHERRY'S DUB
We start off with a very early version of Eric Donaldson's 'Cherry O Baby'.
This version was recorded at Dynamic Sounds, in 1971 and has remained lost on master tape until now.
Track 2 FRENEMY DUB
This classic rhythm known as 'Mad Mad World' and 'Crying in the Ghetto' both voiced by Winston Jarret
got worked on by Tubby as an exclusive mix for his sound system. Released here for the first time featuring
the late, great Jacob Miller on dubbed vocal.
Track 3 FALLING FOR DUB
A version here of Cornell Campbell's 'My Whole World is Falling Down' Tubby in fine form.
Track 4 DUB ON THE STREET AGAIN
Yes my friend The Street Again finds Cornell Campbell's vocal dubbed King Tubby Style Nice Rockers drums from Sly Dunbar.
Track 5 DECEIVING THE DUB
Sly and Robbie dubbing up Delroy Wilson's ' So Long Jenny' with King Tubby at the boards
Jessica93, prodigal bastard of our glorious french squat scene, relocated on Born Bad : this is no picnic. Geoffroy Laporte, alone against all odds, alternates bass and guitar to build harsh loops with a drum machine spitting pre-Gulf War patterns. That’s where it gets tricky : every musical posse claims him. Grunge, sure, but Jessica doesn’t indulge in necrophilia. His circuit is punk, he doesn’t dress the part though. Cold wave, the atmosphere fits somehow, but the gear does not. The self-confident rock horde saw him playing with hair in his eyes… but he never joined the Party. Metal had something to say but sadly, nobody listened. Maybe it's time to give it a rest and let Jessica93 cook his great misery broth on her own, called « 666 tours de périph’ » (666 laps on the beltway). Witnessing Jessica93 live makes you dread that he'll get up the next morning, drive 200 miles and one nap later kick it again, when it takes us a good week to recover from the bad half of that same evening. Like so many other unknown soldiers during our very own world war of music, he patrols small venues relentlessly.
At the heart of this cultural pentacle painted by french weirdos Bryan's Magic Tears, and Carine Krinator, Jessica93 has built a sound validated by years of chosen vagrancy, birthing bands with joyously stupid monikers, in the humid jungle of small labels. Jessica93's debut album had a track celebrating Omar Little, HBO’s gay bandit from Baltimore. This story begins on the beltway, where Florence Rey, accidental copkiller turned to political icon of the 90’s. Geoffroy offers his brilliant analysis : " C’est la police qui nous tire d’ssus / C’est mon trou d’balle qui leur chie d’ssus « (Police shoots us down / my dripping asshole gets the job done).
A previous album was haunted by bedbugs, this one is essentially about love, a delicious scourge just as hard to eradicate. Two black diamonds peek out of the LP : ’’La colline du crack’’, heartbreak song about the ultimate temptation of violent delights, located on crackhead central in Paris. The brilliant chorus, ‘Take my hand and come with me to Crack Hill’ will put an end to the rumours, almost everything was really false. And Bébé Requin, alternative obituary that’ll make you shiver, where our nice couple states ‘’on kiffe la drogue dure et les ptits chiens’ (‘we love hard drugs and little dogs’). And that is the reason we face the wall of sound jostled by unnecessary shoulder thrusts: those nice fat chunks of charcoal poetry, hidden under light sarcasm.
The rest of the record demonstrates the know-how acquired in loop-by-loop construction of ruins that are pleasant to squat in together. There’s your classic doom delicatessen, with bits of heavy metal inside, crafted with the manic care typical of hard wankers. Arthur Satàn, who produced and mixed the album at home in Bordeaux, helped him get his head out of the reverb safe house. And Jessica93 took the opportunity to switch to the dark side of the language : french at last. Worth the wait ! Sing along : « nique sa mère / nique sa grosse mère » (translate that yourself).
Gravitate, in case you didn't know, is yet another label from James Burnham aka Burnski aka Instinct. It's hard to keep up with the man's unrelenting yet brilliant work rate, but worth making the effort to do so if you like minimal, tech and garage. The latest on this fledgling project goes deep and arrives just in time for some balmy Ibiza party nights. 'Gravitate 03-1' is loopy and lazy and invitingly mid-tempo, 'Gravitate 03-2' picks up the pace a touch but is still couched in warm, roomy grooves and soul-drenched chords. The flipside brings more gritty and turbo-powered tech on 'Gravitate 03-3' then a nice silky and blissed out cruiser to close on 'Gravitate 03-4'. Four more functional but well-formed sounds from the brilliant Burnham.
Sean Roman is a Toronto-based producer who has worked with Toronto Hustle before on an EP for Wolf Music. Here he serves up a club-ready crowd pleaser that shows his love for original UKG sounds. 'Did It For Love' on Selections rides on low-slung and well-swung drums with some nice tender vocals up top. The percussion is crisp and the groove drips with cool. Flip over this limited 12" and you will find a Toronto Hustle Late Night dub that pairs things back to some meaty drums and grittier textures, with the vocals more turned down and sparking synth motifs looping to bring some colour. Useful stuff.
12:01, time to wake up! Aris 1201 is back on CAF? with a new record. Deeply rooted in the city center of Geneva, this eight tracker is as smokey as its rush hour traffic jams. Bringing together old tracks with new material, this album spans from 4/4 club-ready highways to hip-hop inspired groovy beats. Using a minimum amount of ingredients (raw samples, percussive rhythmics, grainy textures), Aris 1201 delivers a result full of layers and complexity. So only one thing to do: hop in front of the Blunt Mobile and have a nice ride.
Ltd Silver Vinyl[23,95 €]
Domino Records haben mit Upchuck eine rohe Punk-Wucht aus Atlanta unter Vertrag genommen. Die fünfköpfige Band um Sängerin KT entstand 2018 aus der lokalen Skater:innen-Szene – laut, wild und kompromisslos.
Mit „Plastic“ legen sie nun ihre erste Single beim neuen Label vor: ein wütender, knapp zweiminütiger Ritt durch schrammelnde Gitarren und aufgeladene Vocals. Produziert wurde der Track von Ty Segall, gemastert von Heba Kadry und visuell in Szene gesetzt von Ian Cone. Inhaltlich dreht sich alles um den verzweifelten Versuch, in einer künstlichen Welt echte Verbindungen zu finden.
Der Rolling Stone brachte ihren Sound nach einem SXSW-Gig auf den Punkt: „Everything explodes.“
[a] a1. Tired
[b] a2. Plastic
[c] a3. New Case
[d] a4. Fried
[e] a5. Homenaje
[f] a6. Kept Inside
[h] b2. Un Momento
[k] b5. Lost One
[l] b6. Slow Down
Multi-BRIT Award and Mercury Prize nominee Olivia Dean announces her highly-anticipated second album, The Art of Loving, arriving on 26thSeptember via Capitol Records.
The Art of Loving is a tender, intentional deep dive into the many dimensions of love – romantic, platonic, self, and everything in between. The album will feature Olivia’s recently released single, ‘Nice To Each Other’.
Scruscru dives into "the modern Yerevan bubble of music" with a new various artists outing that takes a look at the Armenian take on jazz, hip hop and house. It's utterly refreshing right off the bat with Vahagn M & Ycrow layering up jazzy keys with nice contemporary deep house swing, UNDO takes things into a vibey live jazz lounge and Your Friend Daao lays down shuffling and broken drum patterns that are effervescent with Neo-soul and nu-jazz energy. Elsewhere, Yerevan Calling's 'Next Step' brings stuttering jazz swagger and Shhau & Mesrop sink into a deep and soulful late-night sound on 'Andset'. There is a great deal of musical charm and originality to all of these fresh fusions, which makes this is vital LP.
Herb Rhythm has long been kicking out brilliantly garage and house sounds and now he is back with something a little deeper on GLBDOM Classic. 'True' is a smooth and soulful garage house sound, but it's not overly produced - there are still some nice frayed edges to the drums while the vocal is an r&b gem. It comes in various mixes from bumping for the club to more cut-up and 2-step from Ease Up George. On the flip is the fresh dub garage delight 'So Many' with plenty of nostalgic throwbacks and liquid chords, then 'You Can Do It' closes with a more direct sound but still plenty of warming pads. A mighty useful EP, for sure.
*Long overdue reissue of the first album by The Hanging Stars to coincide with their tour support slot with Edwyn Collins – initial 300 copies come with 12 x 12 print*
“In late-Sixties California, the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers combined traditional country music with hippy rock to great success. The influence lingered and whatever cultural relevance it has this is a delightful, transporting listen” – The Times 4/5
London-based psych-folk outfit The Hanging Stars re-release their much-loved debut album Over the Silvery Lake on Crimson Crow. Blending folk pastoralism with swampy 60s Americana, they sound like the missing link between the California desert sun and the grey skies of London Town. The album was recorded between LA, Nashville and Walthamstow, with each of these vastly different places leaving an indelible mark on the songs.
Now signed to the Loose Records label and fronted by London-based songwriter, singer and guitarist Richard Olson (The See See, Eighteenth Day of May), The Hanging Stars are essentially a loose collective of people who weave together a blissed-out psychedelic tapestry. The rest of the core band is made up of Sam Ferman on bass and Paulie Cobra on drums, Horse on pedal steel and Patrick Ralla on banjo, guitar. They jam rather than write and hang out rather than rehearse, harnessing a kind of tipsy euphoria resplendent with luscious arrangements and glorious vocal harmonies.
During 2015, prior to this album’s original release the band released two critically acclaimed singles via The Great Pop Supplement (both of which also appear on the album). “Golden Vanity” was premiered by The Line of Best Fit who said; “you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd just unearthed a rare deep cut from the late 60s/early 70s boom of psychedelia infused Americana” and “The House on The Hill” was described by The Guardian as; "a hazy, desert-dream of a song, nicely sharpened with steely-eyed guitars, Mersey-laced harmonies and just a whiff of the Gun Club”.
There are a number of allusions to nature and the weather on the album, borne in part out of the contrasting surroundings in which it was produced. The band’s fascination with Americana led them to record some of the material Stateside, laying down some of the parts at Battle Tapes Studios in Nashville (Lambchop, Paperhead), as well as at Vision Quest Studios in Los Angeles with Rob Campanella. His work with The Quarter After, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Beachwood Sparks The Tyde, and GospelbeacH was a perfect match to capture their sound and they even had San Franciscan legend Chrystof Certik step in on lead guitar for a couple of tracks.
Following the LA recordings, a trip to the Californian desert provided the core notion of what they wanted to produce - a shard of light that they clung on to whilst recording the rest of the album in the significantly more rain-soaked atmosphere of Walthamstow, London, under the watchful eye of Brian O'Shaughnessy at Bark Studios (The Clientele, Comet Gain). As the band explained at the time: “Ultimately we hope you can hear both the sand and the rain in this record.”
The Hanging Stars place themselves firmly as part of a long folk tradition encompassing European and North American influences – as a continuation rather than a pastiche of these styles. This is the sound of a band really coming in to their own, fully formed and in no doubt of their vision. With Over the Silvery Lake they succeeded in producing a record, which has the country, blues and folk traditions at its heart.
Neo funk rising star Buscrates aims high with Blasting Off, his first full-length album. The Pittsburgh-based keyboard cosmonaut has been grabbing ears since his days hooking up beats with the hip hop crew East Liberty Quarters, but after slinging spicy one-offs to a slew of hot labels like Omega Supreme, Voyage Funktastique and Razor N Tape (as well as contributing production to Wiz Khalifa and Curren$y's 2009 project), the time has come for a full-length featuring his growing modern funk repertoire.
"I'm a '90s hip hop dude, but I grew up on that '80s funk stuff," Buscrates acknowledges. DJ gigs provided a working knowledge of the jams that moved a contemporary crowd, and as his collection of keyboards and drum machines grew he began blending the best of both decades with his personal futuristic edge. "I was nice on the MPC but I wanted to have a little more dynamic range with what I was doing," he notes. The self-described "certified synth geek" was soon branching into sounds that recalled '80s legend Kashif crossed with the hip hop bounce of DJ Spinna, and the modern funk community took notice.
For his first full-length, Buscrates has crewed up with an ace team of collaborators, featuring vocalist Sally Green on the bouncy lead single "Lost And Found" and "Eight Nine." Kate Moe Dee takes over mic duties for the second single, "How Ya Gonna Do It," a slinky groove that slides in place alongside groups like the Sunburst Band and Rene & Angela as an exemplar of sophisticated R&B. Adding to those credentials are the sultry vocals of Anda on "Believe," but of course, it wouldn't be a Buscrates set without some stank, neck-snapping instrumentals. "Five Days" and "Sure Shot," both collabos with the drum technician DJ Epik, will rattle speakers and have already been lighting up message boards on recent Buscrates DJ sets. Round things out with some easy gliding, jazzy funk ("Turn It Out" with Brothermartino on flute and "Evergreen" featuring Tony Ozier) and you've got all the ingredients for a high-flying cosmic ride with Buscrates at the controls.
Legendary postmodern, post punk, post human, past caring collective Mekons return with a brand-new album for 2025. Their first release on Fire Records, ‘Horror’ a collection of songs written in late 2022 but providing a horribly prescient reflection of the world in its current miasma and how we got here. ‘Horror’ looks at history and the legacies of British imperialism with mashed up lyrics set against a typically eclectic sound that amalgamates everything from dub, country, noise, rock & roll, electronica, punk, music hall, polka and you can even take your partner for a nice waltz on ‘Sad And Sad And Sad’. The roots of their global sound reflect their nomadic journey through time and space from Leeds to California in the West and Siberia in the East and is woven into the fabric and intricacies of their song creation… Sounding like The Chills and R.E.M circa the I.R.S Records years, ‘Mudcrawlers’ sees just about the whole band joining Jon Langford on vocals speaking of Irish famine and refugees journeying to Wales. ‘War Economy’ shivers in the cold of such Boroughs spiked one-liners: “Clinical coercion will not achieve dominance!” Sounding like its straight off a Jenny Holzer neon sign (she of Abuse Of Power Comes As No Surprise), it’s held together by a disgruntled swaggering riff that underpins an explosion of disquiet. Meanwhile, Rico takes the lead on the maliciously luscious ‘Fallen Leaves’ an appalled and appalling Hammer Horror take on climate breakdown reminiscent of Rolling Thunder Dylan, that recalls The Pogues at their most introspective, its Celtic twilightism augmented by Susie Honeyman’s keening violin as the dying sun sinks down and the river Styx flows on in the pitch black night. Almost 50 years in the making, these Mekons continue to astound, their sound, sentiment and method of delivery blended to perfection by bass player and studio wizard, Dave Trumfio. The Mekons are Jon Langford, Sally Timms, Tom Greenhalgh, Dave Trumfio, Susie Honeyman, Rico Bell, Steve Goulding, and Lu Edmonds. "Effortlessly eloquent post-punks" Pitchfork // “The Mekons are still vital” Rolling Stone // “The most revolutionary group in the history of rock ‘n’ roll,” Lester Bangs // UK Tour 8-15 May 2025 (including London, Manchester, Glasgow, and more).
