We bid July goodbye with arguably the strongest week of the month. I review six new albums, including the long overdue return of Trashcan Sinatras and The Durutti Column, plus Shearwater, The Cleaners From Venus, Ulrika Spacek remixed, and a nepo baby worth paying attention to.
Over in Notable Releases, Andrew gives his opinions on the latest from Arca, Ed Askew, Shearling (not Shearwater) and more.
On this week’s BV Interviews, I talk to Taja Cheek aka L’Rain.
Pour three out out for Glen Hansard, Sick of It All’s Lou Koller, and Kavinski. RIP.
Head below for this week’s reviews…
ALBUM OF THE WEEK: Trashcan Sinatras – Ever the Optimist (TCS Recordings)
First album in a decade from these Scottish pop greats is one of their best, and features vocal contributions from Camera Obscura’s Tracyanne Campbell and Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside
Slow and steady wins the race. Scotland’s Trashcan Sinatras have been making sparkling, literate guitar pop with the same five-piece lineup for four decades. While there’s often a gap between releases, they’ve maintained an equally remarkable level of quality, which continues with Ever the Optimist, their seventh album and first in 10 years.
“We’re all gambling, trying to hold it together,” Frank Reader sings on Ever the Optimist‘s sprightly title track and opening song. “Always, forever, through stormy weather.” The guitars chime, Reader’s voice sounds just like it did on the band’s debut album, Cake, and when the rest of the band join in on harmonies, the song really takes off.
They just keep flying from there. Not unlike fellow Glaswegians Teenage Fanclub and Aztec Camera, Trashcan Sinatras have an effortless way with melody, a knack for earworm choruses, and an even better way with middle eights, not to mention a disposition for marrying warm tunes with melancholic lyrics that is just so satisfying. See also: “The Bitter End,” which owes a little to the Jesus and Mary Chain; the lightly jazzy “A View from Nowhere,” which features an enveloping, swarm-like guitar solo; and “Rome,” which is bathed in dubby, ragged, orchestral grandeur.
Veteran bands who are described as “jangle” often descend into a lull of sleepy midtempo material, but working with Delgados drummer Paul Savage as producer, Trashcan Sinatras keep pep in their step, and the arrangements help keep things interesting (see “The Associated Funk” and “Birds I Couldn’t Identify”). There are also a couple of terrific duets here: “Bad Husband” is a he-said-she-said short story featuring Camera Obscura’s Tracyanne Campbell, and Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside lends his honeyed falsetto to the atmospheric ballad “Hold On Today.”
Ever the Optimist ends on a sublime note, and really earns its title, with “Learning to Love Your Ghost,” a song about grief and acceptance that’s as good as any they’ve ever written. “When there’s no more normal to barricade my mind / When you’re deep in the trenches, what you gonna do but survive?” Reader sings against swelling strings and horns. Survive they do, the Trashcan Sinatras. Gracefully.
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ALBUM OF THE WEEK #2: Shearwater – The New World (Polyborus)
Jonathan Meiburg assembles an all-star cast for Shearwater’s wonderful, dynamic new album
Jonathan Meiburg calls the many talented musicians who contributed to Shearwater’s new album “the wildest ensemble we’ve ever assembled.” He’s not really overstating things, either. In addition to regular bandmates Emily Lee and Dan Duszynski, The New World features Shahzad Ismaily, Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart, Thor Harris, woodwinds player Doug Wieselman, qanunist Farouz Zreik, ngonist Mamadou Kouyate, and percussionists Mahamadou Tounkara and Moctar Kouyate (of Malian group Ngoni Ba). Oh, and spoken word by one Laurie Anderson.
If you don’t know what some of those instruments are (or some of the musicians who play them), you are not alone, but just know that Shearwater puts them all to good use. About three minutes into the album, on the beautiful, slowly pulsing “Even Song,” a slow build-up leads to a minor chord being unleashed on an acoustic guitar. It has the kind of widescreen ’80s grandeur that brings to mind Trevor Rabin-era Yes, early Peter Gabriel, and Love and Rockets, a tiny moment that awakens your senses, letting you know something special lies ahead.
The New World is a Shearwater album of the highest order: lush, proggy, and orchestral; dramatic, just a little gothy, mysterious, and full of wonder and towering melodies. Produced by the band and recorded and mixed by Duszynski, it sounds amazing. (Headphone Album alert!) In addition to all the skilled players and exotic instruments, Meiburg layered the songs with field recordings made on expeditions around the world — he is a geographer and ornithologist when not playing in bands. “I used to worry about keeping those worlds separate,” Meiburg says. “But now it all feels like one big project.” Shearwater’s universe is expanding, and it is a thing of beauty worth getting lost in.
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The Durutti Column – Renascent (London Records)
Vini Reilly’s first Durutti Column album in 16 years still has some of his magic
As The Durutti Column, Vini Reilly was one of the first artists signed to Factory Records and appeared on the label’s inaugural release, a 7″ compilation that also featured Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire, and John Dowie. He stayed with Factory throughout the ’80s, crafting gorgeous, mostly instrumental music built around his distinctive finger-picked, spiderweb guitar style. That there is a new Durutti Column album at all is surprising. Following the release of 2010’s A Paean to Wilson, a tribute to friend and Factory Records founder Tony Wilson, who had died three years prior, Vini Reilly suffered a series of strokes that left him unable to play guitar; health and financial problems continued, and he all but fell off the face of the earth.
But he continued physical therapy as his nephew started a crowdfunding campaign to help pay the bills, and eventually became well enough to start playing again. Aided by longtime producer and collaborator Kier Stewart and drummer Bruce Mitchell, we now have Renascent, the first Durutti Column album in 16 years. Most of it works remarkably well, and while Reilly’s playing is a little more spare, his signature style is still there, unmistakable.
Renascent plays like a tour through The Durutti Column’s different eras: there are spectral instrumentals that recall “Sketch for Summer,” downtempo, beat-driven compositions à la his ’90s work, and Eno-esque ambience. Then there’s “Sargasso Sea,” one of two songs featuring singer-songwriter Caoilfhionn Rose, which is a lovely piano ballad but doesn’t really feel like it belongs here.
The two best songs, though — “Liars” and “Scammer” — feature Vini Reilly on vocals, frail but very human, and with his echoing lead lines and pulsing synthesizers it’s as if he’s on a deep-space probe, floating through an endless sea of stars, like he’d finally found his way back home.
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The Cleaners from Venus – Beryl & Ruff Go Shopping (Notting Hill Music)
Another charming chapter from Britain’s most prolific home-recording genius
Martin Newell has been releasing wonderful, distinctly British psych-pop as The Cleaners from Venus since the early ’80s. He’s kind of like the UK’s Robert Pollard or R. Stevie Moore, with a seemingly endless well of earworms, all recorded at home on whatever equipment is at hand. (He’s actually written a book on home recording.) Beryl & Ruff Go Shopping is the umpteenth Cleaners from Venus album, made on an 8-track Portastudio, and it’s pretty hi-fi as far as their records go.
At this point, Newell’s got a signature sound — jazzy, orchestral pop influenced by The Kinks, The Beatles, and other sunshine psychedelia — and a vocal delivery that leans into the Britishness of it all and is as distinctive as his melodies. With its bouncy piano backing, “Scenes from Smalltown England” is as quintessentially Cleaners as it gets, another entry in Newell’s ever-growing catalog of small-town songs. The hits keep coming with “Neverland for Now,” “The Vintage Girl,” “Supermoon,” and “Spring Wings In.” Beryl & Ruff Go Shopping isn’t a bad introduction to The Cleaners from Venus, either, but from here head directly to 1982’s Midnight Cleaners and become obsessed, like so many others already have.
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Ulrika Spacek – EXPO, REMIXED (Full Time Hobby)
One of my favorite albums of 2026 gets remixed by Fantasy of a Broken Heart, More Eaze, members of members of YHWH Nailgun and Caroline, and more
Ulrika Spacek’s EXPO is one of my very favorite albums of 2026 so far, and given the band made it by sampling themselves, it’s appropriate that they’d deliver a remix album where all but one of the 11 songs gets radically reworked by a different artist. “After a few months of having EXPO out, it felt like a good time to share the individual layers with other artists to see what they could build with our blocks of sound,” the band say. “We really like how it turned out, as it provides an alternative world of EXPO — each remix really reflects what we like about the artists we asked in the first place. In many ways we are quite an inward-looking band, so collaborating in this way was a nice contrast to our usual way of working.”
Everything here is pretty interesting: single “Build a Box and Break It” is broken even further by WA Keys (YHWH Nailgun’s Jack Tobias); “Expo” gets chopped up into a 2-step garage Frankenstein by Leeds collective HONESTY; UK producer wing! takes “Picto” into trance territory; NYC’s more eaze deconstructs “Showroom” into glitchy ambience; and I’m not sure how to describe whatever Gloorp did to “Weights and Measures,” but it’s cool. Too often remix records feel like an afterthought. This one feels like every artist approached the material with the same care Ulrika Spacek gave the originals.
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Family Stereo – The Thread (Bella Union)
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree in the case of the debut album from the son of Everything But the Girls’ Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn
London-based singer-songwriter Blake Watt comes from good stock — his parents are Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn, aka Everything But the Girl. Blake started releasing singles under the name Family Stereo during the pandemic, and he’s opened all of Watt and Thorn’s comeback shows so far. The solo project is now a band, who have released their debut album on Bella Union, the label run by Cocteau Twins’ Simon Raymonde.
“I think my writing has been getting more pared-back as I’ve progressed,” says Blake. “I find more and more that simple is better. I love telling a story in the simplest way or conveying a feeling in the simplest way, with not too many frills.” These songs are gentle folk, some piano-based, some acoustic guitar-based, and the spare sounds match his emotive voice (he clearly inherited his mom’s pipes). The gentler numbers on The Thread are lovely, but more spirited tracks like “Fault Lines” point in an even more promising direction.
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INDIE BASEMENT CLASSIC: Trashcan Sinatras – Cake (Go! Discs / London, 1990)
Trashcan Sinatras arrived with one of the great indie-pop debuts of the ’90s
With the new Trashcan Sinatras album just out, I thought I’d go back to where it all began. When The Smiths broke up, it felt like the world was in need of a new literate, melodic, jangly pop band to fill Morrissey & Marr’s big shoes and indie fans’ hearts. That crown ultimately, if only briefly, went to Suede a couple of years later, but one of the best contenders was Scotland’s Trashcan Sinatras, who continue to have a knack for putting gorgeous melodies to tongue-twisting, heart-on-sleeve love songs. They arrived fully formed on their debut, Cake, which is full of wonderful songwriting that mixes chest-beating anthemicism with subtle moments and sparkling production, taking the best of ’80s UK indie and remodeling it for a new decade.
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