Dundee composer extraordinaire Andrew Wasylyk enlists some well-known names for his latest project, Irreparable Parables. From Gruff Rhys and Kathryn Joseph to Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, for first-time listeners this is likely Wasylyk’s most accessible material, blending his cinematic noir charm with pockets of jazz, classical and indie flair.
It’s counterpointed by two key highlights: the first being ‘Love Is a Life That Lasts Forever (ft. Molly Linen)’. Reminiscent of Glasgow duo Cloth via Linen’s hushed vocals, its bright trumpets and textures echo waves of joy and hope, with Wasylyk looking to the writings of Derek Jarman for inspiration. Constrastingly, Kathryn Joseph’s pain-ridden vocal delivery on…
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Felix Mackenzie-Barrow probably could have been forgiven for resting on his laurels creatively after the 2025 he had; the band he fronts, Divorce, were one of the indie rock stories of the year, and their debut album, Drive to Goldenhammer, made the business end of many a year-end list. Quietly, though, he’s been working on a side project, with quietly being the operative word; this debut album under his solo moniker, Book of Churches, is a minimalist effort in the grand tradition of indie folk singer-songwriters.
The tracks were each written and recorded in a single day and then set aside, making this a collection of snapshots in which Felix ruminates on some weighty issues in quiet moments stolen away from the noise of Divorce’s rise.
One would hope that to deem Surfbort an act who really need to be seen live would do nothing to diminish their recorded output. Captivating as largely a consequence of vocalist Dani Miller’s chaotic on-stage persona, there’s nothing from this third album from the New York outfit to suggest that’s likely to change. However, it’s in the less obvious moments – for an act renowned for their frenetic vintage-hued punk rock, at least – that Reality Star twinkles brightest.
‘Jessica’s Changed’ is the runaway winner of these. There’s a wonderful juxtaposition of an imagined ‘then’ and now: the ‘90s slacker rock-via-2010s lo-fi resurgence sound that’s instead clear, crisp and almost epic in its sonic scale; the titular Jessica – a mainstay, at least from…
For a band that spent nearly a decade on the road — stopping to record albums before getting right back to the grind — Nashville’s The Brook & The Bluff reaped the rewards of living out of a suitcase, winning over fans across the globe, churning out viral hits online, and sharpening their live set. But finally slowing down and parking the van for a while proved transformative in the creation of one of their most compelling records to date.
Werewolf, their most rock-forward album yet, is not a road record. It came together much like the band’s earliest material did – worked out slowly in their rehearsal space, day after day. Oddly enough, despite taking shape at a more leisurely pace, Werewolf plays like a live record, with the amps turned up, the drums hitting harder,…
France’s near-revolution of May ’68 kicked the country’s small but vibrant counter-culture into overdrive and birthed a local underground music scene. The bands it spawned made music with far less rock purity than groups from the UK and US – their influences foregrounded improvisation, disjunction and genre-blending: Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa, free jazz and radical politics. The introduction of the synthesiser in the early 1970s added fuel to the fire.
This six-track compilation inaugurates a series to accompany Ian Thompson’s Synths, Sax & Situationists – the first English-language book to investigate this extraordinary and still largely unknown movement. It focuses on the second wave of bands that emerged in 1972/3, when…
Most all within the sphere of my reach has a reverence for classic soul music. Not upper-cased to designate any genre distinction, but closer to the ground… the small “s” signifying what truly changes and crosses the course of our blood. We’ve sought solace and direction as if a spinning disc were a communion rail before which we surrender; as if at the bent knee of our parents. It’s a ritual that has remained fortifying and alive – because the music itself has: refusing challenges to its legacy and relevance by evolving as we do.
Otis Redding, being but one sharp example, continues to sound like a living human being leaping from a pair of speakers because, in a very real way, he is one: his voice still reaching out with what poet William Carlos Williams…
In 1971 several dozen African American soul, jazz, and gospel artists embarked on a journey that would change the lives of everyone involved. They traveled from New York City to Ghana, West Africa to take part in a 13-hour concert entitled Soul to Soul. The concert was a celebration of 14 years of Ghana’s independence from British rule. For most of these artists it was their first trip to Africa. For the African American musicians, this was a journey about personal roots, the ancestral homeland, history, discovery, loss, pain and joy.
Directed by Academy AwardⓇ winner Denis Sanders and produced by Tom Mosk & Richard Bock, the concert film/documentary had a limited theatrical run in 1971. It now returns restored with the original edit reconstructing each scene…
The Set Up is flagged as a companion piece to last year’s Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom, starting off from a tune Willy Vlautin brought in at the end of the sessions, ‘Walking with His Sleeves Down’. Vlautin says, “Amy learned it on piano, and we recorded it live. Her take was stunning, but the song didn’t quite fit with the record. It was lonelier, more rattled, and it missed that rudderless romance that inhabits the world of Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom, so we set it aside”
Stunning doesn’t begin to cover it. If you had a namecheck for Birmingham’s Judas Priest on your Delines lyric bingo card, you can tick it off on this song. Just Amy Boone and piano, bleak but beautiful. The next song that Vlautin brought to the band was ‘The Meter Keeps Ticking’,…
There are a couple of trajectories that the opening trio of albums by a new artist often take. The first is a debut album planned to perfection after years of playing and dreaming, then a second that is like the first but maybe not as strong, followed by a third that is less so. The second is an artist finding their studio feet in the simplest configuration of their music on their debut album, gently building on that with record number two and by the third, blossoming into an expressive, confident studio artist overflowing in decorative, colourful ideas and ready to push on with the creation of their most fully realised and sonically evolved work to date. Katherine Priddy belongs firmly in the second group of these examples; her 2021 debut, The Eternal Rocks Beneath, heralded…
Shabaka Hutchings’ two and a half years away from the saxophone have proved fruitful, his beatific album of (predominantly) flute music – Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace – emerging in April 2024 to almost universal acclaim. Perhaps too much acclaim, fretted those who despaired of ever hearing him attack the tenor sax again. Yet here he is, back on sax – a move proclaimed loudly by Of the Earth’s attendant press release. And indeed, sax is the central voice on the new album’s impressionistic opener A Future Untold, lyrical over nuages of tinkling bells. After that, Hutchings’ iconic axe is less dominant – obliged to fit into a complex choral network of flutes and electronic percussion, all played, programmed, recorded and mixed by…
Cancelled gigs, avoidant record labels, crackpot outbursts… for some time, things have been ‘complicated’ in the world of Morrissey. Yet if neurosis, despair and paranoia remain his materials, here he uses them well.
In as impressive voice as he’s ever been, with a polished rock/ funk-lite/ continental trip-hop production, it revisits multiple past phases: homesick, ‘The Monsters of Pig Alley’ reprises the Anglo-coshboy ’90s; the booze-sodden, priapic ‘Boulevard’ recalls noughties European visions; his more recent American sheen emerges quizzically from the Parisien cemetery-stalking title song.
Best is the stark ‘Many Icebergs Ago’, a soliloquy of East End pubs, suggestive “stirrings below” and the long dark corridor of his life as it…
Will Oldham wants us to be aware of structure, of dualism and symmetry. His new album, We Are Together Again, released under his Bonnie “Prince” Billy moniker, opens with ‘Why Is the Lion?’ and closes with ‘Bride of the Lion’. The two iterations of the same song share similar (but subtly adjusted) lyrics, structured as a series of questions about fear, metaphysical in nature, to which the answer is difficult to fathom but seems to involve love at both personal and infinite levels. ‘Why is the Lion?’ is slow, discursive, easy on the ear, decorated by Jacob Duncan’s flute. It approaches the realm of baroque folk, like some of Donovan’s work with flautist Harold McNair, but where Donovan was lighthearted even at his most melancholic moments, Oldham admits…
…includes a bonus live track.
Since putting out their debut album Projector in 2021, Geese have become one of the most respected bands of their generation.
The former NME Cover stars have built a fierce reputation for making consistently interesting, experimental indie–rock that makes you believe original ideas still exist, even as they reference acts who’ve come before them.
Their growth has been a word-of-mouth sensation, chatter around that first LP – a solid slice of post-punk thrills – getting increasingly louder with 2023’s country-tinged rock’n’roll record 3D Country and frontman Cameron Winter’s acclaimed solo debut Heavy Metal last year.
Now, with their third album Getting Killed,…
zakè’s deep attachment to the seasons of the Midwest, along with his intuitive approach to sound creation, has led to a deep and varied body of analog ambient drone recordings across the past ten years. Many of his albums take on the forms and colors of the space in which they are heard, but others convey something more fleeting and indefinable, far beyond the five senses. Cantus for Winter in Six Parts creates a space for comfort, contemplation, nostalgia, and longing; a moment of stillness that honors the cycle of all things, wandering fallow landscapes while dreaming of their renewal.
…The music billows and drifts like snowbanks under wind, and as such is well-suited for playing while indoors, watching the flakes fall…
All Duke Ellington concerts offered music of substance. Audiences listened patiently through the medleys and Tony Watkins’ vocals. Some performances, however, stood apart because they contained material that was fresh — music not yet worn thin by repetition, where both the thinking and playing could still surprise.
Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, and the orchestra toured Asia (the “Far East”) in 1963. Rather than immediately writing new compositions, they deliberately allowed the impressions of the journey to settle, preferring that the process of transformation occur naturally rather than risk producing a mere pastiche.
Ellington’s “The Far East Suite” (RCA 1966) was eventually recorded over three days, from…
The thing about finding yourself is there’s always another corner to turn. The Vermont-based singer/songwriter Liz Cooper wrote her third album during a period of intense self-discovery. She moved to New York for the first time, weathered a pandemic, came out to herself after falling in love with a friend, and experienced her first queer relationship and breakup, all in the course of a few years, all while tracing out the songs that would come to make up New Day. These ten tracks scintillate with the kind of self-confidence that only beams through after you’ve aimed a sharp gaze inward – and realized that whatever you see in there will always keep changing, no matter how much you feel like you’ve got a grasp on it.
Despite its boisterousness and verve, New Day…
“I wanna live on the wings of desire,” are the first words Hemi Hemingway sings on his new album, Wings of Desire. There’s a reference here, of course, to the 1987 Wim Wenders classic about an angel who gives up his wings so as to experience human love, the aesthetics of which all make sense within Hemingway’s universe: the grimy yet romantic pulse of 1980s Berlin, the way its detached black-and-white gives way to full colour, its post-punk soundtrack. But more than that, this opening line is a statement of intent which fuels the entire album. Grappling with the end of a long-term relationship and a relocation from London to New Zealand, Hemingway’s songwriting began to explore the possibilities of a new, uncertain future.
“A friend of mine described it as…
Pina Palau writes songs like diary entries with a guitar. Moving between folk, indie and Americana, she sings about longing, confusion and the things left unsaid between two people. Crush and heartbreak meet dry humour, vulnerability meets warmth. Always from the perspective of a musician who’s quietly exploring the human mind.
The Zürich-based songwriter has released two albums so far, including the hit single “Jupi”, played Montreux Jazz Festival and Reeperbahn Festival, and opened for Courtney Barnett and Alex Lahey. She also supported King Hannah on a sold-out European tour and has been played on BBC Radio 6 Music and FluxFM.
Live, Pina Palau and her band offer pedal-steel romance, western-style guitar picking…
On their third album, Amaro, Bibi Club invites us to brave the dark beasts that shadow us beneath the surface, and to devote ourselves to the healing power of a fierce will to live. It explores the liminal spectrum between the here and beyond, pointing to love, nature, and community as the unifying purpose. The songs draw a map of a world of its own, following the trajectory traced by the Bibis in recent years.
Now out of the living room, we dance in a mental space overloaded with grief and fear in their rawest forms. Following the death of two loved ones in the last year, the mantra “I want to love, I want to live” resonates intensely in each melody; if the heart is a place that never dies, we must reach it as quickly as possible.
When Hey Colossus released their debut album Hey Colossus Hates You in 2004, they turned heads, as one of the few bands experimenting with a sound that was both psychedelic and hardcore. Planting themselves at the heart of the noise rock scene, the group made it known that they were a product of roaring guitars and hellish screams. Their sound was raw, completely authentic and oozing with pure passion. Now over two decades into their craft, Hey Colossus has shifted a fair bit into the alternative space, leaving behind the helter-skelter punk that was once ingrained in their early work. After a two-year break, on Christmas Day last year, the psychedelic six-piece announced a brand new record Heaven Was Wild alongside a mini documentary.