A Place To Bury Strangers

★★★★

See Through You

DEDSTRANGE. DL/LP

Real-deal NYC noise-pop three-piece remain untamed.

Where nu-gaze is often far too eager to please, offering but a timid approximation of the original turn-of-the-’90s shoegazers, APTBS always feel like the genuine article. Sole mainstay Oliver Ackermann, who tellingly also works as an FX pedal architect, clearly understands that to make a feedback-pop omelette, many eggs have to meet a brutal demise. His sixth album in 20 years unveils an umpteenth rhythm section, but presents a wholly unsanitised vision, where screeching white noise guitars eclipse thundering beats in a reverb dungeon far from prissy ‘Health & Safety’ regulation. While Ackermann audibly still hasn’t recovered from hearing the JAMC’s late- ’80s B-sides darkfest Barbed Wire Kisses (see Let’s See Each Other, etc), and Hold On Tight even mirrors Sidewalking’s pedestrian-in-rain outsider imagery, fabulous shafts of light shoot in late on, as beachy I Don’t Know How You Do It and New Order-esque Love Reaches Out conclude with unforeseen blue-sky optimism.

Andrew Perry

The Boo Radleys

★★★

Keep On With Falling

BOOSTR. CD/DL/LP

Former shoegazers’ first new LP since 1998.

Though absent original guitarist and chief songwriter Martin Carr is still flying solo, Boo Radleys frontman Simon ‘Sice’ Rowbottom, bassist Tim Brown and drummer Rob Cieka re-awoke Boo last summer. Exploring euthanasia and alcoholism, their 2021 EP A Full Syringe And Memories Of You broke new thematic ground, with the trademark ebullience that once made the Boos ubiquitous on breakfasttime radio largely absent.

Melodically, at least, Keep On With Falling lets the sunshine back in, its bright melodies, glockenspiel glints and occasional reggae and ska motifs warming, even if the title track is a disavowal of religion, and the (bad) Karma Police-like I Can’t Be What You Want Me To Be details a stalled relationship. Great that they are back on their own label, on their own terms, but some of these “democratically produced” recordings want for a ruthless arbitrator.

James McNair

Guided By Voices

★★★★

Crystal Nuns Cathedral

GBV INC. CD/DL/LP

Ninth album in three years, 12 songs in 38 minutes… but it’s a good ’un!

Robert Pollard’s troop, unlike postmillennial garage-rockers Osees and Ty Segall, have rarely deviated far from their original script, bashing out neo-classical punk-pop-rock, often at the lower end of the audio fidelity spectrum. Post-2012 re-formation productivity has only intensified lately: where last year’s Earth Man Blues and It’s Not Them… gloriously nailed GBV’s rapid-fire gem-shower brief, CNC eases towards more sophisticated, thought-out, and unabashedly epic song construction. Given Pollard’s Who fixation, it’s less Meaty, Beaty…, more Quadrophenia, administered by a firing lineup featuring ace guitarists Doug Gillard and Bobby Bare Jr., who magisterially navigate Re-Develop’s crunchy time signature, Birds In The Pipe’s psychedelic eccentricity and Excited Ones’ transition from two-chord bop-along to wonkily exploratory bridge.Expertly interwoven orchestration on smouldering opener Eye City and Climbing A Ramp doesn’t stop the rock, but actually boosts its authoritative power. Thirty-five albums in, incredibly, GBV are still scaling new heights.

Andrew Perry

Loop

★★★★

Sonancy

COOKING VINYL. CD/DL/LP

London late-’80s spacerockers’ first full earth mission in 32 years.

When opener Interference riffs on one crunching chord for 57 seconds, then briefly diverts to a second, only to return to the first again (a pattern sustained for four mesmerising minutes), it’s clear that Robert Hampson’snewly-staffed Loop will not be deviating from their original minimalist logic. After 1990’s valedictory A Gilded Eternity, Hampson, both as Main and under his own name, relinquished guitars in favour of synth drones and musique concrète, so this much-delayed fourth outing marks a hearty resumption of six-string hypnosis, superbly underpinned by a rhythm section (loaned from Bristolian cadets The Heads) battering out beats variously inspired by Kraut-y motorik (Eolian; Fermion), and on brain-busters Supra, Halo and Aurora, post-punk invention à la Bunnymen and Killing Joke. With most cuts clocking in under five minutes, Sonancy’s austere precision carries right through to its auteur’s Chrome-esque robo voicing. Rarely has measured maturity led to such aurally altered states.

Andrew Perry

Swamp Dogg

★★★

I Need A Job… So I Can Buy More Auto-Tune

DON GIOVANNI. CD/DL/LP

Cult soul man’s gazillionth genre-bending album.

It seems 79-year-old iconoclast Swamp Dogg has finally been caught in a Catch 22. Obviously, a followup to 2018’s Love, Loss And Auto-Tune, so many of these new songs are drenched in the pitch-altering software that it’s impossible to know whether his fixation is born of despair or fascination. Like the laterlife albums of many artists, the worldly experience Dogg brings to love ballad Soul To Blessed Soul and other tracks gives them a moral weight that can’t be faked. From the deep soul of She Got That Fire to I Need Your Body’s freaky funk, Dogg runs the gamut of his career, and if it wasn’t for a heavy hand on the pitch button, Cheating All Over Again could be as great as Curtis Mayfield’s final recordings.

Too often, however, it’s just too hard to get past that artificially wobbly voice.

Andy Fyfe

Loop: back with six-string hypnosis intact.

Carson McHone

★★★★

Still Life

LOOSE. CD/DL/LP

Third LP makes good on early promise, and then some.

For five years Austin’s Carson McHone has been a staple of ‘ones to watch’ New Year predictors, her country-tinged songs touching emotions rarely available to other songwriters. On 2019’s Carousel McHone hinted that she had far wider musical ambitions, but it barely forewarned of the wonders revealed here.

The album leaps from popping Southern soul horns and greasy sax to poignant piano balladry, discordant psychedelic guitar or, on the startlingly spartan closing track, Tried, just a single guitar string plucked with slowly building ferocity, while McHone pours her heart out about cancelled promises, poor choices (hers and others), emotional ambushes and sweet surrender. The touchstone influences – Aimee Mann, Frazey Ford, Ann Peebles – barely begin to scratch the surface of the musical depths McHone mines on Still Life, which finally moves her on from being just ‘one to watch’ to the woman of the moment.

Andy Fyfe

Deserta

★★★★

Every Moment, Everything You Need

FELTE. CD/DL/LP

Former Father John Misty collaborator’s second dose of shoegazey drama.

Shoegazers typically promote FXloaded guitars over standout vocals and lyrics, but Matthew Doty is a noisemaker with a need to communicate. His one-man battalion (voice, guitars, keys, programmed beats) outsizes even the likes of Slowdive, Sigur Rós and Mogwai, but if the opening title Lost In The Weight is one translation of the genre, knowing Doty’s particular backstory shines a whole different light on his words. Deserta’s 2020 debut, Black Aura My Sun, was inspired by impending fatherhood, but as a healthcare worker by day as well as father and musician, 2020 over-delivered to the point that Every Moment… is surely the first shoegaze album with PTSD. Its sound reflects the galaxies above yet the likes of I’m So Tired and Far From Over document reality on the ground, a gripping tour de force on different levels.