The Eighteenth Day Of May – S/T Expanded Reissue

The Eighteenth Day Of May only managed one album in their short lifetime, and I've been a long time fan but have never found an opportune moment to cover it until now.

The band splintered off into a number of other much longer lasting musical projects, notably Lake Ruth, the Hanging Stars and The Left Outsides, all of which have been covered here at various points over the years, but it was their brief time together as the Eighteenth Day of May which was a magical breeding ground of intersecting musical tastes coalescing into something unique in a way that hadn't been seen since Sandy Denny joined the scruffy lads of Fairport Convention in inventing UK folk-rock. While clearly not as pivotal as Unhalfbricking and Liege and Lief, the Eighteenth Day of May is equally as irreverent in its treatment of the genre, with plenty of jangly, psychedelic edges to what might otherwise seem a reasonably traditional UK folk-rock album. Indeed it is said that they were just as likely to cover Spacemen 3 as Bert Jansch in their live repertoire of the time, and vocalist Alison Brice often sounded like she'd be just as comfortable fronting a dream-pop band, which more or less came to fruition with Lake Ruth, although they're equally hard to tie down to one genre.

Tragically they were never able to complete a second album but Cardinal Fuzz / Feeding Tube Records put together a wonderful retrospective double LP set in 2020 which included the original album in full, doubling its original length with a wealth of material intended for a second album. That second album must have been almost ready to come out of the oven, and judging from what's on here would have been even more immersive than their first, with the beautifully trippy Tell Me Tomorrow being something of a career highlight that we're privileged now to be able to hear.

Naturally the Cardinal Fuzz release sold out before I knew of its existence, but new London label Circuitry Recordings has seen fit to reissue it in a limited run of 300, due in May. These are bound to sell quickly too but can be pre-ordered through Bandcamp below where the album can also be heard in full.

The Lazy Eyes - Songbook

Here's another excellent band that popped up during our long hibernation. 

I was initially drawn to The Lazy Eyes when I noticed they had chosen to cover Broadcast, surely the actions of a band with impeccable taste. 

Their 2022 LP is an impressive, fully formed debut with that very distinct Antipodean psychedelic flavour that no one else seems to quite be able to grasp . I'm getting Pond and Violet Swells vibes from this, and that is always welcome. 

There's some serious psychedelic baroque pop songcraftery going on in songs like Starting Over, Imaginary Girl and Nobody Taught Me, which sound really carefully constructed with not a note out of place, but there's also another side to the band where they like to stretch out with some pretty wigged out instrumental jams which is where I think their strength really lies. The relentless propulsive beat of Fuzz Jam and the Where's My Brain??? are both pretty unbeatable in this regard, while the motorik drive of Tangerine finds common ground between early Tame Impala and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard in the most irresistible fashion.

A really nicely balanced debut here. 

Willow Tea - Death And Life And All That Lays In Between

 

'Naive melodies for imaginary films and short walks' is how the Berlin based Willow Tea describe their music and their latest, Death And Life And All That Lays In Between certainly conjures images of something stalking the land.

This is very much my sort of comfy synth project with lots of lovely wobbly flutes and eerie mellotron choral vocals crafting a sense of creeping incidental unease in a similar fashion to earlier Active Listener favourites The Soulless Party or The Heartwood Institute. Fans of either of those acts would do well to investigate immediately.

And a serving suggestion if I may: I had this on heavy rotation while reading David Barnett's latest folk-horror opus Scratch Moss and it paired very nicely with Barnett's tale of an ancient evil stirring from deep within the earth.

Available to stream or download (on a name your price basis) here:

Telegraph - Topography of Mind

 

If I was given this as the subject of a blind-folded taste test and asked to guess its country and date of origin I would more than likely have posited UK, very early seventies. And I'd be wrong on both counts. 

Topography of Mind, released in February, is the second album from Israel's excellent progressive rockers Telegraph and is probably my favourite album of the year so far.

The four long tracks (all around the 10-12 minute mark) contained within evoke many of the giants of the early seventies UK prog scene and are beautifully constructed pieces without a second wasted. 

Apart from a couple of short verses of wispy treated vocals (think Greg Lake on the quieter tracks from his stint in King Crimson), this is entirely instrumental. Guitarist Tal Rubinstein has a lovely economical style that can't help but bring to mind Camel's Andy Latimer. Telegraph believe in playing to their strengths, and his unhurried, lyrical guitar leads fit in perfectly where other bands might feel they need to shoehorn in more vocals unneccesarily.

There's nothing too busy going on in any of these tracks which is very welcome. Relaxed, pastoral flute and acoustic guitar passages appear frequently (the opening of Valley of Delerium could almost be a madrigal), but they're just as comfortable floating off into space; the second half of album closer Somewhere Along These Lines is distinctly Floydian with keyboardist Eze Sakson's synth leads playing superbly off of Rubinstein's guitar vamps like a lost middle section of Shine On You Crazy Diamond.

Very highly recommended to those who (like me) prefer prog rock of the vintage persuasion.

Analysing A Ghost By Electronic Means

This one is a little more niche than what I would normally cover and given its very specific theme, it’s probably already known by a lot of its potential audience (especially as I’m late to the party). But as I’m only just now learning of its existence, I’ll assume there are others among us who are also still in need of the good word.

2022 saw the 50th anniversary of Nigel Kneale's classic BBC Supernatural thriller The Stone Tape, an occasion that prompted Hidden Britain to approach a group of the UK's leading wyrd electronic artists and commission a new series of works in tribute, leading to the release of Analysing A Ghost By Electronic Means in 2023.

Inevitably with a project like this there will be some disparity about what the actual brief is, but I’d say that 80-90% of this fits together seamlessly which is pretty remarkable given the number of busy minds involved. Those with more diverse tastes than myself may find the hit rate even higher for them.

With artists associated with labels previously championed here such as Clay Pipe Recordings, Wayside & Woodland and Castles in Space, it's no surprise that this is the success that it is. A well balanced mix of more melodic themes and dark ambient incidentals, there's very little here that would have sounded out of place on the original broadcast. 

Particular kudos to The Night Monitor - It's In The Computer would be right at home in an early seventies episode of Doctor Who, as well as to the always excellent Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan who can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned.

Stream / download here: 

The New Eves - The New Eve Is Rising

Brighton folk-punk quartet the New Eves drag the folk tradition kicking and screaming into the 21st century on their superb debut LP. It’s a true Esoteric Britannia statement with their deeply ingrained and quietly terrifying Albion roots merging effortlessly with the anarchic post-punk of the Slits and the Aupairs, the hypnotic rhythmic grooves of Can, and droning strings ala Velvet Underground era John Cale. For a start.

It’s a truly visceral experience, and reaches Comus like levels of intensity at times.

Check out their wonderfully unhinged modernisation and deconstruction of the Alfred Noyes narrative poem The Highwayman, previously put to music by Phil Ochs for a primer. Poor old Phil would not cope.

Great stuff and would potentially have been my album of the year last year, had I known of it then. 

Bressa Creeting Cake

I've been revisiting this old favourite of late and thought I'd share it here as its largely unknown outside of New Zealand, and to be fair they're far from a household name even here in their homeland. 

Their self titled (and only) album is - in this writer's opinion - the best Flying Nun album of the nineties.

It's a beautiful, off-kilter pop record which boasts more memorable choruses than most bands would manage in a career, but sadly they were too weird and individualistic to make an impression on the general public and are now a bit of a cult favourite, with a small but rabidly loyal fanbase.

A vinyl reissue a few years back appended the rest of their recorded output (EP tracks and tribute album appearances) and this is what you'll find if you care to investigate them on Spotify or Bandcamp. And I urge you to do so if you're looking for something strange and beautiful that you can obsess over for a lifetime. You won't regret it.

Spooky Eyes - S/T

This Tasmania three-piece's debut is a great old fashioned psychedelic power trio album that doesn't sound a day over 1970 and is seriously deserving of a Keef cover.

I bet guitarist / vocalist Jude Hastings has a great record collection. He's clearly a scholar of the era when proto-heavy metal was still heavily blues based, with a strong Tony Iommi influence to his lead guitar work which would sound right at home on Sabbath's debut. The rhythm section of Piper Rayner and Jaxon Bassett are pitch perfect for this material too.

Their originals are full of memorable, energetic riffs and are so well constructed that the only nit I can pick with this is that their mid-album cover of the Count Five's Psychotic Reaction comes across as an unnecessary distraction from the excellence of their own material.

A top album that will fit nicely between the May Blitz and Sir Lord Baltimore LPs on your shelf. 

Takeshi Terauchi - Eleki Bushi 1966-1974

Japan in the sixties was surf guitar mad, enough so to spawn its own sub-genre, Eleki. Upon their first tour of Japan the Ventures became superstars, and soon enough the Eleki Bumu was in full swing, fusing the Venture's surf guitars with the melodies and sometimes instrumentation of traditional Japanese folk music. 

Takeshi Terauchi's mother was a music teacher who played the traditonal Japanese stringed instrument the shamisen, the strings of which are typically played with a more vigorous staccato attack than those on a guitar. Terauchi himself took up the guitar at the age of five and applying his mother's shamisen technique to his own guitar playing he was well on the road to becoming Eleki's undisputed master with his distinctive style. His style would evolve considerably over the years, often incorporating elements of heavy psychedelia.

This post is intended to serve two purposes. Firstly to draw your attention specifically to this excellent 2023 collection of Terauchi's work issued by French label 180 g. It's a fine companion piece to the more expansive Big Beat Records Nippon Guitars collection which helped introduce Terauchi to a wider Western audience in 2011 and there's not much material doubled up between the two so you should own both.

Secondly, although Nippon Guitars was a revelatory release at the time, Terauchi's back catalogue otherwise remained elusive beyond Youtube streams and torrented vinyl rips. Fortunately this is no longer the case with 180 g following up Eleshi Bushi in 2025 with reissues of six of his most well regarded albums from the sixties and early seventies which can all be had in full through their Bandcamp page here.

Dig in, it really is a treasure trove of inspirational guitar music.

Sun Dial - Overspill Sessions

Sun Dial's archives have been getting a pretty thorough combing through over the last few years and I'm all for it. 

Firstly I'm operating on the assumption that you, dear reader, are familiar with the band. If not, you need to be listening to their classic 1990 debut Other Way Out right now. Set that going and head back here. 

During this era the band had a great thing going with vintage Beatlesque UK psychedelic songcraft filtered through a spectrum of heavy Hawkwind meets Stooges space rock. They released two albums and a series of EPs in this style before pivoting to a more contemporary shoegaze sound with 1992's Reflecter.

Overspill Sessions is the latest in their archival release series and dating from 1991, falls smack bang right in the middle of my favourite era for the band. Coming from the same productive sessions that were responsible for the original Overspill EP and the Return Journey album (confusingly released after Reflecter), Overspill Sessions is both a great look at how the material evolved in the studio and an excellent album in its own right. 

Looking at the track list you'll see a few familiar names if you know those original releases, but you'll find that here they're either substantially different performances or presented in new mixes that serve the material extremely well. There are also several songs that I believe have never been released before (Let It Go and Black Light) and they're very worthy additions to the Sun Dial canon. And the covers from these sessions (It's All Too Much and Interstellar Overdrive) could almost serve as a manifesto for the band during this era.

Highly recommended listening and if you fancy digging deeper into this era I'd also recommend the archival releases of Other Way In (outtakes from Other Way Out),  Never Fade: A Collection Of EP's 1990-1992, and Rays Of The Sun - Demos 1991-1992 all of which are superb.