After two decades fronting Editors and releasing two albums with Smith & Burrows, Tom Smith is finally stepping into solo territory with There Is Nothing In The Dark That Isn’t There In The Light. Motivated by a desire to reconnect with the raw, acoustic beginnings of his songwriting, Smith set out to create something more intimate and personal, away from the collaborative nature of his band projects.
Enlisting producer Iain Archer, together, they crafted a record built around emotional honesty, acoustic textures, and themes of connection, memory, and resilience. The opening track, ‘Deep Dive’, became the album’s emotional anchor, setting a tone of gentle hope in the face of loneliness.
Category: acoustic
With continual creativity and finesse Acoustic Hot Tuna sets out touring across the United States July, August and September. Masters in their field, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady’s joy in playing unfiltered riffs, swapping notes and smiles, has delighted them and thrilled their audiences for seven decades!
Hot Tuna has brought a wealth of emotions to their music through deep perceptions and tremendous talent. Members of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Grammy recipients, they are always injecting fresh energy into their sound with constant improvisation taking their musical horizons further. Every note is a unique expression of that very moment.
Jorma enthuses, “Focus on the things you love, listen with an open heart, and the music will…
Sam Shackleton has been subtly proving himself to be the real deal in terms of traditional folk song interpretation. It takes a competent musician to do justice to songs that were made to be sung and passed through generations; it takes an exceptional talent to truly inhabit the songs and breathe fresh life into them, as Sam Shackleton does. He has been ploughing away on the margins for five years or so now, releasing a debut album under his own label in 2022 that earned kudos for the authenticity of his approach and the stylistic echoes of artists like Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie. One look at the tone and templates of his releases reveals Sam to be a keen student of the early sixties’ folk revival; this is clearly a period wherein the attitude and approach to folk songs…
The Cranberries performed on MTV’s Unplugged in 1995 in promotion for their sophomore album, ‘No Need to Argue’, but the audio has never been released, until now. Released in the full 9-song, 45-minute performance.
…Recorded at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with a string section during the promotion of No Need to Argue, the broadcast featured favorites from the new album (“Zombie,” “Ode to My Family”), the already-sterling “Linger,” a few songs that would appear on their next album, 1996’s To the Faithful Departed (“Free to Decide,” “I’m Still Remembering”), and the fan favorite “Yesterday’s Gone,” which never made any of their albums but was beloved enough to be licensed for inclusion on the last expansion of No Need to Argue.
It’s always interesting to see where the next Imaginational Anthem compilation will take us, and this fourteenth addition (in time for Tompkins Square’s twentieth anniversary) has hopped us over to one of the traditional music hubs of the world to show us some of the instrumental guitar talent operating in Ireland.
Cian Nugent has his hand on the curating tiller and has chosen nine other tracks to sandwich his own little number, the lovely ‘I am Asleep and do not Wake Me’, a traditional Irish tune that he learned from a harp arrangement. As you would expect from Cian, the playing here on solo acoustic is finely nuanced and unshowy, with a couple of softly audible knocks on the body giving the sound an intimate feel.
…An expanded reissue of their stellar “Acoustic Junk” (2009) record, this album features five new acoustic recordings alongside five tracks from the original album — three of which have been remixed for this compilation.
Known for their haunting melodies and introspective songwriting, the band’s acoustic arrangements on this collection showcase the raw beauty and emotional depth that have been at the centre of their individual sound since their inception. The band comprises Margo Timmins (vocals), Michael Timmins (guitar), Jeff Bird (mandolin, harmonica, bass, percussion), Andy Maize (backup vocals), Josh Finlayson (banjo), and Jaro Czerwinec (accordion). The album was produced, partially recorded, and…
For decades, Sir Richard Bishop has been a formidable force in the world of experimental guitar music. From his foundational work with the Sun City Girls to his extensive and eclectic solo career, he has consistently defied categorisation, drawing from a global well of musical traditions to create something uniquely his own. His most recent offering, 2020’s Oneiric Formulary, continued this exploration of a “spirited polytheistic” approach to the guitar; described in these pages as “a roller-coaster of a success” and a “beautiful and brilliant riot of a record.”
Now, with Hillbilly Ragas, Bishop turns his gaze inwards, towards the heart of American folk traditions, only to shatter them and rebuild them in his own image.
Sidling up to a posthumous album can be a tricky task, especially if it’s from an artist who’s close to your heart. The temptation to view things through a lens tinted by their passing is tough to resist. But Broken Homes and Gardens, the record completed just weeks before Michael Hurley’s death, could have come from any point in his discography — the last link in the hitherto unbroken chain the maverick troubadour began forging more than 60 years ago.
Hurley — who passed away in April 2025 at age 83 — first found his feet on downtown New York City’s ‘60s underground scene, alongside boundary-bludgeoning outliers like The Holy Modal Rounders and The Fugs. He spent the ensuing decades quietly becoming the quintessential cult…
Ryan Adams marks 25 years of his breakthrough solo debut with a reimagined take on ‘Heartbreaker’. Featuring eleven newly recorded versions of songs from the original 2000 album. With subtle string arrangements and a renewed emotional depth, these reworkings revisit the ache and vulnerability that made the original so enduring.
As Whiskeytown finally ground to a halt in the wake of an astonishing number of personal changes following Faithless Street (coupled with record company problems that kept their final album, Pneumonia, from reaching stores until two years after it was recorded), Ryan Adams ducked into a Nashville studio for two weeks of sessions with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.
Woody at Home is a two-volume secret treasure trove of Woody’s home recordings — recordings that Woody was unable to release in his lifetime, a life cut short by Huntington’s disease.
…The contents of Woody at Home were recorded from 1951 to 1952 in his Gravesend, Brooklyn home. Of the 22 tracks, 13 of them were only ever recorded at this New York residence. Guthrie employed one microphone and a reel-to-reel tape machine to capture the collected songs.
Steve Rosenthal transferred and produced the album while Jessica Thompson handled mixing and mastering duties. The duo utilized “pioneering software and antique tape machines to de-mix and mix the voice and guitar,” on Woody at Home to achieve a homespun but clearer sound.
…Eric Clapton reissue an “enhanced” edition of 1992’s live album Unplugged, boasting a slightly reorganized and expanded 2CD or 2LP sequence, a brand-new mix and highlights from a never-before-heard audio interview with Clapton discussing the songs in his set shortly before playing them in that session.
…The British guitar icon – known for his work in The Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith, Derek & The Dominos and his own half-century-plus solo career – had little to prove when he stepped into Bray Studios at Windsor, England on January 16, 1992. Five years earlier, he’d completed a second, successful stint in rehab to overcome his alcohol addiction, releasing Clapton Crossroads in 1988 – one of the first…