Binker & Moses – Accelerometer Overdose

The recording project of saxophonist Binker Golding and drummer and composer Moses Boyd, Binker & Moses are representative of a new wave of acts within London who look to combine the jazz tradition with hip-hop, Caribbean rhythms and various electronic styles. The latest single from forthcoming record Feeding The Machine on Gearbox Records, ‘Accelerometer Overdose’ welcomes the tape loops of Max Luthert, pushing things into ambient territory and further increasing the possibilities of the Binker & Moses sound.

Sun June – Somewhere + 3

Last year saw the release of Sun June’s excellent album Somewhere on Run For Cover Records, which recently featured on our Albums We Missed in 2021 feature. The record was released from isolation, and when the band were finally able to get back together they channelled both the frustration of those lost months and the joy of being reunited into new songs. The result is Somewhere + 3, a deluxe edition of last year’s record with three previously unreleased tracks.

The vibe of these new songs is captured perfectly on lead single ‘Easy’. “[It] is a romantic struggle song,” explains says Laura Colwell. “It’s about love and partnership and longstanding arguments that are hard to get past.”

Want it to be easy
Swore we’d be better by now
Picture of your mother
In Vietnam, 1977

Widowspeak – Everything is Simple

“Everything is simple ’til it’s not,” sings Molly Hamilton of Widowspeak on ‘Everything is Simple’, the lead single from the New York duo’s forthcoming album, The Jacket. It’s a song about how things grow complicated with time, how even situations which begin as pure potential eventually become knotted with limitations, and how, unreliable narrators that we are, we often bend reality to adapt. But despite that, the song sounds surprisingly vibrant, unfurling with a patient confidence that we’ve come to expect from Widowspeak. Check out the video, directed by OTIUM, below:

The Jacket is out via Captured Tracks on the 11th March and you can pre-order it now from the Widowspeak Bandcamp page.

Good Good Blood – The Dizzying Parade

Back in November we introduced you to The Dizzying Parade, the latest album from Good Good Blood on Team Love Records, with single ‘Green Bank’. “A densely layered track which balances a propelling drum beat with an dreamy weightlessness,” we described, “Smith’s vocals finding that neo-psychedelic line between attitude and ethereality.” Ahead of the album’s release this week, Good Good Blood have unveiled the title track. Another propulsive song which gradually builds in intensity as it unfolds, the tension growing and growing before unravelling into a sonic kaleidoscope of colour and sound. A finale as disorientating as the title suggests.

Allegra Krieger – Taking It In

Brooklyn-based songwriter Allegra Krieger is back with Precious Thing, a new LP out via Northern Spy Records this spring. Lead single ‘Taking It In’ introduces the album’s distinctively inviting and wistful sound, Krieger’s gentle croon sitting within a changeable arrangement of strings that conjure the sense of memories ebbing and flowing around the present moment. “Where am I now? Where was I three years ago?” she asks, “Where is my mother where is anyone I know?” Check out the video by Samuel Ogoe, Melissa Lozada-Oliva and Koa Ho below:

Precious Thing releases via Northern Spy Records on the 4th March and you can pre-order it now from the Allegra Krieger Bandcamp page.

 chores – Trip Wire

chores are a post punk slash dream pop band from Rochester NY. They recently released their debut single, ‘Trip Wire’, taken from a forthcoming EP. It’s a wonderful introduction, the kind of lo-fi indie pop gem that would be right at home on an early 90s Sarah Records sampler. As the title suggests, it’s a song about trying to avoid all those little everyday triggers that spark anxiety. As lead Heather Swenson sings “it’s a thick mire, avoiding any tripwire / that could signal friendly fire somewhere in my brain, so many times a day.”

Melk – Yankee Division Highway

Self-described “aspiring optimists” from Washington D.C., Melk make dreamy, punky indie pop that nevertheless traverse some pretty serious emotional depths. Comprising of Melissa Kain (guitar & vocals), AJ DiGregorio (bass) and Alex Scheuer (drums), Melk have just released their second EP, a three-song collection called Somebody, Nobody, Anybody. The standout is the slow-burning final track, ‘Yankee Division Highway’, a song the band say is “about how apathy can erode the trust you have in loved ones.” Kain guides us through the patient build, matching the intensity of the instrumentation before drifting into a rueful croon.

Carrie Biell – See Through the Trees

“I’ve been living my whole damn life trying to make everybody feel alright,” sings Seattle-based singer-songwriter Carrie Biell in latest single, ‘See Through the Trees’. “Maybe I’m sick of trying.” The line captures the track’s strange relationship between uncertainty and conviction, where beliefs are felt with palpable force even when solutions might not be easy or accessible. “This is about feeling maxed out in life by people and life commitments,” Biell explains, “but still trying to open up and be vulnerable in a new relationship. It’s about responding to your own needs while also giving to a new partner and learning to trust.”

Modern Nature – Performance

Rising from the ashes of previous band Ultimate Painting, Modern Nature is the new moniker of London‘s Jack Cooper. A project which takes the compositions and songwriting developed with Ultimate Painting and builds upon them with a newfound willingness to improvise and experiment. This month sees the release of latest record Island Of Noise on Bella Union, with lead single ‘Performance’ offering a glimpse of what’s to come. A song “written from the perspective of someone seeing or realising something overwhelming for the first time,” as Cooper puts it, consisting of a multitude of moving parts that mimic a kind of irrepressible curiosity.

Check out the video by Conan Roberts, Phoebe Cooper and Cooper himself below:

Island Of Noise is out on the 28th January via Bella Union and you can pre-order it from the Modern Nature Bandcamp page.

Pompey – Overwhelmed

Montreal based artist Pompey has played in a variety of acts within the city, lending his talents to the likes of Thanya Iyer, Corey Gulkin and Paper Beat Scissors, but Overwhelmed is the first full-length album of his own. Released by Anything Bagel, the record is a self-professed pandemic album. A product not so much of the prolonged anxiety of the present but rather Pompey’s methods of coping. A deliberate search for comfort and kindness within the constant pressure, carving out a space in which to rest. The title track illustrates the mood as good as any on the record, delivered with a deliberate tenderness which invites the listener to share the safe harbour for a while.

I try not to frown
Smile spreads light throughout my crown
I will trust myself
Over time

Nuisance – Kuchisabishii

A collaboration between William J. Seidel and Ryan E. Weber (REW<<, Eric & Magill), Nuisance craft a version of dream pop coloured by folk and classical sensibilities, though the process is far more notable than that. Weber spent two years recording instruments and coding them into software, building up a library of sounds which can be downloaded at Poetic Devices. After such a laborious process, the pair decided their first use of the program should be as immediate as possible, and the first Nuisance album Kuchisabishii, (out now via Katuktu Collective) came together in just two days. A shifting, impressionistic exploration of intimacy and immediacy, it’s a wonderful example of music made from the ground up, from atomic level building blocks to an album-sized ecosystem.

Don’t Worry – Crushing Weight / Head’s Chocka

Fronted by co-leads Ronan Van Kehoe and Samuel Watson, Don’t Worry have won recognition with their blend of wry observation and nostalgic charm. Following last year’s single ‘As If By Magic‘, the outfit are returning with full-length Remorseless Swing on Specialist Subject Records, and the first singles suggest the Don’t Worry style is evolving in several directions beyond their indie rock/emo roots. Be it the poppy (or poppier) rhythms of ‘Crushing Weight’ or the sweet romance of ‘Head’s Chocka’, though the lyrics still have signature flashes of wit.

Why can’t we just take this moment
Flatter it with rapturous applause and leave early doors
Listen, my head is chocka
But I can no longer forget here and now

Oh, how
I’m tongue tied over you

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With a warm and ethereal sound that belies the cutting tone of the lyrics, latest single ‘Money’ is a stellar example of this style. The track homes in on society’s ability to rationalise the destruction of its own environment, delivered with a self-awareness which sees Hamilton’s dreamy vocals mimic the individualist’s remove from systemic issues. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the things we tell ourselves in order to ‘forget’ the toll of our collective actions,” Hamilton explains. “Whatever makes it easier to forgive what we’re complicit in. Some of that is related to the environment and how people have trained themselves to tune out ‘environmentalist propaganda.'”

The song’s video is dialed into this too. Widowspeak play the song on a sunny day in the park, but the rendition is interspersed by vintage film of nature in varying degrees of health. “The archival footage is mostly pulled from films aimed at employees or shareholders of various industries,” Hamilton says. “The narration for many of them (forestry, agriculture, mining, energy) was surprisingly concerned with the dangers of an environment out of balance… [which] shows you that we haven’t learned much in the last 70 years.”

This is intrinsically linked to the value system of the political moment, where every facet of existence is judged on some scale of productivity. When the only true measure of worth is a return on the investment, then there is no space for acting with restraint or stopping to consider consequence. ‘Money’ captures this—how capitalism has coerced us all into its own encompassing logic, and justifies its own destructive forces—evoking not so much an ignorance of our own impact on the world but rather our attempts to forget it. A distracting mantra, some kind of hypnosis.

Will you get back what you put in?
It’s too late to start over again
To earn your living, it’s worth forsaking
All is forgiven and free for the taking

Money doesn’t grow on trees
Money

Plum is out via Captured Tracks on the 28th August and you can pre-order it from the Widowspeak Bandcamp page.

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Tracklisting:

1. On A Good Day (Joanna Newsom Cover) – Jordan Klassen & Brian Chan
2. Storm Windows (John Prine Cover) – Jeffrey Foucault
3. I’m Going Home (Hank Williams Cover) – Teen Suicide
4. You Are the Everything (R.E.M. Cover) – Redbird
5. You and I Are a Gang of Losers (The Dears Cover) – Admiral Fallow
6. Won’t Back Down (Tom Petty Cover) – Benjamin Francis Leftwich
7. I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine (Bob Dylan Cover) – Dirty Projectors
8. Storms (Fleetwood Mac Cover) – Matt Sweeney & Bonnie Prince Billy
9. It’s Not Happening (Be Good Tanyas Cover) – Lowpines
10. Two Headed Boy (Neutral Milk Hotel) – My Latest Novel
11. Cruel Summer (Bananarama Cover) – Superchunk
12. Southern Girls (Cheap Trick Cover) – Cold Warps
13. Tambourine Man (Bob Dylan Cover) – Cloud Cult
14. Black Cat (Donkeys Cover) – Advance Base
15. Save Yourself (Sharon Van Etten Cover) – Brendan Losch
16. Learning (Perfume Genius Cover) – The Bearcat
17. Wicked Game (Chris Isaak Cover) – Widowspeak
18. John Wayne Gacy Jr. (Sufjan Stevens Cover) – Bryan John Appleby
19. Reason To Believe (Tim Hardin Cover) – Evening Hymns
20. You Are My Sunshine (Oliver Hood Cover) – Peter Broderick

As ever, please please please support the musicians we feature if you enjoy what you hear. The artist names in the tracklisting will take you to a page for each so please explore their music catalogues.

The Covers Mix: Volume #5 from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

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