In 2024, Hovvdy released their most ambitious album yet, a nearly hour-long eponymous double LP that experimented further with the duo’s combination of earthy, earnest lo-fi pop and reality-bending atmospheric effects. It was produced by Hovvdy’s Charlie Martin and Will Taylor, along with Andrew Sarlo and longtime collaborator Ben Littlejohn. It was also their most personal album to date, with Martin remarking that he could be heard crying on some of the songs. While still inhabiting the intimate spaces and loose performance style they’re known for, Hovvdy took a distinctly different approach to the follow-up, Big World, which was recorded with Littlejohn. The album, their sixth, reflects a deliberate attempt by the duo to make something…
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t would be hard to find a more arresting opener to any album of 2026 than the jarring discordant flutes and blast of brass which announce Grace Cummings’ fourth LP, Bloodhorse! In fact, let’s push that further and boldly say it would be impossible. Opening track ‘The Hills are Alive …’ arrives with a sudden impact of unusual sounds from all directions; there’s no chance of giving this music only half your attention. If you had hoped to press play, sit back and let the music fill your background, you’ll be disappointed. Cummings belts out “The hills are alive with the sound of – ” and, as the subject of the song appears, the music develops into a big, bold orchestral journey; it’s a clichéd epic presented in an entirely serious juxtaposition with the subject matter.
…Recorded between 1988 and 1989 in a small 8-track home studio in Amman, Jordan, Pieces of a Dream captures a side of the Arab music scene rarely documented: a group of musicians deeply inspired by jazz, soul, yacht rock and city pop, creating music that sounds closer to late-night LA or London than what most would associate with Jordan at the time.
Nechazz was formed by Palestinian-Jordanian musician Basim Said & Khaldoon Nasser and Iraqi singer and guitarist Kassim Sabounchi. While the trio became locally known for their live shows at the iconic Amman club Rumours, the music they wrote and recorded together was never officially released and remained unheard even among friends and family of the band.
Coming from a historic lineage, The Womack Sisters’ self-titled debut album is a throwback to the heyday of soul. Expansive and luxurious, focused on interlocking, ardent vocals, the trio of Kucha, Zeimani, and BG makes a strong career opening statement with these eleven efforts.
Perfectly paired with the retro-soul label Daptone Records, the backing music supports the vocals at every step, swelling when called upon or receding when needed. As the granddaughters of Sam Cooke, daughters of Womack & Womack (Zekkariyas & Zeriiyaa), and nieces of Bobby Womack, this music is their heritage.
The trio work best when all take turns singing lead and harmonizing, such as on the head bopping opener “Chauffeur”, grounding…
There is no questioning actor Morgan Freeman’s lifelong dedication and connection to deep, organic blues. Even before co-founding the now iconic Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 2001, Freeman has been an outspoken proponent of the music. The club is also home to the Ground Zero Arts Foundation, which helps local blues artists with healthcare and other economic support. Freeman spearheaded this effort combining the rugged, raw blues he promotes, with full orchestrated accompaniment. Even though there doesn’t appear to be much common ground between the classical orchestra’s strict adherence to printed music and the blues’ more earthy freeform tendencies, the concept is unique and challenging. Some may remember…
The multi-talented musician, bandleader, and entertainer Jon Batiste gets so much acclaim as a pop-jazz headliner that his piano talents are sometimes overlooked. Yet, this four-part series of solo piano recordings has already begun to change those perceptions. Batiste issued his first volume, the highly acclaimed and top-charted Beethoven Blues, in 2024. To follow, he now presents three more volumes: Black Mozart, Vol 2, and Monk Mediations and Monk Movements, comprising Volumes 3 and 4.
Batiste is by no means the first jazz pianist or jazz artist to draw the linkage between classical composers and Thelonious Monk. Yet, given Batiste’s New Orleans upbringing, he brings a more comprehensive palette to the music.
James Ellis Ford’s second solo album joins a small and exclusive list of records that were made in hospitals. There’s J Dilla’s Donuts, there’s The Wind by Warren Zevon, and now there’s Lost in Another World, in this case recorded at Saint Barts in the City of London between intensive sessions of chemotherapy over a nine month period. At times it’s heartwrenching, but never mawkish, and throughout there’s a sense of dignity that often comes with the knowledge that death could be just waiting around the corner. Given a less than 30% chance of survival, it’s heartening to report that Ford is still with us and seemingly making good progress.
Perhaps most striking is the stark honesty of these songs, where irony falls away and there’s…
There’s something so refreshing about Sweeping Promises. A Kansas-based two-piece, Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug specialize in short, sharp slices of punk-inflected garage-pop. Their first two albums cut through the pandemic-induced uncertainty of early-2020s US underground music almost by sheer force of will, their hooks too insistent and their performances too committed to be ignored. On You Say I Romanticize, we pretty much get more of the same, with some minor developments; it reflects well on them that, for the most part, this is a very good thing.
Sweeping Promises’ lean, unapologetic style revives certain elements of the US post-punk tradition in a remarkably vivid and straightforward way. There’s so much gusto and verve in their…
The giddy, clever Canadians in Kiwi Jr. named the the first song on their fourth full-length “Photos of the Reenactment” which has to be an R.E.M. reference (i.e. Fables of the Reconstruction), however subtle. And yes, pinwheeling 12-string licks frame this surrealist fantasy and jangle hems in its ebullience, and early, punk-y R.E.M. is a fair enough reference.
…Cheerful mayhem balances precariously against angsty uncertainty in these tracks, which wobble and keen as much as they bang on forward. There’s a bit of Canadian self-effacement at work — “You are here as the first class entertainment/You are here because it’s Drag-your-daughter-to-work Day” warbles Jeremy Gaudet — and existential angst tucked carefully into bopping…
On September 12, 1966, television audiences first met The Monkees. Under the auspices of creators Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the zany foursome of Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork pushed the boundaries of the American sitcom format with their musical misadventures.
The Emmy Award-winning comedy only lasted two seasons and 58 episodes on NBC but endured thanks to Saturday morning repeats, syndication, cable, DVD, Blu-ray, and – most notably – the albums recorded by the four young men cast as The Monkees who went on to assume the roles in a real-life group.
On August 14, Rhino celebrate Season 1 of The Monkees just in time for its 60th anniversary.
The Everything But the Girl reissue campaign continues with 2CD deluxe editions of Walking Wounded and Temperamental.
Originally released in 1996, Walking Wounded peaked at No 4 on the UK Album Chart and includes two Top 10 hits, the title track and ‘Wrong’. The 2CD deluxe sees the album mastered at Abbey Road Studios by Miles Showell, with a tracklisting that follows the out-of-print Edsel 2015 deluxe edition with album and bonus tracks on CD 1, plus remixes and demos on CD 2. It’s actually not identical because for, some reason, the new reissue loses the Dilinja Remix of ‘Before Today’ (29 tracks in total versus 30 on the Edsel).
Temperamental was issued in 1999 and was Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt’s ninth studio album.
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…
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…