Ever lock your gaze on a fractal animation and have the dizzying impression you were tumbling into the screen? The British multimedia artist Lucas Dupuy’s recent exhibition One panoramic view after another will unfold operates on a similar principle. His artworks begin as airbrush studies, which he then photographs and rephotographs, zooming in on smaller and smaller details, drilling down to microscopic levels of granularity. Only at the end of this iterative process does he hit solid ground: Having achieved the desired tangle of lines, he pulls out his pigments and paints the ropy forms on heavy burlap, the fabric’s pits and threads giving the piece a three-dimensional, larger-than-life quality.
If Dupuy’s paintings are a way of removing…
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After 29 months, 6 distinct legs, and 130 concerts across practically every corner of Europe and North America, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band finally wrapped up their world tour Thursday evening at Stadio Giuseppe Meazza in Milan, Italy.
The setlist was largely standard for this final leg of the tour until the very end when Springsteen strapped his guitar back on after typical show closer “Chimes of Freedom,” and called out, “Key of B, boys. Key of B.” He was instructing them to break into John Fogerty’s 1975 rock anthem “Rockin’ All Over the World,” which is known to most European audiences thanks to Status Quo’s 1977 cover.
“Rockin’ All Over the World” has been in Springsteen’s live repertoire with the E Street Band going all the way back to the 1981 River…
Fans of Algernon Cadwallader during their original run claim lifelong bragging rights for having seen them play a late-2000s basement show with sweaty floors and a fisheye-toting Flickr photographer — and they probably have the blown-out YouTube video to prove it. Across the Northeast, the Philadelphia emo band paid its dues at every VFW hall, youth community center, and dilapidated DIY house that opened its doors. In the seven years before they called it quits, Algernon were a refreshingly haphazard and wildly fun live act. The longer the crowd bellowed like a football team to open “Serial Killer Status,” the higher scrawny teens flung themselves to “Katie’s Conscious”; the faster the drive home through pitch-black suburbs, the stronger the urge to burn…
Sidling up to a posthumous album can be a tricky task, especially if it’s from an artist who’s close to your heart. The temptation to view things through a lens tinted by their passing is tough to resist. But Broken Homes and Gardens, the record completed just weeks before Michael Hurley’s death, could have come from any point in his discography — the last link in the hitherto unbroken chain the maverick troubadour began forging more than 60 years ago.
Hurley — who passed away in April 2025 at age 83 — first found his feet on downtown New York City’s ‘60s underground scene, alongside boundary-bludgeoning outliers like The Holy Modal Rounders and The Fugs. He spent the ensuing decades quietly becoming the quintessential cult…
Blue Earth Sound is a Chicago jazz project led by composer and multi-instrumentalist James Weir. Cicero Nights is his debut leader date after playing in many bands on the Windy City scene.
His accompanists include drummer Patch Romanowski and flutist/saxophonist Eamonn Prizy, with Will Miller playing trumpet, Michael Wells on guitar, Jackson Ramsey on strings, and percussionists Alex Aguero and Joshua Wells. Weir plays piano, Rhodes organ, Wurlitzer, guitar, and bass. He wrote and arranged this intimate brew of lyric, contemporary jazz, psychedelic soul, club, and library music with slinky funk and hip-hop grooves. Recording and mixing engineer Dave Vettraino housed the band at International Anthem’s Warehouse studio,…
Hot on the heels of winning the Doris Duke Artist Award, drummer, composer, producer, and rapper Kassa Overall delivers CREAM, his fourth long-player and second album on Warp. While jazz and hip-hop have been bound together since Guru released Jazzmatazz in 1993, this set turns that notion on its head. CREAM, named after Wu-Tang Clan’s “Cash Rules Everything Around Me,” offers hip instrumental versions of seven rap classics and a cover of “Freedom Jazz Dance,” an Eddie Harris tune immortalized by Miles Davis. Overall reimagines hip-hop classics as jazz standards, exploring compositional architectures and subtle harmonies, and nearly discovering hidden rhythmic complexities. The music was recorded live in studio and released without overdubs,…
…this expanded edition features five previously unreleased demos and alternate takes, along with the never-before-heard track “Hey Ah Nothin’”.
The other bonus material: alternate versions of “Ain’t Hurting Nobody” and “Quit Hollerin at Me,” acoustic versions of “All the Way with You” and “Humidity Built the Snowman,” and a demo version of “Lake Marie.”
John Prine‘s follow-up to his comeback album, The Missing Years, is more of the same in terms of freeing up Prine’s idiosyncratic muse and marrying the result to Howie Epstein’s top-flight production sound. Fans of the early Prine may find that sound over-produced, but the songs never get lost, and with Prine’s typically humorous, off-center view of the world (song titles include…
January 2024 marks the beginning of a new era for leading UK pop-punks Neck Deep, their upcoming 10 track LP captures a moment of harmony between their global success and their dedication to staying true to their roots.
Following huge tours and top 5 records, the band opted to write and record their self-titled album in their own warehouse space in Wrexham, and from energetic opener “Dumbstruck Dumbf**k” all the way through to introspective closing track “Moody Weirdo”, Neck Deep expertly represents the band. It’s pop-punk perfection with a distinguishable Neck Deep stamp on it.
The familiar themes of failing romantic relationships and self-loathing are cushioned by the bouncy, upbeat music and sense of…
With lives as cynical as all those born between 1990 and 2010 are predestined to have, and as tragic as our short-lived beauties often find themselves, it’s a wonder some people find the time to uplift each other. On jasmine.4.t‘s debut record, You Are the Morning, it’s often accomplished by Jasmine Cruickshank uplifting herself first. In a sad world that expresses its hopes in oblique ironies, my soul leaps out for the simple sincerity of her music. The forces encircling her messages of gender acceptance and self-actualisation may be moustache-twirlingly evil, but jasmine.4.t is a righteous silver bullet.
The record proves to be slightly more interesting in its lyrical content than its musical content, but that’s more a compliment than a dig.
Since Joanne Shaw Taylor so effectively recaptured her roots in 2022 with Blues from the Heart Live, her studio efforts have been a mixed bag. In her earnest endeavors to expand her style, she issued a pop-oriented, highly polished studio outing titled Nobody’s Fool, thereby setting the stage for the R&B-influenced Heavy Soul, a second outing with producer Kevin Shirley (he also oversaw 2016’s Wild).
But on Black & Gold, the supervision of the former studio collaborator of Iron Maiden and Led Zeppelin–who also mixed the Nashville recordings for mastering by Bob Ludwig–results in a glossy veneer that too often camouflages the inviting intimacy by which the British guitarist/songwriter most benefits. Fortunately, on…
Tomboy is singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Maia Sharp’s tenth solo album.
The album is a celebration of the true self, personal, and mostly uplifting, rather than mired in the depths of introspection. There’s a rhythmic thread running through the album, with percussion a prominent element on most tracks.
Sharp plays all kinds of guitars, keyboards, and even soprano saxophone, yet this is the first time she’s worked with synths, an OP-1 mini synth that adds new textures to her sound.
As usual, these are well-crafted songs, written from the perspective of a single woman, now four or five years removed from a two-decade marriage, themes of which she explored on her 2021 Mercy Rising and 2023’s…
Dancer teased their fantastic new album with three singles that make heavy use of a greenscreen. On ‘Just Say Yes’, they play blowup instruments in fancy dress on a speedboat, on ‘Happy Halloween’ they’re perpetually spinning into a fiery vortex, while on ‘Baby Blue’, singer Gemma Fleet is a floating head in space, wearing a party hat. The videos feel like the Glasgow-based band are underlining a manifesto commitment to use small budgets to make something fun, attention grabbing and really quite charming.
More or Less arrives just 18 months after their debut and it’s full of the same bursts of sparkling, jangly pop. Dancer don’t try to reinvent the wheel, instead they draw from a long lineage of Northern indie bands. Songs like ‘Baby Blue’ and…
Amidst today’s deluge of genreless streaming bait, Liquid Mike are a refreshing splash of tonic.
Since unknowingly bursting onto the scene in 2021, Mike Maple and company have continued to self-produce power-pop gold at a freakish rate that’s typically reserved for Guided By Voices. Hell Is an Airport is Liquid Mike’s fifth full-length since 2021 and first following last year’s well-documented breakthrough. They’re still breaking out of their own self-destructive cycles. But even though the adjustments on their new album are minor, this band of Midwest workhorses keep firing on all cylinders.
Maple recently quit his job delivering the daily mail, but that hasn’t changed how Liquid Mike operates. Hell Is an Airport was recorded,…
After working on their previous album remotely due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, Bombadil‘s Daniel Michalak and James Phillips met up in person at Phillips’ recording studio in Durham, North Carolina, in April 2025 to track a concept album about the moon. Joining them was new member Madison Rivis, a dancer/choreographer/multi-instrumentalist who’d been adding some choreography to their live sets, and who wrote the fable that served as the basis for an album about a group of friends who try to help the fallen moon get back in the sky.
While knowledge of this overarching plot isn’t necessary to enjoy tuneful acoustic songs about friendship, adventure, existential reflection, and needing help, it will aid in making sense…
In a way, Rafiq Bhatia‘s improvisational second album for Anti- is an extension of his interpretive work. The musician paid tribute to Flying Lotus and Sam Cooke in 2012 with versions that bore strong rhythmic and melodic likenesses to the originals. Crepuscular and turbulent 2020 renderings of classics by Duke Ellington, Ornette Coleman, and Ewan MacColl, as heard on Standards, Vol. 1, were more unorthodox, far less likely to be heard on a “coffee house vibes” playlist than in a dim bohemian cafe or den where scuffed copies of David Lynch soundtracks, Ambient 4: Isolationism, and Ben Frost’s By the Throat are in rotation. With his guitar and laptop and other gear at his feet, Bhatia takes inspiration this time from the elements, but we’re not talking…
After landing in the Top 30 in their native Australia as well as charting across Europe with their second album, Day/Night (2021), Parcels remain deeply indebted to the sounds of the ’70s on LOVED, an album guided by the theme of unity. What makes Parcels so irresistible here — at least if one is open to some wholehearted brotherly love — is that their particular touchstones seem to include funky disco in the celebratory tradition of Chic, certain civil rights-era classic soul, and the vestiges of harmony-driven West Coast hippie folk-rock, all tinged with modern indie and electro-pop. Not entirely party-hearty, a good half of the album succumbs to a yearning bittersweetness, although it’s relentlessly affectionate throughout, and LOVED kicks off with a dance-funk…
The young Neal Casal pictured on the front cover of No One Above You (The Early Years 1991-1998) and throughout its companion piece book is not the hirsute countenance of his days with The Chris Robinson Brotherhood or Circles Around the Sun. But there is nevertheless an air of familiarity in the music of the album and the photographic images in its companion piece, evoking the late lamented Casal’s work throughout his career.
The baker’s dozen tracks of this anthology consist of covers juxtaposed with original material that, taken together, bespeak honest acknowledgement of roots, purposely executed as the means to transcend them. For instance, the threads of continuity within Casal’s subsequent work for Ryan Adams’ Cardinals and…
With her second album, Dark Sky Reserve, Dutch musician Robin Kester continues to explore the gloomy, mysterious atmospheres she fortified on 2023’s Honeycomb Shades. That album saw her adding vintage organs and keys, woodwinds, and various other instruments (vibraphone, autoharp, hurdy-gurdy, and more) to a core palette of guitars, modular synths, bass, and drums that she had established on earlier short-form releases. The album was recorded with producer Ali Chant (PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding) in Bristol, England — her first time tracking outside of the Netherlands — and a handful of similarly celestial-minded musicians, such as Portishead’s Adrian Utley and This Is the Kit affiliate Rozi Plain. The idea of exploring is an apt one for a track list with titles…