Indie Basement (7/24): the week in classic indie, alternative & college rock

I hope everyone’s summer is going well and you’re staying cool. The World Cup its behind us — I enjoyed it but am glad it’s over (and that Spain won) — and that might have something to do with why July has been somewhat quiet in Indie Basemen World. But there hasn’t been a week without a great album and this one is no different. I review three this week: Robyn Hitchcock, Alex Cameron, and Josh da Costa, plus Baxter Dury releases an album’s worth of old school extended mixes of Allbarone tunes.

This week’s Indie Basement Classic is both Talk Talk‘s biggest commercial success and weirdly underrated now.

It’s a much bigger week in Notable Releases with Andrew reviewing the new albums from Charlie XCX (I like it too) and Voidz Strokes’ Reality Awaits, among others.

On this week’s BV Interviews I talk to the one, the only Tricky. And if you haven’t listened to his new album yet, you should.

From this week’s BV headlines, we’ve got new album announcements from Protomartyr, Teenage Fanclub, and Boy Harsher.

Head below for this week’s reviews…

ALBUM OF THE WEEK: Robyn Hitchcock – The Confuser (Tiny Ghost)
Robyn Hitchcock celebrates collapse with one of his strongest albums ever

“I owe a lot to a dead man’s cock!” Now that’s how you start an album. Robyn Hitchcock has been making psychedelic guitar pop for 50 years, and he’s still throwing heaters. He calls his 25th album a “celebration of collapse, or if you wanna put it more positively, change.” Celebration is the key word, as The Confuser is a party record about the end of the world.

It’s about a lot of things, actually: aging and the inevitability of death, accountability, accepting fate but not giving in, and why a lot of this is OK. “Are we seeing the last gasp of the old guard in a world that’s moved too fast? Or is the dead hand grabbing us around the ankle and pulling us back into the pit of hell? Don’t you think you’ve got away, because you haven’t. Here comes the judgment,” Robyn told us in BV Interviews. “In terms of vibe, just me largely having a good time on the crest of the annihilating wave.”

Made in Robyn’s current hometown of Nashville with a band of ace session musicians, including his old Soft Boys bandmate Kimberly Rew and Dr. Dog’s Eric Slick, The Confuser doesn’t sound like an album made by a 72-year-old. It’s spry, thoughtful, funny, and endlessly melodic, with wonderful production throughout. There are the kind of zippy, lyrically dazzling jangle-pop gems that decorated his peak college radio period (“I Am This Thing,” “Yesterday’s Rain”), funky jams (“Building from the Ruins,” “How to Feel Alright”), and the kind of trippy, affecting ballads few do better, like “Ghost in Sunlight,” which features backing vocals by Gillian Welch.

The biggest difference between 32-year-old Robyn and 72-year-old Robyn is that he’s no longer being odd for odd’s sake. Instead, he’s bringing his unique perspective and lyrical bent to relatable subjects. “It’s fixin’ to rain / A tornado’s on the line,” he sings on “Ghost in Sunlight,” which looks at grief and society’s short memory. “They tore up the tracks this morning / The tracks they laid the day that you were born / Look at them, they’re gone.” The apocalypse may be coming, but I hope Robyn gets to make a few more albums like The Confuser before it does.

More: Robyn talks The Confuser and more on our BV Interviews podcast.

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Baxter Dury – Allbarone Versions (Extended Versions by Paul Epworth) (Heavenly)
Producer Paul Epworth turns the best songs on Baxter Dury’s most recent album into even bigger club bangers

Baxter Dury’s great 2025 album Allbarone was already the most explicitly dancefloor-oriented album he had ever made, but producer Paul Epworth has now gone back and reworked five of its tracks into even bigger bangers. The idea here was to make old-school ’80s-style 12″ extended dance mixes, pulling the songs apart, stretching out the best bits, boosting the basslines, and so on.

These days, though, producers are a bit savvier and have better tools at their disposal, so Epworth is not just adding some electro handclaps and quadrupling the instrumental sections. Mind you, handclaps are added, along with bongos, on “Kubla Khan,” which also dirties up the bass and gives the whole thing more of a late-’70s flavor. “Allbarone” goes into Barry White territory by pitch-shifting Baxter’s vocals down an octave while widening the percussion’s stereo field for a bigger impact and a more dramatic drop.

More: the French Touch-inspired “Alpha Dog,” with its slinky, sexy bassline and swooping strings, doesn’t really need much done to it, but the added dubbed-out midsection is pretty awesome. Meanwhile, the rolling, roiling “Schadenfreude” ups the gurgling electronics and creates another nice drop. Best of all is “Return of the Sharpheads,” which builds and builds and builds into a swirling synth-disco orgasmatron worthy of French mad geniuses like Cerrone. Again, these five cuts aren’t wildly radical remixes; Epworth just takes what was already there and gives everything a boost, with more room to stretch out. The original Allbarone is all most people will need, but for those who are here to dance, the magic pixie disco dust added to Versions is very welcome.

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Alex Cameron – Late to Set (self-released)
Alex Cameron sticks to the script, even after losing it

A musician who loves to play characters in his songs, Alex Cameron says the songs on his new album Late to Set were based on “nine forgotten long-form screenplays written between the years 2022 and 2025” that were lost, along with Cameron’s home, in the devastating L.A. wildfires. The latter certainly comes into play thematically, but Cameron’s signature wit is still on display, as is his swagger. Working with collaborators new (producers Zach Dawes, Maxim Ludwig, and Mark Perkins) and old (Jack Ladder but, alas, saxophonist and onetime “business partner” Roy Molloy is nowhere to be found), Cameron sounds pretty much as he always does, crafting vignettes set to heartland rock melodies and synth-rock arrangements.

“Testosterone in Blue” is prototypical AlCam: “Can you hear me now? Blame it on Mercury in Retrograde,” he sings over electronic strings and clanking percussion. “There’s something coming, can you hear it now? I’m revving up like a Chevrolet.” Not without its charms, Late to Set doesn’t hit the way his first couple of records did, and to keep the movie analogy going, it’s a bit like a mildly disappointing sequel that has just enough of the old juice to remind you how enjoyable his records can be.

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Josh da Costa – New Wave Graveyard (Stones Throw)
The MGMT and Drugdealer collaborator imagines an alternate universe of early-’80s chart singles on his debut solo album

Josh Da Costa used to lead groups Regal Degal and CMON, plays in Drugdealer, and has collaborated with MGMT, Gena Jacuzzi, and more over the last 15 years. He’s also got a great show on NTS Radio, the appropriately titled Confusing Mix, where Josh’s deep, highly eclectic taste in music is on full display. His first-ever solo album is a bit like his radio show come to life in original songs.

New Wave Graveyard is, according to Da Costa, a “greatest hits from a parallel universe, classic songs from an alternate reality,” where “instead of trying to home in on one specific vibe or sound, I went through my own taste and record collection and tried out different approaches — as if I were more than just one artist.” You get Cleaners from Venus-style lo-fi melodic psychedelia, early-’80s mutant pop, ’60s sunshine nuggets, songs that sound like Prince demos, and junkshop new wave. It all holds together more than Josh lets on, too, but the diversity keeps things fun and interesting to the end.

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INDIE BASEMENT CLASSIC: Talk Talk – The Colour of Spring (EMI, 1986)
Talk Talk’s third album feels like an underrated gem these days, and is getting a new 40th anniversary reissue

While most of the praise for Talk Talk these days tends to be heaped on the group’s final two albums, the undoubtedly great Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, I think the album I actually enjoy the most is 1986’s The Colour of Spring. Talk Talk were still a functioning commercial band at this point — as in they played live, did interviews, etc. — but they’d abandoned the New Romantic synth-pop sound of their first two albums. (This was also their biggest-selling album, a Top 10 LP in the UK.) But it didn’t really sound like anything else in 1986, a year when it seemed like most albums had gated drums, Fairlight synthesizers, and generally too much of everything.

Fully collaborating with keyboardist/producer Tim Friese-Greene (with whom they would collaborate for the rest of their run) for the first time — and a host of session pros, including Steve Winwood — The Colour of Spring was a Big ’80s album in its own way: massively ambitious, with widescreen production, but organic in a way you didn’t get with, say, The The, Prefab Sprout, XTC, or Tears for Fears. They were still writing pop songs — “Life’s What You Make It” might be their best single — but you could see where they were heading, too. Very few records from 1986 hold up the way The Colour of Spring does.

There’s a new half-speed mastered 40th anniversary vinyl reissue of The Colour of Spring that’s out in September and you can preorder it in the BV shop.

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