Stella Donnelly - Beware Of The Dogs - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Like the many Banded Stilts that spread across the cover of her newest album Flood, Stella Donnelly is wading into uncharted territory. Here, she finds herself discovering who she is as an artist among the flock, and how abundant one individual can be. Flood is Donnelly's record of this rediscovery the product of months of risky experimentation, hard moments of introspection, and a lot of moving around. Her early reflections on the relationship between the individual and the many can be traced back to Donnelly's time in the rainforests of Bellingen, where she took to birdwatching as both a hobby and an escape in a border-restricted world. By paying closer attention to the natural world around her, she recalls InchI was able to lose that feeling of anyone's reaction to me. I forgot who I was as a musician, which was a humbling experience of just being; being my small self.Inch Reconnecting with the 'small self' allowed Donnelly to tap into creative wells she didn't know existed. Soon songs were coming to her in a way she could not control and over the coming months, Donnelly accumulated 43 tracks as she moved out of Bellingen and around the country, often finding herself displaced due to border restrictions, a tough rental market, and once from the joys of finding black mould in the walls. InchI had so many opportunities to write things in strange places,Inch Donnelly remarks, having passed through Fremantle, Williams, Guilderton, Margaret River and Melbourne. InchI often had no choice about where I was. There's no denying that not being able to access your family with border closures, it zooms in on those parts of your life you care about.Inch With new locations came new approaches. InchIt freshened things up for sure,Inch Donnelly says, and writing with band members Jennifer Aslett, George Foster, Jack Gaby and Marcel Tussie, soon began to feel like kindergarten pla

*Fragments of the past intersect with a dynamic sonic vision on Hallways of Grey, the second full length from Corker. Expanding upon the dense, rhythmic post-punk of their 2023 debut-the Cincinnati group have not only tightened the screws on their repertoire, they've upped the ante significantly. Decamping from drab studio confines to the expanses of an Indiana farm, Hallways of Grey finds the collective style and creativity of Corker flourishing. While the delivery and dark-to-light balance might echo shades of what Adrian Borland patented decades ago, Corker add their own color (more than just grey, mind you) in a convincing manner across the album. Lead cuts, InchDistant DawnInch and InchVital FallInch showcase the range and dexterity that Ohio seems to inherently cultivate, but tracks like InchForever SilentInch (featuring Angie Willcutt from Artificial Go and ROD) and the finale, InchNo NecessitiesInch, are like a death trip from the cosmos down to the factory floor. It's a focused frenzy towards the finish line, a rush of calculated execution, a mad dash run with style.

Almost as soon as Stella Chronopoulou began writing Adagio, her fifth album as Stella, she knew the time had finally come to sing in Greek, her native tongue. It would be a first. She started the record almost by accident in 2019, during an 11-hour boat ride to the island of Anafi. Stella had recently gone through a patch of personal turmoil and needed a break from home. On the ferry, she pulled out her cell phone as the boat clipped through the Mediterranean and began with a simple melody, steadily piecing together a rough instrumental. As psychedelic keyboards twinkled and swayed above staccato drums, the track suggested some deep exhalation, as if Stella were letting go of long-unnecessary baggage. For a spell, she set the instrumental aside. She wasn't ready yet, or in a rush. Stella, after all, grew up in a slow place. During her youth in a relatively rural suburb of Athens, Greece, she and her friends played unfettered in empty streets, not worried about cars or permission, and living felt easy. But in the last decade life has steadily become busier for Stella, now based in the heart of Athens. She has become one of modern Greece's most popular musical exports, with three sophisticated, playful pop albums rendered with international élan. After her Sub Pop debut, Up and Away, in 2022, she catapulted beyond three million monthly Spotify listeners. That success was a blessing, but Stella sometimes found herself pining for the slower pace of her youth. That longing is the thread that loosely binds together her fifth album, the entrancing Adagio. Borrowing it's name from the term for music that's meant to be played slowly, Adagio is a pop record that feels like a very warm blanket, it's nylon-string guitars and featherlight percussion swaddling it's listeners for three minutes at a time. Written and recorded over the span of five years, with a consortium of internat