More cherry picking through the mountain of albums, more picking of the cherries, the never ending pile of demanding cherries that find their way here on a daily basis. You surely know the policy by now? We do, on the whole, only feature the albums and things we feel positive about. We really don’t have time to clutter up these already overloaded pages with negative reviews of things that do nothing for us, there isn’t the time or space, there isn’t any need, although some times… Here’s another six.

I’m Being Good – Shapeshitter (Infinite Chug) – Leafcutters filing past windows? We we haven’t encountered I’m Being Good for way way too long. Sometimes, very rarely, the algorithm can deliver, seems this album came out back in May, it passed by on our social media a couple of days back. Never as unhinged as a first listen would have you think, there’s some complex things going on here, abstract things, beautiful things, moody things, sometimes a little darker that previous times maybe? A waking memory of a Wim Wenders film where Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz form an unlikely friendship maybe, and that bit there, kind of sounds like there’s a stealth-like shark approaching like A Greener Shade Of Teal and then the next piece has an even more sinister tension to it. That opening sentence made it sound like there were lots of maybes, no, there’s no maybes here, this is something rather different for I’m Being Good, as good as ever mind you, he or she or they is or are being good. Who is the Red Boy and what has the red boy done? An art dealer? Or maybe an arms dealer, there is little difference. “Maybe a drug dealer, I couldn’t be bothered to look it up”. Anyway, I do keep going back to this album and the ominous tone-pictures (that and borrowing words) and the salvaging of melted ice cream and yes, these do sound like musical pieces from imaginary films, albeit the rather strange left field films you think Andrew might watch late at night. Is it Andrew isn’t it? I never really paid attention to the detail, just enjoyed the music and this album is massively enjoyable, delightfully hard boiled, awkwardly so, but so easy to just enjoy, it is probably something from an Appropriately Infinite Universe and an idea of what we’ve all become. I could write all kinds of things here – oh that’s a good bit, there’s lots of good bits – it isn’t bitty though, it is fully formed and yes, I could write all kinds of nonsense about the way it all flows, but you don’t read music reviews any more do you? Surely you just hit the play button and find out for yourselves and all we’re really doing here these days is cherry picking and sharing the things we think you might like to explore. This is an excellent album, you once again need to take the time to let it explain itself, just crack it open and then let it settle, then let it flow, let it try to let you in for once you do get in you will find there’s so so much here. It might even be the best I’m Being Good release yet (and there has been a lot of good ones over what must be many years now). This album moves is such satisfying ways, I mean the way the actual music moves, the way it travels, the steps it takes, it sounds like it might be being awkward, it never actually is, neither are the words. Highly recommended, thank you algorithm. Bandcamp / www.infinitechug.com   

Ida The Young – Tell Me When You Pass The Sun (Korobushka Records) – We’ve covered the band from From Pilsen, Czechia a couple of times in recent weeks, after two EPs, several singles and almost two hundred shows during the last couple of years Ida The Young have just released their debut full-length album Tell Me When You Pass The Sun. That first e.mail from the band sent to us a few weeks back had us really wanting to know more and no, you really wouldn’t mind them sticking around – do rather like the way the title track builds and evolves as she sings about sticking around and then takes a turn midway though, Common Knowledge really is a beautiful song at the end of a rather refined album – a beautifully detailed song, a song that picks up and goes again in such a gloriously glowing way at the end of it all. 

I think Tell Me was the song that really did hook me in and send me down that on-line rabbit hole explore their previous releases just before this new album landed in full with those harmonies or the sometimes pulsating guitar and bass weaving or the dissonant flavour descending under that beautifully hypnotic voice of hers. Her being the British-born singer Iris Hobson-Mazur, she’s there at the front of it all with her confidently expressive, beautifully voiced way of pulling you in to those tunes and her words. This isn’t just a great singer with a good backing band though, this is proper group of people taking the road a little less travelled rather than the obvious one, this is a proper full-bodied band who write and play together rather impressively, a lot more than just a singer and a band.   

I’m still new to Ida The Young, I’m still unwrapping their delights, apparently their roots are (at least partly) in folk and this sound of their has been evolving quite a lot to what is now a kind of rich luscious date I say slightly psychedelic soft rock thing – which usually isn’t my thing, but this is so so rich, so wonderfully detailed, and she, Iris Hobson-Mazur, has such a presence, and whatever she might be trying to say about what might be buried in her flower beds, it is so enticing, inviting…

“The songs on this album tread the line between what is intimate and personal to me and what is complete fantasy,” she writes of her lyrics. “I find that the two worlds seem to collide when I write lyrics, not only through creating characters and situations I’ve never been in but also through recognising my own delusions in how I perceive the world around me. I like to feel as if my own experiences are somewhere hidden throughout the song, but to most people and sometimes even to myself, it isn’t exactly clear where they begin and where they end.”

Tell Me When You Pass The Sun is a rather beautiful album, a refined intriguing album, a beautifully voiced album that isn’t as obvious as it might first appear to be.  Bandcamp / Instagram

Tell Me When You Pass The Sun will be available digitally and on 12” vinyl featuring illustrations by Livia Suchá. The limited edition of the album also includes two bonus tracks on 7” vinyl (those are also included if you download the album)

Sunflowers – You Have Fallen… Congratulations! (Fuzz Club) – You Have Fallen… Congratulations! is the fifth full-length album by Porto’s noise-punk whatever they are band Sunflowers, it is also their first release through UK-based Fuzz Club Records. They’re not doing anything revolutionary, they probably don’t want to, what they’re doing is making some kind of urgently raw wired up jagged Devo-flavoured psychedelic garage thing that should make lovers of Frankie And The Witchfingers rather happy – “It’s a record that refuses to look away from the madness of modern existence — choosing instead to laugh, scream, and contort itself into something stranger, louder, and far more unstable”. And here it is…  Bandcamp

Sterbus – Black and Gold – Last time I checked, which I must admit was probably some time ago, probably far too long ago, Sterbus, as warm-hearted as they always have been, were sounding just a little bit too much like a Cardiacs clone band to really do it, pleased to hear they’ve evolved. The Italian band still have healthy hints of the more restrained bits of Cardiacs (and Sea Nymphs) but those hints are only hints now and where once they would dominate, the flavours are at healthy levels now and far far less obvious and almost hiding in there alongside bits that taste of Gentle Giant or PFM or Beatles and maybe even Jethro Tull. Sterbus are quietly dancing around a sometimes very English sounding almost folky mix of considered prog rock that flows in a gentle crafted deliciously detailed uncluttered way. Black and Gold is a delightful album, a quiet considered sometimes joyous album that wants to take you to a better place if you feel like letting it. The Greatest Possible Happiness to all then… Bandcamp

Alto Aria – Ephemeral (Rhizome) – “Born from a poem, the record inhabits a realm where language melts, reforms, and returns as soft reflections of affection and embodied remembrance, a sphere where classical clarity touches electronic shimmer and a singular voice floats between sensation and transcendence” and I have to admit it is a bit floaty new age breathy dreamy, a little too polite and restrained, a little too nice. 

“Space Afrika weave strings and field textures through Dimming’s spectral tone while Yan Higa’s delicate production and Skarv’s synths exhale beside Croatian Amor’s glacial pulse, all anchored by the artwork, a serene 1985 portrait of their grandmother that protects the emotional core with quiet grace. The album asks how we greet transformation and how something fleeting can feel infinite as the body preserves what the mind releases and inner seasons shift in harmony with the outer world. Ephemeral arrives as angel and echo, a shimmering trace that enters gently and lingers with contemplative depth”.

There are some nice textures in the music, a times almost classical, that voice is just too new age hippy dippy floaty though and does some of it sound like some slick television advert for some kind of lifestyle aspiration or other? They tell us Ephemeral “is about falling in love. To stay open even when you have a porous heart, even though some things are not meant to hold. Made from a poem, all the songs are threads reaching back to the same moment in time. An ephemeral moment that, for me, will last forever.”

Ah, you know me and my cyncial smile, I need a little more dirt, grit, something, a vocal style that’s a little less obvious, a little less grounding in the real world, this sounds like a car advert made in Dubai but hey, you might like it, go make your own mind up, I mean, some people thought Portishead made exciting music, can’t say I ever did. Like the cover art, a painting by Elsebet Schütze…   Bandcamp

Kylver – The Gobi – Four big slices of instrumental epicness, the opening piece a slow movig fifteen minutes, four expansive piece of rather solid atmospheric rock of a heavier nature, four pieces that come flavoured with hits of things on the progressive side of things. Four big thick meaty instrumental pieces that are in no hurry to get to wherever they’re eventually going and take all the time they need to move and evolve rather monolithically as their motifs repeat and their moods evolve in a positively repetitive kind of way with thise atmospherics of post-rock nature, those Hammond tones of the 70’s that give the four piece a classic rock sound. Kind of enjoyably satisfying in a heavy prog flavoured manner without ever really being progressive in the challenging sense of the term, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne’s Kylver kind of sound like the Luke Oram painting that adorns their front cover they do their chosen thing rather well… Bandcamp / Website

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