When Joan As Police Woman released Real Life in 2006, it felt like the arrival of a fully formed solo artist rather than a debut in the usual sense. Joan Wasser had already lived several creative lives as a violinist, band member, collaborator and arranger, and the album gathered those histories into a poised, intimate set of songs about grief, love, survival and the possibility of carrying on. Twenty years later, Real Life Evolution returns to the same ten songs with a different kind of knowledge. The title is well chosen. These are songs that have aged, travelled, stretched, tightened and changed emotional weight through performance.
A clear sign of that evolution is the running order. The original album began with ‘Real Life’ and ended with ‘We Don’t Own It’. The new version…
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In the grand tradition of left-of-center rock bands, Neptune started as an art project. In the 1990s, Boston sculptor Jason Sanford began fashioning homemade guitars and basses out of scrap metal and repurposed detritus, and the band quickly followed (check out their first ever show in 1994). Over the ensuing years, Sanford (who also plays in E with Thalia Zedek) bolted Neptune into a tight and ferocious noise rock unit that brandished very heavy instruments adorned with blades, spikes, and jagged edges. When George Miller made Mad Max: Fury Road, he dropped the ball by not showcasing Neptune riding the Doof Wagon. (Sure, Coma-Doof Warrior was impressive but Neptune as the harbingers of the apocalypse would have killed.) Because of the construction of…
Devlin and the Harm sits in an intriguing place somewhere between widescreen indie rock and shadowed americana. There are moments here that feel vast; songs opening into towering choruses, drums crashing, powerful guitars, melodies that make you think of open skies, but the emotional landscape beneath them is far darker and more intimate. Across these eleven tracks, the band returns repeatedly to themes of collapse, inheritance, addiction, memory, and the uneasy possibility of redemption. It is an album concerned less with escape than with what remains after illusions fail.
The opening track, ‘Kingdom Comes’, immediately establishes the album’s central tensions. Built around a slow-burning atmosphere…
…Former members of Zebra Hunt have got together in Seattle to form Fallen Oaks, and we should rejoice that they did. Lead vocalist and guitarist Robert Mercer has written a fine assembly of songs and is ably backed by Erik Bennett on bass, Mitch Leffler on drums, Zack Erb on fiddle, and the wonderful pedal steel player Paul Hutzler. Will this record change your life? Maybe not, but it should, and at the very least, will add something special to the days you play it. ‘Roadside Prayers’ and ‘Stucco House’ are a must, along with the plaintive guitar on ‘Motel’.
‘Roadside Prayers’ is a three-minute, stunning alternative country ballad lamenting the love and loss of a friend. The guitar and mournfully aching violin work perfectly. The change of…
…In addition to a new remaster of the original album, this edition includes 13 previously unissued bonus tracks including demos, alternate takes, and outtakes from the album sessions.
After The Beau Brummels dissolved in 1968 following their swan song, Bradley’s Barn, it was doubtful that we’d ever hear from the band again, despite their individual and collective brilliance. The group did somehow reunite in 1975, however, for this fine and somewhat understated album. The band’s weaving of folk, country, and pop stylings hadn’t really changed that much from their prime in the mid- to late ’60s.
Ron Elliot has several superb songs on here, notably “Tennessee Walker” and the excellent album closer, “Today by Day,” which is sung by…
Heretics & Heritage is the fourth album from Leeds-based Lewis Pugh, combining both bluegrass and traditional folk/roots influences. Pugh himself plays banjo, guitar, snare drum and double bass, in addition to lead vocals, and all but two songs are self-penned.
The album lineup includes two members of north-east bluegrass band The Often Herd, in Evan Davies on mandolin, and Niles Krieger on fiddle. The opening track, ‘Big Stone Lifter’, is an up-tempo bluegrass number, with pedal steel courtesy of Stephen Hicken Jr., an addition to the usual bluegrass lineup including the aforesaid mandolin, fiddle and banjo. Indeed, the pedal steel is a very effective addition to the sonic mix, providing a unifying thread through much of the album.
…includes three bonus tracks: covers of Eddie Murphy’s “Party All the Time,” William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” and Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”
“Johnny can do what he wants,” Sturgill Simpson told Uncut when his new alias debuted on 2024’s Passage Du Desir, which found him rolling through Paris streets “like a cork in a bottle” while listening to ‘70s soft rock and Serge Gainsbourg.
His first five albums proper had burned Nashville bridges during an odyssey through outlaw country, psychedelia, synths and Kentucky bluegrass, while tracing the five metaphysical phases of the Western soul.
Johnny Blue Skies blew this preordained cycle away. He feels more real this time round, not…
District Five’s Glut continues the Zurich band’s push into a sound that pulls equally from art-rock, jazz, post-punk, and experimental noise without fully settling into any one category.
The four-piece has spent over a decade developing a sound that feels loose and spontaneous without losing focus, and this album captures that balance particularly well.
Recorded with minimal overdubs, the record has the tension and unpredictability of a live performance, but the band’s control over dynamics and texture keeps it from spiraling into chaos. Instead, Glut feels like a document of a group constantly reacting to one another in real time.
“Seed” opens the record with uneasy momentum as scattered guitar lines, pulsing bass,…
Trumpeter Steven Bernstein contrasts a spare jazz trio with bold electronic reinvention on his 2026 double album. The first half (ResoNation Trio) finds the longtime Sex Mob leader in ruminative exploration alongside bassist Scott Colley and drummer Nasheet Waits. Together, they strike a painterly expressionism with songs that often feel more like sketches based on a mood, like little improvised vignettes. Some cuts, like “August 3,” are more ruminative, with Bernstein’s lyrical melody shadowed in skittering, woody bass and drum colors. Others, like “Woodstock,” play like a funky, improvised jam. While the trio’s spare approach is a far cry from the rambunctious party atmosphere of Bernstein’s work with Sex Mob, they nonetheless pull you closer within their…
When considering the title, one might imagine the answer as “sound,” as the post-rock collective Hanry, as the album, or all three. Defined as a “meditation on emergence,” What Came From Silence is a celebration of music and a coming-out party for the French band, who has released a series of EPs and singles leading up to this full-length debut.
The core trio becomes a quintet for this release, the typical post-rock setup enhanced by piano, cello and electronics. In deference to the title, the set starts with “Noise Drowns Out,” which rises from silence rather than attacking; this smooth entry allows the theme of emergence to take hold. The background sheen is like a drone upon which the percussion – both organic and…
Unexpected encounters often yield unexpected results. It is easy to get lost in Radwan Ghazi Moumneh’s extensive discography. Especially if your eye (and ear!) is drawn to the albums recorded under the name Jerusalem in My Heart, which take Arabic music as their starting point, falling somewhere in the vicinity of bands such as Land of Kush, Praed or Sanam. These unexpected collaborations sometimes result in overlooked releases, such as the exceptional The Sentimental Moves – a project that brings together musicians from different worlds, recorded with Canadian guitarist Eric Chenaux – essentially, before Moumneh fully established his distinctive style straddling those worlds.
In Montreal, Moumneh runs a recording studio,…
A lot of life can happen when nothing’s going on. As the years tick by, landmarks become less regular. Highs become less vaulted. Lows become less abyssal. There’s a reason that posting to social media is mostly a younger person’s game. It’s not that less becomes less exciting or moving, it’s just less flashy. Most of life tends to happen in those quiet periods, which we far too often write off as boring, which, in turn, makes us feel bad about our lives, as if we’re not living up to the influencers we could be.
On her first album in five years, British composer and pianist Poppy Ackroyd explores those moments that fall between the posts, the phone calls and text messages; they might not even warrant a diary entry, depending on how…
…compiled by Robert Fripp, including Brian Eno, David Sylvian, Andy Summers, The League of Gentlemen and more.
“[Panegyric label head] Declan Colgan told [Fripp’s manager] David Singleton: ‘Robert has more ampersands in his professional life than anyone I know!’ We went through three iterations of this CD – a David version, a Declan version, and then I made my own comments, and we have this CD that you have. Primarily this is stuff that I want to sit down and listen to. How do we begin? How do we get drawn into this? And then in the middle, when everything sags, what do you do there? And then at the end, well, how do you complete and wind this all up in such a way that the beginning and the end have gone full circle? And there you are.”
Ramshackle Swedish folk, medieval jam sessions, home-spun hymns recorded straight to tape, and albums named after revolutionary communist bands: The world of Gustaf Dicksson’s musical project Blod may seem unbearably esoteric. But a little context helps; Dicksson is a spiritual descendant of Swedish Progg movement of the 1960s and ’70s — not to be confused with prog rock, it was a left-wing, anti-commercial music movement that encompassed a wide range of styles, from psych-rock bands to nationally beloved singer-songwriters. Blod is indebted to the mossier, more experimental ends of the movement, including bands like Träd, Gräs & Stenar. This is the anti-capitalist, DIY heritage which Discreet Music — the record store and label…
Sunflower is the debut album of German/British artist Paul Holland. It features a number of very enjoyable characteristics, from West Coast soft rock to out-and-out folk, via some quite interesting world music. Above all, it has a very relaxed and personal feel to it, making it the perfect sound for relaxing in the sunshine.
It opens with a rocky number, ‘Clouds of Haze’, which jogs along very nicely indeed, with a live feel about it. The track explores the on/off nature of some relationships and certainly encourages the listener to explore the rest of the album, which tends to mellow out as it goes along.
It’s followed by a slower, jazzier track, ‘Feels Right’, which undoubtedly highlights his ability as an astute, talented songwriter.
If you were going to go looking for rough but melodic bands, you might very well start in Ohio. That’s where the granddaddy of them all — Guided by Voices — got its start, not to mention the Greenhornes, New Bomb Turks, Times New Viking, Cloud Nothings and many, many others. There’s something about flat, fertile, churchy Ohio that encourages rebellion, even oddity — remember Pere Ubu and Devo came from here. But there’s also a midwestern full-hearted-ness in even the most confrontational of bands. There’s ragged soul in ragged riffs here, and if you want evidence, look no further than Smug Brothers.
Smug Brothers, out of Dayton, have been at it for two decades, garnering modest success but an engaging catalogue. The band formed…
In the glory days of Italy’s library music session scene, Giancarlo Barigozzi and his cohorts were like Milan’s answer to L.A.’s legendary Wrecking Crew — if the latter were cutting one-size-fits-all soundtrack music for film and TV licensing. One main difference is that The Wrecking Crew never got to put their names on the records.
Sax/flute wizard Barigozzi and his peers worked on tons of sessions — and not just library music. They would get the call to come play when American jazz heavyweights blew through Italy, be it Joe Venuti or Gerry Mulligan. But in the wide-ranging world of library sessions, Barigozzi could wail in a genre-agnostic way, whether he was diving into electroacoustic experimentalism, chamber-jazz impressionism, early-adopter…
Americana singer-songwriter Caleb Caudle enters a significant new chapter with his seventh studio album, Heavy Thrill. Arriving at a time of profound personal and artistic transition, the record was created as Caudle and his wife prepared to welcome their first child. It also marks his first venture as a self-producer, giving the North Carolina native complete creative control over the project. Recorded at the legendary Cash Cabin Studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee, and later mixed by renowned engineer Jacquire King and mastered by Pete Lyman, the album reflects both growth and self-discovery.
Across its ten songs, Heavy Thrill explores themes of ageing, uncertainty, perseverance, and the feeling of being an outsider…