Gabor Kovacs
I have been following Daniel Land for more than 10 years now. Out Of Season is another excellent dreamy album. The vinyl LP has not been off my turntable since it arrived.
Favorite track: Alison.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Purchasable with gift card
£7GBP or more
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Beautifully designed inner and outer sleeves featuring artwork from Cornish artist Katy Barrell.
Includes unlimited streaming of Out of Season
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 2 days
edition of 300
49 remaining
£23GBPor more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Everything in the standard CD package, plus:
• Extremely limited album-length compact disc EP featuring beautiful, meditative ambient remixes of eight of the "Out of Season" tracks, remixed by Daniel under his ambient alias "Alan Lidden".
• Set of three double-sided postcards featuring art from both the "Out of Season" album and "Island of Ghosts" EP
Includes unlimited streaming of Out of Season
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 2 days
edition of 100
8 remaining
£22GBPor more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
The full "Out of Season" album, presented in a beautifully designed six-panel digipak with pull-out 12 page booklet containing credits and full-colour artwork from Cornish artist Katy Barrell.
Includes unlimited streaming of Out of Season
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Deluxe LP Package - Deep Sea Green Vinyl + Additional Booklet + Bonus CD + Postcards (Extremely Limited!)
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Deluxe Package contains everything in the Standard Package, plus:
• Additional Insert Booklet, 8x8 inches, featuring full-colour artwork and photography throughout, an essay about the album's themes, and full lyrics.
• Extremely limited album-length compact disc EP featuring beautiful, meditative ambient remixes of eight of the "Out of Season" tracks, remixed by Daniel under his ambient alias "Alan Lidden".
• Set of three double-sided postcards featuring art from both the "Out of Season" album and "Island of Ghosts" EP
Includes unlimited streaming of Out of Season
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
"This album ranks alongside the highest this music has to offer, The Blue Niles’ 'A Walk Across The Rooftops'... live with it for a while and fall in love".
– Louder Than War
"Profound contemplations of memory, history, and identity within the context of post-Brexit Britain"
– Last Day Deaf.
"A magnum opus. Daniel Land stands as a pioneer... an auteur in the music landscape"
– Fame Magazine.
"An intimate, indie-shoegaze offering brimming with personal nostalgia"
– v13.
"Ambitious in its shattering authenticity... a wise, mature and comforting work... one of the great shoegaze and alternative rock records"
– Indie Music France.
"In a genre often maligned for its lack of engagement with the real world, Land uses the sonic conventions of shoegaze as a backdrop for a distinctly outward-looking exploration of memory, identity, and desire"
– Gigslutz.
"Dream-pop guitars flicker gently, hopefully, and alas, on the horizon, like European shores. Land has set the bar high..."
– Travellers Tunes.
Daniel Land's new album, "Out of Season", is his most ambitious record to date, a series of reflections on history, memory, and post-Brexit Britain, which was inspired by Daniel’s return to the landscapes of his youth – the rugged, underpopulated west coast of Somerset, where he has spent increasing amounts of time since beginning the album in 2018.
"Out of Season" was written and partly recorded there, in a static caravan overlooking the coast, during the period when the UK was tearing itself apart over its relationship to Europe.
"I didn't set out to write about Brexit", Daniel says, "I have a kind of horror of political music. But I couldn’t escape the atmosphere of the time – this strange, distorted version of ‘Englishness’ in the national psyche. I’ve always been interested in memory and nostalgia; Brexit illustrates the dangers of taking seductive, possibly false memories at face value”.
Songs like “White Chalk”, “Island of Ghosts”, and the album’s title track, represent a series of attempts to reclaim an older, more peculiar idea of England which, Daniel says has been “Lost in the nationalist mythmaking of the past decades” – the island of misfits and outsiders exemplified by the works of Derek Jarman, for example, whom Daniel was rediscovering while working on the album.
“I must have read 'Modern Nature' ten times over the years”, Daniel says. “What I love about Jarman is that he had a deep, abiding love for England, but it was a very complicated, critical and a very queer kind of love. That was very much my mood, going into the making of this album”.
Like Jarman’s work, "Out of Season" probes national identity whilst also displaying resolutely queer themes throughout. Daniel’s voice – once described by The Guardian as "The spawn of Elizabeth Fraser and Anthony Hegarty” – is less heavily reverbed than before, bringing to the fore his often-confessional lyrics, inspired by the frankness of modern queer poets like Andrew McMillan, Seán Hewitt, and Ocean Vuong.
A lyrical highlight is the gorgeous “Southern Soul”, a deceptively straightforward recounting of a decades-old hookup with a closeted guy from his hometown which, Daniel says, “Serves as a metaphor for everything I’m talking about in the album”. Elsewhere the potentially Slowdive-referencing opening track “Alison” subtly flips assumptions with Daniel’s note that “Alison is a fairly common boy’s name in Lusophone countries, like Portugal and Brazil”.
And in keeping with the album’s nods to the heroes of gay literature, Daniel’s self-styling of the album as a “Dream Pop Album on National Themes” deliberately references the full title of Tony Kushner’s era-defining play "Angels in America", whose central character is namechecked in the hook-laden “Lemon Boy” – a song which must surely stand as Daniel’s most deliciously pop moment yet.
In recent years, Daniel has become both a scholar and a practitioner of the kind of music he creates, studying towards a PhD on artists like the Cocteau Twins at the London College of Music, while collaborating with artists like Darkher and Siobhan De Mare. He is also currently writing a memoir about homophobia.
Lauded by Mark Radcliffe, Guy Garvey, Tom Robinson, and many others, Daniel Land makes music that, in the words of BBC Radio 1, "You can't help but think the late John Peel would have loved".
credits
released November 3, 2023
All songs by Daniel Land except "Alison" by Daniel Land/Rob Sykes; "White Chalk", "Idlewild" and "Put Your Broken Arrows Down" by Daniel Land/Gary Bruce. All songs published by Cacophony Ltd.
Produced and mixed by Daniel Land at homes in London and Somerset. Additional engineering by Sean Woodlock at Hackney Road Studios, London; by Gary Bruce at Studio St. Pois, Normandy; and by Annie Leeth at Maze Studios, Atlanta, Georgia.
All vocals and instruments by Daniel Land except: Gary Bruce - Rhythm Guitars (all tracks except 1, 4, 5, 7), Rob Sykes - Bass (1, 10), Brin Coleman - Keyboards (1, 9, 10), Annie Leeth - Strings (1).
The cover painting is "Carrag-a-Pilaz" by Katy Barrell, who also painted the inner sleeve art, "Winter Horizon, Porthcew". www.katybarrell.com
A wonderful collaborator and a very dear friend, I can't recommend Brin's work enough. If you're pushed for time, start with my faves Twilight Sessions Vol 10, Nothing For Miles, or Landscape & Drift. Daniel Land
Shoegaze ist die Kunst des Dröhnens, doch „Everything Is Alive“ setzt diese Elemente nur sparsam ein. Statt Hall- und Zerr-Sounds aufzutürmen, schäumt die Musik in feinen Bläschen über.
https://tortue.substack.com/i/140348114/slowdive-everything-is-alive-dead-oceans Daniel Welsch
The debut EP from Tokyo group re:lapse delivers four gorgeous shoegaze songs, with billowing clouds of guitar cradling far-off vocals. Bandcamp New & Notable Sep 27, 2021