International is Saint Etienne’s 13th album. It is their last. According to the promotional material, it was written while recording their last album, 2021’s I’ve Been Trying to Tell You. The trio – Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs – must have known back then they were planning to bow out.
Where I’ve Been Trying to Tell You was blurred, gauzy, low to mid-tempo and impressionistic, its counterpart is often up-tempo and avowedly poppy. Both albums, though, are shot-through with reflectiveness and melancholy. Underlining this, Cracknell ambivalently declares “looking back I could be worse, I could be better too” during “Brand New me.” “The Last Time,” the final track, finds her musing “now I’m really glad we made the trip… 30 odd years later… we’re not…
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Pete Fucinaro’s Little Window is a dynamic journey through contemporary jazz, expertly blending traditional roots with modern improvisational flair.
Completed at Clubhouse Recording Studios on November 16, 2014, by Paul Antonell, the album features nine original compositions that showcase Fucinaro’s versatility on tenor sax, soprano sax, and toy piano, alongside a talented ensemble: Ebba Dankel (piano, synth, voice), Ethan Ditthardt (guitar), Jared Beckstead-Craan (bass), and Alex Souris (drums).
The dynamic interaction of the band is striking, especially considering this is the first project these musicians have worked together as an ensemble. Little Window thrives on its diversity.
“Bonfire” burns with classic swing vibes,…
You have to admire a bandleader who enhances an album by dedicating one of his compositions to an Uber driver and inviting his 85-year-old mother to play piano on the last two numbers. That is exactly what bassist Mike Pope does on The Parts You Keep, and they are two of the recording’s more pleasing episodes. Pope also adds a four-member string section on the standard “That Old Feeling” and his quirky composition “Past Is Prologue” (both of which encompass guest appearances by acclaimed trumpeter Randy Brecker).
Elsewhere, Pope leads an able trio (Geoffrey Keezer, piano; Nate Smith, drums) through its paces with other guest stopovers by saxophonist Roxy Coss and guitarist Amaury Cabral, each of whom performs on three tracks.
Music holds many forms, and for Jens Kuross, it’s a vehicle of inner expression, dotted with piano chimes. Curdled instrumentation decorates Crooked Songs, a record bristling with anguished vocals and pulverised piano patterns. Such is the frenzy that Kuross momentarily takes a break from singing during “No One’s Hiding from the Sun” to let out a ghostly whisper. This type of soulful searching is like a throwback to Roger Waters during the Amused to Death era, preferring fierceness over form.
In terms of sonics, Crooked Songs feels like a lo-fi record: many of the tunes, like “Stereotype”, open with an inhaled breath before banging through the song. Many of the songs purportedly flowed based on instinct, as the musician…
This cutting-edge experimental/ambient work was created after a long hiatus by electronic musician Roedelius, renowned as a pioneer of German experimental music, environmental music, and Krautrock, and Onnen Bock, known not only as an audio engineer for the Berlin Philharmonic but also for his work with Roedelius in the unit Qluster, and composer, arranger, flutist, keyboardist Yuko Matsuzaki, the creator of the extremely rare Japanese ’80s New Age / ambient album “Raden no Hako”!
After a long hiatus since the early 2000s, when Yuko Matsuzaki arranged and edited music data by Roedelius and Onnen Bock, added new compositions and mixed it, the final mix was finally released in 2020. The title track…
…Shinetiac returns to West Mineral with the follow up to their debut album, Not All Who Wander Are Lost and brings us Infiltrating Roku City.
Initially composed and rehearsed as a live set for a 29 Speedway x Conditioner’s show in Brooklyn, and performed again at Philly’s Spindrift, the Shinetiac boys spent the winter of 2024 taking these odds and ends of recordings and jams and sculpting them into something beautiful, critical, and earnest all at once.
Comprised of Philly’s Pontiac Streator (Slunty), Brooklyn’s Shiner, and Berlin based Ben Bondy, the trio deliver us a delicious perspective on their worldview through their deep friendship.
The first ten seconds of Infiltrating Roku City speak for themselves: Shinetiac make music…
Texas-based duo Balmorhea (Rob Lowe and Michael A. Muller) present their latest Deutsche Grammophon album – the original soundtrack they composed and recorded for The Trap, written and directed by actress Lena Headey (Game of Thrones). Based on Headey’s BAFTA-nominated short of the same name, and starring Michelle Fairley and James Nelson-Joyce, The Trap was premiered at the Austin Film Festival in October 2023.
The Trap is a psychological drama about a woman whose solitary life is disturbed by her meeting with a troubled young man. Balmorhea’s evocative score enhances the film’s sense of isolation, mystery and unease. “The music is very honest and intimate; gravitating mostly around piano and vibraphone with atmospheric guitars…
It is a shame that it took Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to bring attention to Valentin Silvestrov, the foremost Ukrainian composer of the day. Conductor Christopher Lyndon-Gee and the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra have examined his orchestral output in a series of albums containing highly worthwhile works, and here is another, which made classical best-seller lists in the summer of 2025. Both works are receiving their world premieres here. Lyndon-Gee writes his own ambitious liner notes, which quote Jean-Jacques Nattiez on the nature of postmodernism and state that he had an overwhelming feeling during rehearsals that the Symphony No. 8, composed in 2012 and 2013, had a feeling of prophecy about what was coming next in Ukraine.
György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments, Op. 24, have been recorded by various soprano-and-violin pairs. The work poses challenges for both participants, from extended violin techniques to Sprechstimme, large leaps, and yelping in the vocal part. Yet it is perhaps the shifting relationships between the singer and the violin, with the violin part containing elements of both accompaniment and dialogue, that is the greatest trick. Soprano Susan Narucki and violinist Curtis Macomber have performed the work together for some time, and they are quite sensitive to the roles played by the two parts. As the title suggests, the work consists of settings of brief texts from Kafka’s letters and other incidental texts. Some are less than 15 seconds long, and there is a mysterious…
An audacious collection of new music, Orbiting Garden features pianist William Hobbs performing pieces by Christos Hatzis (b. 1953) and Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892-1988).
While three of its four pieces are by the Greek-Canadian composer, the one by the Indian-English composer Sorabji, Nocturne “Djâmi” (1928), is no footnote but instead a twenty-three-minute colossus. Adding considerably to the release’s value, the pieces by Hatzis, Through a Glass Darkly, Face to Face, and Orbiting Garden, have never before been recorded until now.
As different as the composers are, there are commonalities: each straddles two distinct cultures and attempts to synthesize them in his music, and, as Hobbs points out, each also…
Time moves forward inexorably for us all, even for Triptides, a band determined to live in the sunny warmth of California’s past. As their musical obsessions shifted from the mid- to late ’60s over the course of their first several albums, the band have advanced into the laid-back, balmy climate of the early to mid-’70s on 2025’s Shapeshifter. The cheery buzz of synthesizers carries the weight on many of the record’s 11 tracks, and while numbers like “Connection,” “Your Darkness,” and “More Than a Friend” build up enough momentum to rock, the significant majority of this music is amiably easygoing, summoning a proto-yacht rock vibe. Shapeshifter also captures less of the back-and-forth feel of a band playing live than one might hope for, which is not a surprise…
…The CD is actually 13 tracks and includes bonus track ‘My God is Better than You’re Gawd’.
The initial single from Stockholm Syndrome, Fishbone’s first new album in nearly two decades, arrived shortly before last year’s presidential election. The bluntly titled “Racist Piece of Shit” pulls no punches regarding the ska-funk-metal pioneers’ feelings toward our current president and his supporters, even if musically, it’s a relatively unambitious (though scorching) tune. Eight months and a lot of bad news later, Fishbone’s still fuming, but they’ve worked hard to channel that fury into heavy, complex, and deeply idiosyncratic music that can stand up to their best material from the late 1980s and early ’90s.
The band began as a bunch of junior high misfits…
72-track / 3 CD box set containing four hours of both groove-laden and downright rocking music from the (mostly London) Pub Rock scene’s heyday of the mid ’70s through to the early ’80s. Every track expertly and lovingly remastered by renowned studio wizard Tim Turan.
In some respects, a lavish follow-up to Grapefruit’s highly successful 2019 Surrender to the Rhythm set which highlighted Pub Rock’s pioneers. Time! Gentlemen! features a selection of cuts from many of the usual suspects of the genre such as Brinsley Schwarz, Dr. Feelgood, Chilli Willi and The Red Hot Peppers and Kokomo, but excitingly, goes beyond the usual fare by including some of their lesser-known gems. Not only a virtual treasure trove of great ’70s rock, the set also…
In a dark gallery, looking into a bright room with snow-covered floors and a square hole cut from its center — this is how a viewer experiences A Cold Hole, an installation by artist Taryn Simon. But it’s not a static encounter: Watching from the gallery, you’ll routinely see someone enter the bright room, climb into the hole, and plunge into icy water beneath it. Simon sought to probe questions about public praise and personal desire. But when singer-songwriter Dana Foote saw the piece at an art museum in Western Massachusetts, the dark pit struck her as a powerful metaphor for a period of depression or stagnancy — a “psychological winter,” she’s called it.
Foote was in one such winter while writing Swallow the Knife, her latest record as Sir Chloe.
Projects that fuse electronic and traditional music risk doing neither genre justice if they don’t get the basics – songwriting and production – correct. Electro Baghdad reaps the rewards of its two creators’ sustained, patient collaboration and attention to detail.
Shiran and Bakal self-released the joint EP Electro Hafla in 2023, in tribute to the Yemeni component of their respective heritages; on this full-length follow-up they do the same for their shared Iraqi ancestry, painting a triumphant tapestry of multiple identity and depth at the level both of text and sound. Bakal’s restrained and elegant use of a range of dance music styles (techno, reggaeton, breakbeats) lays the foundation for moments of real catharsis when Shiran’s Iraqi…
This collaborative album is born of a musical meeting at Toronto’s Experimental Link Series event. The series focuses on celebrating and reinvigorating what it describes as Persian classical music through cross-cultural collaborations with Canadian musicians from other backgrounds. In this case, Hamid Motebassem, a renowned Dutch-based setar and tar musician, came together with the George Crotty Trio – a Canadian jazz trio featuring Crotty on cello, Jonathan Chapman on bass and Dhaivat Jani on percussion.
Though the result is described as a “jazz-forward musical exploration”, it is very much focused on Iranian classical composition, with Motebassem’s setar as the central instrument. Deeply contemplative, the atmosphere of this…
If it wasn’t for Salif Keita, Kassé Mady Diabaté would surely have been recognised as the finest male vocalist in Mali, with a distinctive style that was relaxed, thrilling and soulful.
A griot, he was steeped in the Mandinka traditions, but always happy to experiment, as he showed with his work with Toumani Diabaté’s Symmetric Orchestra or in collaboration with Toumani and Taj Mahal.
His six solo albums, including the classic Kiriké, were a glorious reminder of his roots, and this set of recordings made soon before his death in 2018 follows much the same pattern. His voice is as glorious as ever, and he is backed by a fine acoustic band, dominated by guitars and balafon.
His daughter Hawa – herself a fine singer and…
A masterclass of 20th century Cuban-American showbiz, this has all the vintage allure of a night at Havana’s Tropicana, or indeed one of the Miami clubs Albita Rodriguez is still playing 40 years after abandoning her career as a country singer in Cuba for a white trouser suit and the bright lights (and anti-Castrists) of Florida.
Here she’s teamed up with fellow resident Chucho Valdés, grand old keyboard maestro responsible for 60 years of an unstoppable and headlining amalgam of Afro-Cuban lore, classics, jazz, funk, ballads and more. It’s all virtuoso stuff, with Valdés’ vamping montunos and rippling arpeggios flowing across a selection of six standards and three new compositions by Albita.
The standards are best: you can’t have too many…