indie-rock

Doug Gillard has spent most of his career as someone else’s guitarist. Guided by Voices, currently. Nada Surf, Cobra Verde, Death of Samantha, plus a long list of collaborations that reads like a who’s who of American indie rock. The consummate sideman.

Parallel Stride is only his fourth album under his own name, and his first since 2014’s Parade On. It’s also his best.

The lineage is exactly what you’d expect from the bands he’s kept company with: The Who, Big Star, the Kinks, the Raspberries, Teenage Fanclub. Opener “Face of Smiles” leans hard into that last one, a warm rhythm strum and wistful turn in the melody. Gillard handled the arrangements and most of the instruments himself, recorded across a few years, and the dedication and assurance shows through.

“Saving My Life Every Day” and “Cannons” are the ones that grab you first, big-hearted and immediate, the hooks that pull you in on a single listen. Then the other nine do the rest of the work of convincing you to stay. A guitarist’s guitarist, finally pointing the songs at himself.

The Elliott Smith comparisons are everywhere for Beauty Land, and they’re correct, if you’re specific about it. These songs wouldn’t necessarily sit on Either/Or. What they share with Smith is the trick of tying off devastating lyrics around sweet melodies: relapses, rehab, rejection, all delivered without flinching. It’s honest to the point of discomfort.

The other reason the comparison sticks is how Mendez records his acoustics. Close-miked and over the bridge, so the sound of his fretting hand on the strings comes through. A small detail, but it’s what gives these songs the feeling of being let in on a secret. There’s even a whistle solo of sorts on “Gentle Love.” Not quite Jealous Guy, but reaching.

Fourteen songs in twenty-six minutes, none of them past three. That could point to throwaways or sketches abandoned early, and a couple do end sooner than you’d like. But each one earns its place, and Mendez gets out before any idea overstays.

Bob Pollard’s 44th album as GBV (solo records and side projects not included; nobody has the time). Familiarity might ordinarily breed contempt, but it never has with Pollard. Each album adds something, gives someone a new way in. There have been many eras of GBV, and this one, a decade or so deep with Gillard, Bare Jr., Shue and March, is among the strongest.

When I reviewed Broken Social Scene’s Remember the Humans I said not to expect anything wildly different, just an excellent BSS record. Pollard works at the opposite extreme of productivity, but the principle is the same: you know roughly what to expect, and reliability is sometimes better than reinvention. The danger is taking it for granted. They won’t be around forever.

Or will they? The record keeps circling its own story without quite admitting to it. “We outlast them all” is classic GBV power pop; Pollard insists it’s about anyone who perseveres, not the band, though good luck hearing it that way. Then “Out With a Theory” gives the actual autobiography, a covers act writing Cheap Trick knock-offs and dreaming of recording in Mitch Easter’s garage, and he calls that one the ballad of GBV’s history. Deflection and confession, two tracks apart.

Friko’s second record wears its influences the way the best maximalists do: the heart-on-sleeve 00s indie pop of Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade, Bright Eyes is all over it, but never as debt. Singer and songwriter Niko Kapetan has digested it into something of his own.

It moves between nostalgia and escape. ‘Dear Bicycle’ is an ode to a childhood bike; ‘Hot Air Balloon’ yearns toward a plan to get away, and would sit comfortably on Pablo Honey.

The arrangements are the real pleasure. On ‘Certainty’ the strings dial up the urgency under the vocal rather than just dressing it. ‘Seven Degrees’ revels in some 60s pop with a touch of psychedelia, Beatlesy and bright, though it perhaps throws in one key change too many.

I suspect the sequencing will be the bone of contention. Where you land on the couple of slower songs depends on what you want from a record like this: respite and variety, or unbroken momentum. Some listeners will feel the air go out of the room; others will be grateful for the window.

The story so far is on the record, and it isn’t pretty. Mike Kinsella’s divorce, his drinking, Steve Lamos walking away for two years: LP4 puts all of it on the table.

Opener “Man Overboard” begins with a stuttering 7/4 drum pattern and soft vocalising, Kinsella resigned to his fate. “No Feeling” carries the mood: ‘Tell the doctors I’m done / The kids, “Adieu” / And mother, “Désolé”’. By “Blood On My Blood” the story of his life is in disarray. Three songs in, it’s clear Mike is struggling.

His voice has changed since LP1. More expressive, less one-dimensional. What was a constraint 25 years ago is now the thing that makes him worth listening to.

The lyrical themes peak on “Bad Moons”, the teenaged feelings of the debut firmly in the rear-view. This is a record about the difficulty of middle age. The kids of LP1 are divorced dads now.

The band keeps up its recent habit of using guests sparingly. Brendan Yates, Caithlin De Marrais and Wisp appear as backing vocalists, adding texture rather than rewriting the songs.

A record full of gut punches, then. Sonically it’s a leap over LPs 1–3, less in style than in execution: the twinkly, expansive sound is intact, the synths and strings improve everything without announcing themselves, and the arrangements are lusher than the band has managed before.

Put your headphones on for this one. Mike might not be alright, but the record is.

The first Broken Social Scene album in 21 years to be produced by Dave Newfeld. With so many singers and instrumentalists in the fold, every new member is additive. Newfeld is multiplicative. No other producer does so much with so much: instruments fade in and out, emphasis shifts to a different part of the mix, of the band. His return is excellent news.

It also makes it hard to resist comparing Remember the Humans to the earlier masterworks. I’m not sure this one has an era-defining piece like “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl”. It doesn’t open with the unbroken run of 10/10 songs that the self-titled album did.

So what do we have? The highlights are very strong. “Only the Good I Keep” arrives early, sung by new member Hannah Georgas (they had room for more?), full of forty-something nostalgia. Lisa Lobsinger brings “Relief”, a highly addictive piece of electro-pop with some great drumming. Feist turns up near the end on “What Happens Now”, a song that starts as a mantra and builds into something tender.

The consistency across the album is high, and the basslines are particularly good. BSS songs have always been melancholic. The specific flavour may have subtly changed, but it’s still there, still tangible through the densely layered arrangements.

Whether they’ve “grown” or “improved” is hard to say. They stretch the definition of a band. They arrived sui generis and have done what they do, well, across several albums, so don’t expect anything groundbreaking here. Expect an excellent Broken Social Scene album, which is a high watermark indeed.

Brown Horse are from Norwich, which you would never guess from Total Dive. The guitars are pure Crazy Horse and the pedal steel weeps on cue. A song called “Heart of the Country” arrives with no apparent irony. This is the modern Americana mould—the one Ovven, Ratboys, Florry, Tiberius and a dozen others are working right now, all of them tracing the same lines back through MJ Lenderman to Jason Molina, Lucinda Williams, Silver Jews, the Drive-By Truckers, Wilco, Uncle Tupelo.

The geography is the only misdirection. The other song titles (“Wreck”, “Sadness Reigns”, “Oblivion”) tell you exactly where the lyrics live, and they aren’t wrong.

The standout is “Twisters”. You could argue the record doesn’t move around much: the mood, the tempo, the instrumentation and the preoccupations hold fairly steady from start to finish. That’s a fair criticism of a less assured album. Here it isn’t one. When a band sounds this good doing one thing, the consistency reads as confidence rather than limitation, and I’m happy to sit in it for 45 minutes.

Star Moles is Emily Moales, a Philadelphia songwriter whose previous records leaned hard into knights, dragons and Arthurian legend. Highway to Hell puts all that aside: the opener spells it out (“Gone are the albums of knights and dragons / Gone are the kings and queens of Camelot”), and what’s left is the everyday, observed with a wry, slightly bewildered eye. Postmasters general, days off, parties skipped. Kevin Basko’s production at is loose in a presumably deliberate way: a flubbed intro on “The End” stays in, and stray vocal moments a tidier record would have scrubbed are left to breathe. It suits songs that sit in the same 70s Laurel Canyon folk-pop territory that you’ll have noted I keep finding myself drawn to lately—warm, melodic, hazy, but with arrangements that reward attention.

Troubadour is a record of genres in conversation. Sag uses on a melodic phrase that briefly nods at Smashing Pumpkins’ Today before settling into something that’s part alt-country, part emo. Other tracks lean folk, country, shoegaze, post-hardcore. None of this is the maximalist everything-at-once approach; the genres are deployed song by song, deliberately, with the range emerging across the album rather than crammed into individual tracks. Singer Brendan Wright calls it “farm emo”, which is both funny and accurate.

It’s a breakup album, but a quiet one. The lyrics circle reflection rather than recrimination, even when the music goes loud. If you want a single comparison, it’s Uncle Tupelo plus Modest Mouse—the alt-country sturdiness of one, the restless dynamics of the other.

Moab and Redwood are the standouts. Both let the band’s range surface inside a single song without losing the deliberate per-track approach that defines the rest of the record.

Cameron Picton’s first record outside Black Midi (a band whose shtick I never totally warmed to) and a tonal world away from Geordie Greep’s The New Sound, whose calypso pastiche left me cold. My New Band Believe is the Windmill alumnus I didn’t expect to like. Almost entirely acoustic, built from strings, woodwind, harpsichord and pianos stacked into something that keeps tilting underfoot, it has the orchestral curiosity of Van Dyke Parks without the kitsch. “Love Story” sits in the middle like a small domestic scene that won’t quite hold still. The whole thing is intriguing in a way I’m still working out, which is the better kind of intriguing.

Sean Solomon spent the better part of a decade fronting Moaning on Sub Pop before that band wound down, and went back to making animated videos for Run the Jewels and Unknown Mortal Orchestra in the quieter stretch that followed. The World Is Not Good Enough is his first solo record, on ANTI-, and it sounds like a record made by someone who took the long way round to it.

Hushed, melodic, personal; “Postcard” is the standout and “Black Hole” is the most honest: “I’m afraid if I have children / I might pass this sadness on”. Coping mechanisms, fears named rather than dodged.

Hannah Pruzinsky’s work on this record is unmistakably that of a writer. They co-run a NYC music publication, and the LP shipped with a limited run of illustrated choose-your-own-adventure booklets. The songs share that sensibility: patient, considered, attentive to small pivots. Mostly hushed instrumentation—fingerpicked guitar and piano, but also Wurlitzer, sax, and synth—threaded with improvised interludes that keep the sequencing loose. The lyrics circle dependency and control without ever landing too hard on either.

The quiet gets broken twice, usefully. “if you cannot make it stop” pushes toward shoegaze: Grouper at one end of the dial, My Bloody Valentine at the other. This makes the surrounding calm feel like a choice rather than a default.

The Twilight Sad have spent twenty years working a seam between Scottish indie, goth, and shoegaze—three sounds that have drifted in and out of fashion around them. It’s The Long Goodbye is their first record in seven years, and it arrives at a moment when shoegaze has gone from a minor concern to something close to a default setting for young guitar bands. Good timing.

James Graham wrote the album while watching his mother live with early-onset dementia. I didn’t know that on first listen—I learned it later, and the lyrics rearranged themselves accordingly on the third or fourth pass. The title stops being a phrase and starts being a description.

Likely to find them their biggest audience yet, and deservedly so.