Emerging from the gentle coastal terrain of South Cornwall, England, The Heavenly Bodes’ debut LP, The Green Hills, is, at times, a reflection of its surroundings. The album’s opener, “De Gruene Heuvels” (the album’s title in Dutch), and its closer, “The Heavenly Bode,” both have a jangly late-’60s country-rock vibe reminiscent of The Byrds and Mike Nesmith’s solo output. “De Gruene Heuvels” bears a resemblance to The Monkees’ tune “Circle Sky” from the cult classic film Head, with its freaked-out fuzz guitar lines layered over jangly rhythm guitar. “The Heavenly Bode” uses a similar formula but adds shimmering guitar work and fiery fuzz leads to propel it along. Both songs possess a down-home style filtered through a kaleidoscopic haze.
Latest Entries »
This lengthy album covers multiple phases of Feldman’s musical thinking from 1950 to 1972. Meaningfully, he wrote many of these compositions to play with friends such as John Cage and David Tudor. These challenging pieces, in which Feldman wanted to wash away compositional rhetoric and allow sounds to be heard on their own terms, function as aural palate cleansers. To realize Feldman’s scores, with their indeterminate elements, the pianists must play an active role in the compositional process and coordinate very closely. These musicians do so seamlessly and intuitively, never losing the required concentration, while the recording engineers do incredible work in miking and blending up to five pianos at once. The earliest pieces, such as…
Assa’d Khoury’s second and final record has an almost mythical status among Arabic record collectors. Originally copies of the 1978 landmark LP are scarce, making the Syrian musician’s unique blend of microtonal Farfisa, fuzz guitars and Middle Eastern percussion a holy grail for crate diggers and psych hounds for decades.
Its reputation is well-deserved, as — despite its cheesy retro album art and exotic album title — Khoury’s re-imaginings of traditional Arabic melodies for modified electronic organ somehow manage to sound both impressively futuristic and weirdly retrograde, as if a Damascus lounge band had been abducted and forced to perform at an intergalactic casino.
Despite its far-out, futurist sounds, Khoury…
Congratulations, the new album from songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jacob Ungerleider, is the result of the casual playing of his demo tracks in the home of musicians Jenn Wasner and Alan Good Parker. Wasner, a member of Flock of Dimes and Wye Oak, kept asking Parker who was singing those songs on their Los Angeles stereo, and it turned out Parker was playing demos by the Virginia-based pianist he had met when they were touring with Natalie Prass. Ungerleider had recently moved to Los Angeles, and Wasner, who fell in love with these tracks, vowed to help Ungerleider put these songs together for an album.
In addition to co-producing Congratulations with Ungerleider, Wasner also sings and plays a variety of instruments on the record, as do…
The title of Willow Avalon’s new album, Pink Pocket Pistol, suggests she wants to have it both ways. She has a soft, feminine side as indicated by the color and small size of her gun.
However, the fact that she has a weapon reveals she’s tough and dangerous. The album cover features her pointing a chromium grey revolver at the beholder. The pink is gone, which indicates the significance of her steely power. The outward femininity is just a pretty disguise.
This works as a metaphor for Avalon herself. On the outside, she is dainty in a faux innocent manner. Inside, she is strong and determined, even treacherous if you cross her. While Avalon mostly sings in a high-pitched girly voice, somewhere between a bleat and Betty Boop,…
Celebrating 25 years, Pneumonia stands as an alt-country centerpiece, capturing Whiskeytown at their most expansive and iconic moment.
Whiskeytown had ceased to be a band in the truest sense by the time they recorded their third (and final) full-length album, Pneumonia; the group began to collapse during the touring following Strangers’ Almanac, with members coming and going at a remarkable pace, and for the Pneumonia sessions, the only musicians on hand who had appeared on Faithless Street three years earlier were lead vocalist and songwriter Ryan Adams and violinist and backing vocalist Caitlin Cary. Multi-instrumentalist Mike Daly and percussionist producer Ethan Johns dominated the sessions’ sprawling cast of players…
British-born, Canada-raised saxophonist and EWI master Seamus Blake hosts a soul-jazz revival on this tribute to funky sax legend Eddie Harris. Blake focuses everything on electric, echo-plexed, funky soul-jazz. He’s surrounded himself with a killer band that includes electric bassist Tim Lefebvre, drummer Corey Fonville, and Hammond B-3 organist and pianist Sam Yahel. Vocalist Dawn Pemberton guests. The set was recorded in Vancouver and co-produced by Blake, Scott Morin, and Cellar Music boss Cory Weeds.
The set opens with Gene McDaniels’ “Compared to What,” passionately recorded in 1969 by Harris and Les McCann on Swiss Movement. Pemberton delivers the lyric with earthy grit as Lefebvre and Fonville back Yahel’s…
Grateful Dead is dipping into its archives for a 60th anniversary concert release going back to the band’s earliest years.
Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, CA (7/3/66) arrives on 2 CDs, digital/streaming, or 3 LPs. The concert, recorded by Owsley “Bear” Stanley, previously appeared as part of the 2015 box set 30 Trips Around the Sun. Featuring Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, and Bob Weir, the show has been mastered for this release by Jeffrey Norman with speed correction and restoration by Plangent Processes.
Songs include the earliest known recordings of “Cardboard Cowboy,” “You Don’t Have to Ask,” and “Tastebud,” as well as a cover of Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s “Gangster of Love.”
Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Margo Price release a protest mixtape, Days of Unrest, a nine-track collection inspired by the causes and communities she’s championed throughout her career, ranging from prison reform and marijuana legalization to immigration, farming and labor rights.
Produced by longtime collaborator Matt Ross-Spang, the set blends original material with reimagined classics. Among the covers are Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” featuring Joan Baez and Memphis Mariachi, Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm,” Charlie Daniels’ “Long Haired Country Girl” featuring Billy Swan and the traditional folk song “De Colores,” also with Memphis Mariachi.
In the ‘80s, F/i was so underground that even their founder, Richard Franecki, didn’t have copies of their earliest albums. “I don’t really count those in our discography, since they were privately issued under our fake ‘Uddersounds’ label,” he has said. The group eventually found modest success — a series of albums on the much-respected noise label RRRecords, European tours, shows with Hawkwind and Acid Mothers Temple — but in those early days, F/i recorded cassettes to trade rather than sell, swapping single copies for material from like-minded bands. 1985’s Invisible Men is the holy grail of this era, a tape so rare that they didn’t even bother releasing it on a fake label.
Franecki came up through Milwaukee’s tiny punk scene in the late ‘70s, playing in bands…
Brutalismus 3000, the Berlin electronic duo comprised of producer Theo Zeitner and singer Victoria Vassiliki Daldas, call their music “nu-gabber post-techno punk.” They deride Berlin’s techno scene as painfully serious and “unstylish,” cringing at ravers self-styled as revolutionaries. They shoot music videos with happy crews of children smashing and spray-painting TVs. And if they had to write a manifesto, they’d title it “Fuck Shit Up” (or “We’ll Kill a CEO”).
This devil-may-care attitude befits the duo’s loud, aggro, in-your-face music: scrap-metal synths and air-raid sirens, jackhammering hardstyle kicks, and banshee shrieks that sound like they’re being shredded through chopper blades. Brutalismus 3000’s second album, Harmony,…
Pressing play on Spacemoth’s new album is like stepping into a ‘90s Magic Eye painting: Everything suddenly becomes 3D, jumping off the page in a blur of motion. Infectiously catchy from the get-go — all Day-Glo synth splodges, fuzzed-out guitar, boxy drum workouts, and strawberry bubblegum basslines — Inward Eye is both instantly gratifying and wrapped in deeper meaning. At its heart, it’s a paean to journeying — on the road, inside your mind’s eye, and to other cosmic dimensions, all while you ponder things like “Do We Exist?” and how to communicate through a paper cup.
That Maryam Qudus wrote most of the record in the back of a tour van while traveling across the U.S. with psych rockers La Luz makes sense. Who hasn’t felt their most creative when…
…Nixon Boyd hails from Ontario and has been playing in the indie rock band Hollerado since 2007. Hollerado make a much different brand of indie rock than Boyd’s solo stuff — infectious anthems laced with power-pop ecstasy. When Boyd was almost finished with his debut solo album Every Time We Turn a Corner, the bag with the hard drives containing the album was stolen from his car, and he started over.
…The title track, which serves as the opener, has an almost surfy atmosphere to it, à la Mac DeMarco at his calmest. As with “You Will Always Get Away with It,” the irresistibility is in the repetition of the refrain, which in this case is just the words of the song/album title. But he draws out the phrase by repeating the word “turn”…
…newly remastered by Technology Works from the original source tapes.
Strut Records presents the first definitive expanded reissue of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Sun Ra’s 1977 session recorded at the Bluebird in Bloomington, Indiana. The Arkestra were at the peak of their powers in 1977, releasing revered albums like The Soul Vibration of Man and My Favorite Things with Arkestra regulars Marshall Allen, Danny Ray Thompson, Michael Ray and Luqman Ali among the core musicians. Ra also continued his touring in Europe with historic gigs in Italy. During this period, Arkestra live performances were often loosely structured into thematic blocks that moved from reflections on jazz history to cosmic “space narrative” sections…
Trumpeter and composer Ralph Alessi cuts a distinctive figure in contemporary jazz, with a remarkable ability to use the same tools as most – acoustic instrumentation, quartet and quintet formations, bop vocabulary – and still come up with something that sounds like no one else.
A Sun That Never Set, his fifth album as a leader for ECM, bears this out. Fronting a fivesome made of friends and family, including his brother Joseph on trombone, Matt Mitchell on piano, John Hébert on bass, and Ches Smith on drums and percussion, Alessi carefully and calmly sculpts environments that feel like a singularity in the middle of post bop, chamber jazz, and some sort of sonic language unique to the leader himself. Despite, or, rather, encouraged by the craft with…
Purgate’s latest release, Leavings, has a simple yet effective formula. Take a short abstract motif, and let it loop for a few minutes.
These motifs, however, are synthesized from melodic fragments, static, distortion, and other unusual features. And the looping varies each of them slightly across iterations.
Purgate is Frederic Arbour, also known as the label head for Cyclic Law. Thus, he is intimately familiar with dark ambient, industrial, and adjacent genres of music. His efforts on this album only provide a respectful nod toward those established forms before heading out in new directions.
‘Cinders’ opens the album with shards of airy, floating synth grounded by a pulsing rhythm. ‘Ashes’ is even more focused on repeating,..
The album November 89 comprises a selection of very early GAS tracks, some of which date back to the late 1980s. They were first released in 2008 as a CD insert in the art book ‘Wolfgang Voigt GAS’, published on Raster-Noton.
Just like the photographs in the book, these pieces are early precursors that would evolve in the ensuing years with the albums ‘Zauberberg’ and ‘Königsforst’ into a style-defining, audiovisual “Gesamtkunstwerk” (total work of art) comprising hypnotically focused forest imagery and an abstract, psychedelic wash of sound created by alphorn and bass drum.
…As the title suggests, it was mostly, remarkably, made in ’89, back when Voigt was finding his feet between techno, house and…
…20th-anniversary edition has been remastered from the original tapes and includes an exclusive live LP of the band’s performance at the 2007 Lowlands Festival in Biddinghuizen, Netherlands.
In the metal community, there are two veteran/legendary bands that, whenever they release a new album, you know pretty much what you’re going to get. We’re talkin’ ’bout AC/DC and Motörhead, of course. While the former band now takes several years between albums, the latter cranks them out on a much more frequent basis, as evidenced by the arrival of 2006’s Kiss of Death (which arrived barely over two years since 2004’s Inferno). The fact that the hard-living group is still at it is an astonishing feat unto itself, but when you realize they’re still keeping pace with…
2026 marks the 40th anniversary of Truthdare Doubledare, the second studio album from UK synth outfit Bronski Beat. Four decades on, London Records revisit the album with its first-ever reissue, presented across a range of formats including digital, limited edition purple LP, picture disc LP, 1CD, and expanded 3CD. Fully remastered, the release also unearths rare and previously unreleased studio sessions and live recordings.
New remixes include a striking rework of “Hit That Perfect Beat” from Doncaster-born, London-based DJ I. JORDAN. Injecting the original track with euphoric synth lines, complex arpeggios, and a driving vocal hook, the rework is built for the modern dance floor whilst respecting the original’s important roots.
“You can change the chapter, you can change the book, but the story remains the same if you’d take a look”. So runs the chorus line from ‘Nobody’s Diary’ by Yazoo, an unexpectedly prophetic lyric looking forward to the formation of Doublespeak. For here is a supergroup founded in the 2020s but rooted almost entirely in the early development of electronic music.
As supergroups go, this one is entirely logical – and in fact, the only surprise about the Orwellian Doublespeak is that it took this long for them to form. Electronic music royalty Vince Clarke (not just Yazoo, but Depeche Mode and Erasure) and Neil Arthur (Blancmange) have been good friends since the early 1980s, when making your own pop music was fast becoming a pleasure…