The Leaf Lab

When Fernando Corona released Martes, his first album as Murcof, back in 2002, it was a bolt from the blue: a work of such clarity and strength of character that it became an instant genre classic. Utopía is a collection featuring sympathetic reworkings of tracks from Martes, the two tracks from 2003's exceptional Ulysses 12", both tracks from the Utopía Remixes 12" (April 2004) and two further previously unreleased Murcof tracks, ‘Una’ and ‘Ultimatum’.

With an intuitive understanding of melody and dynamics, Nancy Elizabeth brings a refreshingly Northern turn of phrase to her debut album, Battle and Victory. The Lancashire-born singer’s down-to-earth songs are brought to life by her warm and unaffected voice; Unpretentious but effortlessly ambitious, Not content with writing and singing all the songs herself, the 23 year-old also plays most of the instruments, including guitar, khim, Indian harmonium, Appalachian dulcimer and bouzouki, amongst many others. Prominently featured is a 22-string Celtic harp, which she first picked up a little over two years ago, after an inspirational chance meeting with a harp player at a Liverpool gallery. Not long afterwards she received a modest award from a music foundation, and within days had spent it all on the perfect instrument, which has become a cornerstone of her performances.

Beautiful Seizure is the debut album from Chicago trio volcano!, and it’s an intense, exhilarating and immensely rewarding ride. What may at first sound chaotic and unplanned reveals itself on repeated listening as meticulously structured: rhythms gather, flicker, melt (down) and emerge as something different; splenetic episodes give way to passages of hymnal calm which in turn are shattered as language breaks down into strobe-like stuttering and is tugged back into line by Sam Scranton’s insistent drumming; silvery shards of controlled static ride high above everything. Melodies are stretched to and beyond breaking point, Aaron With’s guitar shifts between a ragged, feverish dissonance and bright spaciousness. There are no boundaries and no indulgences, nothing here that’s hackneyed or extraneous.

Triosk pianist Adrian Klumpes’ debut solo album. Like a Rothko canvas, Be Still is minimal and introspective, yet rich and intense; a rush of colour from a deliberately limited palette. As Klumpes explains: “Minimalism assumes much more involved actions before and after the event”. As a result, the album is vested with a range of emotion: feelings of violence, relief, loneliness, pain and finality are integral to the recordings. Recorded in a single five-hour session in Klumpes’ hometown of Sydney, all the sounds were captured in the same room, with the same mics, using the same piano. Simultaneously premeditated and spontaneous, the recordings strive for an edgy tranquility.

Miami Ice is the highly melodic, playfully energetic third album by Chicago’s Icy Demons, and their first for The Leaf Label. The band’s altered pop music draws on a vast musical vocabulary, sometimes within a single song, transporting the listener to exotic locations with songs of dreams and endurance, alien paranoia and community, time travel and the western frontier. Using an odd assortment of vintage keyboards and ethnic percussion, Icy Demons evoke a past that actually might prove to be the future.

Wildbirds & Peacedrums: The Snake [CD]

The Chicago trio’s outstanding third album, Piñata is the sound of volcano! past distilled into a most potent formula for the present: unsparingly concise, stickily melodic, lyrically stronger and stranger, darkly humorous, ferociously driven, fabulously inventive. Clocking in at just over 40 minutes, the album has an aggressive energy that’s as exciting as it is unpredictable.