Following a pair of companion albums — Tender and the more energized Spiral Your Way Out — that captured different stages of post-breakup emotions, Zahara Jaime broadens the topics at hand while still navigating the deeply personal on their fourth album, Distant Lands. Lending Zzzahara a hand in wrangling their rangy sound spectrum — one that integrates post-punk, giddy dream pop, driving indie rock, and murky shoegaze — is Casey Lagos (Stick to Your Guns, Cold War Kids), who less polishes than reinforces the songwriter’s knotty sound. They pull listeners to their feet with the swirling, squalling opener, “Whispering Tree,” a song whose mismatched multi-tracked vocals, warbly injected guitar hooks, tonal percussion, and wall of strummed guitars…
Category: indie
Over their nearly twenty year existence Ceremony has been hard to pin down. Ceremony’s turn away from blistering powerviolence into post-punk over time has become their calling card. By 2019’s In The Spirit World Now they had completely flipped the band’s paradigm over 6 albums. Synth took focus in the mixes and the band seemed fully passed punk.
Despite sonic shifts Ceremony retained their hardcore credibility. Live, Ceremony never abandoned their early material, the post-punk of “Turn Away The Bad Thing” nestles closely with the stomping juggernaut of “This Is My War”. Fan-favorite “Kersed,” is a live staple, much in the same way Napalm Death has to play “You Suffer”. Even as Ceremony continued…
Gathered here are the cardigan-clad teens’s near-complete recordings. Channeling spoken word, loud-quiet dynamics, the K aesthetic, and questionably-tuned guitars into an emo cacophony all their own, this hand-screened edition includes the 1995 four-song 7” and five-song demo tape, two previously unreleased songs from their Tim Green-produced session, and a pair of unhinged live cuts, all housed in a glorious hand screened chipboard sleeve, with squeal-along lyric insert. It perfectly captures their jangly, emotionally open sound that would later become known as “tweemo.” Shaped by Calvin Johnson’s orbit and the influence of bands like Lync, Evergreen, and Nuzzle, tweemo was exactly what the name implied. As Kalin put it: “Vulnerability is part of the style, I guess.”
A 6-show 2025 residency at the Teragram in Los Angeles turned into something special. To shake things up, Brigid Dawson joined the fold, bringing a vital spark back to this middle-era garage punk run.
Drawn from the final 3 shows, this set gathers what OSEES call the creme de la creme: some long bloated fliers, some short sweet friers, and plenty of grease. It’s a sharp snapshot of a band clearly having a very good time.
That chemistry stuck. This is the version of the band touring this year: 6-piece OSEES, with newer material and surprise crypt-crackers added to keep it up to snuff.
“Tried to mix it up for the kiddos so I brought on the big guns…Brigid Dawson.
Much like scene counterparts Turnover and Basement, Citizen budded in the haze of early 2010s emo and grew to ripen in the radiance of alternative rock. The raucousness of formative releases like Youth matured on 2017’s As You Please, blooming on 2021’s Life In Your Glass World onwards, where huge hooks and electronic experimentation entered proceedings. Calling The Dogs stuck to that formula in solid, if perhaps unspectacular, fashion, and Halcyon Blues sits as a significant brick in the band’s road towards a strengthened sonic identity.
Reflective of life’s sudden changes and need for catharsis amongst the chaos, the record encapsulates its theme across 11 dynamic tracks that veer between Citizen’s…
Booker Stardrum and Evan Shornstein’s new album begins by depositing you into a new world. “OOPS!,” the title track and opener, kicks off immediately, with monolithic bass and shuffling drums swarmed by an army of insect-like blips and bleeps. You might need a moment to orient yourself, as piano notes hang in the air and keyboard tones settle like mist on a pond; it’s as though your eyes are adjusting, taking in the contours of the twinkling, alien landscape. The drums and shaker keep their mechanized pace, but the electronics constantly brighten and fade like flowers blooming in time lapse. When the song ends after a brisk two minutes, it feels like you’ve walked many miles without realizing it, distracted by the beautiful sensory overload.
With his playful, nature-bound alter ego, Art Feynman, Luke Temple has so far offered an unpredictable, experimental patchwork of folktronica, Krautrock inspirations, global rhythms, Talking Heads-inspired art pop / rock, environmental field recordings, themes relating to the collective consciousness, and so on.
His fourth Art Feynman album, Orphans, surprises again with a 13-track set of mostly instrumentals. While intended as background music, this is Luke Temple after all, and the songs nevertheless hold an allure all their own. The solo LP starts off with a pair of simple, sparse recordings made up of understated yet bittersweet keyboard melodies over sustained chords, and components like time-keeping bass, nature sounds,…
A sonic essay on memory, The Rest Is My Ghost defers from any climax; it offers caution and meditation, but not release. This is by careful design – this soundscape doesn’t want to be enrapturing, in any typical sense. It sits nicely with other such ambient drone works like Richard Skelton’s Ivystrung and Lowercase Noises’ This Is for Our Sins.
There is something oceanic about the whole album – organ-esque glitches on ‘Eclosion’ don’t build up as much as they accumulate, like sediment on a beach. Every section seeks to immerse, like in ‘Sodium Vapour Halo’, which tumbles out without much fanfare, its mournful synth line dragged down and out in a persistent low-end churn.
Everything in the album sounds shrouded,…
…newly mastered by Matt Colon at Metropolis Studios (under the supervision of Bobby Gillespie and Andrew Innes) and features the original track list alongside a curated selection of B-sides and rarities.
Primal Scream found themselves in danger of losing their hip audience in the wake of their misconceived trad-rock record, Give Out But Don’t Give Up. As a reaction, they returned to the genre-bending, electronic dance-rock of the seminal Screamadelica for Give Out‘s follow-up, Vanishing Point. Instead of recycling the dazzlingly bright neo-psychedelia of Screamadelica, Primal Scream reaches deep into cavernous dub and ’60s pop. Vanishing Point is a dark, trippy album, filled with mind-bending rhythms and cinematic flourishes.
On Man/Woman/Chainsaw’s debut album, the London art-rock sextet live up to the compelling fracture their name evokes. In an early press statement, guitarist-singer Billy Ward described how they’re excited by musical “chaos,” straddling the line “between pretty and noisy” and “often trying to jump between the two.” Cannonball cartwheels from ultra-sweet pop balladry to proggy chamber-pop to aggressive post-punk clatter, seemingly treating each of its styles with equal reverence. At first, these tonal shifts may give you whiplash. But after you get your bearings, you start to relish them. It’s quite the feat.
The band — Ward, singer-bassist Vera Leppänen, singer-keyboardist Emmie-Mae Avery, violinist Clio Starwood, drummer Lola Cherry, and…
Dance music is an inherently physical art form. Its hard-hitting beats urge you to move your body and contort it into shapes you otherwise never would, interlocking with the rhythms and basslines flowing from the speakers.
When the textures of the music mirror those of the bodies in motion, the vaporous heat of a packed floor, the beams of light piercing the dark room, it feels that much more visceral.
For their second album as Overmono, brothers Tom and Ed Russell cloak their tracks in this physicality, the vital lifeforce of truly great dance music. Across the eleven cuts on Pure Devotion, the Welsh producers tap into the tactile and tangible, resulting in a tighter, more focused follow-up to the sinuous sprawl of…
Megasound is the rock and roll progeny of three indie pop friends. Kerry Alexander has fronted Bad Bad Hats with Chris Hoge for more than a decade, and the duo have known Elana Carroll (aka Party Nails) even longer. While on tour together in 2018, Carroll joined Bad Bad Hats on stage for an encore performance. It was a cover of “Pretend to Be Nice”, hit single of comic book band Josie & the Pussycats, written by Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger for the 2001 live action movie. This swirling musical cauldron produced a bubble of an idea: a new band. Elana on lead vocals, Kerry on guitar, Chris on drums. Songs inspired by early 2000s rock, the music of their collective youths. A fresh watch of Josie & the Pussycats sealed the deal. Megasound was officially born.
Roy Montgomery and Martha Skye Murphy extend their thing on Nebular, penning a suite of widescreen dreampop epics that harness all their separate strengths into a fizzing artmelt – tipped FFO Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd, Flying Saucer Attack, Jessamine and lovesliescrushing.
It didn’t take much for Montgomery and Murphy to connect. All Murphy did was include one of Mongomery’s songs on a mixtape and the conversations that followed led them to spot harmonies in their approaches to music: they both recorded to a Tascam multitrack recorder, for one. And if you’ve been following either artist, you’ll have noticed their collaborations bubbling up through the cracks in the last few years. Murphy appeared on Montgomery’s…
Avon’s lesser-hailed, glam ‘80s synth-pop and new wave movement is spotlighted in-depth via 20 songs compiled by studio engineer Dave Massey, who smartly portrays the breadth and quality of an ‘80s blindspot.
The Bristol & Bath Blitz Club Meets Art School Sound – 80’s Explosion traces the reverberating influence of Rusty Egan and co.’s new wave crucible, The Blitz Club, along the M4 leyline, where it met Avon art school kids advancing from punk and funk into a new decade. Egan’s signature DJ brew – e.g. Kraftwerk to Visage, Burundi Black to Bowie, Japan and Grace Jones – would spark myriad emulators who were also mirroring the chops of Duran Duran (sons of the Brum club scene an hour north) and the likes of Martyn Ware…
An abandoned cathedral. A gruesome murder. A powerful supernatural entity living in the catacombs. It all comes to a head in downtown Los Angeles. What will happen and who will live to tell the tale? Such is the storyline of Cathedral, the thrilling new album and terrifying graphic novel from director and musician John Carpenter, based on a dream Carpenter had in 2024.
Cathedral has all the drama, dark atmosphere, and frenetic pacing of a classic heavy metal record. Especially designed as the soundtrack to the graphic novel, each track corresponds to a specific section of the book. The liner notes included with the album packaging feature prompts for each track, creating a fully interactive experience. Combined with the graphic novel,…
John Darnielle looks back with wry fondness on this 24th full-length album, revisiting obscure events and semi-famous people in his typically arch and literate way. Music figures prominently in this gallery of memories — he dedicates one song to the prog band Renaissance’s 1976 date at Carnegie Hall, another to a mythical opening slot for grungy Candlebox, still another to the speed metal band, Venom, “hollering cocaine.”
One of the best of these songs recounts the later days of Layne Staley, who doesn’t want this, any of this, now that he’s got it. As usual, Darnielle writes crisp, well-tailored third-person stories about other people, which clearly also reflect his own experiences.
This is a relatively subtle album, not exactly…