New music from Mere Women, Palehound and more . .

SERvin’ Up! – w/c June 26, 2017

Palehound – A Place I’ll Always Go
Mere Women – Big Skies
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – On The Echoing Green
Radiohead – OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 – 2017
Small World Experience – Soft Knocks
Shinichi Atobe – From The Heart, It’s A Start, A Work Of Art
Algiers – The Underside of Power
Hollow Everdaze – Cartoons
J DIlla – J Dilla Delights Volume 1
Can – Can: The Singles
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Hello,

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has been making music since 1995, starting in post-rock bands Tarentel and The Drift in San Francisco before going solo with open-ended streams of sound finding sweet solace between noise and ambience. After relocating to Berlin to continue his own work as well as produce collaborative efforts with kindred spirits Grouper and Felicia Atkinson, he now lives in New York, where the rumble of its urban sprawl has contributed to the approach on his wonderful new album, On the Echoing Green. Ledesma cuts across shoegaze-style dream-pop, post-rock and hazy ambience, re-contextualising and saturating the peak elements and textural nuance of each to glow with beauty. There is something freewheeling and joyous about On The Echoing Green – the kind of feels you might suggest makes it perfect for a road-trip. Yet there is something positively airborne about these songs, pulsing headfirst from the sky and up into space.

After dropping their debut album Dry Food in 2015, there was no doubt Ellen Kempner upfront of her Boston trio Palehound was an electric guitar whizz who could take frenetic flights of fancy on her six-string and compress them into deliriously good indie-pop nuggets. Taking on the end of the classic 90s indie sound that wore vulnerability proudly through its crash n’ burn melodic style, the follow-up A Place I’ll Always Go expands on the template with more complexity and depth. Surrounding new love and loss as other people come in and out of Kempner’s life and figure heavily, her songs on A Place I’ll Always Go give her more space to explore her newfound emotions and the result is to have Palehoud more heart-wrenching than heart-starting but all the better for it.

Sydney’s Mere Women have upped their own ante on their daringly teetering music for their third album, Big Skies. Their cavernous and pointed post-punk works on guitar and synth interplay for a sound both ferocious and swirling, dealt out with superbly channelled energy to make sure they don’t miss their mark. That make is to hold you in full thrall with an album in tow to dark places of the mind, taking what they call an alternative stance on the female experience, defining isolation as a core factor. How they turn that isolation into an out-of-body like experience with their music is a brilliantly unsettling feat where space and freedom don’t always equate to peace of mind.

Also, new tunes from Shabazz Palaces, The Clientele, Dent May, Wixwood, Ghostpoet, Sudan Archves, Lee Ranaldo, Oxford Poet, Jen Cloher and Peter Perrett.

Enjoy it all on 2SER,

Andrew