Rush is the third outing from Lucian Ban & Elevation, and their first in a decade. The Romanian pianist assembled the group in 2006 with tenor saxophonist Abraham Burton, bassist John Hébert, and drummer Eric McPherson. Mystery, the group’s raw live debut, was recorded on-stage in 2010 and released in 2013 and included all original compositions by the band’s members. 2018’s Songs from Afar included several traditional works arranged by Ban and Hébert alongside originals; the lineup included two guests: violist Mat Maneri and Romanian vocalist/folklorist Gavril Tarmure. Ban composed eight of the nine pieces on Rush; the only exception, “Golden Oriole,” is a traditional Romanian song with vocals by Tarmure.
Opener “Dark Blue” is dedicated to Abdullah…
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…includes the recently-shared “World’s Always Burning” featuring Mannequin Pussy along with previously unreleased songs “I’ve Said Too Much” featuring Dazy, “3 AM,” and “Thought You Were Waving [Anthony’s Version],” which is a cover by Anthony Green (Circa Survive, L.S. Dunes, Saosin).
“I want to make pop rock music for people who are fucked up,” Militarie Gun frontman Ian Shelton said in a recent interview for the band’s new album, God Save the Gun. Shelton comes from hardcore punk, a world where fucked-up-ness is transmitted through vein-popping screamed vocals and antagonistic riffs. But with Militarie Gun, he’s always been more interested in spinning catharsis and confrontation into the biggest songs he possibly can. He spits and snarls, for sure, but then comes…
Guitarist/composer Gyan Riley and guitarist/ producer Noah Georgeson were childhood friends in Nevada City, California, where they bonded over their love of classical guitar years before each carved his own successful, genre-diverse music career. (Riley has worked with the likes of John Zorn, Arooj Aftab, and his father, Terry Riley; Georgeson has collaborated with Fred Frith, Alvin Curran, and Joanna Newsom, to name a few.) Georgeson also went on to play with and produce multiple albums for freak folk artist and fellow guitar afficionado Devendra Banhart.
HUG is the trio of Riley, Georgeson, and Banhart, who got together at Sita Studio in Los Angeles without much of a plan in mind except to record some music together. The resulting…
When you’ve got the goods like Buddy Miller, you can disappear for 15 years and return in such fine shape that one wonders if you ever left.
Think back to all those fine albums on Hightone and New West with Julie Miller’s great songwriting, the tremolo-soaked guitar solos, those earthy vocals, the careful selection of guest artists, the McCrary Sisters, the knack of unearthing memorable cover tunes, and the overriding soul that covered every song. It’s as if Buddy Miller had that checklist. All those elements and more are present on his eponymous album, a gem that reminds us why we fell in love with Buddy Miller’s music in the first place.
In the intervening years, Miller produced numerous albums, so it is not surprising to see…
…completely remastered by acclaimed audio engineer Leon Zervos at Studio 301 and features three early recordings that originally appeared on the band’s rare, self-titled Australian ”JBT’ EP.
Three opens with the distinctive fingerpicked, slide-driven guitar that becomes the canvas for the remainder of the record. Joined by Rory Quirk on bass and Jason McGann on drums, the trio delivers an emotionally charged romp through ten tracks of earthy, bluesy jam band intonations.
Paying homage to his Australian roots, the inclusion of the didgeridoo in the backdrop of several tracks plays nicely against his six-string grooves. The most accessible and shortest song on the record, “Pickapart,” shows off Butler’s picking prowess on an amplified 12-string…
In his 20s, when Nate Amos was uploading his every musical impulse to Bandcamp, he released a particularly out-there tranche of songs focused on “technology corrupting nature,” he told the Guardian recently. He soon came to understand this noisy spell as a symptom of anxiety and depression: “The beauty was in the unknown, because I was having such a hard time with the known.” The newer work that’s made his name as This Is Lorelei is tellingly lucid by contrast, the work of someone who can now look discomfort dead on and make it beautiful.
It doesn’t take a leap to connect that to Amos’ recent sobriety. His official debut album, 2024’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star — a crystalline pop record that stealthily acquired…
Since discovering John Coltrane as a teenager, saxophonist Andy Sheppard has forged a remarkable career, earning multiple British Jazz Awards, international acclaim and even a place in the UK pop charts. His musical range is equally impressive: alongside jazz giants George Russell, Gil Evans and Carla Bley, he has worked with artists as diverse as Baaba Maal, Runrig and John Martyn.
Equally at home in a big band, solo setting or small group, Sheppard now turns his attention to a new trio with Italian pianist Rita Marcotulli and French bassist Michel Benita. The drummer-less format echoes his acclaimed work with Carla Bley and Steve Swallow, while giving this new partnership its own distinctive space.
The trio may be new, but Marcotulli and Benita…
Chopping Mountain is the sixth long player from Ibibio Sound Machine. It was recorded in South London at their Vanguard studio and produced by synthesist/saxophonist Max Grunhard. It’s the first time ISM has eschewed an outside producer since 2019’s Doko Mien. Their subjects across these ten tracks are love, social and political resistance, unity, and healing, both societal and individual. While these aren’t unfamiliar topics, they are presented with a seamless maturity and an unwillingness to compromise. The songs were rehearsed, performed, and recorded collectively; they’re chock-full of classic West African highlife, mutant post-punk, Afrobeat, electronic sounds, and breathtaking 21st century soul.
Opener “Burning in Lagos” is introduced by…
Remastered by Atsushi Izumi.
Regis‘ early music will always loom large in techno. His searing records on Downwards, the label he started with Female, helped define what became known as the Birmingham Sound. As a member of Sandwell District, he’s partly responsible for the sleek and spacey style that prevailed in techno clubs in the ’00s.
Influential as those sounds were, though, his music from the last decade feels closer to his personal essence as an artist. Manbait, a collection of remixes from 2010 to 2015, teased out the lifelong love of post-punk and industrial that had always set him apart. Hidden in This Is the Light That You Missed carries on along the same path, delivering nine cuts of elegantly reduced…
The expanded edition features the original 9 tracks alongside 4 brand-new songs recorded with producer John Congleton and 2 raw demos.
In the process of burgeoning Chicago duo Friko (singer/songwriter/guitarist Niko Kapetan and drummer Bailey Minzenberger) playing out in support of their electric debut LP — including a 2025 tour with the Flaming Lips and Modest Mouse — they added guitarist Korgan Robb and bassist David Fuller to their official lineup. This four-piece version of Friko then headed to Los Angeles to record their sophomore album with Grammy-winning producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Sleater-Kinney, Mogwai). While the band had been very hands-on in all aspects of preparing their debut, including co-producing,…
…The album has been newly remastered and cut directly from the analog master tapes.
It starts with a crackle of feedback shooting from speaker to speaker and a voice intoning, “Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time, for y’all have knocked her up” and talking about rising “above it all or drown in my own sh*t.” This could only have been utterly bizarre back in 1971 and it’s no less so decades later; though the Mothership was well on its way already, Maggot Brain really helped it take off. The instrumental title track is the key reason to listen, specifically for Eddie Hazel’s lengthy, mind-melting solo. George Clinton famously told Hazel to play “like your momma had just died,” and the resulting evocation of melancholy and sorrow doesn’t merely rival…
Fans of blue-eyed soulman Eli ‘Paperboy’ Reed have enjoyed plenty of passionate, often searing music from the singer over the past 20 years.
But even though he released some terrific albums recently, they have been rearrangements of others’ songs.
A side road of an entire set of Merle Haggard tunes done in an R&B style, and another of classic soul covers — 2023s wonderful Hits and Misses — tided listeners over. But it has been seven years since Reed’s last batch of originals.
That musical drought ends with Getting There. Not only does the singer remain in typically stunning form vocally, but he pens eleven new gems, adding two obscure covers few will recognize.
Better yet, he joins with 84-year-old icon…
For over 20 years now, Pokey LaFarge has been delivering his version of retro-Americana. That journey continues with Rent Money, a collection of eleven tracks preoccupied with the almighty dollar. LaFarge follows up the more expansive Rhumba Country with this slightly scaled-back effort. Once again working with producer Elliot Bergman (Wild Belle, LA LOM, Natalie Bergman), LaFarge’s sound incorporates light blues, jazz, easy reggae, folk, country, and rock and roll, all in a minimalist manner. While LaFarge’s music may look back to the mid-20th century, his lyrics address modern monetary worries and timeless love.
The album opens with a shuffling tune titled “The Thing,” displaying sweet backing vocals from Addie Hamilton, who pops up a few times…
Musical Instrument Digital Interface (aka MIDI) has such a pervasive presence in the musical landscape that it’s easy to take it for granted. Yet, when it first appeared in the early 1980s, the standard felt miraculous. Back when technology was more meaningful, MIDI’s ability to bridge physical and digital domains meant that devices like synthesizers and keyboards were suddenly able to talk both to each other and to computer programs. The protocol has countless applications today, many of them purely software-based, but this particular facet remains its most fascinating, even serving as a core aesthetic principle for acts like Berlin’s Gamut Inc.
Since the early 2010s, Aggregate Festival founders Marion Wörle and Maciej Śledziecki…
In its opening moments, Blasé Saint seems easy to pigeonhole. “Lifelover” begins with the muted thump of a kick drum, a migrating flock of reversed percussion hits, and a keyboard line that sounds like an Angelo Badalamenti DX7 patch poached from some nerdy producer subreddit. Its palette, swaddled in an ASMR-ready mixture of cassette hiss and field recordings, gives “regulation dub techno.” But before you can get too comfortable, the song pulls you into its undertow; five minutes later, it spits you out in a wholly new place. Atonal loops bloom and fold into themselves, while the drums and synth, repeating on an infinite cycle, get subsumed by gigantic bass frequencies. It’s intense and impressive, dumping a familiar bag of tricks onto the table and rearranging…
Ezra Collective have a talent that’s rarely found in jazz music, the ability to sound and feel like far more than session musicians put in a room to play music. The London born quintet have had this cohesive, tight-knit energy since their debut EP Chapter 7 in 2016, and it’s easy to hear that their connection has a history that reaches long before that. The words accessible and jazz don’t really go together, but as a young, relatable, current troupe of musicians, Ezra Collective have taken Afro-jazz to the mainstream, and with Here Because of Hope, they’re finally telling it’s story.
Here Because of Hope is split into three sections, marked by poems read by Letitia Wright, taking us not only on a journey through genres, but a literal, geographical journey of jazz.
…The second disc introduces 3 brand-new studio recordings from the band — their first newly minted studio material in over two decades — including a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on the Wire” and Melissa Etheridge’s “Stronger Than Me”. The bonus collection is rounded out by a selection of live performances dating from both their original 1970s touring era and recent 2025 concerts.
The reason that The Roaring Silence became Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s best-selling album may have been because of both Bruce Springsteen-penned singles, but its instrumental makeup, by way of Mann’s keyboard manipulation coupled with Chris Thompson’s chiseled singing, had just as much of an affect. “Blinded By the Light” and “Spirit in the Night” gave the band hits…
Iridescent jangle nirvana. Visceral punk energy. Mournful folk-accented vocalese. Stinging oaths of love and hate, with occasional chipmunk harmonies. The third Tubs album contains this and more, to the delight of all who enjoyed the first two Tubs albums for the abundance of said qualities. One of its 12 songs, however, breaks new ground. Opening with a groovily offbeat drum pattern, ‘Do Yourself a Favor’ bops onto the dancefloor amid frantic guitar downstrokes and an incessant keyboard riff deserving of its own hand-jive routine. This is actually a Prince song, albeit one with complex provenance and never released in his lifetime. The Tubs infuse it with their Celtic-tinged shimmer, while the lyric could almost be one of Tubs songwriter Owen Williams’…