19 Ducktails The Flower Lane The Flower Lane’ is the fourth album from Ducktails. It was recorded and mixed over the Summer of 2012 with Al Carlson (Peaking Lights, Oneohtrix Point Never), as Ducktails aka Matt Mondanile’s hectic schedule as a concurrent member of Real Estate began to wind down. The ten songs on ‘The Flower Lane’ move across a range of expressive pop songs that are bright and expansive, with arrangements that would have been at home on the early records of sophisticated guitar pop icons such as Aztec Camera and Prefab Sprout. “Mondanile’s fourth album as Ducktails and first for Domino, finds him emerging as a proper songwriter in his own right.” - The Quietus
18 Matthew E White Big Inner Moving, redemptive and powerfully soulful, ‘Big Inner’ is a timeless record told in seven songs that mingle memory with the rawness of any given human moment. The references from the lyrics that echo the common conditions of love, death, seeking, and finding, to open tributes to artists like Washington Phillips, Allen Toussaint, Jorge Ben, Jimmy Cliff, and Randy Newman - are their own scavenger hunt through music history and through Matthew E. White’s place in it. ‘Big Inner’, his first album, was universally lauded by critics. Compared to the likes of Amy Winehouse, Beta Band, Cat Power, Spiritualized, and Lambchop, it blends vintage soul-pop with blues, funk and gospel to create a soulful masterpiece soaked in a bygone age. “A dramatic pop-gospel record that
hits extremes of the mood spectrum: very easygoing and very obsessive” - NY Times
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16 My Bloody Valentine MBV
On the evening of Saturday February second, at just after Midnight, www. mybloodyvalentine.org crashed. Epically. Earlier that afternoon, Kevin Sheilds had written on the bands official Boards Of Canada, one of the most facebook page that “We are preparing respected and influential electronic to go live with the new album/ artists of recent times, return with website this evening. We will make their first album in eight years. What an announcement as soon as its up.”... with pre-release puzzles, desert That was as far as the hype went, but it parties, mysterious videos, and limited damn near broke the internet. Twenty Record Store Day offerings, the hype two years after the release of the now surrounding ‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’ has legendary ‘loveless’ came the perfectly been building to a fever pitch. You’ll be titled ‘mbv’, and talk about eagerly pleased to know that the album holds anticipated. They haven’t re-written up against this weight of expectation, the rule book here (they did that delivering another seductively over two decades ago), but they are widescreen, sci-fi cinematic selection still possibly one of the most unique of electronica tracks that could only sounding bands in history. ‘mbv’ is come from the studios of Sandison nine stunning tracks in just under forty and Eoin. With accompanying sleeve seven minutes and completely worth / inner sleeve artwork featuring blurry the wait. Slow distorted burns and images of secret American landscapes submerged melodies, wonky guitars, of atom bomb tests, peyote trips, bent necks, epic delays, waves of religious sects and Area 51, the album shadows... everything that you’d want is opens with a short electronica piece there. Nobody does it better. that references the pair’s fondness for the BBC Radiophonic workshop, or perhaps the incidental music from early “Still, after an absence of more 70s sci-fi films like The Andromeda than 20 years it’s the most Strain. Spidery arpeggiated synths and aggressively amniotic stuff going. abstract choral washes lift tracks like ‘Reach For The Dead’ and ‘White The lead track, She Found Cyclosa’, which recall the horror Now, picks up more or less where movies of John Carpenter and Dario Loveless left off, with guitarist Argento. The woozy detuned analogue Bilinda Butcher cooing shapeless keyboards that have become BOC’s trademark arrive on the stumbling, nothings, Valentine-in-chief stuttering ‘Jacquard Causeway’, while Kevin Shields crooning back, the beat-driven lushness of ‘Cold guitars flanging, and an urgent Earth’ could be seen as being a classic aortic throb underpinning all the of the braindance era. This eerie and unsettling first half makes way for a gauziness. You can imagine fans more uplifting ‘part 2’, with tracks like punching the air at this point, in ‘Palace Posy’ and especially ‘Nothing the blessed relief that this long, Is Real’ providing warm synths, while titles like ‘New Seeds’ suggest rebirth long, long-awaited album doesn’t and hope in this lifeless landscape. induce a desire to kick the cat in Perhaps the soundtrack to a film that disappointment.” only exists in Boards Of Canada’s minds, ‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’ is an intense and rewarding listen. ~ The Guardian
Boards of Canada Tomorrow’s Harvest