Léna Bartels made a terrific debut album, Preservation, in 2022. Now, after a split release with regular collaborator Nico Hedley (It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year, released in February), she’s back with a new full-length album. It’s not a surprising departure or change of pace for the Brooklyn-via-Portland singer/songwriter; it does, however, build on that excellent debut.
Many of the same musicians appear on Bartels’ new record, The Brightest Silver Fish, particularly the core trio of Izzy Oram Brown on guitar, Micah Prussack (Youbet) on bass, and Andrew Emge (The Big Net) on drums (Bartels plays mostly guitar and keyboards). The songs are uniformly stellar, but the arrangements are also crucial, mainly because they contain a surprising amount of…
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…features a brand-new song titled “Decoy” as well as demos of “Cosmic Joke” and “Truth.”
“Enter the room of nothing / Enter the room of me,” sings Haley Fohr on ‘Skeleton Key’, backed by the buzz of organ and electric guitar. She towers above, her voice theatrical and macabre, a quality that’s always been there in her contralto delivery, but never as bombastic.
That room could be the basement studio in Chicago where Halo On the Inside first took shape. For eight months, she locked herself away there, embarking on long, late-night writing sessions. Like the record’s cover, she existed in a vacuum, exploring new sounds, synths and parts of herself. Time and place get wobbly when you’re up all night on your own in a windowless room. Fohr found…
At nearly 85, saxophonist and bandleader Gary Bartz releases Damage Control, his first leader date in 12 years. It’s the first volume in a proposed trilogy titled The Eternal Tenure of Sound. Bartz highlights another side of his musical persona here: the love of popular soul and R&B. These are the jams he sings in the shower. It contains songs associated with artists including Earth Wind & Fire, Curtis Mayfield, Anita Baker, Patti LaBelle, El DeBarge, Dexter Wansel, Norman Connors, and McCoy Tyner.
Damage Control was produced by drummer/percussionist Om’Mas Keith (Sa-Ra Creative Partners, Erykah Badu, Frank Ocean). It was recorded at his Los Angeles studio. Bartz wrote startling charts that transform these covers…
In 2019, New York-based multi-instrumentalist Cochemea set out on a trilogy of albums. The first, All My Relations, proved to be an eclectic collection of free-form jazz, whose tropes crumbled under the pressure of the musician’s ambitions. With Vol. 2: Baca Sewa, Cochemea focused on deep percussion swings, adding streaks of wind instruments to produce flares of whimsy to the unassuming yet potent grooves. These first two outings proved that the artist had intentions far past an impressive discography. Cochemea wanted to bridge worlds and generations using the connective tissue that has always been present but never fully utilized: Jazz.
Cochemea, as ready as an artist can be, prepares for the finale of his ambitious…
…expanded edition features 14 tracks of alternate versions and studio takes.
When Sun Ra released his debut Saturn release in 1957, he signaled the Arkestra’s mission for the future. The cover declared the album a “21st Century Limited Edition.” The compositions on Supersonic Jazz conveyed optimism and hope, bringing a message auguring the World of Tomorrow. Ra declared this the first dimension of a fresh art form, as he set about evolving a new American music — a composite of the past and future, the known coalescing with the unknown. The album, not very well received upon release, reveals a vibrant universe of sound, with highly developed arrangements and sophisticated musicianship, especially Ra’s…
…This edition of ‘Ramshackled’ has been newly remastered from the original master tapes and features the single versions of ‘Ooh Baby (Goin’ to Pieces)’ and ‘One Way Rag’ as two bonus tracks (issued on CD for the first time).
It’s worth remembering that between the release of 1971’s Fragile and 1974’s Relayer, Yes had steadily risen from plucky progressive rock hopefuls to become bona fide superstars, selling millions of albums around the globe and effortlessly filling arenas around North America and Europe.
With relationships souring due to clashing egos and the financial imperative to keep the cash-cow rolling, the idea of enabling every band member to record a solo album could be viewed either as a cunning managerial sleight of hand,…
Caroline Spence may not be a household name, but, for those in the know, a new album is always cause for celebration. Her four full-length albums are littered with absolutely glorious melodies, earworm choruses, sympathetic instrumental backing and unfailingly relatable lyrics, all sung in one of the most distinctive voices around, a sweetly expressive soprano with a ‘catch’ in it that Spence uses sparingly, not for effect but to express emotion in her songs.
That perfect summation of Spence’s output to date can now be applied, rather conveniently, to the new album Heart Go Wild. The press release promises an expansion of her sound, something that pushes past Spence’s firmly established folk foundations into something more adventurous…
Erica Dunn plays an unhinged guitar in Tropical Fuck Storm and leads the rowdy pop-tinged punk band Mod Con, but the Palm Springs project has a whole different vibe: acoustic, unvarnished, a bit somber, and emotionally revealing.
This is a mostly solitary, inward-looking endeavor that has to fit in between the artist’s other obligations. As a result, Palm Springs releases have been somewhat widely spaced out: debut Palm Springs & Friends in 2018, a rarities compilation A Collection of Songs in 2021, and now the eight-song Turning Yr Back on the Dolphin.
Here, Dunn’s songs are framed by low-toned, agile guitar picking, rooted in folk but slipping off, sometimes into jazz. To this, she adds the barest of additional elements: occasional…
Grounded in personal loss and the trauma that accompanies such an experience, sound artist Arvin Dola presents eight mid-length tracks of experimental ambient music. As suggested by the title, the album explores the concept of ghosts – not necessarily in a literal or supernatural sense, but in how both the past and unrealized futures can haunt the present.
These ideas are based on the works of Mark Fisher and Jacques Derrida, and are commonly referred to as “hauntology.” The latter has a rich recent history in the darker side of modern ambient music, with entire albums dedicated to exploring its aesthetics of memory, absence, and grief.
Dola’s take employs a typical set of building blocks – droning synth chords,…
Composer, alone is a collection of twelve solo piano pieces by Swiss composer Jürg Frey, performed by Dutch pianist/composer Reinier van Houdt. It is the sequel to the 2022 triple album lieues d’ombres and the third collaboration between Frey and van Houdt on elsewhere music. The two have cultivated a close rapport, first documented on l’air, l’instant – deux pianos in 2020.
This three-disc set features a wide range of Frey’s solo piano compositions from 1990 to 2024, including his latest piano pieces ‘Composer, alone (1)’ and ‘Composer, alone (2)’. This three-disc album traces Frey’s journey over the past 30 years as he explores his voice as a composer through piano works. It reveals how his compositional style has evolved, while also…
In early September in a basement room in Oxford Street’s underbelly, sandwiched between conversations about fogous and creeps, Alexander Tucker sat and strummed an acoustic guitar. For those more familiar with his Nonexistent, Brood X Cycles, or Microcorps output, the notion of him fingering a fretboard might appear quite novel. But this is the Alexander Tucker who wailed on banjos and violins during his early 21st century work and moved in similar circles to Jackie-O Motherfucker. That evening, Tucker united these supposedly opposing approaches by playing his guitar through an array of modular synthesisers and effects pedals, transforming struck strings into heaven-shattering drones that surged up against a ceiling too low to contain them. His mutations…
As well as making atmospheric electronic compositions, the Baghdad-born, Barcelona-based musician Dania also works night shifts as an emergency doctor. These nocturnal hours are the influence behind her new album Listless: all seven tracks were composed and recorded after midnight, while the artwork features the spindly flower of the Japanese snake gourd, a plant that only blooms after dark. But there is little trace of the chaos of her late-night schedule here: instead, the record embodies a quiet calm that is sometimes blissful, sometimes eerie.
Meeting somewhere between trip-hop, shoegaze and ambient, with a touch of pop, the textured tracks slink along dreamily, propelled by washes of synths and, for the first time, drums.
…includes 25 never-before-released cues.
When Halloween Kills appeared in the midst of John Carpenter‘s renaissance in the 2010s and 2020s, it was clear that the creative juices between him, his son Cody Carpenter, and godson Daniel Davies were in full flow. As with their soundtrack to Halloween [2018], which kicked off a new trilogy of films in the venerable horror movie franchise, the music for the second installment is classic Carpenter, albeit fuller and richer-sounding than it was on 1978’s original Halloween.
Carpenter and his team find even more ways to reinterpret Halloween’s classic theme, whether piling mountains of synths on it (“Halloween Kills Main Title”), setting it to a four-on-the-floor beat (“Halloween Kills End Titles”), and…
Gazelle Twin has become a prolific scorer in the past few years; her latest project is written for the Welsh procedural drama Mudtown (Ar y Ffin). Viewing the trailer, one can tell that there’s a great deal of tension in the show; suffice it to say that the producers hired the right person for the job.
The title track, which we assume is played over the opening credits, is awash in bell-toned percussion, innocent at first, then savaged by a deep electronic drone. One can already sense the ways in which the plot may turn. Many of the pieces here are similarly short, but contain some segment of inner transition, refusing to be incidental music.
“Take the Hit” is the first piece to launch right into the listener. The drums are hard and harsh, the implication that something mean is…
Earlier this year, nomadic Texan instrumentalist Jason Dungan, who operates out of Copenhagen under the moniker Blue Lake, released Weft, a beautiful, shimmering short album of finely textured, intricate instrumentals. Although the record is in itself a significant piece of work, Jason considered it an interim project of sorts, testing his ability as bandleader and promising a full-length album by the end of the year.
So here we have The Animal, an LP that fully embraces the community spirit of music and a band sound. Before Weft, Blue Lake releases have been more solitary endeavours, with only 2019’s The Parrot splitting a solo structure with a collaborative sound. This makes the thinking behind Weft clearer, and that process immediately…
From the first track on You Want It! You Got It!, Berlin-based Lawn Chair establish the mood: snarky, sarcastic, brooding… yet somehow fun. There’s fantastic energy to “Fancy Car, Girlfriend and the Big House.” “So you’ve got life all figured out/ You’ve got the fancy car, girlfriend and the big house,” Seattle native, lead singer and lyricist Claudia Schlutius chants. “A man turning heads when he walks down the street/ Impeccably dressed yet always so modest/ So used to getting everything you ever wanted.” There’s a distinct Cyndi Lauper or Julie Brown vibe. “Well hello, it’s me again!” she reminds, and suddenly we have a broader picture of the subject of the song — his perfection is hollow: somewhere there’s a person who’s done waiting for his returned…
Shiner have a sound, but it’s not easy to classify. You can get close by mentioning their ’90s peers, such as Jawbox, who also balanced melody, heaviness, and precision.
Still, nothing ever feels complete – phrases like “heavy shoegaze” or “heavy alternative” seem apt, but don’t fully capture it. BELIEVEYOUME is a great place to start if you are new to the band. If you are a longtime fan, this is the follow-up to the masterful The Egg you have been waiting for. It’s Shiner at the peak of their powers, delivering a juiced-up version of the sound that has had fans enthralled for nearly three decades.
BELIEVEYOUME is their first release since 2020’s Shadenfreude, which marked their return after a nearly 20-year absence.
Bruce Springsteen began headlining arenas in the northeast as far back as October 1976 when he gigged two nights at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. He returned there for four concerts on the Darkness tour, and hit Madison Square Garden and Nassau Coliseum, too, then yet again in late 1980 on the River tour along with various regional Gardens and Civic Centers.
However, Springsteen wouldn’t play an arena show in his home state of New Jersey until July 1981 because, until then it didn’t have one. When the Brendan Byrne Arena opened in East Rutherford, Bruce and the E Street Band christened the future home of the Nets and Devils with a sold-out, six-show stand.
The new building already made this summer…