Midge Ure released A Man of Two Worlds, a new double album. His first album of new material in 12 years sees the former Ultravox frontman divide the offering into two parts. The first half, World One: Music, consists of eight instrumental pieces, while the second half, World Two: Songs, features eight ‘proper’ songs (with vocals).
This concept is said to be partly inspired by the time Midge spent during lockdown listening to instrumental music, and some of the work he heard whilst presenting THE SPACE on Scala Radio. He began writing what became a selection of instrumental pieces — “music shaped by reflection, uncertainty, and a strange kind of quiet”.
The eight vocal songs which form the second part of the album, are described as…
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Animal Collective has always approached its records from a modular mindset, working as a literal collective of artists who operate under a shared banner. Throughout their myriad releases, some members have been absent on certain albums, and different configurations of the four players have resulted in wildly different sounds, ranging from wide-eyed folk to rave-worthy experimental electronica. Though they’ve produced music as Animal Collective previously, Croz Boyce zeroes in on the specific creative connection shared by AC members Dave Portner and Brian Weitz. It’s a sound that’s very much in keeping with the woozy psychedelia of their greater collective, but just different enough to merit its own distinction. One of the primary differences is that…
Bruce Springsteen doesn’t need to risk alienating a small but vocal fraction of his fanbase by taking a stand against what he sees as a clear and present danger to the future of America, a land he clearly loves with every fiber of his being.
But he does it anyway because that’s just how much he cares about the things that truly matter. That’s an admirable trait that Springsteen has embodied for the longest time.
And if the way the crowd responded to his most impassioned speeches taking Donald Trump to task at what appeared to be a sold-out Mortgage Matchup Center on Thursday, April 16, when the Land of Hope & Dreams American Tour hit downtown Phoenix, are any indication?
…He hadn’t even played guitar before setting…
Two years ago, Carla J. Easton co-directed and narrated Since Yesterday, a documentary examining 60 years of all-girl bands in Scotland. You can tell, too; her latest album plays like a paean to the effervescent pop of the likes of Strawberry Switchblade, His Latest Flame and The Twinsets. There are more contemporary influences, too, with Alvvays – Easton’s one-time shipmates on Belle & Sebastian’s Boaty Weekender – hanging particularly heavy over this sparkling set of guitar-pop songs, which are made all the more impressive when you consider that Easton learned to play the guitar specifically for this record.
There is real depth and variety on I Think That I Might Love You, which runs the gamut from the glam-pop stomp of…
Long a big man on the tenor saxophone campus, Chris Potter has never rested on his laurels, still hungry to make a significant statement significantly different from the one he made before. Alive with Ghosts Today manifests Potter as a saxophonist/composer/bandleader still in his prime for all three of these roles.
Potter’s guiding light for this project is the story of the notorious American abolitionist John Brown, who led armed and bloody anti-slavery activities in the run up to the American Civil War that exposed and illuminated a deep, complicated divide in American society. Potter felt it’s time to address that divide of which Brown symbolized that persists today. Of course, as an instrumentalist, Potter doesn’t address it through words.
Lavender Networks marks the Warp debut of Fire-Toolz, Angel Marcloid’s hard-to-pin-down new age cybermetal project, which has issued albums on tape-friendly experimental labels like Hausu Mountain and Orange Milk.
Coming several months after a Danny Brown album loaded with guest features from the hyperpop and digicore scenes, Marcloid’s presence on Warp shows that the label has been paying particular attention to newer generations of niche Internet-based musicians with an anarchic disregard for genre restrictions. Marcloid’s record-store-in-a-blender genre fusion is well established by this point, but as with her last few albums, she’s continually refining her style while adding new elements and approaches.
By this point, Loraine James needs little introduction. For much of the last decade, she has been one of London’s most consistently innovative and emotionally expressive club producers, building a reputation over a series of albums of questioning electronica, expert sound design, and shapeshifting beats, whether it’s the watercolour techno of records like For You and I (2019) and Reflection (2021), the Julius Eastman-homage Building Something Beautiful for Me (2022), or her extraordinary ambient work under the name Whatever the Weather.
…Exactly why this might be, it’s hard to say. How much it matters, even more so, as James does have a significant and committed audience; it’s just that her body of work so far commands…
Cola always felt like a comedown. By the time Tim Darcy and Ben Stidworthy’s previous band, Ought, came to an end in 2021, the Montreal group had morphed from nervy, scrappy post-punk to grandiose art rock. Cola, formed with drummer Evan Cartwright, shifted to something stark and simple with the terse indie rock of their debut, 2022’s Deep in View and its slightly lusher follow-up, 2024’s The Gloss. On their third album, Cost of Living Adjustment, Cola have embraced, if not maximalism, then at least letting go of restraint.
The trio is still enthralled by the pointed edges of post-punk that serve as the skeleton of most of their tracks. Yet, from the moment that opener “Forced Position” kicks in, you can tell something has changed. Cartwright’s anxious…
Look for Your Mind! is the 6th album from brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario, aka The Lemon Twigs, following on from their career highs of 2023’s Everything Harmony and 2024’s A Dream Is All We Know, both of which had elevated their music to a new finessed, sophisticated level. On this latest outing the formula hasn’t really changed in that the songs still have their roots in the 1960s and ’70s and arrive with a refreshed vibrancy, although there are moments where the brothers tread a fine line between authenticity and pastiche.
The first half of the album features several standout moments, some of the best of their career to date. The title track comes out of the blocks fast, the sound of 1965 guitar-pop distilled into the finest of essences. The motifs may be familiar…
The energy is the first thing you notice. A lot of reunions and records coming off a long hiatus can sound tentative, careful, or, worst of all, listless. Remember the Humans, the first Broken Social Scene album in nine years, brims with vitality from the outset. In fact, the opening track, “Not Around Anymore,” pulses with pent-up energy, and in it frontman Kevin Drew reassures the listener that passing time is okay, that “you don’t need to cry anymore,” even though, “it’s all gone away.” Loss doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
The song also reassures in its symphonic pleasures, showcasing Broken Social Scenes’s shifting palettes, from soft horns to sped-up fast-picked guitars. Throughout, the band overflows with ideas, excited but patient, letting the tunes…
…Omnivore Recordings reignite its longtime series of Knack collections with Knackology: The Zen Recordings, a 19-song collection from the archives of the label founded by the band’s main songwriter and lead singer, the late Doug Fieger. The set boasts demos, live recordings, and studio rarities from the band that’s so much more than just “My Sharona” and “Good Girls Don’t.”
Knackology rounds up demos from Fieger and Berton Averre – the pair began collaborating in 1973, six years before the release on Capitol Records of Get The Knack – of “That’s What the Little Girls Do” and “Rock & Roll Is Good for You,” as well as the band’s live performances from various venues of “My Sharona,” “Good Girls Don’t,” “Baby Talks Dirty,” “(She’s So) Selfish,”…
…Wild at Heart is composed of outtakes recorded with producer Rick Rubin in 2007 for the Home Before Dark album (which was released the next year). Diamond has recently completed the tracks for this release.
Diamond and Rubin – whose production credits at the time already encompassed Johnny Cash, Tom Petty, Donovan, Run-DMC, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and numerous others – first teamed up for 2005’s 12 Songs. Rubin encouraged Diamond to go with a raw, minimalist sound for the album, echoing back to his earliest recordings on Bang in the 1960s. Crucially, he also encouraged Diamond to once again pick up his guitar and center the songs around the instrument. With songs including the anthemic “Hell Yeah” and jubilant…
Heavy Stereo, Hurricane #1, Arnold, Kevin Rowland in suspenders… it’s generally accepted that Creation Records did not invest their Oasis windfall wisely. Yet amid the frenzy of the mid-’90s guitar-band goldrush, they did make one very shrewd acquisition, swooping in to sign Super Furry Animals after only the band’s second show proper outside Wales – even if Alan McGee subsequently let slip that this may have been more a case of luck than judgement.
“Initially I just heard Super Furry Animals as being similar to Blur,” McGee told SFA biographer Ric Rawlins. “So I thought, ‘Well, fuck! Blur sell lots of records, I could have my version!’ Little did I know that I was signing The Beach Boys meets fucking Gong meets Isaac Hayes on a fucking…
Aldous Harding cuts a divisive figure in the world of alt-rock. To her devotees – and there are enough of them to warrant her playing three nights at London’s Barbican later this month – she is a strange and endlessly fascinating figure. Her lyrics are mysteries to be unpicked for deeper meaning, like dreams awaiting analysis. On Train on the Island, her fifth album, you’re invited to make some kind of sense of stuff about naked owls, having your face covered with bechamel sauce, seeing “the real John Cale” silently eating rice, “Sicilians reaching over the clams”, and the imponderable lines: “I’m saving myself by eating rocks and plants / I pray for the incel.”
The curious album covers; the uneasy stage presence and between-song non-sequiturs;…
Longtime fans of Evansville, Indiana’s the Cold Stares might be confused by the title of the once-duo/now trio’s new album.
Promotional notes advise us that Texas was created after touring extensively in that state, looking to capture its essence in their music. They recorded these eleven songs in Austin at the mostly analog Bud’s Recording Services, further cementing the Lone Star connection.
This is not an outfit that sits around waiting for inspiration to strike. Texas is the fifth album since 2021, following two discs of The Southern (2024, 2025), in addition to nearly constant touring. Initially, singer/songwriter/guitarist Chris Tapp was so convinced in his songs that he self-released the first four Cold Stares albums…
Vocalist Daphne Roubini leads the Vancouver-based group Black Gardenia on Whisky Scented Kisses. The style and sound hark back to the 1940s and ’50s. Although not trying to revive that specific era, this homage does justice to the time period’s musical memory. With a solid team made up of Paul Pigat (guitar, arrangements), Brad Turner (trumpet, flugelhorn), Stephen Nikleva (guitar), Jeremy Holmes (bass) and Dave Say (saxophone), Roubini is well supported. The songs feel full yet never overpowering as the tracks flicker by.
Sometimes an artist can waver in their aesthetic attitude. Roubini and Black Gardenia do not. From the start, one understands where they’re coming from: a smoke-filled bar where all walks of life gather. The title track, especially,…
Brown Box includes all of the duo’s studio output released between 1990 and 2007, including Twin/Tone debut album God Ween Satan: The Oneness, a run of releases on Elektra spanning 1992’s Pure Guava to 2000’s White Pepper; the outtakes collection Shinola, Vol. 1; and the band’s most recent release, 2007’s La Cucaracha. (Chocolate and Cheese uses the same 2024 remaster from the box, but it has not been confirmed if the others have received similar treatment.) All the discs are packaged in CD-size wallets; there does not appear to be a booklet or additional notes in the packshot. The albums White Pepper and 2003’s dark Quebec, long out-of-print on vinyl, will also be made available on colored vinyl: a “green pepper” LP for the former…
Fuzz Club are becoming one of the key hubs for all sounds psychedelic – whether it is the music that is fully in vein with the original psych of the late sixties or any of the updated versions from there on to current times. In that respect, to all who follow all things psych, it will probably be no surprise that one of the modern purveyors of psych that are Minneapolis’ Jason Edmonds and his Magic Castles, have found their way to this label with their new offering Realized.
Edmonds, as the bad’s principal songwriter, has always favoured that trippy, dream-like thread that original psychedelia introduced (not much fuzz or energy rush there), giving it that shoegaze/dream pop veneer, but then updated for the new century. Of course, many critics have…
…includes three reimagined tracks: a revamped version of fan-favorite “Delilah,” a duet with Billy Strings on “Dirt – Macon version” and a cover of The Allman Brothers‘ “Ramblin’ Man”. The remaining nine tracks explore walking the line between letting go of old love and addiction.
Last year, Marcus King deviated from his norm with the Rick Rubin-produced Mood Swings. He scaled back his vaunted guitar and valiantly focused on his vocals, experimenting with soul. Now he follows that up by returning to his roots, reuniting with his longtime live band for their first album since 2018’s Carolina Confessions. The new release, Darling Blue, is a safe, guest-filled, country-tinged offering that still manages to deliver a few changeups to King’s sound.
1. Marisa Anderson – Rop Koh
2. Ed O’Brien – Blue Morpho
3. The Sleeves – Empty Thoughts
4. Tamikrest – Imanin
5. Thomas Dollbaum – Pulverize
6. Blood Sucking Maniacs – Family Tree/Heartbeat (Lucky Marlo Allen)
7. Jeff Parker ETA IVtet – Like Swimwear (part two)
8. The Lemon Twigs – 2 Or 3
9. Kevin Morby – Badlands
10. Brown Spirits – Bakelite Dashboard
11. Aldous Harding – Venus in the Zinnia
12. Angélique Kidjo – Big Heart
13. Hiss Golden Messenger – I’m People
14. Suss – Sunset IV
15. Hurray for the Riff Raff – Pa’Lante (Live)