Stash, the second album from BCMC — the Chicago guitar-and-keys duo of Bill MacKay and Cooper Crain — pulls a range of styles from their minimalist set-up across eight tracks.
It arrives on Drag City and is the follow-up to 2023’s Foreign Smokes. The album was preceded by two early singles, ”Kaleidosmoke’ and ‘Tête-à-Tête’. Although Stash certainly feels related to that debut, the music here is more excitable, with the musicians happy to explore dynamically within a song.
Take ‘Badland Rag’, one of two seven-minute-plus tracks: the music starts as a future western soundtrack crossed with mariachi styles; there’s a distinctly broad and cinematic feel to the sound, with Bill’s guitar veering from…
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On her previous album, Tasha was a rush of color in motion. The Chicago songwriter was fast approaching the end of a video game level and the inevitable change of map, power-ups, and co-players. She spoke then of her Saturn return — a stage of meteoric change you go through in your late twenties, when everything you know about yourself is reframed. She sang to old friends — sharing beach wine with Nina; eulogizing her late collaborator Eric Littmann — but also looked forward, asking the world: What’s next? She called the album All This and So Much More. She knew what was coming — her fourth full-length, You Are Spring!, arrives at the So Much More part.
First things first, Tasha left her native Chicago for an even bigger world — New York,…
A decade in the making, Public Luxury is an unashamedly political exercise that never strays into preaching to the converted.
Delivered mostly in Spanish, it’s a blast of heat and light in dark times. Imagine early Pixies but they’re only playing Isla de Encanta and Kim isn’t letting Black Francis near the mic. And it’s not all screams and shouts; on tracks such as ‘Yellow Sun’, there’s a melodic softness that reveals a fragility under the surface, something which might even appeal to fans of The Killers.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising that an album that was ten years in the making may have a disjointed edge. That’s a blessing and a curse of course, the stylistic twists and turns offer something fresh with each track but makes for a slightly more…
On Dear God, The Pretty Reckless returns with another introspective album pairing hard-rocking riffs with intricate melodies and powerful vocals. The New York rockers’ fifth studio album gives equal time to soft, contemplative moments and rock aggression.
The Pretty Reckless’s biggest weakness has always been an overreliance on generic chord progressions, especially in the choruses. That’s still a problem at times on Dear God, most notably on the milquetoast power ballad “About You.” Their biggest strength is the combination of Taylor Momsen’s smoky, soulful voice and Ben Phillips’s hard rock riffs.
On the 2014 album Going to Hell, Momsen sang about judgment and sins that would lead to…
Yes, the new Chanel Beads record is called Your Day Will Come (2026), which is the exact same title as the project’s previous LP, Your Day Will Come (2024). As a press release notes, the repetition is about challenging record industry norms, but it’s also a way of evoking “the duel between certainty and doubt” that mastermind Shane Lavers wrestled with during the record’s creation.
Or, to put that last part more plainly, the difference is a matter of intonation: “I’m Ron Burgundy?” versus “I’m Ron Burgundy.” So, which punctuation is Your Day Will Come (2026)?
Like its predecessor, the new album was recorded in Lavers’ small Brooklyn studio with the help of his frequent group of collaborators including singer Maya McGrory, violinist Zachary Paul…
Each American Aquarium album is best viewed as a slice of BJ Barham’s life. The frontman writes in the moment, and his music is a distillation of the world as he sees it, and the life he has carved for himself along with his wife, Rachael, and their 8-year-old-daughter, Pearl, in the increasingly-suburbanized Wendell, NC, a half hour east of Raleigh. In the two years since the last Aquarium record, as he wrote and recorded what became New Ways to Lose, Barham has been thriving.
Aquarium’s 12th studio album showcases the band at the top of its game and Barham at the top of his craft as a songwriter. More than a decade into sobriety, and nearly that long into parenthood, Barham has a content life in his midcentury-era home a few blocks from downtown…
Having ceded creative control to numerous collaborators on 2022’s Spell 31 (veteran pop songwriter Eg White; rappers Pa Salieu and Berwyn), Naomi and Lisa-Kaindé Diaz return to first principles for their fourth album.
Written mainly by the sisters themselves, Offering recentres Ibeyi in their own sonic universe: fusing the influences of their Cuban percussionist father and Parisian upbringing, the twins sing in multiple languages, summoning ancient lore over intricate beats, transcendent harmonies and brooding distortion.
Self-sufficiency crops up as a lyrical theme, too: “One thing is for sure, I’m who I was looking for,” goes the refrain of Baba, which matches incantatory vocals with an irresistibly grimy…
There’s some significance to the release of Winter Songs – it’s the first album featuring Steve Swallow as a leader since 2013, and the first one since the passing of Carla Bley, his multi-decade partner in life and music. Considering the folks he’s most associated with – free jazz pioneer Jimmy Giuffre, vibraphone maverick Gary Burton, genre-agnostic guitarist John Scofield, quirky keyboardist Jamie Saft, his artistically unique spouse – fans might be surprised at the vibe on Winter Songs. Joined by saxophonist Chris Cheek, trumpeter Mike Rodriguez, pianist Gil Goldstein, guitarist Steve Cardenas, and drummer Adam Nussbaum, Swallow takes us back in time, when jazz was transitioning from bebop to hard bop in small clubs around New York. Though known for his…
…’Complete B-Sides: 1988-97′ has been remastered from the original analogue tapes and includes an additional six live tracks. The first two – ‘Planet of Sound’ and ‘Tame’ were originally released on the 1991 ‘Alec Empire’ single and were recorded at the band’s 26 July 1991 Brixton Academy gig. The remaining four bonus live tracks – ‘Debaser’, ‘The Holiday Song’. ‘Cactus’ and ‘Nimrod’s Son’ – were first released on the 1989 promo Pixies Live and were recorded on 10 August 1989 at Cabaret Metro, Chicago.
…Originally released on CD in 2001, while the band were almost a decade into a hiatus, Complete B-Sides contained 19 B-sides from the band’s classic 4AD era (1988-1991) and featured beloved Pixies tracks including “Wave of…
Rodney Crowell’s string of 2001’s Houston Kid, 2003’s Fate’s Right Hand, and 2005’s The Outsider, a trilogy of sorts, are as strong as any three consecutive albums in Americana. He attempted to continue this momentum in 2005 by going into the studio with the same band, including Steuart Smith on guitar, and co-producing with Crowell, along with Benmont Tench joining on organ. He was attempting to vary the script somewhat, but was uncomfortable with the results, feeling it was too similar to the trilogy aesthetic. Twenty years later, he found the album in his vaults and felt it was the right time to release it.
So, we have Then Again with a couple of new, updated touches. To these ears, the album is more introspective, arguably more deeply…
The iconic backdrop of California – from the Hollywood hills to its gnarly mountain trails – has always been a particularly evocative source of inspiration when it comes to art, so it’s not all too surprising to learn that Joe Newman, frontman of alt-J, felt so drawn to its confines for his first solo foray. His first venture proper outside of the band since their formation almost 20 years ago now – under the moniker of his former screenname JJerome87 – The Canyon is a bold offering that comes dripping with a sultry California spirit. Opener ‘Mr Alligator’ swaggers to life in a bluesy manner, before ‘Green Velvet’ hazily saunters in, bathed in the kind of enveloping warmth that only Los Angeles could help conjure up. An assembled cast of session musicians and…
If a title’s purpose is to illuminate an album’s themes, then The Ground Above, Beth Orton’s ninth, suggests she’s been buried alive. Listening, too, for the first time, one fears that’s exactly what’s happened. Once that gentle, languid voice ached with a mere crack on “She Cries Your Name”, and that crack, furthermore, let light in. Three decades later, it trembles and breaks on her new record’s earliest notes. Indeed, this title track initially appears so privately visceral one worries about intruding. Her moans and groans are singular, guttural, even primal, as though they’ve discovered a life of their own.
Arguably, however, Orton has rarely sounded more like herself; and deciphering these lines confirms she’s making peace with her demons,…
After their fluke hit “Pepper”, off 1996’s Electric Larryland, Butthole Surfers label, Capitol Records, wanted a follow-up. The band submitted After the Astronaut, but at the eleventh hour (with promotional copies already out), the label killed the album. Then, in 2001, on a new label, a revamped version titled Weird Revolution appeared. It went nowhere, and that was pretty much the end of the Butthole Surfers. Now the original record, shelved years ago, arrives.
While fans have had lo-fi copies for decades, this new release clearly displays what the Surfers were going for in 1998. Gone are the cataclysmic punk freakouts of their early years, and in their place are remedial drum loops and pedestrian synth-laden ambient space outs.
Here comes the science bit, concentrate: all you space nerds out there will be well aware that ‘the Wow! signal’ was of course a narrowband radio signal detected by Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope back in August 1977. So intense was its strength and so mysterious was its frequency that it was chalked up to being from bloody aliens. Astounded astronomer Jerry R. Ehman simply scribbled Wow! on the initial report.
Ever since their gothic sci-fi masterpiece 2001 album Origin of Symmetry, Muse have been largely preoccupied with matters of life up there and who’s really pulling the strings down here. For frontman Matt Bellamy, his obsession with the stars, conspiracy and the great beyond seems to come from an undying need for answers,…
Nowhere Sessions was recorded in a secluded family cabin deep in the heart of Iceland, far from the bustle and roar. According to Snorri Hallgrímsson, the old cabin is “not only a retreat but a place of memory and continuity.”
The album is as much about meaningful solitude as it is about solidarity, although the two are often complementary.
The lead single “I Am Weary, Don’t Let Me Rest” is indicative of the album’s intimacy. The video begins with an image of the composer’s hand poised above the piano before the camera expands to reveal a home filled with musicians, exuding an incredible warmth. The strings ease in like clouds covering the horizon. Soon there is a second pair of hands at the ivories, a statement of…
Every once in a while, a recording surfaces to remind us of the value of unfettered creativity, spontaneity, and experimentalism, Open Space (2026) a model example. Comprising ten improvisations performed by clarinetist Fie Schouten, cellist Vincent Courtois, drummer Sofia Borges, and text reciter Pierre Baux, the piece was inspired by Georges Perec’s 1974 book Espèces d’espaces (“Species of Spaces”). While the parts were collectively generated in the moment, they’re not without some structural foundation as the four created a musical design that follows the chronology of the book. Texts recited by Baux aren’t spun out of thin air but are instead fragments taken from Perec’s original.
The compositions are credited equally to all…
Were the Watchtowers is the final recorded work of the Sadies singer-guitarist Dallas Good, completed before his unexpected passing in February 2022. It’s jointly credited to Good and Richard Reed Parry (of Arcade Fire).
…The 9-song album features guest appearances from Margaret Atwood and Neko Case, while other contributors include Kurt Vile, Yo La Tengo, Jim Jarmusch, John Doe, Jon Spencer, Scott McCaughey and Gary Louris. Closing cut “Not in the World” features the aforementioned fan choir, with more than 500 contributors.
…Parry explained that Were the Watchtowers was written and recorded over the course of a decade, and further explores the “cosmic, psychedelic Americana sounds” heard when Parry…
Five nights later, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band returned to the World’s Most Famous Arena with their fans’ interests piqued. A fantastic performance was anticipated for their New York finale, especially after increasingly stellar showings in Elmont and Brooklyn, and MSG night one in-between, but there was also hope that this second night in the same venue may bring a setlist change or two, as it had in Inglewood’s Kia Forum in early April. That hope would ultimately be in vain as Springsteen and the E Street Band stayed on course with what they’ve been playing since that second night in Inglewood, meaning they eclipsed the five straight identical setlists between April 7th to April 23rd with this sixth successive show of ‘the same’. That’s something that hadn’t…
While the Beatles were whipping up the initial storms of mania in the U.K., bands in America weren’t just sitting around waiting for something to happen. Contrary to popular belief there were a few burgeoning rock & roll scenes cooking along quite nicely in the colonies. On the West Coast, surf music was riding the waves, while on college campuses across the country bands were cranking out a raucous take on rock & roll mixed with R&B in a style later known as frat rock. The early rumblings of garage rock were being heard in small towns and cities too, creating a vibrant sound that even the mighty Beatles couldn’t wipe out. Cherry Red’s 2026 compilation Steppin’ Out: The Roots of Garage Rock 1963-1965 digs into these strands of American music, unearthing…
Whether some genres or sub-genres are supposed to go together or not is often a moot point, and in more cases or not, depends on whether a band or an artist have the ability and inventiveness to be able to make a musical combination that actually works.
Taking that route on their debut album, The Devil You Know, is New York quintet St. Divine. As you sift through the eleven tracks here, you can encounter quite a few things this band likes, garage rock, punk art rock, Americana, and they sneak quite a few things they sneak in, sometimes in a single song.
Such an approach is always a sort of a double-edged sword – it can turn into a chaotic mess, or it could be inspired and inventive…