James Krivchenia is a multifaceted artist who, whether you realize it or not, has made his way onto your playlist at some point.
From his session work with pop sensations like Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, to drumming and producing for Grammy-nominated folk titans Big Thief, Krivchenia has his hands in many pots, none of which can prepare you for his phenomenally complex solo material.
On Performing Belief, his daring, abstract solo LP that shimmers and pulses with electronic blips, atmospheric field recordings, and raw percussion prowess.
The spiritually fulfilling and oddly danceable eight song LP is a labor of love dedicated to the artist’s tirelessly free approach to dance music.
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“The world has grown so accustomed to being apathetic,” Norwegian alt-pop sensation AURORA told NME about the thought-process behind her fifth album, a record that asks: What Happened to the Heart? Good news is scarce as we find ourselves in a seemingly constant doom spiral. The answer, as AURORA seeks to find, is within you. That lump beating in your chest that gives you life and pumps out the love that pulls you to others – we just need something dramatic to remind us. “Something needs to break apart,” she continued. “The least we can do is just keep being in touch with each other and ourselves.”
What better way to connect than through bangers? “We’re good people and we both deserve peace,” she sings on the ecstatic…
Just when you think you know what you’re going to get from Dope Lemon, here comes Golden Wolf. Less than a year after the last Angus & Julia Stone album and less than two since Kimosabè, Angus is back at it, delivering yet another solid record.
…Golden Wolf marks a step away from Stone’s youth, instead exploring what lies ahead. With Dope Lemon’s sound being heavily influenced by classic rock as well a reflective state of where Stone is at that particular point of his life, this new album invites its listeners to enjoy the journey of life with that familiar groovy, psychedelic sound, bringing you the perfect summer feels album, that just keeps getting better with every listen.
The almost Fontaines D.C.-esque opener “John Belushi” is a great way to kick off the album.
On the follow-up to 2020’s Thunderclouds, indie cult hero Louis Philippe and his latter-day collaborators the Night Mail create an impeccable pop bouquet, infused with gentle melancholy and the quiet wisdom of time’s passage. Philippe is one of those rare artists whose music felt distinctly grown-up and sophisticated, even in the earliest part of his career. His references were hip and often outside of the pop/rock mainstream — jazz, bossa nova, classical, French chanson.
Throughout his multi-decade career, he has remained something of a musical magpie, utilizing the choicest bits from all genres to decorate his intricate, layered pop songs. With its graceful chamber pop arrangements, lush vocals, and clever chord sequences, The Road to the Sea…
Mountain Climer is the alias of Indiana native singer-songwriter Jeremy Climer. Before You Turn Out the Lights moves beyond Climer’s pop punk beginnings by adding a laid-back layer of country and roots rock. Its first two tracks, ‘American Oak’ and ‘Not Friends Anymore,’ trilling mandolins, slide guitars, dancing piano lines and strings introduce an amiable country-folk vibe. But things quickly take a darker, rockier turn with the next song, ‘From a Bedroom in Denver,’ which sounds like a spooky electric version of Springsteen’s ‘State Trooper’ from his Nebraska album. A lone sorrowful violin and funky pulsing bass set the stage for the brooding chill of ‘Cut Enough Wood,’ a cautionary tale of a rural older couple realising too late that they may not survive the oncoming…
Kassi Valazza opens ‘Roll On’, a meditative country -tinged ballad from her third album, with a stark realisation: “I’ve made up my mind, I feel like I do”, she asserts over a slow-motion two-step rhythm and thick brushstrokes of pedal steel and fiddle. “And if I feel like I do, I’ll try moving on”.
Her voice is a high, sharp lilt that brings to mind Joan Baez or Carolyn Hester or other folk singers from the ’60s and ’70s, with a gentle vibrato and a gift for windswept phrasing. She sings like the breeze is scattering her syllables like leaves. “Roll On” is a break-up song – with a lover perhaps, but more likely with a city – but she instills the song not with resentment or sadness, but a precarious excitement for a new beginning.
From Newman Street is an album full of…
In 2023, at age 73, film director Sally Potter released Pink Bikini, her singer/songwriter debut album. Its songs revolved around her growing up a young female activist and rebel in London during the 1960s. Potter is well known for composing and recording her own film scores — Orlando, The Tango Lesson, The Roads Not Taken among them — and her musical pedigree dates to the 1970s with Lindsay Cooper’s various groups including the Feminist Improvising Group.
Anatomy, from Bella Union, is a song cycle that charts “the passionate love, destructive human behaviours, spiritual longings, physical dependencies and rampant exploitation that make up our turbulent love affair with the planet we inhabit.” She enlisted Marta Salogni as…
Scott Morgan, the Vancouver electronic music artist who works under the name loscil, leads a quiet life; the kind of patient, dedicated figure who desires neither cultural omnipresence nor promotional shortcuts, but rather a respectable long game played on fields that tend toward the timeless: graceful ambience, chamber drone, dub-inflected electronics. And while there’s plenty of change across his catalogue, Morgan’s thumbprint has remained distinct.
You can usually tell a loscil production through several compositional and production tics: the thickness of the textures; deft layering and arrangement that affords each sound its own presence in the field; juxtaposition that never feels awkward or ungainly; careful balance of…
You can see why Model/Actriz’s 2023 debut album Dogsbody attracted a lot of approving critical attention. In an era when rock music largely leans towards familiarity – where originality has essentially come to mean rearranging recognisable sounds from the past in a relatively fresh way – here was a band who genuinely didn’t seem to sound much like anyone else.
The Brooklyn quartet had released a handful of noisy singles pre-Covid, which attracted vague comparisons to the notoriously challenging clangour of the late ’70s no wave movement or the frenetic dance-punk of Liars, an outlier band on the far left field of the early ’00s New York scene that gave the world the Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But on Dogsbody they honed…
With Gumshoe, Samantha Crain overcomes her tendency to self-isolate. Crain’s signature blend of folk, blues, and rock has appeared on Reservation Dogs and Lily Gladstone’s film Fancy Dance.
A member of the Choctaw nation, Crain used Gumshoe as an opportunity to take on their motto “Together we’re more.” Gumshoe feels more fluid and celebratory than Crain’s work has in some time, as she invited her band to collaborate more in the process.
The album kicks off with “Dragonfly,” a retro rocker with a flittering, angular guitar line that will catch your ears immediately. The rev-up contrasts what was with what’s to come: balancing Crain’s fierce independence with the human need to build connection with others.
Electric Junk: Deutsche Rock, Psych and Kosmische 1970-1978 is Cherry Red’s deep dive into the German underground, mainly focusing on rock music but also delving into spacy, abstract electronic sounds. The liner notes make a point to immediately disavow the K word, though it makes the set’s title slightly misleading, as Deutschrock is actually a much more mainstream, blue-collar form of German rock music than the experimental styles lumped together as Krautrock.
The compilers intentionally avoided Can and Kraftwerk, instead shining light on a lot of more obscure acts, yet also making the case that Faust should be regarded as a pop band. The release doesn’t shy away from including lengthy jams, with a righteous Guru Guru cut starting things…
After joining the Fantasy Records roster in 2023, Lucius released the single “Stranger Danger” as a preview of their fourth studio album, but the following year, the seductive indie pop outfit instead delivered a re-recording of their debut LP, 2013’s Wildewoman (with a new duet with Brandi Carlile added to sweeten the pot). It turns out that the two releases, much like the band’s tandem lead vocalists, are complementary.
Following divergences into more stylized ’80s pop, new wave, dance-pop, and more over the years, the expected album, titled simply Lucius, finds them looking back across the intervening years with a more direct indie pop reminiscent of their early material. It’s a poignant set of earnest songs focused on the acclaimed singers’ voices…
Over its crisp 32 minutes and nine songs, Altogether Stranger embraces electropop, lo-fi terrain and gothic solo contemplation. By deconstructing modern R&B, the upbeat “Come on” is as close as it gets to pop’s mainstream. The unifying factors are Lael Neale’s way with a tune – she writes a memorable song – and her penetrating yet translucent voice.
The Virginia-born, now Los Angeles-resident Neale’s third album is firmly in the art pop bag. Her main instrument is the electronic Suzuki Omnichord, which can employ pre-set rhythms, be played with buttons and strummed via a touch-sensitive plate. Effectively, it’s a rhythm-assisted analogue of an autoharp. Despite this, Altogether Stranger is not a folk-slanted album.
With her previous album, the elegant and breezy Safe to Run (2023), Esther Rose completed a string of four albums that explored affection, regret, and heartbreak with a tuneful retro-country that welcomed in fans of pure singer/songwriter fare. After recording that album, Rose considered quitting music, relocated from New Orleans to Santa Fe, quit drinking, and then started getting somewhere with therapy. (The working title for the follow-up was The Therapy LP.) When she decided she wanted to keep making music after all, she called on Ross Farbe, producer of her third and fourth albums, and headed to Nashville for live-to-tape sessions with a set of songs that were more open and confrontational in nature. In line with this new…
In 1972 black people rarely featured in the country’s white-owned official newspapers, unless, perhaps, they were a dead “terrorist”. However, Dr Footswitch’s performance prompted The Rhodesia Herald to print the picture of their guitar player, Manu Kambani, on the front page along with the screaming sentence “Jimi Hendrix is dead but Manu is alive”. With his ability to mimic the mesmerising antics of Jimi Hendrix Manu had impressed everybody and the editor of the paper couldn’t resist printing the story. Heavy criticism from conservative whites followed, accusing the Herald of “lowering the standards.” But the coverage turned Manu into an emblematic figure in Harare, one of Salisbury’s oldest townships, and would influence many youngsters…
The Wee Small Hours feature B-sides, covers, and previously unreleased songs from the New Jersey band’s 14-year tenure with Domino. It includes also Real Estate’s renditions of Television’s “Days,” the Nerves’ “Paper Dolls,” and the Strokes’ “Barely Legal.”
“This is something we’ve talked about doing for a while now,” Real Estate frontman Martin Courtney said in a press statement. “The title comes from the lyrics to an unreleased song we recorded during the Atlas sessions at Wilco’s loft in Chicago back in 2013, which in turn references a great Frank Sinatra record. This feels to us like a worthy addition to the catalog and we hope you all love it.” Real Estate released their self-titled debut via Woodsist in 2009. They joined Domino in 2011…
The Scandinavian project Arcanum brings together four artists all well-known to followers of music at ECM: Arve Henriksen, Trygve Seim, Anders Jormin and Markku Ounaskari. They’ve played together in many permutations over the years, but this is their first album as a quartet. Already hailed as a “Nordic supergroup” in some quarters, the designation hardly conveys the thoughtful, reflective quality of the improvising and the sensitivity of the interaction here, whether playing music composed in real time or taking a written theme to new places.
Ounaksari, Jormin and Seim were all working with folksinger and kantele player Sinikka Langeland when the idea of a new band was first raised: “We’d often play as a trio during soundchecks…
Even today, Japan remains a thriving capital of recorded music – and, in particular, physical media. In the 1970s, it wasn’t uncommon for top-tier American artists, from Andy Williams to The Supremes, to record live albums exclusively for the Japanese market. Among those artists was Yusuf, a.k.a. Cat Stevens, whose 1974’s Saturnight: Live from Tokyo was the singer-songwriter’s first concert LP. Now, following its reissue last November as part of Record Store Day’s Black Friday event, Saturnight is coming to wide-release vinyl, CD, and digital/streaming on May 2 from UMe and Cat-o-Log Records.
Recorded at Nakano’s Sun Plaza Hall on June 22, 1974, the album chronicled Stevens’ Bamboozle World Tour.
