CD's

LP is Standard Jacket + Download Card.

First 15 LP orders come with Limited Edition Custom Booklet.

Traps PS are a band that breaks “less is more” all the way down to “less is everything.” You get it: like the Minutemen, the songs are short because they don’t need to be long. And like the Minutemen, sixty seconds of Traps PS hits harder and resonates longer than five-ten-twenty sloppy minutes from somebody else. Or like Gang of Four, who got it from James Brown, who is a fundamental Traps PS inspiration—Traps PS cares about discipline, rhythm and clarity. Says drummer Miles Wintner: “We don’t waste time.” They’ve always been unafraid to do what needed to be done, this practically telepathic trio of Wintner, bassist/backing vocalist Danny Miller and singer/guitarist Andrew Jeffords. They recorded and released records on their community-oriented/community-involved label Papermade and played any space they’d fit—lost all ages institutions like L.A.’s Pehrspace or not-exactly legal “guerilla” shows on city streets and in dusty Inglewood oil fields. But with their first full-length in three years coming into focus, they found L.A. independent label Innovative Leisure ready to amplify that DIY capability:

“We’ve done so much in our own bubble that it was exciting to explore another aspect,” says Jeffords. “I’m enjoying inviting people into our family. By the time they walked into Long Beach’s Jazzcats studio—where label mates like Hanni El Khatib and the Molochs recorded with producer Jonny Bell—they had more than twenty songs nearly fully finished, trimmed to their most necessary components and rehearsed only enough to sharpen the original inspiration. That was the most important part, says Jeffords, to capture that ecstatic lightning-strike instant that sparked a song in the first place, and to make sure it never fizzled out. “If we didn’t have that feeling,” he adds, “the song would have never made it out of the rehearsal studio.”

Their last full-length was about energy, says Jeffords, an echo of the helicopters that shook the walls in his old apartment and the car crashes in the street. New Chants would be darker in tone and color, he thought—about people and their machines, and the blurring relationship between them. Like the way you can sometimes see your reflection in a TV screen—maybe you lose track of where the media starts and you begin. If “Fourth Walls” didn’t make it obvious, the black border around their cover art does: Traps PS knows there’s always a frame around the image.

This is where the real spirit of that first wave of post-punk is at work on New Chants. It’s that uneasiness with the future and the unpredictable effects it brings, and an effort to make an unpredictable new music to meet it. (Possibly related: there’s actually one of the Jazzcats studio cats playing piano on this album, but not where you’d think.)

New Chants is an album about watching and being watched, about white noise and negative space, about how what’s undone or unplayed or unsaid is just as deliberate and meaningful as everything else. Jeffords even perforated his lyrics sheet with “…” ellipses—negative space in the language itself. So think Wire’s precision minimalism, antidote to the over-the-top spectacle of punk and pop both. You’ll hear it in “Seven Voices” or the album’s title track. Think Public Image and that caustic, corrosive—and purer for it—dissonance.

You’ll hear it in “Two Truths,” with its ragged semi-chorus of “Emmmmmmbrace …” Think the Contortions, who tore out everything in their songs except the rhythm and discovered there wasn’t much else they’d needed anyway, except for some saxophone used more as flamethrower than musical instrument. You’ll hear that as “Fourth Walls” falls in on itself. And then think about Traps PS, who thought about what they didn’t need and then threw it out, and who made an album only out of what they felt mattered most: “Let it be what it is,” says Jeffords. New Chants is barely twenty minutes long—but it’s got everything.

LP is Gatefold Jacket + Download Card.

CD is 4 Panel Digipack.

Rotterdam’s Iguana Death Cult hasn’t exactly been shy about causing havoc on whatever stage they set foot. That’s likely been the one constant since establishing their giddy brand of protopunk and garage rock on debut LP The First Stirrings Of Insect Life. Iguana’s pending follow-up Nude Casino marks a swift and sobering departure from the miasma of psychedelics they purvey so fervently. But no less intense: this band has been sharpening their tools, reemerging from their concrete cavern with a ragged and convulsive post-punk attack akin to Devo, The Gun Club, and Richard Hell.

Nude Casino sporadically evokes Iguana Death Cult’s more hedonistic tendencies, but the album’s crisper, more unvarnished sonic makeup illustrates a seething skepticism as a counterbalance. Frontman Jeroen Reek finds himself teetering in demented neurosis between vivid dream states and stark reality. The album’s beating heart is ‘Tuesday’s Lament’, an arresting five-chapter monologue that wrestles with the strains of mortality and belief. As Reek narrates the invasion of existing evils into his phantasmagorical, aquatic dream world, somehow, Iguana Death Cult manage to jam it all into a belter of a melodic hook: “Swimming upstream for the sake of paradise, it’s up there still.” A bashful resolution, albeit one that balances on the edge of fatalism.

Adding a touch of sobriety, both sonically and lyrically, hasn’t stifled Iguana Death Cult daredevil ways the slightest. The mighty triptych of ‘Nude Casino’, ‘Bright Lights’ and ‘Lorraine’ was pretty much written simultaneously, a testament to the off-the-chain chemistry the Dutch quintet has developed over the years. Axe-wielder Tobias Opschoor once again brandishes his resourcefulness for licks that penetrate the skull with charm and impertinence. He is the brains behind Nude Casino’s manic, climax-building pinnacle ‘Nature Calls’, a juggernaut of a track that ironically captures a yearning to drift away from the civilized world. Though more grounded in reality, sonically speaking, ‘Nature Calls’ might be the closest kin to the more surrealist pronouncements of First Stirrings.

Playing an abundance of shows – at small clubs, squats and festivals such as The Great Escape, Lowlands, c/o pop, Plissken and Reeperbahn – has whipped Iguana into even more ferocious live band, and that experience carries over in the recordings. The tandem of Justin Boer (bass) and Arjen van Opstal (drums) is still the engine that drives the group’s helter-skelter horsepower. Jimmy de Kok adds a new melodic dynamic, assaulting the neurons with feverish organs and synths. With yet another erratic element in the fold, Nude Casino invokes something more claustrophobic and barren, tackling themes like sleep paralysis (‘Half Frisian’) and lost innocence (‘Castle In The Sky’).

Indeed, Iguana Death Cult isn’t gleefully surfing that mighty tidal wave anymore, but giving in to destructive currents that enwrap everything in chaos. Nude Casino is an intrusive, spastic affair, streamlined into a propellant, hook-heavy yomps, never more obvious than the cadaverous disco pulse of ‘Carnal Beat Machine’. Like The Clash and Minutemen before them, Iguana Death Cult have embraced the art of rocking the fuck out with all senses and impulses up to eleven. Rapturously sinking in their claws, and never letting go.

2LP is Gatefold Jacket, Custom Inner Sleeves + Download Card.

CD is Jewel Case.

In a world where art is compromised and commodified, shrunk down and boxed in, Vicktor Taiwò wants us to open up. The vibrant young singer-songwriter traffics in subtle hints and soaring melodies, slow creeps and grand climaxes. Taiwò is on a mission to collect something from himself, and it’s a journey worth following.

It is the frigid winter of the year 2000 and Vicktor Taiwò, an eight year old, accompanied by his mother and siblings, arrive in East London after leaving behind the visceral warmth of Abeokuta, Nigeria behind. Raised in a Christian home, his exposure to performing music came as it does for many with gifted vocal ability; honing skills and crafting harmonies in church choirs.

Years forward and disillusioned by his decision to study Law & Business at university, Vicktor Taiwò makes a choice that alters the course of his life permanently. After encouragement from friends and a brief stint as a frustrated photographer, Taiwò decides on January 1, 2012 precisely - as he does with most things - that he would make music his medium.

Once he started uploading his songs online, listeners caught on quickly. Without label or publisher, he found himself synced on shows like Girls and Dear White People. JUNO, Vicktor’s self-released debut EP, was met with praise by the likes of Vice, Billboard, and Okayplayer for its lean, focused approach to song structure, and for its withering, poetic lyrics.

Even at such an early stage in his development, Taiwò was finding angles that most songwriters would neglect. “At this point, all I really think there is for humans to do is to explore detail,” he says. “To see how infinite an infinitely expanding universe really is, and how small the smallest particle really is.”

His debut album, Joy Comes in Spirit, is at once experimental and comforting – collected shards of soul and style reassembled into something entirely new. Due out on Innovative Leisure, the record introduces a bold new artist willing to take musical and lyrical risks, and to bare himself to an international audience. The result is an arresting, unforgettable work that shrugs off the expectations we have that musicians fit easily into recognizable molds.

A fearless writer, on “Letters I Wrote,” Taiwò opens with a remarkable scene: “If you never see sunlight again / And the sun turns black and makes you so afraid / Can you find the light within to fight the night?” It’s a note to self of course; from Joy Comes in Spirit’s first note, Vicktor is mining his own psyche for its dark depths and hidden crevices, demanding from himself the sort of emotional reaction his work incites in others.

Songs like “Subducta. Psalm 69,” a seven-minute, multi-part epic, echo contemporary hip-hop; “tDS (Surf)” seems designed to be sung around campfires in the distant future; “Supernatural Women” traces 808s & Heartbreak back to its Zappian roots. And “Summon,” one of the record’s highlights, is like if you trapped a troubled spirit in a GameBoy Colour.

Vicktor Taiwò is emotionally complex. His album’s beautiful closer, “Morning Joy,” is redemptive, an optimistic look toward better days. It’s hard not to be optimistic in the face of Taiwò’s talent, the kind of which is rarely harnessed so seamlessly, and at such a young age. He’ll be an artist of consequence for years to come, no matter what outside forces threaten to block his path.