Joyer are brothers Nick and Shane Sullivan who are quietly making some of the finest recent slowcore music. Their latest album, Sun Into Flies, is their third full-length and the first not to be self-released, instead being issued through Z Tapes, the Slovakian label run by Filip Zemcik which has become a byword for quality lo-fi releases.
The trio - Gemma Fleet (The Wharves), Robert Sotelo, and Chris Taylor began making music in the unexpected landscape of a Glasgow flat and they have a combined sound entirely of their own concoction. A hazy mixture of medieval folk, baroque pop, and 60s psychedelia, it’s an utterly bamboozling palette but it works.
The album was initially conceived as a concept record about Australia’s first and largest air raid, the 1942 Bombing of Darwin, until Robertson realized the repetitive nature of history would be better-suited to what he wanted to say. In this way, it’s his most focused release yet, both lyrically and sonically.
Tough Age call their music “culmination rock” and what a description this is. The work of Jarrett Samson, Jesse Locke, and Penny Clark is really the combining of years of sonic ideas, lost bands, and defining experiences. Since 2012, each album has refined their tight and energetic sound further; so Which Way Am I? is their strongest release.
Endless Space (Between You & I) is entirely a record of its own, suffused with a purity that only true dream pop can provide. Everything is ethereal (unsurprising from the person who released an EP titled Ethereality in 2018) and the songs never cease to sparkle, awash as they are in technicolor reverie.
As is often the case with a third album, the production levels have been raised. The sounds of Flower Of Devotion are glossier and crisper, the raw qualities of their indie-rock both softened and rounded. The new lushness will be more inviting to the casual listener but the basic premise of Dehd’s music is kept to satiate long-time followers.
There’s a repeated line in W.B. Yeats’ poem ‘Easter 1916’: A terrible beauty is born. This devastating line could describe the feeling of listening to Joy Division’s Closer for the first time. It’s a colossal work of art; a post-punk pillar; an ingenious sonic landscape; a blinding existential vision of songwriting.
Nova Scotia rockers Kestrels want to remind you of another era and their latest album Dream Or Don’t Dream is their love letter to ‘90s rock, mixing the hushed aesthetics of shoegaze with the fuzz and energy of power-pop. In its meshing of big-name rock backing talent and its commitment, Kestrels will find an interested audience.
To listen to Bananagun is to travel the world under an invigorating blend of inspiration. They are the youth basking in the glow of old styles: there are African grooves, drum and bass beats, tropicalia, and ‘60s psychedelic pop; it’s a credit to the band that their sonic melange settles so well as a whole.
Moth is the creative project of Darcy Berry, known for his punchy drumming in Melbourne’s strikingly different but equally excellent Gonzo and U-Bahn. Moth became known for their chaotic live performances around Melbourne, fleshing out the bare bones of the project with talent from bands such as Alien Nosejob and Body Maintenance.
Where before Modern Nature found urgency in exploring their sonic boundaries though - dipping into everything from krautrock to free jazz - Annual is a conceptual rather than experimental piece. Annual documents one year in Cooper’s life, with his thoughts drawn from a journal filled with ideas and notes.
Catharsis has always lain within a truly heartbreaking country song: a few minutes of ached crying, staring into the abyss of romance and loss, and a temporary peace comes over the singer. This is something Esther Rose recognizes and so we have her new EP, filled with covers of some of her favorite depressing country anthems.
This covers album is essentially a cleanup of Johnston’s ramshackle workings, an imagining of how the outsider artist may have sounded if he hadn’t been plagued by weighty personal issues and a lack of quality recordings. There is no attempt to match the wild spirit of Johnston - they couldn’t - instead offering a fair homage to the icon.
Scott Ryan Davis (Psychic Ills) brings us an album vastly differing in tone to the experimental psychedelia of that band’s work, a welcomingly soft departure. Vincent’s Playlist feels intensely personal, a loving remembrance of the glory of guitar music. The songs scratch and soar as if they had arrived from a Flying Nun Records release.
