Not Turning Off: Volume 32

Handfuls of new and archival matter from The Loyal Seas, Loner Deluxe, Beneather, Polypores, Prolapse and more go under the spotlight

With spring officially in motion and before things might just slow down a tad on the releases front over the coming summer months – as more artists concentrate on catering for long-pent-up live demands – here’s another analytical funnelling from the small mountain of May releases out there.

Whilst the reunited Belly seem to be back indefinitely on the hiatus bench after 2018’s decent Dove reunion LP, Tanya Donelly has recently returned comfortably to roaming collaborative projects, on top of her doula day-job, through low-key Bandcamp-only dispatches, a 2020 covers-album with The Parkington Sisters and a duo pairing with fellow Bostonian Brian Sullivan (Dylan in the Movies).

Having hooked-up with the latter artist to twice contribute to American Laundromat Records’ tribute compilations, to reinterpret hits from The Cure and The Smiths, Donelly returns with Sullivan to the same label – trading under The Loyal Seas umbrella – to unveil the Strange Mornings in the Garden album.

With both sharing vocal and songwriting duties, albeit with Donelly’s still remarkably radiant tones sensibly given more prominence than Sullivan’s less distinctive murmur, the ten assembled all-original pieces – featuring assistance from various Parkington Sisters, Juliana Hatfield Three bassist Dean Fisher and others – positively glow and glide in lush ensemble arrangements, replete with tiers of guitars, bass, keyboards, strings and harmonies.

This translates into more textured yet concise extensions of latter-day homespun Donelly solo works, as most notably rounded-up on 2016’s Swansong Series anthology of Bandcamp EPs on American Laundromat. Moreover, this fresh collection is unapologetically stuffed with hooks and memorable melodies.

Hence, opener “(So far from) Silverlake” sets up things nicely as a warming duet atop languid six-string tangling before we’re treated to even stronger ensuing moments. This takes us then through the gorgeous folk-rock chime of the title track, the country-baroque of “Early Light”, the spacey reverberations of “Driving with a Ghost”, the shimmering and vocally acrobatic “Mary Magdalene in the Great Sky” (reprised from the Swansong Series), the hushed chamber-pop balladry of “Last of the Great Machines” and the intimate finale of “Swimmers in the Gold”.

Although realistically it won’t set the world alight, Strange Mornings in the Garden is crafted with a loving attention to detail that is infectiously comforting as well as elevating. Tanya Donelly fans should rank it highly in her thankfully-not-over-yet oeuvre.

Whatever has been in the Rusted Rail label water supply over the past couple of years certainly isn’t doing any harm – quite the contrary in fact. Following on then from still-quite-fresh outings from Cubs, A Lilac Decline and Loner Deluxe, which have contained the common recurring personnel of Rusted Rail CEO Keith Wallace and acclaimed visual artist Cecilia Danell working alongside others, this new double-sized album from the latter project proves to be another strong suite.

Recorded largely at a rural recording residency in Ballycastle, Ireland, Hinterlands picks-up where last year’s smorgasbord-like Field Recordings left-off, finding ringleader Wallace continuing – with the support of Danell and a few guest accomplices – to mainline and remould ideas from his nineties-to-noughties-heavy record collection to great effect.

The reference points are less immediately identifiable than its on predecessor however, with an immersive reach that proves to be richer and more seamless, especially when Danell’s vocals are fused closely next to those of Wallace, amidst fuzzy seams of guitars, banjo, bass, assorted synths and related oddments.

Thus, we’re transported through FX-drenched Folk Implosionisms (“How the West Wind Blows” and “Stolen By The Faeries”); cosmic cowboy art-pop (“Dún Briste”, “Nick Drake’s Sister In Space”, “Search & Rescue” and the Yo La Tengo cross-referencing “Tranquil Eyes”); trancey lo-tech sound collages (“We Used to Dance in The Sky”, “Bog Disco” and “Lunar Swamp”); twangy yet abstract ambient Americana (“Ruined Church”); deconstructed-shoegaze-meets-danceable-retro-futurism (“Sea Glass”); and deliciously dark yet dreamy drone-pop (“Hollow Mountain”).

Although clocking at over an hour, Hinterlands doesn’t feel bloated or self-indulgent, contradicting the cliché that longer CD-based releases are always unwarranted. Instead, it’s a double-album to keep us contentedly lost within, for the rest of this year and beyond.

Also forging sonic spaces to get submerged inside – from even more abstract directions – is the eponymous album from Beneather on Where It’s at Is Where You Are. Another off-shoot from The Leaf Library mothership (see also Shifts from Sea Glass and Melinda Bronstein’s solo In Reverse), this is the brainchild of the band’s TV soundtrack composing drummer Lewis Young.

The ten-track aural absorption exercise finds Young crafting Nordic-noir-tinged tapestries from guitar, bass, tape loops, samples and aforementioned bandmate Bronstein’s heavily-manipulated wordless vocals. Although inscrutably and deliberately swerving straightforward song structures, the collection sustains a hypnotic allure throughout.

Shifting subtly through the most elemental ends of vintage shoegaze (“Melts into Air” and “Dreamgaze”), Cocteau Twins-meets-Julianna Barwick ethereality (“Colour Me the Same”), slowed-down ambient techno (“Halcyon Tide”) and the gauzy enigmas of Grouper (“17 Sinners”), whilst remaining in a collectivist cinematic mindset, this is a long player to turn up loud and sink into without obsessing about what really makes it tick behind the scenes.

Another fine addition to The Leaf Library’s growing side-project collection in short.

Over in the electronic realms the goods still keep coming in too…

Having recently set-up a Bandcamp digital subscription series aimed at the most dedicated fans, to help segregate his more unfiltered audio wares from his set-piece physical produce on record labels, Stephen James Buckley brings forth his first Polypores long-player for Ian Boddy’s operationally well-drilled DiN label, in the form of Hyperincandescent.

Once more released out of chronological recording order, the album was cut last June between sessions for the already available Gargantuan and Crystal Shop. Fittingly then, over its two near-22-minute pieces, the record does noticeably bridge the gap between the former’s epically concertinaed-together sprawl of segments and the latter’s more playful shorter essays. Hence, the opening title track flows through soothing ambient meditations, drones and woozy warbling, whilst “Floating in The Meme Pool” is busier as it moves through waves of rippling reverberations, percussive glitchscaping, foggy pulsing, glistening arpeggios and barely-there stillness.

Wrapped in yet more striking sleeve art, Hyperincandescent yet again marks out Stephen Buckley as one of the most distinctive synth-sculptors on the scene, energised by his unbreakable born-to-do-it creative drive. Furthermore, despite the duration of its two expanded compositions, the album acts as an accessible late entry point for newcomers.

Whilst the Polypores plough continues in its own furrow, two other new electronically-farmed outings offer starkly contrasting aural moods.

Thus, we find Fuzzy Lights co-leader Xavier Watkins reappearing as Twenty Three Hanging Trees, with the adroitly commanding Visages on Woodford Halse. Bringing together some murkily mesmeric modular synth and guitar-knitted soundscapes, that tick all the reliable Tangerine Dream, Blade Runner and Cosmic Ground boxes but with some crucially-added incorporeal magnetic mystery, this cassette/download set compellingly defies easy disassembling and quietly demands repeat visits.

Infinitely brighter and far more kaleidoscopic is the eponymous debut long player from The Sound of Science on Castles in Space. Constructed by the artistic coupling of Dean Honer and Kevin Pearce – who have collectively been involved with The All Seeing I, The Moonlandingz, The Eccentronic Research Council and a variety of small-screen scores for HBO and the BBC – this vividly colourful collection seeks to revisit the spirit of 1970s and 1980s educational science books and TV programmes, with more modern subject matter, to fit both the discerning ears of children and their parents in the 2020s.

Incorporating an assortment of guest-speaking narrators and singers (including Sharron Kraus and the Verve Children’s Choir of Sheffield, amongst others); sounds that blur the barriers between the Radiophonic Workshop, Freddie Phillips, OMD’s “Genetic Engineering”, Dare-era Human League, Tom Tom Club and Kraftwerk’s The Mix; and some likeably sincere scholastic Tomorrow’s World infusions, this is a charmingly joyous, uplifting and enlightening synth-pop-science experiment gone right.

The just mentioned Sharron Kraus also returns to a fruitful partnership with Justin Hopper on Swift Wings (Nightshade Records); a sequel of sorts to collective Concrete Islands favourite Chanctonbury Rings (with Belbury Poly). It finds Hopper’s scholarly readings of Victor Neuberg poems at the core, around which Kraus wraps opulent sonic layers from her own evocative voice, recorders, bamboo flute, dulcimer, electronics and percussion, which in turn are bolstered by Jane Griffiths (violin/viola), Neal Hepplestone (bass/double bass) and Guy Whittaker (drums).

With words full of mystery and innocence pulled from the natural world and settings that plug into space-age madrigal movements, airy lysergic-pastoralism, elegiac synthscaping and hauntological-prog, this might be a niche affair but it’s a serenely captivating one.

Through digs into the BBC sessions vaults, the Precious Recordings of London label has thus far leaned towards to more jangle-prone and bookish band enterprises from the 80s and 90s. However, with the release of a pair of brilliantly-packaged double-7” EPs of John Peel-commissioned recordings from Prolapse, the venture takes an arresting lateral turn.

As an imposing but kept-at-arm’s-length set of characters in the Leicester independent music world of the 1990s, Prolapse perhaps sound even more impressive now in our more genre-hybridising times.

The primary formula – well-represented here from the two taped Maida Vale studio visits from 1994 and 1997 – finds the co-fronting Begbie-meets-Mark E. Smith-alike ‘Scottish’ Mick Derrick and the seemingly gentile yet coolly formidable Linda Steelyard monologing as largely spoken-word-spooling protagonists, behind which the line-up of bassist Mick Harrison, guitarists David Jeffreys and Pat Marsden, drummer Tim Pattison and – for the second session – keyboard-player Donald Ross Skinner, pummel and twist semi-improvised post-punk, post-hardcore and post-rock shapes.

Featuring songs from the ensemble’s first and third albums, as well as otherwise unreleased compositions, the two EPs are an absolutely engorging feast of invective and invention. Highpoints include the edgy Slint-meets-Fugazi angularity of “Serpico” and “Doorstep Rhythmical Bloc”, the smouldering churn of “Broken Cormorant”, the stuttering motorik-laced “Slash/Oblique”, the brilliantly bonkers stomp of “Deanshanger” (with radically different and hilarious lyrics to the bagpipe-boosted version found on The Italian Flag LP) and the atypical acid-folk-framed “Place Called Clock”.

With an expanded double-vinyl reissue of the group’s Pointless Walks to Dismal Places debut also on the horizon via Optic Nerve Recordings, there could be no better time to (re)discover Prolapse – other than with a bit of time-travel to catch them on stage at the Princess Charlotte or the Physio & Firkin in Leicester that is. On their own though, John Peel Sessions 20.08.94 and 08.04.97 are genuinely essential purchases.

No strangers to excavating antiquarian curiosities too – albeit on grander scales – is the conscientiously curatorial Cherry Red Records, whose 3CD boxset reissue of Pleasure, from the short-lived but fecund Leeds quartet Girls at Our Best! is an almost textbook example in giving a long-lost band the complete works treatment, to save later-comers from breaking the bank on Discogs or needing to illicitly hunt around for bootlegs.

The bundled-up original 1981 album, a handful of contemporaneous singles, radio sessions, demos and live material all encapsulate the foursome – fronted by the buoyant high-register vocals of Judy Evans – joining the dots between post-punk gusto, C86-anticipating indie-pop and a splash of theatrical kitsch.

Nuggets found amongst the 54 gathered tracks include the chugging yet nimble “Water Babies”, the scrappy polka-meets-skiffle of “Fun-City Teenagers”, the Adam Ant-goes-twee “£600,000”, the wry singalong of “Fast Boyfriends”, the anthemic agit-punk of “Going Nowhere Fast”, The Raincoats-saluting “Warm Girls” and a raggedly spirited take on the oft-covered hand-me-down gospel gem “This Train”.

As a historical document with plenty of appendices, this rebooted edition of Pleasure may still be an acquired taste for some but connoisseurs of empowering late-70s/early-80s DIY musical explosions should be more than satisfied with such an authoritative archival set.