Vero - Razor Tongue - VINYL LP

It's creation led by pure emotion, Cate Le Bon's seventh record Michelangelo Dying usurped the album she thought she was making. The product of all-consuming heartache, her feelings overrode her reluctance to write an album about love, and in the process became a kind of exorcism. What emerges is a wonderfully iridescent attempt to photograph a wound before it closes up but which in doing so, picks at it too. Musically, there is a continuation and expansion of a sound a machine with a heart that has taken shape over her last two records (2019s Reward and 2022s Pompeii) as Le Bon has increasingly taken control of the playing and producing herself. As guitars and saxophones are pushed through pedals and percussion and voices are fed through filters, an iridescent, green and silky sound emerges, with flashes of the artistic singularities of David Bowie, Nico, John McGeoch and Laurie Anderson surfacing and disappearing below the waterline throughout. What were left with is an ever-changing, continuous entity, a kind of song cycle. Each iteration reflects and progresses the last, each one a shard of the same broken mirror shifting, glinting, concealing and revealing, depending on how it is turned in the light. There are ultimately, Cate asserts, No revelations. No conclusions. There is no reason. There is repetition and chaos. I eventually allowed myself a vacant mind to experience it without resistance and without searching for a revelation or order to any of it. An exercise in the viscerality of life, of love, of humanity for both listener and artist, Michelangelo Dying knows what it is to hold, to be held, and to be exquisitely, profoundly alone. The characters are interchangeable concludes Cate, but at the end of it all, it's me meeting myself.

Zacc Harris's Chasing Shadows, out November 15, 2024, captures the essence of a fleeting yet decisive moment, with intricate, cinematic compositions inspired by the natural world. Following the success of Small Wonders-a DownBeat 4-star album and Best of the Year pick-Chasing Shadows showcases Harris's symbiotic quintet, blending melodic depth and harmonic complexity. It is a testament to the guitarist's continued evolution as an emerging voice in contemporary jazz.

On their bold and brilliant debut album 'Unsoothing Interior', Stockholm's Vero reflect the nature of life itself. Their songs prioritise feeling over perfectionism - what feels, or sounds, best - creating a record that tumbles through it's contents with a sense of unpredictability, excitement and curiosity. It's an album full of raw guitar riffs that spin and swirl and fizz, and evoke the spirit of artists like Sonic Youth, Garbage and Pixies. The record, out May 6th via PNKSLM Recordings (ShitKid, Les Big Byrd, Holy etc.), is a document of the three musicians' own experiences, injected with a natural urgency that comes from both the reality in the songs and writing and recording them in a studio paid for by the hour. For it's listeners, it acts less as a roadmap through the turbulence and more as a confidante to share the highs and lows, drama and desire with, encompassing everything from S*x, friendship and figuring out exactly who you are.