FEATURE:
One for the Record Collection!
IN THIS PHOTO: Mitski
Essential February Releases
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I am actually…
IN THIS PHOTO: Big Thief/PHOTO CREDIT: Buck Meek
writing this feature on 29th December, so in the couple of weeks until this goes live, schedules could have changed. I am a bit late to really get a grip on the January-due albums, so I want to look ahead to the best albums out next month. There are quite a few must-own albums out that will make a cold month much warmer. The first big week for new releases is on 4th February. I will start with the upcoming album from Los Bitchos. Let the Festivities Begin! It is one I am pre-ordering myself (you can also order the album here). It is going to be a real treat of an album:
“Produced by Alex Kapranos (Franz Ferdinand). Panthers prowling through a desert. Cowgirls swaggering into a saloon and kicking up dust. Riding shotgun with a Tarantino heroine. Having the fiesta of your lives under a giant piñata with all your friends. Los Bitchos’ hallucinatory surf-exotica is as evocative as it is playful: the London-based pan-continental group could well be your new favourite party band with their instrumental voyages that are the soundtrack to setting alight to a row of flaming sambucas and losing yourself to the night. They’ve got a bun-tight knack for a groove – and they’ve got the best fringes in rock’n’roll too.
Serra Petale (guitar), Agustina Ruiz (keytar), Josefine Jonsson (bass) and Nic Crawshaw (drums) hail from different parts of the world but met via all-night house parties, or through friends, in London. Their unique sound binds them together, though, taking in a retrofuturistic blend of Peruvian chicha, Argentine cumbia, Turkish psych and surf guitars. They are London’s answer to Khruangbin, if Khruangbin spent all weekend getting slammed on cheap tequila in”.
The excellent Animal Collective release their eleventh studio album, Time Skiffs. It is an album that I would advise people to pre-order. The Maryland-formed band have been around almost twenty years now. They always release such amazing albums. It seems that Time Skiffs will be no exception:
“Time Skiffs’ nine songs are love letters, distress signals, en plein air observations, and relaxation hymns, the collected transmissions of four people who have grown into relationships and parenthood and adult worry. But they are rendered with Animal Collective’s singular sense of exploratory wonder. Harmonies so rich you want to skydive through their shared air, textures so fascinating you want to decode their sorcery, rhythms so intricate you want to untangle their sources. Here is Animal Collective's past two decades, still in search of what’s next”.
After releasing one of last year’s best albums, For the First time, it is amazing that Black Country, New Road (Isaac Wood, Tyler Hyde, Lewis Evans, Georgia Ellery, May Kershaw, Charlie Wayne and Luke Mark) are putting out their second album, Ants From Up There, on 4th February. It is a sign of their amazing productivity and popularity. This will already be one of 2022’s most-anticipated albums – and I expect it will get the same awesome reviews as their debut. This is an album that you definitely need to pre-order:
“Black Country, New Road return with their second album Ants From Up There. Following on almost exactly a year to the day from the release of their acclaimed debut For the first time, the band have harnessed the momentum from that record and run full pelt into their second, with Ants From Up There managing to strike a skilful balance between feeling like a bold stylistic overhaul of what came before, as well as a natural progression.
Released alongside the announcement the band (Lewis Evans, May Kershaw, Charlie Wayne, Luke Mark, Isaac Wood, Tyler Hyde and Georgia Ellery) have also today shared the first single from the album, ‘Chaos Space Marine’, a track that has already become a live favourite with fans since its first public airings earlier this year - combining sprightly violin, rhythmic piano, and stabs of saxophone to create something infectiously fluid that builds to a rousing crescendo.
PHOTO CREDIT: Rosie Foster
It’s a track that frontman Isaac Wood calls “the best song we’ve ever written.” It’s a chaotic yet coherent creation that ricochets around unpredictably but also seamlessly. “We threw in every idea anyone had with that song,” says Wood. “So the making of it was a really fast, whimsical approach - like throwing all the shit at the wall and just letting everything stick.”
Their debut For the first time is a certain 2021 Album of the Year, having received ecstatic reviews from critics and fans alike as well as being shortlisted for the prestigious Mercury Music Prize. For the first time the band melded klezmer, post-rock, indie and an often intense spoken word delivery. On Ants From Up There they have expanded on this unique concoction to create a singular sonic middle ground that traverses classical minimalism, indie-folk, pop, alt rock and a distinct tone that is already unique to the band.
Recorded at Chale Abbey Studios, Isle Of Wight, across the summer with the band’s long-term live engineer Sergio Maschetzko, it’s also an album that comes loaded with a deep-rooted conviction in the end result. “We were just so hyped the whole time,” says Hyde. “It was such a pleasure to make. I've kind of accepted that this might be the best thing that I'm ever part of for the rest of my life. And that's fine”.
Another brilliant artist releasing an album on 4th February is Cate Le Bon. The exceptional Welsh songwriter prepares to release Pompeii. Following 2019’s Reward, her sixth studio album is looking like it will be hugely well-received. This is what Rough Trade say about it:
“Cate returns with another intricate, timeless and rewarding album. Pompeii Cate Le Bon’s sixth full-length studio album and the follow up to 2019’s Mercury- nominated Reward, bears a storied title summoning apocalypse, but the metaphor eclipses any “dissection of immediacy,” says Le Bon. Not to downplay her nod to disorientation induced by double catastrophe — global pandemic plus climate emergency’s colliding eco- traumas resonate all too eerily. “What would be your last gesture?” she asks. But just as Vesuvius remains active, Pompeii reaches past the current crises to tap into what Le Bon calls “an economy of time warp” where life roils, bubbles, wrinkles, melts, hardens, and reconfigures unpredictably, like lava—or sound, rather. Like she says in the opener, “Dirt on the Bed,” Sound doesn’t go away / In habitual silence / It reinvents the surface / Of everything you touch.
Pompeii is sonically minimal in parts, and its lyrics jog between self-reflection and direct address. Vulnerability, although “obscured,” challenges Le Bon’s tendencies towards irony. Written primarily on bass and composed entirely alone in an “uninterrupted vacuum,” Le Bon plays every instrument (except drums and saxophones) and recorded the album largely by herself with long-term collaborator and co-producer Samur Khouja in Cardiff, Wales. Enforced time and space pushed boundaries, leading to an even more extreme version of Le Bon's studio process – as exits were sealed, she granted herself “permission to annihilate identity.” “Assumptions were destroyed, and nothing was rejected” as her punk assessments of existence emerged.
Enter Le Bon’s signature aesthetic paradox: songs built for Now miraculously germinate from her interests in antiquity, philosophy, architecture, and divinity’s modalities. Unhinged opulence rests in sonic deconstruction that finds coherence in pop structures, and her narrativity favors slippage away from meaning. In “Remembering Me,” she sings: In the classical rewrite / I wore the heat like / A hundred birthday cakes / Under one sun. Reconstituted meltdowns, eloquently expressed. This mirrors what she says about the creative process: “as a changeable element, it’s sometimes the only point of control... acircuit breaker.” She’s for sure enlightened, or at least more highly evolved than the rest of us. Hear the last stanza on the album closer, “Wheel”: I do not think that you love yourself / I’d take you back to school / And teach you right / How to want a life / But, it takes more time than you’d tender. Reprimanding herself or a loved one, no matter: it’s an end note about learning how to love, which takes a lifetime and is more urgent than ever.
To leverage visionary control, Le Bon invented twisted types of discipline into her absurdist decision making. Primary goals in this project were to mimic the “religious” sensibility in one of Tim Presley’s paintings, which hung on the studio wall as a meditative image and was reproduced as a portrait of Le Bon for Pompeii’s cover. Fist across the heart, stalwart and saintly: how to make “music that sounds like a painting?” Cate asked herself. Enter piles of Pompeii’s signature synths made on favourites such as the Yamaha DX7, amongst others; basslines inspired by 1980s Japanese city pop, designed to bring joyfulness and abandonment; vocal arrangements that add memorable depth to the melodic fabric of each song; long-term collaborator Stella Mozgawa’s “jazz-thinking” percussion patched in from quarantined Australia; and Khouja’s encouraging presence.
The songs of Pompeii feel suspended in time, both of the moment and instant but reactionary and Dada-esque in their insistence to be playful, satirical, and surreal. From the spirited, strutting bass fretwork of “Moderation”, to the sax-swagger of “Running Away”; a tale exquisite in nature but ultimately doomed (The fountain that empties the world / Too beautiful to hold), escapism lives as a foil to the outside world. Pompeii’s audacious tribute to memory, compassion, and mortal salience is here to stay”.
There are two more albums due on 4th February that I want to highlight, before I move along to the following week. Perhaps the best February-due album comes in the form of Mitski’s Laurel Hell. This is an album that you definitely need to pre-order. I am going to quote from a recent Rolling Stone interview with her soon. First, this is what Rough Trade write about Laurel Hell:
“We don’t typically look to pop albums to answer our cultural moment, let alone to meet the soul hunger left in the wake of global catastrophe. But occasionally, an artist proves the form more malleable and capacious than we knew. With Laurel Hell, Mitski cements her reputation as an artist in possession of such power - capable of using her talent to perform the alchemy that turns our most savage and alienated experiences into the very elixir that cures them. Her critically beloved last album, Be the Cowboy, built on the breakout acclaim of 2016’s Puberty 2 and launched her from cult favourite to indie star. She ascended amid a fever of national division, and the grind of touring and pitfalls of increased visibility influenced her music as much as her spirit.
Like the mountain laurels for this new album is named, public perception, like the intoxicating prism of the internet, can offer an alluring façade that obscures a deadly trap - one that tightens the more you struggle. Exhausted by this warped mirror, and our addiction to false binaries, she began writing songs that stripped away the masks and revealed the complex and often contradictory realities behind them. She wrote many of these songs during or before 2018, while the album finished mixing in May 2021. It is the longest span of time Mitski has ever spent on a record, and a process that concluded amid a radically changed world.
She recorded Laurel Hell with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland throughout the isolation of a global pandemic, during which some of the songs “slowly took on new forms and meanings, like seed to flower.” Sometimes it’s hard to see the change when you’re the agent of it, but for the lucky rest of us, Mitski has written a soundtrack for transformation, a map to the place where vulnerability and resilience, sorrow and delight, error and transcendence can all sit within our humanity, can all be seen as worthy of acknowledgment, and ultimately, love”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Josefina Santos for Rolling Stone
When speaking with Rolling Stone late last year, the Japanese-American singer-songwriter talked about her career, upbringing, and following up the hugely successful 2018 album, Be the Cowboy, with the her highly-anticipated sixth studio album:
“In the past year, as she’s planned her return with Laurel Hell, Mitski spent time setting boundaries for herself and being aware of her limitations. She’s even worked with her team to ensure that her schedule has mandatory breaks so she can eat and unwind. (In December, weeks after this interview, it was reported in Billboard that her management company had dissolved following a sexual-harassment allegation against her manager. A representative for Mitski says that this person is “currently transitioning out of the role of being Mitski’s manager”; the manager did not respond to a request for comment.)
“I think this break has been good for me,” she says. “I had physically neglected my health because I was on tour so much. I didn’t have health insurance. Basically during all of my twenties, I had no time or space to figure out who I am. I needed to actually figure out how to take care of my body”.
Even though The District have had to cancel some shows recently, they are bringing out Great American Painting on 4th February. This is the follow-up from their 2020 album, You Know I'm Not Going Anywhere. Make sure that you go and pre-order their approaching fifth studio album:
“The Districts return with their biggest, boldest and most naturally pop album. It's upbeat and has a real XTC mid period edge. It's a bundle of fun and a real surprise.
This record is a new era. The desire to create something larger than yourself, that will infiltrate people’s hearts like well oiled machines, to paint pictures that will shake them and create a resounding push forward towards something more. In our pandemic isolation, what we wanted was to play a loud collage of music, unconfined by preconceived notions of what it should be, and to transcend ourselves in a room full of breathing, screaming, vibrating human beings - to let the darkness out in a cathartic squeal of noise, eclipsing it with light. We wanted to feel it all at once with you and to escape this fucked up world and find our way into a better one together”.
Although there are two albums (each) from the week 18th and 25th February, there are three from 11th that I want to discuss. Big Thief have been sharing songs and snippets from their forthcoming album, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. One of the most prolific and extraordinary groups, this is an album you need to pre-order and add to your February collection:
“Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is a sprawling double-LP exploring the deepest elements and possibilities of Big Thief. To truly dig into all that the music of Adrianne Lenker, Max Oleartchik, Buck Meek, and James Krivchenia desired in 2020, the band decided to write and record a rambling account of growth as individuals, musicians, and chosen family over 4 distinct recording sessions. In Upstate New York, Topanga Canyon, The Rocky Mountains, and Tucson, Arizona, Big Thief spent 5 months in creation and came out with 45 completed songs. The most resonant of this material was edited down into the 20 tracks that make up DNWMIBIY, a fluid and adventurous listen. The album was produced by drummer James Krivchenia who initially pitched the recording concept for DNWMIBIY back in late 2019 with the goal of encapsulating the many different aspects of Adrianne’s songwriting and the band onto a single record”.
The band formerly known as British Sea Power, Sea Power, are giving us Everything Was Forever on 11th February. A band who have endured and captivated for many years, they show no signs of slowing. I feel that one cannot be without their new album. Ensure that you go pre-order the amazing Everything Was Forever:
“Sea Power (formerly British) release their first new album in five years – Everything Was Forever. Their music has won them some remarkable admirers – Lou Reed, David Bowie and London's National Maritime Museum. Indeed, the BSP fanbase now includes Doctor Who, Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes. Peter Capaldi is a confirmed BSP fan. "A band of stark originality," he wrote in his foreword for the reissue of the band's 2003 debut album, The Decline Of British Sea Power. "BSP's songs bring you the bite of the wind, the fury of the sea, and music that is simply exhilarating." Daniel Radcliffe has talked in detail about his plan to get a BSP tattoo (featuring the 2002 T-shirt slogan Bravery Already Exists). Benedict Cumberbatch is also an admirer of the band.
Fifteen years on from their first concert, British Sea Power continue to make bold, galvanising, idiosyncratic marks on the world. Race horses and massive ocean-going yachts have been named after the band. London's National Maritime Museum recently opened a new £35m exhibition wing. Visitors are greeted by huge, sculpted quotations from Shakespeare and Coleridge – and a lyric from British Sea Power”.
The brilliant American band, Spoon, release their tenth studio album, Lucifer on the Sofa, on 11th February. If you are not familiar with their previous work, I would still recommend their forthcoming album. They are a band that will definitely hook you in. Go and pre-order a copy of Lucifer on the Sofa:
“Spoon’s tenth album, Lucifer on the Sofa, is the band’s purest rock ’n roll record to date. Texas-made, it is the first set of songs that the quintet has put to tape in its hometown of Austin in more than a decade. Written and recorded over the last two years – both in and out of lockdown – these songs mark a shift toward something louder, wilder, and more full-colour.
From the detuned guitars anchoring “The Hardest Cut,” to the urgency of “Wild," to the band’s blown-out cover of the Smog classic “Held,” Lucifer on the Sofa bottles the physical thrill of a band tearing up a packed room. It’s an album of intensity and intimacy, where the music’s harshest edges feel as vivid as the directions quietly murmured into the mic on the first-take. According to frontman Britt Daniel, “It’s the sound of classic rock as written by a guy who never did get Eric Clapton”.
Actually, there are more albums out in February that I want to recommend (I underestimated how many good ones are due!). One of two from 18th that I want to bring to your attention is Beach House’s Once Twice Melody. You can pre-order the album now. I am not a massive Beach House fan, though I do like their stuff. I am interesting in that they are going to deliver with Once Twice Melody:
“Beach House release their 8th album titled Once Twice Melody. Once Twice Melody, the first album produced entirely by Beach House, was recorded at Pachyderm studio in Cannon Falls, MN, United Studio in Los Angeles, CA, and Apple Orchard Studios in Baltimore, MD. For the first time, a live string ensemble was used, with arrangements by David Campbell. Once Twice Melody was mostly mixed by Alan Moulder but a few tracks were also mixed by Caesar Edmunds, Trevor Spencer, and Dave Fridmann”.
The second album from 18th February that you should add to your basket is Metronomy’s Small World. This is a band who always release such incredible music! For that reason alone, you will want to pre-order their new album:
“Now on album number seven, Metronomy has continued where many of their 2000s ‘cool’ band peers have dropped off along the way. Small World is a return to simple pleasures, nature, an embracing in part of more pared down, songwriterly sonics (some moments wouldn’t sound amiss on a Wilco release), all while asking broader existential questions: which feels at least somewhat rooted in the period of time during which it was made – 2020. For all that Mount seems to think he has made a comparatively sombre record, much of Small World still pulses with the zesty, tongue-in-cheek joie de vivre you’d expect of a Metronomy record.
So sure, things are different now Joe Mount is getting older and what’s on his mind is changing, but that doesn’t mark a change in quality for Metronomy. An immaculate set of tracks, Joe Mount’s ability as a songwriter and arranger shines through on Small World, evergreen. Metronomy might be growing up, but they’re not afraid to still have fun with it all. Through the tumultuous ebb and flow of the years, Metronomy continues to endure and make great pop music – and, really, that’s all that we could ask for”.
Moving on to some terrific albums coming out on 25th February. SASAMI is an artist I have been following for a while. Her new album, Squeeze is one I will be pre-ordering. There is not a tonne of information about the album available online (I cannot see any recent interview from her). She does say on her Bandcamp: “Squeeze, the second full length from Sasami, surveys the raw aggression of nu-metal, tender plainspokeness of country-pop and folk rock, and dramatic romanticism of classical music”. Similarly, there is not too much available regarding Soft Cell’s *Happiness Is Not Included. Regardless, this is an iconic group who are always brilliant. This is what Rough Trade say about their new album:
“Soft Cell - legendary frontman Marc Almond and producer / instrumentalist Dave Ball - return with their fifth studio album and first in 20 years, *Happiness Not Included. It represents their first new album since they issued Cruelty Without Beauty back in 2002”.
I am providing links to pre-order these albums. If they are sold out, it is worth checking other sites. Sticking with legendary acts, Spiritualized release Everything Was Beautiful on 25th February. This is an album that you need to pre-order, as the demand is quite high already!
“During lockdown last year, J Spaceman would walk through an empty “Roman London” where the world was “full of birdsong and strangeness”, trying to make sense of all the music playing in his head at the time. The mixers and mixes of his new record weren’t working out yet. Spaceman plays 16 different instruments on Everything Was Beautiful which was put down at 11 different studios, as well as at his home.
He also employed more than 30 musicians and singers including his daughter Poppy, long-time collaborator and friend John Coxon, string and brass sections, choirs and finger bells and chimes from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. Eventually the mixes got there and Everything Was Beautiful was achieved.
The result is some of the most “live” sounding recordings that Spiritualized have released since the Live At The Albert Hall record of 1998, around the time of Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space”.
March is looking pretty tasty for new albums! I shall write about those albums next month. The final album I will recommend is from Tears for Fears. They are releasing The Tipping Point on 25th February. This is a group that have been giving the world such amazing music for decades. You will want to get this album:
“Some forty years into one of music’s most impactful, sometimes tense and yet curiously enduring partnerships, Tears For Fears have finally arrived together at The Tipping Point – the group’s ambitious, accomplished and surprising first new studio album in nearly two decades.
And now, at very long last, Tears For Fears find themselves back in peak form at The Tipping Point, an inspired song cycle that speaks powerfully and artfully to our present tense here in 2021. This is an album that vividly recalls the depth and emotional force of the group’s earliest triumphs. Imagine a far more outward-looking take on Tears For Fear’s famously introspective 1983 debut album The Hurting set in an even more mad world, or 1985’s Songs From The Big Chair bravely confronting even bigger issues in our increasingly unruly world. Or even 1989’s The Seeds Of Love that sows a mix of love and other emotions.
The Tipping Point is the bold, beautiful and powerful sound of Tears For Fears finding themselves together all over again”.
Above are a selection of albums out next month that I think people should order. You can see others here if you want more selection. Even though we are only just in 2022, there are some amazing albums planned and due already! If you need some brilliant albums to enjoy in February, I hope that the above…
IS of some assistance.