Charles “Poppy Bob” Walker’s guitar compositions have a liquid, expansive cosmic Americana scope. The notes linger in pellucid backwashes and slide eerily between the known tones. Not much is known about the Yuma-based outsider artist, now apparently deceased, but his work on DOUBLE-WIDE —and on the earlier Dirt Bike Vacation — is a far cry from the usual pickin’ and grinnin’ proficiencies of blues-folk old-timers.
The guitarist and song-hunter Cameron Knowler stumbled on Walker’s work at, of all places, a Texas local library branch. Intrigued enough to track down a sample, Knowler immediately became obsessed with the music, which evokes ambient kosmische players like Chuck Johnson, Luke Schneider, and in some moods, William Tyler.
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We always want life to make sense, yet despite our best efforts, it does not. This is the starting point for Asymmetry, which distills a lifetime of thoughts and emotions into 88 keys. Alex Kozobolisis no stranger to such efforts; his seasonal quadrilogy, The Seasons Are Not Four, swept 14 tracks into four quadrants, a tidy project, although as the title indicates, the “real” seasons seep into their neighbors’ yards.
Asymmetry includes wholly original tracks, plus a couple reimaginings; the slightly jazzy tone represents a shift from the composer’s prior works, but a holiday spirit bubbles below; at times the tender notes call to mind Vince Guardini’s classic Peanuts score. As early as opening track “Lost Hours,” one can hear the snow…
…Close to a century ago Virginia Woolf captured duration and sensation in flux in her 1928 novel Orlando in a line Sunik Kim quotes in an essay accompanying her new album, Formenverwandler: “An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second”.
As Kim’s essay explains, Formenverwandler seeks to explore perceptions of time and memory. Spread across two CDs and close to two hours, the album sees dazzling irruptions of electronics test the limits of how much information and variation can be stretched across or condensed into units of time. Where long-form compositions…
Setting aside initial plans for a second chapter of THE HARP, Kety Fusco has forged forward with the full-length BOHÈME. In a remarkable confluence, Iggy Pop (who appears on early single “SHE”) is having a moment, coming off the wild success of Teddybears’ “Punkrocker” from the Superman soundtrack. “SHE” underlines both Fusco’s gothic sensibilities and her efforts to bring the harp into what one might call an alternative mainstream. “The harp is not heard as much,” says Iggy, but one wants it to be; or at least, one wants the harp to be heard in surprising fashion, no longer relegated to the upscale and staid. One can also glean the shift in the video for “BLOW,” which references films such as Friday the 13th and The Blair Witch Project, albeit in…
Milwaukee’s Altered Five Blues Band is nearing the quarter-century mark and returns with their eighth studio album, Hammer & Chisel. The multiple BMA nominees are one of the most dependable, hard-driving blues units on the scene. Once again, Tom Hambridge is in the producer’s chair for the sixth consecutive time. As such, the album was recorded in Nashville. Principal songwriter and guitarist Jeff Schroedl is now the head of Blind Pig Records, the band’s label for nearly the past decade.
Schroedl is one of four original members who have been on board since the inception. The others include vocalist Jeff Taylor, bassist Mark Solveson, and drummer Alan Arber. New member Steve Huebler is on keyboards, replacing original member Raymond Tevich, to whom they…
There are several artists, it seems, who go by the name of Sam Lewis. So, just to be clear, this release, Everything’s Fine, is from the Nashville musician of that name, and it’s his 7th release, following on from 2024’s Superposition. In terms of intention, Lewis, in discussion with studio engineer Joe McMahan, wanted to deliver a sparse recording, in places that might be seen as the case, but there’s still a full sound across this album.
The spirit of John Prine floats above the opener and single ‘Chase the Moon’, rhyming couplets and a narrative melodic bounce push along picked and strummed guitar. The song was created around the time of Prine’s passing, so it’s fitting that his influence lives on through this.
…Title track ‘Everything’s Fine’ appears at…
Badawi was born Raz Mesinai in 1973 in Jerusalem. By spending a lot of time with Bedouins in the Sinai desert as a youngster, he picked up on their unique musical style.
When he reached the age of seven, he was taken under the wing of dervish sheik Murshid Hassan (of the Palestinian refugee camp of Balata), who taught the youngster all about exotic Middle Eastern drumming.
Soon he had mastered such percussive instruments as the bendir, zarb, and darbukka. After moving to New York City, he found himself immersed in the burgeoning NYC Academy of Underground DJs (which included DJ Spooky and a host of others) and changed his name to Badawai (which means “desert dweller” or simply “Bedouin”).
Now 20 years since the start of the project, The Winter Sounds has an international sensibility and a distinct global vision. Formed by Patrick Keenan in Athens, GA, the group now includes a few European members and has Prague as its home base. The group hasn’t necessarily adopted a world music sound, but instead maintains its roots in indie pop and new wave. Despite this, the band has articulated a global outlook, drawing specifically on the ideas of the solarpunk literary movement, with a focus on grassroots movement toward a sustainable future. With The Winter Sounds’ seventh album, Jupiter, the band puts forth a positive and encouraging message supported by bright and optimistic sounds.
With single “Kaleidoscope,” the album opens…
Camouflage are one of the few German bands to have been making music successfully at home and abroad for the last couple of decades. “The Great Commandment” (1987) and “Love Is A Shield” (1989) were actually worldwide hits. After four albums, Camouflage felt it was time to experiment. This phase reached its zenith with the album Spice Crackers in 1995 – the most daring, most interesting work they ever released. Electropop tracks sit side by side with hypnotic, repetetive, spheric tracks. Now, 30 years later, “Spice Crackers” will finally be released on vinyl for the first time!
Heiko Maile, Camouflage founder member and producer of “Spice Crackers”, has this to say about working on the album: On our previous productions, we started out with just a few…
Out of press in its original form for years, controversial beat poet Allen Ginsberg‘s East Village love-in First Blues – a vast double-album of collaborations with Bob Dylan, Arthur Russell, Anne Waldman, David Mansfield, Perry Robinson, David Amram and many other friends and contemporaries is reissued via Death Is Not The End.
It’s hard to deny Ginsberg’s impact; his poetry alone was enough to shift the course of US counter culture, and you can visualise his contributions to downtown punk and folk. But his music career isn’t quite as intimately understood, which makes ‘First Blues’ a pretty vital artefact for anyone looking to investigate further. Ginsberg wrote and recorded the material between 1971 and 1983, taking the opportunity to leaf through his lengthy…
Uzed is the fourth album by Belgian band Univers Zero. It was released three years after ‘Ceux du Dehors’, due to a change in line-up and a new repertoire, although the EP ‘Crawling Wind’ had been released in the meantime. The album marked a turning point for the band. Univers Zero explored new electric colors, giving it a more rock feel with the addition of new musicians such as Jean-Luc Plouvier, who introduced the synthesizer, guitarist Michel Delory, who played a memorable solo in ‘Célesta (For Chantal)’, and André Mergen on electric cello and alto saxophone, who enriched the orchestral texture. Dirk Descheemaeker on clarinet and soprano saxophone, the return of Christian Genet on bass, this evolution can also be explained by the arrival of new musicians.
Torch Bearers is the landmark new recording from Grammy Award© winning trumpeter-composer-arranger Brian Lynch, featuring legendary saxophonist Charles McPherson. Recorded at Van Gelder Studios with an all-star lineup including vocalist Samara Joy, this album documents the first recorded collaboration between Lynch and McPherson since their initial meeting in 1980, reflecting a shared artistic lineage shaped by direct experience with pianist and educator Barry Harris.
Featuring original compositions including pieces written specifically for and with Joy, alongside canonic bebop works by Barry Harris and Dizzy Gillespie, the album showcases mutual intuition among musicians united by Harris’ influence. Joined by pianists Rob Schneiderman…
After forming the band as teens in 2013 and putting out four albums by the turn of the decade, Boston indie rock trio Vundabar enjoyed a second wind when their six-year-old single “Alien Blues” went viral on social platforms in 2021. With new fans in tow, the group bolstered their engaging mix of surf/garage rock, post-punk, and angular indie rock with more electronics on the next year’s Devil for the Fire LP.
Their sixth album, Surgery and Pleasure, finds Vundabar at their most urgent and visceral yet, as they lean into brisker tempos, 2000s indie rock, and post-punk postures for their Loma Vista label debut. It kicks off with the dingy and driving “Life Is a Movie” (“There is no story, just an endless roiling ocean”), a partly shouted, anxious…
What makes a great Springsteen concert is deeply subjective and often tied to what we bring to the occasion ourselves: who went with us (my future husband!); when we saw it (the day after graduation!); how long have we been looking forward to it (finally, after 11 years the E Street Band is reuniting!).
What makes for a thrilling Springsteen concert is perhaps more definable. An element of the unexpected plays a significant role, and for those who see many shows and tours, getting songs in the set that we’ve never witnessed before. Some of the thrill lies in the risk the artist takes in playing material that’s not battle-hardened; we feel rewarded by the chances they’ve taken on us.
It’s in this context of thrilling that a night like…
YODOK III is something of a catch-all outfit, part free improvisation, part post-rock, part ambient, and a few other parts. The group consists of Tomas Järmyr (drums), Kristoffer Lo (tuba), and Dirk Serries (guitar), who have been performing and recording together for over a decade. Here, they are joined by organist Petra Bjørkhaug on a 54-minute improvised set recorded live at the Nidarosdomen Cathedral in Trondheim.
The album consists of one self-titled piece that begins quiet – not just ambient but hovering at the edge of perception – and slowly builds into a crescendo of sound nearly a hour later. Nidarosdomen’s organ has 9600 pipes and this performance must have been a spectacle, with subsonic frequencies that you could feel…
H.R. Giger (1940-2014) was a surrealist artist known most for his design of the xenomorph from the Alien films and a number of album covers and related artwork for Magma, Emerson, Lake, & Palmer, Celtic Frost, and the Dead Kennedys. A Giger insert in the latter’s Frankenchrist album was the subject of a criminal lawsuit, where members of the Kennedys and several other parties were alleged to have contributed to “distribution of harmful matter to minors” due to the sexual nature of the artwork. The trial ended in acquittal, with the judge recognizing that the piece had at least some artistic merit. This publicity probably led to more people (including teenagers) becoming aware of Giger’s psychosexual works.
But Giger is mostly known for his disturbing…
As indicated by the title, Forward Into Light is a hopeful album, suggesting that history is tilting toward something brighter and more positive. This attitude may be in short supply these days, but its rarity makes it all the more essential. The bookends are carefully chosen, as the album begins with a piece inspired by the women’s suffrage movement in the U.S., which eventually succeeded, and ends with a “meditation on resilience” that might be applied to multiple nations and situations, from Ukraine to Gaza and points afar and in-between. These pieces, titled “Forward Into Light” and “Something for the Dark,” work in tandem to identify the spiritual struggle and speculate on its eventual outcome. The image of Synder like a supplicant bathed in a beam of light…
Concord Music Group reissue R.E.M. at the BBC, originally released in 2018, the comprehensive broadcast collection from R.E.M.
R.E.M. grew up with the BBC, and this historic relationship is lovingly celebrated across an incredible collection that beautifully illustrates the career trajectory of one of modern music’s greatest bands. The collection—available as a super-deluxe edition 8-CD/1-DVD box set, as well as 2-CD, 2-LP and digital formats—comprises a treasure trove of rare and unreleased live and studio recordings culled from theBBC and band archives. This is a must-have collection for R.E.M. fans and an authoritative introduction for newcomers.
In-studio performances featured in the 8-CD/1-DVD box set include a John Peel Session…
Guitarist, composer, arranger, and producer Gregory Uhlmann expanded his musical and sonic reach in 2023 after more than a decade of quirky singer-songwriter albums. In September, he collaborated with guitarist and Hand Habits creator Meg Duffy on the celebrated Doubles. The following year he joined experimental L.A. collective SML, along with Macie Stewart, Josh Johnson, Anna Butterss, Jeremiah Chiu, and Booker Stardrum. They issued a widely acclaimed eponymous debut on International Anthem. In 2025, he and saxophonist Johnson teamed with bassist Sam Wilkes to release Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes. SML released How You Been in November 2025. Extra Stars marks Uhlmann’s solo debut for International Anthem. Its 13 brief works are airy…
Mercury Falling was released in March 1996. It reached number four in Sting’s native UK and number five in the US, becoming his fifth straight studio album to make the top 5 in both countries. The album features the UK top 40 hits ‘Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot’, ‘You Still Touch Me’ and ‘I Was Brought To My Senses’ and was Sting’s last album to feature the production talents of Hugh Padgham, which underlines the feeling that this record was the end of a certain phase in Sting’s solo career. Supporting musicians on the album include frequent collaborators Dominic Miller on guitar, Kenny Kirkland on keyboards, Vinnie Colaiuta on drums, and Branford Marsalis on tenor and soprano saxophone.
…Mercury Falling (Expanded Edition) adds 19…