Numero present ’90s shoegaze band Should’s ’98 debut ‘Feed Like Fishes’ + 10 period bonus tracks.
The folks in Phoenix’s Half String talked up this trio when they were Austin, TX’s shiFt (before they moved north to various universities and gave up their name because of another band called Shift). And it’s easy to see why: Should would have fit perfectly into Arizona’s former “beautiful noise,” post-dream pop scene.
Even without the interestingly sedate but grasping cover of the Wedding Present’s “Spangle” (and, on another record, 18th Dye’s “Merger”), their sound makes it apparent that they can match the English in pairing inventive, modern guitars to lulling tunes for nighttime singing. You could see “Sarah Missing” appearing on a Slowdive…
Category: pop
Billed as the legendary, now-octogenarian singer and songwriter’s 30th album, Inspirations of Life and Love proves to be a surprisingly melancholy Valentine’s Week release, if a quite moving one. It was recorded mostly at Paul Anka’s home studio in California, although he’s backed by a symphony orchestra that was recorded in Budapest. With 11 tracks in all, the album combines a little bit of everything as far as sourcing goes, with a mix of covers, re-recorded Anka hits from decades past, brand-new original songs, and in one case, a first-time Anka recording of a song he co-wrote with Michael Jackson for Jackson. That song, “Love Never Felt So Good,” appeared on the posthumous Jackson album Xscape in 2014. Anka puts a warmer, springlike spin on that upbeat,…
In the world of electronic pop, Danny L Harle is something of a Max Martin figure. Over the past several years, the English producer and songwriter has become a go-to collaborator for both emerging and established stars, generating an impressive list of hits while pushing the genre into colourful new directions.
As a solo artist, Harle’s music is decidedly weirder. As a member of PC Music, the revolutionary collective out of London, Harle helped define the exaggerated, bubblegum-and-supersaw sound that defined early hyperpop. On 2021’s Harlecore — a marvellously absurd, high-concept album that imagined a virtual club soundtracked by Harle’s four rave-focused alter-egos — he dove headlong into happy hardcore, gabber…
For a few minutes in 1976 – America’s bicentennial year and the 15th anniversary of California-sun ambassadors The Beach Boys – the hype was right: Brian Wilson was back. On November 27th, the group’s resident, troubled genius was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. And he was solo, his first TV appearance without brothers Dennis and Carl, Mike Love and Al Jardine since a legendary recital of Surf’s Up in the 1967 documentary Inside Pop. Brian’s three SNL songs included an eerie ‘Good Vibrations’ – alone and skittish at a piano in a faux-sandbox set – and ‘Back Home’, a jaunty original from the Beach Boys’ latest LP, 15 Big Ones, with the SNL band even though the former were in town selling out Madison Square Garden.
Brian also performed ‘Love Is a Woman’, a new…
Bug Teeth’s debut full-length arrives softly, building and scrutinising loss down to its fine veins, even as it gazes upward to the skies.
With a title drawn from Robert Hooke’s 17th-century scientific text magnifying the minutiae of living forms, Micrographia zeroes in on the subtleties of grief, familial memory and the burden of loving someone who is gone.
At the heart of the album is the rupture of PJ Johnson’s life when their mother died suddenly in 2021 which left them unmoored and desperate to make sense of the absence. “Tapeworm” questions if her mother would prefer no children if she were to live her life over, “With time again would you give it up / A sacrifice / Would you give me up?” It’s a crippling place to begin.
Backtracking a bit from previously issued volumes of the series, Musik Music Musique 1979: The Roots of Synth Pop functions as a sort of prequel, mapping out the blueprint of the new wave revolution of the ’80s, from synth-heavy post-punk and art rock to some of synth pop’s earliest chart-toppers. It’s not as if electronic instruments weren’t prominent in popular music before 1979, but synthesizers were clearly well on their way to being a defining characteristic of the musical landscape. The set starts with the Buggles’ “Technopop,” proposing a name for the music of the future — Kraftwerk would later give a song a similar title on 1986’s Electric Café, which originally had the working title Techno Pop as well, and decades later, a reissue retroactively bore…
Formed in 2020, toso toso is made up of producer, drummer, and sound designer Kabir Adhiya-Kumar; synth and keyboardist Rahul Carlberg; producer and guitarist Celia Hill; and interdisciplinary artist Isabel Crespo Pardo, the group’s vocalist and wordsmith.
Essentially a wide-ranging supergroup of left-field solo acts from across a plethora of musical forms as classical pianists sit beside sound designers and improvisational vocalists, toso toso forge these disparate crafts into something dense, emotional and properly distinctive on their self-titled debut album.
Opener ‘cLAcLAcLA’ serves as a microcosm of the record; bounding out in a flurry of micro-sampled chaos, like the contents of your…
Dinamarca has a soft spot for vocalists. In 2019, he invited a host of artists to perform vocals on his LP Sol De Mi Vida, then went on to record a reggaeton EP with Bay Area singer La Favi, a trap single with rising Chilean rapper AKRIILA, and now this hyperpop/reggaeton hybrid with Ángel Ballesteros — lead singer of pop-perreo trio Meth Math. Earlier Dinamarca productions would have spoken to the hard and fast dembow of Meth Math tracks like “Mermelhada” from their last LP Chupetones, which was co-produced by Nick León. But as of 2018, Dinamarca has been kneading out the harder edges of his reggaeton rattle into something generally mellower and happier. His first foray with Meth Math leaned towards trap, while his solo debut album soñao pulled…
Jessica Pratt sings in a voice as gentle as unspun wool, but her stories feel deeply rooted, like they were born from a collective subconscious to reveal fundamental truths about human longing. Asher White gets at similarly heady ideas: leaving your city to seek reinvention, wondering whether your fate is predetermined. But where Pratt works primarily in the folk tradition, White’s approach is decidedly contemporary, drawing from Palberta and 100 gecs’ internet-laden glitchiness. Her music has the jangling, intentionally constructed commotion of an artist who synthesizes new sounds to understand something essential about the world she lives in.
As timeless as Pratt’s songs have always been, she’s followed a clear evolution since…
…40CD box set houses 319 tracks; the playing time is more than 28 hours. If features seven-inch single versions, 12-inch single versions, remixes, B-sides and non-album tracks.
Summer Time: The Singles Collection 1974-2010, coming from the late singer’s Driven by the Music catalogue imprint, is set to be a staggering tribute to Donna Summer’s decades-long presence as a dancefloor filler. Timed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of her breakthrough hit “Love to Love You, Baby,” this 40CD set will highlight five decades’ worth of single sides she issued all over the world, from early Dutch single-only tracks to material from her tenures on Casablanca, Geffen, Mercury, Warner Bros., Atlantic and more. Amidst the familiar hits (“Love to Love…
Yamila Rios is a kind of sound vessel — a composer, singer, and cellist who has the ability to conjure ethereal beauty in multiple contexts, carving out a space where gauzy textures, elegant melodic gestures, an almost subversive rhythmic presence, and trippy incantations mingle, collide, and pull apart. While she makes drifty, ambient pop as Yamila, she’s also been actively collaborating with choreographers and dance companies. Despite placid surfaces, her music pulses with movement. Splitting her time between Madrid, in her native Spain, and Brussels, Belgium, Yamila has found strong collaborators in the Echo Collective, whose founding duo — violinist Margaret Hermant and violist Neil Leiter — has established it as one of the go-to string ensembles in…
From the moment we are born, we begin the long walk home. Elizabeth and Beverly and Glenn-Copeland started down the path together nearly half a century ago, and have been trailing it since, hand in hand and song by song. Together, they’ve made a life sharing their unselfish hearts-ones too large for earthly configuration-through art and community, encouraging us all to take our own dance down the road with elemental love and grace.
Now, as Glenn lives with a version of Dementia known as LATE, their walk has taken on a different weight. Out of this season comes Laughter In Summer, an album the couple made together-realizing, before long, that it was a love letter to one another: a tender ledger of memories, shared devotion, grief and joy.
…”Microwave,” the 1989 track from Japanese singer Kyoko Koizumi, opens with a plasticky creak and a kitchen timer ring. Adding in crunchy guitar samples, a thudding drum machine and a house-inspired keyboard solo, the chart-topping vocalist embraced the playful spirit that defined Japan’s experimental ’80s genre, known as techno kayō, or techno pop. Positioned on the B-side of the new vinyl-only compilation, Techno Kayō Vol. 1: Japanese Techno Pop 1981-1989, “Microwave” proves that this sometimes-underestimated genre still has the power to surprise.
Lovingly compiled by Toshihito “Dubby” Maeyama (owner of Onda records) and Antal Heitlager (co-founder of Amsterdam’s renowned Rush Hour label), Vol. 1 sets out to establish…
As an artist who tries to present your art in more forms than one, there are so many obstacles in front of you, particularly if you try to present a certain concept or concept through it. It not only requires a ton of talent but also hours of hard work to make something sensible out of it.
Producer, singer, rapper, and visual artist Quadeca is one such artist who started out by presenting his work through YouTube, whose previous work which slowly took him to a spot at last year’s Coachella Music Festival. Now, Quadeca is coming with his latest concept album and a feature film Vanisher, Horizon Scraper, through which he presents a concept, as he puts it, “about a man who sets sail alone in search of freedom but is unknowingly drifting toward destruction”.
CBGB’s was the center of the N.Y.C. punk explosion, as well as a welcoming place to play for all the artists and bands who followed in the wake. CBGB: A New York City Soundtrack 1975-1986 is a four-disc set that seeks to paint a picture of the original scene as it burst out into the open as well as detailing the various sounds and movements, like no wave and hardcore, that were born in the ensuing years. All the groups one would hope for are here, represented by slightly deeper cuts — Talking Heads’ sprightly live version of “A Clean Break” for one — along with a ton of lesser-known bands and a healthy dose of super-obscure ones. It’s the kind of collection where even someone with a healthy knowledge of the scene will be constantly surprised. One surprise element…
Lia Braswell’s Rising is forceful and expressive. Each song sounds an individual statement without there being any real sonic outliers (or weak points, for that matter) in the bunch. This makes for an intense listen, but a rich and engaging one too. The musical backbone is a relentless dance rock, mixing the thundering beats and assertive electronics of Pet Shop Boys or the Eurythmics with the breakneck, organic rush of Florence + The Machine and the complex, artful freedom of Wye Oak.
“Out of Sight” belongs to the 1980s, with a thudding, dead-eyed beat, glancing, urgent bleeps, and big burns of synthesizer that curl into a spacious instrumental bridge. “One Too Many” is another for the Less Than Zero crowd with some Duran Duran menace programmed…
Following a 2025 Record Store Day Black Friday release, Linda Ronstadt’s The Early Years compilation comes to general retail on 2LP vinyl and single CD. The set from Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists label brings together 15 songs from Ronstadt’s 1967-1974 Capitol Records period (with some surprising omissions, such as “Desperado”). Selections include “Different Drum,” “Faithless Love,” “You’re No Good,” “Long, Long Time,” and “When Will I Be Loved.”
The Early Years is a stunning new compilation that celebrates the formative era of one of music’s most powerful and pioneering voices — Linda Ronstadt.
Featuring breakout hits like “Different Drum” and the Grammy-nominated “Long, Long Time,” The Early Years traces Ronstadt’s artistic…
Bob Lind has a mighty back catalogue. He recorded his first album nearly 60 years ago; he’s been recording almost consistently ever since, and his songs have been covered by over 200 artists, including Glen Campbell, Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton, Eric Clapton, Nancy Sinatra and The Four Tops. In recent years, he’s found a musician who really does get Lind musically and spiritually. Producer Jamie Hoover has worked with Lind on the last three of his albums and continues this work on the latest. Joining Lind and Hoover on the album is professor, composer, sideman and session musician George Wurzbach, as well as overdub engineer Brad Gagne at Sentient Sound Studios in North Miami. Between the four of them, they swapped various elements of…
James Walsh’s It’s All Happening is a masterclass in quiet intensity. The Starsailor frontman has always had a knack for turning fragile and thoughtful moments into rousing anthems for the band. With his latest solo offering, he strips everything back to raw emotion – stripped of spectacle, It’s All Happening is Walsh at his most intimate: tender, precise, and quietly electrifying.
Every track feels lived-in, the kind of songs that could only come from someone with James’ songwriting pedigree. Following 2023’s Coming Good, Walsh continues his reflective solo journey, exploring love, heartbreak, and the empowering triumphs of self-discovery.
Written, produced, and performed by James, the album flourishes in its restraint.
The A’s, The B’s and The Monkees, at long last, brings together on 2 CDs all of the band’s commercial singles originally released between 1966 and 1970, from “Last Train to Clarksville” b/w “Take a Giant Step” through “Oh My My” b/w “I Love You Better.”
The A’s from Messrs. Jones, Dolenz, Nesmith, and Tork include songs from Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Neil Diamond, John Stewart, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller: the chart-topping “Last Train to Clarksville,” “I’m a Believer,” and “Daydream Believer,” along with the hits “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” (No. 2), “Pleasant Valley Sunday” (No. 3), “Valleri” (No. 3), and “D.W. Washburn” (No. 19).
The B’s are no less filled with fan favorites…