Non-sensical, un-user friendly, at times half finished. Camper Van Beethoven’s second album II & III saw the folk-punk of the band’s debut LP morphing into an even wider array of stylistic influences and (un)ironic contradictions, all rolled up into a coherently incoherent collection of some of the band’s most defining songs.
Originally released in 1986, the follow up to Telephone Free Landslide Victory did much to develop an already iconoclastic Camper Van Beethoven idiom. II & III ranges from alt-country ballads (“Sad Lovers’ Waltz”) to call-backs to the European folk instrumentals of their earlier work (“No Krugerrands For David”, “4 Year Plan”). Also featured is the band’s bluegrass-Americana take on Sonic Youth’s “I Love Her All the Time”…
Category: indie
…Music of the Terrazoku: Ethnographic Recordings from an Imagined Future is the brainchild of drummer-composer Will Glaser, who has assembled a wide array of experimental musicians to help him execute his vision. There’s pretty much everything here, from ambience to industrial music, free improv to early 20th-century jazz. The idea is that such musicians have lived through a climactic event that has wiped away all reference points, and are recreating music from scratch, a metaphor for rebuilding a fractured society.
The very first sounds are like a Geiger counter and a human playing on found containers before breaking into an array of junk drums: just what one might expect for the re-origins of music. Isn’t this how our primitive ancestors started?
With Aves de Nahá, Bosque Vacío turn from the fractured wetlands of Mexico City toward the dense cosmologies of the Lacandon jungle in Chiapas. Where 2023’s Cantera Oriente traced the unstable boundaries between quarry, reserve and megapolis — a site where nature exists in continuous dialogue with urbanism — this new work listens further back and further outward.
Asphalt gives way to canopy; infrastructural hum yields to breath, feather, omen.
Developed through an exchange between anthropology, ornithology and the Lacandon community of Nahá, the album situates birds not as documentary field-recording subjects but as sentient presences embedded in ritual, subsistence and prophecy. Crucially, they are…
The Spatulas’ Miranda Soileau-Pratt has long been a favorite among Dusted’s rock contingent, whether exploring the “entropic blues” with Nowhere Flower’s Lila Jarzombek or working out an earthy, buzzing, fuzzing full band sound in Beehive Mind and The March Chant EP. In her latest incarnation, she has surrounded herself with an all-new band, which includes Luke Einsiedler, ex of Arvid Noe and (New England) Patriots; Elijah Bodish of Mordecai and the drummer Greg Witz of Invisible Rays and Strange Passage. The result is a fuller, richer, more explosive sound, especially in the guitars where Soileau-Pratt and Einsiedler find a raucous, slashing concord.
Soileau-Pratt sings, as always, with a little wobble, the waver in her voice conveying…
Where has Ecca Vandal been? Nine years have passed since NME labelled the artist’s self-titled album “one of the year’s brightest debuts” for the way she attacked storming guitar riffs as easily as punchy synth beats. Much like Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes or Nova Twins, Vandal juggled her fiery punk spirit with plenty of vocal dexterity, earning support slots with Incubus and Queens of the Stone Age. But after the pandemic interrupted her momentum, she didn’t come racing out of the blocks to chase after it.
Vandal refused to rush her second album. Carefully crafted in producer Richie Buxton’s bedroom in Melbourne – the city where she grew up after moving from South Africa as a child – she hit reset, bided her time and named…
It’s only been three years since Feeble Little Horse last released an album—2023’s excellent, blown-out Girl With Fish—but between the canceled tour, a standalone single, and sporadic activity online since then, it feels like the wait has been far longer. Alas, that ends very soon; Feeble Little Horse are releasing their new album, Bitknot. The band hasn’t shared any further information about the LP, so this comes very close to qualifying for “surprise release” status.
Feeble Little Horse embrace the D.I.Y. nature of the Pittsburgh music scene, from the gauzy, more immediate sound of their live performances to the extra attention they pay and the flourishes they add to their recorded output. They were formed in 2021 by guitarists Sebastian Kinsler…
Les Claypool has been a busy man to start 2026, with an upcoming nationwide tour, releasing a new double album with The Claypool Lennon Delirium, a new EP with Primus, and now comes another release, Return of the Live Frogs: Volume 1.
Back in 2023, Les donned his Colonel persona again to revamp his Fearless Flying frog Brigade for an amazing tour. This release is a reminder of that magic.
The FFFB for this live offering is Sean Ono Lennon (aka Captain Shiner on guitar), Harry Waters (keys), Mike Dillon (percussion), Skerik (sax), and Paulo Baldi (drums) as the band stretches out and gets loose on four original songs. Each track allows for ample individual solos as the players take their turn in the spotlight.
Les Claypool is one of the most creative eccentrics of the modern era, and his latest album under The Claypool Lennon Delirium moniker – The Great Parrot-Ox and The Golden Egg of Empathy – does much to cement that status. It’s arguably the spaciest album of his career, and perhaps the best of his collaborations with Sean Ono Lennon.
After a bonkers “Pro-Log,” the proceedings start in earnest with “W.A.P.” (no relation to Cardi B). Claypool’s melodic bass lines soar over a percussive racket, an impressive and powerful contrast. A spacey organ comes into the mix before Lennon intones his pop lullaby. Lennon’s tune is no more impressive than those written by his father’s overrated band The Beatles, but – thanks to Claypool’s spectacular arsenal…
Interesting monikers are something you are going to run into quite often lately, and vocal artist Leslie Lowder has one for you – idiiom. With her latest album Neural Network, Lowder establishes herself as one of the more intriguing vocalists, starting with Laurie Anderson back in the eighties up to more current vocal experimentalists like Juliana Barwick.
And Lowder picks up a double-edged sword here, as all of the five tracks are improvisations, with Lowder manipulating her vocals with electronics to create a unique effect with each. The double edge here is that such experiments can often be quite risky, with no middle ground, and Lowder doubles the risk here by having no other instrumentation added – they could fail…
Ava Mendoza is simply one of the best guitarists around today. She has played with a murderer’s row of improvisers and experimentalists over the last 20 years, across styles incorporating rock, blues, jazz, bluegrass, metal, and the avant-garde.
…Alive Alone, Alive Together collects Mendoza’s recent live recordings from four different events. Half are duets with drummer Hamid Drake from the Summer Bummer Festival in Antwerp, while the rest are solo performances from the US and Italy. Despite what might be thought of as a limited sound palette, there is little repetition throughout the album.
‘Sun Gun’ is one of the duets, with Mendoza picking distorted lines in a heavy blues style accompanied by Drake’s nonstop barrages.
Lowertown’s Olivia Osby and Avsha Weinberg almost didn’t survive themselves. After signing to Dirty Hit as teens, they were strapped into the up-and-comer indie rock grind, touring and churning out EPs and an eventual debut album, I Love to Lie, in 2022. The problem wasn’t that they drifted apart, but rather that they got too close. Co-dependently close. After a four-year “break” (three, if you’re counting the Skin of My Teeth EP), Osby and Weinberg have re-emerged with Ugly Duckling Union, their long-awaited sophomore record. Back in Weinberg’s basement, where they cut the earliest Lowertown tracks, the pair return to their blunt yet lyrical writing and unraveling song structures. The result comes with a little more grit and a little less studio polish, which is perfect…
For more than 3 decades, David Eugene Edwards has carved out a singular path through American music. First with the gothic folk urgency of 16 Horsepower, then with the devotional intensity of Wovenhand, and more recently through the stripped-down landscape of his solo work.
…The booming bass voice of David Eugene Edwards is imposing to begin with. Now imagine how it sounds when he’s singing Latin. That’s what he’s doing at various points in Mercurial Silence, an album that continues the shift that started with 2023’s Hyacinth, drifting away from deeply haunting (and haunted) Appalachian barnstormers and toward the modern era — employing drum machines and electronics but still managing to make them sound like they’ve…
In a recent column for the New Yorker, writer Kyle Chayka details a “lo-fi rebellion” against the aesthetics of tech-driven uniformity: “Anything that appears too smooth these days is suspicious,” he says, citing a recent Weezer tour poster featuring the “Cool S,” the universal sigil of our shared humanity, as a counter-example. Chayka’s subjects primarily operate in the visual worlds of marketing and design, but it’s easy to identify sonic parallels. The kids are selling their turntables and buying guitars, saving rock’n’roll, and banging their heads until they incur nerve damage. In the face of A.I. homogeneity, the human —embodied, subjective, flawed—is in.
MASK, a new collection of songs from Aaron Maine’s indie pop project Porches…
Noise can feel like drowning. This is often intentional and a large part of its appeal to the sickos, but even the largest of whales comes up for air every 15 minutes — breaking the surface tension, pupils constricting toward the atmosphere, and taking a bus-sized gulp.
Is there anything that experimental noise can learn from this mammalian constraint?
Max Klebanoff is working on it. For several years, his project Death Kneel has kneaded noise music into a wide range of shapes, from diving directly into the harsh void on 2023’s Dawn Simulation, released via très fashion noise imprint Chondritic Sound, to the cavernous, waterlogged ambiance of 2025’s Ink Wash Apparition. On his new release Remembering Well, he picks up…
Engraving of Armor is the solo debut of Beck Zegans, an established member of New York’s indie scene with years of experience by this point both as a live sound engineer and guitarist. She’d been writing her own songs for some time but noticed her material taking on a heavier, more confrontational demeanor while holed up during COVID-19 shutdowns. When it came time to record some of these songs for her first album, she worked collaboratively with her band – synth player/bassist Alex MacKay (Nation of Language) and drummer Julian Fader (Remember Sports, Ava Luna) – who took turns building upon Zegans’ demos (guitar and drum loops) in their individual home studios. A fourth contributor on a couple tracks was guitarist El Kempner…
At some point over the more than 20 years that she has been performing and recording, Alela Diane quietly became an American treasure. Every time she releases a record, it feels like a gift, something tangible you can hold in your hands whenever you need a reminder that powerful music comes from actual humans playing real instruments. With the release of her new record, Who’s Keeping Time?, that gift is more poignant than ever.
Conceived in the wake of losing her friend and mentor, the legendary folk singer Michael Hurley, Diane nurtured this new set of songs from ideas to live recordings in the attic of her Victorian home in Portland, Oregon. Coinciding with that was her deepening need to reconnect with the town’s music community. She took guitar lessons…
Introducing a brand new series of ultra rare, vintage concert recordings from notorious NY rowdy punk rockers, Dead Boys, performing their best songs before a homegrown crowd! 2 shows, both recorded at the historic CBGBs club, both capturing one of the rowdiest, raucous musical acts to ever set foot on stage – and digitally remastered to capture all the gory, gruesome glory!
50 years ago this year, the placid seas of British and American rock were disturbed… if not destroyed… by a tsunami of sound arising from the streets of New York City and London. It wasn’t called punk rock yet… just a bunch of bands, disparate in nature and unique in sound, but seemingly bound together by a single common cause. Something must change. Everything must change.
Radhika Dade’s debut album is a dreamy delight that balances her lovely vocals against varied musical backing that’s exceedingly poppy, but not afraid to gently paint outside the lines. Cine-pop is a fine title for the album; she seeks to make each song a different mood and each could fit a different scene in a film. The lilting ballad “Feline Bandits” would be perfect for a melancholy seaside walk on a rainy day, “Starry Eyes” is a fine soundtrack for a swirling party scene, the jangling girl group inspired “Cocoa Butter Eyes” feels like a falling in and out (and back in) of love montage, and “Sleep” is just right for a scene where the lonely protagonist can’t sleep thanks to a nocturnal obsession. Dade’s voice is a fine vessel for the songs, coming across sweet…