Where were we? Asked that the time before last time, enough of that and on with the music and the going off and things (and how good was it) and what we said last time or last week or last year, you’ve read all this already, never mind the damn editorial, cut to the chase and never mind the biscuits or the dogfish, just jump down past this bit, who needs an editorial? Jump past and let the actual music do the actual walking and the actual talking. Exact same thing again, another five (or so) slices of musical things that have passed our way recently and however you like to slice it and of course it was the price of apples and here comes the intro, Don’t be flippant she said, how could it ever be flippant? I can’t remember why she said that now, in one ear, out the other, “Gawd, is Organ still going?”

Five? There’s something rather compelling about five. Cross-pollination? Five more? Is there another way? A better way? A cure for pulling flying rabbits out of the clouds? Is there a rhyme? Is there a reason? Was there ever a reason? What do reasons make? Five more? Snake oil? Everything must go and same as last time (and the time before that) five, and no, we never do and the proof of the pudding is in that proof reading. When we started this thing, oh never mind, it doesn’t matter why we started this damn thing and like we asked last time, does anyone bother reading the editorial? Does anyone ever actually look down the rabbit hole or is it all just method acting? We do really try to listen to everything that comes in, we do it so you don’t have to, we are very (very) very very picky about what we actually post on these fractured pages or about what gets played on the radio or indeed what we hang in a gallery. Cut to the chase, never mind the editorial, there’s loads of music further down the page, well five or so pieces of music that have come our way in the last few days and cut cut slash and cut it, who needs an editorial or words or worms in general? What’s Wordsworth? Just facts and links and sounds then. Here you go, play the music, grab your five, eat your greens, go eat some art, go eat some fresh music and don’t forget whatever it was we said last time…

Here we go again, five slices of music that have recently come our way, in no particular order, starting somewhere out there in Chicago? Well the footage was shot in Chicago

1: Terms – a live video just shared by their label, it does the talking and the walking and anything else you might need it to do really. Studio versions of these tracks are to be found on All Becomes Indistinct, an album reviewed on these pages back about this time last year when it came out, the review will give you all information – ORGAN THING: Let’s go round again, a second deliciously complex, warmly rewarding album from Terms, out on SkinGraft this week. Hear an exclusive track before it hits the streets…

2: Swami & the Bed of Nails – “featuring Swami John Reis (Hot Snakes, Drive Like Jehu, Rocket From The Crypt, PLOSIVS and more) are excited to announce the August 2 release of the band’s debut album, All Of This Awaits You. Produced by John Reis and mixed by Ben Moore, All Of This Awaits You was born out of the final Hot Snakes writing sessions in 2023. Transforming into what Reis describes as “a growing tributary” after the passing of his longtime friend and bandmate Rick Froberg, the songs on the eventual nine-song album presented here come from this challenging time of reflection and redirection. 

All Of This Awaits You is an immediate blast of joy intended to celebrate our time on Earth. It is nostalgia for a past that probably never happened. It is the hope that the future will consider embracing the innocence of rock ‘n’ roll. It is an idealized pursuit intended to elevate the status of the simplest pleasures and ridicule the unattractive lust of the unhindered ambitious. The music is a reenactment of the past lives of elderly teenagers returning once again to sustain their echo. All Of This Awaits You is punk rock music, but your guess is as good as ours when it comes to the meaning of that. Watch the video for the album’s punchy new single, Privacy…“

“We were all very excited about the initial recordings, and the songs set the bar high,” Reis recalls from those 2023 Hot Snakes writing sessions. “As I continued writing, I started to notice some songs would likely have an eventual home on a different record of some kind. This music branched off and I figured I’d revisit it sometime in the years to come with 2024 being an exciting year for Hot Snakes. Lots of good times planned ahead. When Rick [Froberg] suddenly passed, I was completely heartbroken and shellshocked. The loss continues to be something I have trouble navigating. This record is the songs of that tributary. In November 2023, I decided to finish it and turn it into something. At the time I felt paralyzed and confused so I tried to un-paralyze myself by surrounding myself with friends, making something out of nothing, playing music which felt timely to me, and make plans. The best plan seemed to consist of me jumping back on guitar, doing some yelling and singing, getting in the van and visiting the many villages and selling my wares.”

“Much like the Swami John Reis LP, Ride The Wild Night, All Of This Awaits You features Joe Guevara on piano and synthesizer. Whereas the last record occupies a garage-y take on rock ‘n’ roll, All Of This Awaits You is punk through the lens of rock ‘n’ roll. Instead of the organic piano featured prominently on this first record, the sound now is predominantly arpeggiated, buzzsaw synths and reedy organs. 

On drums is both Jason Koukounis of Hot Snakes and Night Marchers and Richard Larson. Koukounis propels the earlier recordings with blown out 4/4 bombast while Larson offers a loose whip approach and parks it back in the garage. On bass is Tommy Kitsos, also from Night Marchers, CPC Gangbangs and a Hot Snakes fill-in, reservist. Kitsos has a sound bigger than all outdoors. On second guitar is Mark Murino who played in Radio Wendy and Dirty Sweet. He brings a stylistic timelessness, making it hard to date this recording. Also appearing on this record is Rob Crow (who plays with Reis in PLOSIVS as well as Pinback), Anthony Anzaldo (from Ceremony and Cold Cave) and Jacob Turnbloom (from Mrs. Magician)”. 

All of which, before we get to Mary Mousetrap, gives us an excuse to post some classic Pinback action…

3: Mary Mousetrap has let another track loose, a fine follow up to Windowpane

there’s been two tracks now, we look forward to the third…

4: Hydropsyche – Berlin-based artist Jon Eirik Boska aka Hydropsyche (High Heal, Petra Hermanova collaborator) has announced a debut album of what we’re told will be expressive electronic music. A track from the fothcoming album, Exhumed & Forgiven, a release on thew respected Unguarded label can be heard now as a fist tape of the new album.

Unguarded is a self declared “record and art label” from Berlin, a label founded in 2020, a label that “seeks to foster forward thinking artists with a focus on exploring cross-disciplinary collaboration and embarking on sonic adventures”. Find Exhumed & Forgiven on Bandcamp

5: Tindersticks have announced a new album Soft Tissue, to be released on City Slang on September 13th 2024. Along with the announcement they have announced live dates, including a headline show at London’s prestigious Royal Albert Hall.

“A tangible sense of mutual curiosity propels the five members of Tindersticks to fresh territory on ‘Soft Tissue’, their 14th album proper. Previously, on ‘No Treasure but Hope’ (2019), these mavens of mood and beauty had embraced a kind of dusky, live-sounding naturalism, followed by the bracingly executed experimental left-turns of 2020’s ‘Distractions’. As resilient and flexible as its title suggests, ‘Soft Tissue‘ connects and exceeds those extremes, drawing new life from the contrasts and convergences of its tight, intuitive songs and restless details.
 
These contrasts find instant focus on opener “New World”, shared online for the first time today – the first track written for ‘Soft Tissue’ and a springboard for the album’s thematic concerns about personal/public worlds knocked off-kilter. The arrangements pick up close to where 2016’s ‘The Waiting Room’ left off and steer the record into febrile terrain, balancing Stuart Staples‘ sandy vocals with Julian Siegel’s brass arrangements, Dave Boulter’s pensive keys and Gina Foster’s soulful backing vocals. Meanwhile, Staples’s introspective reflections lead to a refrain that takes a more outward-looking slant, flagged up on a banner in the song’s playful promo video: “I won’t let my love become my weakness.”
 
The video, as well as the album’s sleeve, are made with Staples’ daughter, artist Sidonie Osborne Staples. Stuart comments: “Sid was making these tiny ceramic characters, I asked her to make some of the band. Later I wrote this song about somehow trying make sense of this strange world I felt developing around me and these little guys came back into my mind. Let’s take them on a stop motion journey across a strange land, from the barren rocks to the bountiful fruit that is not familiar and maybe poisonous. Sid put the landscapes together and moved the figures, millimetres at a time. Neil took the photographs, we edited as went along.”

The journey began during a break from the tour for Tindersticks’ 30th anniversary compilation ‘Past Imperfect’, as Staples began writing “New World”, “Always a Stranger” and “The Secret of Breathing”. Ideas were knocked around in the studio, McKinna bringing the start of “Falling, the Light” and “Soon to be April”, and the record began to creep forward.
 
That growth proceeded at a studio in Girona, Spain – not a “fancy studio”, says Stuart, but one that offered the vital attributes of rooms big enough to play, cook, eat, hang out and listen to music together in. “To me, working with a band is a conversation. It’s about people. When a songwriter provides ideas for people to bring to life musically, it starts a conversation that everybody’s involved in and has some kind of ownership of. I suppose it starts off from me with an acoustic guitar singing the start of ‘New World’. I know what that song means to me, how I want it to feel. But at the same time I love to be surprised, it’s all about those conversations being alive.
 
“And it’s fun,” he adds, “to work with people like Gina and Julian, and within the band, with ideas flowing. We can have ideas but that’s just the start of the conversation. When you’re actually there in the room and things start to happen, things can really fly. You can walk away from the studio feeling so enlivened. It can be a fantastic feeling.”
 
With the vocals, strings and brass completed in London, the result upholds Tindersticks’ extraordinarily sustained commitment to ambition and exploration, stretching back more than three decades. If the symphonic ruminations of Tindersticks’ trio of 1993-7 albums established them as trend-averse explorers of great depth and reach, ‘Simple Pleasure’ (1999) and ‘Can Our Love…’ (2001) proved equally adept at exploring contrasting textures within tighter contexts. After 2003’s twinkling ‘Waiting for the Moon’, and an emotional live performance of their second album in 2006, the band said farewell to three old bandmates, leaving Staples, Fraser and Boulter to start again. McKinna (multi-instrumentalist) and Thomas Belhom (drums) joined for the warming rebirth of ‘The Hungry Saw’ (2008), before Harvin took over on drums for the increasingly confident ‘Falling Down a Mountain’ (2010) and the palpably freeing ‘The Something Rain’ (2012).
 
Later work equipped Tindersticks’ inquisitive impetus with fertile focus. Between compositions for the First World War commemorations (‘Ypres’, 2014) and F Percy Smith’s microscopic movies (‘Minute Bodies’, 2017), 2016’s ‘The Waiting Room’ crackled with global sounds. Staples then delivered a solo album (Arrhythmia, 2018) and the soundtrack to director Claire Denis’s science-fiction film ‘High Life’, strengthening the band’s long-term ties to the filmmaker – soundtracks to Denis’s ‘Stars at Noon’ and ‘Both Sides of the Blade’ have since followed.
 
‘No Treasure but Hope and Distractions’ affirmed the band’s readiness to stretch themselves, to live and breathe inside their music. More recently, two 2023 France shows devoted to their hugely varied 10-film work with Denis upheld the band’s adaptable determination to actively pursue ever-bigger challenges. Says Stuart: “It’s about being more demanding, more ambitious, and then coming out the other end of it feeling as though you’ve achieved something.”
 
On ‘Soft Tissue’, that ambition takes the form of a fluid, questing take on what Tindersticks can be, anchored by a sense of trust between the bandmates. As Stuart explains, “In this band, I think that there’s so much… I was going to say talent but it’s got nothing to do with talent, really, it’s about that desire, that need to reach for something and to go to places you haven’t been. And I feel that comes from everybody. I didn’t feel as though there was any kind of restriction about, or any dogma about, what this record could be, beyond where it takes us and what excites us.”

There’s a massive list of dates that end at the Albert Hal lin MArch next year, not doubt you can find them all on the band’s website

21.10. UK Brighton, Dome
23.10. UK Manchester, New Century
24.10. UK Bristol, Beacon
25.10. UK Birmingham, Town Hall
26.10. UK Sheffield, Octagon Theatre
14.03. – UK Glasgow, Pavilion Theatre
15.03. – IRL Dublin, 3Olympia
17.03. – UK London, Royal Albert Hall 

Amd while we’re here…