Fruit Bats – Gold Past Life CD/LP+MP3 (Merge)
Fruit Bats’ Gold Past Life marks both an end and a beginning. It’s the end of an unintentional thematic trilogy of records from Eric D. Johnson that began with 2014’s EDJ (a solo record by name, but a Fruit Bats release in spirit) and hit an emotional peak with 2016’s Absolute Loser. They encompassed years of loss, displacement, and the persistent, low-level anxiety of the current political climate. They were written in the wake of friends who left these earthly confines and families that could have been. But the songs on Gold Past Life also represent new beginnings – the journeys that await after making it through troubled times. Johnson’s falsetto shines atop the bopping folk-rock of Gold Past Life. The new record features more keyboard influences and a range of guests including Greta Morgan (Springtime Carnivore, Vampire Weekend), Neal Casal (Circles Around the Sun), Trevor Beld Jimenez and Tim Ramsey (Parting Lines), Meg Duffy (Hand Habits), and more. It also sees his working relationship with producer and engineer Thom Monahan (Neko Case, Peter Bjorn & John, Devendra Banhart) hit its stride.

Hot Chip – A Bath Full Of Ecstasy CD/LP (Domino)
Hot Chip’s electrifying seventh album, A Bath Full Of Ecstasy, is the group’s definitive release, crystallizing the sound they’ve become celebrated for – bridging euphoria and melancholy with colorful melodies, idiosyncratic vocalizations and pounding electronic pop rhythms. Recorded in Paris and London, the nine-track collection sees the group (Owen Clarke, Al Doyle, Joe Goddard, Felix Martin and Alexis Taylor) open up to a more adventurous and collaborative songwriting process, choosing to work with outside producers for the first time: Philippe Zdar, the French maestro who’s shaped the magic of Cassius and Phoenix, and Rodaidh McDonald, the Scot who’s collaborated with The xx, David Byrne and Sampha, among others.

Buddy & Judy Miller – Breakdown On 20th Ave. South CD/LP+MP3 (New West)
Their first album together in nearly 10 years, Breakdown On 20th Ave. South is an album of Julie Miller songs produced by Buddy Miller. As a couple and individually, Buddy and Julie have been nominated and received multiple awards including Grammys, Americana Awards, Dove Awards among others. Julie Millers songs have been recorded by a diverse range of artists including Emmylou Harris, Lee Ann Womack, Levon Helm, Solomon Burke, and Miranda Lambert. Buddy Miller is known for his work as a guitarist, performing live and in the studio with artists such as Robert Plant, Alison Krauss, Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris. Buddy’s production credits include albums with Plant, Harris, Earle, Patty Griffin, Shawn Colvin and many more. Breakdown On 20th Ave. South is a first rate showcase for Julies finely crafted lyrics. Tracks like “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” and “Everything Is Your Fault” hint at the ups and downs of love. The entire album is tied together by Buddy’s unfussy production style.

Nick Murphy/Chet Faker – Run Fast Sleep Naked CD (Downtown)
The new release from Nick Murphy, the artist formerly known as Chet Faker, Run Fast Sleep Naked is the follow-up to his 2014 debut Built On Glass which was released under the Chet Faker moniker, and 2017’s Missing Link EP. Co-produced by Dave Harrington, the vocals for the collection were captured all around the world during the last four years. For the record, Murphy found “spaces and environments that most inspired him,” ranging from his grandmother’s living room to a studio in Tokyo to a New Zealand rental home while on vacation with his family. During this period, the musician began a process of intense self-examination, using Joseph Campbell’s writings to question his role as an artist in modern society. The instrumentation for the album was later recorded at Brooklyn, New York’s Figure 8 with help from over 15 musicians and a full orchestra.

Willie Nelson – Ride Me Back Home CD/LP (Sony)
Willie Nelson returns with another incredible addition to his legendary catalog. Once again working with longtime producer Buddy Cannon, Ride Me Back Home sits beside 2017’s God’s Problem Child and 2018’s Last Man Standing as a trilogy of superior song craft exploring ideas of mortality with wisdom, empathy and a winking love of life. Nelson and Cannon co-wrote a handful of songs but go deep into their favorite songsmiths, great writers with great stories to tell: Sonny Throck-Morton, Guy Clark, Mac Davis, and Buzz Rabin. The result is a magical collection of tunes with emphasis on the lyric. Backed by an amazing band of Nashville gunslingers, Ride Me Back Home finds Willie Nelson making some of the most inspired work of his career.

Richard Reed Parry – Quiet River Of Dust Vol. 2: That Side Of The River CD/LP+MP3 (ANTI-)
Music of the spheres: it’s a term that refers to the universal harmony generated by celestial bodies in orbit, but it means something different to Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry. His musical spheres are floating worlds, 360° embodiments of memory, VR renditions of old family photos. These spheres not only served as metaphorical inspiration for the lyrics of his new project, Quiet River Of Dust, but appear throughout the album artwork and, most strikingly, in the films Parry made to be projected in planetarium-style domes to accompany live performances of this music. The first volume of Quiet River Of Dust was released on the autumn equinox of 2018; this second volume, out on the summer solstice of 2019, was created at the same time. Both volumes bleed into one another, by design. “It feels like a multi-sided window to me,” says Parry, “a different view into this prismatic song world.” Japanese folk myths, death poems and British folk music are tributaries flowing into a river of late-20th century avant-garde composition and traditional song craft, written and performed by a member of a Grammy-winning rock band. This is a meditative, widescreen musical experience with Beach Boy harmonies and a hypnotic pulse. Layered songs that move in a linear fashion, following a current rather than circular composition.

The Raconteurs – Help Us Stranger CD/LP (Third Man)
The Raconteurs – Jack White, Brendan Benson, Jack Lawrence, and Patrick Keeler – are back with their long-awaited new album, Help Us Stranger, which serves as the Grammy-winning rock band’s third studio LP and first new release in more than a decade. The 12-track collection sees the mighty combo reassembled, stronger and perhaps even more vital than ever before as they continue to push rock & roll forward into its future, bonding prodigious riffs, blues power, sinewy psychedelia, Detroit funk, and Nashville soul via Benson and White’s uncompromising songcraft and the band’s steadfast musical muscle. The pair wrote all of the songs on the record except the lone Donovan cover, “Hey Gyp (Dig The Slowness)”.

Titus Andronicus – An Obelisk CD/LP+MP3 (Merge)
An Obelisk is the sixth album from Titus Andronicus, which finds the noted rock band under the stewardship of producer and legendary rocker Bob Mould (Hüsker Dü, Sugar). This trans-generational meeting of the minds has yielded the most immediate, intense, and unadorned Titus Andronicus record to date. Clocking in at a brisk 38 minutes and change, it is also the shortest. Recorded over six breathless days at Steve Albini’s world-renowned Electrical Audio studio in Chicago, An Obelisk presents the sound of Titus Andronicus, rock band, at its most irreducible, as monolithic as the album’s titular monument.

Two Door Cinema Club – False Alarm CD/LP (Glassnote)
Two Door Cinema Club’s highly-anticipated fourth album False Alarm finds the three piece gloriously unshackled and creatively at the peak of their game. Across it’s ten tracks, False Alarm wryly scans and satirizes the social and environmental woes of 2019 through the prism of wonderfully off-kilter pop, simultaneously borrowing from and warping elements of future pop, disco, rock, funk and soul. Recorded in sessions between London and L.A. with producer Jacknife Lee (U2, REM, The Killers), it’s an LP that takes the familiar and twists it, to startling and stimulating effect.

Mort Garson – Mother Earth’s Plantasia [Reissue/1976] CD/LP (Sacred Bones)
If you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you from Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles (or bought a Simmons mattress from Sears) in 1976, you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for plants. Subtitled warm earth music for plants… and the people that love them, it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientific tunes enacted on the new-fangled device called the Moog. Before Brian Eno did it, Mort Garson was making discreet music.

Bad Books – III CD/LP (Concord/Loma Vista)
“For their first record in seven years, Bad Books made sure it was worth the wait, and not a side project worth forgetting. Helmed by singer-songwriters Kevin Devine and Andy Hull (of Manchester Orchestra), III brings their talents together and distills them into an album that’s all of a piece while preserving each writer’s own identity. In the realm of Frightened Rabbit and Volcano Choir, Bad Books offer a sometimes exuberant, sometimes somber sound that takes simple folk songs and blows them out with dramatic piano chords, churchlike choral arrangements, spacey atmospherics and digital embellishments. For all their basis in acoustic instruments, these are songs that shimmer and echo at length — not for a coffee house, but an opera house. Devine and Hull contribute five songs each, trading back and forth, track-by-track. In spite of the album’s cohesive feel, the differences between each writer’s songs are quite drastic — Devine’s are generally upbeat and full-bodied, while Hull’s are far gloomier and barren. III is a record that fluctuates between the joyous and the melancholy over and over, making those many contrasts of dark and light all the more impactful.” — Exclaim

Holy Ghost! – Work CD/LP (West End)
Holy Ghost! is one of the few modern-day practitioners of pure, unadulterated dance music; crafting each sound from scratch with unapologetic, exacting precision in the studio before delivering hit after hit to the dance floor.

JR JR – Invocations/Conversations CD/2xLP (Love Is EZ)
Recently released on vinyl – now available on CD. New album from the band formally known as Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.

The Ocean Blue – Kings And Queens/Knaves And Thieves CD/LP+MP3 (Korda)
Dream pop legends release their first new album in over six years.

The Innocence Mission ‎– Befriended [Reissue/2003] LP (Badman)
Originally released on CD in 2003, Befriended received high praise from NPR, Pitchfork, and many others. Arguably their best work, it is a haunting collection of songs that feature the interplay of Don Peris’ gorgeously warm and shimmering electric guitars with Karen’s Peris’ transcendently lovely vocals and moving lyrics. Limited milky-white colored vinyl pressing.