…6CD special edition featuring unheard material, including early demos, alternate takes, and unreleased songs.
There’s a live recording on this boxset that seems to perfectly embody the challenges faced by Paul Weller after he split up The Jam. He and his new band, The Style Council, are playing the Goldiggers in Chippenham, Wiltshire, in March 1984, showcasing tracks from the upcoming Cafe Bleu album to an increasingly restless audience.
“I need absolute quiet for this number,” Weller insists, before a bossa nova called “The Whole Point of No Return”. The crowd start wolf-whistling as Dee C Lee comes out to sing “Paris Match” and, as the band perform low-key acoustic songs inspired, variously, by Antonio Carlos Jobim, …
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Presenting a local music scene to a wider audience can be an arduous task if it is a scene that has already made a name for itself.
Pinning down what – or who – Lucia & The Best Boys are has, since their emergence in the late 2010s, been more difficult than perhaps it should. Emerging from a fertile synth-led Glasgow scene that gave us Walt Disco and The Ninth Wave – artists whose sonic and visual identities appeared fully-formed from the off – between name, line-up and sound changes, it hasn’t seemed to fully ‘click’ for the outfit. And, thankfully, at points on this debut, it does: opener ‘Butterflies’, ‘Love Yourself’ and ‘So Sweet I Could Die’ brim with the kind of bombast usually seen with shoulder pads and voluminous perms. When they amp up the ‘80s theatrics – think Bonnie Tyler after a few Snakebites and an accident with black eyeliner – the crystal-clear nature and range of…
Philly’s 
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Simply put, the Trash Can Sinatras never let their fans down. Starting with 1990’s 
It is tempting to search the 
Perhaps you’re familiar with Star Moles, the ultra-prolific recording project from Philadelphia musician Emily Moales. Perhaps you’re also familiar with Rubber Band Gun, the similarly ultra-prolific project from regular Star Moles contributor Kevin Basko; Rubber Band Gun and Star Moles dropped the song “Frodoboy” a couple of months ago. Perhaps you would also like to know about Sam and Louise Sullivan, a sibling duo who make a ton of music with Moales and Basko and who have a new album Love & Devotion.
Timing, as they say, is everything. And, arriving almost 10 years since they first formed in Brighton, and more than four since their 2022 debut EP ‘’Til The Stream Runs Dry’ tipped them for intriguingly grubby, underground success, jazz-punk band Opus Kink have taken the road to their debut album at a glacial pace.
XXXXX, the new album by Venezuelan producer-vocalist Arca, is reportedly laden with meaning: a press release claims that “suspended between posthuman augmentation and raw emotion, XXXXX exposes the mainframe”. But the reason Arca, real name Alejandra Ghersi, has become such a star of electronic music – and a mainstream-adjacent one at that – is not because she lets philosophy postgrads in Berlin write her marketing copy: it’s because, for well over a decade, she has been putting out records like XXXXX, which seem to tap into the body’s most primal, feral frequencies better than nearly anyone else. That ability has resulted in recent callups to collaborate on Madonna’s Confessions II and remix pop singer Addison Rae, and she has amassed…
There was a certain jovial energy that added to the 2022 debut of contemporary jazz duo DOMi & JD BECK. Coming out of the gate with major co-signs from the likes of Herbie Hancock, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and Anderson.Paak, who helped release the stellar debut through his APESHIT imprint, along with the illustrious Blue Note Records. At the time, it seemed like the freshly budding duo was destined for jazz stardom in an era where the genre rarely gets the attention it deserves, but for one reason or another, the debut LP, titled NOT TiGHT, didn’t make the impact it was meant to. Sure, the Grammy acknowledgment was nice, and the A-list guest appearances were lovely and added some unique flair to the duo’s nimble, playful sound. Still, it could’ve been those…
Who needs a style when you’ve got the songs? We’re living in a musical landscape mediated by algorithmic overlords, in which listeners often seek to be soothed by (possibly evil) ambient tones, burrow deeper into (often frictionless) aesthetics they already like, and passively consume (AI-generated?) tracks suited for various lifestyle functions. People of taste have been decrying the public’s preference for familiar slop over challenging, adventurous, hard-to-categorize art from time immemorial, but in the music world, the streaming era has intensified the primacy of vibes over tunes. 
Peals — the Baltimore duo of William Cashion (Future Islands) and Bruce Willen (Double Dagger) — return with twin releases via Thrill Jockey: The Compound 76 and Le Pantoum 46.
Twenty-five years on from its original release, Warp Records brings Aphex Twin’s