Since discovering John Coltrane as a teenager, saxophonist Andy Sheppard has forged a remarkable career, earning multiple British Jazz Awards, international acclaim and even a place in the UK pop charts. His musical range is equally impressive: alongside jazz giants George Russell, Gil Evans and Carla Bley, he has worked with artists as diverse as Baaba Maal, Runrig and John Martyn.
Equally at home in a big band, solo setting or small group, Sheppard now turns his attention to a new trio with Italian pianist Rita Marcotulli and French bassist Michel Benita. The drummer-less format echoes his acclaimed work with Carla Bley and Steve Swallow, while giving this new partnership its own distinctive space.
The trio may be new, but Marcotulli and Benita…
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Chopping Mountain is the sixth long player from Ibibio Sound Machine. It was recorded in South London at their Vanguard studio and produced by synthesist/saxophonist Max Grunhard. It’s the first time ISM has eschewed an outside producer since 2019’s Doko Mien. Their subjects across these ten tracks are love, social and political resistance, unity, and healing, both societal and individual. While these aren’t unfamiliar topics, they are presented with a seamless maturity and an unwillingness to compromise. The songs were rehearsed, performed, and recorded collectively; they’re chock-full of classic West African highlife, mutant post-punk, Afrobeat, electronic sounds, and breathtaking 21st century soul.
Opener “Burning in Lagos” is introduced by…
Remastered by Atsushi Izumi.
Regis‘ early music will always loom large in techno. His searing records on Downwards, the label he started with Female, helped define what became known as the Birmingham Sound. As a member of Sandwell District, he’s partly responsible for the sleek and spacey style that prevailed in techno clubs in the ’00s.
Influential as those sounds were, though, his music from the last decade feels closer to his personal essence as an artist. Manbait, a collection of remixes from 2010 to 2015, teased out the lifelong love of post-punk and industrial that had always set him apart. Hidden in This Is the Light That You Missed carries on along the same path, delivering nine cuts of elegantly reduced…
The expanded edition features the original 9 tracks alongside 4 brand-new songs recorded with producer John Congleton and 2 raw demos.
In the process of burgeoning Chicago duo Friko (singer/songwriter/guitarist Niko Kapetan and drummer Bailey Minzenberger) playing out in support of their electric debut LP — including a 2025 tour with the Flaming Lips and Modest Mouse — they added guitarist Korgan Robb and bassist David Fuller to their official lineup. This four-piece version of Friko then headed to Los Angeles to record their sophomore album with Grammy-winning producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Sleater-Kinney, Mogwai). While the band had been very hands-on in all aspects of preparing their debut, including co-producing,…
Where in the past Bloc Party have dealt in emotional ambiguity, on this seventh effort all metaphors are discarded. Described by Kele Okereke as the most personal work of his career, Anatomy of a Brief Romance is a chronological account of a relationship from first glance to final goodbye, operating as a memoir over 14 songs.
Given the autobiographical content, it’s a surprise that Okereke chose to release this under the Bloc Party name rather than as a solo record. Yet the presence of guitarist Russell Lissack, drummer Louise Bartle and new bassist Harry Deacon — making his recording debut with the band — proves crucial. Although the album leans more heavily on synthesisers than before, the band add a heft and texture that the subject…
…The album has been newly remastered and cut directly from the analog master tapes.
It starts with a crackle of feedback shooting from speaker to speaker and a voice intoning, “Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time, for y’all have knocked her up” and talking about rising “above it all or drown in my own sh*t.” This could only have been utterly bizarre back in 1971 and it’s no less so decades later; though the Mothership was well on its way already, Maggot Brain really helped it take off. The instrumental title track is the key reason to listen, specifically for Eddie Hazel’s lengthy, mind-melting solo. George Clinton famously told Hazel to play “like your momma had just died,” and the resulting evocation of melancholy and sorrow doesn’t merely rival…
Fans of blue-eyed soulman Eli ‘Paperboy’ Reed have enjoyed plenty of passionate, often searing music from the singer over the past 20 years.
But even though he released some terrific albums recently, they have been rearrangements of others’ songs.
A side road of an entire set of Merle Haggard tunes done in an R&B style, and another of classic soul covers — 2023s wonderful Hits and Misses — tided listeners over. But it has been seven years since Reed’s last batch of originals.
That musical drought ends with Getting There. Not only does the singer remain in typically stunning form vocally, but he pens eleven new gems, adding two obscure covers few will recognize.
Better yet, he joins with 84-year-old icon…
For over 20 years now, Pokey LaFarge has been delivering his version of retro-Americana. That journey continues with Rent Money, a collection of eleven tracks preoccupied with the almighty dollar. LaFarge follows up the more expansive Rhumba Country with this slightly scaled-back effort. Once again working with producer Elliot Bergman (Wild Belle, LA LOM, Natalie Bergman), LaFarge’s sound incorporates light blues, jazz, easy reggae, folk, country, and rock and roll, all in a minimalist manner. While LaFarge’s music may look back to the mid-20th century, his lyrics address modern monetary worries and timeless love.
The album opens with a shuffling tune titled “The Thing,” displaying sweet backing vocals from Addie Hamilton, who pops up a few times…
Musical Instrument Digital Interface (aka MIDI) has such a pervasive presence in the musical landscape that it’s easy to take it for granted. Yet, when it first appeared in the early 1980s, the standard felt miraculous. Back when technology was more meaningful, MIDI’s ability to bridge physical and digital domains meant that devices like synthesizers and keyboards were suddenly able to talk both to each other and to computer programs. The protocol has countless applications today, many of them purely software-based, but this particular facet remains its most fascinating, even serving as a core aesthetic principle for acts like Berlin’s Gamut Inc.
Since the early 2010s, Aggregate Festival founders Marion Wörle and Maciej Śledziecki…
In its opening moments, Blasé Saint seems easy to pigeonhole. “Lifelover” begins with the muted thump of a kick drum, a migrating flock of reversed percussion hits, and a keyboard line that sounds like an Angelo Badalamenti DX7 patch poached from some nerdy producer subreddit. Its palette, swaddled in an ASMR-ready mixture of cassette hiss and field recordings, gives “regulation dub techno.” But before you can get too comfortable, the song pulls you into its undertow; five minutes later, it spits you out in a wholly new place. Atonal loops bloom and fold into themselves, while the drums and synth, repeating on an infinite cycle, get subsumed by gigantic bass frequencies. It’s intense and impressive, dumping a familiar bag of tricks onto the table and rearranging…
Ezra Collective have a talent that’s rarely found in jazz music, the ability to sound and feel like far more than session musicians put in a room to play music. The London born quintet have had this cohesive, tight-knit energy since their debut EP Chapter 7 in 2016, and it’s easy to hear that their connection has a history that reaches long before that. The words accessible and jazz don’t really go together, but as a young, relatable, current troupe of musicians, Ezra Collective have taken Afro-jazz to the mainstream, and with Here Because of Hope, they’re finally telling it’s story.
Here Because of Hope is split into three sections, marked by poems read by Letitia Wright, taking us not only on a journey through genres, but a literal, geographical journey of jazz.
…The second disc introduces 3 brand-new studio recordings from the band — their first newly minted studio material in over two decades — including a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on the Wire” and Melissa Etheridge’s “Stronger Than Me”. The bonus collection is rounded out by a selection of live performances dating from both their original 1970s touring era and recent 2025 concerts.
The reason that The Roaring Silence became Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s best-selling album may have been because of both Bruce Springsteen-penned singles, but its instrumental makeup, by way of Mann’s keyboard manipulation coupled with Chris Thompson’s chiseled singing, had just as much of an affect. “Blinded By the Light” and “Spirit in the Night” gave the band hits…
Iridescent jangle nirvana. Visceral punk energy. Mournful folk-accented vocalese. Stinging oaths of love and hate, with occasional chipmunk harmonies. The third Tubs album contains this and more, to the delight of all who enjoyed the first two Tubs albums for the abundance of said qualities. One of its 12 songs, however, breaks new ground. Opening with a groovily offbeat drum pattern, ‘Do Yourself a Favor’ bops onto the dancefloor amid frantic guitar downstrokes and an incessant keyboard riff deserving of its own hand-jive routine. This is actually a Prince song, albeit one with complex provenance and never released in his lifetime. The Tubs infuse it with their Celtic-tinged shimmer, while the lyric could almost be one of Tubs songwriter Owen Williams’…
Twenty-five years is an awful long time in electronic music – but that’s how long Simon Green, aka Bonobo, has been applying his beat making craft. Working from the early days with Tru Thoughts, where he established himself as an original producer capable of incorporating different styles and cultures into his work, Green has extended the spirit of collaboration to instrumentalists and vocalists alike.
On his watch the careers of singers such as Andreya Triana have been enabled to flourish, with Green’s talent of writing for the singer as much as the song a key feature of his work. With his live following now at a feverish peak, where do we find Bonobo’s music a quarter of a century on?
The answer from Distance in Static is that his…
Rattlin’ Bones marks Bronwyn Keith-Hynes’ first foray into songwriting. For those unfamiliar with her name, here’s a brief résumé of the story so far. Raised near Charlottesville, Virginia, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Keith-Hynes was barely done with toddling when she started fiddling, cutting her teeth on Irish traditional music and getting into bluegrass as a teenager. After honing her skills at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, she was one of the founders of the progressive string band Mile Twelve, three of whose five members were alumni of that highly revered institution; they won the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) New Artist of the Year Award in 2020. Next on the Keith-Hynes CV came her debut solo album,…
Ten years ago, on Do Easy – an album made with her twin sister as Tasseomancy – Sari Lightman sang of wanting to “reinvent” herself, to “fade into folk songs”. Her solo debut isn’t a reinvention, not exactly, but it draws much more closely from that “old music”, blurring autobiography and fragments of real and imagined other lives into a set of hushed, intimate songs.
The Way I Saw You emerges from a time of transition for Lightman, amid new community and a quieter way of life with her partner and toddler on the edges of Los Angeles. In her native Toronto, she and sister Romy developed a cosmic, experimental folk sound across 20 years of shared projects: Ghost Bees, Tasseomancy, The Lightman Sisters. Their most recent release,…