Albums of the Year 2021
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John Dwyer, Nick Murray, Brad Caulkins, Greg Coates and Tom Dolas - Witch Egg
Transparent green vinyl edition.
SIGNED COPIES NOW SOLD OUT
LIMITED GREEN VINYL STILL AVAILABLE HERE
John Dwyer leads another group of miners down into the murky caverns on Witch Egg, featuring current and past members of OSEES in an improvised supernova.
For the most part Nick Murray's Jaki Liebezeit-channeling drums are the rope around the band's waists, keeping them tethered to the surface world as sustained guitars bore down into the depths while probing saxophones sniff out treasures for rumbling bass lines to dislodge, keyboard sweeps deftly sweeping away the detritus.
After this deep dive extraction, the raw gems are cut to shape and refined through the mixing desk, a now lab-coated Dwyer unafraid of the kind of radical fader fuckery heard on Miles Davis' Get Up With It. The end result is not glossy but rich and complex, with more details and fractal patterns revealing themselves with every repeated listen and each increased level of loupe magnification.
John Dwyer signed these limited transparent green vinyl copies in gold pen at the much-needed and reinvigorating OSEES show last month, as well as a couple of other tasty limited editions!
AVAILABLE HERE
Low - HEY WHAT
Crystal clear vinyl Loser Edition.
AVAILABLE HERE
Yasmin Williams - Urban Driftwood
"Yasmin Williams is truly a guitarist for the new century."
For fans of fingerstyle guitar, instrumental, and new-age, such as Robbie Basho, and Elizabeth Cotten.
Yasmin Williams is endlessly inventive in her approaches to the acoustic guitar: Laying it flat on her lap, using mallets or a cello bow on the strings, using one hand to play a thumb piano, playing percussive parts on the body of the guitar or using tap shoes, sometimes all within the same song. Sounds impressive but gimmicky, you might think. Urban Driftwood never comes off as showy however, all these techniques feel subtle and justified by the phenomenal songwriting that they serve.
AVAILABLE HERE
Dry Cleaning - New Long Leg
What a debut record! We've been hooked on this group ever since seeing a captivating support set at an Upset The Rhythm show in early 2019 (honestly could not tell you who they were supporting, Dry Cleaning and in particular vocalist Florence Shaw stole the show entirely). Seeing them go from there to all of a sudden playing on Jimmy Fallon in just a couple of years feels unthinkable for a group so seemingly esoteric, but man, that's how it should be, right? Bands as characterful as this need to be treasured and celebrated.
AVAILABLE HERE
Endless Boogie - Admonitions
AVAILABLE HERE
Marisa Anderson / William Tyler - Lost Futures
Limited blue vinyl.
Guitarists Marisa Anderson and William Tyler distill deeply rooted and varied traditions into distinctive voices all their own.
Anderson and Tyler are each unyielding in their desire to extend through those traditions and the confines of “guitar music” to craft music at once intimate and expansive, conversational and transcendent. The duo’s debut collaborative album tethers together their singular voices into unified narratives that glisten, drive, and sway. On Lost Futures, Anderson and Tyler’s guitars dance through lush arrangements and pastoral duets serpentine and reverent.
AVAILABLE HERE
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The LSO - Promises
Three different versions in gatefold die-cut sleeves:
End of Year marbled vinyl edition.
Simply stunning 46 minute album. It floats and melts and is beautiful and mesmerizing. Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra joining together for an album for the ears, heart and soul.
AVAILABLE HERE
Colleen - The Tunnel & The Clearing
The Tunnel and the Clearing is a work of lucid reverence, a constellation of marvels suspended in air.
Colleen is an aboundingly inventive composer and artist. For two decades Cécile Schott, as Colleen, has crafted welcoming, enchanting, and bewildering music. The multi-instrumentalist and vocalist’s timeless compositions make use of carefully selected tools to mold memories into transcendent splendor. The Tunnel and the Clearing finds Schott at her most vulnerable and confident, invoking contemplative and swirling organ processed through analog electronics, steady drum machine syncopations and her distinctive voice. On an album centered on processing the complicated washes of emotion through tribulations and revelations Colleen presents a vision of breathless clarity.
AVAILABLE HERE
Matt Sweeney & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Superwolves
Where once was Superwolf, now roam Superwolves, the new album and demon spawn of Matt Sweeney and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy.
The songs that make up Superwolves, the duo’s second album and first since 2005’s Superwolf, go boldly into undreamed-of places, and go deep, as Matt and Bonny take all the musics they know to make songs that penetrate. In classic Garcia-Hunter style, Sweeney and the ‘Prince’ first work separately, finding a path to each other in their solitary imaginings. In this process, a new creature grows out of the old one. In this name of this partnership, the guitar shares an open and fluid space with the vocals, the voices sing with the guitars—every moment in the life of Superwolves is an extravaganza, guided only by its need.
AVAILABLE HERE
Warren Hampshire - Language Of The Birds
Language Of The Birds LP was recorded solo shortly after completing Galaxies Like Grains Of Sand and The Honey Bear with jazz pianist Greg Foat. Language Of The Birds is noticeably influenced by Warrens love of walking the countryside and woodlands on the Isle of Wight. It's also influenced by his interest in Catastrophism / Extinction events and the use of Symbolism employed in the Art, Architecture and Writings used to communicate knowledge of such events to subsequent civilizations. Warrens personal folk musings hint at 60s Psychedelic Folk but with a deeper connection to nature and the part we all play within it, it's impossible not to be drawn into his music and artwork which provokes memories of old children's books, Fairy tales, and the transportive paintings associated with them....
AVAILABLE HERE
Modern Nature - Island of Noise
180g recycled vinyl with 36p perfect bound booklet limited to 1000.
AVAILABLE HERE
Grouper - Shade
An achingly beautiful LP truly up there with Liz Harris' best work.
AVAILABLE HERE
Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds - Swing From The Sean De Lear
AVAILABLE HERE
Lost Girls - Menneskekoliektivet
Limited white vinyl.
Norwegian duo Lost Girls, artist and writer Jenny Hval and multi-instrumentalist Håvard Volden's first album after collaborating for more than ten years.
AVAILABLE HERE
Bobby Gillespie & Jehnny Beth - Utopian Ashes
Third Man US import exclusive, signed by Bobby Gillespie.
AVAILAIBLE HERE
Silver Synthetic - Silver Synthetic
Translucent yellow and purple coloured vinyl.
AVAILABLE HERE
Black Country, New Road - For The First Time
Eco-wax special edition with 16 page lyric booklet and sticker.
AVAILABLE HERE
Madlib - Sound Ancestors (Arranged By Kieran Hebden)
AVAILABLE HERE
Gazelle Twin & NYX - Deep England
Limited green vinyl. Rooted in English pagan and sacred music, Deep England is an electronic-choral expansion of Gazelle Twin’s 2018 album Pastoral.
AVAILABLE HERE.