Looking back at 2026's album releases the Le Carousel album The Humans Will Destroy Us is standing out, a ten track concept album (the concept being human capacity for our own destruction... via, ooh take your pick... climate change, AI, nuclear weapons, psychotic leaders, war, ...) that blends dancefloor electronics, synth soundtracks, kosmische and Weatherall inspired sounds into a single, coherent whole.
Le Carousel's Phil Kieran released an EP this week, two versions of a track called Leave It All Behind that he felt didn't quite fit on the album. The first version rides in on electronic percussion and soft female vocals singing the track title, looped and overlapping. Synths add to the blurry psychedelic feel. Halfway through the rhythm hits the foreground and an organ joins, the track becoming more driving, more upfront, before the drums drop out completely.
The second version, the Le Carousel Mix, has a guitar and bass thrown in, the rhythm tougher and more live, an electronic/ live band stomp with a vocal by Phil, the vague promise of escape with a lack of regret. The Le Carousel mix kicks on, a drone/ psyche/ post- punk version of the song equally at home at a messy indie night as out clubbing. You can buy both at Bandcamp.
Time & Space is the new album from Nottingham's Shrinkwrap, out now on Notts label Delia Recordings. It's a thirteen track double album and almost all the tracks are over five minutes long. It's an album that demands your full attention, not an album for cherry picking or flicking through or for those with short attention spans (and doesn't that affect us all at times these days- a short attention span seems to be a symptom of modern life). Time & Space is an album to get lost in, to surrender to, to give oneself up to. There's no sense in rushing it. You need to let the music work its magic in its own time.
The first four tracks take in a beautiful marimba led opener (Vibra Marimba), layered and sonically rich Balearica (Call Me When You Get There), the languid and soulful Beautiful Thing, and then a short neo- classical piece called People Passing Through You. The hum of electricity and the dreamy haze of FX are everywhere, tying the tracks together. Shrinkwrap mention Cocteau Twins, Talk Talk, Massive Attack, The KLF and Ryuichi Sakamoto as influences and all of those feel on the money.
Time & Space drifts into dubby areas and into more uptempo ones. On 54 Blues Pt 1, drums and energy kick in. The follow up, 54 Blues Pt. 2, flips it, downtempo, Bristolian blues. Throughout, there are both live instruments by a variety of guest musicians and the Shrinkwrap duo's samples, synths and machines, a blurring that makes for an organic and alive sound.
As it moves towards the final four songs Time & Space wanders into ambient territory. Calm Your Mind takes a vocal sample, 'Let your mind wander... calm your mind', and wraps it in rain forest sounds, double bass, pedal steel guitar and fluttering synths. The title track jolts us with a synth wobble and electronic drums. Blind Side is journey into ambient techno and they finish with Acoustic, a track built around an acoustic guitar and FX, a trip into sound and feeling.
There's so much going on on Time & Space hat you need several sittings, ideally some with headphones, to let it reveal itself fully. Mark Raynor and Matt Horobin have poured several decades of listening to music and making music into it, a head music album that is rich and rewarding in lots of ways.
You can find Time & Space in various formats at Bandcamp.
Robin Guthrie, ex- Cocteau Twin, has a Bandcamp page where he uploads what he calls his 'orphan tracks', some of them orphaned from the album he was working on back in 2015 (Universal Road, recorded with Mark Gardener of Ride). Robin must have been on a creative spurt because as well as the ten songs on that album there have been several that have seen the light of day on Bandcamp. The latest, out last week, is Coming Up For Air, three minutes of rippling guitar lines over a sheen of warm FX and some beautiful lead lines. It glides by in a shimmer, instrumental shoegaze/ dream pop recorded on the French Riviera.
According to Robin, 'Elvis was in the building'. You can find it, listen and buy here. Well worth it.
It doesn't sound at all like Elvis to me.
Back in May Robin released Cherokee, a song from 2012 that began life in Mexico City in 2008. Those familiar guitar sounds, rising chords and FX pedals, with an injection of guitars at just after one minute and then drums a few seconds later- it could be a lost Cocteau Twins track, his guitar playing is so signature and recognisable. The falling notes at three minutes forty sound like lush, warm droplets falling, all very lovely. Again, find it at Bandcamp.
Over at The Vinyl Villain JC spent September counting down 800 songs that span the parameters of the blog and his musical world. Near to the business end of things was a song by Echo And The Bunnymen, a band who were a formative Vinyl Villain influence. The song was Heads Will Roll, from 1983's Porcupine. It was a choice that made me smile- out of all the songs from the classic four man line up, from Crocodiles to Ocean Rain, all those songs and moments, all those singles, JC went for a Porcupine album track.
I spent some time going back to Porcupine and Heads Will Roll. The album was described by those involved in making it as 'horrible'. They'd been on tour and hadn't had time to write new songs. The songs they were writing didn't flow as easily as the Heaven Up Here songs. Mac doesn't like singing the Porcupine songs, as he feels the words are too personal, that he gave too much away. Will didn't like the record company telling him first version of the songs and the production weren't good enough and resented them having to be re- worked and re- recorded. Les didn't like the record industry full stop. Pete had been producing The Wild Swans, spent some time doing other things, and was a little isolated from the other three Bunnymen (as he often was). Not ideal conditions. That they made Porcupine at all is a miracle.
The Cutter and The Back Of Love are songs one and two- two massive Bunnymen singles, adorned with Shankar's strings- and after that the album does become a bit heavy and self obsessed. My White Devil and Clay are both serious songs. The title track too.
Side two opens with the drama and psychedelic post- punk of Heads Will Roll though and suddenly we're back down at the front, the band blazing and the violas and cellos linking 1967 with 1983, headspinning swirly psyche and Mac singing of 'partly politic' and 'no one calling', meetings in private places where he will 'stare you into the ground'. It's gripping and exhilarating stuff, psychedelic Bunnymen with verses and choruses.
They recorded a longer version, the Summer Version, which eventually came out as a B- side on the post- Porcupine standalone single Never Stop, a song that broke the gloom. Lay down thy raincoat and groove. The Summer Version is longer, Will's spindly guitar at the fore and Les' bass powering everything along, before the viola comes in. It ends with Shankar's strings and Pete's drums going off on one for forty seconds,a section which could easily have been stretched out for longer.
This clip of the Bunnymen on Dutch TV miming to Heads Will Roll demonstrates what was so great about them, the 1983 Bunnymen in all their pomp.
The 2003 CD release of Porcupine (and the other canonical 80s albums) featured various B- sides and extras. Porcupine's extras included four previously unreleased versions from the original studio recordings, produced by Kingbird (Ian Broudie, who produced both the original and re- recorded songs for Porcupine) and before Shakar's strings were added. When you listen to them it's easy to see why Will was pissed off at them being rejected- there's nothing wrong with them, they're sparser and possibly less dynamic but still good takes. WEA/ Korova rejected them as 'too uncommercial'. I'm not sure Will was too bothered about being commercial. When they'd recorded The Back Of Love in 1982 tensions were so bad Drummond got them off to Scotland, a tour of the highlands and islands, to rebuild band relations, a tactic which didn't entirely succeed. The Porcupine sessions were tense and that can be heard in the original versions I think. Shankar's strings which added so much to The Back Of Love and The Cutter were brought back. This is the original version of the album's title track...
Ian's lyrics to the Porcupine song Higher Hell were inspired by seeing a Hieronymus Bosch painting while on tour in Madrid, Ian lost in the detail and crazy world of the 16th century Dutch painter. The lower heaven and higher hell of the song were Ian's version of Bosch's psychedelic/ religious freakout world of God, animals and monsters, birds swallowing people whole and bodies piled up after final judgement.
Hieronymus Bosch appears on the new Bunnymen album Apples For Isaac, a link between the worlds of 1983 and 2026. 'What would Hieronymus say?', Ian sings in the single Brussels Is Haunted, a genuinely great late period Bunnymen song, Ian back at the top of his game, sounding good and writing lyrics that are memorable.
It's difficult to listen to the album and hear it as a full Bunnymen album in some ways- Will only appears on a few songs and Ian has said that Will's 'weird stuff' didn't get used. It feels more like an Ian McCulloch solo album but the name Echo and The Bunnymen will get greater attention and sales. But even so, it's good, I like it. It feels weirdly personal due to the title but that's not the only reason. At least half the songs are much better than you might expect at this stage in proceedings and the fact that there's been so long between this one and the previous one (ten years) suggests Ian has worked at it, chosen his best songs, got them recorded as he wants them and not just rushed out some mediocre product. It feels like he cares.
Clem Burke's drums give it some wallop, the guitars and synths sparkle, it sounds Bunnymen but not deliberately so, not chasing or reviving the classic sound- it's just that this is what they sound like. First song Take Me By The Hand charges in at a pace and Can't Be Sold follows, bold and confident in itself. Brussels Is Haunted is a beauty. On some of the songs Ian sounds his age, the voice a bit worn and weary- not in a bad way but in a way that works for the songs.
An Unstoppable Force opens side two, Velvets acoustic guitars and Ian at the fore, wiser maybe, a man who knows time and tide wait for no- one.
There are a couple more that stand up- Asimov has clipped guitar chords and some drama and The Light That Surrounds You pulls at the heartstrings. Lab Rats Ran has sax that recalls Roxy Music. Apples For Isaac ends with We Prayed In The Dark and by the time it finishes I've spent forty minutes listening to eleven new Echo And The Bunnymen songs and not wished I had Ocean Rain, Porcupine, Crocodiles or Heaven Up Here on instead. It's not any of those albums either but it's definitely, on its own terms, a minor triumph.
The last two Spiritualized albums were released in 2018 and 2022, songs recorded at the same time and split over two records with titles that joined up to form a phrase courtesy of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt.
There's an argument, not least in the pair of album titles, that the sixteen songs demonstrate that Jason has finally found some inner peace and buried the demons that were on his trail for the previous three or four decades and that dominated his songwriting. The songs were worked up on Jason's laptop with Jason playing a huge range of instruments- sixteen I read somewhere- and it is incredible what can be done on a laptop. The songs are huge, fresh and vibrant, a definite addition to the Spiritualized back catalogue after a couple of previous albums that didn't do as much for me (2008's Songs In A&E and 2012's Sweet Heart Sweet Light). If ...And Nothing Hurt and Everything Was Beautiful... end up being the full stop on Spiritualized, they're a good place to finish.
Jason's no stranger to long songs. The longest song on 2018's ...And Nothing Hurt was The Morning After which blasts off with organ drone and Johnny B. Good guitar, totally Velvet Underground too, and then Jason's slightly broken voice, 'Jane said she had a problem with the modern world/ All the boys she ever loved are in love with another girl...'
There's a view on various Spritualized forums that Jane is Jason, reflecting on his own problems with the modern world. The song is a blast, nearly eight minutes of rock 'n roll as catharsis, the ending overdubbed with free jazz sax and a pile up of instruments putting Jason's laptop through its paces.
The longest song 2022's Everything Was Beautiful... was The A Song (Laid In Your Arms), seven minutes and seven seconds of exhilarating psych/ space rock. 'These are the words, they're as old as the hills/ Cooked on a diet of mushrooms and pills/ One man's crime is another man's thrill/ And we're gone'. Some kind of acceptance there. Guitars, horns, organ, drums, all weigh in, layered and distorted and all contributing to a mass musical delirium. 'We're laid in your arms'.
More Durutti Column- there's already quite a lot of Vini here this year, hopefully you can stick with it. There's so much to find in his back catalogue, always a track you hadn't heard or noticed properly before.
Today's mix is a post- Factory selection. Factory folded in 1992, debts killing off a fourteen year art experiment. Tony Wilson moved on and with typical bravado launched Factory Too (Factory 2) in 1994 with The Durutti Column the first band to sign up (Wilson was Vini's friend, mentor and manager so it seemed obvious Vini would follow Tony- everyone else had gone to London Records or elsewhere because under the rules of engagement at Factory, 'the artists own everything, the label owns nothing', a beautiful artistic stance that left the label nothing to bargain with when the creditors began banging on the doors and they tried to save the label in 1991/ 2).
Factory Too/ 2, Wilson with original Factory co- director Alan Erasmus, also signed Hopper and The Space Monkeys (I recall nothing about Hopper but The Space Monkeys play a few times including a good gig at The Boardwalk). The Durutti Column released two albums for the label before it too folded- 1994's Sex And Death and 1998's Time Was Gigantic... When We Were Kids, and one in between on Le Disques de Crepuscule, a Factory Belgian offshoot.
After that Vini's albums came out on Kooky or Artful leading to the 2010's tribute to Tony Wilson, A Paean To Wilson. In 2012 Vini suffered a series of strokes and that was that it seemed until this year's comeback, Renascent. The eleven albums he made after 1994 and the various recordings that came out as a series of CD only albums called The Sporadic Recordings are a treasure trove of lesser known and obscure Durutti Column songs. This mix only scratches the surface.
Or A You Just A Technician? is the opening track from 2010's Paean To Wilson, recorded for Tony after his death in 2007. The track is a minute of sound manipulation, Wilson interviewing Martin Hannett about his role as a producer, ever the provocateur. Requiem is from the same album, a long eulogy for Vini's friend.
It's Wonderful is a glorious explosion of sound from 2006's Keep Breathing, a huge and life affriming piece of music. I saw Durutti Column at Manchester Academy, in the small room at the top of the student union, around this time playing a set of songs mainly from the 90s albums and finishing with some Stooges style raw power. It's Wonderful was superb. In the 90s and 00s we saw them play several gigs in Manchester, a couple in unusual places- one at Atlas Bar where Vini and Bruce played in the window, their backs to Deansgate and another at the Comedy Club on Deansgate Locks around 2003/ 4 where Vini made some jokes about how he should be telling jokes and played the first two songs just him, his guitar and a ghetto blaster, before the band came on and joined him. It wasn't sold out- funny how patchy attendance was a some of the Factory related stuff in the 90s and 00s. I went to an afternoon at the Cornerhouse where Wilson introduced 10 videos that made Manchester or Factory, with a Q&A after. There were about twenty people there including The Other Two (sat in front of us). Memory tells me the Comedy Store gig an afternoon gig too.
Fidelity is from 1996's album of the same name, a John Bonham sampling tune. Both track and album are very much lost DC. Eley Rudge guests on vocals with Vini on guitar, synths, piano and samples.
Fado is from Sex And Death, a twelve track album that was his first for four years when it came out in 1994. Vini goes all over the place on the album, a real pick and mix job, with tracks in a dozen styles. In 1991 The Durutti Column played at Factory's Cities In The Park festival in Heaton Park, partly a tribute to Hannett. It was a hot day and the line up was strong- Durutti Column, Cath Carroll, ACR, De La Soul, New FADs, Revenge, Electronic (with Pet Shop Boys appearing on Patience Of A Saint) and Happy Mondays. One of those gigs you have to pinch yourself actually happened and cost less than £20. The version of Fado we were privileged to listen to in the afternoon heat was as good as anything else we heard that day. Fado is named after the traditional Portuguese music Vini heard on tour in Lisbon, music all about sadness, loss and longing.
So Many Crumbs and Monkeys!is from 2008's Sunlight To Blue... Blue To Blackness, an acoustic, folk sounding song with a drum machine and Vini's guitar playing a total joy. Vini sings in the second half of the song.
Longsight Romance is from 2001's Rebellion. Longsight is a mile south of Manchester city centre on the A6 towards Stockport. The song is full of delay and FX, several guitar parts, hand drums and Vini's voice. The album takes in Irish folk, a song with a rapper, various guest vocalists and a banjo.
The Sporadic recordings came out in 1990 followed by The Return Of... in 2002 and a third volume, Sporadic Three, in 2007. The CDs are full of archival recordings, demos, lost tracks, experiments, all manner of rare and unreleased songs. Nile Reprise and Daizepam 5mgs are both from The Return Of The Sporadic Recordings and Drinking Time (Version) and Fate are from Sporadic Three. All three are typically Vini- inventive, expressive, off the cuff, and melodic. According to the sleevenotes, written by Vini, Drinking Time was an offcut from Time Was Gigantic... and has 'Laurie Laptop pulling all the FX he could find on the track'. Fate is described as a 'little Portastudio tune from around the time of Tempus Fugit' (which was released in 2004). Fate is acoustic guitar with plenty of delay, notes echoing round the mix, a blur of background sound, an electric guitar drippling notes into the foreground and Vini's soft vocals. It's a gorgeous, lilting, middle of the night kind of song, the sort of thing it seems Vini was recording almost as an afterthought.
A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion.
Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was What are you really thinking about just now?
I was thinking about various things, both trivial and more important. Musically it took me to The Charlatans. There was an inspired response from the OSS (Oblique Saturdays Squad) which included Otavio August Fernades Cardoso (Ernie), Kurt Vile and The Charlatans (Al G, and a different Charlatans song from mine), The Housemartins, Broken Chanter, Happy Mondays, The Colourfield and Hifi Sean and David McAlmont (all JC), National Trust membership (Mrs G), the England 1970 World Cup squad (Jase), The B52s (Rol), Jake Thackray (The Swede), Jonathan Dee (A Telepathic Fish) and NOZZ (Chris Zen Arcade).
At the start of this series in January I thought I might pull all the songs together into a mix or series of mixes but the sheer volume of them has left me a bit overwhelmed by the prospect. An end of year job maybe.
Anyway, this week's card is this- The tape is now the music.
A few weeks ago a friend who's moving house sent me a message to ask if it was worth trying to sell a box of old cassettes, 'mainly 80s pop' he said, 'Springsteen, Dire Straits, that kind of thing'. I said it was, the cassette revival was very much a thing and 80s pop was probably much sought after. I recommended Fountains records in Stretford. He came back with £50 in his pocket and promised to buy me a pint to say thank you (I've not had that pint yet it occurs to me).
The photo at the top of this post and the one below are the tapes I still own, bought at various points since the late 80s. I sometimes bought cassettes back in the day- cheaper than vinyl, portable, often contained extra tracks, some bought for car listening- many of these pictured here were owned on vinyl as well (and possibly later on on CD too). A couple are magazine freebies, one is a bootleg of Andrew Weatherall DJing at Cream bought in a clothes shop in Wigan (funny the things you remember), a couple are promos from a magazine in Manchester I contributed a few things to in the mid 90s, a handful are very recent (products of the tape revival) and there's a few C90s in there too which for sentimental reasons I've never felt able to part with. I could probably equal my friend's £50 windfall by taking many of these up the road but I think I'd miss them. I do actually still have a cassette player too but am cautious about playing them in case they get tangled and snagged.
Possibly Billy Bragg's best song, certainly one of his most loved. I adored it when it came out and it evokes the world it was released into very much- the me as an 18 year old world and the wider world of 1988.
The cassette single (they tried to make the word cassingle a thing and it didn't really take off) was a cheap way of picking up extra tracks and B-sides for Walkman listening, especially if you picked them up from the bargain bin in Woolworths after they'd dropped out of the chart. The 1993 One Dove cassingle of Breakdown cost me less than a quid and has the sublime Squire Black Dove Rides Out version of Breakdown on it, ideal for listening to on the move at a time when I didn't have the facility to tape from my vinyl. Andrew Weatherall and the Sabres boys with a ten minute cinematic dub odyssey, remixing One Dove and sampling Shades Of Rhythm and Tranquility Bass to fine effect.
Klangkollektor is from Nuremberg and releases records on Jason Boardman's Before I Die label. Thoroughly recommended. The cassette release of The Stockport Tapes captures Klangkollektor playing live in Lower Hillgate, Stockport, two summers ago. Dubby Balearica with Roland Space Echo and tweeting birds.
