Amongst many amazing releases, for my tastes two very important albums to recently come out of Records on Ribs are All the Empires of the World’s Last Rites and—just out today—Les Étoiles’ To Leave a Mark. If you dig bands like Explosions in the Sky or God Speed You Black Emperor! then you’ll definitely like All the Empires of the World. I’m not sure what to even compare Les Étoiles to, but both albums are gorgeous, especially today’s release.
From the record label’s description:
Last year Les Étoiles returned to his home town of Bridgnorth, Shropshire. To Leave A Mark is a beautiful evocation of this place, its joy and tragedies, the town as a container of people, times, love and loss. It is about how a place, or better, the memories of a place, intertwine with one’s self, even when, on returning, those memories are not quite true. It is a testament to a ‘homesickness’ for ‘the memory of a home never seen’, to when the sediment of memory matches reality, but also to the more common moments when it does not.Simply recorded in the front room of his parent’s home on guitar, keyboards and the drum machine on his grandfather’s organ and then carefully produced and mixed by Tim Wright, these are songs of rare warmth and real fragility, rich with emotion and detail. It is a collection to be cherished: one of sadness, joy and uncommon intensity.
Records on Ribs distributes all of its albums for free under a Creative Commons license. Donations to the label or especially for the albums are, of course, welcome (and I think worth it).
Lastly, tonight if you happen to be in Nottingham, Tammy reminds us that this new Les Étoiles album “will be launched in style at a party at Jam Cafe in Nottingham tonight. Come down from 8pm to watch Les Étoiles and El Heath perform, and listen to the ROR DJs spin some tunes whilst enjoying a delicious beer or two. If you can’t make it (and why not?), you’ll have to make do with downloading the album – it’s certainly one of my favourite records of the year so far.”