Les Claypool has been a busy man to start 2026, with an upcoming nationwide tour, releasing a new double album with The Claypool Lennon Delirium, a new EP with Primus, and now comes another release, Return of the Live Frogs: Volume 1.
Back in 2023, Les donned his Colonel persona again to revamp his Fearless Flying frog Brigade for an amazing tour. This release is a reminder of that magic.
The FFFB for this live offering is Sean Ono Lennon (aka Captain Shiner on guitar), Harry Waters (keys), Mike Dillon (percussion), Skerik (sax), and Paulo Baldi (drums) as the band stretches out and gets loose on four original songs. Each track allows for ample individual solos as the players take their turn in the spotlight.
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Les Claypool is one of the most creative eccentrics of the modern era, and his latest album under The Claypool Lennon Delirium moniker – The Great Parrot-Ox and The Golden Egg of Empathy – does much to cement that status. It’s arguably the spaciest album of his career, and perhaps the best of his collaborations with Sean Ono Lennon.
After a bonkers “Pro-Log,” the proceedings start in earnest with “W.A.P.” (no relation to Cardi B). Claypool’s melodic bass lines soar over a percussive racket, an impressive and powerful contrast. A spacey organ comes into the mix before Lennon intones his pop lullaby. Lennon’s tune is no more impressive than those written by his father’s overrated band The Beatles, but – thanks to Claypool’s spectacular arsenal…
Can & Irmin Schmidt – »Replay« 1968-2026 (15 Gems and Rarities Compiled Exclusively for Mojo) (2026)
As the last surviving core member of krautrock outliers Can and curator of their still potent musical legacy, Irmin Schmidt has hand-selected a CD of riches and rarities from the band’s vast archives exclusively for MOJO.
In the pantheon of great musical cults, few are more potent and enduring than Can. An avant-garde groove machine. A radical rethink of what a rock band could be. A group of fiercely independent talents who could switch from expansive psychedelic jams to magically skewed pop music on a whim. Holger Czukay. Jaki Liebezeit. Michael Karoli. Irmin Schmidt. Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki.
…Replay 1968-2026 brings together riches and rarities from the band’s life and afterlife.
Interesting monikers are something you are going to run into quite often lately, and vocal artist Leslie Lowder has one for you – idiiom. With her latest album Neural Network, Lowder establishes herself as one of the more intriguing vocalists, starting with Laurie Anderson back in the eighties up to more current vocal experimentalists like Juliana Barwick.
And Lowder picks up a double-edged sword here, as all of the five tracks are improvisations, with Lowder manipulating her vocals with electronics to create a unique effect with each. The double edge here is that such experiments can often be quite risky, with no middle ground, and Lowder doubles the risk here by having no other instrumentation added – they could fail…
With a discography approaching 200 releases, it might be tempting to imagine saxophonist Ivo Perelman as a kind of jazz gunfighter, in the lineage of Charlie Parker or Coleman Hawkins, stepping into one cutting contest after another. But that image misses the mark. Perelman’s recordings are rarely about competition. Instead, they are grounded in creation, collaboration and deep musical partnership. The closest he comes to that rough-and-tumble spirit is in his long-running exchanges with pianist Matthew Shipp, where the intensity of their rapport can resemble a friendly but fierce sparring match.
With Trifecta, Perelman presents three studio sessions, each pairing him with a different guitarist: Marc Ribot, Elliott Sharp and Joe Morris.
Ava Mendoza is simply one of the best guitarists around today. She has played with a murderer’s row of improvisers and experimentalists over the last 20 years, across styles incorporating rock, blues, jazz, bluegrass, metal, and the avant-garde.
…Alive Alone, Alive Together collects Mendoza’s recent live recordings from four different events. Half are duets with drummer Hamid Drake from the Summer Bummer Festival in Antwerp, while the rest are solo performances from the US and Italy. Despite what might be thought of as a limited sound palette, there is little repetition throughout the album.
‘Sun Gun’ is one of the duets, with Mendoza picking distorted lines in a heavy blues style accompanied by Drake’s nonstop barrages.
In one sense, this 8-track collaboration between Pulitzer prize-winning composer-vocalist Caroline Shaw and Grammy award-winning cellist-composer Andrew Yee is a snapshot of a friendship.
The title – Or, the Whale – comes from Melville’s Moby-Dick, and in particular from director Wu Tsang’s 2022 silent film version for which Shaw and Yee provided the score. A condensed suite combines cello, electronics and ethereal vocals in a haunting, folk-infused evocation of the novel, whale song and all.
Much here is similarly imaginative. Yee’s uplifting ‘The Trees of Green-Wood’ channels Meredith Monk as Shaw sings a catalogue of trees organised by diameter of trunk: the greater the girth, the louder the music.
Cocanha transmit an energy more befitting a choir than two singers. Such is their energy that vocalists Caroline Dufau and Lila Fraysse dot Flame Folclòre with a multitude of harmonic jumps and counter-melodies, mostly through articulated energy alone. “Diurê Tremblar” is one hugely impressive collage, an audio sample making way for bustles of chorale singing. Could it be a hymn or a prayer? Performed in Occitan, the message may not be entirely clear to the listener, although there’s no denying the impact every syllable makes on the ear.
As a rule, Flame Folclòre seems to defy genres: only time will tell, but Cocanha’s third record could be a harbinger of other minority-language rock albums to come. The record arrives following the news of Moya Brennan’s death. While it…
Lowertown’s Olivia Osby and Avsha Weinberg almost didn’t survive themselves. After signing to Dirty Hit as teens, they were strapped into the up-and-comer indie rock grind, touring and churning out EPs and an eventual debut album, I Love to Lie, in 2022. The problem wasn’t that they drifted apart, but rather that they got too close. Co-dependently close. After a four-year “break” (three, if you’re counting the Skin of My Teeth EP), Osby and Weinberg have re-emerged with Ugly Duckling Union, their long-awaited sophomore record. Back in Weinberg’s basement, where they cut the earliest Lowertown tracks, the pair return to their blunt yet lyrical writing and unraveling song structures. The result comes with a little more grit and a little less studio polish, which is perfect…
For more than 3 decades, David Eugene Edwards has carved out a singular path through American music. First with the gothic folk urgency of 16 Horsepower, then with the devotional intensity of Wovenhand, and more recently through the stripped-down landscape of his solo work.
…The booming bass voice of David Eugene Edwards is imposing to begin with. Now imagine how it sounds when he’s singing Latin. That’s what he’s doing at various points in Mercurial Silence, an album that continues the shift that started with 2023’s Hyacinth, drifting away from deeply haunting (and haunted) Appalachian barnstormers and toward the modern era — employing drum machines and electronics but still managing to make them sound like they’ve…
Steep Canyon Rangers arrive at a moment of renewal and reaffirmation with Next Act, their 15th studio album. The record represents a conscious tightening of focus: a return to the bluegrass foundations that first bound the band together, approached with the confidence and emotional range earned through years of collective evolution. It is an affirmation that bluegrass still contains endless expressive possibility. Next Act finds the Rangers sounding deeply at home in their own musical language, drawing strength from tradition while continuing to write new chapters within it.
Formed in North Carolina and shaped equally by the Appalachian Mountains and the Piedmont, Steep Canyon Rangers have long occupied a singular space in American roots music.
In a recent column for the New Yorker, writer Kyle Chayka details a “lo-fi rebellion” against the aesthetics of tech-driven uniformity: “Anything that appears too smooth these days is suspicious,” he says, citing a recent Weezer tour poster featuring the “Cool S,” the universal sigil of our shared humanity, as a counter-example. Chayka’s subjects primarily operate in the visual worlds of marketing and design, but it’s easy to identify sonic parallels. The kids are selling their turntables and buying guitars, saving rock’n’roll, and banging their heads until they incur nerve damage. In the face of A.I. homogeneity, the human —embodied, subjective, flawed—is in.
MASK, a new collection of songs from Aaron Maine’s indie pop project Porches…
Live albums are either superb or meh. Luckily, vocalist Catherine Russell sounds amazing, whether in a studio, jazz club or theatre setting. Live at Jazz at Lincoln Center exhibits the singer’s soulful vocals as well as wonderful backing support from the musicians joining her: guitarist Matt Munisteri, pianist Ben Paterson, bassist Russell Hall, drummer Domo Branch, trumpeter Jon-Erik Kellso, trombonist John Allred and Evan Arntzen on tenor sax and clarinet. Russell’s usual style is prevalent throughout the project. The mix of vintage New Orleans jazz, swing, rhythm and blues is always sure to delight a variety of listeners.
Whether it’s a slower melody or an upbeat, toe-tapping tune, the pieces are sung with emotion and sensitivity.
Country boy-in-the-Big Apple, Arthur Russell does folk fusion with his own, peerless verve on a remastered edition of his evergreen 2008 retrospective.
One of the most fascinating, multifaceted, greatest artists of the late C.20th, Arthur Russell is variously known as a disco auteur, virtuoso avant-pop cellist-composer, and bard of the highest order, but maybe less so as a country crooner. Compiled and issued in 2008, Love Is Overtaking Me most ideally framed this lesser-covered aspect of his work with 21 songs recorded under his own name and as part of The Flying Hearts (with Peter Zummo, Rhys Chatham, Jon Gibson, a.o.), plus in duo with Steven Hall as Turbo Sporty, The Flying Hearts, and Bright & Early.
Noise can feel like drowning. This is often intentional and a large part of its appeal to the sickos, but even the largest of whales comes up for air every 15 minutes — breaking the surface tension, pupils constricting toward the atmosphere, and taking a bus-sized gulp.
Is there anything that experimental noise can learn from this mammalian constraint?
Max Klebanoff is working on it. For several years, his project Death Kneel has kneaded noise music into a wide range of shapes, from diving directly into the harsh void on 2023’s Dawn Simulation, released via très fashion noise imprint Chondritic Sound, to the cavernous, waterlogged ambiance of 2025’s Ink Wash Apparition. On his new release Remembering Well, he picks up…
A lot has changed in the eight years since West Yorkshire rockers Marmozets went on hiatus, in 2018 cruelly vanishing from the scene just shortly after the critical acclaim of their second studio album, Knowing What You Know Now. Frontwoman Becca Bottomley became a mother and married bandmate Jack, all faced a global pandemic (remember that one?), and the world took a dramatic shift towards the right. For Becca, it birthed a generation of cowards – herself apparently included – ultimately spawning CO.WAR.DICE, a ferocious return to the forefront and the end of a self-confessed life in the shadows.
Largely picking up from where the now-four piece left off, this third record is driven by Becca’s snarling vocals and a frantic…
Engraving of Armor is the solo debut of Beck Zegans, an established member of New York’s indie scene with years of experience by this point both as a live sound engineer and guitarist. She’d been writing her own songs for some time but noticed her material taking on a heavier, more confrontational demeanor while holed up during COVID-19 shutdowns. When it came time to record some of these songs for her first album, she worked collaboratively with her band – synth player/bassist Alex MacKay (Nation of Language) and drummer Julian Fader (Remember Sports, Ava Luna) – who took turns building upon Zegans’ demos (guitar and drum loops) in their individual home studios. A fourth contributor on a couple tracks was guitarist El Kempner…
Mirror Ball is a 1995 collaboration between Neil Young and members of Pearl Jam, released through Reprise Records during the height of the grunge era. Recorded largely live in the studio over a handful of sessions in Seattle, the album captures a loose, raw sound that blends Young’s songwriting with Pearl Jam’s dense guitar interplay and rhythm section.
The project grew out of Young’s friendship with the band following several live performances together in the early 1990s. Songs like “Song X,” “Downtown,” “I’m the Ocean,” and “Throw Your Hatred Down” reflect themes of conflict, idealism, and social tension, while the recordings retain an unpolished, spontaneous feel with audible studio chatter and extended jams throughout.
At some point over the more than 20 years that she has been performing and recording, Alela Diane quietly became an American treasure. Every time she releases a record, it feels like a gift, something tangible you can hold in your hands whenever you need a reminder that powerful music comes from actual humans playing real instruments. With the release of her new record, Who’s Keeping Time?, that gift is more poignant than ever.
Conceived in the wake of losing her friend and mentor, the legendary folk singer Michael Hurley, Diane nurtured this new set of songs from ideas to live recordings in the attic of her Victorian home in Portland, Oregon. Coinciding with that was her deepening need to reconnect with the town’s music community. She took guitar lessons…
Introducing a brand new series of ultra rare, vintage concert recordings from notorious NY rowdy punk rockers, Dead Boys, performing their best songs before a homegrown crowd! 2 shows, both recorded at the historic CBGBs club, both capturing one of the rowdiest, raucous musical acts to ever set foot on stage – and digitally remastered to capture all the gory, gruesome glory!
50 years ago this year, the placid seas of British and American rock were disturbed… if not destroyed… by a tsunami of sound arising from the streets of New York City and London. It wasn’t called punk rock yet… just a bunch of bands, disparate in nature and unique in sound, but seemingly bound together by a single common cause. Something must change. Everything must change.