Issue 19.

Welcome to issue 19 of Deluxe. This edition flips the usual parameters as we’re focusing on the content of the shops rather than the bricks, mortar and shelves that confine them. We’ve produced a list of 100 albums - compiled by the staff at Drift Records, our own shop - that have turned our ears and heads throughout 2019.

As we’re based at Drift for this edition, we’ll also talk about their Sea Change Festival - that runs annually on the last May bank holiday weekend - and also the Dinked Collective of independent shops, a motley crew that includes Drift as one of its founders. These days, record shops play an ever bigger part of the creative community. We’re proud to have a home and we’re proud to be needed.


Written and compiled by The Drift Record Shop
Designed by jenny@atworkportfolio.co.uk
Cover illustration by Jordan Amy Lee
Sub edited by Lu Overy


Deluxe is available now in all good record shops. A digital version of the magazine will go online in December, but you can read some of the edition below.

78. Drugdealer - Raw Honey
Mexican Summer / 19 April

77. Whitney - Forever Turned Around
Secretly Canadian / 30 August

76. (Sandy) Alex G - House of Sugar
Domino / 13 September

75. Fat White Family - Serfs Up!
Domino / 19 April

74. Portico Quartet - Memory Streams
Gondwana Records / 4 October

 73. Metronomy - Metronomy Forever?
Because Music / 13 September

72. SASAMI - SASAMI
Domino / 8 March

71. You Tell Me - You Tell Me
Memphis Industries / 11 January

70. Steve Gunn - The Unseen In Between
Matador / 18 January

69. Julia Jacklin - Crushing
Transgressive Records / 22 February

 48. Richard Dawson - 2020
Weird World / 11 October

47. White Denim - Side Effects
City Slang / 29 March

46. Pom Poko - Birthday
Bella Union / 22 February

45. Sarah Davachi - Pale Bloom
W.25th / 14 June

44. Tropical Fuck Storm - Braindrops
Joyful Noise Recordings / 23 August

43. Gia Margaret - There’s Always Glimmer
Dalliance / 24 May

42. Kim Gordon - No Home Record
Matador / 11 October

41. Pozi - PZ1
PRAH Recordings / 5 April

40. Little Simz - Grey Area
Age 101 / 1 March

39. Girl Band - The Talkies
Rough Trade Records / 27 September

28. Aldous Harding - Designer
4AD / 26 April

27. Rozi Plain - What a Boost
Memphis Industries / 5 April

26. Sunn O))) - Life Metal
Southern Lord / 26 April

26. Sunn O))) - Pyroclasts
Southern Lord / 25th October

25. Pip Blom - Boat
Heavenly Recordings / 31 May

24. Jenny Hval - The Practice of Love
Sacred Bones / 13 September

23. Daniel Thorne - Lines of Sight
Erased Tapes / 15 March

22. Thom Yorke - ANIMA
XL Recordings / 19 July

21. Nérija - Blume
Domino / 2 August

20. Gruff Rhys - Pang!
Rough Trade Records / 13 September

19. Trash Kit - Horizon
Upset The Rhythm / 5 July

18. Modern Nature - How To Live
Bella Union / 23 August

17. Cate Le Bon - Reward
Mexican Summer / 24 May

16. Oh Sees - Face Stabber
Castle Face / 16 August

15. School of Language - 45

Memphis Industries / 26 July 

The Brewis brothers of Field Music are national treasures. Whilst on a brief hiatus from the day job, David Brewis took a busman’s holiday and created his third LP under the School of Language moniker with the poignant and slick 45, a concept album about the dubious rise in politics, the capricious behaviour while in office and the motley cast of co-conspirators of Donald Trump, the forty- fifth president of the USA. It’s so brutally funny, “Nobody’s bigger or better at the military, Nobody’s done so much for equality”, being just a couple of the things that 45 knows better than anyone else, on one of the album’s early highlights, Nobody Knows. So long as you can ignore the terrifying underbelly that these are all things said by this preposterous man, listing them all is in itself ludicrous to the point of hysteria, but Brewis’ use of enunciation for a high-funk punchline is pretty incredible. Protest music so often becomes preachy, dogmatic and just, well, boring, but on this shimmering album Brewis has used a new set of tools to craft something highly charged with stylistic influences from James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone. He lets the satire do the talking rather than barking directives. Musically it bristles with energy, rich and warm while full of short, sharp staccato struts. It takes the Midas touch to pull off something that on paper sounds like a bad idea incarnate, but he’s done it here with flair and charm.

 14. Cool Maritime - Sharing Waves

Leaving Records / 15 February 

Sharing Waves is the second release from LA-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Sean Hellfritsch under the moniker Cool Maritime. Although the album was technically first released as a micro-pressing in June 2018, it received its full release back this year on Leaving Records, and we just can’t not tell you about it. Sharing Waves has a central theme of the duality between the electronic and the natural - this beautiful album was recorded in remote outdoor locations on his “lunchbox” studio (a synthesiser in a suitcase). The songs were composed in the wild with a scientific mode of recording the panoramic landscapes, notations charting his observations and processing them into looping electronic imitations as part of the suites. It’s all layered into a cacophony, and the tracks slowly emerge from the observational impressions. The twinkling pulses and long, steady rolling swells sound beautifully organic and pristine; glassy droplets of sound patter in entirely natural sounding patterns. Sharing Waves’ journey through seven distinct soundscapes is a beautiful headspace, a reflective and peaceful time away from the hectic outside world. The expansive environments and fully-realized worlds are there to be explored and get lost in, a gently discombobulating experience of entirely electronic compositions that sound so living and so green. This is subtle music, so go meet it halfway. Shed some baggage and let the waves flow around you and over you and genuinely take you somewhere.

 13. Ibibio Sound Machine - Doko Mien

Merge / 22 March 

The third LP from the London based afro-funk futurists, led by the inimitable Eno Williams. Doko Mien largely sticks to the same sonic explosion of funk and retro electro-pop as the 2014 self-titled debut and 2017’s Uyai, but it is the “electro” aspect that has gradually settled lower in the mix. Toned down are the hyperactive laser beams that previously shot through the traditional and percussive rhythms. Doko Mien is a fuller album; there is less of a fight through the cacophony, and the electronic ashes add more of a soft phasing wash to the background. Although ISM has always been very much about London-born, Nigerian-bred vocalist Eno Williams at the forefront, this new album is the band at their most focused and most balanced; she is the central point, gliding between glittering power diva, sultry R&B singer and when required, feral banshee. Throughout, she is a natural and glorious ring-leader. Stylistically the band still draws heavily on New York new wave and disco with Ghanaian highlife and Nigerian folk culture, but the eight-piece out t really has locked in their own trademark sound with a unique groove that takes them from electro-punk, African polyrhythms and shimmering R&B, to the low- tempo soul where Williams purrs to great effect. Hugely impressive that her voice cuts through the dense instrumentation; that said, the band throws everything into the mix, and creates euphoria without clutter.

12. Will Burns and Hannah Peel - Chalk Hill Blue

Rivertones / 22 March

Hannah Peel, the musician and composer, and Will Burns, the Faber New Poet, join forces for an exploration into the electronic landscapes and natural timbres of England. One of our finest synth standard-bearers, Peel’s analogue soundscapes move from a quiet burr to an intense and rousing drive that recalls the sonic exploration of Delia Derbyshire or Daphne Oram. The subtlety of her soundscapes is utterly captivating and gives a distinct and quiet spiritual identity of its own to the third part of this record, the abstract landscape. Aside from the rich and antiquated beats - at times quietly hypnotic, at times foreboding - the instrumentation is beautifully measured, with long soft piano keys or strings, and incredible emotional weight. Burns’s poetry is deeply personal, a stream of consciousness and memory that is quietly intense and beautifully open. The frailties of human and nature, the mundane, decay and - we think - above all else, love. A few frenzied moments aside - the album’s centre point, Change, for example, carries perhaps the record’s most intense moments of introspection - it is an album of minute shifts and incredible moving atmospheres. Deftly fused by producer Erland Cooper, Chalk Hill Blue (the name of an iridescent blue-grey butterfly which lives on chalk heaths) is a truly majestic piece, a collaboration where two artists bring entirely different elements to the fore and create something that is wholly new and totally special. A sonic coalescence that provides some of this year’s most genuinely moving moments.

11. Kevin Morby - Oh My God

Dead Oceans / 26 April

Oh My God is a slow-building masterpiece, a double concept album on modern day spirituality and religion that really gets right to the core of you, well, it got to the core of us anyway. For his fifth solo LP, Kevin Morby has created a contemporary gospel, songs full of searching that use some of the traditional - with repeated phrases and delivery in call and response - but remain light throughout; an air of tired early-morning optimism is always present. The instrumentation is for the best part fairly primitive, but dynamic shifts from contemplative ballads to heavenly rousers with soaring choirs are empowering, feeling really loose and all hung on Morby’s addictively laconic drawl. He has such a distinctive voice, and even the pacing of the delivery feels entirely Morby-ish, whilst he channels the same sort of immutable energy as Bob Dylan’s gospel phase or New Skin for the Old Ceremony era Leonard Cohen. “It’s not a born-again thing,” he explains in the liner notes, “it’s more that ‘Oh My God’ is such a profound statement we all use multiple times a day and means so many different things. It’s not about an actual God but a perceived one.” Those repeated phrases are fascinating, it gives the album a sort of loop where themes keep bubbling up to the surface. A spiritual album, the sort of record that you know you’re going to start all over again before it’s even reached its conclusion.

10. The Comet Is Coming - Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery

Impulse! Records / 15 March 

The Comet Is Coming, and the many projects and artists that are part of their collective reach, are in no small part responsible for the remarkable resurgence of interest in jazz. Their 2016 debut Channel the Spirits received a Mercury-nomination, and the subsequent years have seen the three players - reeds man “King Shabaka” Hutchings, synth player Dan “Danalogue” Leavers and drummer Max “Betamax” Hallett - bring wild live creativity and production energy to artists like Sons Of Kemet, Flamingods, Snapped Ankles, Melt Yourself Down, Ibibio Sound Machine and Rozi Plain. Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery is an absolute odyssey of an album, nine tracks that incorporate gestures and timbres from almost any jazz styling, also bringing in punk-rock, drones, electronic pulses, funk and grime with such authority. Leavers and Hallett provide a remarkable rhythm section, their creative partnership offers a telepathic understanding of not only what they’re doing, but where they’re going. They create ever-morphing textures and beats that drive the album on through the sections of ambience, and especially when the band kicks into exhilarating hyperdrive and delivers some of the year’s most enthralling bangers at breakneck speed. The dynamic offers space and time for Hutchings to take centre stage and deliver tones on the sax - and brie y bass clarinet - that are truly lyrical and utterly inspiring. The smoky Ethiopian-styled grooves that bookend the album are as poignant as some of the full-lunged screams in the middle that sound like nothing short of the arrival of the apocalypse. Aside from the sax, the only other voice is the guest appearance of Kate Tempest on Blood of the Past, a hugely successful partnership that further articulates the album’s core message, excoriating how society is not only tearing the world apart, but ripping itself in two. They share some understood colours of jazz here, but there is no homage, this is a remarkable album of thrilling creativity, forward-looking in its unity.

9. Ty Segall - First Taste 

Drag City / 2 August

One of the early reviews pinned First Taste as our garage king Ty’s 12th “solo studio album”, which seems like a preposterous thing to even try and count to be honest, especially as during the process of compiling this magazine he announced and released a four LP box set of demos and outtakes. Side projects, collaborations and demos aside, there will always be more. The multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter delivers First Taste with a fascinating self-imposed ban on the guitars, quite radical to say the least when he is synonymous with the thrashing Californian garage scene. That’s not to say that without knowing this and on first listen you’d necessarily notice, a Japanese koto or a Greek bouzouki can still make one hell of a din if you beat the shit out of them like the tried and trusted Les Paul or Jaguar. The change of instrumentation has really brought some fascinating production to the forefront, the keys play a big part in delivering all sorts of tones, and the double-tracked drums from Segall and frequent collaborator Charles Moothart sound absolutely huge and totally primal. He also finds genuinely exciting alternative resonances to keep the weird levels pumping - the chorus of manic and discordant schoolyard recorders that brings Whatever to a gloriously unruly close is one of the album’s many peculiar joys. Production wise, First Taste is doubtless one of his most inventive sets of songs to dates, richly psychedelic and totally unafraid to experiment into some brilliantly weird corners. Some of the big vocal moments - especially Ice Plant and When I Met My Parents Pt. 3 - have more than a little bad-trip Beatles about their layers, rich choruses of voices that are deliciously spooky. Lone Cowboys is a glorious end track. A sort of lo-fi Stairway to Heaven start that gets ever more frenzied across its perfect four and a half minutes. The prolific garage rocker proves again that he is a mercurial and highly inventive producer able to channel his indulgences into a focused and hugely enjoyable album.

8. black midi - Schlagenheim

Rough Trade Records / 21 June

One of this year’s most exciting musical directions is that a young London four-piece making profoundly difficult and genuinely unclassifiable music were picked up, Mercury nominated and listened to far and wide. The year’s most talked-about debut confirmed pretty much only one thing, that black midi are making music like no other band in the world. As much as it is a frenetic amalgamation of ideas and influences, Schlagenheim is testament to the precocious and fearless youthful exuberance of its creators. It chops and changes throughout, and although they had all eyes on them, they seemingly carried on much as they do on stage; it’s as if the audience is a by- product of the frenetic energy that exists between them. The band’s feet are most rooted in a deranged take on noise rock, a jacked-up mode of the sort of sonic experimentalism that emanated from West Germany in the late 60s. There are elements of free jazz in there too, anarchic sections that break down the pace, further accentuating the ow of the rest of the album where the ideas really click into place. Some of the tracks have a disarmingly catchy melody under the clunks and squealing guitars. The frenzied guitars and the wide-eyed stare of Geordie Greep’s vocals are truly powerful because they are locked in place by Morgan Simpson’s quite extraordinary drumming. A human metronome, he allows everything else sonic to oscillate wildly as he pounds, thumps and skitters at the very centre of everything they do. The other factor on record is the utterly perfect pairing with producer Dan Carey, a set of hands and ears seemingly connected to everything important and vital around. Although what they are doing is extreme, each sound is beautifully captured, and that clarity makes for a kaleidoscope rather than a cacophony. A fiercely unique record that is in fitting lineage to The Pop Group’s seminal Y debut, 40 years later and equally disruptive. A legitimate one of a kind album.

7. Wand - Laughing Matter

Drag City / 19 April 

The L.A. based Wand return with their fifth LP - the fifth in five years - a 15-song double album that takes them ever further away from the crackling psych-rock suburbs to become one of America’s most expansive and underrated bands. Since forming in 2013, Wand have gone through an explosive metamorphosis as orbiting members of the garage scene (playing as part of both Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin’s bands, even releasing on Segall’s GOD? label), developing into a five piece and offering more air and space in their compositions, whilst more drastically shifting the onus of the song-writing from Cory Hanson to more of a sonic democracy. The gestures they started to make on 2017’s excellent Plum are fully realised here, they have stripped everything back, the warping fuzz and distortion are no longer at the forefront, but rather as tones to add layers of texture and sound. The interplay between the keys and guitars is really evocative stuff, strikingly pretty music and songs given as much time as is necessary to unwrap. The biggest impact in turning down the gnarl is the emphasis it has placed on Hanson’s vocals, full of a vulnerable melancholy reminiscent of a young Thom Yorke. Across the hour plus of Laughing Matter‘s running time, there are sections that are exercises in rewarded patience; the late album appearance of Airplane has the sort of slow growing builds that only Yo La Tengo have previously made so captivating. Airplane is also fascinating because So a Arreguin takes lead vocals, an entirely different voice but totally in keeping with the rest of the album. An incredibly thoughtful record from a band who might not even be through the metamorphosis they started, and in that way Laughing Matter is a weird sonic sibling of Talk Talk’s seminal Laughing Stock. It has the same quality of creating a hugely emotional character that is the sum of its whole rather than just its parts.

6. Angel Olsen - All Mirrors

Jagjaguwar / 4 October

With Angel Olsen’s album All Mirrors, lightning has struck for the fourth time, another totally different and totally consuming record from one of the most captivating and progressive artists around. Her 2012 debut Half Way Home was lo- and immediate, and 2014’s Burn Your Fire for No Witness further developed her voice and ability to deliver emotional intensity. 2016’s My Woman was sheer big time, a swaggering pop record with more charm than bravado, and a skill to wrap the emotional potency in radio-friendly nuggets. The fourth full-length studio release from the North Carolina-based singer-songwriter is nothing short of revelatory. Some of the biggest emotions committed to record in this year, or any year to date. Initially working almost alone in remote Anacortes, Washington, she focused on the simplest possible delivery to give space and time to the weight of what and why she was articulating. Working with frequent collaborator Ben Babbitt and virtuoso composer Jherek Bischoff, the songs on All Mirrors blossomed into 11 utterly breathtaking pieces, with an augmenting 12-piece string section and producer John Congleton’s seismic sonic gestures. The orchestrations on All Mirrors are phenomenal, reaching the same drunk lofty heights as Phil Spector (the boom to the drum is particularly reminiscent) and the intense discordance of Scott Walker’s compositions. The instrumentation brings out a different facet of each song: on the album’s opener Lark she sounds utterly majestic, on Tonight she’s hardly able to get the words out under the strain as the rich strings carry her forward, breathy whispers that slowly drown into high drama, it’s utterly heartbreaking. The other sonic space is a sort of analogue-synth- drenched-retro-futuristic sound - the album’s formidable title track has more than a little of the Gary Numan about it. The two contrasting styles work in beautiful balance, it’s a searing album and her nest yet. The grandest gestures with heartfelt sentiments, everything here is intense and totally overwhelming. These timeless songs really stay with you.

5. Vanishing Twin - The Age of Immunology

Fire Records / 7 June

Vanishing Twin are a fascinating line-up. Led by the elegantly stoic vocals of Brussels-bred, London-based musician Cathy Lucas, she has assembled a wide- reaching unit to include Japanese bassist Susumu Mukai (aka electro-funk producer Zongamin), Italian drummer Valentina Magaletti (whose credits include Bat for Lashes and Gruff Rhys’s Neon Neon project), former Broadcast sound manipulator Phil M.F.U. (a.k.a. Man From Uranus), and Parisian avant-garde filmmaker Elliott Arndt on flute and percussion. In these frighteningly inward-looking times, it’s thrilling to find that these sonic experimentalists are as widespread in their geography... albeit all based in London, but you get what we mean. They have taken psychedelic traditions from around the globe and created a swirling masterpiece that also incorporates tropicalía and kosmische rock to highly evocative effect. In a year where Stereolab reformed to play live and reissued more of their seminal work, it’s a fascinating symmetry that a band has arrived very much flying their flag for this new audience, channeling the same otherworldly energy and peculiar charm. Not sure that we’ve ever comfortably compared a band to Stereolab before, but Vanishing Twin are more than worthy of that high praise. Effortlessly stylish throughout, there are slower paced sections, but not one moment where richly layered sounds aren’t utterly captivating. Magician’s Success has the sort of bubbling production that would sit beautifully in the middle of a Jean-Claude Vannier record, a beautiful breeze and a swooning slice of melancholic pop. Although indebted to decades of recorded music, with analogue bleeps and tape whirls, there is no sentimentalism or nostalgia here, the group’s unique alchemy gives the record a distinct character all its own. An absolute masterclass in ingenuity and fertile ideas, trying to decode what timbres are making up the rich sonic panorama is time in vain, as they all fade into a gorgeous haze. Eerie and instantly charming, it’s one of this year’s finest moods.

4. Big Thief - U.F.O.F. / Two Hands 

4AD / 3 May / 11 October

The New York-based Big Thief returned this year in a new partnership with 4AD, releasing two quite unbelievable albums, celestial twins that display the full extent and vision of the band’s artistic grandeur. The first part, U.F.O.F., was recorded in rural western Washington at Bear Creek Studios with engineer Dom Monks, and producer Andrew Sarlo, who was also behind their previous albums. Epic landscapes cast their shadow on the album, full of rain drops on windows as Adrianne Lenker forces her way out of a strained whisper. There is a hypnotic intensity, pretty guitar loops that change emphasis entirely with the subtlest gesture. There is rarely a moment on U.F.O.F. that all four members aren’t playing, finding space for minor movements that in unison are beautifully balanced and articulate. Only a few days after completing the record they took to the sun beaten El Paso desert to tape the companion Two Hands album. The same band, the same tones, but a more earthy flipside to the mysterious and spooky U.F.O.F.; this time it feels very much like you are in the room with them. Two Hands has a different kind of intensity, less long-held introspection, it’s more outspoken with moments of the carefree in Forgotten Eyes and the epic thrashing payoff in Not that has taken an album and a half to finally erupt, voices breaking, drums falling over, distortion swelling like a black hole. Listening to the albums back-to-back was the first time that we realised that we’re approaching the end of the decade, traditionally opportunity to take stock. These are tempestuous times and these two records might be the perfect one two to play out the decade, to chart where we are now and where we might be headed. Not one moment on these brilliant records is wasted, two different and perfect documents of a band in full creative flight.

3. Bill Callahan - Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest

Drag City / 14 June

Bill Callahan is such a regularly played entity in these parts that a six year absence of new material hadn’t been as conspicuous as with other artists, in many ways he’s never been away. That said, the release of his 17th album as Bill Callahan or Smog - a 20 track double album no less - was a hugely welcome surprise. Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest is an album of pastoral domesticity, it’s a bit like expecting the odd letter from a friend to keep in touch, only to receive the manuscript for a novel, an expansive summary of the last six years and how your friend and our protagonist has changed. In short, we now find Bill happily married (and responsible for us looking up the definition of the word uxorious) and also father to a son. These big life moments informed the shape of the album, it is somewhere beyond the headspace of Apocalypse or Dream River, and a returning theme is to act more as an observer than trying to necessarily decode the themes and conflicts. On his impeccable three proceeding albums there were more resolutions song to song; here there are fewer questions asked (other than the biggest and most unanswerable), centring more on reflections of contentment. The tracks on Sheepskin Vest are often quite short, little vignettes that beam with a simple prettiness. But it’s not all in soft focus with sunshine pouring through windows, he still has an inimitable turn of phrase that can take a pensive turn, that and devilishly funny in his low-key observations (“Like hotel curtains, we never really met”). The arrangements are beautifully simple, with some of his most country- inspired hues to date (including a cover of the Carter Family’s Lonesome Valley, sung in a duet with his wife Hanly as one of the closing highlights). His rich baritone throughout conveys the intricacy of each song, every moment sounds delicious. Callahan truly has no equal as a storyteller, from the seemingly inconsequential to the very inexplicable, a perfect album.

2. W. H. Lung - Incidental Music

Melodic / 5 April

Our April Record of the Month was the incandescent debut album from Manchester’s W. H. Lung. It was a release we’d been waiting for with bated ears since welcoming the band to Devon as part of the second Sea Change Festival back in 2017.

The cataclysmic vigour they brought to our ballroom that night has only grown in the time since, not bigger, but more intense, more controlled, and with their first full release it is perfectly formed. What a gloriously contradictory title it is too, there is not one moment incidental about this album, it is full of considered and carefully orchestrated rises for a journey of euphoric highs. As debuts go, this one is hugely assured. There are cues to Manchester’s musical lineage (from New Order to The Stone Roses), but they’ve avoided paying homage to those cherished catalogues and gone about delivering eight insistent songs with motorik beats, marching synthesisers and some very smart writing. There are some shared tones which do contribute to the instant sense of familiarity with W. H. Lung: the stark air around the basslines and drum beats - on Inspiration! and Nothing Is - feel spiritually indebted to Martin Hannett, and the huge album opener Simpatico People has the sort of grandeur to the guitars that is more in line with The Cult’s She Sells Sanctuary than anything currently about. Another element placing them directly in the modern age is a fierce lyrical relevance to these songs, they feel politically charged without spelling out the clear views of their creators. “We got qualms with the rich, qualms with the ill, qualms with the poor”... it says a great deal about the political landscape right now, the brooding energy fanning the flames. Without ever appearing formulaic, the band have worked hard to develop their core dynamic strength, they understand fully the need to build and release tension. They control the pace perfectly, not one element overstays its welcome, always playing a clear part on driving the songs propulsively ever forward. A formidable debut record of modern maximalism.

1. Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains

Drag City / 12 July

Our 2019 Record of the Year is the phoenix-like return of David Berman with the absolutely incredible self-titled Purple Mountains, his perfect, final gift.

In May, a full decade after the Silver Jews auteur announced his retirement from music, Drag City mailed a set of 12”s in a box to us with All My Happiness is Gone, the reintroduction of David Berman, now as Purple Mountains. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, heartbreakingly so, he was unmistakable in both his drawling delivery and his peculiar turn of phrase, over- complicated and devilishly funny. The album followed in early July, and as we remarked at the time, “We’re pretty sure this is a very special album indeed.” It was, it is. Warmly supported by Jeremy Earl, Jarvis Taveniere and Aaron Neveu of Woods, singer Anna St. Louis, Kyle Forester of Crystal Stills, John Andrews of Quilt and Silver Jews collaborator Chris Stroffolino, Purple Mountains sounds fantastic, gracious warm country-tinged ballads with pedal steel and weary harmonica, sentimental pop with phasing organs and raucous bar-room stomp-alongs. But that is just the delivery, and that is the mastery of Berman, as Purple Mountains is thematically unrelentingly sad and bleak. Although it all plays beautifully and his winking delivery is great fun, he is un inching about loss of love and loss of family.

In early August, less than a month after Purple Mountains debuted and just days before their rst tour, David Berman died. The singer Jeffrey Lewis had become friends with Berman - even producing an absolutely incredible piece of art, depicting visual interpretations of Berman’s lifelong works - and it was his eulogy that hit us hardest. “I told him that I think his album (Purple Mountains) is great, but that is like reading someone’s suicide note and telling them it has nice grammar”. It’s all there, and after losing Berman, each listen is harder and harder. “The dead know what they’re doing when they leave this world behind”. The first, last and only Purple Mountains album is perfect, ten brilliantly written songs full of a sweet surface sadness, a deliciously wry delivery, and so much heartbreak in the shadows that it took a remarkably brave and skilled person to write them. It is a masterpiece and perhaps the most fitting epitaph for David Berman.