While Rossi’s previous solo albums explored his love for acoustic ballads, vocal harmonies, and the blend of British rock with country influences, this album, Francis Rossi’s first in seven years, marks a true return to the energetic, guitar-driven sound that made him a legend with Status Quo.
The Accidental sees Francis Rossi playing to his strengths, but taking risks, cutting loose, and exploring new territory – this album is all about old bones and fresh blood.
The fresh blood in question comes largely from Hiran Ilangantilike, a guitarist who was originally a school friend of one of Francis’ children, and co-producer Andy Brook. What became the sessions for ‘The Accidental’ was initially born of just plugging in and making some serious noise…
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On Langeleik, two pioneers of alternative pedal-steel meet across oceans, time, and temperament. Norwegian multi-instrumentalist Geir Sundstøl and London-based pedal-steel player Joe Harvey-Whyte merge the instrument’s ghostly resonance with field recordings, ambient drones and vintage synths to create a sound that feels as fluid and alive as the rivers that inspired it.
Geir and Joe got in touch in 2016 when Joe, exploring beyond his usual listening habits, stumbled upon Geir’s debut Furulund. Struck by its hypnotic slide melodies, he reached out. A musical friendship grew through years of conversation, sharing curiosities and visiting each other’s studios in Oslo and London.
In August 2024, during a break from touring…
Cherry Red, longtime home for Howard Jones’ catalogue, release an unheard set from the beginning of his career.
Live at the Marquee, finds the inimitable singer-songwriter-keyboardist wowing a crowd at the late London venue just before his commercial breakthrough in 1983.
The wholly unreleased show, was unearthed from master tapes when the label began compiling bonus material for reissues of his former Warner catalogue in 2018, and remixed by Jones himself for this release. (It appears from the metadata that three of these Marquee tracks were originally released as B-sides to early singles.) The packaging includes rare and unreleased photos of Jones from the period.
When the then-28-year-old Jones took the stage…
In some ways, Shackleton is a musical shaman. Across a 20-year career — including 2012’s monumental Music for the Quiet Hour / The Drawbar Organ EPs and recent collaborative highlight The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now — the acclaimed producer has guided listeners on a journey through the outer perimeters of spiritual dub, Carnatic music, alternative tuning methods, prog, German folk, and free jazz. It is an undeniably intoxicating mix and, at times, an overwhelming one: Listening to it can be like entering a room filled with thick incense smoke and esoteric objects; everything is primed to get you in the zone, especially the devotional chanting.
Yet with Euphoria Bound, his solo follow-up to 2023’s The Scandal of Time, the haze that…
You can cling onto the rambunctiousness of youth, refusing to grow up; you can swerve hard into maturity, peel the stickers off your guitar, and hope that critical adulation follows.
On their seventh LP, Joyce Manor find a fine middle ground, and the result is their best record since 2012’s Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired. There’s a wistfulness to these nine tracks, which see the band journeying backwards to examine their pasts, but refusing to force profundity where there isn’t any to find. On the title track, Barry Johnson sings “I used to go to this bar / Back when I didn’t have a car / ‘cause it was close to my apartment / So that was just as far as I went.” Reflection on time past is theme enough for this record, whether or not the memories are inherently dramatic;…
Marta Del Grandi is in a liminal space between the past she always has one eye on and a future she consistently encourages herself to move towards. Her third album, Dream Life, feels like grappling with a reality check where you’ve put in the work but things don’t look the way you expected and there are untold peripheral problems beyond your control.
In the great indie pop tradition, Dream Life masks melancholia with whimsy, whether it’s fantasy land synths, syncopated programmed beats, or slide guitar. The dreamy, brooding, and vaguely foreboding synth arrangement of ‘20 Days of Summer’ touches broadly on a feeling of not being able to laugh at the chaos, as Del Grandi reminds herself “to keep going / try to breathe”.
German pianist Julia Hülsmann has making a series of strong trio and quartet albums for ECM Records for almost twenty years. While I Was Away is the first vocal record she’s made since 2015’s A Clear Midnight: Kurt Weill in America, which guest-starred elastic-voiced songwriter/interpreter Theo Bleckmann.
For her thirteenth album, Hülsmann assembles a new group that includes drummer Eva Klesse, bassist Eva Kruse, violinist Héloïse Lefebvre, cellist Susanne Paul, and, crucially, a trio of singers: Aline Frazão, Live Maria Roggen, and Michael Schiefel. For such an unusual lineup, the bandleader gathers an eclectic batch of songs for them to perform. Hülsmann sets poems by Emily Dickinson (“Sleep”), e.e. cummings (“TicToc”), and…
There’s a delicious irony to an album called Wormslayer planting relentless earworms in the mind that tunnel through it for days on end. Listeners fond of hook-laden, grand-scale sonic storytelling will find that English rock band Kula Shaker’s eighth effort delivers mystic folk rock every bit as adventuresome as Frank Herbert’s Dune — (ear)worms included.
Wormslayer sees a band beloved for its spiritual sensitivity stitching threads of observation into a familiar tapestry: an image of worldly evil alongside glimpses of what the heart longs for most. On a planet that “weeps beneath a mantle of shadows” (per the 2006 game The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess), Kula Shaker advocate for mobilizing the “poets of light”, finding…
Folk and blues legend Eric Bibb has garnered numerous Blues Music Awards Awards and Grammy nominations over the course of five decades and 34 albums. Regarded as a blues legend, his output is consistently strong.
One Mississippi is a direct follow-up to 2024’s In the Real World, rendering almost entirely original material with a similar backing cast. Once again, Bibb works with longtime musical director and producer, co-writer, and multi-instrumentalist Glen Scott, along with slide guitarist Robbie McIntosh and fiddler Esbjorn Hazelius. Select tracks draw in strings, background vocalists, and other flourishes. The tracks center around Bibb’s immaculate acoustic guitar and banjo playing, his vocals, and heartfelt lyrics.
While it’s almost six years since arch Parisien hipster and former Eurovision performer Sébastien Tellier released his last album, he can hardly be described as a slacker. In the interim, there’s been three film soundtracks, two EPs and he performed at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Paralympic Games – not to mention having to deal with an irritating case of identity theft.
However, the untamed dandy has now donned his wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses once more and ventured into the recording studio to create Kiss the Beast, a diverse rainbow of electronica sounds that covers ground as varied as spaced-out ballads, rump-shaking electro-pop, electro-orchestral cinematic sounds and mellow folktronica without sounding disjointed or forced.
How do you get the Buzzcocks sound? Steve Diggle says that’s like a chef revealing his secrets, but admits that one crucial ingredient is his old H&H amp. This was acquired almost 50 years ago with the advance the band got for signing to United Artists – you can see it on the cover of Going Steady. “It gives that transistorised valve sound and you can hear it very distinctively on that first album,” he explains. “In Manchester, people wondered why we used these little amps, but it meant you could get distortion at a very low volume and that became our identity. Double track a riff through the H&H amp and you get that unique Buzzcocks sound.”
The double-tracked H&H riff pops up a few times on Attitude Adjustment, a reminder…
There are times, listening to Richard Bishop do his thing with Sun City Girls, when this reviewer thinks, “Everyone else can stop playing their guitars now.” A few of those moments occur at points during the 92 minutes of music included on Three Lobed’s reissue of tracks from two of the Sun City Girls’ late-1980s Cloaven Cassettes: Famous Asthma (1987) and Tibetan Jazz 666 (1988). For listeners not tuned in to the vagaries of the Sun City Girls’ prolific output, the Cloaven Cassettes were self-released tapes, often composed of performances of the band at its loosest and weirdest, and the Sun City Girls could get very, very weird. Most of what you’ll hear on this reissue is the Bishop brothers and Charles Gocher in improvisation, working a blend of mutant jazz,…
Pastor Chris Congregation – West Virginia Snake Handler Revival “They Shall Take Up Serpents” (2025)
High in the mountains of West Virginia lies McDowell County. Formerly a hotspot for American coal mining, technological advancements and outsourced labour crept through Appalachia in the mid-twentieth century, leaving communities like McDowell destitute. From 1950 to 2020, the county saw its population fall by over 80%, and by 2015 it had the highest number of drug-related deaths of any county in the United States.
Alongside abandoned buildings and burnt-out cars, McDowell County is dense with churches. Typically Pentecostal, these have become a refuge for a community on the fringes of a zombified American dream clinging to bygone prosperity. One is The House of the Lord Jesus, also known as the last remaining snake-handling…
Back in 2021, Tom Paxton and John McCutcheon had stopped touring because of the pandemic, but their ideas for new songs kept flowing. So, the two decided to meet every Monday afternoons at 2pm via Zoom for songwriting sessions. Before long, they had enough songs for an album, and they released Together in 2023. After Together appeared, they continued swapping songs and making music, and when they took stock, they found they had plenty of material for another album, Together Again.
…To dive into their collective pasts would take a book, but suffice it to say that Paxton has recorded or appeared on more than 70 albums starting in 1964, and written thousands of songs which are largely staples of the folk tradition…
This latest full-length from Edinburgh’s Siobhan Wilson touches on many themes including, but not limited to, friendships, wanderlust and the cosmos, but if there’s a relationship that’s key to the record, it’s Wilson’s own with the electric guitar. Known previously for a more folky, pastoral sound, Wilson has clearly come to understand the power that amplification can provide, especially when used minimally. Thaw is loosely conceptual – side A inspired by summer, and side B by winter – but in truth, its mood shifts continually. Opener Starlove is somewhere at the junction between grunge and shoegaze, while Snowflakes, thick with atmosphere, is straight out of Twin Peaks.
Some songs you might categorise as guitar-pop, including the charming ‘On Est Bien’,…
…Peanut is the sixth-ish album by New York-based musician and engineer Otto Benson, and the first with vocals. He shed a lot of skin before arriving at this album’s dusky, dusty sound, which is defined by gentle nylon-stringed guitar and shivery Rhodes piano and lands somewhere at the intersection of Frankie Cosmos, Hayden Pedigo, and Let It Die-era Feist. A scan of his meticulously maintained website reveals a trove of hyperactive vaporwave under the name Memo Boy; ambient music as Ronnie P; puckish hyperpop under the name OTTO; a tingly beat tape with Mietze Conte; and at least a handful more experiments with different forms of contemporary electronic pop.
…All of this is to say that form is clearly important to Benson; although Peanut is his…
There’s something about trees and storms in Iti Eta No. Heimat’s third album is an exploration of collage and landscape – not just the physical landscape of the French countryside where Olivier Demeaux (Cheveu, Accident du Travail) and Armelle Oberlé (The Dreams, Badaboum) moved after lockdown, but it’s visceral, emotional imprint. A violent storm left trees scattered across the road, and that image inspired the atmosphere of Iti Eta No. Heimat’s early records were a deliberate exploration of ‘Eastern’ tonalities, but Iti Eta No sees the group moving away from that kind of orientalist imagery. It feels more refined, like deviant pop made dance-floor accessible thanks to Krikor Kouchian’s (L.I.E.S, I’m a Cliche) mastering. There is a distinct sense of…
30th anniversary remaster. Included is a second disc with 7 bonus tracks from the era, some unreleased, some remixes and reinterpretations.
It’s been observed that while the bleeding edge of what’s cool continues onward, there are always plenty of people still exploring styles long deemed outdated, sometimes finding something new and exciting as a result. Such is the case with Pittsburgh’s Lowsunday, led by open fan of ’80s British post-punk rock Shane Sahene. Drawing inspiration from such pioneers of emotional, thrilling music as the Sound, Bauhaus, the Chameleons, and Echo and the Bunnymen, vocalist/guitarist Sahene originally formed and led the group in the mid-’90s as a quintet called Low Sunday Ghost Machine.