Outsideleft Week in Music When Bodies Change We Should Acknowledge It and Let It Come.

The most exciting music coming out of Bearwood these days is getting recorded in compressed time, on the upper floors of a house over by the Woods. Expensive Hobbies is a very electric stuttering hot technicolor mess of steam and loathing. That's a sonic fear you feel. In a world of a billion dad bods, you'd expect nothing less from the real Dad Bod, an American in Bearwood anchored only by a wilfully discomfitting world view.  "It's so hard to live these days, swimming with the whales and the stingrays, my raybans broke, I crashed my third motorcycle... My kids need dental treatment and... Dance recitals..." Someone said in Dad Bod, Beck meets Dinosaur Jr up around the bend where we can't clearly see. The forthcoming LP will be called, 'Entirelife Crisis'. Simply superb. 

All This and So Much More is Tasha's meditation on abundance... On everything that comes your way that surrounds you and the opportunities everyone reading this on some expensive computer phone thing has. Our lives are as rich as we allow them to be and what are you going to do with that. I loved the quietly introspective Tasha, and will just have to get used to the rockin' a bit more rollicking-like version. If Tasha can, I can.

A very down home Adrianne on this new single. Fiddles to the fore. 

If any music moved me to tears of joy this week and I can't tell you why, affective lability maybe, it's been a truly joyless few weeks... Soweto Gospel Choir's You Got The Love from their really really excessively brilliant LP 'The History of House' is the one.

We interviewed Sweden's Then Comes Silence back in May at the start of their US tour and since then they have been busy perpetually touring Europe in support of their Trickery album, with a visit to the UK planned for November. This one gives you a taster for what is in store, taken from that album.  Superior Gothic Rock is how I'd describe it.

In 2012 Goat released their first album and it was, and still is great, backed up by a brilliant live show they looked set to take on the world. However, since then, despite the odd flash of that initial brilliance they seem to have spun around in ever decreasing circles. Sadly this single does nothing to stop their decline. They're still undoubtedly a great spectacle live and that first album still holds up but...

Oh man, epic, supersonic disco. This is why stereo was invented. Really is. Maybe even Quad. How did they do it?  Here's my number, 07539700988, please give me a call and tell me. I want to know this more than I want to know any other thing this weekend. So supremely aces!

On the 25th anniversary of his Mule Variations LP, Tom Waits releases a previously unheard version of Get Behind The Mule (Spiritual) from that LP. This is no desultory toss off kept in a tape warehouse for two and a half decades, tweaked with expanded bass. It's prime Tom, and if that's your thing then you'll want it bad. Crystalline-intense and unforgiving, souls saved from God's plan. Get Behind The Mule is beautiful, and your're sure to hear it, the piano sounds busted. Not spoiling my enjoyment.

Well I can't argue against this jaunty outing from Claude Fontaine. There's a touch of the Liam Bailey's about this. And by the end I love it way more than I do at the beginning. It has grown on me that quick. And the percussion. When you hear it, you hear it. Wow!

What I like about Jack is that he can sound to me like a one man contemporary Purp. Apart from the consistently horrible timbre to Jack's voice, this is really flawless entertainment. I like it enough. Taken from the 'No Name' LP which was first available from Jack's record store, only, I read that on a music website. RIght-o.

Five hearts for the first 30 seconds which are sublime until the singing starts and then I am wishing well, had this French-American Duo could have swapped sides at birth and the singing was in French well then you'd have a Big Time winner. Not a small time one. That's right I don't love this singing. Everything else, Aces. Oh and from the incredible Stones Throw label and I think they know way more about me. so possibly line thru' the slightly neg. bits of this review. Here, I'll do it for you.

Alternative supermusician indie types convene and by rights, 50 years ago I would have hated the idea, the cloistered pally supergroup thing. Johnny's Rotten and Peel taught me to be suspicious. Now I am just a burn out and can't raise the pulse required to wilfully ignore it. Supergroups are still on a certain scale a horrid idea. I can't find that scale now. Take a big micrometer to measure that. The Hard Quartet is made up of some truly certifiably great indie types though; Jim White, Emmett Kelly, Matt Sweeney and the readily identifiable Steve Malkmus. And they rock in a pleasantly hard way and I am drawn by humourless intensity of the name, of course it makes it all so seriously funny. Thrillingly short. Good. Check it out.

No one hums like Sam Smith, right? And would you believe it is the 10th anniversary of Sam's  debut LP, 'In The Lonely Hour'. An LP that spooked a million or more swooning record buyers  to go down to their local record store. Thing is since they were all as old as me, this makeover won't feel like ten years have elapsed since the first time. It can't really be 10 years ago already? Can it? It could have been a year ago. Or a couple of years ago. Or maybe it feels like it never happened. 

Rip roaring funk rock from the Father. It goes on forever though, oh well nevermind, maybe Father John Misty just doesn't age as rapidly as I do.  I think you might find that there's never been a greater need for backwards guitar than at this moment in time, doncha think right here right now on I Guess Time Just Makes a Fool of Us All. Wholly excellent.

"Synthpop with a human heart" is how Jay Wires describes his music and it's an apt description.  Following up May's  'Meaningless' single, this mines similar deeply personal areas, this time his experiences with online dating sites.  You may have guessed those experiences weren't positive, which in turn makes you imagine this track will be a right old gloom fest, but in fact it is quite the opposite, being skilfully crafted ear worm synth pop, drawing on his '80s influences to good effect.  "Maybe we were never meant to be" he laments. OK, it is a bit down on love, but is no lesser for it. Cheer up Jay, there is someone out there for you somewhere! Available from good ol' Bandcamp  (the song, that is, not a life partner). On Bandcamp here

Hawkwind's 1971 'In Search of Space' album is afforded the reverence and respect it deserves in this Cherry Red Records reissue. See Alan Rider's review here. 

'Simple Reality' follows up short lived Coventry band from 1981, Skeet's, previous archive release 'Park Road', which appeared at the back end of last year, and contains some of the same tracks, along with freshly unearthed tracks, all remastered to an impressive quality, given they were all recorded on a basic reel to reel tape machine. Its a mix of studio, instrumental, and live tracks taken from their farewell gig (out of a mere 10 in total) atop an articulated lorry trailer in a Coventry pub beer garden. Despite the basic drum machine popping away quietly in the background, hesitant performances and nervous vocals, there is a genuine charm on show here, coupled with fledgeling song writing skills. We can only guess at what might have happened if a label like Postcard had happened across them at the time, (as we said in our review of 'Park Road') but we will never really know. At least we still have this, though, to give us a hint of the possible future success that eluded them.

John Robinson takes a ride with the new Blake Jones and the Trike Shop LP right here?

Mark Heaney is a Vancouver based composer and builder of arts communities. Placentia Bay is a piece written for, as I understand it, the bassist Meaghan Williams; and is performed against an elegantly understated chamber backdrop. It is the third concoction of a beautiful musical triptych, inspired by the story of the Atlantic Charter, which cemented an anti-fascist security allyship during World War 2, while fomenting a post-war emphasis on peace. I think it's okay to quote Julian Cowley's Modern Composition column from Wire Magazine here, column here, "The theme is topical, given current anxieties in the West." It's is this week in Britain 's most multicultural city, a timely,evocative and optimistic piece. I am bouyed with joy.

Reverse Image and Thomas Bey William Bailey's Tokokawa LP from Fourth Dimension is reviewed here

From the Empire State on the Rebel Yell's 40th Anniversary. I am so bothered  by heights i can't even think why they would have gone up there.

From 1981, Delta 5 were a Leeds band from the same local stable as the better known Gang of Four and lesser known The Mekons.  Having produced a clutch of DIY basic and scratchily catchy singles, they were well established at that time as one of those left wing, feminist leaning acts like The Au Pairs, Kleenex, and The Raincoats, though there was a misconception that they were an all girl band. In fact they had two male members, as did The Au Pairs, and operated as a unit.  As a result this album came as a real surprise/shock on release, with its higher production values and skilled performances and song writing, as well as the use of (gasp!) a horn section on some tracks!! In the musically tribal waters of 1980's indie, that was tantamount to a betrayal and as such the album did poorly at the time.  Looking at it now though, its an excellent album by a groundbreaking band.  Pairing dual basses and vocals as the basis for each song, and taking an egalitarian attitude to live performance (no stripping off and writhing on the floor required here!), when I caught them at their height, on their joint headliner tour with Pere Ubu and Gang of Four, they felt , and were, genuinely different. That history has overlooked them since is both unfair and unjust.