Any hiker knows that walking the main trail is—pardon the mixed metaphor — barely the tip of the iceberg. (Or perhaps scratching the surface? Is that better?) Regardless, the more fascinating and picturesque the journey, the more it merits repeat visits to find variations on whatever side trails and shortcuts there are to discover. And so, after taking us on their most rich folky excursion to date with The Shieling (2025), it seems that Fergus McCreadie and friends had still not shown us nearly everything their beloved Scottish landscape has to offer. Little surprise that such a fruitful session had another share of ideas that could not all fit on the album proper.
Whatever you might call their blend of snappy jazz and woodsy folk, its organic growth is…
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Understanding the universe begins with listening rather than seeing. Listening to the stars as much as to our unconscious mind. This is the idea around which both Jeffrey Zablotny’s film and Jana Irmert‘s soundtrack revolve.
The documentary follows the journey of neutrinos through three subterranean observatories – SNOLAB in Canada, Super-Kamiokande in Japan and IceCube beneath the Antarctic ice. Throughout the film, the narrator repeatedly returns to acts of listening: “We are listening for a whisper.” “Listening through stone, ice and water.” The scientists descend deep beneath the Earth’s surface because, as the film explains, “the surface of the Earth is full of interference.” Only underground, protected from the overwhelming…
New Orleans funk and R&B legend Cyril Neville has released Don’t Wait Til I’m Gone, his first solo album in several years. Produced by trumpeter/ vocalist Shamarr Allen, the album features a wide-ranging cast of New Orleans musicians, including members of the Hot 8 Brass Band, guitarist Leo Nocentelli, saxophonist Donald Harrison, keyboardist Ivan Neville and Kermit Ruffins. The title track is a collaboration between Cyril and his brother Aaron Neville, who co-wrote the song with Michael Goods and contributes vocals.
Allen played a major role in shaping the record, co-writing many of the songs and arranging much of the horn work. One standout track, “Lemonade,” incorporates the second line energy of the Hot 8 Brass Band and was written…
You have to hand it to Chris “CR” Gennone when it comes to naming his bands; consistency is at the fore. He loves the moniker CR so much so that he’s recorded five albums as CR and the Degenerates, then with a few lineup changes, it was CR and the Nones in 2019, and now we have the third album from CR & the White Lights.
Having listened to their previous release, The Ghosts Are Coming Home, which is a truly magnificent album, the quality of writing and musicianship hasn’t slipped one iota on this new one. This is a really solid collection bringing to mind the best qualities of Neil Young and Wilco, that spotlights Gennone’s wonderfully soulful and effective vocals and some superb driving hooks, demonstrating his musicianship…
If not for Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark — Alvin Schwartz’s infamous anthology series of folk stories that have haunted grade school book fairs for decades — The Garden as we know them might not exist. Ever since twin brothers Fletcher and Wyatt Shears began releasing their brand of sun-bleached, goofball punk rock in the early 2010s, they’ve cited the book’s influence on their work with Biblical reverence and referenced its nightmare-inducing illustrations in the cover art of side projects. The true parallel, however, is structural: Where Schwartz’s writing was succinct and vernacular, so too is the twins’ output across The Garden’s six studio albums and various EPs (and sprawling network of alter egos).
In recent years, the typical Shears song has…
Remember when SST records ruled the independent rock scene in the late ’80s, early ’90s and when those sounds created by the bands like The Meat Puppets, where everything sounded like it was going to fall apart any second, but never did, creating effervescent-sounding jams somewhere between elastic folk and spaced-out jazz?
If you do, rejoice, as Philadelphia’s Jeffrey Alexander & The Heavy Lidders are back again with their latest (umpteenth) offering Liquid Donnon. If you are yet to get to such a sound, listening to this one, you will not only go for that sound, but will revive your Grateful Dead collection (if you have one, if not, make one) as well as the vast set of offerings Alexander and his crew have on offer. Here, Alexander and his Lidders go…
Abnormal Conditions’ is the fifth album by upstate New York roots rockers Frank Migliorelli and the Dirt Nappers, and it is an absolute corker.
It blends rock, soul, folk and even sixties pop in a wonderfully ‘live’ feeling record. With two members of Springsteen’s backing band in Soozie Tyrell and Lisa Lowell helping out, the pedigree of the band is unquestionable.
In his mid-sixties, Migliorelli has had a long and varied artistic career. He has been a computer and video game developer, written children’s music and worked in educational media and been a creative director at a design firm. He has also found time to produce blues and soul music before returning to writing and performing, which he has been doing for the past ten years.
If there were a collective appreciation of dramatic album intros of the year, then Babylon, the latest offering from The Huntress and the Holder of Hands, would definitely be a big part of the conversation. Like a film where the opening shot is a post-apocalyptic barren landscape, smoke from a recently grounded fighter jet still billows, fragments of civilisation lie broken and motionless, nature fights back amid scattered rubble, and, above, a clear blue sky appears impossibly tranquil and unattainable. Then heaving into view comes a solitary human frame, still very much alive but lost, lonely and desperate among the overwhelming destruction that surrounds. That very place, or at least a personalised assimilation of it, is where this album drops us with…
DeForrest Brown Jr. was born on a military base in Tampa and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, where his grandmother worked at the jail where Martin Luther King was held. He played trumpet and tuba in school marching ensembles, moved to New York in 2013 to write music criticism for Mixmag, Resident Advisor, and Artforum, and eventually co-founded the Make Techno Black Again campaign, which started as a meme, became a clothing line, and hardened into a serious political position. His 2022 book Assembling a Black Counter Culture spent 432 pages arguing that the music industry built a global economy around a Black art form and systematically cut Black people out of it. His four Planet Mu albums, from Of Desire, Longing in 2019 through Techxodus in…
Jazz 625 was a British television show, hosted by trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton, that ran from 1964 to 1966 on BBC2; the name comes from the higher-resolution 625-line UHF system that the station employed for broadcast. The show featured a variety of British musicians as well as top American artists such as Art Blakey, Jimmy Giuffre, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Thelonious Monk and the Modern Jazz Quartet. The archives thus hold a treasure trove of mid-60s jazz and, thankfully, the 35 mm film containing many episodes has survived and can be seen at a variety of sites online as well as on DVD. On March 19, 1965, pianist Bill Evans and his trio featuring bassist Chuck Israels and drummer Larry Bunker played an hour-long set for…
Pianist Joey Alexander displays a nuanced stylistic maturity on his eighth studio album, 2026’s Celestial Keeper. The follow-up to 2023’s Continuance, Celestial Keeper is Alexander’s first album since moving back to his native Bali, Indonesia. It arrives on the heels of a formative decade for the instrumentalist living in New York and Baltimore, during which time he grew from an 11-year-old jazz wunderkind, to a Grammy winner and leader of his own internationally recognized trio. While he was always a virtuoso, Alexander (who was still just 23 at the time of recording) has only gotten better both as an improviser and conceptualist. He brings all of this experience to bear on Celestial Keeper, a title that evokes the idea of a guardian angel and finds him…
If Irish violinist Darragh Morgan’s latest release is any indication, Northern Irish contemporary music is not just alive and well but thriving. With the violinist partnering with the Ulster Orchestra and conductor David Brophy, the smartly curated Spin presents four fiercely imaginative works for violin and orchestra written expressly for Morgan by long-time collaborators Bill Campbell, Brian Irvine, Ryan Molloy, and Frank Lyons. Northern Irish musical heritage and traditional classical structures are drawn upon, but the music on Spin, all four pieces world premiere recordings, is in no way constrained by geography or the past when the composers present vivid works emblematic of their distinct personalities.
The personnel involved in the project is…
Features the bonus track “Bad Luck Hideaway”.
When you’ve come back as successfully as the Stones did with Hackney Diamonds, what exactly do you do for an encore? Its renewed urgency, communal goodwill and, more importantly, the strongest Stones music in years made it a hard act to follow. The temptation to deliver a straight- forward sequel must have been strong. Indeed, there are superficial links with Foreign Tongues: returning producer Andrew Watt and a clutch of songs begun during those 2023 sessions. But while Hackney Diamonds was about return and resurgence, its successor offers something more nuanced. Above all, the Stones’ 25th studio album carries an unforced pleasure in playing together – striking in a band that might easily…
Sidemen in rock regularly boast a side to them that comes bursting out later in life. Pink Floyd guitarist Snowy White made his presence known on the radio with the wistful “Bird of Paradise,” just as Genesis touring bassist Daryl Stuermer found a new lease of life as Phil Collins’ co-writer on No Jacket Required. Thin Lizzy bandmate Brian Robertson showcased a new layer in his trajectory with the fiery Diamonds and Dirt, now re-packaged as a two-CD deal. While the first disc showcases the 2011 album as it should be, the latter is an entirely new record named The Brian Robertson Album, which is entirely instrumental.
As it happens, the boxset is credited as Diamonds and Dirt, so it might make sense to rate it as one flowing whole. The collection…
The Brazilian brothers Khouri, vocalist and lead guitarist Matheus and bassist/vocalist Thiago Khouri, have obviously listened to every record cut in Liverpool in the early ’60s and absorbed some important lessons regarding brevity, harmony, the proper amount of jangle, and whacking the listener across the chops with a big fat hook. They’ve put those studies to good use in their group Banda AL9, releasing two excellent albums both in Portuguese and English before 2026’s English-only Hey! Hey! We’re Banda AL9. It wouldn’t matter if the record were sung in Martian, anyone with a love for bright and sunny guitar rock that sounds a bunch like, well, almost exactly like, the Beatles when Paul took over and scrubbed any irony or darkness from the final product,…
Attention should definitely be given to the remarkable sound design achieved by ambient-electronic artist Hollan Holmes on The Sanctity of Rust; his maturation as a composer and conceptualist impresses even more, however, and marks the release as a high point in this Texas-based sound sculptor’s career. The sound design first: among the hardware and software listed on the release’s inner sleeve are the Korg MS20 and Oberheim Matrix 12 plus tools such as Native Instruments, Arturia Pigments, and Spectrasonics Omnisphere; custom samples and FM synthesis also played a part in the project’s production. He’s no purist, by the way: Holmes is happy to work acoustic sounds into a composition if the music requires it, which means one shouldn’t…
At the age of 72, “Evil” Graham Lee, the legendary pedal steel pioneer and veteran of the iconic Australian band The Triffids, delivers his first ever album under his own name titled I Think I’m Alone Now. In addition to his work with The Triffids, Graham’s place in ambient history was cemented in 1990 when his evocative pedal steel became the soulful centerpiece of The KLF’s masterpiece, Chill Out (specifically on the highlight “Baltimore to Fair Play”).
…He’s recorded with Robert Forster and Cut Copy. But for nearly a decade, he has used his Bandcamp page as a repository of ongoing experiments, from ascendant longform instrumentals and aleatoric collages to exquisite and tender tributes to late songwriters like John Prine and…
For listeners drawn to the quietly adventurous music of Aldous Harding, Cate Le Bon or Jessica Pratt, Half Truth, by California songwriter Avery Hellman, who performs as Ismay, will feel like a welcome discovery. Folk, americana and indie influences intertwine throughout the album, producing songs that are musically understated yet emotionally rich. These are not songs that announce themselves immediately. Instead, Half Truth rewards patience, revealing carefully observed lyrics and subtle arrangements that slowly gather emotional weight.
The title track introduces one of the album’s central concerns: the difficulty of honest communication. “Half truth I’d like to disappear” becomes both confession and defence, as…
If by looking at the cover for Max Subar’s album, Anything Could Be, you get the impression that you are looking at (and possibly will listen to) a typical singer-songwriter album, you would be both right and wrong.
Right, because yes, this is a singer-songwriter album, and its often sparse, acoustically driven sound is all over the place. Wrong, because there is that often missing element of distinction in such music, and here it goes beyond some inventive arrangement touches that embellish the music. It is in one of the key elements that make singer-songwriter music work – the lyrical content that goes beyond ‘pain in my heart’ style storytelling that graces (or disgraces) so many singer-songwriter albums.
The current popularity of primarily instrumental bands combining funk, blues, R&B and soul can’t be entirely traced to the UK’s New Mastersounds. But there is no question that the recently disbanded quartet’s output, which began in 2000, brought new life and a fresh attitude to a genre that experienced a brief commercial surge in the mid-’60s.
So, it’s no surprise that Pittsburgh’s Norside, who opened dates for the Mastersounds, would look to that quartet to craft their similarly-styled sound. Their second album, Coal &Soul, embodies that, albeit in a trio format. It’s no coincidence they landed on the label that New Mastersounds’ guitarist Eddie Roberts founded.
Credit for this keyboards, guitar and drums…