The Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi embraces the imperfections and transience of creation. A potter might express wabi-sabi through the art of kintsugi, the mending of broken ceramics with lacquer mixed with dust from precious metals. Raúl Sotomayor expresses his version of wabi-sabi on the latest album from Sotomayor, his duo with sister Paulina, which represents a shift from seeking perfection to pushing sonic boundaries. “When I started making music, I tried to make everything sound clean and proper,” he said in a recent documentary on his creative process. “Now it’s how much can we clip it or distort it, or how much can we stretch it and it’s still gonna sound good?” The result is a record both calculated and chaotic, crafted by artists who have…
Latest Entries »
Released by Houndstooth (the in-house record label of London nightclub Fabric) in partnership with Mastery-a London sound studio best known for putting on installations and live shows with a host of performers-Quantum Sound is billed as a record “for listening with eyes closed.” You can listen to each of the comp’s 12 tracks in its entirety or, for maximum transcendence, an hour-long continuous mix crafted by composer and club supremo Hannah Holland, who also contributes two excellent productions of her own. The vinyl even comes with an eye mask if you buy it from Fabric’s website.
The air of peace and tranquility permeating this music is to be expected. But it comes from several unlikely sources, author and TV personality…
The second album of collaboration between former journalist and current label owner Eric Brace and talented wandering guitarist Thomm Jutz, Circle and Square is a comforting mix of harmonies and carefully constructed acoustic tunes. The duos’ guitars are here fleshed out as required by bass, drums and piano, adding colour and sonic range where required. This is not music to challenge the listener, but to provide a tasteful and thoughtful frame for the ten songs which make up Circle and Square. Looking at the world around them, the two singers share leads and harmonies over stories of art, of neighbours, of memories, of lost friends. But the tone is also upbeat, finding the positive of creation amidst the destruction of all we once held sane around us.
Subtle and sleepy, gentle and resonant, Eric Thompson’s shimmering take on country-rock takes Nashville’s emotive vocal style, throws in a pedal steel and rootsy rock riffs, and turns out a dusty, feel-good – if slightly too slick – album called Manic + Organic. Whether on the shuffling rock anthem “Get Back to It” or the humorous, old-school country of “It’s a Guy Thing,” Thompson’s band uses simple arrangements to evoke a true down-home feeling. The songwriting isn’t as gritty and powerful as that of Whiskeytown, Ryan Adams, or Kasey Chambers, but Eric Thompson is cut from the same thread – patterned by Gram Parsons, the Allman Brothers, Johnny Cash, and Willie Nelson – and Manic + Organic shows his potential to one day make a really spectacular record.
Callum Beattie speaks truth to the people. The Scottish artist’s penchant for connection has taken him from dusty barrooms to the biggest venues his homeland can offer, including a packed-out night at Glasgow’s epic OVO Hydro. New album INDI kicks off another mammoth year for the songwriter, and it’s packed with huge amounts, music that unashamedly aims for big crowds, and wide open spaces.
Produced alongside Joe Cross, comparisons range from Bruce Springsteen in his prime to Sam Fender or Stereophonics; honest songwriting rooted in everyday experience, Callum has a tendency to keep things raw, and not to over-think his studio arrangements.
As such, every track on here could be a…
Not quite a new album and not quite a compilation, Bobby Charles‘ 2004 release Last Train to Memphis is closer to a clearing-house for little-heard recordings than a proper album. Billed as a single-disc release paired with a bonus disc, the two-CD set contains a total of 34 songs, and since there is no distinct difference between the two discs, it only seems appropriate to treat it all as a sprawling double album. Jim Bateman says in his perfunctory, largely biographical liner notes that this album “fills in the years between his critically acclaimed 1972 Bearsville release and today,” which is certainly true, since all 34 songs on the two discs were recorded sometime between 1971 and 2001. The liners do detail the individual recording dates and lineups for the tracks, but it’s hard to tell when and where…
Albatross didn’t begin as a Big Wreck project. The band had broken up after the poor commercial showing of 2001’s The Pleasure and the Greed, and lead singer Ian Thornley had gone on to form his own successful band, simply called Thornley, and life as we know it went on. Thornley is a fine singer, with a voice that mirrors Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, and he certainly didn’t need Big Wreck to continue on with his career, but he reconnected with Big Wreck guitarist Brian Doherty after some years, and the two went into the studio to record with Thornley’s current band.
Albatross is the result, and the album was released under the Big Wreck moniker, even though it was essentially Thornley (the band) with the addition of Doherty as a third guitarist.
Acclaimed country troubadour Ward Davis steps into a new chapter with the release of his latest studio album, Here I Am, via MNRK Music Group. The 11-song collection arrives alongside the official lyric video for the focus track, “Downright Awful Stupid Beautiful Lie,” offering fans an intimate window into what may be Davis’ most revealing work yet.
Raw, reflective and unflinchingly honest, Here I Am captures Davis at a turning point. Written largely in the aftermath of a hard divorce and a season of personal reckoning, the album finds the singer-songwriter confronting his past while emerging with clarity and hard-earned wisdom. Long celebrated for his gritty delivery and sharp storytelling, Davis leans fully into those…
Guitarist and composer Mike Johnson has co-led or led Denver-based avant-rock ensemble Thinking Plague since 1982. The band’s music has been roughly within the aesthetic orbit of Henry Cow and Art Bears, but with a distinct compositional bent. In that sense, it is arguably a more “American” sound based on tightly notated angularity, abrupt pivots, and timbral choices that are influenced as much by 20th-century classical as rock.
This is Johnson’s first solo album that he seeks to distinguish from his work with Thinking Plague. While a number of familiar collaborators from that outfit contribute on The Gardens of Loss (e.g., Elaine diFalco, Dave Willey, Bill Pohl, and Mark Harris), so does an 11-piece orchestral section of strings, reeds, and brass.
A powerful new archival release from the legendary experimental project Muslimgauze, titled Muslimlahore. This album continues the ongoing posthumous excavation of Bryn Jones’ vast and politically charged body of work, offering listeners a fresh immersion into his unique blend of ethnic electronica, dub, and tape-based soundscapes.
Muslimlahore presents a suite of tracks that reflect Muslimgauze’s enduring fascination with South Asian and Islamic themes, filtered through his signature style of layered percussion, field recordings, and hypnotic loops.
The album’s title evokes the city of Lahore in Pakistan, situating the music within a broader context of post-colonial identity, resistance, and cultural memory.
femtanyl’s method for cover art involves doing an illustration and then using a phone to take a picture of it on the computer screen, spawning cruddy little Moiré pattern grids. It’s a good analog for femtanyl’s digital hardcore music: bitcrushed, compressed, spewing and screaming to a doomsday drum thwack. But while the artwork — femtanyl’s trademark feline creature Token engulfed by flames — still teems with digital artifacts, the music on this debut album seems keen to transcend the screen. MAN BITES DOG might be at the laptop rave, but it’s thinking about body-bashing in a dank DIY venue.
Noelle Mansbridge is assisted here by Juno Callendar, who arrived as a live drummer and now plays multiple instruments and helps…
There’s a sincerely grounded quality to A Djinn and a Hunter Went Walking. The new album from balafonist Neba Solo and donsongoni (hunter’s harp) player Benego Diakité – their first as a duo – shines a light on two Malian musicians who are masters of their repertoires. Each performer hails from a different cultural background, with Solo trained in Senufo traditions and Diakité rooted in the Wassoulou region, and they come together here with an understated ease. It makes for a soothing work from start to finish, but with enough moving parts to reasonably grab and hold the attention of a range of audiences.
This is no ordinary celebration of genius. There is no bombast in this combination, at least not in the fully produced pieces. Solo’s and Diakité’s…
For years, Angel Du$t was Justice Tripp’s balmy reprieve from Trapped Under Ice. When he fronted the Baltimore hardcore band, he cursed out ice queens and swore he’d “stay cold forevermore” to protect his heart. These tormented songs were molded by the trauma and violence that Tripp endured during his hardscrabble upbringing. Angel Du$t’s 2014 debut, A.D., with its pink cover art and perky pop-punk sound, showed that he was learning to leave the past behind and warm up a bit. On subsequent Angel Du$t records, the music got even softer, the imagery cozier, and Tripp’s lyrics, which once focused almost solely on heartbreak and regret, became intoxicated by the fumes of romance (“Deep Love,” “Big Ass Love,” “Love Slam”) and rock’n’roll…
Long before Sister Hazel become a platinum-selling name, its future songwriters Ken Block and Drew Copeland are just two friends chasing small gigs, harmonizing for the sheer love of it. That early spark finally surfaces with Ken & Drew’s: Lost Cassette Covers, a lovingly restored time capsule that pulls ten cover songs from tapes the duo recorded back in 1993.
These early sessions—now presented as Recovered Recordings: The Pre-Hazel Tapes—capture Ken and Drew in their most unfiltered form. There’s no polish, no grand ambition, just the sound of two voices locking in and discovering their chemistry in real time. The first two tracks to surface, tender takes on “Closer to Fine” by Indigo Girls and “Peaceful Easy Feeling” by Eagles, immediately…
Bob “Slim” Dunlap epitomized the journeyman musician who plays for the fun of it when his day gig allows. However, even casual listeners know his name for one reason: landing the “hot seat” assignment of succeeding the Replacements’ late, troubled guitarist Bob Stinson. But there’s more to Dunlap’s story than his experience with that legendarily star-crossed Minneapolis quartet might indicate.
Slim Dunlap’s two obscure yet adored mid-90’s solo albums “The Old New Me” & “Times Like This” have been remastered and packaged on a new double-CD entitled Every Little Word. In full cooperation with Slim’s family and Peter Jesperson’s Medium Cool – Twin/Tone Records imprint especially for Curation Records.
Wild Horses originally formed in 1978, when guitarist Brian Robertson left Thin Lizzy after the legendary ‘Live And Dangerous’ record, and bassist Jimmy Bain left Rainbow following the double live ‘On Stage’ album, joining forces to create this melodic, hard rock supergroup.
Originally featuring drummer Kenney Jones (Faces, The Who) and guitarist Jimmy McCulloch (Wings, Stone The Crows), the line-up stabilised when Robertson and Bain were joined by drummer Clive Edwards (Uli Jon Roth, UFO, Pat Travers) and multi-instrumentalist Neil Carter (UFO, Gary Moore).
They were signed to EMI following their appearance at the 1979 Reading Rock Festival, releasing their Trevor Rabin (Yes) produced debut ‘The First Album’ in 1980. Featuring the singles…
Singer-songwriter Jeremy Ivey has released his new album, Its Shape Will Reveal Itself, via Soggy Anvil Records. The record is an intimate, home-recorded collection that leans into warmth, imperfection, and raw emotion rather than polished studio sheen.
Alongside the album’s release, Ivey has shared its first single, “Edge of Darkness,” recorded live to a single microphone with his wife, Margo Price. The track premiered through Back In The Garage, a stripped-down session project founded by Luke Pelletier and his brother Tristan Pelletier. Originally not intended for public release, the album was recorded at Ivey’s home on a refurbished Tascam 388 reel-to-reel machine, giving the songs a lived-in, analog warmth.
“I recently refurbished an old Tascam 388…
Is any chore more humbling than cleaning the refrigerator? Every few weeks, I cringe as I scrape up leftovers that never met the microwave and toss produce that never saw the stove. Philadelphia indie rockers Remember Sports have long documented mundane shames like this; their sophomore record All of Something ended with a song about washing blood out of bedsheets.
Their fifth, The Refrigerator, takes many more passes at the humiliating cycles of domesticity: shoes you tie that will come undone, food waste you forget and then-ew-rediscover. “Say that there’s more to life than cleaning up my room,” singer Carmen Perry belts and pleads on the fuzzy single “Bug,” a song in which she steps on a leftover chip from a bowl she ate days earlier.
Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys build a captivating sonic world tinged with intimacy on Pale Bloom. The Berlin-based band’s seventh studio album maintains a hauntingly atmospheric quality, ultimately honing the gothic art-pop sound the group have become known for.
Opening track ‘Bloom’ establishes the album’s persistent eeriness, initially playing with the melodies and lyrics of nursery rhymes. This almost ghostly nostalgia for childhood is evoked throughout Pale Bloom, supported by a mesmerising viola part courtesy of Jean-Louise Parker. The song’s instrumentals build, combining strings with electric guitar effectively. Like its title would suggest, ‘Bloom’ unfurls organically – a manifestation of slowly…
In every form of music there are the giants, the ones whose talent and ambition strut across the world stage, dazzling critical and commercial considerations alike.
Then there are the quiet geniuses, the folks who display equal creativity and range to their more famous compadres, but with little interest in the spotlight – simply going about their business making music that doesn’t sound like anyone else. These folks’ music may likely be less-heralded, but will have an equally broad and meaningful impact in the years to come.
Cellist and composer Tomeka Reid is definitely one of those quiet ones. She’s unusual just by virtue of her chosen instrument – the cello is not the first axe one thinks of when we think…