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…
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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…
A dozen records into his career, Canadian country musician Corb Lund has decided to look back. His latest, Dark Horses, finds Lund stripping down some of his favorite songs from across his expansive catalog and presenting them with little more than his voice and an acoustic guitar. The result is a beautiful reintroduction to these songs, a mix of classics and often-overlooked gems laid out in their rawest form yet.
The album is sequenced chronologically, with Lund going back to 1995 for the opening song, “Untitled Waltz.” While he’s generally not one to overproduce his songs, drenching them in effects and a slew of additional instruments, there is still a stark difference between the originals and how they’re presented here. “No Roads Here,”…
On their third LP, Celestial, the Brazilian progressive metal band Papangu cracks open a universe of possibility by foregoing digital shortcuts in favor of ecstatic analog craftsmanship. Following their blistering 2021 debut Holoceno and the percussive fables of Lampião Rei three years later, Celestial showcases the band’s exploratory techniques with spacey jazz and textured folk instruments, harkening back to the experimental prog of the ‘60s and ‘70s without overrelying on retro nostalgia. Their music has traces of King Crimson and Magma’s stardust, sure — but the band, who hail from João Pessoa, are ultimately aligned with the psychedelic canon of the country’s Northeast; a bridge between acoustic tradition and electronic innovation constructed…
Between snatches of harried breath and taxed adrenal glands, our frail mortality begs us to slow down. Distressing headlines, leaning towers of obligations, and the holes that fast living leaves in our memories as it eats away at our sanity can leave us craving reminders that life is more than a series of frantically checked boxes.
London-based Brazilian artist Marcelo Frota, MOMO., has crafted a listening experience in his new album, Tum Tum Tum, that acts as a buffer from the frenzy. Rhythmically confident and seasoned with grace, MOMO.’s eighth collection invites us into intimate moments and quiet reflections. Across its measured 25 minutes, Tum Tum Tum weaves a dream of sun-splashed Brazilian warmth through samba,…
The volatile reedsman Kjetil Møster is undersung outside of Norway (and even inside?), but has been a consistent provider of extreme saxophonics and memorable tune themes, until he has now reached his 50th year. Perhaps his power is too frightening for some? Bergen’s Møster is rocking it out (and screaming it out also) on this new album, yet another set with a thematic, suite-like nature. Development is everything. Blasting off heavily, ‘Desert Ride’ is one made on a 19-wheeled monster, careening up and down the dunes of blow-out squall and occasional pockets for reflection (like the last minute of this extended explosiveness). Hængsle’s grunge bass is overloaded, Kapstad’s drums slam with a teetering forwardness, while Møster snakes…
Like past gatherings of tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman, pianist Matthew Shipp, bassist William Parker, and drummer Bobby Kapp, inscribed to memory on the highly touted Ineffable Joy (2019) and Heptagon (2017), Synesthesia erupts into consciousness with a punch and flurry.
Feverish by design, “First Color Heard” stays true to its title and to the heart of each participant. Rambling, rumbling, reaching for the stars, Perelman exhorts his fellow travelers, and “First Color Heard” fills the airspace with a noise beyond beauty, ending its nine minutes in Shipp’s restful hands. “Phosphene,” an impression of light that occurs without light entering the eye, resulting from excitation of neurons in the visual system, breaks the mold and off…
Following a pair of companion albums — Tender and the more energized Spiral Your Way Out — that captured different stages of post-breakup emotions, Zahara Jaime broadens the topics at hand while still navigating the deeply personal on their fourth album, Distant Lands. Lending Zzzahara a hand in wrangling their rangy sound spectrum — one that integrates post-punk, giddy dream pop, driving indie rock, and murky shoegaze — is Casey Lagos (Stick to Your Guns, Cold War Kids), who less polishes than reinforces the songwriter’s knotty sound. They pull listeners to their feet with the swirling, squalling opener, “Whispering Tree,” a song whose mismatched multi-tracked vocals, warbly injected guitar hooks, tonal percussion, and wall of strummed guitars…
Over their nearly twenty year existence Ceremony has been hard to pin down. Ceremony’s turn away from blistering powerviolence into post-punk over time has become their calling card. By 2019’s In The Spirit World Now they had completely flipped the band’s paradigm over 6 albums. Synth took focus in the mixes and the band seemed fully passed punk.
Despite sonic shifts Ceremony retained their hardcore credibility. Live, Ceremony never abandoned their early material, the post-punk of “Turn Away The Bad Thing” nestles closely with the stomping juggernaut of “This Is My War”. Fan-favorite “Kersed,” is a live staple, much in the same way Napalm Death has to play “You Suffer”. Even as Ceremony continued…
…features an instrumental versions bonus disc on CD2.
Legacy bands must straddle a line between the musical approach that originally brought them to fame and trying something new. With some fans, either choice – if made outright – dooms the latest release. But what of bands that undergo radical lineup changes over the years? Are they still beholden to what came before? And what of those that emerge with no remaining original members? Are they doomed to a life of caricature?
That’s Yes’ basic conundrum. They never had a lineup for longer than two consecutive albums. Well, until now. The current grouping of Steve Howe, Geoff Downes, Jon Davison, Billy Sherwood and Jay Schellen has lasted longer…
Recorded in Nashville with producer Steven Wood and featuring a veritable who’s who of premier Nashville studio musicians, The Country Side of Paul Carrack Vol 2 features cover versions of 10 classic Country hits.
Paul says: “I’ve always wanted to make a country album, and I’m now very pleased to be coming with the second edition. A lot of people detect the influences of soul in my music, but I’ve always loved country as well. Growing up, I was hungry for any kind of music, but I would listen to people like Chet Atkins, The Everly Brothers, Hank Williams and I particularly loved Ray Charles, who is predominantly known for his soul and jazz stuff, but could also sing great country.
I have an older brother, John and one Christmas…