With time and experience always comes a sense of knowing, and CASTLEBEAT built his new album around this idea. After releasing his debut album, CASTLEBEAT has spent the last decade working on his record label, spirit goth. CASTLEBEAT II feels like a landmark project he’s been leading up to, revisiting sketches of songs from his debut, and giving them a second life.
CASTLEBEAT, a.k.a. Josh Hwang, returns to his roots on this new record, but expands it further. The indie dream pop artist stays firmly rooted within the genre, with guitar riffs in “This Takes Time” feeling unmistakably 2016, while tracks like ‘Table and Chair’ add elements of electronic drums and layered production that bend far beyond the constraints of genre.
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10 years ago, Madrid native Juana Everett decided it was time for her to make a big change, and so, she bravely crossed the Atlantic to the US, and in 2021, she realised her dream of releasing the debut solo album she had made there, the aptly titled Move On. Now she’s back with her follow-up, Past Lives in California, this time charting the years she has spent in the state and the ups and the downs she experienced along the way.
The album unfolds much like the decade-long physical and emotional journey Everett found herself taking throughout the Golden State, trying to find the place where she felt she belonged. The opener, the smooth ‘Bring Me Back’, finds her longing for a place in time more than a location itself as she wistfully remembers…
Fans of experimental solo guitar records have been having a good year. The spring brought a new record by avant-jazz/power ambient guru David Torn and a career-spanning comp of madcap inventor Hans Reichel’s work. Now, Bill Orcutt’s Palilalia label gives us two LPs’ worth of gnarled fission and warped disputation from German provocateur Olaf Rupp. Rupp released a tribute to Reichel in 2020, NOBEACH, in which he captured his countryman’s pastoral eccentricities and bizarre tonal menagerie exactly. On collaborative albums like 2010’s The Specter of Genius with drummer Michael Wertmuller, Rupp plays with a whiplike velocity, echoing the thorny barrage of avant-guitar saint Derek Bailey. On Fuzzy Logic, he’s operating in a slower, more viscous mode,…
James Brandon Lewis is on a remarkable run.
Deface the Currency (2026), his second collaborative album with the Messthetics, placed him at the cutting edge of the fiery fusion of punk and jazz. While that record proved he could invoke the power and fury of ’60s Detroit band MC5’s rock-and-roll testimonial Are You Ready to TESTIFY! (2007), on Omni, he is invoking a different kind of testimonial, one grounded in his upbringing as the son of a minister. Lewis and his long-running quartet, pianist Aruán Ortiz, bassist Brad Jones, and drummer Chad Taylor expand on Lewis’ “Molecular Systematic Music” and construct a sonic temple where they deliver a twelve-tone gospel from the pulpit.
Lewis has carefully structured the album around…
Pascal Bideau’s second album as Akusmi is infused with feelings of wonder and delight, and dashed with fleeting touches of humour and charm. The record is at the same time energetic but pensive, exciting but foreboding, taking the listener through a narrative arc of marvel and adventure.
Opening track ‘A Waking Dream’ starts with ethereal and dream-like piano, harp and sax passages, reminiscent of a flowing river; aquatic and sparkly, with some slightly murky elements in the lower ends. Once the rhythmical percussion and wind instruments kick in, however, the listener is transported with a sense of forward movement, making it the perfect opener for what appears to be a riveting musical journey. This leads into subsequent track ‘Anima’, an invigorating…
Patrick Gräser, AKA Answer Code Request, was one of the defining producers of Berghain’s second generation. First emerging in the early 2010s, Gräser was producing industrial-strength techno influenced by the hardcore continuum, serving Berlin techno with a twist of UK rave and ’90s IDM. As a resident of the Berlin club, he was an heir apparent to mentor Marcel Dettmann — only instead of Dettmann’s penchant for EBM and new wave, it sounded like Gräser had spent formative years clubbing on Fridays during the Sub:stance heydays. The pair of records he released during that period — 2014’s Code and 2018’s Gens — remain high watermarks of the Ostgut Ton catalogue.
New LP Halo picks up where Gens left off.
The lines have been blurred everywhere in music, so why not in what goes by the name of field recordings? What once was solely the concept of actually going outside and recording sounds you hear and then (but not necessarily) combining them with music itself, has become something a bit different.
These days it includes recording on tour, in hotel rooms, Airbnbs, and small studios, often across multiple countries. It could be because of the spur-of-the-moment, when a song idea pops up, or getting a certain feeling from the location you find yourself in. Or, it could be all of those.
It seems that singer songwriter (another term that is gathering new meanings along the way) Melanie Radford had all of those things in…
Jolene Marie is not an artist comfortable in the spotlight. With a generally private and reserved persona, she openly admits to not liking people looking at her, one of the reasons that led to her not performing her music on stage until she was in her late twenties. However, the release of her five-track EP Honey in 2023 revealed a singer-songwriter of immense promise, creating a steady groundswell of interest amongst both critics and the americana music community. Now, having teamed up with producer Brock Geiger, Marie has released Sun Creek, her debut album written over four months of diligent songcraft.
The opening track ‘Two Hands Together’ quickly sets the musical landscape, minimalistic and intimate, with subtle splashes of…
It is almost 10 years that the trio of Adrian Blake Enscoe, Sydney Shepherd, and Regina Strayhorn, known to those that have already caught up with them as Bandits On the Run, have been operating, with a slew of independent releases.
Judging by the sound of those the New York trio should have already made quite a name for themselves, and maybe Rough Magic, will do that for them.
Not only is their take on the folk pop/rock combination one of the more inventive at the moment, but their concept of rotating lead vocals and rotating instruments is not a gimmick but serves the full purpose of their music and has both sense and purpose.
You can hear vast musical knowledge oozing…
Dead Pioneers’ Wagon Burner arrives just in time for the United States’ 250th birthday, and it is the gift the country deserves and needs right now: An indigenous voice of reason taking the actual history of the country to task and rallying those of us who aren’t licking boots to unite and fight back. The band’s spiritual peers include timeless groups like Minutemen, Suicidal Tendencies, Public Enemy, and Dead Kennedys, bands that functioned as the alternative CNN of their time.
As a punk rock record, it’s a blast, an anthemic, catchy collection of tracks that shows Dead Pioneers gelling. Throughout, Deal and guests weave spoken word pieces into their incendiary tour of the many shades of punk, and its 12 songs are barbed with humor and an invitation…
Emerging from the gentle coastal terrain of South Cornwall, England, The Heavenly Bodes’ debut LP, The Green Hills, is, at times, a reflection of its surroundings. The album’s opener, “De Gruene Heuvels” (the album’s title in Dutch), and its closer, “The Heavenly Bode,” both have a jangly late-’60s country-rock vibe reminiscent of The Byrds and Mike Nesmith’s solo output. “De Gruene Heuvels” bears a resemblance to The Monkees’ tune “Circle Sky” from the cult classic film Head, with its freaked-out fuzz guitar lines layered over jangly rhythm guitar. “The Heavenly Bode” uses a similar formula but adds shimmering guitar work and fiery fuzz leads to propel it along. Both songs possess a down-home style filtered through a kaleidoscopic haze.
This lengthy album covers multiple phases of Feldman’s musical thinking from 1950 to 1972. Meaningfully, he wrote many of these compositions to play with friends such as John Cage and David Tudor. These challenging pieces, in which Feldman wanted to wash away compositional rhetoric and allow sounds to be heard on their own terms, function as aural palate cleansers. To realize Feldman’s scores, with their indeterminate elements, the pianists must play an active role in the compositional process and coordinate very closely. These musicians do so seamlessly and intuitively, never losing the required concentration, while the recording engineers do incredible work in miking and blending up to five pianos at once. The earliest pieces, such as…
Assa’d Khoury’s second and final record has an almost mythical status among Arabic record collectors. Originally copies of the 1978 landmark LP are scarce, making the Syrian musician’s unique blend of microtonal Farfisa, fuzz guitars and Middle Eastern percussion a holy grail for crate diggers and psych hounds for decades.
Its reputation is well-deserved, as — despite its cheesy retro album art and exotic album title — Khoury’s re-imaginings of traditional Arabic melodies for modified electronic organ somehow manage to sound both impressively futuristic and weirdly retrograde, as if a Damascus lounge band had been abducted and forced to perform at an intergalactic casino.
Despite its far-out, futurist sounds, Khoury…
Congratulations, the new album from songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jacob Ungerleider, is the result of the casual playing of his demo tracks in the home of musicians Jenn Wasner and Alan Good Parker. Wasner, a member of Flock of Dimes and Wye Oak, kept asking Parker who was singing those songs on their Los Angeles stereo, and it turned out Parker was playing demos by the Virginia-based pianist he had met when they were touring with Natalie Prass. Ungerleider had recently moved to Los Angeles, and Wasner, who fell in love with these tracks, vowed to help Ungerleider put these songs together for an album.
In addition to co-producing Congratulations with Ungerleider, Wasner also sings and plays a variety of instruments on the record, as do…
The title of Willow Avalon’s new album, Pink Pocket Pistol, suggests she wants to have it both ways. She has a soft, feminine side as indicated by the color and small size of her gun.
However, the fact that she has a weapon reveals she’s tough and dangerous. The album cover features her pointing a chromium grey revolver at the beholder. The pink is gone, which indicates the significance of her steely power. The outward femininity is just a pretty disguise.
This works as a metaphor for Avalon herself. On the outside, she is dainty in a faux innocent manner. Inside, she is strong and determined, even treacherous if you cross her. While Avalon mostly sings in a high-pitched girly voice, somewhere between a bleat and Betty Boop,…
Celebrating 25 years, Pneumonia stands as an alt-country centerpiece, capturing Whiskeytown at their most expansive and iconic moment.
Whiskeytown had ceased to be a band in the truest sense by the time they recorded their third (and final) full-length album, Pneumonia; the group began to collapse during the touring following Strangers’ Almanac, with members coming and going at a remarkable pace, and for the Pneumonia sessions, the only musicians on hand who had appeared on Faithless Street three years earlier were lead vocalist and songwriter Ryan Adams and violinist and backing vocalist Caitlin Cary. Multi-instrumentalist Mike Daly and percussionist producer Ethan Johns dominated the sessions’ sprawling cast of players…
British-born, Canada-raised saxophonist and EWI master Seamus Blake hosts a soul-jazz revival on this tribute to funky sax legend Eddie Harris. Blake focuses everything on electric, echo-plexed, funky soul-jazz. He’s surrounded himself with a killer band that includes electric bassist Tim Lefebvre, drummer Corey Fonville, and Hammond B-3 organist and pianist Sam Yahel. Vocalist Dawn Pemberton guests. The set was recorded in Vancouver and co-produced by Blake, Scott Morin, and Cellar Music boss Cory Weeds.
The set opens with Gene McDaniels’ “Compared to What,” passionately recorded in 1969 by Harris and Les McCann on Swiss Movement. Pemberton delivers the lyric with earthy grit as Lefebvre and Fonville back Yahel’s…
Grateful Dead is dipping into its archives for a 60th anniversary concert release going back to the band’s earliest years.
Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, CA (7/3/66) arrives on 2 CDs, digital/streaming, or 3 LPs. The concert, recorded by Owsley “Bear” Stanley, previously appeared as part of the 2015 box set 30 Trips Around the Sun. Featuring Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, and Bob Weir, the show has been mastered for this release by Jeffrey Norman with speed correction and restoration by Plangent Processes.
Songs include the earliest known recordings of “Cardboard Cowboy,” “You Don’t Have to Ask,” and “Tastebud,” as well as a cover of Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s “Gangster of Love.”
Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Margo Price release a protest mixtape, Days of Unrest, a nine-track collection inspired by the causes and communities she’s championed throughout her career, ranging from prison reform and marijuana legalization to immigration, farming and labor rights.
Produced by longtime collaborator Matt Ross-Spang, the set blends original material with reimagined classics. Among the covers are Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” featuring Joan Baez and Memphis Mariachi, Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm,” Charlie Daniels’ “Long Haired Country Girl” featuring Billy Swan and the traditional folk song “De Colores,” also with Memphis Mariachi.
In the ‘80s, F/i was so underground that even their founder, Richard Franecki, didn’t have copies of their earliest albums. “I don’t really count those in our discography, since they were privately issued under our fake ‘Uddersounds’ label,” he has said. The group eventually found modest success — a series of albums on the much-respected noise label RRRecords, European tours, shows with Hawkwind and Acid Mothers Temple — but in those early days, F/i recorded cassettes to trade rather than sell, swapping single copies for material from like-minded bands. 1985’s Invisible Men is the holy grail of this era, a tape so rare that they didn’t even bother releasing it on a fake label.
Franecki came up through Milwaukee’s tiny punk scene in the late ‘70s, playing in bands…