Small Black "New Chain"Small Black "New Chain"
$12.99 CD $14.99 LP $9.90 MP3New Chain is the debut long-player from New York’s Small Black. The Brooklyn group have succeeded in melting together locked and popped drum-shudder, gauzy spirographic synths and subtly contagious, half-remembered melody into ebullient bursts of evocative, subliminal and thoroughly modern pop. The songs are equally informed by the rhythmic bounce and stylistic swagger of more left-leaning contemporary radio rap and R’n‘B as it is the submerged kaleidoscopic swirl of the early 4AD dream factory. Formed at the tail-end of 2008 as a bedroom recording project, Small Black first made waves with their eponymous debut EP.Throughout it, Small Black allowed their addictive, stay-gold hooks to unfurl themselves gradually over repeated listens. And now, slightly more immediate and polished than its predecessor, Small Black's new album New Chain remains a continuation of this contrasting ethos – a delirious smudging of the lines between melancholy and nostalgia, tension and celebration, unabashed pop music and experimentation. A thinker’s party record? A party-hardy thinker’s record? Not sure. All we know is that New Chain is one of the most involved, intriguing and effortlessly human collections of organic pop music you’re likely to hear this or any other year.
Spokane "Little Hours"Spokane "Little Hours"
$12.99 LP+CD $9.99 MP3Little Hours is the patient sheen of stillness after a short, violent burst of intention. The lingering, resonant decay of a nail being hammered into wood. A piano laden marriage of small hopes and quiet violence. In Church Hill, a borough of Richmond, Virginia, there is a small yellow cottage. Next to the cottage is an austere replica of a mid-nineteenth century, white Federal period house. The members of Spokane hand built the structure over the course of 2006 while recording and revising their first new album in four years, Little Hours. The record is both a document of and an aural parallel to that difficult, meticulous process. In the emotional vein of folk singer Jackson C. Frank with the textural emaciation of composers Zbigniew Preisner and Morton Feldman, the songs themselves are hinged on concepts of failure and stillborn ideas, on the conflicted process of building or birthing a cerebral image into the world. There are the echoes of insistent cats running through the skeletal frame of the house, pillaged, infant birds in their mouths, left half-dead at the foot of the hole where the stair would be. Little Hours is packaged in a vinyl sleeve with both record and CD inside, 50 of which are handmade and numbered. It features the core ensemble of 2003's Measurement, which MOJO magazine called "a uniquely enthralling treasure", along with contributions from members of Brooklyn's orchestral, minimalist band Gregor Samsa,
Sunset Rubdown "Dragonslayer"Sunset Rubdown "Dragonslayer"
$17.99 2xLP $12.99 CD $9.99 MP3Sunset Rubdown was once the moniker under which Spencer Krug released low fidelity solo recordings. The project has long since evolved into a full band, and Dragonslayer is the third full-length recorded by the whole group. Besides Krug, it features the three musicians who originally signed on: Jordan Robson-Cramer on drums, guitar and keys, Michael Doerksen on guitar and bass, and Camilla Wynne Ingr on keys, percussion and vocals. And now, for the first time, newest member Mark Nicol can be heard on bass, drums, and percussion.
Sunset Rubdown's previous release on Jagjaguwar, Random Spirit Lover, was a studio-built album, in that much of it was written while recording (built up in separate layers, with almost all the vocals needing to be overdubbed). With the new album, the band wanted to try something completely different. It was a very conscious decision, and not a "natural progression." The result is an album that feels honest, natural, and straightforward. The musicianship is left in the open, unassisted by studio magic, and the songs are left to justify for themselves their own screwy pop-rock existence.
Dragonslayer was recorded in the fall of 2008. Sunset Rubdown hope that the true strength of this new album is a hidden complexity that emerges slowly from within the straight production and raw musicianship, and from what sounds at first to be an only slightly skewed approach to pop. They hope it's like that one friend of yours who looks unassuming and normal, but once you get to know him it's obvious he's basically crazy.
Sunset Rubdown "Random Spirit Lover"Sunset Rubdown "Random Spirit Lover"
$12.99 CD $17.99 2xLP $9.99 MP3The woven lyrics and singular songwriting style heard in Sunset Rubdown invoke a mythological world, where magical narratives and tiny metaphors give shape to ordinary objects in the room; sometimes beautiful, sometimes beastly. The moniker was first born to bare the solo bedroom recordings of Spencer Krug, but has since evolved into a full-fledged band. Now enter Sunset Rubdown's third full-length record, "Random Spirit Lover", featuring twelve songs that bleed in and out of each other, mixing portents with theatrics, confusions with conversions. The dark glamour of the music beneath the half-baked revelations in rhyme creates a tone of high drama, blown-out and overt, but the stage is wild and the roles aren't clear, so the sincerity of the work and the spontaneity of the recordings can't help but shine through the formality of structure.
Supreme Dicks "The Unexamined Life"Supreme Dicks "The Unexamined Life"
$17.99 2xLP $9.99 MP3Jagjaguwar is proud to reintroduce the complete recordings of Supreme Dicks in the form of Breathing and Not Breathing, a four CD set that includes both of the band's studio albums, The Unexamined Life from 1993 and The Emotional Plague from 1996, along with 1994's Workingman's Dick, a collection of early archival recordings, and the 1996 EP This Is Not A Dick, which has been fleshed out with rare and unreleased tracks. Also available are 2xLP editions of The Unexamined Life and The Emotional Plague, neither of which has been previously released on vinyl.
Supreme Dicks "The Emotional Plague"Supreme Dicks "The Emotional Plague"
$17.99 2xLP $9.99 MP3Jagjaguwar is proud to reintroduce the complete recordings of Supreme Dicks in the form of Breathing and Not Breathing, a four CD set that includes both of the band's studio albums, The Unexamined Life from 1993 and The Emotional Plague from 1996, along with 1994's Workingman's Dick, a collection of early archival recordings, and the 1996 EP This Is Not A Dick, which has been fleshed out with rare and unreleased tracks. Also available are 2xLP editions of The Unexamined Life and The Emotional Plague, neither of which has been previously released on vinyl.
Sur Une Plage "Legerdemain"Sur Une Plage "Legerdemain"
$15.99 LP $7.92 MP3Legerdemain - a trick, a slight of hand, a skill to make an audience believe that something is other than what it appears to be. Such is the case with Sur Une Plage's first studio album, a collection of pop songs, stripped of their organic beginnings to reveal a colder, more cynical outlook towards an uncertain future. Past experiences - mistakes, successes - should offer clues for successful navigation of future occurrences, yet with such a dismal track record, is there any assurance that these missteps will not be repeated? Recorded over a half year, "Legerdemain" is the culmination of an idea formed by Joshua Wells and Colin McKill during an unrelated tour ages ago. The idea was a musical project typifying simplicity; sparse instrumentation with vocals, harkening back to an age simultaneously of singer/songwriters and the first forays into synthesized music. Warmth, and hope, fighting through cuspidated obstacles - perhaps humanity's most enduring trick; its salvation in the face of overwhelmingly bleak odds.
Swan Lake "Enemy Mine"Swan Lake "Enemy Mine"
$12.99 LP $12.99 CD $9.99 MP3Swan Lake is the musical group featuring celebrated songwriter-mystics Daniel Bejar (of Destroyer and New Pornographers), Spencer Krug (of Sunset Rubdown and Wolf Parade) and Carey Mercer (of Frog Eyes and Blackout Beach). While their debut album was a beautifully-weaved mash-up of their disparate song-writing styles, often with layer upon layer of various melodies and stylistics thrown into a collaborative cauldron to magical, and at times discordant effect, their second album Enemy Mine reflects a more stripped-down, more deliberate approach to collaboration. It's as if they really tried to just make nice songs together.
The Besnard Lakes "The Besnard Lakes Are The Divine Wind"The Besnard Lakes "The Besnard Lakes Are The Divine Wind"
$11.99 12 inchEarly in 2016, The Besnard Lakes released their finest album to date, the magisterial A Coliseum Complex Museum and toured worldwide throughout the following months. Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas, the couple at the heart of the band, had spent the previous summer on their annual retreat to their namesake Besnard Lake. In a place with so much personal significance, they spent time writing the music that was to form the album. Culling the tracks down to an album proved a difficult task and inevitably there were tracks they loved that just didn't quite fit with the overall album.
So it is with delight that almost exactly a year on, the band are able to release this 12" of two brand new, exclusive tracks written and recorded at the same time as the album. "Laura Lee" is a sibling track to the album's illustrious first single, "The Golden Lion" - spacious reverb-y drums echo around an almost sci-fi vocal line sung by Olga Goreas. Meanwhile, the title track "The Divine Wind" is the Besnard Lakes at their expansive, psychedelic best: a sustained keyboard building through to a bombastic coda, complete with Lasek's unmistakable falsetto.
If you ever needed a reminder of just how unique, beautiful and far-reaching this band is, then The Besnard Lakes Are the Divine Wind delivers. They’ll be on tour on the west coast of North America in December and worldwide throughout 2017.
The Besnard Lakes "A Coliseum Complex Museum"The Besnard Lakes "A Coliseum Complex Museum"
$12.99 CD $16.99 LP $16.99 LP $7.99 MP3Unique among their furrowed brow peers, The Besnard Lakes are unafraid to marry textured, questing headphone sonics to the honeyed pleasure of radio hits past: the rapture of My Bloody Valentine entwined with the romance of Fleetwood Mac. Imagine dreamy Beach House riding Led Zeppelin dynamics, with unabashedly androgynous vocal harmonies.
Channelling their obsessions with the paranormal as well as the dark arts, A Coliseum Complex Museum is populated by cryptozoological creatures (The Bray Road Beast, Golden Lion) while also luxuriating in natural phenomena and beauty (The Plain Moon, Nightingale). These themes are sincere yet good-humoured. The LP's title jokily refers to a landmark-heavy road sign spotted on tour in Texas, the varied emotional impulses within reflected by its environmentally warped artwork.
The Besnard Lakes "Until In Excess, Imperceptible UFO"The Besnard Lakes "Until In Excess, Imperceptible UFO"
$12.99 CD $15.99 LP $7.92 MP3With Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO, The Besnard Lakes create a distinct and dreamy headspace, an enigmatic and somehow familiar placelessness. It happens in such a way that both the close and casual listener find themselves immersed in the generous sonic vision, one moment as timeless as the next.
The Besnard Lakes "You Lived in the City"The Besnard Lakes "You Lived in the City"
$9.99 12 inch $3.96 MP3Songs for the documentary Welcome to Pine Point came to fruition after Michael Simons, one of its creative directors and a longtime friend of The Besnard Lakes' Jace Lasek, told the band about this web-based project he was working on — about a mining town that had been abandoned in northern Canada —and asked if the band would be interested in providing some music for it. Simons also asked if the band would cover "We're Here for a Good Time (Not a Long Time)" by Canadian rock band Trooper. Herewith is their interpretation available for the first time as physical media. "The Corner" is one of two songs written for the end credits of the film "Memories Corner". This is the song that wasn't chosen. Also a Besnard Lakes rarity, this song is available for the first and only time on You Live in the City.
"Special thanks to: Audrey Fouche, the director of Memories Corner, and its producers; Welcome to Pine Point creators Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge and the National Film Board of Canada. These projects were both absolutely a pleasure to work on, and we hope you, dear listeners, enjoy these offerings." — The Besnard Lakes
The Besnard Lakes "The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night"The Besnard Lakes "The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night"
$14.99 LP $12.99 CD $9.90 MP3There is a war now. The message has been sent through short wave in code. The Besnard Lakes twisting chronicle, or fever dream, of spies, double agents, novelists and aspiring rock gods has turned violent. Loyalty, dishonor, love, hatred all seen through the eyes of two spies, fighting a war that may not be real. One follows the other as they receive coded messages and spread destruction.The city is burning, and it's to the benefit of music obsessives everywhere. Once again, the husband-and-wife duo of Olga Goreas and Jace Lasek has crafted a majestic, sprawling vision of guitar bombast and captivating pop experiments. With the aid of Besnard members Kevin Laing on drums and Richard White on guitar, The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night is a dense, ambitious recording, experimenting, as always, with the studio as instrument.
The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night calls upon the influence of ELO and finer parts of the Alan Parsons Project in its orchestration. Still helped by the Ghost of Beach Boys Past, the album is more Dennis Wilson than Brian, and more Peter Green Fleetwood Mac than Lindsay Buckingham. The album is a dark bliss-out that folds the eerie guitar epics of the Montreal band's breakthrough into a wall of affected drones and atmospherics, but with a toughened immediacy and grit that gives the form a much-needed shove over the cliffs, making for a haunting, provocative swan dive into the crushing tide.
The Besnard Lakes "Casino Nanaimo"The Besnard Lakes "Casino Nanaimo"
$9.99 12 inch $1.99 MP3In early 2007, the Besnard Lakes released a full-length album on Jagjaguwar that quickly made it onto numerous and budding best-albums-of-the-year short-lists by a whole range of music-listening pedigree. Now these inspired Montrealers continue what they've started, re-stoking the flames and releasing two additional tracks. Side A is "Casino Nanaimo", a place where repetitive sound and lights engulf addicted gamblers all vying for space on the eternal wheel of fortune. And then there is side B, "Devastation (alternate version)", the unedited and original straight-to-two-track nine-minute version, recorded live-off-the-floor at Breakglass Studios.
The Besnard Lakes "The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse"The Besnard Lakes "The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse"
$12.99 CD $15.99 LP $7.92 MP3Rich with Beach Boys style harmonies, Roy Orbison reverbs and orchestra, Pink Floyd's pacing and Freddy Mercury's falsetto, The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse is a luxurious foray into sound and music. This is the second record by The Besnard Lakes, Montrealers by way of Western Canada. Their independently released previous record, Volume I, came out in 2004, and it was noticed by critics but was largely overlooked by the public at large. On both records, The Besnard Lakes have shown that they are masters of finely-honed experimental pop songs that invoke the eerie Lynchian setting as aided and abetted by the music of Julee Cruise. But, on The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse, the band throws into the mix a mad dash of Fleetwood Mac proportioned swagger and ambition. Not so incidentally, the Besnard Lakes have created a masterpiece that will resonate within all quarters, amongst critics, casual and not-so-casual rock listeners, garden variety pop fans and headphone junkies.
The Cave Singers "Banshee"The Cave Singers "Banshee"
$12.99 CD $16.99 LPBanshee brings The Cave Singers back to their original 3 piece lineup and also their approach to songwriting: an exchange of Derek sending Pete a riff and Pete responding with vocal ideas. From there, the songs come together. The album was recorded live in July 2015 over 6 days with producer Randall Dunn. The record is warmly anchored in the members' creative familiarity with one another. Yet there is a new thirst to Banshee, one that can be attributed to the combination of the band taking a year off to work on other projects - Pete Quirk's solo album and the Kodiak Deathbeds debut record - and their return to songwriting from a distanced correspondence.
The Cave Singers "Naomi"The Cave Singers "Naomi"
$12.99 CD $15.99 LP $9.99 MP3On Naomi, The Cave Singers have charted new territory for the band, both musically and spiritually, while remaining true to their distinctive brand of brushfired folk. After some time in the dark wealth of the unknown, they have returned to the light with a revitalized purpose.
The Cave Singers "No Witch"The Cave Singers "No Witch"
$14.99 LP $12.99 CD $9.99 MP3The Cave Singers spend a good deal of time beyond the darkened edges of Seattle, in the mist and mystic, among the wolves and redwoods. And their songs, at least on record, have always been like beautiful, faded grayscale photos of this hinterland. Now, these photos are injected with hot blood and technicolor, a ferocity and bite we've yet to see from the band.
By all accounts, No Witch is The Cave Singers' rock record. Laid to tape with dark wizard producer Randall Dunn (Black Mountain, Sunn O))), Boris), No Witch is grander and more lush than The Cave Singers' previous efforts. It's also a nervier, scrappier affair: greasy guitars buck and rear up; Eastern-influenced blues snake through songs; gospel choirs rise up like tidal waves. There are big, grinning nods to Beggar's Banquet-era Stones, the best of Mellencamp ("Clever Creatures") and the juke joint legends of Mississippi like Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside ("Black Leaf" and "No Prosecution If We Bail"). Of course, it's all filtered through that particular, magical Cave Singers formula: Pete Quirk's reedy, behind-the-beat delivery and existential wordplay, Derek Fudesco's lyrical guitar runs and drummer Marty Lunds' no nonsense rhythms.
No Witch is a newfound sheen to the aura that made The Cave Singers' music so special to begin with. All told, there's treasure to be found here for the biker gang weekender, the double rainbow chaser and all that falls in the valley between them.
The Dead C "Clyma Est Mort"
The Dead C "The Dead C Perform M. Harris"
The Lord Dog Bird "The Lord Dog Bird"The Lord Dog Bird "The Lord Dog Bird"
$12.99 LP $12.99 CD $9.99 MP3The Lord Dog Bird is the solo recording project of Colin McCann, guitarist for Jagjaguwar artists, Wilderness. While the band was on extended hiatus, McCann kept at it, documenting his feelings about life and music at home on his four track. The result is a gritty, tactile document of a time spent in self-exploration and flux.
The Skygreen Leopards "Gorgeous Johnny"The Skygreen Leopards "Gorgeous Johnny"
$12.99 CD $14.99 LP $9.99 MP3It’s been 8 years since the first Skygreen Leopards' record was released. Since then the boys have maintained their singular aesthetic while managing to dabble with faux-folk, avant garde pop, reverb-drenched lo-fi psychedelia, plastic country and blurry ballads. This latest effort finds them collaborating with Jason Quever (Papercuts) to create a melancholy world overflowing with itinerant dandies, urban streets, suburban teens, and more girls' names than I care to count, all set to melodic shuffles featuring harmonies, frail piano, and romantic guitars.
As always with the Leopards the rhythms refuse to be bridled, the boys resist the urge to jam, and they won’t ever learn to sing properly. This will frustrate the expectations of some. Others will find a sweet shadowy hiding place in these songs -- 3 minutes to hang out with girls who race horses, boys who never learned to dance, and a dirty uncle who steals your cigarettes.
The Skygreen Leopards "Life and Love in Sparrow's Meadow"The Skygreen Leopards "Life and Love in Sparrow's Meadow"
$11.00 LP $12.99 CD $9.99 MP3With Life & Love in Sparrow's Meadow, The Skygreen Leopards expand on their strange pastoral folk-pop and enter center stage as one of the most unique voices in the new folk movement. The Skygreen Leopards are Donovan Quinn (Verdure) and Glenn Donaldson (Thuja, Blithe Sons, Franciscan Hobbies, Birdtree, Ivytree, etc.). Formed in 2001, Quinn and Donaldson met while responding to a cryptic ad in the paper looking for Lumberjack players (little wooden dancing men you play on a board for percussion and visual interest). After being bested by an Appalachian man, Donovan and Glenn began studying the stars together where Glenn, while tracing his finger along Orion, said, "Donovan, we are the Skygreen Leopards", and so they were.
The Skygreen Leopards originate from the Bay Area-based Jewelled Antler forest of bands. Donaldson co-founded the Jewelled Antler label in 1999, which has since released over 25 CD-R's ranging from straight field recordings & outdoor improv-folk to noise & fractured pop music. The Skygreen Leopards are without a doubt the most structured and accessible of these projects. Much of the Jewelled Antler music is recorded live outdoors on mini-discs & boomboxes while the Skygreen Leopards primarily focus on a surreal form of multi-layered folk-pop recorded on an old reel-to-reel housed in a moldy trailer on the back of a horse ranch. 12-string guitars, banjos, dulcimers, Jew's harps, organs, maracas, mandolins, harmonicas, ocarinas & reed flutes harmonize with the field-recorded songs of birds, barnyard animals & insects. This hedge of sounds is the backdrop for Quinn & Donaldson's mythological rants & hazy melodies.
Tim Darcy "Saturday Night"
Tim Heidecker "In Glendale"Tim Heidecker "In Glendale"
$12.99 CD $16.99 LP $9.99 MP3For the last decade, Tim Heidecker (along with his comedy partner Eric Wareheim) has proven to be one of our cult-comedy greats with his Adult Swim series "Tim & Eric's Awesome Show, Great Job!" and "Tim & Eric's Bedtime Stories." He's starred in indie films and played sold out stand-up sets around the world.
But who is Tim Heidecker? Is he a real man with all the regular feels? Well, yes, of course he is. He resides on a hill in Glendale, CA, up to his armpits in diapers, bills, his mortgage, in the workaday life of a writer. It's this pedestrian side of his life from which Heidecker pulls the fodder for the aptly titled In Glendale, his first earnest collection of songwriting under his full name.
In Glendale shows Heidecker shifting deftly from the mundane to the idiosyncratic; from the sentimental to the caustic; from the earnest to the humorous. His knack for crafting catchy tunes amid curious subject matter pops up in spades across In Glendale. "Ghost In My Bed" is a lovely little number about cutting off someone's head, sticking it in a plastic bag and burying it beneath the Hollywood sign.
After an album's worth of songs about Hollywood murder fantasies, diaper changes and even a cameo from director David Gordon Green, you're left desperately trying to wipe the smile off your face.
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