Amparo – After Ours
The project of Gothenburg-based musician, producer and visual artist Lela Amparo, Amparo is an outlet for atmospheric and cinematic music that blends electronic, ambient and folk. Taken from new album Day and Night, out now on Bikiniwax Records, latest single ‘After Ours’ is a great example. Drawing on the likes of Bonobo and The Cinematic Orchestra, the song builds from simple guitar and plaintive strings into a rich, jazz-inflected track that’s thick with a sense of late-night drama and emotion. ‘After Ours’ is “inspired by a night spent in Paris before changing the course of my life,” Amparo explains. “It’s about being in the moment and knowing nothing will ever be the same.”
Getdown Services – Cream Of The Crop
If John Cooper Clarke’s ‘Evidently Chickentown’ conjured the end days through pictures of a tedious, ruined Britain, then ‘Cream of the Crop’ by Bristol’s Getdown Services offers a new vision of the non-future. A world polished to within an inch of its life and then polished a bit harder. A stage of capitalism so late they’ve stopped updating the time on the board. Think branded boozers and no-change-from-a-tenner street food cuisine. The milieu is brought to life by shiny disco beats, though it is the conversational snark of vocalist Josh Law the grabs the attention. A figure who finds himself in a place so soulless he’s not sure whether to self-immolate or burst out laughing. Either way, he’s stuck there and so are you. Roll up everybody, Chickentown’s had a fresh coat of paint.
Jeffrey Silverstein – Cowboy Grass
Later this spring, Jeffrey Silverstein will release Western Sky Music, his second LP for Arrowhawk Records and first full-length since 2020’s You Become the Mountain. Promising an evolution of Silverstein’s cosmic brand of country, the album again features contributions from Barry Walker Jr (pedal steel) and Alex Chapman (bass), and also adds Akron/Family’s Dana Buoy on drums, as well as guest appearances from William Tyler and VSF fav Karima Walker. Lead single ‘Cowboy Grass’ is our first taste, a song with a little more dust and dirt and barroom boogie than anything Silverstein has made to date. Watch the video, directed by Austin Abbott and starring Eric DuRant, below:
Western Sky Music releases via Arrowhawk Records on 12th May. Pre-order a copy now from the Jeffrey Silverstein Bandcamp page.
Melati ESP – BAHASA BARU
With LP hipernatural coming soon on Carpark Records, Indonesian-American experimental pop artist Melati ESP has unveiled new single, ‘BAHASA BARU’. The record is notable in the way it draws on the breadth of Melati’s cultural influences to achieve its vivid sound (Javanese radio Dangdut, gamelan cassettes, Moving Shadow-era liquid jungle and Japanese chill-out are all listed as inspirations), and the new single serves as the ideal introduction to a style which exists outside of the usual categorization of genre or geography. “It’s a personal statement of intent,” Melati explains, “being comfortable in occupying the third space, and creating new ways of communicating that are tethered to intuition, empathy and understanding.” The song comes complete with a video, directed by Melati’s sister Kathleen Malay, which celebrates this embrace of otherness despite, as Melati puts it, “mostly feeling like a baby alien while growing up in Jakarta, always between two worlds.”
hipernatural is out on the 28th April via Carpark Records.
The Saxophones – Desert Flower
Released to announce their third album, coming early this summer on Full Time Hobby, ‘Desert Flower’ is the new single from The Saxophones. For the uninitiated, The Saxophones is the project of married duo Alexi Erenkov and Alison Alderdice, who make slinky Lynchian lounge music that’s dark and velvety, confronting existential concerns with a smoky sophistication. What Erenkov describes as “about avoidance and fear impeding personal growth and the deepening of relationships,” ‘Desert Flower’ is no different. Creeping and cryptic, it blends the material and the mystical, eventually swelling to emotive peaks as Erenkov’s croon gives way to radiant sax. It’s an intriguing glimpse of what promises to be a strange and sublime record.
There are symbols everywhere
signs that even I can’t deny.
Only if they aligned,
I could lift away the veil.
To Be a Cloud will be released via Full Time Hobby on 2nd June. Pre-order it now from Bandcamp.
Strange Ranger – Rain So Hard
Strange Ranger are a band who have been defined by a sense of self-reinvention. Winning initial acclaim within the spheres of indie rock, 2019’s Remember The Rockets saw the first shoots of shoegaze and pop influences breaking the surface, and by No Light in Heaven the following year they were entirely rebranded as an experimental electronic outfit. New single ‘Rain So Hard’, out via Fire Talk Records, emerges from this electro ground, its lush and layered sound playing as some nameless immensity above the vocals, be it a looming cityscape or wide open sky. This overwhelming scale registers as a kind of melancholy, the vocals adrift within something to large for them to navigate or control. “How do I get out of this movie now?” asks the repeated refrain, hoping for nothing more than another person to cling onto for the ride. Watch the video directed by Ben Turok below:
‘Rain So Hard’ is out now via Fire Talk Records.
Women Tied to Railroad Tracks – Fake Tans
Back in 2019 we wrote about Women Tied to the Railroad Tracks, describing the sound of their album And Levitating as “indie pop that sits in a strange space between mundane reality and freaky dreams.” With their debut record on the horizon with Anxiety Blanket Records, the LA outfit have shared the brand new single, ‘Fake Tans’. A bright summertime track loosely based on Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook, where the protagonist speaks of an encounter with a man with a crack in his personality: “like a gap in a dam, and through that gap the future might pour in a different shape—terrible perhaps, or marvelous, but something new.”
Yael S. Copeland – Pool
Having made a name fronting Borito, Tel Aviv’s Yael S. Copeland is setting out alone for her first solo release. If the Borito sound occupied a colourful, retro bracket of the dream pop/rock genre, then Copeland’s solo work turns more toward the intimate and lo-fi, having more in common with Alex G and Elliott Smith. With an album set for release later this month, latest single ‘Pool’ shows how this stripped back style is no less immersive or heartfelt, the lyrics playing like something between a daydream and a poem in their gentle reflection, the sound still managing to envelop the listener in its lush layers.
big sky
like a big pool
blue and clear
but I can’t see my
reflection when I look down here