…20th-anniversary edition has been remastered from the original tapes and includes an exclusive live LP of the band’s performance at the 2007 Lowlands Festival in Biddinghuizen, Netherlands.
In the metal community, there are two veteran/legendary bands that, whenever they release a new album, you know pretty much what you’re going to get. We’re talkin’ ’bout AC/DC and Motörhead, of course. While the former band now takes several years between albums, the latter cranks them out on a much more frequent basis, as evidenced by the arrival of 2006’s Kiss of Death (which arrived barely over two years since 2004’s Inferno). The fact that the hard-living group is still at it is an astonishing feat unto itself, but when you realize they’re still keeping pace with…
Category: rock
One of the most patriotic albums of 2026 comes from a place of shame and disgust. Watching the country passively shift toward authoritarian rule and turn its back on the principles and ideals the U.S. was founded on in favor of racism, tribalism, and a raft of other -isms, Adam Weiner, better known as Low Cut Connie, has delivered a stellar call to action against the bigots in charge with Livin in the USA. Across 10 tracks, he oscillates between highlighting just how low we have sunk as a country and grabbing the wheel, jerking the album into a more upbeat tempo that refuses to let the fascists steal our collective joy. Nowhere is this clearer than on the first two cuts: the title track is a moody, piano- and electric guitar-driven lament about living in a country that…
Toronto was always a sort of musical melting pot, so it is no wonder that the core trio of Toronto-based, Brazilian native multi-instrumentalist Felipe Sena with co-writers Artu Bastos and Dan McLay that goes by the name of Orbital Ensemble, has found its nesting place there.
With a help of a multitude of truly experienced musicians, this true ensemble has come up with its second album, Continua, recorded primarily live with the core six-piece that is often the manner in which Orbital Ensemble plays on stage, Sena, Bastos, and company have come up with something that is labelled quite precisely as neotropical psychedelic sound.
And yes, that is exactly what this mostly instrumental music sounds like – a combination…
Who needs frivolous instruments like guitars or four string basses to make frisky, rollicking pop rock? Not the dudes in the self-titled Lester Winchester McKendree trio.
While the unusual arrangement of keyboards, drums and two string bass might seem like they’re working with a few hands tied behind their backs, the offbeat lineup provides such a rich, full sound, few will notice, or care, about missing instruments (or bass strings). With the somewhat boastfully titled They Got It All, these guys lock into a groove and ride it for ten sharp, snappy tunes that’ll leave even the grouchiest listener grinning.
Although the three musicians share equal billing, two-string bassist (influenced by Morphine’s late Mark Sandman’s similarly primitive…
Phish release a new digital box set, Phish: Live In Saratoga Springs 2025. The 55-song compilation collects the Vermont quartet’s complete three-night run at Saratoga Springs, NY’s Broadview Stage at Saratoga Performing Arts Center, which takes place at the tail end of the first leg of the band’s 2025 summer tour. Each of the shows, held from July 25–27, 2025, contains some notable moments: Phish’s opening night features a completely seamless second set, the middle night includes teases of N.I.B. by Black Sabbath, Walk This Way by Aerosmith, December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night) by The Four Seasons, and other tunes, while the final night becomes an instant classic, opening with Tweezer Reprise and culminating with the first-ever “Tweezer” encore…
Carry On the sophomore solo album by the late rocker Chris Cornell has recently been reissued and expanded. The Steve Lillywhite-produced 2007 album finds Cornell shifting the alt-rock sounds he cultivated as frontman for Soundgarden and supergroup Audioslave into a more introspective, darker direction. Highlights include singles “No Such Thing” and “Arms Around Your Love,” a cover of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” (here extended from its original album release) and the film mix of Cornell’s hard-driving “You Know My Name,” the terrific theme song to 2006’s Casino Royale, the first James Bond film to star Daniel Craig as the British spy. This digital edition also includes two studio bonus tracks initially available on U.K. and Japanese pressings.
After the early-Nineties alt-rock explosion, bands that had made it big in the Eighties largely pulled their hair out trying to fit in. U2 went disco. Guns N’ Roses spent about 25 years chasing Chinese Democracy. And Metallica? Well, they just got weird — and, contrary to popular belief, that wasn’t a bad thing.
Neither of the quartet’s Load albums, released in 1996 and 1997, sound overtly “alt,” since James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett’s riffs owed a greater debt to the blues and Lynyrd Skynyrd than shoegaze or Pixies. But they achieved a simulacrum of “alt,” at least for headbangers, by playing with a looseness that still feels like a rejection of the white-knuckle thrashing that earned them their legend. Hetfield had learned…
Though vaguely considered along the lines of noise, space rock, dream pop and psychedelic, The Telescopes have consistently expanded boundaries, colouring outside the lines with possibility. This house has many rooms, embraced across genres, influential to many, all embracing, in an orbit of its own. Static Charge is The Telescopes’ 19th studio album since the group’s inception in 1988 – and their 7th release on Tapete Records.
After a three-month tour of the UK and Europe, the all embracing sounds of The Telescopes return with a lean blitz of seditionary hits. Take a jolt of Static Charge and step beyond the realm of natural vision. Stone age beats, outsider sounds, low end disturbance unite in resistance to the new weirdness of existence.
…’Steal Your Face’ has been newly remastered by David Glasser and sourced from the master tapes which were restored and speed-corrected using Plangent Processes.
Grateful Dead’s fifth live album, Steal Your Face, presents the band during a “farewell” run at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in October of 1974. Feeling the impacts of years of touring, along with the responsibilities involved with incorporating their massive Wall of Sound system into their shows, the Dead went on a hiatus from touring after the five Winterland dates, though they would be gathering just a few months later to begin work on the album Blues for Allah. Along with Steal Your Face being released in 1976, the Winterland shows were documented on film for…
…Bruce Springsteen started off his packed Pittsburgh show with an earnest (but scripted) speech, calling these dangerous times for America, lambasting the current administration and calling for a celebration and defense of American ideals, democracy and the Constitution. For the record, he added a few more of those lengthy diatribes throughout the night. But Springsteen and his E Street Band did their best to channel the “righteous power” of arts, music and rock ‘n’ roll over almost three hours on the group’s Land of Hope & Dreams American tour.
“Tonight we ask all of you to join with us in choosing hope over fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over lawlessness, ethics over unbridled corruption,…
…This expanded edition has been newly remastered from the original tapes and includes five bonus tracks and two additional discs featuring live performances recorded on the ‘Magic Is a Child’ tour at Hofstra University, Long Island and The Community Theater, Phoenix, AZ in October and November 1977.
Magic Is a Child was released in 1977, the debut for new Nektar guitarist Dave Nelson. Carrying on, though, from where their last set left off, Nektar’s fascination with shorter, punchier songs continued unabated, even while the keyboards continued to swell and the guitars shifted ever more toward the symphonic. Nektar’s brightening vistas were new, however, and a fatal flaw as far as their fans were concerned. They didn’t want…
For more than a decade, River Shook fronted Sarah Shook and the Disarmers, a raucous but fitfully tender country-rock unit that, for most of its run, hit the bottle as hard as it hit the pavement. In that grandest of country music traditions, the Disarmers’ songs were honest reflections of the blackout-chasing lives the members were living, but that changed when Shook got sober in 2019. The albums that followed, especially 2024’s incisive Revelations, were more clear-eyed; they also exposed the fault lines that had begun to destabilize the Disarmers. In June 2025, Shook played their final show with their longtime band. By then, they’d already begun working on the nervy, forthright songs that would become their eponymous solo debut.
On Dear God, The Pretty Reckless returns with another introspective album pairing hard-rocking riffs with intricate melodies and powerful vocals. The New York rockers’ fifth studio album gives equal time to soft, contemplative moments and rock aggression.
The Pretty Reckless’s biggest weakness has always been an overreliance on generic chord progressions, especially in the choruses. That’s still a problem at times on Dear God, most notably on the milquetoast power ballad “About You.” Their biggest strength is the combination of Taylor Momsen’s smoky, soulful voice and Ben Phillips’s hard rock riffs.
On the 2014 album Going to Hell, Momsen sang about judgment and sins that would lead to…
Each American Aquarium album is best viewed as a slice of BJ Barham’s life. The frontman writes in the moment, and his music is a distillation of the world as he sees it, and the life he has carved for himself along with his wife, Rachael, and their 8-year-old-daughter, Pearl, in the increasingly-suburbanized Wendell, NC, a half hour east of Raleigh. In the two years since the last Aquarium record, as he wrote and recorded what became New Ways to Lose, Barham has been thriving.
Aquarium’s 12th studio album showcases the band at the top of its game and Barham at the top of his craft as a songwriter. More than a decade into sobriety, and nearly that long into parenthood, Barham has a content life in his midcentury-era home a few blocks from downtown…
Here comes the science bit, concentrate: all you space nerds out there will be well aware that ‘the Wow! signal’ was of course a narrowband radio signal detected by Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope back in August 1977. So intense was its strength and so mysterious was its frequency that it was chalked up to being from bloody aliens. Astounded astronomer Jerry R. Ehman simply scribbled Wow! on the initial report.
Ever since their gothic sci-fi masterpiece 2001 album Origin of Symmetry, Muse have been largely preoccupied with matters of life up there and who’s really pulling the strings down here. For frontman Matt Bellamy, his obsession with the stars, conspiracy and the great beyond seems to come from an undying need for answers,…
Five nights later, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band returned to the World’s Most Famous Arena with their fans’ interests piqued. A fantastic performance was anticipated for their New York finale, especially after increasingly stellar showings in Elmont and Brooklyn, and MSG night one in-between, but there was also hope that this second night in the same venue may bring a setlist change or two, as it had in Inglewood’s Kia Forum in early April. That hope would ultimately be in vain as Springsteen and the E Street Band stayed on course with what they’ve been playing since that second night in Inglewood, meaning they eclipsed the five straight identical setlists between April 7th to April 23rd with this sixth successive show of ‘the same’. That’s something that hadn’t…