What is new in my music library? (recent purchases I enjoy)
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Pulp – More
New Pulp album !!! Their first in 24 years... SUPERB!
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Eli Paperboy Reed - Sings Walkin' And Talkin' And Other Smash Hits! (20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) (2025)
Eli Paperboy Reed is celebrating 20 years of making soulful music with the re-release of his very first album, Sings Walkin’ And Talkin’ And Other Smash Hits! The set was originally recorded in a basement studio in Allston, Massachusetts, all live to analog tape in mono and pressed as a limited run of 300 CDs in 2005. This self-released CD was mostly sold while Reed busked on the streets of Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass in his early 20s.
This deluxe edition includes all 12 tracks from Eli’s debut album and 14 never before released tracks!©
Lifeguard - Ripped and Torn 2025
Ripped and Torn, Lifeguard - Qobuz
Listen to unlimited streaming or download Ripped and Torn by Lifeguard in Hi-Res quality on Qobuz. Subscriptions from $10.83/month.
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The world is changing fast for the Chicago teenagers in Lifeguard. After a pair of much-praised EPs, this smart and ambitious trio have released a knockout debut, Ripped and Torn. With echoes of Unwound, Bauhaus, and Fugazi, their sharp, well-rehearsed, high-volume originals walk the line between outright noise rock and the occasional melodic turn that doesn't lessen the impact. Lifeguard have honed their songwriting to an edge that belies their age, and like the buzzing amps that can be heard at the conclusion of several tracks, singer/guitarist Kai Slater, drummer Isaac Lowenstein and singer/bassist Asher Case all have energy and atonal ambitions to burn. (Case's musical curiosities are a family affair—his father Brian Case was in Chicago indie rock bands 90 Day Men and The Ponys, and currently plays in FACS.) "Like You'll Lose" is a loud/soft krautrock-influenced ride with a stinging guitar. Starting with a keyboard drone, "Under Your Reach" blossoms into a near anthem. While the lyrics will improve with time, the words in that track nevertheless do the job—"All your spite/ On your pillow/ Not for all/ That flower." Opening with guitar shriek, "How To Say Deisar" threatens to continue as a full-on basher, but soon becomes more settled; a steady drumbeat precedes the barking lines, "You say something/ I say something too." Lifeguard's inner fires emerge in several just-for-fun cacophonous blasts. The twenty-four seconds of "Me and My Flashes" forcefully wipes the palette clean, and in "Music for 3 Drums," galloping drums and feedback feed off the trio's unrestrained passions. Filled with more drums and guitar feedback, "Charlie's Vox" pauses before resuming its clanking trek. The title track is as grand as this collection gets with repeated chords and drums before the volume recedes and Slater and Case sing, "You're teacher's pet." And with the next and final track, "T.L.A.," Lifeguard reaches for something deeper, asserting "Words like tonality come to me/ The kind of thing that breaks." © Robert Baird
The Way U Make Me Feel: UK Boogie & Street Soul, 1980-1994, by Various Artists
12 track album
freestylerecords.bandcamp.com
VA - The Way U Make Me Feel: UK Boogie & Street Soul, 1980-1994 (2025)
AWESOME!
We compile a killer overview of rare & undersung UK street soul & boogie tracks from across the 80s and early 90s, selected from the creme of our recent 12" reissue programme. Featuring an exclusive mid-90s cut from Manchester street soul act Gold In The Shade, along with photography from Andrew Holligan and notes from Kevin Le Gendre.
"The sleeve of this album has faces that tell a thousand stories. In Hackney, east London, where photographer Andrew Holligan created a series of inspired pictures, every day people developed a vibrant culture, enlivening a part of the capital that was much maligned during the Thatcher years. The street was a lounge, a place to meet, talk, laugh, and, generally, hang. This was also the golden age of the house party.
At the dawn of the 80s the sound of black popular music that these good folk were listening to was in the grip of change. For the most part bands with horn sections were scaling down and the 8-10 piece unit gave way to much smaller ensembles with a less orchestral sound, as saxophonists, trumpeters and trombonists who provided finely shaded harmonies and counter-melodies were being replaced by keyboard players. Indeed the rainbow of colours fashioned by an arsenal of synthesizers, from Prophets and Korgs to Rolands and Yamahas, brought preen and sheen to soul, which, with a lower tempo and heavy bouncing bass lines, was being referred to as boogie. Needless to say the new sub-genre caught on in the UK and became another form of vocabulary for audiences to embrace in the slipstream of the Brit-funk movement of the mid '70s, which was spearheaded by groups of mostly young Britons of West Indian heritage.
During this transitional period, which also saw the emergence of lovers rock, there was a certain amount of movement between genres, and a cursory glance at the total output of black British music reveals the presence of female vocalists recording in several styles. Lines were crossed. Furthermore, there was an increase in the amount of one-off studio projects, in which a producer-composer wrote a track, played keys and called in a singer and some additional sessioneers to add finishing touches. This is one of the main reasons why the era is so fascinating, and is still the subject of the extensive research that has led to an album such as The Way U Make Me Feel. Rather than being a scene that was centred around several marquee bands, boogie Brit-Funk was more disparate and fragmented, and therefore far harder to pin down and document.
The other term that was coined for the slew of releases was Street Soul, which also resonated with a certain spirit of independence, as the bulk of the artists who stood under this umbrella were releasing their work on small labels that did not have the reach of the majors. It meant that they were often consigned to obscurity, for the most part. The story is all too familiar. But low key can be high grade. Big labels and large venues serve a purpose but the real good times are to be had at house parties on the street where people live. The Boogie is always funkier when it drops in the basement."
— Kevin Le Gendre ©
Black Market Karma - Mellowmaker (2025)
Following 2024’s ‘Wobble’, ‘Mellowmaker’ is the second chapter in Black Market Karma’s two-part album series on Fuzz Club. Crafted entirely by Stanley Belton—who writes, records, and produces everything himself—the record embraces analogue imperfections and tape wobble, splicing them with modern techniques to create a “cassette-ified” lo-fi psychedelia blending ‘60s pop, ‘90s neo-psych, and crunchy hip-hop breakbeats.
"Mellowmaker was made immediately after Wobble, I kinda see them as two sides of each other", Belton says. The washed-out saturated vocals and jangling Vox guitars are there, but the in-built fuzz and repeater sounds on his cherished vintage Ultrasonic get some heavier usage here. Synths take more of a back-burner in favour of dreamy mellotron samples. Drums are still recorded with one mic and ran through guitar amps or mixed with drum machines, but lean even more into 60s dancefloor breakbeats.
At its core, Belton states that ‘Mellowmaker’ attempts to give temporary permanence to the timeless and intangible, a liminal feeling permeating the eleven tracks here: "With these two albums I've attempted to crystallise how it feels to be stuck between a feeling of amnesia of the soul and the earthly experience of piloting a meat suit... I’m still chasing that longing intangible ‘Hiraeth’ feeling. The sense of wanting to find our way home to a place that maybe doesn’t exist." ©
Landlady - Make Up / Lost Time 2025
"Intellectual" ART ROCK
Superb!
Welcome to Landlady’s Make Up / Lost Time, where traditional orchestral sounds are as vital as the glitchy synthesizers and long-lost sound-effects seeping in through the cracks in the walls. Flanked by an all-star cast of collaborators—Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado, Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner, Big Thief’s Buck Meek—Schatz’s songwriting prowess seems to level up in front of your very ears as the LP progresses in a way that suggests there is no ceiling. Equal parts Vampire Weekend, The Roches, Flaming Lips, and Randy Newman, Schatz knows how to mangle mundane and miserable moments into raw, unforgettable pop hooks. The song “At Odds” declares, “Your money’s no good here / it’s never good anywhere” and, guess what kids, it just so happens to double as a statement on the album itself: big budgets don’t create this kind of musical triumph, only imagination and elbow grease do. In fact, if the LP title can be read as a mission statement, then the listener is bound to conclude these 45 beautiful minutes with a stunned declaration of “mission accomplished.” ©
Trash Classic, by Frankie and the Witch Fingers
11 track album
frankieandthewitchfingers.bandcamp.com
Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Trash Classic 2025
Some real good muzak is still being made!
"Hooks so infectious they rot on impact. Trash Classic marks a feral mutation for Frankie and the Witch Fingers—a record that snarls with proto-punk venom, angular melodies, and electronic textures that cough and sputter like dying neon lights under a poisoned sky.
This record pushes the Witch Fingers’ sound to a razor's edge. Wiry and twitching, it bends into synth-punk and fractured new wave, with fragments of industrial grime caked under its nails. Guitars detonate and slice like cinder blocks through glass, while gnashing basslines slither through the sludge, alive and seething. Buzzy synths take the forefront, driving relentless rhythms that crack and pop, drenched in a chemically saturated sheen—part bug-eyed speed-freak pogo, part dance-floor delirium. The vocals cut through like static-laced transmissions—balancing both smirk and sneer—layering playful unease over themes of escapism, decay, and overindulgence.
The songs were born in the grime of Vernon, Los Angeles—a wasteland littered with gutted RVs and rusting machinery, where the air tastes like asphalt and dog food. But the real alchemy happened in Oakland, at Tiny Telephone Studio, where producer Maryam Qudus (La Luz, Spacemoth) helped transmute the tracks into their final forms. Unhinged tones, unconventional recording experiments, and wild sonic detours transformed the songs into something alive and unpredictable.
Every day of recording began with cartoons blaring at full volume—a Looney Tunes ritual that turned the madness of the recording process into something child like. Late at night, sugar-fueled candy binges kept the energy spiking, pushing the sessions into a fever dream of jittery, spastic playfulness.
The result is a raw, twisted monument to rot and excess—toxic glamour and nihilistic salvation. Trash Classic isn’t just a record; it’s an auditory dumpster bible—a gutter gospel for those ready to dive into its filth." ©
David Hill, Yale Schola Cantorum - Weir: In the Land of Uz & Beach: The Canticle of the Sun (2025)
Both performance and recording quality is first rate on the Hyperion label.
Ouzo Bazooka - Kapaim 2025
This release is when you want just to enjoy life and music....
" Ouzo Bazooka’s Kapaim is a mesmerizing fusion of Middle Eastern psychedelia, funk, soul, and rock, led by multi-instrumentalist Uri Brauner Kinrot. Known for their genre-blending sound and powerful live shows, the band refines their vision on this mostly instrumental album, creating a deeply textured and emotionally resonant experience.
Originally launched as a solo project, Ouzo Bazooka has grown into a globally acclaimed band, but Kapaim sees Kinrot returning to a more intimate, solo-focused approach. With rich bass grooves, swirling guitars, wonky synths, and rare but impactful vocals, the album weaves a hypnotic soundscape that feels both cosmic and rooted in tradition." ©
Very nice programme, well performed by the Prague Radio Symphony. The mastering let some dynamics survive the ordeal...
Toshio Hosokawa: Orchestral Works, Vol. 5 - Futari Shizuka – the Maiden From the Sea; Ceremony
Toshio Hosokawa: Orchestral Works, Vol. 5 - Futari Shizuka – the Maiden From the Sea; Ceremony. Naxos: 8574656. Buy CD or download online. Ilse Eerens (soprano), Ryoko Aoki (noh singer), Mario Caroli (piccolo, flutes), Residentie Orkest the Hague, Jun Märkl
Ilse Eerens, Ryoko Aoki, Mario Caroli, Residentie Orkest The Hague & Jun Märkl - Hosokawa: Futari Shizuka - The Maiden from the Sea & Ceremony (2025)
La Serenissima, Adrian Chandler - Crossing Borders (2025)
Crossing Borders
Their second album of 2025, and their 11th album with Signum Records, baroque giants La Serenissima return with an album of works by composers including Telemann, Sieber, Durante, and Brescianello. The album explores how their styles changed and developed as they ‘crossed borders’ between Italy,
www.highresaudio.com
Their second album of 2025, and their 11th album with Signum Records, baroque giants La Serenissima return with an album of works by composers including Telemann, Sieber, Durante, and Brescianello. The album explores how their styles changed and developed as they ‘crossed borders’ between Italy, Germany, France and other European countries. Vivaldi’, La Serenissima is ‘one of Britain’s best-loved chamber orchestras’ (The Telegraph) known for their outstanding performances, championing a host of neglected Italian baroque composers. Uniquely, the group’s entire repertoire is edited from source material by founder and violinist, Adrian Chandler OSI. ©
From Eastern Europe
From Eastern Europe. Alpha: ALPHA827. Buy 2 CDs or download online. Marie-Elisabeth Hecker (cello), Martin Helmchen (piano)
Marie-Elisabeth Hecker & Martin Helmchen - From Eastern Europe -2025
Norbert Kraft, Guillermo González, Brussels Philharmonic, Ali Rahbari - Art & Music: Picasso - Music of His Time (2003)
www.qobuz.com
Art & Music: Picasso - Music of His Time, Various Artists - Qobuz
Listen to unlimited streaming or download Art & Music: Picasso - Music of His Time by Various Artists in Hi-Res quality on Qobuz. Subscriptions from $10.83/month.
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Westra Aros Pipers, Stephen Stubbs, Paul Audet, Les Voix Humaines, Rose Consort of Viols - Art & Music: Rembrandt - Music of His Time (2008)
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