Kyle Hamlett haunts the eerie corners of Americana, but he does it with a sideways grin. His songs jitter gleefully amid spectral harmonies, gothy but also celebratory, like a skeleton dancing a cakewalk across a stage. Hamlett fronted Nashville’s Lylas in his younger days and has, more lately, recorded with pedal steel phenom Luke Schneider. This album is a solo effort, though the artist draws support from a range of Americana players. A good bit of the late Justin Townes Earl’s backing band turns up to play here: Joe McMahan on guitar and a range of exotic instruments (cavaquinho! Kalimba!), Adam Bednarik on bass and Bryan Owings on drums and percussion.
Song’s like “Fool’s Moon” set up a twitching, skittering tension in the picked guitars, but…
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Carson McHone begins 2025’s Pentimento with the sounds of birds chirping outside and McHone reciting the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, as they appeared in a letter to Margaret Fuller. Neither of these things necessarily define McHone’s creative approach on Pentimento, but their presence speaks volumes about how this LP differs from her previous work. There’s a musical and lyrical intimacy in these songs and performances that sounds natural and unforced, and she is clearly not wary of letting her poetic sensibilities take the lead in her writing. According to McHone, nearly all the songs on Pentimento began as poems before she struck on the idea of setting them to music, and while the words mesh comfortably with the melodies, much of this album…
It’s fair to say the past decade has brought some challenges for Swedish singer-songwriter Marlene Oak. Ten years ago, she got the difficult diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder Type 2, then just a few years ago she experienced an episode of severe psychosis, something she described as “terrifying”, leading her to question her own reality and even fearing there was a demon inside her.
Understandably, it took her some time to recover, but even whilst still feeling fragile, she felt compelled to turn her trauma into art, and with Peter Morén, she co-wrote and produced what would be Welcome to Oak Land.
“I thought I always knew / What I wanted to do / Now I’m split up in two,” Oak sings on the album opener ‘Threading a Fine Line’, no doubt…
The ongoing retrospective of the late John Wetton’s live recordings lands in the 1990s, during the time he was plying his trade as a solo artist. This 10-disc set, which presents eight shows from that decade in either remastered or revised form, is a treasure trove of material recorded in Japan, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands.
While there are inevitably repeated songs across such a wide-ranging set of shows – especially the most crucial pieces from his work with Asia, King Crimson and UK – there are plenty of variations in performance and arrangement, and Wetton is in fine voice throughout.
Asia’s ‘Heat of the Moment’ pops up in every show, of course; but often in rearranged form, while Crimson’s ‘Easy Money’ regularly…
…featuring new interpretations, rare B sides and unreleased archival gems.
Rivers of the Red Planet, the new LP from Berlin upstart Max Graef, hearkens back to an era when the album served the fundamental statement of a musician’s aesthetic. This is in no small part due to the young producer’s diverse ear. Graef has been making waves in the underground house world, but as he recently told, he spends most of his money on old records he can’t play in clubs. Rivers, meanwhile, was originally conceived as an instrumental hip-hop album. It has a loose, smoky feel that owes as much to beatmakers like Madlib or J Dilla as it does to any house producer. A casual synthesis of dusty jazz, hip-hop and house, Rivers speaks to Graef’s formidable talent.
Julian Cope’s Head Heritage label recently unearthed another entry in its “Ambient Autumn” series: the archival release Now That I’m Different by the experimental project Queen Elizabeth. Spanning recordings from 1990 to 2005, this album is less a traditional musical experience and more a raw, immersive sonic artifact.
For those accustomed to conventional structure, this collection of drones and “near-music-concrete” will prove challenging. The tracks are rough-edged and often ramshackle, prioritizing texture and atmosphere over melody or rhythm. Imagine archaic, distressed sounds wrestling with the occasional, unexpected presence of a string quartet or the organic ur-drone provided by guest artist Stephen O’Malley of SunnO))).
This time, the performances took place during 2024-2025 and recorded at venues across Europe, United States, Canada and on Cruise To The Edge, which explains the post-fixed ‘Live Around The World‘ part on the new album, Are We Nearly There Yet?. BBT aficionados will recognise the title as it is a line from the song Last Eleven, which also gave its name to the band’s latest successful studio album, The Likes of Us – the first with the new line-up, featuring vocalist Alberto Bravin (PFM) and keyboardist Oskar Holldorff (Dim Gray). The resultant series of shows included the Zoetermeer Boerderij, with the two shows scheduled featuring: on Saturday, the band played almost the entire new studio album, while on Sunday, they played iconic songs from the band’s rich history.
Legendary French industrial pioneers Vox Populi! arrive on Dark Entries with a reissue of Sucre De Pastèque. Vox Populi! was founded in Paris in 1981 by Axel Kyrou, a multi-instrumentalist of Greek, French, and Palestinian roots. He soon recruited his future partner, Mitra, and her brother Arash Khalatbari, who were born in Iran and came to Paris in their teens, as well as bassist Fr6 Man (Francis Manne).
Their sound was motley, combining elements of musique concrete and early industrial with horns, flutes, and traditional Persian instrumentation. Improbably prolific and ceaselessly divergent, Vox Populi! found their way onto dozens of cassette compilations during the heyday of the 1980s DIY tape music scene, including releases…
San Francisco power trio chokecherry is a band that exists squarely within the modern moment. In previous times, you’d meet band members at school, work or possibly through ragged weather-stained notes on the local guitar shop bulletin board. Coincidentally, these were the same way you’d meet romantic partners.
Chokecherry are a symbol of the increasing efficiency of modern existence, in that they met on Hinge. Guitarist Izzie Clark and bassist E. Scarlett Levinson met on the dating app in 2022 but never went on any dates, opting to start a band instead. Ripe Fruit Rots and Falls is the first full-length consequence of that decision.
The band’s sound lives within the loosely defined boundaries of alt rock, but beyond that they…
Thomas Raggi, the razor-sharp guitarist powering Italian rock firestarter Måneskin, is fully ablaze on his explosive debut album Masquerade. The eight-track collection packs seven riotous originals, rounded out by a high-voltage take on Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)’.
Brimming with rock ’n’ roll swagger and magnetic musical alchemy, Thomas has pulled together an all-star cast – Tom Morello (who was at the helm of production and the album’s creative course), Beck, Nic Cester, Alex Kapranos, Kasabian‘s Serge Pizzorno, former Guns N’ Roses member Matt Sorum, The Struts frontman Luke Spiller and more to join him for a riotous celebration of pure guitar heroism.
The album’s genesis springs purely from…
Recorded live in Spain during Loreena McKennitt’s summer 2024 tour of Europe, Live in Madrid is an audio vérité soundboard recording of a complete 20-song show from that tour, captured in stereo directly from the mixing desk located in the venue front-of-house. Other than the mastering and editing work needed in order for us to offer the listeners an optimum listening experience, this album comes as close as you can get to the live performance as it sounded at the “Noches del Botánico” festival on that balmy Mediterranean night.
Live In Madrid contains the entirety of 1994’s The Mask and Mirror performed in sequence, plus over an hour of fan favourites drawn from across the range of Loreena’s catalogue of studio recordings.
…two audio CDs of “This Is What You Wanted” Live In Mexico City & bonus track edition of the studio album “Never Let Me Go” with “Shout”.
An intimate exploration of Placebo’s evolution, charting their journey through lyrics and songs that delve into the human experience.
Placebo’s second feature-length documentary called This Search for Meaning. This intimate and enlightening film explores the ideas that inhabit the lyrics and subject matter of Placebo’s songs, whilst charting their evolution as a group and as human beings. It is a fearless, truthful and forthright exploration of the creative process and the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, along with its inevitable consequences.
Since emerging from obscurity in the 1990s with provocative songs such as “Nancy Boy” and “Bruise Pristine”, Placebo forged a decidedly unfashionable path through the brazenly macho ‘Britpop’ scene to explore subjects such as the body politic and the continued erosion of our human rights…
…featuring four bonus tracks.
On this, their 10th album, the melodious Mancunians started at the drum kit and built from there. This is no bad thing. The overall effect is wide-ranging, surprising and altogether more uplifting than either the delicious despairing Giants of All Sizes (2019) or gentle, soulful Flying Dream 1 (2021).
We kick off with “Things I’ve Been Telling Myself for Years”, (for instance, “Of course I’ll live to 96 and fix the welfare state”) a self-deprecating piece of analysis that packs in the influences without ever being derivative. As Garvey puts it, “We referenced The Meters, Beastie Boys, Sly and Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix, Arctics, Queens of the Stone Age, Bolan, Tom Waits, Public Enemy and…
The new Jason Isbell album, Foxes in the Snow, offers an opportunity to appreciate his considerable gifts as a singer, songwriter, and guitarist in a fresh way. It’s his first solo acoustic album and his first that he recorded in New York — in just five days no less at Electric Lady Studios in the West Village.
In February, Isbell played two sold-out shows at the Beacon Theatre, blending the new material with fan favorites from his years with The 400 Unit and the Drive-By Truckers. Each night ended with a carefully chosen cover: a haunting rendition of Bon Iver’s “Best/Rest” on Friday and a tender take on John Prine’s “Storm Windows” on Saturday.
A few days later, during a conversation with WFUV radio, Isbell opened up about the making of the album and the beautiful old guitar that…
For the first time on vinyl, a lost gem of 90’s garage punk for the darkly inclined. Recorded in 1997 by Greg Talenfeld (Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Pavement, The Walkmen) and never released before, The Night Has Eyes is a hidden treasure unearthed from the fertile end-of-the-century NYC underground scene.
In Ally Pankiw’s recent documentary, Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, we’re reminded that Sarah McLachlan’s all-women tour once found itself in the crosshairs of televangelist Jerry Falwell, who condemned Lilith’s proto-feminist folkloric inspiration-and, by extension, the festival’s pro-choice/queer-positive mandate-as a paragon of demonic depravity. If the charges seemed absurd at the time, they’re absolutely hilarious…
Multi-instrumentalist Chris Franck and DJ and producer Patrick Forge have been making music under the moniker Da Lata for a good quarter-century now. In all that time, the gist of the project has remained largely consistent: Da Lata‘s music is warm, soulful, and made, more or less, in collaboration with (or at least inspired by) artists working with musical styles that have emerged from African-Brazilian interchanges.
It’s a comfortable niche for Da Lata, which has done an admirable job of making music that holds up pretty well over the decades, even with heavy lounge and jazz-fusion vibes. Now, a full 25 years after the debut of Songs from the Tin, the new album Edge of Blue continues the group’s steady stream of appealing tropical grooves.
Martian Sunset is the latest album from American vibraphonist and composer Bill Ware, who, over a three-decade career, has carved his path across a variety of ensembles including The Jazz Passengers, Groove Collective, the trio Vibes, and Rez Abbasi’s Acoustic Quartet. The ten original compositions were written anew — though initially conceived as part of his pandemic-triggered 1k Song Project — for The Club Bird All-Stars, the long-running vehicle for his prolific creativity, formed in 1993 after a three-month engagement at the beloved Japanese venue Club Bird. The group’s new iteration features adventurous guitarist Rez Abbasi, seasoned bassist Jay Anderson, and unsung drummer Taru Alexander, with pianist Matt King remaining in the lineup.
The saxophonist Pharoah Sanders was often described as an enigma of jazz, once famously characterized as “a mad wind screeching through the root-cellars of Hell.” That “mad wind” is absent on Love Is Here: The Complete Paris 1975 ORTF Recordings, but the enigma remains. This pivotal album captures Sanders stretching out, away from his Impulse! Records contract, exploring a sound that moves beyond late-stage John Coltrane and places a greater emphasis on tone, melody, and lyrical expression.
Recorded live at Maison de la Radio’s Studio 104 in Paris on November 17, 1975, this set is a crucial document that bridges the gap between his turbulent free-jazz explorations and the meditative tranquility of his later work.
This all-Ravel recording by the Nash Ensemble was the final project of Amelia Freedman’s extraordinary 60 years as artistic director, and it’s a fitting farewell to the group’s much-missed founder, who died in July.
It includes all three larger chamber works plus the composer’s own two-piano arrangement of his orchestral masterpiece ‘La Valse’: Alasdair Beatson and Simon Crawford-Phillips are a polished team in this, sounding wonderfully louche early on and then dispatching fistfuls of notes and long glissandos with seeming ease, all while catching the music’s increasingly sinister nature.
The 1905 ‘Introduction and Allegro’ was a commission from a harp manufacturer, intended to make their instrument sound good – which…
Is there anything Marc-André Hamelin can’t do? In a recording career that now spans nearly four decades, the Canadian pianist has handled everything from Mozart sonatas to presentations of Ives, Ornstein, Feldman, and Rzewski. He has championed lesser-known names like Alkan, Henselt, and Medtner, and even offered a full-length album of his own compositions.
His latest release, Found Objects / Sound Objects, showcases his immense range. Hamelin performs works by seven composers, from John Cage to Frank Zappa to himself. Some of it is impressively difficult – the arrangement of Zappa’s ‘Ruth is Sleeping’ was originally made for two pianists, not one – but he has it all comfortably under his fingers. The virtuosity is…