On the first two Fantastic Cat records, the quartet of singer-songwriters (Anthony D’Amato, Brian Dunne, Don DiLego, and Mike Montali) brought their own styles successfully into a band setting. However, on their third album, the cheekily titled Cat Out of Hell, Fantastic Cat feels like a long-running, well-oiled, veteran outfit.
Things are more fluid as individual contributions have melded, crafting an overall, interlocking sound. The extremely well-produced album adds sonic touches like strings, harpsichord, and tambourines to spruce up the group’s solid base of indie/folk rock tunes, all delivered with pristine harmonies and evocative lyrics.
Opening exuberantly with “Donnie Takes the Bus”, Fantastic Cat drops into a cheery,…
Category: indie-folk
A flicker of light was the namesake of Lia Pappas-Kemps‘s first EP, 2024’s Gleam, but the Toronto singer-songwriter’s full-length debut Winged proves that she’s more than just a flash in the pan. The idea of depicting a new indie rock-adjacent local artist often conjures one blurry-edged, vague cipher with a pretty generic sound profile. While Pappas-Kemps is adamantly a deviation from the norm, depending on where you start with her already-chameleonic œuvre, that may or may not be immediately apparent.
The second half of Winged opens a portal that makes it undeniable. On a twisted, knotty tree trunk of a song called “Wound Up and Coiling,” Pappas-Kemps kicks the project’s mouth agape as the titular tension becomes too much…
…Tenderness was born out of a tough storm of circumstances: the pandemic, a cancelled tour, a break-up, and the loss of her father. Furloughed and with too much time on her hands, Katy Beth Young (Peggy Sue, Deep Throat Choir) began to write new songs in her north London living room, windows wide open to the hot summer outside. In August 2020, during that “weird window” of the pandemic where lockdown eased up enough for a trip to the seaside, or across London, Young visited producer Euan Hinshelwood (Younghusband, Cate Le Bon) at his Greenwich studio. In two days, the pair recorded eight demos with no pressure or plan. The final recordings are sparse in that country way but layered with Hinshelwood’s carefully chosen textures: synths, drones, rich…
Out of a ten-day dog-sitting stint in the countryside came Milwaukee-based singer-songwriter Maximiano’s second release: Rokeby. Rokeby is the name of a historic district in upstate New York, along the Hudson Valley River. It happens to be where Maximiano crafted these songs, but it is also a place named after Sir Walter Scott’s Rokeby, an epic poem set during the English Civil War, a time of chaos and division.
There are a few things at work here. The rural aspect comes through the album’s folkier cuts and arrangements. As far as Scott is concerned, the songs in Rokeby reflect a literary streak to the singer-songwriter, with lyrics referencing Rilke, Max Porter, Dickinson and Highsmith; but thematically, they also express…
Why are some harmonies so pleasing to the human ear? Actually, to the human brain. A physicist might answer that it is due to simple mathematical frequency ratios. Well, maybe simple to a mathematician, but Greek to an arithmophobe. But not ‘Greek’ to some actual Greeks, such as Plato, who were on the vanguard of trying to answer what is truly an ancient question. So, 2,500 or so years later, what is the answer? Don’t know, don’t care. But you know it when you hear it. And you are going to hear a ton of it on Rebel Joy, the debut album by americana duo Roswell Road.
The harmonies that saturate this album might lead one to believe they are so-called ‘blood’ harmonies, also known as ‘sister’ harmonies, to denote the type of perfectly matched voices…
Following albums made in his home state of New Jersey, across New York State, and while living in rural Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, John Andrews‘ fifth LP was written and recorded after a move to the industrial, maritime neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn. Its working-class setting and Andrews’ seasonal job with N.Y.C. Parks both work their way into the warm, reflective fabric of the self-produced Streetsweeper. It also marks his relocation from the Woodsist label to Earth Libraries. This time around, Andrews’ semi-fictional band the Yawns consists of Luke Temple (bass, guitar), who also engineered the album, as well as his returning Cut Worms touring bandmates Noah Bond (drums) and Keven Lareau (bass). Star Moles’ Emily Moales lends backing…
Maria Taylor started working on Story’s End — her latest LP — six years ago, beginning with a handful of quiet, stripped-down demos in her home studio. There was no real rush to follow up her 2019 self-titled effort, but fractures in both her marriage and a close friendship found her leaning back into these songs once again.
The result is both beautiful and heartbreaking. Songs of marriages and friendships falling apart sit alongside moments of optimism and renewal, making Story’s End an emotionally powerful journal set to a lush soundtrack. The opening title track features Taylor’s hushed vocals floating over a maudlin piano before strings — and eventually drums — enter the mix. It’s a deeply affecting opening salvo.
Joe Pernice has been playing an uncompromising brand of indie music for more than three decades now. He dug into alternative country with the Boston-based Scud Mountain Boys before switching to a more indie rock/pop sound with the Pernice Brothers. But it’s his latest — and first — solo studio effort, where he strips it all down for a mellower, often somber vibe that is as beautiful as it is thoughtful.
The album opens with the pristine and surprisingly sardonic “Peace in Our Home,” with Pernice gently singing the title over light acoustic guitar and immaculate harmonizing backup vocals before adding the stinging “…when you’re gone” to punctuate the song. “Deep into the Dawn,” the following track, is just as mellow,…
Offering up more of her perceptive, increasingly world-wise songs, Responsible Friend is Elizabeth Ziman’s sixth Elizabeth & the Catapult album and first since the COVID-concerned sincerely, e. A little more playful but no less profound, it finds her grappling with relationships, work, and, more generally, human stewardship amidst the existential threat of things like worsening socio-politics and climate change. Ziman produced much of the album herself, but longtime collaborator Dan Molad (Lucius) produced four tracks and mixed most of the songs, and Jon Titterington (Father John Misty) lent a hand on a couple tracks.
Responsible Friend opens with the earnest “I Love You Still,” a song whose tender, supportive sentiments are underscored by…
VOLUMES: ONE, the first non-studio release from Bon Iver, captures 10 distinctive live performances, recorded between 2019 and 2023, showcasing Justin Vernon and his band at their most whole. There’s a warmth and exuberance across the album, as well as the sort of muscular sound you can really only get at a live show. For the uninitiated and die-hards alike, these recordings could well be the defining versions of the tracks, no doubt made possible through the essential live engineering of Xandy Whitesel and performances from bandmates Jenn Wasner, Sean Carey, Michael Lewis, Matthew McCaughan, and Andrew Fitzpatrick.
Vernon began working on VOLUMES: ONE in 2020, and he spent a considerable amount of time combing through concerts…
Wendy Eisenberg has evidently always been a fan of the rhetorical question, but perhaps never more so than on Wendy Eisenberg. “You are the oldest you’ve ever been,” they intone, sweet and clear, on the opening track: “Did you feel yourself change?” Whos, whats, wheres, whys, and hows abound: see “Who was I becoming?” (“Meaning Business”), “What gave me that idea?” and “Where was I when that happened?” (“The Ultraworld”), “Why did I try? Did I try?” (“Will You Dare”), “Is that how I wound up here?” (“Another Lifetime Floats Away”). But, as with all rhetorical questions, there are no answers expected. The asking — or, more specifically, the spacious, open silence that follows in the question’s wake — is the point. After all, absence is itself a kind of presence. Those gaps…
What would be experimental folk exactly? As with any other genre, it would approximately mean that you as an artist are not taking the usual routes associated with such a genre, and it could be anything from bringing in elements from elsewhere, to not so usual performance, lyrics and anything else that might be considered ordinary.
You can get practically all of that on Bird or Snake, the second album by Chicago-based singer songwriter Emma Hospelhorn, who operates under the moniker of Em Spel. It is more or less all there – jazzy song structures, classical flutes, found sounds, subtle electronics, and lyrics that go into deeper subjects.
Hospelhorn wrote the songs and produced them herself, with additional production by…
After more than a decade of relative silence, Diana Darby’s Otterson offers a new chapter of the singer/songwriter’s uniquely haunted sound. The insular style Darby found on previous albums remains consistent throughout Otterson, but this time around the construction was a little different. Pieced together from new songs and some older material while Darby was making the transition from recording on four-track to working with Digital Audio Workstations. Though the overcast character that has defined much of her discography doesn’t change much with these technological advances, there’s a different tint to Darby’s muted colors throughout the album.
Opening track “April” is spare, with clinks of a lonesome tambourine keeping time for…
…There’s a moment on Sluice’s new album, Companion, where frontman Justin Morris sings about being a kid reading in a bunk on a tour bus, crying and asking “what happened to it all feeling so good?” It’s a question that drove him out of music entirely — and, eventually, back into it on very different terms.
The Durham, North Carolina quartet — Morris on guitar and vocals, Oliver Child-Lanning on bass and various instruments, Avery Sullivan on drums, and Libby Rodenbough on fiddle — release Companion, their third album and Mtn Laurel Recording Co. debut, on March 27th. It follows 2023’s Radial Gate, the album Morris made after fleeing New York for a Craigslist house in Hillsborough with then-stranger Child-Lanning, tracking…
Stefanie Drootin and Chris Senseney are music lifers, married parents of two who have been the core of the band Big Harp essentially since they met two decades ago. As a teenager in the San Fernando Valley, Drootin committed to the DIY scene early, joining bands as a bassist before she could drive and bailing on high school with only a year left in order to tour. After Senseney met Drootin on the road in 2007, they accidentally moved to California together, got married, had their first kid, and then started Big Harp. They are lifers, and lifers make it work.
Big Harp’s fourth album, Runs to Blue, does not feel overdue. With songs of wanderlust and loss, love for your children and love for your lover, accepting one’s increasing age while also…
Only a year on from the release of their self-titled debut album, supergroup Butler, Blake & Grant have released the follow up, Murmurs, via 355 Recordings. The record sees the trio – Bernard Butler (Suede, McAlmont & Butler), Norman Blake (Teenage Fanclub) and James Grant (Love and Money) – reimagining songs from their respective back catalogues.
Butler, Blake & Grant formed when Scottish musician, Douglas MacIntyre, who promotes FRETS Concerts, invited them to perform a low-key concert in South Lanarkshire, Scotland, guessing that they would work well together. The trio then performed all over the UK and recorded a critically-acclaimed 2024 album of original material at Blake’s home on the banks of the River Clyde.
Following the two-person effort Could Have Done Anything (2023), Charlotte Cornfield‘s sixth album, Hurts Like Hell, is a much more collaborative outing as well as her first for Merge and her first since becoming a mother. Not coincidentally (and despite its title), it’s a warm, touching set of songs that is still packed with her often profoundly intimate observations, but this time there’s a subtle shift toward gratitude and perseverance. The collaborators include producer Phil Weinrobe (Adrianne Lenker, Lonnie Holley) and a backing band consisting of Palehound’s El Kempner (guitar, vocals), Lake Street Dive’s Bridget Kearney (bass, vocals), and Wilder Maker’s Adam Brisbin (guitar, pedal steel) and Sean Mullins (drums). The album was recorded at Weinrobe’s…
Throughout his career José González has been a pacifying voice, delivering quiet, organically-made records that emphasize patience and humanity. He’s not particularly prolific, though when they arrive his albums tend to hit their mark — consistency, both in tone and quality, is one of his hallmarks. González rarely employs more than one or two guitars and the occasional second harmony, nor does he need to. His gentle, though commanding tenor and deft fingerpicked arrangements are enough to fill the rooms he creates. Understated as they are, his songs are also not without weight and his fifth album, Against the Dying of the Light, is his heaviest to date. It’s posed as a more outward-focused sequel to 2021’s Local Valley, his meditative fourth…
Otracami, the project of Brooklyn-based songwriter and composer Camila Ortiz, releases her album Runoff, via Figure & Ground.
Across the eleven tracks of Runoff, Otracami layers intricate vocals, field recordings, and samples into full-band arrangements that feel overfull with life, mirroring the album’s central tension between containment and overflow. “I was trying out leaving for the first time—people and jobs and situations with family,” reflects Ortiz. “It was real trial and error—sometimes that really worked and felt liberating and other times I had to turn around and go back. It was a period of big experimentation.”
On Runoff, Otracami draws from both the landscapes of her life in New York and her childhood in Northern California, which…
…‘Death is real, someone’s there and then they’re not, and it’s not for singing about, it’s not for making into art,’ sang Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum on ‘Real Death’, one of a whole, heartbreaking album of songs recorded in the wake of his partner’s death from cancer. Personal grief is by its nature individual. We can never know exactly what someone else is feeling, even when they express themselves with eloquence or with complete rawness. But that doesn’t mean we can’t gain something from the experience. Elverum made art – eloquent and raw – whether he wanted to or not, and the same could be said for Joshua Burnside, who wrote and recorded It’s Not Going to Be Okay after and about the death of his best friend, the musician Dean Jendoubi.