Lone Striker – Dunno (single)

Tom Brown is a indie DIY scene veteran who released a number of “fuzzy, jangly and melodic” records with his bands Rural France (on Meritorio Records) and Teenage Tom Petties (on Safe Suburban Home and Repeating Cloud). Let’s get to know his new project, Lone Striker. Captured at home using a selection of bedroom instruments and samples, off-kilter soul drum loops and found sounds, Tom has spent five years making a record that takes a lifelong love of warped Americana (think: Sparklehorse, Mercury Rev, Silver Jews) and puts it through a very British lens. A patchwork of sounds and stories, beamed from a broken transistor radio. The songs themselves are immaculately crafted. With nods to the melodies, structures and arrangements of the Brill Building golden years, Lone Striker’s scruffy, warm heart has melancholy and melody pumping through it. While Lone Striker has been a long and mostly solitary pursuit, there was room for a few guests. Most notably, Billy Fuller of BEAK>, who lends his beautiful bass lines to the weary first single, Dunno (and to Cursed Like Roy).

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(Make Me A) TRISTE© Mixtape Episode 179: Charlie Kaplan

Charlie Kaplan

Charlie Kaplan is an independent songwriter from New York, a muisc writer and the bassist in New York art pop/soft rock trio Office Culture which just released its fourth album, Enough, in October. As a solo artist, Charlie had three LPs and two EPs out, all via the Glamour Gowns imprint: Sunday came out in 2020, followed by Country Life In America in 2023. Eternal Repeater, Kaplan’s latest solo album, which came out on November 1st, is a great folk rock work, and was produced by Nico Hedley.
About the album Charlie said: “My third album, Eternal Repeater, centers around mankind’s entropic inclination to cruelty and fear. To my ears, each successive song radiates out from the most private paranoias to, by the end of the album, the terrible form these atoms take in aggregate: mass panic, prejudice, demagoguery. I found this theme in the eerie mode of music I was writing, which recalled the spooky, northern English folk that seems to ooze out inevitably from heavy music from Pink Floyd to Ty Segall. I decided to put together a playlist of sounds like these to illustrate why my ear led me to paint this picture, one that combines both tempting sweetness and an abiding darkness“.

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