Across numerous releases since they formed in the mid-2000s, London’s The Leaf Library have experimented with everything from a gentle fusion of indie pop and post-rock to experimental indie electronica, noise, and drone minimalism. With their fourth studio album, After the Rain, Strange Seeds, the group wanted to prioritize more-traditional, structured songwriting over sounds and atmosphere. Longtime fans will likely be happy to learn that the results are still notably textured and adventurous. To start, they combine distorted, slowcore-adjacent rock timbres, strings (by guests Iskra Strings), and lightly bouncy, sweet vocal harmonies on the deceptively tuneful “Colour Chant,” a song inspired by shifting weather. As the album title implies, the great…
Latest Entries »
Xylitol‘s first release for Planet Mu, Anemones, drew from atmospheric jungle as well as Krautrock and minimal wave, creating a wondrous form of breakbeat-driven electronic music that levitates as it crushes. Blumenfantasie is the follow-up album, and it’s no less impressive, strengthening the elements that made its predecessor stand out. Opener “Chromophoria” has just the right amount of atmosphere to momentarily make you feel like you’re falling through time, paired with bugged-out breaks that snap everything into focus. The title track slips Cluster-like puttering drum machines beneath shuffling drums and a flood of bass. “Melancholia” takes its time to let a sorrowful atmosphere unfold, then erupts with perfectly timed hard breaks.
Los Angeles-based duo Green-House first surfaced in 2020 with Six Songs for Invisible Gardens, an EP of calm, delicate, flora-inspired synth instrumentals accompanied by bird song and other natural sounds. Appearing soon after the much-heralded reissue of Mother Earth’s Plantasia by Mort Garson, it slotted nicely into plant-themed playlists of ambient and new age music, and became a streaming favorite during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Green-House’s music continued to celebrate nature and domestic environments on subsequent releases like Music for Living Spaces and A Host for All Kinds of Life. After releasing most of their work on Leaving Records, Hinterlands is Green-House’s first effort for Ghostly International. It maintains the same soothing feel…
Following no floor, a remarkable instrumental collaboration with claire rousay that focused on pastoral electro-acoustic soundscapes, more eaze remained with Thrill Jockey for her vocal-based solo effort sentence structure in the country. The album’s lyrics, often delivered through Auto-Tune but occasionally left unaltered, explore intimate moments and frustrating situations, reflecting on jealousy, apathy, and the difficulties of trying to succeed as a musician.
Fragile vocals and bubbling, twinkling synthesizers adorn the patient opener “leave (again),” while ambient pop gem “bad friend” is propelled by a gently blipping pulse and softly crying steel guitar. Another of the record’s more accessible tunes, “the producer,” also contains…
Grace Ives has spent the past several years turning archetypal formats — the nursery rhyme, the ringtone, the 9 to 5 — into a repertoire of oblique pop standards so well-crafted they belie the personal chaos inside them.
She trades in stories of glamorous disarray, all bruised egos and Irish exits and rambling thoughts. By Ives’ own estimation, she spent the three years after the release of her 2022 breakthrough, Janky Star, crashing out: drinking too much, pushing people away, falling down, etc. Eventually, she ditched booze, made for Los Angeles, and learned to drive, soundtracking her rides with Peter Gabriel, Mitski, and her personal top-ranked song of all time, Kesha’s “Die Young.”
It tracks that Girlfriend, her resplendent and…
Digging even deeper into a personal archive of home-recorded tapes from another time, If You Wanna Laugh, You Gotta Cry Sometimes is the third volume of previously unreleased songs from the already obscure Georgia singer/songwriter Robert Lester Folsom. In the mid-’70s, when Folsom was just out of his teens, he self-released the studio album Music and Dreams. For decades, the psychedelic soft rock of Music and Dreams served as Folsom’s only public output, and its combination of quality, mystery, and rarity eventually made it a collector’s item. Folsom’s archive of demos, unreleased solo tracks, and tunes made with friends on his reel-to-reel four-track has proved just as interesting as the strange moods of Music and Dreams, and If You…
There have been a few singles from the UK band, Wille and Bandits, shared on this site that have drawn enthusiastic responses. Let’s fill in some blanks, now that their new album, Salt Roots, has arrived. The band hails from Cornwall, a place that almost feels like the Deep South of the UK, rural, coastal, variable weather, and a place that prides itself on rugged individualism. The band’s live shows have audiences abuzz.
Frontman Wille Edwards (lead vocals, Dobro, lap steel, electric and acoustic guitars) has drawn acclaim from both fans and giants such as Joe Bonamassa and Beth Hart, who have toured with the band. Hammond organist Stevie Watts was voted UK Instrumentalist of the Year. The bass-drum tandem of Harry Mackaill and Joe Harris…
When Cayetana disbanded, Augusta Koch found an outlet for her increasingly personal songs in Gladie. After a pair of albums produced by bandmate Matt Schimelfenig that framed discontented lyrics in an appropriately scrappy grunge-pop, they decided to bring in an outside producer for the first time for their third long-player, No Need to Be Lonely. While this move may cause one to think of cleaner surfaces and a generally stronger, more streamlined sound, in this case No Need to Be Lonely benefits from something else: a more impulsive, immediate sound generated with help from their choice, indie punk hero Jeff Rosenstock.
The album opens with filtered, muffled guitar and half-drums alongside a jagged, cracking vocal melody that begins with the words…
John Zorn’s Sing Me Now Asleep captures The Gnostic Trio — Bill Frisell, Kenny Wollesen, and Carol Emanuel — at their most delicate and inward-looking. Drawing on minimalism, early music and jazz, the album unfolds with a quiet assurance that favours space, texture and restraint over virtuosity. Sing Me Now Asleep is their first CD in over five years and not surprisingly it explores some unexpected new directions — notably two ambient-influenced pieces in the spirit of Zorn’s Absinthe and Redbird, and a dramatic long form composition in the style of his cinematic file card works. Enhanced by the moody electronics of Ikue Mori on one hypnotic track, this ninth CD in the legacy of The Gnostic Trio is their most gentle and soothing to date, and heralds a striking…
US pianist Marilyn Crispell and Swedish bassist Anders Jormin filter their decades of musical experience and improvisational instinct into Memento, their debut duo recording. Combining original compositions with four freely created pieces, the album focuses on the universal themes of memory and loss.
Crispell, recently honored with a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master award, first met Jormin at a Stockholm festival in 1992. It left a lasting mark on her musical thinking. “When I heard Anders playing, it touched a chord in me that resonated strongly,” she recalls. Jormin, a longtime member of the Bobo Stenson Trio, has collaborated with Tomasz Stańko, Charles Lloyd and Don Cherry. He has recorded many albums…
Continuing the sonic universe they first unveiled on 2022’s Antimai, Sunya finds the band leaning into synth textures and tightly wound grooves, drawing as heavily from jazz and funk as from progressive rock.
Clarion Call Media sent over these details: Moving further into the world they began shaping on 2022’s Antimai, Sunya finds the band leaning into synth textures and tightly wound grooves, pulling from jazz and funk as much as progressive rock. The scope is still ambitious, but the lens has shifted.
Where Antimai spoke from the collective voice of a city, Sunya is personal. The songs follow a single perspective stepping beyond the walls for the first time, confronting both the physical…
The newest studio album from singer/songwriter Son Little finds the fluid artist touching on a wide range of genres. CITYFOLK uses synths, soft beats, acoustic strums, and much more as Little delves into his history, love life, and modern-day societal hardships for inspiration across the eleven tracks presented here.
Little was dealing with severe flooding in his Atlanta home, so he headed to Muscle Shoals, AL, to soak in that town’s famous musical history and work with Ben Tanner (Alabama Shakes), who co-produced the record. The talented Little plays everything from mellotron to banjo as he refuses to be restrained by music industry expectations.
For most of CITYFOLK, the programmed beats and synths provide a mellow backing…
Hurray for the Riff Raff release Live Forever, a new live record on the exact two-year anniversary of The Past Is Still Alive-named one of the Best Albums of the 2020s So Far by Pitchfork, and one of the Best Albums of 2024 by the New York Times, Atlantic, Associated Press, NPR Music, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Out, Mojo, Uncut, and a multitude of others.
Live Forever was captured over the course of two sold-out summer nights at the Old Town School of Folk Music in bandleader Alynda Segarra’s new home of Chicago. Spanning 14 songs, Live Forever presents The Past Is Still Alive in its entirety, as well as a selection of Hurray for the Riff Raff’s show-stopping, set-defining staples: decrying ICE on the poetic “Precious Cargo”…
The year is 2026, the rollercoaster ride that was Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine has long since been shut down and covered in tarpaulin to make way for a 21st century theme park of bland pop.
Formed in 1987 by Fruitbat and Jim Bob, Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine burst onto the scene with their signature style of punk-pop infused with samples, drum machines, and social commentary. Join Jim Bob and Fruitbat, as they take a retrospective look back at the complete Carter U.S.M. singles, from 1988 to 1997.
First released in 1995, Straw Donkey is an essential introduction to Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine, featuring the U.K. Top 20 singles ‘The Only Living Boy In New Cross’, ‘After The Watershed (Early Learning The Hard Way)’, ‘Rubbish’…
As AI becomes an increasing threat to humans trying to make a living from creative activities, Nubiyan Twist’s latest album is a defiant riposte. It is a celebration of the joyful energy and chaos that comes from musicians getting together in a room to play. While that could imply a scrappy sound, it would be a wildly inaccurate description of the ensemble. Chasing Shadows represents a skilful interception of jazz, afrobeat, R&B and electronics, fused with a mastery that reflects the nine-piece band’s background having formed in 2011 while studying at the Leeds College of Music.
Their fifth album resists the temptation of indulging in extended jams, all eleven tracks timing around the four-minute mark. New vocalist, Eniola Idowu, brings an extra soulful touch…
…“Legendary Edition” of the band’s self-titled debut offers the remastered original album (featuring tracks like “Mama Kin,” “Movin’ Out” and the eventual smash hit “Dream On”) alongside a new remix of the album, overseen in 2024 by Steven Tyler and Joe Perry with producer/engineer Zakk Cervini and producer Steve Berkowitz, plus a further 17 unreleased tracks including studio outtakes and a vintage live performance in the band’s hometown.
…The quintet – singer Steven Tyler, lead guitarist Joe Perry, rhythm guitarist Brad Whitford, bassist Tom Hamilton and drummer Joey Kramer – had been playing together since 1970 – even sharing a home together on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue – and were famously signed to…
…For this anniversary release, the album has been fully remastered, and accompanied by an additional LP of bonus tracks, including the 2005 tour EP, a trove of previously unreleased studio and live tracks, and rarities like “The End’s Not Near” (as featured on The O.C.) and a demo version of “The Funeral.”
Band of Horses is the phoenix ascending from the carcass of Carissa’s Wierd, Ben Bridwell and Matt Brooke’s former band. (But what happened to the proposed November 16th?) While the penchant for beautiful melody is present everywhere here, that’s pretty much where the similarity between both groups stops. Whereas their former project centered itself on slower-than-codeine-cough-syrup-on-a-cold-day, lushly…
Once upon a time, albums of cover versions were something of a “go to” (along with hastily assembled live records or compilations with one or two new tracks) when an artist’s creative juices were running a bit dry. In recent times though, these stop-gaps seem to have been replaced with the remix album – because who really wants to give away all that lovely publishing income?
However, it seems that the covers album might be making something of a comeback in 2026. Already this year, the Damned have put out Not Like Everybody Else and even Willie Nelson has released Last Leaf on the Tree.
The latest to join this trend is the Dandy Warhols, who have even appropriated the title of David Bowie’s own covers album from 1973.