Mitski - The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We - VINYL LP

A much-deserved and open armed 25th anniversary celebration of Opeth's magnum opus. Two decades in, now certified silver, and still a breath-taking piece of work, dense with extraordinary melodic moments, spine-tingling atmospherics and agile but crushing heaviness, and one that saw the Swedish metallers kick open prog's ornate doors, fed death metal through the cosmic kaleidoscope and introduced a generation of music nerds to a world of limitless musical possibilities.

Limited Edition Vinyl. Sometimes, Mitski says, it feels like life would be easier without hope, or a soul, or love. But when she closes her eyes and thinks about what's truly hers, what can't be repossessed or demolished, she sees love. InchThe best thing I ever did in my life was to love people,Inch Mitski says. InchI wish I could leave behind all the love I have, after I die, so that I can shine all this goodness, all this good love that I've created onto other people.Inch She hopes her newest album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, will continue to shine that love long after she's gone. Listening to it, that's precisely how it feels like a love that's haunting the land. InchThis is my most American album,Inch Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of it's private sorrows and painful contradictions. In this album, which is sonically Mitski's most expansive, epic, and wise, the songs seem to be introducing wounds and then actively healing them. Here, love is timetraveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star. The album is full of the ache of the grown- up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It's a tiny epic. From the bottom of a glass, to a driveway slushy with memory and snow, to a freight train barreling through the Midwest, and all the way to the moon, it feels like everything, and everyone, is crying out, screaming in pain, arching towards love. Love is that inhospitable land, beckoning us and then rejecting us. To love this place - this earth, this America, this body - takes active work. It might be impossible. The best things are.

SITW's fourth studio album is a satirical celebration of mistakes. A joyous lambasting of everyone and everything that's wrong in the world, against the real-time backdrop of global uncertainty, corruption and political unrest. A London Charivari. Rough Music. A gleeful old-fashioned cancelling. A Chaunter's delight. 14th Century recording demons collecting mistakes in a sack. Women mugging rich merchants. Nettles being pissed on. S**t food at Lent. A terrible plan. An undoing. The aftermath of a car crash. Catching people doing something they shouldn't. Nursery rhymes reimagined as death threats. Behind the sarcastic acerbic delivery, Nicola Kearey and Ian Carter convey thoughtful, essential interpretations encouraging us all to check ourselves, through the multi-layered music of cities through time. This is about as far away from pastoral folk music as you can get. In their typical wry city-weary style, a beady eye is cast over those committing wrongs in plain sight, with Kearey narrating a series of tales of people fucking up, or being fucked up, with some brief respite in Lavender - one of London's oldest street melodies - the album being named after the 14th Century story of Tittivilus, the recording demon, who collects scribes' mistakes (pokes) and the idle chatter of the Inchliars with their hairy tonguesInch congregation. Despite this seriousness, the album's working-class dry gallows humour carries a stoic Inchif you don't laugh you'll cryInch feeling amongst the corruption, scandals and barefaced lies we all observe on a daily basis, with a warning that Inchonly you can fix your deficitsInch and Inchit's your words and deeds that matter... and let me tell you, they speak volumesInch. The core of the record imagines a sound of traditional London music, where the musical continuum is unbroken by the population decimated by the world wars, or by gentrification