It was unreasonable to expect Duane Betts’ second full-length long-player, Isle of Hope, to match the passionate match of musicianship and material of its predecessor, Wild and Precious Life. And, in fact, this Sun Records release only comes close and ultimately falls short because the bright moments, most of them instrumental, merely interrupt the mainly sluggish performances of somewhat formulaic arrangements overseen by studio supervisor Dave Cobb. The man who’s produced Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile, Sturgill Simpson and Jason Isbell certainly has a recognizable style that includes pristine audio quality. But this Betts record, recorded in just five days at Cobb’s studio in Savannah, GA, suffers from too many ponderous instances like “Best Wishes.”
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Performing under the moniker Fruit Bats, Chicago’s Eric D. Johnson has managed to seamlessly slip in and out of genres throughout his 25-year career, from indie rock and pop to experimental folk. Following up last year’s Baby Man, a surprisingly intimate record with Johnson handling the entire album on his own, he is back with a full band on The Landfill, and the difference is obvious from the opening track.
“The Saddest Part of the Song” sounds like a classic Otis Redding tune before Johnson’s distinctive reedy tenor kicks in, occasionally reaching a falsetto. It’s a curious pick for an opening track, but a great song regardless, with layer upon layer of instruments. “All Wounds” is closer to the indie folk sound Fruit Bats is known for, but…
Slippers‘ cozy brand of indie pop is baked to perfection on their second album Slippers 08. Madeline BB is the writer and singer, and drummer too, and she’s got the whole thing figured out. It’s never a bad idea to mix together intimate C-86 noise pop, woolly Elephant 6-sounding indie, and hooky, pocket-sized power pop, especially when the songs are short and focused, the guitars are crisp and jangly, the rhythm section plays with economical punch, and the vocals have best friend warmth. BB’s lyrics feel like that same friend telling you about her hopes, dreams, problems, and feelings; it’s so small scale and intimate that it’s impossible not to be drawn in right away. She never overstays her welcome musically, keeping the songs very short and never…
Listening to Magazine feels like speedrunning a tour of the circles of hell. The band doesn’t even try to make these songs sum up to anything coherent: each song hits, fades, and the next introduces itself, just to fade again in record time. On each, synthesist Jack Tobias puts down ominous chords and motifs at the worst moments; guitarist-that-sounds-like-a-synthesist Saguiv Rosenstock plays what could very well be the transposed sheet music of a dying dog’s final whimpers; vocalist Zack Borzone moans against the beat in broken Revelations-inspired word association poetry; and drummer Sam Pickard works like the devil to hold the whole operation together. Right when you get accustomed to one song’s palate, it pauses, waits a few seconds,…
Taking a critically acclaimed, historic composition and reconfiguring it for a seemingly anachronistic style can be tough to pull off, even, to some ears, heretical. However, for composer and pianist Aaron Wyanski, retooling the works of the prolific, groundbreaking 20th-century composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) has become something of an ongoing project, with results nothing short of stunning and deeply imaginative. Taking these unorthodox, atonal works and dropping them into the mid-century world of lounge jazz works a lot better than you would think, and the most ambitious example of this ongoing fascination may be his best work yet.
Pierrot Lunaire is Schoenberg’s 1912 interpretation of 21 poems by Albert Giraud,…
Adam Schatz is nothing if not eclectic and musically profound.
The saxophonist, composer, and keyboard player, known for his curious indie pop songwriting project Landlady, as well as playing alongside the likes of Wye Oak, Japanese Breakfast, Sylvan Esso, and This Is the Kit, is also a longtime curator of jazz and experimental music. That is why his latest album, Civil Engineering, Vol. 1, seems like a delightful inevitability. It’s the result of one day in a Manhattan recording studio, creating improvised magic with bassist Carmen Quill (Scree, Tilt) and drummer Qasim Naqvi (Dawn of Midi).
Labelling Civil Engineering, Vol. 1 as jazz is fairly accurate, although the overall sound eschews labels. As with all improvised music,…
The imagery New Mexico banjoist Johnny Bell throws up on his first fully composed solo banjo album, Mountain States, is often along the lines of slow-moving, sun-scorched skylines, or a scorpion in a desert with its tail quivering. There is an element of unease and an underlying gravity running through this music that is a far cry from a more ambient style of country banjo music, like that of Andrew Tuttle’s Fleeting Adventure, for example; something also reflected in the album artwork in which Daniel McCoy Jr. (Muscogee Creek/Potawatomi) renders New Mexico’s Diablo Canyon in surreal, psychedelic colour, a landscape at once familiar and alien.
A chunk of this is down to co-producer Andrew Weathers’ direction and decision to mic…
It’s been more than 8 years since Maryam Saleh’s last album. A stalwart of the Egyptian alternative scene, many believed the Cairo native had quit the industry entirely after the 2017 release of Lekhfa with Maurice Louca and Tamer Abu Ghazaleh, until a sudden collaboration with Syrian producer Hello Psychaleppo dropped in 2023.
The synth-led single ‘Baghanny’ deviated from the artist’s more traditional-leaning electro-shaabi but signalled the return of one of Egypt’s most compelling voices. Syrr, written and recorded under the mentorship of Palestinian musician Kamilya Jubran, finds Saleh back in more familiar territory. With Louca returning on production, the album draws on traditional modes while carrying a heavier emotional weight.
You know you’re listening to a hardcore album when the lyrics that most warm your heart are, “Sit the fuck down, get your guard down.” This intense desire for connection fuels Hammok’s latest album, When Does This Place Become Our Scene. Following their 2024 debut’s within-the-scene success, the Norwegian power trio now finds themselves on the verge of breaking internationally and expanding beyond the expected bounds of hardcore/punk/noise rock, leading to questions like, where are they and who’s with them? It’s good inspiration, as this album shows that the band thrives amidst raw, furious uncertainty.
Repeatedly asking “Is this us or am I alone?” over rampaging drums and guitars that will make you slam yourself into the nearest bystander,…
Much of the publicity surrounding Deadlights refers to it as Lauren Lakis’ debut, but surely her releases have been appearing fairly regularly since Ferocious in 2018, making this her fourth album? Whatever; the cover photo of Deadlights appears to be a messy, witty and possibly dark homage to the cover of the Cars’ 1978 debut.
There is sometimes a pop sensibility lurking at the heart of Lakis’ songs, but although powerful, it’s definitely not “power pop,” as its melodies are generally submerged in surging and ebbing distorted guitars. Deadlights is essentially a shoegaze record with some strong ‘90s alt-rock inflections, and much of it trudges along disconsolately with Lakis’ dreamy, reverb-masked voice riding the waves of guitar and…
As the years went by, Káryyn’s chilling masterclass of a debut album started to feel like a singularity. 2019’s The Quanta Series seemed like it might not only stand the test of time but be capable of bending it, blurring the past into futuristic art-pop. It took half a decade for the Armenian American singer and composer to follow it up with another record, the James Ford-produced EP Calm Kaoss!, which was preceded by a standalone single co-produced with Hudson Mohawke.
Along with Björk collaborator Marta Salogni on mixing duties, those names turn up throughout the credits of Káryyn’s long-awaited new album, like the UK alternative’s equivalent to the Weeknd enlisting Max Martin and Oneohtrix Point Never on Dawn FM.
The innovations of Berlin’s Basic Channel in the mid-’90s led to a whole new way of thinking about dance music, introducing countless producers to the possibilities of reverb and delay. Producers have been working off the template they set for dub techno ever since. Less often imitated is the duo’s work as Rhythm & Sound, where they slowed their music to reggae tempos and hewed closer to the Jamaican innovations that informed their trippy production tricks. This sound is having a small moment right now. Stuttgart’s Ghost Dubs has made a career of it, both solo and with a fired-up Kevin Richard Martin; Brussels’ Carrier shaped it into cavernous forms on last year’s awesome Rhythm Immortal; all the while, co-originator and close Rhythm & Sound collaborator…
KOGG is Cerys Hogg and Selena Kay, who both teach music. With backgrounds in jazz improvisation and classical composition, respectively, they found a common interest in exploring randomness and new ways to make sounds, including building their own instruments. They describe collecting whistles from Christmas crackers and creating a device to blow them with air bulbs. Programming devised sounds into synthesisers, they have crafted their own music, and it is quite something.
As they point out, experimental music has a reputation for being a male business, and a serious one. Hogg and Kay set out to make music their own way, and the results are joyous. The opening track, ‘Reel’, is conceptually satisfying,…
The Turtle Island String Quartet has built a unique position in chamber music. They improvise as readily as they read from a score, and they are committed to bringing diverse musical traditions into dialogue with the classical quartet tradition. Throughout the album, these composers write their art-music passages with skill, but the strongest moments come when the quartet is set free to improvise. So fluent is their collective improvisation that on many tracks it is genuinely difficult to tell where the written score ends and the spontaneous invention begins.
Representing the tensions between different musical traditions, the title piece by Balakrishnan is aptly spirited, tuneful, and blues-inflected, with fiddle-style violin playing and ample…
Norwegian jazz pianist and composer Kjetil Mulelid was born on February 4th 1991, in Hurdal, Norway. In 2014, he completed his studies at the Jazz program at Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Thereafter, he has been active with such bands as Kjemile, Wako and others, as well as his own work with Kjetil Mulelid Trio and his duo with Siril Malmedal Hauge.
Hauge, a Norwegian jazz singer, was born on November 28th 1992. She was also educated on the jazz program at University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. In addition to heading projects such as Fieldfare and Wild Things Run Fast, she has collaberated with other bands and musicians. In 2010, she received the Norwegian Cultural Educational Council (dream scholarship).
Known for his involvement in the long-running Chemirani Ensemble – a Persian classical group founded alongside his father and siblings – acclaimed French-Iranian percussionist Keyvan Chemirani here leads his own quartet, exploring Persian and Indian traditions through the lens of jazz and contemporary classical music. With his brother Bijan on percussion, saz and laoúto, Keyvan is joined by Benjamin Moussay on piano and modular synthesiser and violinist Yvlin.
The result is a rich and eclectic set of compositions, from the plaintive opening chords of ‘Royaumont’ and the intense trance-like groove of ‘Dar-é Marmouz’ (featuring Keyvan on fiery santur) to the Parisian romanticism of ‘La Cena Grande’, on which the violin takes centre stage…
…Originally shelved by his label in 2001, this 21-track record has finally seen an official release.
The Suicide Handbook is Ryan Adams’ most elusive and mythic recordings. The album is a raw and intimate collection of songs that captures the songwriter at his most unguarded. Recorded at the beginning of his solo career and long circulating only through bootlegs, the album has earned a legendary status among die-hard fans and fans of the Americana genre alike for its stark stripped-back beauty.
Acoustic arrangements and hushed, late-night vocals, these songs feel like private confessions set to tape. Adams leans into themes of heartbreak, isolation, and emotional vulnerability, delivering recordings that are as fragile…
…includes two bonus tracks: Mitski’s covers of One Direction’s “Fireproof” and Frank Sinatra’s “I’m a Fool to Want You” previously only available on compilations.
Based in Brooklyn but with an unsettled background that called over a dozen countries on multiple continents home before she reached her twenties, Mitski Miyawaki makes her Dead Oceans debut with her fourth album, Puberty 2.
Her background is not irrelevant here, as the album reflects her own, very personal — and intentional or not, her generation’s — crisis of belonging as she recounts stories of navigating young adulthood in the City. A visceral work that shares the immediacy of classic punk and confessional singer/songwriter fare at once, Puberty 2 takes…