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Swim Deep
There's A Big Star Outside
If one thing is clear from the offset of revelatory fourth album ‘There’s A Big Star Outside...’, it’s that Swim Deep is no longer the same band you’ve always known.In some ways, Swim Deep’s fourth album – full of acoustic guitars and floral notes courtesy of a Mellotron keyboard (one of the finest musical exports from their native Birmingham) – has no business being as luscious and evolved as it is. But ‘There’s A Big Star Outside...’ could only have surfaced as a result of such testing years. It takes the youthful dreaming of their debut, and the excitable experimentalism of its follow-ups, and leads it to a more assured space, aided hugely by the input of producer Bill Ryder-Jones, who became a mentor throughout the journey. “A lot of the album, Bill’s drawn out of me,” Ozzy nods. “That sense of boldness and not hiding behind the music that he’s instilled in me has really made the album flourish, and be what I want it to be. It’s a cliché to say, but I feel I’ve been writing towards this record my whole life.”It’s fitting that this is the message Swim Deep have arrived at, because ‘There’s A Big Star Outside...’ genuinely does feel like a golden moment for the band. Across more than a decade in the industry, they’ve revelled in the highs and weathered the lows – but their fourth feels like an album that exists outside of all that. It’s one that’s less about chasing the next rungs of success and more about really nailing their flag to the mast as artists, as adults, and as a group who were always in it for more than just fleeting scenes and early buzz.
Submarine Cat
CD | LP
Girls Names
Stains on Silence
The new full length album from post-punkers Girls Names.
Marked by the presence of drum machines and programming throughout, these eight masterfully-woven tales are once again commandeered by founder Cully, whose words, understated yet defiant, mine purpose and meaning from the mire ("I want to bathe again, I want to swim again / In a pool of twisting bodies, blackened gold." - ‘25’). But while Stains on Silence came critically close to never being made, having lived with it, reconfigured it, and guided its metamorphosis from flickers of inspiration and half-formed schemes, it’s both a statement of pure perseverance, and a head-on confrontation with ambivalence that couldn’t be more assured. - Brian Coney, March 2018
Tough Love
CD | LP
Damien Jurado
What's New, Tomboy?
What’s New, Tomboy? is an album that seeks respite in bare minimums and barren revelations: sometimes frail, sometimes affirming, sometimes wry, and usually a threadbare mix of all those sentiments. It could be considered Damien Jurado’s finest collection of music to date, with songs exuding the inviting warmth of a lone porch light gleaming amidst the disorienting darkness. Though more stripped and grounded in their execution, songs like “Sandra”, “Ochoa” and “Alice Hyatt” are generous and candid in their vocabulary, eschewing the sometimes abstruse imagery of Jurado’s previous releases. “There is no hiding on these tracks.” Though What’s New, Tomboy? is the first Damien Jurado record that ends with a question mark, he has never sounded more assured and content in giving up his ghosts: “I’m only living sentences // That were long before I got here.”
Loose
CD | LP
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