In addition to her delicate, spacious arrangements; gentle, articulate vocals; and affection for unusual melodies and harmonic progressions, Vermont singer/songwriter Ruth Garbus has become known over the years for her eclectic approach to assembling albums. The onetime member of acid folk group Feathers and indie pop outfit Happy Birthday — both of which also featured King Tuff’s Kyle Thomas — added quirky touches like finger cymbals, vocoder, synthesizer, and samples of a Rodgers & Hammerstein song to her mostly folk-oriented second solo LP, Kleinmeister. Her third album, the Thomas-produced Profound, navigates wistfully earnest material like “The Lost Soul” (“Everybody seems to want some…thing/Everybody seems to know”), the humorously…
Category: indie-folk
Performing under the moniker Fruit Bats, Chicago’s Eric D. Johnson has managed to seamlessly slip in and out of genres throughout his 25-year career, from indie rock and pop to experimental folk. Following up last year’s Baby Man, a surprisingly intimate record with Johnson handling the entire album on his own, he is back with a full band on The Landfill, and the difference is obvious from the opening track.
“The Saddest Part of the Song” sounds like a classic Otis Redding tune before Johnson’s distinctive reedy tenor kicks in, occasionally reaching a falsetto. It’s a curious pick for an opening track, but a great song regardless, with layer upon layer of instruments. “All Wounds” is closer to the indie folk sound Fruit Bats is known for, but…
There is something deceptive about The Chauffeur. On first listen, REXEN — Michael Rexen — sounds like a textbook introspective acoustic singer-songwriter. That melancholy, low-key reflectiveness is real enough, but it’s only a small part of what’s going on. This is the work of a restless maverick, made with a strong supporting cast (John Parish handles the mix), the variety in his vocal delivery alone is surprisingly unexpected. REXEN swings from a deep, intoxicated baritone croon to a disorienting high register so innocent it sounds like he’s impersonating a child. On ‘You’ve Got It All Wrong’ his singing tips into a wild, suffering howl, the kind John Lennon let loose on his first solo album; while on ‘M. Romance’ he’s a smooth lounge crooner in repose.
…featuring a previously unreleased demo, alternate versions of much-loved album favorites and a cover from the sessions for their seminal debut album.
Light Upon the Lake is the moseying debut album of Whitney, a septet built around the core songwriting team of Julien Ehrlich and Max Kakacek, both formerly of Smith Westerns. Often surprisingly intimate for a seven-piece, the group makes subtle use of instrumentation like brass and strings to flesh out without symphonizing their country-tinged indie pop.
The melancholy opener, “No Woman,” begins with cushiony keyboards and a short brass fanfare before Ehrlich — who doubles as the band’s lead singer and drummer — introduces his misty, double-tracked falsetto. He appears…
It seems obvious and trite to say that Liz Lawrence‘s fifth album was one that she should never have had to write. The story behind Vespers is a heartbreaking one – in the summer of 2024, Lawrence’s sister Jessie suddenly died following an accident while on holiday in Ireland. For the next few months, Lawrence was understandably plunged into a kind of creative inertia, until six months later, the songs for Vespers were written over a period of three weeks.
The result is an album that couldn’t be more different to Lawrence’s last record – the funk-pop behemoth that was Peanuts – but one that’s likely to stand as one of the most beautiful, affecting and life-affirming records you’ll hear all year. As grief is, sadly, the most universal of…
The extremely personal nature of this album is evident in the introduction to the song “Canopies.” What begins as a gentle prelude is actually a moment captured on a family trip to Houston, where Azniv Korkejian (AKA Bedouine) discreetly recorded a conversation with her mother and later wove it into the song’s opening bars. The track becomes a vessel for a story her mother once carried alone, her childhood spent in an orphanage, placed there by her own mother as a way to escape an abusive father. Nearby, in those years, her mother would sing into the air as if sending a message across distance, feeling her daughter’s presence in the breeze. The line she remembers, “the waves of Beirut’s beaches flutter, and how sweetly they blow my darling’s…
These days – on the new, ninth Fink album – Greenall is operating within a lineage of authentic, quietly revolutionary artists from England’s verdant southwestern toe. Artists like Michael Chapman. In 1970, the elusive acoustic guitar wizard released an album called Fully Qualified Survivor. The cult-classic served as a lodestar for Greenall – along with bandmates Tim Thornton and Guy Whittaker – as he began jigsawing together The City Is Coming to Erase it All, the follow-up to 2024’s Beauty In Your Wake. He even considered covering a song from it, but in the process, inadvertently stumbled into what became the album’s opener. ‘Wishing For Blue Sky’ circles a universal teenage ache: waiting for life to start. “No point dying of patience” goes the first lyric as crunching…
Above all else, Widemouth’s debut LP, No Gasoline, is a record about friendship. Born out of the basement of a Northwestern University dorm where two/fourths of the band would meet to play Paul Simon and Big Thief covers, the band approached this album as a team, writing all of the songs together. And thematically, it sounds like an oral history of a foursome building a chosen community, with the songs brimming with emotions and shared inside stories.
Throughout the dozen tracks that make up this LP, the Chicago band manages to offer hints of everyone from Phoebe Bridgers and Bright Eyes to local band Ratboys. There is a moodiness to the mellow opening track, “I Wish You Passed On a Little Anger,” with Mak Carnahan…
Philadelphia singer/songwriter Greg Mendez had been plugging away on the regional D.I.Y. scene for over 15 years when he unexpectedly generated some buzz with his 2023 eponymous LP. That album had stripped back the arrangements of many of his prior self-recorded indie rock tracks, arriving at something more intimate, acoustic-minded, and disarming while hanging on to his affinity for short, sensitive, self-conscious songs.
The Dead Oceans label signed him soon after its release. Arriving a full 20 years after his first MySpace uploads, he makes his proper full-length label debut with the like-minded Beauty Land, an album of regretful, confessional songs so short that they verge on a different art form. (Its 14 tracks clock in at 26 minutes.)
For more than 3 decades, David Eugene Edwards has carved out a singular path through American music. First with the gothic folk urgency of 16 Horsepower, then with the devotional intensity of Wovenhand, and more recently through the stripped-down landscape of his solo work.
…The booming bass voice of David Eugene Edwards is imposing to begin with. Now imagine how it sounds when he’s singing Latin. That’s what he’s doing at various points in Mercurial Silence, an album that continues the shift that started with 2023’s Hyacinth, drifting away from deeply haunting (and haunted) Appalachian barnstormers and toward the modern era — employing drum machines and electronics but still managing to make them sound like they’ve…
At some point over the more than 20 years that she has been performing and recording, Alela Diane quietly became an American treasure. Every time she releases a record, it feels like a gift, something tangible you can hold in your hands whenever you need a reminder that powerful music comes from actual humans playing real instruments. With the release of her new record, Who’s Keeping Time?, that gift is more poignant than ever.
Conceived in the wake of losing her friend and mentor, the legendary folk singer Michael Hurley, Diane nurtured this new set of songs from ideas to live recordings in the attic of her Victorian home in Portland, Oregon. Coinciding with that was her deepening need to reconnect with the town’s music community. She took guitar lessons…
Simon Joyner’s 2024 album Coyote Butterfly ranks among the most simultaneously beautiful and devastating documents of its kind, a painfully raw and autobiographical account of the untimely death of Joyner’s son Owen. Since the early ‘90s, Joyner has been one of independent music’s most authentically independent artists, and while his poetic songs have never shied away from difficult emotions, the depths of vulnerability and sorrow he found on Coyote Butterfly were even more searingly real than anything he’d made before. Even though the album focused on collecting the finite feelings of grief, it represented a place to honor these feelings rather than a capstone in Joyner’s life of work. Tough Love, Joyner’s 19th solo effort and his first since Coyote Butterfly…
Thomas Dollbaum is a songwriter who values atmosphere above all else. His voice is loamy and deep, the dissipating smoke in a room right after you’ve blown out a candle, and it will be familiar to anyone who’s spent time with the road-trip elegies of Damien Jurado or the art-folk incantations of Richard Buckner. On his second album, Birds of Paradise, the Florida-born, Louisiana-based songwriter is accompanied by MJ Lenderman on drums, occasional guitar, and backing vocals, which helps Dollbaum’s rootsy, heartland rock feel part of a larger conversation in modern indie music, and his lyrics about “rambling through the pines” and “driving through the early morning” help it fit squarely into our most immediate associations with Americana as a genre and aesthetic.
Musicians who become parents sometimes feel compelled to write songs about it. But really, what is there to say? Every parenthood experience is unique, and also very much the same, and probably has been for something like three hundred thousand years since humans evolved. All the wonder or magic inherent in the process is deeply personal, and therefore dreary as hell when someone else sings about it. That’s a grinchy perspective, no question, but Shakey Graves — a.k.a. Alejandro Rose-Garcia — does little to change it on his latest, Fondness, etc..
The album is said to reflect the new contours of Rose-Garcia’s life with his wife and young daughter, who was born in 2024. That means these songs are in many ways about…
I’m Kingfisher is the alter ego of Swedish singer-songwriter Thomas Jonsson. Give Up Together is his sixth album under that guise and comes three years after his last release, Glue, which was far less structured and had a jazzier, looser feel to it.
It opens with the lead single ‘Years of Depression’, which is an emotional entry point and undoubtedly sets the tone for the tracks to come. It certainly has a heavier tone than his earlier work, but it still has that slow, thoughtful application that signifies Jonsson’s work. His writing is both deep and reflective, and in many ways can be seen as almost Leonard Cohen-like in its imagery.
“Here I am. White as f**k and privileged, but also an open wound. I go to the bathhouse to enjoy silence, with naked men with no bodies.
Though still young enough to have as much future stretching ahead as past behind him, Kevin Morby has already clocked up nine albums that track his migrations – first from his native state of Texas to Kansas, then to NYC, LA and back to Kansas (City) – while fine-tuning his countrified folk-rock. Both Harlem River and City Music stand as odes to New York, while Sundowner documented his Midwest homecoming, and 2022’s This Is a Photograph was inspired by Memphis and largely written during a stay there in its historic Peabody hotel. On Morby’s 10th, specific places (and events connected to them) are again the stuff of his songs but now he’s taking stock of his 20 years on the road and mapping out much more of his interior terrain as a result. Despite the title,…
Whitehorse have returned to their folk-rock roots on their latest full-length record, All I Want Is All of It. The Canadian husband-and-wife team of Luke Doucet and Melissa McClellan recorded the album in a 19th-century farmhouse to capture the mood of past spirits in the ancient place.
Of course, only a New World denizen would consider a place built 200 years ago old. Its semi-rural setting on the other side of the tracks offers a haunting aural landscape. The musicians said the location functioned as the creative inspiration behind the new disc.
Whitehorse‘s 11 songs are purposely experimental and vary in style and tone. They range from the primitive rawness of a demo (“Lighthouse”) recorded on McClellan’s iPhone…
Aldous Harding cuts a divisive figure in the world of alt-rock. To her devotees – and there are enough of them to warrant her playing three nights at London’s Barbican later this month – she is a strange and endlessly fascinating figure. Her lyrics are mysteries to be unpicked for deeper meaning, like dreams awaiting analysis. On Train on the Island, her fifth album, you’re invited to make some kind of sense of stuff about naked owls, having your face covered with bechamel sauce, seeing “the real John Cale” silently eating rice, “Sicilians reaching over the clams”, and the imponderable lines: “I’m saving myself by eating rocks and plants / I pray for the incel.”
The curious album covers; the uneasy stage presence and between-song non-sequiturs;…
Stephen Becker loves to find poetry and eloquence in the inane activities of everyday life. “Bad Idea”, the first song on his new album, Gravity Blanket, begins: “Had a bad idea again / So I remain uncertain for a while / Took some time to breathe again / And thrift a collared shirt to find my style.” In the lazy, midtempo “Emergency”, he asks a practical question: “Why’d you get a car in New York City? / The train goes far enough.” A fascinating bedroom-pop songwriter and musician, his musical approach may come off as occasionally naïve and “normcore”, but there is deep sophistication and unique textures in every song.
Becker is an in-demand New York sideman, working with artists as diverse as Rubblebucket, Vagabon, Katie Von Schleicher,…
It can take years to develop the kind of band chemistry you can hear straight away, the kind that’s all over mildred’s debut album Fenceline.
It’s not just that the Oakland four-piece write and sing democratically, it’s that their shared authorship feels like a genuine meeting of ideas passed around the room rather than delivered from any one fixed point. What could have felt piecemeal instead feels companionable and lived-in. There’s real warmth in that, and trust too. These are people you want to be friends with: unselfconscious, generous and together because they like the sound of each other’s instincts.
Opener “UPS Brown” gets that across beautifully. A low violin drone runs under guitars that feel both worn and careful, with crunchy…