In a career that began 75 years ago, pre-dating even Alan Freed’s adoption of the phrase ‘rock’n’roll’, Mavis Staples must have thought she’d seen just about everything; one of the most recognisable voices of the United States’ struggle for civil rights, she continued singing on the side of the righteous as the search for equality dragged on. Now 86, she should be taking it easy, assured her wars have been won. Yet, here we are in 2025, and the last member standing of The Staple Singers is dusting off her old friend Curtis Mayfield’s ‘We Got to Have Peace’, her work incomplete as long as the world continues to promote leaders too dumb to understand the message.
Staples’ solo career took a while to get going: two albums for Volt while the family group…
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Contains bonus tracks ‘Bad Moon Rising (Live)’ and ‘As Long As I See the Light (Live)’ .
Back in June of this year, US president Donald Trump ordered a parade in Washington DC in honour of the 250th birthday of the US Army – and, it was strongly suspected in certain quarters, of the 79th birthday of himself. At one point during what turned out to be a somewhat sullen and half-arsed trudge-past, the speakers blared the unmistakable descending riff of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son”.
This was either splendid mischief or atrocious ignorance on someone’s part. “Fortunate Son”, which first appeared on 1969’s Willy & The Poor Boys, was a none-too-subtle protest song decrying the ease with which the well-connected…
Born and raised in Valldemossa, a picturesque village on the island of Majorca, singer Júlia Colom grew up immersed in a rich tradition of Spanish folk music. The first song she learned, at age six, was The Song of the Sibyl, a medieval chant performed on Christmas Eve. Passed down orally through generations of Majorcans, The Song of the Sybil is long and ornate — a melismatic tune with lyrics that foretell the Apocalypse. Unsurprisingly, it left a lasting impression on Colom.
This musical memory sparked Colom’s passion for singing. Curiosity soon became vocation, and at 18, Colom left Majorca for Barcelona, where she earned a degree in music and expanded her practice into composition and contemporary music. Still deeply connected to her Majorcan heritage,…
…Zig-Zag Band emerged in the early ’80s, a time when Zimbabwe was forging its post-independence identity, and quickly established itself as one of the country’s most distinctive musical voices. Their sound — a vibrant fusion of reggae, traditional rhythms, brass arrangements, and mbira-inspired guitar — helped define what would become known as Chigiyo, a genre named after a traditional dance from the Chimanimani region.
Formed in Kwekwe under the mentorship of Robson Kadenhe and led by guitarist Gilbert Zvamaida, the band crafted a bold, original style. With intricate guitar lines, infectious dance rhythms, and raw, soulful Shona vocals, they pushed beyond genre boundaries. While many contemporaries opted for commercially safer routes,…
Cheikh Lô has never quite enjoyed the fame of his fellow Senegalese superstars, like his early patron Youssou N’Dour or Baaba Maal, perhaps because of his slower output. Maame is his first album in a decade. It was brought to World Circuit by the label’s former owner, Nick Gold, who deploys the strictest quality control in the business, so the omens were promising.
It does not, in the main, disappoint. A Cheikh Lô record is never going to feature Auto-Tune or hip-hop beats; he barely acknowledges the existence of mbalax, Senegal’s previous dance craze. Opening track “Baba Moussa BP 120”, has an Atlantic sway — in the past he has recorded tracks in the Brazilian state of Bahia. Thierno Koite’s saxophone flutters like a jungle full of birds and…
You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. Perhaps in recent years, we grew guilty of rather taking for granted the special magic of Amadou & Mariam. Between 1998’s international debut Sou Ni Tile and 2017’s La Confusion they released eight studio albums, and in addition we were treated to reissues of their early cassette albums recorded while the blind Malian duo were residents in Cote d’Ivoire. They were all great, it goes without saying, with 2004’s Manu Chao-produced, Grammy-nominated Dimanche à Bamako a career highlight. But the music press is forever lusting after the ‘next big thing’ and is oddly reluctant to allow any artist to settle into a groove once it becomes familiar, however mighty that groove might be. We demand ‘evolution’ and ‘innovation’ – and…
When Denver five-piece Destiny Bond perform live, they shed pints of sweat like any hardworking hardcore band. But every once in a while, they lose more than just fluids; vocalist Cloe Madonna Janzen busted a tooth at a recent gig in San Antonio, Texas, marking the second time she’s lost one at a show. Aside from being punk as fuck, Janzen’s dental mishap encapsulates Destiny Bond’s spirit of inversion: Pain can be liberating, anger can be productive, and hardcore can be vulnerable. On their new album The Love, Destiny Bond mine these dualities and hone their sound into something that’s somehow crisper and more ragged all at once.
On their 2023 debut, Be My Vengeance, Destiny Bond leaned into the more melodic…
Last year Peter Buck (R.E.M., the Minus 5) and Barrett Martin (Screaming Trees, Mad Season) unveiled the debut album from the Silverlites, their supergroup with the Black Crowes’ Rich Robinson and singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur.
Now Buck and Martin are announcing another supergroup called Drink the Sea with Alain Johannes and Duke Garwood.
Johannes is a founding member of the band Eleven and plays in the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures with Josh Homme, John Paul Jones, and Dave Grohl for live performances. Duke Garwood is a British multi-instrumentalist with six studio albums and has collaborated with Mark Lanegan and the Orb.
About the project, Martin explained on…
DOGA, new studio album by Juana Molina, the eighth full-length of her career and her first album of new compositions in eight years.
For DOGA she has been trying to master the furiously difficult world of analogue synths, hunching over instruments that resemble old-fashioned telephone switchboards to invent sounds that don’t rely on pre-programmed waveforms. She recorded everything she made but became overwhelmed by the hundreds of hours of tape. It prompted her to work with a producer, Emilio Haro, for the first time since her debut. DOGA is deeper and more spacious than its predecessor, with synthesised orchestral touches: the guitars on ‘Miro Todo’ (I See Everything), says Molina, sound like violins that “are somehow out of…
Joelton Mayfield grew up living and breathing the Bible, through early youth aligning himself unquestioningly with the Christian fundamentalism of his native Texas. You can hear that familiarity and comfort in songs like “Jacob Dreamed a Ladder,” an earnest, entirely natural, slightly updated exploration of the story from the Book of Genesis. “And behold, the lord, as you’ve never seen before, driving down a highway of solid gold/the mover of the mountains bringing peace into the valley down below,” Mayfield croons, wobbling on the notes to give them extra emotional impact. Yet the slow rocking “Now,” hints at a widening perspective, quoting Wilco and the Mountain Goats, as Mayfield discovers the power of secular music. Crowd Pleaser is not about…
The Cosmic Tones Research Trio make the kind of music that just makes sense at this moment in history. It’s not zeitgeisty, it doesn’t riff off current fads or aim blows at current examples of political injustices. There is no arch post-modern self-referentiality and no arbitrary attempts at engaging with future technologies.
Instead, the Portland, Oregon trio construct vibrating pathways of sound that lift you clear of those contemporary concerns. Their expansive brand of spiritual jazz arrived fully-formed on last year’s debut All Is Sound, an album that combined meditative structures and supremely detailed micro-passages in a way perfected by the likes of Don Cherry, Alice Coltrane and John Coltrane.
The current arc of spiritual and cosmic jazz…
A jazz artist stepping into the studio to record some Thelonious Monk can approach the task from different angles. They can go all in and make a statement with solely Monk tunes. Pianist Ran Blake’s Epistrophy (1991) is one example of this approach. Or the artist can pick one of their favorite Monk classics (or two or three) and present them alongside a batch of originals and/or tunes by other artists to create a set list. Almost everybody with a substantial discography has paid homage to the legend in this way. Or, as is the case with bassist Dayna Stephens, the Monk songbook can be examined for some lesser-known jewels to be molded into an (almost) all-Monk show.
That disc is Monk’d, and as described, we find not so much his more familiar work…
Bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Eric McPherson, two of jazz’s most forward-thinking rhythmists, form the core of the Borderlands Trio alongside pianist Kris Davis. After three acclaimed albums with that group, the pair decided to continue their collaboration, this time summoning powerhouse alto saxophonist Darius Jones — a central figure in New York’s avant-garde scene known for fusing modern expressiveness with old-school improvisational spirit.
Together, they form Otherlands Trio, an improvisation-centered ensemble whose elliptical and sectional journeys yield revelatory musical discoveries. Star Mountain, their debut, features five tracks — two expansive (of approximately 15 minutes) and three concise explorations.
When Aberdeen-raised drummer and composer Sebastian Rochford’s star rose around the millennium, he quickly made an impact with his precocious and inclusive awareness of 1950-1960s Monk-and-Miles jazz grooves, rock, funk, global music and more. From 2002, Rochford’s unique sax-led quintet Polar Bear began earning nominations for Mercury, Mobo and Urban Music prizes, as well as the kind of fame rare in instrumental jazz. He also played key roles with Acoustic Ladyland, Basquiat Strings, Fulborn Teversham, Sons of Kemet, and as a sideman with Damon Albarn, Brian Eno and Adele.
Finding Ways follows 2023’s A Short Diary (a duo album in partnership with pianist Kit Downes) in dealing with the death in 2019 of…
No orchestra’s interpretation of a composer’s material is ever definitive, yet it would be hard to imagine another bettering the Orchestre National de France’s performances of works by Maurice Ravel. With its Music Director Cristian Macelaru conducting, the orchestra celebrated the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth by presenting his major orchestral works at an early 2025 Ravel festival in Paris, the first concert on February 28th and the last March 13th.
This expansive three-hour document of the shows includes Ma Mère l’Oye, Le Tombeau de Couperin, and the complete Daphnis et Chloé (with the Chœur de Radio France joining the ONF for the latter), plus stellar renditions of La Valse, Une barque sur l’océan, Pavane pour une infante…
Remastered by Mark Beazley.
After the calm, measured beauty of Sakura, versatile Japanese producer Susumu Yokota followed a comparatively experimental and eclectic path on Grinning Cat.
The beats are more prevalent (though never as floor-friendly as his voluminous house, trance, and techno releases), the instrumentation is more varied, and the overall feel shifts markedly from track to track. Piano is the dominant instrument here, just as guitar was for Sakura. But Yokota’s skill with context finds him tailoring the sound of the instrument to suit each individual track. “Imagine” uses a hazy piano loop and vocal samples seemingly lifted from sacred music to achieve a thoughtful, meditative effect.
Every day is Halloween for Ship Sket. InitiatriX, the debut LP from the Dorset-born, Manchester-based producer (real name Josh Griffiths), weds freaky sampled dialogue to the kind of strings that almost always point towards impending doom. In other words, InitiatriX will leave you scrambling around for the light switch.
At times, the album’s tendencies toward horror feel explicit. Eerie, detuned piano segues into an ice storm of sub-zero grime on “Audition for the Part of the Killer,” making good on the theatrical shock value promised by the title. Things get even scarier on “Supermodel Mansion,” summoning a Southern Gothic scene that’s all shrieking crows and fire-and-brimstone ranting. On the bitcrushed “Desire 4 Stealth,” a demonic cackle…
How do you follow the best album of your decade-long career? The one that pulled everything together in impressively fearless fashion? When ‘everything’ means goth rock drama, horror-punk opera and Jim Steinman-esque epics about doomed vampire lovers?
For Creeper, the question is wholly rhetorical. You do it all over again, obviously. Halloween sees the arrival of Sanguivore II – when else? – but really, it would be a disservice to call it the Reload to Sanguivore’s Load. Mostly because it’s even better. The hooks are heavier, the peaks are higher, and the pacing is picture-perfect.
Once again, the Southampton sextet worked with Tom Dalgety (Ghost, Rammstein, The Cult, Opeth), clearly a producer with a knack for capturing…