If dream-pop and shoegaze colliding with ’90s grunge, noise, and garage rock sounds like your bag, dollhouse, the debut album from New York five-piece Slow Fiction, is a pretty compelling proposition. Following three sparkling EPs and a run of singles, including the excellent “When” for Speedy Wunderground, the band have crafted a record that shifts from hazy and dreamlike to abrasive, strident, and propulsive, yet remains threaded throughout with a wistful, often hypnotic beauty.
Previous single “junior year” opens the album with a restless bass line and shimmering, twisting guitars, as frontwoman Julia Vassallo asks, “Who are you when no one’s looking back or through?” It’s a question that hangs over much…
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Hailing from Cairo, 33-year-old oud player and composer Aly Eissa is a member of the brilliant trance-inducing trio The Handover, and this is his latest solo project. His inspirations include Abdo Dagher, the oud player and violinist who performed with Oum Kalthoum, and oud master Hazem Shahin (who was declared ‘The Best Oud Player in the Arab World’ in 2002).
Eissa’s style of playing is at once rooted in Arabic tradition, Egyptian classical music and folk music traditions, while also soaring into its own improvisatory, exploratory, expansive intricacies. That he started out as a teen metalhead on guitar is another useful point on his music’s compass.
The title-track, in two parts, clocks in at a mammoth 38 minutes, an immersive,…
August 4th marks the 449th anniversary of the most notable recorded appearance of the East Anglian hellhound Black Shuck. It’s unlikely to be an anniversary that’s made it into your Google Calendar. But for Chris Spalton, aka The Breedling, it’s the chief inspiration behind his new album, A Straunge And Terrible Wunder.
This is music designed to disturb. Using a jet-black palette of drones, synths and field recordings, Spalton drags one of Britain’s oldest parazoological phenomena into the present day. It feels as though the album has been dredged up out of some Fenland bog. Like the most effective horrors, it leaves you with a knot in the pit of your stomach, and a self-flagellatory desire to go through it all again.
Akira Kosemura‘s second volume of archival works testifies to the Japanese composer’s inexhaustible creativity. Since making his recording debut in 2007, Kosemura has produced a prodigious amount of work, not only solo recordings but scores for video games, television, and movies. It’s safe to presume that the nineteen pieces featured on Diary 2020-2022 are but a sampling of the total amount of material he created over that span. It’s a Kosemura project full stop, as it was composed, arranged, produced, and performed by him. One comes away from the release amazed at the seeming effortlessness with which music emerges whenever this entirely self-taught artist places himself in front of a keyboard.
That the pieces have been issued under…
Florian Stoffner is a Swiss guitarist whose work encompasses composed jazz, free improvisation and genre-disregarding song. His associates include trumpeter Manuel Mengis, drummers Paul Lovens and Michael Griener, singer Anna Frey, and saxophonists Hans Koch and John Butcher. On his last solo album, Norman (Veto, 2014), he displayed a breadth of technique and a slippery sense of time, which he occasionally seemed to put in reverse with the tap of a pedal.
But Stoffner seems to be aiming for something very reduced and specific on bijou, his latest solitary outing and first release on an American label. Its name, the French word for gem, conveys the recording’s concentrated nature. The CD, which lasts just 33 minutes, does not…
Christian Dillingham isn’t the first jazz artist to translate feelings about social and political events into musical expression, with Charlie Haden, Max Roach, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus but a sampling of others who’ve done the same. Whether it be “Alabama” or “Fables of Faubus,” the genre’s leading figures have consistently addressed critical moments through their art. Dillingham doesn’t hector the listener with shrill diatribes and take-downs; instead, the Chicago-based double bassist references them through an inner sleeve statement, track titles, and the heat of his trio’s instrumental performances.
In that statement, he describes the current climate in his home country as one marked by “social tension and moral uncertainty,…
Boasting a catchy sound and enjoying genuine freedom within the structure, saxophonist and composer Bryan Murray leads a supple chord-less jazz trio featuring bassist Adam Linz and longtime associate drummer Dan Monaghan. With friendship and collaboration at the center of Wolf, Murray — who also leads the peculiar avant-garde-meets-country band Bryan and the Haggards, is a member of Moppa Elliott’s Unspeakable Garbage, and has performed with David Byrne and St. Vincent outside the jazz sphere — explores his own music, radiating energy and abandon in a way that keeps listeners fully engaged.
“Bombs” kicks off with hooky, motivic saxophone firepower over agile drums and sturdy bass, channeling David S. Ware and the reed…
Lance Cowan hails from West Kentucky. Songwriting and singing mark the third phase of his working life. Originally employed as a journalist for a weekly newspaper, then a publicist, it was only a short jump to honing his craft as a songwriter. His excellent first album, So Far, So Good, released in 2024, was followed a year later with the critically acclaimed Against the Grain.
Continuing to write, Cowan’s third release in three years once again hits the mark and is a strong set of eleven cuts.
What stands out in the songs is Cowan’s ability to weave a story and keep your attention. The music is no-frills americana, occasionally bordering on country and with one track dipping more than a toe in the easy-listening pool.
Over the past several years, Maris O’Tierney established herself as an engaging, evocative songwriter and musician as one half of Maeve & Quinn, the duo she formed with her twin sister, Bryce. The pair released exquisite records such as the EPs Something Overheard, Something Overhead (2018) and Star-Crossed (2021), as well as 2023’s full-length release, Another Door, drawing inspiration from multiple points of origin: where they grew up (Alaska), the country of their heritage (Ireland), and their current hometown (Chicago). While Maris has stepped out with her first solo album under the moniker Park Hills Circle, she still retains the sensibilities of that duo, along with additional sonic layers that give this debut a warm uniqueness.
Some albums just cry out: “put me on in the car, and turn the volume up!” Jeffrey Halford and the Healers’ latest album, Used Parts, his ninth, is one such release, perfectly suited to a road trip, ideally across Mississippi and Texas, but anywhere with an open road ahead. Opening track ‘Bright Light’ features a cool riff, with Halford’s vocals striking the right note from the off, singing of being a “guitar man”, the troubadour who “Played in Natchez/ I played in Amsterdam/ Roaming around/ From town to town”, while reflecting on the realities of the music business “Looking out at the bright lights/ The buildings tall/ I can’t help thinking/ It’s a long way to fall.”
The gritty, earthy guitar solo has a Neil Young vibe, the whole album featuring fine guitar…
…Includes rare mono version of third album, ‘Ma Kelly’s Greasy Spoon’, various singles and B-sides, outtakes and alternative versions, plus a version of The Doors’ ‘Roadhouse Blues’.
On August 23, 2024, this much-loved British rock institution played what is likely to be their last ever show. In a career that goes back to 1962, after several name changes, they settled on Status Quo in 1968. Signing to Pye Records for their breakthrough hit single, ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’, Francis Rossi (guitar and vocals), Rick Parfitt (guitar and vocals), Alan Lancaster (bass and vocals) and John Coghlan (drums and percussion), had a psychedelic sound and image in keeping with the fashion of the time.
Quo eventually found their signature,…
Listening to abracadabra’s peel away EP is a little bit like scrolling through Instagram reels, minus the crushing ennui. The beats are fidgety and liable to change. There’s a sense of something whizzing and spooling. A new vocal style might emerge, or a bonkers effect could be layered over something else for a few seconds. Sometimes, in that time-honored 1960s tradition, abracadabra might just use a weird sound — a train whistle, a dub siren — only for it never to crop up in the song again. And why not? Abracadabra build songs like Kevin McCallister builds booby traps: intricate feats of imagination rigged with surprises.
Abracadabra are Hannah Skelton (vocals, synthesizers) and Chris Niles (bass, synthesizers). Although they’ve been active…
It’s been a little over a year since the inaugural release of Maqām Records, musician Amir ElSaffar‘s label focused on old and new music based in various Arabic and adjacent modal traditions. New to the roster is Firas Zreik, a much-acclaimed composer and kanunist who draws on his Palestinian roots in his art. Zreik’s new album Tarabesque is a sparkling example of this work and a brilliant addition to Maqām’s growing repertoire. A cross-genre record flowing from a transnational confluence of instruments and styles, Tarabesque is a kind of platonic ideal of some sector of contemporary jazz: dialogic, complex, and made so with a great sense of purpose.
As the album’s name implies, Tarabesque as a project centers around the idea of tarab,…
There comes a point in every great electronic artist’s career where reinvention stops being a statement and simply becomes instinct. Steve Rachmad has spent the best part of 45 years refining a language built on Detroit soul, Dutch precision and the endless possibilities of analogue machinery. On Light and Time, however, he steps beyond the dancefloor almost entirely.
Few figures have cast a shadow over European techno quite like Rachmad. Through aliases including Sterac, Parallel 9 and Sterac Electronics, his influence has become inseparable from the evolution of Dutch electronic music itself, while his enduring relationship with Detroit’s melodic sensibilities has shaped generations of producers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Between 1799 and 1804, Alexander von Humboldt, a German environmentalist and the father of modern geography, traveled across Latin America, mapping the terrain, discovering the sources of the Orinoco River, cataloging animal and plant species, and gathering stories he heard along the way. Two hundred years later, American experimental duo Hourloupe — writer, painter, and guitarist Frank Menchaca and guitarist and producer Anar Badalov — retells and retraces one of the stories Humboldt collected during his travels.
It’s a cryptic tale of a tribe pursued by cannibals to “the cliffs of the cataracts,” where they became extinct. The only proof of their existence is a bird speaking in a dead language. This story inspired Menchaca to write his own version,…
Not much is really new on veteran drummer Mike Clark’s 2026 album, Kuon Ganjo (Time Without Beginning), which encompasses a series of nine hard-bop themes performed by Clark’s able quintet. Having said that, the most reasonable question is, do they do it well? And the answer to that is an unequivocal yes.
Clark, who has been around the block more than a few times during his decades-long career as a jazz/funk timekeeper and is perhaps best known for his several-year alliance with pianist Herbie Hancock, has more than a dozen albums as leader under his belt and knows who can play — which is apparently why he chose trumpeter Eddie Henderson and tenor saxophonist Craig Handy to share front-line duties, backed by pianist…
Like clockwork, Dinner Party’s third brief studio project arrived three years after Enigmatic Society, which followed the self-titled debut by the same time span. The core quartet, consisting of facilitator/producer Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper, Kamasi Washington, and 9th Wonder, is once again joined by the pacifying Phoelix as main vocalist and (on all nine cuts) co-writer. The commanding J. Ivy sets the scene on “Stop Being Late,” one of five tracks with 9th’s smooth boom bap production, greeting, instructing, and ultimately welcoming a guest who shows up tardy and empty handed: “We know that love is what you bringin’.” From there, the players serve up another comforting soul-cuterie board of concise compositions that favors intricate rhythmic…
These days, Alfie Agnew is a Maths professor at California State University Fullerton. Back in the 1980s, however, he was singer and guitarist with US punks the Adolescents, as well as DI along with Sean Elliot. However, while academia might provide a more regular income than playing music, it clearly isn’t anything like as much fun. So, for the last decade, the pair of them have been scratching that itch in their side hustle, Professor and the Madman, along with Rat Scabies and Paul Gray of the Damned.
Dreamworld is far from a group of punk veterans revisiting old glories though. In fact, its inspirations reach far further back than that. Indeed, its cover art, which takes a significant cue from the Beatles’ Revolver gives more than…
Clayton Denwood hails from Toronto, Canada, and now resides in Bristol, South West England, via Woodstock, New York. Early influences, while he was formulating his musical style, were Bob Dylan (he was even touted at times as the new Dylan), Van Morrison, The Band and Grateful Dead and his appreciation of roots music appears to have emanated from these early days. Living in Woodstock for some years reinforced this, especially as he worked with Levon Helm, Garth Hudson and Rick Danko from The Band. He spent years honing his craft in live performances across New York City, Montreal, Toronto and London before settling in the UK several years ago. He now plies his trade across the land with appearances, with his red-hot band, at south of…
Paul McClure, on his fourth album, decided to go to pastures new and left the rural north and travelled south to East Sussex and the fine Bex-Pop Studios in Bexhill-on-Sea. For this album, Trevor Moss took over the production duties and provided bass, mandolin, banjo, and harmonica, as well as fellow musicians Thure Johansen on electric guitar and resonator guitar, violinist Henry Bristow, and Moss’s wife, Hannah-Lou, on vocals. McClure himself says, “we wanted to capture a moment, prioritising feel over perfection, and the record came together pretty quickly over a few sessions”.
We open with a really strong song, ‘I’m Not Lost’, a banjo-focused song looking at how we try and pick up the pieces again after problems and trying to stay positive with some lovely…