Re-issue with bonus tracks.

Helen Ballentine’s spellbinding first full-length album Quiet the Room is the sound of a window opening, a barrier dissolving. Across these fourteen tracks, the outside world seeps in and the inside world crawls out.

The result is a stunning and quietly moving work that reflects the journeys we take through the physical and spiritual realms of ourselves in order to show up for the world.

Track Listings
1 : Giving Up
2 : Used to Be Lonely
3 : Before I Know It
4 : Song for Ty
5 : Valleys (My Love)
6 : Rhododendron
7 : My Life Alone
8 : Day & Night
9 : Friend of Mine
10 : Forever Turned Around

Forever Turned Around came together over several sessions across the country. Though Julien Ehrlich is Whitney's lead singing drummer while Max Kakacek is the lead guitarist, when writing, both transcend their roles to piece together each offering lyrically and compositionally. "The way it ends up working is one of us comes up with a basic idea for a song and the other person serves as the foil to complicate that idea. We ask, 'What can we change to make it more interesting?'" says Kakacek. Challenging each other is the core of their songwriting partnership. It's these risks and experiments that make Forever Turned Around a triumph. Take opener "Giving Up," which started from a stream-of-conscious revelation when Ehrlich improvised the chorus while Kakacek played Wurlitzer. What began as a nod to Neil Young's Live at Massey Hall 1971 in an afternoon turned into a heart-rending and relatable song about the ups and downs of long-term relationships. Over twinkling piano, Ehrlich sings, "Though we started losing touch / I've been hanging on because / You're the only one I love." He explains, "In a relationship, you don't stay at the same level at all times. You go through weeks where you're closed off." After a session with producers Bradley Cook (Hand Habits, Hiss Golden Messenger) and Jonathan Rado (Weyes Blood, Father John Misty) helped color in the arrangements, the album truly revealed itself when they reunited with original rhythm guitarist Ziyad Asrar in his basement Chicago studio-the same place where they hashed out much of their critically acclaimed 2016 debut, Light Upon The Lake. "Getting down there was so important because we've always used that basement for music. The comfort and familiarity mattered but having Ziyad be a buffer between us was so helpful," says Ehrlich. With Asrar, songs like "Song For Ty" and "Forever Turned Around" effortlessly came together. Restlessness is at the heart of Whitney's resonant and stunning sophomore album Forever Turned Around. As Ehrlich and Kakacek realized life can change almost instantly. Priorities shift, relationships evolve, home can become far away, and even when luck momentarily works out, there's still that underlying search for something better. Happiness can be fleeting but this album proves that even when it feels like time is turning on it's head and there's either a moment of clarity or crippling doubt, there's still beauty in figuring it all out.

Collection of live performances from the iconic singer-songwriter, recorded at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, '64 and '65. The footage includes songs such as 'Blowin' in the Wind' and 'Like a Rolling Stone' and features his first-ever, controversial, purist-baiting appearance with an electric band.

There's a restlessness amongst Scotland's indie-folk artists of late. The Pictish Trail (aka Johnny Lynch) has shacked up with London alt-folkster Adem for the 80s-referencing dance dynamics of Silver Columns; Lynch's Fence Collective co-founder, King Creosote, recently collaborated with Edinburgh's Meursault and Brighton's Animal Magic Tricks on the Cold Seeds album. And now Creosote, real name Kenny Anderson, has emerged again as a member of The Burns Unit, a supergroup of sorts also featuring ex-Delgado Emma Pollock, Karine Polwart, Sushil Dade/Future Pilot A.K.A. and more. But while these relationships may seem rather incestuous, there's no doubt that the system's getting results.

The Burns Unit is a more complete, slick-sounding offering than KC's Cold Seeds. Whereas that record, released in July, was a largely improvised affair, Side Show will slip nicely beside those old Delgados records you don't play nearly enough. It's supremely polished of first impression, but also offers a far deeper experience than collaborative albums of its kind typically do. This stems from the detail in the songs containedthough several players appear throughout, half of these tracks are written by just a pair of musicians, really opening up each piece's heart. The exceptions are usually more rambunctious and loose of feel, all eight members lending input to the toe-tapping Send Them Kids to Warthe track is one of three to feature MC Soom T, who's previously worked with The Orb and Asian Dub Foundation.

While Side Show's tracks are varied of style, the boisterous often bookended by arrangements of tender emoting, drummer Mattie Foulds' production keeps every potentially distracting diversion in check with a mix (done at Chem 19, alongside celebrated producer Paul Savage) that allows highlights to shine but never detract from the enjoyment of this album as a whole. Consistency, it seems, is paramount, and while The Burns Unit's members don't quite chip in evenly, everybody's contributions are given the space they need to sing out from these never-cluttered compositions. Worthy of singling out, though, are a couple of real show-stoppers: Future Pilot A.K.C., which sees Anderson and Dade weave a tapestry of engrossing melancholy, and the Pollock-fronted You Need Me to Need This (written with Skydiggers' Michael Johnson), perhaps the most perplexingly beautiful-yet-bombastic number she's sung on since the days of The Great Eastern.

Excellently conceived, brilliantly executed and splendidly presented, Side Show is a little wonder that's considerably more than the sum of its admittedly excellent parts. Fingers crossed that its makers turn their occasional live performances into a proper tour, soon. --Mike Diver

Track Listings
1 : Handsome Billy
2 : Isis and Osiris
3 : Scapegoat
4 : Templehof
5 : Crow Jane
6 : Memento
7 : Wonder Blunts the Knife
8 : Exquisite Corpse
9 : Satellite

JASMINE PENDER (aka solo artist Rotten Bliss) and highly regarded post-punk legend JOWE HEAD (Swell Maps, Television Personalities). Their collaboration is one of equal but balancing elemental forces, like hot engine oil poured into freezing water. Their debut is intoxicating, brewed from their diseased imaginations into a strange synthesis of psych-folk, punk sleaze and ambient drone.