…includes 3 intimate acoustic tracks (“Fall in Fall Out”, “I’m Breaking Out”, and “A Black Moon”)
It is always fascinating recognising influences in a band or artists style, but noting how they have been adapted, morphed into something different and new. For the Brighton based three-piece rock band Tigercub, influences like Nirvana and Queens of The Stone Age are easy and obvious to grasp, but it is also apparent how the trio push through into their own style and making.
For those not in the know, Tigercub consist of Jamie Stephen Hall (vocals/guitar), Jimi Wheelwright (bass) and James Allix (drums). For the last 15 years they have honed and refined their alternative rock sound, and their albums so far – particularly with 2021’s As Blue As Indigo – have seen…
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Even at her most austere and experimental, Susanne Sundfør has a way of creating amenable and approachable music that is infused with her own brand of idiosyncratic enchantment, and so it is with Revelations of Divine Love. The singer-songwriter’s seventh album is inspired by recent motherhood and a profound connection with the texts of the fourteenth-century English mystic and anchoress Julian of Norwich. Sundfør recorded this album live in an empty but acoustically conducive Norwegian church with just her voice and the accompaniment of a pipe organ. If that configuration sounds like it might be sparse, her voice is a rich and powerful instrument in itself, and more than a match for the room-shaking timbre of a finely tuned and pristine organ.
In The Juniper Tree, an interrelationship between the ethereal and terrestrial seems to cloak the everpresent Icelandic landscape. The film, written and directed by Nietzchka Keene in 1986 and released in 1990, is disbelieving of binaries such as life and death, natural and supernatural, stillness and unrest. It is perhaps best known as the genesis point for Björk’s career as an actor, but in its compelling feminist retelling of the Brothers Grimm story of the same name it recasts tropes of witches and wicked stepmothers as women in tune with nature’s gifts and fighting for survival under the suspicious gaze of patriarchy. Throughout, the land dwarfs the characters, and a sense of studied quietude saturates even the tensest moments. Tenderness and terror…
A molten extension of Daydream Nation-era Sonic Youth, the Stooges’ drill-press rhythms, and early Dinosaur Jr., Raise should have been made by young record shop rats from the Midwest. Adding to this is a fascination with the open road; only two of the album’s nine songs do not directly reference cars or driving. It’s no real surprise, then, that this Oxford, England-based band found a home on Stateside turntables that were otherwise Anglophobic, despite being pigeonholed as shoegazers. In all fairness, the band was about as exciting to watch as any actual shoegaze band, and Adam Franklin’s vocals were buried deep within the studio and live mixes. (Flying leg kicks, windmills, and eye contact couldn’t have been all that possible with an unwieldy battery…
In Steve Reich’s music, repetition is a method of survival. A phrase returns carrying the microscopic damage of having been heard, while attention acquires an unfamiliar capacity for desire. Recordings on ECM brings that reciprocal transformation back to vinyl, gathering the three albums ECM released between 1978 and 1982. Revisiting the collection issued on CD in 2016, this three-LP edition, one day shy of the composer’s 90th birthday.
Sourced from the original analogue master tapes, the records reproduce their original sleeves; archival photographs accompany Paul Griffiths’s liner notes. Inside the music, strict procedures open improbable apertures, and counting becomes a form of surrender.
Released in March 1983, Magical Ring is the seventh studio album by Irish folk group Clannad and marks a pivotal moment in the band’s evolution from traditional Celtic folk towards the atmospheric sound that would later define much of their international success. The album blends Irish-language songs, traditional melodies, and contemporary production, creating a rich and evocative listening experience.
Its standout track, the haunting “Theme from Harry’s Game”, became Clannad’s breakthrough hit, reaching No. 5 on the UK Singles Chart and introducing their distinctive sound to a wider audience.
Other notable tracks include “Newgrange”, a fan favourite showcasing the band’s ethereal…
In the seven-year gap between her second LP, Midnight, and her next album, Stef Chura broke off an engagement, left her home state and roots in the Detroit indie scene for places south, gave birth to her first child, and then eventually returned to Detroit. In the meantime, she headed back to the studio with songs in hand that bear the bruises of someone who has a few hard-won life lessons under their belt but is still trying to make sense of it all. The album was recorded at Chase Park Transduction in Athens, Georgia with none other than the Apples in Stereo’s Robert Schneider, celebrated for his production work with Neutral Milk Hotel, among others. He both produced and played on the album. (Schneider had long been teaching theoretical math…
… includes three CDs: the original mixes on CD1, the 2026 remix on CD2, and a third disc of completely unreleased studio tracks and outtakes like “Sad Suit” and “Aborted Soliloquy”, alongside live performances from their 2000 tour.
Released in 1999, J-Tull Dot Com was Jethro Tull’s 20th studio album. Anderson and company navigated the 1980s well, but the ’90s proved to have new obstacles, with CDs, the beginning of bands using the internet and a new bass player (Jonathon Noyce). Martin Barre (guitars, backing vocals) and Ian Anderson remained the core of the band with Doane Perry (drums) and Andrew Giddings (keyboards) who had been with the band since 1984 and 1991, respectively, at this point. And yet, make no mistake,…
…remastered by Geoff Pesche at Abbey Road. A 2CD deluxe edition offers an interesting selection of bonus tracks (20 in total) including previously unreleased David Kosten mixes of some album tracks, unheard demos and BBC live sessions and recordings.
Starsailor was already a critic’s darling in the band’s native England during mid-2001, and the group’s painfully melodic debut, Love Is Here, poised the band to rise in the shadows of Doves, Coldplay, and Travis. Starsailor, however, isn’t as polished as its counterparts, but that’s not to say Love Is Here isn’t a beautiful piece of work. It’s less lilting than Coldplay’s Parachutes, and frontman James Walsh’s aching vocals shape his angularity as a singer/songwriter. Starsailor is…
Recorded during his summer 2026 run of outdoor UK shows, which brought together a phenomenal band and a setlist spanning the songs that have defined Weller’s musical journey, in performances widely praised by fans and press alike. The album brings together classic tracks and much-loved favourites from across Weller’s remarkable catalogue, spanning The Jam, The Style Council and his solo work, alongside a cover of the Curtis Mayfield classic, Move On Up. Talking about the live album, Paul said: “We hope this live recording gives justice to the experience that we and the audience felt on these tour dates. We all felt they were very special shows – all of ’em! This recording is straight off the sound board. All real, all true, more power, more love.” Reviewing Weller’s…
Jimmy LaValle’s The Album Leaf delivers A Body of Voices, his 9th studio LP and the most collaborative, pop-forward project of his acclaimed quarter-century run. Known for nuanced, melodic, and meditative electro-organic music, LaValle has always been a process-driven artist, constantly refining his sound and pushing beyond his natural inclinations. On A Body of Voices, he does that by welcoming the artistry of others on a scale he’s never attempted before.
Nearly every track is a collaboration, with contributors including Aaron Shaw, Aaron Ray, Aisha Badru, Kyle Kidd, Maiah Manser, Aelatan, Nicole Miglis (Hundred Waters), Theresa Wayman (Warpaint), Raphaelle Standell-Preston (Braids, Blue Hawaii), Spencer Zahn…
We are living after the end of the end of history—both in the sense that Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 theory of a democratic finish line has come and gone, and that it feels disconcertingly like we’re living through the end times themselves, alive after everything and left to make a life in the wreckage that optimism left behind. We are living post- everything: post-liberalism, post-language, post-hope. On “Culture,” Greg Freeman adds two more to the list: post-culture and post-rock-and-roll. The current moment, he says, is simply beyond analogy. When all our words are “plagiarized before they’re written,” as he puts it on “Loser’s Prize,” even art itself begins to feel mind-numbingly futile. Everything that’s worth saying has already been said, but if we say nothing at all…
After Gary the fibreglass gorilla (and the wildly successful 2024 album named after him) took indie icons Blossoms far and wide, for their sixth studio effort the band have opted to shift their focus to something a tad closer to home. Named after the local moniker for Stockport Town Hall where frontman Tom Ogden tied the knot, Songs From The Wedding Cake sees the band addressing the many elements of love and loss (the latter being of a no-claims insurance bonus, rather than a relationship, mind you…).
Recorded live to tape by the five-piece with Shawn Lee (Young Gun Silver Fox) on production duties, Songs From The Wedding Cake sees Blossoms further straying from synth-pop to go full force with rollicking guitar and bass…
The line the Beatles drew to mark a turning point in late 1965 was both bold and significant. With the release of Rubber Soul, their sixth album, in December, the mop-tops took their first big step toward becoming artists. Its influence and history-making chain of events (from Pet Sounds to Revolver to almost every aspiring musical work released in the past six decades) have been well documented for decades. Then and now, it deserves all the attention. Things were happening fast for the Beatles in their fifth year together. Since the release of their debut album, Please Please Me, in March 1963, the quartet was on a nonstop rotation of live performances and studio dates. In the 13 months between their second LP and December 1964’s rushed Beatles for Sale…
It’s fair to say that Meshell Ndegeocello has made a career out of declining to stay in one place too long. Since helping spark the neo soul genre with her 1993 debut album, Plantation Lullabies, she has variously worked in the fields of jazz, R&B, alternative rock, reggae, fusion and gospel. Her last album, No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin, seemed intent on defying any kind of classification, leaping from Afrobeat funk to electronic abstraction to a closing track that sounded not unlike the xx: it won a Grammy for best alternative jazz album, which slightly smacked of the awards’ organisers throwing up their hands in defeat after a lengthy and fruitless attempt to decide in which category it might belong.
Even if you knew absolutely nothing about…
The idea that an album could be made piecemeal, in different countries, via the internet, would have been inconceivable forty years ago. Such technology would have seemed strange; stranger still might have been the idea that the traditional method – that is, recording a series of songs in one place during a set period of time – is far less viable these days. The logistical demands of creative practice in 2026 mean a piecemeal approach is an all-too necessary solution for many artists. Studios and practice spaces are expensive to rent. It’s difficult to organise a group of busy people (who may not have made music their full-time profession) into one place to record. Vanishing Twin’s excellent new album, Archives, was created in a so-called “virtual studio space”,…
Famously, in life Mark E. Smith never played by the rules, and the same seems to continue in his psychic afterlife. Put together by Smith confidants Ed Blaney and Simon “Ding” Archer, the album takes nine leftover vocal and lyrical pieces from the iconic frontman and reimagines them in new soundscapes — a process that somehow feels entirely in keeping with Smith, who may even have preferred this method, sidestepping the graft and grind of keeping a band together.
It’s not just any two chancers cobbling this together, either. The backing tracks are excellent: grinding, metallic slabs of industrial noise that stand up in their own right, way beyond any Fall-related flag of convenience. And, in truth, whether it is or not is pure distraction.
…features 104 tracks, demos, outtakes, live performances, interviews, and other rare recordings half of which are previously unreleased.
Year Zero, 1976. While his punk contemporaries were at least pretending to hate old music, D.P. Costello had fewer qualms about negotiating with the past. He unpicked the mysteries of Mississippi John Hurt; channelled Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison; was “completely unnerved” rather than contemptuous when he spotted Bert Jansch in the audience at one of his early gigs. Taking The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo as a gateway drug, he studied the heartbreak and nuance of country and dreamed of becoming a Nashville songwriter. He even tried his hand at Vaudeville whimsy. A fleet-footed 1976 demo called…