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Dig deep enough inside yourself – start treating your body as your sanctuary rather than your enemy – and eventually you'll find yourself blooming right back out into the sun. That's the transformation Guerilla Toss trace on their newest album Famously Alive, their effervescent Sub Pop debut. After a decade sprinkling glitter into grit, building a reputation as one of the most ferociously creative art-rock groups working, the upstate New York band have eased fully into their light. This is Guerilla Toss at their most luminescent – awake, alive, and extending an open invitation to anyone who wants to soak it all up beside them.

Love variations: The variant, and its corollary the variation, inseparable from the Middle Ages, have established themselves, particularly since Eloge de la variante (In praise of the variant) by Bernard Cerquiglini and the term of “mouvance” (mobility) inaugurated by Paul Zumthor, as genuine writing processes. Extending them to the musical field sounds quite obvious, and allows us furthermore to apprehend the modes of transmission and circulation of the medieval melodic repertoires.

On their second record, Sideways to New Italy, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever have turned their gaze inward, to their individual pasts and the places that inform them. From a town in regional Australia that serves as a living relic to how immigrants brought a sense of home to an alien place, to the familiar Mediterranean statues that dot the front lawns of the Melbourne suburbs where the band members live, the inspiration for the record came from the attempts people make at crafting utopia in their backyard (while knowing there is no such thing as a clean slate).

Buildings burning in every direction; macabre unknowns in your friendly neighbor’s basement; undecided voters sharpening their pencils: under pressure we could call Kiwi Jr’s Cooler Returns “timely.” But what year is it, again? On their sophomoric smash-up released world-wide by Sub Pop Records, Kiwi Jr cycle through the recent zigs & looming zags of the new decade, squinting anew at New Year’s parties forgotten and under-investigated small town diner fires, piecing together low-stakes conspiracy theories on what’s coming down the pike in 2021.

Smash cut to Kiwi Jr.’s third album, Chopper, overseen by trusted pilot Dan Boeckner (Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs) on storied Sub Pop Records. Turning nocturnal with necks mock turtle, our Local Kiwi Jr. takes neon flight off the digital cliff - like The Monkees starring in Blade Runner; like Michael Mann directs Encino Man. Ten songs with synth shimmer, zen gongs with yard strimmer. The signs along the highway read “LESS BAR, MORE NOIR AHEAD.” Ah, those late summer, Joe Strummer, Home on the Range Rover Blues.

SOMM Recordings announces a significant new release: the first live performance on CD of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony and Sibelius' Second Symphony by legendary conductor Serge Koussevitzky and the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

In the horror genre, sequels are perfunctory. As the insufferable film bro Randy explains in Scream 2, “There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to create a successful sequel. Number one: the body count is always bigger. Number two: the death scenes are always much more elaborate—more blood, more gore.

What happens when an abrasive rock trio trades guitars for synths, cranks up the beats and leans into the everyday anxieties of simply being a functioning human in the 21st century? The answer is uneasy laughter, the sensational second sub pop release from Los Angeles-based moaning. Vocalist/guitarist Sean Solomon, bassist/keyboardist Pascal Stevenson and drummer Andrew MacKelvie have been friends and co-conspirators amid the fertile L.A.

The selection of live recordings here run the spectrum, from solitary to exuberant. Some were made solo, in the summer of 2020, while other tracks are electrified with the energy that comes from a day cooped up making music with your friends.