A companion piece to the album, Right Now!, this collection contains additional recordings from those sessions, as well as Tchad Blake remixes and reworkings of songs from Right Now! All recordings, except for “Reap What You Sow,” have never been released. The psychedelic supergroup featuring Dave Alvin, Victor Krummenacher, David Immerglück, Michael Jerome, and Jesse Sykes continues to defy expectations and genre.
The album opens with an instrumental reinterpretation of Spellbinder inspired by Hungarian jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo, whose work has long influenced guitarist David Immerglück. “I’ve been a huge fan of Gabor Szabo my whole life,” Immerglück says. “When the idea came up to record Spellbinder, it felt like a no-brainer.”
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Since the release of his ACT debut Letter to the Universe (2023) and its follow-up Highlife (2024), Ghanaian-born trumpeter Peter Somuah, now based in Rotterdam, has established himself as a bridge-builder between cultures and continents. “An excellent musician and jazz at its most international,” notes the BBC. For the globetrotting Peter Somuah, musical influences from geographically distant cultures are always just a step away. This is precisely what his new album Walking Distance is about.
Walking Distance is an exploration of musical unity — a journey through diverse genres that, despite their differences, remain deeply interconnected. The album blends elements of post-bop jazz, Arab music, Latin grooves, blues,…
This is pianist Shai Maestro’s second release since signing for Naive in 2025. The first, Solo: Miniatures & Tales (2025), was a personal exploration; in deliberate contrast, The Guesthouse is expansive, open and collaborative. Maestro describes the album as “my attempt to turn the creative chaos that lives in mind into one coherent artistic statement, always having a simple melody as a thread that tells the story of this collective.” Inspired by Rumi’s poem The Guesthouse, Maestro uses the idea of a guesthouse as a framework — a place with an open door where musical guests are welcome to enter and collaborate freely. The result is an album markedly different from his previous work, with a far broader musical palette. It has also pushed Maestro in new…
Owelu Dreamhouse (pronounced Oh-WAY-lew) is a collaborative project masterminded by vocalist Nkechi Anele and multi-instrumentalist and arranger Nic Ryan-Glenie, both formerly of the band Saskwatch, with whom the pair helped shape the Melbourne soul renaissance. They now return with their new band, focused on a contemporary take on cinematic soul, supported by a myriad of musicians from their local scene.
Opener ‘Kellen’ sets their stall with its crisp percussion, sweeping strings, funk guitar licks and a searing trumpet solo in the track’s last leg. Anele lights up the record with her commanding vocals that vary from subtle and nuanced on ‘Tourist’ to searing intensity on the Afro-funk meets disco stomper ‘Struggle for Kasawa’.
How do you become considered a classic in any music genre or sub-genre? Is it how long you’ve been on the scene, how many fans or just cult fans you have, how many records you have come up with, have you been recognised by other artists, something else or all of the above?
the black watch could boast with probably all of the above as one of the psych rock stalwarts still around and still recording (16 albums and EP’s, maybe more, under their belt), including that recognition from other artists, in their case specifically another psych rock stalwart Nick Saloman of the Bevis Frond Fame, who just released their lates album Varied Superstitions on his Blue Matter Records.
So, more specifically, what kind of psych rock…
Fair Warning was such a dark, intense record that Van Halen almost had no choice but to lighten up on their next album, and 1982’s Diver Down is indeed much lighter than its predecessor. In many ways, it’s a return to the early albums, heavy on covers and party anthems, but where those records were rough and exuberant — they felt like the work of the world’s best bar band just made good, which is, of course, kind of what they were — this is undoubtedly the work of a finely honed band who has only grown tighter and heavier since their debut. As a band, they might be tight, but Diver Down is anything but tight. It’s a downright mess, barely clocking in at 31 minutes, cobbled together out of five covers, two minute-long instrumentals, and five new songs.
Some artists turn up on the music scene as rough diamonds, so to say, with talent showing, but with some edges that need to be finely honed through time to make their music sound great and probability of that happening always somewhere in the middle.
On the other hand, there are artists that appear suddenly as a full-fledged, well, artists with their talent up to the fore and their music presenting itself as fully rounded pieces of art. You can count Eliza Noxon and her debut album Good Monsters with Bad Habits in the latter group for sure.
With only two sole singles officially released, Noxon’s music sounds fully complete, with all the elements in their rightful place and no hiccups. Whether it is just pure talent or…
The expanded release includes two additional songs: A cover of the Jason Isbell track “Good While It Lasted” and “Stopover”.
Listening to current Nashville resident Imogen Clark’s latest, Choking On Fuel, you’d swear she was a native who got her start playing dive bars around town before finally getting booked at The Bluebird Café or The Basement East.
Surprisingly, Clark got her start as a teen playing bars in Sydney, Australia, not exactly the most obvious jumping off spot for a rising country/Americana star. Regardless, Choking On Fuel is an impressive collection.
Clark has spent the past few years on the road, headlining as well as opening for a slew of disparate musicians ranging from…
Nashville producer username first heard footwork music when DJ Rashad’s “It’s Wack” played on a Grand Theft Auto V radio station. Bay Area producer Marsh crane’s introduction came when he stumbled onto Knxwledge’s VATOGATO tapes on Bandcamp. Their journeys to the Chicago dance genre reflect the stylistic approaches that set them apart from their Midwestern compatriots; where RP Boo and co.’s minimalism emphasizes the persistent rhythms that sustain a dancefloor, username and Marsh crane embrace a busier, Zoomer-inspired sound, hashing underground rap microgenres and recognizable samples into dreamy collagist fantasies.
After a slew of collaborative tracks in 2025, OVERTIME arrives as the friends’ first…
“I became interested in the idea that recording is a bottomless medium,” explains multi-instrumentalist Gryphon Rue in the press notes of his new album. “You have a bag that can fit any sound; the room in the bag is limitless.” Indeed, the sounds conjured up by Rue on I Keep My Diamond Necklace in a Pond of Sparkling Water draw from a variety of sources and span multiple genres within the “experimental” umbrella. Rue plays bowed chimes, modular synthesizer, acoustic guitar, Mellotron, bells, and more, but also adds found sounds, animals, and even planetary signals to create a setting that is at once mysterious, soothing, complex, and quirky.
Coming off last year’s 4n_objx, which implemented a more electronic, processed aura,…
Songs introduces Santiago Diez Fischer – a composer/performer with roots in Buenos Ares and branches in contemporary European institutes – poetically expressing a form of abstract electro-acoustic composition with an almost punkish approach not normally heard on explorative contemporary minimalist label Another Timbre, yet clearly resonating its tenets. An instrumentalist at heart, who turns to electro-acoustic forms for their immediacy and the limitations of playing with an ensemble back in Argentina, Diez Fischer can coincidentally be grouped with a number of other Argentine composers – Lucio Capece, Gabriel Paiuk, and Tomàs Cabado – who grew up with Argentine rock, tango, folk music, and make music that challenges perceptions of…
Marty Ehrlich first encountered Julius Hemphill in the early 1970s when he was a high school student in St. Louis. Though Ehrlich performed and recorded with BAG (Black Artists’ Group), a community-based collective co-founded by Hemphill in 1968 to foster collaboration and present music, dance, theater, visual arts and creative writing, he didn’t get to know him well until the two were living in New York in the late 1970s. Ehrlich went on to collaborate with Hemphill, particularly as a member of Hemphill’s saxophone sextet, becoming musical director after the leader died in 1995. As chief researcher for Hemphill’s archive, Ehrlich has continued to unearth a trove of previously unreleased recordings, many documented on…
When Souad Massi left Algeria for Paris in 1999, she carried with her a set of influences as eclectic as they were unlikely: Oum Kalthoum and Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin, classical guitar and Algerian folk poetry. Her debut solo album, Raoui (2001), went gold in France almost immediately, and the records that followed confirmed her reputation as a singular talent: a singer of rare emotional intelligence whose bittersweet voice seemed the perfect vessel for songs of exile, longing and survival.
More than two decades on, and four years since her last album Sequana, that voice remains unmistakable, but Zagate, her new album, finds Massi in a newly unguarded place. Recorded predominantly in the UK and produced…
Dog Chocolate, from London, make a fractious, fragmented racket, swarms of stinging discordant guitar notes pinging over the thrash of indeterminate drums. The singing, or rather chanting, is likewise agitated, like Tyvek or, perhaps, Uranium Club.
Bands like Dog Chocolate can write songs about anything, from potatoes left to sprout in the basement to ill-advised bushwacking expeditions next to the highway. One cheery punk song is all about treatments for facial blemishes (“Fungal Free 2023”). But the thing is, you don’t really notice what these songs are about; you follow them breathlessly as they pogo around the room. The band, too, often seems enamored of their juddering stuttering grooves. “You can’t just be…
“Feels like all I ever do is try / And try again,” Kerrin Connolly sings on “Try”, the first track on her latest album, Simpleton. While the song seems like a monument to self-doubt, the album by the Boston-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist shows an artist overflowing with chops and dedication. While there are plenty of similarities between Simpleton and previous albums like Almost (2020) and Transitions (2024), Connolly has stepped up her game on her latest record, with smart, sophisticated arrangements and an arsenal of pop songs that are a quantum leap from those already-great earlier works.
Connolly describes Simpleton as “a concept album which explores the themes of a hero’s journey – some classic, others modern and…
…’Power to the People’ features 9CD, 123 tracks (90 of which are previously unreleased) to chronicle the story of Lennon and Ono’s political activism, spanning the prolific period between 1969’s anthem “Give Peace a Chance” and 1972’s controversial live album ‘Sometime in New York City’ as well as that year’s One to One concerts at Madison Square Garden.
The most challenging of John Lennon’s post-Beatles albums, there was latterly an additional barrier to Some Time in New York City being afforded the lavish box set treatment: namely that opening track, the still contentious, ‘Woman Is the N***** of the World’.
With said song now removed, a newly remixed version of the album – retitled New York City…
For a band that has always cultivated a unique and idiosyncratic sound, New Age Doom appears to have fully mastered their craft on Angels Against Angels. The album demonstrates a confident command of arrangement and atmosphere, tactically marshalling diverse musical elements while seamlessly integrating multiple genres. At the same time, it advances a spiritual message rooted in equality, love and truth.
Sparkling with elements of jazz, experimental, electronic, progressive rock and dub, the record is elevated further by the unmistakable vocals and lyricism of H.R. (Human Rights), frontman of the legendary band Bad Brains. Angels Against Angels uproots disparate sonic textures and intricately fuses them with both playfulness…
Not everything is Twin Peaks, but Rockie does kinda feel like the album Donna Hayward would make if she could pursue her musical ambitions: She’d be influenced by Julee Cruise, for sure, and probably Chromatics, and Sky Ferreira, and what could be more Badalamentian than the cloudburst of synth that opens “On Our Knees”? Maybe you feel like you’ve seen this show before, but it’s actually the spooky and charming debut from New York songwriter Cate Osborne, aka Rockie Rode, an unassuming indie-pop record with the aura of a vintage cult classic.
In Rockie’s New York, there is no traffic, every jukebox is stocked with Sharon Van Etten records, and the road to heaven begins with a U-turn to Queens. Osborne produces on…
Jenn Grant is a multi-award-winning Canadian singer-songwriter with eight albums to date. Queen of the Strait is, however, by far the most personal. It covers many deeply private subjects, including escaping from a dark physical attack when she was 18 and living briefly in London, to the heartbreak of going on a local TV show when she was a child to give her dog away as her mother was unable to pay for needed heart surgery.
‘Daddy and his Shotgun’ reveals her memories of being taken Goose hunting by her father and how she would become somehow attached and name the birds before they were shot down. She is now a vegetarian. The bravery she has shown to write about these and other events that have shaped her life and beliefs is quite extraordinary.
Welsh instrumentalist Huw Marc Bennett’s new album, Heol Las, cuts a refreshingly fine dash. Taking traditional melodies from South Wales – notably the Morgannwg/Glamorgan region – and reimagining them through a lens of folk jazz and psychedelic roots, Bennett paints a beguiling vision. Cerddoriaeth werin, the folk music of Morgannwg, is vividly brought to modern life here.
‘Carol Haf’ (Summer Carol) opens the proceedings with a ceremonial feel – a bright, sparkling hope for the future – rooted in Bro Morgannwg’s (Vale of Glamorgan region) seasonal rituals. ‘Cân Gwasael’ (Wassail Song) dips down into a darker mood, playing tentatively with the winter tradition of the Mari Lwyd (Welsh midwinter horse-skull folk ritual) – spindly, brooding, haunting…