Nightvision finds Devon Allman stepping out of familiar territory and into something far more understated and exploratory. Best known for his blues-rock lineage, Allman strips things back here, abandoning vocals and classic song structures in favor of an instrumental, late-night soundscape that feels closer to art-rock, ambient, and DIY cinema than traditional rock records.
This isn’t an album built for instant gratification. Nightvision moves slowly, letting tones breathe and moods develop. Guitars shimmer rather than solo, synths hum in the background, and rhythms creep forward with a restrained, almost hypnotic pulse. The music feels intentionally dim-lit — like walking empty streets after midnight with nothing but neon reflections and distant noise for company.
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Although it’s hard to know whether Zu themselves will be happy to hear this image being invoked, there’s something slightly eerie about one of the first sounds on the opening track of their latest album sounding more than a little like the whirring of helicopter blades. Recalling a key image of the first major news story of the year feels like one of their strange but apt alchemical coincidences that great artists can sometimes conjure up. Italian trio Zu are true musical alchemists. Their singular jazz-punk/experimental rock sound takes base materials (saxophone, bass and drums) and turns them into something wondrously radiant; a heavy, meditative, groovy and spiritual fusion whose formula belongs to them alone.
While the band have plied their singular trade…
Few bands feel as tied to their hometown mythology as The Flaming Lips, so it makes perfect sense that their full-album performance of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots would eventually circle back to Oklahoma City. Recorded on August 30, 2024 at the Zoo Amphitheater, this release captures a band revisiting its early-2000s peak with both affection and a steadier, lived-in sense of timing.
After an introduction by the mayor of OKC thanking the band for their contribution to the city, the Lips launch into “Fight Test,” which establishes the tone immediately. The rhythm section sits heavier than on the studio version, and Steven Drozd’s keyboard work gives the song a low, steady hum that pushes the chorus forward. “One More Robot / Sympathy 3000-21” follows with a gentle lift…
If you’re tapped into the right corners of the underground, Winged Wheel are a supergroup. Recruiting a member of Sonic Youth — arguably the greatest experimental rock band of all time, and inarguably one of the most popular — certainly bolsters that designation.
But even before Steve Shelley got behind the kit for 2024’s Big Hotel, the “creatively and geographically scattered collective” was an impressive assemblage of talent. More importantly, the music lives up to the pedigree.
The band began as a remote file-trading operation early in the decade, deep in the dregs of the pandemic. The players: Chicago-based Whitney Johnson, who releases music as Matchess and plays in Circuit Des Yeux; Cory Plump,…
Pullman is a studio-born acoustic supergroup that emerged from Chicago’s post-rock milieu in the late ’90s, uniting Ken “Bundy K.” Brown (Tortoise/ Directions in Music), Curtis Harvey (Rex), Chris Brokaw (Come), and Doug McCombs (Tortoise/Eleventh Dream Day); drummer Tim Barnes later joined, solidifying the group’s core lineup. They debuted on Thrill Jockey with Turnstyles & Junkpiles (1998), a hushed, live-to-2-track collection of interwoven guitars that critics likened to John Fahey, Leo Kottke, and Gastr del Sol. Their follow-up, Viewfinder (2001), expanded the palette with percussion, subtle electric textures, and multi-track layering, while maintaining Pullman’s rustic, cinematic restraint. Across both albums, the band became a touchstone for…
At only 26, Jenny Hollingworth has already (incredibly) been making music for half her life. Having formed freak-pop project Let’s Eat Grandma with Rosa Walton as a young teen, the duo released their striking debut effort, ‘I Gemini’, aged just 16. Now, with three Let’s Eat Grandma albums under their joint belt (the most recent being 2022’s confronting ‘Two Ribbons’), the pair have taken that record’s crux – namely, the metamorphosis of their relationship from inseparable teenagers to independent adult entities – to its natural conclusion, each embarking on solo endeavours under new monikers.
Jenny On Holiday, then, sees her step sideways with a staunchly pop palette, leaving behind the quirkier corners of LEG’s fantastical…
As a group who’ve always existed with a winning duality of punk and pop at their core, you can often gauge where The Cribs are about to land on that spectrum by the outside hands they’ve enlisted to help guide the ship. On 2017’s raw and grungy ‘24-7 Rock Star Shit’, legendary Nirvana producer Steve Albini sat at the desk. On new record ‘Selling a Vibe’, they decided to throw a curveball by bringing in former Chairlift member and Lil Yachty producer Patrick Wimberley. As guitarist Ryan Jarman told NME last year: “We wanted to try working with someone who specifically worked with more pop kind of people.”
But fear not: the band’s ninth studio album is far from a big, Swift-ian attempt to infiltrate the commercial pop mainstream. Within the first…
Emma Tricca’s Prisms of Winter is an intimate recording — a collection of twelve stripped‑down live recordings that feel less like a performance and more like a whispered conversation between artist and listener. Recorded in London’s backrooms and scattered studios, the album is suffused with a quiet magic, and the kind of intimacy that makes you lean in closer, as though Tricca were singing directly into your ear.
This is Tricca at her most vulnerable and poetic. By paring back the arrangements, she exposes the bare bones of her songs — the words, the voice, the guitar — and in doing so, reveals their timeless strength. The immediacy of the recordings creates a sense of closeness, as if each track were a secret shared in confidence.
…Sevdah – or sevdalinka, as Slavs tend to add an affectionate diminutive to anything they love – is the deep and distinctive music of Bosnia and Herzegovina, often full of lost love, nostalgia and longing. The name comes from the same Arabic root as saudade in Portuguese, which characterises both fado in Portugal and morna in Cape Verde. On the notes to their new album, Radio Sevdah, Divanhana describe sevdah melodies as “soft as moonlight and as powerful as the ocean’s tide.” Divanhana perform some traditional sevdah songs, in contemporary arrangements, but are more focused on composing new songs.
The Bosnian band launch a radio station in the form of an album, encompassing ‘jingles’ and spoken-word interludes between new…
Vazz formed in Glasgow during the early ’80s, and initially consisted of vocalist/lyricist Anna Howson and multi-instrumentalist Hugh Small. With Howson’s ethereal harmonies floating over Small’s sparse drum machines and mysterious guitar hooks, the duo’s music fell somewhere between coldwave, post-punk, and dream pop. The five-song mini-album Your Lungs and Your Tongues (released in 1986 by Cathexis Recordings, also home to records by Fini Tribe and Pink Industry) was one of a handful of vinyl releases the pair made before splitting up near the end of the decade. As Small resurfaced during the 2010s with solo piano and ambient compositions, Vazz’s scant ’80s discography was rediscovered and revived in several different configurations…
It’s been a year and a half since BASIC first emerged out of a bare bones set up of two guitars (Chris Forsyth and Nick Millevoi) and a drum machine. That early experiment, inspired by the 1984 collaboration between Robert Quine and Fred Maher, put a boxy, machine-drilled framework around open-ended guitar jam. Mikel Patrick Avery tended the rough propulsion of the drum machine, enriching its stutter with additional improvised percussion, while Forsyth and Millevoi slashed away at one another on conventional and baritone guitar. It was, at once, disciplined and free-spirited, and you can see why it appealed to Forsyth. Christian Carey reviewed the full-length debut last year, writing “With a rattling drum pattern, synth lines embellished by bent notes…
San Diego in the ’90s was a great place to be if you were a weird punk kid. A conservative Navy town on the surface, the hardcore underground churned out innovative bands at a furious clip, with the bleeding edge of the scene revolving around Gravity Records and its standard-bearers, Heroin and Antioch Arrow. Balancing nihilistic fervor with a ragged poetic sensibility, these bands transmuted post-adolescent angst into timeless invectives against boredom and apathy. After Heroin broke up in 1993, guitarist Scott Bartoloni joined with vocalist Matt Goldsby, bassist Ryan Noel, and drummer Mario Rubalcaba to form Clikatat Ikatowi. Combining the intensity of hardcore with the epic soundscapes of local noise rock exemplars Drive Like Jehu, Clikatat Ikatowi quickly…
Despite his relatively young age, Kory Reeder has already produced well over a hundred scores, the earliest dating from 2017 and the Covid years being particularly fertile for him. He has composed in a range of genres which include large ensemble, soloist with orchestra, choral, chamber (5+ players), quartets, trios, duos, solo, open ensemble pieces, art songs, stage music, electronic music, field recordings. In addition, Homestead is his second album release on Another Timbre, his first on that label having been entitled Codex Vivere recorded in December 2021 by Apartment House. Prior to those releases, Reeder’s first album Love Songs, Duets had been released on the prestigious Editions Wandelweiser Records. Two other Reeder albums have been released…
Propulsion and stillness coincide in the atmospheric “State of Motion,” an early single from this third volume in the Nanocluster series. Vibrations build and surge, their overtones merging in limpid pools of sound. A pedal steel arcs over ambient tones, a drum beat pushes it onward, but mostly this music doesn’t develop so much as it exists. You can float on it, on your back, like a swimmer in salt water, effortlessly taking in the liquid tone and pulse of it.
Nanocluster Vol. 3 pairs Wire’s Colin Newman and his creative partner Malka Spigel with cosmic country’s SUSS, two sets of musical talents that Dusted has long admired. We’ve covered works by Spigel and Wire since moving to the Tumblr and Githead in the before times. As for SUSS, of the 2024 Birds and Beasts,…
If you thought Fleet Foxes’ White Winter Hymnal evoked the feeling of deepest winter, you should check out this beautifully odd and solitary project from Arkansas-based multi-instrumentalist Chaz Knapp to hear how it’s really done. Chaz is a traditional instrumentalist and field recorder, whose Microfolk series highlighted him as a musical collagist. Winter Music contrasts Microfolk (which was recorded in the summer heat) in that Chaz took his instruments to various locations in the rugged terrain of Northwest Arkansas in the depths of winter, recording with tape loops and improvisations while his fingers froze and his nylon string guitar neck shrank in the cold.
The result is something of a remote and isolated audio diary, as much documenting…
When you have a look at the June Star website, a wonderfully jaundiced and witty description of the band reads – “the band was formed in 1998 by singer/songwriter Andrew Grimm, and since then they have put out 21 records, toured a bit of the US and have gone into debt“.
…After making 21 albums, for the songs on this collection to sound as refreshing and memorable as they do is nothing short of astonishing. Grimm is backed up by a stellar bunch of musicians (the line-up of the band has changed a bit over the years), Dave Hadley (pedal steel), David Bryson (drums), Chris Iseli (bass), and Michael Zepeda (guitar). Hilariously, on the publicity material, not only does Grimm say he’s the band leader and singer, but also “Manager/Publicist/Songwriter/Plumber“.
The 12″ single redefined music and the way we move to it, something that’s celebrated on the fantastic new four-CD collection from Cherry Red Records, Extended Stimulation: 12″ Pop Adventures on the Dancefloor 1983-1988. While 12″ vinyl is generally associated with disco, electronic, and hip-hop, this box set explores just how revolutionary it could be for traditional pop music, featuring tracks from the likes of New Order, Simply Red, the Human League, Duran Duran, Talk Talk, Pet Shop Boys, and many others.
However, these may not be the songs as most people remember them. That’s because everything here is either a remix (or extended mix) of some kind, originally released on 12″ vinyl. A little history lesson may be in order. Before the 12″…
Lightning in a Twilight Hour are another band built around the heartbreak of Bobby Wratten, and like the Field Mice, Northern Picture Library, and Trembling Blue Stars, their albums are made up of songs that trickle like warm tears down the cheeks of a heartbroken soul. Colours Yet to Be Named has all the hallmarks of his work: precisely jangling guitars, dub-inspired basslines, soothingly dark synth pads, and vocals that alternately glide on top of, or sink into, the gloom. Wratten is joined as he was on the group’s previous masterpiece of overwhelming melancholy Overwintering by longtime collaborators Anne Marie Davies and Beth Arzy on vocals along with producer Ian Catt and bassist Michael Hiscock. They work together seamlessly to create a soft…