Flying in from unexpected angles, Jack White’s albums this decade so far have proved him to be as creatively fidgety as ever. Following his 2022-released diptych Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive – the first sonically outré futuristic rock, the latter an acoustic-leaning album that wandered through country, folk and even jazz – there came the stunning stylistic consolidation of 2024’s No Name. Rather than be tempted to retrace the template of the latter, White’s thoughts have already moved on.
A certain playfulness, however, remains in terms of White’s pre-release teasing of Frozen Charlotte. While white label copies of No Name were furtively slipped into the bags of shoppers at the Third Man Records stores in London,…
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By 1963 Miles Davis was on the cusp of being left behind. Creatively exhausted, touring with a repeatedly imploding sextet, he was also trading in a form of modal jazz that was rapidly becoming old hat compared to the frenetic, discursive innovations of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. However, there were signs of promise. For three tracks on the inconsistent studio LP, Seven Steps to Heaven Davis recruited 17-year-old Chicago drummer Tony Williams, 23-year-old pianist Herbie Hancock and Michigan-born bassist Ron Carter (an ancient 26). Allied to the relentless skitter of Williams’ drums, Carter’s regal, mellifluous bass, and Hancock’s background melodic conversations, Davis was able to expand and contract his sound, allowing for more…
At first glance the sleeve’s photo shows an overhead shot of a manhole cover, with a pair of lace-up boots next to it. Closer inspection shows the pattern on the sewer grate could come from a Vasarely painting: a grid of raised metal circles of carefully ordered sizes form a globe-like image in its centre, seeming to pulsate or spin. This manhole cover was photographed by EarthBall in Geneva. Maybe they felt the primeval force that its image suggested was coming up to meet them at the gig. Do EarthBall make music that mirrors Vasarely’s idea of the “plastic alphabet” where geometrics make a visual language that “communicates, across cultures”, a language that can be assembled in any form, anywhere?
Their new album, Actual Earth Music Vol. 3 & 4,…
With ‘Sowas von Egal 3’, the Hamburg-based Damaged Goods DJ team continues its compilation series on Bureau B, once again turning its attention to the underground scenes of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in the early 1980s.
The spiky drive and romantic melodies of early-mid ’80s Mittel European dancefloors is fully embraced on Sowas von Egal 3 (German Synth Wave Underground 1981-86) with some 16 nuggets sifted from tape compilations and hard-to-find pressings. Prevailing streams of US & UK new wave, disco and punk are puckered with a Teutonic efficiency and wizzed-up sexiness on all counts from the bubbling hook of ‘He Sabine’ by Guyer’s Connection’ thru the DAF-esque swag of an EBM pioneer Tommi Stumpf in…
Folk music in the United States underwent a rebirth of sorts in the 1960s when young people began using the direct messaging and emotionally bold sound of the genre as a component of protest, making songs that expressed their political views and reflected the sweeping social change their generation was experiencing. With 100 songs and well over four hours of music, When Will They Ever Learn? A Story of U.S. Folk Music 1963-1969 explores every phase of the folk revolution of the ’60s, tracking the evolution as it quickly grew away from traditional trappings into forms that were more experimental but no less righteous. The earliest waves of collegiate folk-rock are represented by the spartan production and vocal harmony-centric songs of groups like…
Matt Jones and The Bobs formed way back in 2011 while they were studying at Radford University, all sharing a love of americana, roots, and classic rock. Their debut album Brother’s Hymn was released in 2014 to much local acclaim. It highlighted all the issues about growing up in small-town Southwest Virginia from the view of young men of a certain age. However, despite paying their dues, as with many college bands, they broke up in 2015 to concentrate on other pursuits.
However, unlike many bands, they kept in contact with each other and eventually got back together in 2024, stepping back into the world of music older and wiser, perhaps, each with ten years more experience to draw on. The result is a splendid, mature album for today’s musical…
…featuring newly unearthed bonus tracks and unheard demos.
The overused shorthand, “retro,” can mean that a group short on their own ideas has repackaged the past. Although Israel Nash Gripka’s country-rock/Americana infused music raises immediate comparisons to a host of classic folk-rock acts, Israel Nash’s Rain Plans is hardly a slavish (or lazy) re-creation of history. Instead, he’s applied a master craftsman’s aesthetic to expanding what might have started as simple singer-songwriter tunes. The resulting album features richly layered instrumentation that draws on acoustic and electric sounds, soft-diffusion reverb to cosset the mix and, above all, a worshipful appreciation for warm analog tone. Casual listeners may…
Panda Bear is a team player. He’s been a part of Animal Collective since its inception, lending his distinctive vocals to indie anthems like “My Girls” and “Summertime Clothes.” He crossed over into the mainstream via Daft Punk’s hypnotic “Doin’ It Right,” on a journey that led to his first (and only) Gold-certified record to date. Essentially, the man born Noah Lennox is the secret ingredient that word got out about — and ever since, everyone’s been eating good.
For the last 15 years, Panda Bear has been steadily bonding with another prolific collaborator in Spaceman 3’s Peter Kember, a.k.a. Sonic Boom. That partnership eventually blossomed into 2022’s Reset: a kaleidoscopic, crystalline dismantling of vintage pop that served as…
Plenty of people turn to punk seeking an escape; Nick Vicario needed distance from the thing itself. As a player in West Coast bands like Crisis Man, Cower, and Public Eye, the Oregon-born musician has spent most of his life abiding by hardcore ethos both onstage and off, for better or for worse. When he relocated to Los Angeles and launched his mostly-solo project Smirk with 2021’s scuzzy, lo-fi LP, he was indulging in the reckless, destructive behaviors that tend to be more alluring in song than in practice. In a breakthrough moment he says came to him as a gradual epiphany rather than a dispatch from rock bottom, Vicario realized drugs had taken too much control over his life. With his third Smirk album, Speculative Fiction, he’s on the side of recovery — but it…
Preparing for the final song of his Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour on Friday (May 22) night in Cleveland, Bruce Springsteen reminded the Rocket Arena crowd that “the E Street Band was built for hard times.”
Those times have inarguably become harder during the seven-and-a-half weeks since the 20-date trek began in Minneapolis, and it was evident on Friday that it’s only made the group, 20 strong on this outing, harder and Springsteen even more focused and resolute in his mission.
Cleveland marked the 17th date of the tour — and the start of its final week — which is likely to culminate in an even more pointed and poignant reckoning on May 27 at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. The tour wraps May 30 in…
All of modern jazz and improvised music owes a debt to Jimmy Giuffre (1921-2008). A quiet revolutionary, Giuffre helped reshape the language of jazz in ways that many musicians now take for granted. His solo recordings anticipated those of Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell, while his early experiments without a rhythm section, common practice today, were once considered radical. Even his approach to free jazz set him apart. Where contemporaries like John Coltrane and Albert Ayler explored the music’s most explosive possibilities, Giuffre pursued a more introspective path, crafting a form of free jazz that was cerebral, restrained, and deeply attentive to space. For many listeners, Free Fall (1963), recorded with pianist Paul Bley and…
Alexander Noice makes music that is full of complexity yet also full of mirth. On his 2019 album NOICE (also the name of the ensemble he gathered for that record), his guitar work joined forces with alto saxophone, bass, drums (both acoustic and programmed) and the twin vocals of Karina Kallas and Argenta Walther as they worked their way through Noice’s knotty but endlessly catchy compositions.
…On Perpetually and Forever, Noice handles the lion’s share of the instrumentation, credited with guitar, piano, synths, vocals, and programming, with saxophones, flute, and bass clarinet added to a few of the tracks. While the somewhat “one-person band” status of the record may lead other artists to adopt a more minimalist…
Techno, noise, drone — as modern underground electronic music’s power trio, these three bodies thrive in spaces and on labels with the creative ambition to tease out their commonalities, while picking and pulling at the frayed edges of their discrepancies. There is perhaps one absolute that ties them together: darkness, the evocation of space and light that can take many forms — a smoke-filled car; the soupy, impenetrable air of the club; a bedroom; an underpass. On Camilla Pisani’s Konstellationen, darkness takes a more primal form: the night sky.
Described as “an exploration of language as a universal force projected onto the universe,” Konstellationen showcases Pisani’s gift for developing density as a tool for both rhythm…
…While Madonna and Soft Cell nostalgize Danceteria as a lost Eden — a place where you could bump shoulders with David Byrne, Debi Mazar, and Jean-Michel Basquiat on any given night — Nirosta Steel’s essential MY SKYSCRAPER is a messier and richer document of that same cultural moment. The album offers a panoramic view of the longing, the ecstasy, and the restlessness at the heart of New York City’s artistic heyday. But there’s no nostalgia to smooth away its rough edges: MY SKYSCRAPER is a lost artifact that somehow arrives exactly when it’s needed.
Nirosta Steel is the alias of Steven Hall, a Scottish-born musician who became a close friend and collaborator of experimental music auteur Arthur Russell after moving to New York.
Aussie hard rock combo Rose Tattoo have persisted on and off with many personnel changes for many decades, despite the deaths of most of the early band’s lineup. Emerging in the late 1970’s with a bluesy blend of strident hard rock and melodic, no-frills heavy metal, the band’s first four albums yielded the hits “Bad Boy for Love,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll Outlaw,” “Nice Boys,” and “Scarred for Life.” One of Australia’s premier hard rock acts, Rose Tattoo found less success overseas, though they did influence American acts like Guns N’ Roses, Keel, L.A. Guns, and Nashville Pussy, all of whom have covered the band’s songs.
Rose Tattoo was formed in Sydney in 1976 by ex-Buffalo guitarist Peter Wells and — with the additions of former Buster Brown…
The lineup of the oddly titled SPLAT! may only be 3/5 of the Deep Purple that gave us the iconic riffy ’70s “Smoke on the Water” hits. But considering those days are over five decades in the past, you might not know it.
A trio from that classic Mark ll lineup — bassist Roger Glover, singer/songwriter Ian Gillan and drummer Ian Paice — remain. And even though they are 80, or close to it, (relatively new guitarist Simon McBride who joined in 2022 is just 47) there is no question from the throbbing licks on opening track “Arrogant Boy” that no vitality or spark is lacking in these performances from guys who could be sitting back collecting residual checks.
SPLAT! arrives just two years after 2024s =1, another late-career juggernaut that…
…Remastered from the original tapes, this album includes four outtakes rescued from damaged session tapes.
By 1977, Bluegrass was arriving at a crossroads. Questions about whether to stay in a strict acoustic framework or to push the boundaries and include non-traditional instruments like drums, pedal steel, and electric instruments. This is where the short-lived group Boone Creek took up the mantle of experimentation and laid the foundation for what would become “Newgrass.”
Featuring future giants Ricky Skaggs, Jerry Douglas, Wes Golding, and Terry Baucom, Boone Creek was willing to push further than many of their contemporaries. Listening to it today, it is easy to hear the seeds of ideas that would…
Max Knouse is so laid back he might tip over on this minimalist country folk record. The songwriter, from Oregon, sometimes tours and plays with Califone, another band that can kick haunting melody up out of the dust, but he shares none of their multi-tonal, multi-rhythmic fascination with rhythm. Drums and bass, played respectively by Ben Lumsdaine and Bailey Zick, stay present but simple, a sleepy swing in their slapping concord.
The main event, however, remains Knouse’s thready tenor and deep-in-the-pocket licks. His bent towards surreality begs comparisons with Michael Hurley. In somnolent “Like a Rocket Stage,” he contemplates an infestation of bees in his kitchen; the landlord explains they’re just looking for a hive. It’s just off reality, possibly…
Like Tony Allen’s drumming in Fela Kuti’s band, or Clyde Stubblefield’s beats for James Brown, there’s something essentially timeless about krautrock rhythms. Can’s Jaki Leibezeit and Neu!’s Klaus Dinger created a rhythmic language that is “motorik” in every sense – a way of delineating forward-momentum, a propulsive groove that links rock music’s physicality with the repetition of electronica. Perhaps this is why a genre of music that emerged in a West German counterculture of the early ’70s continues to represent futurism and progress, even for bands who have absolutely no contact with Germany – from Tokyo’s Minami Deutsch to Chicago’s Lifeguard; from Sao Paulo’s Bike to Bristol’s Beak; from London’s Snapped Ankles to Venice’s Squadra Omega.
Lost Tape – 1980 sounds like the half-remembered fever dream of a long-ago journey across some wild and distant country, riding in the back of a battered taxi through the desert, a tape distorting loudly on the car’s player, eating into the lower tiers of your dreams like a fungus. It’s jarring, lulling, painful, absorbing, unexpected and weird all in one go. Who was Abdou El Omari? He grew up in Tafraoute, in the Anti-Atlas mountains, south of Agadir, and began recording in the 1970s while still in his early twenties, around the same time as Nass El Ghiwane and the mighty Oudaden. But his music was wilder, more futuristic, more experimental and more global than his peers. Perhaps too much so. By the 1980s, he had gone quiet and ventured into hairdressing.