Michael Harding

One of the standout albums of 2021. It's everything you expected and more. Simply amazing. Dry Cleaning release their debut studio album New Long Leg on 4AD. The 10-track long-player, which includes ‘Strong Feelings’ and last year’s single ‘Scratchcard Lanyard’, was recorded over two weeks last summer at Rockfield Studios in rural Wales with producer John Parish (PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding). Following on from their thrillingly taut 2019 EPs Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks and Sweet Princess, New Long Leg is more ambitious and complex, with Shaw’s spoken vocals tightly intertwined with the band’s restless instrumentals. With lyrics preoccupied by themes like dissociation, escapism, daydreaming, complicated feelings of love, anger, revenge, anxiety, the kitchen, lethargy, forgetfulness, and survival, Shaw says, “the title is ambiguous; a new long leg could be an expensive present or a growth or a table repair.”

Throughout a chequered career Arthur Brown has never been one to play by the rules and when the chart topping The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown split nobody knew what the band’s namesake would do next. When he resurfaced several years later it was with the proto-prog, avant-garde Kingdom Come, a band so way out that time is only just catching up. Eternal Messenger: An Anthology 1970-1973 collects the band’s three albums along with a rare jam session and a disc of radio sessions to make the perfect introduction to Arthur Brown’s crazy world…

Hector Berlioz, France’s greatest Romantic composer, exemplifies the spirit of his age – yet his genius was also ahead of its time. Reflecting his colourful life, his music is astonishing for its originality and ambition, and for orchestration of groundbreaking brilliance. This, the first-ever complete Berlioz edition, comprises carefully selected recordings and even includes works completely new to the catalogue. The accompanying booklet, lavishly illustrated, contains a fascinating commentary from Berlioz biographer David Cairns, whose words bring the composer’s music still more vividly to life.

The Charlotte, North Carolina-based bands, second full-length album, The Electric Man, on Bright Antenna Records, produced by Joey Waronker (Beck, Brandon Flowers, Yeasayer, Atoms for Peace, Air), finds singer/guitarist Drake Margolnick and drummer Michael Finster taking listeners on a journey from light into darkness and back again. Reaching new emotional depths through a few life-changing events over the past year, the 12-track album delivers atmospheric rock with passionate vocals, pop-minded melodies, rapturous orchestral soundscapes, and themes that run the gamut from love and loss to fear and despair to hope and happiness. Several songs, including the album’s title track, were inspired by the death of their close friend and former band member, Grant Harding, in 2015.