What We've Been Listening To...New Release Round Up

By Jon Milton

This week bought not one, but two excellent psych rock albums in the form of ‘Centre’ by Mt Mountain, and the self-titled first album by Diagonal, on Fuzz Club and Little Cloud Records respectively.

Mt Mountain’s fourth album begins majestically with ‘Tassels’, seven minutes of sparkling krautrock, and it concludes with the sublime, laid back ‘Deluge’. In between are seven hypnotic tracks that glisten and beguile with their undoubted elegance. It’s a wonderful album that is made for zoning out to.

​Equally polished and wondrous is the debut album from Chicago’s Diagonal. The two singles ‘Anticipation’ and ‘Negatives’ kick off the album and are followed by the sixties garage sounding 'Hemingway' and 'Monotony', the Motorik wig-out 'Runes', masterful psych of 'Waves' and 'Serotonin' interspersed with a couple of quieter moments in ‘In the Tall Grass’ and ‘Snail’. As with Mt Mountain’s ‘Centre’ the album draws you in so that you feel as though it has breezed by in a flash, which should give you some indication of its immersive splendour. 

​Blume continue this week’s spacy, tripped out theme with ‘In Heaven’, the second single from their new album due out next week. In Heaven celebrates Velvet Underground / Spiritualised, following on from their dreamy ‘Do the Same’ single, also released this month. 

​Having released his Green and Blue EP’s last year Toby Hayes of Laundromat returned this week with a new single ‘Flat Planet’, taken from his forthcoming, you guessed it ‘Red’ EP. Its another fine tune that blends shuffling hip hop beats with indie sensibilities rather nicely. 

​Elsewhere this week we came across the new single by Eades and new EP by Gardenback. Eades are apparently a collective made up of songwriters, producers, sound engineers and session musicians who describe themselves as ‘David Byrne and Lou Reed’s dyslexic child playing out of a Motorola Pebl’, whatever that means. ‘Former Warnings Cluster is a great tune though, full of quirks and clever touches, very much in the Home Counties/Public Body mould. 

Similarly upbeat is Gardenback’s excellent new ‘Word of Mouth’ EP. The title and track and ‘Do No Evil’ bustle with confident sixties riffs, 'Cynical Guy' is moody and reverb-driven, and ‘Go Native’ treads the same early eighties territory that Pottery do so well on ‘Welcome to Bobby’s Motel’. All in all its rather good.
​
You can listen to all of the singles listed above and more on our updated monthly playlist.