The newest release from Buffalo, NY instrumental jamband, Organ Fairchild, continues their tripped-out grooves mixed with smooth flowing vibes that lovers of their live shows have come to cherish. BOOM! is a sweet collection that takes the listener on a journey with the band, knowing that the tracks will shift and morph when the group enters their natural habitat, the stage.
For this studio effort, Organ Fairchild (Joe Bellanti- organ and keyboards, Corey Kertzie- drums and percussion, and Dave Ruch- guitar) worked with Justin Guip (Hot Tuna, Levon Helm), who recorded, mixed, and co-produced, and Alan Evans (Soulive), who mastered the record.
Opener “Westside Bowl” mixes smooth lounge-ready sounds with chicken scratchy guitar…
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By 1962, Wes Montgomery had already changed the way jazz guitar sounded. A self-taught player from Indianapolis, he built his style around his thumb instead of a pick, creating a warm, rounded tone that cut through without ever sounding harsh. His use of octaves became a signature, but what really set him apart was his sense of structure; his solos felt organized, intentional, and grounded in melody. Full House, recorded live at Tsubo in Berkeley, captures Montgomery in a straight-ahead setting, backed by Johnny Griffin on sax, Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Jimmy Cobb on drums. It’s one of the clearest documents of his small-group strength. As part of Craft Recordings ‘ Original Jazz Classics series, Full House is being reissued on 180-gram vinyl…
Drummer/composer Booker Stardrum delivers a new powerful solo album Close-up On The Outside, his first for We Jazz Records. The new record sees Stardrum (also a member of SML and frequent collaborator of Lisel, Photay, Horse Lords, Wendy Eisenberg, and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma) doubling down on the earthy tactility of human sound and communication while also exploring rich, electroacoustic landscapes. The album, released on LP and digitally, involves Stardrum’s close collaborators Anna Butterss, Jeremiah Chiu, Chris Williams, Lester St. Louis, Logan Hone and Michael Coleman.
While he now lives and works near Kingston, New York, Booker Stardrum made the first notes heard on the new album at an artist residency…
Much has been written about the Transatlantic fallout of punk rock, with every crevice of the era meticulously scanned in the hope of a lost classic. Whilst Circle X’s fractious run, two albums and two EPs, over a span of seventeen years, might not signify complete unknown status to seasoned crate-diggers, their minimal place in the history books belies their brilliance.
Formed in 1978, in Louisville, Kentucky – by brothers Rik and David Letendre, alongside Tony Pinotti and Bruce Witsiepe – Circle X emerged from the ashes of the city’s very first punk bands No Fun and The I-Holes, surfing the shockwaves created by punk rock. The band swiftly relocated. First to New York, then Dijon, and back to New York again, all the time evolving and mutating…
Two years on from their ambitious debut, Hysterical Strength, the North Yorkshire-born but now London-based six-piece DEADLETTER return with their sophomore album, Existence Is Bliss. Across twelve tracks, their evolved, multi-layered sound underpins lyrics that explore what it means to truly live, rather than merely exist, in an increasingly tumultuous world where life can be extremely challenging.
Shortly after recording their previous record, the band faced challenges of their own. A line-up change that came mid-album campaign saw saxophonist Nathan Pigott, who has a background in jazz, step in to fill the boots previously occupied by Poppy Richler.
In recent years especially, saxophone has had…
Conjuring images of blizzards and howling winds, Kevin Richard Martin’s Sub Zero is called that for a reason. It’s monolithic and unforgiving, even by the Bug’s standards, representing his most suffocating take on ambient dub yet. It’s not just a matter of making already heavy music heavier: Here, Martin hollows out his materials, leaving just the bass and high frequencies.
The only real midrange comes from what sounds like inclement weather or the occasional distant, lumbering percussion. It’s a new wrinkle in Martin’s sound, making yet another record of bleak electronic dirges feel unexpectedly novel. Sub Zero is a black hole of sound that sucks the color out of everything around it and makes a universe out of what feels like nothingness.
Annie Hogan is something of a quiet icon of goth and post-punk. A longtime friend of Marc Almond, she put on early Soft Cell shows and played with his dark cabaret side-project Marc and the Mambas. She appears on Barry Adamson’s seminal Moss Side Story and has worked with Lydia Lunch, Nick Cave, and several members of Einstürzende Neubauten. She’s also been releasing evocative solo music since the late 1980s, the latest of which, the six track album Tongues in My Head, strikes an elegant balance of light and shade.
Opening track ‘Alles Ist Verloren’ is measured but bleak, a taxonomy of a post-apocalyptic landscape peopled with faith healers, wilting trees and “shaking bones of the dead”. The bones of the track are also bare – a simple chord…
Slipping into a ghostly voice on the opening tune, Ritt Momney takes the audience into a country unbalanced by politics and unfocused in theme. These dreamlike, picaresque tunes take many different forms; a collage equal parts inventive and heroic. Jangly garage pop number “Lightshow” exhibits a singer beneath a torrent of swirling instruments: angular, opaque and eerie.
Ritt Momney (née Jack Rutter), on his third record, fearlessly tackles the ennui that envelops his generation. The 21st century has been a cycle of war, chaos and pandemic; that turmoil forms the skeleton of Base. Occasionally oppressive, the record holds a bittersweet undercurrent that should be readily identified by all who listen carefully. Organ-drenched ballad “Body”…
Every now and then a record comes around that just knocks you off your feet on the first listen. Floors you, insists to be played again, rinse and repeat. Carnival is one of those records. An album that demands one’s full attention for its entire duration. Which is testament to the tenacity and talents of its creators, Vona Vella.
The British band is essentially the brainchild of songwriting duo Izzy Davis and Dan Cunningham, who initially started the project from their living room during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Originally from Loughborough, they finally settled in Nottingham via London. The (then) duo put out an EP in 2022 (Go Outside Forever) followed by a self-titled album the next year having been discovered then signed by…
“If I’m so empowered, why am I such a coward / If I’m so strong, why am I broken?” asks Self Esteem, aka Rebecca Lucy Taylor, on ‘I Do and I Don’t Care’, the opening track on her third album A Complicated Woman. Hopeless though the outspoken pop diva may sound, these contradictions are an invitation into the spectacularly more interesting grey area where two things can be true at once.
Paradoxical thinking is nothing new to Taylor, who cut a choppy path to liberation on her widely acclaimed second album Prioritise Pleasure, having gone solo from indie duo Slow Club in 2017. Lamenting cycles of misogyny, feminist anxieties and societal pressures, it was a brave, bolshy portrayal of all her knotty complexities,…
In TV they talk of the “anthology series”: a regular, recurring show, like The Twilight Zone, Tales of The Unexpected, Inside No.9 or Black Mirror, where each episode has a different setting, cast and sometimes director, unified only by a small team of writers or showrunners. In a similar vein, you could see certain 21st-century outfits – Sault, UNKLE, Handsome Boy Modelling School, Mr Jukes – as “anthology groups”: modular ensembles with a shifting cast of guest musicians and vocalists, changing from song to song.
Gorillaz are, of course, the anthology group ne plus ultra. Just two threads hold the project together. One is the punky, cartoonish artwork of Jamie Hewlett; the other is the anything-goes sonic adventurism of Damon Albarn…
When it came to composing for her new album In the Low Light, British singer-songwriter Lucy Kitchen’s songs first started life as small poems, a simple way to capture her thoughts and mood during a very difficult time: her husband’s battle with cancer and, tragically, his eventual death. With such a heavy shadow hanging over it, perhaps the most surprising thing about the album is that it’s not all darkness and depression; in fact, there is a brightness of hope there too that reflects the mending Kitchen found through the creative process.
The album opener, ‘Winter King’, is hauntingly bleak as Kitchen, her voice fragile and airy, expresses yearning using some fantastic, dark, imagery: “Would you come to me on…
On his fifth album, Joe Wilkes delivers a powerful statement of intent. Hope in My Chest, Fire in My Throat finds the folk troubadour at his most focused, combining intricate finger-picking guitar with traditionally delivered songs rich in storytelling, humour, and sharp political observation. The album was conceived in the shadow of accident, illness, death, and personal upheaval, and stands as a testament to Wilkes’ determination to succeed at all costs. Rather than retreat inward, he leans into the rawness of experience, producing a record that feels lived-in and urgent.
The opening track, Seven Gypsies immediately surprises. Beginning with the sound of a Sarangi — a nod to the Middle East – it sets…
The Michigan power pop trio’s fourth album Lost at Sea is their first to be written together and this sense of camaraderie and togetherness has led to their most consistent sounding record yet, their simmering outrage at the state of the world also led to a little bit more angst in the lyrics and noise in the guitars. A couple of the songs here really tilt the scales toward the power side of the power pop equation, and that’s a good thing. “It Doesn’t Matter” is a fiery blast of hard rocking guitar pop that bursts out of the speakers in the might verses, “The Message” unspools in a haze of blazing overdriven guitar, and a couple of other tracks quietly seethe. Surrounding these moments are plenty of harmony-heavy pop songs that show off their skills as writers of the kind of warm…
Up in the North Star State recently, America’s seams appeared to be unravelling, with Minnesotans having to weather the chill of ICE. Meanwhile, down in the Golden State, Rose’s Pawn Shop was applying the final stitches to a musical security blanket for these turbulent times. American Seams is their Californian quilt of sound, a ten-track patchwork of country, rock, folk, and bluegrass, with a golden ratio of banjo and fiddle.
Rose’s Pawn Shop’s fifth studio album comes hot on the heels of Marigold, frontman Paul Givant’s solo album of 2025. It was recorded live in the studio at Los Angeles’ Love Street Sound, owned by The Doors’ founder member and guitarist Robby Krieger. Production was in the hands of Eric Corne, whose recent CV also includes…
After a half-dozen full-lengths and a clutch of EPs and live releases, plus one miraculously injury-free van crash in the French countryside, EXEK has arrived. The seventh studio offering from the Melbourne-based sextet, Prove the Mountains Move, comes courtesy of Brooklyn’s DFA Records, which has been fusing together rock and electronic music since the halcyon days of flagship act LCD Soundsystem.
First emerging as acolytes of Public Image Ltd.’s immortal Metal Box (aka Second Edition), EXEK has subsequently been delivering dubbed-out death-disco the equal of paragons such as The Rapture and Anika. Each EXEK album finds the group adding and subtracting elements to their core sound; Prove the Mountains Move finds…
deathcrash emerged from the same London art-rock scene that birthed contemporaries like Black Country, New Road and caroline, which means they’re young enough to still be figuring the world out but old enough already to have grown disillusioned with a lot of it.
“This life is the best life/ Oh god, it’s the only one,” vocalist/guitarist Tiernan Banks laments on “CMC,” a highlight of deathcrash’s new album Somersaults, as a wash of arpeggiated guitars unspool around him. The more the phrase repeats, the more its meanings seem to multiply: Are deathcrash suddenly aware of temporal finality, or are they dissatisfied by the notion that this is as good as it’s ever going to get? Is it too self-piteous to identify with both?
…Composer and sound designer Victoria Barca combines bleeps, crunchy percussion and chirping electronics on her albums to create music that blurs the line between acoustic and synthetic, laboratory-created and field-recorded. Her fourth album, released by Mondoj, has the power to create musical worlds. It combines electronic, electroacoustic and acoustic sounds, juxtaposing exotica-style sounds, quasi-folk forms, vocalisations and snippets of recordings. It also shows the potential and possibilities that sound offers. This album was created almost entirely without leaving home.
…Camilla Nebbia’s saxophone in ‘Sporo’ spins seductive phrases, sounding as if someone were playing in the next room. Everything here…
