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…
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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.
Perhaps you’re familiar with Star Moles, the ultra-prolific recording project from Philadelphia musician Emily Moales. Perhaps you’re also familiar with Rubber Band Gun, the similarly ultra-prolific project from regular Star Moles contributor Kevin Basko; Rubber Band Gun and Star Moles dropped the song “Frodoboy” a couple of months ago. Perhaps you would also like to know about Sam and Louise Sullivan, a sibling duo who make a ton of music with Moales and Basko and who have a new album Love & Devotion.
Sam and Louise Sullivan grew up around the US, and they started playing folk music together as kids. These days, they both live in Philadelphia, where Louise runs her own ceramics business and Sam works as a teacher.
Timing, as they say, is everything. And, arriving almost 10 years since they first formed in Brighton, and more than four since their 2022 debut EP ‘’Til The Stream Runs Dry’ tipped them for intriguingly grubby, underground success, jazz-punk band Opus Kink have taken the road to their debut album at a glacial pace.
The reasons for The Sweet Goodbye’s lengthy gestation are standard issue for a relatively small band: a classic mathematical problem of too many day jobs plus not enough time or money. But the musical landscape slows for no band, and the alternative world that Opus Kink find themselves returning to is a markedly different one to that in which they cut their teeth.
Back in the earlier part of the decade, NME…
XXXXX, the new album by Venezuelan producer-vocalist Arca, is reportedly laden with meaning: a press release claims that “suspended between posthuman augmentation and raw emotion, XXXXX exposes the mainframe”. But the reason Arca, real name Alejandra Ghersi, has become such a star of electronic music – and a mainstream-adjacent one at that – is not because she lets philosophy postgrads in Berlin write her marketing copy: it’s because, for well over a decade, she has been putting out records like XXXXX, which seem to tap into the body’s most primal, feral frequencies better than nearly anyone else. That ability has resulted in recent callups to collaborate on Madonna’s Confessions II and remix pop singer Addison Rae, and she has amassed…
Drummer Cindy Blackman Santana‘s boundaryless, organic musical perspective is informed by decades of experience. Once a busker in New York, she began her career with Wallace Roney during the mid-1980s and released Arcane, her first leader date, in 1988. She’s released 14 more albums under her own name and collaborated with Jacky Terrasson, Charnett Moffett, and others as well as pop musicians like Lenny Kravitz, Joss Stone, and husband Carlos Santana. Her catalog also lists two tributes to mentor and influence Tony Williams and his Lifetime ensembles: Another Lifetime in 2010 and 2012’s Spectrum Road. The 80-minute Coherence figures more in the electrified jazz vein of those two outings. It was recorded (mostly) live in the studio as…
New York’s Prison are nebulous at best, a loose and ever-changing collective of players who consistently produce some of outsider rock’s most freaked-out jams, regardless of who’s taking part. There are key contributors like Endless Boogie’s Paul Major, Liquor Store’s Sarim Al-Rawi, and multi-instrumentalist Matt Lilly, but different sessions find them joined by various like-minded heads making for different shades of psychedelic intensity on each new record.
Prison’s third long-player, Big Rigs on the BQE, is the product of a recording date in 2024 that included percussionist Ryan Sawyer and Sic Alps’ Mike Donovan adding fuzz-saturated organ to the mix, along with former Prison-staffers Matt Leibowitz and Adam Reich also adding…
…the 2CD edition adds rare live recordings and early demos on CD2.
…The London-based three-piece, led by Brian Molko, caused a stir in the mid-’90s with a couple of singles on indies (‘Bruise Pristine’ on a Fierce Panda split 7” and ‘Come Home’ on Deceptive) before signing to Virgin subsidiary Hut. Placebo’s glammed-up image, post-grunge riffs and Molko’s distinctive vocals (not to mention the singer’s talent for promotion) quickly earnt them a besotted fanbase and in 1997 they broke through, with the spikey and sassy ‘Nancy Boy’ reaching No 4 in the singles chart and helping their debut album to go platinum.
Thirty years on, the band have returned to Placebo to give the album’s 10 tracks, plus…
There was a certain jovial energy that added to the 2022 debut of contemporary jazz duo DOMi & JD BECK. Coming out of the gate with major co-signs from the likes of Herbie Hancock, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and Anderson.Paak, who helped release the stellar debut through his APESHIT imprint, along with the illustrious Blue Note Records. At the time, it seemed like the freshly budding duo was destined for jazz stardom in an era where the genre rarely gets the attention it deserves, but for one reason or another, the debut LP, titled NOT TiGHT, didn’t make the impact it was meant to. Sure, the Grammy acknowledgment was nice, and the A-list guest appearances were lovely and added some unique flair to the duo’s nimble, playful sound. Still, it could’ve been those…
…new 50th anniversary 2CD expansion of The Flamin’ Groovies’ 1976 Sire debut is built around a new remaster of the original album from the analog tapes. The bonus disc adds previously unreleased outtakes and alternates as well as the existing audio from a Roxy show in ’76.
A lot had happened with the Flamin’ Groovies in the nearly five years that separated the epochal Teenage Head album and their return to American record racks with Shake Some Action. The Groovies lost their record deal with Buddah; lead singer Roy Loney had quit the band, leaving Cyril Jordan as the uncontested leader; and they had spent a lot of time in Europe, building a significant following in the United Kingdom. As a result, the Flamin’ Groovies on Shake Some Action…
Who needs a style when you’ve got the songs? We’re living in a musical landscape mediated by algorithmic overlords, in which listeners often seek to be soothed by (possibly evil) ambient tones, burrow deeper into (often frictionless) aesthetics they already like, and passively consume (AI-generated?) tracks suited for various lifestyle functions. People of taste have been decrying the public’s preference for familiar slop over challenging, adventurous, hard-to-categorize art from time immemorial, but in the music world, the streaming era has intensified the primacy of vibes over tunes. Mallory Hawk’s Chinook flies in the face of that conventional wisdom.
…Chinook is named for the helicopters that dotted the sky during Hawk’s childhood in…
The charismatic Albert Castiglia is one of our most preeminent blues-rockers, a certified badass, an engaging entertainer, and an underrated guitarist. As we learn on his 13th solo album, Grits & Glory, he’s also an unapologetic songwriter in touch with our chaotic times. It’s by far his most expansive album, as one of the few roots-blues artists who covers The Beatles and John Coltrane on the same record.
There are several threads here. He recorded live at Abbey Road Studios, working in the same space where The Beatles recorded their White Album and Pink Floyd laid down Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. For the first time, Castiglia demonstrates an affinity for jazz in a searing take of Mongo Santamaria’s…