Zappa Records is rolling out its first archival release of 2026, and in doing so, is belatedly celebrating the 50th anniversary of one of Frank Zappa’s landmark releases. Bongo Fury, The Mothers of Invention’s 1975 collaboration with fellow iconoclast Don Van Vliet a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, is notable not only as the final original album to be released by Zappa and The Mothers but also as a transitional album featuring band members George Duke, Tom and Bruce Fowler, and Napoleon Murphy Brock alongside newer recruits such as Terry Bozzio and Denny Walley. Zappa was coming off a purple patch that saw his music reaching a new level of success (including the Gold-certified albums Over-Nite Sensation and apostrophe (‘), the latter of which reached the U.S. top ten)…
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There should be no lingering doubt that Avalon Emerson has fully arrived, on a mesmering album that has to be heard to be believed.
It’s been a colourful journey for the Californian electronic pioneer so far, even on 2023’s debut album & The Charm the sheer scale of ideas radiating from the album were mesmerising, if that was Emerson in cocoon form then there is no doubt that Written into Changes is a blossoming, and a victory lap for an artist that has grown into a fully realised songwriter, which was never ever going to wobble on uncertainty.
Playful, emotional pop that captures the feeling of an artist in motion, The album is a memoiristic album and the product of five years of constant travel – including multinational…
Vacate the ice baths, people, Ladytron have gone all warm and gooey. The trio are best known for sleek and bleak synth-pop. And they’re masters at it. But for their eighth album, Paradises, Helen Marnie, Mira Aroyo and Daniel Hunt are sounding, well, happy. Two years on from Time’s Arrow, the Liverpool-formed group have headed for the disco. One probably where everyone one is wearing black, but still, there’s dancing.
The group’s new found fun kicks off with ‘I Believe in You’, a banger that uses the hypnotic Roland sound of A Guy Called Gerald’s 80s acid house classic ‘Voodoo Ray’. The sound is used again on ‘A Death in London’, ‘Free, Free’ and to great effect on album closer ‘For a Life in London’, a spoken word song with Pet Shop Boys DNA.
Some artists follow a consistent developmental path in their work, others are more mercurial, the routes they take less predictable by comparison. That overly simplistic binary’s challenged by German ambient pioneer Markus Guentner: his output on the one hand seems to have developed organically, with each step naturally leading to the next and all exemplifying his particular sensibility; he’s also, however, someone capable of a sudden left turn in stylistic direction.
Consider how different his 2025 release, Black Dahlia, is from his latest, On Brutal Soil, We Grow. Whereas the earlier set feels like an unremitting plunge into a Black Hole, the new one feels at times celestial by comparison. The titles Guentner chose mirror that change: Black Dahlia is…
Jürg Frey album Je laisse a la nuit son poids d’ombre (“I leave to the night its weight of shadow” in English) is his thirteenth for the label, some as composer, some as musician.
…Impressive as Frey’s tally of releases with Another Timbre is, it is worth remembering that in his earlier years from 1996 to 2010 most of his releases were on Edition Wandelweiser, which also catalogues his compositions (currently up to 188 of them) varying from many compositions for a single piano up to several compositions for a full orchestra. The composition which gives this album its name dates back to 2019-20 and was written for two soprano voices, cello, violin, trombone, clarinet, tuba, flute,…
This release from instrumental drone trio Setting (Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly and Joseph Westerlund) sees them complete a trio of live albums before they drop their second studio effort next year. at Public Records was recorded last spring when the band descended on Brooklyn to play a bill with Philadelphia band BASIC (previous Setting live albums at Eulogy and at Black Mountain College Museum were recorded in the band’s home state of North Carolina).
In a sense, this set plays out as more of a sibling piece to Eulogy than Black Mountain, with a darker and more urgent feel in places than the latter. After an edgy start, combining percussion that sounds like ghosts in the attic with eerie beeps and an insidious, undulating drone…
There are times when an album slips completely off the rails so abruptly and forcefully that it tarnishes what has come before it as well as what is to follow. Such is the case with Seatte-based saxophonist and composer Kate Olson‘s album, So It Goes, which is humming briskly along, free from perplexity or discord, until she and her companions decide to perform Alice Coltrane’s enigmatic “Translinear Light.” By the time those seven minutes-plus have passed, whatever positive impressions the album has made have for the most part been forgotten and replaced by the question, “What were they thinking?”
As if that were not enough to dampen the party, Olson follows with her own somber compositions, “Pink Mountain” and “Afterthoughts,”…
When the London jazz festival ran online only in 2020, an enthralling livestreamed performance by Swiss harpist Julie Campiche’s avant-jazz ensemble was a startling highlight, introducing UK audiences to a virtuoso instrumentalist and composer who was already turning heads in Europe. Campiche plucked guitar, zither and east Asian-style sounds from the harp, mingled with vocal loops, classical music, Nordic ambient jazz and more. You might call her soundscape magical or otherworldly if it didn’t coexist with a campaigner’s political urgency on environmental and social issues. But Campiche is too much of a visionary to overwhelm the eloquence of pure sound with polemic, as her new album, the unaccompanied Unspoken, confirms more than ever.
If you think that covering the songs of others is easy by just picking up your instruments and microphones, than you are quite mistaken.
Sure you can do that, but then you are just a cover band/artist. Injecting something new and/or your own into the song you are covering is another kettle of fish, and doing it in a completely opposite style/genre just doubles the complexity of your undertaking.
All the possible hurdles didn’t seem to deter the Italian duo of Giacomo Pedicini and Claudia Sorvillo and their huge cast of guests to cover all their favorite hard rock/heavy metal anthems in a completely different manner on their third album under the moniker of Driving Mrs. Satan – “Late Ever After.”
Sometimes, ends come unannounced. In the mid-2010s, Britain nurtured a second generation of the unfortunately named genre, “soft grunge” (ironically, an outgrowth of emo and hardcore).
At its forefront were Milk Teeth, Wallflower, Muskets, and, the era’s breakout stars, Bloody Knees. They released only four EPs, but bumped shoulders with national stars like Wolf Alice and Soft Play. By 2019, they had disappeared, and so had their contemporaries.
In 2026, soft grunge’s descendants are as prominent as ever, from Midrift to recent One Step Closer to the doom-shaded Die Spitz. What Else comes perfectly timed. Recorded in 2020, the question lingers: is it a time capsule of a brief moment, or did Bloody Knees forge…
Too many blues and blues-rock guitarists try to impress their audiences by playing a blazing series of multiple notes, yet fail to make a statement. San Diego-based, BMA Award winner Laura Chavez, on the other hand, manages to consistently ‘say something.’ There simply are not many guitarists who stand side by side with the great Ronnie Earl and earn his respect like Chavez.
…A true feel player, Chavez held down many memorable gigs with the late Candye Kane. There are several others in her orbit, too, including Deborah Coleman, Dani Wilde, The Mannish Boys, Mike Ledbetter, Monster Mike Welch, Casey Hensley, and Whitney Shay. Blues guitar fans have long acknowledged Chavez’s skills as the consummate side person. Her debut as…
Following Léve Léve Vol. 1, this second volume continues a long-term exploration of the popular music of São Tomé and Príncipe, with a clear focus on rhythm, movement and dancefloor energy. Curated by Tom B., Léve Léve Vol. 2 brings together emblematic recordings from the 1970s and ’80s, carefully restored and remastered, designed as much for close listening as for DJ use.
The compilation deepens and completes the first volume by returning to key groups such as Sangazuza, Conjunto Equador, Africa Negra and Pedro Lima, while also unveiling previously unreleased or hard-to-find tracks. Across the record, puxa and socopê rhythms unfold with remarkable intensity, capturing these bands at the height of their powers: tight…
James Blake sometimes feels like pop music’s arch, ultra-serious older brother, floating above the scene with warbly torch songs that never quite come down to earth. He’s left his ghostly prints on artists ranging from Beyoncé to Rosalía to Lil Yachty, and it’s a testament to his influence how widespread his once novel, weightless style of production has become.
There was a time when it wasn’t common for mainstream artists to sing over instrumentals that sound like they would crumble against a gentle caress, or pitch vocals up and down to inhuman extremes. All of that experimentation, coupled with his heart-on-sleeve, midtempo songwriting, has lent Blake a somewhat dowdy image, like a Tory councillor who liked dubstep before…
Pianist Eliza Garth is an advocate for contemporary classical music and also likes to find nooks and crannies in the concert music canon to present. On her latest recording, By the River, Garth plays from both repertoires. All of the programmed pieces are based on hymn tunes, from Lutheran chorales to shape note spirituals.
The latter is featured in “Variations on an Early American Hymn Tune” by David Froom (1951- 2022). “Holy Manna” is treated to a simple lining out of its melody at the piece’s outset. After this unassuming opening, the material is thoroughly developed in multiple sections, building to arcing counterpoint at breakneck speed. Scott Wheeler (b. 1952) also employs variation techniques in “Beach Spring.” It too culminates in…
Under the Sign is Irvine Myling, and this is his first Cryo Chamber release. Other than that, he has little visible online presence or prior discography. Nonetheless, whether he is a newcomer or veteran, Conflux is a commendable effort. The album is an interesting and unusual blend of instrumentation, drones, and effects that could be roughly classified as tribal ambient. But like with many such classifications, it is only somewhat descriptive of the actual sound.
Indeed, the album is centered around indigenous or folk drumming, low-end strings, and flute motifs. Atop this are keyboard drones and throaty vocalizations. The sound is frequently dense, full, and varied. It is arguably cinematic, but different from the dark ambient leanings of…
While The Stooges had a few obvious points of influence — the swagger of the early Rolling Stones, the horny pound of the Troggs, the fuzztone sneer of a thousand teenage garage bands, and the Velvet Underground’s experimental eagerness to leap into the void — they didn’t really sound like anyone else around when their first album hit the streets in 1969. It’s hard to say if Ron Asheton, Scott Asheton, Dave Alexander, and the man then known as Iggy Stooge were capable of making anything more sophisticated than this, but if they were, they weren’t letting on, and the best moments of this record document the blithering inarticulate fury of the post-adolescent id. Ron Asheton’s guitar runs (fortified with bracing use of fuzztone and wah-wah) are so brutal and concise…
Sydney’s Itchy and the Nits are back with their sophomore album, chronicling the joys of telling lies, stinky stinky men, and nudie beaches. For a taste of summer in the darkest of times, look only to Itchy and the Nits to toss you a swimsuit and make a splash.
Following their scrappy debut EP and two years touring across the US, EU, and Japan, the Nits have amplified the charm, crisped up production, and continued on their mission of spunky, fast punk akin to the Ramones meeting Courtney Bartnett at a beachfront concessions stand. Greetings from Itchy and the Nits is rife with hits and slam-danceable classics. Boasting only 22 minutes of runtime, the 12 track album is endlessly repeatable.
The Nits are full of fun, but there’s also…
Guitarist Derek Bailey, one of the first practitioners of non-idiomatic free improvisation, once opined that solo extemporization was an inferior activity. Since he played unaccompanied concerts quite often, Bailey might’ve been pulling the interviewer’s leg, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t mean it, since his preferred playing situation was one where the musicians hadn’t fixed on a vocabulary yet.
A quarter century has passed since Bailey left this earth, but if anyone has his words and example committed to heart, it’s John Butcher. The English soprano/tenor saxophonist took Bailey’s precedent quite seriously as he developed his own capacity to operate within the realm of absolute freedom, and you can perceive elements…