…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,…
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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…
Singer-songwriter Bird, otherwise known as Janie Price, has released a new full-length album. Held Here Together is made up of her two recent EPs, 2025’s Heads Or Tales and Strange As Folk from earlier this year.
This can be a risky strategy as reusing material again quickly can put off existing fans. On this occasion it may well be a marketing masterstroke as she has a tour supporting Ward Thomas to expose her to a whole new audience, and 3 new songs to keep her current crowd happy.
Bird’s trademark sound is rich, swelling strings building what would otherwise be relatively bare folk songs into something that Van Dyke Parks would be proud of. The song order on Bandcamp is different to that sent to us, pulling…
For a songwriter whose career has been built on melody rather than spectacle, Melody Boy feels less like a debut than the natural next chapter for Andy Crofts. Its ambition lies not in grand gestures, but in the detail, revealing a songwriter who trusts his instincts and knows when to let the songs speak for themselves.
Best known for his work with The Moons and as a longstanding member of Paul Weller’s band, Crofts has spent years refining an approach rooted in timeless songcraft. Echoes of Buddy Holly’s emotional directness and Brian Wilson’s lush sense of arrangement drift through the record, yet they never feel like signposts.
They are simply part of Crofts’ musical vocabulary, creating a layered sonic landscape…
Chicago’s Cel Ray specialize in a frantic, jackhammering form of post-punk, which they play at hardcore speeds. Cel Ray released their first two EPs Cellular Raymond and Piss Park in 2023, and they’ll follow those record with their full-length debut Cel Rayzer
Modern post-punk’s yappiest frontmen leverage comedy like it’s a pillar of the genre: sardonic vocals as an auditory plot device, parody as critique, roasts of their fellow man as feminist credentials. But when Cel Ray frontwoman Maddie Daviss resorts to comedy, it seems to come from an entirely natural place. Like fellow Chicago-reared women whose wit pours forth from diminutive frames, Daviss is loud and loose in a literal sense, with limbs that swing around onstage…
If you’re looking for some noir jazz fit to soundtrack a mid-20th-century crime flick, keep looking. Selections from the Gutter is better suited to a footage of the house going up in flames than to a smoke curling from a cigarette up past a cocked-just-so fedora. Brooklyn-based saxophonist Michael Foster has delivered musical intensity with the Ghost (his full-on free-jazz trio) and the New York Review Of Cocksucking (his quietly abrasive duo with Richard Kammerman) and facilitated its proliferation via the Queer Trash concert series.
But Selections from the Gutter’s fire is not only fiercely cleansing; it’s quite artfully lit. It captures Foster playing in Berlin with local…
The musician known as Gi Gi understands the magic of a slow burn. In his chillout room, sounds waft from unseen corners into the middle distance, hovering like smoke illuminated by a flashlight. Each of the Texas-born, Melbourne-based producer’s albums has the hazy quality of a sense memory, the unexpected pleasant feeling of deja vu on a spring morning. His tunes seem to curl outward until they take up the whole screen, dazzling, pastel-tinted arrays that organize themselves without drawing attention to the process. Suddenly, it’s there, as are you, and everything feels locked into a specific but fleeting place.
For the better part of a decade, Gi Gi has been a reliably prolific source of foggy downtempo…
Two of Britain’s most exciting folk musicians, both of Hebridean heritage, are behind Donn/Dubh (Black/Brown), an album inspired by Saltair na Rann, a 10th-century Celtic collection of cantos in which sacred history is foretold, and winds are given colours. Angeline Morrison and Arun Sood expand its spectrum of northerly and westerly shades, soldering together traditional Gaelic texts and tunes with distortion, drone, dream-pop and post-rock.
The pair have the chops for such a project. Morrison, co-founder of the Black British Folk Collective, has brilliantly brought forgotten Black histories into the folk canon for years, including on 2022’s The Sorrow Songs. That same year, Sood’s Searching Erskine used sonic collage…
Japanese band maya ongaku’s second album Nothing Space Music unfolds as a quietly textural journey, balancing stillness with subtle movement to create an atmosphere that feels intimate. Opening track ‘Vanishing Waves’ sets the tone immediately. Metallic and silvery synths interweave with acoustic guitar and gentle piano while understated vocals sit in unison. The song is reminiscent of ’70s Japanese rock bands like Happy End, with a touch of psychedelia in the spacious arrangement.
‘Thinkingscape’ breaks the haziness with a foreboding string opening, but the tension rapidly resolves into something more circular and grounded than the previous tracks. It’s the most structurally distinct track on the album,…
In the 1970s, The Hollywood Stars were a band that was supposed to hit it big but didn’t quite connect with the masses, thanks to a variety of record company foul-ups and the wrong-headed production of their self-titled 1977 debut album. The band was lucky enough to have a small but committed cult following who kept the tales of their powerful live shows alive, and a pair of archival releases — 2013’s Shine Like a Radio: The Great Lost 1974 Album and 2019’s Sound City — allowed fans of ’70s glam and power pop to at long last hear how they were meant to sound. The albums generated enough buzz that the group reunited, and 2026’s Hey! L.A.! is their second studio LP since returning to duty. As the title suggests, Hey! L.A.! is a loose concept album,…
It has been 6 years since the GRAMMY-nominated artist Somi Kakoma released a collection of original songs, as she spent that time immersed in theater and multidisciplinary performance. Now returning to her first love, songwriting/singing, she looks inward on the lush What Does It Take to Bloom?, a multitiered effort rooted in jazz, Ghana-based highlife, and theatrical grandeur. Co-producing with Benjamin James (The Cavemen), Somi’s musical journey is a globe-trotting, multi-cultural affair. The album was written and recorded in various locations (Dakar, Lagos, Paris, and New York), but it has a thematic musical/lyrical theme running through it as Kakoma searches for stability and internal meaning in a fractured world.
Opening with three jazz-based efforts, Somi…
Sittin’ with Blaze showcases an assemblage of 13 contemporary songwriters covering classic early Blaze recordings from his ‘tree house’ days in Georgia. Those recordings were originally released by Lost Art Records as Sittin’ by the Road in 2010 culled from demos recorded by Blaze in the mid- ’70s. The compilation includes new recordings by Phosphorescent, Willie Watson, Lucy Dacus, Dylan Earl, Cactus Lee, Uncle Lucius, Riley Downing, Joshua Ray Walker, Twain, Angela Autumn, John R. Miller, John Moreland, and Lucinda Williams.
…Foley (born in Arkansas in 1949 and originally named, more prosaically, Michael David Fuller) is one of the great lost titans of the Austin music scene of the 1970s and 1980s. His life story was not a happy one, from contracting…