Although it’s hard to know whether Zu themselves will be happy to hear this image being invoked, there’s something slightly eerie about one of the first sounds on the opening track of their latest album sounding more than a little like the whirring of helicopter blades. Recalling a key image of the first major news story of the year feels like one of their strange but apt alchemical coincidences that great artists can sometimes conjure up. Italian trio Zu are true musical alchemists. Their singular jazz-punk/experimental rock sound takes base materials (saxophone, bass and drums) and turns them into something wondrously radiant; a heavy, meditative, groovy and spiritual fusion whose formula belongs to them alone.
While the band have plied their singular trade…
Category: rock
If you’re tapped into the right corners of the underground, Winged Wheel are a supergroup. Recruiting a member of Sonic Youth — arguably the greatest experimental rock band of all time, and inarguably one of the most popular — certainly bolsters that designation.
But even before Steve Shelley got behind the kit for 2024’s Big Hotel, the “creatively and geographically scattered collective” was an impressive assemblage of talent. More importantly, the music lives up to the pedigree.
The band began as a remote file-trading operation early in the decade, deep in the dregs of the pandemic. The players: Chicago-based Whitney Johnson, who releases music as Matchess and plays in Circuit Des Yeux; Cory Plump,…
It’s been a year and a half since BASIC first emerged out of a bare bones set up of two guitars (Chris Forsyth and Nick Millevoi) and a drum machine. That early experiment, inspired by the 1984 collaboration between Robert Quine and Fred Maher, put a boxy, machine-drilled framework around open-ended guitar jam. Mikel Patrick Avery tended the rough propulsion of the drum machine, enriching its stutter with additional improvised percussion, while Forsyth and Millevoi slashed away at one another on conventional and baritone guitar. It was, at once, disciplined and free-spirited, and you can see why it appealed to Forsyth. Christian Carey reviewed the full-length debut last year, writing “With a rattling drum pattern, synth lines embellished by bent notes…
When you have a look at the June Star website, a wonderfully jaundiced and witty description of the band reads – “the band was formed in 1998 by singer/songwriter Andrew Grimm, and since then they have put out 21 records, toured a bit of the US and have gone into debt“.
…After making 21 albums, for the songs on this collection to sound as refreshing and memorable as they do is nothing short of astonishing. Grimm is backed up by a stellar bunch of musicians (the line-up of the band has changed a bit over the years), Dave Hadley (pedal steel), David Bryson (drums), Chris Iseli (bass), and Michael Zepeda (guitar). Hilariously, on the publicity material, not only does Grimm say he’s the band leader and singer, but also “Manager/Publicist/Songwriter/Plumber“.
TAKAAT began (and still operate) as the rhythm section to Mdou Moctar, the breakout Nigerien rock band named for its charismatic frontman.
This puts Ahmoudou Madassane (guitar/vocals), bassist Mikey Coltun (the sole American in the group), and drummer Souleymane Ibrahim in the same realm as Calexico. That indie band started out as part of alt-country weirdos Giant Sand, but TAKAAT aren’t seeking to branch out from or expand the sound of their parent outfit. They might have more in common with one of Bob Weir’s non-Dead outfits. Like Weir, Madassane has had to invent his own method of playing rhythm guitar to accommodate a brilliant, dynamic leader–and when that leader’s not in the picture, there’s a lot of space left to fill.
It’s quite a distance from New York City to Water Valley, Mississippi, a small town in the deep south of the USA, not too far from Tupelo. With its thriving music scene, it was here that native New Yorker Pete Mancini chose to record his fourth solo album American Equator. Produced by Drive-By Trucker Matt Patton in his studio, Dial Back Sound, the pair had also collaborated on Mancini’s Killing the Old Ways in 2020.
With Patton again producing and playing terrific bass lines alongside fellow Trucker Jay Gonzalez on keyboards and guitars, comparisons are inevitably made with Drive-By Truckers. While it’s true to say that their many fans will find much to love about this album, there are other influences at work here. With hints of Blondie and…
There’s J.D. Salinger, there’s Thomas Pynchon, and then there’s Takashi Mizutani, founder, singer and guitarist of Japanese psychedelic rock giants Les Rallizes Dénudés. How and why could someone so obviously gifted, perhaps even touched by the divine, remove themselves from a world that not only inspires their art but adores it? This question plagued some of the most dedicated and maniacal record collectors in the world, the deepest heads with the most fried and obscure psych rock platters, until 2021 when The Last One Musique and Temporal Drift opened the floodgates and let the music stream forth. It’s curious to think that if Mizutani had emerged from hiding before his death in 2019, perhaps he might have enjoyed the exposure, much in the way…
Omnivore Recordings and The International Pop Overthrow Music Festival are proud to present International Pop Overthrow: Vol. 26, a three-disc compilation featuring 66 tracks by artists from all over the world who have played the International Pop Overthrow (IPO) festival, along with some who haven’t — at least, not yet! The IPO compilations go back as far as the festival, to 1998 when Vol. 1 was a single disc. Since then, the collection expanded to two discs the following year, and then three discs in 2002 for Vol. 5, and it has remained a three-a set since. International Pop Overthrow: Vol. 26 showcases artists from across the globe, doing just about every sub-genre of pop music, including power pop, pop/rock, folk/pop, psychedelic pop, garage, indie-rock, modern…
Before Chat Pile took on sold-out tours and widespread critical acclaim, they played Roadburn 2023-their biggest show to date, in front of a packed room of 3,000 on the festival’s main stage. Fresh off the release of God’s Country, the Oklahoma quartet brought their suffocating, sludgy noise rock to Tilburg for their first-ever European performance, delivering a set that felt like a milestone. The bleakness, the anguish, the raw absurdity-it all scaled up effortlessly, proving that Chat Pile’s chaos could consume any audience, no matter the size.
The set was recorded by the Roadburn staff and later remixed by the band’s longtime engineer, Jared Stimpfl, capturing the full weight of the performance. The result is something both…
Taking their name from the mining byproducts that litter their home state of Oklahoma, American four-piece Chat Pile attempt to make sense of a crumbling world through their sludgy strain of noise rock. After finding online viral success with their 2019 debut EP, This Dungeon Earth, the group built their tense sound across the 2020s with acclaimed albums like God’s Country (2022), Cool World (2024), and In the Earth Again, a collaborative album with guitarist Hayden Pedigo.
Blood at Night: This release contains the entire collection of manipulated tape loops recorded during the making of Cool World. Sections of most of these tracks were dissected and subtly woven into the final version of the record. All the original cassettes used on this collection were sourced…
And so continues the Californian quartet’s mythic two-part journey. Horizons/West – the twelfth studio album from Thrice – might not have arrived quite as hot-on-the-heels of first parter ‘Horizons/East’ as some might have liked, but better late than never eh? Where 2021’s ‘Horizons/East’ opens with the soft glow of possibility, though, its counterpart crashes in with the aftermath. Less a sunrise, a warming haze of hope, and more the moment the sun disappears, the long shadow cast by the doubts that came before. If ‘Horizons/East’ asks what it means to believe, ‘Horizons/West’ asks what remains after belief has been tested, cracked, and dragged through the murky waters.
Opening track ‘Blackout’ feels like the negative…
Nearly three decades since their debut, Good Charlotte return with Motel Du Cap, a raw, heartfelt revival that bridges nostalgic pop-punk spirit with seasoned emotional depth.
From the grind of Waldorf, Maryland, to selling over 11 million albums worldwide, Good Charlotte didn’t play by the rules; they smashed them. With fists-in-the-air bangers like ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’, ‘I Just Wanna Live’, and ‘The Anthem,’ they wore their hearts like battle scars and never backed down.
There’s something poetic about a band rediscovering its spark in a place as dreamlike as the south of France. For Good Charlotte, it was a private wedding gig at the illustrious Hotel du Cap in 2023 that reignited the flame.
The sticker on the front cover says “The heaviest proto-metal compilation ever released.” And considering the label behind Yeah Man, It’s Bloody Heavy is Rise Above, founded by former Napalm Death and Cathedral frontman Lee Dorrian, this is not idle hubris.
Yeah Man, It’s Bloody Heavy collects 10 tracks which were not originally released. The first band heard are Birmingham’s Heavyboots. They are followed by Band Of Mental Breakdown (also known as B.O.M.B.), Macbeth Periscope, Agatha’s Moment, Jessica’s Theme, Greenfly, Clemen Pull, Living Dead, Crimson Earth and Zacariah.
Heavyboots’ “Who Knows, Who Cares,” which kicks-off Yeah Man…, is primitively recorded but packs so much punch it transcends any…
The blues have been around nearly as long as America has had music to call its own, but it was when the music went electric in the wake of World War II that it began to attract a real audience outside of the Black community, albeit through a circuitous route. By the ’50s, every major American city had clubs where blues artists played for eager audiences, and small record companies made their music available to take home. It was the twin phenomena of rock & roll (initially a new name for blues and R&B tunes good for dancing that were sold to teenagers by radio hosts like Alan Freed and Dewey Phillips) and the obsessive British blues fans who collected the records and formed bands to replicate their sounds that gradually took the blues to a younger pop audience.
Mastered at MoFi’s California studio, Mobile Fidelity’s hybrid SACD puts the record’s artistic significance in proper perspective. It invites you to hear with stellar clarity the diverse architecture, passionate playing, and fervent emotions that help make ‘Dreamboat Annie’ an all-time classic. This 50th anniversary edition also marks the first time Heart’s opening salvo has been available in audiophile quality on disc in more than a decade.
In the 1980s and ’90s, numerous women recorded blistering rock, but things were quite different in 1976 — when female singers tended to be pigeonholed as soft rockers and singer/songwriters and were encouraged to take after Carly Simon, Melissa Manchester, or Joni Mitchell rather than Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath.
The Kentucky Headhunters have reissued Big Boss Man, a one-of-a-kind project originally recorded in partnership with Sony/ATV Music Publishing two decades ago.
Long considered a hidden gem within the band’s catalog, Big Boss Man returns as a newly remastered, fully restored project, released on the band’s own Practice House Records label. The origins of the project go back to 2005, when then Sony/ATV President Donna Hilley, compilation supervisor Jack Jackson and creative director of new music Tom Long, approached The Headhunters with an idea to take 12 classics from the Sony/ATV catalog and “Headhunterize” them, infusing each song with the group’s signature energy. The purpose behind the project was to breathe…