Four years have passed since T. Hardy Morris — former member of Dead Confederate and Diamond Rugs — released his last critically acclaimed solo album, The Digital Age of Rome. He didn’t rush into a follow-up, but instead took his time, carefully considering what he wanted to express. The result is Artificial Tears, a record steeped in introspection and deliberate self-examination.
The result is a dozen lo-fi indie rock tracks that focus on identity and searching for meaning delivered through poetically cryptic lyrics that recall everyone from Michael Stipe to Leonard Cohen. On “Don’t Kill Your Time (To Shine)” one of the album’s early singles, Morris offers a plea for the listener to not worry about what others think, delivered over an echoey, dreamy soundtrack…
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Industrial music legend Chris Connelly returns to his first love with White Phosphorus (Chris Connelly plays Throbbing Gristle), a suitably uncompromising homage to the “random, tense, scary & compulsively fascinating” phase of industrial music’s catalysers and ur-agitators. Having carved a twisted career with behemoths Ministry and Revolting Cocks over the past 40 years, starting life with the formidable Fini Tribe and collaborating with disparate characters such as Killing Joke, Cabaret Voltaire, Jim O’Rourke, and too many others, Connelly has returned armed with nothing but a cassette recorder, a reel to reel, a razor blade and some tape.
The Scottish-born musician first discovered Throbbing Gristle through their…
Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum has dug into the archives for a new album. GIANT OPENING MOUTH ON THE GROUND is a collaboration with Washington experimentalist Arrington de Dionyso. Elverum and de Dionyso previously played together in the experimental band Old Time Relijun.
…Though this is its first release, the 33-minute album dates back more than a decade. It was recorded in 2014, and the story stretches back even further. “Around 2010 I made this self-playing loud sculpture by connecting a giant gong (48″) to a giant subwoofer (2×18″) via a contact mic, a crossover, and a powerful amplifier,” Elverum explained on Substack. “I don’t do much besides find the frequency where it wants to resonate infinitely and let it go. I like the opportunity…
Following last year’s deluxe expansion of 1974’s Apostrophe (‘) and the recent restoration of the same year’s concert film Cheaper Than Cheep, Frank Zappa’s archival team is turning the page to 1975 and expansively revisiting One Size Fits All in time for its 50th anniversary. The guitarist-songwriter-bandleader-producer’s twentieth album (and fourteenth with The Mothers of Invention), it featured the by-then-familiar lineup of keyboardist George Duke, drummer Chester Thompson, percussionist Ruth Underwood, bassist Tom Fowler, and saxophonist Napoleon Murphy Brock. One Size Fits All continued their jazz-rooted satirical explorations, and reached No. 26 on the Billboard 200. Zappa and the band decamped to Colorado’s Caribou Ranch – birthing ground for…
Music To Use Crayons By: This volume collects instrumental tracks, instrumental demos, and TV Mixes that reach through Kevin Gilbert’s career, where he frequently reworked projects of the past, and where the music just as often hinted at things to come. A TV Mix is a version of a song presented without lead vocals, still retaining elements such as instrumentation and background vocals.
Much of this collection has gone unheard, and many tracks stand out, perhaps none more than the unfinished and never before released “If Your Love Has To.”
There is a story arc to this collection. The early versions and the TV Mixes together forge a portrait of a hard-working musician in a hard-to-work town.
Lodestar is a reissue of the rare 1974 album by the American band Lodestar, released by Numero Group, renowned for its archival projects. The music blends elements of folk-rock, psychedelia, and country, creating an atmospheric sound emblematic of the 1970s underground scene.
Tracks like Who Are You stand out with melancholic acoustic melodies, delicate guitar arrangements, and introspective lyrics. The song “Who Are You” performed by Lodestar appears as Track 4 on the compilation album Cosmic American Music: Motel California, released in October 2024 by Numero Group. The album transports listeners to an era of independent musicians, reflecting a spirit of freedom and experimentation, making it a valuable discovery for fans of Cosmic American Music.
Learning Greek opens with the most almighty bludgeoning affair, where the post-hardcore, mosh-pit-triggering tirade that is ‘Neighbours’ finds Humour telling a rather gloomy tale – that of our protagonist in a paranoia-induced state, believing that malevolent beings are out to get them. This debut sees the Glasgow outfit departing somewhat from their early art-punk, hinting at more crossover appeal.
It’s an album that features some of its most interesting works in its latter half – the caustic post-punk of ‘I Knew We Would Talk’, for example, or ‘Aphid’, which meanders between grunge, motorik goth-rock and noise, with sinister sci-fi stylings. ‘Memorial’, meanwhile, flirts with pop-punk to be the kind of pint-spiller…
In 1995 In The Red released the Cheater Slicks fourth full length album, Don’t Like You. The band, based in Boston at the time, travelled to New York to record at Jerry Teel’s Funhouse studio with Jon Spencer acting as producer. The result was a completely over the top noisefest that remains one of my favorite ITR releases to this day. Admittedly, Jon’s production was heavy-handed and extreme but, I thought it suited the band and this material well.
“Prior to the recording the band demoed their material at a couple of different eight track studios in Boston. The demos showed that the band had enough material for an album that would be (in my opinion) their strongest to date. When the album was released it was very well received…
…Stax Revue: Live in ’65! expands a pivotal pair of concerts undertaken at the 5-4 Ballroom in Los Angeles 60 summers ago when the Memphis label – newly bolstered by a distribution deal with Atlantic Records – took several of its marquee acts to the West Coast (many for the first time) for a spirited club set packed with favorites by William Bell (“You Don’t Miss Your Water”), Rufus Thomas (“Walking the Dog”), his daughter Carla (“Every Ounce of Strength”) plus bands like Booker T. & The MG’s and Stax house band The Mar-Keys. What made the set’s timing truly striking was that, days after the shows went on from August 7 to 8, the L.A. neighborhood of Watts saw its population rise up to protest the racism and discrimination from the city towards its Black residents.
Fountain Baby, the second album by Amaarae, was a revelation – a sensual, funny, frank and musically dense record released in 2023 that established the 31-year-old Ghanaian American pop musician as a cultural force to match contemporaries such as Rosalía and Charli xcx.
Although the songs are hedonistic – largely oscillating between wry flexes of wealth and lyrics about trifling with, and being trifled by, women in her orbit – she is also a realist: actions have consequences in Amaarae’s world, such as on Reckless & Sweet, as she wonders whether her lovers desire her or merely her money.
Despite the ingenuity and complexity of her music, Amaarae has struggled to break into the mainstream, in the UK at least. A recent…
Released on the Jazz at Lincoln Center’s label, Blue Engine Records, The Roar and the Whisper marks the fifth studio album by award-winning saxophonist and composer Alexa Tarantino. A member of the prestigious Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the all-female quintet Artemis, Tarantino forms a pliant quartet with pianist Steven Feifke, bassist Philip Norris, and drummer Mark Whitfield Jr, inviting guest vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant to join them in two pieces, the last of which also features percussionist Keita Ogawa.
This is a work of contagious post-bop irradiation that begins with “Inside Looking Out”, a mutable, dynamic piece showcasing strong interaction between Tarantino and Feifke — an encouraging accompanist who is very much in sync…
Although David Grubbs has worked with all of the musicians who join him in Bitterviper, they’ve yet to all gather in a single place. Still, they all seem highly attuned to what one another does.
The quartet’s eponymous debut was produced through file sharing, an accretive process set in motion by lush, often psychoacoustic solo cello lines and patterns played by the Athens-based Nikos Veliotis and subsequently layered with sounds by Grubbs, Japanese electronics master Taku Unami, and percussionist-composer Sarah Hennies. Across four gorgeously contemplative, deeply spacious pieces the ensemble achieves a stunning cohesion, even without considering that everything we hear was produced in four different locales at different times.
Bringing old music styles and forms to contemporary audiences isn’t a task for just any artist. Korean-American composer and pianist Juri Seo draws on key structures from Bach, Rameau, Pachelbel, etc., and gives them a modern shakeup on Obsolete Music. With a jovial flourish and incredibly astute insight, Seo pays homage while carving out new musical landscapes. Chamber sextet Latitude 49 — known for their contemporary sensibilities and their finesse — is a fine fit to breathe life into Seo’s score, making the music sing and soar exquisitely.
“It’s impossible to call anything obsolete, since when you say something is obsolete, you’re bringing it back to relevance,” says Seo. By reworking classical ways of playing,…
Meeting somewhere between post-punk and techno, electronic body music (EBM) emerged in early 1980s Europe as a darker, sweatier alternative to the more melodic synth music of the time. Made up of militant chants and muscular rhythms perforated with ominous clangs, the genre mostly thrived in goth bars and clubs, except for the odd chart entry from key players such as Front 242. Even 40 years on, EBM still lurks on the fringes of dance music.
Irish producer Autumns is one name championing the industrial club sound through his stormy yet pumping hardware tracks and raucous live sets, which are all flailing limbs and swishing hair behind a tangle of wires. Since starting the project in 2013, he has put out a formidable 88…
“Where’s the pride in this city? I won’t survive in this city,” For Those I Love – aka David Balfe – spits despondently in ‘This Is Not The Place I Belong’. Throughout the Dublin poet-producer’s new album Carving the Stone, he is trapped between those two states of mind: his love of home paralyses his impulse to leave, while the problems he observes – crime, skyrocketing rents, boredom – make a future there just as unthinkable. His clear-eyed spoken-word and stylish beatmaking, both sharpened since his 2021 eponymous debut, combine for a brutal, complex study of his city.
The key to the album’s brilliance is Balfe’s darting between small, succinct portraits, from barflies to beatings: “Smashed in the head outside a creche with his son in his hands,” lies one…
On their fifth album, Mal Blum reimagines the role of the villain for bad boys everywhere. Villainy here is personal — Blum made the record, appropriately called The Villain, about the unique exhaustion of being cast as the antagonist in a trans-for-trans breakup; it’s also political, in a society that vilifies gender non-conformity.
Here, Blum explores the friction of binary victim-villain thinking, challenging dehumanizing stereotypes with relatable nuance: “I was too willing/To make you the villain… Does it make me the villain?” they sing on the title track. But Blum’s villainy is mosaic, inviting listeners to question their complicity in searching for the “bad guy” in their own lives and rhetoric, too.
Gone is the jokey dysphoric flair of their earlier…
Five years ago, Teethe’s debut record wound with a cadence resembling a jack-in-the-box: sonically clinging and gleaming like tin sheens in sunlight. It almost synced with a resting heart rate, lulling the listener into a somnambulistic state and an anxious anticipation for the terminal surprise of its winding. In the follow-up to their debut, Magic of the Sale, they finally leap out with unanticipated results, even if in hindsight, the developments seem latent.
Their second LP takes on bigger dimensions adorned with a diverse palette composed of a consistent troupe of versatile actors, elemental magnitudes, and a fresh air that lets it come to life in a familiar yet novel way. Much of the instrumentation orbits a center of percussion that remains methodical (but shines especially…
Flying the flag for mesmerising guitar sounds The Royston Club make music of the type that has become a rarity. Equipped with a melodic gift for writing, the Welsh indie rockers write infectiously, producing Strokes-like material that lingers and becomes part of the DNA.
Driving themselves into the top tier of indie, the Wrexham four-piece has seen debut record Shaking Hips and Crashing Cars from 2023 reach number 16 on the UK Official Album Chart, an accomplishment that has since been followed by several career milestones in the form of live performances at iconic venues and festivals.
New effort, second album Songs for the Spine, follows a not at all dissimilar pattern. Lofty, anthemic and compelling, the ten tracks…