By his own impeccable standards, The Red Castle was one of the most unguarded releases of John Southworth‘s career. A spiritual ramble through grief and wonder, its hybrid of ancient and modern instrumentation felt unexpectedly poignant and immersive. Following the death of his father, it also marked a life chapter and presented a subsequent threshold to somewhere new.
Rain from the East arrives just seven months later and amplifies, both figuratively and literally, Southworth’s signature style in surprising ways. It’s a confident album, compact in its arrangements, but played with ferocity and intention. Like much of his best work, it plucks lesser-heard elements from esoteric subgenres and shakes them into a cocktail only he can serve.
Category: pop
With Spring Flood, Mariam Wallentin and Vestnorsk Jazzensemble present a new collective work in which improvisation, poetry, and vivid imagery merge into a living, organic expression.
The album originates from Wallentin’s stay in Basel in the spring of 2023. There, with the Rhine as a constant sonic backdrop, a series of diary notes began to take shape. As Mariam recalls: “The Rhine flowed and murmured day and night outside the hotel, and the riverbank was covered with small flowers and trees already in bloom. And I encountered spring in a new place. I saw the green breaking through and the water rushing along, accompanied by entirely different scents and temperaments than at home. The familiar and the unknown hand in hand.
Hit That Perfect Beat: The London Records Story is a double-CD companion to a podcast of the same name, charting the history of the label from the early 1980s, after the British branch of Decca Records was acquired by PolyGram. Though the label was reopened in the 2010s, the compilation stops in the early 2000s, bringing highlights from more than 20 years of hit releases.
The set starts out in the new wave era, with a few classics like Bananarama’s enduring “Cruel Summer” and Bronski Beat’s queer anthem “Smalltown Boy,” along with U.K. hits by acts drawing from folk (the Bluebells, Hothouse Flowers) and soul (Total Contrast, Carmel). Bronski Beat appear again with the compilation’s namesake tune, and leader Jimmy Somerville’s…
Having a solo project has been Josh Conway’s dream since he was a child. Between then and now, he has found international acclaim with The Marías, of which he is the drummer, primary producer and co-writer of nearly all of their material. With this outfit, Conway broadcast his distinctive production style, blurring bedroom-pop and dream-pop hallmarks with psychedelic undertones. There is an ethereal, understated and cohesive quality to The Marías, whilst still retaining a penchant for pop capacity and heterogeneous production. As many listeners of Conway will likely have come from The Marías’ fanbase, there will be trepidation about how similar it may sound, how far he will drift from the band sonically, or whether his production style works without his band.
Slippers‘ cozy brand of indie pop is baked to perfection on their second album Slippers 08. Madeline BB is the writer and singer, and drummer too, and she’s got the whole thing figured out. It’s never a bad idea to mix together intimate C-86 noise pop, woolly Elephant 6-sounding indie, and hooky, pocket-sized power pop, especially when the songs are short and focused, the guitars are crisp and jangly, the rhythm section plays with economical punch, and the vocals have best friend warmth. BB’s lyrics feel like that same friend telling you about her hopes, dreams, problems, and feelings; it’s so small scale and intimate that it’s impossible not to be drawn in right away. She never overstays her welcome musically, keeping the songs very short and never…
As the years went by, Káryyn’s chilling masterclass of a debut album started to feel like a singularity. 2019’s The Quanta Series seemed like it might not only stand the test of time but be capable of bending it, blurring the past into futuristic art-pop. It took half a decade for the Armenian American singer and composer to follow it up with another record, the James Ford-produced EP Calm Kaoss!, which was preceded by a standalone single co-produced with Hudson Mohawke.
Along with Björk collaborator Marta Salogni on mixing duties, those names turn up throughout the credits of Káryyn’s long-awaited new album, like the UK alternative’s equivalent to the Weeknd enlisting Max Martin and Oneohtrix Point Never on Dawn FM.
…In addition to a new remaster of the original album, this edition includes 13 previously unissued bonus tracks including demos, alternate takes, and outtakes from the album sessions.
After The Beau Brummels dissolved in 1968 following their swan song, Bradley’s Barn, it was doubtful that we’d ever hear from the band again, despite their individual and collective brilliance. The group did somehow reunite in 1975, however, for this fine and somewhat understated album. The band’s weaving of folk, country, and pop stylings hadn’t really changed that much from their prime in the mid- to late ’60s.
Ron Elliot has several superb songs on here, notably “Tennessee Walker” and the excellent album closer, “Today by Day,” which is sung by…
If you were going to go looking for rough but melodic bands, you might very well start in Ohio. That’s where the granddaddy of them all — Guided by Voices — got its start, not to mention the Greenhornes, New Bomb Turks, Times New Viking, Cloud Nothings and many, many others. There’s something about flat, fertile, churchy Ohio that encourages rebellion, even oddity — remember Pere Ubu and Devo came from here. But there’s also a midwestern full-hearted-ness in even the most confrontational of bands. There’s ragged soul in ragged riffs here, and if you want evidence, look no further than Smug Brothers.
Smug Brothers, out of Dayton, have been at it for two decades, garnering modest success but an engaging catalogue. The band formed…
Fitz and the Tantrums return with Man on The Moon (The Galaxy Edition), the deluxe version of their sixth studio album. The release includes three new tracks, highlighted by the recently released single “Good Morning California.” Last year’s standard version of Man on The Moon was met with enthusiastic praise from Rolling Stone, Billboard, and more, and supported by a massive 31-city headline tour across North America. Bringing their infectious live show to the small screen, Fitz and the Tantrums performed the album’s lead single and title track on national television with high-profile appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and The Man on The Moon Tour continues this summer alongside various festival stops and a pair of arena dates opening for Zac Brown Band.
Expanded reissue of the cult 1991 Skooshny compilation, now collecting all twenty-one of the LA power-pop trio’s recordings from 1971 to 1981 including four tracks new to this edition.
Skooshny is an L.A.-based psych-folk-pop trio who originally came together in 1971, a time that singer/guitarist Mark Breyer later said was “too late for the Byrds, too early for R.E.M.” Breyer and drummer David Winogrond had been in a Chicago-area trio, Brevity, before moving to L.A. in the early ’70s to try their luck on the West Coast. They met guitarist/keyboardist Bruce Wagner after placing an ad in a music publication and he continued to be an on-again/off-again member. Rehearsals proved to be tough to organize, however, as none of the three had a car and relied on public…
From the start of her career, Jackie De Shannon was a great singer, with a strong instrument and a fine sense of how to invest her performances with emotion and nuance. However, DeShannon has said more than once that Liberty, the label that she was signed to through the 1960s, was more interested in her as a songwriter than a performer (she’d already penned a hit for Brenda Lee, “Alone With You”). So it was a real paradox that when she recorded her first LP in 1963, Liberty insisted that she record a set of covers rather than her own material. (The album included three tracks by Bob Dylan, only months after the release of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, though the label turned down her suggestion to cut a full album of his work.) DeShannon’s debut was…
A lot of people are making music influenced by trip-hop right now, and a lot of it is very good. But it typically skews towards the sultry meeting point of sexual danger and stoned paranoia with the razor-sharp aesthetic edges of the ’90s and ’00s internet. Bristol’s Tara Clerkin Trio are steeped in their hometown’s trip-hop tradition, but their approach is more folk-rock than the voluptuous blues associated with Tricky or Massive Attack. They make music for autumnal scenes with scarves and coffee rather than a time loop where you’re always ashing the same spliff. Car-stereo stuff like Dido and Beth Orton sometimes comes to mind. It’s almost twee.
Somehow, this approach makes their second album, Somewhere Good, sound slipperier and…
One of the more enigmatic bands of the classic 4AD era, Swallow was formed by Louise Trehy and Mike Mason, who met in early 90’s Camberwell, London. both were deeply involved with the independent music scene of the time; Louise co-founded Setanta Records (home of The Divine Comedy, Edwyn Collins and Into Paradise with whom Mike would occasionally play), and Mike traversed between bike courier, video director, and lighting designer for Spacemen 3, Slowdive, Spiritualized, Curve and Chapterhouse. Prompted by Louise, they started writing songs together, drawing inspiration from a healthy mix of sources: CAN, noise, post-punk, and American forces of nature like Captain Beefheart and Butthole Surfers. Their first songs quickly surfaced and were recorded…
For music fans of a certain vintage, the name Hue and Cry will immediately send them back to the late 1980s. Pat Kane and his brother Gregory seemed to be the epitome of the sharp-suited, smooth pop-jazz-soul that was so popular back in those days. Yet there was more to them than a snazzy image – their biggest hit ‘Looking for Linda’ sounded like a swooning ballad but was actually about domestic abuse, while their signature track, ‘Labour of Love’, was an infectious, politically-charged critique of capitalism.
Although the brothers haven’t particularly troubled the charts since 1991’s Stars Crash Down album, they’ve very much remained a going concern, releasing a number of albums since they reformed after an appearance on ITV’s…
Filtering one of Borges’ short stories through the theory that our world is just a computer simulation, JJ Weihl uses ambient synthscapes to frame head-spinning ideas about knowledge and chaos.
“You who read me-are you certain you understand my language?” asks the narrator of Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel.” The Argentine writer’s short story, first published in 1941, imagines an infinite archive of books in which the alphabet has been configured into every possible combination, resulting in a limitless array of texts meaning everything and nothing. In creating Library Copy Do Not Remove, her third solo album as Discovery Zone, JJ Weihl connected Borges’s logical puzzle to the simulation hypothesis, the popular theory that, since at some point…
There’s no doubt that London during the mid-’60s was one of the swingingest, downright hippest eras in the history of the world. From the fit of the clothes to the look of films, the nifty turns of phrase to the sound of the dazzling records being made, there’s a wealth of brilliance to discover. Numerous compilations have done their best to bring the era to life and this is easily one of the best. What’s It All About? Film & TV Music from Swinging London does what it says on the package and does it with the prerequisite style. It jumbles together TV and movie themes, songs from films, tracks by top bands and underground faves that appeared on both, and the occasional ringer to give a clear picture of just how much fun everyone was having.
Back in 2024, La Grande Accumulation, the acclaimed first collaboration between Turkish sound artist and photographer Anadol (Gözen Atila) and French composer, musician and singer Marie Klock was compared with everything from folk to French chansons and even Krautrock, but what everyone agreed on was its eccentricity. On Manivelles that eccentricity persists, but the album feels less of a complete statement and more like a bunch of oddities and fragments, a collection of pebbles gathered on the seashore for their strange and evocative shapes. That difference might be ascribed to the very different ways the two albums came together. La Grande Accumulation was the fruition of a thrilling first encounter, an unexpected meeting of minds and talents.
“You can change the chapter, you can change the book, but the story remains the same if you’d take a look”. So runs the chorus line from ‘Nobody’s Diary’ by Yazoo, an unexpectedly prophetic lyric looking forward to the formation of Doublespeak. For here is a supergroup founded in the 2020s but rooted almost entirely in the early development of electronic music.
As supergroups go, this one is entirely logical – and in fact, the only surprise about the Orwellian Doublespeak is that it took this long for them to form. Electronic music royalty Vince Clarke (not just Yazoo, but Depeche Mode and Erasure) and Neil Arthur (Blancmange) have been good friends since the early 1980s, when making your own pop music was fast becoming a pleasure…
Back in 2016, The Monkees celebrated their 50th anniversary with their first album of new material since 1996’s Justus. The appropriately-titled Good Times!, produced by Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger, was a true return to form. The acclaimed album reached No. 14 on the Billboard 200, becoming the group’s highest-charting release in 48 years.
Now Rhino is revisiting Good Times! in a 10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition which celebrates not only the album, but the 60th anniversary of The Monkees and the memory of Schlesinger, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork (all of whom died following its release) and Davy Jones (who had passed away in 2012 but was nonetheless featured on Good Times! via archival material).
The Boys of Dungeon Lane is not only the 18th solo album to be released by Paul McCartney; it is a collection of rare and revealing glimpses into memories never-before shared along with some newly inspired love songs, from one of the most culturally significant figures of our time.
Across the album, Paul turns the lens inward, revisiting the formative years that shaped not only his life, but the very foundations of modern popular culture. In a career defined by timeless storytelling and unforgettable characters, Paul now tells the most personal story of all, his own. The album is his most introspective album to date, taking the listener back to where it all began. These extraordinary new songs find Paul writing with rare openness about his childhood…