Modernism functions as both a companion piece to Chris Stamey’s 2025 LP Anything Is Possible and a love letter to the wide spectrum of crafted pop hooks and freeform rock that saturated AM/FM radio frequencies in the ’60s and early ’70s. Working out of his Modern Recording studio in Chapel Hill, N.C., the dB’s cofounder and onetime Alex Chilton collaborator revisits classics by the Beatles, the Kinks, Sly and The Family Stone, the Left Banke and others, also throwing in a few of his own songs.
Modernism’s formidable guest list includes Big Star’s Jody Stephens, Wilco’s Pat Sansone, members of the dB’s, Brian Wilson alumni Probyn Gregory and Nelson Bragg, the Uptown Horns, drummer Jon Wurster (Mountain Goats,…
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In 2019, Gilles Peterson asked London-based jazz drummer/producer Jake Long to assemble a band to back American saxophonist Gary Bartz at the first We Out Here Festival. He chose Maisha, his forward-thinking electric jazz and improv group. Following the wildly successful show, the parties booked a recording studio to deliver the raw, darkly vibrant Night Dreamer Direct-to-Disc Sessions. Long’s 2020s project is Your Brother’s Keeper. It consists of himself on drums with Maisha veterans Ali MacSween on piano, electronics, and modular EFX, trumpeter Axel Kaner-Lidstrom, double bassist Twm Dylan, percussionist Tim Doyle and top-flight saxophonist Chelsea Carmichael. While collective interplay and improvisation are central tenets in this record’s purpose, it’s not…
Belladonna Nocturne is intended as a thematic sequel to Belladonna, Daniel Lanois’ moody, evocative album of ambient and dub instrumentals from 2005. While it maintains a similar feel and features some of the same personnel, it sounds like a venture into new terrain right from the start. “Cap Negre” is a short intro piece containing sporadic rhythms and heavily detailed yet spacious mixing, leading into the jazzy abstract drift of “At the Foot of the Skyway Bridge.” Slightly haunting yet cool-headed and relaxed, the music paints an intoxicating nighttime scene. “Inside the Walls of Puebla” is more rustic, with sturdy, knocking drums and a Latin flair to the layered acoustic guitars. The deeply resonant piano piece “Snow Lake” seems far too texturally treated to label…
The album art that Max Allison designs for Hausu Mountain, the way-out-there experimental label that he co-founded with Doug Kaplan, often look like the world maps that led players through late-’90s video games: bright, pixelated representations of forests, mountains, ancient ruins and futuristic cities. Zoom in for a closer look, though, and it’s impossible to tell how your digital avatar would make it across these fractured landscapes. On the cover of Juckport, the latest from Allison’s solo project Mukqs, an S-shaped waterway leads to a pool shaded by a single drooping tree. But this oasis is surrounded by a nightmare jumble of tilted buildings, rampant overgrowth, and impossible geometry.
The image serves as a succinct summary of…
Lots of international superstar DJs end up making cosmic and exploratory records when they tire of – as the late Andrew Weatherall, albeit with tongue firmly in cheek, put it – “that ghastly oompty-boompty music.” Lots of them do quite well at it, too. But they are just daytrippers in the galactic expanse compared to Detroit hero Jeff Mills who is not only still bashing out the brain-jellifying techno to vast crowds week-in-week-out well over 40 years into his DJ career, but has been making out-there sounds for imagined futures in performances, collaborations and recordings for very nearly as long.
Back when Mills was part of Underground Resistance in the early ’90s, releases would regularly come with gnomic statements or…
Once written off, the ’00s indie movement has proved to be remarkably enduring. Just look at Hard-Fi – the band took time out after 2011 album Killer Sounds, but have rebounded in fine style. Last summer saw some of their biggest headline shows to date, while a 20th anniversary (when did we get so old?) re-issue of debut album Stars of CCTV stormed the charts.
New album Sweating Someome Else’s Fever is their first in 15 years, and it leans in to their live prowess. Each song feels tailor made for those rousing performances, the crisp production aimed at presenting the work in a natural, high-energy way.
‘They Ain’t Your Friends’ is a storming introduction, before Mike Kalle and Bajo Del Sol…
This three-disc package from Edsel combines Labi Siffre’s self-titled debut (1970) and The Singer and the Song (1971) with a disc of additional contemporaneous material. At the time of the set’s release, the still-active British singer/songwriter was in the midst of a commercial upswing with film, television, and ad placements, as well as social media, introducing his underexposed and underappreciated early work to a new generation of listeners. (All of this occurring two decades after Siffre’s songs were sampled for tracks by Jay-Z, Eminem, and Kanye West, among others.) Edsel originally expanded and reissued these two albums separately in 2015, and in 2020 made the discs part of the comprehensive nine-disc box My Song. For the box, two post-1971 B-sides…
Four decades after their early-80’s heyday when “Love Plus One” made them unlikely, fresh-faced pop stars, Haircut One Hundred return with an album that has all the zip and zest one could possibly hope for. Boxing the Compass finds the reconstituted group dishing out the same joyous mix of jangling guitar pop and slick horn-driven funk that made their sound unique back in the day, sounding like not a minute has passed since their acrimonious split. Front man Nick Heyward has written a fine batch of songs that lean hard into nostalgia, but never sound out of date. The record is divided almost equally between up-tempo, funk workouts that feature the guitars Chic-ing away like mad, the horns blowing up a storm, and the rhythm section locked into a serious groove.
If it’s nearly impossible to define jazz, Miles Davis, perhaps inadvertently, gave it a shot in 1956. The context was mundane: His band was fulfilling Davis’ obligations to Prestige, recording several sides’ worth of music that the indie would release mostly over four albums — Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’, and Steamin’ — while the trumpeter moved on to a bigger deal and wider audience at Columbia. Those recordings, plus another session featuring Sonny Rollins in John Coltrane’s place on saxophone, are chronicled in a new box set from Craft recordings, assembled to celebrate Davis’ centennial.
In the course of those two tossed-off sessions, Davis and his all-star quintet distilled everything that came before them and much…
Any discussion about Datura4 will focus on its frontman/founder Dom Mariani.
Although not a world-renowned, or even familiar, name to all but the most dedicated rock fan, Mariani is an award-winning icon of the Australian roots music scene. He has led, or been involved with, a dizzying array of bands over a career extending back to the early ’80s.
Those familiar with the sounds from down under may recognize groups such as The Stems, The Someloves, DM3, The Stonefish, The Summer Suns… and there are more. Mariani has been connected with them all, some as frontman, others as a hired hand for a while or tours. There is a full Wikipedia page dedicated to his eventful, colorful career for those who want to learn more.
Swim Deep’s evolution has been fascinating to watch. Since forming in 2011, the British indie band have zigged and zagged through different shades of alternative music, taking in everything from the dreamy indie-pop of 2013 debut Where the Heaven Are We and the synth-led psych wigout of follow-up ‘Mothers’, to third album Emerald Classics’ ‘90s dance-pop leaning sounds. Another left turn landed in 2024, with There’s a Big Star Outside – rich, warm, introspective alt-rock that twinkled and swelled.
Two years on from that last record, Swim Deep – frontman Austin “Ozzy” Williams, keyboardist James Balmont, bassist Cavan McCarthy, guitarist JJ Buchanan and drummer Thomas Fiquet – are breaking the habit of a lifetime.
Daniel Monkman’s third album as Zoon, Happy Thought School, addresses similar themes as the project’s previous releases, from the racial prejudice the artist faced as an Indigenous student to their struggle with addiction. The songs blend the artist’s “moccasin-gaze” style with elements of 2000s-era pop and early-2010s indie rock, and it includes collaborations with Chris Chu, who attempted similar genre fusions with his groups the Morning Benders and POP ETC. The album’s title refers to the school Monkman attended, where they were one of the only Indigenous students, and were subject to racist discrimination from classmates as well as teachers. The traumatic experiences at school led Monkman to seek refuge by playing music, and to cope with pain…
Americana artist Jenny Reynolds understands what it is like to have too much time on one’s hands yet not enough time to get the things that really need to be done. She will sit aimlessly and listen to the rain on one cut, then bemoan having to wait for the next. That situation resembles what often goes on in our own lives. The particulars may be different, but the paradoxical psychic pain is the same. We want to be able to be still and simultaneously keep on moving, which causes anxiety. Reynold’s lyrics wryly address our existential challenges with a nod to love as the redeemer.
The 11 story songs on Willow & Stone keep things simple. It is mostly with Reynold’s on acoustic guitar (sometimes electric), accompanied by small combos of instrumentalists on…
If every picture tells a story, then perhaps the album cover for The Hanging Stars‘ latest release, Just a Day, is perhaps something of a statement of intent because it features a simple photo of the four current band members standing against a dusty cornflower blue backdrop.
A line-up change at the end of 2024 resulted in a more stripped down version of the band with a quartet of Richard Olson (vocals and guitar), Patrick Ralla (guitar), Paul Milne (bass) and Paulie Cobra (drums) – this being his last recording before a prolonged sabbatical, his live replacement for live tours being Charlie Salvidge who has played previously with the bands TOY, Proper Ornaments, and Great Silkie.
Their sixth proper release in ten years – their…
Indie rock outfit Office Dog came out of the gate with a rare sense of self-assurance and individuality. While their music typically leans toward the downtrodden, exploring loneliness and loss, the lo-fi mosaics they craft on their releases reflect confidence in a sound they can call their own. Finding this sense of singularity so early in their career made them an immediate standout in a burgeoning scene, with their place as rising stars in the genre cemented by releases like their debut LP, Spiel, and the short yet potent, texture-driven Doggerland. While this uniqueness is refreshing, it raises the question all bands like Office Dog face: Do they stick to the winning formula they quickly cultivated, or do they lean on the daring and dive deeper into their distinctiveness,…
Disc 1 features a brand new (2026) stereo remix of the album by Michael Hunter. Discs 2 and 3 feature a previously unreleased recording of the band’s performance at Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London on the 20th November 1999. Disc 4 contains jam sessions and early versions of tracks.
…Recorded at their own studio, The Racket Club, between December 1998 and August 1999, the album’s zeigeisty title reflected Marillion’s embrace of the internet as a means of communicating directly with their fans, leading to early forays into crowdfunding. The band – at this point Steve Hogarth (vocals, piano, percussion), Steve Rothery (guitar), Mark Kelly (keyboards), Pete Trewavas (bass, guitar, backing vocals) and Ian Mosley – were credited on production,…
Few second acts in American life have been as fun to experience as that of Swamp Dogg, the bluesman turned self-proclaimed king of 1970s sleaze-and-skeeze satirical country R&B who, in 2018, released Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Poliça’s Ryan Olson as producers. Since then, the smooth, salty songwriter worked with Vernon and the lit-folksy likes of the late John Prine and Jenny Lewis on albums such as 2020’s Sorry You Couldn’t Make It and 2022’s I Need a Job…So I Can Buy More Auto-Tune, with Lewis also winning a place on Dogg’s latest album, Swamp Dogg Contemplates the Afterlife, as the maestro covers her eerily delicate “Acid Tongue” as something roughly soulful, brass-and-organ grinding, and salvation-filled.
Feebles, Fables and Ferns captures a rare duo session between guitarist Mick Goodrick and pianist Fred Hersch. Recorded in August 1988 at Hersch’s studio in New York, the album provides an intimate display of the superbly matched improvisational skills of two musicians in full flight.
During his career, Goodrick perfected the art of avoiding the spotlight, even when collaborating with artists such as John Surman, Charlie Haden and Gary Burton. He was not prolific as a composer or recording artist, preferring to work behind the scenes, often in educational roles. Yet his innovative approach to improvisation proved influential, with many prominent musicians, among them Julian Lage and Pat Metheny, acknowledging his impact.
East Two + 7 comprises previously unreleased tracks from one of Sun Ra’s most productive periods: 1972-73. Those two hectic years saw Sun Ra recording numerous albums, staging concerts, teaching at Berkeley, acting in and composing the score for a full-length movie, embarking on a multi-album (though ill-fated) major label deal, and touring the U.S. and Europe.
The title track, “East Two,” is one of two pieces on this album originating at a two-day October 1972 session at Chicago’s Streeterville Studios. That workshop produced two entire albums: Ra’s major label debut, Space Is the Place (issued on Blue Thumb — and not to be confused with the film and soundtrack of the same title), and Discipline 27-II (released on Ra’s own Saturn imprint).
…featuring 8 new tracks & reworks.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Rialto’s greatest ambition was to obtain immortality as the answer to a pub quiz question, that being: which band had the longest period between second and third albums? In the case of this band, who fizzled to a couple of minor hits only at the very end of the Britpop era, it’s been 24 years. Nearly a quarter of a century is a long time to be away, only then to be coming back.
Contemporaries Pulp are also releasing a new album after an uncannily similar time between releases, but Jarvis Cocker and co have sporadically toured in between. Rialto have not. Will anyone remember them? Do they start from scratch? And, perhaps most pertinently, why now?