Well, it is December again! Another 12 months of selecting new and obscure music has flown by so fast! We’ve had an amazing year here at Wax and Stamp, and hope you have too. 2025 saw us find and send you a wide range of genres, spanning hip hop, indie rock, jazz, electronica, Italian film music, African high life and so much more.
If you’ve been with us through this year or some of it, we hope you enjoyed the boxes as much as we loved compiling them. If you’re new here & this is your first box, welcome. We hope you enjoy the flow of musical experiences as we find and send them out over the months to come, and as always, if you have any feedback, or need anything from us, you can get a hold of the support team here:
[email protected].
Now, on to the vinyl. As we’ve managed to get you quite a few months of two albums, it would be rude to not do that during the holiday season, so once again it’s a bonus month with two long players:
This month’s first album is a special one from Ivor Novello winning singer-songwriter Ben Howard. You may have come across his work in the 2010s, where he was lauded for many releases, including his Mercury prize nominated debut record ‘Every Kingdom’ released in 2011. Fast Forward to March 2022, Howard was sat in his Ibiza garden when he found himself unable to think clearly, form sentences or speak for almost an hour. A month later, the same thing happened again. Ben learned he’d suffered two mini-strokes.
Following multiple tests, Howard and his band returned to Le Manoir de Léon recording studio in south-west France, where they’d previously worked on his acclaimed third album ‘Noonday Dream’. “We went in and put down ten songs in ten days, then spent the rest of the year tinkering with them” Howard says, “We worked through the heatwave, the air conditioning broke, after what had happened I was so tired in the afternoons that I slept a lot. We just played solidly and slept, there was no time for retrospection.” The result is; “Is It” a lush, sonically splintered album which captures Howard working through those moments of seismic shift.
This is the perfect work to sit down with and reminisce, perhaps go over the last year and make plans for the next.
The second album is an absolute treat for any of you fans of Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham/Nicks style poppiness. “Dark Matter Dreams” is the lovely and largely overlooked debut album from Des Moines Iowa duo Field Division. You’ll find plenty that sounds familiar here in terms of string work and harmonies, but that adds to rather than detracts from the dreamy Americana vibe that oozes through every song. A great one to put on during cold winter days and daydream of California sunshine.
