One day, will Saintseneca’s new record, Highwallow & Supermoon Songs, do for another worn-down, listless folk musician what painting did for bandleader Zac Little? Toward the end of the 2010s, Little suffered a prolonged period of creative doldrums, thus explaining the seven years or so it took his band to follow up Pillar of Na. Touring and recording and writing and practicing all take a toll; even artists need time to fill their cups, contrary to preconceptions that art is easy and those who make it their vocation are blessed with ever-flowing goblets. (This is very much not the case, for artists as well as for arts and culture critics. We all identify as “tired.”)
It fits that Little plugged into painting to recharge his spirit. Highwallow & Supermoon Songs…
Latest Entries »
While singer/songwriter Christian Kjellvander certainly has a niche in the angsty, earthy corners of music, his output has traversed the alternately ambling and gritty lo-fi rock of his group Loosegoats, and moody solo fare that touches on dusty Americana, sinewy rock, and spacey balladry. After releasing his eighth solo LP, the dark and more experimental Wild Hxmans, in 2018, he delivered a pair of discontented, confessional sets, About Love and Loving Again (2020) and Hold Your Love Still (2023), the latter of which took on existential, sociopolitical challenges as well those of a romantic nature. Arriving two years later, Ex Voto/The Silent Love is a brooding, even rawer final entry in an unofficial trilogy on love. Originally conceived as a set of sparse…
Night CRIÚ evokes clandestine ceremonies in forest glades, covert rituals taking place in the depths of a cave. Crepuscular and ghostly, this is a realm where an intoned, reverberant voice meshes with ritualistic choirs, undulating brass, methodically bowed strings and unhurried percussion.
Musically, the lineage could be the solo work of Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard or Anna von Hausswolff at her most reductive. If the fifth solo album from the Ireland’s Hilary Woods were employed as the soundtrack to the 1967 Czech film Marketa Lazarová or Werner Herzog’s 1976 Herz aus Glas, it would be a seamless transposition – this music exists beyond place and time.
For Woods, getting to this point has not been linear. From 1999, she was the bassist of…
James Chapman envisions Welcome to the Tudor Gate as a horror-fantasy soundtrack, a score he wrote for a half-remembered film, then misplaced for over a decade. Recorded in 2014, it evokes the tone of classic ’60s and ’70s maestros like Dario Argento and John Carpenter, yet rests easily within the wintry synth-pop oeuvre he’s created under the name Maps.
It’s a foreboding follow-up to Counter Melodies, Chapman’s overtly dance-inspired 2023 album, yet its overriding sense of menace is fused with electricity and action rather than outright doom. In other words, it sounds like a Maps record, albeit one made for the witching hour. 40 minutes in length, Tudor Gate is presented in eight chapters, the first of which plays like…
‘Leftovers (1970-1988)’ compiles the “accidental” Leftovers trilogy of limited edition Record Store Day-exclusive vinyl releases, ‘Leftovers Again?!’, ‘Leftovers Again?! AGAIN?!’, and ‘Leftovers Again?! Again!?! (Again)’ (released between 2021 and 2025) into a two disc pREServed CD collection.
Formed in the early ’70s, The Residents have now been charting a unique path through the musical landscape for over half a century now. From far-out, experimental recordings to highly conceptual, innovative multi-platform projects, the band refuses to stand still, and continues to move in several different directions at once.
Combining new RDX mixes produced by The Residents using their original multitrack tapes under lockdown conditions during 2020,…
Anna von Hausswolff’s sixth studio album is being trailed as the 39-year-old Swede’s pivot towards pop, which you could say is all relative. For the last decade, Von Hauswolff has dealt in music that is solemn, echo-laden, heavy on the drone of her beloved pipe organ and fully deserving of the adjective gothic.
Her work has elicited comparisons to Nico and Diamanda Galás; 40 years ago, it might have been packaged in a hauntingly abstract Vaughan Oliver sleeve and released on 4AD. She has collaborated with Swans, Sunn O))) and the black metal band Wolves in the Throne Room. Her last album, 2020’s All Thoughts Fly, was a collection of instrumentals, recorded on a replica of a 17th-century German baroque organ in a church in…
With Fur & Gold, Bat for Lashes – aka Natasha Khan – brings a fairytale quality and air of mystery to her music, performing a delicate balancing act between everyday emotions and the power of fantasy. As the title suggests, there’s something gorgeous but raw about her songs, which fly from spare British chamber folk to shades of lavish rock, pop, and dance as she throws herself into stories that update the traditions of other iconic female artists. She’s a warrior princess of the moors with only her steed to keep her company on “Horse and I,” a song whose dramatic sweep would do Kate Bush proud; on the fable-like sensual duet “Trophy,” Khan sings “creatures of mercy/shoot them down and set me free” with Björk-like urgency. Despite Fur & Gold’s unabashedly mystical vibe, Khan emphasizes…
Jeff Goldblum together with his long-time band, The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, returns to deliver sheer joy with his idiosyncratic take on a collection of standards that, for Jeff, are amongst the best songs ever written.
Here, the actor yet again brings his on-screen charisma and eccentricities to the keys, with a groove that is totally unique. With all tracks newly arranged by The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra themselves, Jeff is, as the EP title suggests, joined by an array of talented, and unexpected, guest singers, all as thrilled to be accompanied by Jeff as he is to accompany them. Jeff and the band are joined by Kelly Clarkson, Mattiel Brown (of indie-rock duo Mattiel), Brazilian singer-songwriter Rodrigo Amarante and Freda Payne.
After turning heads locally in 2023 with their excellent debut album Lush Life, Melbourne band The Belair Lip Bombs made international headlines last year when they were announced as the newest signees to Jack White’s Third Man Records – in turn, making them the very first Australian act to join the label. It’s a big mantle to step up to, but it feels like a task the four-piece are equipped for – after all, it’s the drive and confidence that was present on ‘Lush Life’ that got them the gig in the first place.
The band’s second album Again, despite its title, is not a once-more go-around of ‘Lush Life’. Instead, it looks at that LP’s already-versatile nature and maps out new terrain for the ambitious indie rockers to explore. Such boldness is present in lead single ‘Hey You’, which buzzes with urgency…
Originally released in 1999, No Exit marked a bold and fearless reinvention — bridging Blondie’s punk roots with a contemporary pop sensibility that resonated across generations.
The album was their first for 17 years at the time and features what was, frankly, a surprise UK number one single in ‘Maria’ along with its less successful follow-up, ‘Nothing Is Real But the Girl’. The new deluxe edition features a remastered version of the standard 14-track album on the first disc while CD 2 offers Japan-only bonus track ‘Hot Shot’ (with additional production and mix by David Wrench) along with a selection of seven remixes (from the many that were issued back in the day).
…“It’s been an idea that’s been hatching for a while, but it’s only just come to fruition now,”…
…This edition adds six unearthed home demos, including unheard songs ‘Hold Me Up’ and ‘Don’t Blow Your Wind’, alongside early versions of favourites like ‘Tangerine’, ‘Summer’, ‘Kitchen Door’ and ‘Clobbered’.
Put Sleepy Eyed in your CD player, hit play, and prepare to be amazed — “Tangerine,” the lead-off cut, signals the brief but welcome return of “Dinosaur Jr. Jr.” with two-and-three-quarters minutes of charging neo-grunge guitars and galloping drums, the likes of which you haven’t heard from this band since Birdbrain. But, of course, Buffalo Tom sound a lot tighter, stronger, and more confident when they dig into the big shaggy dog rock than they did five years previous, and while they never get quite as…
Electronic music pioneers Soft Cell release a super deluxe reissue of their classic 1983 album The Art Of Falling Apart via Universal Music. Soft Cell’s – aka singer and frontman Marc Almond and multi-instrumentalist and producer Dave Ball – second album is freshly remastered by Barry Grint from the original tapes and shows off the feted duo’s gothic take on pop music in all its full, darkly textured glory. Following directly on from 1982’s seminal one-of-the-first remix albums ‘Non-Stop Ecstatic Dancing’, ‘The Art Of Falling Apart’ reached No. 5 on the UK charts. As befits an album celebrating difference and choosing art over the glitzy 80s pop dream, ‘The Art Of Falling Apart’ gloriously twists and turns between anger, frustration and destruction to beauty, reflection and unity.
…Featuring the original 1969 mix, the album has also been newly mixed by Charlie Russell from the original 1/4″ production multi-track tapes, while the third disc contains a newly discovered live recording from the Finnish radio archives of the bands stunning performance at the Kulttuuritalo Hall in Helsinki on 3rd December 1969, recorded just months after the bands’ career-altering performance at Woodstock.
Ssssh was Ten Years After’s new release at the time of their incendiary performance at the Woodstock Festival in August, 1969. As a result, it was their first hit album in the U.S., peaking at number 20 in September of that year. This recording is a primer of British blues-rock of the era, showcasing Alvin Lee’s guitar pyrotechnics and…
…features 28 unreleased tracks and takes the listener on a journey from the band’s earliest demos and BBC Radio One Sessions through the singles to the album and beyond. Each disc contains rare and, in most cases, unreleased versions of songs.
Universal Music Recordings are shooting a new box set in the right direction, covering Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s U.K. pop landmark Welcome to the Pleasuredome in exhaustive new detail.
Though it’s already been exhaustively been reissued – once on a 2CD set from Salvo Music, on 2014’s vinyl/cassette/DVD set Inside the Pleasuredome (along with a 2018 Record Store Day box set of 12″ singles and the 2022 RSD comp Altered Reels, which brought a pair of…
Keith Moon’s death three weeks after its release added a tragic coda to The Who’s eighth album. In truth, Pete Townshend had threatened to sack Moon during the protracted sessions for Who Are You, his booze-addled antics by then eclipsing his ability to actually do the job.
Contemporary reviews bemoaned the guitarist’s infatuation with synthesizers, but on a record frequently concerned with slipping into irrelevance – ‘New Song’, the still barnstorming title track – it’s one of the most interesting elements, elevating what might otherwise have been stodgier rockers.
Extras on the new multi-format reissue include Glyn Johns’ rejected mix (not enough Ox); 1979 live tracks with replacement Kenney Jones (not enough Moon); demos and rehearsals,…
Given every guitar band since crica 1965 owes a debt – stated or otherwise – to the usual scouse suspects beginning with “B”, you might think that the format has scraped right through the bottom of the barrel by now. But creativity is a weird old thing. Stick a load of the obvious Guided By Voices influences into AI and yeah, you’ll likely get some hackneyed pale imitation of rock music from the past 60-odd years. Which is what most modern guitar bands are doing, to be fair. But something uncanny seems to happen when those same influences are filtered through Bob Pollard’s brain. There’s suddenly something fresh melodically, even now after 42 albums and over 500 songs. It’s like you’ve been eating the same dad rock sandwich for years and suddenly someone’s…
…Damien Jurado‘s new album, Private Hospital is the fifth and final instalment of his “Reggae Film Star” pentalogy, a series that began in 2023.
On his Substack, Jurado expressed pride in the series but singled out the upcoming album, calling it a “very different album for me.” While the specifics of the album’s new sound have yet to be revealed, Jurado is making a notable shift in how he releases his music.
Private Hospital will be Jurado’s first album released exclusively in book form. He is moving on from traditional formats like vinyl, CDs, and cassettes, citing there are “a myriad of reasons, but environmental being at the top of my list.” In his announcement, Jurado urged fans to research the environmental impact of polyvinyl…
…CD release featuring 5 bonus tracks.
For nearly three decades, Boston’s Dropkick Murphys have brought a rowdy, beery, joyously disreputable form of Celtic punk to the masses. When they arrived on the national scene in the late ’90s, the Murphys were one of many extremely fun niche bands on Rancid’s Hellcat imprint. But the Murphys toured hard and made irresistible ragers, and they eventually transcended their background, finding their way to audiences far outside their subculture. In 2005, for instance, they set some unused archival Woody Guthrie words to stomping, ominous, irresistible music. A year later, Martin Scorsese used “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” the resulting song, in a couple of his scenes from his Oscar-winning Boston crime epic…