Sometimes to find your inner self, you have to take respite from the outside world. That’s what alto saxophonist and bandleader Caroline Davis did when she spent a four-week artist residency in northern Wyoming, where she recorded set of tracks in a cabin there, on the fallows. Fallows is unlike anything Davis has ever done before, stepping mostly outside the jazz genre and her jazz persona to follow a muse that’s looks at art and the world it inhabits on natural, spiritual terms.
A rare record made in Ucross, Wyoming, Fallows takes advantage of the serenity offered there to create music with a mind freed of clutter. Accordingly, it’s an un-self-conscious set of recordings, made without any consideration of how the public might receive it. Davis comes…
Latest Entries »
Ulysses Owens Jr. takes the classic hard bop sound and makes it pop with a youthful urgency on 2026’s Around the World with U. The album, which follows 2024’s New Beat, is the New York drummer and Julliard professor’s second with his Generation Y ensemble; a group who takes direct inspiration from the hard-driving style of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Made up of some former students and up-and-coming players, the group here features alto saxophonist Erena Terakubo, trumpeter Anthony Hervey, pianist Tyler Bullock, and bassist Yasushi Nakamura. Pushed ever forward by Owens’ muscular, hard-swinging grooves, they conjure a robust, live-in-studio sound that crackles with the burn-out intensity of a club gig. It’s a vibe they capture from the start on…
Matinee Acoustic Live at the Prince Albert finds Johnny Moped taking an unexpected turn with an acoustic set that, against all expectations, proves both engaging and highly entertaining. The very idea of a Johnny Moped acoustic performance might raise eyebrows among longtime fans, but the results speak for themselves.
Historically known for their chaotic and unpredictable shows, Johnny Moped have, in recent years, evolved into a far tighter and more dependable live act. That doesn’t mean the band have lost their edge—mistakes still happen, but within the Moped universe, they only add to the charm. What truly drives the performance is the same energy and excitement that has always defined them, and it remains fully intact here.
To many in the know, Brian Foote-who cut his teeth raving in Wisconsin-is as synonymous with Chicago label kranky as the albums they’ve released. Foote has worked alongside co-founder Joel Leoschke as a publicist for the label since 2005. But he’s also a label boss in his own right. Inaugurated in 2012, L.A.’s Peak Oil (run by Foote and Brion Brionson) is a home for the kind of “strange and mysterious” heads-down electronic music that grows in dank basements: ambient-adjacent, breaks-friendly, and with the club never too far from its mind. One of the label’s recent “stars” (insofar as an underground group can attain that status) are Brooklyn ambient trio Purelink, who to date have released two albums of critically acclaimed chilled electronica that feel part of a wider return…
Reverence for the organ trio tradition of 1970s soul jazz remains Parlor Greens’ guiding light on sophomore album Emeralds. The trio was founded when Tim Carman-whose heavy blues rock trio, GA-20, releases music through Colemine’s catch-all subsidiary Karma Chief-told Colemine founder Terry Cole about his aspirations for an organ trio after which Cole called up guitarist Jimmy James and organ player Adam Scone. James did a seven-year stint in the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, while Scone played an integral role in the late ’90s soul revival as a member of The Sugarman 3 and as a session player with Daptone. Not only had James and Scone played in organ trios in the past, but they’d previously collaborated on Brooklyn to Brooklin, the 2022 full-length…
Rogue Wave began almost by accident.
In early 2002, faced with the sort of existential crisis unique to the newly unemployed, Zach Rogue decided to take some time off from his home base of San Francisco. He set off with a one-way ticket to New York in March with the intention of recording one or two songs with a friend, in an effort to exorcise his demons both artistically and personally. He came away with both a new lease on life and an album’s worth of material that would later become Rogue Wave’s stunning debut, Out of the Shadow.
At the end of 2002, while preparing the album for self-release, Zach rounded out the band’s lineup with the addition of Pat Spurgeon (drums, keys, samples, vocals) Sonya Westcott (bass, vocals)…
Paul Carrack is releasing a concert album recorded at Royal Albert Hall in London on Oct. 24, 2024, in celebration of 50 years of his first hit, “How Long,” recorded with Ace in 1974.
For One Night Only (Live in London) comprises two halves with Carrack joined by special guests SWR big band and orchestra playing songs from the album Don’t Wait Too Long and the second half featuring Carrack with his own band playing all his big hits. They’re joined on two tracks by a 150-piece choir, Funky Voices.
Dubbed by the BBC as “The Man With the Golden Voice,” Carrack’s breakthrough moment came when he wrote and sang “How Long” from his days with Ace. Paul also enjoyed great success as the voice behind numerous hits for…
Morning Star finds Këkht Aräkh arriving at a truer, more refined version of himself. Recorded between Berlin and Stockholm, the album emerges from a period of intense personal and artistic growth, blending aggressive black metal passages with immersive, textured soundscapes that feel both intimate and vast.
Since his origins in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, Dmitry (a.k.a. Crying Orc), the sole mastermind behind the project, has sought a distinctive path within black metal. This vision unfolded through his debut Through the Branches to Eternity EP (2018) and the albums Night & Love (2018) and Pale Swordsman (2021), establishing a signature tension between ferocious, visceral black metal and delicate, introspective ballads.
Haiku Salut are one of a kind and always have been from the moment their debut EP, How We Got Along After the Yarn Bomb, landed in the summer of 2011. Fusing elements of folk, classical, chamber pop, lo-fi indie, and electronica, the trio — Louise Croft, Gemma Barkerwood, and Sophie Barkerwood — have made creating the unconventional into an artform. They’ve been lauded by both music fans and critics alike, not to mention other artists — some of whom have collaborated with them over the years, such as Public Service Broadcasting.
Over the course of the band’s 16 years of existence, they’ve put out five albums plus a handful of EPs and singles of music that refuses to conform to any structured genre or fad. As multi-instrumentalists of various facets themselves,…
Shinichi Atobe’s arresting house and techno beams with inimitable candor, built from bright, phlegmatic loops that run on an eccentric internal logic. Now a quarter century into a career largely characterized by mystique and a seeming avoidance of the public eye, Atobe has spent the better part of the 2020s slowly opening up, with some bemusement. His laconic interview with Tone Glow in 2024 — most noteworthy for being the first time anyone had asked the alleged recluse to go on the record — revealed an artist with little interest in extended introspection or narrativization beyond a few quaint details. (His favorite hobby? “Sleeping.”) Accordingly, Atobe’s sound has evolved laterally over the course of the decade, reupholstering the artist’s quirks into a series of…
Kinshasa isn’t the kind of city that waits for you to be ready, the city just takes over your experience. It is a metropolis of staggering contradictions, where the ghosts of Belgian colonialism collide with the relentless, vibrating hustle of hyper-capitalism. To attempt to capture the essence of this place on tape seems like a fool’s errand, yet this is exactly what the Kinshasa-based street art collective KINACT have achieved with their debut LP, Kinshasa in Action. Founded in 2015 by Eddy Ekete, KinAct first made their name not on stage, but in the gutters, markets, and intersections of the Congolese capital. They transformed public spaces into living, breathing theatres of the absurd, constructing elaborate regalia from the city’s discarded detritus, bottles, wires, tires, and dismembered…
Dream pop is a genre that takes a great deal of attention to perfect. It’s not enough to write idiosyncratic lyrics set to a jangly beat; there are holes to be filled between drum cymbals and bass chimes. Burning at Both Ends aims to hit that sweet spot between wakefulness and drowsy activities. The finished work is a more palatable equivalent to My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, a facet that will enthrall some and disappoint others. Nonetheless, Hit Like a Girl take no prisoners, presenting a well-formed record that resides comfortably in the dream pop canon. Led by Nicolle Maroulis, an artist who uses they/them pronouns, the group achieve a sonic meditation on 21st century living.
“Only Have Myself,” an angry rocker, is dotted with ferocious exhibits of screaming from…
After more than a decade of relative silence, Diana Darby’s Otterson offers a new chapter of the singer/songwriter’s uniquely haunted sound. The insular style Darby found on previous albums remains consistent throughout Otterson, but this time around the construction was a little different. Pieced together from new songs and some older material while Darby was making the transition from recording on four-track to working with Digital Audio Workstations. Though the overcast character that has defined much of her discography doesn’t change much with these technological advances, there’s a different tint to Darby’s muted colors throughout the album.
Opening track “April” is spare, with clinks of a lonesome tambourine keeping time for…
…There’s a moment on Sluice’s new album, Companion, where frontman Justin Morris sings about being a kid reading in a bunk on a tour bus, crying and asking “what happened to it all feeling so good?” It’s a question that drove him out of music entirely — and, eventually, back into it on very different terms.
The Durham, North Carolina quartet — Morris on guitar and vocals, Oliver Child-Lanning on bass and various instruments, Avery Sullivan on drums, and Libby Rodenbough on fiddle — release Companion, their third album and Mtn Laurel Recording Co. debut, on March 27th. It follows 2023’s Radial Gate, the album Morris made after fleeing New York for a Craigslist house in Hillsborough with then-stranger Child-Lanning, tracking…
…Love These Days by Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Karen Dahlstrom is a strong collection of songs rooted in contemporary folk, with dalliances into country, blues and even jazz. You wouldn’t be remiss if you were wondering why you hadn’t heard of Dahlstrom until now. To be fair, she is a bit of a late bloomer, but having spent some time as a member of the americana trio Bobtown, Dahlstrom returns with her first proper solo record. Brimming with beguiling songs that could only have been penned by someone with the life experiences to do them justice, it’s a discerning, mature worldview of life and love.
The charming opener ‘Can’t Help Myself’ asserts itself immediately with an irresistible guitar and bass groove, punctuated with subtle…
At the age of sixty-eight, Jim Lauderdale is in top form, his voice as good as ever. The iconic songwriter, now a Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee, is showing no signs of slowing down, and in his own words: “I feel like I’m writing and recording more than ever, and that’s such a favourite thing of mine”. After featuring on Dallas Burrow’s The Way the West Was Won last year, Lauderdale is back with a record of his own, Country Super Hits Volume 2.
For those unfamiliar with his Country Super Hits Volume 1, released back in 2006, despite its title, it’s not a compilation of old hits, but rather a studio LP featuring a batch of songs that were new at the time. In the same way, with Volume 2, you are treated to thirteen fresh songs ready…
Stefanie Drootin and Chris Senseney are music lifers, married parents of two who have been the core of the band Big Harp essentially since they met two decades ago. As a teenager in the San Fernando Valley, Drootin committed to the DIY scene early, joining bands as a bassist before she could drive and bailing on high school with only a year left in order to tour. After Senseney met Drootin on the road in 2007, they accidentally moved to California together, got married, had their first kid, and then started Big Harp. They are lifers, and lifers make it work.
Big Harp’s fourth album, Runs to Blue, does not feel overdue. With songs of wanderlust and loss, love for your children and love for your lover, accepting one’s increasing age while also…
Mixed and mastered by Jim O’Rourke from unheard tapes recorded in the ’70s, Echo Park is a snapshot of Los Angeles life from helium-voiced mainstay Tommy Peltier that foreshadows the blue-eyed soul that would emerge just a few years later.
Now 90 years old, Peltier is still playing relatively regularly for a nonagenarian, but he cut his teeth as a jazzman – he’d never really intended to make pop music.
Born in New Orleans, Peltier relocated to Los Angeles as a teen and quickly established himself on the jazz circuit, playing cornet in his band the Jazz Corps and even recording an album with Roland Kirk. But it wasn’t to be; Peltier suffered an injury in 1970 that ended his horn playing career so he retrained as a singer-songwriter…
The initial plan for guitarist Robben Ford’s first solo studio album in about five years was supposed to be a tribute to Jeff Beck. But a move to the UK changed direction for what became Two Shades of Blue. The title references not just the locations (London and Indiana) and different musicians used to support jazz, blues, soulful singer/songwriting guitarist Ford (ex-Tom Scott’s LA Express, Yellowjackets and others), but how his approach to the blues genre is wider and more inclusive than most.
Three US recorded songs aim at a Jeff Beck-inflected ‘Blow by Blow’ and ‘Wired’ instrumental groove. He’s joined by veterans bassist Daryl Jones (Rolling Stones, Miles Davis) and drummer Gary Husband (John McLaughlin,..
This is a huge undertaking, an eight-CD set comprising all the band’s official studio albums released between 2006 and 2014, with a few added extras. It features not just the original albums, remixed and remastered (and notably not by Steven Wilson, prog’s ‘go-to’ man for this task), but also rarities, bonus tracks and acoustic reinterpretations, as well as new stereo and immersive mixes. Together, these highlight the journey The Pineapple Thief has been on since taking their early formative steps.
Retracing Our Steps is the second such release commemorating the legacy of The Pineapple Thief, following on from 2023’s How Did We Find Our Way, 1999–2006, which serves as almost the definitive guide to the band and their early…