Never Go Home

There's so much new music out there at the moment I don't feel like I can keep up with it, either as a listener/ fan or as a blogger. Jason Boardman's Before I Die label is at a point where every release is essential- this year the label has released Arrival and Kevin McCormick's One/ Common Place 12" and the Hawksmoor album Am I Conscious Now? which followed albums in 2025 by Klangkollektor and Sonnenspot. Now Before I Die has put out a 7" that is right up there alongside those other records, J- Walk's Never Go Home, produced in J- Walk's Stockport home studio. 

The A- side is a slice of late 80s indie indebted psychedelia, the sunglasses, repetition and Vox amps of Spacemen 3 and spirit of the pre- Screamadelica Creation records- some softly sung vocals, layers of guitars and keys, a woozy organ solo and hissy drums. It's a marvel. 

'You can never go home again/ There's no sense in trying'.

The B-side is Dub Never Go, a maximally dubbed out excursion with the Roland Space Echo in full effect and the ghost of King Tubby hovering around the room. The drums rattle and the bass bumps away, there's hiss and flutter, random bursts of distorted organ and acres and acres of echo. It's also a marvel. 

You can find it at Bandcamp, available digitally and (maybe) with some vinyl still available. 

Broken Beauty

Jason Boardman's Manchester based Before I Die label has become one of the ones to watch in 2023 and 2024, a small is beautiful aesthetic coupled with some very strong music, with Nuremberg's Konformer making one of last year's best albums and this year releases from Klangkollektor and Khartomb both raising the bar again. The latest release is from J- Walk (otherwise known a Martin Fisher/ Martin Brew), an album called Broken Beauty, made in a room in Stockport using cheap and long forgotten keyboards, guitars and amps, unplugging from the world, switching the Casios and Yamahas on and seeing what happens. The result is a ten track album that blends dub, post- punk experimentation, tropical rhythms, digi- dub and DIY culture. 

There is something special about Broken Beauty, something spontaneous but also something that can only come from a lifetime of soaking music up, steeping oneself in the culture and coming at making music anew. It also sounds like Martin had a lot of fun making it. This is Black Lion Passage, Stopfordian dub of the highest quality. 

You can find the album at Bandcamp, and if you're lucky there may be some vinyl copies left at some of the shops- Bandcamp have sold all of theirs. Pick any of the ten tracks and you'll find gold. This is Walking In The Sunshine, more superb sounding J- Walk tropical/ dub from the sunny streets of Stockport, a cover of the 1982 Balearic pop  song by Laid Back, the Danish duo of John Guldberg and Tim Stahl.