Oh and another one that seems worth mentioning here is the return of Mirah! It's been like 8 years since her last one? Cold Cold Water is such a classic tune, I'm curious to hear what she'll have in store for today's world.
Oh wow. I forgot all about her. Will definitely add that to the queue! Looks like interest in her was rekindled after the 20 year re-release of ...
Oh and another one that seems worth mentioning here is the return of Mirah! It's been like 8 years since her last one? Cold Cold Water is such a classic tune, I'm curious to hear what she'll have in store for today's world.
Oh wow. I forgot all about her. Will definitely add that to the queue! Looks like interest in her was rekindled...
I'm listening to the new one at this very moment. She sounds less like the Raincoats now and more like Juliana Hatfield, and it's significantly less lo-fi without being completely not-lo-fi... it's a nice album. Then again, maybe that's just because I really like Juliana Hatfield? 🤔
Shy C86 lad takes seductive but reclusive '60s French Chanteuse out on a date. Forgotten about cult classic twee band/singer-songwriter from the late '80s surprises world with new release that sounds as good as anything she's done before!
TBH, I've never even heard of this C86-like band before. I guess they had some stuff come out in the late 80s that's really good too. I just love when a new discovery forces you down a rabbit hole or two! MJ & BayState (& perhaps dihansse 🤔) , I think you guys will positively love this!!!
Shy C86 lad takes seductive but reclusive '60s French Chanteuse out on a date. Forgotten about cult classic twee band/singer-songwriter from the late '80s surprises world with new release that sounds as good as anything she's done before!
TBH, I've never even heard of this C86-like band before. I guess they had some stuff come out in the late 80s that's really good too. I just love when a new discovery forces you down a rabbit hole or two! MJ & BayState (& perhaps dihansse 🤔) , I think you guys will positively love this!!!
I saw that too... Actually, it's only been in the last 10 years or so that I've developed a liking for twee-pop, jangle-pop, C86, the Sarah Records stable of recording artists, and so on. When that stuff first came out in the 80s I didn't really like any of it, not even the Field Mice. And as for the Would-Be-Goods, this is their sixth album, but before now we only had two of them listed on BEA. (Maybe I'll add the rest later this week if someone else doesn't get to it first.) I still think their first album (The Camera Loves Me) was way too lo-fi, like a lot of the twee stuff was, but since then they've been getting better with each album. They'll probably always be best-known for that first one though, because it was released during "Peak Twee" in 1988. So that seems unfortunate to me.
On a more positive note, this week is looking much better than last week, and I've managed to find about a half-dozen recommendable albums in addition to the three I mentioned earlier. Nothing and Mitski are still at the top of the list, and even though I'm usually more of a "Nothing-type guy," I have to say that based on what I've heard so far, the new Mitski album is likely to end up as the #1. So it's pretty ironic (from my perspective) that she chose the album title she did.
This song was released this past Friday, and if it never makes it to the radio, I'd like to thank the radio powers that be for making the world aware of how far their brain trains don't travel.
This song was released this past Friday, and if it never makes it to the radio, I'd like to thank the radio powers that be for making the world aware of how far their brain trains don't travel.
The joke's on you, I'm afraid — radio programmers haven't had viable brain tissue in their heads since the early 1980s.
So it looks like this is a week for experimental avant-garde leftfield neo-classical compositional-weirdness material. Which is fine, really. And to that end, the best new thing I've heard this week is this neo-classical-with-electronics album:
I will say that almost everything I've heard by Ms. Hirano is brilliant, but she's not the recording artist you turn to for massively-reverberating fuzzed-out guitars or angelic harmonies over galactic dreamscapes.
I've gushed about my boy Bill Callahan in the past - Zen Master Callahan. And, I'll probably gush about him again in the future. I haven't been particularly good about keeping up with his latest releases, falling off somewhere after 2013's Dream River. BUT, the fault is all my own. AND, I'm going to remedy that THIS very night by checking out his latest - My Days of 58 - which sounds utterly fantastic based upon the three singles released thus far. Especially the track "The Man I'm Supposed To Be" which includes this little wake up call to get the fuck out of your head ...
I saw that demon inside me
Trying to claim my body as its own
Invader, enslaver, little headstone
Tell me, has it grown?
...
I've been living too long in my head - The Man I'm Supposed To Be
To quote the esteemable Zen Master herself, Alysa Liu - "That's what I'm fucking talking about!!!" 🛼 So good to be back under my old master Callahan's tutelage. Perhaps the finest lyricist of my generation!
What FEBRUARY 27TH, 2026 release do YOU have your ears & heart set on when midnight strikes?! 🔭👀
I've gushed about my boy Bill Callahan in the past - Zen Master Callahan. And, I'll probably gush about him again in the future. I haven't been particularly good about keeping up with his latest releases, falling off somewhere after 2013's Dream River. BUT, the fault is all my own. AND, I'm going to remedy that THIS very night by checking out his latest - My Days of 28 - which sounds utterly fantastic based upon the three singles released thus far.
Have I ever mentioned that you have unusually catholic musical tastes? (That's lower-case "c" catholic, not upper-case "C" Catholic, obviously. Though I wouldn't be surprised if you liked upper-case "C" Catholic tunes too, at this point.) Anyway, that's a nice album, with some interesting use of electric guitar for dissonance purposes, and I might even say something silly like "he sounds like John Murry" except that it's really more like the other way around. He could also be compared to Leonard Cohen, but that's only because they're both baritone singers and people have actually heard of Leonard Cohen.
Anyway, this is probably the best week for new releases so far this year, but I was able to narrow down my "check these out" list to the three I've already harped on above and three others (it was six, but that just seemed like a TL;DR type of situation).
Nothing (2010s), A Short History of Decay: Not to be confused with the album of the same title by... John Murry! Nothing is, to my ears, the best shoegaze-metal band ever, better than Deafheaven, Alcest, and Jesu (though maybe not all three combined). Their biggest problem is album-cover art. This is their fifth album and they're all great, and they all have terrible album covers. It's... perplexing.
The Julies, Cherisher: This shoegaze-pop band broke up back in 1996, just as their first "real" album, Lovelife, was being released. Of course, shoegaze-pop fans will remember 1996 as the year Lush, perhaps the greatest shoegaze-pop band of them all, released an album that was also entitled Lovelife. So if you were a music consumer in 1996 and you were in the market for an album called "Lovelife," which one were you gonna buy — that thing, or the one with Miki and Emma? Bad luck and bad timing, I guess... In 2021 or thereabouts, i.e., 25 years later, The Julies got back together, and made an album in 2023 called Always & Always (a unique title — thanks, Discogs!). This new one is better, though.
Landowner, Assumption - These guys are a jagged & very angular post-punk guitar band, not very hooky or melodic, and for some reason they don't like guitar distortion. But they've been getting better on every album, to the point where they've finally made one I actually like.
The Legal Matters, Lost at Sea - This is just a really good, and somewhat 70s-retro, power pop album, made by three guys from Michigan. Despite the band name they don't sound like The Who at all (at least in my opinion.)
But putting the Mitski and Nothing albums aside for the moment, the big winner for me this week is:
This is essentially a dreampop/trip-hop duo with an Arabic (Emirati/Egyptian, to be specific) female lead singer named Mayah Alkhateri, who sings all the songs in Arabic. So that's unusual, and I guess this is an effort to prove that quality dreampop acts can come from and/or exist in the MIddle East. (Except that the other person in the duo, Salvador Navarrete, is from Paris and that's where they're both based. Also, the name "Kiss Facility" doesn't exactly sound Middle Eastern — though TBH I've never actually kissed a MIddle Eastern gal before, in or out of a facility built for that purpose, so I guess I wouldn't know.) All that aside, this is the sort of album I tend to like, and while it could really use more electric guitars, it has lots of Middle Eastern elements to make it sound all different and new and fressshhhh! The only problem is that they haven't put the album up for pre-order on the streaming services, or anywhere else that I can find, so there's a chance the release could be delayed and I'll have egg on my face which will no doubt drip down onto my shirt and possibly my pants too, causing a mess. (Edit: It's there! I'm egg-free!)
Next week looks... okay, I guess? Definitely not as big as this week. There's a new Squeeze album, along with the Swell Maps for the older contingent, and there's also a new album by World I Hate called Total Nuclear Annihilation that I can't imagine anyone wanting to miss out on. Good music for gardening, tidying up the house, playing with the cats, or maybe just starting World War III for the fun of it or because you've already wrecked everything else.
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