L’Rain, the genre-defying project of musician and artistic curator Taja Cheek, broke through with the bewildering 2021 full-length Fatigue, which was followed two years later by the “anti-breakup” album I Killed Your Dog. Fourth release Fata Morgana addresses themes of alienation and self-doubt, with Cheek questioning how to prosper in a world that wasn’t meant for her. Co-produced with frequent collaborators Ben Chapoteau-Katz and Andrew Lappin, along with appearances from other musicians including Cibo Matto’s Yuka Honda, the album often feels dreamier and more nebulous than other L’Rain albums, with Cheek’s vocals often emanating from a cocoon of ethereal effects. Even still, there are numerous unexpected shifts into different genres, all of which are…
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It’s absolutely normal to expect the weird and the wonderful each time those prolific Australian psychedelicists, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard release a new album. Yet, guitars are also pretty much expected to be somewhere in the mix. Not so with Alien Metal: their 28th album in 14 years.
Fuelled by Joey Walker’s recent synthesizer obsession, Alien Metal apparently evolved from an extended seamless Eurorack jam that took in techno, breakbeat, house and the electronic end of prog rock to make something that is part thumping hardcore foot-stomper and part tripped out hard-spinner. However, while this may be something of an unexpected left turn for the Melbourne six-piece, the sound on this new disc is still very much their own. So, it’s unlikely to…
Interviewed by MOJO around her 2020 album Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers admitted she nearly quit high school through sheer lack of motivation. “Then I found something that I would do forever,” she said, explaining how music changed her life. Six years after her last solo record, however, fans of her reflective, raw-nerved songwriting might have wondered if she was having second thoughts. Boygenius, her supergroup with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, explained a couple of years, but there was still a sense Bridgers was in retreat.
Partly that seemed a result of the intrusions that come when an artist’s acute gift for articulating difficult emotions leads people to think they know them. There was also the unhealthy fascination with her personal life (she dated…
As unlikely as it sounds, Carly Simon’s first paid gig was singing jingles for her uncle’s company: one of the pre-eminent singer-songwriters of a generation not short on pre-eminent singer-songwriters cutting her teeth on adverts for cold cream, household mops and local banks. Fast forward a few years and she’s winning her first Grammy for Best New Artist with a debut single, “That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be”, which dared to question the preferred currency of popular music: love and romance. Jac Holzman, initially her sole cheerleader at Elektra Records, was vindicated: Simon staked her place in the slipstream, but not the shadow, of Carole King and Joni Mitchell, her seductive alto honey-dripping lyrical scepticism, wit, rapture and realism…
In retrospect, Laura Veirs‘ 12th album Found Light was something of an artistic turning point for the Portland musician. It was a break-up album, contemplating the end of her marriage, but also her first album that she co-produced. An album of demo tracks recorded on her phone followed in 2023, and now we have Temple Songs, the very definition of a DIY album.
Temple Songs is the first album that she’s written, recorded, produced and performed entirely on her own. It was quite literally recorded in Veirs’ backyard. She’s built her own studio and recorded this album using just a laptop and two microphones, and the entire album is simply Veirs’ voice, some delicate acoustic guitar and the odd instrumental embellishment.
Josh Martin’s Western Mind operates within the mythology of the American West while carefully sidestepping the clichés that usually flatten that landscape into postcard romanticism. The album understands that the West is not merely a geographic region but a psychological condition, shaped equally by physical enormity and emotional projection. Across these eleven instrumentals, Martin transforms highways, abandoned towns, mountain passes, and flickering roadside relics into reflections on solitude, memory, and the uneasy relationship between freedom and isolation. What could have become a simple ambient guitar record instead emerges as a deeply atmospheric meditation on place and perception, rich with emotional nuance and sonic detail.
What was the hippest guy in Malaysia cooking up in the early 1970s? Tiga Trombone provides the answer in sharp, surprising detail: eleven variegated songs rolled forth like a pin-wheeling time capsule let out of the box. The first one, “Masth Chantani,” is driven by percussion that blends the timbre and beats of Asia and Africa — tabla-taut and talking-drum-woozy — adorned by sinuous strings that could be Arabic or Indian.
Next up is “Ida,” another package of dynamic contrasts, with a searing baritone sax inevitably indebted to Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, mitigated by winsome flutes that just as inevitably recall the paisley and flowers optimism of the hippie counterculture, with some jazzy electric keyboard riffs thrown in for bonding. Down at…
Rising Panamanian jazz flutist Anggie Obin, who attended Berklee College of Music in Boston and is based in Barcelona, gathers a first-class quintet — American saxophonist Bill McHenry, Cuban pianist Miguel “Wiwi” Garcia, Japanese bassist Masa Kamaguchi, and Spanish drummer Estefania Chamorro — for a wonderful debut album that honors her musical mentors and her late great-grandmother. Luz was titled after the latter, an important pillar in her life.
“For Mr. G” begins the album in warm modal complicity, with saxophone and flute beautifully interlocking through contrasting timbres. The piece, dedicated to saxophonist Carlos Garnett — with whom Obin first recorded professionally — features her wandering freely,…
Named after the 1970s celebrity drinking club of which Alice Cooper was a ringleader, the latter-day Hollywood Vampires are a supergroup comprising Cooper, Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry, silver-screen superstar Johnny Depp, and Cooper/Crossbone Skully bassist Tommy Henriksen.
…In 2018, the Hollywood Vampires took to the prestigious Montreux stage, bringing their unique blend of theatrical rock, reverence for their fallen heroes, and unapologetic energy to one of the most renowned festivals in the world. What unfolded was more than a concert. A celebration of the music, the excess, the camaraderie and the legacy that continues to shape generations.
Rooted in the spirit of the original Hollywood Vampires, a legendary collective of musicians…
Omnivore Recordings and The International Pop Overthrow Music Festival present International Pop Overthrow: Volume 27, a three-disc compilation featuring 68 tracks by artists from all over the world who have played the International Pop Overthrow (IPO) festival, along with some who haven’t — at least, not yet! The IPO compilations go back as far as the festival, to 1998 when Volume 1 was a single disc. Since then, the collection expanded to two discs the following year, and then three discs in 2002 for Volume 5, and it has remained a three-disc set since. International Pop Overthrow: Volume 27 showcases artists from across the globe, doing just about every sub-genre of pop music, including power pop, pop/rock, folk/pop, psychedelic pop, garage,…
…this new deluxe edition contains two additional discs inclusive of rare remixes and a complete previously unreleased live show recorded on the Meso-America tour in 1982.
In 1982, the B-52’s teamed up with David Byrne for an album and ended up putting out the Mesopotamia EP instead. Rumors swirled that the band didn’t like working with the Talking Heads frontman, but Kate Pierson told us a few years ago that their manager had been “pushing us, pushing us, to get the next record out” and they “felt rushed.” The deluxe edition arranges the tracklist as originally intended, pairing newly remastered versions of the original six songs with three outtakes: unreleased recordings of “Big Bird” and “Adios Desconocida,” plus…
Multi-track recording of a King Crimson set from June 29th, 1974, at Penn State University, featuring the Bruford, Cross, Fripp and Wetton incarnation of the band on brilliantly brutal form. Contains material from ‘Larks’ Tongues in Aspic’ and ‘Starless and Bible Black’ plus ‘Is There Life Out There?’ and ‘It Is for You But Not for Us’, two of the finest improvs from this tour.
Though this particular line-up were edging closer to oblivion, listening to this full show 30 years after the event, the energy levels are astounding.[endtease] In his journal from the time RF described the show as “Tired. Lifeless. Lacklustre” Maybe Fripp’s estimation of the gig was informed by his recovering from mild food poisoning, the cumulative effect of prunes and a boil in his ear!
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…
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.