Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux picked the band’s September 26, 1991 show at Boston Garden for release as Dave’s Picks Volume 59.
…the new collection features the most recent Grateful Dead concert date ever selected for the long-running live archival series.
Keyboardist Bruce Hornsby had been touring with the band for a year by the time the Grateful Dead arrived in Boston for a sold-out six-night run in September 1991. The two-keyboard iteration of the lineup — Hornsby and Vince Welnick along with bassist Phil Lesh, guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann — would remain intact through Hornsby’s departure the following March.
Dave’s Picks Volume 59 features the complete,…
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J.P. Reali’s Grateful Blues may not seem a wholly original thought, at least upon a cursory glance, given Luther Dickinson and Datrian Johnson’s vividly wrought Dead Blues Volume I, released late in 2025.
But the veteran Delaware guitarist, long a staple of the Washington, D.C. music scene, puts a distinctive twist on his concept for this six-song EP. Rather than do what the NMA co-founder and his compatriot did, that is, assemble blues material covered by the iconic band, Reali and company arrange a discerning selection of Dead material in a largely authentic style.
Given that slant, it should come as no surprise that the late Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan figures heavily in the mix. Reali doesn’t sound quite…
In the late 1970s, Neil Fraser, AKA Mad Professor, and his wife moved into a house in Croydon. “The normal thing would be to put in some chairs, a table,” he said in a podcast last year. Instead, the legendary dub producer fitted his living room with a four-track mixing desk and his collection of homemade gear, thus marking the beginning of the studio and label Ariwa Sounds.
The early years of Ariwa were captured in a 1984 album, which was reissued by Melodies International in 2023. Now, the two labels reunite to document the sounds that followed. This double compilation isn’t an attempt at a greatest hits collection, nor a chronological history, but an insight into the label’s expansive output between 1984 and 2026, featuring big names…
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, The Darling Buds made a trio of very fine albums that flirted with noise pop, dance rock, and trip hop while ultimately coming across like first-class guitar pop. Since their return in the late 2020s they’ve continued making fine music, first with the Evergreen EP in 2017, now on 2026’s Same Sun/Same Sky. The band are in fine form, sounding tight and energetic with guitars that alternately jangle and bite. Andrea Lewis Jarvis’ voice doesn’t sound like it has aged a day; she presides over a batch of peppy rockers and swooning ballads like she’s been doing it non-stop for decades. As nice as it is that everything sounds really good, what’s even better is that their songwriting is on par with what it was in their prime, and maybe even…
There’s a slang term in Brazilian Portuguese that defines the dark, unkempt spaces where underground parties tend to happen: “inferninho,” or “little hell.” Whether they’re abandoned warehouses, as was so common for the UK’s acid house parties in the 1980s, or repurposed samba school rehearsal venues, these makeshift places are almost inescapable if you want to get to know São Paulo’s independent electronic scene. Producer Agazero’s new EP, Dissidente, is a sonic representation of the “inferninho”: a grimy and sometimes harsh experience that’s highly entertaining but could leave your head reeling.
For the last decade, the São Gonçalo-born, São Paulo-based artist has been making jittery club music after first finding his audience…
Paradessence spotlights the innate surrealism of Visible Cloaks shimmering, digital-powered exotica. Since 2014 the duo, Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile, have forged a borderless space where echoes of globally dispersed music converge in a glimmering zone and the periphery between synthetic and otherwise is porous. Their albums bring to mind Yves Tanguy paintings, filled with impressions of familiar forms contained in unusual contours and doused in hyperreal sheen.
Visible Cloaks’ first full length since 2017’s Lex, Paradessence amplifies the portals and colourful intrusions generated by their crossing of streams. Opener ‘Apsis’ begins with slithers of synth that mutate between elegant brush strokes and serrated sequences. ‘Skylight’ begins in…
Listening to Denny Zeitlin has often felt like accepting an invitation to the unknown. Zeitlin has never been content to simply play a tune. He probes it, turns it inside out, and often uncovers possibilities most musicians overlook.
Odyssey reinforces that reputation. Although much of the material spans different periods of his career, the album never feels like a nostalgic exercise. Instead, it captures an artist whose curiosity remains remarkably intact.
The trio’s 2003 concert performances, featuring the late bassist Mel Graves and drummer George Marsh, remind us of what made this partnership so rewarding. There is complete trust among the three performers, allowing the music to unfold naturally rather than following…
…6CD special edition featuring unheard material, including early demos, alternate takes, and unreleased songs.
There’s a live recording on this boxset that seems to perfectly embody the challenges faced by Paul Weller after he split up The Jam. He and his new band, The Style Council, are playing the Goldiggers in Chippenham, Wiltshire, in March 1984, showcasing tracks from the upcoming Cafe Bleu album to an increasingly restless audience.
“I need absolute quiet for this number,” Weller insists, before a bossa nova called “The Whole Point of No Return”. The crowd start wolf-whistling as Dee C Lee comes out to sing “Paris Match” and, as the band perform low-key acoustic songs inspired, variously, by Antonio Carlos Jobim, …
Presenting a local music scene to a wider audience can be an arduous task if it is a scene that has already made a name for itself.
Den Tapes (yes, just cassette tapes and Bandcamp) is one of those outlets that tries to go deeper into a better-known local scene that is Seattle, Washington, digging up a serious twee/jangle/lo-fi/bedroom pop gem that is Super Honey Teaspoon! by Soda Gumball.
If the name of the project might hark back to the days when bubble gum rock ruled, then Jealous Yellow (one Benjamin Rea), the name of the person behind the project, might be a bit left field too.
Yet, make no mistake, Jealous Yellow, who doubles as a music instructor, obviously knows every big or small sub-genre where pop and…
Pinning down what – or who – Lucia & The Best Boys are has, since their emergence in the late 2010s, been more difficult than perhaps it should. Emerging from a fertile synth-led Glasgow scene that gave us Walt Disco and The Ninth Wave – artists whose sonic and visual identities appeared fully-formed from the off – between name, line-up and sound changes, it hasn’t seemed to fully ‘click’ for the outfit. And, thankfully, at points on this debut, it does: opener ‘Butterflies’, ‘Love Yourself’ and ‘So Sweet I Could Die’ brim with the kind of bombast usually seen with shoulder pads and voluminous perms. When they amp up the ‘80s theatrics – think Bonnie Tyler after a few Snakebites and an accident with black eyeliner – the crystal-clear nature and range of…
Philly’s Mopar Stars do a nice job stripping some great old alt-rock for parts, then rebuild them into something sleek and sporty. Their first full-length album, 2026’s Official Researchers of the NJ Devil, welds together the hooky power pop feel of vintage Teenage Fanclub, the beery, bleary, and wistful sound of the Replacements, and the chunky chord change rock of early Bob Mould. There are also traces of Built to Spill, Urge Overkill, Redd Kross, Bitch Magnet, and Matthew Sweet in there for good measure. What could have just been a fun game of spot the influence becomes something less obvious and more impressive as the sticky hooks, heart-felt vocals, and witty lyrics begin to pile up. Songs like “Only Bar in Town” and “Everyone Wants What I Got” don’t just sound…
The songs come trailing jets of psychedelic blues, the singing tamped down to a smoke-haloed whisper, hard rock in a liminal space. Tiger Bear Wolf, out of Greensboro, NC, distills ZZ Top, Kyuss, Sabbath and Om into a seething mesh of guitar-heavy mysticism.
This third album — 15 years delayed with some material over 20 years old — reaches back to an earlier musical era, when hairy dudes and feedback and boogie-ing blues vamps still figured prominently in the culture. Songs nod to late 1970s, early 1980s heavy metal a la Deep Purple or Blue Cheer, or later on, to the Stoner rock revival of the early 1990s that birthed QOTSA.
Tiger Bear Wolf dates to the Bush II era, taking shape in 2002, as art rock glittered and…
Robert Sawrey’s story inevitably shapes the way The End of the Road is heard. Recording under the name Hadnot Creek, he only began releasing music after retiring from a career outside the music industry. That sense of freedom runs throughout these ten songs. There is no sense of chasing fashions or commercial expectations, just a songwriter drawing on country, blues and americana traditions to tell stories about flawed people, broken relationships and the long shadows cast by addiction and mortality. Despite the darkness that often inhabits the lyrics, there is also something quietly life-affirming about the album simply existing: proof that creativity need not have an expiry date.
Opener ‘A River of Love’ immediately introduces…
This album is such a remarkable document, and on so many levels. Perhaps its main “story” is that it could well be the very last studio recording by Jack DeJohnette (1942-2025), having been made during sessions on two successive days at a studio near the great drummer’s home just outside Woodstock in upstate New York, at a time when he was already avoiding travel, and, as it was to turn out, not quite a year before he died.
DeJohnette was indisputably one of jazz’s greats and the sheer wonder of his musicianship shines through on this wonderful record. As Ethan Iverson has written, among jazz drummers “Elvin-Tony-Jack was and is the holy trinity”, referring to Jones-Williams-DeJohnette. DeJohnette has almost 100 album credits on ECM, notably…
It’s a bold move in this attention economy to create an album that requires close listening, but that doesn’t bother leo. If you need a flashy hook, then he doesn’t need you. The Manchester producer’s new album, Cicada Burnt, is an abstract, dubby journey full of pristine sub bass; the swing and syncopation of UK and Detroit dance music; and an ultra-clear sound design. It’s sparse and wandering, with numerous side quests and a tendency to circle back to revisit ideas. The release, on L.A.’s Peak Oil, is more polished than leo’s recent projects — like Dissipating Heavily and the live recording lived II — but it’s not sterile either, featuring distortion and fuzz that add a distressed character to the proceedings.
Cicada Burnt is both vivid and mysteriously…
The Patagonian city of San Carlos de Bariloche is a beautiful place, lakeside and fringed by tall, snow-dusted mountains. This is where Argentinian artist Luciano Lamtzev, aka Lumtz, grew up, and where he spent two years recording Tesoros, documenting a relaxing-sounding life: lying by the water, walking through nature, listening to the sounds of the city around him. (Apparently he really doesn’t like wearing headphones.) The process was multi-faceted, yielding field recordings, notebooks filled with drawings and ideas, and, eventually, compositions. Tesoros is a gorgeous, sometimes twee record of downtempo electroacoustic sketches that highlight the mundane majesty of living in a beautiful place.
Lamtzev’s previous releases were made of…
Litvar is an alternative band formed in Willimantic, Connecticut in 2020. The band is made up of Rex Thurstan (vocal, lead guitar), Joe Lemieux (drums), Violet Falkowski (vocal, guitar), and John Blues McCarthy (vocal, bass). The band’s name is a compound word of ‘light’ and ‘variation’.
…Thurstan describes the band’s third studio album, Being Here, as “a bare, stripped-back folk record.” Yet, that might be stretching it a bit.
Of course, Thurstan might have in mind what counts as folk in these modern times, or he might have a broader meaning of the term bare, as most of the album is inspired by the loss of his father. What he also might have in mind is a prevailing languid tone of the songs here and sparse, or better said, sustained, but…
Simply put, the Trash Can Sinatras never let their fans down. Starting with 1990’s Cake they’ve released a string of excellent albums featuring their smartly structured, literary-minded songs played with a nimble touch, arranged like a souffle, and sung with the perfect blend of wit and soul by Francis Reader. As the years rolled by the pace slowed more than some might like, to the point where the appearance of 2026’s Ever the Optimist came as something of a brilliant surprise to those wondering where the band had been since the release of 2016’s Wild Pendulum. As one might hope, the record is made up of songs that touch on adult situations with the group’s usual deftness, sometimes coming across almost bitterly melancholic, other times warmly…
Ed Askew was a New York artist, poet, songwriter and genuine underground legend. Having first broken through with his self-titled album in 1968 (subsequently known as Ask the Unicorn), he made ripples in the Woodstock generation, and ploughed a furrow similar to the likes of The Incredible String Band or Vashti Bunyan on this side of the Atlantic. However, this did not translate into commercial success, and he soon settled into a life of painting, writing, and teaching art. He never stopped making music, although this was generally of the home recording variety, without any particular label interest.
In 2002, a re-release of his lost second album, Little Eyes, gradually started to garner some attention, and eventually led to 2013’s…
It is tempting to search the Family Stereo debut album for lyrical snippets that talk of upbringing and home life, like a musical busybody. For the pseudonym belongs to Blake Watt, the twenty-something son of Everything But the Girl parents Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn. Doesn’t that make you feel old?!
Yet on The Thread that, emphatically, is where the musical similarities end, in spite of the occasional richness suggesting the tonal qualities of his mother’s vocal, or the poised songwriting with which his father has made an understated impact as a solo artist.
Those are mere sidelines, happily, for it is clear Watt has forged his own musical path and can easily stand on his own two musical feet.