5CD box set of the albums released on Artful/Fullfill during the period 2001-2009.
Expanded double disc editions on vinyl and CD of LC, the second studio set by The Durutti Column, originally issued by Factory in 1981 and ranked among Vini Reilly's finest albums.
Released in 1983, label-owner Miguel met the band in the Manchester before subsequently inviting them to record a single in Portugal. As the story goes, Vini came and recorded a whole albums worth of material, which would be quickly developed into following releases. This was the pre-cursor to Without Mercy and it contains some beautiful little tunes and is highly under-rated and overlooked.
A collaboration between virtuoso guitarist Vini Reilly and legendary Manchester producer Martin Hannett, the Return of The Durutti Column paired Reilly's non-rock sketches with Hannett's electronic textures to produce "perfectly realized, correctly ambient and inventive music" (NME). The infamous sandpaper sleeve was somewhat less user friendly. Inspired by a 1959 Situationist publication by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, the relentless iconoclasts at Factory hoped that the abrasive packaging would destroy existing record collections.
Shiver is the exciting and boundary pushing second record from LA-based Icelandic musician Jónsi, co-produced by A. G. Cook (PC Music, Charlie XCX) and comes a decade after his debut, Go, was released. The new album features tracks with Liz Fraser (Cocteau Twins) and pop icon Robyn. It will be released on 2nd October 2020 and was recorded in Berlin, Reykjavik, London and Helsinki.
“I don’t really understand how I make music,” says Josie Boivin, who records and performs as MUNYA. “I feel like it’s coming from another world.” Other-worldly is an apt descriptor for MUNYA’s music. The songs are at turns playful and melancholy, as catchy as they are strange, light and airy but full of powerful emotion.
Cáo Xuěqín’s 18th century novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, little known in the West, is a Chinese national epic, occupying a role in the literature of China roughly akin to that of Shakespeare in English. With its principal plot arc of two beautiful, sensitive and aristocratic young people whose love affair is doomed, the play it most resembles is Romeo and Juliet. Despite this resemblance, the fabric from which Dream of the Red Chamber is woven is shot through with many unfamiliar and unsettling threads.
Oakland artist Madeline Kenney bounds toward the unknown on her third album, Sucker’s Lunch, expanding on the idea of what a love song could be – a little more cautious than exuberant, more nuanced than blazing devotion. Sonically, the album expands upon Kenney’s earlier, guitar-driven sound – a definitive step forward from an artist adept at communicating universal sentiments in a voice unmistakably her own.
Their versatile sound, at times reminiscent of golden 60s, power pop, dream pop, post-punk and indie rock, demonstrates a dynamic range of songwriting prowess centered around consistently infectious, sun-soaked melodies and guitar hooks. HFHW formed in Davis, California as a noise collaboration between Adam Abildgaard and Nick Duffy in 2010, expanding to a full band when bassist Ted Davis and guitarist Nathaniel Blum joined the group in the following years. Renouncing the traditional front-manned format of most contemporary bands, the four instead each contribute songs and share the lead.
The sophomore album from the JUNO award winning band, Dizzy. In bringing The Sun and Her Scorch to life, Dizzy tapped into their increased sense of closeness and confidence, an element that Munshaw attributes to their frequent touring over the past few years (including stints opening for artists like Death Cab for Cutie, Oh Wonder, Tokyo Police Club, and U.S. Girls). Describing the process as “totally challenging and completely rewarding,” the band took an entirely self-directed approach to every aspect of the album’s creation, introducing a more kinetic energy into their sound through their lavish use of live instrumentation.
The power of a Winter song is hard to describe, like how the delicate world building of a good book can be more compelling than real life. There's a make-believe, fairy tale surrealism that sets Winter's blend of shoegaze and psychedelia apart while existing in the same universe as the ethereal dream pop of Cocteau Twins and Melody's Echo Chamber. Samira Winter grew up in Curitiba, Brazil, where her Brazilian mother filled their home with the gentle melodies of MPB (música popular brasileira), and her father introduced her to the distorted sounds of American punk. At 18, she moved to Boston where she first released music as Winter, eventually moving to LA's Echo Park.
Pure X is the last band, has always been the last band. Not that there won’t be future acts, more that Pure X understands that all this pageantry, this civilization is wrapping up. It burned hot and bright like thermite used to bust a safe open, but now is the age of radiating waves, each one buckles the foundation more than the last.
Manchester’s The Slow Readers Club return with their fourth album, The Joy Of The Return. Opening to an energetic blend of driving drums and infectious guitar lines, the opening track builds through evocative verses and anthemic choruses, imbued with their idiosyncratic brand of insightful and confronting lyricism and set against relentlessly danceable and energy-provoking instrumentation. “‘All I Hear’ is about a lack of agency and an inability to affect change. That there’s something happening, and you have no choice but to go along with it,” explains singer Aaron Starkie.
If I Break Horses’s third album holds you in its grip like a great film, it’s no coincidence. Faced with making the follow-up to 2014’s plush Chiaroscuro, Horses’s Maria Lindén decided to take the time to make something different, with an emphasis on instrumental, cinematic music. That album is Warnings, an intimate and sublimely expansive return that, as its recording suggests, sets its own pace with the intuitive power of a much-loved movie. And, as its title suggests, its sumptuous sound worlds – dreamy mellotrons, haunting loops, analogue synths – and layered lyrics crackle with immersive dramatic tensions on many levels.
