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Label: Forged Artifacts Words by Ryan Underwood & Luke Janke Thumper by Molly Drag Molly Drag's Thumper bursts to life with compellingly   driven plucky guitar, piano and bass during opening track Last Words ; a soaring melodies are distant enough yet with an earnest closeness, building the song into a cacophony of noise and yearning. The project's heart and soul, Michael Hansford uses his calculated and melancholic voice to deliver damning words of both pain and empathy. His imagery and lyricism in what it's like to suffer shines particularly in a small line from the track Falling Back: " You swallow the light/ I am vomiting the dark " This has a sense of familiarity, evoking overlooked but very human emotions and giving us a comforting reminder that we all live and die, with the same impact of a similar Sufjan lyric in "Fourth of July" from 2015's Carrie & Lowell. It draws acute awareness that our own lives are just as weird a...

Label: Fort Evil Fruit 'The Wig' is a labyrinthine concept piece exploring the concept "le perruque" - doing one's work on company time. Described as a "collage of workplace field recordings," it is a strange concept album and modern pastiche to gothic noise. Each track expands into what is essentially a caffeinated department meeting with the voices on mute. Irish experimentalists David Lacey [Rainfear, Irish improve scene] and Andrew Fogarty [Toymonger, Boys of Summer] here seem to organize the often monotonous and disheveled shuffling of daily office routine into clicking plastic landscapes littered with creaky doors and a mild cough. The Wig by Andrew Fogarty / David Lacey ‘The Wig’ is a scarce blending of human ambience and found sound set in drab grey spaces most musicians are keen on escaping. What Fogarty and Lacey do is embrace the limited instrumentation and often-abysmal acoustics of office spaces and turn it into a ...