Described as “a luminous collection of scenes and reckonings”, Love, the 7th and possibly final album from Dexys Midnight Runners if Kevin Rowland is to be believed, continues to display the regained spirit Rowland has shown since 2012’s One Day I’m Going to Soar. If 2023’s The Feminine Divine was all about sex (and without doubt Rowland’s autobiography Bless Me Father was full of it); Love is, well, unsurprisingly, about love.
The Feminine Divine was raw and redemptive, and Love is largely a smiling coda. Broadly working with largely the same set up as the last album, with Sean Read and Mike Timothy (Jim Paterson has three co-writes, also), Love reveals itself gradually. Horns and strings are used sympathetically and sparingly; the attack…
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Arab Strap were full of middle-aged malaise from day one, at least spiritually. Now, 30 years on they’ve grown into the curmudgeons they were always destined to be, but their ninth album is just as funny and insightful as ever, as the grinding minutiae of life’s banality is contrasted with touching messages of hope and contentment.
Many of these songs are more or less an inventory of gripes on a given theme: internet slop, physical decrepitude, the manosphere etc. All backed with varied arrangements, like the no-wave skronk of ‘Dollar Park’, the old-school thrash finale on ‘You You You’ or the industrial jazz-rock bombast of ‘I Get Noise’. It’s a rich musical abyss for Aidan Moffat to shout into.
But while the one-liners and pop culture…
Longtime shoegaze fans and followers surely have certain sound combinations in their minds that they would love to hear, and one such a combination would probably involve My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive with a touch of Lilys to boot. And such a ‘dream’ combination’ might just have been recorded by San Diego’s Sparkler, a duo of Chris and Tron and a revolving set of guests who all seem to love and cherish MBV’s Loveless and Slowdive’s Pygmalion above anything else.
Of course, such adoration can go two ways – turn out to be a second-rate copy of the originals, or an inspired set of sounds that tries to build more where the sources of inspiration left off.
Luckily for Sparkler, Chris, Tron and their guests are able to come with an interesting take…
Two years after debuting on Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label with Mahōgakkō, an over- whelming and fascinating collision of breakneck rhythms and giddy yet tender avant-pop melodies, Hakushi Hasegawa released Honest Feeling Album, another chaotic, boundary-smashing effort that plays by nobody else’s rules. Hasegawa’s music has always mixed tightly arranged live instrumentation with breakbeats and samples, but this album features the newly formed HaHa and the Hairpins, giving the music more of a full band feel, which still blurs the lines between live and programmed. With music as maximalist as Hasegawa’s, it’s only natural that the artist would continually push their music further with each successive release, and there’s simply more of…
Itta and Marqido once performed under the name 10. However, the duo changed their name to TENGGER upon the birth of their son and, soon after, bandmate RAAI. According to the press notes for the group’s latest album SKY, RAAI has begun to “step into his own artistic path,” presumably separate from his parents (10 became TENGGER around 2012, meaning RAAI is a teenager). Still, TENGGER hasn’t changed their name for their new release, perhaps because, again according to the press notes, “[RAAI’s] presence remains part of the project’s fabric,” which, if you’ve ever been the parent of a teenager, makes sense. Regardless of the nature of their son’s involvement, Itta and Marqido remain affected, even transformed, by his existence.
Need an escape from the gloom and doom of global politics? How about a hit of Brazilian world-jazz of the “sal, sol, sul” variety? Ella & The Bossa Beat‘s Amare might be the ticket. For an idea of the ethos, consider a few of the titles: “Mais que um Verão” (More than a Summer), “Areia” (Sand), “Amanhecer” (Dawning), “Summer Rain,” “Amare.” Salt, sun, south, and of course, love…
On their fourth project together, the father-daughter songwriting team of Orlando-based Brazilian singer-pianist Ella Blu and drummer-percussionist Magrus Borges offers a dreamy album of original music recorded in Italy in collaboration with São Paulo-born Milan-based songwriter and singer-guitarist Toco (Tomaz Di Cunto). Blu, who counts Orlando’s…
Barely a month after Brooklyn noise-rockers Parts & Labor made their triumphant return with Set of All Sets, their first album in 15 years, Dan Friel‘s other band, power trio Upper Wilds, continued their planetary series with Mercury. For a group whose music has always been inspired by space and the cosmos since the beginning, this is easily their most human work to date, with lyrics focusing on death and mortality. Skin cancer began to develop on Friel’s face as the group started working on the album, and though the cancer’s removal was easy and painless, the mere presence of something potentially life-threatening had a major impact on him and put a lot of things in perspective, from issues like climate change and capitalism to cemeteries and the afterlife.
In early 2025, experimental trio Black Duck went on a tour of Spain with their Thrill Jockey labelmate, the Copenhagen-based singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Elena Setién. The two acts found common ground through improvisation, and developed a nightly habit of sitting in on each other’s sets. Once the tour wrapped, they decided to continue their collaboration in the studio and met up with Chicago engineer Nick Broste a few months later.
Although its three members — Douglas McCombs (Tortoise, Eleventh Dream Day), Bill MacKay (Ryley Walker, Nathan Bowles), and Charles Rumback (Colorist) — combine decades of experience within the Midwestern indie, jazz, and folk worlds, this joint effort with Setién is only their…
Steered by their co-founder, Will Greenham, musical collective Blind Yeo is a hodgepodge of all-ages misfits from around the UK who found solace in an arts hub called The Cornish Bank.
Onstage, this Falmouth-based crew move about like spinning tops and dress as wizards in colorful capes. They sound a bit like fellow beach town residents The New Eves — if that band’s loose, chant-based noisemaking looked to the laidback experimentation of The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band rather than stern-faced NYC cool.
Their debut album, The Lemoine Point, takes just a few seconds to stutter to life and snap into a Switched On Volume 1-era Stereolab groove complete with blinking arcade-game crossfire.
In the decades leading up to its release there had been loads and more loads of excellent collections of girl group and related music that originated in the U.K., but Strawberry Records’ 2026 collection Really Into Somethin’: Brit Girl Sounds & Styles 1962-1970 is one of the best. It gathers up a few names familiar to semi-casual music fans like Dusty Springfield and Lulu and a handful of artists that medium speed collectors of the style might know and love like P.P. Arnold, Sharon Tandy, Barbara Ruskin, and Julie Driscoll, but most of the three discs are made up of singers and groups that were more or less lost to the sands of time unless you were super devoted to digging up the rarest of the rare. Luckily for those who don’t want to spend hours searching and many…
The Riot Squad only released seven singles on the U.K.’s Pye label between 1965 and 1967. But thanks to the discovery of Joe Meek’s Tea Chest Tapes, the story of the band that might be best known for a short-lived collaboration with David Bowie can now be told in full. I Take It That We’re Through: Anthology 1965-1967 arrives from Cherry Red’s Strawberry imprint, with 3 CDs and 83 tracks (40 of which are previously unreleased and another 14 of which are new to CD).
Ron Ryan (guitar), Graham Bonney (vocals), Bob Evans (saxophone), Mark Stevens (keyboards), Mike Martin (bass), and future member of The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Mitch Mitchell (drums), formed The Riot Squad in late 1964. The group’s lineup was notoriously fluid; the band’s…
Kelley Stoltz is an American songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and DIY innovator whose career stretches back to the late 1990s, when he began self-recording lush, psych‑tinged pop and garage rock in his San Francisco home studio.
…He’s a master craftsman and Beatles-esque sonic architect who never gets lost in the weeds. His songs bounce and groove with garage band light-hearted-ness. And he’s been at it forever, longer, even than Taylor Swift, without any discernable drop in quality. All of which brings us to If You Don’t Know Me, Buy Now. This 19th full-length is as good as anything from his stellar Sub Pop run (Below the Branches, Circular Sounds, To Dreamers). If it’s not quite as stunning as Antique Glow, well, hardly anything is;…
Organ trios aren’t as common as they once were. With the keyboardist handling the bass duties from the Hammond’s bass pedals and a guitarist or tenor saxophonist providing melodic help on top of a grooving drummer, these bands once turned bars into real music halls. Today, bars are alive with the sound of ESPN, alas, perhaps.
This organ trio of guitarist Peter Bernstein, organist Larry Goldings, and drummer Bill Stewart, however, don’t generally play funky blues workouts. Rhombus is a beautifully balanced survey of modern jazz compositions by masters, along with two originals. In fact, these tunes seem somewhat surprising in this instrumentation. Keith Jarrett rarely recorded with a guitarist; Abdullah Ibrahim, Thelonious Monk, and…
In 2024, the year of their 20th anniversary, Stefon Harris & Blackout experienced grief and loss with the sudden death of founding saxophonist, vocoder-assisted singer, and aerophonist (an electronic wind instrument) Casey Benjamin. He was, in addition to a bandmate and creative partner, a close friend whose artistic life was deeply intertwined with Harris’. The space he left was enormous.
Legacy Dances is the band’s unconventional memorial and tribute to his memory and includes Benjamin’s playing on all but one track. Harris’s idea for Blackout has always been centered on the idea of jazz as empathy in action, as a blueprint for empathy’s transformative power.
The finger-popping title-track set opener…
Sam Shepherd studied classical piano before he started making brainy dance music as Floating Points. He still occasionally dips his toe back into the classical world, as when he collaborated with the London Symphony Orchestra and the late jazz legend Pharoah Sanders on the great 2021 album Promises. Now, Floating Points is getting into the ballet business.
…Mere Mortals is Floating Points’s first full-length ballet score. Shepherd, who is known for mesmeric live sets that often combine acoustic and electronic instruments, wrote the work in response to a commission from Tamara Rojo, Artistic Director of San Francisco Ballet.
Inspired by the myth of Pandora and laced with metatextual poetry, Mere Mortals was…
PRAED is an amalgamation of Raed Yassin (electronics, vocals) and Paed Conca (clarinets, bass, samples), from Lebanon and Switzerland respectively, who have worked together as a duo since 2006. Recorded between Beirut and Berlin, they’ve invited a large group of string and percussion players, well suited to the pair’s devotion to incremental layering and massive pulse-states.
The tracks range from 19 minutes down to four – ample time for expansion! Conca stacks up his clarinet parts to make a veritable horn section, while the hard-attack frame and goblet drums attain an abandoned ecstasy. The strings are strong, but sit just below the synths on the equality meter, with underlaid drones…
Really Good Time’s debut album Affirmations is a tale of squashed expectations and failed dreams. Sizzling with punk influences and genre-bending songwriting, Affirmations is the agenda of an angry generation, and an exquisite contribution to the exciting landscape that is the Irish music scene. The Dublin trio, made up of Wastefellow (vocals, guitar), Ado Tornado (drums), and Jacque le Coque (bass), have established themselves as one of the sharpest acts to come out of Ireland, offering a unique combination of powerful riffs, black humor, and explosive live performances that have landed the band on the same stage as Franz Ferdinand, The Murder Capital, and Gurriers.
With this first album, Really Good Time reflect on the communal nihilism and disillusion…
The Rolling Stones have a new album, Foreign Tongues, out, much to their fans’ delight. Audiences have long craved the raw blues-rock sound of Mick Jagger’s vocals, Keith Richards’ slashing riffs, and the band’s pugnacious attitude. Critical reception to the new record has been mixed, but there is ample desire for such unvarnished manly sounds. As evidenced by the reviews, fans of the new Stones record weren’t looking for a return to the courtly baroque pop of “Lady Jane” or “As Tears Go By”. They wanted the loud, aggressive energy of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” or “Tumbling Dice”.
This style is historically categorized as “cock rock” because of its emphasis on masculinity and performative sexuality. Fans of that kind…