Connan Mockasin - Forever Dolphin Love - Metallic Silver - VINYL LP

Vinyl LP pressing. On Room Inside the World-Ought's third album and first for Merge-growing up doesn't mean mellowing out so much as it means learning to pay attention, listening carefully and openly, staying somewhere long enough to really understand where you are. Recorded at Rare Book Room in Brooklyn with producer Nicolas Vernhes (Deerhunter, Animal Collective, Silver Jews), Room Inside the World explores themes that have always concerned the band- identity, connection, survival in a precarious world-but with a bolder, more nuanced sound palette. Vibraphone, justly intonated synthesizers, drum machines, and a 70-piece choir suffuse the precise post-punk breakdowns that spangled Ought's first two albums, giving rise to an emotional complexity that pushes their characteristically taut sound to greater depths.

The third and finest album yet by Toronto artist Tamara Lindeman, recorded in France with Afie Jurvanen (Bahamas) and Robbie Lackritz (Feist), Loyalty crystallizes her lapidary songcraft into eleven emotionally charged vignettes and intimate portraits, redolent of fellow Canadians Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and David Wiffen, but utterly her own. A diaphanous eeriness and harmonic and rhythmic tension contributes to a pervading sense of clock-stopping bloom and smolder, recalling the spooky avant-soul of Terry Callier’s Occasional Rain. She’s an extraordinary singer and instrumentalist—on Loyalty she plays guitar, banjo, and keys—but Lindeman has always been a songwriter’s songwriter, recognized for her intricate verse, filled with double meanings, ambiguities, and complex metaphors. Though more moving than ever, her writing here is almost clinical in its unflinchingly self-examining gaze and deliberate delivery, evoking similarly idiosyncratic songsters from Linda Perhacs to Bill Callahan. Lyrically, Loyalty inverts the language of confession, of regret, of our most private and muddled mental feelings, by externalizing those anxieties through exquisite observation of the things and people we accumulate, the modest meanings accreted during our most ostensibly mundane domestic moments.

Connan Mockasin drifts deeper into his dreamy inner cosmos on Caramel - a liquified blend of soul, blues, funk, and ambient pop, flecked with Gallic sway and Eastern shimmer. Imagine Prince sipping afternoon psilocybin tea with Robert Wyatt in Canterbury, or Scritti Politti's catalog held captive and reconstructed by a brigade of warped VHS cassettes. Eleven blissed-out tracks from the singular mind behind Forever Dolphin Love, Jassbusters, and so much more.