Newly remastered and now with a previously unreleased bonus track, “Hammer and Nails”.
Laura Cantrell knows and loves good music too well to be a purist, and while her first two albums, Not the Tremblin’ Kind and When the Roses Bloom Again, were firmly grounded in her great fondness for country music, she expands her boundaries a bit on her third set (and first for Matador), Humming by the Flowered Vine. While the feel of Humming by the Flowered Vine isn’t radically different than her previous work, the sound and arrangements offer some new wrinkles, with producer J.D. Foster and a superb cast of musicians edging Cantrell into an inventive pop direction. The pensive love song “14th Street,” a strong but sorrowful reading of “And Still,”…
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There is nothing ordinary about Fantastic Negrito. From his given Christian name of Xavier Dphrepaulezz to his career revitalization as a roots artist combining blues, soul, funk, and rock along with album titles ‘Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?’ and ‘Please Don’t Be Dead’ (3 nabbed GRAMMY’S), Negrito avoids following any existing blueprint.
That’s especially apparent when listening to Fantastic Negrito Alive, released July 17 via Storefront Records. Compiled from a recent tour’s most earth-quivering performances, this is the epitome of how a concert album should sound. Its 13 tracks veer way off-course from their studio versions, feeding off the audience’s energy, which then ramps up his own. His eclectic nature is fully exposed for this generous hour and…
Everything I Ever Saw continues The Menzingers’ tradition of heartfelt storytelling through their signature Americana punk rock style. It’s an album built on consistency rather than reinvention, leaning heavily into the formula of impassioned vocals and steady rock riffs that has made the band so beloved.
The use of Shin Noguchi’s street photography for the artwork immediately stamps the album with a recognisable personality, the same intriguing, sombre vulnerability that is present across most of their album covers is undeniable here. In fact, it is one of their strongest artwork choices, second only to 2017’s After the Party, and it feels like an intentional reference to their most popular album. Many of the tracks follow suit,…
On June 17, 1976, the formidable Relayer lineup of YES – Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squire, Alan White, and Patrick Moraz – performed in front of a capacity crowd at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, NJ. The quintet was captured mid-tour during a live broadcast on New York’s WNEW-FM. While the performance has remained one of the band’s most popular bootlegs for decades, this release marks its first official appearance.
The recording finds the band at a creative peak during the “Solo Albums Tour.” Following the success of Relayer (1974), the members spent 1975 recording five individual solo projects; this 1976 tour was the first time these new arrangements were integrated into the live set. The performance balances full-band epics…
“I’m living with a knife in my side/I’m gonna take it for a joy ride,” Gracie Abrams sings three songs into her new album. This isn’t the first time the word “knife” appears on Daughter from Hell, nor is it the last. She’ll reference knives four different times across the album, and that’s not even including the stunning piano ballad “The Knife.” For Abrams, these blades are a tool to describe her pain – the way they twist, cut to the bone, and even linger a while. And on Daughter From Hell, you’d almost think she likes it. “They’re daring me to pull it out,” she sings. “I’ll probably keep it for a lifetime.”
Expectations are high for Daughter From Hell, out this Friday via Interscope. And that’s not just because it’s Abrams’ third…
There was a fusty, claustrophobic aura surrounding Cardiacs’ 1988 debut album, A Little Man And A House And The Whole World Window. Released 14 months later, On Land And In The Sea captured them basking in psychedelic sunshine. Less a transformation than a giddy blossoming, it showcased their self-created world of imagination, wonder and squint-eyed eccentricity.
Leader and chief songwriter Tim Smith may or may not have been thrilled by an increasing amount of attention from the music mainstream, momentary approval from Steve Wright on Radio 1 included, but his music spoke only of feverish, mischievous delight. The primitive, angular clatter of Cardiacs’ earliest efforts had grown into something bigger and more ambitious.
The deluxe edition features 15 additional tracks: rare remixes, live versions and instrumentals.
On their sixth album, the increasingly prolific neo-psych outfit Portugal. The Man look to the past for inspiration on In the Mountain in the Cloud. The album represents a breakthrough for the band on a couple of levels, the most obvious of which is their signing to major-label Atlantic, which comes as a big step up after years of quietly working their way through the indie circuit. The other is the less tangible artistic breakthrough. With such a rigorous release schedule, Portugal. The Man has been a band that listeners have been able to watch hone their craft step by step, slowly tinkering and adjusting things and growing into a band that’s not only hit their stride, but is in full…
…includes three bonus tracks: a previously unreleased alternate mix of “Dogtown”, “I Don’t Know Why” (Demo) and “Walking on Thin Ice”.
Born in the shadow of incredible grief, Yoko Ono’s fifth solo album, Season of Glass, holds a specific place in her greater body of work, its vivid expressions of a spectrum of painfully raw feelings frozen in place by tragedy. Released in 1981, Season of Glass arrived just months after Ono watched her husband John Lennon be murdered as they were returning home from a recording session. Infamously, a photograph of Lennon’s blood-spattered glasses served as the cover art for the album, a creative choice Ono fought for against pushback from label executives who felt it would horrify the record-buying public.
True to its name, (the best & the rest of) New Order will include both the 1994 hits set (the best of) New Order and its 1995 follow-up (the rest of) New Order. The former featured their biggest hits up to 1993’s Republic and new mixes of songs like “Bizarre Love Triangle,” “True Faith” and ‘Round & Round,” while the latter collected 10 mostly recent remixes, including a handful of exclusive tracks. For this new package, those discs will be augmented by a further two CDs of remixes and bonus tracks, including the versions exclusive to U.S. and cassette pressings of (the best of) New Order and plenty more period remixes, including many which were only ever on vinyl and even a few unreleased cuts, including the first focus track: a vintage mix of Republic track…
Wafer-thin mint? You might think, after the excavations of 2013’s Fisherman’s Box, that Mike Scott had trawled the ocean floor of the Fisherman’s Blues sessions. But, as expansive as it was, the box was restricted to a chronological inspection of Scott’s evolution in the years 1986-1988. Back then, thanks to an early digital process involving Betamax tape, the recording never stopped. Enough was never enough.
The shorthand version of the Fisherman’s Blues story recounts a voyage from the epic rock of Scott’s Big Music toward the sweet pipings of Irish trad. In fact, the music was more cosmopolitan than that, absorbing influences from all over. Fisherman’s Box included a disc on which the Memphis Sanctified Singers rubbed…
Along with the lucky hundreds in attendance at north London’s Unit 58 and the car park of Leeds’ Brudenell Social Club, NME first heard Yard Act’s new album in May. At these free last-minute gigs, the Leeds quartet surprised fans by playing ‘You’re Gonna Need a Little Music’ from top to bottom – instantly after it was announced. A power move that perhaps indicates the confidence they harness, now three albums in, but one that also mirrors the approach that birthed it: four live musicians under one roof at their most instinctive.
Following the bitty writing process that characterised their Mercury Prize-nominated debut album ‘The Overload’ (2022) and its playful successor ‘Where’s My Utopia?’ (2024), Yard Act assembled their own studio space in…
At 79, Lenny Kaye isn’t the oldest artist to make a debut album (that honour goes to Sun Ra Arkestra’s Marshall Allen at a sprightly 100 years old) but Kaye may be the individual with the most varied musical reach to take his sweet time in producing a solo album.
By the time he took up the role for which he is best known, as Patti Smith’s guitar-wielding co-pilot, he had already dabbled in the college fraternity gig circuit (where he first covered “Gloria”), released protest song “Crazy Like a Fox” (using the alias Link Cromwell), forged a career as a music writer for august journals Rolling Stone, Jazz & Pop, Crawdaddy and Melody Maker, and was there or thereabouts when Creem editor Dave Marsh first coined the term “punk rock”.
Different When It’s Silent appears six years after the release of Fall to Pieces, the album Tricky made soon after the death of his daughter Mazy. Though he’s issued material through several collaborative side projects in the interim, it makes sense that this is the proper follow-up to Fall to Pieces, as it feels like an extension of that album’s outpouring of grief and occasional anger.
For most of the songs on the album, Tricky is joined by new collaborator Mitch Sanders, whose haunting falsetto floats above Tricky’s wounded, raspy whispers. Brooding opener “I Still See Me There” finds the two mourning together over a slow, obtuse rhythm, making for one of the album’s most striking, affecting moments. The two continue to ruminate on pain and loss…
Five decades into a career that has seen Ed Snodderly as a songwriter, performer, actor, and owner of the legendary Down Home club in East Tennessee, comes perhaps his most personal release to date. ES Pearl Presents Baggage Flies Free not only continues the family name; his grandma was Pearlie Bell, his mom Willie Pearl, but offers a glimpse into his life in East Tennessee. Surrounded by a stellar cast that includes Tim O’Brien, Amythyst Kiah, Verlon Thompson and Brother Boy Eugene Wolf, the mainly acoustic songs still have a contemporary feel thanks to some pin-sharp production.
The opener, ‘Coming Down This Road’, picks up pace as it travels, leading into the melodic ‘Willow Green’, which sees Snodderly admiring…
Formed in 2001, Aberdeen’s The XCERTS never reached the heights of their fast/slow DNA brothers Biffy Clyro and Twin Atlantic, but they should have. Their new album, i think i want to go home now., shows exactly why. A punchy, euphoric blend of anger and melodic softness, it sees Murray Macleod attempting to make sense of the world after his father’s cancer diagnosis. Following the opening title track, do it to myself offers an incendiary pop-punk blast full of barbed-wire guitars and brain-rattling bass with the all-important quieter breakdown as Macleod repeatedly questions: ‘Will it always be like this?’, while another highlight comes in the form of the driving Smashing Pumpkins-style love song, sinking feeling.
There’s also the screamo of pretty ugly, but…
The latest entry in Wild Up’s complete account of music by Julius Eastman focuses exclusively on one of his greatest works, 1979’s Gay Guerillia. Although the score is open to any group of instruments of a similar timbre, Wild Up director Christopher Rountree stretched those definitions a bit to forge an orchestral version with four loose instrumental categories.
As Rountree explained, “Our idea for our interpretation is to reach toward one another timbrally so that the instruments begin to blend and transcend their characteristic sounds.” The resulting arrangement recasts the music with fuller voicings and enhanced richness, while still transmitting an essential power and drive. Structured like a chorale fantasia based on…
When Conal was released in 1981 on the Norwegian independent label Uniton Records with an initial run of 4,000 LPs, Conrad Schnitzler had already long been known beyond the borders of the Federal Republic of Germany and was now appreciated worldwide as a media artist and musician. In addition to the many cassette and LP editions he released himself, international labels were now increasingly releasing his music. In the same year as Conal, for example, the album Control was released on the American label DYS, followed in 1986 by Concert in the USA and Consequenz 2 in Spain. Schnitzler worked tirelessly and his total work of art, including his music, was becoming increasingly multifaceted. Conal is a good example of this development.
A sign of the ever-encroaching AI times in which we’re living, the words “Produced Entirely by Humans” appear on the back cover of this superb joint effort from electronic artists David Helpling and Scott Reich — not that such clarification is needed when the music couldn’t more possibly reflect a human touch and the sensibilities of its creators. Both figures are long-standing practitioners of the ambient art, and the two appear to bring out the best in each other when pooling their talents as they do here.
While details about “who plays what” are clarified, the nine compositions are credited to both, making it impossible to determine who might have been more involved in the production of a given piece or whether each was equally…
Brighton on the English South Coast has always been weird. It was built almost from scratch as a hedonistic playground by the foppish Prince Regent, later King George IV, just over 200 years ago — and ever since has attracted waves of freaks, cultists, ravers, lowlifes, and oddballs. Nowadays, it’s beset by gentrification, chain restaurants, media folk and wellness gurus, but just under the surface it still has the air of “a town that is constantly helping the police with their enquiries” as the writer Keith Waterhouse put it in the 1970s. And now, as ever, hidden away from the seafront clubs and big indie gigs, it has a wellspring of genuine eccentricity clinging on to its surreality in basement flats, weird jam sessions above pubs, smelly poetry readings, and weird…
Those who have been following Shane Embury’s career closely since the days of Unseen Terror’s Human Error back in 1987 may be less surprised by the largely accessible, melodic music of Bridge to Resolution than those who are aware of him only as Napalm Death’s bass player and a figurehead of the U.K. extreme music underground scene. There’s never been any shortage of diversity in Embury’s musical career, and it’s his work outside of metal, such as the shoegaze-ish indie noise rock of Little Giant Drug, his electronic dark ambient/drone project Dark Sky Burial and his association with art-rock veterans Cardiacs, that point most clearly in the direction he takes on the first album to be issued under his own name.
As the awkward phrasing above suggests,…