Following a pair of compilations in 2023 chronicling earlier parts of their storied career, British rockers The Kinks have one more in the chamber to commemorate their 60th anniversary as a group, focusing on a period of transition and finality in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. The Journey Part 3 offer a dozen favorites originally released on Arista Records between 1977 and 1984, including the band’s last worldwide smash, “Come Dancing.” The newly remastered selections – which, in a first for The Journey series, are curated by the band – will be paired with a never-before-released recording of one of the group’s final concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in the summer of 1993.
After a challenging period of conceptual, theatrical creative ambitions but less commercial…
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Nevertheless is a word that Marc Byrd, half of Hammock along with Andrew Thompson, grew accustomed to hearing at funerals in the Deep South. “A loved one is gone. Nevertheless…” The word was meant to convey reflection, recalibration, a pause between considerations, as in Selah.
The duo is no stranger to sorrow and loss, which has informed their music for decades. This makes them well-suited to convey empathy, as they do throughout this recording, dedicated to a friend who lost both a son and a daughter to addiction. “Requiem for Johan” (the son) begins this journey, which is less one toward recovery than to incorporation; the track title “Like a Sadness We Get Used To” reflects this incorporation, as do Byrd’s words, “We limp on,” which might…
Sometimes the title of the album says it all. With Ain’t Rocked in a While, Brent Cobb & The Fixin’s decided to press pause on Cobb’s more singer/songwriter offerings, strap on the electric guitars, and turn the amps up.
Produced by Cobb and Oran Thornton, the players recorded live to tape at The Black Palace in Springfield, MO. Cobb brings his touring band, Len Clark on drums, Matt McDaniel on guitar, and Josh Williams on bass, to a headlining role with the louder offerings. The best of the crackling numbers is the title effort as the fuzzy riffs, head-banging groove, and foot-stomping drums pump up the country twanged ode to AC/DC.
The players then deliver their hearty, loud, but nondescript retro rockers.
Anybody who’s followed Gwenno Saunders’ career since leaving The Pipettes will know to expect the unconventional. In the last decade, she’s released three albums, all sung in either the Welsh or Cornish language. Her solo material is as far removed from the day-glo pop of The Pipettes, instead being dreamlike electronica tackling subjects like loss of culture and regional identity.
Utopia, though, is quite the departure. Saunders’ fourth record sees her singing in English on most (but not all) tracks, and the songs are far more personal than before. There’s a loose theme of looking at Saunders’ formative years, which involved a spell living in Las Vegas, a move to London and the rise and fall of The Pipettes.
As a result, Utopia feels like her most varied…
Nearly a half century after the frantic, drum pummeling, free-associating “Calling All Girls,” Half Japanese’s Jad Fair is still at it, both on his own account and under the now storied Half Japanese name. A pair of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, faux-naive 2025 releases attest to the fact that cynicism has no hold on Fair, even now, and that lots of things still rhyme quite excellently with “heart.”
Adventure is latest of somewhere north of 20 Half Japanese albums. It features a long-standing line-up, whose members have been in place since the late 1980s: Jason Willett on bass, Gilles-Vincent Rieder on drums and percussion, John Sluggett on guitar, piano and bass, and Mick Hobbs, sadly, on guitar for the very last time. He passed away in 2024. Euan Hinshelwood, who also…
György Kurtág’s Játékok, whose title means “games,” are meant to depict the experiments of a child newly exposed to the piano; their structures take off from simple figures in the manner of Debussy’s etudes and range into the unexpected. The series began in the late ’70s and has continued into the 2020s, with Kurtág in his nineties; he supervised this 2025 recording by pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. The pieces have the same basic nature but have expanded somewhat in scope; the earlier ones are mostly less than a minute long. They have been compared to Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, but in addition to the games aspect, the Játékok are mostly autobiographical works, and the ways in which Kurtág combines these two functions are endlessly interesting.
For Sowmya Somanath, music is a borderless realm. Trained in Western and Indian classical singing, the Hindustani-American artist frames ragas with a facade of electronic beats, samples and random sounds. In her world, different traditions coexist innocently and peacefully. This enriching coexistence is manifested in both music and artwork. Possibly alluding to the chivalric romance about Tristan and Isolde, a sword, depicted on the cover is emblematic of connection under pretence of division.
Both visually and sonically, her second full-length as Plume Girl continues the trajectory of Somanath’s previous work, In the End We Begin, originally released in 2023 and scheduled for reissue on the same day as the new record.
Gabriele Poso is an internationally recognized percussionist, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and recording artist from Italy. He has been preaching the gospel of tamburo music since studying it in his teens. The word “tamburo” in Italian simply means “drum.” That said, it is the beating heart of a genre-crossing, percussion-driven musical tradition that reflects Italy, Northern and Western Africa, South America, and the Caribbean. Its presence and influence on four decades of Italian music — 1960s-1990s — can’t be overstated. These 11 tracks offer a kaleidoscope of hard-grooving tamburo style in jazz, library sound, rock, disco, funk, and film and TV soundtracks.
The record opens with an exotica version of Juan Tizol and Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” by…
For nearly a century, leisurely strolling through the Colombian cities of Cartagena and Barranquilla has meant being ready to party on any given corner. Booming from colorful sound systems known as picós, the sticky coastal air buzzes with a dizzying mix of Jamaican soca, Ghanaian highlife, Congolese soukous, Arab disco, and local staples like salsa and champeta.
These mobile discos, usually family-owned and passed down through generations, are synonymous with the neighborhoods where each clandestine party was formalized into a micro-economy. Picós are emblazoned with cheeky names and flashy visual identities, with the entrepreneurial selectors known as picoteros gaining notoriety with “exclusive” record collections procured…
Barney Keen might well be your favourite musician’s favourite musician. He’s worked at some of the top studios in London, and has been cited by an imposing array of top tier songwriters. Barney Keen has worked extensively with Kae Tempest, but along the way he’s also developed his own instincts – his own take on songwriting. Airy, bright, and dominated by spiritually uplifting grooves, debut album Harbinger is a delight, an unexpected knockout first time from a talent who has been slept-on for too long.
With connections to musicians in both Brazil and Portugal, it’s perhaps no surprise that there’s an airy feel to the material on Harbinger. Very much a labour of love, there’s a bossa brightness to his musicality, while he operates with…
Regardless of standing on the political spectrum, there’s no denying that the current state of the world is a dire one, and lately there’s been no shortage of bands willing to call it out – from the trending Kneecap and Bob Vylan to more established acts like Idles or Sleaford Mods. Black Country duo Big Special now follow in their footsteps, their lyrics and themes tackling issues from class warfare and mental health to addiction and working jobs you hate.
This week, they upended expectations by dropping their sophomore album without any of the now standardised build-up — a surprise release that’s no small feat in today’s market-driven music industry. National Average arrives as a sudden punch: part Idles, part Mike Skinner,…
The Fateful Symmetry is the posthumous eighth solo album by the groundbreaking and influential artist Mark Stewart, completed shortly before his passing in April 2023. It is set to be released on July 11, 2025, on Mute, his long-standing label.
Across an illustrious career of pioneering music with The Pop Group, Mark Stewart & The Maffia and as a solo artist, Stewart has produced a seminal body of work, galvanized by the DIY ideals of punk, radical politics, protest movements, theory, philosophy, technology, art and poetry.
With The Fateful Symmetry, Stewart’s abiding legacy as a ‘“revered countercultural musician” (The Guardian) is sustained, with an album as fearless and visionary as his best work.
Testifying to his prolific, unrelenting ingenuity,…
Silken ambience is the name of the game on this set from Icelandic composer Olafur Arnalds and dream-pop singer Talos, aka Eoin French, who tragically died in August last year, aged 36. Arnalds completed the album after his death.
Talos’ high, otherworldly voice is the dominant signature, from the opening title track with its heavy swell of strings at the high points, through to the spare piano and voice passages of “Bedrock”, a slow, melancholy piano ballad bathed in shimmering reverb and a chorus of voices. Talos’ delicate lone voice over Arnalds’ spare piano lines draws you in deeply, immediately and strikingly beautiful in its effects, but sometimes the reverb on the voice, the limpid instrumental settings, the piano polished to a sheen,…
To celebrate their 10th anniversary, Parisian independent imprint Latency – the stellar label that’s responsible for TLF Trio’s ‘Sweet Harmony’, Laurel Halo’s ‘Raw Silk Uncut Wood’ and, more recently, Nídia & Valentina’s excellent ‘Estradas’ – commissioned HTRK, Indonesian duo Tarawangsawelas and London-based multi-instrumentalist Damsel Elysium to write exclusive soundscapes for a special label night at Rome’s historic Villa Medici.
A year later, they followed it with a second chapter featuring music from CS + Kreme, Mabe Fratti, Angel Bat Dawid, Duval Timothy and Kalia Vandever, and now their third installment arrives with a similarly well-curated lineup.
Laraaji’s up first with the masterful 11-minute…
All music is inherently syncretic, traditional and contemporary alike, and it’s impossible (not to mention undesirable) to maintain complete musical purity. If this wasn’t the case, there would be no mystery to the nature of music, and no power. That being said, there can be a thin line between a genuine musical dialogue across borders and treacly garbage.
One path towards engaging with different forms of traditional music in a way that maintains vitality and invention can be found in the world of improvised music. This is, in part, because improvised music always varies heavily based on regional scenes, regardless of nationality – even the AACM and the Black Artists Group sound totally different from one another, even though…
The life of composer Seán Doherty (b. 1987) has developed along two equally critical paths, on one side formal studies that culminated in a PhD in musicology at Trinity College Dublin and his current position as an assistant professor of music at Dublin City University, on the other the sensibility that crystallized through exposure to the Irish fiddle tradition of his Derry hometown.
As Doherty himself acknowledges in introductory notes to this terrific collection of chamber music, he is, “at heart, a fiddle player” whose native tongue is Irish traditional music. Having learned from teachers in both traditional and classical music, it’s only natural for him to express himself through their combination.
Beyond being marked by Doherty’s…
Danish-Argentine guitarist and composer Mark Solborg offers nine aesthetically compelling avant-garde chamber pieces that leave a bold imprint due to their originality. While the written sections are well-considered, the improvisation unfolds confidently from the fabric of each composition, insidiously performed by his Tungemal quartet, featuring Portuguese trumpeter Susana Santos Silva, Danish pianist Simon Toldam, and Norwegian percussionist Ingar Zach.
Emitting melancholic and dark sounds, “Spoke” feels like a meditation on loss and grief. It’s layered with dismal piano chords, lachrymose trumpet lines sculpted with emotional fragility and enchanting effects, and understated guitar coloring. “Southern Swag” thrives on an offbeat…
Pianist Frank Kimbrough‘s untimely passing — on December 30, 2020 — left a void in the world. Nothing can or ever will fill it, but his work and influence sound eternal, resonating and rippling across space and time. Kimbrough still has plenty to show us and teach us about the beauty inherent in the art of pianistic elocution, melodic variation, harmonic depth, human touch and reflective improvisation. And that’s made evident on this previously unreleased solo session.
On July 19, 2010, Kimbrough made himself comfortable behind a Steinway B at his favorite recording studio — Maggie’s Farm, in Buck’s County, Pennsylvania — and engineer Matt Balitsaris rolled tape, capturing that afternoon’s music for posterity. Now, some 15 years…