{"title":"12XU","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"through-today","title":"Through Today","description":"\u003cp\u003eSophomore album for rising Australian band Chimers. A husband \/ wife duo comprising life partners Padraic Skehan (vocals\/guitar) and Binx (drums\/vocals. Ten tracks of tightly-coiled intensity that barely lets up for all of its 34 minutes.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn enlisting Boulet, the band were confident that due to his own experience of being one half of Party Dozen, they had someone who understood the confines of working within the structure of a two-piece but also the possibilities that creates. Boulet, in turn, rewarding that trust by capturing a powerful bedrock of sound that allowed the band's taught rhythms to circle and permeate and yet give full breathing space for the melody within. For Pittman’s part, having a third ear on hand to devote serious listening time and critical commentary was an added bonus.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"12XU","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":51227756003659,"sku":"2243827","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/e4d5cc18-c82a-8c36-9c39-ec3b399e2398_8926ae3e_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1738926035"},{"product_id":"after-the-flood","title":"After The Flood","description":"\u003cp\u003eNew album from \u003cstrong\u003eEd Kuepper\u003c\/strong\u003e (\u003cem\u003eThe Saints\u003c\/em\u003e) and \u003cstrong\u003eJim White\u003c\/strong\u003e (\u003cem\u003eDirty Three\u003c\/em\u003e). Deep into their careers, at the top of their game, ever curious, changing and searching, Ed and Jim reach another high-water mark.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe widescreen selection of songs gives a tracking shot of Ed’s career to date. The earliest song reimagined here is The Saints' \"\u003cem\u003eSwing For The Crime\u003c\/em\u003e\", which originally appeared in 1978 on the \u003cem\u003ePrehistoric Sounds\u003c\/em\u003e album. Ed’s early 80s band Laughing Clowns is generously represented and rewired with the songs \"\u003cem\u003eCrying Dance\u003c\/em\u003e\", \"\u003cem\u003eThe Year Of The Bloated Goat\u003c\/em\u003e\" and \"\u003cem\u003eCollapse Board\u003c\/em\u003e\".\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHis solo career is deeply mined for reworked hidden gems; \"\u003cem\u003eDemolition\u003c\/em\u003e\" and \"\u003cem\u003eMiracles\u003c\/em\u003e\" (both from 2007’s \u003cem\u003eJean Lee and the Yellow Dog\u003c\/em\u003e) and \"\u003cem\u003eThe Ruins\u003c\/em\u003e\" (from 2015’s \u003cem\u003eLost Cities\u003c\/em\u003e). \"\u003cem\u003eThe 16 Days\u003c\/em\u003e\" originally appeared on Ed’s second album under his own name, \u003cem\u003eRooms of the Magnificent\u003c\/em\u003e in 1986.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"12XU","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":51296494977355,"sku":"R7596-0658","price":32.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/590b74b9-715d-dd00-fd43-14e097dfd745_c9148573-cc73-443a-9a5b-f3ecb6dd5d04.jpg?v=1752285989"},{"product_id":"mannheim-hbf","title":"Mannheim HBF","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"tralbumData tralbum-about\"\u003eso the bad news is,  in a fit of pique, I asked Chat GPT (nicely) to compose a one-sheet for the new Shit and Shine double album, \u003cem\u003eMannheim HBF\u003c\/em\u003e.  The even worse news (yes, even worse than resorting to such tactics) is that the resulting biography is halfway passable and on some levels, superior to the sort of thing being published by what’s left of our weekly coupon-shoppers.  But for fuck’s sake my friends, Craig Clouse did not get to where he is today today by settling for halfway passable and neither should you.  That Shit and Shine’s discography is vast and dizzying is already well established ; what’s not nearly as established are these recordings being specifically dizzying. I don’t know if there’s anyone else in modern music as skilled in waltzing around the periphery of so many disparate idioms (“noise”, being one of the least prominent this time around) and somehow, against all odds, tying ‘em together in the most intricate of knots.  And who doesn’t love knots?\u2028\u2028 \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe all have our favorite ways to experience music that’s all-engulfing, but whether your preferred method is thru a stadium sized sound system or ear buds affixed as you’ve leapt off the tallest building in Bastrop, TX (the Jerry Fay Wilhelm Center for the Performing Arts, since you asked), not for the first time, Shit and\u003cspan class=\"bcTruncateMore\"\u003e Shine is entirely appropriate in either instance, possibly every instance. There are moments where I think this is a club record.  The Friars Club, however. \u2028\u2028 \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFar be it from me to provide guidelines for how and when you take in \u003cem\u003eMannheim HBF\u003c\/em\u003e.  “No interruptions”, “no distractions” are merely suggestions on the label’s part, though we cannot be held responsible for what happens if you ignore ‘em.   Thank you.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e  \u003ca\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003ch3 class=\"credits-label\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"12XU","offers":[{"title":"2LP - Black","offer_id":51542446768459,"sku":"R7501-9648","price":44.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/a1953569682_16.jpg?v=1743176836"},{"product_id":"ghost-ship","title":"Ghost Ship","description":"\u003cp\u003eFour years after his rock juggernaut \u003cem\u003ePuritan\u003c\/em\u003e, Chris Brokaw delivers \u003cem\u003eGhost Ship\u003c\/em\u003e, a landscape meditation (at sea) for vocals and electric guitars.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"I set out to make an 8 song statement like \u003cem\u003eDesert Shore\u003c\/em\u003e or \u003cem\u003eRaw Power,\u003c\/em\u003e but it became a 9 song... something else. I've described it to friends as Twin Peaks-ish but that feels only part right. The songs were written on a 60's Teisco Del Rey electric guitar, set up by the Belgian luthier Flip Scipio with heavy gauge flat wound strings and an .80 gauge low E string tuned down to a low A, which reframes how you play the instrument. I wrote them all quickly in a kind of fever.\"—Brokaw\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"12XU","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":51542460793163,"sku":"R3687-3059","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/148424_main.jpg?v=1743177068"},{"product_id":"hell-2","title":"Hell 2","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eHell 2\u003c\/em\u003e is not the first album from Austin’s Blank Hellscape, but it’s certainly the most fully-realized. OK, at least it’s the longest. The three-piece nightmare band knocked around the claustrophobic end of the house show circuit for a longish spell but right around pre-‘dermic times, the trio of Ethan Billips, Max Deems and Andrew Nogay morphed into a multi-dimensional synapse-snapper with little regard for genre nor their own self-preservation. On that front, Hell 2 was echelons in the making; it would not be an exaggeration to say the writing \/ recording \/ editing process was arduous and lengthy enough it nearly took Blank Hellscape out of the game for good.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut before you declare, “better luck next time”, strap yourself in to your favorite listening chair \/ apparatus and bask in this sprawling double album, to these ears, an uncanny musical \u0026amp; lyrical representation of the confusing, scary and thoroughly oppressive state we currently find ourselves in (not specifically Texas, but yes, Texas, too). I could not be more proud to dub this their long-awaited magnum opus, and not simply because doing so will totally fuck shit up for whoever puts out their next album.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"12XU","offers":[{"title":"2LP - Black","offer_id":51542544056651,"sku":"R4132-6855","price":47.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/148423_main.jpg?v=1743177994"},{"product_id":"desert-so-green","title":"Desert So Green","description":"\u003cp\u003e“So, how did this band even happen?” That’s the question most often asked of Winged Wheel, a creatively and geographically scattered collective who have somehow congregated to make a noise that’s unexpected but undeniable. The band includes Whitney Johnson (Matchess, Circuit des Yeux), Cory Plump (Spray Paint, co-owner of the dream venue Tubby’s), Matthew J. Rolin (solo guitar wizard and half of the Powers\/Rolin Duo), Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth), Lonnie Slack, and Fred Thomas (Idle Ray, Tyvek), each player living in a different city and bringing their own unique element to the group’s chain reactions. Early long distance file-trading between a few members yielded 2022’s No Island, a debut album that was accidentally really good. Good enough for the band to expand their membership and meet in person for the sessions that became 2024’s Big Hotel, a surgically-assembled murk of high energy kosmische rock with jammed-out tendencies. Fast forward just a little and all of a sudden the band that started out as a passing idea has completed multiple tours, become a taper’s dream with sets that drift through structure and improvisation, and ridden the momentum to places unforeseen on their third album, \u003cem\u003eDesert So Green\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAfter a run of shows across the Midwest in the spring of 2025, the group settled into a studio on the outskirts of Chicago to track their next record. Though the full lineup had only been solidified for a little over a year at this point, time together on stage led to a quickly-expanding sound and a unified vision of always going somewhere new. To this end, Winged Wheel abandoned the play-now-sort-it-out-later approach of Big Hotel and instead spent hours refining flashes of inspiration into coherent songs. Full-blast, krautrock-informed jamming took a backseat to deeper experimentation, and the band found new dimensions, different atmospheres. The arrangements are still dense with layers of synths, noisy disruptions, and glowing orbs of alien sound, but every shift is considered and intentional. It’s an album that spends its duration struggling to balance a scale with excitement on one side and anxious tension on the other. Things move a little slower and the aftershock hits harder than the initial adrenaline rush.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhile \u003cem\u003eDesert So Green\u003c\/em\u003e is defined by a newfound restraint, there’s also an intensity that never lets up. “Bird Spells” pulsates perpetually at the edge of a breaking point, moving through various storm systems before finally, momentarily, finding a break in the clouds. Can-esque rhythms, scrapes of viola, and Throbbing Gristle-level decay all get dubbed into infinity on the absolutely demonic “Canvas 2.” Rolling waves of percussion and treated instruments try fruitlessly to climb their way out of a slippery well on the churning closer “The Suite Goes Quiet.” At times, some ripping weirdness cuts through the simmering. Syncopated dual guitars lock in on “Speed Table” while Shelley destroys the kit as only he can, and Slack’s greasy steel guitar riffing of “I See Poseurs Every Day” evokes scenes of a truck stop showdown between ZZ Top and the Silver Apples. “Beautiful Holy Jewel Home” is the closest Winged Wheel has ever come to straightforward melodic tuneage, and it still arrives in a form that’s uneasy and fragmented.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eDesert So Green\u003c\/em\u003e represents yet another transformation for Winged Wheel, one that takes them into a space of sharpened dynamism and more nuanced expression. The energy that arrived all at once in loud explosions on earlier albums is refracted here, and all the more powerful when broken down. It’s a set of strange songs that demand close inspection and reward this attention with a clearer view of the band’s individual personalities, and the separate alchemical presence that emerges when these personalities come together. \u003cem\u003eDesert So Green\u003c\/em\u003e changes gears, defies probability, confounds in strains of joy and confusion, and leaves us wondering, once again and still without answers, how did this band even happen?\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"12XU","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":56100151132491,"sku":"R6611-2470","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/unnamed-2025-12-12T122548.274.jpg?v=1765542357"},{"product_id":"psychic-sidekick","title":"Psychic Sidekick","description":"\u003cp\u003eMark Morgan (formerly of Sightings and Silk Purse) and Gaute Granli first met in Brooklyn at The Glove in 2017 while Granli was on tour from his home country of Norway. The following year, Morgan embarked on a solo European tour and he and Granli did three shows together in Norway. Ultimately finding each other reasonably tolerable and able to agree to disagree on punk versus prog, they soon thereafter toured together in the fall of 2019 in Europe for 50 days with each playing solo. As the tour progressed, both found themselves influencing and being influenced by the other and by the end, they decided they should do a band together (easier to book one act rather than a package deal). Plans were made to reconvene in 2020 to record and possibly tour but then Covid threw a wrench into the works. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA couple of years later, Rump State finally started playing and recording together in 2021 at Entropy Studio in Redford, Michigan (notably the childhood home of Ted Nugent who purportedly refers to it as \"Tedford\"). Outside of agreeing that there should be a strong focus on duo vocals and that Morgan would play guitar and Granli electronics, not much else was discussed in advance of first playing together. From these sessions, their first LP \"Retaliation Aesthetics\" was cobbled together and eventually released on the Parisian No Lagos label in March 2023. Since then, Rump State has toured the USA once and Europe multiple times.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'Psychic Sidekick', Rump State's second album, is a jarring, dizzying (even!) collision ; prior notions of song disassembly and aural properties being repossessed-then-sold-for-scrap were already due for reassessment. Morgan and Granli have rendered such arguments moot, and if you prefer \"discussion\" to argument, CONGRATS ON BEING SO (fucking) civilized. That's not gonna diminish this album's impact one iota.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIs this the most challenging album of 2026? How in blazes should I know, it's only February.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"12XU","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":56530126274891,"sku":"R2918-1166","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/unnamed-2026-02-16T151224.041.jpg?v=1771254751"},{"product_id":"the-sleeves","title":"The Sleeves","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe Sleeves are the duo of Jack Cooper and Tara Cunningham, both likely known to you as one half of Modern Nature. Following an all-instrumental Mossy Tapes release last November, Cooper and Cunningham have recorded 10 new songs showcasing their vocal and guitar interplay with only the faintest echoes of prior efforts (individually or collectively), representing a fully realized leap forward from their largely improvised debut.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'The Sleeves' is a somewhat counter intuitive take on the guitar\/vocal duo formula (provided you think there is such a thing) though it's not nearly as simplistic as \"the space between the notes\" -- it would be the height of exaggeration to say an album this simultaneously expansive and incandescent is unprecedented. But it doesn't happen nearly often enough, either.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Sleeves have London and NYC dates planned for this July and September respectively, with further touring to be announced in the coming weeks.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“What I initially found so familiar and exciting about playing guitar with Jack - and continually do - is that our approach to music is pretty much exactly the same. And that is - to celebrate the space that frames ideas, embraces silence, to play simply, simultaneously championing our respective unembellished guitar sounds, whilst looking for sounds that aren’t like a guitar at all - bells, birds, switching between radio stations etc. It’s rare to find someone who - whatever this means to you - ‘gets it’ - and I think when we started playing guitar together, we both knew the other had something of whatever our ‘it’ was.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“‘The Sleeves’ is the sum of our shared musical journey thus far, an exciting mix of familiarity and uncharted territory in its approach to structure and how we use our guitars and voices. It feels to me like we are both citing shared references and traditions, whilst floating in our own, single-cell world that is completely genre-less. That grey area is where we seem to thrive. As Jack says, it feels like music that really couldn’t be made by anyone else.” - Tara Cunningham\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“Tara and I started playing guitar together at the start of 2024. It was an improvised music night in a railway arch in South London. The set was great but there was a couple of minutes in particular where Tara and I really sort of locked in. We made a record a few weeks later. There was something in the way we played together that felt very intuitive from the start. We recognised a shared approach right away and an affinity to the way each other played.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“During the summer we got stuck in a traffic jam coming home from a show in Glasgow. We spent a few hours singing along to the Mamas \u0026amp; The Papas and Simon \u0026amp; Garfunkel and over the course of the day, like magic we became The Sleeves.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“We're excited about it because it feels like music that really couldn’t be made by anyone else. 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Lupo Città wrote the songs for \u003cem\u003eInverno\u003c\/em\u003e by instinct: each song, in viscera, a life and personality of its own. Chris, Jenn, and Sarah each brought in songs at different stages, in different forms and moods. Some came together fast, others took long. Some songs had to be stripped, slowed down or sped up, while others were completely gutted and rebuilt.  A hard coming out of post-Covid lockdown, trying to relearn to live outside of isolation. Moving from the dark of winter into light, a jarring shift, the world was changing so fast in such stark contrast between the quiet isolation we settled into with close friends and family. We couldn’t look away anymore, in the light of day, escalating political and social chaos happening outside, now rapidly closing in.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhile Lupo Città’s debut was melodic, energetic, world-weary, sometimes chaotic,\u003cem\u003eInverno\u003c\/em\u003e is out on a limb, taking a risk, and not caring at all how it turns out.\u003cem\u003eInverno\u003c\/em\u003e is a snapshot of the bad and good of trying to stay awake and present, fighting off the sleep of winter, the lure of time standing still, so we can create the world we want instead of trying to survive the world we're in. Writing, playing, listening to music is essential, now, more than ever, for our survival amidst uncertainty, doubt, dystopia, grief, loss, blindness, vision, and love. 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