Leif swears off the ambient house of 2021’s ‘9 Airs’ and rediscovers his childhood guitar on Collide, visualising a shattered kosmische approximation that’ll surely speak to fans of Shackleton or James Holden.
If there’s a thread that links all of Welsh producer Lief Knowles’ albums, it’s memory. ‘Collide’ doesn’t aesthetically sound much like its predecessor, but there’s a shared sense of communion with the past. On ‘9 Airs’, Knowles attempted to rework old melodies into new compositions and on ‘Collide’, his decaying Aria Pro II electric guitar is used to recapture an era that’s slipping away. What sets this one apart is its commitment to the concept; Knowles has circled the dancefloor for years, muddling his foggy ambient tent-friendly…
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After three-years in the making, Fred again.. has released the final instalment of his highly acclaimed USB project offering a whopping 34-track collection of songs.
Fred’s USB album originally began in 2022, featuring tracks like ‘Baby Again’, ‘Rumble’ alongside Skrillex & Flowdan, ‘Jungle’, ‘leavemealone’ with Baby Keem and ‘stayinit’ with Lil Yachty, as well as remixes from Nia Archives, HAAi and Rico Nasty; an impressive showcase of the diverse collaborators Fred surrounds himself with.
Fred has been teasing this forthcoming new material for weeks, including at small club shows across the UK and throughout the live set he recorded overlooking Naples’ Piazza del Plebiscito on a fan’s roof.
Lauded on release as Stornoway’s most expansive and confident work, Bonxie remains a hymn to connection, ecology, and the beauty of life. This expanded edition includes previously unreleased B-side tracks from the original recording sessions, as well as some of their well-known unplucked versions of tracks on the album.
Bonxie is Stornoway’s boldest and most outward-looking record, an album infused with a sense of wonder for the natural world and humanity’s place within it.
Produced by Gil Norton (Pixies, Foo Fighters, Echo & The Bunnymen), with a contribution from Craig Potter (Elbow), the songs are studded with field recordings of birds (20 species appear across the album), weaving them into melodies…
Damaged Goods is proud to present re-issues of one of thee great collaborations of our times…
Thee Headcoats Sect is the inevitable intersection of two generations of mad-hatted Punk R & B misfits with musical and philosophical lineage that can be traced back over more than 30 years. The Downliners Sect were among the country’s foremost rhythm and blues groups, their most prolific period being the years from 1964 to 1966. As is often the case, they were denied the sort of success they deserved – they were outcasts, too young, too uncouth, and just a tad too eccentric to be accepted by their peers. As the Melody Maker said of their debut album in 1964: ‘forget this one if you want a Happy Christmas, and don’t want to drive all the guests away from your party’.
…includes two bonus tracks “Sittin’ Here (Karizma DJs Dub) and “Sittin’ Here (Peacey Remix).
Coming 15 years after he dazzled the world with his jazz-house album Tourist, Ludovic Navarre returned to his St. Germain moniker with this self-titled 2015 effort, the self-titling being a signal that the project was reborn. It is, at least partially, as rare groove jazz has been replaced by music from Mali, West Africa, along with blues and funky jazz guitars from around the world.
In the case of the highlight “Real Blues,” it is a Lightnin’ Hopkins sample that supplies the blues, while Navarre does his usual — and intoxicating — light house shuffle underneath. Many of the cuts here sound like an Amadou & Mariam release that’s constantly segueing into…
Jan Akkerman in a live setting is a beautiful thing to behold, and on his new record, My Focus: Live Under the Rainbow, you can absorb his technical mastery and tone, where it was born to live – on stage.
Live music needs to offer you something that you cannot get on a studio recording. It’s the sense of freedom and intimacy, wondering how the songs will be played and what the reaction will be. Live concerts give you the tingle where the hair stands up on the back of your neck. “Live audiences give you the tension and responsibility to be creative, for me that’s the challenge I like,” says the iconic Dutch guitarist. After all of these years, you ponder what keeps Jan going out there, night after night. “It’s my love to play for people all around…
Old Rock Stars never die, and judging by Lost In Hollywood Again, they never fade away either. A 77 year old Graham Bonnet is testament to that. Recorded in the legendary Whisky A Go Go, on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, in August last year, Bonnet and band give it their all.
Raw and raucous, you can taste the sweat as it drips from the venue’s ceiling. You can hear every voice in the crowd whooping and hollering as they give it up for each song. Bonnet is clearly welcome here. In reality it’s unvarnished proof of Graham Bonnet’s phenomenal voice. Ok, it’s lost a little of its lustre over the years. But he still climbs the upper slopes and delivers with vigour and indeed, soul. More than that, every note is weighted with a flinty edge of “Look, I’m still here” defiance.
The reissue expands the original 8-track album to 20 tracks in total, including never-before-heard material discovered in White’s personal archives after his death in 2018.
Forty-five years ago, Tony Joe White released an album of what he called “swamp rock” (an amalgam of southern rock, country and blues roots music), and he called it The Real Thang. It was only released on vinyl, it only had eight tracks, and it was not very successful in terms of sales; in fact, it did not gain much attention at all. It was perhaps because White, after some success with well-balanced country blues albums in the ’70s (Homemade Ice Cream, for example), decided to ramp up his songs with a disco beat (that was pretty popular at the time), overlaying…
On her third album as a leader, tenor saxophonist Nicole Glover partners terrifically with bassist Tyrone Allen II and drummer Kayvon Gordon, who can turn on a dime and provide elastic and responsive support.
Collaborating with such versatile players proves liberating for Glover, who’s totally unshackled in these performances. Some know the Portland, Oregon native and current NYC resident as a member of the all-female jazz outfit Artemis or Christian McBride’s Ursa Major, but Glover is no less compelling when the stage is primarily hers. The trio format plays to Glover’s strengths, while variety’s added when cellist Lester St. Louis sits in with the trio on a couple of tracks.
The album title will be familiar to psychologists…
British trumpeter Laura Jurd has been around for a while – her first album came out in 2012 – but remains relatively unknown on these shores. Though young in jazz years (she’s still under 40), she’s worked in a diverse array of modes, from last year’s adventurous session with British legend Paul Dunmall to the amiable rollick of 2022’s aptly titled The Big Friendly Album to her albums with the ECM-minded quartet Dinosaur.
Jurd’s latest leader album, Rites and Revelations deals somewhat in the ceremonial and epiphanic, but it could serve as an awakening to American listeners unfamiliar with her work.
As a trumpeter, bandleader and woman, Jurd may fit the bill for fans of jaimie branch looking to fill the hole left by their untimely passing.
…features 25 bonus tracks — nine studio rarities and 16 live recordings captured by bootlegger Mike Millard at Pink Floyd’s Los Angeles Sports Arena concert on April 26 1975, now receiving its first official release. The live audio has been restored and remastered by Steven Wilson.
…It’s a considerable trove of audiovisual material chronicling the British band’s Herculean task of following up the commercial success of 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which was in the early stages of a staggering multi-year run on the Billboard charts. After mooting a conceptual piece involving “household objects” (heard on the bonus track “Wine Glasses”), Wish You Were Here largely deals with the numbness of absence. “Welcome to the Machine” and “Have a Cigar”…
…Longtime collaborators Jacques Greene (Philippe Aubin-Dionne) and Nosaj Thing (Jason Chung) are officially stepping out as a duo with a self-titled album centered on collaboration. “Trust is the key word and concept around this project,” says Aubin-Dionne. Verses GT isn’t just an album, it seems, but an immersive audiovisual experience (live shows, music videos, light displays — “an all encompassing banner for a new collaborative world,” trumpets their Bandcamp) painstakingly crafted across a bevy of glamorous metropolises in hot pursuit of that elusive little thing called vibe. It’s a risky proposition: A concept like this can feel a little overwrought, a little too “creative”-as-noun, a little for sale, Wales Bonner Sambas, never worn. But Aubin-Dionne and Chung are…
Works in Metal is alchemic in its offering as Lamin Fofana’s pursuit of difficult meanings come to the fore yet again. Fofana sets about the arduous process of reworking and reshaping metals, seeking long-awaited transcendence from what writer, teacher, scholar, anti-colonial, feminist activist and Surrealist Suzanne Césaire refers to as the “sordid contemporary antinomies: Whites-Blacks, Europeans-Africans, civilized-savage”. Works in Metal seeks to destroy such paradoxes and damning self-beliefs sonically through sound archives, field recordings and unique production methods as a tribute to Césaire’s prophetic writing.
‘Arc’s Blues Flame’, the album’s opener, is dominated by high synth tones and occasional kick drums suggesting a vastness, equally…
A cover photo that makes the perfectly coiffed composer look like she’s prepped for a Dynasty cameo is merely one of many surprises this collection of Victoria Bond chamber pieces offers. In the three works featured on Dancing on Glass, the American composer exchanges the standard practice of adopting traditional templates as guides and instead gives freer reign to her imagination. That makes for music rich in originality and flair, not to mention performed with élan by violinist Pauline Him Harris, violist Chieh-Fan Yiu, and cellist Coleman Itzkoff on the titular work and by pianists Madeline Rogers and Florencia Zuloaga on the others.
Emblematic of Bond’s approach, she based the string trio setting Dancing on Glass on…
Based in Mumbai, architect turned vocalist/ songwriter Vidhya Gopal has a lifelong adoration for Hindustani music, lending her a variety of vocal influences, including thumri, qawwali and ghazal. The follow-up to her 2023 debut EP Par, Mehfil is a concept release reimagining Indian semi-classical music with a modern sensibility. Recorded in front of a live audience, Gopal is joined by an ensemble consisting of keyboards, harmonium, tabla, electric guitar, bass and percussion.
On opening tracks ‘Piya Milan’ and ‘Akeli Darr Laage’, Gopal’s voice is accompanied by piano only – with well-chosen harmonic structures imbuing the songs with a tender, cinematic quality. More instruments are introduced as the concert progresses, shifting the tone from…
Since 2006, the singular Toronto rock ‘n’ roll institution Fucked Up have been releasing a series of long, sprawling, ambitious records named after years of the Chinese Zodiac calendar. Over the next year, they will finally complete that project, releasing the three final Zodiac records as an ongoing series that’ll eventually make up a five-LP series called Grass Can Move Stones. The first of the three installments is called Year of the Goat, and it was supposed to come out next week. Instead, it’s up on Bandcamp today, presumably for Bandcamp Friday reasons.
There are two tracks on Year of the Goat, and they’re about a half-hour long each.
…There’s a whole lot of lore to Year of the Goat, which is apparently just one part of…
By the mid-’60s, European touring had become a routine familiar to many of jazz’s most well-known practitioners. Thelonious Monk was already over two decades into his career when he began to visit Europe in earnest. Europeans were excited to experience Monk and his storied personality, often focusing as much on his appearance and idiosyncratic behavior ahead of the music.
The release of Bremen 1965 finds the legend on his second tour to feature stops in Germany with his seasoned quartet featuring his longtime saxophone foil, Charlie Rouse, along with bassist Larry Gales and drummer Ben Riley. Bremen, Germany was the second stop on the quartet’s world tour, which would include much of Europe, Australia, and Japan. The recording was made on…
Konk If You’re Lonely: Fat White Family live at Konk Studios is the latest instalment in the Domino Documents series, an album featuring Fat White Family’s most incendiary moments recorded live in one day at London’s Konk Studios. The Fat White Family cast has forever been a revolving door of interesting and lively characters, each iteration brilliant in its own right, but they have never sounded better than on the 13 career-spanning tracks that make up Konk If You’re Lonely.
Fresh off the back of the trio of triumphant “Counter-Vortex 360°” shows at London’s Colour Factory in December 2024, the band decamped to Konk Studios to get the set down for posterity’s sake. What emerges is a document of a band at the top of their game, oozing swagger…