U.S. GIRLS - Half Free

"[Meg Remy's songs] take us into the spaces that are supposed to provide us with solace—home, family, relationships—and make them feel awkward and uncomfortable. (As the dejected narrator of 'Sororal Feelings' declares through a deceptively sunny harmony: 'Now I'm going to hang myself/Hang myself from my family tree.')  

Likewise, Remy's music has always thrived on the conflict between the familiar and foreign. On previous U.S. Girls releases, her pop and experimental sensibilities—part Shangri-Las, part Sun Ra—were often at war with one another. [...] But, by building upon the grotto-bound R&B introduced on 2013's Free Advice Column EP (whose hip-hop-schooled producer, Onakabazien, returns here), Half Free further fortifies the common ground between Remy's diamond-cut melodies and avant-garde urges. The album sounds like your favourite golden-oldies station beamed through a pirate-radio frequency, seamlessly fusing '60s-vintage girl-group serenades and smooth '70s disco into dubby panoramas and horror-movie atmospherics." - Stuart Berman, Pitchfork

BATTLES - La Di Da Di

"La Di Da Di, Battles' first album in four years, follows an extended period of silence after the end of their two-year Gloss Drop tour. Battles can't write on the road, so guitarist/keyboardist Ian Williams and guitarist/bassist Dave Konopka holed up in a New York City rehearsal space to jot down sketches while drummer John Stanier, who had relocated to Berlin, tapped out beats virtually. Once they reunited at Pawtucket, RI studio Machines with Magnets in late 2013 and early 2014, the sounds began to flow.

La Di Da Di is less fragmented than Battles' last album, suggesting the type of natural undercurrent that's only achievable after you've spent more than a decade pushing your bandmates' creative limits." - Consequence Of Sound

OUGHT - Sun Coming Down

"Montreal quartet Ought had one of 2014's underground sleeper successes with their strikingly idiosyncratic debut album More Than Any Other Day. While the music was frenetic, wired post-punk indie rock there was always a spark of accessible melody present to suggest that they could prosper in the lineage of other dynamic North American indie rock bands like R.E.M. and Sonic Youth. Their second album Sun Coming Down succeeds in developing their intriguing sound and approach while allowing a welcome splash of light and colour to creep in.

Ought are a band who have a perfect grasp on who they are and where they're going. Everything they do is thoughtful and impactful. Consider the striking cover image of dollops of bright colour, a stark contrast to the monochrome grey of the debut record. Also, a sign of their supreme confidence is their steadfast adherence to only having eight songs on their record, an old indie rock trick from the '70s and '80s that signifies there is not an inch of fat, wasted breath or thrown-away guitar line on the record. Everything happens for a reason." - musicOMH

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

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

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

JIM O'ROURKE - Simple Songs

"Simple Songs is one of those albums that tests and rewards your faith in an artist's aesthetic vision, even as they're taking you to some rather queasy places. The title is a joke, of course (and not the album's most sophisticated): these are ornate and tricksy constructions, that align post-rock and prog's constant gear-shifts and rigorous compositional fussiness with an at least more superficially saccharine tradition.

When he gives a sly nod to Queen on 'End Of The Road,' or ends the album with a finale that matches the throbbing grandiosity of '10538 Overture,' it would be easy to read Simple Songs, at least in part, as a prank, a provocateur's pastiche. O'Rourke, though, is a more complex operator than that. His references and subversions, his games and digs, are oblique and nuanced; his purposes sometimes obtuse; his music more or less infallibly, if not always comprehensibly, excellent." - Uncut

GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR - 'Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress'

"'Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress' is exceptional in the GY!BE canon in a whole heap of ways. Firstly, it's a mere 40 minutes long—which is short by anybody's modern standards, let alone for the band which popularised the 20-minute-plus track time for a whole generation. What's more, the four tracks that make up the album play through as one single suite, resulting in such a potent statement that it's tough to argue against always sitting through in its entirety (as if 'motherfucker=redeemer' had been its own album). The only other release by the band to rival Asunder in its sheer distilled potency is the half-hour Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada EP.

A deceptively meaningful step for Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the occasional soppiness of post-rock, which ultimately rendered it a dirty word in certain circles, has all but disappeared from the work of its godparents, now truly playing the music they were destined to play, and in its purest, weightiest possible form." - The Quietus

JEFRE CANTU-LEDESMA - A Year With 13 Moons

"This isn't the first time that drum machines turn up in Cantu-Ledesma's music, but they're foregrounded here as never before. That very specific combination of elements—the ringing guitar tones and flat, dry, electronic thwacks—will inevitably suggest comparisons with Durutti Column; Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd's The Moon and the Melodies is another reference point, though Cantu-Ledesma's waterlogged-tape timbres and power-sander effects give the album its own specific mood and feel...If 13 Moons were a sculpture, it would be an abalone shell crusted with battery acid; it would be a broken, bleeding heart ensconced in a burnt-out amplifier. Ultimately, it's hard to decide if this is the year's most fucked up ambient album, or its most bucolic noise record." - Pitchfork

JORDAN DE LA SIERRA - Gymnosphere: Song Of The Rose

"Before New Age hit terra firma at the dawn of the 1980s, the classically-trained Bay Area composer Jordan De La Sierra's consciousness soared with cosmic concepts. With cues and lessons from the great minimalists La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Pandit Pran Nath, and help from the venerable public radio program Hearts of Space, De La Sierra embarked on journey in alternate tunings and resounding reverberations, transporting entranced listeners from the Golden Gates to the intergalactic." - Numero Group

ARIEL KALMA - An Evolutionary Music: Original Recordings 1972-1979

"Ariel Kalma's boundary-blurring electronic music is heard here in radiant detail across a selection of work spanning his early free-jazz and spoken-word trips to his infinite modular synthesizer and analogue rhythm-machine meditations. Kalma's story is one of world travel, musical discovery and ego abandonment. Yet for an artist who often discarded public recognition in favor of the ascetic truths in musicmaking, An Evolutionary Music offers the imprint of an outright auteur.

Born in France, but rarely in one place for long, Kalma's 1970s migrations took flight through the decade's furthest spaces of musical and spiritual invention. As a hired horn for well-known French groups, the young musician toured as far as India in 1972, a place where Kalma found an antidote to rock 'n' roll's glitz and glamour in sacred music traditions. Kalma would later return to India and learn circular breathing techniques enabling him to sustain notes without pause against tape-looping harmonies configured through his homemade effects units.

Those effects evolved from Kalma's loyalty to a beloved dual ReVox setup—two tape machines 'chained' together to form a primitive delay unit. Over looped saxophone melodies, Kalma would mix in all shades of polyphonic color, synthesizing fragments of poetry with ambient space or setting modal flute melodies to rippling drum machine patterns and starlit field recordings. The results collapse distinctions between “electro-acoustic”, “biomusicology” and “ambient” categorization." - RVNG Intl.

A WINGED VICTORY FOR THE SULLEN - ATOMOS

Although composed for a dance work by Wayne McGregor, this music stands on its own. Those enamored with Max Richter's recent boxset (which included Infra, a piece also created for Wayne McGregor) will find much to love in A Winged Victory For The Sullen's ambient/classical washes of sound.

"If Stars of the Lid's music sounds like a hollowed-out 100-piece ensemble with ether for its innards, AWVFTS is the opposite. Made from strings, piano, the occasional horn, and electric guitars processed into ambient washes and scrawls, it's all inner voices coiled together, more classical than drone. The music is recorded in large spaces, so that between natural acoustic and electronic effects, every instrument seems to float in an ocean-sized force field of harmonic resonance. Minimal melodic information carries maximal tone, the few voices somehow resplendently full and forlornly isolated at once." - Pitchfork

LAST EX - S/T

Exquisitely recorded and arranged in a manner that can't help but bring to mind the contemporary production work of Geoff Barrow for Portishead, Beak> and Anika, Timber Timbre members Olivier Fairfield and Simon Trottier deliver a groovily sustained, classily motorik mood melding occasionally queasy dissonance and electronic/tape treatments with easy-on-the-ears orchestration on this debut album. 

"Constellation stalwarts Do Make Say Think and Exhaust are reference points, but it's the redesigned krautrock of Tortoise that is most suitably comparable to Last Ex’s approach here. Groove, minimalism and disorder all have their place on this album. Occasional tracks, such as 'Girl Seizure' and 'Cape Fear' make obvious the project's roots in soundtracking but then there’s the almost danceable opener 'Hotel Blues' and the Third-era Portishead art rock of 'Resurrection Drive I' to contend with." - Drowned In Sound

TAPE - Casino

Another round of drifting beauty from the stalwart Häpna trio, with the airy, gently picked/keyed refrains this time out catching this writer's ear more than their last effort, 2011's Revelationes, hewing (slightly) closer to the feel of '08's Luminarium. 

"Tape have been distilling minimalism, experimentalism and pure pop into inimitably ravishing music for fourteen years now. This, their sixth album, is their most luminous to date. The group’s sound has evolved over the years, but its subtlety in artfully blending acoustic and electronic inputs is a constant...Having reverted to an absence of percussion for Casino, the trio’s multi-instrumental approach is further pared to a simple palette of analogue electronics plus guitar and/or piano and electric keys. Each of the album’s seven tracks lasts an even six or seven minutes, and each is gently insistent and acutely melodic; each an instant hit of pure aural pleasure." - Dalston Sound

KEITH CROSS & PETER ROSS - Bored Civilians

This recent reissue from Esoteric Recordings first caught our eye when it received a glowing writeup in MOJO magazine. Keith Cross & Peter Ross' Bored Civilians came after Cross' departure from short-lived prog-rock group T2. He took a different path with this next project with Ross, although Bored Civilians' Laurel Canyon-esque folk-rock has enough proggy touches to mark this album as a uniquely British take on the California sound.

"Esoteric Recordings are pleased to announce the release of an official re-mastered edition of Bored Civilians, the only album by the duo of Keith Cross & Peter Ross. Cross had earned plaudits as a young guitar virtuoso with the power trio T2 (who recorded an album for Decca Records in 1970). By 1972 his music had developed still further when he teamed up with Ross to record this marvellous album for Decca Records with guest musicians such as Nick Lowe, Jimmy Hastings and B.J. Cole. Highly sought after by collectors of the 'progressive' era, Bored Civilians has been newly re-mastered from the original Decca master tapes and includes two rare B-sides as bonus tracks. This reissue restores the original album artwork and includes a new essay." - Cherry Red

SLINT - Spiderland (remastered CD/LP with outtakes/demos + DVD)

If you passed on the pricy limited-edition Record Store Day box set but were pining to watch the enclosed Breadcrumb Trail documentary, now's your chance to check it out, bundled with a brand-new remastering of the original record as well as a download card with 14 tracks' worth of never-before-heard rehearsal and demo material.

"A foreword by collaborator Will Oldham, 14 previously unreleased outtakes and demos, and a documentary detail the creation of the album and the career arc of Slint in general. Spiderland itself remains a wasteland, a bleak, undead sulk of spindling guitar and hollow percussion. Seven-minute conclusion 'Good Morning, Captain' constitutes a main talking point, Brian McMahan's bizarre, spoken-word fairy tale wrapping around an oppressive death march. And yet, when you page through the booklet you'll see smiling faces, kids having fun recording in the studio. It's as if this reissue wants to prove Slint was human, not just a faceless menace that cut a record lost to time and circumstance, worthy of celebration and also fitting neatly in a box." - Austin Chronicle

VA - Bowie Heard Them Here First

Following up on the soul/girl group focus of the Dusty Springfield edition of the always interesting Heard Them Here First series, this selection of songs covered by David Bowie is an eclectic mix of genres, to be expected given the chameleonic nature of his career. If you thought "Alabama Song" was first performed by the Doors (as I did), pick this up and hear who really recorded it first. The perpetual journey of musical discovery continues...

"The latest release in our Heard Them Here First series traces the career of David Bowie via an eclectic selection of the other writers’ songs he chose to record...As one might expect from the chameleonic Bowie, the featured tracks emanate from a diverse array of musical genres, eras and artists, from Lotte Lenya & the Three Admirals' 1930 recording of Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weill’s 'Alabama Song' to the Pixies' spiky 'Cactus' from 1988's Surfer Rosa. Other unlikely bedfellows: Johnny Mathis and Iggy Pop; Bobby Bland and the Velvet Underground; Jacques Brel and Chuck Berry; Martha & the Vandellas and Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers, make for a strikingly wide-ranging programme." - Ace Records

K. LEIMER - A Period Of Review: Original Recordings 1975-1983

Whether conjuring up electronic art-rock atmospheres à la Cluster & Eno or sample-laced, funkily abstract workouts in the vein of Material and My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, K. Leimer's output has been impressively constant (he continues to self-release in the same manner in which all these tracks were originally made available, via his Palace Of Lights imprint) but little-known up to now, making this RVNG set (an archival sequel of sorts to the label's 2012 Sensations' Fix collection Music Is Painting In The Air) all the more appreciated.

"The tape-manipulated serenity Leimer experienced with Cluster II was a key revelation. Leimer realized the potential to compose with minimal training and scoured pawnshops for cheap instruments and recording equipment to transpose his wayward musical instincts. Leimer’s sound palette and composition soon refined and heightened with the accessibility of dynamic equipment such as the Micromoog and TEAC multi-track tape machines." - RVNG

INVENTIONS - S/T

Meditative washes of guitar, electronic treatments, samples, stripped-back beats and the occasional vocal mark this debut full-length collaboration between Eluvium and guitarist Mark T. Smith of Explosions In The Sky.

"Inventions is the new band formed by longtime friends, tourmates, and labelmates Matthew Cooper of Eluvium, and Mark T. Smith of Explosions In The Sky. It began in earnest in 2013 when Cooper invited Smith to collaborate on a song for Eluvium's otherworldly double album, Nightmare Ending. The track, 'Envenom Mettle,' was a standout on an album full of them, and just like that a longstanding friendship blossomed into a full-fledged creative partnership. There are plenty of talking points here: the fact that Cooper hasn't been in a 'band' of any sort since he was a teenager; no member of Explosions In The Sky has released an album outside of the context of EITS since their inception in the late '90s; and, of course, this is a dream duo for anyone familiar with the unparalleled emotional resonance of Cooper and Smith's respective day jobs." - Temporary Residence

VA - Inner City Beat! Detective Themes, Spy Music and Imaginary Thrillers

An exciting Soul Jazz compilation spotlighting British library music composers who provided background instrumentals for suspense-laden, action-packed TV shows and films. There are non-stop thrills to be found here amongst the funky breakbeats and jazzy grooves by David Lindup, Johnny Hawksworth and co.

"Library music was meant to be used by film studios or television and radio stations. It was never meant to be commercially available. The music was recorded on spec by music libraries. They often hired young unknown composers, musicians and producers. Once recorded, record libraries sent out demonstration copies of their music to production companies. If the production companies liked what they heard, they’d license it from the music libraries. That was how it was meant to work.

Often, the music recorded by library companies was never licensed. Since then, it has lain unheard in the vaults of music libraries like KPM, De Wolfe, Amphonic and Conroy. This includes the music on Inner City Beat!, recently released by Soul Jazz Records. It features twenty-four slices of jazz, funk and easy listening. It's like returning to what was a golden period in television and cinema." - Dereksmusicblog