Kaiso Power: Sound Revolution in Trinidad 1970- 1980 is a collection of rare jazz, calypso and percussive gems from Trinidad and Tobago from the revolutionary generation of the ’70s, bringing radical new political vision and reclaiming ancient spiritual consciousness through music.
…From Soundway comes a slim (just ten tracks) and somewhat understated, but no less sublime, compilation of calypso and jazz from a time of political unrest and sonic experimentation in Trinidad. It’s with the second track, ‘Tabu’, that this compilation makes its personality clear – a laid-back feel that yields dancing alongside revolution. ‘River Comes Down’ is a welcome moment of slightly wilder abandon among the more easygoing pieces – it’s also one of…
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Getting ahead of next year’s 90th birthday celebrations, American pianist Simone Dinnerstein presents two works by Philip Glass, performing alongside her own string ensemble.
Baroklyn – the name conflates her home borough of Brooklyn and the baroque sensibilities of J.S. Bach – take a far-from-mechanical approach to the composer’s minimalist tics. Their aim is to emulate the passage of time like sand through an hourglass (hence the title) rather than chopping the music into segments like the hands of a clock. And it works.
Arranged by Michael Riesman, Suite from The Hours splices Glass’s score for Stephen Daldry’s film into an almost symphonic three-movement work. The story’s pain and poetry is…
Highsigh like to stretch definitions. In the studio, they’re about pushing the boundaries of what we might call pop; on paper, they test the meaning of ‘supergroup’. There’s a whole heap of musicians mucking in here on debut album Once Bend, but primarily they comprise Ro Lundberg of freeform New Yorkers JOBS, John Dieterich of Pitchfork art-rockers Deerhoof and Matt Mehlan of whatever-works collective Skeletons (and any number of jazz-adjacent experimental outfits he happens upon). It’s a dense mix of exploratory musical backgrounds and usually sounds like it too.
Part-time percussionists all, the three of them are fixated on rhythm, piling on drum patterns and chewy electronic thumps. They whip up a panic attack on ‘Words We Choose’…
Earlier this year, Cheekface “broke containment,” as the youths say. The Los Angeles trio had spent seven years self-releasing albums of quirked-up indie rock and amassing a following of “Cheek freaks,” loyal fans who revere their playful hooks and meme-poisoned humor. But in March, after revealing that they had rejected an opportunity to appear in an AT&T commercial due to the company’s contracts with ICE, Cheekface drew a surge of attention for their politics — which, like their lyrics, lean lefty and anti-corporate. Then a clip of their jittery deep cut “I Feel So Weird!” blew up and became a TikTok trend in the furries community, and suddenly this humble DIY band was the subject of “discourse” and “quote dunks” and Needle Drop videos and other…
Following the 2LP vinyl edition for Record Store Day, XTC’s 17 April 1981 gig at Emerald City in New Jersey is released once again as Live Boots – Official Bootleg but this time as a 2CD set.
Dave Gregory recalls this as “Gig 11 on a 19-date U.S. tour, planned to promote the living daylights out of our Black Sea album, this night was a return to a hot venue we’d previously visited in January 1980 as part of the gruelling Drums & Wires campaign…. XTC at that time was a performing machine capable of creating megawatts of excitement.” Andy Partridge says: “We were tighter than a firefly’s fundament that night, even more astounding was the adrenaline-soaked speed we took every song at”.
This is apparently the first of a planned…
In addition to being one-half of synth pop legends Erasure for over 40 years and engaging in numerous other solo and collaborative projects, Vince Clarke has racked up a sizeable discography of remixes. Remix/Remodel: The Vince Clarke Remixes selects 26 of them, though that’s nowhere close to complete.
The set begins with the first remix he ever did back in the late ’80s, a house-inspired version of Happy Mondays’ “Wrote for Luck” which stripped out the guitars and placed a thumping kick drum up front. The remix ended up being a bigger hit than the original album version, and helped define the alternative dance sound of the Madchester scene. Aside from this remix, however, the collection skips ahead two decades (leaving…
Playing the vibraphone with a relentless sense of urgency and intent while displaying a strong, distinctive compositional identity, Victor Vieira-Branco is a name to reckon with in contemporary jazz. Rooted in Philadelphia, Bark Culture is Vieira-Branco’s creative brainchild, where intriguing sonic forces feel at once dark and lyrical, sometimes effusive yet always fresh and compelling. For this date, the core trio — with John Moran on double bass and Joey Sullivan on drums — is expanded into a harmonically richer quartet with the addition of pianist Sam Yulsman.
The Giant is Awkward, Bark Culture’s sophomore record, opens with “Palace”, whose lush theme, rhythmically vivid drive, and hip arrangement command our attention from the very first…
Cautious Clay’s The Hours: High Noon is the third part of his conceptual trilogy of songs about one day in a life. As the Beatles might say, “Oh boy”. Cautious Clay has tackled the concept of “a day in the life”, but he’s done so completely out of order. One does not need to have heard the first two volumes before this one. In fact, he released part three (Night) back in October 2025 and part one. The Hours: Morning. in May 2025. Clay purposely issued them out of sequence rather than consecutively. The albums may thematically connect but do not tell a linear story. The new release can stand on its own. One need not know or reference the first two to appreciate this one.
Despite the title, the eight songs on High Noon do not begin with a track about 12 pm.
Powerhouse seven-piece roots-rock outfit Bywater Call stake their claim with Broken Souvenirs, their fourth studio album. It’s a record that confidently blends rock, Southern soul, blues, funk, and singer-songwriter sensibilities. At the heart of it all is frontwoman Meghan Parnell, one of the finest vocalists working today. She possesses killer pipes, not unlike Susan Tedeschi but with an edge. She’s soulful and powerful, dialed back when necessary. With an innate sense of timing not unlike Aretha Franklin, her phrasing is spot on. You’re either born with a voice like Parnell’s or you spend a lifetime reaching for it.
Formed in Toronto in 2017 by guitarist Dave Barnes and Parnell, Bywater Call also features Bruce McCarthy (drums), Mike Meusel…
DICE have always made music for moments. The kind that become memories before they are even over. On their second studio album ‘I Thought the Altitude Would Make It Worth the View’, the Perth quartet effortlessly capture that strange feeling of being nostalgic for experiences that may have not actually happened yet, turning their instinct for connection, movement and living in the moment into their most ambitious record to date.
Following the momentum of ‘Midnight Zoo’ and the ‘Wings’ EP, DICE have moved far beyond their roots as Perth indie favourites, becoming an international touring force. The leap from their garage rock beginnings into ‘I Thought the Altitude Would Make It Worth the View’ feels utterly organic rather than forced.
Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux picked the band’s September 26, 1991 show at Boston Garden for release as Dave’s Picks Volume 59.
…the new collection features the most recent Grateful Dead concert date ever selected for the long-running live archival series.
Keyboardist Bruce Hornsby had been touring with the band for a year by the time the Grateful Dead arrived in Boston for a sold-out six-night run in September 1991. The two-keyboard iteration of the lineup — Hornsby and Vince Welnick along with bassist Phil Lesh, guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann — would remain intact through Hornsby’s departure the following March.
Dave’s Picks Volume 59 features the complete,…
J.P. Reali’s Grateful Blues may not seem a wholly original thought, at least upon a cursory glance, given Luther Dickinson and Datrian Johnson’s vividly wrought Dead Blues Volume I, released late in 2025.
But the veteran Delaware guitarist, long a staple of the Washington, D.C. music scene, puts a distinctive twist on his concept for this six-song EP. Rather than do what the NMA co-founder and his compatriot did, that is, assemble blues material covered by the iconic band, Reali and company arrange a discerning selection of Dead material in a largely authentic style.
Given that slant, it should come as no surprise that the late Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan figures heavily in the mix. Reali doesn’t sound quite…
In the late 1970s, Neil Fraser, AKA Mad Professor, and his wife moved into a house in Croydon. “The normal thing would be to put in some chairs, a table,” he said in a podcast last year. Instead, the legendary dub producer fitted his living room with a four-track mixing desk and his collection of homemade gear, thus marking the beginning of the studio and label Ariwa Sounds.
The early years of Ariwa were captured in a 1984 album, which was reissued by Melodies International in 2023. Now, the two labels reunite to document the sounds that followed. This double compilation isn’t an attempt at a greatest hits collection, nor a chronological history, but an insight into the label’s expansive output between 1984 and 2026, featuring big names…
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, The Darling Buds made a trio of very fine albums that flirted with noise pop, dance rock, and trip hop while ultimately coming across like first-class guitar pop. Since their return in the late 2020s they’ve continued making fine music, first with the Evergreen EP in 2017, now on 2026’s Same Sun/Same Sky. The band are in fine form, sounding tight and energetic with guitars that alternately jangle and bite. Andrea Lewis Jarvis’ voice doesn’t sound like it has aged a day; she presides over a batch of peppy rockers and swooning ballads like she’s been doing it non-stop for decades. As nice as it is that everything sounds really good, what’s even better is that their songwriting is on par with what it was in their prime, and maybe even…
There’s a slang term in Brazilian Portuguese that defines the dark, unkempt spaces where underground parties tend to happen: “inferninho,” or “little hell.” Whether they’re abandoned warehouses, as was so common for the UK’s acid house parties in the 1980s, or repurposed samba school rehearsal venues, these makeshift places are almost inescapable if you want to get to know São Paulo’s independent electronic scene. Producer Agazero’s new EP, Dissidente, is a sonic representation of the “inferninho”: a grimy and sometimes harsh experience that’s highly entertaining but could leave your head reeling.
For the last decade, the São Gonçalo-born, São Paulo-based artist has been making jittery club music after first finding his audience…
Paradessence spotlights the innate surrealism of Visible Cloaks shimmering, digital-powered exotica. Since 2014 the duo, Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile, have forged a borderless space where echoes of globally dispersed music converge in a glimmering zone and the periphery between synthetic and otherwise is porous. Their albums bring to mind Yves Tanguy paintings, filled with impressions of familiar forms contained in unusual contours and doused in hyperreal sheen.
Visible Cloaks’ first full length since 2017’s Lex, Paradessence amplifies the portals and colourful intrusions generated by their crossing of streams. Opener ‘Apsis’ begins with slithers of synth that mutate between elegant brush strokes and serrated sequences. ‘Skylight’ begins in…
Listening to Denny Zeitlin has often felt like accepting an invitation to the unknown. Zeitlin has never been content to simply play a tune. He probes it, turns it inside out, and often uncovers possibilities most musicians overlook.
Odyssey reinforces that reputation. Although much of the material spans different periods of his career, the album never feels like a nostalgic exercise. Instead, it captures an artist whose curiosity remains remarkably intact.
The trio’s 2003 concert performances, featuring the late bassist Mel Graves and drummer George Marsh, remind us of what made this partnership so rewarding. There is complete trust among the three performers, allowing the music to unfold naturally rather than following…
…6CD special edition featuring unheard material, including early demos, alternate takes, and unreleased songs.
There’s a live recording on this boxset that seems to perfectly embody the challenges faced by Paul Weller after he split up The Jam. He and his new band, The Style Council, are playing the Goldiggers in Chippenham, Wiltshire, in March 1984, showcasing tracks from the upcoming Cafe Bleu album to an increasingly restless audience.
“I need absolute quiet for this number,” Weller insists, before a bossa nova called “The Whole Point of No Return”. The crowd start wolf-whistling as Dee C Lee comes out to sing “Paris Match” and, as the band perform low-key acoustic songs inspired, variously, by Antonio Carlos Jobim, …
Presenting a local music scene to a wider audience can be an arduous task if it is a scene that has already made a name for itself.
Den Tapes (yes, just cassette tapes and Bandcamp) is one of those outlets that tries to go deeper into a better-known local scene that is Seattle, Washington, digging up a serious twee/jangle/lo-fi/bedroom pop gem that is Super Honey Teaspoon! by Soda Gumball.
If the name of the project might hark back to the days when bubble gum rock ruled, then Jealous Yellow (one Benjamin Rea), the name of the person behind the project, might be a bit left field too.
Yet, make no mistake, Jealous Yellow, who doubles as a music instructor, obviously knows every big or small sub-genre where pop and…
Pinning down what – or who – Lucia & The Best Boys are has, since their emergence in the late 2010s, been more difficult than perhaps it should. Emerging from a fertile synth-led Glasgow scene that gave us Walt Disco and The Ninth Wave – artists whose sonic and visual identities appeared fully-formed from the off – between name, line-up and sound changes, it hasn’t seemed to fully ‘click’ for the outfit. And, thankfully, at points on this debut, it does: opener ‘Butterflies’, ‘Love Yourself’ and ‘So Sweet I Could Die’ brim with the kind of bombast usually seen with shoulder pads and voluminous perms. When they amp up the ‘80s theatrics – think Bonnie Tyler after a few Snakebites and an accident with black eyeliner – the crystal-clear nature and range of…