Staff Picks

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WE ARE WINTER'S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN (WAWBARC) is the new quartet of Mat Ball (BIG|BRAVE), Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion), and Jonathan Downs and Patch (both Ada). On "NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER" they present six modal lullabies drenched in seared distortion, slathered across striding electronic pulses. Ball and Menuck began creating music in and for the bleakest moments of Montréal winters and later recruited Downs and Patch to flesh out their initial ideas. Menuck met them in 2015 when recording Ada's final album at Montréal's Hotel2Tango, where they reconvened to make this record. "NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER" is an album about witnessing bleakness from a place of safety. Carrying newfound descriptive depth, thanks to the quartet's open-ended songs freeing him from writing in meter, Menuck likens his lyrics to photorealism. Scorched and tarnished and laden with harrowing imagery, "NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER" is also a record bathed in light: the bewilderment of hopeful spirits witnessing despair, watching a blizzard of distress unfold outside from a place of relative shelter and comfort. You could call that emotional ambivalence, maybe numbness. But those words are too passive for the weight of conflicted feeling resonating through the album.

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To make her 2023 album, Light, Dark, Light Again, Angie McMahon had to walk through the fire. The Melbourne singer-songwriter's second LP was written from the ashes of a tough but transformative few years of relationship changes, private breakdowns and core-shaking revelations about self. At times, McMahon felt like falling apart. But instead, she pushed through and found that hope, joy and relief lies on the other side of pain. Light, Dark, Light Again is a record about facing fear and learning it can be a portal to something bigger and better. It finds that the only certainty in life is that everything ends, and everything begins again - that there is life and death and life again, that there is light and dark and light again.

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"The Moon and the Melodies" is a singular record within the Cocteau Twins' catalogue. Unusually ethereal, even by their standards, and largely instrumental, the album was guided by the free-form improvisations of collaborator Harold Budd, an ambient pioneer who had drifted into their orbit as if by divine intervention. Building on the atmospheric bliss of "Victorialand", released earlier the same year (1986), it signalled a possible future for the trio, yet it was a path they'd never take again. Now, almost forty years after its initial release, Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd's "The Moon and the Melodies" is being reissued for the first time, remastered from the original tapes by guitarist/co-producer Robin Guthrie, and complete with the original 23 Envelope (Vaughan Oliver) artwork. For such a low-key affair, the album casts a long shadow - but bassist Simon Raymonde believes the record's uniqueness stems directly from its humble, unpremeditated origins: "It captured a moment in time between friends that are enjoying making music together. Really, that's the essence of it".

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Individually, Kronos Quartet and Sun Ra are two of the most groundbreaking names in contemporary music. The former is the legendary San Francisco-based string quartet that laid a blueprint for what concert music could become, working with the likes of John Cage, Tanya Tagaq, and Astor Piazzolla. The latter was a singular jazz and avant-garde bandleader, as well as a philosopher and poet, who honed an extraordinary strain of cosmic experimental music from the 1950s until his ascension in 1993. As a capstone to Kronos Quartet’s 50th anniversary, the group has joined forces with the Red Hot Organization for the new album Outer Spaceways Incorporated: Kronos Quartet & Friends Meet Sun Ra. It’s stacked with some of the most innovative artists active today — everyone from multidimensional electronic musician Jlin, to Moor Mother and DJ Haram’s radical noise / rap project 700 Bliss, to abstract hip hop luminaries Armand Hammer, to avant-garde hero Laurie Anderson, to minimalist pioneer Terry Riley.

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Released in 1971 on Impulse and recorded with two different ensembles, Thembi marked a departure from the slowly developing, side-long, mantra-like grooves Sanders had been pursuing for much of his solo career. Instead, it offers an intriguingly wide range of relatively concise ideas resulting in something of an anomaly in Sanders' prime period. Verve By Request Series features 180-gram vinyl, pressed at Third Man in Detroit.

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Less than a year after her album "Through And Through", Baby Rose returns with "Slow Burn", a collection of songs that explode her sonic palette from progressive R&B into a rawer, richer and more sprawling lens of American music. Here, Rose asserts herself as not only a once-in-ten-lifetimes vocalist, but as a formidable songwriter connecting the dots where Muscle Shoals meets psych, psych meets jazz, jazz meets Americana, and the right players bring it all together. Produced by BADBADNOTGOOD, Rose and the band found an instant but seemingly endless well of inspiration; what started as an introduction became a day, became a song, became a night, became "Slow Burn". The songs on "Slow Burn" were inspired in part by Rose's experiences driving between her family's home bases. Rose would crank music and let her mind drift, making room for the internal monologues and imagined dialogues you might not otherwise dare to hear. There's a dreaminess in those moments, and they smolder on "Slow Burn": memories lose their realities, feelings replace happenings.

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A sprawling patchwork of the artist’s dreams and fears, Parannoul’s third album After the Magic explores the enigmatic solo artist’s life in the wake of his second album’s overnight success.

Expanding on the shoegaze-shaded emo that made Parannoul’s To See the Next Part of the Dream so beloved by lo-fi and indie rock fans alike, After the Magic sees the anonymous auteur striving to write a follow-up as worthy of acclaim as the last.

Across the album’s ten songs, Parannoul plunges yet deeper into his diverse pool of influences, coming back to the surface with a record that captures and extends the magic of its predecessor. Unexpected flashes of orchestral ambient and glitched-out electronica meld seamlessly with Parannoul’s signature passages of noisy, distortion-laden shoegaze, offering a real time glimpse into the maturation of one of indie rock’s most exciting artists.

In the artist’s own words, “This album is not what you expected, but what I always wanted.”

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Recorded across three sold-out shows at Dublin's Vicar Street, "Live In Dublin" features Lankum performing songs from across their catalogue, including "Wild Rover", "Go Dig My Grave", and "The Rocky Road To Dublin" (which up until now has never been officially released). The shows followed the 2023 release of the Irish folk quartet's fourth studio album, "False Lankum", which went on to be The Guardian's Album of The Year, The Quietus' Album of the Year, Mojo's #3 Album of The Year, and a Mercury Prize shortlist nominee.

The seasons may change, but the follies of the heart are constant in this ineffably lovely quartet of films by Eric Rohmer, one of cinema’s most perceptive chroniclers of the pangs and perils of romance. Set throughout France, Tales of the Four Seasons is a cycle to stand alongside the director’s two earlier acclaimed film series, Six Moral Tales and Comedies and Proverbs. By turns comic and melancholic, breezy and richly philosophical, these bittersweet tales of love, longing, and the inevitable misunderstandings that shape human relationships probe the most complex of emotions with the utmost grace. FOUR-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES• New 2K digital restorations, supervised by cinematographer Diane Baratier and Laurent Schérer, director Eric Rohmer’s son, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks• New interview program recorded at Rohmer’s house in Tulle, France, featuring Baratier, producer Françoise Etchegaray, sound engineer Pascal Ribier, and editor Mary Stephen• Excerpts of radio interviews with Rohmer conducted by film critics Michel Ciment and Serge Daney• Documentary from 2005 on the making of A Tale of Summer, by Etchegaray and Jean-André Fieschi• Two short films directed by Rohmer: A Farmer in Montfaucon (1968) and The Kreutzer Sonata (1956)• Trailer• New English subtitle translations• PLUS: An essay by film critic Imogen Sara Smith

A reclusive gym manager falls hard for an ambitious bodybuilder headed through town to Las Vegas in pursuit of her dream. But their love ignites violence, pulling them deep into the web of crime. Anna Baryshnikov, Kristen Stewart, Dave Franco, Rose Glass,   From Director Rose Glass comes an electric new love story; reclusive gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) falls hard for Jackie (Katy O’Brian), an ambitious bodybuilder headed through town to Vegas in pursuit of her dream. But their love ignites violence, pulling them deep into the web of Lou’s criminal family.

A week in the life of Paterson, a poet bus driver, and his wife Laura, a very creative artist, who live in Paterson, New Jersey, hometown of many famous poets and artists.

Desperate to escape his mind-numbing routine, uptown Manhattan office worker Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) ventures downtown for a hookup with a mystery woman (Rosanna Arquette). So begins the wildest night of his life, as bizarre occurrences—involving underground-art punks, a distressed waitress, a crazed Mister Softee truck driver, and a bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweight—pile up with anxiety-inducing relentlessness and thwart his attempts to get home. With this Kafkaesque cult classic, Martin Scorsese—abetted by Michael Ballhaus’s kinetic cinematography and scene-stealing supporting turns by Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr, Catherine O’Hara, and John Heard—directed a darkly comic tale of mistaken identity, turning the desolate night world of 1980s SoHo into a bohemian wonderland of surreal menace.