On the first two Fantastic Cat records, the quartet of singer-songwriters (Anthony D’Amato, Brian Dunne, Don DiLego, and Mike Montali) brought their own styles successfully into a band setting. However, on their third album, the cheekily titled Cat Out of Hell, Fantastic Cat feels like a long-running, well-oiled, veteran outfit.
Things are more fluid as individual contributions have melded, crafting an overall, interlocking sound. The extremely well-produced album adds sonic touches like strings, harpsichord, and tambourines to spruce up the group’s solid base of indie/folk rock tunes, all delivered with pristine harmonies and evocative lyrics.
Opening exuberantly with “Donnie Takes the Bus”, Fantastic Cat drops into a cheery,…
Category: rock
For the vast majority of the recorded output under his Plankton Wat pseudonym across well over two decades, Dewey Mahood has operated as a solitary sculptor. Yet, in more recent years, guest accomplices have been drafted-in to subtly contribute sonic parts or to help technically refine the end products, most notably on 2021’s tremendous wider-screen Future Times and 2024’s mesmerically minimised Corridors.
With The Vanishing World, Mahood goes a far fuller hog, in reconfiguring the project as a pan-dimensional quartet, drawing from the energy of largely undocumented Plankton Wat live line-ups; his past ensemble work with Eternal Tapestry, Galaxy Research and others; and embracing a more kaleidoscopic studio-enabled scope.
Joe Jackson has spent nearly half a century not staying in one place too long. Through highlights (1979’s new-wave-meets-bar-band debut, Look Sharp!) and lowlights (the 1997 classical concept LP Heaven & Hell), the British singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has crossed genres as frequently and effortlessly as the contemporary he’s most often compared to, Elvis Costello.
His previous record — 2023’s Mr. Joe Jackson Presents: Max Champion in ‘What a Racket!’ — was an all-original set of songs inspired by the waning days of British music hall, complete with boisterous horns, musicians banging on pots and pans, and numbers featuring plenty of double entrendes. At this point, there are only a few genres Jackson hasn’t yet graced.
Jim Jones is, of course, the scraggly British rock’n’roll Jesus who out-Stooged Iggy in the 80s with delirium rockers Thee Hypnotics, and has chased that fuzzy psych-punk high ever since under various names, line-ups and conjurations.
Black Crowe Chris Robinson produced this album, and also provided some vocals, as did ‘Mrs’ Marc Bolan Gloria Jones. Green On Red mainman Chuck Prophet also wanders in for some guitar musings. Does this qualify the ‘All Stars’ nomenclature? Yes. Who were you expecting? Slash? C’mon, man, everybody cool is dead these days.
Much like fellow junk-punk-funker Jon Spencer, JJ’s sound these days is stripped-down and laid bare, free of the youthful 17-minutes-long-with-four-guitar-solos excesses his previous…
Joyann Parker’s Life Lines embraces soul and grit over perfection. In place of overly polished production are genuinely heartfelt efforts, complete with powerful vocals from Parker. Simply, Life Lines is not an album you hear every day in modernity.
Parker started in music much later than many of her peers, which has profoundly influenced her career. Moreover, her success has been largely fan-driven, keeping her music genuine and earnest.
“I started doing this when I was older,” Parker recently told American Songwriter. “And so I felt like I had missed out on a lot. I thought, ‘I’ve got to fit in this box.’ I wasn’t very happy for a while; I don’t feel a lot of that pressure anymore.”
This raw, real approach is evident even in the simplest parts of this ’70s-tinged album,…
In the 1990s, during Japan’s second psychedelic revolution, three players with an insatiable appetite for epic aural freakouts were working overtime together in two simultaneous supergroup trios. When they weren’t busy with their regular bands, High Rise bassist Nanjo Asahito, Acid Mothers Temple guitarist Makoto Kawabata, and Ruins drummer Tatsuya Yoshida constituted both Musica Transonic and Mainliner.
In theory, these offshoots had somewhat distinct aims. Mainliner was all about kicking the monstrously heavy fuzz-fests of High Rise and Acid Mothers Temple up to another level. Musica Transonic was more about improv, imagining a world where the jazz element of free jazz was replaced by apocalyptic noise.
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…
Before a single note of music was played at the opening night of the 2026 Land of Hope and Dreams Tour, it was clear this wasn’t going to be a typical Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band concert. In a break from decades of tradition, the band walked onto the stage in total darkness, visible to the crowd only in hazy silhouette. Springsteen came out last, and addressed the capacity crowd at the Target Center in Minneapolis, speaking much like he did at the city’s No Kings rally a few days earlier.
“I want to begin the night with a prayer for our men and women overseas,” he said. “We pray for their safe return. The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock & roll in dangerous…
Clearlight was formed in 1973 and was the vision of gifted pianist and composer Cyrille Verdeaux. The first work to appear under the Clearlight name was ‘Clearlight Symphony’, recorded in 1973 and 1974 and first issued by Virgin Records in early 1975. The album was notable for featuring Gong members Steve Hillage, Tim Blake and Didier Malherbe. The follow-up album, ‘Forever Blowing Bubbles’ was recorded in the summer of 1975 and featured a full band formed by Verdeaux and former King Crimson violinist David Cross guesting among others.
1977’s ‘Les Contes du Singe Fou’ was recorded with a full band who now included former Magma violinist Didier Lockwood and was a fine fusion of jazz, psychedelic…
Angine de Poitrine are the most thrilling Canadian mystery since David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds. Though the anonymous Québécois duo had been gigging quietly around the Great White North for years, a single KEXP session last December at France’s Rennes Festival rapidly made them viral superstars. In bobbing paper-mâché masks and monochromatic wardrobes, these two “space-time voyagers”—known only as Klek de Poitrine and Khn de Poitrine—make weirdly danceable math-rock for muffled drums and comically fretted microtonal guitar. Self-described as a “Mantra-Rock Dada Pythagorean-Cubist Orchestra,” they’ve managed to rack up better view counts than the Tiny Desk Concerts from Clipse and Weezer. A copy of their debut, 2024’s Vol. I…
Live and Acoustic presents Trey Anastasio at his most stripped-back and introspective, capturing a series of performances from his sold-out 2025 Spring Acoustic Tour. Produced by Vance Powell and featuring longtime collaborator Jeff Tanski on keyboards, the album offers a focused and intimate listening experience.
Spanning 22 songs drawn from across Anastasio’s four-decade career, Live and Acoustic highlights the strength of his songwriting in its purest form. Without the expansive arrangements often associated with his work, the songs are allowed to breathe, revealing their melodic core and emotional depth. Fan favorites such as “Stash,” “Waste,” “Divided Sky,” and “Pebbles and Marbles” take on a new dimension in this setting…
U2’s second surprise six-track EP of 2026, Easter Lily arrives six weeks after Days of Ash – the period in the ecclesiastical calendar known as Lent. For U2 fans, it’s a case of feast rather than fast, with both releases standing alone and distinct from the band’s new studio album, for which recording sessions remain ongoing.
As The Edge explains in the new accompanying edition of the band’s Propaganda ’zine: “We wrote some songs meant for our album, but they started to assert themselves in some unexpected ways, demanding special attention, their own devotional world, suggesting they didn’t feel part of our album. So we folded… agreed to their timeline… the songs are the boss.”
These are certainly boss songs – Easter Lily…
After a five-year run of musically intrepid and critically acclaimed studio LPs – Absolute Zero, Non-Secure Connection, ‘Flicted, Deep Sea Vents – as well as entire albums’ worth of still-unreleased material, the virtuoso pianist suddenly found himself “creatively fried.”
Despite his best, well-intentioned efforts to step away from songwriting for a brief time, his creative musings ultimately prevailed. One particularly tenacious song idea led to several months of sleepless nights before Mr. Hornsby finally relented, resulting in the incredibly satisfying title track to his latest release, Indigo Park.
Within the ten tracks of Indigo Park, Mr. Hornsby and his uber-talented musical cohorts, The Noisemakers, this time…
8-CD Box Set – Newly mastered albums with bonus B-Sides and live shows.
After leaving Deep Purple, Ian Gillan retired from the music business to pursue other business ventures including ownership of the Kingsway studio, where in 1974 he began to work on his first post-Deep Purple solo tracks. This combined with a warm reception to his appearance at Roger Glover’s Butterfly Ball live show prompted him to form a new band.
Initially called Shand Grenade, Ian was persuaded by the management to change the band’s name to the Ian Gillan Band. He recruited guitarist Ray Fenwick, bass player John Gustafson, keyboard player Mike Moran and Mark Nauseef on drums, using Roger Glover as producer…
During the late ’70s, the beginnings of a wave of music heavily inspired by the garage rock and psychedelia of the 1960s began to swell. Chalk it up to many factors — the availability of a number of reissues, especially the Pebbles series, a disillusionment with the restrictive rules of punk rock, the passage of enough time so that the era seemed glamorous, the chance to get cheap vintage gear — but the result was an underground that evolved in many interesting directions and even went quite overground at different times. Cherry Red’s 2026 collection This Can’t Be Today: American Psychedelia & the Paisley Underground 1977-1988 looks to document the scene, gathering together the many strands and sounds of the time to present a comprehensive view.
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…
The Beatles are a singularly iconic rock band. While plenty of classic rock groups, like the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and, most successfully, Queen, continue to rack up tens of millions of monthly Spotify streams, no other band remains as relevant as the Beatles. Many YouTubers build popular channels by explaining musical theory through their songs or by delving into the supposed mysteries of how their music was created.
That makes it increasingly more challenging to find a new perspective on the group. With a Little Help from My Friends: Covers of the Beatles 1967-1970 may well provide some interesting new points of discussion. Does it make for an equally enjoyable listening experience?
This 3-disc box set from Cherry Red Records…
Matinee Acoustic Live at the Prince Albert finds Johnny Moped taking an unexpected turn with an acoustic set that, against all expectations, proves both engaging and highly entertaining. The very idea of a Johnny Moped acoustic performance might raise eyebrows among longtime fans, but the results speak for themselves.
Historically known for their chaotic and unpredictable shows, Johnny Moped have, in recent years, evolved into a far tighter and more dependable live act. That doesn’t mean the band have lost their edge—mistakes still happen, but within the Moped universe, they only add to the charm. What truly drives the performance is the same energy and excitement that has always defined them, and it remains fully intact here.
Paul Carrack is releasing a concert album recorded at Royal Albert Hall in London on Oct. 24, 2024, in celebration of 50 years of his first hit, “How Long,” recorded with Ace in 1974.
For One Night Only (Live in London) comprises two halves with Carrack joined by special guests SWR big band and orchestra playing songs from the album Don’t Wait Too Long and the second half featuring Carrack with his own band playing all his big hits. They’re joined on two tracks by a 150-piece choir, Funky Voices.
Dubbed by the BBC as “The Man With the Golden Voice,” Carrack’s breakthrough moment came when he wrote and sang “How Long” from his days with Ace. Paul also enjoyed great success as the voice behind numerous hits for…
Morning Star finds Këkht Aräkh arriving at a truer, more refined version of himself. Recorded between Berlin and Stockholm, the album emerges from a period of intense personal and artistic growth, blending aggressive black metal passages with immersive, textured soundscapes that feel both intimate and vast.
Since his origins in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, Dmitry (a.k.a. Crying Orc), the sole mastermind behind the project, has sought a distinctive path within black metal. This vision unfolded through his debut Through the Branches to Eternity EP (2018) and the albums Night & Love (2018) and Pale Swordsman (2021), establishing a signature tension between ferocious, visceral black metal and delicate, introspective ballads.