…Sir Van Morrison releases the 51st (give or take) solo album of a stellar career spanning more than 60 years across a wide range of musical genres; and, extraordinarily, he has become even more prolific in the last 10 years since turning 70, releasing more than an album a year, culminating in an album of predominantly blues covers sprinkled with a few new songs of his own.
Morrison’s musical career began in the late 50s as he learned to play guitar and saxophone as a teenager and featured in a variety of bands before forming Them in 1963, a quasi R’n’B group that released a string of singles, including rock standards such as ‘Gloria’ and ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’. He left to go solo in 1967 after monetary disputes arising from the band’s…
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Panic! At the Disco is celebrating two decades of their career by giving fans A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out (20th Anniversary Deluxe). The 20th Anniversary Deluxe will feature remastered versions of iconic tracks like “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” and “Lying Is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off,” along with unreleased demos and live recordings.
Discovered by Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz when the band members were still in their teens, Panic! At The Disco exploded onto the musical landscape with the release of A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out in the fall of 2005, which reached the upper echelons of the Billboard 200 and garnered multi-platinum success. The release’s breakout single, “I Write Sins Not Tragedies,” would become…
The second volume in the WaJazz Japanese Jazz Spectacle series, selected by Yusuke Ogawa.
“Japanese jazz expert Yusuke Ogawa continues the WaJazz exploration with another essential collection of music that contains something uniquely Japanese — focusing this time on the King Records catalog. Featuring timeless music by Isao Suzuki, Toshiaki Yokota, Akira Miyazawa, Takeru Muraoka, Yasuaki Shimizu, Masahiko Togashi, George Otsuka, and more.
“It is my great pleasure to introduce you to the second volume of the “Japanese Jazz Spectacle” series. Following the first compilation which focused on recordings from the Nippon Columbia catalog, this time we are digging into the King Records archives.
With Convergence, his second solo album, Swedish-born bassist Björn Meyer further develops music on the blueprint established with his recording Provenance (2017), making use of the technical potential of the bass guitar to establish striking sonorities and grained textures while also being acutely aware of the acoustic space in which his sounds emerge. In its review of Björn’s previous solo statement, London Jazz News found the bassist demonstrating “that melodic high-jinks and emotional intensity aren’t just for those who inhabit the treble stave. Meyer’s bass sings.” Here the bass player’s atmospheric explorations conjure images in the mind. His technical innovations appear expanded in a programme of songful quality. In brief it feels complete in itself…
By the end of 1980, after 10 years waiting for the world to catch up with them, things were looking bleak for Suicide. The pioneering New York electronic project of keyboardist Martin Rev and vocalist Alan Vega had released a sinister self-titled debut in 1977; the album was met by hostility from crowds and mocked as “puerile” by Rolling Stone. Playing on tour with Elvis Costello, the Clash, and the Cars, they’d been pelted with shoes, coins, and even knives. ZE Records had backed May 1980’s glitzier follow-up, Suicide: Alan Vega and Martin Rev, putting the duo in the expensive Power Station studios with the Cars’ Ric Ocasek on production. But the label had hoped for a dance-pop record, telling Ocasek to think of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” for reference, and Vega felt it…
A bold statement for a new year. The seventh studio album by Australian band The Paper Kites, If You Go There, I Hope You Find It, is already, even as 2026 takes its first baby steps, an album-of-the-year contender. The majority of the album was written at a friend’s farm located within the Yarra Valley in Melbourne, and the wide-open spaces and mountain views have clearly served as an inspiration to the band. ‘If You Go There, I Hope You Find It’ is a phrase co-founder Christina Lacy wrote on a fogged-up bus window one morning, which became a quiet mission statement — a reflection on distance, devotion and the quiet hope that the people you love will find what they’re looking for, even if you can’t follow them where they go. Musically, it’s the five band…
Lucinda Williams’s built a body of work that thrives on autobiography and the confessional, fearless vignettes of broken love affairs and men going off the rails. But as she explained in her 2023 memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, she comes from a family who “understood and taught me the power of language and music to create a more just world”. Williams may be bloodied but she’s unbowed: if anything, she’s as mad as hell and she aint’ going to take it anymore.
There’s an air of apocalypse, of last things about World Gone Wrong, the same cocktail of impending doom, rock ‘n roll swagger and gospel intensity that infuses the Stones’ Gimme Shelter. We are in the hour of darkness from the opening title track, a companion piece to…
Justin Townes Earle, the deeply talented but sadly troubled folk/Americana musician, succumbed to an accidental overdose just over five years ago. Yet within the span of just weeks, an authorized biography — What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome — has been released, and musician Sammy Brue is issuing an album largely drawn from Earle’s journals. Aptly titled The Journals and released with the blessing of Earle’s widow, the record stands as both a work of sadness and a celebration of Earle’s remarkable gift as a songwriter.
The striking opening track, “Lonely Mornings,” sets the tone of the record early on with a stripped-down sound – little more than an acoustic guitar and vocals, putting the lyrics at…
On their fourth album Yatta!, the celebrated Dutch quartet YĪN YĪN extends, bends, and ignites a joyous mix of disco, funk, surf, psychedelia, and Southeast Asian motifs. UNCUT magazine previously dubbed their highly addictive sound “cosmic disco”—a fitting starting point—but as Yatta! proves, the band’s sonic footprint is an ever-evolving kaleidoscope of sounds, textures, and beats.
As with their breakthrough album Mount Matsu (2024), their devotion to getting the dance floor moving remains front and center. That impulse, already strong, has intensified — Yatta! lifting it to an ecstatic next level.
The result? An album that reveals a band whose groove just keeps getting deeper.
In their infancy, Vancouver trio cub embraced the term cuddlecore — coined by friend and Destroyer guitarist Nicolas Bragg — as a cheeky tagline for their ramshackle fusion of ‘60s bubblegum pop and three-chord punk rock. It was an apt descriptor; their 1993 debut record Betti-Cola had garnered a cult following on North American college campuses in part because of its Archie Comics-inspired cover art, riddled with sentient teddy bears, rainbow Popsicles, and lucky pennies.
Where cub’s visuals exuded cuteness, their songwriting possessed a campy bite. Like their twee-punk contemporaries in Heavenly and Tiger Trap, cub’s best songs capture the emotional confusion and lost innocence of adolescence, stories of teenage runaways and…
Buyers of the physical version of this album, which made classical best-seller charts in the summer of 2025, will get an explication of the contents, much of it from composer Hannah Kendall, that contains a good deal of language aimed at the ideological environment of Columbia University, where Kendall received a PhD; one hears of “creolised sites of connectivity” (not to mention “créolité”), “the Plantation Machine and its ongoing feedback loop system that continues today,” and more in this vein. The deployments of the instruments in Kendall’s compositions reflect these ideas and embody imagery associated with them (“The timbral qualities of the radio feedback and interference” in the opening shouting forever into the receiver, for example, “serve to emulate…
Though Leo Records has previously documented Quartet (London) 1985 (1988); Quartet (Birmingham) 1985 (1991); and Quartet (Coventry) 1985 (1993), Burning Ambulance Music is proud to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the tour with this set of previously unreleased recordings from Liverpool, Sheffield, Leicester, Bristol, Southampton, Leeds, and Huddersfield.
…With a brazen logic all its own, Quartet (England) 1985 is not, by any means or definition, for those whose algorithms prescribe soothing puppy and kitten videos or languorous spa music. Maniacal, undaunted, unflinching, Quartet (England) 1985 place the brave listener in the eye of the cacophonous tornado fury that was Anthony Braxton, pianist Marilyn Crispell, bassist…
There are possibly two key reasons why musicians take on other professional tasks – they need a number of personal channels to express their talents and ideas or, they simply need more money. Or both. Whatever is the case with Max Alper, who as a musician goes under Peretsky, he tries to express himself as a composer (and performer), as well as an educator (there he is La Meme Young), and technologist.
For the case in hand, his most recent album It Doesn’t Get Cold in October Anymore (and he’s got over 30 of those), he maybe can stick to music, as the one he makes works on a number of levels. While previously he spread his musical palette from noise, sound art, and free improvisation, this time around he decided to work…
The opening track of Buletten & Blumen, Siriusmo’s fourth album, is multi-faceted. ‘That Could Funktion As a Song’ begins with the sound of a computer logging on. A metronome starts. Then a stranger mutters “Hmmm… cool. So that could function as a song… I guess.” The uncanny voice has all the emotional detachment of a scripted call centre helpline or, more chillingly, an AI. “Ok, ok,” says that voice again “I like instruments,” but the intonation is off. It builds symphonically before fading out into the clatter of computer keys being punched. Herbie Hancock meets The Muppets’ Mah Na Mah Na, as the track lighthouses a sea of undulating synths. While the satirical-cum-philosophical, broken haiku of the spoken word sections makes the listener…
There are few musical outfits whose music creates such a warm glow as instrumental super-trio Leveret. Accordionist Andy Cutting, concertina player (who also recorded this album), Rob Harbron, and violinist Sam Sweeney are at the top of the pile in each of their departments, and their work as Leveret has been consistently excellent through six albums and eleven years.
For Lost Measures, the band unearthed several old tunes and melodies that had lain dormant for many years and combined them with originals from Andy and Rob to result in eleven pieces of beautiful music showcasing the strengths of these musicians, both as individuals and as one of the best instrumental groups operating.
One of the most rewarding aspects of…
So far, Atlanta-based singer songwriter Diane Coll has been making music under the motto “therapy through music.” Quite a few songwriters have a similar idea, for some it works, for others, not so much. It is a somewhat lofty concept, and you really have to have clearly set vision and ideas to make it work. Both the music and lyrics have to have a detailed balance and ideas to sound plausible to listeners. For her previous four albums, it was more a hit than miss concept for Coll, and now, for Strangely in Tune, her fifth album, that therapeutic concept has its full fruition for Coll, both musically and lyrically.
Coll has that touch in music and lyrics that utilises more gentle, ethereal elements not strictly defined by any specific genre, covering…
It’s a great time to be an indie band making anything that sounds post-punk. Dry Cleaning and Black Country, New Road have outlasted their initial hype cycles and begun chugging toward longevity. Geese have invited a stunning amount of breathless adulation from prestige media who were indifferent to indie rock five seconds ago. Poptimism’s cultural capture is over! Everyone grab a delay pedal and arpeggiate a sus chord! People who watch Saturday Night Live will know who you are!
It’s funny, then, to consider “Careers in Acting,” the opening salvo of A-Rhythm Absolute. On it, Sunday Mourners frontman Quinn Robinson disavows the trappings of success, swearing off an acting career and internet fame and instead promising to “make it big in the parking lot.”
It’s not foregrounded, but as Strangest Feeling beds in after repeated listens it becomes clear that one of its core traits is The Pixies-originated quiet-loud, soft-hard dynamic which oozed into grunge. The second LP from the Irish-born, Sydney dwelling Bonnie Stewart isn’t a grunge album, but it has a kindred sensibility. Take third track “Bittersweet”. It has a My Bloody Valentine / Pale Saints haziness but as a verse gives way to the chorus – boom, an explosion. The voice is folky, lilting, the melodies honeyed. Yet Stewart likes offsetting this with flare-ups indicating that – presumably – she likes to give listeners a surprise.
Some of Strangest Feeling is less structured, more abstract. Opening track “Dragon” is diffuse, goth-ish, evoking the percussive aspects…
Knowing when to stop is a much-undervalued attribute, particularly in the music industry. So rare is the artist who calls it a day – and doesn’t renege on the decision – they are exceptions that prove the rule. Syd Barrett, Mark Hollis, Meg White… Even rarer is knowing how to stop – David Bowie of course set the benchmark for career-concluding swan songs with 2016’s Blackstar.
But fellow New York resident JG Thirlwell has made a similar creative choice with the release of Halt, his tenth album under the Foetus nom de plume – satellite, remix and live releases notwithstanding. The record brings to a close a project that spans 45 years of exceptional creativity, and at times controversy.
There’s an apocryphal story about Thirlwell…
Every field recording is a virtual reality. Joshua Bonnetta understands that precept: The Canadian artist eschews “authentic” reproductions of any space, openly embracing subjectivity. “I abstract the sounds,” Bonnetta has said of his 2016 album Lago, “so that they would align more with my experience and the feeling of what I got from that place.” A personal perspective comes to the fore in his experimental documentaries, too. El Mar La Mar, his 2017 collaboration with director J.P. Sniadecki, placed oral histories alongside audio of the Sonoran desert, painting the U.S.-Mexico border as a landscape of trauma and bureaucratic racism. In 2020’s The Two Sights, he portrayed the epistemological reality of clairvoyant townspeople in the Outer Hebrides by eschewing…