Gus Dapperton - 4 Dear Life - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Limited 180gm vinyl LP pressing. Lloyd Cole & The Commotions - Cole, Blair Cowan, Lawrence Donegan, Neil Clark and Stephen Irvine - were formed in Glasgow in 1982, where Buxton-born singer-songwriter Cole was studying Philosophy and English at the University of Glasgow -Their sound swam against the tide of shiny 80s synthesisers, offering intense, melodic, guitar-based pop, topped with droll words packed with literary references. Given just how loved debut album Rattlesnakes was, it would have been hard for whatever followed to be received as warmly - yet Easy Pieces made a good first of it. It was to sell twice as many copies in it's first two weeks as Rattlesnakes had to date, giving the group a Top 5 chart placing on it's in November 1985. Recorded with 80s super- producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, it's first two singles, the brooding, gospel influenced Brand New Friend and the forever-jaunty Lost Weekend reached the UK Top 20.

Drawing from post-punk, dub, hip-hop, electronic dance music and traditional Afro-Cuban rhythms, Folly Group have established themselves amongst UK experimental rock's new leading lights. Marrying open-hearted lyricism with furiously inventive self-production, this bracing, complex record lends a genuinely original voice to a familiar theme alienation in modern Britain.

2020 . Brendan Benson finds himself in an enviable spot as he enters the third decade of a remarkably creative, consistently idiosyncratic career - an accomplished frontman, musician, songwriter, producer, band member, husband, and dad. Benson's seventh solo album, and first new LP in almost seven years, Dear Life is this consummate polymath's most inventive and upbeat work thus far, an 11- track song cycle about life, love, family, fatherhood, and the pure joy of making music. Produced and almost entirely performed by Benson at his own Readymade Studio in Nashville, the album sees the Michigan-born, Nashville-based artist - and co-founder, with Jack White, of The Raconteurs - reveling in a more modernist approach than ever before, fueled by a heady brew of cannabis, hip-hop, and a newly discovered interest in software drum programming. The result is an untapped playfulness that elevates expertly crafted songs like the opener, InchI Can If You Want Me To,Inch and the first single, InchGood To Be Alive,Inch with voluble arrangements, elastic grooves, and incandescent power. Imbued with revitalized ambition and confidence, Dear Life is Brendan Benson at his very best.