New Music Recommendations – 19th April 2019

by Dave Bertram and Philip Moss

So, here are five new music recommendations to wrap your ears around this week from – Cate Le Bon, Slowdive side project The Soft Cavalry, Dog Daisies, Kurt Vile and the excellent Izzy Heltai.

Cate Le Bon has premiered the video for the second single from her forthcoming record, Reward, due out in late May on Mexican Summer. Following the ‘glowering and swaggering and lovesick’ Daylight Matters, Home To You is a wonderful exploration of the subjectivity at home.

Former War On Drugs man, Kurt Vile has released a stripped-down version of Loading Zones from his latest album Bottle It In, together with a beautiful cover of the Stones’ No Expectations for his Spotify Singles series – check it out through the link above.

Lancaster based singer/songwriter, Stephen Hudson, has this week released his second EP under the Dog Daisies moniker on Bingo Records. An Inland Voyage Pt. 1 is the first installment in a set of two releases that Stephen has recorded at home while looking after his young son.

Stephen commented, ‘This is the first part of a collection of short, hastily written, widescreen lo-fi songs that I recorded into a phone and then pasted together on a dying iMac in the February of 2019. Most of the songs were written at 5am, and I wanted to document the bleary-eyed, floating underwater “oh-shit!!” feeling of being a new parent and all the dark, happy, teary and ridiculous thoughts that come with little sleep.’

Elsie Plimmer of Bristol-based project Watch Paint Dry also contributes vocals on Carehome. All other instruments and voices are by Stephen himself.

The EP is available to download on Dog Daisies’ Bandcamp now, with a physical release planned for later in the year.

Fresh on the Bella Union roster, The Soft Cavalry – a new project formed by the husband/wife duo of Slowdive’s Steve Clarke and Rachel Goswell – have a self-titled debut album set for release on 5th July. It lacks the power of the previous Slowdive record, but retains all the deep reverb you’d expect from this writing partnership – listen to the adequately-named Dive above.

And to finish, Massachusetts indie-folk songwriter Izzy Heltai takes all the right cues from a range of melancholic Americana influences on Marching Song. Built on his unfiltered, scratchy voice, this track transposes his nomadic lifestyle sonically. Let’s hope his metamorphosis doesn’t give us another Jake Bugg.

Want to keep up to date with all our latest pieces? Follow us on social media…