Jim Jones is, of course, the scraggly British rock’n’roll Jesus who out-Stooged Iggy in the 80s with delirium rockers Thee Hypnotics, and has chased that fuzzy psych-punk high ever since under various names, line-ups and conjurations.
Black Crowe Chris Robinson produced this album, and also provided some vocals, as did ‘Mrs’ Marc Bolan Gloria Jones. Green On Red mainman Chuck Prophet also wanders in for some guitar musings. Does this qualify the ‘All Stars’ nomenclature? Yes. Who were you expecting? Slash? C’mon, man, everybody cool is dead these days.
Much like fellow junk-punk-funker Jon Spencer, JJ’s sound these days is stripped-down and laid bare, free of the youthful 17-minutes-long-with-four-guitar-solos excesses his previous…
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Joyann Parker’s Life Lines embraces soul and grit over perfection. In place of overly polished production are genuinely heartfelt efforts, complete with powerful vocals from Parker. Simply, Life Lines is not an album you hear every day in modernity.
Parker started in music much later than many of her peers, which has profoundly influenced her career. Moreover, her success has been largely fan-driven, keeping her music genuine and earnest.
“I started doing this when I was older,” Parker recently told American Songwriter. “And so I felt like I had missed out on a lot. I thought, ‘I’ve got to fit in this box.’ I wasn’t very happy for a while; I don’t feel a lot of that pressure anymore.”
This raw, real approach is evident even in the simplest parts of this ’70s-tinged album,…
The excellent quintet WÖR utilises violin, bagpipes, accordion, guitar and saxophones to reimagine 18th-century tunes from the Flanders region of Belgium. Swedish women’s self-styled ‘Folk’appella’ quartet Kongero honour the folk traditions of their home region, Jämtland, in northern Sweden, in a similar manner.
Here, these two ensembles combine for a tantalising project. The sonic landscapes on display are beautifully produced and virtuosically played. ‘Var är du?’ rolls with bucolic wonder, the instruments of WÖR blending perfectly with the voices of Kongero. ‘Schoon Lief’ is a wistful, soft and gently evolving number evocative of winter mists and bright, clear skies, while ‘Ridder & Jungfrun’ presents a drifting…
The basic elements of This House’s sound will be familiar to anyone who followed G.W. Sok’s career before. A furious clangor of box-y drums, barbed wire guitar play and hoarse, poetic shouted lyrics all point towards the Ex, the long-running art-punk band that Sok left in 2008. His partner, Ignacio Córdoba, adds electronics here, in line with his own work, but the music mostly lurches and spasms with fierce, rhythmic punk intelligence. A couple of shadowy interludes — acoustic “Introduction to Poetry” and the ominous title track — hint at a less frenetic iteration of This House, but mostly these cut rattle with whip-sharp, multi-layered rhythms. Every element, not just drums, builds a beat architecture, jittery, not-quite comfortable setting for the songs.
…On their earliest recordings, Poison Ruïn were a compelling curiosity: an anonymous, no-fi anarcho-punk project, kitted out in chainmail and singing about the plight of the medieval peasantry. Their focus has grown both wider and sharper over the past half-decade, as founding member Mac Kennedy has fleshed out a full lineup and spoken more openly about the band’s intent. He’s learned to walk the fine line between what he’s called “sword for sword’s sake” aestheticism and the use of medieval imagery to make pointed societal critiques. Their second album, Hymns from the Hills, is Kennedy’s view from beyond the proverbial castle walls, and he writes eloquently from that perspective. He expresses solidarity with those “dropped off and discarded…
In the 1990s, during Japan’s second psychedelic revolution, three players with an insatiable appetite for epic aural freakouts were working overtime together in two simultaneous supergroup trios. When they weren’t busy with their regular bands, High Rise bassist Nanjo Asahito, Acid Mothers Temple guitarist Makoto Kawabata, and Ruins drummer Tatsuya Yoshida constituted both Musica Transonic and Mainliner.
In theory, these offshoots had somewhat distinct aims. Mainliner was all about kicking the monstrously heavy fuzz-fests of High Rise and Acid Mothers Temple up to another level. Musica Transonic was more about improv, imagining a world where the jazz element of free jazz was replaced by apocalyptic noise.
Despite the fact that it includes the track “Winter, Don’t Let Go,” For Those Who Stay is very much an album of spring. More specifically, it’s about the emergence into spring after a long winter, which has been chronicled month by month, track by track by Hollie Kenniff.
The first two singles appeared in December, the second two in January (including the winter track), followed by one in February, one in early March, and finally the full eleven track album the first week of spring.
We have been anxiously awaiting this set (ironically, one track is titled, “The World Can Wait”), whose tracks are now presented in a different order, telling a complete story, although we also appreciated the chapter-by-chapter reveal.
Split Apex navigates a murky subterranean river, the headwaters of which lie in the craggy caverns between The Shadow Ring’s stark moonscapes and the blown-out craters that Wolf Eyes patrols. The London-based duo — bassist/vocalist Peter Blundell (Mosquitoes, Komare) and Finnish ex-pat Jussi Palmusaari on electronics, percussion and guitar — prepare oblique, haunting sound constructions that thrum, squall and slither. Theirs is a squirmy brand of deconstructed song, featuring meaty bass and snippets of droll spoken word from Blundell and uncanny electronics and guitar scree courtesy of Palmusaari. The pair focus on atmosphere, squeezing sound into a warm, fluid environment that’s as suitable for thoughtful rumination as it is for growing…
…Timothy McCormack, currently Assistant Professor of Composition at University of California San Diego, already had an impressive list of compositions and a significant discography before turning to the piano. Although that list included substantial solo pieces for other instruments, McCormack recounts that the piano had been avoided until the discovery of a ‘strange chord’ whose ‘intervention’ became more and more compelling and difficult to ignore. In the end it proved the eventual catalyst for mine but for its sublimation, a work which started as what the composer thought was going to be a ‘small side-project’ but which ended up being a year’s full on compositional effort. The pianist Jack Yarbrough was the intended performer from…
Heights Prospection, the debut album by Swiss saxophonist Alain Métrailler, balances styles, moods, and grooves with distinct character. Some records manage to appeal to listeners across the jazz spectrum, and this is certainly one of them. Featuring seven compelling original compositions, Métrailler entrusts them to a vibrant New York-based quartet with pianist Elias Stemeseder, bassist Chris Tordini, and drummer Eric McPherson. The bandleader, who spent six years in Brooklyn before returning to Switzerland, also interprets the standard “Crazy He Calls Me” in a supple saxophone-piano duet dedicated to influential alto saxophonist Lee Konitz.
Métrailler does not limit himself to classic jazz lyricism; he also pushes forward…
Michael Dease, widely admired as one of the world’s foremost jazz trombonists but rather less-known as an educator, dons his professorial garb on Spartan Strong, supervising a splendid session by a special corps of undergrads (and students in his trombone studio) who together comprise the MSU (Michigan State University) Jazz Trombones, 23 members in all when one counts Dease and the group’s half-dozen bass trombones.
Dease lets the students have full rein, soloing only twice (on Steve Turre’s smoothly walking “Groove Blues” and Oscar Pettiford’s fast-paced and dazzling closing theme, “Blues in the Closet”). There are brief respites from the trombone avalanche courtesy of guest artists Benny Benack III (who sings on the standard…
Less than a year after her luscious solo debut, Pacífico Maravilla, Nidia Góngora returns, this time as the frontwoman of Nuevos Ríos. Alongside her are members of her longtime group, Canalón de Timbiquí, and Toulouse-based Reco Reco, an ensemble that focuses on plugged-in renditions of South American styles. Together, the collective perform lively, electrified versions of music from Góngora and Canalón de Timbiquí’s finely honed repertoire, continuing to bear witness to the traditions and lifeways of the Pacific coast of Colombia for audiences worldwide.
Nuevos Ríos’ self-titled debut is nothing short of astonishing, a clear continuation of the work Góngora and her compatriots have long been doing, and yet something that feels wholly new.
…Tenderness was born out of a tough storm of circumstances: the pandemic, a cancelled tour, a break-up, and the loss of her father. Furloughed and with too much time on her hands, Katy Beth Young (Peggy Sue, Deep Throat Choir) began to write new songs in her north London living room, windows wide open to the hot summer outside. In August 2020, during that “weird window” of the pandemic where lockdown eased up enough for a trip to the seaside, or across London, Young visited producer Euan Hinshelwood (Younghusband, Cate Le Bon) at his Greenwich studio. In two days, the pair recorded eight demos with no pressure or plan. The final recordings are sparse in that country way but layered with Hinshelwood’s carefully chosen textures: synths, drones, rich…
Florian T M Zeisig is one of contemporary ambient music’s preeminent shapeshifters. The Berlin-based producer first made waves in late 2020 with You Look So Serious, a compilation of Enya edits that distilled the singer’s voice down to a distant emanation. Since then, he’s set his talents to throbbing neurodrone, skunky spiritual jazz, West Mineral tropical unease, and a fantastic album about working at a nightclub that sounded like a party heard through the wall. His latest endeavor is a rotating collective with a name so florid it makes Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 seem like a perfectly modest moniker, and the theme this time is rock music, stripped of orthodoxy.
Zeisig assembled The Thinking of the World Began Pounding in Our Ears the Moment We Hit Shore…
Out of a ten-day dog-sitting stint in the countryside came Milwaukee-based singer-songwriter Maximiano’s second release: Rokeby. Rokeby is the name of a historic district in upstate New York, along the Hudson Valley River. It happens to be where Maximiano crafted these songs, but it is also a place named after Sir Walter Scott’s Rokeby, an epic poem set during the English Civil War, a time of chaos and division.
There are a few things at work here. The rural aspect comes through the album’s folkier cuts and arrangements. As far as Scott is concerned, the songs in Rokeby reflect a literary streak to the singer-songwriter, with lyrics referencing Rilke, Max Porter, Dickinson and Highsmith; but thematically, they also express…
Why are some harmonies so pleasing to the human ear? Actually, to the human brain. A physicist might answer that it is due to simple mathematical frequency ratios. Well, maybe simple to a mathematician, but Greek to an arithmophobe. But not ‘Greek’ to some actual Greeks, such as Plato, who were on the vanguard of trying to answer what is truly an ancient question. So, 2,500 or so years later, what is the answer? Don’t know, don’t care. But you know it when you hear it. And you are going to hear a ton of it on Rebel Joy, the debut album by americana duo Roswell Road.
The harmonies that saturate this album might lead one to believe they are so-called ‘blood’ harmonies, also known as ‘sister’ harmonies, to denote the type of perfectly matched voices…
Rennes-based, self-described feminist punk trio Île de Garde have an unusual configuration; synths (Cécile Aurégan), drums (Morgane Poulain) and low-key, mostly spoken word vocals (Klara Coudrais), but it proves to be a flexible and mostly powerful one. This six-track EP or mini album is their first release and it’s promising and varied enough to wish it was a full album, though not all its strands are equally thrilling.
Looking analytically at their songs, it becomes clear that Poulain is central to Île de Garde’s appeal. The synths are generally retro-‘80s flavored and provide the melodies, and the vocals range from delicate to imperious, but it’s the drums that seem most of all to determine the character of each song, with one exception that proves…
Recorded and mixed over a three-day span in March of 2025, then pressed on cassette quickly enough to be given away with their Which Direction Goes the Beam, which hit shelves in April, Bunker Intimations II finds Index for Working Musik at their most spontaneous and improvisatory. The nature of the recording seems to inspire the group to tap into the latent darkness found in their “real” songs and basically sounds like a 48-minute haunting. The songs rarely rise above the level of a cloaked whisper, scratchy violins carry the near-melodies, and the rest of the band sets the controls for the heart of spookiness. Only “Going to Heaven on the End of a String (Papal Version)” has vocals, the rest of the songs allow the space between the notes to fill in where the voices…
“Bariken” is a 2004 album by Merzbow, and as its title suggests, the theme of this work centers on the Bariken itself. The Bariken, also known as the “Taiwan Duck,” is a species of duck and has some characteristics that are its vivid green and ultramarine plumage and the red caruncle that extends around its bill and eyes.
Around 2003, I happened to notice a peculiar-looking duck in a river near my home. Upon investigation, I learned it was a Bariken — likely one that had escaped or been abandoned after being kept for food, subsequently adapting to the wild. There were also Bariken inhabiting the pond of a nearby Japanese garden. At the time, it was common to see ducks swimming in the rivers and ponds of Tokyo. A few years later,…
From joyful dancefloor productions to funky Afro-pop, reggae and gorgeously melancholic numbers, David Walters’ new album is an expansive affair. With a gang of guest producers including Captain Planet, Blundetto and Art of Tones onboard, the Franco-Caribbean multi-instrumentalist continues along the vein of his 2023 Soul Tropical album: a maximalist channeling of eclectic Afro-Caribbean themes, so brightly coloured that it often masks the personal burdens carried in his lyrics.
Always a great collaborator, Walters is joined by Fatoumata Diawara, Keziah Jones and Philo, who add their wonderful vocal talents to standout songs. However, the soul of the record remains Walters’ clear voice and guitar, the full-bodied production never obscuring how…