At certain angles through the mist and the fog, the Golden Gate Bridge as seen from Lands End park looks like it connects to another world. This feeling of teetering on the edge of the planet informed the work of the more visionary composers associated with San Francisco, like Morton Subotnick and Terry Riley, and it infuses Cole Pulice’s Land’s End Eternal. The saxophonist and composer relocated to the Bay Area from Minneapolis after the Covid-19 lockdown, and their new work is pervaded by the sense that they have arrived at a terrestrial limit and have begun reaching across the astral divide.
Pulice made their name with saxophone solos that sound like they’re being transmitted from Jon Hassell’s fourth world. The massive 2023 track “If I Don’t See You in the Future, I’ll See You…
Category: indie
The last time we heard from Laura Marling, her album was dedicated to a hypothetical daughter. Song for Our Daughter was released in April 2020, right at the start of the pandemic, and the offspring referred to in the title was a purely figurative one. It did prove to be a strangely prophetic title, for Marling’s follow-up is all about her actual daughter, born not too long after the release of her last album.
Patterns in Repeat, her eighth album, is a record all about parenthood, recorded in snatches at home, with her new born baby by her side. It makes for a beautifully intimate album, one recorded demo-style in her living room, with no drums and featuring Marling’s voice accompanied only by guitar, piano and strings. If you listen…
…adds 2 previously unreleased tracks to the digital re-release, including early, stripped-back demos of “Bronwyn”, as well as the album’s title track.
“The brilliance of the day waits for you to wake again,” sings Hannah Frances at the beginning of “Bronwyn,” the opening track of her new album, Keeper of the Shepherd. “Patient in the way I waited for you to love me again.” A lilting but off-kilter time signature carries the song along as oddly tuned, slightly dissonant acoustic and electric guitars are intertwined. As on previous albums, like Bedrock (2021) and White Buffalo (2018), Frances maintains a woodsy, avant-folk sound that is both inviting and curiously unsettling. You can hear Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley, and Joni Mitchell in these songs, but also Kate Bush, Radiohead,…
Adult Mom’s latest album, Natural Causes, channels indie rock heroes like Wednesday and The Beths, while recounting a battle with stage 4 breast cancer, from a first person point of view. “Doctor’s office across Mary’s Avenue / I sit cautiously and wish I could look at / a semblance of a view” Stevie Knipe sings on the acoustic song, “Benadryl.” “Why don’t they have any windows here? / Would it kill them to have something without a gray hue?”
“If this is where the dyin’ go, then / Perhaps they need to fit the dyin’ mood / and it’s no use.” The catchy, well-adorned songs on the album certainly don’t have the “dying mood,” but mortality and self-reflection emanates from each of the songs. It’s rare for somebody to have such bravery and focus, to get down their close…
…Propagandhi is a band that has defeated the curse of age over the last few decades by the simple trick of changing their musical trajectory every few albums. They were elevated from their snotty high school punk band days in Manitoba by Fat Mike, who signed them to Fat Wreck Chords.
Their first two albums, How to Clean Everything (1993) and Less Talk More Rock (1996), incorporated the sound of spiky, dangerously melodic contemporary SoCal punk but wrote radically far-left songs with it. It was like Chomsky fronting a skate punk band, but unlike the academic airiness of Greg Graffin, it felt more raw, more capable of inducing a riot.
After the departure of songwriting wizard John K. Samson (who left the band to found…
The Wind That Had Not Touched Land represents a brief flash in time. It may be that the five musicians who make up Annie A never play together in this form again, so the document that we have here is a record of a fleeting moment.
Annie A is a collaboration between French musician, writer and artist Félicia Atkinson, poet Christina Petrie, London-based duo Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney (better known as Time is Away), and New Zealand/Aotearoa songwriter Maxine Funke. The far-flung geographical origins of the group is offset by a certain closeness, an intimacy that feels almost miraculous.
Opening track, ‘First the Crocus’, is a minimal, mantra-like meditation awash with background clatter and hiss. Its two-word refrain…
In 2025, it might be easy to forget that the idea of taking mind-expanding substances while listening atmospheric music was once considered to be radical and illicit. Over the course of the last few years, both supervised psychedelic exploration and ambient music have gradually inched their way towards the mainstream, but tripping out to wonky albums wasn’t always such a societally accepted activity. In the 1970s, a group of psychotherapists developed a listening routine called the Cosmic-Astral program specifically designed to be played while their patients took LSD. Consisting of classical compositions from Richard Strauss, Alexander Scriabin, and Gustav Holst, the aural curriculum was quickly pulled from shelves due to its questionable legal implications. On Cosmic-Astral…
The life and work of pioneering poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini casts a long shadow over this record from French artist Karen Jebane, also known as Golem Mecanique. The album’s title, which translates as “we are all in danger”, is derived from the final interview Pasolini gave before his still-unsolved murder in 1975, and a sense of threat pervades the record from start to finish. This is a dense, foreboding album, its scale and texture as unforgiving as a vast, broiling body of water. But there is beauty here.
Much of that beauty is provided by Jebane’s trademark drone box, a mournful, swelling instrument that flows beneath the entire record like an underground stream. Given that the LP is being released by Stephen O’Malley’s label…
Listening to The Foel Tower feels like tuning a weathered old radio – you’ll be rewarded for applying patience and concentration.
On this second album, experimental Bristol four-piece Quade make a virtue of the slow build; Barney Matthews’ bassy, cryptic vocals are buried beneath shivering cymbals, gut-rumbling bass and blasts of static, with most of the lyricism left to multi-instrumentalist Tom Connolly’s twisting, agonised, beatific violin.
Like their label mates Moin who describe themselves as “post-whatever”, Quade discard the classic band format for a more organic, intuitive approach. Canada Geese starts with a simple, strummed acoustic guitar and close-quarters detail: distant birdsong, the soft rattle of what..
UK Godfathers of Rave Orbital revisit their early Brown album EPs with an ongoing series of ‘Orbital LEDs’ (Limited Edition Drops) – 12” singles re-issued with newly commissioned artwork designed by Intro.
Orbital’s Lush EP, originally released in 1993, is a defining moment in 90s electronic music. Featuring Lush 3-1 and Lush 3-2, these tracks showcased the duo’s ability to blend hypnotic melodies with intricate, electronic beats. The EP, part of their acclaimed Orbital 2 album (aka The Brown Album), captured the essence of progressive house and techno, earning widespread praise. DJs and ravers alike embraced its euphoric yet cerebral sound, solidifying Orbital’s reputation as pioneers. Reissued as part of The Brown Album…
The 2025 release of Look At All The Love We Found: A Tribute to Sublime marks the 20th anniversary of the original 2005 tribute album Look At All The Love We Found (Cornerstone R.A.S.), now reworked and remastered, featuring over 30 artists covering classic Sublime tracks including Zac Brown Band (“Wrong Way”), Pennywise (“Same In The End”), Jack Johnson (“Badfish”) and more, in addition to 8 previously unreleased tracks. One of the unreleased tracks includes a collaboration with Slightly Stoopid and Stick Figure with their take of the Sublime classic “Slow Ride.”
“We’re honored to release our cover of “Slow Ride” with our brother Stick Figure to honor the legacy of Sublime. Produced by our good friend “Miguel” Happoldt, the OG Sublime producer…
Das Kinn, Bureau B’s new signing, feels like a bold new discovery even if he’s in his mid-40s. Hamburg’s experimental imprint finds itself in the unusual position of being one of the most consistently interesting labels on the planet whilst also fielding a roster of artists of a certain vintage such as Karl Bartos, Peter Baumann, Faust and Martin Rev. Fresher blood about the place augurs well, but don’t expect sunshine and roses. Ruinenkampf serves as a millennial cri-de-coeur, expounding upon how broken everything is.
Das Kinn arrives to the slow, steady beep beep beep of ‘Jamais Vu’. It’s a ballad of solemnity, originally recorded by 80s Berlin tape underground outfit Teurer Denn Je, and it reverses in like an articulated bus, warning us to get out of the way.
…The Expansion Pack includes eight alternate versions of songs from ‘Magpie’, one cover, and a brand-new song called “Tell Me You Love Me.”
Vancouver’s Peach Pit are one of those rare, self-aware bands that take criticism in stride. Early in their career, after they performed at a Battle of the Bands, they received rather negative feedback from a judge, something to the effect of “generic indie rock band”. So they saw it fitting to name their self-released debut Being So Normal. Columbia Records must have thought they were something more than “normal”, as they signed the group and helped launch their career. Peach Pit went on to release two solid albums under the imprint.
Now, on their fourth release called Magpie, the band clearly refuse to compromise.
In Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 1957 composition Kontakte, a buzzing tone suddenly sputters into a cloud of sporadic pulses — the apex of the piece’s demonstration of the interrelation between rhythm, timbre, and pitch.The avant-garde titan would later call this the “concept of unity in electronic music” — a paradigm opened up by electronics’ superhuman capacity to modulate sound. Koshiro Hino, leader of Osaka band goat (jp), flips Stockhausen’s compositional ideas on their head, using guitar, saxophone, and bass as percussion instruments in human-powered simulations of programmed polyrhythms. Rather than rely on the precision of machinery, the group taps into the creative tension in human fallibility. Their latest record emerged from a collaboration with the Belgian…
On the cover of Wasteland, Jim Ghedi sits at what looks like a quarry in a tattered outfit of a battered and bruised but not quite totally beaten dandy from a few centuries ago, the red glow of the background suggesting we may well be in hell’s waiting room. The starkly brutal surroundings and apocalyptic undertow proves a perfect match to the Sheffield-based folk guitarist’s fourth solo album (sixth if you count two excellent sets of guitar instrumentals as a duo with Toby Hay, whose 2018 solo album The Longest Day is an unsung gem).
There’s often solid reasons to be skeptical when an artist embarks on a bold departure from their usual musical habitat. Widescreen and epic in intent yet deeply personal and intimate in execution, brutal and bleak in its themes but ultimately…
One of the many iconic releases held within Gorillaz’s discography is getting the live treatment for the second time since its 2005 release. After immortalizing the live version of Demon Days with a concert film, the animated band grabs another live performance from April 2006 at the Apollo Theater.
Record Store Day 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of Gorillaz iconic 6x platinum album ‘Demon Days’ with the release of ‘Live from the Apollo Theater’, the first vinyl pressing ever from the recording of the iconic 2006 show in Harlem, New York. ‘Demon Days Live’ consisted of two residencies, with five shows played at the Manchester Opera House and another five played at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York.
Manhattan once teemed with trout. Though Minetta Creek was diverted underground in the early 19th century and eventually ran dry, some still claim to hear running water beneath the streets of Greenwich Village where, nearly two hundred years later, Paco Cathcart would be born. Cathcart grew up across the East River in Brooklyn and began recording music as the Cradle in 2013. Across some 50 albums, the project has evolved from off-the-cuff experiments to increasingly intentional gems like 2018’s Bag of Holding.
Down on Them is Cathcart’s debut release under their own name and their first with “one band.” Cathcart, who has played in groups like Big Neck Police, Shimmer, and Climax Landers, found like-minded bandmates in bassist Miriam Elhajli,…
Known for a sound which defined indie in the 2000s, The Kooks return with their new album Never/Know following their No. 1 UK Album Konk, additional 3 UK Top 10 Albums, 3 UK Top 10 Singles, 2 BRIT nominations and an MTV Best UK Act Award. Their 2006 debut album sold over 2 million copies, reaching quadruple platinum status in the UK.
Helmed by the two original members of the band – lead singer Luke Pritchard and guitarist Hugh Harris – the duo have never stopped evolving, transitioning from indie rock to synthpop and krautrock influences, growing their 3.5 Million global audience to what it is today.
The 11-track offering, self-produced by Pritchard, was born out of a mission…