It’s a blessing that a band with such a relatively short career (and terribly tragic ending) has an official live album to its catalog of recordings.
…Sourced from an audience recording and mastered by frontman Mark Sandman shortly before his untimely death of a heart attack onstage in 1999, Bootleg Detroit is 12 songs of the best prime-era Morphine had to offer, on tour in early 1994. The band was fresh off its breakthrough album, Cure for Pain, which was released the prior fall, and most of the set here is comprised of songs from that album. Seven of Cure for Pain’s 13 songs are represented here, along with two from the band’s debut, Good, and a couple extras.
The sound quality of these performances, being an audience recording, has been lamented…
Category: indie
After the explosion of punk rock in the U.K., the underground split off in many directions including synth pop, dance punk, post-punk, new romantic, and many others. Most groups, no matter the style they played, were looking to experiment or make a statement, often political, and generally treated the pop charts like a curse to be avoided. Around the time that the 1970s turned to the ’80s, there were a number of groups and journalists who decided the time was ripe to remake pop music, not ignore it, and to storm the charts, not disdain them. Chief among the writers was Paul Morley in the NME and his thoughts helped direct many bands to set aside the gray abrasiveness of their music in favor of something shiny and technicolor that wasn’t built for student bedsits, but for…
The Bluebells’ Sisters is a perfect snapshot of early ’80s “Sound of Young Scotland”: Glasgow indie pop with bittersweet spirit, sharp hooks, and heartfelt harmonies. Signing to the then-nascent London Records, and working with a procession of esteemed producers (including Elvis Costello who became a mentor and teacher to the band), The Bluebells enjoyed three UK hits in the 1980s (‘Cath’, ‘Young at Heart’ and ‘I’m Falling’) before touring widely throughout Europe and North America, developing their live sound and signing to Seymour Stein’s Sire Records in the U.S.
A decade later in 1993 that ‘Young at Heart’ hit the U.K. No 1 spot following its use as a T.V. advert for Volkswagen. Fast forward to this decade The Bluebells have reformed with…
With each of her projects, Me Lost Me‘s Jayne Dent creates an all-encompassing world, and on This Material Moment, it’s one filled with tension and uncertainty. Though her previous album RPG revolved around the imaginary landscapes of video games, the tangible here and now her fourth full-length focuses on feels even less stable. One thing is certain: This Material Moment features some of Dent’s most emotional songwriting. The automatic writing techniques she learned during her studies with Julia Holter shook loose fears and confessions she could no longer avoid, and she confronts them and the “negative days” she outlines on the brooding album opener “Useful Analogies.” Dent skillfully uses language’s power to capture and subvert states of being on…
…contains singles, demos as well as a BBC session and three live shows from the era. Compiled in conjunction with Fall expert Conway Patton.
A mixture of lackluster performances and songs filled with vigor and fury, Middle Class Revolt is a puzzling proposition from The Fall.
After two opening tracks that seem ready to convince worried fans that Smith couldn’t care less (“15 Ways” and “Reckoning”) there follows the poppish “Behind the Counter” and their devilish cover of Henry Cow’s “War,” with Smith making up half the lyrics.
Other highlights include the furious “Hey! Student” (a rewrite of a 1977 tune, “Hey! Fascist”), and yet another Monks cover: “Shut Up!” All find Smith in fine form, impassioned and deeply sarcastic.
For his seventh solo outing, MVD LUV, singer/songwriter Juan Wauters returned to his birthplace of Montevideo, Uruguay, to record an album in loving tribute to the place where he grew up, something he’d always wanted to do but never had a chance to before now. Wauters explains this more or less exactly over a jaunty piano on “Amor Montevideo,” the short, spoken introduction that begins the album. While in Montevideo, Wauters enlisted a crew of backing musicians and collaborators from the region, bringing elements of Uruguay’s musical heritage into his lighthearted and exuberant songwriting. This can manifest as the Spanish-sung lyrics and persistent hand drum rhythms that join woozy synthesizers on “Manejando por Pando” or as a spontaneous…
Long one of the more underappreciated singer/songwriters on the indie scene, Laura Stevenson‘s seventh solo album, Late Great, should lift her stature yet again for those in the know. It was written in the wake of a string of major life events, among them first-time motherhood, a painful breakup, new love, and a career transition involving going back to school (for a master’s degree in music therapy) — and that’s not to mention the global turmoil of the period since she recorded her previous album in late 2019.
Some of her long-time advocates returned to work with her on this new material, namely legendary alt-rock producer John Agnello and indie punk long-hauler Jeff Rosenstock, who not only did arrangements and played several…
Black Antlers comes with less of the mythos that attaches itself to other Coil albums. Where Time Machines, Loves Secret Domain, Horse Rotorvator and so on inspired nerdy obsessions with the eldritch mechanisms used to create them – a determined perpetual state of constant evolution and hedonistic experimentation via narcotics and pharmaceuticals, home studio tech, countercultural mining, occult practice and sundry other alternative states – Coil’s penultimate studio album superficially seems more ordinary. It is, after all, one where they embraced more conventional song structures, including the wonderful take on English folk staple ‘All the Pretty Little Horses’ and the same might have gone for their life outside music. In late-period Coil interviews…
Pan•American (Labradford’s Mark Nelson) and Shimmy Disc founder Kramer have always been prolific, collaboration-friendly artists, but both have been especially productive during the 2020s, focusing on ambient music that often leans toward cosmic Americana. Interior of an Edifice Under the Sea is their second album together, appearing just over a year after 2024’s Reverberations of Non-Stop Traffic on Redding Road.
Unsurprisingly, it’s in a similar vein, exploring murky, slowly drifting guitar-based drone. The music befits the album’s underwater theme, with the swaying loops and gently trippy echo of opener “In the Time It Takes to Drown” bringing to mind a submarine voyage deep beneath the surface. Some tracks have clear guitar melodies,…
It’s not often you listen to minimalist sequencer-constructed electronic music and think of Jimi Hendrix. But Helena Hauff’s sounds are built different. Whether solo or in collaboration — as she is here, returning after a decade to work with fellow Hamburg musician Kris “F#X” Jakob — there’s something about her sounds that, like a Hendrix riff, feel wrenched out of the air or sculpted from electricity.
Hauff and Jakob double down on that vibe on R4, which starts with precisely zero compromise in “C4.” The track roars and screeches along at a low and slow tempo, the distortion so much a part of its fabric you’d think you were listening to a noise artist if not for the innate funkiness that gradually emerges as the patterns rise and…
With 2018’s Vessel, Frankie Cosmos, then the six-year-old solo project of New Yorker Greta Kline, signed with Sub Pop while becoming a proper four-piece. Their third Sub Pop release, 2022’s Inner World Peace, found Kline’s bouncy, bittersweet indie pop stretching into psychedelic and ’70s pop/rock territory for the first time — at least the first time so conspicuously.
Three years later, Frankie Cosmos return with the rejiggered lineup of Kline, longtime bassist Alex Bailey, and newcomers Katie von Schleicher (who co-produced Inner World Peace) and drummer Hugo Stanley from the now-defunct Palm. Recorded in a house where they were all living together at the time, it’s the project’s first band-era effort to be produced and recorded…
After twenty years of musical partnership, Automatic finds Jeremiah Fraites and Wesley Schultz traveling new sonic and thematic terrain with their most raw and personal collection thus far. Thrilled at breaking new songwriting ground, Fraites and Schultz reached out to Woodstock, NY-based producer/songwriter/keyboardist David Baron who outfitted Woodstock’s Utopia studio like the legendary Abbey Road facility, installing both vintage and cutting-edge gear. In a capacious “live room,” the musicians could perform songs as a unit, leaving fewer opportunities to fix mistakes, or refine the sound.
While songs reveal a risky intimacy and heretofore untapped undercurrent of humor, Automatic remains very much what fans…
A Sober Conversation is the work of a master songwriter, one who knows how to achieve their goals. As the album’s nine tracks pour from the speakers, comparisons come to mind: 20/20 and Smiley Smile-era Beach Boys, Lindsey Buckingham, the early solo years of Todd Rundgren.
But nothing sounds quite like any of these – spikiness is never far. The initially dreamy opening track “The Tent” is punctuated by squalls of noise. Next, on the sumptuous “Two Legged Dog,” dense, overstated keyboards contrast with the jaunty melody. Part of the point seems to be undermining anything which might lean into tranquillity. A song beds in and, then, bam: it’s knocked off balance.
Considering that every album so far by the US-raised, Manchester-dwelling…
As the Jeanines, the songwriting team of Alicia Jeanine and Jed Smith have stood out from other indie pop bands by adding folk-rock jangle and other tinges of folksy traditionalism to their otherwise bouncy and melodic tunes. While the band is still exploring a sound that descends from the starry-eyed pop of C-86, Sarah Records, and early K Records lineage, their songs are grounded by their folkier leanings, highlighting a realism and weariness in the songwriting that a fully pop-modeled sound might obscure.
The Jeanines’ third album, How Long Can It Last, is another set of songs from the band that leans into their unique assemblage of sonic reference points and highlights the sharpness of their collective songwriting talents.
Co-released by Cairo’s HIZZ imprint and Heat Crimes, Egyptian producer Elkotsh‘s debut album skirts the experimental edge of mahraganat, disrupting electroid rhythms and dextrous live percussive workouts with acidic synth improvisations and warped instrumental vamps.
Elkotsh’s kaleidoscopic, forward-thinking productions are representative of a vital new wave of Egyptian electronic music, alloying sounds that vibrate through the country’s street festivals and cafés with clubwise mutations from across the wider world.
…This hard-charging, bass-bombing set of squirrelly, footwork-damaged, mostly instrumental, mutoid mahraganat – aka electro-shaabi – is positively electric with the necessity of creation.
A boundary-crossing, all-instrumental power trio whose members are spread out between Marseille, Nice and Lyon, Toru are behind one the biggest shake-ups to France’s thriving prog underground as of late.
In a scene largely dominated by ’60s psych-rock traditionalism (largely thanks to their Toulouse peers SLIFT, whose Sub Pop signing gave the scene a major signal boost), the trio — guitarists and multi-instrumentalists Arthur Arsenne and Héloïse Francesconi and drummer Nicolas Brisset — are defiant, even hostile, genre agnostics. 2020’s eponymous debut was a lo-fi collision between jazz, metal, minimalism, and free-form improv — a skronky maelstrom from three firebrands on the verge of a breakthrough.
Metal Bubble Trio is the latest project from Andrew Dost, the Michigan-born musician who gained international recognition as a member of the Grammy-winning pop trio Fun. After that band went on hiatus in 2015, Dost began a new phase of his career working as a film composer in Los Angeles.
His passion for songwriting was never far away, but he wasn’t sure about his next direction. Surprisingly, it was a charming online video of a child prodigy that set him on the path to recording Cucumber, his new group’s debut album. Released in January 2025, the nine-song set is a glowing pastiche of tropical indie pop inspired by bossa nova, jazz, and various flavors of exotica. While Dost is no stranger to making…
“I want it now, never, always,” Tashiina Buswa sings on “Look What You Did,” the penultimate track on Ribbon Skirt’s debut album, Bite Down. It’s a decent summation of her storytelling style: Everything is simultaneously happening, has already happened, hasn’t happened yet, and will never happen. Each memory is in constant danger of getting smothered in distortion, trampled by drums, or even warped by Auto-Tune into a funhouse-mirror reflection of itself — so you’d better listen carefully.
Formerly known as Love Language, Ribbon Skirt are the Montreal-based duo of singer and guitarist Tashiina Buswa and multi-instrumentalist Billy Riley; they’re named after a traditional Native American and First Nations garment symbolizing resilience and femininity — a nod to…