Alessandro Cortini "Scuro Chiaro (Mute)"
From Mute Records:
SCURO CHIARO comes from a place that delights in the affirmation of life’s constant variations, simultaneously presenting both bewilderment and vulnerability with its sombre hues and pulsing, synthetic surfaces.
The album’s title plays on the term for heavily contrasting light and shadow in painting and other visual arts. Cortini explains, “SCURO CHIARO is the opposite of chiaroscuro [the use of light and shadow to give strong contrast], and in a way it shows that no matter how you order things there’s always going to be two elements that tend to be the opposite of each other that make up the truth—or make up everything.”
Corbu x Jimi Goodwin "Lost & Found (Trash Casual)"
From Trash Casual:
Corbu is the music and visual art made by a grown-up choirboy-turned-psychonaut, and a hairstylist/lyricist who had never touched an instrument until she was playing on a Jumbotron at Austin City Limits. Jonathan Graves and Amanda create dirty, electronic dream-pop as a kind of medicine, trying to lure their audience deeper into their own subconscious while giving them something to sing along to. Jonathan has written a number of Corbu songs in his dreams, and Amanda contributes real-world, “non-musical” samples and textures that push and pull against the pop song format, as they occasionally dive off a cliff together into a pool of abstraction and ambient noise. Corbu has toured with Bloc Party, performed with Goldfrapp, played at Austin City Limits and Electric Forest festivals, and finished their debut album Crayon Soul with Dave Fridmann (Tame Impala, MGMT, The Flaming Lips).
Bachelor "Doomin’ Sun (Polyvinyl)"
From Polyvinyl:
Bachelor, the new project from Melina Duterte (Jay Som) and Ellen Kempner (Palehound), is not a band, it’s a friendship.
You could say the friendship began in 2017 when Duterte and Kempner first met in a Sacramento green room and experienced love at first sight. Having been mutual fans of each other for years at that point, putting each other’s songs on playlists and scouring YouTube for live videos, they both remember starting that night as nervous wrecks intent on making a good impression. That proved extremely easy, and their anxious facades quickly faded into geeky fandom as they unabashedly yell-sang lyrics from the crowd during each other’s sets.
A year later, Kempner visited Duterte’s home studio in Los Angeles to mess around and record for fun. They hadn’t really hung out much since the two shows they did in 2017, but they kept in touch by hesitantly texting and replying to Instagram posts. Now together in LA, the jitters Kempner and Duterte fought the first time they met were back, but this time they weren’t born of insecurity, but of excitement. The two spent a few hours writing and recording their first song together, “Sand Angel,” a seductive slow-burner that unfurls like a lucid dream. Kempner’s arid lead vocals are punctuated by Duterte’s spry harmonies, lending the track a rare dynamism that could only mean one thing: they had to write an album together.
Reigning Sound "A Little More Time with Reigning Sound (Merge)"
From Merge Records:
The old saying “you can’t go home again” is most often true. Life moves on and nothing stays the same, but that’s certainly not the case for songwriter Greg Cartwright, who returned to his home city of Memphis to record the new Reigning Sound album, A Little More Time with Reigning Sound.
And it’s not only the terrain that’s familiar: For this new LP, Cartwright also reunited with Reigning Sound’s original “Memphis lineup” of Jeremy Scott (bass), Greg Roberson (drums), and Alex Greene (keyboards), all of whom played on the band’s earliest recordings. The new songs explore fresh lyrical and musical territories but at times also tastefully echo back to Reigning Sound’s Break Up, Break Down and Time Bomb High School. That’s not by chance—it’s just what happens when these musicians get in the same room. Their sonic chemistry hasn’t faded a bit.