You have to hand it to Chris “CR” Gennone when it comes to naming his bands; consistency is at the fore. He loves the moniker CR so much so that he’s recorded five albums as CR and the Degenerates, then with a few lineup changes, it was CR and the Nones in 2019, and now we have the third album from CR & the White Lights.
Having listened to their previous release, The Ghosts Are Coming Home, which is a truly magnificent album, the quality of writing and musicianship hasn’t slipped one iota on this new one. This is a really solid collection bringing to mind the best qualities of Neil Young and Wilco, that spotlights Gennone’s wonderfully soulful and effective vocals and some superb driving hooks, demonstrating his musicianship…
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If not for Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark — Alvin Schwartz’s infamous anthology series of folk stories that have haunted grade school book fairs for decades — 
Remember when SST records ruled the independent rock scene in the late ’80s, early ’90s and when those sounds created by the bands like The Meat Puppets, where everything sounded like it was going to fall apart any second, but never did, creating effervescent-sounding jams somewhere between elastic folk and spaced-out jazz?
Abnormal Conditions’ is the fifth album by upstate New York roots rockers 
If there were a collective appreciation of dramatic album intros of the year, then Babylon, the latest offering from 
DeForrest Brown Jr. was born on a military base in Tampa and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, where his grandmother worked at the jail where Martin Luther King was held. He played trumpet and tuba in school marching ensembles, moved to New York in 2013 to write music criticism for Mixmag, Resident Advisor, and Artforum, and eventually co-founded the Make Techno Black Again campaign, which started as a meme, became a clothing line, and hardened into a serious political position. His 2022 book Assembling a Black Counter Culture spent 432 pages arguing that the music industry built a global economy around a Black art form and systematically cut Black people out of it. His four Planet Mu albums, from 
Jazz 625 was a British television show, hosted by trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton, that ran from 1964 to 1966 on BBC2; the name comes from the higher-resolution 625-line UHF system that the station employed for broadcast. The show featured a variety of British musicians as well as top American artists such as Art Blakey, Jimmy Giuffre, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Thelonious Monk and the Modern Jazz Quartet. The archives thus hold a treasure trove of mid-60s jazz and, thankfully, the 35 mm film containing many episodes has survived and can be seen at a variety of sites online as well as on DVD. On March 19, 1965, pianist Bill Evans and his trio featuring bassist Chuck Israels and drummer Larry Bunker played an hour-long set for…
Pianist 
If Irish violinist Darragh Morgan’s latest release is any indication, Northern Irish contemporary music is not just alive and well but thriving. With the violinist partnering with the Ulster Orchestra and conductor David Brophy, the smartly curated Spin presents four fiercely imaginative works for violin and orchestra written expressly for Morgan by long-time collaborators Bill Campbell, Brian Irvine, Ryan Molloy, and Frank Lyons. Northern Irish musical heritage and traditional classical structures are drawn upon, but the music on Spin, all four pieces world premiere recordings, is in no way constrained by geography or the past when the composers present vivid works emblematic of their distinct personalities.
Features the bonus track “Bad Luck Hideaway”.
Sidemen in rock regularly boast a side to them that comes bursting out later in life. Pink Floyd guitarist Snowy White made his presence known on the radio with the wistful “Bird of Paradise,” just as Genesis touring bassist Daryl Stuermer found a new lease of life as Phil Collins’ co-writer on No Jacket Required. 
The Brazilian brothers Khouri, vocalist and lead guitarist Matheus and bassist/vocalist Thiago Khouri, have obviously listened to every record cut in Liverpool in the early ’60s and absorbed some important lessons regarding brevity, harmony, the proper amount of jangle, and whacking the listener across the chops with a big fat hook. They’ve put those studies to good use in their group Banda AL9, releasing two excellent albums both in Portuguese and English before 2026’s English-only Hey! Hey! We’re Banda AL9. It wouldn’t matter if the record were sung in Martian, anyone with a love for bright and sunny guitar rock that sounds a bunch like, well, almost exactly like, the Beatles when Paul took over and scrubbed any irony or darkness from the final product,…
Attention should definitely be given to the remarkable sound design achieved by ambient-electronic artist 
At the age of 72, 
For listeners drawn to the quietly adventurous music of Aldous Harding, Cate Le Bon or Jessica Pratt, Half Truth, by California songwriter Avery Hellman, who performs as 
If by looking at the cover for 
The current popularity of primarily instrumental bands combining funk, blues, R&B and soul can’t be entirely traced to the UK’s New Mastersounds. But there is no question that the recently disbanded quartet’s output, which began in 2000, brought new life and a fresh attitude to a genre that experienced a brief commercial surge in the mid-’60s.
Pluto in Aquarius is the third album from cellist