David Lance Callahan – ‘Island State’ (from ‘Down To The Marshes’ LP)

With ‘Down To The Marshes’ David Lance Callahan continues to explore contemporary issues in ways that are seldom obvious either lyrically or musically. Instead, these are songs that tread the liminal spaces between the boundaries of the extremes encouraged by much of the 21st Century. It makes for a record that sounds recognisably rooted in past traditions yet at the same time contemporary and ageless. Callahan manages this by recognising history’s cycles  and by making his references broad enough to illuminate these reverberations with a visionary elegance that conjures past, present and future within the same moment. In many ways ‘Down To The Marshes’ is not a comfortable record, but it has the sense to measure its solemnity against an earthy warmth that is enormously, endlessly rewarding.

Tristwch Y Fenywod – ‘Ferch Gyda’r Llygaid Du’ (from ‘Tristwch Y Fenywod’ LP)

Tristwch Y Fenywod’s eponymous debut LP is the sound of something deliciously twisted. It’s Macbeth’s witches meets Dead Can Dance in a Welsh forest where owls are not what they seem. It’s deep dark mountain pools reflecting a hunter’s moon with the cackle of ravens drifting with the snow down Gospel Pass. It’s the sound of Medieval ghost villages turned over, of wraith fires flickering in the fog. It’s a chilling hauntological sketch of winter’s desolation. It’s the Welsh language magical gothic folk album you never knew you needed.

epic45 – ‘Finality’ (from ‘You’ll Only See Us When The Light Has Gone’ LP)

The sight of the sun going down may no longer make me cry but the passing of things into darkness certainly brings a chill of melancholy. This is the inevitability of age of course, as inescapable as the cycles of nature. Things end. Things begin. Blink and you miss them. Much of this is captured in ‘You’ll Only See Us When The Light Is Gone’ with its oddly assured fragility and fascination with the temporal distortions of liminal spaces, both physical and psychic. Spirits in their houses, ghosts in their machines. Usborne’s book on their childhood bookshelves. Things we all invent and project on our eyelids to make sense of what we feel around us. Music, photographs, words. Whispers or whatever.

Heartbreaking and oddly celebratory.

(A much lengthier review appeared on Caught By The River here: https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2024/02/epic-45-youll-only-see-us-review/ )

The Softies – ’23rd Birthday’ (from ‘The Bed I Made’ LP)

Despite having adored Tiger Trap back in 1993 (how is that more than THIRTY years ago?), I somehow never really loved The Softies. This would have been as much on me as anything else, the ‘twee’ branding on anything remotely ‘underground’ and pared back making me bristle with mistrust and distaste. Muttering “you/I will not join the club for those who were not members of a club in the past” under my breath at every opportunity and retreating to… somewhere else, anyway. As a result I very nearly sidestepped ‘The Bed I Made’ in 2024. I am glad I didn’t, however, as it is a record of remarkably assured introspection where the potentially irritating self-pity of youth is cast into the kaleidoscopic vision of maturity and experience. Nostalgia still carries its recognisable patina of loss but is muted delicately by, if not always acceptance, then at least understanding. It’s as good a way as any of making the bed one has to lie in as comfortable as the pebbles of time allow. 

The Revolutionary Army of The Infant Jesus – ‘The Road Home’ (from ‘The Dream We Carry’ LP)

Perhaps unsurprisingly there is something of the hymnal in The Revolutionary Army of The Infant Jesus’ album ’The Dream We Carry’. Certainly there is something of the elusively spiritual, the mildly hallucinatory, the transcendentally reflective. ‘The Dream We Carry’ feels like a work that is turning its back on England, retreating into mediated nostalgia as a means of imagining potential tomorrows. The language in much of it is European (French and German) and where it is not, it is most notably Tom O’Bedlam reciting W.B. Yeats’ ‘Song of the Wandering Aengus’, accompanied by a chorus of angels and a swelling of strings. This is the sound of the strength in vulnerability; the comforting permanence of softness; the meditative calm of anger. Acceptance and rejection in one fluid embrace. 

Ghostwriter – ‘I Stand Amazed’ (from ‘Tremulant’ LP)

To a previous version of myself the very idea of an album made up mostly of interpretations of hymns would have set off my warning klaxons. The inclusion of a version of ‘Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down’ (which I first heard via Uncle Tupelo) might have intrigued me, but I doubt that former self would have investigated further. More fool them, however, for ‘Tremulant’ is a tremendous thirty four minutes of 21st Century reverence with a timeless relevance. A collaboration between Mark Brend, Suzy Mangion, Andrew Rumsey and Michael Weston King, the recordings here were made largely in isolation, inputs pieced together in personal meditation, a kind of communal spirituality of energies slipping across the networks. It’s perhaps best experienced in the two long pieces (‘I Stand Amazed’ and ‘The Anchor’), both of which are expansive interpretations that resonate with the spirit of 15th Century chapels and corrugated iron tabernacles.

Liana Flores – ‘Crystalline’ (from ‘Flower of the soul’ LP)

Seductive Weekend jazz inflections, sweet sophistipop confections: ‘Flower of the soul’ is warm yet fresh, like a morning in early May. It is a box of delicacies sprinkled with dew; the sound of a Tirzah Garwood print reflected in a moonlit waterway as a Lesley Duncan album whispers in the mist. It’s the sound of sipping espresso in the Cafe Bleu, of sifting memory and landing on bluebells in the castle woods. Echoes of previous lives dust our shoulders. A pocketful of pebbles. The sun squinting through the leaves. Adrift downstream on a daydream.

Nubya Garcia – ‘Clarity’ (from ‘Odyssey’ LP)

Does Nubya Garcia make ‘good’ Jazz? ‘Bad’ Jazz? ‘Mainstream’ Jazz? The kind of Jazz that is acceptable for the dribbling dilettante to name drop? I have no idea. If I attempted to write anything about the form it would read like the illiterate ramblings of the ignorant; a tiny bit of knowledge being the devil’s plaything, or something like that. Instead then let me simply say that ‘Odyssey’ is aptly titled, being a work that takes the listener through landscapes that are by turns discordant and dislocating, luxurious and succulent. It takes one through a melange of moods in a whisper under an hour and makes it feel so special one wants to do it all over again immediately.

Andrew Wasylyk & Tommy Perman – ‘Be The Hammer (feat. Aidan Moffat)’ (from ‘Ash Grey and the Gull Glides On’ LP)

Third album in a row in this year’s Unpopular advent where two artists with exemplary solo catalogues collaborate to create something that surpasses the heights one might hope for. The chilly electronica of twilight meets sun warmed morning room pianos. Subdued drawing room rhythms dance with 13th floor bedroom breaths. Fingers click. An afternoon sunbeam brings the garden to a partially curtained retreat; a clock chimes somewhere in the depths and time seeps through the cracks in the concrete. For almost all its length the pieces on ‘Ash Grey and the Gull Glides On’ are instrumental. Words would feel like an intrusion. Yet when they do come in the form of Aidan Moffat’s vocal on album closing ‘Be The Hammer’ they feel oddly inevitable. Simultaneously challenging and comforting, they are like the voice track from a brutalist observational documentary wrapping itself around a Godard daydream.