The third solo album by New Orleans D.I.Y. musician Urq (Spllit, W-9), This Dismal Village marks his Exploding in Sound label debut.
It’s his first to be recorded entirely on a four-track cassette Portastudio, almost ditching any digital elements in the process (although some chords from a phone app were looped into “Kings in Bed,” for instance). A dingy, lo-fi blend of playful prog-pop, druggy psychedelia, angular punk, and alternate tunings, it’s a dystopia-themed concept album that travels through time with stops in the Dark Ages, the 1950s, and the present, and each track represents a location in the village. While not recommended for those in a dour or earnest mood, cynicism is welcome.
Inspired by Shirley Jackson’s novel We Have…
Category: art rock
Newly remastered 4CD box set by Peter Hammill featuring his first four studio albums issued on his own label, Fie! Records, between 1992 and 1996. Peter Hammill first came to prominence as the founding member and voice of the legendary progressive rock group Van der Graaf Generator.
Alongside his work with Van der Graaf Generator, Peter Hammill has enjoyed a long career as an innovative and ground-breaking solo artist. In 1992 he established his own label, Fie!, to handle his solo work, beginning with the release of the acclaimed ‘Fireships’ that year. A more introspective work, the album was labelled in the original liner notes as “Number 1 in the BeCalm series” and received much critical praise thanks to songs such as ‘I Will Find You’, ‘Curtains’ and ‘Gaia’.
The remarkable output of Ekseption, is compiled in this 13-part CD box set, Planet Ekseption.
Their real breakthrough came in 1969, when their first album Ekseption was released. With their unique combination of classical music and pop, they achieved international success and released 6 popular albums in 3 years. Keyboardist Rick van der Linden gave the band its recognisable sound during that period, until he left in 1973. After his departure, their success slowly declined, even though there were reunions later on.
Planet Ekseption brings together their musical legacy with remastered albums and rare bonus material.The first 9 albums have been remastered from the original master tapes. The remaining 3 albums have been mastered…
After Black Midi called it quits in 2023, bassist/co-vocalist Cameron Picton eventually started making music on his own. Although he was drawn to a more spacious, acoustic sound than that of his former band, his approach was still dramatic and unpredictable in nature. Not quite sure if he wanted to be in another band, he ultimately did bring in collaborators for his debut album, among them members of experimental London group caroline, singer/songwriter/composer Kiran Leonard, and veteran percussionist Steve Noble. Featuring shifting, often trippy narratives (he cited King Crimson as an influence), he named the project and the album My New Band Believe. Without offering much in the way of a through line other than the concept of “dream logic,”…
Recorded and mixed over a three-day span in March of 2025, then pressed on cassette quickly enough to be given away with their Which Direction Goes the Beam, which hit shelves in April, Bunker Intimations II finds Index for Working Musik at their most spontaneous and improvisatory. The nature of the recording seems to inspire the group to tap into the latent darkness found in their “real” songs and basically sounds like a 48-minute haunting. The songs rarely rise above the level of a cloaked whisper, scratchy violins carry the near-melodies, and the rest of the band sets the controls for the heart of spookiness. Only “Going to Heaven on the End of a String (Papal Version)” has vocals, the rest of the songs allow the space between the notes to fill in where the voices…
The storied, three-decade (and counting) career of American visual and performance artist, sculptor, photographer, filmmaker, costume designer, and musician Marnie Weber (b. 1959) began with gigs paid in beer at an LA trucker bar in 1977. Her band, Party Boys, formed in artists’ hangout spots in downtown LA’s semi-abandoned industrial zones. Weber was then 19 and had just left home. After a handful of shows, the bar’s owner asked if she and her female bandmate would perform nude. Taking this as a sign to leave LA, they promptly took off to London. However, their search for more ethical trade there was arrested by a harrowing experience. The band were violently assaulted following a cancelled gig, resulting in the destruction of their instruments, their singer’s…
Magma’s Cosmic Masterpiece: The Absolute Classic Live Album That Redefined Progressive Music Magma’s mythic 1975 live set, captured in full fire at Paris’ Taverne de l’Olympia, returns to mark its 50th anniversary with a stunning new edition. Presented as an exclusive 2LP pressing on translucent blue vinyl and housed in a deluxe gatefold sleeve, this release honors one of the most powerful live documents in progressive music history. Widely hailed as one of the greatest live albums ever recorded, Live captures the band at their most transcendent, delivering a performance that shattered genre boundaries and redefined the possibilities of rock. The recording radiates raw intensity, precision, and an otherworldly vision that remains unmatched decades later.
Zappa Records is rolling out its first archival release of 2026, and in doing so, is belatedly celebrating the 50th anniversary of one of Frank Zappa’s landmark releases. Bongo Fury, The Mothers of Invention’s 1975 collaboration with fellow iconoclast Don Van Vliet a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, is notable not only as the final original album to be released by Zappa and The Mothers but also as a transitional album featuring band members George Duke, Tom and Bruce Fowler, and Napoleon Murphy Brock alongside newer recruits such as Terry Bozzio and Denny Walley. Zappa was coming off a purple patch that saw his music reaching a new level of success (including the Gold-certified albums Over-Nite Sensation and apostrophe (‘), the latter of which reached the U.S. top ten)…
Long-standing U.S. art rock collective Biota releases a new album every few years. Measured Not Found, its first since 2019’s Fragment for Balance, is a woozy and disorienting journey through shimmering and haunting collages that have become the group’s signature sound.
The instrumentation is broad, including clavioline, French horn, prepared music boxes, Hammond organ, guitars, ektara, Fender Rhodes, strumstick, trumpet, bass, piano, synthesizer, harmonica, flute, rubab, pump organ, accordion, kit drums, tabla, biomellowdrone, bent circuits, dumbek, and violin. The most prominent are piano, synthesizer, guitar, and the other stringed instruments. Vocals are present on a handful of tracks.
Unlike any other outfit aside from…
…dEUS’ second album returns in a newly remastered edition, expanded with a selection of B-sides and rare recordings.
Producing the opening track “I Don’t Mind Whatever Happens” to sound like a scratchy blues track from 1930 may well be the little joke of either the band or producer Eric Drew Feldman in homage to his former boss Captain Beefheart. The results work pretty well anyway, though, and that characterizes the same “try it, let’s see what happens” spirit through In a Bar. Having established its own sense of savvy white boy urban blues on Worst Case Scenario, the band explores more ways around it on its second effort, generally favoring a quieter, calmer result throughout. New guitarist Craig Ward fits into the lineup well, business carrying…
…dEUS debut album remastered and added with B-sides and rarities.
About the only thing wrong with dEUS’ full-length debut is that the band put its best foot forward right at the start with the great “Suds & Soda.” A tense, energetic rip with Klaas Janzoons’ violin the final touch that sends everything over the top, it has all the wired energy of early-’90s rock, but with its own arty edge. The only thing quite like it might have been PJ Harvey’s early efforts, but with more feedback throughout the mix and a fine organ break. From that great start, the five-piece spent its time exploring its own interesting rock zone, referencing back to classic rock influences and jazz pioneers as much as any of its many frazzled contemporaries.
There’s something electrifying about a record that feels forged in the cracks between shifts, under fluorescent lights, and in the ache of repetition. Muffled Ears, the World Sounds Bad Quality, the new full-length from Reading’s Sightseeing Crew, pulses with that energy. It’s a record that grabs modern disorientation by the collar and turns it into something cinematic.
Written over a year split between manual graft, bar shifts, and desk hours, this is a body of work that understands routine from the inside. You can feel the grind in its rhythm, but instead of sinking under that weight, Sightseeing Crew explode it outward. The result is a kaleidoscopic blend of swirling sax lines, expansive guitar atmospheres and melodies that feel slightly bent out of shape.
Guitarist and composer Mike Johnson has co-led or led Denver-based avant-rock ensemble Thinking Plague since 1982. The band’s music has been roughly within the aesthetic orbit of Henry Cow and Art Bears, but with a distinct compositional bent. In that sense, it is arguably a more “American” sound based on tightly notated angularity, abrupt pivots, and timbral choices that are influenced as much by 20th-century classical as rock.
This is Johnson’s first solo album that he seeks to distinguish from his work with Thinking Plague. While a number of familiar collaborators from that outfit contribute on The Gardens of Loss (e.g., Elaine diFalco, Dave Willey, Bill Pohl, and Mark Harris), so does an 11-piece orchestral section of strings, reeds, and brass.
Equipment Pointed Ankh is a truly bizarre collective. While the profile of Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band has risen precipitously over the last few years, the same gang of adventurers has continued to make strange, colorful, mostly instrumental music as Equipment Pointed Ankh behind the scenes — of which Eggs a Little Late is the latest taste. It sounds as though this fresh batch of music has been influenced by the collective’s recent recording and touring experiences as The Roadhouse Band, stirring in more honky-tonk, country-rock influences, and it’s certainly more accessible than their last couple of efforts, 2023’s excellent From Inside the House and Downtown!
The clearest throughline from past EPA recordings is the two spoken-word pieces,…
Electric Cowbell Records announces the launch of Richmond Relics, a new archival imprint dedicated to preserving the city’s musical history. Its inaugural release is a newly remastered reissue of FA3574, the sole album from Richmond, Virginia’s legendary supergroup Famous Actors From Out of Town. Originally self-released in 1986 as a limited-edition, cassette-only title, FA3574 was recorded at Floodzone, a repurposed tobacco warehouse studio in Richmond.
The album features ten original instrumental tracks that capture the group’s kinetic chemistry and their off-kilter blend of late-’70s/early-’80s art rock, jazz, noise, and improvisation. Nearly forty years later, the recordings remain strikingly vibrant. Now fully remastered for vinyl, FA3574…
Knowing when to stop is a much-undervalued attribute, particularly in the music industry. So rare is the artist who calls it a day – and doesn’t renege on the decision – they are exceptions that prove the rule. Syd Barrett, Mark Hollis, Meg White… Even rarer is knowing how to stop – David Bowie of course set the benchmark for career-concluding swan songs with 2016’s Blackstar.
But fellow New York resident JG Thirlwell has made a similar creative choice with the release of Halt, his tenth album under the Foetus nom de plume – satellite, remix and live releases notwithstanding. The record brings to a close a project that spans 45 years of exceptional creativity, and at times controversy.
There’s an apocryphal story about Thirlwell…
You might think you’re busy, but are you busy like Arnold de Boer of Zea? In addition to being the Ex’s mouthpiece for the past decade and a half, he’s been the singer, guitarist, songwriter, booker, driver, etc., of Zea for 31 years. Throughout that time, the project has continually morphed, operating as a one-man show, a stylistically chameleonic ensemble and a multi-continental, collaborative endeavor that often projects its messages in more than one tongue.
In Lichem Fol Beloften (“a body filled with promises”) is sung entirely in Frisian, the language spoken in de Boer’s northern Netherlands neck of the woods. He wrote some of the lyrics, taking others from poems translated into the dialect. If you get the CD or LP editions,…
It’s right there in the name: Thee Reps are passionate about repetition. They hammered the point home on their debut cassette, Minimal Surface. A half-decade later, substantial compositional growth has enabled the NYC-based five-piece to deepen and broaden their approach to music-making.
With Cryptocartography, repetition is now in service to the structure of Thee Reps’ songcraft. They’ve plunged deeper into the sea of iteration and have searched out new waters to explore. Improvisation and chamber music are even more prevalent than before, and the minimalist nests of repetition are even more elaborate. The album’s title alludes to mapping locations that are only rumored to exist; on Cryptocartography Thee Reps’…
“Some people only exist to prang me the fuck out,” decrees the softened Scouse accent of Unreal’s unreliable narrator Ned Green amidst the hurley-burly of early album highlight ‘Sleepers, Awake’. Amidst the catharsis of its geometric, interlocking guitar rhythms, and bee-in-yer-bonnet brass maelstroms, Green’s spoken-word narrations are cut-glass, surgical observations that glimmer with the same wry wit that scaffolds the best work by Richard Dawson, Neil Blackwell, Chris Morris, etc. He searches for deeper meaning in the commonplace; wants ecstasy in the everyday; and, should his ultimate goal be to be the first rock and roll singer to reference the ‘Shaver Only’ plug socket, he succeeds on all counts.
Legss have pottered along nicely in…
‘Aqualung Live’ is a recording of Jethro Tull performing their classic album ‘Aqualung’ in full, originally released in 2005 and now newly remastered.
Each era of rock music has had its own craftily marketed phenomenon — it was the “live album” in the ’70s, “unplugged” recordings in the ’90s, and since the late ’80s through the present day, the “tribute album.” But the early 21st century saw another addition — veteran bands revisiting classic albums and performing them in their entirety. Jethro Tull’s most enduring release is largely agreed to be 1971’s classic Aqualung, and in late 2004 Ian Anderson, Martin Barre, and their latest Tull mates dusted off the album once more in front of a small audience for XM Radio’s…