Coming out of Montréal and Canada’s rich Persian music scene, this debut album, Unveiled, from Parisa Karimi Molan is a revelation. Growing up singing in secret in Iran, Molan was forbidden, like all other women, from performing publicly. Therefore, she was taught behind closed doors by masters, including Iranian diva Parissa, who shared the art of avaz, a centuries-old classical style of Iranian singing. Living in Montréal now, Molan’s free to sing again, and you can hear the joy and power she brings to the music.
Joined by Tehrani Drom – Iranian musicians on setar and tar, and a surprisingly great accordionist from Moldova who fits right in – the songs here are rooted in both folk and Persian classical traditions. Molan shines a spotlight…
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New York-based percussionist and sound artist Lesley Mok describes her music as “a passage through affective zones.” A phrase that carries a cinematic charge, the soundworld she’s created is not unlike the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker: oppressive, mysterious, and existing outside the confines of conventional spatio-temporality. Navigating the friction between digital electronics and analogue percussion, while drawing on her jazz and free-improvisation background, each track plays like a scene from a film unfurling in darkness. berserk opens with a rain of metallic chimes, its rhythm unstable, seemingly sentient. midland unsettles further: an industrial hum yields to irradiated clicks, conjuring a landscape both dangerous and alluring.
When Pharoah Sanders initially recorded with Theresa in 1979, he was still under contract to Arista. Arista refused to let Sanders be pictured on the cover or mentioned in the title, resulting in the album being issued as Ed Kelly & Friend, although anyone with even a passing knowledge of Sanders’ style immediately recognized his playing. The reissue corrects the title situation and adds five 1992 bonus selections by pianist Kelly to fill out the disc. The first six tunes comprise the original session, and they established a pattern that Sanders faithfully followed throughout his Theresa tenure. They included curious remakes of Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” and “Pippin” from the Broadway show of the same name, the anguished, wailing “You’ve Got to Have Freedom”…
At Iridium 2004 is a vast work. Cecil Taylor also leaves behind similarly vast territories of sound: the 10-disc Feel Trio recordings 2 Ts For A Lovely T (Codanza Records, 1995) or the monumental In Berlin ’88 box (FMP, 1989). Within jazz, his music stands like a monolith-challenging and imposing. Cecil Taylor Orchestra Humane’s At Iridium 2004 continues the tradition.
Taylor’s hallmark intensity remained undiminished at the Iridium residency. Contemporary accounts suggest that these performances functioned less as conventional free-jazz engagements than as laboratories for large-scale compositional thinking. The music confirms that Taylor’s technical command and imaginative reach were fully intact. His pianism-still astonishing…
She may have recently come to wider attention thanks to her theme song (“The Wise Man’s Song”) and score for the hit Mackenzie Crook series Small Prophets, but for those of us in the know, Amelia Baker, better known as Cinder Well, has been a leading light in the alt-folk scene for over a decade. Following a starkly expressive debut EP in 2015, she released three albums of spellbinding songcraft and ever-increasing sonic depth.
She has a reputation as a purveyor of dark folk – hints of discord, lyrics rich with symbolic meaning – but this is only half the story, because Baker is also a talented melodicist whose songs stretch out and unfold with a natural if sometimes mysterious grace, drawing in influences from unexpected quarters. And as it turns out,…
When Steve Lacy released “Nice Shoes” last summer — a teaser for his new album Oh Yeah? that dropped alongside his Rolling Stone cover story — the song took fans by surprise. Its frenetic breakbeat signaled a looming sonic departure for Lacy, whose Grammy-winning output includes virtuosic instrumentation for everyone from The Internet (their long-awaited new album is on the way) to Kendrick Lamar.
Even so, the song’s later moments, punctuated by a more familiar Steve plucking his guitar and crooning sweetly, pointed to something more dynamic. On his long-gestating album, Lacy builds an ambitious universe around those instincts, turning breakbeats, guitar ballads, trip-hop murk, and crude-almost-cringe humor…
America is Orquesta Akokán’s fourth album. In a relatively short time, the multi-generational, international big band has won over audiences from Miami to Tokyo and many stops between with their reinvigorated take on the golden era of Cuban mambo, rhumba, salsa, bugalu, Latin soul, tumbao, and cha-cha-cha all wedded to 21st century Latin jazz.
Issued just a week after the U.S.’s 250th anniversary, the set, recorded live to tape by Daptone’s Gabriel Roth at Penrose Recorders, still relies heavily on always swinging mambo, at once intimate and poignant. They debut new vocalists in singer/musicologist/recording artist Mariam Elhajli (who has worked with Mali Obomsawin, Adam O’Farrill, Jason Lindner…
Bruce Springsteen began Saturday night with a speech. Ever since President Donald Trump was elected for the second time, Springsteen has taken the extraordinary step of not letting his music speak for itself at the start of his shows.
Instead, when he stepped on stage at 7:30 p.m. sharp at the Xfinity Mobile Arena in South Philadelphia for the final date of his “Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour,” the Boss came out swinging.
Labeling the Trump administration “corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless, and treasonous,” he asked his audience to join him in embracing a communal, inclusive version of America that he believes runs counter to the president’s. (The president has frequently hit back…
…This remastered edition restores the album’s original running order and features new artwork by Greg Cartwright.
Time Bomb High School is much more than another garage tribute to soulful ’60s Brit-rock. But the sophomore effort from the Reigning Sound is something less than the band’s minimal, country-folk debut. During knockouts like the Rolling Stones-flavored “Straight Shooter” and “I’d Much Rather Be with the Boys,” Greg Cartwright and his Memphis combo’s sound is as pure, and as well-grounded, as anything since Exile on Main Street. With 14 tracks, however, the material and arrangements are spread just a little too thin, and too many average tunes are allowed in the mix. A bit of a stylistic return for…
Hiding your identity is a bold move in 2026. In this year of stalker glasses and flock cameras and algorithmic analysis of every internet move you make, it might seem futile to try to keep your name out of things. But Ferries, based who knows where and comprised of who knows how many or what sort of people, is doing its level best.
Aside from a modest (and cagey) Bandcamp page, the band has left very little internet trail. Assuming this secrecy is an intentional decision, it’s certainly working; their sound is the only objective info we’ve got.
About that sound: it’s slow and dubby, its cavernous sonic space encompassing body-shaking low-end and dreamy, trebly vocals. You might point to the Mekons’ most…
Friends and colleagues since the late ’70s, Evan Parker and John Zorn are two of contemporary music’s most uncompromising saxophone innovators, and here they collaborate on a surprising and long overdue studio project.
Recorded in New York and Britain from 2025 to 2026 Those Landings is an achingly beautiful exploration of modern reed music with an ambient touch from two radical musical philosophers who use the saxophone as a sound source.
Rather than focusing on traditional jazz forms, Parker and Zorn treat the saxophone as a source of texture, atmosphere and sound itself, creating music that feels exploratory, intimate and unexpectedly beautiful. A long-overdue collaboration between two of contemporary…
Since Quicksand‘s return in the late 2010’s they’ve sporadically made records that not only capture the power and passion of their initial work, but have expanded the band’s reach into new, even more exciting territory. By adding more melody and space to their sound, while occasionally easing back on the dynamic crunch of the guitars and pummeling power of the drums, they’ve opened things up and given singer Walter Schreifels a more dynamic background for his sometimes screamed, sometimes crooned vocals.
2021’s Distant Populations exhibited these changes in their early phases, 2026’s Bring on the Psychics is the full fruition of their efforts. Most of the album has the explosiveness of a pile of TNT with a lit fuse — the opening trio of songs…
Swapmeet is a collective of four singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalists (Venus O’Broin, Maxwell Elphick, Jack Medlyn, and Josh Doherty) from Adelaide, Australia, who had experience in other bands before coming together around the time they graduated from high school. They enjoyed a steady rise throughout the early 2020s, from a band that made records as birthday gifts for friends to becoming a touring act and being named Best Emerging Artist at SXSW Sydney. On the strength of their 2024 debut EP, they became the first international act to be signed to Los Angeles indie label Winspear, home of similarly heartfelt, overcast acts like villagerrr, Slow Pulp, and runo plum. Their debut album, Mount Zero‘s understated mix of lo-fi, Midwest emo, and dreamy…
Anyone looking for an excellent recording of Handel’s masterpiece can find it here. The Irish Baroque Orchestra, led by Peter Whelan, aims to bring the magic and drama of the first performance of this piece, which took place in Dublin in 1742. The orchestra members perform on period instruments, lending the sound a warm, glowing quality throughout. The chorus is relatively small by the standards of many Messiah recordings, in keeping with Handel’s lean yet first-rate forces for the premiere. As a result, individual lines stand out with unusual clarity, aided by excellent recording quality. In addition, the diction across the ensemble is exemplary, such as in “His Yoke is Easy” and the brief “The Lord Gave the Word,” where the chorus dispatches Handel’s plentiful…
Aaron Lee Tasjan’s version of outsider-ism began as a 13-year-old, when his family moved from California to Ohio. It turned out to be the first of many times he’s used music to bridge a gap between folks who seemingly had little in common, and it’s one of the stories found on his latest album, Get Over It, Underdog. For this record, though, music nearly abandoned Tasjan, returning just when he needed it most.
That Ohio story, “Ballad of an East Canton Lowlife,” falls smack-dab in the middle of Get Over It, Underdog, but serves to reintroduce us to Tasjan a bit, even a half-dozen albums in, as, well, a bit of a teenage misfit – “Born a white boy/I don’t know why/I was raised up to never even try” – even as he knows, as he proves a moment later…
There’s a moment on ‘Cruise Ship Designer’, one of the more playful tracks on Dry Cleaning’s third album, where it seems like singer Florence Shaw is finally getting something off her chest, something that might be deeply relevant to the band’s creative process. It’s a declaration that she makes just as the song clangs to a standstill, almost obscured by the grinding guitars: “I make sure there are hidden messages in my work,” she states boldly.
Ever since the London four-piece released their debut EP Sweet Princess in 2019, there has been a temptation to approach Dry Cleaning’s records as a puzzling cryptic crossword or surreal Wordle cut-up, turning each song into a breadcrumb trail (as their distant spoken-word ancestors Slint might have it). “It’s a Tokyo bouncy…
…features three remix bonus tracks.
The Charlatans are one of those bands with little following in the United States but a massive fanbase in the UK. The rare American who happens upon them is likely searching for artists associated with Oasis or Blur before digging into Inspiral Carpets, Manic Street Preachers, or Ocean Colour Scene. That’s how far we are removed from the Cheshire band, now boasting 14 albums, 22 top 40 singles, and three number one albums.
Despite our collective ignorance, the Charlatans have returned after an eight-year hiatus with a certain amount of fanfare. The band, which features Tim Burgess (vocals), Martin Blunt (bass), Mark Collins (guitar), Tony Rogers (keyboards), and Pete Salisbury (drums), entered the studio with…
Like another of the year’s biggest pop records, Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, the second full-length from the self-proclaimed “emotional junglist” Nia Archives is an album of two halves. The first documents its protagonist falling in love at breakneck speed; the second, the whiplash of sudden heartbreak. Unlike Rodrigo, Archives didn’t grow up starring on Disney Channel, a predestined route to success, but in Bradford, cutting her teeth on early 00s pirate radio, dancehall and landfill indie.
More than most major artists, Archives has carved out her own path. After leaving home at just 16 to move into a youth hostel in Manchester, she started teaching herself to make beats; eventually, she uprooted to Hackney and studied…
Newly remastered and now with a previously unreleased bonus track, “Hammer and Nails”.
Laura Cantrell knows and loves good music too well to be a purist, and while her first two albums, Not the Tremblin’ Kind and When the Roses Bloom Again, were firmly grounded in her great fondness for country music, she expands her boundaries a bit on her third set (and first for Matador), Humming by the Flowered Vine. While the feel of Humming by the Flowered Vine isn’t radically different than her previous work, the sound and arrangements offer some new wrinkles, with producer J.D. Foster and a superb cast of musicians edging Cantrell into an inventive pop direction. The pensive love song “14th Street,” a strong but sorrowful reading of “And Still,”…
There is nothing ordinary about Fantastic Negrito. From his given Christian name of Xavier Dphrepaulezz to his career revitalization as a roots artist combining blues, soul, funk, and rock along with album titles ‘Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?’ and ‘Please Don’t Be Dead’ (3 nabbed GRAMMY’S), Negrito avoids following any existing blueprint.
That’s especially apparent when listening to Fantastic Negrito Alive, released July 17 via Storefront Records. Compiled from a recent tour’s most earth-quivering performances, this is the epitome of how a concert album should sound. Its 13 tracks veer way off-course from their studio versions, feeding off the audience’s energy, which then ramps up his own. His eclectic nature is fully exposed for this generous hour and…