Latest Entries »

December 28th, 1990, at The Marquee was an interesting time and place for Phish. After making its NYC debut in the spring of 1988, the band bounced around various rooms — including eight shows at the legendary Wetlands Preserve — before making its debut at The Marquee for the band’s 13th career show in New York City. Phish would play The Marquee two more times in 1991, before continuing its climb up the ladder of NYC venues, to The Academy, Mariott Marquis, Roseland Ballroom, and Lonestar Roadhouse before making it to the Beacon Theatre in April ’94 and finally to Madison Square Garden later that year — almost four years exactly from the Marquee gig.
In extensive liner notes on LivePhish, an archivist writes that advanced tickets to…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

The 6th studio album by Florence + The Machine, 12 new songs + 4 exclusive Chamber Versions.
Since the release of their groundbreaking debut album Lungs in 2009, alt-rock group Florence + The Machine have not only carved their own space in the modern music scene – they have established their own unique world. A sonic and aesthetic domain fueled by rage, the divine feminine and the comfort of witchcraft, Florence + The Machine have become synonymous with the carnal, primal and unknown.
Fronted by the one and only Florence Welch, Florence + The Machine are preparing for the release of their sixth studio album Everybody Scream, out via Polydor Records. The album is destined for a Halloween release…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Following the release of his seventh studio album A Modern Day Distraction last year, Jake Bugg is back with a very special deluxe repack of the celebrated record. Following the release of the first single Never Said Goodbye Jake releases Oblivious previously unreleased and written during the spring 0f 2025 it’s an up tempo celebratory slice of British guitar pop which resonates perfectly for the sound of our post Oasis summer. British guitar music has never sounded so good. Jake headlined packed out UK dates across the summer and will be doing instores to support the album, whilst also headlining the RadioX event on Oct 3rd 13 years and seven albums into his career, A Modern Day Distraction cements Jake as one of the UK’s most established and enduring songwriters in the UK.

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

These new ethnographic-oriented albums document recent Pacific projects initiated by Australian-based label Wantok Musik in the two formerly war-torn island nations of Bougainville and Timor-Leste (East Timor). Encouraging connections in both countries between younger up-and-coming musicians and their local community elders, the aim is to ensure the regions’ unique songs, languages and history are properly passed on, while the elders are still able to do so.
Lek Mak celebrates the distinctive Pacific culture of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, which includes Buka and several smaller islands that lie between Papua New Guinea and the northern tip of the Solomon Islands archipelago. Previously considered part of PNG, there have…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

…After a decade of remarkable releases, Exzald S (Sarah Foulquiere) is finally ready to unveil her debut solo album ~ not counting the collaborative Serene Transfer Scheme, lodged in a unique steel box. The fantastic art ~ also by the artist ~ is an invitation to enter into a fabulous science fictional world. On Irisdesc, Exzald S continues to map the terrain of a planet only she knows, sending samples of her voice into space as if each were a passenger on Voyager‘s golden record. Words are secondary to expression, sucked into whirlpools of electronic sound.
While there are other travelers in the same sonic galaxy ~ Katarina Gryvul, for example whose recent work also appears on the Subtext label ~ no others share her planet. This is because…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Sébastien Betbeder’s comedy-drama L’Incroyable Femme Des Neige (The Incredible Snow Woman) looks like a lot of fun based on the trailer, but don’t judge the film score by the trailer music. What Ensemble 0 (Sylvain Chauveau, Stéphane Garin & Joël Mérah) have composed is something tonally different: more subdued, as lighthearted as falling snow.
…The tracks are as brief as flurries, the shortest only eleven seconds, and even the longest coming up just short of two and a half minutes.  There’s little time to appreciate one before the next, but tougher they establish a playful mood.
The LP begins peacefully, with soft piano joined by swiftly expanding orchestral elements. “Les Grands Espaces” draws the listener in,…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

The Indonesian composer Eunike Tanzil has an interesting story. She was inspired to pursue film music when her father gave her an album of music by John Williams, who has made it to Medan in North Sumatra. Partly trained in the U.S., she has written music for The Addams Family 2 and the fantasy series Abominable and the Invisible City. One can hear her film music background on her debut album, The First of Everything. The album is said by Tanzil to be a “journey of self-exploration,” reflecting key moments in her life thus far. It opens with an orchestral-tuning-like ‘Opening’ that inventively morphs into fuller pieces, and the other 11 tracks are evocations of scenes or aspects of her experiences. Only one, a dark and direct orchestral ‘Requiem’ marking the death…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Living up to its titular promise, Susanna Mendlow‘s Travels with Cello features music from Georgia, Bulgaria, Argentina, Germany, and the United States. The hour-long travelogue’s distinguished by unaccompanied performances and ones partnering her, separately, with pianists Michael Angelucci and Stefan Petrov. Further enhancing the recording is the fact that some of the works are first recordings and some arrangements by the cellist herself. Interestingly, the project’s origin can be traced to the moment her husband, captivated by violinist Maxim Vengerov’s recording of the slow movement from Mendelssohn’s Sonata in F Major, suggested she record the work for cello. And with that, the journey began.
Complementing the Mendelssohn work are…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Animal Collective have released Jetty (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), an album of music that the band’s Deakin and Geologist composed for a new documentary about the reconstruction of Rockaway Beach after its destruction by Hurricane Sandy. Jetty is directed by Sam Fleischner, whose previous work includes music videos for MGMT, Santigold, and Animal Collective’s own Panda Bear.
Here’s a little more about the film: “A record of a geological transplant: granite boulders blasted from a quarry, trucked to the coast, and placed into rock structures extending out from the New York City shoreline. This mighty human effort to out-engineer nature was captured on Super 16mm film, and features an original soundtrack by Animal Collective.

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Howl for More is Antony Hurley’s follow-up album to Quiet Rooms, which was released in 2022.
The songs were written by Hurley on his travels between Southern Italy, Mexico and eventually his native Kent. It has a very languid, serene overall feel to it. The supporting material suggests that the core of the album reflects the fragmentary nature of travel.
The album opens with ‘Awakening’, which is a very enjoyable instrumental with dreamy synths, which sets the mood. This is followed by ‘Dans Song’, which skipping along very pleasantly is as upbeat as the album gets. Hurley’s vocals are very laid back over a nice, comfortable beat. On a number of tracks, he is joined by a female vocalist who is mixed very far back, which gives…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

In the novel Barney’s Version, Mordecai Richler wrote of Montreal that “its salvation [is] the continuing devotion to pleasure by our movers and shakers.” The city exudes a self-assured, continental coolness, and its relative affordability makes it admirably hospitable to its artists. But Richler is right that this coolness takes effort; it’s an act of devotion rather than a natural endowment to the Québécois.
Hélène Barbier is one such devoted mover and shaker. Relocating to Montreal from France some 10-plus years ago, she’s put in the work: first with the lo-fi punk outfit Moss Lime and then as co-founder of label/zine/all-around scene-saver Celluloid Lunch, alongside her equally industrious husband Joe Chamandy of…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Hyloxolos is the expansive and surprising new psych-rock supergroup featuring Dave Harrington (Darkside), Peter Matthew Bauer (The Walkmen), Dylan Carlson (Earth), avant-garde instrumentalist & drummer Dylan Fujioka (Meatbodies) and Otis Bauer (Trench) on bass.
This album, like the founding of the band itself, was birthed last year over an intense 48 hour period of writing and recording at 64sound in Los Angeles with engineer Tyler Karmen (Bat for Lashes, Devendra Banhart). The massive walls of sound, rolling swells and long, winding passages unfold deliberately, in heavy, kaleidoscopic waves. These six tracks are the sound of an inspired group of strangers cleaving something new out of the ether on arrival. The first notes of…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

After spending 2024 wrestling with that classic second album syndrome, Hotel Lux have returned, having finally pinned writer’s block down on the mat. Named after a Billy Childish song that inspired the band’s formation, The Bitter Cup is a rough and ready LP that marks a new creative direction for the five-piece.
Hotel Lux’s well-received debut, Hands Across the Creek, was laced with politically charged vitriol, and fans will be relieved to hear that the band refuse to shy away from tackling tricky topics on their second full-length offering. From ‘Costermonger’, a musical interpretation of a BBC documentary about the fall of Deptford Market, to ‘Another One Gone’, a lament for those the band have lost to suicide, The Bitter Cup reflects myriad issues in…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Boston-based Brendan Wright has been releasing music – first as Tiberius Wright and more recently just Tiberius – since 2015, when they were still a teenager. Recently, the Tiberius moniker has come to represent a full band rather than a solo project, and the music has shifted too, from dreamy, reverb-drenched slacker indie pop to a tighter, crisper sound that Wright calls ‘farm emo’. 2023 mini-album was a minor masterpiece of small-town catharsis and city alienation, where twangy guitars shared space with power chords and Patsy Cline sentimentalism traded blows with post-hardcore or shoegaze dynamics. It was a winning combination, and a highly original one.
Luckily for us, Wright has chosen to continue down that route with the new full-length…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Over the years, West Virginian Charles Wesley Godwin has built up a reputation for delivering excellent live shows. He’s supported artists such as Luke Combs and Zach Bryan and is at present out on the road with Eric Church. Live from the Steel City is a 23-track album that displays Godwin’s expertise and showcases his expansive catalogue of road-tested material and the prowess of The Allegheny High. Godwin describes Live from the Steel City as a recording of “a live show the boys and I have curated in bars, clubs, theatres, amphitheatres, arenas and stadiums over the last several years”. The speakers sound stacked for this sold-out gig at the AE Outdoor stage in Pittsburgh. Recorded in September 2024, the day before the Pittsburgh Steelers played…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

The Beggar had its genesis as a collection of “quite rough and raw” demo recordings, released in 2018 on Bandcamp. Robin Adams then saw how the songs evolved in a live setting when played by a band and decided to revisit and re-record the songs with a group of musician friends.
He has had no funding for the record, and so it “was a labour of love from everyone involved who dedicated their precious time and talent to these recordings”.
At the time of the initial recording, Adams had been recovering from a very difficult four-year period of chronic disease, which had left him housebound and isolated. He was “unable to gig, see friends, or to socialise in any meaningful way due to debilitating fatigue”.

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Detroit-based Ethan Daniel Davidson is nothing if not prolific. Lear is Davidson’s 14th studio album and, even more impressively, his second of 2025. If that earlier album, Cordelia, helped reinforce a reputation as a reflective songwriter, then Lear, which emerged from those same sessions, can be assumed to be a companion piece.
The album has been compared to Neil Young’s On the Beach insofar as it is dripping in melancholy and ache. In its tone and tempo, it hints that Cohen wouldn’t be so far wide of the mark either. Davidson is mining the dark corners of his own psyche here, and it shows. His songs have become more autobiographical, and opening track ‘Stop Breaking Down’ has Davidson reflecting on a hitchhiking youth, of bad…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .

Golden Brown’s Stefan Beck was inspired by Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea series as he wrote this suite of songs, and he encourages listeners to read the books while absorbing Patterner. His interpretation isn’t especially literal; the title comes from a master wizard in the trilogy and a couple of the track titles are place names from the world LeGuin built. However, the books have a wonderful down-to-earth naturalism, spiked with the glitter of occasional magic, and massed, sometimes, into epic contours. That’s something this music has as well, a cosmic Americana made of ordinary sounds — guitar picking, cello predominate — polished to a heightened, semi-surreal clarity.
Beck has made three previous albums as Golden Brown. He’s also a member of Prairiewolf,…

You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please .