Shoving into the world in 2021 with the intense Blackhaine collaboration ‘Did U Cum Yet / I’m Not Gonna Cum’, Hull-born sonic and visual artist Richie Culver (AKA Quiet Husband) has been feverishly recording and releasing music like a man possessed ever since.
His 2024 outing for Drowned By Locals, Religious Equipment, claimed the album of the week slot here at the Quietus. There was something insular and paranoid about that record. Like it was trying to keep the world out. The Architecture of Perception (only his 4th release since the start of this year, the slacker), by contrast, feels outward-looking. It’s spacious, atmospheric. The opening track ‘Composition’ is like standing outside of a club in the sticky heat of the night.
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Jocelyn Balu’s debut album is one of a Congolese artist stepping into a lineage and making it breathe again. Rooted in the rumba of the ’40s to ’70s, Borumba follows the music’s Atlantic circle, from Kongo traditions and forced exile to Cuba and back. But the nine tracks never treat heritage as museum glass. They are warm, alert, political and gloriously alive, with every arrangement revealing fresh rhythmic depth, historical purpose, memory, grace and delight.
Balu’s golden, gospel-trained voice is the album’s centre of gravity, opening with a solemn a cappella on ‘Mobembo’ before it unfurls its elegant guitars, elastic bass and dancing percussion from a band assembled in southern France. The title-track states the mission with irresistible grace.
It is more than twenty years since Mick Flannery released his debut album Evening Train, but the tale it told of (as he puts it) “love, lust, gambling, and a faithful betrayal” has obviously preyed on his mind as he has carved out a feted musical career. Now he has reworked the songs from that record and added ten new ones into an album which accompanies a stage production. The House Must Win has already played to 17,000 people in Ireland over a five-week run. This could be termed the soundtrack album, and Flannery has clearly poured his heart and soul into it.
He has gathered a stellar cast of musicians and guest artists for the recording, including Anais Mitchell, Jenn Grand, Lisa Hannigan and others on vocals, as well as sundry Flannerys.
Austin’s The Black Drumset isn’t just a band, it’s an experiment. Brian Wiley has released three studio recordings since 2009 and the latest, Friends in Dark Places was carefully crafted over the course of seven years, its seven songs are full-bodied trips into the nexus between interstellar intrigue and carnal rhythms. With droning keyboards as copiously applied as the droning guitars, it’s the drums, other percussion, and Wiley’s mesmerizingly monotone vocals that provide a solid center. “Everything turns in time/ See my place in this life/ Every place, every time/ Beauty, hope, peace of mind,” he sings, offering a reassurance that gives way to an extended, entrancing jam.
Wiley’s music radiates a calm, justified…
Take that, AI. Sure, your favorite tech bro’s favorite plagiarism machine can Frankenstein together bits and pieces from every genre and era of music past; but never forget: Every limb, organ and cell of that monster was dead to begin with.
But Nu Jazz, an unruly conglomeration of abstract creators from across the spectrum of New York City’s underground and experimental music scenes, create their hybrids the old-fashioned way: they throw these living, breathing musics into a room together, shut off the lights, and let nature take its messy, delirious course. The results may be unpredictable, they may wear the name “mutant” as a blessing and a curse, they almost certainly will end up ugly to most unadventurous eyes; but they will thrive with visceral, rabid life.
01. Martyn Lenoble & Christian Eigner feat. Mark Lanegan & Dave Gahan – Cat People (Putting…
02. Supersuckers – Never Let Me Down Again
03. The Stooges – Dirt
04. Johnny Marr – I Feel You
05. Vince Clarke & Ane Brun – Fly On…
06. Gordon Lightfoot – Sundown
07. The Soulsavers – San Quentin Blues
08. Nouvelle Vague – Enjoy the Silence
09. Fad Gadget – Back to Nature
10. The Normal – T.V.O.D.
11. Cabaret Voltaire – Spread the Virus
12. Front 242 – Headhunter
13. Sunroof – Conspiracies
14. LFO – Freak
15. Blind Willie Johnson – John the Revelator
Ambient Americana Volume 2 brings together major icons of the ambient and experimental folk scenes, including legendary producer Daniel Lanois, ambient guitar pioneer William Tyler, and standard-bearers of the current cosmic Americana revival like Hayden Pedigo and North Americans.
“Our May 2021 issue came with a special free CD – the then-latest instalment in our Sounds of the New West series. Titled Ambient Americana: A Road Trip Across Psychic State Lines, it brought together a group of artists who were mixing the traditions of country and folk with the mind-expanding sounds of ambient and kosmische music.
…a mere five years on, we’re delighted to bring you Volume 2, which comes free with Uncut’s August 2026 issue.”
The Lovin’ Spoonful were one of the most popular American bands of the 1960s; they were also one of the most confounding. They were a thoroughly modern band capable of transcendent pop moments like “Do You Believe in Magic,” beautiful ballads like “Didn’t Want to Have to Do it,” hot rockers like “Summer in the City,” and songs like “Rain on the Roof” that niftily anticipated country-rock, but they also padded out their albums with old-timey jug band and blues songs that made them seem like fogeys before their time. This split made them a brilliant singles band, while their albums were more hit and miss.
The whole unruly mess is available for view in one sprawling package on Strawberry Records’ complete retrospective What a Day for…
To celebrate 50 years since the formation of Rainbow and the release of the debut album Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, Demon Music present a comprehensive box set covering the years 1975-1976.
As well as including the seminal first two studio album, the box set includes a trilogy of live albums from Rainbow’s debut world tour and documenting the band’s first shows in Europe with shows from Cologne, Dusseldorf and Nurnberg. The final disc of this 9 disc set features a multitude of rare mixes, edits and studio rehearsal performances all newly mastered by Andy Pearce & Matt Wortham.
…Rainbow was initially formed as a Ritchie Blackmore solo project in the early months of 1975, after a Deep Purple tour of the previous…
Nashville-based guitarist and composer Kevin Coleman is a far-reaching musician who likes to take the instrumental acoustic guitar genre and fully maximise its potential. His debut album, 2018’s First Songs, used the purely solo set-up to demonstrate his ambition and prowess, while 2024’s Imaginary Conversations saw him expanding the soundscape to incorporate a broad range of ideas.
K.C. Blues is a natural follow-up to Imaginary Conversations that Kevin began recording pretty much as soon as that album landed. This extended writing and recording process has resulted in a set that feels diverse, bringing in experimental folk, Americana and blues over six tracks and forty minutes. Like on Conversations,…
If you’re a fan of Gram Parsons or Emmylou Harris, husband-and-wife duo Eleese and Matthew Meschery’s band name Brand New Heartache is bound to fire a spark of recognition.
You might also be pleased to hear that the inspiration of Parsons and Harris can be felt throughout A New Alchemy, the couple’s debut album, as the Californian natives – who are recent transplants to Tennessee – showcase beautiful vocals, tight harmonies and, of course, a tale or two of heartache.
The airy, acoustic Montreal sees the couple dreaming of the city, of walking its streets as revellers spill from bars and the smell from bakeries fills the air, their harmonies so tight there is no room at all for movement.
Born in rural Bandjoun and raised in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, Kareyce Fotso is the daughter of a sculptor father and a businesswoman mother who also worked as a professional mourner. A former biochemistry student, she chose theatre and music instead. Accompanying herself on instruments including guitar, bells, percussion and sanza, as she does on this, her fifth album, she has since become one of Central Africa’s most distinctive voices. Her métier is a sort of bluesy Afropop with social conscience and strong emotional wallop. On Gwà, named after a traditional women’s healing circle, she turns that voice towards testimony, solidarity and survival, delivering a song cycle devoted to female survivors speaking truth to power.
DoYeon Kim works in a space informed by jazz and free improvisation, imbued with vestiges of folk music. She plays a gayageum, a plucked zither, which is not an instrument normally found in these contexts. Joining Kim are violist Mat Maneri, bassist Henry Fraser and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. The musicians are well attuned, bringing out detailed interactions between subsets of the group and the quartet as a whole.
The opening track, “The Beats of Distant Thunder,” is a case in point, with Kim and Maneri beginning the proceedings in the lead, only to have Fraser and Sorey lock in a double time groove that spurs the action further forward. Maneri and Fraser trade solos, and Kim plucks a line imitating Sorey’s use of cymbals. The whole group brings…
Before they shaped the future of music, and before they led the indispensable label that housed this sea-changing output, PC Music’s A. G. Cook and Danny L Harle were just two British kids — “Dux Kidz,” as they called themselves — who wanted to have fun. Their 2012 output under the “Dux” name ranged from happy-go-lucky pop to artfully disfigured hip-hop and even impressionistic classical music.
All of these tracks featured commercial instrumentation pulled from romplers, MIDI banks, and sample CDs — an unabashed embrace of sounds once considered tacky and undesirable. Why make an honest attempt at distinguished music with such cheeky components? Because that sort of thing sounded like a damn fun time.
Alex Cameron probably didn’t mean to release his album right after the trailer for Digger dropped, but it’s mighty good timing. Digger is a Tom Cruise venture and appears to be halfway between Tropic Thunder’s gonzo work and Christian Bale’s Oscar angling in Vice. Both Vice and Digger ogle like a carnival barker at the transformation of a usually chiseled Hollywood star getting fat, as if the gravitas and comedy simply spring from calories and discrepancy.
“I put on a ton of weight / For a role I didn’t get / Now I’m always late for set / Getting panned in the LA Times / Getting tanned on the internet,” Cameron snarls at the beginning of his new album, Late to Set. Pumped up and steely “Eye of the Tiger” guitars thud behind him, a warbly…
Welcomer’s Miles Sutton observes the world from a remove, delivering even intimate scenes from an ironic remove. Most of the time, he’s only half singing, through the verse injecting conversational lyrics with the barest tinge of melody.
Yet in the chorus, Sutton reveals a fascination with pop: the arrangements bristle with hooks and billow with strings, multi-voiced singing and rock instruments.
This is Sutton’s first full-length album as Welcomer, following a self-titled EP in 2022. The Wellington, New Zealand artist enlisted producer and engineer Jesse Austin-Stewart for this one, working with him to develop layered but buoyant orchestrations for these songs, which glisten and shimmer with trebly picking, swoops of…
“Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.” Famously uttered by bassist-guitarist Greg Lake, those words encapsulate the theatricality, thrills, breadth, and fascination surrounding Brain Salad Surgery — Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s fourth studio album. Originally released in late 1973, it finds the trio taking front-to-back control of its situation and incorporating several studio firsts. The platinum-certified effort also stands as one of the greatest prog-rock feats in history. Its cohesive blend of musicianship, songwriting, and production set a standard that, decades later, remains revered amid fans and critics alike.
Mastered at Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab’s California studio, the reissue label’s numbered-edition hybrid SACD of Brain Salad Surgery presents…
The lo-fi, melancholic slowcore of Duster proves a magical fit with the atmospheric, pleasingly pastoral sampledelica of Dirty Art Club; they teamed together under the name Sooj to make the excellent Crusher. A drifting, meandering, and hazily trippy album, it’s made up of songs that are a soundtrack for staring out the window on a cloudy day wondering where it all went wrong. Or perhaps accompaniment for a long bike ride in the autumn haze of a late afternoon, twisting and turning down unknown streets losing oneself in the music. So, a lot like a Duster album, but somehow even more so. The lovely samples and washes of sound Matt Cagle (aka Dirty Art Club) fits between the strums, thrums, and croons of Clay Parton and Canaan Amber (aka Duster)…
Many bands have written songs about surviving, whether that’s dissecting the circumstances of life events or analysing pain, but very few make survival sound so exhilarating. On their debut album, Hoping As a Coping Mechanism, Bristol trio MOULD manage to tap into and bottle the nervous energy of being human in the world today, then they shake it until it fizzes over the edges. “Misanthrope” immediately launches the listener into a paradox of simultaneously combustible and life-affirming noise.
Building on the ferocious promise of their previous EPs the band allows themselves more time and space to broaden their sonic vocabulary here. Lead singles “Float” and “Falling Posture” hinted at this evolution and within the context…
As Michael Cloud Duguay points out, church organs are the only instruments that form part of a building. Organs only play in the place where they were constructed, and people come to them if they want to listen.
Duguay is a composer and producer from Ontario, and he describes Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go as “almost” a documentary about organs. Using recordings made during a nine-day road trip around the remote fringes of Newfoundland, the album is built around the sounds of organs in seven different churches – in places called things like Agathuna, Bonavista and Cupids.
Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go is a complex, multi-layered album with a strong documentary flavour – not only bringing these crumbling…