There are times when an album slips completely off the rails so abruptly and forcefully that it tarnishes what has come before it as well as what is to follow. Such is the case with Seatte-based saxophonist and composer Kate Olson‘s album, So It Goes, which is humming briskly along, free from perplexity or discord, until she and her companions decide to perform Alice Coltrane’s enigmatic “Translinear Light.” By the time those seven minutes-plus have passed, whatever positive impressions the album has made have for the most part been forgotten and replaced by the question, “What were they thinking?”
As if that were not enough to dampen the party, Olson follows with her own somber compositions, “Pink Mountain” and “Afterthoughts,”…
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When the London jazz festival ran online only in 2020, an enthralling livestreamed performance by Swiss harpist Julie Campiche’s avant-jazz ensemble was a startling highlight, introducing UK audiences to a virtuoso instrumentalist and composer who was already turning heads in Europe. Campiche plucked guitar, zither and east Asian-style sounds from the harp, mingled with vocal loops, classical music, Nordic ambient jazz and more. You might call her soundscape magical or otherworldly if it didn’t coexist with a campaigner’s political urgency on environmental and social issues. But Campiche is too much of a visionary to overwhelm the eloquence of pure sound with polemic, as her new album, the unaccompanied Unspoken, confirms more than ever.
If you think that covering the songs of others is easy by just picking up your instruments and microphones, than you are quite mistaken.
Sure you can do that, but then you are just a cover band/artist. Injecting something new and/or your own into the song you are covering is another kettle of fish, and doing it in a completely opposite style/genre just doubles the complexity of your undertaking.
All the possible hurdles didn’t seem to deter the Italian duo of Giacomo Pedicini and Claudia Sorvillo and their huge cast of guests to cover all their favorite hard rock/heavy metal anthems in a completely different manner on their third album under the moniker of Driving Mrs. Satan – “Late Ever After.”
Sometimes, ends come unannounced. In the mid-2010s, Britain nurtured a second generation of the unfortunately named genre, “soft grunge” (ironically, an outgrowth of emo and hardcore).
At its forefront were Milk Teeth, Wallflower, Muskets, and, the era’s breakout stars, Bloody Knees. They released only four EPs, but bumped shoulders with national stars like Wolf Alice and Soft Play. By 2019, they had disappeared, and so had their contemporaries.
In 2026, soft grunge’s descendants are as prominent as ever, from Midrift to recent One Step Closer to the doom-shaded Die Spitz. What Else comes perfectly timed. Recorded in 2020, the question lingers: is it a time capsule of a brief moment, or did Bloody Knees forge…
Too many blues and blues-rock guitarists try to impress their audiences by playing a blazing series of multiple notes, yet fail to make a statement. San Diego-based, BMA Award winner Laura Chavez, on the other hand, manages to consistently ‘say something.’ There simply are not many guitarists who stand side by side with the great Ronnie Earl and earn his respect like Chavez.
…A true feel player, Chavez held down many memorable gigs with the late Candye Kane. There are several others in her orbit, too, including Deborah Coleman, Dani Wilde, The Mannish Boys, Mike Ledbetter, Monster Mike Welch, Casey Hensley, and Whitney Shay. Blues guitar fans have long acknowledged Chavez’s skills as the consummate side person. Her debut as…
Following Léve Léve Vol. 1, this second volume continues a long-term exploration of the popular music of São Tomé and Príncipe, with a clear focus on rhythm, movement and dancefloor energy. Curated by Tom B., Léve Léve Vol. 2 brings together emblematic recordings from the 1970s and ’80s, carefully restored and remastered, designed as much for close listening as for DJ use.
The compilation deepens and completes the first volume by returning to key groups such as Sangazuza, Conjunto Equador, Africa Negra and Pedro Lima, while also unveiling previously unreleased or hard-to-find tracks. Across the record, puxa and socopê rhythms unfold with remarkable intensity, capturing these bands at the height of their powers: tight…
James Blake sometimes feels like pop music’s arch, ultra-serious older brother, floating above the scene with warbly torch songs that never quite come down to earth. He’s left his ghostly prints on artists ranging from Beyoncé to Rosalía to Lil Yachty, and it’s a testament to his influence how widespread his once novel, weightless style of production has become.
There was a time when it wasn’t common for mainstream artists to sing over instrumentals that sound like they would crumble against a gentle caress, or pitch vocals up and down to inhuman extremes. All of that experimentation, coupled with his heart-on-sleeve, midtempo songwriting, has lent Blake a somewhat dowdy image, like a Tory councillor who liked dubstep before…
Pianist Eliza Garth is an advocate for contemporary classical music and also likes to find nooks and crannies in the concert music canon to present. On her latest recording, By the River, Garth plays from both repertoires. All of the programmed pieces are based on hymn tunes, from Lutheran chorales to shape note spirituals.
The latter is featured in “Variations on an Early American Hymn Tune” by David Froom (1951- 2022). “Holy Manna” is treated to a simple lining out of its melody at the piece’s outset. After this unassuming opening, the material is thoroughly developed in multiple sections, building to arcing counterpoint at breakneck speed. Scott Wheeler (b. 1952) also employs variation techniques in “Beach Spring.” It too culminates in…
Under the Sign is Irvine Myling, and this is his first Cryo Chamber release. Other than that, he has little visible online presence or prior discography. Nonetheless, whether he is a newcomer or veteran, Conflux is a commendable effort. The album is an interesting and unusual blend of instrumentation, drones, and effects that could be roughly classified as tribal ambient. But like with many such classifications, it is only somewhat descriptive of the actual sound.
Indeed, the album is centered around indigenous or folk drumming, low-end strings, and flute motifs. Atop this are keyboard drones and throaty vocalizations. The sound is frequently dense, full, and varied. It is arguably cinematic, but different from the dark ambient leanings of…
While The Stooges had a few obvious points of influence — the swagger of the early Rolling Stones, the horny pound of the Troggs, the fuzztone sneer of a thousand teenage garage bands, and the Velvet Underground’s experimental eagerness to leap into the void — they didn’t really sound like anyone else around when their first album hit the streets in 1969. It’s hard to say if Ron Asheton, Scott Asheton, Dave Alexander, and the man then known as Iggy Stooge were capable of making anything more sophisticated than this, but if they were, they weren’t letting on, and the best moments of this record document the blithering inarticulate fury of the post-adolescent id. Ron Asheton’s guitar runs (fortified with bracing use of fuzztone and wah-wah) are so brutal and concise…
Sydney’s Itchy and the Nits are back with their sophomore album, chronicling the joys of telling lies, stinky stinky men, and nudie beaches. For a taste of summer in the darkest of times, look only to Itchy and the Nits to toss you a swimsuit and make a splash.
Following their scrappy debut EP and two years touring across the US, EU, and Japan, the Nits have amplified the charm, crisped up production, and continued on their mission of spunky, fast punk akin to the Ramones meeting Courtney Bartnett at a beachfront concessions stand. Greetings from Itchy and the Nits is rife with hits and slam-danceable classics. Boasting only 22 minutes of runtime, the 12 track album is endlessly repeatable.
The Nits are full of fun, but there’s also…
Guitarist Derek Bailey, one of the first practitioners of non-idiomatic free improvisation, once opined that solo extemporization was an inferior activity. Since he played unaccompanied concerts quite often, Bailey might’ve been pulling the interviewer’s leg, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t mean it, since his preferred playing situation was one where the musicians hadn’t fixed on a vocabulary yet.
A quarter century has passed since Bailey left this earth, but if anyone has his words and example committed to heart, it’s John Butcher. The English soprano/tenor saxophonist took Bailey’s precedent quite seriously as he developed his own capacity to operate within the realm of absolute freedom, and you can perceive elements…
In a time when big name acts of previous decades fill stadiums with their comeback tours, relentless nostalgia has become an industry of its own. The familiarities of the past providing a sort of cultural comfort blanket. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a bit of nostalgia, but mining an earlier era as an artistic source, can quickly put an artist in a particular bracket.
Singer-songwriter and all-round jazztronica sensation Anna Stubbs aka Kinzoogianna joyously avoids the pitfalls of retro-ism with The Clique of ’86, her second solo effort. On this fun and deeply gratifying set of tracks, she couples forward-looking contemporary jazz with a multitude of ’80s styles and sonic inflections to deliver a musical experience that is tongue…
Compiled by Jonny Slut of the influential mid-week London club night Nag Nag Nag, When the 2000s Clashed: Machine Music for a New Millennium anthologizes the hipster club scene of the decade, starting with the electroclash movement and moving through dance-punk revival on to blog-house. Electroclash stapes like Peaches, ADULT., Fischerspooner, and Ladytron all appear on the first two discs, which also feature neo-electro classics like Vitalic’s vampire-rave bloodcurdler “Poney Pt. I” and Legowelt’s sublime “Disco Rout.” The haunting vibes continue with a remix of Golden Boy and Miss Kittin’s “Rippin Kittin” and Pet Shop Boys’ remix of Atomizer’s “Hooked on Radiation,” while the likes of Detroit Grand Pubahs’ “Sandwiches” and Avenue D’s “Do I Look Like a Slut?” revel…
…Over the course of those decades, Ace Records has established a number of long-running series including their Songwriters and Producers lines. A recent release in the Songwriters series celebrates two of the all-time greats in both categories: Philadelphia’s Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff. Love Train: The Gamble and Huff Songbook brings together 24 songs from the Philadelphia International Records duo who also formed two thirds of Mighty Three Publishing along with the late Thom Bell. Though some of PIR’s brightest lights are represented here (The O’Jays, Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes, Lou Rawls), the collection draws heavily on the songs written by G&H that left Philly to resonate in Detroit, Memphis, London, Jamaica, and beyond.
One of the defining characteristics of Moneyball, Dutch Interior‘s Fat Possum label debut, was its eclectic, shape-shifting nature as it drifted between slowcore, livelier lo-fi rock, harmonic country-rock, and more, including spacy, experimental drone music. Whether or not it served as a justification for this or actually worked (it somehow did), that trait was largely explained by the group’s sizeable six-member lineup, their varied musical backgrounds, and the fact that they all contributed music, lead vocals, and lyrics to the record.
The follow-up EP, It’s Glass, acts more like an extension of that album than a sequel in that it meanders into additional adjacent territories. The EP opens with the rustic “Ground Scores,” a minimalist alt-country love song with…
All Are Welcome In: A Return to Maraqopa is a redux album by Damien Jurado, released on March 16, 2026. The record features reworked versions of songs originally from his “Maraqopa” trilogy — Maraqopa (2012), Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Sun (2014), and Visions of Us on the Land (2016) — a series of concept albums produced in collaboration with the late Richard Swift.
The project was co-produced and engineered by Lacey Brown at J&B Studios in Edmonds, WA. According to Jurado, the release fulfills a vision he and Swift had discussed years ago — revisiting and reshaping songs from the trilogy after its completion. Many of the tracks featured on this release were performed live during Jurado’s “All Are Welcome In” tour in the autumn of 2025.
The Israeli-born Ben Aylon won a Best Artist nomination in the Songlines World Music Awards for his 2021 album Xalam.
That recording was a labour of love, the culmination of a decade studying the xalam and kamalengoni while recording in Senegal.
This follow-up takes his musical adventures to the next level, with his own rhythmic and increasingly assured playing augmented by some of West Africa’s finest voices.
Cheikh Lô takes the lead on the slinky, orchestrated mbalax of ‘Terranga’, and Dobet Gnahoré’s husky tones grace ‘Nan You’, which mixes African and electronic influences to fine effect. Elsewhere, the soulful former Super Diamono singer Omar Pene and the Ethiopian-Israeli…
Marja Ahti was born in Sweden in 1981 and is now a sound artist working in Turku, Finland. She works with field recordings and other acoustic sound material combined with synthesizers, feedback and tape treatments, organising sounds in a loosely associative way.
Besides her solo work, she is active in the duo Ahti and Ahti with her partner Niko-Matti Ahti, and they are members of the Himera, a collective of four Turku-based musicians and sound artists who organize a festival and concerts focused on different expressions of experimental music and sonic art. That group has been active since 2012. For Visiting Cloud (Two Translations) the two Ahti compositions “Chora (2019/2024)”…
In this unusual album, Helen Anahita Wilsonnot only produces sonic tributes to the members of the Solanaceae plant family; she provides them with a voice. Biodata from member plants is used to trigger certain instruments and sounds, with whom Wilson produces duets both electronic and organic. The mysterious nature of the family ~ represented in the clever alliteration of “magic, medicine, myth and mortality” ~ is extended to the allusive sounds.
The first surprise: every member of the nightshade family contains nicotine: not only the tobacco plant, but the eggplant, potato, pepper and gooseberry. In the opening piece, Wilson establishes a percussive pulse, quicker than one might expect for something called “Nicotine Hit,” backed by what sounds like a saw, likely triggered by…