17 February 2025

Artist: TDID
Who: A musical project originating from the Strasbourg area in France. Its name
is inspired by Trouble Dissociatif de l’Identité (TDI in French) and Dissociative Identity
Disorder (DID in English), a condition where multiple personalities coexist within the same individual. A perfect metaphor for TDID’s musical vision: an ever-evolving artistic identity, embracing different sonic facets while remaining anchored in a dark and immersive aesthetic.

Album: Xx PHLEGMATIC
2nd one.

Press info: TDID takes us on a journey through ethereal soundscapes and haunting rhythms. Each track delves into themes of isolation, confronting darkness, and the search for truth. The album oscillates between melancholy and raw power, driven by cold synths, deep basslines, and a spectral voice that echoes like a call in the night.

TUTV: A fitting soundtrack for every Goth addict who wants to go out, hit a sinister nightclub and lose him/herself in the hypnotizing vortex of mysterious darkwave dynamics.

Echoes of early Siouxsie bone-chilling wailing and Lene Lovich‘s enigmatic melodiousness inject Xx Phlegmatic with ominous sonic shadows you love to be surrounded by. TDID creates a ghostly world where surreality and reality meet. Fascinating.

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Facebook – Bandcamp
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Band: MANIC STREET PREACHERS
Who: The veteran Welsh heroes who
started their career back in 1986.

Album: CRITICAL THINKING
Their 15th.

James Dean Bradfield (frontman): “As you get older and as all the concepts, ideologies
and understandings that you’ve grown up with start to dissemble and crumble around you – whether it be left, right or left of centre – once you realise that they become a separate tense and economies work in different ways – the game is up. You can’t think the way you used to think. You’ve got to have a looser way of thinking and see what comes out of it. That’s what
we did with this record.”

Photo credit: Alex Lake

NME says: “With warm but spiky ’80s art-indie, the Welsh rock veterans’
15th album finds no absolute design for life – but still plenty of fight.”

TUTV: The Manics are one of my all-time favorite bands, on record and on stage,
but for the last 3 albums (this one included) they sound at times too mellow, too sugary, too poppy. I understand why. In your 50s, you can’t have the same flame burning as it happened in your 20s and let it hear you the way they did with cutting punk flair and roasting rippers.

Mind you, they still know what an anthem should/could sound like and they come up with a handful (Critical Thinking / Decline & Fall / Brushstrokes of Reunion / Hiding in Plain Sight / One Man Militia) but the new ones do not strike and adrenalize the way their many classics did/do. No, this isn’t a bad record at all but also not one to archive as a great one.

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Instagram – All Albums

Band: THE LUMINEERS
Who: Lauded folk pop-rockers
from Denver, Colorado.

Album: AUTOMATIC
Their 5th longplayer.

MOJO Magazine: “The combination of Schultz’s desperately appealing voice and
Fraites’s lonesome but poppy piano still hits hard. They’re still doing things right.”

TUTV: These are ecstatsic days for folk rock-pop fans. The Luminineers ‘ new one is out ow. The Lathums‘ 3rd one, titeld Matter Does Not Define lands on 7th March and Mumford & Sons 5th, named Rushmere comes out on March 25th. The Luminineers take it easy.

Except for anthemic, upbeat openers So Long and Asshole they entice with a series of sepia-colored torch songs, passional musings and picturesque balladry. Gather around romantic hearts, lit some candles and enjoy the longing melodrama at play here.

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Instagram – Linktree
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Band: THE WOMBATS
Who: Seasoned British veteran
indies, active since 2003.

Album: OH! THE OCEAN
Their 6th LP.

Press info: “This set grooves with social anxiety, internal strife, compulsive behaviours
and the dilemmas and tribulations of Los Angeles life, where vocalist/guitarist/songwroter Matthew “Murph” Murphy and his family live. From behind the band’s deceptively cuddly façade, Murph has always written openly about his anxiety, depression and addictions
(he’s now “sober as hell”).

But with this collection there’s a sense of progress towards confronting, accepting and coping with his issues. Alongside familiar sounds they explore new genres from glistening tech rock to sci-fi pop, futuristic fuzz rock to bluesy rock’n’roll, with touches of disco and hip-hop-inflections.”

UNCUT says: ““What may be The Wombats’ most plain fun album to date.”

TUTV: Lots of primo tunes to play out loud while driving in your car with the windows down, your hair in the wind and the sun up high. Wait, it’s still winter. So windows up, heating on and hair down, but don’t change the volume and your thrilling state of pop paradise mind.

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Instagram – All Albums

Artist: IMUSTBE LEONARDO
Who: Berlin-based Italian singer-songwriter who, since 2016,
has composed, recorded, and played songs around Europe and
America. He has, so far, 2 albums and 2 EPs on his résumé.

ML: “The story of “Berlin, Ohio”, begins one morning in February 2022. Ten years had passed since I moved to Berlin, and that day I looked out the living room window and thought about some of the people I had met here, and who had left the city and the rooms they used to call home. Berlin appeared to me as a sort of unstoppable vortex made up of figures who arrived with their aspirations or who left because their future was now somewhere else. Those who remained had only two states of mind available: that of those who are making their dreams come true and that of those who are giving up. I thought I should tell the stories of those empty rooms, and of the ones who had left them.

“Berlin, Ohio” is a 36-minute album. It contains imperfections, smudges, wrinkles, flaws, and it is a work made with all the honesty, dedication and seriousness that Howard, Peter and I have been capable of. I am proud of this record, I am happy that it exists thanks to me, and I am bold enough to say that this work belongs to the present, to the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century – because many of the stories and thoughts it is made of could not have existed before now.

TUTV: IMustBe Leonardo is at his best when he translates his mixed emotions, his busy mind and his stream of consciousness in stripped-to-the-bone ponderings wrapped in intimate, introspective songs. Except for a couple of one-man-garage-rock band explosions (my favorite knife / the place) he and his expressive guitar do the talking.

Give the record a couple of spins, let the music
grow on you and you’ll find sonic tranquillity.

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