Swampy surf rock, psychedelic Peruvian chicha and ambient blues – within Brian J. Gitkin’s global genre-hopping, guitar-twanging discography, these are the elements that keep coming back around. And they’re here again on his fifth album, together with touches of New Orleans music and gospel. Although he plays most of the instruments here himself, Gitkin’s real speciality is in his composition, where he pulls on the threads of these different styles and reweaves them together so confidently that the blend feels entirely natural. What really binds it all is the atmosphere. There is a nostalgic but slightly unreal quality across the album’s six instrumentals and four songs, the guitar ripples and organ reverbs evoking romantic and somewhat dreamlike images…
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Multi-platinum country artist and STAIND frontman Aaron Lewis releases his latest solo album, Give My Country Back, available via Big Machine Label Group. With his sixth solo country album, Lewis once again delivers the unapologetic honesty and hard-earned perspective that have defined his career. Across ten tracks, Give My Country Back explores themes of accountability, resilience, faith, patriotism and personal growth – pairing gritty throwback country textures with Lewis’ unmistakable vocal intensity.
“That’s life’s struggle right there,” Lewis says. “You are the master of your own destiny, and everything happens because of your actions — whether you want to admit it or not. Self-ownership is a huge thing to learn how to do in this life…
Everyone remembers when bands like The All American Rejects began to surface in the rock scene early 2000s. A contagious earworm for the audio senses is an understatement for what they would achieve and create with their music alone. The All American Rejects would become a favorite for many, hooking fans with ultra-magnetic classics such as “Swing Swing,” with their lyrical charm and infectious power-pop instrumental fervor.
Standing out from the crowd of other bands at the time, All American Rejects was not quite pop, not quite punk, but sat pretty within the genre regions of pop-rock where they could test the waters of their craft.
Tyson Ritter and the band are no strangers to writing material that digs deep.
SYML releases deluxe of live album Paris Unplugged. First captured live at Le Consulat Voltaire in Paris, France, the original 16-track set has been expanded into a 20-track deluxe edition. The newly expanded tracklist features his highly sought-after cover of “Mr. Sandman (Paris Unplugged Live).”
SYML shares: “I want to say that I always knew I would one day record a live album of my songs in Paris, but that’s not true. What a gift it’s been to perform these songs outside of my bedroom when I wrote them years ago, much less in Paris. Some of my favorite albums growing up were live records, and in hindsight I think it was the imperfections, the sound of the room, and the slight variations on familiar music that attracted me.
Slow Accordion is acclaimed guitarist Oliver Wood, of The Wood Brothers, Matt Glassmeyer, of New York and Nashville’s improvised music scenes, on his own strange Wurlitzer and percussion (Billy Martin, Lambchop, Aqua Teen Hunger Force), far-out, hard-grooving bass player Ted Pecchio (Col. Bruce Hampton, Doyle Bramhall II, Tedeschi Trucks Band), and magically versatile drummer Mark Raudabaugh (Sierra Hull, Donna the Buffalo, Jim Lauderdale). Four boundlessly inspired, Nashville-based musicians (and longtime friends) with no preconceived ideas or concepts beyond coming together to conjure music out of thin air, purely in the present moment. Their debut album, on Royal Potato Family/RPF Records, is a completely improvised and analog work…
Parker Barrow returns with Hold The Mash, their second full-length album and the follow-up to 2023’s Jukebox Gypsies. Continuing to draw from Southern rock, blues rock, and classic hard rock, the Nashville outfit shows a clearer sense of direction this time around, refining rather than reinventing the formula introduced on its debut.
Fronted by vocalist Megan Kane and drummer Dylan Turner, Parker Barrow takes its name from the notorious criminal duo Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, although the reference serves more as an inspiration for the band’s identity than as a recurring theme. The current lineup is completed by guitarists Alex Bender and Will Tipton, bassist Kyle Priber, and keyboardist Eric Safka, whose contributions help give the group a fuller sound.
West Virginia’s John R. Miller gratifies a whole host of musical erogenous zones on his new album The Great Unknowing, including honky tonk country, Appalachian folk, feral folk rock, and a few things you’re not sure exactly what to call that get caught up in the hopper as he puts a heaping helping of 16 tracks on your plate to savor. Mr. Miller doesn’t bite off more than he can chew though. He delivers the goods on what’s ultimately a songwriter album graced by strong musical accompaniment.
Even before John R. Miller started sprouting flecks of gray in his hair and beard, he came across as a crotchety old soul in that endearing sort of way. You can tell he’s hard on clutches and brake pads. Sometimes he forgets to shower or eat. He seesaws between benders and sobriety.
The hard-living country singer/songwriter Gary Stewart rightfully earned his title “King of the Honky Tonks.” He began as a songwriter of drinking, honky tonk, and heartbreak songs. During the 1970s he hit as a recording artist with charting singles including “She’s Acting Single (I’m Drinking Doubles),” “Drinkin’ Thing,” “Quits,” and “Whiskey Trip,” and a string of charting albums from 1975’s Out of Hand to 1980’s Cactus and a Rose. They earned the respect of critics, DJs, and the record-buying public. Stewart sounded like a young George Jones and pounded the piano like Jerry Lee Lewis. After the hits stopped, his lifestyle got the better of him, despite three excellent comeback albums for Hightone in the ’90s.
In November 2003, his wife of 47 years died…
If you make an album that sounds different to what you’ve done in the past, listeners will complain that it doesn’t sound like your previous work. If you make an album that doesn’t stray from the path, however, listeners will then criticize you for not having any new ideas. It’s getting harder and harder to please anyone any of the time, let alone some people some of the time, so what exactly is the solution? On their third studio album, Vancouver-via-Vernon’s Mock Media might have perfected their masterplan: sound like everybody and nobody else simultaneously.
While plenty of bands will be afraid to leave their comfort zone out of fear that they’ll create something misaligned with their established sound, this is a band that already existed…
Heavy Metal (Live! Nairobi International Casino!) is a landmark Zamrock album by Paul Ngozi and the Ngozi Family Band, originally captured live-in-the-studio style in 1977.
Blending psychedelic rock, heavy fuzz guitar effects, and African rhythms, it stands as a cornerstone of the ’70s Zambian rock movement. The album relies heavily on Ngozi’s signature “Gee Flanger” guitar effects pedal, creating a swirling, psychedelic fuzz texture that drives tracks like “Heavy Metal” and “Dangerous Woman”
…Zamrock was a bona-fide rock scene, with albums released through independent labels based in Zambia. This music scene was complete, encompassing the genres of rock, acid folk, fusion, Afro-beat, South African jazz and…
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…
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…