Album: Carlos Moralez – Field Notes
On an album that defies genre, LA’s Moralez reveals years of research on love and death in meditations, confessions, and reflections.
Album
Album: desksnail – Lights Leak
These songs take hold in secret, stealth-boldened waves. There is a sadness to it all but also a sense of quiet hope – the warm, trembling arrival of more ambient atmospherics opening up like a freshly risen sun on a soft and secret summer’s morning.
Album: Doc Turbo – What’s So Important?
Bold, clean, fresh, and powerful: Doc Turbo is bringing skanking back with their new album.
Album: Weak Hands – We Can’t!
After a decade of existence, the Toronto band finally releases their debut album, a confident collection of tracks about heartbreak and healing.
Album: Peaks of Valleys – Eclipse
Eclipse by Peaks of Valleys, an electronic/ambient indie rock band from Madison, Wisconsin, is the sonic equivalent of a closing eye, too stubborn to submit to sleepiness or an eclipse that is too shy to be observed but self-assured enough to appear in the sky. It rests at an in-between state of dark and light. Sleep and wakefulness. Absence and appearance. This is a record that is comfortably contradictory in terms of both its lyrics and the soundscape it engenders that wreathes your ears reminiscent of the velvetiness of the music of bands like Amber Run and Sleeping At Last.
Album: Ahana – Soma
On her debut album, Soma, Ahana – with her elaborate embroidery of a heritage, originally being both Portuguese and Northern Indian – takes the focus off of everything but the body. Then she takes you through a swooping journey on which you discover that the things you thought you were looking for are not the things you long to find. And the body has all the answers if you care or dare to ask.
Album: Space Church – ARE YOU
A sprawling odyssey of sound, the new album from Camberley this trio is awash with musical versatility and artistic ambition.
Album: Omnigone – Turn Up The Fear
The newest chapter in East Bay ska core is here, and you need to hear it.
Album: Bayonne – Filters
This certainly has medicinal qualities, because this is an album of pure electronic-pop perfection that will take you on a journey through loss, grief, hope and happiness.
Album: Ancient Channels – Static Spirit
If things feel like they are falling down the drain and threatening to take you with it, Static Spirit may be the album for you.
Album: i give my friends flowers – DOGSTAR 1
Through natural disasters, deaths, broken relationships and relocations comes DOGSTAR I, the first in a cathartic 2 album set from multi-instrumentalist and producer Jacob Klein.
Album: funeral plain – negation of negation
On Negation of Negation, over a whirring, staticky noise-rock score, Chicago-based band, Funeral Plain proposes that destruction is essentially a form of change. And losing yourself implicitly raises the possibility that you will find yourself; and that when you do, you will discover nothing, or in lyricist, Jonny Gill’s words, ‘no-thing.’ This record argues, as Jonny Gill told me, that there is no innate being, just a continual process of becoming. But first you have to lose yourself.
Album: fuvk – thirty
Clear your calendar and spend time with this album’s intricate, fleeting, genre blending chapters.
Album: Jaewon – Alone At The Movies
Born from a place of isolation and reclusiveness, this cinematic – but also somehow subtle – concept album is very much a job well done.
Album: Azalia Snail – Gentle Mental
This instrumental album understands your sense of fear and gives you a crackle of tranquility and hope within the madness.
Album: Wills Van Doorn – Enduro
Van Doorn’s new record blends power pop, blues, and jazz to give live energy and stress the importance of keeping a steady pace on the road and in life.
Album: moodlighting – Party School
With more of dark New Wave jangle pop sound than “house banger”, the LA duo’s third album teaches that life – even the more menial moments – is the party.
Album: The Skariginals – Get Out of Your Head
On their new full-length album, the LA ska band bursts forth with a wake up call for anyone who needs to wake up and experience joy.
Album: sam hirst – Defenseless, good
Made entirely by himself, the San Francisco-based multi-instrumentalists 8th album is a fine mixture of musical ambition and impressive singular vision.
Album: The Summerlands – Bonfante Gardens Forever
In the new indie punk symphony, songwriter Grant Simmons ruminates on how to grapple with an increasingly inhospitable hometown and more unwelcoming world.