London’s Led Bib were a quintet for 22 years. During that time, they established a well-founded reputation as architects of the rather short-lived anarchic jazz movement. Keyboardist Toby McLaren was a founding member and a co-architect of the band’s sound. He left after 2017’s Umbrella Weather and was temporarily replaced by Elliott Galvin on 2019’s It’s Morning. Following a tour, drummer Mark Holub, bassist Liran Donin, and saxophonists Pete Grogan and Chris Williams, decided to tour as a four-piece. It proved difficult. Led Bib returned to Cuneiform for Hotel Pupik. It was written for quartet and plays to the group’s strengths as composers (tunes were written by three members) improvisers, arrangers, and gifted, instinctive instrumentalists.
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The groove is strong in multi-instrumentalist Adam Ben Ezra’s Heavy Drops. Mainly known as a double bass player, he has performed with the likes of Snarky Puppy, Pat Metheny, Victor Wooten, etc., and it shows in his smooth and energetic musical abilities. Joined by drummer Michael Olivera, Ezra still produces a meaty sound that morphs intriguingly throughout the release. Hints of funk, Latin and Mediterranean accentuate the individual compositions while also coalescing into an album that doesn’t feel disjointed.
Ezra is a confident musician with a willingness to pursue new musical terrain. The title track introduces the listener to the overall vibe. Double bass and drums deliver a fluid performance with brief layers of flute and…
Since leaving Dutch band The Ex, GW Sok – real name Jos Kleij – has spent the last two decades channelling his muse through various projects. His dry wit and often caustic worldview can be heard in collaborations with Oiseaux-Tempête, Lukas Simonis, and King Champion Sounds, to name a handful. The GW in his stage name stands for geitenwollen, and here geitenwollen sok, or sokken (‘goats wool socks’) are the Dutch equivalent of the hair shirt, or the socks with sandals brigade. An implied morality Sok has been happy to subvert this past forty-odd years.
Sok’s new collaboration, Sopa Boba, with dramaturg Jean Vangeebergen and musician Pavel Tchikov, is something else again. In the project’s record, That Moment, Sok narrates…
Halloween: The Complete Expanded Collection collates Carpenter’s soundtracks for the most recent Halloween trilogy: 2018’s Halloween, 2021’s Halloween Kills, and 2022’s Halloween End, which marked the director and composer’s return to film scoring after nearly two decades.
For the first time ever, the complete Halloween trilogy is being released in fully expanded editions, featuring previously unreleased music cues that reveal new layers of the iconic scores. The expanded version of Halloween Kills features 25 unreleased music cues, while Halloween Ends adds 10 new tracks.
…In listening to the recent Halloween scores, the collaborative spirit among the composing trio is one of the first things that jumps out.
House, techno, and garage were respectively invented in Chicago, Detroit, and New York, but the U.K. embraced them and took underground club sounds into the pop charts during the 1980s and ’90s. Burn It Up: The Rise of British Dance Music 1986-1991 explores some of the many developments that took place during the era, from the U.K.’s first attempts at acid house to early rave anthems. Like other Cherry Red anthologies, this one casts a wide net and tries to tell a comprehensive history of its subject, making room for established classics as well as rarities, curiosities, and inclusions that might be kind of a stretch, but hear them out anyway.
The collection starts with Coldcut’s “Beats + Pieces (Mo Bass Remix),” representing…
Given the fact that Matteo Pagamici and Michael Künstle have already composed for TV and film, it’s no surprise that their debut album is cinematic. The bonus is a 92-piece orchestra, which makes every piece sound like a film trailer or theme.
Together, the tracks form a “Musical Travel Diary,” excerpts of which are found in the accompanying book; each is accompanied by a photo and a brief essay.
This being said, one may wish to make their own associations, especially in the opener, “Abstract 2.0.” The tone is Jurassic Park, widescreen large, bursting when the drums and brass advance. Inspired by the overstimulation of a big city, the piece also promises adventure and teems with possibility. In this world, anything…
Imagine you were a collector of folk songs in 1970s Kyiv, a student at the Conservatory, and a member of the Leninist Youth League (obligatory if you wanted easier access to higher ed). Coming back from weekend expeditions to rural villages, you would deposit your field recordings in the archive, but not before you edited them — excising references to gods, Christian or otherwise, or songs too tragic for the Communist Party, which expected optimism from the folk. Composers in the Conservatory might draw from your collections and adapt them for the saccharine folklore ensembles sponsored by the Soviet state.
Imagine you wanted to sing like the women you heard in the village, with the full gritty materiality of your body, even though…
Tight and Loose is an artifact of a time before San Francisco became a bedroom community for the tech empires. Back in the late 1980s, it was still possible for people living there to work in record stores and other non-advancement enterprises to invest their time in creative endeavors that mocked the notion of redeeming values. World of Pooh was one such endeavor.
The band comprised Barbara Manning (voice, guitar, bass), Brandan Kearney (voice, guitar) and Jay Paget (drums). While it was considerably closer to conventional rock ’n’ roll than many of the other combos its members played in (Caroliner, Archipeligo Brewing Co., Glands of External Secretion), World of Pooh was no one’s ladder for pop success. Therein lies some of…
European Sun came together when musician/writer Steve Miles met U.K. indie pop stalwart Rob Pursey (of Heavenly, Tender Trap, the Catenary Wires, etc.) through a mutual musician friend. With Miles on lead vocals and guitar, and backed by Pursey and his frequent bandmates Amelia Fletcher and drummer Ian Button, they launched European Sun with an eponymous album in 2020. It showcased Miles’ anxiously observant, underdog-minded spoke-sung lyrics within a tuneful, D.I.Y indie pop setting. With the vocally kindred Elin Miles stepping in for Fletcher on backing vocals, their second album, When Britain Was Great, sees Miles let loose more as a writer, with confessional songs full of observant social commentary, pop culture references, and timidity.
Has the singer-songwriter categorization, as a genre, lost its meaning? If you think of it solely in the sense of its origins (a solo artist with an acoustic instrument, such as an acoustic guitar or piano), it surely has. In response to this, many modern artists categorized as singer-songwriters defy the genre’s original definition. They achieve this by incorporating diverse musical elements and combining them with a wide array of instrumentation and arrangements.
Listening to Kira Metcalf’s latest album, Lessons in Majestic Humiliation, you can conclude that she is sticking to both the old and new concepts of the singer-songwriter genre musically. At the same time, lyrically, she sees no boundaries, with darker overtones leading the way.
It would be difficult to overstate the righteousness of David Zé’s heart. Raised in Angola while the Southern African country was still a colonial outpost of Portugal, regionally he’s considered an icon of resistance who used music as a weapon for liberation and reform. Zè was assassinated in 1977, two years after Portugal’s withdrawal, but in a nation still fractured and unstable. Speculation continues to swirl that governmental fear of his influential voice led to the killing; author and African studies professor Marissa Jean Moorman points out that while there are no definitive accounts of their deaths, the murders of Zé, and fellow musicians Urbano de Castro and Artur Nunes, were part of a “purge.”
Raised by parents who belonged to a Methodist…
While many of us are bundling against the elements, cursing an abundance of cold, we pause to remember that a year ago a hotter weather event was unfolding in Southern California. The initial warnings called the combination of accumulated drought and fierce wind “a particularly dangerous situation.” On January 7, the first plumes of smoke appeared. Ian Wellman was there, using his field recording equipment to document the sounds of the Santa Ana winds. As the day went on, he began to smell the smoke; he saw the moon turn crimson as ash accumulated on his clothes. When he returned home, he had begun to realize the extent of what was unfolding. The Palisades and Eaton fires would burn throughout the month, demolishing 180,000 structures,…
Belgian-Caribbean composer and musician Nala Sinephro‘s first film score is for The Smashing Machine, a Benny Safdie-directed biopic about MMA fighter Mark Kerr, starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the title role.
On paper, Sinephro seems like an odd choice for the job, as it doesn’t seem like there’s much of a connection between ambient spiritual jazz and extreme fighting. Regardless, Sinephro and her regular collaborators (including saxophonist/flautist Nubya Garcia and former black midi drummer Morgan Simpson) weave an intriguing instrumental backdrop for the film, issued by Warp as a 25-minute soundtrack. Most of the eight tracks are brief pieces which establish a warm glow, swirl lightly, and make their exit.
German alto saxophonist, composer, and improviser Angelika Niescier emerges on Chicago Tapes with a refreshed, invigorating sound shaped by an expanded ensemble that gathers some of the Midwest’s most adventurous musicians. Long engaged in collaborations with American players — among them Tyshawn Sorey, Gerald Cleaver, Chris Tordini, and Tomeka Reid — Niescier brought her compositions and open-ended sketches to Chicago for an ambitious project that yielded nine fearless originals, each brimming with sharp turns and volatile energy.
The album’s kinetic opener, “Rejoice, Disrupt, Resist”, is a furious, defiant response to the anti-immigration stance of the Trump administration. Here, Niescier joins forces with…
…The deluxe edition adds eleven bonus tracks, including a previously unreleased song called “One Wonders Why,” as well as phone demos and alternate studio versions of existing tracks.
After releasing two fine albums for Nonesuch, swinging trad jazz and pop vocal duo Rachael Price (Lake Street Drive) and Vilray Blair Bolles release their third long-player on Concord just in time for their appearance at the 2025 Newport Jazz Festival. West of Broadway is a ten-song set that operates at the intersection of swing, warm, rounded West Coast jazz, and musicals, with stellar, unintrusive production by Dan Knobler and expertly arranged by Jacob Zimmerman. They are joined by a sextet that includes vibraphonist/xylophonist/pianist Warren Wolf, saxophonist Steve Wilson, …
…features two bonus tracks not on the original album. The bonus tracks, “My Lover” and “I Love(d) New York”, were originally left off the initial release due to vinyl space constraints.
Seven albums in, White Lies continue to evolve while keeping their signature mix of shadowy synth-pop and widescreen emotion intact. Night Light finds the London trio leaning deeper into electronic textures than ever before, with the guitars now playing a supporting role to shimmering synths, pulsing basslines, and Harry McVeigh’s commanding baritone.
It’s a sleek, modern evolution that keeps the band’s DNA intact while exploring new sonic territory. The album bursts to life with ‘Nothing On Me’, a quickfire opener that clocks in at just…
“Anyone can come up with a story… you just need a few lies and a few loose wires upstairs and enough time alone to tie them all together”. So says Gene, a character created by Rick Maddocks for his story in ‘Sputnik Diner’. Common threads weave their way through the five stories in the book, all centred around tobacco-belt Ontario.
…Blue Horse Opera started off as a novel idea. But time spent in Southern Spain over a decade ago provoked childhood memories of old, familiar spaghetti western soundtracks. Maddocks’s wiring and musical creativity enabled him to take the narrative (dusty deserts replaced by the Canadian oil sands) and compose a 17-track song cycle, and an endoscopic glimpse into the colourful mind of this writer and musician.
Sony Music Japan has continued its popular series of 7-inch SACD reissues with a 50th anniversary edition of Bruce Springsteen’s seminal Born to Run. The 3CD set features a new DSD remaster of the original album on stereo hybrid SACD (playable on all CD players) along with The Boss’ Greenvale, New York concert of December 12, 1975 on 2 Blu-spec CDs. The CW Post College Post Dome concert featured most of the songs from Born to Run including “Thunder Road,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” “Backstreets,” “She’s the One,” “Jungleland,” and, of course, the title track. (The concert also yielded Springsteen’s now-classic take on “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” which was released as a single nearly a decade later, in 1985.) The concert was issued in 2021 on…