The Burning Hell – All I Need

I think I came to The Burning Hell around ten years ago thanks to the recommendation of Paul Heaton (Beautiful South & Housemartins) in a magazine interview. He said he’d been listening to them and another band called Ages And Ages and they turned out to be two of the best heads up a music magazine has given me in recent years. Admittedly the latter band have fallen off my radar a little lately but The Burning Hell, who are the outlet for musical outpourings of Mathias Kom and multi-instrumentalists Ariel Sharratt and Jake Nicoll, regularly embellished by friends and fellow collaborators, have maintained an impressive schedule of record releases and live performance. Within their emphasis towards story telling and playing live, often in locations way off the regular tour schedule pathways, there is something of the folk music persuasion to this unit. That said, the Burning Hell sound is something else altogether; a rhyming and rapping and self-effacing groove monster with an eye and ear for the absurd married to the keenest of everyday detail, a band that are hard to resist…

Dungen – Hostens Farger

These Swedish psychedelic rockers are soon to be celebrating their 25th anniversary which is a noteworthy landmark when you hear how their European take on melodic UK freakbeat and cosmic sounds sewn in the sixties still sounds so vital. This is the suitably trippy video to a track from their most recent album ‘En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog’ released on Mexican Summer, obviously I cannot understand a word of what is being sung here but somehow, when the music is as eloquent an vivid as this, it matters little, you get the picture anyway…

Withered Hand – Waking Up

Back in the Noughties I, from my far away locale of Southern England, could be heard to wax enviously about the Scottish Fence Collective scene of artists up in Scotland. Catching artists like Pictish Trail and King Creosote at folk gigs near me then learning that they were all tied up in some way to this conglomeration of creative energy seemed fascinating. Withered Hand, the artistic identity of Edinburgh songwriter Dan Willson, are plucked from the same well, releasing a debut album back in 2009. This latest piece was filmed live at a Duddingston Kirk session and the song ‘Waking Up’ will be available on the forthcoming Reveal Records album ‘How To Love’…

Cinder Well – Two Heads Grey Mare

Not only does the music on this track stir up a dusk-time darkening of the spirits, but somehow this accompanying video summons up those dimming of the day sensations as well. Of the song, taken from the new album ‘Cadence’, Cinder Well says “this song is about a human spending a night with a selkie-like vision who comes out of the water. The selkie disappears in the morning, and the human is left with an experience that they can’t put their finger on, questioning reality and experiencing a huge sense of loss. I acted as both the human and the selkie in the music video, which to me portrays that we often look for an escape from ourselves, and we search for that in our external reality. In this case, the human finds this briefly and ecstatically, and then loses it again.”…

The Altons – Float

For my money, the fusion between vintage psychedelics and retro soul sounds has not been tapped to the full. When it works, as it does so well on this dreamy number, it really smashes it out of the park. This is a silky song called ‘Float’ but just listen to the spellbinding way it elevates us into the clouds towards the end, an effect that is captured pretty effectively in this video animation too. Released via Penrose Records, although the YouTube video is posted by Daptone, which is as surefire a guarantee of excellence in soul as you could hope to find today…

Kendrick Scott – Threshold

While I am on the subject of dependable record labels, has there ever been one with such a reliable reputation as Blue Note? To this day, here is a brand that appears to uphold the, now almost quaint, ideal that a label should be run by music people who are emotionally invested in everything aspect of an album release, from the recording of the music to the presentation of the sleeve art. Here drummer Kendrick Scott, who on new Blue Note album ‘Corridors’ is presenting his first compositional treatment in a trio context, proves that there is a place where adventurous classy modern Jazz can be found and it is pretty much the same place we could turn to for over eighty years now…