JULIA HOLTER - Have You In My Wilderness

"Sometimes listening to Julia Holter is like watching a film of a dream: gauzy, beautiful, the set immaculately dressed and the light in the golden hour haloing the characters’ emotional highs and lows. At other times, her music is like dreaming of a film, something half-remembered or only eerily discernible, as if you're falling asleep in front of the TV as snatches of a classic romance flit around amid your own concerns and passions. Her style is rooted in her classical training, composition degree, and highbrow references, but has always been generous with its visceral delights.

While still dreamlike, Have You in My Wilderness, Holter's fourth album, is something clearly felt—ocean spray on a warm breeze, sun baking exposed limbs, a hand glancing across your skin before drifting away. [...] Her previous work didn’t necessarily require any outside reading to unlock its pleasures, but Have You in My Wilderness cuts extraordinarily quickly to the core." - Consquence of Sound

SPOONER OLDHAM - Pot Luck

"Muscle Shoals keyboard stalwart Spooner Oldham (who has possibly the greatest name of all time) has had his fingers on myriad classic tracks. Co-writing hits like the Box Tops' 'Cry Like A Baby,' Percy Sledge's 'Out Of Left Field,' and James and Bobby Purify's 'I'm Your Puppet' with collaborator Dan Penn might be enough to secure a spot in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (which he was inducted into in 2009), but he also lent his keyboards to music from Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, the Stones, and the Flying Burrito Brothers. He's frequently toured with Neil Young and in 2007, toured with the Drive-By Truckers. His pedigree is incredible.

It's curious, then, that his solo album appeared and vanished without a trace. Until now, of course. Light In The Attic Records have reissued Oldham's 1972 collection, Pot Luck, on vinyl and for the first time on CD, complete with extensive liner notes. The songs chosen present an interesting mix: side A is compositions that Oldham wrote (both by himself and with Dan Penn and/or Freddy Weller), and the B-side is an opus of songs that Oldham played on for other artists, each track blending into the next, ending with a gorgeous 'Will The Circle Be Unbroken,' soulful and a bit funky, with some incredible backing vocals." - Popshifter

THE CITY - Now That Everything's Been Said

"We all know the Carole King who wrote some of the biggest hits of the '60s, from 'Will You Love Me Tomorrow' to 'Pleasant Valley Sunday,' via 'The Locomotion' and '(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.' We also know the singer-songwriter behind Tapestry, the album that launched King as a solo singer in her own right. But in between–and not nearly as well known–is King’s band, The City, and their album, Now That Everything’s Been Said.

By the mid-'60s, King's marriage to Gerry Goffin, with whom she'd written many of those wonderful hits, had hit the rocks. A divorce loomed, and King all but retired to raise their two daughters. She headed west to Laurel Canyon in '67, taking the children with her, and made the previously unlikely move of joining a progressive folk-rock band. King formed The City with future husband Charles Larkey on bass and Danny Kortchmar on guitar and vocals. With King on piano and vocals, they created a folk rock sound that pre-empted the singer-songwriter boom of the '70s.

Produced by Lou Adler and featuring Jimmy Gordon on drums, The City's sound is deep and soulful, imperfect but passionate. And the songs, with King writing or co-writing all but one, are as exceptional as you’d expect and as widely covered as her factory work." - Light In The Attic

EVENING HYMNS - Quiet Energies

"Despite his band's ever-revolving lineup, Jonas Bonnetta has pinned down some familiar faces for his latest project. James Bunton returns to fill the engineer role and also plays on the album. Rounding out his backing band are The Wooden Sky's Gavin Gardiner and Andrew Kekewich, Jon Hynes and Sylvie Smith. The 'extended cast of players' also includes string arrangements courtesy of Mika Posen, who has played with Timber Timbre.
 
The songs were primarily written by Bonnetta as an intended solo project, immediately after the release of 2012's Spectral Dusk, but after shelving them for a couple of years, he decided to revisit them with the band. The majority of the tracks were recorded live off the floor.
 
Quiet Energies was recorded over the span of a couple weeks at Bonnetta's new home studio in Mountain Grove, about an hour outside of Kingston, ON. It's a move that profoundly affected Bonnetta—and his sound. While Spectral Dusk was an incredibly personal record inspired by the death of Bonnetta's father, the new set of songs hears him moving forward." - Exclaim!

HELEN - The Original Faces

"Over the course of her nearly decade-long career as Grouper, Liz Harris has become a master of all things overcast. Her ambient compositions and waterlogged ballads are like fogged-up windows—bleary enough to indicate the bleakness inside, but only its vaguest outlines. There's suggestion of something heartbreaking, but its true shape remains occluded, unobtainable, and all the more moving for such an approach. With Helen, her occasional 'pop' band, she's occasionally parted those clouds, peeled back the layers of reverb to reveal the bruised heart at the center of those songs." - SPIN

SLIM TWIG - Thank You For Stickin' With Twig

"After producing two albums for U.S. Girls (U.S. Girls on Kraak in 2011, Gem in 2012), and scoring two films (Sight Unseen & We Come As Friends (winner of a Special Jury Award at Sundance, among numerous other accolades), Twig found himself in 2013 at a creative impasse re: his own songwriting. He had been through full band incarnations live and on record. They featured a cast of Toronto heavies (members of Zacht Automaat, etc...). He briefly performed Slim Twig sets as a duo, featuring multimedia artist and musician, Meg Remy (U.S. Girls). They performed sets that combined versions of Twig’s released songs with freely structured improvisations, samples, and brightly melodic synth textures. Something in this combination of the pop-minded and the cerebrally-produced has rubbed off on the recordings found on Twig’s latest.

Thank You For Stickin' With Twig is to date the most sonically immersive album in Twig’s discography. Where some records have focused explicitly on sample-based songwriting, while others have been completely live-recorded, the new album arrives at a perfectly produced fusion of fidelities. It hovers, glamorously caught between a cloud of obscurant, half-speed tape hiss, and the most stoned Jeff Lynne production you’ve ever heard. Twig flirts here with a variety of vibes, most often opting for a three dimensional approach whereby a warped tape aura is overlaid with colourful, laser-cut keyboard and guitar melodies. A fetishization of analogue texture is married to a digital approach. All the while, we find Twig irreverently raiding classic rock of its symbolism, sexuality, and social ambition for ulterior subversions. In this respect, TYFSWT's closest cousin may be Royal Trux's Accelerator." - DFA Records

LINK WRAY - 3-Track Shack

"Following his instrumental hits 'Rumble' and 'Jack The Ripper,' Link Wray settled into a routine of gigging with his band the Raymen in the Northeastern states, particularly the rough and ready dives of Washington, DC. In the early '70s this stopped, and Link concentrated on working on the farm his brother Vernon had bought in Accokeek, Maryland. Vernon installed a three-track recording studio in the basement of the farmhouse, but his wife complained about the noise so it was moved outside to an old chicken house: the 3-Track Shack was born.

Producer Steve Verroca caught one of Link's performances in a local bar, was impressed, and thought the time was right for a comeback. Extracting elements from his own country, blues and gospel roots and somehow melding them together with the very landscape itself, he created an organic blend of downhome music that was imbued with a primitive spirituality. There is an unpolished, spontaneous feel to the music which sparks it greedily into life, and the Accokeek earth seems to be ground deep into every groove.

These three albums have been out on CD before, but never mastered from the original tapes. You can even hear the frogs croaking outside the shack!" - Ace Records

BLANK REALM - Illegals In Heaven

"Illegals in Heaven lives between past and present fun. Blank Realm's fourth LP, it's impulsive yet nostalgic—it's pulling on your shoes and running across fields when you were a kid, running into green and more green, unashamedly free.

The Australian band channel this feeling of reflective escapism from fizzy opener 'No Views'. The over-arching impulsiveness of the album is captured in its eminently shoutable chorus: 'I've got no views on it, it's just something that I did.' 'Just do it,' it seems to whisper. Lead single 'River Of Longing' speaks only in the most hopeful of terms. 'Meet me on the other side/and we'll make up for stolen time,' chant sibling singers Daniel and Sarah, arms outstretched—'won't you take me by the hand?' It bubbles over with an unbridled, youthful charm." - Crack Magazine

YO LA TENGO - Stuff Like That There

"Yo La Tengo have been in a retrospective bubble since 2013's well-received but too quickly forgotten Fade LP.  With an expanded version of 1993's sublime Painful (as Extra Painful, on Matador) and a vinyl reprint of 1990's well-loved Fakebook on vinyl (on Bar/None) both appearing last year, backwards glancing has been helpfully reminding us how special the group can be.  Now appears the tongue-twistedly-titled Stuff Like That There as an ostensible Fakebook sequel, mixing-up obscure as well as not so obscure covers, self-reworkings and a couple of new songs in less amplified settings, with even past member Dave Schramm returning as an auxiliary guest guitarist.

Yet, in a good way, Stuff Like That There isn't a straightforward second volume of Fakebook. Whilst the concept and band set-up is broadly similar, the sonic execution feels noticeably different. Instead of its quasi-prequel's more overtly rustic hoedowns and more exuberant choice of material, the new album instead frames its gathered assortment of compositions with languid electro-acoustic guitar layers, brushed and shimmery drums, prowling upright-bass lines and some gorgeous tri-part vocal interplay from the long-running core trio of Georgia Hubley, Ira Kaplan and James McNew. Such arrangements and production settings seem to re-locate the warm intimate spots previously hidden amidst the more art-rocking tracts inside two of the band's most essential albums, 1995's Electr-O-Pura and 1997's I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One. This connection is reinforced with balmy remouldings of 'The Ballad Of Red Buckets' and 'Deeper Into Movies' from those respective long-players." - Delusions Of Adequacy

MICHAEL HEAD AND THE STRANDS - The Magical World Of The Strands

"While Head seems unfussed by his relative obscurity, it is still hard to accept that a masterpiece like The Magical World Of The Strands remains so marginal. If anything, The Magical World has improved with age. In the mid-'90s, there was an imperative to position Head as bruised guru to a generation of British rock classicists, exemplified by the Gallaghers and Richard Ashcroft. Head shared a certain romanticism that was rooted in but transcended the working-class Northwest of the country, and his study of old records was just as thorough and unabashed. He was not, though, a writer of anthems, his songwriting mostly too feathery, too evanescent for blokey singalongs.

The closest he came on The Magical World was a rueful and brilliant song about his heroin addiction called 'X Hits The Spot,' which articulated a difficult choice that he had made—essentially, drugs instead of a relationship—and its consequences: coming round to discover he had sold all his furniture to stay high. The chorus is punchy, emphatic, memorable. The verses, though, are more typical of The Magical World: words come in breathless, jazzy flurries, Head appropriating [Arthur] Lee's trick of squeezing two or three extra words into a line to create a sense of babbling discombobulation." - Uncut

DRINKS - Hermits On Holiday

"Cate Le Bon wrote some of my favorite words of 2013 on her album Mug Museum. White Fence is the swirly psych music of Tim Presley. Cate and Tim are friends—Cate played guitar on a tour with White Fence—and so now there's this: DRINKS.

DRINKS has an album coming August 21, and the title track is called 'Hermits On Holiday.' The percussion is a machine at the start, the guitar distinctly Cate, as is that thickly Welsh voice. Tim plays bass on this song, though he told me on the phone that they swap instruments a lot on the album. When that bass kicks in, so does White Fence drummer Nick Murray and the song's lockstep rhythm loosens up, as if it's had a drink. The easy joy and silliness here make me look forward to hearing the full album, Hermits On Holiday." - Bob Boilen, NPR

LIZZY MERCIER DESCLOUX - Press Color

"The lower Manhattan music scene circa the late '70s was a bubbling, effervescent confluence of disco, No Wave, jazz and punk. It birthed the careers of Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Television, the Ramones and even Don Was, whose Was (Not Was) band was also a player. Somewhere on the fringes was Lizzy Mercier Descloux, a French import who used music as just one aspect of her artistic avant-garde arsenal which also included poetry and fashion. This reissue of her off-the-radar ZE label debut didn't make much of a splash upon its 1979 release. Regardless, it has come to be regarded as a charming, evocative curio of a time and place that was fleeting and temporal yet fascinating and influential in its ambitious attempt to join jazz, punk and dance.

Originally only eight selections clocking in at under 30 minutes, this reissue more than doubles that tracklist and is still only 46 minutes long. Extensive liner notes by noted critic/scenester Vivien Goldman in a sumptuous 20-page booklet tell the Descloux story in detail with rare photos and quotes from Smith and Richard Hell, both of whom were friends.

These minimalist pieces—many can't be considered songs—were often improvised in the studio and Descloux, who spoke virtually no English, wasn't exactly a driven vocal talent. Nonetheless, it's the air of cool detached ambiance with mostly sung/spoken vocals over a funk/jazz backing that makes this such a mesmerizing time capsule." - American Songwriter

TRIPTIDES - Azur

"Indiana's Triptides have finally washed up in Los Angeles, a much more suitable home away from home for their appealling, bite-sized snacks of hazy summer psychedelia.

The move seems to have helped them shed the last vestiges of their vintage jangle, replacing it with a much more contemporary sheen, which sees them pawning their Byrdsy tendencies in favour of a much shinier, post-eighties jangle influence.

Perhaps it's just me, but I've found that it's almost impossible to listen to Azur without visualising one of those really colourful multicoloured plastic beach balls. Go and try now. You're back? Hard, wasn't it? 

Azur, simply put, sounds like Real Estate's Days draped over a deck chair with a margerita, which is extremely welcome as we're smack bang in the middle of one of the chilliest cold spells I can remember over here in the New Zealand winter. Given that this hardly constitutes the ideal listening conditions for this album, I'm a little concerned about how obssesed I'd have become with Azur had I been exposed to it in our summer.

There's not a lot more to be said. Short, sharp and irresistable, there's plenty within these songs to keep vintage pop addicts and scenesters alike happy. The always reliable team at Norman Records sum it up perfectly: 'An utterly perfect amalgam of '60s beat pop (The Hollies!) with those moments when Deerhunter decide they are going to be a pop combo.'

I can't top that. The perfect summer record." - The Active Listener

DEAF WISH - Pain

"When Deaf Wish found themselves in a room together for the very first time, they agreed on a guiding philosophy: 'Let's not make anything that's going to last. If we're together for just two shows, then that's what it is.”

They've deviated some.

Over the course of eight years, the Melbourne foursome—bassist Nick Pratt, drummer Daniel Twomey and guitarists Sarah Hardiman and Jensen Tjhung, with each member contributing vocals—have instead amassed one of rock's most exhilarating bodies of work, a concise run of wooly seven-inches and white-knuckle LPs whose legendary live translation has been most accurately described as 'unhinged.' All this despite their being scattered across multiple continents, with no way of getting to know one another outside of intermittent touring. 'We didn't really know what this band was,' Tjhung says. 'We had something, but it wasn't clear—we had to figure out what that was.'

This year marks the arrival of Pain, the first they’ve written since coming together again semi-permanently in Melbourne, and their appropriately titled first full-length for Sub Pop. (Last October's St. Vincent EP was their proper Sub Pop debut.) It is a miraculously dissonant, wonderfully immediate display of Deaf Wish at their mightiest, alive with the same wild chemistry and sense of possibility that made their first recordings so vital." - Sub Pop

VA - Kollektion 4: Bureau B compiled by Richard Fearless

"I always listen out for music with a sense a space, where compositions are stripped down to the barest components while retaining the power to conjure emotion. It's for this reason that I'm so drawn to dub, techno and German avant-garde minimalist music. To me the bands and labels in the Bureau B archive, current and past, were looking to distant lands, their own 'Neuland,' whether in the future with bands like YOU and Riechmann, or from a more remote past, like medieval folk band Ougenweide. They were creating something radical and experimental, something that didn't draw on the same rhythm and blues, Anglo-American rock that was saturating the airwaves at the time. They were pioneers in every sense of the word. With all due respect for the music that forged these paths, it was on hearing the mental guitar on Faust's 'Herbstimmung' that I knew to look not only at the so-called golden years of this era, but to look at what these artists were doing later, as well as the new bands that were emerging from those schools. Artists who are still creating, still innovating. I hope you enjoy the journey." - Richard Fearless for Bureau B

DUCKTAILS - St. Catherine

"The thing that you quickly learn about Matt Mondanile while having a conversation with him about contemporary indie music: Dude is friends with everybody. Not just with the underground darlings who actually worked with him on the Real Estate guitarist’s fifth album as Ducktails (St. Catherine, out this week) but Ariel Pink, Mac DeMarco, and just about every other prolific, do-everything studio rat likely to pop up on the year-end list of a publication like ours. It could make Mondanile sound like a name-dropper, but he’s sincere and genuine enough that he comes off more as a likeable guy who’s just really excited about how well his buds are doing and how much awesome music they’re making.

That geniality also filters into St. Catherine, an album that approximates the gentle comfort of a Sunday afternoon, while not ignoring that day’s trepidation about the week ahead. At times explicitly autobiographical, it’s one of Mondanile’s most personal albums—the chorus to 'Headbanging in the Mirror,' for example, details the East-to-West Coast relocation that gives him his current sense of fish-out-of-water anxiety. But, as always, he gets by with a little help from said friends, including experimental singer/songwriter Julia Holter, who provides vocals to 'Church,' and electronic composer James Ferraro, who appears on 'Mirror.'" - SPIN

EZTV - Calling Out

"EZTV's debut album is a little jewel of decades-soaked power pop, turning the key on Byrdsian jangle and harmonies, filling up the tank at Mitch Easter's Drive-In Studio circa 1985 and rolling on until they land in 2015's lack of guitar pop with effectively facile production warmth. It's full of fine, fresh jangly tunes to pop on while driving around town looking for the best root beer float for that date mate in the passenger seat who might not appreciate the effort." - CMJ

LEON BRIDGES - Coming Home

"It certainly looks as though Texan newcomer Leon Bridges was incubated in some major-label laboratory. Retro soul is some of the most profitable material currently being exported, and the 25-year-old seems precision-engineered, having emerged suddenly in just-so trousers, with a voice that echoes Sam Cooke's. The 10 songs on his debut are unabashedly old-school: romantic, easygoing, some fast, some slow, pitched at a market that seems insatiable when it comes to the comfort of music that harks back to a simpler age.

The truth is stranger. Bridges was pushed into a studio by two members of White Denim, a Texan psych-punk band who had begun hoarding vintage analogue gear. Coming Home was recorded virtually live in a studio thrown together for the purpose.

Bridges's voice comes from his own old soul. 'Better Man' finds him striving to be a better man to his baby. (He loves her better than all those 'Jezebels' lurking 'under perfumed sheets.') Perky with brass and syncopated shimmy, 'Smooth Sailin'' makes the case that Bridges might make a worthy mate. 'Shine,' meanwhile, finds him asking for his transgressions to be forgiven (those Jezebels, at a guess). Every one of these three-minute time capsules is operated with joy and ease, Bridges's nimble way with a vocal melody matched by his band's light touch, a little lag on the beat here, a surprise organ melody there." - The Guardian

THEN & NOW: Toronto Nightlife History - The Stories Of 48 Influential Clubs From 1975-2015

"From award-winning veteran music journalist and DJ Denise Benson comes Then & Now: Toronto Nightlife History, a fascinating, intimate look at four decades of social spaces, dance clubs, and live music venues. Through interviews, research, and enthusiastic feedback from the party people who were there, Benson delves deep behind the scenes to reveal the histories of 48 influential nightlife spaces, and the story of a city that has grown alongside its sounds." - Then And Now Toronto

NAP EYES - Whine Of The Mystic

"It's rare, in these days of glutted media oversaturation, that you encounter a band or a record that instantly distinguishes itself upon first listen as something singularly voiced, truly clarion. But such is the reaction we in Paradise had when, on a serendipitous tip from The Weather Station, we first listened to Nap Eyes, whom we're proud to announce as our most recent signing (in happy collaboration with You've Changed Records in Canada.)

Hailing from Nova Scotia, Nap Eyes is the greatest band you've never heard, and Whine Of The Mystic is their first full-length album, a brilliant small-batch brew of crooked, literate guitar pop refracted through the gray Halifax rain. Recorded live to tape with no overdubs, it's equal parts shambling and sophisticated, with one eye on the dirt and one trained on the starry firmament, inhabiting a skewed world where odes to NASA and the Earth's magnetic field coexist easily with songs about insomnia and drinking too much.

You need this band in your life. Highly recommended if you like The Only Ones/England's Glory, The Modern Lovers, The Clean, The Verlaines, Nikki Sudden/Jacobites, The Go-Betweens, Bedhead, and all things Lou Reed." - Paradise Of Bachelors