Back catalogue: All genres

Review: Feral Child reissues an earlier 45 that allegedly “came and went in a day” on first release: a coruscating pair of instrumental folk gems from Will Sergeant and Paul Simpson. Each artist sharing one side respectively, ‘Toy Piano Mantra / Ghosts Of The Karelia Forest’ was only released last year in 2023, and indeed became little less than an insta-cop; original pressings still go for hundreds. Sergeant’s ‘Toy Piano Mantra’ is culled from the English’s guitarist and Echo & The Bunnymen songwriter’s 2020 album Things Inside, and is a wilful exercise in acoustic guitar and harmonium composition, where the artist avows his own aversion to acoustic instruments in usual favour of the electric guitar. Paul’s side features the formerly unreleased ‘Ghosts Of The Karelia Forest’, a complementarily slow-building and haunting solo piano piece from the Wild Swans and Teardrop Explodes keyboardist. Now reissued on transparent vinyl 7”, you can be certain this one will fly like the first editions.

Review: For the uninitiated, the term "egg-punk" is basically what the kids call Devo-core these days; an internet microgenre of glitchy, lo-fi, new wave-tinged scuzz-punk that doesn't take itself too seriously. This transcontinental split EP sees two of the finest modern examples on either side of the Atlantic, with Nashville's Snooper delivering three cuts of cutesy, chaotic twee-fuzz (one of which was even recorded on a Tascam 48), while the flipside contributed by Barcelona's Prison Affair lowers the tone with murkier, impenetrable garage-machine-punk, coming off like Big Black covering The Cramps. Jagged, incomprehensible, bizarre and oh so fun, let's get eggy.

Review: Not just a catchy name, German crew Phantom Horse take on one side of this split EP, while Belgian oddities Innercity (nothing to do with 'Good Life', just in case that wasn't already clear) handle the flip. Not quite a tale of two extremities, nevertheless the A and B feel very different and invoke diverse feelings, opening on the strange robotic melodies of 'Pink Star' before taking us into darker terrain. If the opener feels glittery, like we're doing external inspections of a space craft littered with flashing buttons and bleeping consoles, 'Ali' goes for something much more sinister. That low end refrain - the most dominant thing on the piece - coupled with hypnotic hi hat loops, can't help but make us feel like something ominous has entered the room.