On the Boston stop of the 1995 tour promoting their second album Blonder and Blonder, the Muffs stopped off at Fort Apache studio to play a set that was broadcast on WFNX, the area’s alternative station. The band sounds energized and full of punk vim and vigor, even though the daytime session was like putting in an extra shift at work. Guitarist Kim Shattuck, in particular, is on fire, attacking her instrument like it was a six-stringed monster that needed immediate subduing. She crashes and slashes through a set of songs mostly derived from the album they were touring, and her singing is even more fiery. On record she mostly kept her howls and screams in check but on-stage she lets loose, favoring pure emotional release over melody. The band follows her…
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Wabash is the name of a river in Indiana and Illinois, an avenue in Chicago and, what is most relevant to this recording, the name of the quartet that performs on the avenue, a respectable group led by bassist Clark Sommers.
Sommers’ WaBaSH ensemble varies from the quartet norm in that two of its members, John Wojciechowski and Geof Bradfield, are saxophonists (who double on flute and bass clarinet, respectively). The group’s fourth member is drummer Dana Hall. Sommers wrote half of the album’s 10 tunes, which serve for the most part as modest launching pads for extended solos by Wojciechowski and Bradfield. Wojciechowski composed two songs, Bradfield and Hall one apiece. The remaining theme is…
Powerhouse vocalist, Grammy-nominated, ten-time BMA winner, singer-songwriter, and bassist Danielle Nicole returns with Fireflies, following her highly acclaimed 2024 album The Love You Bleed. Once again, longstanding blues producer Tony Braunagel produces. Nicole’s effort leans as much into the soul and R&B spectrums as it does toward blues. Seven of the eleven tracks were penned by either Nicole or co-written with guitarist Brandon Miller. Her support is basically a tight quartet. Along with Miller and Nicole (bass and vocals), the backing unit includes the veteran Jim Pugh (keyboards); Braunagel (drums), and Melodye Perry and Maxayne Maraguchi on backing vocals. The album was recorded in Nicole’s hometown of Kansas City.
For singer-songwriter Alicia Blue, Waylon Jennings isn’t so much an influence as someone she calls “a creative angel summoning her from another realm”, so to have his son, Shooter Jennings, describe her as “As rare as they come” must feel like quite the accolade.
Perhaps even more special is the fact that upon hearing the demos of the songs for her debut album Country Desire, he jumped at the chance to work as her producer, not even the fact that she had no label or budget to back her up dampening his enthusiasm: “I’m not worried about that,” Jennings said, brushing it aside like a minor inconvenience. “You’re going to have a big career.”
The steady build of Run Me Ragged opens the album, and Blue’s tone is sharp, but…
…completely remastered and include a replica of Horse Feathers’ original six-song demo CD.
That echo chamber’s a dangerous thing: A number of critics have mistakingly labeled Horse Feathers — the Portland, Ore., duo of Justin Ringle and Peter Broderick — another folksy Americana troupe with an interesting vocalist. Broderick, a talented 19-year-old multi-instrumentalist, certainly adds folk instruments such as banjo, mandolin, and saw to emotive, gothic backdrops; he also accents Ringle’s quavery, near-falsetto with cello, piano, viola, violin, and various sorts of almost-funky percussion. Ignore the chatter– there’s something a bit more avant going on here.
The two approach music rustically, but the Iron & Wine name-checks are off the mark…
Most people will know Laurie Vincent as one half of punk duo Soft Play. In that (largely) boisterous band, he plays guitar while singer and drummer Isaac Holman vents his frustrations about life in a simultaneously aggressive and vulnerable way to devastating effect. With Big Truck – completed by drummer Sam Coppins (formerly of Lady Bird), guitarist Asa Thallon and keyboardist Justin Myles – Vincent steps up to the microphone to do the same, albeit in a very different way.
Big Truck is a more avant-garde and experimental project than Soft Play. It combines gentle spoken word observations with more aggressive emotional spitballing, all tied together by the band’s genre-defying melodies. There are flourishes of jazz here, as well as some punk, post-punk…
How do you celebrate your 10th anniversary as a rock ‘n’ roll band in 2026? For Toronto psychedelic garage rockers Wine Lips, they decided to do what they do best: try to make sense of the last decade in a lean 13-track collection with plenty of fuzz, double time, sardonic lyricism and a well-placed “Woo!” as needed.
TV Dinner is perhaps the most straightforward rock record from Wine Lips to date. It wastes little time — all but one song clock in at three-and-a-half minutes or less — and strips back many of the trippy effects and dressings that characterized their past offerings.
The record’s highlights contain all the high-octane thrills that have spilled over into countless mosh pits. Opener “Cut It” pairs the band’s…
Emerging from Baltimore’s incredibly energetic hardcore scene, TURNSTILE have always displayed a penchant for eclecticism. Last year’s album NEVER ENOUGH epitomised their magpie-like eye for glittering sonics, exploding their hardcore palette into something that could be blissfully melodic and crushingly intense all within the same song. Very much an international breakout moment, the band toast 12 months of NEVER ENOUGH with VERSIONS, a staggering broad selection of re-workings which serves to illustrate the ongoing impact of the parent record.
As a collection, VERSIONS is led by the highs: Porches re-crafts the title song into a spectral slice of after-hours introspection; Blood Orange transforms ‘LIGHT DESIGN’ into a zero…
…box set includes alternative versions as well as an unreleased live show from Rennes, rough mixes and radio sessions from the era. Plus ‘Twenty-Seven Points’ (that was also released in 1995), an album that consists of live recordings made in various locations between 1991 and 1995, but also contains interludes and two previously unheard studio tracks.
Mark E. Smith once again landed on his feet after departing a label, ditching Matador in favor of Permanent, but Cerebral Caustic is notable for many other reasons. First, of all people, Brix Smith (still going by the name) rejoined the lineup, while future events made this the last studio album featuring Craig Scanlon. Though not an original member, his guitar playing for many…
Formed in 1969 by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown keyboardist Vincent Crane, Atomic Rooster forged a sound that blended proto‑metal heaviness with blistering Hammond‑organ riffs, explosive guitar work, and punishing drum patterns. Their music often brushed against what would later become doom metal, dark, powerful, and intense enough to shake the peace‑and‑love sensibilities of the era. Across seven studio albums released between 1970 and 1983, it becomes clear just how far ahead of their time they were, even as they frequently remained under the radar.
Compiled by Cherry Red’s Esoteric Recordings, this 2-CD set collects the band’s BBC sessions recorded between 1970 and 1981, including appearances on Radio 1, the Friday Rock Show,…
The opening commentary about Ruthie Foster’s new record brings this author back 20-plus years to SXSW to see Ruthie perform in a small alley in Austin before only 50 or so curious onlookers. She had the blues and gospel chops then. It was clear to me that her future was promising, though her folk-blues approach was fairly elementary at the time. We all know what has transpired for her – the BMA Koko Taylor Award in 2015, two Grammy nominations, and a Grammy win in 2025 for her album Mileage.
The title for her new album Just Say Yes refers to a sticky note she wrote to herself as she re-engaged her dream of returning to music after a layoff to care for her mom.
…This album too marks another transition.
Montreal-via-Bowen Island, BC’s Lauren Spear bookends her sophomore album as Le Ren with a quote as it was told to her: “He said, ‘A song could love you back.'”
To summon that line here, then, is to quote a quote. Don’t Be Funny Without Me is replete with such intertextual layers that feel hard-pressed to be contained within a couple of extra punctuation marks — especially when Spear herself is as open as her acrobatic pose on the album artwork suggests, barreling through skyward songs entitled “Free Wheeling” and “Going Through the Motions” right after the intro track, “A Song Can Love You Back,” a slight rephrasing that’s decidedly more certain about the idea.
Where her debut, 2021’s Leftovers, was as…
On the face of it, 2025 was a landmark year for Billy Strings. His fifth album, Highway Prayers, won him his third Grammy. The first bluegrass album in more than 22 years to debut at the top of the US album sales chart, it confirmed him as the genre’s biggest crossover star in decades. He was feted by everyone from Bob Dylan to Post Malone to Willie Nelson, the latter describing him as “the John Coltrane of bluegrass”, a pretty impressive soubriquet in anyone’s book. As the New York Times noted, he was now capable of filling the arena-sized venues that his idols – Doc Watson, Clarence White, Tony Rice, Béla Fleck – could never have dreamed of performing in, packing them out with an audience that look less like traditional bluegrass aficionados than…
Before her first release as a solo artist, songwriter and producer, Sera Cahoone had plenty of experience playing with other musicians. Starting at an early age, she first learned how to play the drums, a skill she soon put into practice playing at sessions at local dive bars.
Years later, she moved to Seattle, where she became the drummer for the slowcore outfit Carissa’s Wierd, and later, Band of Horses. 2006 marked the year of her solo debut, which would be followed by a string of records leading up to her latest release, I’ve Missed You All These Years, an album that was eight years in the making.
For I’ve Missed You All These Years, Cahoone returns to Sub Pop Records, the label that first signed her at the start of her solo career,…
…remastered by legendary audio engineer Howie Weinberg and includes 12 previously unreleased tracks. This bonus material compiles B-sides, outtakes, and raw demos from the original recording era.
A smaller, simpler affair than his breakout album, Sha Sha, Ben Kweller’s On My Way strips away the polished alt-rock production and emphasizes the singer/songwriter side of his music. There’s nothing here as immediately infectious as the Sha Sha singles “Wasted and Ready” and “Commerce TX” were, and overall it’s a more subdued album. However, this somewhat more mature approach is contrasted and balanced by Kweller’s voice, which still sounds charmingly, vulnerably adolescent as he ventures further into his twenties.
Despite being friends for many years, The Roaring Waves by prog guitarists Steve Hackett and Marillion’s Steve Rothery is a surprise. Eight years in the conceiving, the pair began it in joint writing sessions at Marillion’s Racket Club studio. For his part, Rothery drew on his band experience. Hackett had a bigger learning curve. They developed the album jointly and separately at their individual studios as well.
With the sea as a unifying theme, the duo conjure an arresting blend of progressive rock, psychedelia, ambient, classical, and electronic music, peppered with cinematic soundscapes and atmospheres appended by lyrical hooks and startling crescendoes. It is not a competetive shredding session. The only vocals are…
…Timeless, a new collection from NPG Records and Legacy Recordings, offers 10 previously unreleased recordings spanning the breadth of the Minneapolis legend’s career, from a 1978 home recording to a live take of a favorite B-side from one of his final concerts.
Prince’s version of “With This Tear,” an early ’90s ballad given to Celine Dion and released to mark the 10th anniversary of his passing this past April, feature on the album, along with new focus track “Stone,” a pop/funk number tracked in 1995 and based on a track from R&B singer Sandra St. Victor. “Stone” was considered for an early configuration of Prince’s 1996 triple album Emancipation, though many of the songs included here aren’t known to be strictly tied to known…
The inclusion of a couple Force-era demos on 2019’s ACR:Box indicated that there could be more such recordings languishing in A Certain Ratio‘s vault. Force Majeure, released in tandem with The Joy of Sextet in 2026, confirms it and then some. Bearing a title that can taken as a declaration of its superiority to the band’s 1986 album, it certainly has an urgency and altogether richer/rawer sound, and while the aforementioned tracks were classified on the box as demos, “original versions,” the term applied here, seems more apt given that the material is fully developed. Moreover, the performances come across as serious rehearsals and further accentuate the crucial additions of keyboardist Andy Connell and saxophonist Tony Quigley. With those two…
After they released It All Comes Down to This, their third new LP of the 2020s, A Certain Ratio looked to the past by touting — and touring in support of — anniversaries related to two of their ’80s albums. Issued simultaneously with Force Majeure, which presented early versions of songs from the 40-year-old Force, The Joy of Sextet marked 45 years since the recording of Sextet. (Sextet was also intended for release in 1981, but did not materialize until early 1982.)
A different proposition from Force Majeure, The Joy of Sextet is the result of ACR handing the multitrack Sextet tapes to Andrew Meecham, aka the Emperor Machine, a veteran producer who had previously remixed ACR tunes and even played on 2023’s rather confusingly titled 1982.
When Pulp and Jarvis Cocker (the band’s soul and brain) appeared back in the ’90s, quite a few critics, even with all the praise, didn’t expect either to last long on the music scene, tying Pulp and Cocker to the Britpop “fad.”
Well, that “fad” is still around, and so are Pulp and Cocker. Yet they didn’t succeed because they remained strictly connected to Britpop, as both had wider aspirations, which they were able to reach with some, simply put, brilliant music and lyrics, being one of the rare artists that were able to bring their cross of British/European song trends (and Cocker himself is a sort of an encyclopedia in that respect) worldwide.
So it is no wonder that Pulp is getting their own live documentary – Pulp: What Do You Do…