Boo Boo Records

October Program Titles Released This Week:

Binker Golding – Abstractions Of Reality Past and Incredible Feathers CD/LP (Gearbox)

Binker Golding truly is the saxophonist of the moment. A highly skilled musician, accomplished composer, and occasional conductor, Golding has performed with everyone from Moses Boyd and Yussef Dayes to Evan Parker and Denys Baptise. Abstractions of Reality Past and Incredible Feathers is his first quartet album, and typically, it goes against the grain. It constitutes a departure from Binker’s more rhythm and riff-heavy collaboration with Moses Boyd as well as his avant-garde project with Elliott Galvin. With all compositions and arrangements by the band leader, there is a greater emphasis on harmonic and melodic development, harking back to the more through-composed jazz fusion of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Expect a contemporary twist in the form of London jazz scene heavyweights; Joe Armon-Jones on piano, Daniel Casimir on double bass, and Sam Jones on drums.

Beth Hart – War In My Mind CD/2xLP (Mascot Label Group)

Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Beth Hart is as real as it gets on her new Rob Cavallo-produced album War In My Mind. In a music industry full of glossy production and airbrushed photoshoots, this is one artist who throws down her cards, shares her darkest secrets and invites you to join her for the ride. The sleeve shot of Beth pounding a piano below her own personal storm cloud is a fitting representation of new material that hits like a force of nature. It opens with the anti-love song “Bad Woman Blues”. A stately piano ballad that swells to an epic anthem, the title track explores the addiction-troubled years when Beth felt she couldn’t go on while the emotionally raw “Let It Grow” is “about having so much hope in the face of being hopeless.” The hedonistic groove of “Try A Little Harder” evokes the tumbling dice of the Vegas Strip and is Hart “jumping into my father’s body back in the ‘70s when he was a high-roller.” [Deluxe CD box set adds two bonus live tracks, coasters, postcards and stickers. Limited blue colored vinyl pressing also available.]

Metronomy – Metronomy Forever CD/2xLP (Because Music)

The follow-up to 2016’s Summer 08, Metronomy Forever features 17 tracks. Its length is born from a desire for breathing room, from not wanting to stuff the hits together like a bouquet of petrol station roses – a modern way of listening to music. Metronomy’s innate skill for blending off-kilter funk, energizing club vibes and esoteric pop is interspersed with some mood-setting, glistening and melodic electronic tracks. The band’s leader Joseph Mount called upon a variety of inspirations for this album. Most notably, he wanted to replicate the feeling of listening to the radio, with an infinite quality, sumptuous songs of different styles, ever rolling, helping to lighten your mood. Moving away from the bustle of his former Parisian home to take up residence atop a hill in the garden of England had an impact, infusing the album with a sense of tranquility and a calm joy that reflects the relative happiness of his existence. Also influential was time spent working on Robyn’s critically adored Honey album, with a similar feeling of emotional, intense, carnal mania informing songs such as “Sex Emoji” and “Salted Caramel Ice Cream”.

[Read more…] about New Releases for September 27, 2019

October Program Titles Released This Week:

Devendra Banhart – Ma CD/LP (Nonesuch)

Ma is Devendra Banhart’s first album since 2016’s Ape In Pink Marble. Bursting with tender, autobiographical vignettes, the record displays a shift from the sonic experimentation of his previous albums to an intricate, captivating story-telling and emotional intimacy. Banhart favors organic sounds to accompany his voice and guitar here with the arrangements bolstered by strings, woodwinds, brass, and keyboards. Lead single “Kantori Ongaku” translates from Japanese to “country music” and is a nod to experimental pop legend Haruomi Hosono, a founding member of the influential electronic band Yellow Magic Orchestra. Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon contributes background vocals on “Now All Gone” and Banhart’s mentor, muse, and dear friend, the folk legend Vashti Bunyan, duets with him on “Will I See You Tonight”. Notes Banhart, “Vashti is the archetype of the mother, one of the most important people in my life. It was so beautiful to sing this duet with her.”

Boy Scouts – Free Company CD (ANTI-)

Recently released on vinyl – now available on CD. As Boy Scouts, Oakland-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Taylor Vick makes the kind of music that hits like good advice from tough emotional truths. Vick’s songs survey the damage that can come from loving other people with curiosity and grace. Her new album Free Company is a stunningly tuneful rumination on heartbreak and loss that is always galloping toward the horizon. Opener “Get Well Soon” reckons with the difficult epiphany that comes when you’ve worked overtime to help someone you love, only to realize they won’t meet you in the middle and help themselves. Her tightest and most cohesive collection of songs, Vick recorded Free Company in a tiny studio her friend Stephen Steinbrink set up inside a rented shipping container – a unique spot that ended up being perfect for her. Steinbrink plays drums, synth, and bass throughout the record in addition to singing backup.

Sam Fender – Hypersonic Missiles CD/LP (Polydor)

Hypersonic Missiles is the debut album from Brits Critics Choice Award Winner Sam Fender. Observational, questioning and socially engaged, Fender has an innate gift for simplifying matters of the newsworthy and topical. “I don’t have answers only questions” he clarifies, but there’s a canny simplicity here that seems to be touching and plain speaking. His words reflect conversations occurring right across the globe, amongst friends in cafes, pubs, and out on the terraces. Frustrations. Misunderstandings. Despair. Album track “Dead Boys” tackles the taboo of male suicide. Having lost close friends to the epidemic, Fender was compelled to address it head on in song. The reaction was immediate. And throughout Hypersonic Missiles there’s a sense that there are far more of those revelations still to come. It’s a brave record with some of its subject matter cutting deep into the grain.

[Read more…] about New Releases for September 13, 2019

September Program Titles Released This Week:

Barns Courtney – 404 CD/LP (Capitol)

The title of Barns Courtney’s new album will no doubt be familiar to anyone who’s ever searched for something online and found themselves face to face with nothing. 404 is an album that explores feelings of loss and bereft inspired by life’s habit of throwing up its own error pages. Courtney explores absence, frustration and the never-ending search for something that seemed like it would always be there until one day, suddenly, it wasn’t: his childhood. All in all, 404 is a commentary on his journey from awe struck naivety to the dark realization of adulthood. The big picture, Barns Courtney notes, is “a weird alternative Narnia or Neverland, where all the tropes of your childhood have melted. From Pokémon to Nintendo 64, the core of my being is there: an unorthodox maelstrom of memories condensed down into this bizarre undulating world.” It makes sense that the album sounds like it does. “To start with I wanted to make a punk record or a Rolling Stones album, but what came out was the synth heavy sound of 404,” he says. “To do anything else wouldn’t have worked. It’s a strange amalgamation of influences based on everywhere I’ve been and some places I haven’t.”

Bat For Lashes – Lost Girls CD/LP (Bat For Lashes)

Lost Girls is another brilliant full-length in Natasha Khan’s incredible, acclaimed discography, mixing sounds she’s always loved – heavy bass lines, synth arpeggios, Iranian pop beats, cascading choruses – with some of her finest songwriting to date. It’s an album full of romance, a homage to Los Angeles where the album was recorded, to being a kid in the ‘80s, to films that touched and changed her life. Spanning 10 tracks, Lost Girls sees Khan dreaming up her own fully formed parallel universe, creating an off-kilter coming of age film in which gangs of marauding female bikers roam our streets, teenagers make out on car hoods and a powerful female energy casts spells and leave clues for us to follow. The women of Lost Girls are parallel to one of Khan’s previous female protagonists, the tough, darkness-driven Pearl, from her 2009 lauded album Two Suns. Within the women of Lost Girls and the character Nikki Pink, Khan unfolds elements of herself; within these songs, we do the same. [Limited indie store exclusive vinyl pressing also available.]

Paul Cauthen – Room 41 CD/LP (Lightning Rod)

Written during a stint spent living out of a suitcase in the artist-haven that is the Belmont, Room 41 chronicles Paul Cauthen’s white-knuckle journey to the brink and back, a harrowing experience that landed him in and out of the hospital as he careened between ecstasy and misery more times than he could count. Cauthen has long been a pusher of boundaries (musical and otherwise), and Room 41 is no exception, with electrifying performances that blend old-school country and gritty soul with ‘70s funk and stirring gospel. His lyrics take on biblical proportions as they tackle lust and envy, pride and despair, destruction and redemption, but these songs are no parables. [Limited edition colored vinyl pressing also available.]

[Read more…] about New Releases for September 6, 2019