New Rotation — August 28

A quiet week, which is the best week to find something. Six records, one of which nobody on the desk had heard of on Monday.

New Rotation — August 21

Six records out this week, each with the verdict attached, plus the one we are still arguing about internally and have therefore not given one.

Hollow Parade — Fathom Street

The fourth record, and the first one that sounds like a decision rather than a habit. Forty-one minutes, no guests, and a second side that finally goes somewhere.

Corrow Pressing is 26 weeks behind

Anything ordered now arrives in March. Three labels have already moved release dates and one has moved a record twice.

Ivy Mensah — Cold Open

A debut recorded in eleven days in a room with one microphone, and it sounds exactly like that, which is either the point or the problem depending on the track.

The second album that never shipped

Pale Interval pressed nine hundred copies in 2011 and destroyed eight hundred and forty of them. We found four people who own one and one person who remembers why.

Dray & the Tallows — Second Sleep

Fifty-four minutes when it should have been thirty-five. There is a very good record in here and the band have declined to find it.

The reissue is now the release

More than half of what a small label presses this year will be something it already released. That is not nostalgia, it is a manufacturing decision, and it is changing what gets made new.

Perennial Static — Nine Fields

Nine instrumentals named after nine fields, and the joke is that you can tell them apart. A quiet record that rewards being played loud.

What the tape remembered

A quarter-inch reel found in a house clearance turned out to hold a mix nobody had heard since 1994, including the two people who made it.