THE VELVET UNDERGROUND - The Complete Matrix Tapes (4CD)

"The first song on the Matrix Tapes is a languid, 13-plus-minute-long version of 'Waiting for the Man,' complete with a whistling break and two previously unreleased verses, seemingly made up on the spot. But what makes this collection essential is the cohesion of the band and the setlists: the shows find the Velvets at their absolute peak as a live unit, with Reed and Sterling Morrison's guitars—the former raucous and unhinged, the latter pristine and precise—meshing with an almost subconscious cohesion. The 42-track set finds the band cruising through some 22 different songs sprawling across their entire career: 'Sweet Jane' is rendered in versions much calmer than the familiar recording on Loaded, forceful on the first round (and with yet another unreleased verse), gentle on the second. Doug Yule introduces a loping melodic bassline into 'Heroin' (first night, second set) before moving over to organ. But most of all, the clarity of the sound—which is drastically improved from the Live 1969 album, where several of these songs were first released, and The Quine Tapes collection, which is rough-quality audience recordings of songs from the same set of shows—makes it feel as if the band is performing right in front of you." - Billboard

BEAT HAPPENING - Look Around

"Domino is proud to announce Look Around, a compiled retrospective from the legendary Beat Happening. Formed in the early '80s at Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington by Calvin Johnson, Heather Lewis and Bret Lunsford, Beat Happening combined a modern primitive pop sound with the D.I.Y. ethos of 'anyone can do it', inspiring countless bands and labels along the way. The music community that arose around the band and their label, K, was in many ways, the sonic antithesis of their Seattle neighbors (and friends) but was no less influential. Look Around is a remastered, career-spanning double album anthology, handpicked by the band and a great starting point for the uninitiated as well as a refreshing reminder to those who caught the wave the first time around." - Domino Recording Company

CARRIE BROWNSTEIN: Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl

"Sleater-Kinney's intensity—derived from both its own talents and in part from the airing of repressed anger that was one of the triumphs of the Riot Grrrl scene—took its listeners to certain uncomfortable places, then asked them to stay there. Though Corin Tucker's voice has a purity of sound to it, ringing like a bell at midnight over the sound of raucous guitars, listening to the music can be complicated business. Not everyone is looking for that in a song.

Carrie Brownstein's new book has a similarly fierce approach, though her methods are complicated. While there are certainly places where an editor could and should have chiseled her prose down to make her points sharper and more affecting, this book is the clear product of a very intelligent person, and filled with flashes of insight and wit. Describing her younger self watching Tucker's previous band, Heavens to Betsy, for example, Brownstein writes,

Heavens to Betsy came across as the most serious of their peers. You stood up, you listened, and you were quiet. They were like really loud librarians.

But this is one of the few tiny moments of humour in the book. Instead, it delivers its goods in what I can only describe as a compellingly depressive register, which sounds like an insult but isn't. By keeping her affect flat, Brownstein is able to avoid melodrama, a good thing because there are elements of her life story she could have frothed up into soap." - The Guardian

DILLY DALLY - Sore

"The most immediately disarming thing about Dilly Dally isn't the hellfire guitar tone or the booming drum work. It’s Katie Monks' voice, a scuffed-up howl descended most directly from Courtney Love but also from Layne Staley, Frank Black, Kurt Cobain—all those singers who heard the harshest grain of their voice not as a flaw but as a weapon. Monks has one hell of a snarl, and hearing her rattle it like so many rusty chains draws Dilly Dally’s debut out of the endless background noise of '90s revivalists and into a space where it can thrash around and feel alive.

The Toronto band's '90s roots are deep, though—Hole's DNA shines through in gutter-pop stunner 'Desire,' and 'Purple Rage' shows an affinity with Helium with its white-hot lead guitars and sunken snare pattern. Pixies show up for their due diligence in Dilly Dally's bibliography, especially in the wobbling bass line of 'Ballin Chain,' but Monks doesn’t seem interested in sharing too much of their wordy snark. If the hallmark of most '90s alt-rock was its tossed-off boredom, its slacker cool, Dilly Dally splits from its forebears in ethos if not sound. This isn't a band out to prove how little they care while still making a lot of noise; those partitions come down, and all the hurt and want and anger behind them come gushing to the forefront." - 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

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

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

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

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

JESSICA HOPPER: The First Collection Of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic

"Hopper's name should be familiar to anyone who makes a point of following contemporary music criticism—she's a longtime editor at Pitchfork and the editor-in-chief of its hard-copy spinoff, The Pitchfork Review. She's written about Kendrick Lamar for SPIN and music licensing for Buzzfeed. In a previous life, she worked on the other side of the shadowy divide between listeners and artists, as a PR rep for acts like Pedro the Lion. She's been deftly reflecting on music—and having those thoughts published—since she was a teenager. (She's 38 now.) And now she's released The First Collection Of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic.

The book, which spans the past 15 years of Hopper's career, is deliberately uneven. Rather than present a chronological arc, she's organized her work by broad subject areas, ranging from straightforward ('Chicago,' her home base) to entertaining ('Bad Reviews,' which favours thoughtful eviscerations over cheap shots) to political ('Females,' the final part, holds the crux of Hopper's feminist critical philosophy). In each section, relative juvenilia sits alongside recent, 'mature' writing. 'Emo: Where The Girls Aren't,' Hopper's tossed-gauntlet of an essay on misogyny in the Chicago scene for a 2003 issue of Punk Planet, is pages away from her unflinching 2013 interview with reporter Jim DeRogatis about R. Kelly's abhorrent record as a sex offender. A laser-focused 2011 profile of the artist St. Vincent buts up against a poetic, impressionistic review of a record by the Swedish singer-songwriter Frida Hyvonen from 2006." - Sarah Liss, National Post

VA - Sherwood At The Controls, Vol. 1: 1979-1984

"Sherwood At The Controls, Vol. 1 captures the producer very early in his career, applying dub techniques to an eclectic variety of rhythms, including a surprising amount of punk-funk grooves.

Sherwood takes an aggressively experimental approach to remixing, even when working with more traditional reggae artists. When you apply that attitude to songs by post-punk bands like The Fall, the results sometimes walk the line between mind-blowing and irritating, but at least they're always interesting. He was far from the first to combine dub reggae and punk, but he took the results farther into outer space than anyone else." - NOW

METZ - II

"Frontman Alex Edkins has said that this record was made with a 'mistakes-left-in kind of approach,' but if anything this only makes II‘s noise-rock more pointed and direct. 'Spit You Out' starts out feeling like a familiar METZ track, all tightly wound distorted bass and sneered vocals, but it casually morphs into something a little more woolly and wild. Edkins' guitar lines and Hayden Menzies' drums rattle and sputter around like malfunctioning machinery before revving back into the pummeling high gear they’re known for. That’s the rule for most of what works best on II: the trio take the forms that worked the first time around, turn them on their head, and then jump right back into the fray with reckless abandon." - SPIN

KIM GORDON: Girl In A Band

"For 30 years, the band Sonic Youth had, as its core, two main vocalists: Thurston Moore on guitar, and Kim Gordon on bass. They were indie rock's power couple—a shining example of love and loyalty in maybe the environment least conducive to marital bliss. Sonic Youth ended in 2011, with their divorce. Now, Gordon has written a new memoir, Girl In A Band, about her marriage, her music and the origins—and the end—of Sonic Youth." - NPR

"It is in its uncrated reports of what she’s always seen but never said, where Gordon allows herself the grace of believing her own intuition, that Girl In A Band becomes a triumph and a manual for owning one’s pain, sensitivity, cruelness, self-consciousness and instinct. Gordon’s heartbreak and insecurities (about her singing voice, for example) are as prevalent as her notable confidence and ferocity." - National Post

VA - Punk 45: Burn Rubber City Burn! Akron, Ohio: Punk and the Decline of the Mid-West 1975-80 / Extermination Nights In The Sixth City - Cleveland, Ohio: Punk and the Decline of the Mid-West 1975-82

"Burn, Rubber City Burn! charts the rise of the music scene in Akron, Ohio at a time when the city and the rubber industry it was associated with was in deep decline, featuring a fantastic collection of Akron groups including Devo, The Bizarros, Rubber City Rebels, Jane Aire, Chi-Pig, The Waitresses and more.

Extermination Nights In The Sixth City charts the rise of underground punk in Cleveland, Ohio, which for many people is the true birthplace of punk music in the mid-1970s, featuring a fantastic collection of punk 45 singles from Cleveland groups including Pere Ubu, electric eels, The Pagans, Rockets From The Tomb, Mirrors, X–X and more." - Soul Jazz Records

ICEAGE - Plowing Into The Field Of Love

Yes, the Nick Cave and Gun Club comparisons are more than apt on this third record by the Danish punks whose instrumental and formal experimentation gets slightly less bounded here, but equally worthy of mention is the influence of The Pogues on tracks like the raucous, mandolin-laced stumble-boogie "Abundant Living." If you're looking for something sullen (and just a touch goofy, in a borderline goth way) to swoon and sulk to, Plowing... might be what you're after—as with any bad-boy dalliance, though, just be careful not to get too close.

"Iceage's angular guitars still manage to sit well alongside piano hits and jabbing violins; it's interesting to hear a little country shuffle on 'The Lord's Favourite' followed by the unnerving poundings of 'Cimmerian Shade,' but it's vocalist Elias Bender that binds it all together. His utterings invoke an image of a frontman giving it his all whilst squirming upon a beer-soaked stage floor. But beneath the growls are still some finely poetic lyrics, something that doesn't register upon first listen, but with more attention one realises there's some clever and arresting wordplay involved. Anyone feeling that post-punk has been revitalised one too many times may find it a bash to the ears but the racket grows on you, and the smarts and heart beneath the dissonance become apparent with every press of the play button." - Under The Radar

NAOMI PUNK - Television Man

While this second effort doesn't stray much from their already-impressive 2012 debut The Feeling, we're not complaining at all, happy to be bludgeoned again by another batch of slightly lopsided, aggressively indifferent Washington State sludge-pop.

"Television Man, the Pacific Northwest act’s follow-up to 2012's The Feeling, is musically disjointed, skittish and askew. The effect isn’t to dazzle with technicality or to confound with deliberate idiosyncrasies, but to take listeners on a circuitous ride to the song’s exalted musical peaks. It’s a ceaselessly forceful record, full of low-end blows that are felt more intensely due to the fact that the arrival schedule is so fickle. It’s also occasionally beautiful, namely when sustained vocal lines cascade across the syncopated bludgeoning of every crescendo." - Wondering Sound

"Most of Television's songs—and most of the songs on 2012's The Feeling, for that matter—are slow and grunge-like, anchored by vaguely radioactive-sounding guitars and vocals mumbled to the point of unintelligibility. They are heavy and romantic but sour end-to-end, the ballads of a teenage swamp thing preening in the dark. They're also unexpectedly pretty, filled with twists of melody and structure far more sophisticated than they need to be to fly in the realms of punk and underground rock." - Pitchfork

VIET CONG - Cassette (12" EP)

While we're waiting for the fully-fledged full-length debut (which we're especially eagerly anticipating if the advance 'rough mix' of "Bunker Buster" is any indication of what's in store), this vinyl-only reissue of Viet Cong's 2013 cassette-only EP is a fine introduction to the band's paisley-stained post-punk, while inevitably also serving to sate those who still wonder what a third Women record might have sounded like.

"Viet Cong is a new project made up of four distinct voices. Matt Flegel and Scott Munro (respective former members of beloved Calgary band Women, and Chad VanGaalen's band) spent much of 2013 in their basement studio with a mess of old and run-down equipment to build a set of fresh material. Joined by bandmates Daniel Christiansen and Michael Wallace, the band completed work on a debut cassette. What emerged from the studio was a mixture of sharply-angled rhythmic workouts and euphoric '60s garage pop melodies, balanced with a penchant for drone-y, VU-styled downer moments." - Mexican Summer

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

ORANGE JUICE - You Can't Hide Your Love Forever / Rip It Up / Texas Fever / The Orange Juice

After an initial limited vinyl run for last year's Record Store Day, we're glad that Domino have now repressed reissues of all four Orange Juice albums, as well as issuing remastered CD editions. We're particularly partial to their 1982 debut You Can't Hide Your Love Forever, currently a featured title in one of our in-store listening posts!

"Orange Juice were (and are) too funky and jazzy to sit comfortably next to The Smiths, too poppy and sprightly to be filed alongside The Cure, and too hooky and toe-tappingly infectious to share the duvet with Talking Heads. Add in the obvious influences of classic soul, R&B, rock & roll and, of course, punk and you'll be getting pretty close to defining where to stash these discs on your bookshelf. Lyrically, Orange Juice flits wildly (and delightfully) from snappy cynicism to incisive self-deprecation to melancholic romanticism to gutsy angst with eye-watering virtuosity." - Muso's Guide