Combining elements of jam bands and electronic dance rock, Lotus was formed by brothers Jesse Miller (bass/sampler) and Luke Miller (guitar/keyboards), Steve Clemens (drums), Chuck Morris (percussion), and Mike Rempel (guitar) while they were attending Goshen College in Indiana in 1999.
Rise of the Anglerfish explores a dichotomy between light and dark blending live guitar, bass, drums, and keys with warped samples, modular synths, and electronic beats. The result is a wide array of colors and styles unique to Lotus.
As bassist and producer Jesse Miller explained in a statement, the record reflects a dynamic creative period. “We’ve been working on these compositions and recordings for the last two years…
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In March 2025, Berlin’s legendary Frannz Club became the setting for an unforgettable night as Mitch Ryder delivered a blistering live performance. That evening now forms the backbone of Songs from the Road, a brand-new live release that captures the raw power, emotion and urgency that have defined Ryder’s career for more than fifty years.
While the audio recordings were captured in Berlin, the accompanying DVD footage was filmed a month earlier in Lindewerra, Thuringia home base of Ruf Records. Two different locations, united in one compelling release, give Songs From The Road both its sonic punch and visual intimacy.
The album brings together electrifying performances of Ryder’s classic repertoire…
Remastered by Mark Beazley.
On The Boy and the Tree, Susumu Yokata continues the trajectory of ambient albums formed by Sakura and Grinning Cat. Like Sakura, The Boy and the Tree is gentle and buoyant, but for the most part Yokata leaves guitars behind for odder instrumentation — plinks, clacks, gurgles, gongs, and bells. The result, especially on tracks like “Live Echo,” sounds like Brian Eno crossed with the ancient and pastoral. “Fairy Link” dances through a dreamy repetition until it floats into even less grounded territory, “Secret Garden” employs hushed, indiscernible vocals that suggest some magical twilight realm, and “Red Swan” finds an exotic, sparkling Middle Eastern groove. “Thread Leads to Heaven,” possibly the best track on…
The Patterns Lost to Air is Marielle V Jakobsons‘ first solo album in a decade, though she’s collaborated with guitarist Chuck Johnson in the duo Saariselka. The album was recorded in a studio she built in Oakland, California, and its sonic palette consists of violin, Fender Rhodes, and Moog Matriarch. It marks Jakobsons’ intentional shift from drone-based music to harmonic composition, utilizing her classical training. The release is a reflection on renewal and loss, informed by a long-term case of the COVID-19 virus. Jakobsons’ music has always sounded warm, immersive, and exquisite, but this is her richest, most melodic, and most sonically detailed work to date.
Opener “Warm Spring” is an inviting blend of rippling synths, chiming Rhodes keys,…
After building momentum over a few years of local shows and an international tour, Hong Kong shoegaze quintet Lucid Express returns with their second album, Instant Comfort. Blurrier and less glossy than their 2021 debut, the new record is situated at the sweet spot of screwed-down dream pop, ethereal vocals draped over lush guitars and synths, with a few tense, discordant edges.
Instant Comfort was recorded in the band’s studio, an island within an island, perched in an industrial district outside central Hong Kong, with views of both skyscrapers and the Chinese border. It’s a sanctuary from the grinding realities of the city, and their music likewise plays like a delicate and immersive retreat, a space that feels temporarily above reality. Vocalist Kim Ho’s…
A lot can change during the fraught time between when a musician finishes recording an album and when it’s released, often months later, per a label’s schedule. For Mirah, everything changed. In the summer of 2018, two weeks before her sixth album, Understanding, came out, the indie rock songwriter lost her beloved father. Four months after that, she gave birth to a son. A year after that, she attempted to resume life as a touring musician, only for the pandemic to nix her plans and intensify her postpartum anxiety.
All this heavy stuff — death, birth, grief, joy, “the whole turn of the earth,” as she sings on “The Beginning of Time” — beats inside the impossibly tender heart of Dedication, Mirah’s first album in seven years, a lifetime of change.
It’s not clear how many albums veteran guitarist and occasional songwriter Duke Robillard has recorded (his publicity cites between 35 and 38, and that’s just from the post-Roomful of Blues years starting in 1985).
But at 77 he is nearing the twilight of a prolific run that hasn’t seen many, if any, misfires in a quest to deliver rollicking rocking, jump blues, rockabilly, and energized jazz to a dedicated and appreciative, if rather cult, audience.
Along the way, Robillard has supported or produced artists as diverse as Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Ronnie Earl, John Hammond, Ruth Brown, Joe Louis Walker and a couple of dozen other talented icons who traverse similar musical territory. It has been an active, colorful, busy livelihood and…
…Vocalist Rae Haas got the idea to name their band MX LONELY because that’s the nickname they gave the shadowy figure that would appear during their bouts of sleep paralysis. The Brooklyn band’s debut full-length All Monsters arrives this Friday, and it’s a comprehensive introduction: The album’s eight songs signal the band’s reverence of ‘80s indie rock, contemporary noise rock, and all the pedal-loving guitar bands they bonded over when they first met in Alcoholics Anonymous just ahead of the pandemic.
With a lot of its lyrics rooted in the Jugnian practice of shadow work — achieving self-acceptance by prodding at the more shameful, suppressed facets of our personalities — All Monsters, like Shelley, argues that monsters are more…
My Days of 58 is the eighth Bill Callahan album, his first since 2022. The twelve tunes here open uncanny depths of expression as Bill continues to blaze one of the most original songwriting-and-performance trails out there. With My Days of 58, he applies the living, breathing energies of his live shows to the studio process, sharpening his slice-of-life portraiture to cut deeper than ever before.
The core musicians featured on My Days of 58 is the group that toured for 2022’s Reality: guitarist Matt Kinsey, saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi and drummer Jim White, whose synergy was evident in 2024’s live Resuscitate!. This showed Bill, as he puts it, “that they could handle anything I threw at them,” adding:
“Improv/unpredictability/the unknown is the…
Craft Recordings mark the tenth anniversary of The Record Company’s Grammy®-nominated debut with an expanded deluxe edition of Give It Back to You. The reissue pairs the original 10-track album featuring the chart-topping “Off the Ground,” alongside fan favorites “Rita Mae Young” and “On the Move” with a newly unearthed live document: the band’s legendary Living Room concert, recorded in bassist Alex Stiff’s Los Feliz home in 2013.
Heard today, Give It Back to You still lands with the same immediacy that helped launch the band a decade ago. The songs are built on tight interplay, gritty textures, and a lived-in blues-rock feel that favors momentum over excess polish. There’s a directness to the writing and performance that makes the album easy to return to-hooks…
With Country Sides, The Band of Heathens lean fully into their rootsy instincts, delivering an album that feels both lived-in and refreshingly unforced. The record sits comfortably at the crossroads of country, Americana, and soul-tinged rock, favoring groove and feel over flash. It’s the sound of a seasoned band trusting the songs, letting space, harmony, and restraint do the heavy lifting.
The album opens in a relaxed, open-road mode, where dusty guitars and warm organ tones set an unhurried pace. There’s a conversational ease to the vocals, passed around between band members, that reinforces the group’s greatest strength: chemistry. Nothing here feels overworked. Instead, the arrangements breathe, giving each song room to settle into its own pocket.
Jazz legends Dave Holland and Norma Winstone, together with the versatile London Vocal Project, present Vital Spark-an album featuring a collection of Kenny Wheeler’s final compositions that were sent over time to Pete Churchill and brought to life through patient arrangement, deep listening, and mutual trust.
Vital Spark captures a rare unity between jazz ensemble and choir, revealing a sound that’s both unforced, delicate, reflective and full of Kenny’s character and energy. The music features new lyrics by Norma Winstone, alongside Wheeler’s settings of poems by Stevie Smith, Lewis Carroll, and William Blake. The result is unmistakably Kenny Wheeler: lyrical but unsentimental, harmonically rich yet spacious. For Dave, Norma, and Pete…
Historic 4 hours of previously unissued 1959 live Art Pepper recorded at Vancouver, Canada’s legendary jazz club The Cellar.
The release of Art Pepper’s Everything Happens To Me: 1959 – Live at the Cellar is the stuff music archivists can only dream of finding. Recordings by an historic and important jazz artist, at a storied venue, at a time when the artist was making some of their most essential work. In this case, catching Pepper on tape at The Cellar in 1959 finds him in the midst of creating and straddling landmark releases like, Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section (1957), Modern Art (1957), Art Pepper + Eleven (1959) and Gettin’ Together (1960). Though Pepper was going through a down time, Vancouver, Canada’s jazz club, The Cellar was in full swing…
…features five new bonus tracks.
Coming off an extended three-year hiatus, the Neighbourhood deliver a hushed yet hooky fifth album with 2025’s Ultrasound. The LP is the group’s first since 2020’s Chip Chrome & the Mono-Tones and finds them moving away from that previous production’s glittery, conceptual sci-fi David Bowie intimations and back toward the shadowy alt-pop of their early years.
Notably, it finds them reunited with producer Justyn Pilbrow, who helmed 2013’s I Love You. and 2015’s Wiped Out!, as well as Jono Dorr, who contributed to the band’s 2014 mixtape #000000 & #FFFFFF. Consequently, many of the tracks have a soft, dreamy quality, recalling the late-night beach party melancholy of the group’s early…
Third Man Records have released the first-ever live anthology from Ann Arbor, MI–based noise rock legends Laughing Hyenas.
That Girl – Live Recordings 1986–1994 collects 18 ferocious tracks, painstakingly compiled by founding member John Brannon from his personal archive of cassette tapes, then transferred, mixed, and mastered by Grammy® Award–winning producer Bobby Emmett (known for his work with Sturgill Simpson, Jack White, and The Sights).
The collection captures the band’s full-on sonic groove assault in its purest, most unadulterated, and gloriously abrasive form. Highlights include such hard-hitting classics as “Here We Go Again,” recorded live for NYC’s famed WNYU in 1990.
If ever a band deserved an LP of live material…
Tori Amos’ daring 2001 concept album Strange Little Girls returns February 20 in an expanded edition that adds rarities and previously unreleased recordings. The Grammy® Award-nominated album finds Amos reinterpreting a dozen songs written by men, shifting them to a female perspective and performing each through one of 12 personas she created for the project. Strange Little Girls (Expanded Edition) combines the original album and B-sides with two unreleased covers from the sessions.
Celebrating 25 years, Strange Little Girls remains one of Amos’ most striking and conceptually ambitious works. To bring the concept to life, she collaborated with renowned makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin, who helped transform her into 12…
Hen Ogledd’s Discombobulated is in the radical mould of music that tackles the now. Unconcerned that references may go out of date, the timelessness of their sound comes in documenting the present, rather than in seeking to transcend (or ignore) it. Lyrically, Discombobulated celebrates dissent with all the force of the protest tradition in folk music; musically, the album glues together sounds and genres to evoke the chaos of today.
Hen Ogledd is the project of Dawn Bothwell, Rhodri Davies, Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington. The first releases were just Dawson and Davies; since then, with the addition of Bothwell for 2016’s Bronze and then Pilkington on 2018’s Mogic, Hen Ogledd have grown both more complete and more porous. Complete, because…
We last encountered Midori Hirano in the company of a pair of Berlin electronic improvisers, noting that “A grounding cadence of piano arpeggios, a tremulous wash of strings, the fluting pulse of synthesizers, Berlin experimental artists Sebastian and Daniel Selke (“the brothers”) and Midori Hirano mix together organic and electronic sounds in this meditation on the scale.”
Here the Berlin-based artist — who trained on classical piano but has more recently shifted to analog and modular synths — revisits the spare, searching aesthetic on her own, mostly on synthethic keyboards but also on piano.
On the synthy side, consider the purity of “Before the Silence,” as it negotiates a brief but luminous keyboard riff. It rolls like a wheel,…
