{"title":"Paradise of Bachelors","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eParadise of Bachelors is a record label, company, and archive based in North Carolina. With a passion for preserving and promoting *authentic* music, the label has become a trusted source for music enthusiasts worldwide.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFounded with the aim of supporting independent artists and showcasing their talent, Paradise of Bachelors has built a reputation for releasing high-quality records across various genres. From folk to country, blues to rock, the label's diverse roster ensures there is something for every music lover.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWith an unwavering commitment to exceptional sound quality and artistic integrity, Paradise of Bachelors consistently delivers unique listening experiences. By collaborating closely with its artists throughout the creative process, the label fosters an environment that allows musicians to fully express themselves.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"pedal-steal-and-four-corners","title":"Pedal Steal and Four Corners","description":"\u003cp\u003eLegendary Texan artist Terry Allen occupies a unique position straddling the frontiers of country music and conceptual art; he has worked with everyone from Guy Clark to David Byrne to Lucinda Williams, and his artwork resides in museums worldwide. \u003ci\u003ePedal Steal and Four Corners\u003c\/i\u003e collects, for the first time, Allen’s radio plays and long-form narrative audio works—two and a half hours of cinematic country-concrète songs, stories, and sound collage.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003ePedal Steal \u003c\/i\u003e(1985), originally composed as a soundtrack to a dance performance, appears on vinyl for the first time, as well as on CD. \u003ci\u003eTorso Hell\u003c\/i\u003e (1986), \u003ci\u003eBleeder\u003c\/i\u003e (1990), \u003ci\u003eReunion (return to Juarez)\u003c\/i\u003e (1992), and \u003ci\u003eDugout\u003c\/i\u003e (1993) comprise the \u003ci\u003eFour Corners\u003c\/i\u003e suite, radio plays broadcast on NPR and never before released, now spanning two CDs. All audio has been meticulously remastered from the original tapes. Fans of Allen’s violent masterpiece Juarez will find much to love in these haunting desert dramas of the chthonic Southwest, which feature Jo Harvey Allen, Lloyd Maines, Butch Hancock, Rolling Stones saxophonist Bobby Keyes, and many others. Roger Corman failed to option the film rights; Jesse Helms failed to ban them; now you can own them!\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLP - 145 Gram Black Virgin Vinyl housed in Heavy-Duty Board Gatefold Jacket, Printed Inner Sleeve with 3CD Set and 28 Page Colour Booklet plus Download.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLP+ - Limited 145 Gram Desert Dusk Blue Vinyl housed in Heavy-Duty Board Gatefold Jacket, Printed Inner Sleeve with 3CD Set and 28 Page Colour Booklet plus Download.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"LP","offer_id":50383941730635,"sku":"1054403","price":44.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/a769d25d-aafe-445e-b1b8-a522ba102891_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726279650"},{"product_id":"undying-color","title":"Undying Color","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe new album (his 6th) by the ever-evolving project of Jaime Fennelly is his most ambitious and spellbinding set of roiling, meditative recordings to date, and the first to supplement his foundational arsenal of Indian pedal harmonium, analog synthesizers, and incantatory voices with a full ensemble, including Janet Beveridge Bean (Eleventh Dream Day, Freakwater), Jim Becker (Califone, Iron and Wine), Haley Fohr (Circuit des Yeux, Jackie Lynn), and Jon Mueller (Death Blues). With prayerful patience and ceremonial gravity, these 7 extraordinary songs conjure and celebrate the cyclical rhythms of nature: tidal surges, human breathing, cicadas in the wilderness gloaming. The record’s forty-five minutes uncannily subsume listeners within an enveloping sensation of primeval remoteness, the heady wonder and instinctual trepidation of sleeping alone beneath the stars. The immersive soundworld that saturates \u003ci\u003eUndying Color\u003c\/i\u003e elides the physical and the metaphysical. To wit, twelve-minute centerpiece \u003ci\u003eGravity Wake\u003c\/i\u003e, commandingly sung by Haley Fohr (Circuit des Yeux, Jackie Lynn) and Janet Beveridge Bean (Eleventh Dream Day, Freakwater), is likely the eeriest and most sensual paean to Einstein’s theory of general relativity ever composed. And the album itself, following its punning title that substitutes \u003ci\u003edying\u003c\/i\u003e for \u003ci\u003edyeing\u003c\/i\u003e, is dedicated to Fennelly’s recently departed uncle, as if the transmutations of color into cloth analogize the potential transmutations of death into music. With \u003ci\u003eUndying Color\u003c\/i\u003e, more bodies bring a corresponding increase in heat. While the project emerged in 2007 along a decidedly solo axis, following the dissolution of Fennelly’s prior group Peeesseye (with guitarist and fellow PoB artist Chris Forsyth and drummer\/visual artist Fritz Welch), Mind Over Mirrors now resembles a band, or a constellation. In addition to the role Crain plays in making this Mind Over Mirrors’ most ambitious and spellbinding set of roiling, meditative recordings yet, \u003ci\u003eUndying Color\u003c\/i\u003e is also the first to supplement Fennelly’s foundational arsenal of Indian pedal harmonium and Oberheim synths with a full ensemble of players, including Jim Becker (fiddle; Califone, Iron and Wine) and Jon Mueller (drums, percussion; Death Blues, Volcano Choir). \u003ci\u003eUndying Color\u003c\/i\u003e also asserts the interwoven formal and folk aspects of Mind Over Mirrors more dramatically than ever before. This sense of simultaneity, of braided vernacular and academic musical traditions, recalls Henry Flynt’s fusion of Appalachian music with avant-garde tactics, aligning Fennelly with other iconoclastic American composers like Charles Ives and Moondog known for similarly syncretic methods. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDeluxe LP edition features 140g virgin vinyl, heavy-duty matte board jacket, full-color printed inner sleeve, and download code for the entire album. \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCD edition features heavy-duty matte gatefold jacket and LP replica artwork.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":50383942123851,"sku":"1004056","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP","offer_id":50383942254923,"sku":"1004055","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/d19feebc-605c-498f-b64f-05e596dfcfdb_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726279685"},{"product_id":"abundance-welcoming-ghosts","title":"Abundance Welcoming Ghosts","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eAbundance Welcoming Ghosts\u003c\/i\u003e finds the British folk-rock band relaxing into a natural, playful confidence: tangling with the thickets, wading in the river, digging the peat, and disappearing into the mountains. It was recorded at Mwnci Studios, in a quiet valley in Southwest Wales, during four days in August 2018, just a month before the band’s songwriter David Morris left the UK for a 9 month meditation retreat at a remote Buddhist monastery on the cliffs of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. By the time the band reached the studios, the imminent hiatus lent a poignant and celebratory atmosphere to the sessions. The compositions had not been fully formed prior to recording, but any pressure was transmuted into invigoration, resulting in the jubilant energy that adorns even the most turbulent songs. This expansiveness bears testament to the skill of long-term collaborator and guide Jimmy Robertson (Michael Chapman), who engineered and mixed the songs. Guest musicians Joan Shelley, who sings the hidden spaces on \u003ci\u003eSnowdon\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003ePiano\u003c\/i\u003e, and Tara Jane O’Neil (Rodan, the Sonora Pine), who plays sweet aching slide guitar on \u003ci\u003eMy Friend\u003c\/i\u003e, complement the core sextet. Ed Sanders’ violin alternates between soaring with crisp highland sadness on \u003ci\u003eBV Kistvaen\u003c\/i\u003e and burying jaws into the flesh of songs like \u003ci\u003eSalvation\u003c\/i\u003e. 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Casting glances back to British folk traditions as well as toward avant-garde horizons, these brilliant new songs, as accessible as they are arcane, buttress Elkington’s brisk guitar figures and baritone poesy with strings, woodwinds, and backing vocals by Tamara Lindeman of the Weather Station.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhere the first record was more firmly situated in the sonic tradition of England’s more interesting 1970s folk revivalists, Eye engages in a broader wrassle, roping in echoes of British library musics, horror-film soundtracks, demure psychedelia, and more rocking elements of folk-rock. The result is a record even more elaborate, shrewd, thoughtful and confessional than its predecessor. \u003ci\u003eEver-Roving Eye\u003c\/i\u003e is instead a sublime distillation of the humane wisdom of a dude who’ll never be; the dude who sings on the single, \u003ci\u003eNowhere Time\u003c\/i\u003e: “There’s a master plan somebody understands \/ And I wish that one was me.” It might well cast a pox on the concept of satisfaction altogether. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor fans of Bert Jansch, Kevin Ayers, Richard Thompson, Joan Shelley, Steve Gunn, Michael Chapman, Mike Cooper, Ryley Walker, Scott Walker.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"Green | LP","offer_id":50383942943051,"sku":"1086900","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Black | LP","offer_id":50383943106891,"sku":"1086899","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50383943303499,"sku":"1086898","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/9b8b7817-a434-4e4c-b0fe-d0e78884d758_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726279774"},{"product_id":"long-lost-solace-find","title":"Long Lost Solace Find","description":"\u003cp\u003eFor fans of Purling Hiss, Birds of Maya, Kurt Vile, Steve Gunn, Nap Eyes, the War on Drugs, Jonathan Richman, The Clean, The Kinks, Neil Young.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe story of \u003ci\u003eLong Lost Solace Find\u003c\/i\u003e, the debut solo album by Mike Polizze, is a Philadelphia story. It’s also a story about the erstwhile Purling Hiss frontman and Birds of Maya shredder stepping out from behind the wall of guitar noise into the bright sunshine to inhabit the dazzling realm of glassychords. Performed entirely by Polizze (largely live and acoustic), with notable instrumental and vocal contributions from longtime friend Kurt Vile, and recorded (slowly, over the course of a year) by War on Drugs engineer Jeff Zeigler, this intimate Philly affair clarifies the bittersweet earworm melodicism of Polizze’s songwriting, revealing bona fide folk-pop chops. \u003ci\u003eLong Lost Solace Find\u003c\/i\u003e finally harvests the wild local honey from the buzzing hive of Hiss.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 2015 Christopher Smith of Paradise of Bachelors urged Polizze to play his first proper solo show under his own name, opening for the Weather Station. The present album developed from that decisive moment, with Polizze, Zeigler, and Vile hunkering down in Uniform Recording to chip away at these twelve songs.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd what songs! With very little electric guitar and few effects audible, Polizze’s expressiveness and dexterity as a fingerstyle player (not to mention a singer) emerges, especially on unadorned tunes like \u003ci\u003eWishing Well\u003c\/i\u003e and the instrumental \u003ci\u003eD’Modal\u003c\/i\u003e, both of which bring to mind friend and fellow Delco native Steve Gunn. An amiably languid mood prevails, offhandedly achieving an atmosphere of quiet bliss and charming nonchalance that belies the morass of contradictions, bruising anxieties, nostalgia and nauseous stasis suggested by the elliptical lyrics (I told you it’s a Philadelphia story). The lyrical content sometimes dissolves into the simple, childlike pleasures of rhymes and phonemic play, dispensing with parsable grammar entirely, as in the chorus of “Do do do” and the “Bam-bam a rambling man, a midnight sham” bit in infectious lead single \u003ci\u003eRevelation\u003c\/i\u003e, an instantly winsome number which features Kurt on backing vocals and surprise trumpet. The way Polizze sings the banal title of \u003ci\u003eBainmarie\u003c\/i\u003e literally, from the French, “Mary’s bath,” a kind of double-boiler kitchen device, a reference to the hardships of past jobs like “memory” gets at the remarkable way these lilting melodies unfold with gorgeous, unpretentiously Proustian grace and ease. The endless hooks here sound casual, almost shrugged-off, despite their carefully constructed recursive and ramifying nature. 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Backed by a collaborative group of friends and acolytes - Steve Gunn (who also produced), Nathan Bowles (Pelt, Black Twig Pickers), James Elkington (Jeff Tweedy, Richard Thompson), Jason Meagher (No-Neck Blues Band), Jimy SeiTang (Rhyton), and fellow UK songwriting luminary Bridget St John - Chapman tears into both bold renderings of new songs and radical reinterpretations of material from his revered catalog, the crack band adeptly scaling the same rarefied sonic heights of classic Harvest albums like \u003ci\u003eFully Qualified Survivor\u003c\/i\u003e, guided by a true survivor's instinct, wit, and wisdom. The result is a sublime chiaroscuro self-portrait, more shadow than light, as an invigorated Chapman wrestles with weighty themes of t ravel, memory, mortality, and redemption, his world-weary whispers assuming the incandescent power of prophecy. The deluxe LP package includes tip-on jacket, printed inner sleeve, lyrics, and download card with two bonus tracks; the CD features a gatefold jacket, lyrics, and two non-LP bonus tracks. The album includes both radical reinterpretations of obscure material from Michael’s catalog as well as three new compositions: \u003ci\u003eSometimes You Just Drive\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eMoney Trouble\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eRosh Pina\u003c\/i\u003e. A longstanding but freshly urgent preoccupation with (as Michael sings in a beloved early tune) “time past and time passing” is evident straightaway, from the album title and the first line of the first song through the final lyric of the record. Never before in his storied career has Chapman gazed so steadily into the abyss of time lost and regained; never before has he engaged so intimately with his legacy and the changing meanings of his own music over time. That he manages to do so without succumbing to nostalgia or sentimentality bears testament to the steely fortitude of his ruminative, tough-minded songs, which survey both inscape and landscape with the same stoical detachment. With 50, Chapman faces mortality with both guitar and chainsaw in hand, and endures. It’s the unguarded sound of Orpheus descending, the snake riding the guitar down the river Styx and returning upstream to tell his story. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":50383994716491,"sku":"1003581","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP","offer_id":50383994814795,"sku":"1003580","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/5765680e-e6ee-4ae4-9787-f486a872a002_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726282144"},{"product_id":"true-north-2","title":"True North","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe masterful follow-up to his universally celebrated 2017 album \u003ci\u003e50\u003c\/i\u003e, Michael Chapman’s \u003ci\u003eTrue North\u003c\/i\u003e finds the elder statesman of British song writing and guitar plumbing an even deeper deep and honing an ever keener edge to his iconic writing. This authoritative set of predominantly new, and utterly devastating, songs hews to a more intimate sonic signature—more atmospheric, textural, and minimalist than \u003ci\u003e50\u003c\/i\u003e, stately and melancholy in equal measure. Recorded in rural West Wales, \u003ci\u003eTrue North\u003c\/i\u003e unflinchingly surveys home and horizon, traveling from the Bahamas to Texas to the Leeds of Chapman’s childhood, haunted by the mirages of memory and intimations of mortality. Joining him on this introspective journey is a cast of old friends and new disciples: once again Steve Gunn produces and plays guitar, and fellow UK song writing hero Bridget St John sings, collaborating with cellist Sarah Smout and legendary pedal steel player BJ Cole, who has accompanied everyone from John Cale to Scott Walker, Elton John to Terry Allen, Felt to Björk.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhereas \u003ci\u003e50\u003c\/i\u003e featured two new songs among radical reinterpretations of material from Chapman’s deep catalogue, \u003ci\u003eTrue North\u003c\/i\u003e includes twice as many new numbers among its quiver of eleven arrows - \u003ci\u003eIt’s Too Late, Eleuthera\u003c\/i\u003e, the fiery \u003ci\u003eBluesman\u003c\/i\u003e, and slow-rolling album centre piece \u003ci\u003eTruck Song \u003c\/i\u003e- confirming the exultant return of Chapman the songwriter. The other songs were selected from various obscure corners of Chapman’s vast catalogue (\u003ci\u003eYouth Is Wasted on the Young\u003c\/i\u003e was previously recorded with Thurston Moore and Jim O’Rourke for a compilation, for example.) In these renderings they receive their definitive treatments, utterly transformed.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCD - Six Panel Gatefold Sleeve.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLP - 140 Gram Black Vinyl with Download.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLP+ - Limited 140 Gram Red Wine Coloured Vinyl with Download.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"LP.","offer_id":50383995208011,"sku":"1052219","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50383995044171,"sku":"1052217","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP","offer_id":50383995502923,"sku":"1052218","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/abaf27b4-b5af-4aaf-93c6-eedc2d3b00c1_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726282180"},{"product_id":"imitation-of-war-2","title":"Imitation of War","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe first Itasca record in over four years begins, in “Milk,” with a dream of Genevieve, “the myth in the mirror’s gleam” perhaps, on this faith-haunted album, a reference to the fifth-century saint, or the chaste, cave-dwelling heroine of medieval legend. It ends with Olympia, standing at the shore maybe, among these myth-haunted songs, a reference to the ancient Greek sacred site, or, considering the artist narrator of the title track, to Édouard Manet’s revolutionary 1863 painting of a defiant sex worker. Across its suite of smoky nocturnes, Imitation of War finds Los Angeles-based songwriter, singer, and guitarist Kayla Cohen continually embracing the tangled ambiguities of its evocative title, with its suggestions of artfulness, artifice, and antagonism alike.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAptly, the song “Imitation of War” maps the range of the eponymous record’s domain, in which Cohen surveys, with refreshing urgency and a refined sonic palette, mythologies and psychologies both classical and deeply personal. Her characteristically ethereal vocals precipitate, among orange and laurel trees, upon rockier terrain than ever before, negotiating a “muse’s crown” and “a snare set by the devil.” The uneasy idyll, set to a brisker tempo and more spirited and spacious band-centered arrangement than most anything on \u003ci\u003eSpring\u003c\/i\u003e (2019) or \u003ci\u003eOpen to\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eChance\u003c\/i\u003e (2016), her prior two albums with Paradise of Bachelors, captures the flexibility and finesse Cohen wrings from reduction. Distilled to an oceanic essence of guitars, bass, drums, and vocals, Imitation of War is simultaneously (and somewhat counterintuitively) her loosest, leanest, and most liberatingly unclad album and her most theatrical set of songs and performances to date. “Molière’s Reprise,” named for the seventeenth-century French playwright, sets the mise en scene: like the apple tree that hangs on \/ the curtains rise, I sing my song \/ myth changes to an actor’s call the bell rings, the curtains fall \/ and storyless I’m off.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis kind of allegorical theatricality manifests not only in the redolent, if sometimes cryptically allusive (and intentionally Jungian), symbolism and subject matter which includes El Dorado, Circe, and Orion in addition to the aforementioned cast of muses, saints, and devils, at play in night and nature but likewise in the immediacy of its inky, glammy production. Cohen began writing several of these songs, notably “Tears on Sky Mountain,” in the fall of 2020, while she was recording with Gun Outfit (with whom she plays bass) in Pine Flat, California, near Sequoia National Forest. A nearby forest fire darkened the day into an eerie, eternal gloaming, ominously masking and unmasking the moon above the redwoods a menace and color palette that shaded the resulting songs.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEngineered and co-produced by Robbie Cody of the bands Wand and Behavior, whom Cohen credits with helping to instill a newfound levity and sense of fun in the recording process, \u003ci\u003eImitation of War\u003c\/i\u003e features both Cody’s bandmates Evan Backer and Evan Burrows and Cohen’s regular collaborator and bandmate Daniel Swire, also of Gun Outfit. Cody proved instrumental in shaping the elemental, guitar-centric arrangements to achieve what he refers to as “an economy of sounds.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCohen played all the guitar parts herself, largely on her 1971 Gibson SG-100 the acoustic instrumental sketch “Interlude,” the ballad “Dancing Woman,” and the portrait in miniature “Olympia” are exquisite exceptions showcasing her deft command of the instrument. Nowhere is this confidence and lyricism more evident than on the record’s sublime nine-and-a-half-minute centerpiece “Easy Spirit,” the incendiary, downshifting dynamics and painterly solos of which radically expand her prior folk-inflected guitarist touchstones Michael Chapman, Mike Cooper, Meg Baird into the rarefied rock-and-roll strata inhabited by Jerry Garcia, Phil Lynott, and Tom Verlaine. These ten sturdy set-pieces represent the most smolderingly electric guitar-forward recordings of Itasca’s deepening catalog.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCohen explains the titular simulation as the “performance of war postures” evident at every scale of human and animal life. But it could just as easily apply to the revelation that, with \u003ci\u003eImitation of War\u003c\/i\u003e, Itasca has finally come to inhabit fully the staged postures toward which former records gestured. She sounds more herself, more confidently authorial than the longing protagonist of her earlier work. No imitation, formal or emotional, of former self or imagined other, remains. It’s a self-knowing sentiment implied in the lyrics of “El Dorado”: I knew the road to my El Dorado \/ but I was caught looking at the weeds.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eInstead, now, as she reflects a couple verses later, her eyes are out of the weeds and on her characters, where “daylight shines on her theater.” Or as she sings at the close of the pastoral “Under Gates of Cobalt Blue”: and it makes me laugh \/ and cry out and laugh again the era’s through \/ but the story will not end.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50384091316555,"sku":"2170227","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50384091185483,"sku":"2170226","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Imitation_of_War_1b5dc5be_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726286787"},{"product_id":"what-in-the-natural-world","title":"What in the Natural World","description":"\u003cp\u003eEntrancing guitarist and singer Jake Xerxes Fussell follows his celebrated self-titled debut (produced by William Tyler) with a moving new album of \u003ci\u003eNatural Questions\u003c\/i\u003e in the form of transmogrified folk\/blues koans. This time these radiant ancient tunes tone several shades darker while amplifying their absurdist humor, illuminating our national, and psychic, predicaments. Featuring art by iconic painter Roger Brown and contributions from three notable Nathans - Nathan Bowles (Steve Gunn), Nathan Salsburg (Alan Lomax Archive), and Nathan Golub (Mountain Goats) - as well as Joan Shelley and Casey Toll (Mt. Moriah). It’s the result of a lifetime dedicated to apprenticeships with master storytellers, from Piedmont blueswomen Precious Bryant and Etta Baker to documentary artists Les Blank and Art Rosenbaum. So if \u003ci\u003eWhat in the Natural World\u003c\/i\u003e feels both several shades darker, and unsettlingly funnier, than Jake’s self-titled 2015 debut, you need only look around at our national predicament in 2017 for clues. Since then Jake has played around the country, opening for Wilco, dueting with Tyler, and touring with Mt. Moriah, Nathan Bowles, and Daniel Bachman … and the territory he’s traversed, for many of our fellow citizens, doesn’t brook much hope. Unlike his debut, the majority of these songs are not nominally traditional; they don’t hail from what Jake calls “the weird void of folk anonymity and the dark, fertile past.” Five of nine are attributed to specific artists, both canonical (Duke Ellington) and obscure (Helen Cockram), and all are recast in vibrant, assured recordings that elide genres and dissolve the false binaries of tradition and innovation, folk and modern, old and new. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"LP","offer_id":50384100196683,"sku":"1008308","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50384100360523,"sku":"1008309","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/290ab9c8-acf2-40b9-be01-4c297fc99a3d_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726287094"},{"product_id":"shone-a-rainbow-light-on","title":"Shone a Rainbow Light On","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe debut recording by Setting, a trio comprising Nathan Bowles (solo\/trio, Pelt, Black Twig Pickers); Jaime Fennelly (Mind Over Mirrors, Peeesseye); and Joe Westerlund (solo, Califone, Sylvan Esso, Jake Xerxes Fussell).\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSetting, befitting its name which can be read as noun or verb, and simultaneously suggests the sun, or any star in the firmament from our earthbound perspective; a story and its surroundings, its scenic context or mise en scène; or a psychedelic experience, as in the prescription to mind one’s “set and setting” arose outdoors, uncontained and unconstrained by architecture. The group’s debut recording Shone a Rainbow Light On traverses textural, phosphorescent topography with a certified organic folk-engine. Kosmische correspondences are inevitable and valid, but also somewhat deceptive, given this meditative music’s terrestrial rootedness in the familiar natural world, more in native humus and humidity than in outer space. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFueled by a vibratory hybrid of acoustic and electronic instrumentation, these four stately longform pieces sound like a UFO slowly sinking into a peat bog (or, as we call it in North Carolina, a pocosin). \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAn instrumental trio comprising Nathan Bowles (solo\/trio, Pelt, Black Twig Pickers) on strings, keys, and percussion; Jaime Fennelly (Mind Over Mirrors, Peeesseye) on harmoniums, synthesizers, and piano zither; and Joe Westerlund (solo, Califone, Sylvan Esso, Jake Xerxes Fussell) on drums, percussion, and metallophones, Setting established its own setting and found its footing in regularly scheduled improvisational sessions outside Westerlund’s home in Durham, North Carolina, beginning in 2021. The three players began as two, in the context of occasional Bowles and Westerlund percussion duo performances dating back to 2018. Fennelly provided the initial impetus to gather and play together with intentionality and discipline, as well as an harmonic adhesive and thickening agent in the grain and gravity of his harmonium and synthesizer. As always, Bowles’s background as a pianist and drummer informs his approach to banjo, imparting a woodiness, a piney verticality and resinous tang. Westerlund’s training with Milford Graves is apparent in his polyrhythmic flow and its correspondences to human circulatory and corporeal rhythms. They recorded their collective discoveries with engineer Nick Broste in the spring of 2022.The record begins, like the group’s name, and like the language of its unique instrumental interplay, with ambiguous grammar: “We Center,” the first and longest track at thirteen and a half minutes, builds patiently to a percolating climax of tidal heaving, with ceremonial connotations. “Zoetropics,” the shortest piece, follows, offering a more diaphanous counterpoint to the density of its predecessor. The zithery, shivering “A Sun Harp,” its title redolent of Sun Ra, showcases Westerlund’s unfettered drumming, which skitters restlessly until anchored, at its conclusion, by a minor bass progression. Finally, “Fog Glossaries” exhales through the maritime and meteorological evocations of its title, distant buoys clanging.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAlthough certainly elements and strategies of so-called ambient and drone musical traditions are invoked and deployed, those diffuse terms feel inadequate to describe everything else happening here: the devotion[1]al valences, the minimalist rigor, and even submarine jazz inclinations perceptible beneath the surface. Throughout this four-movement program, which invites deep listening, it is often difficult to differentiate individual instruments from the massed choir of the group’s unified sonic presence. At times what sound like field recordings cicadas, birds, wind, water splash out of this slow but powerful current, only to be revealed as overtones produced by harmonium, banjo, or cymbals. Setting’s sound is fundamentally synthetic in the sense of synthesis, not artifice—in a manner remarkable for its almost entirely acoustic arsenal of instrumentation, often registering as the product of a single alien technology, perhaps the rainbow lights of that bog-marooned UFO. (“Setting,” of course, can also refer to a machine’s variable operational amplitude its temperature, volume, speed, elevation, etc.)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSometimes the most seemingly extraterrestrial lifeforms are in fact our unfamiliar earthbound neighbors. Despite the destruction of many such habitats, the coastal plains of eastern, tidewater North Carolina is home to more pocosins freshwater, evergreen wetlands with deep, acidic, sandy, peat soils than anywhere else in the world. These threatened peat-bog ecosystems are the only native environment to sustain the carnivorous Venus flytrap, among other oddities. The sonic ecosystem of Setting similarly deep, acidic, and boggy contains equivalent wonders, savage and delicate, for listeners willing to take the time to sink.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor fans of Popol Vuh, Brian Eno’s Ambient 4, Harmonia, The Necks.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50393542295883,"sku":"2049576","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50393542164811,"sku":"2049574","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Setting_-_Shone_a_Rainbow_Light_On_03c226de_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726420663"},{"product_id":"good-and-green-again","title":"Good And Green Again","description":"\u003cp\u003eJake Xerxes Fussell’s fourth album finds the acclaimed folksong interpreter, guitarist, and singer navigating fresh sonic and compositional landscapes on the most conceptually focused, breathtakingly rendered, and enigmatically poignant record of his wondrous catalog. Produced by James Elkington and featuring formidable players both familiar (Casey Toll, Libby Rodenbough) and new (Joe Westerlund, Bonnie “Prince” Billy), it includes Jake’s first original compositions; atmospheric arrangements with pedal steel, horns, and strings.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor fans of Bob Dylan, John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, Ry Cooder, Michael Chapman, Jim Dickinson, Michael Hurley, The Youngbloods, James Elkington, Nathan Salsburg and Bonnie “Prince” Billy.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"Black | LP","offer_id":50402367373643,"sku":"1136678","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50402366062923,"sku":"1136679","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/2d391695-91eb-485e-99c9-cc9e117e955e_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726542880"},{"product_id":"gonna-california-2","title":"Gonna California","description":"\u003cp\u003eRIYL: Dave Alvin, Ryan Bingham, Bobby Bare, David Byrne, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Guy Clark, the Chicks, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, Joe Ely, Little Feat…\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe first-ever release of the long-lost first-ever studio recordings by the internationally celebrated visual artist and iconoclastic musician whose work bridges the disparate worlds of contemporary art and country music. The deluxe gatefold 7\" vinyl edition, limited to 500 copies, features recently rediscovered and restored early (and superior) mixes of both songs; a printed inner sleeve with original liner notes by Allen and an excerpt from the book; a lyrics insert; and Allen’s contemporaneous visual art in an arresting package. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eReleased in conjunction with the publication of Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen, by Brendan Greaves (New York: Hachette Books, 2024). Gonna California imagines an alternate reality where Allen's long-lost first studio recordings, captured with a full band in LA in 1968, saw a proper release. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"Black 7\"","offer_id":50402507030859,"sku":"2179453","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Terry_Allen_-_Gonna_California_7_1b2888d6_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726547765"},{"product_id":"lubbock-on-everything","title":"Lubbock (On Everything)","description":"\u003cp\u003eLegendary Texan artist Terry Allen occupies a unique position straddling the frontiers of country music and visual art; he has worked with everyone from Guy Clark to David Byrne to Lucinda Williams, and his artwork resides in museums worldwide. Widely acclaimed as a masterpiece, his deeply moving (and hilarious) satirical second album, a complex memory palace to his West Texas hometown Lubbock, is often cited as the urtext of alt-country. Produced in collaboration with the artist and meticulously remastered from the original analog tapes, this is the definitive edition: the first to correct the tape speed inconsistencies evident on all prior versions; the first U.S. vinyl reissue; the first CD to restore the full track listing; and the first to contextualize the record within Allen's 50-year career. Just four years separate Terry Allen's first and second albums and consecutive masterpieces, \u003ci\u003eJuarez \u003c\/i\u003e(1975) and \u003ci\u003eLubbock (on everything) \u003c\/i\u003e (1979), but the two records inhabit completely different systems of world building, wildly divergent in terms of sonics, scope, and circumstance. Arguably Allen's most widely beloved and most easily approachable album - it contains his 2 best-known and most covered songs, \u003ci\u003eAmarillo Highway (for Dave Hickey)\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eNew Delhi Freight Train\u003c\/i\u003e (famously first recorded by Little Feat) - Lubbock (on everything) is his complex memory palace to his West Texas hometown. Compared to its sparsely produced predecessor, it represents a much more collaborative, even collective, effort with a local Lubbock studio band, complete with rhythm section, pedal steel, fiddle, and horns, and helmed by master guitarist Lloyd Maines, who became Terry's frequent musical partner, producer, and the de facto bandleader of the Panhandle Mystery Band. Even if Allen's music is more accurately described as art-country, Lubbock (on everything) sowed the seeds of alt-country's emergence a decade later. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e2LP - Deluxe 2LP package includes tip-on gatefold jacket with lyrics, printed inner sleeves, download code, and 28 page book with related artwork and photos, an oral history by Allen, and essays by David Byrne, Lloyd Maines, and PoB.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e2CD - Double CD edition features replica jacket, sleeves, and tipped-in 52 page book.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"CD | x2","offer_id":50402717237579,"sku":"406273","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"LPx2","offer_id":50402713829707,"sku":"406272","price":42.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/c9442cdf-bb75-4b9d-8e97-3c2d6da9c5bf_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726554629"},{"product_id":"all-gist-2","title":"All Gist","description":"\u003cp\u003eRIYL: Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Stefan Grossman, Mike Cooper, Richard Thompson, Steve Gunn, Neneh Cherry. The duo's third album of instrumental guitar recordings pushes their sinuous compositions into labyrinthine new shapes, interlocking and interlocutory, supported by a cast of stellar collaborators. Interwoven among the dazzling original pieces is a fascinating array of covers, ranging from traditional Breton dance tunes to a deconstruction of Neneh Cherry's \"Buffalo Stance.\" How it was made - in two segments of three days, one in early Winter, one in late Winter, in Chicago - is a testament to James and Nathan’s enthusiasm for the project. As they’d done on their previous two duo records, each brought fragments of varying lengths to the table (literally James and his family’s kitchen table) and, in varying degrees of frenzy, built songs out of them. Some, like “Numb Limbs,” took several intense hours of tinkering, mostly for Nathan to carve sympathetic designs around the knotty edifice James had constructed—thus its title. Others, like “Death Wishes to Kill” (a phrase lifted from a T.F. Powys novel the two had each recently read and loved) took its feverish shape in forty minutes full of shrieks and groans and hysterical laughs hard-stopped by James rushing out, late, to get his son from school. The acceptable window for coffee consumption was pushed to its reasonable limits, and then beyond them, slamming up against a reasonable hour to start drinking beer. As with Ambsace, the covers on All Gist outline a Venn diagram of Elkington and Salsburg’s abiding interests. On one end is a faithful arrangement of English composer Howard Skempton’s resplendent “Well, Well, Cornelius” (1999); on the other is a composite of two traditional Breton dance tunes (pieced together from Canadian, Irish, and Breton sources); and in the middle where else is a transmutation of Neneh Cherry’s monumental “Buffalo Stance” (1988), a song that no one aside from James and Nathan would ever have thought for a moment could or should be made into fodder for two acoustic guitars. But it was, and with delicacy and joy and sincere reverence for the original, which they painstakingly deconstructed. All Gist perhaps demonstrates more than anything the precarious balance struck between what the Elkington-Salsburg duo is exemplified by cramming to compose or remember guitar parts in James’s kitchen and what the duo could be if it was the engine of a small orchestra in a government-funded arts enclave in some Central European country … where they’d be contractually obliged to perform in matching well-tailored suits. Their melody-first sensibilities are perfectly suited to each other … playfully complex guitar work that sounds as if it was tossed off in an afternoon of whiskey and laughs. – NPR\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50405268750667,"sku":"2188110","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50405269143883,"sku":"2188125","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/James_Elkington_and_Nathan_Salsburg_-_All_Gist_8fe42b0c_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726575081"},{"product_id":"jake-xerxes-fussell","title":"Jake Xerxes Fussell","description":"\u003cp\u003eProduced by and featuring Willliam Tyler on guitar with Chris Scruggs (steel guitaf, bass. mandolin Bonnie \"Prince\" Billy, Marty Stuart). Brian Kotzur (drums: Silver Jews), and Hoot Hester (fiddle: Bill Monroe, Ray Charles). Jake Xexes Fussel's debut transmutes ten arcane folk and blues tunes into vibey cosmic laments and crooked riverine laments. As a teenager Fussell began playing with elder musicians in the Chattahoochee Valley including Piedmont blues legend Precious Bryant, Alabama bluesman George Daniel, Jimmie Tarlton as well as accompanying Etta James in North Carolina. 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Named for The Shades, the Reading, UK folk club where Mike Cooper regularly performed, and which housed prodigy Derek Hall—“a guitarist who could actually match Davey Graham both in technique and musical ideas” —this super rare EP was issued in 1965.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"7\"","offer_id":50441284387147,"sku":"1013323","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}]},{"product_id":"the-neon-gate","title":"The Neon Gate","description":"\u003cp\u003eAfter 3 years of silence, the Canadian band Nap Eyes have returned with their own meditations on the monstrous and familiar (or the monstrously familiar). \u003ci\u003eThe Neon Gate\u003c\/i\u003e, their metamorphic 5th long-player, collects a cache of 9 fascinating reveries recorded over the 4 years since their last album, \u003ci\u003eSnapshot of a Beginner\u003c\/i\u003e (5 of which were released episodically throughout the spring and summer of 2024). “I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness,” the album’s colossal penultimate track, is, along with “Demons,” their languorous adaptation of a phantasmagorical poem by Russian Romantic Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), one of two ambitious but adept adaptations in which singer and principal songwriter Nigel Chapman unravels knotty, century-old verse into a fluid, memorable melodies across the loom of the band’s pulsing instrumental syncretism.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis fresh engagement with narrative and lyric formality complements the 7 original songs on the record, which reveal classic Naps touchstones but also evidence of divergent impulses toward nonlinear abstraction and longform improvisational composition (resulting in their most discursive, deconstructed, and deliquescent songs to date). With The Neon Gate Nap Eyes have transmuted, as has their understanding of what a song is, what it can do, where it might go.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat all sounds deadly serious, but these songs are also as funny, quirky, and touching as ever, juxtaposing absurdist Middle Ages settings with concisely rendered quotidian details of journeys between earthly and cosmic planes (see the picaresque “Passageway” in particular). Castles and mystical critters abound, and faith in chemistry, astrophysics, and naturalistic observation tempers the spiraling doubt that can accompany deep cogitation. So the humble titular birds of opening track “Eight Tired Starlings” (Star Birds) must navigate light beams, curving spacetime, gravitational waves, and “billion-years-distant” galactic collisions. The pocket light beam, “complacent wizard,” and “breakfast plate” of eight-minute closing track “Isolation” (written, naturally, during COVID-19 pandemic lockdown) catalyze an uncomfortable revelation in the form of a one-liner: “how to get crushed under a gigantic \/ metaphysical rock.” In between, piloted by the band’s subtle, synthetic rhythms, “Feline Wave Race” emerges from Chapman’s current improvisational writing practice and experiments with spontaneous composition. We are transported, in the company of a digital wildcat, from deep space through telescoping deep time “when the gas clouds \/ pass away and \/ the molecules \/ distribute \/ all across the fabric \/ of the horizon” from “the edge of the moat \/ of the 13th-century castle” to 1996, the year Nintendo released the jetskiing video game Wave Race 64.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe recording methodology informed how the other band members Seamus Dalton, Josh Salter, and Brad Labelle, often supplementing or supplanting their customary respective roles on drums, bass, and guitar with synth work and drum programming kept pace with this dream logic. Nigel recorded demos many involving loops and the band built recursive fractal patterns upon those skeletal armatures, often remotely (sometimes with assistance from engineer René Wilson). The origins of even the most otherworldy songs were often intimately domestic. Although most vocals were tracked live with the band, Nigel recorded his vocals for “Feline Wave Race” and “Dark Mystery Enigma Bird,” two disjunctive fables about animals told through stream-of-consciousness narratives, in a blanket-draped children’s cardboard castle in his parents’ basement.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen they exist at all verse-chorus-verse structures often disintegrate in favor of an unhurried unfolding, an emphasis on marking, attenuating, and collapsing time over standard musical notions of progression or refrain, a foregrounding of ellipsis over resolution. Only the careening “Ice Grass Underpass,” written in 2009, predating the band’s existence but prefiguring the sonic signature of their foundational first two albums, closely resembles, with Labelle’s snowy guitar squall (also evident in his lacerating, atonal leads scribbling through “Tangent Dissolve”), their older material. Speaking of snow: half-blinded by a blizzard and in danger of losing their way and plunging “headlong into some damned ravine,” the “master” and coachman of “Demons” are first mystified and then petrified by eerie apparitions of uncanny but uncertain spectral nature. “Is there a witch who is getting married?” the coachman speculates earnestly. “Some goblin they’re burying?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor fans of Yo La Tengo, The Only Ones, Swell Maps, The Modern Lovers, Felt, The Clean, The Verlaines, The Go-Betweens, Kurt Vile, Courtney Barnett, Belle and Sebastian, all things Lou Reed.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50447177810251,"sku":"2213459","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50447177613643,"sku":"2213458","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Nap_Eyes_-_The_Neon_Gate_ff709109_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727073019"},{"product_id":"life-and-another","title":"Life, and Another","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe magical Mega Bog returns with another fantastical off-world transmission, the most sophisticated, exploratory, and accessible statement yet from surrealist songwriter and avant-pop prospector Erin Birgy. Featuring James Krivchenia (Big Thief), who co-produced, and Zach Burba (iji) among its cast of vibrant players, Life, and Another bristles with painterly technicolor surface textures while plumbing fathomless depths of feeling.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCohabiting with Life, and Another’s co-producer, engineer, and percussionist James Krivchenia (Big Thief) in a small cabin near the Rio Grande off of NM State Route 68, Birgy found herself often alone, suspended between their separate touring schedules. In these silent time passages, Birgy experienced a complete loss of self amid the expanse. Frequently thinking about death in the middle of nowhere opened a familiar black hole of troubling projections, and any desire to find freedom or remain positive continued to fold back into self-destructive thought and fear. New, northern landscapes, like the woods and rivers outside of Seattle, Washington, provided inspiration during odd sublets in the area. Dark as everything may actually be, Birgy always manages to stay with trouble and conjure the extraordinary resulting music.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRecorded over several sessions in various studios Life bleeds with instrumental contributions from longtime and new collaborators, including Aaron Otheim, Zach Burba of iji, Will Segerstrom, Matt Bachmann, Andrew Dorset of Lake, James Krivchenia of Big Thief, Meg Duffy of Hand Habits, Jade Tcimpidis, Alex Liebman, and co-engineers Geoff Treager and Phil Hartunian. Listeners know by now they can trust Mega Bog to continuously lead them into deeper and wilder, spiritual pop territories. Skittering piano glissandos, haunting psychic background voices, and tequila-inspired improvisations creep and crawl over the dark-night-of-the-soul rock and roll dreamscape, before vanishing to make way for invocations of quiet clarity and living-breathing instrumental passages. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor fans of Laurie Anderson, Kate Bush, Kevin Ayers, Bridget St John, David Bowie, Cate Le Bon, Aldous Harding, Big Thief and Nico.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"Black | LP.","offer_id":50455685857611,"sku":"1123468","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"Black | LP","offer_id":50455688970571,"sku":"1130957","price":22.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50455687692619,"sku":"1123467","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/b2d5b5e3-a3b7-4345-ad03-34e7b7284b68_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727193453"},{"product_id":"way-out-weather","title":"Way Out Weather","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eWay Out Weather \u003c\/i\u003ecompletes Steve Gunn's satisfying transformation into a mature songwriter, singer and bandleader of subtlety and authority. The critically acclaimed \u003ci\u003eTime Off\u003c\/i\u003e (2013), his first full-band album highlighting his vocals represented the culmination of Steve's steady 15 year migration from the fringes of the guitar avant-garde, where he is regarded as a prodigy, and towards his especial style of more traditionally informed songcraft. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAn enthusiastic and generous collaborator - recently he has partnered with Kurt Vile, Michael Chapman, Mike Cooper, The Black Twig Pickers, Cian Nugent - Gunn's WOW band comprised longtime musical brothers Jason Meagher (bass, drones, engineering), Justin Tripp (bass, guitars, keys, production), and John Truscinski (drums), in addition to newcomers Nathan Bowles (drums, pianos, keys: Black Twig Pickers, Pelt); James Elkiington (guitar, lap steel, dobro: Freakwater, Jeff Tweedy); Mary Lattimore (harp, keys: Thurston Moore, Kurt Vile); and Jimmy Sei Tang (synths, electronics: Psychic Ills, Rhyton). \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA radical widescreen evolution, \u003ci\u003eWay Out Weather\u003c\/i\u003e is Steve's career defining statement to date. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"LP","offer_id":50460553642315,"sku":"378369","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/0c4cbfb2-ba3c-4032-a5b4-e65a58ce5c84_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727234320"},{"product_id":"crazy-horse-never-died-2","title":"Crazy Horse Never Died","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe Choctaw, Assiniboine, and Texan poet, journalist, visual artist, American Indian Movement activist, and musician Roxy  Gordon (First Coyote Boy) (1945–2000) was above all a storyteller, known primarily as a writer of inimitable style and unvarnished candor, whose wide-ranging work encompassed poetry, short fiction, essays, memoirs, journalism, and criticism. Over the course of his career he recorded six albums, wrote six books, and published hundreds of shorter texts in outlets ranging from Rolling Stone and The Village Voice to the Coleman Chronicle and Democrat-Voice, in addition to founding and operating, with his wife Judy Gordon, Wowapi Press and the underground country music journal Picking Up the Tempo. Along the way he cultivated close friendships with fellow Texan songwriters such as Lubbockites Terry Allen, Butch Hancock, and Tommy X. Hancock, as well as Ray Wylie Hubbard, Billy Joe Shaver, and, most famously, Townes Van Zandt, whom he called his brother. Although his work covered a vast array of topics exploring strata personal, local, global, and cosmic alike, Gordon’s primary subject as a writer, musician, and visual artist was always American Indian culture, specifically the ways it collided and coexisted with European American culture in the South and West and within the context of his own life and braided identity.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe ten songs on \u003ci\u003eCrazy Horse Never Died\u003c\/i\u003e, his first officially released and distributed album, were recorded in Dallas in 1988. “Songs” is perhaps an imprecise taxonomy for what Roxy captured on this and his other albums, all of which remain out of print or were released in instantly obscure limited editions of homebrew cassettes and CD-R’s. (Paradise of Bachelors plans to reissue remastered, expanded editions of his catalog; Crazy Horse is the first.) He only occasionally attempted to sing, and his musical recordings are primarily corollaries of, and vehicles for, his poems. His sharp West Texan drawl, tinged by formative years of reservation living in Montana and unmistakable once you hear it high, lonesome, flat, and cold-blooded as a bare rusty blade instead patiently unfurls in skewed sheets of anecdotal verse and discursive narrative rants. His songs are essentially recitations over backing tracks of fingerpicked guitars, rubbery washtub bass, and buzzing, oscillating keyboards. On the stark yellow and red jacket of Crazy Horse, which he designed himself, Gordon describes these recordings as innately ambivalent in terms of form, content, and identity: These are poems and\/or songs about the American West, white and Indian. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eCrazy Horse Never Died\u003c\/i\u003e comprises songs that span the personal and political arcs of his writing practice and the poles of his native and white ancestries. His introduction to the almost-title track in the strikingly illustrated poetry chapbook supplement to the album (included in the LP edition) draws explicit parallels between the oppression and displacement of Palestinians by Zionists and the similar treatment of Native Americans by Europeans, justifying the historical necessity of resistance to racist imperialism through terrorism.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor fans of Terry Allen, Leonard Cohen, Willie Dunn, John Trudell, Buffy St. Marie and Townes Van Zandt. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":50466080489803,"sku":"2019269","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP","offer_id":50466080719179,"sku":"2019270","price":34.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Roxy_Gordon_-_Crazy_Horse_Never_Died_eb9f5f61_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727304386"},{"product_id":"life-and-death-in-paradise-and-milan-live-acoustic-2018","title":"Life and Death in Paradise and Milan Live Acoustic 2018","description":"\u003cp\u003eMike Cooper wrote his final songwriter record, a suite of gloaming glam-rock anthems performed with a spiritual jazz trio, while living on the Costa Tropical of Granada, Spain, an era when he was considering retiring from music altogether. A chance encounter and a last-ditch record deal convinced him to make one last album, which he recorded in 1974 at Pathway Studios in London, with “The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World,” featuring the inventive South African jazz rhythm section of Louis Moholo and Harry Miller with UK saxophonist Mike Osborne.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis first-ever reissue includes a bonus CD of Milan Live Acoustic 2018, a previously unreleased solo set that represents Cooper’s return, after forty-four years pursuing free improvisation and electronics, to a new, deconstructed approach to singing, steel guitar, and songcraft.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor fans of Derek Bailey, David Bowie, Tim Buckley, John Cale, Michael Chapman, Lol Coxhill, Davey Graham, Steve Gunn, Van Morrison, Louis Moholo, Mike Osborne, Lou Reed, Sonny Sharrock and Television.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe deluxe LP+CD edition also features a six-panel insert with additional artwork and an essay by the artist about both records. 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Once a vast swampland, now a ghost-choked locale. This is the wetlands landscape Nathan Bowles conjures with this cinematic suite of contemplatice set pieces. LP - Vinyl is 150 gram vinyl with full colour inserts and download code.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"LP","offer_id":50492674965835,"sku":"381824","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/6076de3d-6ceb-4155-a904-b7d405b69297_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727692973"},{"product_id":"whine-of-the-mystic","title":"Whine of the Mystic","description":"\u003cp\u003eNova Scotia's Nap Eyes is the greatest band you've never heard, and Whine of the Mystic is their first full-length album, a brilliant small-batch brew of crooked, literate guitar pop refracted through the gray Halifax rain. Recorded live to tape with no overdubs, it's equal parts shambling and sophisticated, with one eye on the dirt and one trained on the starry firmament, inhabiting a skewed world where odes to NASA and the Earth's magnetic field coexist easily with songs about insomnia and drinking too much. Nap Eyes' keen sonic signature cruises briskly and beautifully along the dog-eared axes of jangle-jaded Oceanic pop music (The Clean, The Verlaines, The Go-Betweens), and through the backpages of Peter Perrett (The Only Ones) via all things Lou Reed without ever sounding very much like anything else happening today. Whine of the Mystic articulates the urgency of youthful grace. 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It's a natural progression for Toronto artist Tamara Lindeman's acclaimed songwriting practice. In excess virtue lies danger, or at least limits to pragmatic action - it's a lesson hard learned by anyone disillusioned by the erosion of youthful mythologies. Strict fealty to a fixed ideal of identity doesn't do us any favors as adults. Recorded at La Frette Studios just outside Paris in the winter of 2014, in close collaboration with Afie Jurvanen (Bahamas) and Robbie Lackritz (Feist), the record 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. In excess virtue lies danger, or at least limits to pragmatic action - it's a lesson hard learned by anyone disillusioned by the erosion of youthful mythologies. Strict fealty to a fixed ideal of identity doesn't do us any favors as adults. Recorded at La Frette Studios just outside Paris in the winter of 2014, in close collaboration with Afie Jurvanen (Bahamas) and Robbie Lackritz (Feist), the record 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.LP - With Download.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"LP | x2","offer_id":50493129687371,"sku":"388220","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50493131194699,"sku":"388221","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/9834bfb8-be8d-4717-a20d-afe49e274db1_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727695674"},{"product_id":"thought-rock-fish-scale","title":"Thought Rock Fish Scale","description":"\u003cp\u003eRecorded live to tape, with no overdubs, on the North Shore of Nova Scotia, Nap Eyes' quietly contemplative sophomore record refines and elaborates their debut, offering an airier, more spacious second chapter, a bracing blast of bright oceanic sunshine after the moonlit alleys of 'Whine of the Mystic'. But the briny, cold Atlantic roils beneath these exquisite, literate guitar pop songs, posing riddles about friendship, faith, mortality, and self-doubt. Like all of their recordings to date, the album is framed by a set of severe self-imposed strictures: a mere four days to capture as many songs as possible completely live, with no overdubs, to a temperamental old TEAC four-track 1\/4\" tape recorder. The result is a document pristine in its intentional imperfections. After the dark, drunken night of 'Whine of the Mystic' (recorded nocturnally in Montreal), 'Thought Rock Fish Scale' brings blinding sunlight and blue horizon to these elemental stories of water, fire, and spirit. Compared with its predecessor, this album is far less concerned with the effects of alcohol—excepting \"Click Clack,\" with its admission that \"Sometimes, drinking, I feel so happy but then \/ I can't remember why ... Sometimes, drinking, I don't know my best friend for my best friend\"—and more concerned with negotiating the mornings after, all the hungover or otherwise creaky, tentative new mornings of a life assembled from discrete days. Musically, a new delicacy and tautness manifest here as well, a patient willingness to wait; Josh Salter (bass), Seamus Dalton (drums), and Brad Loughead (lead guitar) exhibit consummate restraint. Sonic touchstones remain similar—The Go-Betweens (particularly Robert Forster's melancholic bite). 'Thought Rock Fish Scale' deploys the language of anxiety and self-reflection as a sort of symbolic vernacular. Nap Eyes make soul music, in the sense that their music describes, from a position of uneasy humility, the often mundane maintenance of the fragile human soul.... For fans of The Only Ones\/England's Glory, The Modern Lovers, The Clean, The Verlaines, The Go-Betweens, Bedhead, and all things Lou Reed. 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The current lineup likewise prominently features invaluable Nashville stalwarts Peter Stringer-Hye (The Paperhead) on additional vocals and rhythm guitar and polymath Mitch Jones (Fly Golden Eagle) on keyboards, as well as handling co-production and string arrangements on the record. That's Peter singing on \"She Takes Me There\" and \"Northern Country Scene,\" and providing honey to Joe's vinegar on \"Through the Seasons\"; his chugging rhythm parts allow Sean space to explore the stratosphere. Mitch's complex but understated organ and electric piano parts color and thicken things throughout, providing a subtle glaze to the proceedings. Lest you think Promised Land Sound is a band that aspires to sound like the sum of their record collections, think again: the fact is that there just aren't many other bands writing and inhabiting rock and roll songs of this scale and structural and performative sophistication. The Chiltonisms and chiaroscuro of \"She Takes Me There\" recall Big Star, but not so much in sound as in sentiment—the melancholy dislocation of a Southern band in a Southern city, but existing strangely out of time and pushing beyond geography. 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Widely celebrated as a masterpiece - arguably the greatest concept album of all time - his spare, haunting 1975 debut LP Juarez is a violent, fractured tale of the chthonic American Southwest and borderlands. Produced in collaboration with the artist and remastered from the original analog tapes, this is the definitive edition of the art-country classic: the first reissue on vinyl; the first to feature the originally intended artwork (including the lithographs that accompanied the first edition); and the first to contextualize the album within Allen's fifty-year art practice. Juarez is not just an album, at least not in any ordinary sense of the word. Songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen describes it instead as a \"haunting.\" For nearly five decades, Juarez has served as the elusive, enigmatic axis mundi of his artistic and musical practices. Never discrete or static, the Juarez mythos continually accretes a growing constellation of new meanings, mutations, and manifestations, defying linearity and finality, appearing as drawings, constructions, songs, prints, installations, texts, a screenplay, a musical theater piece (co-written with David Byrne), a one-woman stage play, and an NPR radio play (both starring his wife, the actor and writer Jo Harvey Allen). Forty years later, 'Juarez' is widely regarded as Allen's first masterpiece, timelessly relevant, resonating with works of film and literature as much as other music, recalling the existential violence of Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973) and informing successors like David Lynch's Wild at Heart (1990), Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy (1992-98), and Roberto Bolano's 2666 (2004). 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Though she began playing guitar at age thirteen, her songwriting idiom emerged gradually from her longstanding noise and drone practice. Her out-of-time recordings as Itasca—refined over the course of several releases, including the acclaimed 2014 LP Unmoored by the Wind (New Images)—reflects both this dislocated geography and her Janus-faced gaze towards both baroque, acid folk-inflected songcraft and deconstructive, textural sonics. Her adept fingerstyle guitar work—nimble but unshowy, always at the service of framing her plaintively unspooling modal progressions and gorgeous, moonlit voice—centers Itasca's melancholy pastorales in a hazy, heat-mirage space equally suggestive of familiarity and distance, community and anomie. 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On this third solo album, his most exquisite, immersive, and ambitious to date, he again augments his mesmeric clawhammer banjo pieces with piano, percussion, and vocals (mostly wordless, some wordy). The result showcases the full range of Bowles' compositional and performative versatility. Instead of the programmatic place-based narratives of Nansemond, the seven songs on Whole \u0026amp; Cloven offer a stoic meditation on absence, loss, and fragmentation, populating those experiential gaps - the weighty interstices and places in-between - with stillness and wonder. Whereas its predecessor was directly inspired by the mutating environment, and his mutating memories, of his childhood home on the fringes of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia, the new album turns inward, exploring inscapes rather than landscapes. Since Nansemond, Bowles has moved from the mountains of Blacksburg, Virginia - his longtime home - to the Piedmont city of Durham, North Carolina, an uprooting and displacement that perhaps precipitated the divergent iterations and forking paths on display here. Album centerpiece \"I Miss My Dog\" contains teeming multitudes of memory and regret in its eleven vaporous minutes, crawling from stately, deep-water soundings to torrents of hiccupping, densely woven banjo and piano latticework redolent of anxious longing. It sounds like storm-blown rain. As a whole (ahem), Whole \u0026amp; Cloven repeatedly swaps lenses, wide angle for macro, demonstrating a new comfort with long shots and close-ups alike. 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It seemed to resonate in both the sound of his new compositions - the icy limpidity of the arrangements, the snowy tumble of guitars and strings - and with his gnawing consideration of how much cultural upbringing brings to bear on one’s own creativity if given half a chance.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"LP","offer_id":50495810863435,"sku":"1012281","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50495813157195,"sku":"1012280","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/8a88f9c9-66f7-4095-9419-32945c397d29_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727714866"},{"product_id":"out-of-range","title":"Out of Range","description":"\u003cp\u003eTheir fifth LP ranks as their most brutally beautiful statement yet. 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She is joined on her fifth and finest album (and first for PoB) by members of Big Thief, Hand Habits, and iji, who help her spin a manic web of emotions into beautiful, abstract future poems and thrilling genre perversions.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe title of Mega Bog’s newest album \u003ci\u003eDolphine\u003c\/i\u003e is inspired by a myth that suggests that, as humankind evolved from sea creatures, some individuals chose not to leave the water and walk the earth, but rather to stay in the ocean and explore the darkness as dolphins. (The extra “e” was added to take the word out of the everyday, translating it into a potential futuristic dialect.) The songwriting was inspired by Erin’s own swim through a myriad of overwhelming emotions, including the ongoing mourning following the death of her childhood horse companion Rose, her navigation of the feelings and physicality of two abortions, and the hapless and shattering social, political, and environmental turmoil on the planet. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn October of 2016, Erin took her dark sketches to the Outlier Inn studio in Woodridge, NY, with a passionate crew of deeply bonded musicians. Together, they arranged and executed these eleven dizzy pop songs, live, over a tight seven days. The completed sound is thick and inviting. 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More urgent escape than fanciful escapade, the move from one Southwestern desert to another resulted from a set of dire circumstances, both personal and societal, not least of which was the sense, shared by many, that a sinister cabal of impaired lunatics had irredeemably poisoned the already sour well of our American discourse. She decided to drop out and dive deeper—hiking into the mountains, through fragrant juniper and piñon forests, past groves of golden cottonwoods, to the source of what she calls in the song “Cornsilk” with a nod to poet Clayton Eshleman “the canyoned river.” Inspired by the landscape and history of the Four Corners region, the resulting album, the sublime Spring—its title summoning both season and scarce local water sources—dowses a devotional path to high desert headwaters.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCohen followed some heavy footprints across the Sandia and Sangre de Cristo ranges. In the long American tradition of lighting out for the territories, many artists, particularly visual artists including Terry Allen, Georgia O’Keefe, Agnes Martin, Walter de Maria, Bruce Nauman, and Susan Rothenberg have famously sought refuge and inspiration in the Land of Enchantment. Captivating landscapes and the astonishing biodiversity aside (outside), foot-thick adobe walls provide a security and shelter insulation and isolation that can be hard to find in LA. With her studies of New Mexico’s long history and seismic geological and cultural changes, Cohen sought something different, more ancient—a hearth, a retreat from the noisy and noisome city, yes, but also a deeper historical understanding of urbanity and community, landscape and loss. (Chaco Canyon’s massive architectural complexes ranked as the largest buildings in North America until the late 19th century.)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHer investigations bore bright fruit in the form of an interpretive travelogue: Spring, suffused with mystery and a keenly evoked sense of place, contains Cohen’s most quietly dazzling, coherent, and self-assured set of songs to date. Having withdrawn from and returned to the city, she sounds more like herself than ever before. In the context of the album’s bolder arrangements, her gorgeous, lambent voice and helical fingerstyle guitar plumb new depths of expressivity, confidence, and wonder. Inflected with flourishes recalling the ’70s orchestrated concept albums from which it draws influence, Spring resembles an archeological excavation of Cohen’s own encanyoned style. She recorded unhurriedly, in piecemeal fashion, with various collaborators: first to two-inch tape at Minbal studio in Chicago, with Cooper Crain (Bitchin’ Bajas) engineering; then to quarter-inch tape at home, with a Tascam 388; and finally overdubbing at Tropico in Los Angeles, with Greg Hartunian. Daniel Swire (drums), Kayla’s bandmate in Gun Outfit, and Marc Riordan (piano) of Sun Araw provided the exquisitely delicate rhythm section; Dave McPeters once again contributed lightning-field flashes of pedal steel; and James Elkington arranged the subtly cinematic strings (played by Jean Cook.) Chris Cohen mixed, imparting some of his signature classic pop dynamics, which press beyond the sonic realm of the solitary singer-songwriter.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIf\u003ci\u003e Open to Chance\u003c\/i\u003e felt moonlit, spectral and spooky, Spring sounds positively auroral, luminous, a brisk early morning walk through lucid daylit dreams, a series of vivid visions in thrall to the dusty New Mexican terrain. By opening themselves to multivalent interpretations, these generous, sun-dappled songs hide nothing. An intentional narrative of discovery connects the sequence, from the beckoning highway apparition in \u003ci\u003eLily,\u003c\/i\u003e through the immersion in the \u003ci\u003eBlue Spring \u003c\/i\u003edug deep into the recesses of a cliffside cave, to the resigned farewell of\u003ci\u003e A’s Lament\u003c\/i\u003e (which ends, poignantly, with a blessing to a departed friend: “I just want you to be free”). Elsewhere the links to Cohen’s research are oblique, more atmospheric and impressionistic than explicit. She carefully claims no authority or answers, but instead offers a traveler’s tranquil observation and wide-eyed reflection, weaving together her questions about the relationships between the land and the Ancestral Puebloan culture that shaped it with her questions about her own cultural and ecological bearings. 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In a February 1981 letter to his friend and mentor, written shortly after the late 1980 release of his third album \u003ci\u003eSmokin the Dummy,\u003c\/i\u003e while he and his family were living in Fresno, California, Terry explains the genesis of the album title: Westermann died shortly after receiving this letter, enclosed with the LP, the minimalist black jacket of which Allen suggested that Cliff fold into a jaunty cardboard hat if he didn’t like the music. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHis first album to share top billing with the Panhandle Mystery Band, \u003ci\u003eDummy\u003c\/i\u003e documents a ferocious new band in fully telepathic, tornado-fueled flight, refining its caliber, increasing its range, and never looking down. Alongside the stalwart Maines brothers co-producer, guitarist, and all-rounder Lloyd, bassist Kenny, and drummer Donnie and mainstay Richard Bowden (who here contributes not only fiddle but also mandolin, cello, and “truck noise theory,” the big-rig doppler effect of Lloyd’s steel on “Roll Truck Roll”), new addition Jesse Taylor supplies blistering lead guitar, on loan from Joe Ely (who plays harmonica here). 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On his fourth album, acclaimed songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen contemplates kinship the ways sex and violence stitch and sever the ties of family, faith, and society with skewering satire and affection alike. \u003ci\u003eBloodlines\u003c\/i\u003e compiles thematically related but disparate recordings from miscellaneous sources both theatrical and historical: two songs written for plays; two full-band reprises of selections from \u003ci\u003eJuarez\u003c\/i\u003e; the irreverent hellfire-hitchhiker-on-highway ballad “Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy” (featuring Joe Ely); and the poignant eponymous ode to the arteries of ancestry and landscape (the debut recording of eight year-old Natalie Maines, later covered by Lucinda Williams). \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSince 1970, when they met in Allen’s studio in his hometown of Lubbock, Texas, one of songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen’s great foils and friends was the sometimes cantankerous but always brilliant art critic and writer Dave Hickey, with whom he sparred on topics musical, visual, and beyond (and to whom this reissue is dedicated in memoriam, in the wake of his passing in 2021.) Hickey, a fellow Texan paddling against the currents of the hermetic New York centric art world, was an accomplished songwriter in his own right, and he and Terry pushed each other to refine their respective practices. In 1983, the two were thick as thieves brothers in blood and Hickey’s wry but big-hearted presence haunts the history and periphery of \u003ci\u003eBloodlines\u003c\/i\u003e, the album Terry released in June of that year. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn a 1984 review of \u003ci\u003eBloodlines\u003c\/i\u003e, the L.A. Herald Examiner called Allen “one of the most compelling American songwriters working today … making the most unique art-pop of our time,” elsewhere comparing him not only to Moon Mullican and Jerry Lee Lewis, but also to the Velvet Underground and Philip Glass (probably the first time that unlikely quartet ever appeared together in one sentence). In 1983, against all odds, such sentiments were growing in underground prominence, as Allen’s records gained a fanatical word-of-mouth following they weren’t easy to find in those days. 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Although created half a year pre-pandemic, Castle deliberately pursued a minimalist, homebound, and solitary process that represented, for her musical practice, a radical reduction of scale, coupled with a telescopic expansion of scope. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe follow-up to her acclaimed 2018 record \u003ci\u003eAngels of Death, Monarch Season\u003c\/i\u003e is Castle’s private experiment on the effects of microgravity in this context, increased immediacy, intimacy, domesticity, simplicity, brevity, and directness on her music. As a distillation of the formal, compositional, and collaborative qualities of her previous work to the elemental the singular body, the shared Earth, the charged silence of nature at night \u003ci\u003eMonarch Season\u003c\/i\u003e transports the listener, from the first strains of the heavy-lidded guitar instrumental \u003ci\u003eTheory Rest\u003c\/i\u003e, to that lakeside kitchen at dusk, beneath a bright moon twinned in the water.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShe recorded quickly, with only her longtime co-producer Jeff McMurrich to capture her guitar, piano, and for the first time on record harmonica. Jennifer dedicates her blowing to friend and mentor Kath Bloom, who played the Pink City harp. Her airy, lambent voice renders these taut poems as elegant inscriptions within circumscription, fully present and presciently articulate, months before the age of coronavirus quarantines, about the troubles and delights to be found in aloneness, in the patient observation of our immediate surroundings, and if you’re lucky in negotiating abiding love. \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"Black | LP","offer_id":50512847896907,"sku":"1102629","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50512848060747,"sku":"1102628","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/45a5f243-098c-4a49-a88e-153965c471f4_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727908284"},{"product_id":"camelot-4","title":"Camelot","description":"\u003cp\u003eFor Fans Of: The Weather Station, Weyes Blood, Adrianne Lenker, Phoebe Bridgers, Joan Shelley, Lana Del Rey, Cass McCombs, Angel Olsen and Neil Young.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCamelot, the legendary seat of King Arthur’s court in Early Middle Ages Britain, was probably not a real place. A corruption of the name of a real Romano-Briton city, the word “Camelot” accumulated symbolic, mythic resonances over centuries, until achieving its present usage as a near-synonym of “utopia.” In the mid-20th century alone, Camelot inspired an explosion of representations and appropriations, among them the violent, affectless Arthurian court of Robert Bresson’s 1974 film Lancelot du Lac and the absurdist iteration of Monty Python’s 1975 Holy Grail, both of which feature armoured knights erupting into fountains of blood; the mystical Welsh world of novelist John Cowper Powys’s profoundly weird 1951 novel Porius, with its Roman cults, wizards and witches, and wanton giants; and the nationalist nostalgia of President John F. Kennedy’s White House. Unsurprisingly there are fewer Camelots in more recent memory.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCamelot, Canadian songwriter Jennifer Castle’s extraordinary, moving 2024 chronicle of the artist in early middle age, charts a realer, more rooted, and more metaphorical place than the fabled Camelot of the Early Middle Ages (or its myriad depictions), but it too is a space more psychic than physical. In Castle’s Camelot, the fantastic interpenetrates the mundane, and the Grail, if there is one, distills everyday experience into art and art into faith, subliming terrestrial concerns into sublime celestial prayers to Mother Nature, and to the unfolding process of perfecting imperfection in one’s own nature. Co-produced by Jennifer and longtime collaborator Jeff McMurrich, her seventh record is at once her most monumental and unguarded to date, demonstrating a mastery of rendering her verse and melodies alike with crisply poignant economy. For all their pointedly plainspoken lyrical detail and exhilarating full-band musical flourishes, these songs sound inevitable, eternal as morning devotions.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Back in Camelot,” she sings on the lilting, vulnerable title track, “I really learned a lot \/ circles in the crops and \/ sky-high geometry.” The album opens with a candid admission of sleeping “in the unfinished basement,” an embarrassing joke that comes true. But the dreamer is redeemed by dreaming, setting sail in her airborne bed above “sirens and desert deities.” If she questions her own agency whether she is “wishing stones were standing” or just “pissing in the wind” it does not diminish the ineffable existential jolt of such signs and wonders.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis abiding tension between belief and doubt, magic and pragmatism, self and other, sacred and profane, and even, arguably, paganism and monotheism, suffuses these ten songs, which limn an interior landscape shot through with sunstriped shadows of “multi-felt dimensions” both mystical and quotidian. The epic scale and transport of “Camelot,” with its swooning strings, gives way dramatically to “Some Friends,” an acoustic-guitar-and-vocals meditation in miniature on Janus-faced friends and the lunar and solar temperatures of their promises—“bright and beaming verses” versus hot curses which recalls her minimalist last album, 2020’s achingly intimate Monarch Season. (In a symmetrical sequencing gesture, the penultimate track, the incantatory “Earthsong,” bookends the central six with a similarly spare solo performance and coiled chord progression, this time an ambiguous appeal to … a wounded lover? a wounded saint? our wounded planet?)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThose whom “Trust” accuses of treacherous oaths spit through “gilded and golden tooth” cynics, critics, hypocrites, gurus, scientists, doctors, lovers, government, the so-called entertainment industry sow uncertainty that can infect the artist, as in “Louis”: “What’s that dance \/ and can it be done? What’s that song \/ and can it be sung?” Answering affirmatively are “Lucky #8,” an irrepressible ode to dancing as a bulwark against the “tidal pools of pain” and the “theory of collapse,” and “Full Moon in Leo,” which finds the narrator dancing around the house with a broom, wearing nothing but her underwear and “big hair.” But the central question remains: who can we trust, and at what cost faith, in art or angels or otherwise?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCastle’s confidence in her collaborators is the cornerstone of Camelot. Carl Didur (piano and keys), Evan Cartwright (drums and percussion), and steadfast sideman Mike Smith (bass) comprise a rhythm section of exquisite delicacy and depth. This fundamental trio anchors the airiness of regular backing vocalists Victoria Cheong and Isla Craig and frames the guitars of Castle, McMurrich, and Paul Mortimer (and on “Lucky #8,” special guest Cass McCombs). Reprising his decennial role on Castle’s beloved 2014 Pink City, Owen Pallett arranged the strings for Estonia’s FAMES Skopje Studio Orchestra.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOn the ravishing country-soul ballad “Blowing Kisses” Pallett’s crowning achievement here, which can be heard in its entirety in the penultimate episode of the third season of FX’s The Bear Jennifer contemplates time and presence, love and prayer and how songwriting and poetry both manifest and limit all four dimensions: “No words to fumble with \/ I’m not a beggar to language any longer.” Such rare moments of speechlessness “I’m so fucking honoured,” she bluntly proclaims suggest a state “only a god could come up with.” (If Camelot affirms Castle as one of the great song-poets of her generation, she is not immune to the despairing linguistic beggary that plagues all writers.)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCamelot evinces a thoroughgoing faith not only in the natural world including human bodies, which can, miraculously, dance and swim and bleed and embrace and birth but also in our interpretations of and interventions in it: the “charts and diagrams” of “Lucky #8,” a daydreamt billboard on Fairfax Ave. in LA in “Full Moon in Leo,” the bloody invocations of the organ-stained “Mary Miracle,” and all manner of water worship, rivers in particular. (Notably, Jennifer has worked as a farmer and a doula.)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe album ends with “Fractal Canyon”s repeated, exalted insistence that she’s “not alone here.” But where is here?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe word “utopia” itself constitutes a pun, indicating in its ambiguous first syllable both the Greek “eutopia,” or “good-place” the facet most remembered today and “outopia,” or “no-place,” a negative, impossible geography of the mind. Utopia, like its metonym Camelot, is imaginary. Or as fellow Canadian songwriter Neil Young once sang, “Everyone knows this is nowhere.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Can you see how I’d be tempted,” Castle asks out of nowhere, held in the mystery, “to pretend I’m not alone and let the memory bend?”\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50530923872587,"sku":"2218942","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50530923708747,"sku":"2218941","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Jennifer_Castle__Camelot_5c7d3a15_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1728088446"},{"product_id":"dream-all-over","title":"Dream All Over","description":"\u003cp\u003eWe've loved Gun Outfit here at Rough Trade ever since their inclusion on our 2008 Counter Culture compilation - On their most refined and ruefully elegant album to date, Gun Outfit perfect their incandescent sonic signature: a dusky, canyon-cult blues fueled by melodic dual-guitar weaving and seductive male \/ female incantations at zero hour. It's the nocturnal sound of desert-damaged L.A. burnout, a soured American surrealism in rock and roll creole: white line fever, paint fume flashbacks, a stranger wading out alone into the black surf. 'Dream All Over' was produced by Facundo Bermudez (Ty Segall, No Age) and finds a fitting home on the excellent Paradise of Bachelors label.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":51106372452683,"sku":"393779","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/dab734ce-9ba7-4352-b567-63a518473716_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1737006261"},{"product_id":"around-sound","title":"Around Sound","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe second solo record by \u003cstrong\u003eMike Polizze\u003c\/strong\u003e of Philadelphia psych-squallers \u003cstrong\u003ePurling Hiss\u003c\/strong\u003e and \u003cstrong\u003eBirds of Maya\u003c\/strong\u003e, a rainier and more pensive affair than its predecessor—despite its playful humor and plentiful hooks—affirms his status as a consummate (and now not-so-secret) craftsman of instantly memorable bucolic odes of languid beauty. The album deepens his fingerstyle acoustic guitar magic and finally manifests the title of the classic Hiss anthem \"Run from the City.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eDespite its playful humor and plentiful hooks, \u003cem\u003eAround Sound\u003c\/em\u003e is a rainier and more pensive affair than its pandemic-era predecessor, \u003cem\u003eLong Lost Solace Find\u003c\/em\u003e (2020). If \u003cem\u003eLong Lost Solace Find\u003c\/em\u003e revealed the sunshine and sweetness sometimes veiled by the combustible guitar leads and sheer volume of \u003cstrong\u003ePurling Hiss\u003c\/strong\u003e (especially in their live incarnation), then \u003cem\u003eAround Sound\u003c\/em\u003e complicates that picture, infilling a dusky chiaroscuro, ambiguous shadows that play across the late afternoon light.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eOnce again \u003cstrong\u003ePolizze\u003c\/strong\u003e recorded gradually, in close collaboration with co-producer and engineer Jeff Zeigler, over the course of the intervening years since \u003cem\u003eLong Lost Solace Find\u003c\/em\u003e (and the droll demos and outtakes tape, \u003cem\u003eDizzy Demos: 2 Tickets to Cheeseburger in Paradise\u003c\/em\u003e, that followed in its wake). \u003cstrong\u003eMike\u003c\/strong\u003e plays everything on the record—in addition to guitar and vocals, bass, drums, piano, and even mellotron and vibraphone—and it is a testament to \u003cstrong\u003eZeigler\u003c\/strong\u003e's mixing that the arrangements of songs like \"Wake Up\" and \"Too Much Thinking\" avoid any sense of insularity, instead blooming like a band in a room.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBut the sparer songs foregrounding his guitar and vocals, like album opener \"After the Deluge\" (which begins abruptly in media res, mid-picking) and the aforementioned \"Is There Anybody Out There?\" and \"Fast Blues,\" demonstrate the essentially solitary nature of these songs and \u003cstrong\u003ePolizze\u003c\/strong\u003e's self-effacing facility in articulating their enigmas.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis time round, the song structures are more varied and intricate, less bound by predictable shapes and progressions. Tunes suddenly downshift from anthemic rallies into different, loping tempos (\"Everybody I Know,\" shivering with tremolo), and others seem to elide what once may have been two or even three separate ideas for songs (\"You've Been Doing Fine,\" with its elegantly foliated guitars).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWith the increased compositional complexity, the melodies don’t suffer but rather proliferate in counterpoint. Two songs, including the title track, unfold to a full seven minutes, while miraculously managing to retain a sense of effortless spontaneity. Unlike so many of us, \u003cstrong\u003ePolizze\u003c\/strong\u003e is not in a hurry.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWith the album’s new emphasis on acoustic fingerpicking, there are traces of friends and fellow Delaware County denizens \u003cstrong\u003eKurt Vile\u003c\/strong\u003e and \u003cstrong\u003eSteve Gunn\u003c\/strong\u003e, though only in the sense of shared artistic ancestry, Delco echoes of British fingerstyle forebears like \u003cstrong\u003eBert Jansch\u003c\/strong\u003e and \u003cstrong\u003eWizz Jones\u003c\/strong\u003e. The arcing, celestial jangle of \"It Goes Without Saying\" and the hushed, spooky insularity of \"Four Celestions\"—an ode to the classic British brand of electric guitar speakers, though ironically there is no electric guitar on this album—recall \u003cstrong\u003eRain Parade\u003c\/strong\u003e or \u003cstrong\u003eOpal\u003c\/strong\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBut ultimately these recordings dazzle with \u003cstrong\u003ePolizze\u003c\/strong\u003e's own easy, lapidary style, characterized by careful patience, studied nonchalance, and quiet yearning, reaching, always reaching for any, any, any, anything.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":51782398148939,"sku":"R5008-9685","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":51782398181707,"sku":"R5008-1915","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/2d5da8f3-a71f-aa1c-e7a2-b7241c66065e_44a42db0-067a-467b-b215-d36938c2add8.jpg?v=1752235944"},{"product_id":"blood-sucking-maniacs","title":"Blood Sucking Maniacs","description":"\u003cp\u003eBlood Sucking Maniacs, the Allen family band, helmed by patriarch and matriarch Terry Allen and Jo Harvey Allen, spans five generations and 121 years, including (among others) their sons Bukka and Bale Allen; grandsons Kru, Sled, and Calder Allen; Panhandle Mystery Band mainstays Charlie Sexton, Lloyd Maines, and Richard Bowden, and frequent collaborator Will Sexton. The wild and wide-ranging songs collected on their eponymous album are miscellaneous and multiplex, comprising heartrending ballads and arch in-jokes on a spectrum from sublime to unabashedly sentimental. The unifying principle here is not so much blood harmony as blood entropy. Get sucked.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor fans of \u003cspan style=\"caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration: none; display: inline !important; float: none;\"\u003eTerry Allen, Calder Allen, Jo Harvey Allen, David Byrne, Bill Callahan, Guy Clark, Bob Dylan, The Flatlanders, Randy Newman, John Prine, Silver Jews\/Purple Mountains, Townes Van Zandt., Kurt Vile, Wilco.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"2LP - Black","offer_id":56626567610699,"sku":"R9762-1614","price":37.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":56626567643467,"sku":"R9762-9172","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/BloodSuckingManiacs-BloodSuckingManiacs.jpg?v=1772015647"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/collections\/test_7b4843ee_thumbnail_4096_e3b844d0-cf09-4405-b778-4f29a2f6eb09.jpg?v=1726279630","url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/collections\/paradise-of-bachelors.oembed?page=2","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}