…includes live recordings from the Orchestral FM4 Radio Session, Radio Eins Session and three new remixes; ‘Patterns’ (BOKKA Remix), ‘City Walls’ (Last Chance Remix) and ‘Wake Up Strange’ (Four Horsemen Remix).
For more than 30 years, cult British collective Archive have been ploughing their own furrow – joining the dots between ’90s trip-hop, various shades of alt rock and electronica. With Glass Minds, their 13th studio effort, the band continues to break new ground.
…A stark contrast exists between Glass Minds and its brooding and intense predecessor Call to Arms & Angels. For guitarist and co-vocalist Dave Pen, this originates from the differing circumstances in which the two projects were conceived.
Latest Entries »
…include a bonus disc with songs from the December 12, 1973 concert at Omni Coliseum in Atlanta.
From Dick’s Picks Volume 1 to Dave’s Picks Volume 58, Curtis Hixon Hall is front and center once again as we shed a little lovelight on the complete, unreleased show from December 18, 1973. On this one, you’ll find the band coastin’ off that Europe ’72 sound (“Tennessee Jed,” “Brown-Eyed Women,” a not-to-be-missed mix of “China>Rider”), testing the tempo of the newly debuted (12/12/73) pretty little “Peggy-O,” and morphing Wake of the Flood tracks (“Weather Report Suite,” “Row Jimmy,” and “Eyes of the World”) into live form. “Dark Star,”…
Despite its somewhat generic name, jazz trio The Setting have created something striking and quietly astounding on their self-titled debut album. The band, consisting of bassist and composer Eivind Opsvik, keyboard player Elias Stemeseder, and guitarist Will Graefe, have brought to fruition Opsvik‘s love of 1970s and 1980s synthesizer music, ECM solo guitar albums, and experimental art pop. But as the saying goes, the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
While there are certainly touchstones of previous subgenres and legendary artists – ranging from Brian Eno to Joe Zawinul to Ryuichi Sakamoto – all over this beguiling record, the result is a sound that is unlike anything else most ears have heard. The overall experience is decidedly…
Pekka Kuusisto, from Finland, is not your typical classical violinist. He’s been known to swallow tiny microphones in concert, and he might just break into a homegrown folk tune, strumming his fiddle like a mandolin.
Kuusisto has capably recorded the standard repertoire — including Mozart and Vivaldi — but on his new album, Willows, where he plays his violin and leads the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, he’s making some typically unexpected choices.
At the heart of the album is a performance of The Lark Ascending that’s guaranteed to ruffle feathers. The soothing, pastoral work for violin and orchestra, by British composer by Ralph Vaughan Williams, was written as World War I loomed. Over the past century, the piece has…
Kristen Gallerneaux’s Life Day unfolds as a sonic study in recurrence. Not repetition in any formal or minimalist sense, but more a return to a condition: a pulse, a signal, a state of suspended awareness that doesn’t fully resolve into stable time. The album’s six tracks don’t so much sit alongside as flow into each other, like unstable signals rather than discrete transmissions. They feel less composed than remembered, as though surfacing from within a foggy haze.
Across the album, rhythms persist with a curious insistence. They suggest a heartbeat, but just as readily the automated continuity of machines. Life here is never singular. It is doubled, distributed across bodies and systems, signals and supports. What emerges is music that is…
In Greek mythology, when the gods grant King Midas the power to turn everything he touches into gold, what first seems like a wish come true slowly becomes a curse.
In the case of L.A.-based producer Zhu’s fifth studio album Black Midas, however, the tables are turned, and what seems like a curse is musically transmogrified into a blessing.
Created in the wake of the Palisades Fire which saw Zhu’s charred Topanga home left uninhabitable for a year, the stripped-down 14-track melodic techno LP explores the luxurious spaces between sounds. It’s as much about its subtlety as it is the tribal percussion and shadowy basslines, turning darkness itself into a main character with all-black moods and low-register explorations.
Stephen Becker loves to find poetry and eloquence in the inane activities of everyday life. “Bad Idea”, the first song on his new album, Gravity Blanket, begins: “Had a bad idea again / So I remain uncertain for a while / Took some time to breathe again / And thrift a collared shirt to find my style.” In the lazy, midtempo “Emergency”, he asks a practical question: “Why’d you get a car in New York City? / The train goes far enough.” A fascinating bedroom-pop songwriter and musician, his musical approach may come off as occasionally naïve and “normcore”, but there is deep sophistication and unique textures in every song.
Becker is an in-demand New York sideman, working with artists as diverse as Rubblebucket, Vagabon, Katie Von Schleicher,…
There’s a sense in Misty Coast’s fifth album Always Sun that the Norwegian band has opened the curtains a little. Just enough to let the light in more easily this time around.
The familiar elements are all still there, with arrangements that drift and blur their soft-edged melodies, but now they’re put together with more space and less gauze. It’s not a seismic shift in their sound, but it changes what it’s like to sit with: unusually textured, more gently outlined and, ultimately, not quite as intense.
That softer instinct has been there from the beginning of this project. Formed by Linn Frøkedal and Richard Myklebust after their time in The Megaphonic Thrift, Misty Coast has always worked by easing melody out from beneath…
…includes the entirety of their ‘Moderate Air Quality’ EP as bonus tracks.
The British-American poet W. H. Auden, in his poem “The Age of Anxiety” (1947), highlights humanity’s isolation in an increasingly industrialized and failing world.
Nearly 80 years later, The Sick Man of Europe is picking up the threads of the same discussion: how to navigate in a world that is diametrically opposed to our needs? How not to lose your ipseity in a data-driven culture vying for your attention? Sick Man of Europe’s eponymous debut album is an exploration of these existential matters — and more.
Yeah, the Sick Man of Europe does not shy away from fundamental issues — does he?
Joe Martin describes himself as a “21st century Troubadour,” and has been likened to Lyle Lovett, a comparison which is hard to find on the opening song, ‘Hand Me Down Heart’. A driving piece of country rock which is closer to Tom Petty, with an added epic sweep and the bass guitar of Cornelius Webb (Jimmy Webb’s son) pushing the song along. Having been written and recorded in Nashville, you might be expecting a contemporary country-based record. Second tune ‘Checkmate’ confounds that with a pop/rock song which could as easily have emerged from his native Lancashire as the Midwest. Ben Jarrad adds some silky slide guitar.
The country folk of ‘Strangers to Lovers’ has a subtle percussion line from Cal Campbell (son of Glen), whose drum work throughout…
On Middle of Nowhere, Kacey Musgraves doesn’t so much return to her roots as redraw the map entirely — one where solitude isn’t a pit stop between relationships but the destination itself. Written in the aftermath of a breakup and shaped by long stretches of intentional aloneness, her seventh LP and debut for Lost Highway finds her toggling between self-sufficiency, mischief and the occasional bout of well-earned chaos.
The opening title track sets the tone within seconds: sunlit acoustic strums, a low-end thump and Musgraves calmly declaring, “It’s just me and me and that’s all I need.” It’s both a mission statement and, as the record unfolds, a thesis she keeps testing. Because even in the wide-open emotional space she’s carved out, desire…
It can take years to develop the kind of band chemistry you can hear straight away, the kind that’s all over mildred’s debut album Fenceline.
It’s not just that the Oakland four-piece write and sing democratically, it’s that their shared authorship feels like a genuine meeting of ideas passed around the room rather than delivered from any one fixed point. What could have felt piecemeal instead feels companionable and lived-in. There’s real warmth in that, and trust too. These are people you want to be friends with: unselfconscious, generous and together because they like the sound of each other’s instincts.
Opener “UPS Brown” gets that across beautifully. A low violin drone runs under guitars that feel both worn and careful, with crunchy…
Peggy Suicide Cope’s Notes #8 could be the killer: the downfall of Margaret Thatcher against the rise of Julian Cope through New Age thought, fierce London cycling, and a total obsession with capturing the essence of Rave, On-the-One Soul, and the compelling Baggy Beat of his youthful UK contemporaries.
Read through gales of laughter as Cope’s fights with his record company extract from him the most potent music of his career thus far. 52 pages of autobiographical exactitude place Peggy Suicide into the bizarre UK context of early ’90s New Age agitated city-dweller vexation: Ecstasy, riots, dolphins, crop circles – it’s all here.
Then there’s the 39-minute accompanying CD. Highlights include five songs of early ‘pre-enlightened’ material, and Cope’s wonderful ‘A Poll Tax Serenade’ medley.
The biggest Cope’s Notes yet, this fabulous and handsomely bound…
Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds – Live Trax Vol. 73: Branscomb Memorial Auditorium, Lakeland, FL (2026)
Dave Matthews Band dug deep into their archives for Live Trax Vol. 73: 2/10/1997 Branscomb Memorial Auditorium, which features a previously uncirculated recording of a 1997 Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds show.
Dave & Tim’s stop at Branscomb Memorial Auditorium in Lakeland, Florida came as part of a 25-show winter tour. The concert was the last missing piece from the tour as the only show that had never circulated.
While setlists didn’t change much from night to night that winter, there are a few songs on Live Trax Vol. 73 that weren’t played at the previous show (issued as Live Trax Vol. 24 in 2012). Matthews & Reynolds fit their first cover of Daniel Lanois’ “The Maker” into the setlist in Lakeland.
Glissandro 70 is a Canadian experimental duo consisting of Sandro Perri (Polmo Polpo, formerly of Great Lake Swimmers) and Craig Dunsmuir (Kanada 70, Dun Dun Band). They issued their self-titled first album, Glissandro 70, on Constellation in 2006, and its five songs are generally spacious and hypnotic, exploring areas related to Afrobeat, minimalism, abstract pop, and even techno (one song quotes Model 500’s “No UFO’s”). The two musicians continued working together over the years, with both eventually releasing a trio of albums as part of the ensemble Off World. G70 2: Bones of Dundasa arrived two decades after Glissandro 70, and it’s less a brand-new album and more of a collection of additional material the duo created over the years, some of…
John Dwyer launches Heathen Axe, a stripped-back trio built on immediacy, volume and instinct. Written and recorded in quick succession, these tracks were captured live to cassette four-track with minimal takes, leaning into spontaneity and rough-edged energy.
Joined by Tom Dolas and John Hodge, Dwyer drives a set of unpolished, high-intensity recordings where riffs unravel into noise and structure gives way to momentum. The approach is deliberately loose and overdriven, with everything pushed into the red.
Echoing the blown-out psychedelia and underground rock of Mainliner, High Rise and Comets on Fire, Heathen Axe trades precision for impact—direct, chaotic and built to be played loud.
A tribute to a tribute? During the final mix sessions for Peggy Suicide, Cope invited some musicians to Ramport Studio to celebrate the album’s completion. He called this late-night-party recording session E-Man Groovin’ – a tribute to the Jimmy Castor Bunch song of the same name, and the album’s mascot. Since Cope’s old digital tapes were damaged, this new tribute was created using recycled loops and samples from the original. Fifteen grooves imbued with the distinctive Peggy Suicide spirit – Kraut, Baggie, On-the-One – rescued from the archives of Oblivion! Yowzah!
Tracklist shows 15 tracks. However, CD only has 14 tracks. This is due to two of the tracks segueing together as one track. Track 12 is 5:55 long. “Rizla Deutschland” actually lasts…
Maisy Owen, a Nashville native, has been surrounded by music and the art of songcraft just about all her life. First came the viola at age nine, then guitar where she embraced fingerpicking, soaking in influences from Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, Mazzy Star and David Olney. Maisy’s unique sound, musical truth and stirring vocals inhabit Dark On a Sunny Day, her debut album, produced by Robin Eaton (known for his work with Jill Sobule and co-writer of “I Kissed a Girl”)
…Lead single, ‘My Youth Is All for You’, is a perfect opening track. Delicate finger-picked folk guitar and Owen’s lilting, crooning, whispering vocal immediately invite you into her world. “I cannot bear the weight of your affection / I cannot walk with all these shadows behind me”.
Jacklyn records is famed among soul record collectors as the home of three great Darrow Fletcher 45s issued on the label in the mid-60s. The imprint was owned and run by his father, Johnny Haygood, and though it served as a stepping stone in Fletcher’s extensive career, it was launched for a different artist and provided Chicago soul fans with several great discs over its seven-year existence.
A teenage shop assistant who worked in Haygood’s record store called Paul Smith launched the label, following in the footsteps of the young Fletcher who had begun his career a couple of years previously. Though Smith only had two 45 releases, the three sides on them revealed a great voice and writing talent worthy of a much bigger stage.
On her Blue Note debut, 2026’s Diavola, vocalist Gabrielle Cavassa conjures a glowing, dream-like intimacy. The winner of the 2021 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition, Cavassa has a soft, dusky voice in the Billie Holiday and Chet Baker style. She’s a torch singer in the classic sense, but with a spare, direct soulfulness all her own. It’s a style that helped make saxophonist Joshua Redman’s 2023 and 2024 albums where are we and Words Fall Short particularly memorable additions to his catalog. Redman returns the favor here, co-producing (and occasionally playing) alongside label president Don Was. Also on board is a truly all-star ensemble of jazz luminaries, including guitarist Jeff Parker, pianist Paul Cornish, bassist Larry Grenadier, and…