Formed in 1969 by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown keyboardist Vincent Crane, Atomic Rooster forged a sound that blended proto‑metal heaviness with blistering Hammond‑organ riffs, explosive guitar work, and punishing drum patterns. Their music often brushed against what would later become doom metal, dark, powerful, and intense enough to shake the peace‑and‑love sensibilities of the era. Across seven studio albums released between 1970 and 1983, it becomes clear just how far ahead of their time they were, even as they frequently remained under the radar.
Compiled by Cherry Red’s Esoteric Recordings, this 2-CD set collects the band’s BBC sessions recorded between 1970 and 1981, including appearances on Radio 1, the Friday Rock Show,…
Latest Entries »
The opening commentary about Ruthie Foster’s new record brings this author back 20-plus years to SXSW to see Ruthie perform in a small alley in Austin before only 50 or so curious onlookers. She had the blues and gospel chops then. It was clear to me that her future was promising, though her folk-blues approach was fairly elementary at the time. We all know what has transpired for her – the BMA Koko Taylor Award in 2015, two Grammy nominations, and a Grammy win in 2025 for her album Mileage.
The title for her new album Just Say Yes refers to a sticky note she wrote to herself as she re-engaged her dream of returning to music after a layoff to care for her mom.
…This album too marks another transition.
Montreal-via-Bowen Island, BC’s Lauren Spear bookends her sophomore album as Le Ren with a quote as it was told to her: “He said, ‘A song could love you back.'”
To summon that line here, then, is to quote a quote. Don’t Be Funny Without Me is replete with such intertextual layers that feel hard-pressed to be contained within a couple of extra punctuation marks — especially when Spear herself is as open as her acrobatic pose on the album artwork suggests, barreling through skyward songs entitled “Free Wheeling” and “Going Through the Motions” right after the intro track, “A Song Can Love You Back,” a slight rephrasing that’s decidedly more certain about the idea.
Where her debut, 2021’s Leftovers, was as…
On the face of it, 2025 was a landmark year for Billy Strings. His fifth album, Highway Prayers, won him his third Grammy. The first bluegrass album in more than 22 years to debut at the top of the US album sales chart, it confirmed him as the genre’s biggest crossover star in decades. He was feted by everyone from Bob Dylan to Post Malone to Willie Nelson, the latter describing him as “the John Coltrane of bluegrass”, a pretty impressive soubriquet in anyone’s book. As the New York Times noted, he was now capable of filling the arena-sized venues that his idols – Doc Watson, Clarence White, Tony Rice, Béla Fleck – could never have dreamed of performing in, packing them out with an audience that look less like traditional bluegrass aficionados than…
Before her first release as a solo artist, songwriter and producer, Sera Cahoone had plenty of experience playing with other musicians. Starting at an early age, she first learned how to play the drums, a skill she soon put into practice playing at sessions at local dive bars.
Years later, she moved to Seattle, where she became the drummer for the slowcore outfit Carissa’s Wierd, and later, Band of Horses. 2006 marked the year of her solo debut, which would be followed by a string of records leading up to her latest release, I’ve Missed You All These Years, an album that was eight years in the making.
For I’ve Missed You All These Years, Cahoone returns to Sub Pop Records, the label that first signed her at the start of her solo career,…
…remastered by legendary audio engineer Howie Weinberg and includes 12 previously unreleased tracks. This bonus material compiles B-sides, outtakes, and raw demos from the original recording era.
A smaller, simpler affair than his breakout album, Sha Sha, Ben Kweller’s On My Way strips away the polished alt-rock production and emphasizes the singer/songwriter side of his music. There’s nothing here as immediately infectious as the Sha Sha singles “Wasted and Ready” and “Commerce TX” were, and overall it’s a more subdued album. However, this somewhat more mature approach is contrasted and balanced by Kweller’s voice, which still sounds charmingly, vulnerably adolescent as he ventures further into his twenties.
Despite being friends for many years, The Roaring Waves by prog guitarists Steve Hackett and Marillion’s Steve Rothery is a surprise. Eight years in the conceiving, the pair began it in joint writing sessions at Marillion’s Racket Club studio. For his part, Rothery drew on his band experience. Hackett had a bigger learning curve. They developed the album jointly and separately at their individual studios as well.
With the sea as a unifying theme, the duo conjure an arresting blend of progressive rock, psychedelia, ambient, classical, and electronic music, peppered with cinematic soundscapes and atmospheres appended by lyrical hooks and startling crescendoes. It is not a competetive shredding session. The only vocals are…
…Timeless, a new collection from NPG Records and Legacy Recordings, offers 10 previously unreleased recordings spanning the breadth of the Minneapolis legend’s career, from a 1978 home recording to a live take of a favorite B-side from one of his final concerts.
Prince’s version of “With This Tear,” an early ’90s ballad given to Celine Dion and released to mark the 10th anniversary of his passing this past April, feature on the album, along with new focus track “Stone,” a pop/funk number tracked in 1995 and based on a track from R&B singer Sandra St. Victor. “Stone” was considered for an early configuration of Prince’s 1996 triple album Emancipation, though many of the songs included here aren’t known to be strictly tied to known…
The inclusion of a couple Force-era demos on 2019’s ACR:Box indicated that there could be more such recordings languishing in A Certain Ratio‘s vault. Force Majeure, released in tandem with The Joy of Sextet in 2026, confirms it and then some. Bearing a title that can taken as a declaration of its superiority to the band’s 1986 album, it certainly has an urgency and altogether richer/rawer sound, and while the aforementioned tracks were classified on the box as demos, “original versions,” the term applied here, seems more apt given that the material is fully developed. Moreover, the performances come across as serious rehearsals and further accentuate the crucial additions of keyboardist Andy Connell and saxophonist Tony Quigley. With those two…
After they released It All Comes Down to This, their third new LP of the 2020s, A Certain Ratio looked to the past by touting — and touring in support of — anniversaries related to two of their ’80s albums. Issued simultaneously with Force Majeure, which presented early versions of songs from the 40-year-old Force, The Joy of Sextet marked 45 years since the recording of Sextet. (Sextet was also intended for release in 1981, but did not materialize until early 1982.)
A different proposition from Force Majeure, The Joy of Sextet is the result of ACR handing the multitrack Sextet tapes to Andrew Meecham, aka the Emperor Machine, a veteran producer who had previously remixed ACR tunes and even played on 2023’s rather confusingly titled 1982.
When Pulp and Jarvis Cocker (the band’s soul and brain) appeared back in the ’90s, quite a few critics, even with all the praise, didn’t expect either to last long on the music scene, tying Pulp and Cocker to the Britpop “fad.”
Well, that “fad” is still around, and so are Pulp and Cocker. Yet they didn’t succeed because they remained strictly connected to Britpop, as both had wider aspirations, which they were able to reach with some, simply put, brilliant music and lyrics, being one of the rare artists that were able to bring their cross of British/European song trends (and Cocker himself is a sort of an encyclopedia in that respect) worldwide.
So it is no wonder that Pulp is getting their own live documentary – Pulp: What Do You Do…
Mystique has become a commodity in contemporary music. These pseudo-intellectuals, hidden behind vague social media posts and complicated album rollouts, seem more concerned with the aesthetic around their music than the songs themselves, resulting in a slew of impressive-looking albums with little substance.
Psychedelic West Coast four-piece Allah-Las, made up of former record store employees who combined forces in 2008, toy with mystique without falling into its modern trappings. The quartet of Matt Correia, Spencer Dunham, Miles Michaud, and Pedrum Siadatian doesn’t hide behind masks or try to be mysterious. Still, they do draw inspiration from these concepts on their sixth studio album, Sirenas.
The Will of Tongues, the latest record by performer-composer Sarah Davachi, is a marvel of time. The record draws on Davachi’s many years of engagement with historical instruments and fascination with various tuning systems, textures and harmonic structures, featuring reconstructed period wind instruments, historically tuned organs and an abstracted Renaissance choral form. It also makes excellent use of the centuries of combined musical experience brought to bear by her many collaborators, most of whom are noted performer-composers themselves (Whitney Johnson, Eyvind Kang, and Lucy Railton among them). And then there’s the two-hour-plus runtime.
Taken as a whole, The Will of Tongues feels like the culmination of a gradually developed…
Into the Sky is the realisation of a project six years in the making. With the need to keep active during lockdown, former Late of the Pier singer Sam Eastgate – aka LA Priest – made a dance record entirely from sampled material, devising his own form of house music in the process. Yet the finished product sat in the studio while Eastgate completed his guitar-based third album Fase Luna in 2023.
More recently, however, Eastgate revisited his work in the company of producer friend Alex Ridha, aka Boys Noize. Their challenge was to wring as much emotion as possible from the voice and just two accompanying instruments. These are a drum machine – a Gene built by Eastgate himself around a decade ago – and a synthesizer,…
The discourse surrounding the Linda Lindas is more telling about the state of the music industry than of the band’s actual music.
It’s impossible to ignore the cultural criticism associated with the quartet of Lucia and Mila de la Garza, Eloise Wong and Bela Salazar, who rose to fame on the back of a 2021 viral video of them performing a song entitled “Racist, Sexist Boy” at the Los Angeles Public Library. Take one quick Google search and hordes of comments calling the Linda Lindas “nepo babies” or “industry plants” will immediately become apparent.
While people have been quick to blow the whistle on nepo babies lately, one can’t help but notice such labels are disproportionately wielded against women, especially racialized women.
Ty Segall has a new album because it’s been a whole year since the last one, and Segall doesn’t seem at ease until he can hit a studio and record all of the ideas floating around his mind. The prolific artist has released 18 studio albums, plus three collaborative albums and several projects with other bands over just 18 years.
Despite the constant output and frequent changes in bandmates, Segall has been remarkably consistent in churning out top-notch garage rock. Chrome continues that success with one of his heaviest albums to date.
For this album, Segall reunites with The Freedom Band, made up of guitarist Emmett Kelly, bassist Mikal Cronin, drummer Evan Burrows, and Ben Boye on keyboards and piano.
Jim James’ first solo album in eight years finds him dealing with human disconnection in an age of chronic overstimulation. He uses a term he coined to describe this feeling as the title, Wowed Out.
Modern sensory overload in an age of technological wonder, somehow leaving us more alone, is something James grapples with throughout the record; however, this wasn’t a thematic plan. The album was assembled when James dug into recordings he’d created with his longtime friend, award-winning composer Brian Reitzell (Lost in Translation, The Virgin Suicides). These tracks were meant for different projects, but all share an underlying theme, as James calls it, of being Wowed Out.
The layers of instrumentation and vocals can…
Forty years on, The Jayhawks remain true to their trusted sound. Their lush and patented three-part harmonies and thoughtful, imagery-filled lyrics never go out of style. Their 12th studio album, Sanctuary Park, is a balm for these times. They capture the innocence of teenage years, reflecting from the perspective of adulthood. The opening track, “Keeping Our Heads Above Water,” begins with the line, “under the football lights,” immediately putting the listener in a nostalgic frame of mind. Yet, the upbeat music obscures the theme of resignation heard at the end, “taking all that you have to believe again.” The album’s most riveting track, “Hands on the Wheel,” begins this way in a cappella harmonies, ‘We’ll steal your daddy’s car/Roll down the window…
When Alabama Shakes sauntered in with the Southern groove of ‘Hold On’ in early 2012, the members were barely older than the boys and girls for which they named their debut. Sure, guitarist Heath Fogg was nearing 30, but Brittany Howard sang about the surprise of surviving to 22 from the wizened perspective of just 23. They advanced quickly, shifting in only three years from their elemental and agile soul-rock beginnings to the psychedelic and skywriting Sound & Color. An album borne of audacious vision and confident execution, it recalled the joyful hybrids that have long come from their geographical zone, particularly just north in Muscle Shoals and Memphis. Howard continued that quest with two highly collaborative solo albums,…
In the summer of 1976, Bob Marley & The Wailers hit the UK shortly before the heatwave, in mid-June. They’d been touring Rastaman Vibration since April – breakthrough shows in the US and Europe – and in Britain, just a few months after the success of Live! and No Woman, No Cry, filled four nights and two matinees at
the Hammersmith Odeon, announcing that reggae was no niche novelty but a potent force. In the audience was future DJ Don Letts who in the linernotes here makes an impassioned case for that residency’s significance. “It made British kids who’d never stepped in a Caribbean household feel the hum of something deeper than rock or pop. Marley showed the world the spirituality, rebellion and beauty inside our culture.” Letts also asserts that reviewers of…