It features seven solos, one by each artist who played on Minus: Daniel Blumberg, Terry Day, Ute Kanngiesser, Billy Steiger, Tom Wheatley, Jim White and Seymour Wright. Daniel Blumberg’s Minus is an astonishing work; one that weds an improvisational, free-music ethos to the rawest emotional songwriting, rooted deep in the personal turmoil Blumberg experienced whilst making the record. Minus is an album about breakdowns: relationship breakdowns, mental and physical breakdowns, breakdowns in communication, and the breaking down of received methods and practices. And situated at the broken-down heart of the record lies a pathological preoccupation with a breakdown of trust. But out of all this, and through the arteries of the album’s seven tracks, pulses a sense of growing fortitude and an almost mantra-like effort to create a way back into the world. Key refrains sound like the fevered incantations of a soul willing itself to recover, to find its voice again, and to resurrect the broken-down self.

Art School Girlfriend (ASG) is one of the coolest lesbians on the indie music scene.

The story of Get Tragic can be traced way back to the relentless gigging off the back of their 2014 self-produced and self-titled record, when the heels finally fell off of Blood Red Shoes at the end of that same year. A near-decade of incessant road time and a non-stop pace of life finally took its toll, with the band stopping only to quickly hammer out “another ten songs” to release as their next record, before ploughing straight back into touring. The pair exhausted themselves to the point of collapse. The pair come out the other side sounding fresher and more assured than ever. Recording in the States, working with a new producer, ditching the two-piece rock rulebook they arguably helped write - everything that went into Get Tragic was a leap into the unknown. Their first move, post-reconciliation was a writing retreat in rural Wales, which saw them woken up by the village community leaders, who entered the house while they were sleeping and banished them from town, fearful of the rock group’s proximity to the local church. Through mishap and misfortune, the songs that came out of the sessions were the duo’s light at the end of the ever-expanding tunnel. They decamped to L.A. to record with Nick Launay (Yeah Yeah Yeahs / Arcade Fire / Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds). He pushed them to explore these new worlds even further, and as such the the after-effects of Laura’s motorbike tragedy can be heard throughout Get Tragic – more melodic and synth-led than any of the band’s records to date, it embraces electronics and nuance in a way their stripped-back and stomping two-piece rock sound of old never could have. Knowingly embracing the tragedy of their movements, and the clarity at the end of such woe – they even laugh at the very idea of having a picture of themselves on the cover – Get Tragic is a total reimagining of the Blood Red Shoes you might think you know.

Grooving looping guitar psych-out dream-state vocals bring you trippy melodies.
The London five-piece Tom Dougall, Dominic O’Dair, Maxim Barron, Charlie Salvidge and Max Oscarnold release their first album on Tough Love and their fourth for the world. It’s recorded in home studios, mixed at Studio B in South London and completely self-produced.
Insistent marching pop beats drive a hole through the fuzz guitar forest. Twangy guitars are understated but at the same time bursting at the seams with little tricky riffs, melodies and flourishes. Innocence and sadness and the feeling of losing something you’ve never had.

2008 expanded edition of Vini Reilly and DC's 1985 album Circuses & Bread featuring ten bonus tracks. One of DC's finest albums as a whole, Circuses & Bread is as beautiful as it is emotional. The bonus tracks include the rare Japanese single 'For Noriko'/'Love Fading', compilation tracks 'Verbiers' and 'The Aftermath' plus four previously unreleased tracks from the cancelled 1983 album Short Stories For Pauline. Also includes the rarely heard 1983 single 'I Get Along Without You Very Well', a Hoagy Carmichael cover sung by Lindsay Reade and dedicated to her former husband, the late Anthony H. Wilson (Factory Records founder and Durutti Column manager). The booklet restores the original cover design by 8vo. LTM.

Analogue synth wizard Martin Jenkins returns to Ghost Box with a glorious vision of retro-futurist electronics in ‘Hollow Earth’, the sequel to ‘Stasis’ [2016]
At just under 1 hour long, ‘Hollow Earth’ weighs in as one of PCA’s most significant, broadest artist albums (as opposed to compilations). It finds the widely beloved project reeling inwards after the extrospective exploits of his ‘Stasis’ LP to reflect on themes of “subterranean exploration and submerged psychologies.”
Gassed on the spirits of Berlin skool synth improvisation and the new age chuff-on that informed early ‘90s house music, the album unfurls as a nightflight over undulating internal topography, roaming from signature slow techno wonders to weightless, vocodered waltz in ‘Descent’ and furtive, ghostly shapes in ‘Claustrophobe’, before raising the energy level with strident dance tracks such as ‘Mindshaft’ and ‘Core sample’. But it’s int he later quarters that we find some of the most precious material, such as the deliciously moody atmosphere and sylvan slink of ‘Dancing Shadows’, the mind-bending noise sculpture of ‘Quad Tape Substrate’, and his Carpenter-on-quaaludes emulation, ‘Buried Memories’.

Based in Bristol, LTO first made waves as part of mysterious electronic collective Old Apparatus. As a solo producer, LTO has since attracted attention with his praised debut LP "The Number From Which All Things Come" and subsequent ambient/modern classical-focussed "Storybook“ LP. With "Déjà Rêvé“, he expands on that classical sensibility, creating a highly expressive and nuanced release for Denovali Records.
Each of the tracks on this record express a certain abstracted sense of time and place, often of a long forgotten memory or dream, or of an imagined future; of places foreign, yet strangely familiar; of varying states of consciousness; of non-linear time systems; of repetitive childhood fever dreams; of places with different laws of physics removing the constraints of day-to-day reality that you never want to leave; of unimaginable landscapes.
Broadening the already far-reaching colour palette of "Storybook", LTO has created something truly remarkable: complex piano arrangements, ethereal soundscapes, elegant orchestration and floating ambience, all perfectly placed in a rich cinematic landscape. LTO creates an ingenious dramaturgy, inducing different moods, from dark to light, with an inimitable depth and irresistible suction.
“haunting and comforting in equal measure. 4/5" – MOJO
“like memory preserved in nostalgic aspic” – The Independent
“a beautiful collection that stands tall alongside the work of his contemporaries” – XLR8R
“Blurring the lines between the organic and machine-made... Takes nebulous sounds and crashes them with the clatter of machine rhythms… Brilliant.” - Hyponik
“An adventurous blend of hues grey and dark...Staggeringly rich.” - FACT
"Another great album by a real talent hugely deserving of even more attention. Remarkable. 9/10" - God is in the TV

King Midas Sound (Kevin Martin / The Bug & Roger Robinson) deliver an exceptionally stark new album; an hour-long study of unravelling love rendered via desolate, beautiful ambient/shoegaze/concrète textures. It’s an unusual album; the vocals sitting high in the mix, the instrumentation recalling Kevin Martin’s work on Experimental Audio Research’s 'The Köner Experiment’, the atmosphere often suffocating. We’ve sunk deep into it and reckon it’s nothing short of a modern day classic, something like Tricky’s dread-filled Pre-Millennium Tension if it had been produced by Thomas Köner.
Auspiciously cued for a Valentine’s Day release, ‘Solitude’ is a meditation on loss, an elegy to extinguished romance and love in the endtimes. Combining the confessional vulnerability of Robinson’s lyrics and dreader-than-dread delivery with the most stripped back arrangements in Kevin Martin’s entire catalogue, the duo drill deep into emotional sufferation with simultaneously airless, deeply moving results, glacially limning a coming-to-terms with loss.
It pushes King Midas Sound’s pessimism to heart-rinsing degrees, staging Robinson in a series of vantablack scenes veiled by smoky, minimal synth-lighting, the poet processes irrational and incessant feelings of rejection and loneliness. From the aching desolation of ‘You Disappear’ to the unflinching realisations of ‘X’, the ache imparted by Robinson’s lyrics is only amplified by his quiet stoicism, something that reaches an apex on the emotionally brutal Zeros, recalling Tricky's incredible side project with Terry Hall 'Nearly God', while Kevin Martin finds power in a sense of deferred gratification and his embrace of negative space.
The effect is nothing less than transfixing in the physicality of Robinson’s descriptions and the detached nature of Martin’s sferic electronics on ‘In The Night’, while pangs of lush optimism lend an exquisite contrast to the desiccated riddim and gloom of ‘Alone’, and the sylvan keys in their sensuous reverie, ’Her Body’.
‘Solitude’ is a worthy follow-up to King Midas Sound’s two albums for Hyperdub, in some senses eclipsing both in terms of distinctive, emotional impact. But more than that, it’s an album made for the times we find ourselves in; a meditation on love and loss in the age of info overload.

Discussing the EP, Neil Tennant said: “It contains three satirical songs and one rather sad song. I think it’s because of the times we’re living through.” The four tracks were produced by Tim Powell and Pet Shop Boys and recorded towards the end of last year. They will not be included on Pet Shop Boys’ next album which is being produced by Stuart Price and is due for release in the autumn.