Damon Albarn - The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows - PIAS
The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows was originally intended as an orchestral piece inspired by the landscapes of Iceland. This last year has seen Damon Albarn return to the music in lockdown and develop the work to 11 tracks which further explore themes of fragility, loss, emergence and rebirth. The result is a panoramic collection of songs with Albarn as storyteller. The album title is taken from a John Clare poem Love and Memory. Albarn says "I have been on my own dark journey while making this record and it led me to believe that a pure source might still exist."In a career of perpetual musical shifts and exploration, the record uncovers yet more ground, finding expansive orchestral arrangements nestling with intimate melodies, discordance brushing up against infectious majesty, all set to some of Albarn's most arresting vocal performances to date. Much like the beauty and chaos of the natural world it soundtracks, The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows vividly documents the emotional ebb and flow of the human condition, in all it's extremes, serving as a soul enriching document for our times.

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They Might Be Giants - Book - Idlewild Recordings
Book is a new phase They Might Be Giants album presented on 180-gram audiophile vinyl LP, CD, Cassette and Limited Edition Deluxe CD/Book with package design by Paul Sahre. Featuring "I Broke My Own Rule," "I Lost Thursday," and "I Can't Remember the Dream," Book is billed as a beacon of light amid a pretty unanimously rough period of time with the band's John Linnell describing it's songs as "humorously germane to the catastrophe going on around us."

  

Yusuf / Cat Stevens - Teaser And The Firecat: 50th Anniversary - A&M
Yusuf / Cat Stevens celebrates 1971's landmark album with this 4CD, Blu-ray, 2LP, and 7" set in a rigid clamshell box. It includes the 50th Anniversary remaster of the album on CD/Blu-ray HD Audio completed at Abbey Road by the original producer, Paul Samwell-Smith. Featuring 41 previously unreleased demos, sessions, live tracks, and 21 unreleased TV performances. Plus, an illustrated 108-pg essay book, a 44-pg replica of the original "Teaser And The Firecat" book, and a 7" single of "Moonshadow." Also available Super Deluxe 4CD/Blu-ray Box Set, Deluxe 2CD and LP & CD.

Andy Shauf - Wilds - ANTI
Few artists are storytellers as deft and disarmingly observational as Andy Shauf. The Toronto-based, Saskatchewan-raised musician’s songs unfold like short fiction: they’re densely layered with colorful characters and a rich emotional depth. Like he’s done throughout his career, Shauf wrote, performed, arranged, and produced every song on his new album Wilds at his studio space in the west end of Toronto.  Over the course of a year-and-a-half, Shauf had written more than 50 songs, and pared down this massive body of work, into a single album’s worth of material, which became 2020’s highly acclaimed The Neon Skyline album. These songs focused on a theme by intertwining the individual characters stories of a group of friends who gathered for one night at the same local bar. Wilds includes songs from those same writing sessions, that did not fit into the Skyline storyline and had their own singular identity apart from that album, though he does revisit with his old friends Judy and Jeremy in this outing.