German alto saxophonist, composer, and improviser Angelika Niescier emerges on Chicago Tapes with a refreshed, invigorating sound shaped by an expanded ensemble that gathers some of the Midwest’s most adventurous musicians. Long engaged in collaborations with American players — among them Tyshawn Sorey, Gerald Cleaver, Chris Tordini, and Tomeka Reid — Niescier brought her compositions and open-ended sketches to Chicago for an ambitious project that yielded nine fearless originals, each brimming with sharp turns and volatile energy.
The album’s kinetic opener, “Rejoice, Disrupt, Resist”, is a furious, defiant response to the anti-immigration stance of the Trump administration. Here, Niescier joins forces with…
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…The deluxe edition adds eleven bonus tracks, including a previously unreleased song called “One Wonders Why,” as well as phone demos and alternate studio versions of existing tracks.
After releasing two fine albums for Nonesuch, swinging trad jazz and pop vocal duo Rachael Price (Lake Street Drive) and Vilray Blair Bolles release their third long-player on Concord just in time for their appearance at the 2025 Newport Jazz Festival. West of Broadway is a ten-song set that operates at the intersection of swing, warm, rounded West Coast jazz, and musicals, with stellar, unintrusive production by Dan Knobler and expertly arranged by Jacob Zimmerman. They are joined by a sextet that includes vibraphonist/xylophonist/pianist Warren Wolf, saxophonist Steve Wilson, …
…features two bonus tracks not on the original album. The bonus tracks, “My Lover” and “I Love(d) New York”, were originally left off the initial release due to vinyl space constraints.
Seven albums in, White Lies continue to evolve while keeping their signature mix of shadowy synth-pop and widescreen emotion intact. Night Light finds the London trio leaning deeper into electronic textures than ever before, with the guitars now playing a supporting role to shimmering synths, pulsing basslines, and Harry McVeigh’s commanding baritone.
It’s a sleek, modern evolution that keeps the band’s DNA intact while exploring new sonic territory. The album bursts to life with ‘Nothing On Me’, a quickfire opener that clocks in at just…
“Anyone can come up with a story… you just need a few lies and a few loose wires upstairs and enough time alone to tie them all together”. So says Gene, a character created by Rick Maddocks for his story in ‘Sputnik Diner’. Common threads weave their way through the five stories in the book, all centred around tobacco-belt Ontario.
…Blue Horse Opera started off as a novel idea. But time spent in Southern Spain over a decade ago provoked childhood memories of old, familiar spaghetti western soundtracks. Maddocks’s wiring and musical creativity enabled him to take the narrative (dusty deserts replaced by the Canadian oil sands) and compose a 17-track song cycle, and an endoscopic glimpse into the colourful mind of this writer and musician.
Sony Music Japan has continued its popular series of 7-inch SACD reissues with a 50th anniversary edition of Bruce Springsteen’s seminal Born to Run. The 3CD set features a new DSD remaster of the original album on stereo hybrid SACD (playable on all CD players) along with The Boss’ Greenvale, New York concert of December 12, 1975 on 2 Blu-spec CDs. The CW Post College Post Dome concert featured most of the songs from Born to Run including “Thunder Road,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” “Backstreets,” “She’s the One,” “Jungleland,” and, of course, the title track. (The concert also yielded Springsteen’s now-classic take on “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” which was released as a single nearly a decade later, in 1985.) The concert was issued in 2021 on…
Ari Lennox is one of contemporary R&B’s premier sophisticates, preferring a palette of lush jazz, soul and ’90s hip-hop over the more genre-fluid sound pushed by contemporaries SZA and Kehlani. But a few songs into her new album, Vacancy, she makes it eminently clear that tradition and wildness can coexist, with fabulously sparky results: on ‘Under the Moon’, she describes a lover as “vicious / Like a werewolf / When you’re in it” and proceeds to howl “moooooooooon” as if she is in an old creature feature.
Vacancy, Lennox’s third album, is far and away her most fun, and if it isn’t quite as ingratiating as her 2022 Age/Sex/Location, it makes up for it with canny lyrics and an airy, open sound. ‘Cool Down’ is a reggae/R&B hybrid that…
…’Growing Pains (Deluxe)’ features six added tracks, including “Heavy Heart,” and “Tumbleweed,” and four acoustic tracks that were recorded at Second Nature Vintage in Nashville.
Closing in on their 20-year anniversary, LA’s blues and hip-hop-infused indie pop/rock band Andy Frasco & The U.N. continue to mix sharp humor with often weighty issues on Growing Pains, their 10th studio album.
Though the band has always been willing to wade into the occasional deep lyrical waters in the past (though admittedly with plenty of sly humor and subtlety), this new record finds Frasco and company reflecting on growing up and mortality. That is apparent on the album’s first single, the undeniably catchy “Try Not to Die,” ticking…
What is a watch bird? In Jane Weaver’s telling, it’s a remarkable creature that can travel long distances, seek out the lost, and weather great storms. This album, too, is of sweeping scope: it dances through eras and splashes through genres with abandon. Fifteen years on from its first release, and now in an expanded edition, The Fallen By Watch Bird remains as chimerical as it ever was.
Inspired by the nightmares for children that 1970s popular culture enjoyed churning out, The Fallen By Watch Bird recreates the sensation of ancient fables told through a flickering cathode ray. Weaver’s previous albums had been folk-oriented, and this influence is still palpable, but now she merges these impulses with spacerock, prog and psychedelia. Never quite analogue,…
Since the dissolution of Yura Yura Teikoku, Shintaro Sakamoto has refined a solo language built on understatement. Where his former band favoured volatility, his solo records proceed at lower pressure, privileging texture, spacing and grooves that remain deliberately underdeveloped. On his fifth solo album, Yoo-hoo, that approach resolves into a two-part movement, the record gradually shifting from suspension into motion without ever announcing the change. ‘Is There a Place For You There?’ establishes the album’s opening register, its unhurried and blown-out vocal and flattened delivery setting a mood of controlled inertia, melting against, even slowing the beckoning rhythm of Yuta Suganuma’s drums. The early stretch is governed by tactile…
For Mona Fastvold’s film about the Shaker founder, Daniel Blumberg reworked hymns, composed songs, and led a sizable chorus to mimic speaking in tongues. It’s ambitious but ultimately overbearing.
Formed in England in the mid-1600s, the Religious Society of Friends became known for the tremors and convulsions that would overtake its members during prayer. These “quakes” were not, they believed, handed down from on high, but emerged from the inside out — a blasphemy that saw members of the fledgling sect thrown into prison or run out of town.
…In The Testament of Ann Lee, Shakers shake. Mona Fastvold’s film stars Amanda Seyfried as the founder of the religious movement…
Guitars on Life is a duo offering by acoustic guitarists Jack West and Walter Strauss. Both are Californians. The recording was released in tandem with Essential Curvature, a compilation from West’s folk-jazz band who released five excellent albums between 1996 and 2003. He developed a solo style that allows him to play his trademark eight-string acoustic, slide guitars, bass, and percussion — simultaneously, which he does here. Strauss is best known for his global folk work with Malian musicians including kora masters Mamadou Diabate, Sidiki Diabate, and kamale ngoni great Mamadou Sidibe, among others. He’s also worked with multi-instrumentalist Joe Craven, Cuban violinist Tanmy Moreno, Scottish fiddler Jonny Hardie of the Old Blind Dogs,…
Essential Curvature is a double-length compilation drawn from five albums by Bay Area folk-jazz-world fusion outfit Curvature, guitarist Jack West‘s acoustic band that existed between 1996 and 2003. Their discography includes Continuum (1996), Big Comet Headed for Earth (1998), As We Know It (1999), Big Ideas (2001), and Around About Now (2003). Otá Records signed West for Guitars On Life with guitarist Walter Strauss, to be released alongside the new disc. It contains cuts from each of their releases. The sequencing of these 16 cuts is glorious; it is structured along an aesthetic of flow rather than chronology.
The set opener is the killer title track from Big Ideas. It’s performed by West, bassist Scott Amendola, marimbist/percussionist…
…The expanded digital album includes 11 bonus tracks in total: the three songs from the 2007 ‘End Like This’ EP, four previously unreleased outtakes, and four demos.
Makers is Rocky Votolato’s fourth album, appearing fittingly in line after 2003’s Suicide Medicine, but with a worn resilience all its own. It finds Votolato sounding older and weathered, more content than jaded, and there’s a modest quality to his steady voice that projects words as both sincere and comforting.
Some songs are country-tinged — with touches of harmonica, pedal steel, violin, and piano supporting the focal acoustic guitar — but it’s more that they simply evoke images of rural dirt roads, long walks and quiet autumn nights at home…
The Live at City Gardens EP features a blistering six-song soundboard recording captured live on February 11, 1984, at the legendary punk club City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey.
The EP showcases the band’s raw, electrifying energy as they were on the cusp of releasing their landmark album, Let It Be. The latter tune was a birthday request from Jesperson, who was The Replacement’s manager and the co-founder of the band’s label, Twin-Tone Records, in addition to being Let It Be’s co-producer.
A collector’s item, this 10″ EP was released exclusively as a pre-order bonus alongside The Replacements – Let It Be (Deluxe Edition). It features clear, high-quality audio and includes a rare live performance of the ballad “You’re Getting Married.”
Somewhere in an old mill in Yorkshire, a man – maybe – has been buried under patch cables, feeding electricity through modular synths long enough for the hum to be part of the drizzly landscape. That no one really knows who they are feels appropriate. Their anonymity has become part of the machinery, like an unlabeled switch. Sidings is the latest in a long drift of releases, a third double album that doesn’t move forward so much as nestle deeper into its own circuitry.
The word “sidings” tells us a lot: the quiet track off the main line, where trains go to rest, or wait, or rust. That’s what this record feels like. Music built for those in-between hours when nothing needs doing and no one is expecting you. Where 2023’s Standers felt like slow travel, Sidings feels…
‘The Power Station DLX’ includes the remastered album alongside three discs of bonus material, including unreleased “raw instrumental” versions, single mixes and live material, including the band’s performances from the charity concert Live Aid and an unissued full set from nearly a month later at The Spectrum in Philadelphia.
…The Power Station (a supergroup of sorts) came about during Duran Duran’s hiatus (which also saw Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and Roger Taylor form Arcadia) and featured Robert Palmer, Tony Thompson (from Chic) and Duran members John Taylor and Andy Taylor. Bernard Edwards produced the album (with “informal assistance” from Nile Rodgers) which features the hit singles “Some Like It Hot” and a cover of T. Rex’s…
Although Whitney K is widely characterised as being the artistic expedient of itinerant Canadian musician Konner Whitney (see what he did there?), his latest recording venture Bubble feels much more like a band project than his/their previous recordings. Whitney himself is responsible for all the lyrics here but the musical backings are credited to the core band responsible for recording them in their ‘home studio’ in Montreal. This is mostly Whitney himself alongside Josh Boguski, Michael Halls and Avalon Tassonyi, with support from James Perry. There are other supplementary musicians on ‘Bubble’ but for the most part this is the line-up that has worked on Whitney K’s recent records. Here they deliver a raw and restrained set of songs nourished by warm…
Supertramp are to reissue half-speed remastered vinyl editions of their commercial breakthrough album, Crime Of The Century, and its follow-up, Crisis? What Crisis?
After their self-titled debut in 1970 and its successor, Indelibly Stamped Supertramp veered away from their prog roots to mainstream acclaim on 1974’s Crime Of The Century thanks to the ‘Dreamer’ single, with the album reaching No 4 in the UK and No 38 on the Billboard Hot 100. A year later, Crisis? What Crisis? was less successful in the chart, but has since been named Roger Hodgson’s favourite Supertramp album.
Both albums have been remastered at half-speed by Miles Showell at Abbey Road, overseen by the band and original co-producer Ken Scott.
Searows’ second album, Death in the Business of Whaling, pries and forces confronting emotions to surface. With the title alluding to lines from Moby Dick, Alec Duckart pieces together the divided forces of life and death, the in-between, and feelings unable to be pinpointed.
Opener Belly of the Whale envelops us into a trance, setting the tone for an album gripping at dark corners. Haunting lullabies meet lyrics of death and solitude: ‘After the plummet, sinking into the grave / I’m left in the stomach at the bottom where I live’. It feels cinematic, with instruments creeping around sparse vocals. Dearly Missed begs us to solve a puzzle ending in tragedy, soundtracked by death knells of blazing guitars. Kill What You Eat similarly builds with lyrics that lash: ‘If I say it’s not really…
When Chilli Jesson first appeared on the cover of NME way back in 2012, it was as one half of the most charismatic, chaotic indie frontman double act since Pete ‘n Carl. Palma Violets, the headline declared, were “the best new band in Britain”. Jesson, their bassist and sometime vocalist, was the effortlessly cool mouthpiece of the operation. But behind the youthful bangers and artfully dishevelled hair, Jesson’s adolescence had been tumultuous. At 14, he lost his father to drug addiction, and it’s this grief that – almost 20 years on – the musician addresses with his new venture, Dead Dads Club.
The project (which follows a short-lived second band, Crewel Intentions, and a previous, eponymously named solo venture) might…