After making his mark in the late 60s as one of Jamaica’s brightest young instrumentalists, playing drums and guitar on sessions for Studio One operator Coxson Dodd, Filberto ‘Fil’ Phil Calender worked on sessions for many of the island’s leading producers. He also found time to form The In Crowd, which by the latter half of the 70s provided the primary outlet for his considerable talents as both a musician and songwriter.
In 1978, the septet’s album ‘His Majesty Is Coming’ broke the group in the UK, with the collection swiftly becoming a must-have purchase for all self-respecting British fans of roots reggae. Over the years that immediately followed, Calender and the In Crowd cut a succession of beautifully crafted singles, including ‘We Play Reggae’…
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It’s been more than two years since Jethro Tull released an expanded version of “The Broadsword And The Beast” before letting their reissue programme stumble chronologically, with unexpected emergence of “Bursting Out” box set followed by the “Christmas Album” and “Living In The Past” repackages. All this means another go at 1984’s “Under Wraps” is long overdue, yet it might be closer than everyone thinks, or farther, depending on what a fans’ take on the band’s digital-only offering of a concert from that platter’s promotional tour will be.
Restricted to streaming, Live In Berlin 1985 may seem strange, as it doesn’t contain a single cut from the group’s then-latest record, but the special performance – featuring the temporarily…
Delivering their debut album soon after forming, Sister Ray Davies is the duo of guitarist Adam Morrow and engineer Jamie Sego, who runs Alabama’s Portside Sound, a studio housed in the former Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. They became fast friends when Morrow played sessions there for John Paul White, Donnie Fritts, and others, but anyone expecting music from them in the territory of rhythm & blues or country is going to be very, very surprised. An outlet for their shared love of shoegaze acts such as Slowdive and Ride as well as related sounds like late-’60s fuzz and the noise pop of Yo La Tengo, Sister Ray Davies (a fusion of the Velvet Underground song and the Kinks’ singer) was chosen off an old list of Sego’s, in part because they thought it captured…
For years, the most consistent thing about Constant Smiles was their name. Singer/songwriter Ben Jones surrounded himself with shifting collaborators and sounds that spanned Lost’s moody outbursts, Paragons‘ folk-pop, and Kenneth Anger‘s shimmering electronics. Given that history, Moonflowers‘ musical and emotional openness comes as a surprise — but a welcome one. The album’s search for connection and growth is reflected in Constant Smiles’ own trajectory: Late in 2022, drummer Nora Knight joined Jones and longtime bassist Spike Currier, completing the band’s first-ever permanent lineup. This stability has done wonders. Bolstered by warm, immediate production, Moonflowers‘ sophisticated yet lived-in songs bloom as they balance…
…Featuring 4 additional tracks (‘Sweet Thames Flow Softly’, ‘Yellow Triangle’, ‘Music to Our Ears’, ‘Butterfly’) and a re-imaged version of the track ‘The Big Marquee’ which featured on the original album.
The title, borrowed from WB Yeats’s poem Easter 1916, and the cover, a landscape with an ominous fiery glow in the distance, suggest a confrontational, political record.
There is indeed some score settling on the 25th studio album from a singer who, at 79, remains one of Ireland’s national treasures, but Christy Moore has ever been a nuanced artist, offering the full emotional gamut in the songs he writes and curates. Humour, rage, empathy, sorrow and joy roll seamlessly into each other, united…
Dispensing with his trademark banjo at the suggestion of producer Afie Jurvanen and, by extension, his Appalachian-rooted sound, Nova Scotia’s Old Man Luedecke’s latest, She Told Me Where to Go, finds him exploring different musical textures on songs that capture the darkness and light of reaching your mid-life years, a point where he’d considered giving up music and had taken a job as a deckhand on a scallop boat.
The change is evident in the opening title track, a country blues with a steady drum beat and bottleneck guitar about following fate (“I do not hurry/And I do not rush/I don’t waste no effort/On what don’t mean much/She told me where to go …so I look for Chaos/And I look for signs”). A lighter acoustic shuffle, Guy Fieri is a playful…
…includes four new songs. There are a pair of fuzzed-out rockers, “Cross Your Heart” and “Not Sacred,” as well as two acoustic numbers, “Sunrise” and “Seattle,”
Momma deliver their fantastic new album Welcome to My Blue Sky just in time for a whole new Summer of Grunge.
Momma’s Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten are longtime friends who met as high school Pavement fans in Southern California, now raise hell in Brooklyn, and cram their guitars full of youthful sex-and-romance pangs along with a mommalode of slacker angst.
Jams like “I Want You (Fever)” are for anyone who’s ever heard the chaos in their heart translated into euphoric guitar ruckus.
‘Another Picture’ is the deluxe edition of Blondshell’s acclaimed 2025 album. More than your typical deluxe release, ‘Another Picture’ features a new song plus covers by Conor Oberst, Folk Bitch Trio and more. – an expanded, reimagined look at a record that’s already become essential.
For her second album as Blondshell, L.A. singer-songwriter Sabrina Teitelbaum is figuring out how much of her life story she wants to tell the world — how much she needs to tell — and how much to hide away for herself. On her acclaimed 2023 self-titled debut, she was really letting it all hang out, in searing confessional indie-rock.
But on If You Asked for a Picture, Teitelbaum’s more ambivalent, more questioning, reckoning with her painful past, from childhood…
Haerts deliver a hushed and folky third album with 2025’s Laguna Road. The album is named after the road where the German-born/longtime Brooklyn-based duo of singer Nini Fabi and instrumentalist Benny Gebert lived and recorded the album in Pasadena, California. They had moved west following the release of 2021’s Dream Nation, as well as the birth of their daughter and were just finishing up the album when the Eaton Fire swept through Pasadena, destroying much of the community where the couple made their home. Consequently, they made the difficult decision to move back east, settling in New York’s Hudson Valley where they prepared the album’s release. Where previous albums showcased the duo’s dreamy synth pop,…
You have to be a pretty big Billy Childish fan to notice the subtle differences between his many musical projects (and there are plenty of them), but they really are there if you’re paying attention. His earlier groups, like the Pop Rivets and Thee Mighty Caesars, tended to be musically gritty but lyrically playful, while he was more willing to explore the darker side of his imagination in his blues-oriented solo recordings and latter-day acts such as the Musicians of the British Empire and CTMF. In 2022, Childish reunited one of his most prolific combos, Thee Headcoats (initially active from 1988 to 2000) to pay homage to one of his musical heroes, Don Craine of the Downliners Sect, and they cut an album, Irregularis (The Great Hiatus), that arrived in 2023.
If The Hurting was mental anguish, Songs from the Big Chair marks the progression towards emotional healing, a particularly bold sort of catharsis culled from Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith’s shared attraction to primal scream therapy. The album also heralded a dramatic maturation in the band’s music, away from the synth pop brand with which it was (unjustly) seared following the debut, and towards a complex, enveloping pop sophistication. The songwriting of Orzabal, Smith, and keyboardist Ian Stanley took a huge leap forward, drawing on reserves of palpable emotion and lovely, protracted melodies that draw just as much on soul and R&B music as they do on immediate pop hooks. The album could almost be called pseudo-conceptual, as each song holds its place and each…
Another View is trombonist Kalia Vandever‘s fourth album as a bandleader and her first for Northern Spy. It differs radically from her solo records, and even from 2022’s Regrowth, which showcased her writing and playing in different duos and trios, and 2023’s We Fell in Turn, a completely solo outing that reflected her skill in creating ambient jazz. This album was composed for a quartet that includes guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Kanoa Mendenhall, and drummer Kayvon Gordon. It builds on the lyrical dreamlike qualities of her previous work and dialogue.
On opener “Staring at the Cracked Window,” Halvorson provides a knotty, natural-sounding improvised intro that leads toward the quartet’s entrance on a bass and drum vamp that…
I LOVE LIFE even when I’m hurting is saxophonist, composer, and bandleader Dave McMurray‘s fourth Blue Note outing and follows his two Grateful Dedication volumes. These tracks celebrate everyday life, loss, gratitude, and McMurray’s Detroit hometown. A luminous Motor City cast accompanies him: Keyboardists Luis Resto and Maurice O’Neal, guitarist Wayne Gerard, bassists Don Was and Ibrahim Jones, drummer Jeff Canady, percussionist Mahindi Masai, and vocalists Herschel Boone and Kem. Some bandmates have been collaborators for more since the ’80s, and also play with him in Don Was & the Pan Detroit Ensemble. McMurray plays tenor and soprano saxophones and flute. He composed six of the nine cuts.
The name of the game is groove. Stylistically,…
David Morris of Red River Dialect has always been able to find the spiritual in ordinary objects. It’s a reflection, perhaps, of his training as a Buddhist monk — a habit of contemplation and co-existence with all the inhabitants of the world around him. On Basic Country Mustard, his most successful songs focus not on nature’s myriad wonders, but on what makes us human.
Consider, for instance, the title track, an extended meditation on the most plebian of condiments. Against a jangling guitar, a bouncy drum beat, and scattered piano chords, Morris observes the simplicity — just two ingredients: seeds and liquid — and the infinite variations of mustard. “The Ancient Chinese back in 1000 B.C./ The Romans and Japanese/ They all liked…
Sister Irene O’Connor didn’t want her convent to know what she was up to. She had moved from Australia to Singapore in the 1950s to work with children, buying a guitar to play them her original songs. In 1965, a parent of one of the children invited her to record at a radio station and soon she had a recording contract with Philips. O’Connor released several EPs and a compilation in the late ‘60s, but to keep her burgeoning recording career a secret, she used the pseudonym Myriam Frances. “Nuns didn’t do that kind of thing,” she later explained.
In Singapore, O’Connor met Sister Marimil Lobregat, an audio technician interested in early electronic instruments. They ran into one another by chance a decade later in Sydney…
Thee Headcoatees split up in 1999, each of the four members going their separate ways in music and life and seemingly shutting the door on a career full of A+ rock & roll. Fast forward to 2024 and the band’s distaff partners, the recently reformed Thee Headcoats were recording an album and thought it would be fun to round up the members of Thee Headcoatees and get them on wax too. After some behind the scenes work soon Ludella Black, Kyra LaRubia, Bongo Debbie, and Holly Golightly were in the studio, backed by Thee Headcoats on a selection of songs written by Billy Childish, along with a few choice covers. Unlike many of their happy-go-lucky records made in their early prime, Man-Trap is an angry affair filled with songs about abuse, frustration, the ills of a society…
Welsh hard rockers Budgie are often cited as one of the first U.K. heavy metal bands, known for their dark, blues-infused sound built from gloomy melodies and fierce guitar riffs. Along with Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, Budgie made music that hit harder than their peers, and without the smiling disposition that was common among bands of the psychedelic era.
Budgie’s 1978 offering, Impeckable, is a very uninspired affair, lacking both the adventurous songwriting and refreshing sense of humor characteristic of the band’s early records. The group continues exploring its funk obsessions on “Dish It Up” and “Love for You and Me” while shelling out boring metallic riffs on “Melt the Ice Away” and “Smile Boy Smile.”
“When it’s looking dark, punch the future in the face,” Kurt Vile advised us many years ago. Few bands have taken on this challenge with more gusto than Home Front, the fearless synth punk duo from Edmonton whose sophomore album, Watch It Die, arrives with the violent catharsis of landing a haymaker to the teeth of death.
“In this time of madness / How does this beauty survive?” Graeme MacKinnon shouts on the album’s soaring title track. The answer, it seems, is to cram into a studio with your best friends and crank up your instruments until they’re about to give way.
It’s a formula that MacKinnon (vocals, guitar and bass) and his bandmate Clint Frazier (synths, key, drums and programming) first explored on Home Front’s acclaimed 2023 debut,…