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,…
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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…
This latest full-length from Edinburgh’s Siobhan Wilson touches on many themes including, but not limited to, friendships, wanderlust and the cosmos, but if there’s a relationship that’s key to the record, it’s Wilson’s own with the electric guitar. Known previously for a more folky, pastoral sound, Wilson has clearly come to understand the power that amplification can provide, especially when used minimally. Thaw is loosely conceptual – side A inspired by summer, and side B by winter – but in truth, its mood shifts continually. Opener Starlove is somewhere at the junction between grunge and shoegaze, while Snowflakes, thick with atmosphere, is straight out of Twin Peaks.
Some songs you might categorise as guitar-pop, including the charming ‘On Est Bien’,…
…Peanut is the sixth-ish album by New York-based musician and engineer Otto Benson, and the first with vocals. He shed a lot of skin before arriving at this album’s dusky, dusty sound, which is defined by gentle nylon-stringed guitar and shivery Rhodes piano and lands somewhere at the intersection of Frankie Cosmos, Hayden Pedigo, and Let It Die-era Feist. A scan of his meticulously maintained website reveals a trove of hyperactive vaporwave under the name Memo Boy; ambient music as Ronnie P; puckish hyperpop under the name OTTO; a tingly beat tape with Mietze Conte; and at least a handful more experiments with different forms of contemporary electronic pop.
…All of this is to say that form is clearly important to Benson; although Peanut is his…
There’s something about trees and storms in Iti Eta No. Heimat’s third album is an exploration of collage and landscape – not just the physical landscape of the French countryside where Olivier Demeaux (Cheveu, Accident du Travail) and Armelle Oberlé (The Dreams, Badaboum) moved after lockdown, but it’s visceral, emotional imprint. A violent storm left trees scattered across the road, and that image inspired the atmosphere of Iti Eta No. Heimat’s early records were a deliberate exploration of ‘Eastern’ tonalities, but Iti Eta No sees the group moving away from that kind of orientalist imagery. It feels more refined, like deviant pop made dance-floor accessible thanks to Krikor Kouchian’s (L.I.E.S, I’m a Cliche) mastering. There is a distinct sense of…
30th anniversary remaster. Included is a second disc with 7 bonus tracks from the era, some unreleased, some remixes and reinterpretations.
It’s been observed that while the bleeding edge of what’s cool continues onward, there are always plenty of people still exploring styles long deemed outdated, sometimes finding something new and exciting as a result. Such is the case with Pittsburgh’s Lowsunday, led by open fan of ’80s British post-punk rock Shane Sahene. Drawing inspiration from such pioneers of emotional, thrilling music as the Sound, Bauhaus, the Chameleons, and Echo and the Bunnymen, vocalist/guitarist Sahene originally formed and led the group in the mid-’90s as a quintet called Low Sunday Ghost Machine.
Making a choice among artists who create ambient music veering into modern classical is becoming harder by the day. It is becoming hard sifting through hours of music and finding the ones that don’t end up into a musical wallpaper territory, the ones that keep up in both quality and emotional intensity.
That list is quite rarified these days, but you can easily add Southend-on-Sea visual artist and musician Adrian Lane and his latest album Their Ghosts and Ours to it.
Lane, who has been releasing music since 2013 on various independent labels, is among those who combine acoustic sources with electronic/computer-generated embellishments, something that has been done a lot these days.
Since their founding in 2012, the vision string quartet has stood out for its genre-defying approach and fearless flexibility — performing classical repertoire from memory, composing its own works, and blurring boundaries between classical, rock, jazz, and minimalism.
In the Fields is the young quartet’s bold return — their ACT debut and first recording in five years. It’s a single, choreographed journey that fuses the spirit of folk, the pulse of dance, and the depth of classical tradition into one seamless arc.
Inspired by Béla Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet and its dramatic five-movement form, the album reimagines the string quartet as a living, breathing band — one that thrives on improvisation, rhythm, and fearless experimentation.
Vocalist Viktoria Tolstoy and pianist/keyboard player Jacob Karlzon have worked together as close musical companions and friends for nearly three decades. So, when they choose to call their album Who We Are, it is far more than just an album title: they are making a statement.
What they are offering is a kind of musical self-portrait. They are aggregating and celebrating their shared experience and their mutual trust. Theirs is the kind of artistic language which only emerges after two people have been resonating on the same frequency for years. This duo’s journey began in the mid-1990s during one of Tolstoy’s UK tours. Since then they have performed together again and again, recorded six albums together, including Letter to Herbie (2011),…
Betty Bryant‘s nothin’ better to do radiates the natural confidence of a seasoned club date, where the music speaks for itself. A pianist, singer, and composer whose artistry has been shaped by decades of experience rather than trends (at the impressive age of 96), Bryant brings a storyteller’s instinct and a deep respect for melody to this session. Producer Robert Kyle, himself a seasoned saxophonist and flautist, places her in a setting that is both intimate and expansive, featuring a group of top-tier Southern Californian musicians who know how to support a singer without overshadowing her.
The opener “You Are Not My First Love” sets the mood with a relaxed swing that feels both rueful and wry. Bryant performs the lyrics with…
Tinsley Ellis has been with us for over four decades now, a career that encompassed some of the best songwriting any blues-rocker has ever put on record, mostly documented in his voluminous Alligator catalog. Shortly after the pandemic, Ellis inserted an acoustic segment into his live sets, playing the three different guitars found on Labor of Love, a follow-up to his full 2024 acoustic Naked Truth. Whether Ellis exhausted just about everything he could do in the blues-rock setting remains to be seen. Yet, he has clearly found his higher ground as an acoustic troubadour of the blues. His vocals shine in this format. One senses a newfound freedom and reinvigoration in his approach. Whether using slide or fingerpicking, Ellis is the genuine article, while…
After over 600 gigs, London based brother-and-sister duo The Molotovs have finally released their debut album. It’s fair to say that for a band so aligned with punk, Wasted On Youth is much more of a hark back to Britpop and 2010s indie rock, but despite a slight lack of self-awareness, it is studded with promise.
Indie cursive singing is a bold move, and one that has attracted a lot of attention on social media in recent years by millennials cringing at their youth. There’s an extremely thin line between The Kooks asking the ironically iconic “do you want to go to the seaside?” and Arctic Monkeys presenting the timeless introduction “I said who’s that girl there?”, but it’s very clear which side of that line you want to be on. Unfortunately, it would…
The Rifles have been making waves on the indie-rock scene since their debut album release in the summer of 2006, ‘No Love Lost’. Like many before them, members of the band found themselves compelled to form a band after seeing Oasis perform. This influence is noticeable throughout their previous releases without falling into the often tripped trap of Oasis-Mimicry, the group instead keeps an interest in an over-saturated genre through a healthy dose of New Romantic ideology mixed into a more classic indie high impact rhythm.
In the last 10 years since the the band shared their first release, The Rifles have honed their art and formed a dedicated fan base, and now as a gift to these fans we look at the last decades worth of material and reimagined both the hits…
For last year’s Record Store Day Black Friday lineup, Rhino puts The Doors front and center with Live in Copenhagen, a previously unreleased 1968 performance finally pulled from the vault. Live in Copenhagen captures the band’s full early show from September 17th at the Falkoner Centret during their European tour. It’s a substantial RSD Exclusive — one that highlights The Doors at a pivotal moment, delivering a raw, unpolished document that adds real value to the band’s live catalog rather than reworking material fans already know by heart.
The set begins with “When the Music’s Over,” and the performance immediately shows a band working with precision rather than chaos. Morrison keeps his delivery steady…
Throughout 2024, the Swedish duo Club 8 released a single a month, then gathered them up on an enchanting record titled A Year with Club 8. The idea was such a good one that they did the same thing in 2025.
This time the resulting album was titled Seasonal Echoes and it finds them walking a similar path of warmly melancholic indie pop spiced with the occasional burst of noise pop and a wistful ballad or two. This is the kind of music Johan Angergård and Karolina Komstedt were seemingly born to make, and it should heat the hearts of pop lovers both vintage and newly minted to hear them still making music this sweetly real. As always, Angergård constructs perfect pop miniatures for Komstedt’s lilting voice;…
Syd dePalma’s Paris is dreamlike. Echoes abound, sculpting recognizable rock, folk, and pop stylings into imaginative new shapes. As he plays with light and shadow, the borders between fantasy and reality blur. The familiar soars. An eerie melancholy fills even the most straightforward of dePalma’s melodies, a desperation buried deep in the foundation of every line he sings. The lyrics are uncanny, the sounds constantly shifting. Only two years out from debut, El Lugar de Arder, Paris is a ferocious next step for dePalma, one that radiates surreal energy.
Vivid imagery abounds: of body parts, desire, tears, the sky, the ground, the city, the country. As lead singer on almost all tracks, dePalma makes for a compelling guide to his uncanny world.
Although James Opstad first recorded on double bass at Eastcote Studios, London, in September 2006, on an album entitled Interpretations (2006) credited to a drummer named Jon Opstad, James Opstad did not release an album under his own name until Drift (2025).
In the intervening years, the bassist had played or recorded with Apartment House — for instance, he played on the title track of O, Zomer (2018) by Cassandra Miller — with saxophonist Joe Wright in the duo called duck-rabbit, and in the quartet Jack Davies’ Flea Circus.
On Drift, which was recorded by Simon Reynell in London and Birmingham from 2020 to 2024, a selection of musicians played five Opstad compositions, ranging in…
Five years after releasing Twelve of Hearts, Daniel O’Sullivan reconvenes with Richard Youngs for another intense minimalist meditation.
On their debut collaborative album, Youngs and O’Sullivan used a single chord progression to distill various pop idioms into twelve succinct tracks. And they try something completely different on Persian Carpets, a blissful, longform experiment that’ll be more familiar to anyone who’s been keeping up with Youngs’ Black Truffle sides. Youngs plays zither here, following O’Sullivan’s trance-inducing piano repetitions that recall his collaborations with the great Charlemagne Palestine. But it’s not only repetition that drives ‘Persian Carpets I’. O’Sullivan varies his phrases by altering the dynamics as he plays, creating waves of noise…
…2025 edition was mastered by Rashad Becker and features a new track ‘Sacrificial Code III’.
The first and only time that Kali Malone sat down for a lesson on the pipe organ, she managed about five minutes at the console before begging her teacher to take her inside the belly of the beast. That desire is borne out in her music: Listening to her expansive, slowly moving compositions, which bristle with dazzling arrays of layered waveforms, you feel like you are not just inside the organ — pressed against its pipes, vibrations coursing through your body, air whisking over your skin — but enveloped in the sound itself. The simplest interval might throb like an outboard engine, every new chord triggering wave after rippling wave of beating effects, vibrations as…