Listen - MGMT - MGMT - Full Album

MGMT is the self titled, third studio album from Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser. The successor to 2008’s Oracular Spectacular and 2010’s Congratulations, MGMT sees the band continuing to push themselves to expand the boundaries of modern pop music. The result is a diverse and powerful collection of 10 songs that directly mirrors the duo’s encompassing surrealist view of the everyday.

The album is accompanied by ‘the Optimizer’, providing listeners of the album with a simultaneously aural and optical listening experience including exclusive video footage and CGI work.

Listen - Arctic Monkeys - AM - Full Album

‘AM’ was produced by James Ford and co-produced by Ross Orton at Sage & Sound Recording, LA and Rancho De La Luna, Joshua Tree. The album was engineered by Ian Shea and mixed by Tchad Blake. 

Josh Homme, Pete Thomas and Bill Ryder-Jones all make guest appearances on ‘AM’ – as do the words of John Cooper Clarke, on the track I Wanna Be Yours.

Listen - Crystal Stilts - Nature Noir - Full Album

Recorded in the damp spring of 2013, this newest disc finds the group expanding their palette to include strings, percussion, and synthesizers, to create a record that is both more sonically adventurous and a more personal and humane statement than their previous work. On tracks such as "Star Crawl" and "Sticks and Stones", Hargett's vocals have a striking clarity and soulfulness, while the musical arrangements throughout display a sophistication that may be surprising to those who previously thought of the band as "lo-fi". Meanwhile, album opener "Spirit in Front of Me" and the ripping "Future Folklore" showcase the psychedelic grit that has long been a trademark sound.

Listen - Franz Ferdinand - Right Thoughts Right Words Right Action - Full Album

Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action, the fourth studio album by Franz Ferdinand, will be released by Domino on 26th August 2013.

This exuberant, unencumbered record is the first from the Glasgow band since 2009’s Tonight. They seem to have rediscovered the imagination, vitality and fun found on their classic, era-encapsulating debut Franz Ferdinand.

Recorded over the last year at Kapranos’s Scottish studio and McCarthy’s Sausage Studios in London, the LP cements their status as a unique and adventurous British band: emboldened by a decade’s undreamt-of worldwide success, but still daring and defiant. It’s an ecstatic rejection of the drab conventions often accompanying that level of attention and expectation.

When asked for a quote, Kapranos came back with: “The Intellect Vs The Soul, played out by some dumb band.”* God knows what that means, but the lyrics do seem more poetic this time. There were a few interesting collaborations, but more of that later…

The ten songs that make up Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action take what propelled Franz Ferdinand from the incestuous Glasgow Art School world to, well, the entire world - painterly lyrical detail, heavyweight hooks, precise aesthetic vision and that uncanny ability to marry arch artistic sensibility with pop punch – and push it even further. The breadth of influence, musicality and invention on show here is enormous. If this is unmistakably a Franz Ferdinand record, it is as much by virtue of its sonic daring and perfectly patch-worked eclecticism as the timeless songwriting flair that has long been their calling card.

Franz Ferdinand are still Alex Kapranos, Nick McCarthy, Bob Hardy and Paul Thomson. There’s still no one like them.

Listen - Hunx And His Punx - Street Punk - Full Album

Hunx And His Punx have returned with ‘Street Punk’, a new album filled with the catchiest and most hateful punk songs heard in eons. 

‘Street Punk’ is an unrelenting tour de force, echoing early 80s hardcore, 90s grrrl sounds, Darby Crash on helium, and the female answer to The Misfits. 

After members dropping like flies and moving around the country, Hunx And His Punx are now led by Seth Bogart and Shannon Shaw, who split songwriting and vocal duties. 

In the years since their last album, 2011’s ‘Too Young To Be In Love’, Seth recorded a solo album called ‘Hairdresser Blues’ (2012) and started a homemade TV Show called ‘Hollywood Nailz’, while Shannon released ‘Dreams In The Rat House’ (2013) with her other band Shannon And The Clams. Somehow during all of this Seth and Shannon managed to secretly meet in Los Angeles and Oakland to sort out ‘Street Punk’. 

Recorded in just a couple of days by Facundo Bermudez (who has produced albums by Mika Miko and No Age), ‘Street Punk’ includes a cover of Beastie Boys’ early hardcore anthem ‘Egg Raid On Mojo’, and songs about bad skin, teen angst, social wimpery, trash, isolation, schizophrenia, peroxided delusion, rat parties and vengeance.

Listen - Parquet Courts - Light Up Gold - Full Album

The last few months have seen a wildly accelerated trajectory for Austin Brown and Andrew Savage, aka Parquet Courts. Formed from the ashes of bands such as Fergus & Geronimo and Teenage Cool Kids, Parquet Courts are a glorious encapsulation of everything NYC punk should be; a frenzied and frantic ramraid on the history of garage rock but with more whip smart intelligence, cutting humour and – crucial to the band – emotional honesty than most other bands muster.

Parquet Courts initially released their debut LP “Light Up Gold” on their own label Dull Tools in July last year, but the resultant buzz and excitement (with the tastemaking likes of Spin, Pitchfork, Village Voice and many others joining the ranks of the converted) has seen the album get an official release in the US in January and in the UK on April 15. From start to finish, this is a full throttle experience which you have no choice but to dive in to headfirst, with ridiculously infectious melodies and propulsive guitars which grab you as Brown and Savage (with assist from Max Savage and Sean Yeaton) spin their short, sharp tales of quarter-life ennui (“Borrowed Time”), weed-induced inertia (“Stoned and Starving”) and job anxiety (“Careers in Combat”) with concise, laserlike precision.

“5 stars - Parquet Courts have produced a debut that’s both instantly addictive and lastingly rewarding” – Guardian. 

“9/10 - Goddamn great…a powerful, personality-heavy record” – NME. 

“8.0 - A gel-capsule-sized dosage of distilled NYC punk rock: vinegary smarts, reeled-off quotables...It's maximum-attitude, minimum-patience: not just smart, but frantically smart, blurting out everything it might have to say before the time clock expires” – Pitchfork

Listen - Adam Green & Binki Shapiro - Full Album

Adam Green and Binki Shapiro are two gifted artists with a bi-coastal friendship and a brand new project. Binki Shapiro was one-third of Little Joy, the Brazilian-accented Los Angeles trio formed with Fabrizio Moretti and Rodrigo Amarante that enchanted listeners with its critically acclaimed 2008 album. Adam Green first came to prominence as one-half of the Grammy-winning Moldy Peaches before embarking on a successful and prolific solo career. 

What began as an acquaintance, with a mutual appreciation for each other’s music, soon turned serious when an idea was sparked to collaborate on an album of original duets. The result, Adam Green & Binki Shapiro, is deceptively pretty, filled with the echo of late-sixties folk-pop and an easygoing rapport between two captivating singers. These songs have twists and turns that reveal more with repeat listens, as their protagonists unfurl relationship tales with bittersweet recall.