Benefits - Nails - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

This Portland-based songwriter's music bridges the gap between folk, country, blues and rock. Armed with a guitar, harmonica, sparse percussion and a tin pan alley-esque piano. Ward spins timeless classics that seem to flow effortlessly. Simple yet eloquent tales alive with metaphor and imagery, told in a raspy, sepia-toned croon. He's been compared to Tom Waits, Granddaddy, Sparklehorse and Howe Gelb.

Deleted Scene, the 8th studio album from UK producer Stumbleine, overflows with beautiful nostalgia-tinged electronica. The album is steeped with cloud-like beauty, with opener I Can Stop Anytime I Like fusing addictive sampled vocals with soft, glassy guitars, as if a reflecting pool of the listeners' memories. Cinderhaze ripples that pool with a more driving, magnetic force, shifting and pulling it's emotional weight in cyclic waves. Ursa Minor Sleeps Forever is fittingly sleepy, circling soft slow synth arpeggios in a dreamy haze, a sound built upon by Somnia to an epiphany-like string bed, never straying too far from Stumbleine's serene haven of melodic grace. On Catastrophette Stumbleine crafts a more dramatic and poignant web of sound, as if running through the memories created by the rest of Deleted Scene.The album as a whole is an escape to a dream-state of Stumbleine's making, captivating, yet familiar, and completely enveloping.According to Peter, InchDeleted scene refers to the memories that play over and over inside your own head, replaying hazy copies of hazy copies that evolve into a bittersweet fever dream. Everybody has their own unique collection of deleted scenes slowly distorting and fading away.Inch'Stumbleine is the alias of Peter Cooper. With roots in the UK post rock scene, the reclusive producer began blending slow dream-like pop with fractured lo-fi beats as Stumbleine in 2012. Melancholic rnb vocals ebb and flow above submerged guitar ballads. Sand blasted samples intertwine with broken beats to create music with a nostalgic fragile warmth. Stumbleine is known for a DIY ethic, releasing music directly to fans or via the independent tag Monotreme Records.'

Keaton Henson is shedding the Inchquiet boyInch persona that has defined much of his career. Embracing the grunge-infused sounds of his youth on new album Parader, the elusive songwriter melds emotional darkness, melancholy, and seething frustration as he reckons with the hauntings of his past InchI was nervous about being too loud, but then it sort of just came out.Inch What unravels across Parader's 12 tracks is an introspective autopsy of time as it distorts and folds to inhabit the songwriter's present. InchThere are these disjointed snapshots,Inch he shares, Inchmemories across time popping up amongst this collection of thoughts about what it feels like to be this age and a musician.Inch Production duties were split between Luke Sital-Singh and Alex Farrar (MJ Lenderman, Wednesday, Suki Waterhouse) and there are collaborations with his wife, Danielle Fricke, and Ratboys' Julia Steiner. Keaton Henson has a well-worn reputation as a softly-spoken, reclusive figure who rarely performs live. Since emerging with his debut record in 2010, he has garnered critical acclaim for his mastery at weaving heart-on-sleeve vulnerability into emotionally poignant, folk-tinged outpourings.