Broadly speaking, shredders are the pro wrestlers of music, trafficking in overwrought drama but devoid of soul, the realm of finger-tappers, fretboard lubricators, and those prone to viewing music as a competitive brawl.
As such, the axe-slinger of conscience steers clear of shredding behavior, albeit every-so-often dexterously running the neck to tip listeners off that, you know, they “really know how to play.” But for the typical avant-string consumer, shredding is beyond the pale.
Which brings us to Cyrus Pireh‘s new Palilalia release Thank You, Guitar, his latest stab at “transcendental shred electric guitar music.”
…this album has many surprises to the somewhat untuned ear. ‘We Can’t All Be Alive at the Same…
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In a late 2023 Ottawa Citizen profile by Peter Hum, jazz pianist Josh Rager declared that he’d moved on from donning styles like different sets of clothes to instead embrace his strengths and fully commit himself to his own gifts and talents.
Such wisdom comes naturally to someone who recently passed the fifty-year mark and is eager to use the time he has left in the most productive way possible. Jazz fans living in the Montreal area have long known of Rager as a figure in the city’s jazz scene, though when not playing the Ottawa native is also a dedicated professor at Concordia University.
Rager’s discography is modest, but the quality level of each release is strong, his latest no exception. The pianist has a soft spot for…
Few musicians have scaled the progressive rock battlements with such elegance as Jo Quail. From multiple collaborations with post-rock and metal bands – MONO to Enslaved and beyond – to her own steady flow of extraordinary, genre-melting releases, the cellist is acknowledged as an essential player in the creative underground.
Part of Quail’s charm is that her music is pointedly alive: a never-ending work-in-progress that she returns to in performance, feeding off the tunes, tones and spontaneous ideas that appear to magically coalesce in her songs.
This is particularly prominent on Notan, which features a brand-new version of ‘Rex’, a song originally found on her solo debut From the Sea. In its earlier form, ‘Rex’ was dazzling but…
Bristol-born smoky-voiced singer-songwriter Elles Bailey has been steadily honing her craft for almost a decade now and, with four strong albums already behind her, Elles stature and fanbase are now at an all time high.
Elles last album Beneath The Neon Glow in 2024 reached number one in both the Jazz/Blues Albums Chart and iTunes Albums Chart as well as reaching number 12 in the UK Official Albums Chart. Elles went on to win Artist of the Year at the 2025 UK Blues Awards as well as Vocalist of the Year and Broadcaster Of The Year.
Now Elles starts 2026 with the release of her new album Can’t Take My Story Away which has a much different concept and approach than her previous albums.
Streetlife Serenade may be one of the more unusual – and perhaps overlooked – albums in Joel’s celebrated catalogue. His third album (and second for longtime home base Columbia Records), it followed the modest breakthrough of 1973’s Piano Man with a similar formula to its predecessor. Working again with producer Michael Stewart and a team of Los Angeles session musicians, Joel later admitted the difficulty of recording a follow-up album with an admittedly thinner notebook of songs, so occupied had he been touring in support of Piano Man – at one point opening for The Beach Boys. Consequently, the album boasts not one but two instrumentals: the dexterous “Root Beer Rag” and the offbeat closer “The Mexican Connection.” The remaining songs furthered Joel’s…
The Damned return with a personal and celebratory record, Not Like Everybody Else, a tribute to the band’s late guitarist Brian James, who passed away in March 2025.
The album includes 10 brand new recordings of covers by some of the artists that influenced Brian on his musical journey and inspired the rest of the band. Kicking off with R. Dean Taylor’s “Ghost In My House” and moving through classics like Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play” and The Animals’ “When I Was Young”.
The album closes with “The Last Time,” a moving track featuring Brian James himself, pieced together from original live performances and remixed for this release, cementing the record as both a tribute and a farewell.
Sax player, label and club owner and band leader Ilhan Ersahin has been making waves on the New York jazz/soul underground scene for year and with the release of Mahalle, his band’s latest (sixth) album, he confirms that combining the sounds of his Turkish origins and R&B/soul groove with jazz touches can be a winning combination.
The influence Ersahin and his band have in music circles has already been noticed as he had bee playing with The Red Hot Chilli Peppers or well-known jazzers like Bugge Wesseltoft, and that all over the world, from Sǎo Paulo to Tokyo.
And while Istanbul Sessions, the name of his band, clearly states where Ersahin’s roots lie, Mahalle is a very direct tribute to Turkey’s key city and cultural centre that Istanbul is.
The Midnight Ache is John Blek’s follow-up to last year’s rawly honest Cheer Up. It seems the more albums he releases, the musically mellower he gets. His tenth studio album is a lo-fi, laid-back affair adorned with cello (Moritz Brümmer), viola (Filip Sommer) and piano (Brian Casey), evoking the likes of Beck (circa Sea Change), Ron Sexsmith and Elliot Smith. The songs are rooted in themes of home, as reflected in the album cover featuring pressed flowers from his garden, and were mostly self-produced in a studio Blek built with his own hands. While not wholly a dark night of the soul implied in the title (the name he gave those sleepless insomniac hours lying in bed, overwhelmed by everything that was going on), those shadows do hover.
On A Healthy Earth, Brooklyn slowcore outfit Peaer’s 2019 breakout album, frontman Peter Katz sang songs about the present: being stuck in it, trying to figure it out and even wondering what his might be like across the multiverse.
Nearly seven years later, the trio is back with a new, more polished set of ponderings. Rather than searching across parallel worlds for alternatives to the crushing weight of now, though, Katz scans his own timeline. The titular Doppelgänger is not some interdimensional Peter Katz. It’s the very real past version of himself, and the (hopefully) real future one.
Songs like “No More Today” mark this shift, in which Katz rattles off the vices he plans on ditching. They get increasingly absurd,…
Six years after 1987’s celebrated Wings of Desire, German director Wim Wenders released Faraway, So Close!, an examination of the differences between the angel figures and humans inhabiting Berlin and the myriad social and political factions within the newly unified city. A sequel of sorts to 2023’s Summer Chronicles, the similarly titled second collaboration by David Cordero and Rhucle references both the pronounced physical distance between the ambient producers’ respective home bases in Cádiz and Tokyo but also how musically connected the two feel when collaborating. By sending each other tracks and adding to them in their separate studios, the two have developed a file-sharing methodology that for them functions smoothly. As research on social…
Is Abel Selaocoe the most exciting musician in the world right now? Adding to the growing case is his third album, which presents his 2023 cello concerto, recorded live in London this year with the Aurora Orchestra. Here the prodigious Selaocoe, classically trained in Soweto and Manchester, interweaves South African ancestral and hymnal traditions with Western classical music, to inimitable effect.
Opening with a cascade of percussion, the first three movements are propelled by rhythm and energy, enhanced by regular collaborator Bernhard Schimpelsberger. It’s richly varied, with angular strings, guttural throat-singing, explosions of brass, and even a vocal percussion battle. He makes sparing use of the orchestra,…
John Wiese‘s seemingly endless discography includes harsh noise cut-ups as well as more haunting, nearly cinematic experimental works. His group Sissy Spacek (who, quite amusingly, are vastly more prolific as a recording act than their celebrity namesake) might be best known for their extremist take on grindcore, stuffing dozens of abrupt noise bursts onto 20-minute albums. However, the band also have numerous works which explore musique concrète and free improvisation, as well as large-ensemble performances of works composed by Wiese. In the past, Sissy Spacek recordings have included input from Aaron Dilloway, Kevin Drumm, Matmos, and members of the Los Angeles Free Music Society. Entrance, consisting of four…
One of the best West Coast folk-rock/psychedelic bands, Love may have also been the first widely acclaimed cult/underground group. During their brief heyday they drew from Byrds-ish folk-rock, Stones-ish hard rock, blues, jazz, flamenco, and even light orchestral pop to create a heady stew of their own.
Love’s The Complete Elektra Albums includes the definitive selection of Arthur Lee and company’s inimitable work. In addition to newly remastered versions of 1966’s Love and Da Capo and the landmark Forever Changes (1967), this box also includes the CD debut of Lee’s original mix for 1969’s Four Sail plus a disc of single sides and rarities that appeared on a series of early ’00s CD reissues of these albums.
You might think you’re busy, but are you busy like Arnold de Boer of Zea? In addition to being the Ex’s mouthpiece for the past decade and a half, he’s been the singer, guitarist, songwriter, booker, driver, etc., of Zea for 31 years. Throughout that time, the project has continually morphed, operating as a one-man show, a stylistically chameleonic ensemble and a multi-continental, collaborative endeavor that often projects its messages in more than one tongue.
In Lichem Fol Beloften (“a body filled with promises”) is sung entirely in Frisian, the language spoken in de Boer’s northern Netherlands neck of the woods. He wrote some of the lyrics, taking others from poems translated into the dialect. If you get the CD or LP editions,…
A band always keenly attuned to the nihilistic undercurrents of life in Hong Kong, David Boring has returned after a seven-year hiatus with their second album and a darker, harder, more machinic sound. Their 2017 debut, Unnatural Objects and Their Humans, was a ragged collage of delicate yet crushing post-punk poems driven live by the urgent, confrontational delivery of vocalist Janice Lau. It captures the band’s brash early period, which has morphed as Hong Kong has also fundamentally shifted in recent years, weathering political unrest, a pandemic, and economic pressures that reshaped daily life and the cultural landscape.
Liminal Beings and Their Echoes, released by Damnably and UN.TOMORROW, documents…
We live in an age of multitudes. Our emotions today tilt from joy to horror to humour with the flick of a doom-scrolling finger. Likewise, the art of this era has started to reflect this boundaryless mania. See the multiverse trope in cinema and pop music’s embrace of darker themes and avant-garde producers. Recent cultural history could even be viewed as an arms race of increased emotional complexity; from modernist sincerity to postmodern scepticism to contemporary multiplicities.
These sorts of oscillating moods are something Clothesline from Hell (the solo project of Toronto multi-instrumentalist Adam LaFramboise) utilises with intuitive aplomb. The accessible but gently complex music he comes up with…
Some albums take years to make. The Stone Roses famously took their sweet time over The Second Coming, while Guns N’ Roses made fans wait for over a decade before finally delivering Chinese Democracy. Tugboat Captain? They made Dog Tale in a week, mate – done and dusted in seven days, it’s a refreshing testament to creative brevity.
Recorded at South London studio Ctrl P – run by Sox and Josh from the band – there’s a pervading comfort to the material on Dog Tale. As time has gone on, Tugboat Captain have added baroque flourishes to their songwriting, and while the arrangements here testify to that, they equally refuse to be smothered by ad hoc additions.
As a result, it’s a beaming grin of a record, a witty series of quips, diversions, and…
Singer-songwriter Mike Mattison is best known as the lead vocalist for both the Derek Trucks Band and Tedeschi Trucks Band for more than 20 years. His third release as a band leader is a concept album based upon a novella he wrote about a fictional 1930s country blues act, Ted ‘n’ Turk. Mattison, who has earned an English and American literature degree from Harvard University, rediscovered Ted’ n’ Turk in the 1970s and reunited. The duo decide to re-record their original 78 rpm sides. The resulting album mixes old and new styles, with references to unresolved issues around race, money, and more.
Instrumentally, the record is a groove fest. The individual songs initially begin with repeated riffs that steadily roll on like a freight train.
Inspired by the human experiences of living, connecting and creating, leading Danish trio Human Being Human return with Being.
The album sees the trio expanding their soundscape as they collaborate with American saxophonist Chris Cheek. He brings his style and energy to the project, aligning perfectly with the trio’s contemporary Danish explorations of the acoustic jazz trio format.
The trio’s first two albums, 2022’s Equals and 2023’s Disappearance, positioned the band as one of Europe’s most distinctive in their genre. They are led by bassist and composer Torben Bjornskov; in a country that has produced several remarkable bassists, he stands out as one of their finest. He is joined by pianist Esben Tjalve…
New York-based composer and trumpeter Eddie Allen introduced his band Push with the critically lauded album of the same title in 2014. Allen is always busy playing R&B, pop, Latin music, jazz, and classical in small ensembles, orchestras, big bands, and Broadway pit bands.
Rhythm People, the first album by this group in 12 years, was released by the visionary indie label Origin. The sextet lineup includes Jonathan Beshay on tenor sax, Misha Tsiganov on electric keys, Tyler Bullock II on piano, Kenny Davis on bass, and E.J. Strickland on drums; trombonist Steve Turre guests as well. The album is aptly titled given that the majority of these 13 tunes are rooted in groove, R&B, and modern jazz using post-bop language while embracing contemporary…