Perhaps all-star Boston-based band Reckoners can cheer up these frustrated Beantown sports fans with their sophomore release, Where the Hell Am I? The collaborative made a splash with their 2024 eponymous debut that featured Susan Tedeschi on vocals on some tracks. Tedeschi is not aboard this time, but Alan Evans of Soulive returns to co-produce, and the quasi supergroup lineup remains intact.
Upon first listen (not having heard the debut), the timeless rock and soul harked back to that glorious period of rock n’ roll when Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, Springsteen, Mellencamp, and blues rockers like the J. Geils Band ruled the radio. We could literally set the Reckoners sound back to that period. Yet, their effect is refreshing…
Category: rock
Looking back on her career in the early 90s, Stevie Nicks described the first track of Rock a Little as “the most exciting song that I had ever heard.” This coming from a superstar who was already closely affiliated with several bajillion-selling Fleetwood Mac albums – to say nothing of her own benchmark solo debut. Her remarks attest to the enthusiasm and effort she invested in her third record, a 1985 work that quickly furthered Nicks’ profile and cemented itself as a piece of 80s pop lore.
Mastered at MoFi’s California studio, strictly limited to 3,000 numbered copies, and housed in mini-LP-style gatefold packaging, Mobile Fidelity’s hybrid SACD presents Rock a Little in audiophile sound for its 40th anniversary. Helmed by a cadre of producers and engineers, and recorded…
The follow-up to their show-stopping UK Top 20 album ‘Promised Land’, The Karma Effect arrive with their third record, Cruel Intentions the most complete, crystal-clear realisation of their ambitions yet: leaner, louder, heavier, and joyously larger-than-life.
Exploring love, lust, and danger with dark passion and flashes of cheekiness, the songs balance swagger and wit. The band’s modus operandi is “modern vintage”, a desire to polish up the retro sounds they were raised on into a gleaming, modern product. Although some line-up changes occurred in the background (which sees Nathan Keevil join them on bass, Alan Taylor on drums, and Tom Pitt on keys), a turn of events that could have left them on shaky…
Khun Narin’s Electric Phin Band return with their first new album in a decade III – and their first ever recorded inside a professional studio. Produced by Tommy Brenneck (known for his work with Amy Winehouse, Charles Bradley, Sharon Jones, Beyoncé, Mark Ronson, and The Budos Band) at Diamond West, the album captures the band with a depth and clarity never heard before – without sacrificing the ecstatic propulsion that defines them. The group does not simply perform songs; they create momentum.
Khun Narin’s Electric Phin Band are a multi-generational psychedelic powerhouse from rural Thailand whose ecstatic, amplifier-blown folk music has quietly become one of the most unlikely global cult phenomena of the last decade.
As a follow-up for their Live feat. Annie Golden album Brooklyn’s power pop meets New Wave band The Shirts look back at their first act again with another rambunctious in concert release. Live at Paradise 1979. The show was recorded for a radio broadcast by local station WBCN at Boston’s Paradise Rock Club on August 27, 1979, shortly after their second album Street Light Shine. The tapes were digitized by Wout de Kruif (Dutch Tape Transfers) and demixed/remastered by retired sound engineer Prof Stoned.
It was a weird time for the band. Lead singer Annie Golden had a part in the movie adaptation of Hair and was under pressure to leave the band and become a full-time actress. She turned it down, but in hindsight this period…
There’s a reason Greg Lake deemed Trilogy “such an accurate record” when looking back at it decades later. Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s third studio album teems with exacting arrangements, copious overdubs, and multi-hued colors that showcase the band’s willingness to experiment and desire to put everything in its proper place without becoming too self-serious. Expanding by distilling the ferocious power of its debut and epic leanings of the preceding Tarkus into a more accessible whole, Trilogy stands as the most representative example of the ensemble’s trademark styles.
Mastered at MoFi’s California studio and housed in a mini-LP-type gatefold sleeve, Mobile Fidelity’s numbered-edition hybrid SACD of Trilogy presents the gold-certified effort in audiophile sound.
“What strikes me again, even now, is that rock from the late ’60s through the early ’70s remains the most compelling – whether Western or Japanese. In the mid-1960s, British groups like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones swept across the globe, while in the United States Bob Dylan famously swapped his folk guitar for an electric one, igniting the folk-rock movement. From the surge of new energy among young people in Britain and America – entwined with hippie culture, drugs, and the radical momentum of the anti-Vietnam War movement – an extraordinary body of rock music emerged, ushering in what would become the golden age of rock in the 1970s. In Japan, from around 1968, record companies began grouping these sounds under the label “New Rock”…
The dominant theme of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band’s 2023-2024 concerts was mortality, with key songs such as “Ghosts,” “Last Man Standing” and “I’ll See You in My Dreams” tackling the topic head-on. With their European Land of Hope and Dreams Tour, last year, though, politics started to play a greater role. And their current Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour is even more political. And more urgent.
“We never planned this tour, but we came out because I needed to feel your hope, your strength, and I needed to hear your voices,” Springsteen, 76, said near the end of his sold-out April 20 concert at The Prudential Center in Newark. “My wish is that we brought some hope and some strength for you tonight.”
Primitive Ring is a hard rock power trio, forged in biker rock grime, heavy metal swagger, psychedelic flakes, and bad attitude. Their debut album is reductively self-titled and their sound is similarly free from frills and niceties. Guitarist Charles Moothart made his bones in the Ty Segall universe and much of his musical DNA has made the trip, which makes for an album that would slot in nicely with his work. Bassist Bert Hoover and drummer Jon Modaff are also familiar with the kind of Blue Cheer-meets mustachioed garage rockers vibe and the trio lock together in greasy precision throughout the record. most of the tracks have all the grace of a motorcycle doing donuts on the lawn outside a high school on the first day of summer. Pounding the hooks into…
As founding member and principal songwriter of The Pineapple Thief, Bruce Soord has spent the last decade steadily refining a voice that balances emotional directness with musical restraint. Ghosts In The Park, his latest solo album, is his most personal and unguarded work to date: a record shaped by loss, memory, and the quiet spaces that reveal themselves when life continues to move while everything else appears to stop.
Written over a two-year period while Soord was touring extensively with The Pineapple Thief, the album emerged in hotel rooms, unfamiliar cities, and moments of enforced solitude. Against this backdrop, Soord was navigating the drawn-out decline and eventual death of his father, alongside the continued progression…
Green World Image is the second album and Sub Pop debut of spirited post-punk revivalists Telehealth, a group that build on both the sound and subversion of acts like Devo and the B-52s while updating subject matter for the 2020s. Launched from the Seattle music scene by married couple Alexander Attitude and Kendra Cox, Telehealth are fleshed out by members of Slowdive, Tomten, and other indie projects. Attitude and Cox particularly evoke the B-52s at times thanks to the couple’s dual and rotating lead vocals and accented enunciation. The album begins, however, with the soothing voiceover track “[user onboarding sequence],” which asks, “What if there was a model for living that connects people, finances, nature, and technology into one seamless…
Isotope was formed in 1973 by talented guitarist Gary Boyle and originally featured Jeff Clyne on bass, Brian Miller on keyboards and Nigel Morris on drums. Clyne had previously played with Ian Carr’s Nucleus, while Gary Boyle had played with Stomu Yamashta’s East Wind.
Isotope’s self-titled debut album was released in 1974 and continued the tradition of Jazz Rock fusion that had been pioneered by acts such as Tony Williams’ Lifetime and The Mahavishnu Orchestra. Although their debut album was critically acclaimed, Brian Miller and Jeff Clyne departed Isotope shortly after its release and were replaced by former Soft Machine bassist Hugh Hopper and keyboard player Laurence Scott. This line-up recorded the excellent…
Sixty years after Pet Sounds changed the language of pop music forever, The Pet Sounds Sessions (Deluxe Edition) arrives less as a simple reissue and more as a museum-quality excavation of Brian Wilson’s masterpiece. Originally released as a landmark archival box set in 1997, the newly 2026 edition finally makes this enormous body of session material widely accessible again through streaming platforms and updated physical editions. The result is both overwhelming and fascinating: a deep dive into one of the most carefully constructed albums in popular music history.
For longtime Beach Boys fans, this release is almost mythical. The original Pet Sounds Sessions box had become increasingly difficult to find, often circulating through collectors, bootlegs…
Peter Frampton has released his first new album in 16 years. Carry the Light was co-written with his son, Julian, and features an intriguing cast of guest musicians, including H.E.R., Tom Morello, and Sheryl Crow.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer is continuing in spite of his inclusion body myositis (IBM) diagnosis in 2015. That’s seen him adapt his playing style to counter the generative disease’s effects, while (semi) recent live showings shredding the Beatles with Grace Bowers and Trey Anastasio, and soloing with Pearl Jam in Nashville, prove that the Les Paul-toting legend still has plenty of licks in him yet. Consequently, Carry the Light extends that sentiment, and Frampton hopes it can usher in a new era for him.
The All-American Rejects are back with their first album in 14 years, and their first ever independent release. At the height of their success in the early 2000s, the band had an established place in the pop rock landscape, one foot in emo culture and the other heading into the mainstream, but halted before they inevitably became too radio ready. Their return follows a string of free backyard pop-up concerts, a symbol of their intention to get back to their roots, American kids making fun, high octane rock, and Sandbox is a clear continuation of this energy.
With a catalogue of timeless hits behind them and a ready-made audience, the band really could have continued in any direction they wanted, but obviously planned their resurgence…
…Under Wraps: The Unwrapped Edition explores both Tull’s Under Wraps (1984) and Anderson’s debut as a solo artist, Walk Into Light (1983), via the kind of comprehensive presentation that fans of the series have learned to expect.
The impetus for bringing the albums together is their shared sound. Both albums deviated from the folk-rooted “classic rock” sound of the ‘70s to embrace a then-contemporary style with drum machines, synthesizers, and electronics. At the time, even the band members were split on Under Wraps; bassist Dave Pegg once opined that the outtakes from Tull’s previous album – one which pointed towards Under Wraps with its integration of electronics but still featured more traditional instrumentation, too – might have made…
