Witches, Templars, gargoyles — all are roll called in “Town of the Castle,” a jaunty medieval pop song that plays like an overture to John Southworth‘s marvelous 15th album. Southworth is an Englishman who for most of his career has called Canada home. Many of his poetic, surrealist records are set against North American backdrops, but on The Red Castle, Europe is his muse. After bearing witness to his father’s medically assisted death, the singer/songwriter took himself overseas for what became a kind of spiritual ramble through the Old World. With its impeccable production and orchestral adornments, The Red Castle is consistent with much of Southworth’s late-period catalog, though there is a poignancy here that bleeds through his signature abstraction.
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Tristen Gaspadarek has released four albums of impeccably made, tuneful guitar pop, netting her a devoted fan base and the respect of her peers without achieving breakout success. This is the recipe of a cult artist, one whose music remains consistently individualistic, meeting the high bar of her own standards, while remaining allergic to mainstream attention. At some point you just lean into it. Tristen’s fifth album is titled Unpopular Music, and while it ought to be heard by many, it will at the very least be appreciated by those who consider her a woefully underrated singer/songwriter. Recorded at her Nashville home studio alongside husband and co-producer Buddy Hughen, Unpopular Music is warm, punchy, and abundant with the abstract lyricism…
ASMR for Suicidal Thoughts marks Varg2™ back in collaboration with Chatline, an enigmatic figure long in orbit of Northern Electronics. Recorded live to tape, the record resists comfort. Contained within are two harrowing demonstrations that drag on emptiness, anxiety, and abject pleasure. And though terse and severe, that very void becomes the vessel for its mottled meaning.
Unopen to exploration, ‘ASMR for Suicidal Thoughts’ locks the listener into its own saturated atmosphere. Stripped back and unchanging, and suffocatingly cold at the best of times, funereal melodies pepper cyclical noise so brittle it can barely repeat itself. Disturbingly intimate glints of memories are passed over out of reach, yet with the alarming immediacy of déjà vu.
Enigmatic, prolific singer/songwriter and author known for his genre-defying work and contrary personality.
Julian Cope welcomes you to the new age of the New Age with this brand new deeply sonic magical trip-out album. The three tracks invoke three different experiences: the 29-minute ’Star Garden’ emerges through the cosmic ooze like a grand ancient river gradually descending to meet its final coastal destiny; the shattered radio communications of ‘Who Put All Of This In Motion?’ perplex listeners through its veil of sonic mystery; the final epic ‘Psalm Zero’ is an incantation to the cosmos in which Cope duets with himself like some minimal avant-garde barbershop quartet. This CD is part of Head Heritage’s 2025 Ambient Autumn.
The Studio Albums 1992-2016 brings together nearly 25 years of groundbreaking music. It unites 12 of the band’s core studio works for the first time across 14CDs. The boxed set charts more than two decades of Dream Theater’s musical growth-a career that helped define the sound of modern progressive metal while selling more than 12 million albums worldwide.
It begins with the band’s gold-certified 1992 breakthrough, Images and Words, featuring the Top 10 hit “Pull Me Under,” then navigates a prolific decade as the band scaled new creative heights on albums like Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From A Memory, one of the greatest concept albums in progressive-rock history.
The band continued adding to its legacy…
On Across the Horizon, classical guitarist Nicholas Goluses assumes the role of venerable travel guide in hosting a musical odyssey that visits Argentina, Brazil, Greece, and the American Southwest, the journey long yet rewarding.
No one’s better qualified for the part than Goluses, an awarding-winning Professor of Guitar at the Eastman School of Music who’s delivered world première performances of more than 100 works and whose discography includes recordings for Naxos, BMG, Linn, and Albany.
In being a global travelogue, Across the Horizon plays like a natural extension of concert itineraries that have taken him to North and South America, Europe, Australia, and the Far East. His reputation as a new music aficionado’s…
How do you define a weird record? For most listeners, it usually means a set of sounds arranged as songs or compositions that go beyond the usual set of boundaries or musical formulas, reaching the ears as something out of the usual.
Yet, does such music sound good or bad? Well, that is an individual thing, depending on whether you take weird as being good or bad, often depending on the musical results.
And yes, Gabriel Zucker’s sixth album Confession will be by many considered as weird, as it keeps coming up with sounds that are arranged as songs or compositions that go beyond the usual set of boundaries or musical formulas. As is always the case with weird, unusual or simply unexpected, the key question remains – does it…
These unreleased 1970s sessions from legendary pianist/composer Michael Garrick, see him lead two groups of top Brit jazzers, who perform eight original compositions by Garrick that display his flair for combining emotive writing with modal jazz grooves.
The opening track initially seems straightforward. To begin “Sons of Art,” Michael Garrick runs up and down his piano keyboard. Norma Winstone adds wordless vocals which weave in and out of his sparkling arpeggios. Then, the bass arrives. Drums kick in. So do the tenor sax and trumpet. After a climax around the two-minute mark, what begins as pacific turns turbulent. The conventional has become unpredictably experimental.
To conclude the album, an extraordinary…
A psychonautic swirl of spoken-word slam poetry and echoey shoegaze reverberations, this classic collaboration between indie darlings Yo La Tengo and alternative pioneer Jad Fair is a wild ride. Originally released by Matador in 1998, the album, a series of quirky snapshots and preposterous fables, derives its inspiration from real newspaper headlines.
Yo La Tengo, one of the most prevalent indie fixtures of the last several decades, blends atmospheric harmonies and dreamy melodies with clouds of gnarly squall. The trio can excel in a staggeringly eclectic variety of modes, from post-Velvets boogie to blue-eyed soul to cryptic country, while always sounding exactly like themselves. Here, they operate in full-bore…
He’s had a most curious career, has Anthony Moore. Now settled in Hastings, he spent decades living an itinerant life across Europe; a member of one of pop’s great trios, Slapp Happy, and a prodigious collaborator, he also seems to value having space and time to work alone. One gets the feeling Moore’s keen both to let some old songs home to roost – On Beacon Hill has him revisiting material from his recorded history with new musician friends – and to push ever forward, with new trios like AKA and OBTRAM3.
Indeed, it can be hard to trace the complex routes Moore has pursued over the decades. After dropping out of art school in Newcastle in the late ’60s, he travelled to the Hebrides, where a chance meeting with experimental film…
East Side Confessions is KB Bayley’s third album, and it has a delightful melancholy feel to it. It feels sparse yet layered, mostly thanks to his excellent lap steel guitar playing, which is quite stunning and is accompanied delightfully by several guests who lift his playing even further. It mixes six original songs with four interpretations, the most unusual one of which is his version of the Korgis hit ‘Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime’. He has completely changed the feeling of what was a pretty ordinary ’70s song into something quite enigmatic and far more appealing.
‘Don’t Let the Rain Fall on My Face’ has an intense Southern swamp feel to it. It relates to the last words and reflections of a dying man, someone being hanged, “They are putting up…
Daylight Heart Moonlight Soul is the first album from Belfast-based Slow Autumn, although they have previously released a couple of singles, ‘Wash Me in the Fading Light’ and ‘Lean into the Night’. They say their music is for fans of Wilco, Jason Isbell, and John Moreland, and this is a good starting point, though it is a little gentler in reality. It is laid-back americana, with, for example, the lead guitar, piano and keyboard heard in many tracks not being pushed to the fore. The melodies and choruses in the songs are good, and the relaxed sound is a pleasure to listen to. You can imagine that they would give a live audience a decent night out.
The band say that they are influenced by Dylan, and you can hear this in some of…
Germany’s Bear Family Records deserves plaudits for compiling and releasing exhaustive box sets from some of the best-known figures in early country and rock music. But the reissue label warrants at least as much praise for unearthing and taking a chance on superlative material that most listeners have never even heard of, much less heard.
A perfect example of this is the new Rich-R-Tone Folk Star Story, which fills 12 CDs and has a playing time of more than 14 hours. It collects records released between 1946 and 1954 by Rich-R-Tone, a small, independent Johnson City, Tennessee, label, and its Folk Star subsidiary. The box comes with a coffee table–sized, 144-page hardcover…
Radio Tarifa were one of the great Spanish bands of the ’90s, their blend of Spanish, North African and medieval styles winning deserved international success. Benjamin Escoriza played a key role with his rough, smoky and emotional singing, prior to the band breaking up in 2006. He sadly passed 13 years ago, but Tarifa are back, revived by surviving members, multi-instrumentalists Faín Sánchez Dueñas and Vincent Molino, and helped by 15 other musicians, including five singers. Together, they create a patchily impressive affair.
The exuberant title-track features vocals recorded by Escoriza back in 2004, while the best of the new songs sound more Spanish than North African, with compelling vocals from the flamenco-influenced Javier Castrillón, and a stately…
An expanded CD reissue of Black Rain’s Obliteration Bliss, originally released on cassette via Downwards in 2023.
Degraded, faded cities now empty of people. You can hear household appliances in the kitchens still talking, but only to each other.
The phrases are distorted, unclear; broken English, Japanese and a few Korean and Chinese automated voices, syllables, shopping lists, play lists for dinner and recipes.
Somewhere one of the machines is dialled in on an isolated pre Buddhist monk chant, distant like from a high cliff meditation cell. The flow of the wide, long Black Mother River Kali Gandaki below them. Here is Obliteration Bliss A world in a flash of light. The world running faster and faster.
The National brings an abundance of energy for a brooding, middle-aged indie rock band, as evidenced on their new live album, Rome.
The 21-track, two-LP album — recorded in concert at the Parco della Musica auditorium in Italy’s capital in June — is a fan-friendly sing-along that strings together some of the best sounds of their 25-year career.
Eight of the band’s 10 studio albums are represented in Rome, releasing Friday from this Ohio-born and New York-based quintet fronted by the gravel-voiced Matt Berninger and fueled by two sets of brothers: Aaron and Bryce Dessner and Bryan and Scott Devendorf.
The opener, “Runaway,” is one of a handful of deeper cuts, this one from the lyrically dreary…
By any measurement, it has been a hectic few years for GA-20. Since the two guitar/drum (bass-free) trio burst out of Boston’s blues scene with 2019s frills-free debut, the band has gone through a major reconstruction.
First drummers changed, but co-founding guitarist/singer/songwriter Pat Faherty leaving to form Canyon Lights was a major shakeup. That left lone initial member Matthew Stubbs to recruit singer/guitarist Cody Nilsen, maintaining the group’s name and mission; specifically, creating unvarnished blues heavily influenced by Hound Dog Taylor, Otis Rush, Junior Wells, Howlin’ Wolf and other legends of the genre whose sound was and remains raw and real. All this upheaval within five years would sink many other bands.
‘Cerulean R’ is the expanded 15th anniversary reissue of first Baths record, ‘Cerulean’.
The “R” in the title refers to the tagline “Reissue, Remix, Resurface, Remaster”. The Release itself is split into 3 constituent parts: “Reissue” LP1 is a reissue of the original record. “Remix” LP2 contains 8 unheard remixes created in 2010-2011, around the original release.“Re surface” LP3 contains 8 unsung Baths songs.
It’s fitting that Baths’ debut album Cerulean is on Anticon, as Will Wiesenfeld’s music blends glitchy, hip-hop-tinged beats with delicate atmospheres. Cerulean sounds like the missing link between Bibio, Flying Lotus, Toro y Moi, and Dilla, to name a few, but Wiesenfeld has his own sound within that realm. He keeps his intricate…