The current popularity of primarily instrumental bands combining funk, blues, R&B and soul can’t be entirely traced to the UK’s New Mastersounds. But there is no question that the recently disbanded quartet’s output, which began in 2000, brought new life and a fresh attitude to a genre that experienced a brief commercial surge in the mid-’60s.
So, it’s no surprise that Pittsburgh’s Norside, who opened dates for the Mastersounds, would look to that quartet to craft their similarly-styled sound. Their second album, Coal &Soul, embodies that, albeit in a trio format. It’s no coincidence they landed on the label that New Mastersounds’ guitarist Eddie Roberts founded.
Credit for this keyboards, guitar and drums…
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Pluto in Aquarius is the third album from cellist Janel Leppin‘s Ensemble Volcanic Ash. It follows 2024’s aclaimed To March Is to Love.
Fans of the quintet’s sometimes chaotic weave of formal composition and improvisation are in for something different here. These compositions and arrangements are lower to the ground, more intimate, and spacious even at their most adventurous. The avant chamber group of their first two outings has given way to a rawer, looser approach by these Washington, D.C.-area luminaries that include guitarist Anthony Pirog, bassist Luke Stewart, tenor saxophonist Brian Settles, and drummer Larry Ferguson. Leppin plays cello and the Yamaha CP-70 electric grand piano.
There is tension here, but it’s developmental…
Cellist and composer Janel Leppin returns with Slowly Melting, the simultaneously released solo companion to her Ensemble Volcanic Ash: Pluto in Aquarius set. Leppin plays cello, guitar, bass, a Prophet-Five synth, and piano in compositions, improvisations, and soundscapes for cello. Over eight pieces recorded at The Brink in Richmond, Virginia, and one at Janel’s Room studio, she articulates a genreless space where her own musical obsessions including jazz, chamber music, experimental improvisation, and rock, become a holistic entity greater than the individual parts.
Opener “Zonk” weds plucked cello strings, guitar, droning synth, and distortion; Leppin finds subtle melodies that emerge under the primary theme; spaces and textures wind around…
…Bonus CD featuring 4 extra tracks.
London trio Mary in the Junkyard cheekily dub their sound “weepy chaos rok”, but they often summon something far more: an intricate magic weaved from vocalist and guitarist Clari Freeman-Taylor’s poetic, observational eye and freewheeling arrangements, equally informed by wiry math-laden contemporaries and elegant classical stylings. After a tireless couple of years and adventures stateside (a two-month tour with Wet Leg included), Mary in the Junkyard have gone from courting Corsica buzz to counting fans in Marina Abramović.
Facing their long-awaited debut upon this new foundation, Role Model Hermit opens self-reflexive: “It is yours babe, you deserve it,” Freeman-Taylor pronounces on ‘Mantra III’,…
Roberto Carlos Lange and Fabi Reyna feel like kindred spirits. Long before they met two summers ago, they were making music — as Helado Negro and Reyna Tropical, respectively — building their names with heart-on-your-sleeve electronic and indie-folk songs that touch on diaspora, longing, and love.
On their collaborative record, Helado Tropical, these two worlds naturally collapse into each other, as the seasoned emotional excavators lean into their shared strengths. The result goes down as easy as mango-champagne sorbet.
These nine songs—or perhaps seven, since “Luna” and “Sol” (another iconic pair) flow seamlessly into and out of the floaty, syncopated standout track “Fluye”—were born from a three-day…
Romance is a funny old game. One minute, you’ll be in the trenches of heartbreak, swearing off love forever. The next, you’re down bad for someone new and do a full 180 into living in a swoony movie in your head.
Suki Waterhouse’s third album, Loveland, captures some of the feelings of that latter experience, mining her relationships and infatuations past and present to build a world you’ll want to immerse yourself in whether you’re coupled up, on the hunt or convinced you’re destined to be alone.
“Picture this, it’s innocent / ‘Cause I haven’t even held your hand yet / Do you know that you’ve been coming up in my dreams?” she asks over the Strokes-y guitars of ‘Almost’, diving into a fantasy that plays out in her head alone.
Mikey Powers has a folk voice 200 years out of time. Not the cute kind you get from bands who bought a banjo and a flannel shirt and called it Appalachia, but the authentic kind, where you can’t tell if the guy singing is having a religious experience or a stroke, due to the song’s conviction. With a full entourage, Powers leads The Powers Ensemble’s debut Kindling.
The first thing you should know about The Powers Ensemble is that it isn’t a “band” in the way your dad might understand it. It’s whoever’s free: mandolin and double bass one week, flugelhorn and bass clarinet the next. Powers’s label, Baltimore’s Shiny Boy Press, bills itself as a genre-fluid “arts collective // pals,” which is the kind of statement that usually raises…
Consider the phrase “in the zone.” Usually, it refers to a state of concentration that enhances productivity. From a musical standpoint, it suggests the locked-in flow that musicians can achieve when riding a juicy groove or digging into a wicked series of riffs. To “zone out,” on the other hand, evokes a blissful state of ethereal detachment in which such things as rhythm and momentum are left behind or transcended.
Colorado trio Prairiewolf operates in both these realms, creating limpid yet propulsive instrumental music that faces the stars while remaining focused on doings on the ground.
For their first two albums, Stefan Beck (guitar), Jeremy Erwin (keys/synths), and Tyler Wilcox (bass) created retro-futuristic lounge music…
Room 40’s J.WLSN returns to Lawrence English’s label flanked by his old mate Liam Keenan with a haze of guitars, synths and samples that evokes the rugged, beautiful landscape of New South Wales.
Wilson and Keenan had been working together at an art museum in Sydney for some time when they finally decided to book a session at a local studio. It didn’t take long either; working with their mutual friend David Akerman, they laid down a set of peaceful longform jams that appeared as they reminisced about different stretches of time in the area where they both grew up. Finding the shared similarities and differences, the music appeared as a soundtrack. On the four-part ‘Teflon Blues’, their hazy recollections buried beneath a fog of blurry instrumentation, while on the generous…
Hot Chip release the reissues of The Warning, Made In The Dark and One Life Stand. The albums are being reissued this year for the first time. The collection is the result of Joe Goddard, Alexis Taylor, Owen Clarke, Al Doyle and Felix Martin’s lifelong friendship and musical chemistry.
Rewind to the year 2006 when British music was enthrall to guitar bands in winklepickers and waistcoats. And then along came Hot Chip’s album The Warning like a kaleidoscopic bolt from the blue and turned a generation of indie fans onto the hedonistic pleasure of repetitive beats. The Warning was a ahead of the zeitgeist, spending 17 weeks in the UK charts and earning a Mercury Prize nomination thanks to tracks like ‘Over & Over’ and ‘Boy From School’.
Swampy surf rock, psychedelic Peruvian chicha and ambient blues – within Brian J. Gitkin’s global genre-hopping, guitar-twanging discography, these are the elements that keep coming back around. And they’re here again on his fifth album, together with touches of New Orleans music and gospel. Although he plays most of the instruments here himself, Gitkin’s real speciality is in his composition, where he pulls on the threads of these different styles and reweaves them together so confidently that the blend feels entirely natural. What really binds it all is the atmosphere. There is a nostalgic but slightly unreal quality across the album’s six instrumentals and four songs, the guitar ripples and organ reverbs evoking romantic and somewhat dreamlike images…
Multi-platinum country artist and STAIND frontman Aaron Lewis releases his latest solo album, Give My Country Back, available via Big Machine Label Group. With his sixth solo country album, Lewis once again delivers the unapologetic honesty and hard-earned perspective that have defined his career. Across ten tracks, Give My Country Back explores themes of accountability, resilience, faith, patriotism and personal growth – pairing gritty throwback country textures with Lewis’ unmistakable vocal intensity.
“That’s life’s struggle right there,” Lewis says. “You are the master of your own destiny, and everything happens because of your actions — whether you want to admit it or not. Self-ownership is a huge thing to learn how to do in this life…
Everyone remembers when bands like The All American Rejects began to surface in the rock scene early 2000s. A contagious earworm for the audio senses is an understatement for what they would achieve and create with their music alone. The All American Rejects would become a favorite for many, hooking fans with ultra-magnetic classics such as “Swing Swing,” with their lyrical charm and infectious power-pop instrumental fervor.
Standing out from the crowd of other bands at the time, All American Rejects was not quite pop, not quite punk, but sat pretty within the genre regions of pop-rock where they could test the waters of their craft.
Tyson Ritter and the band are no strangers to writing material that digs deep.
SYML releases deluxe of live album Paris Unplugged. First captured live at Le Consulat Voltaire in Paris, France, the original 16-track set has been expanded into a 20-track deluxe edition. The newly expanded tracklist features his highly sought-after cover of “Mr. Sandman (Paris Unplugged Live).”
SYML shares: “I want to say that I always knew I would one day record a live album of my songs in Paris, but that’s not true. What a gift it’s been to perform these songs outside of my bedroom when I wrote them years ago, much less in Paris. Some of my favorite albums growing up were live records, and in hindsight I think it was the imperfections, the sound of the room, and the slight variations on familiar music that attracted me.
Slow Accordion is acclaimed guitarist Oliver Wood, of The Wood Brothers, Matt Glassmeyer, of New York and Nashville’s improvised music scenes, on his own strange Wurlitzer and percussion (Billy Martin, Lambchop, Aqua Teen Hunger Force), far-out, hard-grooving bass player Ted Pecchio (Col. Bruce Hampton, Doyle Bramhall II, Tedeschi Trucks Band), and magically versatile drummer Mark Raudabaugh (Sierra Hull, Donna the Buffalo, Jim Lauderdale). Four boundlessly inspired, Nashville-based musicians (and longtime friends) with no preconceived ideas or concepts beyond coming together to conjure music out of thin air, purely in the present moment. Their debut album, on Royal Potato Family/RPF Records, is a completely improvised and analog work…
Parker Barrow returns with Hold The Mash, their second full-length album and the follow-up to 2023’s Jukebox Gypsies. Continuing to draw from Southern rock, blues rock, and classic hard rock, the Nashville outfit shows a clearer sense of direction this time around, refining rather than reinventing the formula introduced on its debut.
Fronted by vocalist Megan Kane and drummer Dylan Turner, Parker Barrow takes its name from the notorious criminal duo Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, although the reference serves more as an inspiration for the band’s identity than as a recurring theme. The current lineup is completed by guitarists Alex Bender and Will Tipton, bassist Kyle Priber, and keyboardist Eric Safka, whose contributions help give the group a fuller sound.
West Virginia’s John R. Miller gratifies a whole host of musical erogenous zones on his new album The Great Unknowing, including honky tonk country, Appalachian folk, feral folk rock, and a few things you’re not sure exactly what to call that get caught up in the hopper as he puts a heaping helping of 16 tracks on your plate to savor. Mr. Miller doesn’t bite off more than he can chew though. He delivers the goods on what’s ultimately a songwriter album graced by strong musical accompaniment.
Even before John R. Miller started sprouting flecks of gray in his hair and beard, he came across as a crotchety old soul in that endearing sort of way. You can tell he’s hard on clutches and brake pads. Sometimes he forgets to shower or eat. He seesaws between benders and sobriety.
The hard-living country singer/songwriter Gary Stewart rightfully earned his title “King of the Honky Tonks.” He began as a songwriter of drinking, honky tonk, and heartbreak songs. During the 1970s he hit as a recording artist with charting singles including “She’s Acting Single (I’m Drinking Doubles),” “Drinkin’ Thing,” “Quits,” and “Whiskey Trip,” and a string of charting albums from 1975’s Out of Hand to 1980’s Cactus and a Rose. They earned the respect of critics, DJs, and the record-buying public. Stewart sounded like a young George Jones and pounded the piano like Jerry Lee Lewis. After the hits stopped, his lifestyle got the better of him, despite three excellent comeback albums for Hightone in the ’90s.
In November 2003, his wife of 47 years died…
If you make an album that sounds different to what you’ve done in the past, listeners will complain that it doesn’t sound like your previous work. If you make an album that doesn’t stray from the path, however, listeners will then criticize you for not having any new ideas. It’s getting harder and harder to please anyone any of the time, let alone some people some of the time, so what exactly is the solution? On their third studio album, Vancouver-via-Vernon’s Mock Media might have perfected their masterplan: sound like everybody and nobody else simultaneously.
While plenty of bands will be afraid to leave their comfort zone out of fear that they’ll create something misaligned with their established sound, this is a band that already existed…
Heavy Metal (Live! Nairobi International Casino!) is a landmark Zamrock album by Paul Ngozi and the Ngozi Family Band, originally captured live-in-the-studio style in 1977.
Blending psychedelic rock, heavy fuzz guitar effects, and African rhythms, it stands as a cornerstone of the ’70s Zambian rock movement. The album relies heavily on Ngozi’s signature “Gee Flanger” guitar effects pedal, creating a swirling, psychedelic fuzz texture that drives tracks like “Heavy Metal” and “Dangerous Woman”
…Zamrock was a bona-fide rock scene, with albums released through independent labels based in Zambia. This music scene was complete, encompassing the genres of rock, acid folk, fusion, Afro-beat, South African jazz and…