…Under Wraps: The Unwrapped Edition explores both Tull’s Under Wraps (1984) and Anderson’s debut as a solo artist, Walk Into Light (1983), via the kind of comprehensive presentation that fans of the series have learned to expect.
The impetus for bringing the albums together is their shared sound. Both albums deviated from the folk-rooted “classic rock” sound of the ‘70s to embrace a then-contemporary style with drum machines, synthesizers, and electronics. At the time, even the band members were split on Under Wraps; bassist Dave Pegg once opined that the outtakes from Tull’s previous album – one which pointed towards Under Wraps with its integration of electronics but still featured more traditional instrumentation, too – might have made…
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Frank Zappa’s archival label Vaulternative Records was launched in 2002 by the late artist’s family to present a variety of fascinating odds and ends from his voluminous archive. Now, after a near-decade-long hiatus, Vaulternative is returning from Zappa Records and UMe to continue preserving the experimental side of the Zappa oeuvre.
…Sixteen of the seventeen tracks on Zappa ’66: Vol. 1: Live at TTG Studios are previously unreleased in any format. The release documents the young musician at an October 1966 session at the Hollywood studio just months after the release of The Mothers of Invention’s debut album, Freak Out!, on Verve Records. The new release has been produced, restored, and assembled by “Vaultmeister” Joe Travers and mastered…
Though still young enough to have as much future stretching ahead as past behind him, Kevin Morby has already clocked up nine albums that track his migrations – first from his native state of Texas to Kansas, then to NYC, LA and back to Kansas (City) – while fine-tuning his countrified folk-rock. Both Harlem River and City Music stand as odes to New York, while Sundowner documented his Midwest homecoming, and 2022’s This Is a Photograph was inspired by Memphis and largely written during a stay there in its historic Peabody hotel. On Morby’s 10th, specific places (and events connected to them) are again the stuff of his songs but now he’s taking stock of his 20 years on the road and mapping out much more of his interior terrain as a result. Despite the title,…
Luis Garbán Valdeón is no stranger to parties: for years, he has commanded the international warehouse circuit, playing industrial, techno-forward sets under the moniker Cardopusher. Now, as Safety Trance, he offers his experimental take on mutated reggaeton through Venezuelan influences like raptor house, alongside dembow, ’90s Memphis rap, and witch house. The mix of genres and collaborators on his new album, sacrificio, feels distinct to someone who’s been integral to the neo-perreo movement for years. It’s the most readily accessible music of his career, as well as a glitchy, uncanny record that aims to crack through reggaeton’s status quo to reclaim space for counterculture and community.
Though operating at the center of…
The combination of tabla (tuned Indian hand drums), santur (Iranian dulcimer) and harp does not pop up often, but hearing them together on the new trio album from Montreal’s Shawn Mativetsky, Amir Amiri and Sara Pagé, you’ll wonder why it’s not more common. Though hailing from different countries and traditions, the santur and the harp have intriguing tonal similarities, the former bringing out the latter’s metallic tactility, and the latter bringing out the former’s gossamer ripple. The hopping, polyrhythmic bounce and ricochet of Mativetsky’s drumming emphasizes the percussive nature of both instruments, adding to the music’s harmonic breadth, while the resonance of the strings bring out the more melodic aspects of the tabla. Metamorphose, as its title…
With a voice unmistakably his own, clarinetist and composer Harry Skoler traverses a variety of open-ended atmospheres, displaying an instinctive ability to merge traditional jazz language with contemporary sensibilities in ways that continue to shape his artistic identity. On his seventh album as a leader, Echoes — a tribute to his jazz heroes — Skoler is joined by guitar visionary Bill Frisell and reunited with the rhythm section from Red Brick Hill (2024): bassist Dezron Douglas and drummer Johnathan Blake. Produced once again by saxophonist Walter Smith III, the album draws from familiar ingredients while embracing a welcome sense of risk through occasional ventures into avant-garde territory.
“Evocation” and “Allusion”, two irresistibly…
Founded in 1961 by George Kooymans and Rinus Gerritsen, Dutch rock band Golden Earring (or Golden Earrings, until 1969) started off as a beat band, experimented as a psychedelic quartet and finally became a heavy rock group. Their ninth album Moontan (1973) – including their classic track Radar Love – hit the international album charts and is the band’s most successful album in the United States, being the only Golden Earring album to be certified Gold by the RIAA.
Golden Earring is the sixth, self-titled album that is also known as ‘Wall Of Dolls’ because of the cover photo. The record, released in September 1970, marks the debut of drummer Cesar Zuiderwijk with Golden Earring and is the first in a series of progressively oriented…
…Restored and newly mixed by the band’s Archivist Andy Gamble from tapes found in Francis Rossi’s library. This 2CD edition features the full 18 track concert.
Recorded at the legendary Hammersmith Odeon on 27th June 1979 as part of the bands If You Can’t Stand the Heat Tour, this is regarded as one of the most sought-after live shows from the band and shows Status Quo at their loudest and proudest.
‘Rockin’ All Over the World’ barrels out with cheerful abandon, then ‘Down Down’ grinds forward on that unmistakable Quo chug. ‘Roll Over Lay Down’ stretches into a crowd-pleasing stomp, the band sounding thoroughly pleased with the volume of their own amplifiers.
Fiddle player Rowan Piggott and banjoist Joe Danks first hit the scene as Old Spot in 2023, with their fifteen-track self-titled debut album. A duo of excellent musical ability and a love for American Old-time music, their sound combines strong traditional songs and tunes with a modern, spacious approach. Old Spot (II) continues exploring these traditions and fine-tunes; there is a discernible difference in the sound, with a suggestion of minimalism around some songs and a precise nature to the playing.
The former is evident on the traditional tune ‘Tom Dooley’, a beautifully played banjo piece with delicate swirls of five-string violin winding around the core melody and vocal. Joe’s clear singing is ideal for the song, with…
Following years of IVF and an on-stage miscarriage during a 2023 tour (she finished her set), Abigail Lapell was pregnant with her first child when she booked studio time to make her new album, Shadow Child. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the songs on Toronto singer-songwriter’s new album pivot around the theme of motherhood, with nine of the songs representing a month of gestation – her son was born in November 2024. The album features several special guests, embraces moments of joy and loss and addresses issues such as reproductive health.
Opening with a tolling bell and, inevitably featuring whistling, ‘Whistle Song (One in a Million)’ is a dreamily strummed bluesy musing on loss, mortality, resilience, hope and new…
There is a sharp, choppy wind blowing through the atomised urban decay on Conscious Pilot’s debut album, Human Poultry. The Glasgow-via-Yorkshire outfit are an act reflective of said atomisation, with the band a formation of members of Cheap Teeth, Catholic Action and Big Girl’s Blouse. This, however, doesn’t mean that their collective effort is to be dismissed. This debut is a hip-twisting, twangy relic amongst contemporary post-punk-inspired indie rock. The record sees the marriage of classic post-punk rhythms akin to fellow Glaswegians Orange Juice and Teenage Fanclub, and the modern, sleazy tones of contemporary post punk. Lyrics from Joe Laycock and bassist Jack Sharp reflect a humdrum malaise that has blanketed modern life, particularly on the tracks…
Swedish producer Olof Dreijer is best known for projects with his sibling Karin: namely their duo the Knife, plus Karin’s solo act Fever Ray, with whom he created four brilliant tracks on 2023 album Radical Romantics.
For all that his beats on these records often had African-Caribbean-Latin syncopation, they also had a Scandinavian winter gloom.
Conversely, his debut solo album seems to crane upwards towards sunlight like flowers – and each of the tracks has a floral name. Dance heads will already be familiar with some of them (having appeared on EPs stretching back to 2023) but together they show quite how distinctive Dreijer’s own musical accent is: you can tell it’s him sometimes from just half a second of music.
Released by Avie Records, Crossing the Bar explores the wide expressive possibilities of the contemporary marimba. Percussionist Mika Stoltzman assembles a rich and varied program that moves fluidly across styles and eras, ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach to John Zorn, with Claude Debussy and 21st century composer Miho Hazama in between. Built around close collaborations with several musicians, most notably clarinetist Richard Stoltzman (Mika’s husband and regular collaborator), the program brings together arrangements and contemporary works, including several world premieres. The album opens with the monumental Chaconne from Bach’s Partita No. 2 in an arrangement for marimba and strings. From the outset, the approach highlights…
Towards an Expanse moves through its soundscape of Xhosa traditions and digital adventuring with the same attention to detail throughout. “Layer After Layer,” the opening salvo from Dumama’s prismatic debut album, mirrors its namesake in its expertly layered mille-feuille of hand drums, organ drone, and synth flashes — a considered, holistic process that endures across the electro-acoustic album’s 11 intricate songs.
On the first track, this creates a rich backdrop against which Dumama’s Morcheeba-esque downtempo serenade can drape itself. From then on, Towards an Expanse unfolds as a loving union between music and storytelling, mixing English lyrics with whispers and Xhosa chants.
Indeed, instruments are everywhere on…
In Perdido Street Station, China Miéville describes “crisis energy”, the moment when a system pushed to its absolute limit transforms, where collapse and maximum release become the same event. Guttersnipe adopt this idea as their guiding principle. On Extinction Burst!, their first record in eight years, they turn crisis energy from concept into visceral reality.
The Leeds duo (Uroceras Gigas and Tipula Confusa) see the supposed split between the cerebral and the visceral as a cultural fabrication. They reject the idea that intellect and bodily experience must be separate, a myth sustained by a society that wants its thinkers detached and its bodies unthinking. As Confusa notes, most lifeforms – bacteria, invertebrates, marine animals…
Is Trixies for real? The titular ’60s London night club – filled with cutthroats, dancers, toffs, actors, musicians – is evidently a creation of Squeeze lyricist Chris Difford’s febrile imagination. But does, as the promo insists, this song cycle/musical really date from 1974, three years before Squeeze even had a record deal and Difford and Glenn Tilbrook were all but teenagers? The idea seems quite incredible, but yes, a little sleuthing reveals it to be true: there’s a fleeting reference to it in D&T’s 2004 book, Song By Song, and it’s mentioned again in Difford’s 2017 memoir, Some Fantastic Place. Trixies, shelved for the foreseeable after punk loomed onto the horizon, might otherwise have been their first album. And how different Squeeze history may have been if it was…
Once mainly something that existed in a live setting, the group drifts further into its own orbit with a second collection of songs. What began as a collaboration between two voices now expands with the presence of a third, adding new layers that sometimes verge on something almost familiar.
The work continues to explore a method that feels less like collecting from the outside and more like rearranging from within. Fragments are taken apart and reassembled: rhythms, echoes, remnants of recognizable forms. This time, there is a stronger sense of movement, though it never quite settles. The vocals wander through it all, as if searching without urgency to arrive. At unexpected moments, other sounds surface briefly, then disappear again. The whole seems to find…
Jobi Riccio knows that while a quiet heart-to-heart can solve many problems, sometimes the heart needs a giant, all-caps billboard, especially when the world around that massive sign gets louder by the day. As each new track on her new album Face the Feeling (Yep Roc Records) unveils, Riccio faces another inescapable emotion as if it were a billboard screaming into view as she hurtles down the highway. And rather than turn away from their challenge, Riccio faces those uncomfortable moments with the thrill of self-discovery, reveling in growth and change as facts of life.
Throughout Face the Feeling, Riccio finds masterful balance between extremes, indulging in the light and the dark, the subtle and the direct, the ecstatic highs and the mournful lows.
It’s swift, at just 24 minutes across nine songs, but The Afterparty is Lykke Li at her very, very best, which makes her recent claim at an LA listening party that it could be her last, devastating. It might only be May, but it’s already a serious contender for album of the year. For those of you who had a Brat Summer, The Afterparty comes next.
Lykke Li has thrown the kitchen sink at this album. It includes a 17-piece string section, what she calls “apocalyptic bongos” and more flute than old prog-rock outfit Jethro Tull. The first three songs are a sucker punch of hedonistic glee; opener ‘Not Gon Cry’ grabs your toes and sets out what’s ahead – a heady mix of electro, soul and disco, it’s an instant rush with heart-exploding rhythms, an addictive cowbell and a flute that helps you…
‘Blue’, one of the singles from Deb Never’s debut album, tells a story of unexpected meetings and chance-encounter love. “It’s the way you creep into my life,” she sings in its hook. “Like your favourite out of the blue.” It’s an apt description of Deb’s own aesthetic: songs that arrive unannounced and unfurl gradually and patiently.
Arcade has been a long time coming. Following a breakthrough appearance on Brockhampton’s ‘Ginger’ in 2019, the Seattle-raised, LA-based musician spent years working through a series of EPs before arriving at her debut proper. Now, ex-Brockhampton member Romil Hemnani returns to executive produce and feature, while Dominic Fike (who supposedly passed through the studio at various times during its recording)…