Some records are so forthright, so direct in their intent, that they become a challenge — maybe even a dare — to discuss in critical terms.
In the case of low clouds hang, this land is on fire, Bhutan-born Tashi Dorji‘s latest work for Drag City, this challenge becomes less about pinning down some sonic intangible, and more about the mere listening experience.
The LP is not concerned with subtlety; it’s presented as a meditation on openness and humanity in trying times. That intentionality is evident in Dorji’s freeform guitar improvisation, notable here for its absence of both textural sturm und drang and dissonance. Focus lies instead on tonal interplay, with special mention to “burn the throne” as a center point.
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When it was time to record her new album — the follow-up to 2021’s excellent American Siren — country-folk singer-songwriter Emily Scott Robinson chose to do so at Dreamland Recording Studios, housed in a 130-year-old church sanctuary hidden in the trees outside of Kingston, New York. But the setting and the spiritual center of her work can be found hundreds of miles to the southwest of that location: “Oh, my heart for Appalachia/ Oh, my heart for these blue hills,” Robinson sings in “Appalachia,” the album’s bluegrass-y title track. “Oh, my heart forever captured, beating still.”
The song is both an ode to that magical, mountainous region in the eastern United States and a celebration of resilience,…
The A’s, The B’s and The Monkees, at long last, brings together on 2 CDs all of the band’s commercial singles originally released between 1966 and 1970, from “Last Train to Clarksville” b/w “Take a Giant Step” through “Oh My My” b/w “I Love You Better.”
The A’s from Messrs. Jones, Dolenz, Nesmith, and Tork include songs from Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Neil Diamond, John Stewart, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller: the chart-topping “Last Train to Clarksville,” “I’m a Believer,” and “Daydream Believer,” along with the hits “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” (No. 2), “Pleasant Valley Sunday” (No. 3), “Valleri” (No. 3), and “D.W. Washburn” (No. 19).
The B’s are no less filled with fan favorites…
One Moment in Time: Live in the USA is the logical extension of the process of refinement that Robin Trower has undertaken with his studio albums of recent years. Running roughly 77 minutes in duration on compact disc and a double LP vinyl set, fourteen tracks taken from two shows on a 2025 American tour allow the British guitar hero to do justice to a solo career begun in 1971 upon his departure from Procol Harum.
It is utterly pragmatic that Trower collaborates with some of the same individuals with whom he’s fashioned such finely-honed expressions of contemporary blues like last year’s Come and Find Me and No More Worlds to Conquer from three years prior. The recordings were mixed for maximum detail by Sam Winfield…
Canadian duo Softcult’s gorgeous debut album takes its title from the famous Alexander Den Heijer quote: “When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” The idea of fearless change in pursuit of something better is a mission statement Mercedes and Phoenix Arn-Horn know well. The twins spent more than a decade playing in pop–rock group Courage My Love, but walked away in 2020 after life on a major label got too stifling to continue.
Softcult arrived shortly after in 2021 with Another Bish, a spiky dream-pop anthem that saw the pair refusing to be tamed. Four grungy, Riot Grrl-influenced EPs followed alongside handmade zines, a close-knit online community and tours supporting Muse and Incubus.
While Rossi’s previous solo albums explored his love for acoustic ballads, vocal harmonies, and the blend of British rock with country influences, this album, Francis Rossi’s first in seven years, marks a true return to the energetic, guitar-driven sound that made him a legend with Status Quo.
The Accidental sees Francis Rossi playing to his strengths, but taking risks, cutting loose, and exploring new territory – this album is all about old bones and fresh blood.
The fresh blood in question comes largely from Hiran Ilangantilike, a guitarist who was originally a school friend of one of Francis’ children, and co-producer Andy Brook. What became the sessions for ‘The Accidental’ was initially born of just plugging in and making some serious noise…
On Langeleik, two pioneers of alternative pedal-steel meet across oceans, time, and temperament. Norwegian multi-instrumentalist Geir Sundstøl and London-based pedal-steel player Joe Harvey-Whyte merge the instrument’s ghostly resonance with field recordings, ambient drones and vintage synths to create a sound that feels as fluid and alive as the rivers that inspired it.
Geir and Joe got in touch in 2016 when Joe, exploring beyond his usual listening habits, stumbled upon Geir’s debut Furulund. Struck by its hypnotic slide melodies, he reached out. A musical friendship grew through years of conversation, sharing curiosities and visiting each other’s studios in Oslo and London.
In August 2024, during a break from touring…
Cherry Red, longtime home for Howard Jones’ catalogue, release an unheard set from the beginning of his career.
Live at the Marquee, finds the inimitable singer-songwriter-keyboardist wowing a crowd at the late London venue just before his commercial breakthrough in 1983.
The wholly unreleased show, was unearthed from master tapes when the label began compiling bonus material for reissues of his former Warner catalogue in 2018, and remixed by Jones himself for this release. (It appears from the metadata that three of these Marquee tracks were originally released as B-sides to early singles.) The packaging includes rare and unreleased photos of Jones from the period.
When the then-28-year-old Jones took the stage…
In some ways, Shackleton is a musical shaman. Across a 20-year career — including 2012’s monumental Music for the Quiet Hour / The Drawbar Organ EPs and recent collaborative highlight The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now — the acclaimed producer has guided listeners on a journey through the outer perimeters of spiritual dub, Carnatic music, alternative tuning methods, prog, German folk, and free jazz. It is an undeniably intoxicating mix and, at times, an overwhelming one: Listening to it can be like entering a room filled with thick incense smoke and esoteric objects; everything is primed to get you in the zone, especially the devotional chanting.
Yet with Euphoria Bound, his solo follow-up to 2023’s The Scandal of Time, the haze that…
You can cling onto the rambunctiousness of youth, refusing to grow up; you can swerve hard into maturity, peel the stickers off your guitar, and hope that critical adulation follows.
On their seventh LP, Joyce Manor find a fine middle ground, and the result is their best record since 2012’s Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired. There’s a wistfulness to these nine tracks, which see the band journeying backwards to examine their pasts, but refusing to force profundity where there isn’t any to find. On the title track, Barry Johnson sings “I used to go to this bar / Back when I didn’t have a car / ‘cause it was close to my apartment / So that was just as far as I went.” Reflection on time past is theme enough for this record, whether or not the memories are inherently dramatic;…
There’s a live recording on this boxset that seems to perfectly embody the challenges faced by Paul Weller after he split up The Jam. He and his new band, The Style Council, are playing the Goldiggers in Chippenham, Wiltshire, in March 1984, showcasing tracks from the upcoming Cafe Bleu album to an increasingly restless audience.
“I need absolute quiet for this number,” Weller insists, before a bossa nova called “The Whole Point of No Return”. The crowd start wolf-whistling as Dee C Lee comes out to sing “Paris Match” and, as the band perform low-key acoustic songs inspired, variously, by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Michel Legrand and Erik Satie, you can hear sections of the audience lustily chanting a line from the film Quadrophenia: “We are the Mods,…
Marta Del Grandi is in a liminal space between the past she always has one eye on and a future she consistently encourages herself to move towards. Her third album, Dream Life, feels like grappling with a reality check where you’ve put in the work but things don’t look the way you expected and there are untold peripheral problems beyond your control.
In the great indie pop tradition, Dream Life masks melancholia with whimsy, whether it’s fantasy land synths, syncopated programmed beats, or slide guitar. The dreamy, brooding, and vaguely foreboding synth arrangement of ‘20 Days of Summer’ touches broadly on a feeling of not being able to laugh at the chaos, as Del Grandi reminds herself “to keep going / try to breathe”.
German pianist Julia Hülsmann has making a series of strong trio and quartet albums for ECM Records for almost twenty years. While I Was Away is the first vocal record she’s made since 2015’s A Clear Midnight: Kurt Weill in America, which guest-starred elastic-voiced songwriter/interpreter Theo Bleckmann.
For her thirteenth album, Hülsmann assembles a new group that includes drummer Eva Klesse, bassist Eva Kruse, violinist Héloïse Lefebvre, cellist Susanne Paul, and, crucially, a trio of singers: Aline Frazão, Live Maria Roggen, and Michael Schiefel. For such an unusual lineup, the bandleader gathers an eclectic batch of songs for them to perform. Hülsmann sets poems by Emily Dickinson (“Sleep”), e.e. cummings (“TicToc”), and…
There’s a delicious irony to an album called Wormslayer planting relentless earworms in the mind that tunnel through it for days on end. Listeners fond of hook-laden, grand-scale sonic storytelling will find that English rock band Kula Shaker’s eighth effort delivers mystic folk rock every bit as adventuresome as Frank Herbert’s Dune — (ear)worms included.
Wormslayer sees a band beloved for its spiritual sensitivity stitching threads of observation into a familiar tapestry: an image of worldly evil alongside glimpses of what the heart longs for most. On a planet that “weeps beneath a mantle of shadows” (per the 2006 game The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess), Kula Shaker advocate for mobilizing the “poets of light”, finding…
Folk and blues legend Eric Bibb has garnered numerous Blues Music Awards Awards and Grammy nominations over the course of five decades and 34 albums. Regarded as a blues legend, his output is consistently strong.
One Mississippi is a direct follow-up to 2024’s In the Real World, rendering almost entirely original material with a similar backing cast. Once again, Bibb works with longtime musical director and producer, co-writer, and multi-instrumentalist Glen Scott, along with slide guitarist Robbie McIntosh and fiddler Esbjorn Hazelius. Select tracks draw in strings, background vocalists, and other flourishes. The tracks center around Bibb’s immaculate acoustic guitar and banjo playing, his vocals, and heartfelt lyrics.
While it’s almost six years since arch Parisien hipster and former Eurovision performer Sébastien Tellier released his last album, he can hardly be described as a slacker. In the interim, there’s been three film soundtracks, two EPs and he performed at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Paralympic Games – not to mention having to deal with an irritating case of identity theft.
However, the untamed dandy has now donned his wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses once more and ventured into the recording studio to create Kiss the Beast, a diverse rainbow of electronica sounds that covers ground as varied as spaced-out ballads, rump-shaking electro-pop, electro-orchestral cinematic sounds and mellow folktronica without sounding disjointed or forced.
How do you get the Buzzcocks sound? Steve Diggle says that’s like a chef revealing his secrets, but admits that one crucial ingredient is his old H&H amp. This was acquired almost 50 years ago with the advance the band got for signing to United Artists – you can see it on the cover of Going Steady. “It gives that transistorised valve sound and you can hear it very distinctively on that first album,” he explains. “In Manchester, people wondered why we used these little amps, but it meant you could get distortion at a very low volume and that became our identity. Double track a riff through the H&H amp and you get that unique Buzzcocks sound.”
The double-tracked H&H riff pops up a few times on Attitude Adjustment, a reminder…
There are times, listening to Richard Bishop do his thing with Sun City Girls, when this reviewer thinks, “Everyone else can stop playing their guitars now.” A few of those moments occur at points during the 92 minutes of music included on Three Lobed’s reissue of tracks from two of the Sun City Girls’ late-1980s Cloaven Cassettes: Famous Asthma (1987) and Tibetan Jazz 666 (1988). For listeners not tuned in to the vagaries of the Sun City Girls’ prolific output, the Cloaven Cassettes were self-released tapes, often composed of performances of the band at its loosest and weirdest, and the Sun City Girls could get very, very weird. Most of what you’ll hear on this reissue is the Bishop brothers and Charles Gocher in improvisation, working a blend of mutant jazz,…
Pastor Chris Congregation – West Virginia Snake Handler Revival “They Shall Take Up Serpents” (2025)
High in the mountains of West Virginia lies McDowell County. Formerly a hotspot for American coal mining, technological advancements and outsourced labour crept through Appalachia in the mid-twentieth century, leaving communities like McDowell destitute. From 1950 to 2020, the county saw its population fall by over 80%, and by 2015 it had the highest number of drug-related deaths of any county in the United States.
Alongside abandoned buildings and burnt-out cars, McDowell County is dense with churches. Typically Pentecostal, these have become a refuge for a community on the fringes of a zombified American dream clinging to bygone prosperity. One is The House of the Lord Jesus, also known as the last remaining snake-handling…
Back in 2021, Tom Paxton and John McCutcheon had stopped touring because of the pandemic, but their ideas for new songs kept flowing. So, the two decided to meet every Monday afternoons at 2pm via Zoom for songwriting sessions. Before long, they had enough songs for an album, and they released Together in 2023. After Together appeared, they continued swapping songs and making music, and when they took stock, they found they had plenty of material for another album, Together Again.
…To dive into their collective pasts would take a book, but suffice it to say that Paxton has recorded or appeared on more than 70 albums starting in 1964, and written thousands of songs which are largely staples of the folk tradition…