Outsideleft Week in Music has a flutter on the horses

Italian shoegaze/dreampop band Glazyhaze are almost too much even for a dedicated shoegaze fan like myself. Their new single 'Nirvana', with its video of the two cute boy and girl singers pining at each other in a library across stacks of books, should be hatefully precious. Thanks to the utterly sublime music, it becomes something wonderful instead. Gorgeous swirls of hazy guitar, delicate dreamy melodies, a surprisingly impassioned vocal performance... I was won over, and if you give them a chance you will be too. Beautiful. 

Normally this kind of thing makes me laugh - ah-hahahaha I would laugh, at the beards and voice and little Vs of frowns as they try to remember the timing of the needlessly complicated riffs. But the lyrics. In celebration of strangling someone, to death and that person thanking you for it. An interesting exercise would be to imagine Nick Cave singing something equally nasty. Or a Texas rapper. Whosoever deals in this kind of violence - and let’s face it, it’s the glorying in it, not the description even, the narcissistic celebration of exercising this much control, which is the violence - should not be given any kind of a platform. So, no, there is no link, they can go fuck ‘emselves.

Back, for 2025, the incomparable Joy Crookes, well I mean I can compare her to a few people. January saw 'Pass The Salt' with Vince Staples. And now Mathematics with Kano. Something's happening here for sure. Soul revision. Like if Lorrie Moore was a soul singer. It would be marginally off kilter like this. With a perfect video that might've been shot in a lifetime at our house. If we lived closer to Highbury. You're a bruise and it still hurts... ...and that is pretty fucking miserable. I'm in love with how sad and lovely this is.

Sweden's beardy thrash metal answer to Kraftwerk, Meshuggah, churn out yet another chunka-chunka-chunka riff heavy punch in the gut.  They seem to appeal to a lot of people though.  There are literally hundreds of head nodding fans in the audience here. I do often wonder how the singers in these bands make it to the end of the gig without tearing their throats out?  Then I worked it out.  simple really.  They put their vocals through a pitch shifter and a distortion pedal. They all have sweet, squeaky little voices really.

Honesty's understated take on club electronica is both beguiling and inventive. You can't dance to this, so it wont be appearing near any dancefloor you might come across anytime soon, which is in fact a plus point.  Like the piano driven title track of their upcoming new album 'U R Here', this shimmers slightly, and in parts is barely there. It's a welcome shift from the usual beat-you-over-the-head metal bombast or forced jollity of the pop pastiche single I invariably end up skipping quickly past after the first couple of micro seconds, like sucking on a bad lemon. There is space in here.  And depth.  Space and depth.  Great combination. The new album is worthy of attention. It won't knock you dead, or pin your ears back. It will beguile. You need to be beguiled.  There is not enough beguiling in the world right now.

Could be the most decent bar room band  in the world, in a different decade to this. A way different decade. The Parlor Greens, they've got that vibe down. Guitarist, JImmy James is just so great, here he stamps just enough authority over a groovy blues shuffle to make it amazing.

"Destruction Noise Rock" from Northampton, provided by duo ÜLV, whose debut album ‘Revenant’ came out last year. This one is Bandcamp only and is the first single from their forthcoming second album, ‘Amplifier Mountain’.  Noisy, densely layered and Shoegaze-infused, this bowls along very nicely, inspired by the short film by Chris Marker called (not surprisingly) “La Jetée”. I can't help feel, though, it needs a bit of a boost to lift it up from its mid-paced and claustrophobic sound.  A cleaner mix might help, but then what do I know? After a lay off over winter (clearly they don't like the cold) they are warming back up again by playing two local shows in Northampton on the 27th of February as part of the first A Void Collective night at The Lab, and at the Black Prince on the 7th of March. If you are local, go along.

'That's The Price Of Loving Me' is the second single and title track from Dean Wareham's new solo album. It's easily as good as the previous single, 'You Were The Ones I Had To Betray'. Over a gentle shuffle and a delicate Velvets-esque melody, Dean intones his bittersweet lyrics in the way only he can. Another primo slice of dreampop from a master of the form. There's the expected gorgeous plangent guitar, and room for a surprising synthesiser solo which somehow accentuates rather than disrupting the mood. Lovely.

I’d definitely check Florist out in their May gigs but ‘Gloom Designs' seemed a little too mundane. Disappointing after the impressive 'Have Heaven'. Liked where the opening bars took me, but soon desired to move on. I stayed and enjoyed but realised I was uncomfortable about the state I was falling into - of acceptance and wallow. Will satisfy Emily Sprague fans, but if we live in such a bad age, I’d like less of a rueful shrug and a bit more anger and drive. A call for change even! New album, Jellywish, is out early April.

When I tell you... Keyboards, no vocals, altogether brief, otherworldly and grounded in lofi lore. You'll know right?

It's funny how, if you stick around long enough, you start to hear the same things come back again. Sister Envy are a band from North Wales clearly enamoured of grunge and shoegaze. On their new single 'Swallowed By The Ground', they channel the melodicism and expansive guitar textures of the Smashing Pumpkins. The track has a catchy tune and a belt-along chorus ready made for stadiums. It's just a bit of a shame it all comes out sounding a bit like Muse. Didn't we get rid of that stuff twenty years ago? I guess not.

Andy Bell's next solo album is shaping up nicely, judging by the singles. 'apple green ufo' (like the previously released 'i'm in love' and the album title all in stylised lower case letters) is a delicious slice of krautrock-damaged neo-psychedelia. With its funk-inflected minimalist groove, blasts of synthesiser brass and sensuously whispered vocal, it shows Bell moving outside his comfort zone with aplomb. There's a real sense of percussive space on this that recalls the no wave funk of Liquid Liquid. It's tempting to imagine what Ride could have done with it had he saved it for their next album, but then it would probably have lost some of its intriguing quirkiness in the sonic wash. Very good. 

An opportunistically-timed release about a wedding proposal. It is a season of romance, isn't it? This will be loved forevermore in my house but all because it played at a key moment in time. An evening when we received life-changing news. A welcome message flashed over a screen while Evan (Weiss) sang with enthusiasm over pacy power-pop. Apparently written with the band in an altered state, I entered my own as they played on and the news hit home. Evan likens such a proposal to an OOB moment and though I can’t say I agree (I myself was floored), our proposals found success. Whether I like it or not, a song to never be forgotten!

Frog Eyes was, maybe still is, the raging French poet arm of the Canadian indie charm initiative of the early 21c and, while this is not the unhinged glory that was 2006's The Golden River and is more song-y than panicked CB dispatches from a loon in a watch tower, it still feels like it crept  out of the mirror a little, beveled and distorted. I hope they are back. I welcome their jaundiced eye to be cast upon this sad age. 

Horsegirl, the most charming of the 1000 newish bands with horse in their name, lean right into the Matador indie thing with insistent lowercase energy, barely-there vocals, precocity over production, singalong harmonies and a thorough lack of eye contact. Bless them. Bands like these are like a new bartender at your local - immediately enthralling despite maybe being just like the old ones. Tip your servers and quit staring.

With twenty different versions of tracks drawn from the Black Maria album, largely 'The Alibi' and 'The Great Derailer', its hard to choose any single one for praise.  Many are very good.  Better than the original, almost.  Sufficiently different anyway. If you want to get this,  you can pay what you like for it on Bandcamp.  Theoretically, that means you could get the lot for a penny, if you were that mean. I'd like to think you weren't.

Mash up of the week. Let track A (Not Cool etc) play for about 30 seconds then start up track B (Flight) and let the magic happen! The ingredients are: a long litany of self-pity with a great title and a supremely interesting and original voice plus what veers dangerously towards an American posh wedding band letting loose after an evening of covering The Carpenters at volumes just below conversation level. Together it's sublime. Here's the link to Flight: Bandcamp

Shelleyan Orphan were a British alternative pop group from the 80s, made up of Caroline Crawley and Jemaur Tayle. They probably should have been on 4AD. They made delicate chamber pop with a range of eccentric instruments. They littered their lyrics with references to Romantic poets and Shakespeare. They got bullied in the press for being "pre-Raphaelite fruitcakes". Needless to say, they were absolutely wonderful and I am now obsessed with them. They released three albums in their original lifetime - Helleborine (1987), Century Flower (1989) and Humroot (1992) to press ridicule or indifference, plus a later album We Have Everything We Need (2008). They're all worth hearing, though the debut Helleborine is perhaps their best. Crawley died after a long illness in 2016; Tayle is still making music. 

Sincerely, one of the great punk singles back in the day, by Bristol's The Cortinas. Had been thinking about it this week. You know why. Who or What do you think of when you think of a fascist dictator? The Cortinas right. That Fordism thing? Fordism isn't fascism though, I know. Bass player, Dexter Dalwood, a name you'll probably know, went on to equally great things and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2010. So there you go. Maybe in '77 the Cortinas thought their world was a shitty place and thought to make a fucking fuss about it. Plenty to think about. 

Lydia Lunch last featured in Outsideleft (believe it or not) 2005, in a Joe Ambrose (RIP) Tangier to Marrakesh travelogue.  So, I think Its about time we had something that actually points you towards the coruscating beauty of Lydia Lunch. Possessed of a brattish potty mouth, a screaming sense of the atonal, and a confrontational attitude you could grate concrete with, it's hard to choose one piece to sum all that up. However, I know your attention span is vanishingly small, so I will keep it short. Teenage Jesus and The Jerks was the point at which she started out on her mission to piss off the world, and that was back in..er..um..1979, I think.  Fast forward to 2014 and there she is, standing onstage at the Melkweg, Amsterdam, dedicating a two minute, one chord song to "girls who aren't afraid to be fuckin' ugly".  Some people just never give up on the mission.  Lydia Lunch is one of those.