MOLLY NILSSON - 'ZENITH'

Formats

• LSSN035RG - LP (COLOURED)

  5061041820977

• LSSN035CD/DSA019CD - CD

  5060446120200

Details

REPRESS (10th Anniversary - Red Gold Vinyl Edition)  Sweeping, cinematic, emotional change is in the air. Molly Nilsson’s sixth studio album Zenith begins with clear, wide eyes open to Earth as we would love it to be but seldom is. Recorded in her home of Berlin and whilst touring and, as ever, conceived, produced, written and recorded in solitude, Zenith is Nilsson’s big statement and consequently her most affecting work to date. It sees her reveling in big arrangements, sweeping synth strings, bigger choruses and emotions. Like the rest of us she looks within and to endless sunsets in wonder and puzzlement. That Molly Nilsson is a DIY cult figure is beyond question; she has always written directly and with wit straight down the line between the universal and the personal. The difference with Zenith, and you can hear it in the opening chords of opener The Only Planet, is that her scope is now much wider and her heart heavier than ever before: over a post-ecstatic dusk, Nilsson serenades the globe in a loving embrace. Following on, 1995 is, arguably, one of Nilsson’s finest songs to date. It’s one of those songs to learn the lyrics to, to listen to on repeat, a reason to wear the grooves down to the bone, it’s why pop music can be one of the greatest art forms we have. It’s an example of how, on this album, Molly draws the listener closer to her heart than ever before. There’s simply no escape from the line “The plans that you made / when you still had the time / I’ve saved all the things that you left behind but by now I guess I’d consider them all mine /Windows 95, is only a metaphor for what I feel inside / Although I’m older now / there’s still an emptiness that’s never letting go somehow.” Show-stopper Mountain Time is the soundtrack to being on the run, from societal conventions, from normative ideas of happiness, from your surroundings. It’s the intoxicating call of the renegade. That’s not to say that Nilsson’s light touch has been forsaken for grandiose statements. Bunny Club begins as a demo-sketch before breaking into a fast-paced tale of doomed romance with big rave synths and Bus 194 (All There Is) sees Molly joyride through a city on a happy hardcore bus. But it’s tracks like Tomorrow and another contender for best-ever-Molly moment, Happyness that the true scale of what she’s accomplished reveals itself. We’re locked in a spiraling orbit, strings and bass whirling, gazing at the spinning planet below us as we contemplate both the ultimate freedom in loneliness and the glimmer of hope in the Other. Can we ever be truly with someone? Are we ever truly alone? Over the 13 tracks here we get the impression that Nilsson may always be restless; like anyone else she has conflicting feelings of love and hate. It’s just not many other people can tell you exactly how you feel before you know it yourself. 

Tracks

1. The Only Planet
2. 1995
3. H.O.P.E.
4. Mountain Time
5. Bunny Club
6. Intermezzo: Palimpsest Galore
7. Happyness
8. Lovers Are Losers
9. Clearblue
10. My Body
11. Titanic
12. Bus 194 (All There Is)
13. Tomorrow

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Audio & Video

STRAWBERRY SWITCHBLADE - '1982 4 PIECE DEMO'

Formats

• LSSN048 - 7"

Details

2025 sees a new pressing to acknowledge the enduring legacy of this recording. In 2024, the song Trees & Flowers became an unexpected hit on Tik Tok and introduced a new generation to these timeless songs 700 on Bio-Black Vinyl (available worldwide) To acknowledge what I believe to be an Important Historical Document and also because people still wanna own it, we’ve repressed the sold out 1982 4 Piece Demo by Strawberry Switchblade. With a reprint of the booklet Like the other pressings, it comes with a booklet featuring photos from the period and a contemporary interview with Jill and Rose. Worth noting that the photos included all came from a contact sheet, the originals being lost to time, so they retain a sort of Xerox’d, rough quality. Will never not be blown away the band trusted Night School with this and it’s a source of huge gratification that so many people have discovered this band, these songs, from this humble wee release. 1982 4-Piece Demo” is the first official, fully-licensed and unreleased material to be released under the name Strawberry Switchblade in 30 years. Since disbanding amid major record label acrimony and personal differences in 1986, the already-cult band have since grown in stature and legend. Trailblazers in many ways, the band’s mythology justifiably centers around the charismatic duo of Jill Bryson and Rose McDowall, but that isn’t a complete picture. Bryson and McDowall’s growing friendship, having met some years earlier on the punk scene, became a creative partnership: Bryson’s art school background and McDowall’s history in avant-punk group The Poets meant Strawberry Switchblade was a band pitted against many established norms. The band’s very first incarnation, an all-female 4 piece, recorded one demo at Glasgow’s Hellfire Club and played a handful of gigs. Friends Janice Goodlett and Carole McGowan completed the line up on bass and drums respectively. Strawberry Switchblade would eventually pair down to a duo and go on to chart success but it’s in these raw, passionate recordings that the songwriting and vocal elements were being hammered out and explored in real time. “Spanish Song” is a previously unreleased song. With Rose McDowall’s instantly recognizable lead vocal dovetailing with Bryson’s harmonies and lead guitar, it’s the first glimpse at an alternative history of Strawberry Switchblade. This incarnation could easily have been featured on a Nuggets compilation or a precursor to the indie-pop revolution that would take over British bedrooms a couple of years later. Trees & Flowers is instantly recognizable, a bona fide classic that would earn the band its first record deal. Here it’s given a more forceful rhythm section: Goodlett and McGowan’s playing is in fact accomplished and doesn’t hint at the bands’ youth. Go Away would also surface later on the band’s debut LP but here it is a moody-garage stomper with a psychedelic, haunting refrain. These 3 songs point to a tantalizing future of the band that was never realized. Remastered and restored by Sean Pennycook from the original cassette, with artwork based on a single photographic contact sheet (the only visual evidence of the band in this form) and with a booklet of photographs and new text from contemporary Stephen Pastel.

Tracks

SIDE A: Spanish Song
SIDE AA: Trees & Flowers / Go Away

Press

2025 sees a new pressing to acknowledge the enduring legacy of this recording. In 2024, the song Trees & Flowers became an unexpected hit on Tik Tok and introduced a new generation to these timeless songs

Audio & Video

CLOTHING - 'LA MUERTE EN REALIDAD NO EXISTE'

Formats

• TAR117 - LP

  5061041820809

Details

The record tells the story of the Jesus De La Cruz Conde, who embarks on an epic journey of self-discovery after witnessing his hometown get burned to the ground. The tracks that make up this record are the very repertoire of songs sung by De La Cruz to Mezcal-soaked patrons in haunted cantinas, as he drifts from pueblo to pueblo across a desolate landscape bristling with tumbleweed. Throughout La Muerte en Realidad no Existe, Clothing conjures De la Cruz through this vampire-cowboy alter-ego creating as much a Mexican Gothic as a Latin American Giallo - a phantasmagoric fever dream of love, loss and violence - painted in neon Technicolor.

Tracks

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NILS FRAHM - 'NIGHT'

Formats

• LTR049 - LP

  4066004674612

Details

NILS FRAHM has announced he will fulfil last year’s promise to follow up Day, the collection of solo piano music he released last March. Night, which contains five new tracks, will be released on May 9, 2025, on vinyl as well as via all digital platforms. A CD version, Night & Day, including all eleven tracks from both Day and Night, will also be made available at the same time. These follow Frahm’s latest live album, Paris, which was released in December last year. In the meantime, Frahm will continue as he has for almost three years, with his world tour finally concluding this spring with shows in Australia, America and Canada. Frahm recorded the pieces on Night on the Klavins M450 piano, installed in his studio at the renowned Funkhaus complex in Berlin. It was built by German-Latvian piano maker David Klavins for the first Piano Day in 2015, a celebration that will mark its 10th anniversary this March. At 4.5 meters tall and weighing over a tonne, the model was the largest upright piano in the world at the time. The record is a reminder that, although he has since become celebrated for the complex, intricate arrangements of his most commercially successful multi-instrumental albums, Frahm first made his name with similarly meditative piano compositions on albums like 2009’s The Bells, 2011’s Felt and 2012’s Screws. Night opens at a glacial pace with ‘Wesen’, giving notice of the more subdued nature at the heart of this thirty-minute collection. It conjures images of Frahm, lit only by a candle, huddled over his instrument, playing for the sheer companionship that it offers, while also prompting acknowledgement of his ability to tease affecting melodies from minimal means. ‘Monuments Again’ is more immediately accessible, its subtly jazzy nature disguising a gentle melancholy, with Frahm’s fingers dancing over the keyboard with increasing intensity until, at its conclusion, he reiterates its central theme. Despite its name, ‘Kanten’ – ‘Angles’ in English – is a more traditional affair, a timeless piece of solo chamber music devoted early on to the piano’s lower keys, lending it not so much a sense of menace as a measure of foreboding, at least until Frahm’s right hand takes up the quietly uplifting, melodic initiative. The eight-minute long ‘Listening Over’ also feels initially like a more formal affair, distinguished as much by quiet trills as enviable patience, Frahm often hesitating carefully over its notes, ultimately evoking a sense of relief without the normally attendant tension. If, however, there’s been a certain air of darkness up to this point, Night closes with ‘Canton’, its delicious airiness perhaps the record’s equivalent of a glimpse of dawn, its tender melody like the day’s first sunbeams peeking over the horizon. It’s a perfect conclusion to a typically beguiling collection that, as always, points to a musical character that is immediately, distinctively Frahm’s. It also highlights why the German pianist has continued throughout his career to return loyally to the piano as his first love. After all, it’s notable that, even during his recent, expansive live performances, which find him leaping between multiple keyboards, synths, and even a glass harmonica, Frahm has always made space for such works. That’s something documented on the likes of 2013’s Spaces, where ‘Said And Done’ is a highlight, and last year’s Paris, during which ‘You Name It’ – itself taken from Day – ‘Some’ and ‘Re’ provide a crucial interlude between his more demanding, grandiose works. Night, like Day, confirms that Frahm remains a prolific master of affecting simplicity, tenderness and romance, and as capable as ever of unforgettable, epigrammatic succinctness.

Tracks

1. WESEN 2. MONUMENTS AGAIN 3. KANTEN 4. LISTENING OVER 5. CANTON

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Audio & Video

THEE OH SEES - 'FLOATING COFFIN (2025 REISSUE)'

Formats

• DG004 - LP

  657628452409

Details

We all know the type: prolific bands that commit every loose thought, stray idea and 90-second song fragment to tape. Bands that pay no attention to little inconveniences like “release cycles” or “self-editing,” and instead decide that quantity equals quality, creating a discography more labyrinthine, imposing and—ultimately—exhausting than the cast of creatures in a sci-fi novel. Here is why none of that applies to THEE OH SEES. Because each of the dozen-plus albums they’ve released since 2004 possesses a distinct personality and represents a different point along the path of JOHN DWYER’s slow transformation from auteur of woozy, bare-bones four-track psychedelia to goggle-eyed garage rock marauder backed at long last by a band that both shares and stokes his singular vision. Because drop a needle on any record and—to their great credit—it takes several songs before you’re convinced it’s Thee Oh Sees. The seasick hundred-bottles-of-rum shanty “What the Driven Drink,” from 2007’s delirious Sucks Blood exists in a different galaxy than the rollercoastering “Chem-Farmer” from last year’s Carrion Crawler / The Dream; the doomy doo-wop of “Blood on the Deck” hardly seems like the product of the same band that delivered the yelping “Ruby Go Home” in 2009.

Tracks

1. I Come From The Mountain 2. Toe Cutter - Thumb Buster 3. The Floating Coffin 4. No Spell 5. Strawberries 6. Maze Fancier 7. Night Crawler 8. Sweets Helicopter 9. Tunnel Time 10. Minotaur

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Audio & Video

OH SEES - 'ORC (2025 REISSUE)'

Formats

• DG003 - 2xLPs

  657628452393

Details

The Oh Sees wasted no time in racing headlong into nightmarish battle with the mighty Orc, clawing even farther up the ghastly peak stormed so satisfyingly by their previous A Weird Exits. The band is in tour-greased, anvil-on-a-balance beam, gut-pleasingly heavy form, nimbly braining—with equal dashes of abandon and menace—on this fresh batch of bruisers and brooders, hypnotically stirred into to the cauldron of chaos you’ve come to expect. On Orc, fresh blood Paul Quattrone joins Dan Rincon to form a phalanx of interlocking double drums, alternately propelling and fleet-footing shifting ground to pinion John Dwyer’s cliff-face guitars to the boogie. Tim Hellman keeps it swinging like a battle-axe to the eyebrows. The tunes veer toward the violence of their live shows, with a few tasty swerves into other lanes: heavy to lush, groovy to stately. Throughout, it remains sinister in its swaggering skulk, manic in its fuzz-fried fugues. They hit all the sweet spots the heads foggily remember, and there’s plenty to sweat over if you just hopped into the sauna. More evil…more complex…more narcotic…more screech… more blare…more whisper…there’s even more Brigid. Less “Thee,” but more of everything else.

Tracks

1. The Static God 2. Nite Expo 3. Animated Violence 4. Keys To The Castle 5. Jettisoned 6. Cadaver Dog 7. Paranoise 8. Cooling Tower 9. Drowned Beast 10. Raw Optics

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