Four years have passed since we last heard from Nick Mitchell Maiato, at which time One Eleven Heavy, his sometime band with James Toth of Wooden Wand, had just released their third album, Poolside. Now, after some serious woodshedding, he returns with what is his sophomore album, Naquera, named after the Spanish pueblo in which he resides, that continues to mine the same musical seam, pulling country roots together with funky horns, jazzy guitar lines and deep grooves to create a modern take on the cosmic psychedelia so popular in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Mitchell Maiato’s previous work has, unsurprisingly, drawn comparisons to the Grateful Dead, and one immediately recognises those influences. However, bands such as Royal Trux…
Category: rock
Pop historian Jon Savage knows his way not only around compelling books, but also around coherent compilations of the most varied sonic contexts. Now he excavates, once again, the musical spirit of an era that produced legendary things: Savage illuminates San Francisco’s subculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, beyond the clichés of flower power. The picture Savage draws sounds scruffier, grainier, above all more faceted and more branched than the polished historiography would suggest.
‘Alabama Bound’, originally a folk traditional, was interpreted around 1966 by The Charlatans – meaning the psychedelic rock band that also bore this name – in a rather dragging, almost trance-like manner. Even so, the song’s country…
Henrik Olsson‘s Antumbra Ensemble is an eponymous, genre-blending effort composed, arranged, and led by the Swedish guitarist. The Copenhagen-based outfit contains members new and old. The rhythm section, double bassist Jeppe Skovbakke and drummer Rune Lohse, and tubist Kristian Tangvik, all return from Olsson’s Hand of Benediction I and II albums. They perform in tandem and contrast with a horn section that consists of alto saxophonist Michaela Turcerová, trumpeter Erik Kimestad Pedersen, and trombonist Petter Hängsel. They assist Olsson in creating a musical universe that reflects the influences and methodologies of Henry Cow, Henry Threadgill’s Very Very Circus, Sun Ra, Soft Machine, Marc Ribot, and Frank Zappa, employing…
…featuring two previously unreleased tracks recorded live in Nashville.
For 36 years and 14 albums, Texas songwriter James McMurtry has, in a sense, followed in his father’s footsteps, presenting his brand of country noir music as Larry McMurtry embraced literature in novels like “Lonesome Dove.” The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy is McMurtry’s second release on New West Records, coming four years after he pushed at the framework and notions of roots music with The Horse and the Hounds.
The new album features appearances by Sarah Jarosz, Charlie Sexton, Bonnie Whitmore, Bukka Allen, and others, as well as his familiar backing band with BettySoo on accordion & backing vocals, Cornbread on bass, Tim Holt on…
The Tunnel of Love Express tour is marked by changes: the addition of a horn section for the first time on E Street since 1976 (save for a few dates in 1984 including August 19 and 20); the billing of Bruce Springsteen featuring the E Street Band; and where those seven musicians were positioned on stage. In retrospect, none seem material in terms of lasting impact.
Perhaps the most significant change in 1988 was Springsteen’s public embrace of adulthood and its inherent and often private complexities, explored so movingly on the tour’s namesake album, Tunnel of Love. Much of the yearning and pining romanticism found on Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and The River gave way to starker realizations (“When you’re alone…
After making their Dualtone label debut with 2024’s Easy Company, Futurebirds return with their sixth album and first double-length outing, Far Out Country. It reunites the alternative country-rock group with Easy Company producer Brad Cook as well as contributors like pedal steel guitarist (and former member) Dennis Love and Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield. As for the band proper, it features the lineup of Daniel Womack, Carter King, and Thomas Johnson — their three rotating singer/songwriters — along with the returning rhythm section of Brannen Miles and Tom Myers. Perhaps to a higher degree than on prior releases, it showcases the individual perspectives of each songwriter, with personal songs inspired by things like relationships, first-time…
Hardly a glimmer of light has shone upon the world since Chat Pile broke out into — and against — its awfulness with their staggering 2022 debut, God’s Country. Yet here we are, inching ever closer to the sun all the same.
Sounding the alarm more soul-crushingly than ever, the band remain angry, deranged and mired in the muck of this place. With each release, they’ve sunk further into the dread and spiritual decay their music has always mined, as though modern life keeps rewarding their worst suspicions with fresh evidence.
Their latest, Who Loves the Sun — never mind its brooding, almost-taunting title — is the next evolution of that descent. It plunges further into the band’s sonic depravity, burrowing…
Around the time that he formed the White Stripes, Jack White had a stint as a guitarist for The Go, a wooly and psychedelic Detroit garage-punk band. White was in the Go when they recorded their debut album Whatcha Doin’, which came out on Sub Pop in 1999. Shortly thereafter, White left the Go, and they recorded another album called Free Electricity. It never came out. But after 26 years on the shelf, Free Electricity finally see worldwide release via Sub Pop.
The Go recorded Free Electricity with their Whatcha Doin’ producer, Outrageous Cherry frontman Matthew Smith. In a press release, Smith says that he and the band were listening to a lot of ’60s free jazz when they recorded the LP and that “there’s a heavy jazz influence on this…
Psychedelia in White, the third album from former member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Mick Harvey and longtime collaborator Amanda Acevedo, is a natural evolution from their 2023 duet debut, Phantasmagoria in Blue.
…Where the duo’s debut, and their second release, Golden Mirrors (The Uncovered Sessions Vol. 1) were predominately reinterpretations, for this album, the duo have recorded seven tracks of original material exploring some of the themes from their debut – mythology, love, hope, loss and mysticism – but with a distinct shift in musical style and an overarching theme of finding a safe space within the chaos and confusion of the outside world.
Psychedelia in White represents a seismic…
Just two years into their subtle takeover of radio, MTV, and concert stages across the globe, The Cranberries played a surprisingly intimate show in 1994 at London’s Astoria II. A recording of the set was recently discovered and is being released for the first time. The show finds a band that had just released their (soon-to-be massive) debut with a follow-up on the way (1993’s Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? and 1994’s No Need to Argue). Despite still being a relatively young band, they played that show with the confidence many groups take decades to develop.
Coming off a series of massive gigs in the U.S. o, opening for Duran Duran, playing to a crowd of around 1,000 at this London gig must have been just as jarring as their leap from small…
The dawn of the British folk revival broke in 1965 when Bert Jansch’s “folk-baroque” finger style revolutionised tradition, providing the early morning light for a burgeoning psychedelic scene which, by 1972 had traveled from folk clubs to the high-concept landscapes of progressive rock, exemplified by the Eastern-tinged sitar-guitar on Yes’s ‘Siberian Khatru’.
Western artists utilised Eastern forms as a new musical bedrock. The Byrds transitioned from folk-rock into the uncharted territory of ‘Eight Miles High’, a track widely cited as the first true U.S. “Raga Rock” single. Driven by Roger McGuinn’s solos – inspired by Ravi Shankar and John Coltrane – it proved pop could embrace complex modal structures. Similarly, The Yardbirds’…
Steered by their co-founder, Will Greenham, musical collective Blind Yeo is a hodgepodge of all-ages misfits from around the UK who found solace in an arts hub called The Cornish Bank.
Onstage, this Falmouth-based crew move about like spinning tops and dress as wizards in colorful capes. They sound a bit like fellow beach town residents The New Eves — if that band’s loose, chant-based noisemaking looked to the laidback experimentation of The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band rather than stern-faced NYC cool.
Their debut album, The Lemoine Point, takes just a few seconds to stutter to life and snap into a Switched On Volume 1-era Stereolab groove complete with blinking arcade-game crossfire.
The Riot Squad only released seven singles on the U.K.’s Pye label between 1965 and 1967. But thanks to the discovery of Joe Meek’s Tea Chest Tapes, the story of the band that might be best known for a short-lived collaboration with David Bowie can now be told in full. I Take It That We’re Through: Anthology 1965-1967 arrives from Cherry Red’s Strawberry imprint, with 3 CDs and 83 tracks (40 of which are previously unreleased and another 14 of which are new to CD).
Ron Ryan (guitar), Graham Bonney (vocals), Bob Evans (saxophone), Mark Stevens (keyboards), Mike Martin (bass), and future member of The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Mitch Mitchell (drums), formed The Riot Squad in late 1964. The group’s lineup was notoriously fluid; the band’s…
The Rolling Stones have a new album, Foreign Tongues, out, much to their fans’ delight. Audiences have long craved the raw blues-rock sound of Mick Jagger’s vocals, Keith Richards’ slashing riffs, and the band’s pugnacious attitude. Critical reception to the new record has been mixed, but there is ample desire for such unvarnished manly sounds. As evidenced by the reviews, fans of the new Stones record weren’t looking for a return to the courtly baroque pop of “Lady Jane” or “As Tears Go By”. They wanted the loud, aggressive energy of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” or “Tumbling Dice”.
This style is historically categorized as “cock rock” because of its emphasis on masculinity and performative sexuality. Fans of that kind…
In recent years, Gerry Beckley, co-founder of the group America, known for his Top 40 hit compositions “I Need You,” “Sister Golden Hair,” and “Daisy Jane,” has stopped touring with the group in order to focus his time on family and friends on two continents, and on his solo career.
…Produced by Beckley with frequent collaborator and lyricist Jeff Larson, his new solo album Merciful finds the America co-founder looking at where he’s been and where he is now, with ‘All the Wounded Cowboys’ serving as the album’s focus track. Recorded largely in Beckley’s home studios in Sydney, Australia and Venice, California, the 13-song collection brings together new songs, material rediscovered in his archives and a few unexpected turns. Beckley plays virtually all…
After 10 releases that have garnered Montreal’s Rishi Dhir and his band Elephant Stone a staunch cult following and collaborations with the likes of The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Beck, maybe after their latest album Asha, they will get more than they deserve.
After all, Dhir has been around for a while, covering almost a whole spectrum of psych rock known so far, not only with Elephant Stone but with The Datsons/The High Dials before, and has been one of the more forward purveyors of that branch of psych that looks to India and all things on the Eastern side of the globe.
And so far Dhir and Elephant Stone have not missed a beat in that respect, and obviously had no intention to miss it on their eleventh…
