There are plenty of rags to riches stories in the blues but few, if any, compare to the interesting career of singer/songwriter/harmonicist Chris O’Leary. His is a much different story than the rags to riches type. He fought in the Middle East as a Marine during the Gulf War. He guarded nuclear weapons as a Federal police officer, and yet his love for the blues landed him as the frontman for Levon Helm and the Barn Burners, including stints in New Orleans. The characteristics of discipline, confidence, aggression, poise, and passion are all part of his makeup. Discerning listeners will find these in his songs.
His self-produced Blue Collar is O’Leary’s seventh release and second for Alligator Records, following 2024’s The Hard Line. This high…
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FATHERS conjure a tropical, ’70s-inspired jazz, funk, and fusion atmosphere on their eponymous 2026 Blue Note debut. A supergroup, FATHERS features creative director/producer Kenneth Blume (aka Kenny Beats), keyboardist Keifer Shackelford, bassist/multi-instrumentalist Ben Carr (aka CARRTOONS), and drummer Nate Smith. While they formally came together in 2026, the group initially began as a one-off collaboration when Smith brought Kiefer and Carr on board his 2023 residency at the Montreal Jazz Festival. No stranger to cross-genre experimentation, Smith won a Grammy for 2025’s Live-Action, an album that showcased his broad-minded taste, dipping into funk, hip-hop, and sophisticated modal jazz. Here, FATHERS take a similarly…
Abul Mogard and Rafael Anton Irisarri have independently created some stunning ambient-drone over recent years, including Mogard’s Circular Forms (2015) and Irisarri’s The Shameless Years (2017). Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun is the duo’s third collaborative release, following 2024’s Impossibly Distant, Impossibly Close and 2025’s Live at Le Guess Who? The raw materials for this new collection originally came together during a three-day live residency at Morphine Raum in Berlin, with Mogard on synths and Irisarri on guitar. The sound masses accumulated during those performances were later hewn in the studio, then cello (Martina Bertoni), and violin and vocal (Andrea Burelli) overdubs were added. The resulting six-track suite is…
Toward the end of “I’ll Let You Finish,” the rollicking opener of his second record Fire from the Hip, Finn Wolfhard does something unexpected. After affecting a nineties indie rocker drawl and doling out charmingly rambling lyrics, the twenty-three-year-old singer/actor finishes the song by singing Kanye West’s infamous interruption of Taylor Swift’s speech at the 2009 VMAs. It’s an odd moment, one that would come off as a pretentious cop-out in another’s hands. And in a way, it does have a quality of randomness for its own sake, but Wolfhard somehow makes it work. Part of that is due to how much crackling personality he suffuses into the song itself, but Wolfhard’s recontextualization of that soundbite offers a strangely compelling parallel to his own difficult…
Forty-two years into a career that has quietly defined the underbelly of American neo-psychedelia, Seattle’s The Green Pajamas return with When Fever Let Me Dream. Led by the ever-prolific singer-songwriter Jeff Kelly, the band delivers a record that feels like a lucid, late-night transmission from a bygone era-yet it remains completely timeless.
When Fever Let Me Dream captures the band at their most atmospheric. Heavily indebted to the experimental studio sorcery of the Beatles’ Revolver and the pastoral whimsy of early Pink Floyd, the album floats seamlessly between melodic baroque-pop and hazy, nocturnal rock. The brief opening instrumental “Intro: Pastyme With Good Companye” immediately sets…
Over the course of his career, Will Sheff has released 10 albums that have given the frontman of esteemed indie rock band Okkervil River a reputation as one of the greatest working songwriters in the country.
As Sheff and his shifting lineup of players have traveled the world many times over, they’ve made fans ranging from Lou Reed to Barack Obama. Praised as one of indie-rock’s most ambitious thinkers, Sheff released his debut solo album Nothing Special in 2022 to critical acclaim. Extra Mile follows in the path of Nothing Special – patient and alive and breathing and musical. With collaborations and contributions from friends and musicians like Griff Goldsmith of Dawes, Zac Rae of Death Cab, Peter Silberman…
In 2014, drummer and bandleader Eric Harland released Vipassana, a collection of loose, groove-centric jams with a contemplative vibe. Vipassana II is almost wholly different.
For starters, only bassist Harish Raghavan returns from the earlier project. The rest of the musicians include keyboardist/electronicist BIGYUKI (Masayuki Hirano), percussionist Keita Ogawa, saxophonist Ben Wendel, and guitarist Gilad Hekselman; the latter two are longstanding colleagues while Ogawa and BIGYUKI are more recent collaborators. Over eight selections, these seven players congregate in quartets and trios, and on “Duo,” Harland doesn’t even appear.
Opener “Ghosted” and second track “Tron” are played by the trio of Harland, BIGYUKI, and…
Alexander Hacke and Danielle de Picciotto recorded Lichtung after the married couple decided to settle down near Berlin, close to where Hacke grew up, after living a nomadic lifestyle for 14 years. The album also marks the duo’s first since Hacke left industrial pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten, the group he joined as a teenager in 1981. In some ways, particularly due to the vocals, which are entirely sung in German this time around, Lichtung actually sounds closer to Neubauten than hackedepicciotto‘s previous work. Hacke re-incorporates electronic experiments similar to the ones he made as a youth, before he joined the group. Several of the songs take the form of slow-moving, sorrowful dirges with weeping strings and drone metal guitars.
If Caetano Veloso started working with Arthur Russell instead of Arto Lindsay at the end of the ’80s, it might have sounded like Bruno Berle. Since his 2022 debut, No Reino dos Afetos, the Brazilian songwriter has bridged lo-fi dream pop and música popular brasileira, or MPB, by adding his acoustic guitar and thick vocal timbre to looped sample-based beats. On his latest album, Sem Fronteiras, when the alchemy works, he lands on weird, tender lullabies like “A Noite de Estrelas” that extract and expose the alien elements of the Brazilian sound into a kind of “hyperbossa.” When it fails, it’s because Berle is still finding a way to compound the many genres he is interested in — indie rock, forró, lo-fi hip-hop, and disco — without erasing their distinct identities. In “Amor Inteiro,”…
Fabienne Delsol does modern garage psych as well as anyone; her handful of solo albums have been mysterious, magical delights full of drama and intrigue; it’s no wonder that one of her songs ended up on the soundtrack of Killing Eve. Any music coordinator looking for a song that combines the hooky pop of French ye-ye, the guitar and keys swirl of psychedelia, the stomp of Freakbeat, and the sweetness of the beat group era would do well to pick any one of her songs.
There are plenty of fine examples of Delsol at her best on her 2026 record Indigo Red. Co-produced by Ed Deegan and Delsol herself with a crack band of contributors (Thomas Gardner, Carwyn Eliis) on board, the record sounds typically good, coated in reverb and echo but still cracking…
The duo of multi-instrumentalists Courtney Carmichael and Nikki St. Pierre, sundayclub started out in rural Canada as a way to process the emotions of growing into adulthood, having relationships that fade, and self-discovery. Framing their yearning, bittersweet songs in a shimmery, classic dream pop sound perfected by Carmichael’s gentle, airy vocals, they soon landed on Paper Bag Records (with help from the Weakerthans’ Stephen Carroll, who heard them and passed their music along to the label’s A&R) and based themselves in Winnipeg. Produced by Carmichael, St. Pierre, and Kris Ulrich (Boy Golden, Field Guide), the SUNDAYCLUB LP begins with the brief introductory track “Tune In,” which, while not fully orchestrated, establishes their dreamy, longing…
Parts & Labor were mainstays of the American noise-rock underground which flourished during the 2000s, and even if they never received the major critical acclaim or cult following of someone like Lightning Bolt or Black Dice, they toured constantly and released a sizeable discography of powerful, risk-taking records. Most significantly, they stood apart due to the way they combined freewheeling noise, triumphant melodies, and muscular drumming in equal measures. After making a few diversions such as a fully electronic EP and an attempt to make grindcore pop songs, they released their most accessible effort, Constant Future, before calling it a day around the band’s tenth anniversary in 2012. Dan Friel released solo electronic efforts which continued…
…features 3 bonus alternate tracks.
If you’re looking for those raucous, foot-stomping, banjo-slapping bangers in the vein of ‘The Cave’ or ‘I Will Wait’ from Mumford & Sons, you won’t really find them on their new album Prizefighter (unless you count fourth track ‘Run Together,’ which sounds suspiciously like a Mumford & Sons classic).
However, this is in no way a bad thing. While 2025’s comeback album Rushmere contained tracks with more of Mumford & Sons’ traditional musical stylings, we love that Prizefighter feels like a challenge they have not backed away from. It’s great to see them evolve their sound and even greater to hear how enthusiastic they have been about this latest album in interviews they have done, recently.
Dark Wings is Mason Jennings’ 18th studio album. Across 11 songs, the Minneapolis-based singer/songwriter grapples with trauma, faith, survival, and hope, while embracing a looser, more collaborative approach than many of his most recent recordings. The album was developed through a series of sessions with drummer Scott McPherson, best known for his work with Elliott Smith, Beck, and She & Him.
At age 51, Jennings finds himself moving between raw honesty about childhood scars and dark thoughts, spiritual questioning that refuses easy answers, and a stubborn belief in love’s power to endure. Tracks like “If,” “Sacred Heart,” and “Eagle” capture an artist who has walked through the valley of death and come out…
Seattle indie-folk icons The Head and the Heart commemorate the 15th anniversary of their landmark debut album with the release of a 2011 live show at their beloved hometown venue Neumos. This CD captures a vibrant live set right at the moment the band was breaking out. Live at Neumos (2011) features all the songs from The Head and the Heart’s platinum-selling self-titled album, plus two previously unreleased songs: the original “Long Time Away,” and a cover of Jimmie Rodgers’ “T is for Texas (Blue Yodel #1).”
The Head and the Heart are an acclaimed indie folk band whose influences include Americana, country-rock, and classic Beatlesque pop. The band was formed in Seattle by a group of Northwestern transplants and broke…
The Story of Michael and Tanya is the fifth album by the award-winning the War and Treaty, and their debut on Atlantic Outpost. Wounded Iraq war veteran Michael Trotter, Jr. and gospel/R&B singer Tanya Blount met at a music festival in 2010. They married in 2014, moved from Albion, Michigan to Nashville and released debut album The Healing Tide in 2018. Their music covers vast stylistic and lyric territory; it embraces Black gospel, soul, country, blues, Americana, R&B, and adult contemporary pop with searing emotional honesty, spiritual sophistication, and hooks.
The Story of Michael and Tanya offers fingerpopping truth about their marriage, relationship, personal triumphs, contradictions, and trials in ten songs.
Since 1980 at the very latest, guitarist Kim Simmonds and whatever group of ringers he chooses to call Savoy Brown have been playing bad, late-’70s boogie rock disguised as the blues. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an “original” or a cover, Simmonds and Savoy Brown sound tired on virtually every cut of this set, which covers the years 1992-2007. And his playing, while capable, is simply a reflection of the guitar god imagery of the ’70s. Check out his Robin Trower-ized version of Lowell Fulsom’s classic “Monday Morning Blues,” both the author and Trower (a true electric bluesman) should be insulted. In Simmonds’ hands, the tune becomes a generic, wah-wah-pedaled, psychedelicized blues number with a hint of faux soul thrown in, as does his reading of Willie Dixon’s…
Since their 2008 debut, Luluc have been immersed in the beauties of the everyday, spellbound by the delicate majesty of nature: the view from a “small window” as 2014’s Passerby framed it.
On the duo’s latest record Sweet Thief, a river addresses a mountain, two ravens ponder where to go and an oak’s roots become a symbol of hope. Recorded after moving back to their native Australia after years in the US, Zoë Randell and Steve Hassett’s follow-up to 2023’s Diamonds is hushed and intimate, as if welcoming you into the pair’s living room, lit with the inviting glow of ’60s-inspired melodies and carpeted in soft, resonant harmonies.
The humble record tiptoes in with fingerpicked guitar and brushed percussion…
The 1960s were exhilarating times for the music business. Independent labels across the United States were creating overnight sensations almost daily. Creative hubs like Detroit, Memphis, Chicago, and Los Angeles were shaping and defining the sounds of tomorrow—today.
Among these vibrant scenes was Baltimore, Maryland—home to Chariot Records, a label that delivered a deeply soulful strain of R&B unlike anything else in the country.
Omnivore Recordings, the award-winning reissue label, is proud to announce the acquisition of Chariot Records. Founded in the mid-1960s by four friends from Baltimore who were all working in the record business locally, the label enjoyed a brief but impactful run from 1966 to 1972…
New Avatar marks a full-circle moment for Kelela, who started out playing in rock bands as part of Washington, D.C.’s indie scene before she began working with electronic producers and making more club-based music. The album’s stunning opener, “Idea 1,” layers ethereal, shoegaze-like guitars with existentialist lyrics inspired by Octavia Butler’s dystopian classic Parable of the Sower. Both a return to the singer’s roots and an exciting new direction, it begins a lush, emotionally gripping record which fuses multiple styles she’s explored throughout her career.
“Point Blank” is one of the album’s more club-influenced moments, with slowed-down jungle breakbeats underpinning frank lyrics about a dysfunctional, dangerous relationship.