Rock & Indie CD 562 Items

The tenth studio album by Bjork coming in a Deluxe Mediabook edition

The tenth studio album by Bjork on CD coming with a Digipak sleeve.

The respected Japanese jazz drummer Akira Ishikawa was not messing around when he recorded the 'Uganda (Dawn of Rock)' album with his band the Count Buffaloes. For this offering, originally released in 1972 on Toshiba Records, Akira Ishikawa takes us on a deep tripped-out journey. 'Uganda (Dawn of Rock)' is a fusion of progressive and psych rock with African percussion workouts, dergy-wah wah blues-funk, and jazzy sensibilities; with different genres morphing and uniting as they progress. A long way from his funk and afrobeat album 'Back To Rhythm’, re-issued on Mr Bongo in 2019, this record has a darker, deeper, abstract and experimental stoned tone with the listener being pulled into its vortex for the ride. This record doesn’t pull any punches. For this album, Akira is joined by Hideaki Chihara on bass, guitarist Kimio Mizutani, sounding at times like an early 70s Peter Green, percussionist Larry Sunaga and composer Takeru Muraoka. The album has become highly sought-after amongst psych, prog and acid rock collectors and due to the rare nature of original copies they come at a hefty price tag. We are delighted to present an officially licensed re-issue of this underground Japanese rock rarity.

In the kitchen of the Byron Bay home of Winston McCall stands a refrigerator, adorned on one side by a quote from Tom Waits: “I want beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.” This, the Parkway Drive vocalist says, is a pretty good summation of himself. It holds true, too, as one of the guiding principles behind Darker Still, the seventh full-length album to be born of this picturesque and serene corner of north-eastern NSW, Australia, and the defining musical statement to date from one of modern metal’s most revered bands. Darker Still, McCall says, is the vision he and his bandmates – guitarists Jeff Ling and Luke Kilpatrick, bassist Jia O’Connor and drummer Ben Gordon – have held in their mind’s eye since a misfit group of friends first convened in their parents’ basements and backyards in 2003. The journey to reach this moment has seen Parkway evolve from metal underdogs to festival-headlining behemoth, off the back of close to 20 gruelling years, six critically and commercially acclaimed studio albums (all of which achieving Gold status in their home nation), three documentaries, one live album, and many, many thousands of shows. While Darker Still remains irrefutably Parkway Drive, it finds the band sonically standing shoulder to shoulder with rock and metal’s greats – Metallica, Pantera, Machine Head, Guns N’ Roses – as much as it does their metalcore contemporaries. “I wanted a classic guitar tone for this record,” explains Ling, who credits much of his inspiration to the connection his riffs have with a crowd in a live setting Emerging from the darkness of the past few years, this is the true face of Parkway Drive: redefined and resolute, focused in mind and defiant in spirit. Tracks 1.

Dendê Macêdo is a percussionist, singer, composer, bandleader, teacher, and multi-instrumentalist. He’s been a professional musician since the age of 14, when he appeared in the frontline of Timbalada, Carlinhos Brown’s superstar percussion ensemble. Since 2001, he’s been developing his solo career, splitting his time between the US and Bahia and working with his folkloric group Ologundê and his flagship band Dendê & Band. Now on their second album, Dendê & Band have cultivated a unique sound where Afro-Brazilian traditions like samba de roda and candomble have been seamlessly melded with world rhythms like rumba, afrobeat and mbalax. Dendê & Band have recently performed at venues such as the Glastonbury Festival in the UK, the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles; the KW Latinfest in Canada; the Penang World Music Festival in Malaysia; Summerdance in Chicago and the Chile Pepper Fiesta at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.

The garage -psychedelic French duo The Liminanas straddles since 2009 the boundary between psychedelic, shoegaze,garage & French yé-yé up to cool vocals . Quintessentially French but first known at the start in the US before hitting homeland France. 7 studio albums so far, 2 rare tracks compilations, many Eps,some OST, collabs such as L’Epée with Anton Newcombe & Emmanuelle Seigner : time for a first time Best of, and actually more than a Best of : Double Cd , Ltd Triple Vinyl& Digital editions offer 12 exclusive bonus tracks -new songs + rare songs when they called themselves les Bellas, before The Liminanas-.
“Electrified” also includes 23 classics songs , with featurings such as Peter Hook, Anton Newcombe and French pionners Laurent Garnier, Etienne Daho & Pascal Comelade.
Features liner notes written by Iggy Pop, Peter Hook & Keith Streng (Fleshtones) : because it’s only rock’n’roll.

Fourth instalment in The Wedding Present's popular 'Marc Riley Sessions' series. The Wedding Present are a band with a history that's inextricably intertwined with the BBC and, in particular, the late DJ John Peel, an early champion of the band. Having received critical acclaim for releases 1 - 3, Marc Riley Sessions Volume 4 goes on to feature nine songs recorded for the award-winning BBC 6 Music show in 2017 and 2018. The first four tracks on the album were recorded with a string quartet and trumpeter and include a remarkable reimagining of 'Bewitched', originally from the band's 1989 album Bizarro.

Andrea, frontman of punk rock band The Manges along with guitarist and music producer Alex Bounty (I Divi Di Beverly, Supermarket) started The Veterans in 2006. The first s/t album from 2008 is now reissued on yellow vinyl, coming with a CD that also includes extra tracks from singles and digital releases.

Aspidistrafly, the Singaporean duo comprising April Lee and producer Ricks Ang, return with Altar of Dreams, their first studio album in a decade.

While their last album A Little Fable introduced the world to their bucolic and wispy brand of folk songwriting, Altar of Dreams sees the duo – also the founders of Kitchen. Label – harness their experiences over the past decade to create a wholly new and inspired vision. In this new and third album, they drew upon a rich palette of shapes, sounds and movement: straddling between the visionary photography of Serge Lutens and Dora Maar, 80s Japanese ambient pop, musique concrète and the mournful strings of Béla Bartók.

The world in which Aspidistrafly once inhabited was foggy and awash in faded memory. A feeling of being suspended in time felt inescapable with each listen. In Altar of Dreams, the fog is clearing up. At nine songs under 35 minutes, the album possesses all the defining hallmarks of Aspidistrafly – poetic lyricism, cosmic introspection, lush strings, surrealism, tenderness and texture. But what was once seemingly inscrutable has now been explored with astounding clarity, the duo maneuvering through a space-time continuum with delicate leaps.

‘How To Find A Marblewing’, the opening track, is a heady sound collage of early internet sounds, film, anime, and chopped-and-screwed 90s J-pop. It’s a presence deeply embedded throughout the record, a method Lee describes as “a form of environmental/tape treatment”.

The compositions glimmer with sincerity, addressing all at once destruction, mystery, uncertainty, hopes and dreams. The resulting music is backed by an opulence only possible with a line-up of guest musicians. ‘The Voice of Flowers’ is stirring in its balance of flute, clarinet, tenor saxophone and piano, bolstered by a string quartet. Kitchen. Label artist haruka nakamura features on the track alongside Kyo Ichinose (who arranged the strings for the album) and wind instrumentalist Araki Shin.

‘Interlude: Chrysalises and Larvae’ takes the heavy path downward, adopting its name from the 1973 surrealist odyssey The Hourglass Sanatorium. It leads into ‘Companion to Owls’, a gothic pop paean to mortality inspired by the Book of Job.

Before the namesake centrepiece of the album, another interlude arrives in ‘A Ceremonial Ode’, both of which were stirred by a series of regal Shiseido ads from the 1980s starring model Sayoko Yamaguchi. ‘Altar of Dreams’ is haunted by the lucid dreams that once provided escapism for Lee. Its tranquility belies a simmering tension, just as how a lucid dream would offer control in the face of the unknown. “In one of them, I was floating in a vast darkness safe and secure, and then I fell into a turbulent mirage where I willingly allowed myself to be swept away further and further from reality, hoping that I would never wake up,” she says. “Needless to say I did, and ended up writing this song on one of these dead nights.”

If the title track replicates the feeling of falling deep into that spiral, ‘Silk and Satins’ is a direct analysis of the phenomenon. Warped frequencies collide with nature and television sound effects – the latter sourced from 80s Singaporean horror series Mystery – within an inter-dimensional music world. The track was made with featured artist Sugai KEN, whose own work is an endless scroll of intoxicating found sounds.

‘Quintessence’, the sweeping closing track, distills all the elements scattered across the album into a coda that beautifully refuses to resolve. At first an exercise in guitar looping, the song was then written without a beginning and end in mind. “I’d like to think of it as poetry that’s sung,” says Lee.

In Altar of Dreams, Aspidistrafly are renewed and hopeful. They’ve emerged from a decade spent reframing the world they see through vivid dreams and memories. Now, it’s all yours to experience.

Glass replicated compact discs All new artwork by Gonzalo Sepulveda

When Porridge Radio's Dana Margolin, one of the most vital new voices in rock, began to consider the themes of her new album, three vivid words began to emerge: joy, fear and endlessness. The artwork of the band's third full-length, Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky, is a surreal image that evokes the ducks and dives, slippery slopes and existential angst of life in recent times. "To me, the feelings of joy, fear and endlesses coexist together," says Dana. "You're never just happy or unhappy." Following Every Bad's release in 2020, Margolin was quickly becoming regarded as one of the most magnetic band leaders around. But if Every Bad established Dana's bravery in laying herself bare, her band's third record takes that to anthemic new heights. While there are moments of guttural release, she also finds soft power on songs. "I used to think I had to be loud to be heard," she admits, "but now I'm definitely less afraid of being gentle." The band's first new single, `Back To The Radio', sets out their stall, a lurching call to arms that contrasts Dana's lyrics of panic and closing herself off. This song is just one of example in Wdbltts that explores something that has long been an important part of Porridge Radio's process: playfulness. "I think the album needed to have that balance," Dana explains. Balance: that's the word the album seems to be eternally striving for - joy, fear and endlessness in harmony but also self-acceptance. Dana is more aware of how she's creating a persona as her star continues to rise, and how she's singing personal songs that now belong to other people which gives her purpose. She says, "I wrote these songs for myself, but I think everyone wants to feel like what they're doing is useful in some way. I'm ready to embrace it all now, whatever happens."

Full album dedicated to Hamid El Shaeri’s work on the Egyptian Slam! label. Hamid El Shaeri is the artist behind Habibi Funk’s most popular song to date, “Ayonha”, originally re-released in 2017 on the first Habibi Funk Compilation (habibi007). If you were to ask for a defining Habibi Funk track, there are a few that come to mind: from Fadoul’s “Sid Redad,” Dalton’s “Soul Brother” to Ahmed Malek’s “Omar Gatlato.” However, none are as widely connected with us at this point as Hamid Al Shaeri’s “Ayonha.” We heard the track for the first time when we were working on selecting tracks for your first compilation and we instantly loved it. We obviously had heard of Hamid El Shaeri’s music before, but only material from his Al Jeel phase when he was already the full-blown superstar he is now. Listening to his releases from the early 1980’s opened a whole new door for us. At the time, Hamid had just left Libya to pursue his career in Egypt via a detour in London, where he recorded his first album. Hamid’s distinct sound of the sound is quintessentially reliant on heavy synths and so it was particularly important to purchase these synths in a timely manner. “Whenever a new one [synthesizer] would come out, we would have to buy it immediately, otherwise someone else would get their hands on that sound.” London also played an important role for Hamid as a musical epicenter. He fondly reminisces about the many live shows he attended there, including some of the biggest international musicians like Freddie Mercury and Michael Jackson. After returning to Cairo where he also recorded his following albums, he connected with Slam! for the release of his debut, laying the foundation of a collaboration that lasted for 5 albums. Luckily, we were able to connect with Hamid through our friend Youssra El Hawary, whose extensive network has opened many doors for us within the Egyptian music scene. We met Hamid for the first time probably in 2016 at his office / rehearsal studio in the outskirts Cairo. We were expecting a larger-than-life character in-line with his status as a certified superstar, yet the actual person turned out to be very approachable and super easy to connect with. He liked the idea of an effort to amplify his early works again, which, when originally released, were far from an economic success. While he was down to assist with an interview and his blessing for the project he also told us that for any license we needed to speak with the original label Slam! who released these songs, still held the rights and also remained in business over the decades though they didn’t actively release any new music. Hany Sabet had started Slam! Records in the early 1980s and focused on cassette tape releases, the format that expedited the success of a new generation of record labels in Egypt. By the mid 1980’s, Slam! had become one of the most successful and economically dominant record labels in Egypt, with Hamid El Shaeri being just one of their key artists, alongside Mohamed Mounir, Hanan, Hakim, Mustafa Amar and many more. Luckily, Hany Sabet turned out to be a friend of our colleague Malak Makar’s father, which probably helped to warm him to the idea of licensing “Ayonha” to this - in the scale of his world - tiny label from Germany. Eventually “Ayonha” ended up b ecoming a widely successful release and either Hany or we brought up the idea of a full album dedicated to Hamid El Shaeri’s work on Slam!. "Maktoub Aleina” is the first single and will be released January 14th. Following the massive success of "Ayonha,” “Maktoub Aleina” is another mid-tempo groover with a beautiful, synth-forward melody, that brings together a lovely combination of soul, disco and Arabic pop music of the highest order, giving a taste of full album. The second single, “Yekfini Nesma Sotak” will be released January 28th and combines Hamid’s unique formula of soul and pop, held together by a catchy synth melody. “Yekfini Nesma Sotak” picks up the pace a bit, making the uplifting mood of the track even more powerful. Third single, arriving February 11th, is “Dari Demou’ek,” one of the stand out tracks of Hamid’s early recordings done for Slam! in the early 1980s. Dominated by a disco infused bassline, the track offers a lot of space of the funky production to shine while Hamid inserts his vocals at all the right moments. A masterpiece of disco touched by Arabic pop music. Full album arrives February 25th. This release is dedicated to Hany Sabet, the founder of Slam! and his wife Rosemary Jane Sabet (who took the photos we used for the cover and the booklet), who sadly passed away during the time it took us to prepare the release. As always both vinyl and CD come with an extensive booklet with an interview with Hamid as well as unseen photos.

Pelagic Records commemorates the work of electronic music pioneer Lustmord by releasing The Other, based around his tenth studio album [ O T H E R ] (2008) The Others - Lustmord Deconstructed is a celebration of the fearless attitude of being different and the expression of unique ideas which have never existed before. The new 3LP is an album of Lustmord tracks reinterpreted by some of the spearheads of the contemporary heavy music scene – and beyond: Ulver, Enslaved, Godflesh, Zola Jesus, Bohren & DER Club OF Gore, Steve VON Till, Ihsahn, Jaye Jayle, JO QUAIL,SPOTLIGHTS, KATATONIA's Jonas Renkse , Alexander HACKE's (einstürzende Neubauten) new band Hackedepiciotto, as well as Mono, THE Ocean, Årabrot and Crown. Over 13 years after the release of [ O T H E R ] , 16 bands and solo artists have gathered to record their own unique takes on tracks from the Other-sessions. The result is an album that is more than a compilation, and more than the sum of its parts; covering a wide and diverse range of musical territories, but sharing the same underlying mood and vibe defined by Lustmord's timeless soundscapes: from the ambient solo performances provided by Ihsahn, Enslaved or Jonas Renkse to the subdued voice of Zola Jesus woven into Lustmord's sombre fabric to the industrial carnage that is Godflesh's version of 'Ashen'. What demonstrates the profound influence of Lustmord on this contemporary music underground showcased here is that these very different artists all felt inspired to explore the essence of his idiosyncratic sounds within their own realm: experimental electronica icons Ulver excel on a stunning, hazy rendition of ‘Godeater’, while Japanese post-rock act Mono deliver a crushing version of ‘Er Eb Os’, and THE Ocean take us on a cathartically heavy mindtrip back to our 'Primal [State of Being]'. In the end, each of these 16 artists delivers an interpretation that pays the deepest respect to this pivotal artist, while also standing out as a new track of its own. The Others - Lustmord Deconstructed is not only a tribute and an excellent entry point into the discography of the founding father of dark ambient. It is also a celebration of the most accomplished visionaries in the underground music scene of today, and a manifestation of what binds them together.

‘The Last of the 20th Century Girls’ is the storied second album from London-based artist Findlay - a full-fledged offering born of a personal journey that sees her at her most open, transparent, and introspective yet, drawing upon her own personal experiences since the release of full-length 2017 debut ‘Forgotten Pleasures’. With complex, fully-realised themes ranging from grief and loss to the struggle of losing and re-building one’s confidence, through to the challenges and pitfalls of the past couple of years, all serve to inspire a range of tracks across the album.

Mastered by five-time Grammy award winning engineer Antoine ‘Chab’ Chabert (Daft Punk, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Sebastien Tellier) and self-described as a “late coming of age story”, drenched in nostalgia, melancholy and the kind of strange experiences only a misunderstood millennial could have; the album effortlessly blends a diverse melting pot of breezy alt-indie, psychedelic pop, dreamy lo-fi chill, indie-rock and expansive cinematic sounds. It’s Findlay at her genre-melting finest, and a sharp, tasteful insight into her unique artistic psyche; a perfect representation of her impeccable alternative sound.