We’ve got another bunch of great albums recently released on vinyl to feature this week. The latest from All Them Witches, Blood Orange, Molly Burch, Tokyo Police Club and Phosphorescent have all arrived and are ready for a spin on your system. Yes, we are still waiting for the latest Twenty One Pilots album to arrive, we ordered the limited edition indie shop version and hope they will arrive soon. Let us know if you want us to hold one for you when they come in. We can order the standard black vinyl version, just spark us a message and we’ll get that in pronto for you.
The list of releases from Record Store Day for the upcoming Black Friday event in November was released earlier this week. If you missed it you can find all the details here: Record Store Day – Black Friday Release List Out Now!
Also we loaded up the used browsers last week, you can catch the latest “flippin” video below all the new release details.
Let’s get to the new stuff!
Molly Burch – First Flower – Limited Edition White Vinyl
In a small-town South of Austin, Texas vocalist and songwriter Molly Burch is relaxing in her sunny country home. The 27-year-old is enjoying the calm before the storm that will kick start when her much anticipated sophomore album First Flower hits the public. The Los Angeles native has found tranquility in the outskirts of Texas, appreciating time on the front porch as cicadas sing in the distance behind her.
First Flower is a bright, beautiful album peppered with moments of triumph. Burch’s voice is as strong and dexterous as ever, displaying her incredible range and professionalism as a vocalist. Opening track “Candy” is a swinging, playful hit, while “Wild” deals with pushing away fear. Songs like “Next to Me” and “Dangerous Place” examine failure and distance, and the title track “First Flower” is classic Burch, a simple love song that makes your skin raise with goosebumps when she breaks into the chorus. But the album’s true stand-out is “To The Boys”, a courageous, sassy fuck-you to her own self-deprecation where she learns to love all the things she hated about herself. “I don’t need to scream to get my point across/I don’t need to yell to know that I’m the boss,” she coos over a sparse guitar riff. “I’ve always been told my whole life to speak up,” explains Burch. “I needed to embrace that and not care what people think.”
All Them Witches – ATW
By most bands’ fifth LP, the sound is pretty set. Parameters established. Refinement dissipated in favor of formulaic execution of what’s worked in the past. Fair enough. All Them Witches take a harder route.
The result, mixed by Rob Schnapf (Beck, Elliott Smith, Kurt Vile), is the most intimate, human-sounding album All Them Witches have ever recorded and another redefinition of the band. Introducing keyboardist/percussionist Jonathan Draper to the fold with McLeod, bassist/vocalist Charles Michael Parks, Jr., and drummer/graphic artist Robby Staebler, the new eponymous record isn’t self-titled by mistake. It’s the band confirming and continuing to develop their approach, in the shuffle of “Fishbelly 86 Onions,” the organ-laced groove of “Half-Tongue,” the tense build of “HJTC” and the fluid jam in closer “Rob’s Dream.”
It’s a reaction to being a “bigger” band. To playing bigger shows, bigger tours, etc. From the sustained consonants in Parks’ vocals to McLeod’s commanding slide in “Workhorse” and drifting melancholy at the outset of “Harvest Feast,” All Them Witches is there laying claim to the essential facets of their identity. And the urgency of these tracks – fast pushers and sleepy jams alike – is among their greatest strengths.
Phosphorescent – C’est La Vie – Limited Canadian Edition Orange Vinyl
On C’est La Vie, Houck’s first album of new Phosphorescent material since 2013’s gorgeous career defining and critically acclaimed Muchacho, he takes stock of these changes through the luminous, star-kissed sounds he has spent a career refining. By now, Houck has mastered the contours of this place, as intimate as it is grand, somewhere between dreamed and real, where the great lyrical songwriters meet experimental pioneers and somehow distill into the same person. It is Houck’s own personal musical cosmos, a mixture of the earthy and the wondrous, the troubled and the serene, and by now he commands it with depth and precision. When you ask Houck about the cumulative effect of all this life happening in such a short time, he turns philosophical: ”These significant moments in life can really make you feel your insignificance,” he says. “It’s a paradox I guess, that these wildly profound events simultaneously highlight that maybe none of this matters at all…” On this album, Houck reckons with that void — the vanishing point where our individual significance melts into the stars — and sums it up thusly: C’est La Vie.
Blood Orange – Negro Swan – Limited Deluxe Version Orange Vinyl
Producer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, songwriter and vocalist Devonte Hynes returns with his fourth album as Blood Orange, Negro Swan.
Raised in England, Hynes started out as a teenage punk in the UK band Test Icicles before releasing two orchestral acoustic pop records as Lightspeed Champion. In 2011, he released Coastal Grooves, the first of three solo albums under the moniker Blood Orange. His last album, Freetown Sound, was released to critical acclaim in 2016, and saw Hynes defined as one of the foremost musical voices of his time, receiving comparisons to the likes of KendrickLamar and D’Angelo for his own searing and soothing personal document of life as a black man in America.
He has collaborated with Solange Knowles, FKA Twigs, and many other artists, and was recently one of four artists invited to the Kennedy Center to perform alongside Philip Glass. In addition to his production work, he scored the film Palo Alto, directed by Gia Coppola and starring James Franco.
Hynes’ newest album, Negro Swan, was written and produced by Hynes. Says Hynes:
“My newest album is an exploration into my own and many types of black depression, an honest look at the corners of black existence, and the ongoing anxieties of queer/people of color. A reach back into childhood and modern traumas, and the things we do to get through it all. The underlying thread through each piece on the album is the idea of HOPE, and the lights we can try to turn on within ourselves with a hopefully positive outcome of helping others out of their darkness.”
Tokyo Police Cub – TPC – Indie Shop Exclusive White Vinyl
From the band: “TPC is our fourth studio album (sixth if you count our EPs, which we do).
We wrote it at a beautiful old church in rural Ontario. We’d spend all day drinking coffee and playing songs, taking breaks to go to the beach or shoot cans with a BB gun. At night we’d take turns making dinner, and then we’d drink some beer and pick up the instruments again. It was bliss.
When the songs were done, we went out to Los Angeles and recorded them up in the California sunshine with Rob Schnapf, who also produced Champ.”
It’s everyone’s favourite pastime, watching Backbeat’s “flippin” videos of all the great used and vintage albums we put out, so here’s the latest installment from last week.
That’s it for today, have an amazing weekend. YOU ARE AWESOME!