Virga III continues the series established in the early 2020s by two of Eluvium‘s most purely ambient releases. Virga I was created following a temporary evacuation from the artist’s home due to a snowstorm, and Virga II emerged from a dream sequence during the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to escape all the unspeakable horrors of the world, Virga III takes refuge in small ecosystems and other natural spaces. As such, it’s a lighter and more calming effort than Virga II, though it still has its haunting moments.
“The Fires at Night” feels like a safe space far away from danger, with a supremely calming melody drifting in and out. “Remains” is desolate and forlorn, however, and “Hallucination II” revisits the lurching malaise of the opening…
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Schemes progresses from Kreidler‘s run of albums during the 2010s and ’20s which explore spaces informed by dub, funk, and Fourth World fusion. The tracks here are heavily spacious and atmospheric, yet rhythmic and kinetic. There’s pronounced grooves, but they saunter rather than drive. On a few songs, like opener “Beads,” there’s synth patterns or basslines that seem like they could be intros to dance tracks, but the group decide to hover in that space rather than move forward with a beat. Other tracks have drumming which is detached and unhurried, with airy guitar and synth sequences floating above the rhythms. “Bellboy” is a particularly curious track with haunting voices and a general feeling of a mischievous spirit snooping around.
The band, made up of Delphine Lucy Lam and Vlad Swann, are originally from France and are now based outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The album follows the single ‘Surrender,’ with ‘Qui manque dans ce pays’ as the focus track. Across 11 songs, Fleur Bleu·e move into a more direct sound. The vocals are clearer and more upfront, the reverb is reduced, and the guitars have a rougher edge, while the band’s dream-pop and new-wave melodies remain in place.
The album was written across France, Bulgaria, Mauritius, and the US, during a period of movement between countries and emotional states. After years in cities such as Paris and Los Angeles, the duo moved to a wooded part of Pennsylvania, where the album’s themes of displacement…
Eleventh Dream Day created a monster of an album where ferocious guitar rock collided with ramshackle cowpunk, neatly held together by the irresistible vocal harmonies of Rick Rizzo and Janet Beveridge Bean – think John Doe and Exene Cervenka of X. There’s a blistering, untamed energy hovering over Lived to Tell, perfectly exemplified by one of several standouts, “It’s Not My World.
Lived to Tell, the middle record of Eleventh Dream Day’s three album run with Atlantic Records, is back in business! While critically acclaimed at the time of its 1991 release, the band was never satisfied with the mastered sound of the original record. This new issue of Lived to Tell, which will also be coming out on vinyl later this year, is remastered by Carl Saff from the original DAT archives…
Khun Narin’s Electric Phin Band return with their first new album in a decade III – and their first ever recorded inside a professional studio. Produced by Tommy Brenneck (known for his work with Amy Winehouse, Charles Bradley, Sharon Jones, Beyoncé, Mark Ronson, and The Budos Band) at Diamond West, the album captures the band with a depth and clarity never heard before – without sacrificing the ecstatic propulsion that defines them. The group does not simply perform songs; they create momentum.
Khun Narin’s Electric Phin Band are a multi-generational psychedelic powerhouse from rural Thailand whose ecstatic, amplifier-blown folk music has quietly become one of the most unlikely global cult phenomena of the last decade.
Paradise Metal is a sleight of hand. The music within has very little to do with metal in the conventional sense, and everything to do with the genre’s outer limits-the kind of undulating drone movements practiced by Earth and SUNN O))). The folks at Heat Crimes and their partner label Elhellel will have you know that this music is created by one Father Dionysios Tabakis, an Orthodox priest who serves at the Church of the Panagitsa in Nafplio, Greece. His instruments include the ney, oud, and lyra, among others. The idea is that Paradise Metal is a kind of ancient trance music that addresses age-old maladies: depression, alienation, and isolation.
Opener “Relaxation Music with Tanbur” recalls choice moments from…
There is of course an extensive history of improvisational live jazz being mined for samples for beats. There’s perhaps a less of an established tradition of live improvisation being steered by the ethos of hip hop-orientated groove construction.
Based on the hypnotic, slow-burning workouts of Happy Today, Los Angeles-based guitarist Jeff Parker is willing and able to narrow (if not totally eradicate) the gap between jazz’s historic position as a ‘serious’ improvisational art and its potential for locking in on a robust head-nodding groove. Initially, the only thing that seems to have changed since Parker’s previous two live albums with the ETA IVtet – 2022’s Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy and 2024’s The Way Out of Easy, both superb – is the duration and…
As a follow-up for their Live feat. Annie Golden album Brooklyn’s power pop meets New Wave band The Shirts look back at their first act again with another rambunctious in concert release. Live at Paradise 1979. The show was recorded for a radio broadcast by local station WBCN at Boston’s Paradise Rock Club on August 27, 1979, shortly after their second album Street Light Shine. The tapes were digitized by Wout de Kruif (Dutch Tape Transfers) and demixed/remastered by retired sound engineer Prof Stoned.
It was a weird time for the band. Lead singer Annie Golden had a part in the movie adaptation of Hair and was under pressure to leave the band and become a full-time actress. She turned it down, but in hindsight this period…
Mountain of Youth – the moniker for Hunter Morris’ latest project – mines a slew of classic influences from ‘90s lo-fi rock to folk and Americana on his debut, making for a mix that manages to sound musically nostalgic but with enough of a contemporary feel that it’s not wasting time wallowing in the past.
That doesn’t necessarily pertain to the characters that populate Nowhere, NW, though. “Atomic Days” opens the album with whistling and a steady 4/4 drum beat, before Morris jumps in with lyrics about an aging couple cycling through thoughts of “what if” looking at where they are in life right now. And while the song could just as easily have been a ballad, Morris’ decision to opt for a mid-tempo rock vibe creates a far more…
“I got a feelin’ this party’s just about to begin” sings Americana singer/songwriter Ryan Bingham in his world-weary, gravelly voice as a fiddle saws behind him chased by rocking piano chords. And on this, his sixth studio platter, there’s plenty of raw, tough, country rocking to back up that exhortation. Bingham emerged from semi-obscurity to practically household name status when in 2009 he provided the Oscar, Golden Globe and Critic’s Choice winning “The Weary Kind” tune for the critically acclaimed film Crazy Heart. That trifecta is pretty far in the rearview mirror these days, but Bingham never stopped working, delivering gutsy, unvarnished albums (now on his own Axster/Bingham imprint) overflowing with soulful sounds mixed into country, folk, rock…
Mia Rocha writes music for herself. Releasing songs under the moniker Mia Joy, the Chicago-based artist is the daughter of a poet and a musician, and since a young age, she was encouraged by her father to channel her feelings into music as a way of understanding them.
Taking the advice, she wrote her debut ethereal dream-pop album Spirit Tamer over the course of several emotionally tumultuous years. It captures Rocha’s inner loneliness, cultivates healing, and creates a safe space where she can work through her darkest moments.
“The beginning of writing this album was an incredibly low, dark period and it was also a period where things were just pouring out of me,” she said in a recent episode of Jessica Risker’s…
Flying Mojito Bros released The Swamp Fox, an album featuring their remixes of recordings by late singer-songwriter Tony Joe White. Tony Joe White, known as The Swamp Fox, was a native of Louisiana and wrote such noteworthy songs as “Polk Salad Annie,” “Undercover Agent for the Blues” and “Rainy Night in Georgia.” White died in 2018 at age 75. White’s son and official archivist, Jody White, contacted Flying Mojito Bros (London-based duo Ben Chetwood and Jack Sellen) to collaborate with them on the remix album.
…”During the late 70’s and early 80’s, Tony Joe was blending country, swamp and disco into his own recipe of funky dance music,” Jody White explains. “With some help from the Flying Mojito Bros, these songs are about to see the light…
Jethro Tull released their debut album in 1968, titled This Was. Shortly after the release, guitarist Mick Abrahams left the band to embark on his own solo career and play a more blues-based rock. Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull was leaning towards incorporating more folk and rock in their sound, leaving behind the blues influenced rock of their debut album. Although there were no ‘Mick Abrahams is God’ statements spray painted around London, he has always been recognized as one of the great guitarists of that era. He formed the band Blodwyn Pig, and they released their debut album in 1969. By 1970, following their second album, Blodwyn Pig had run its course and basically split. It is worth noting that both albums made the U.K. top 10 album charts and were…
There’s a reason Greg Lake deemed Trilogy “such an accurate record” when looking back at it decades later. Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s third studio album teems with exacting arrangements, copious overdubs, and multi-hued colors that showcase the band’s willingness to experiment and desire to put everything in its proper place without becoming too self-serious. Expanding by distilling the ferocious power of its debut and epic leanings of the preceding Tarkus into a more accessible whole, Trilogy stands as the most representative example of the ensemble’s trademark styles.
Mastered at MoFi’s California studio and housed in a mini-LP-type gatefold sleeve, Mobile Fidelity’s numbered-edition hybrid SACD of Trilogy presents the gold-certified effort in audiophile sound.
Musicians who become parents sometimes feel compelled to write songs about it. But really, what is there to say? Every parenthood experience is unique, and also very much the same, and probably has been for something like three hundred thousand years since humans evolved. All the wonder or magic inherent in the process is deeply personal, and therefore dreary as hell when someone else sings about it. That’s a grinchy perspective, no question, but Shakey Graves — a.k.a. Alejandro Rose-Garcia — does little to change it on his latest, Fondness, etc..
The album is said to reflect the new contours of Rose-Garcia’s life with his wife and young daughter, who was born in 2024. That means these songs are in many ways about…
I’m Kingfisher is the alter ego of Swedish singer-songwriter Thomas Jonsson. Give Up Together is his sixth album under that guise and comes three years after his last release, Glue, which was far less structured and had a jazzier, looser feel to it.
It opens with the lead single ‘Years of Depression’, which is an emotional entry point and undoubtedly sets the tone for the tracks to come. It certainly has a heavier tone than his earlier work, but it still has that slow, thoughtful application that signifies Jonsson’s work. His writing is both deep and reflective, and in many ways can be seen as almost Leonard Cohen-like in its imagery.
“Here I am. White as f**k and privileged, but also an open wound. I go to the bathhouse to enjoy silence, with naked men with no bodies.
“What strikes me again, even now, is that rock from the late ’60s through the early ’70s remains the most compelling – whether Western or Japanese. In the mid-1960s, British groups like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones swept across the globe, while in the United States Bob Dylan famously swapped his folk guitar for an electric one, igniting the folk-rock movement. From the surge of new energy among young people in Britain and America – entwined with hippie culture, drugs, and the radical momentum of the anti-Vietnam War movement – an extraordinary body of rock music emerged, ushering in what would become the golden age of rock in the 1970s. In Japan, from around 1968, record companies began grouping these sounds under the label “New Rock”…
The dominant theme of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band’s 2023-2024 concerts was mortality, with key songs such as “Ghosts,” “Last Man Standing” and “I’ll See You in My Dreams” tackling the topic head-on. With their European Land of Hope and Dreams Tour, last year, though, politics started to play a greater role. And their current Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour is even more political. And more urgent.
“We never planned this tour, but we came out because I needed to feel your hope, your strength, and I needed to hear your voices,” Springsteen, 76, said near the end of his sold-out April 20 concert at The Prudential Center in Newark. “My wish is that we brought some hope and some strength for you tonight.”
Alto saxophonist and flutist Alan Braufman first emerged as a singular voice in New York’s 1970s loft-jazz scene with his 1975 debut Valley of Search, a record that would later be recognized as a landmark of spiritual and free jazz. After decades outside the spotlight, Braufman returned with a new wave of acclaim, releasing two highly regarded albums in 2020 and 2024 that reestablished him as both an essential elder and a vital contemporary presence-long described as “a legend in free music” (Gilles Peterson / BBC).
Recorded in a single day in the fall of 2025, Anthem for Peace is a fully new studio album that captures Braufman in the present tense. Leading a quartet with vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, bassist Luke Stewart, and drummer Chad Taylor…
Sixteen killer 70s reggae funk and soul cuts from the likes of John Holt, Lee Perry, Cornel Campbell, The Cimarons , The Chosen Few and more featuring superb reggae takes on songs by artists including The Jackson 5, William DeVaughn, Diana Ross and The Supremes, War, The Temptations, Roberta Flack, The Stylistics and others!
Well-documented is the influence of American black music on Jamaican styles of the 1960s – from the birth of ska music, when The Skatalites ska-ified the jump-up southern USA rhythm and blues music of Rosco Gordon, Louis Jordan and Fats Domino, through to the creation of rocksteady when Jamaican artists like The Techniques, The Paragons, Alton Ellis and The Melodians turned to the slower rhythms…