Alternative

Artist: Kix Label: Friday Music

Artist: Helvetia Label: Joyful Noise Recordings

Artist: Youth Lagoon Label: Fat Possum

Artist: Acid Death Label: 7Hard (Membran)

Artist: Michael Janisch Label: Whirlwind Recordings

Artist: Kora Band Label: Whirlwind Recordings

Artist: Helvetia Label: Joyful Noise Recordings

Artist: Monika Label: Other Music

Artist: Girl Band Label: Rough Trade

Artist: Honeymoon Killers Label: Crammed Discs

Artist: Introverted Dancefloor Label: Carpark Records

Artist: Alternative TV Label: Lost Moment

printed, heavy innersleeves - available in green or black 180g vinyl. From the ashes of the past an old companionship has been given fresh blood. In 2014 The Spirit Cabinet was summoned out of old time radio in the Macabre Tavern and is an alliance of spiritists from several Dutch covens such as Hooded Priest, Grimm, Zwartketterij, Cirith Gorgor and Urfaust. A unique blend of traditional Heavy Metal with a harmonious touch of melancholy performed as a blackened spiritual seance is what they will serve you. Record Label: Van Records Style: Metal

Record Label: Arbutus Style: Independent

I Had Grown Wild" is the culminative EP in a series of releases that began in 2014, and is the followup to the success My Brightest Diamond's 2014 full-length "This Is My Hand." This EP of five tracks includes two new original songs from MBD, and a remix of "This Is My Hand" in both English and French. The EP begins and ends with a minimalist but driving remix of the LP's title track, "This Is My Hand," first sung in French, then in English. "Say What", inspired by a poem by Staceyann Chin, recontextualizes images from Billy Holiday's "Strange Fruit" and issues a challenge to compare and contrast the experience of black and white Americans. Continuing on the subject of children, "Bronze Head" lets off the steam with text taken directly from William Butler Yeats' poem by the same name. Birth, the body, and the afterlife all take their places on this EP, with the concluding song "Apparition". Since first singing Stephane (2 accents needed) Mallarme's poem set by Claude Debussy for the song cycle "Quatre chansons de jeunesse" in college when she was studying classical voice, Shara fell in love with the image of the ghost who with glowing hair who leaves behind a trail of white bouquets of perfumed stars Record Label: Asthmatic Kitty Style: Independent

Vinyl: 500 black vinyl, with booklet insert / poster and DL card. Night School's issue of Cut With The Cake Knife includes unpublished photographs, extensive sleeve notes from Rose McDowall and 2 bonus tracks culled from the bootleg 7" "Don't Fear The Reaper." Cut The With The Cake Knife was recorded by Rose McDowall in 1988/89 following the break up of her group Strawberry Switchblade. Produced with the aid of several musicians in several studios, the album features songs written for the fabled second Strawberry Switchblade album. More importantly perhaps it showcases the honest, direct and life-affirming songs of one of the greatest unsung songwriters of the modern pop era at a tumultuous time in her career. Tibet opens the set and could be one of the best pop songs you've never heard. The innate sadness of the songs' content - the loss of a friendship, impending sorrow - is heightened to heart-melting level by McDowall's pop nous and melodic sensibility. Choruses and hooks are everywhere on Cake Knife, from the outsider take on stadium 80s pop in Wings Of Heaven to the spiraling, ecstatic So Vicious, a glorious anthem that highlights the human fragility in McDowall's vocal performance, an instrument that has never lost the naïve purity it first exemplified in Strawberry Switchblade's early 80s recordings. The centerpiece of the album, the title-track, is the greatest Switchblade pop chart hit that never was. Like the veiled melancholy of her former group's hits, Cut With The Cake Knife hints at a darkness beneath the gloss, a darkness that saw McDowall delve into more esoteric territory with her subsequent recordings and collaborations. Cut With The Cake Knife serves as the bridge between the pop music McDowall had been making with her friends Jill Bryson, Lawrence from Felt and Primal Scream to what became a more extreme, deep sound informed by neo-folk and post industrial music. Rose McDowall's role in the canon has always been one of an outsider. Beginning in Glasgow's East End in the avant proto-noise group The Poems, achieving fame briefly in the 80s and then disappearing into counter-cultural folklore, the emphasis in the internet-age has been skewed towards her image and cultural significance. Unseen to many, her solo work, her groups Sorrow and Spell and her collaborations with a whole host of underground luminaries have still touched lives. As McDowall elucidates: "They're real sad songs, about real life. I've had people come up to me to say I'd connected with them and helped them. I remember a gig in America when we made a whole room cry. It was bizarre. A couple at the front of the stage started crying and then these two boys beside and suddenly everyone was crying. And I thought, "that's power. Record Label: Night School/Forte Style: Independent

Limited first pressing on halb blue/halb white vinyl - 180g An ardent moulder of sound, John Lemke began carving out a very unique music blend on his debut album 'People Do' (2013) and its follow up EP 'Walizka' (2014). Informed by his work as a sound designer & composer for documentary films and his natural inclination towards fusing rhythm with rich textures and emotive melodies, he set out on a musical path that had been long in the making and is ever evolving. The quest for unusual, inspiring sound sources has always been at the heart of John's process, however the genesis of his second album 'Nomad Frequencies' was rooted in much more inadvertent circumstances. In the summer of 2014, forced to indefinitely evacuate his Glasgow flat and studio due to structural damage from one hour to the next, with nothing more than a laptop and a bag of clothes, John embarked on a six month odyssey of soul searching, couch surfing and spending an extended period of time in his old hometown of Berlin for the first time in years - it was to be an odyssey that would help ferment and distill the ideas of his second album on which work had just begun. A year of particular global turmoil and upheaval, combined with John's personal, albeit very minor, 'displacement', caused a lot of questioning, frustration and anger, which somehow found its way onto the new material: a more confrontational, at times aggressive sound, paired on the other hand with a yearning for harmony, balance and space. Other influences came less from the world of music, but rather in visual form, through the densely textural art of Anselm Kiefer and the political, yet poetic musings of film maker Adam Curtis. Intent on refining his sound toward a more minimal, bolder style, John set out to limit his sonic palate to a handful of carefully chosen elements. At the centre of this new direction remains the muted piano already introduced on his debut, but in a much more purified and raw form. This organic base is adorned by the warm fuzzing and wavering of analogue synthesisers, tape echoes, meditative tuning forks, field recordings from John's 'exile' period and percussion based on his rigid approach to sampling, which started developing on 'Walizka'. The guiding principle of his orthodox style of recording and sampling is to only use home-made sounds by utilising his own field recordings, applying contact microphones or hydrophones to objects and instruments, running them through different kinds of speakers and re-recording the sounds to arrive at a 'lived in' quality, often misunderstood as plainly 'lo-fi'. Touches of viola and woodwinds parts (Kim Moore of WOLF and Andrew Baker respectively) provide melody fragments and subtle details throughout the journey. With John's healthy disregard for genre boundaries, the array of influences on 'Nomad Frequencies' is vast, but never over-powering. From the meditative tuning fork that starts proceedings on 'Of Elsewhere', the dub echoes to the hints of minimalism, free jazz explosions to the Lynchian atmospherics, all elements serve nothing more than the album's narrative journey between friction and harmony, best appreciated in its entirety. A rhythmic backbone collides with rich ambience and melody, often infectious and jarring at the same time, forging a soulful whole which most likely only reveals its true self after multiple spin Record Label: Denovali Style: Electronic

To coincide with their first Australian tour, New York's IRON CHIC and Poison City are teaming up to release a new limited edition 7". Spewing forth more of the infectious, self-deprecating punk-indie-rock brilliance that IRON CHIC have become renowned for, the two brand new tracks pick up exactly where 'The Constant One' album (Bridge 9) left off. Also includes a cover of Dead Kennedys 'Dog Bite' as the second B-Side. "If ever a band was created for an epic sing-a-long, it was Iron Chic. There's that big feeling at the core of their soaring melodies as they build and rage, starting with a verse from Jason Lubrano and building to a gang sing-a-long at the chorus in nearly every song. They're songs that transcend the performers, taking on the personality and voice of an entire room." - Scenepointblank "Quite often, "pop-punk" gets used to describe something that's actually indie rock (see: Swearin', Japandroids), which can trigger a lot of negative biases amongst people who are fairly certain they're not into the former. The difference lies in tone: pop-punk evokes palm-muted power chords with clean distortion and nasal vocals, whereas indie rock is most associated with shambling, jangly and fuzzy guitars with drawling vocals. Iron Chic gives you both!" - Pitchfork Record Label: Poison City Style: Punk

On Thursday April 6th 1995, five years before the refrain of "...I Like You..." from their 2000 hit song "Bohemian Like You" permeated all known media and stuck forever in the memory banks of music fans worldwide, and eight years before they recorded the song that would become the theme song of the popular tv series Veronica Mars, The Dandy Warhols released their debut album Dandys Rule, Ok? [BTW-002LP] on the now defunct Tim/Kerr Records. The album not only showcased the raw seeds of inspiration that would develop into the full on psyche-pop powerhouse the Dandy's would become but is also an oft overlooked self-contained garage psyche-pop masterpiece in its own right. Portland Oregon based Schizophonic Records is proud to be re-issuing this masterpiece on vinyl in celebration of its 20th anniversary. The question posed by the title of The Dandy Warhols first record is simple, as is the answer. David Bowie answered the question when he asked the Dandys to open for him on tour in 2003. The world of television and film have answered in the extensive licensing of their material throughout the past two decades. Traditional and streaming radio have answered with constant rotation of their music - and, after a spinning of this vinyl reissue of the debut on the old turntable, even the most jaded music fan will be hard pressed to answer with anything other than, "Yes. Absolutely.. Dandys Rule. Record Label: Schizophonic/Cobra Style: Alternative Rock

Originally Released in 1985, and now re-mastered by Steve Albini and Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering, Big Black's first full-length album Atomizer gets the treatment as a 30th anniversary reissue including a double-sided insert and a digital download coupon! This remastered version of Atomizer also includes the song "Strange Things" which appeared on the first pressing of Atomizer, but was not present on subsequent vinyl pressings nor on The Rich Man's Eight Track CD. To put this release into context for the uninformed: Big Black began in 1982. Steve Steve Albini, then a sophomore at Northwestern University, fanzine writer and loudmouth, released the Lungs EP on the Chicago co-operative label Ruthless (whose other artists at the time included Naked Raygun and the Effigies). Lungs was recorded in his apartment on a borrowed 4-track for the price of one case of beer. After that record's release, Jeff Pezzati (singer for Naked Raygun) and Santiago Durango (Naked Raygun, Arsenal), both linchpins of the burgeoning Chicago music scene, joined Big Black. During this period, the band established itself as a live act, recorded two more records, the Bulldozer EP and the Racer-X EP, toured the U.S., and had - in general- a pretty good time. Jeff Pezzati's other obligations precipitated his departure from the band in 1984, when he was replaced by Dave Riley, bass player for Chicago swing-punk band Savage Beliefs. This lineup persisted until the band's self-destruction in August of 1987. Big Black toured the U.S., England, Europe, and Austrailia. They recorded a sh**load of records: Il Duce 45, Atomizer LP, Headache EP (which bore the heartbreakingly-honest disclaimer "Warning! Not as good as Atomizer. Don't get your hopes up, Cheese."), Heartbeat 45, He's A Whore 45, Songs About Fucking LP, and Pig Pile LP / Vide Record Label: Touch & Go Style: Alternative Rock