The Bonus Track: Ryan Adams, Smoke Fairies, Acollective, BRISTOL, Smashing Pumpkins

Ghostly presence

He’s done this to us before: in 2002, straight after delivering the disappointing Demolition album, Ryan Adams produced the excellent debut solo album of Jesse Malin, which sounded more like a Ryan Adams album than Adams’s own recent effort. Early next year sees the release of Butch Walker’s (above) seventh solo album, Afraid of Ghosts. As well as being produced by Adams, their mutual friend Johnny Depp plays guitar on one track, “21+”

https://soundcloud.com/butchwalker/butch-walker-21/

We wish you a fairy Xmas

Grinch alert! As an antidote to all that well-meaning Band Aid carolling, check out Smoke Fairies limited-release Christmas album, Wild Winter, about the duo’s “love/hate relationship with the holiday season”. The single “Christmas Without a Kiss” pretty much says it all.

Picture this

Here’s one for anyone who’s ever put a vinyl album sleeve over their face and pretended to be the cover star (and who hasn’t?) An Israeli band called Acollective have made a video for their song “Break Apart” that rather gloriously takes that game to its logical conclusion

The new nouvelle vague

Now done with turning pop songs into bossa nova cover versions, Nouvelle Vague’s Marc Collins’s new project, Bristol, takes trip-hop classics and ­reimagines them as songs from 1960s film soundtracks. Even stranger than the concept is the fact that it works. Watch the video for Portishead’s “Roads”

Next week’s biggie

Kevin Harley reviews Smashing ­Pumpkins’ Monuments to an Elegy. Listen to “One and All” from the album at the Bonus Track web page. And apologies to all Take That fans for not delivering on the promise to review III today. What can I tell you? We tried our best.