Arvo Pärt’s four symphonies occupy a distinctive place within his output. Written over a span of 45 years, they chart not so much a linear evolution as a series of aesthetic ruptures, from the serial experimentation of the 1960s to the austere spirituality of the Fourth Symphony. By bringing together the complete cycle on a single recording, Eva Ollikainen and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra offer a compelling survey that emphasizes the striking contrasts between the works rather than imposing an artificial sense of continuity. The album joins a still relatively modest discography, long dominated by the various recordings from the Järvi family and Tõnu Kaljuste’s complete cycle. From the opening bars of the First Symphony, Ollikainen adopts an approach…
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Can you say where you are from after many years living in a country not your own? Can you belong to more than one place at the same time? These are the questions Curió Curió, a Brazilian-German duo, attempts to answer on their debut album.
Actress and singer Luiza Monteiro moved out from her hometown of Rio de Janeiro nine years ago to pursue a career in Europe. There she met Dustin Braun, a German producer, best known for his work with Berlin-based Turkish alternative musician Peki Momés, forming Curió Curió. After almost a decade abroad, Monteiro felt she was “not the same person she’d been in Rio,” but not fully from her new home, either. To address this ambiguity, Braun wrote music that is definitely Brazilian — elegant, groovy, sensual,…
Remastered at Abbey Road, Ask Me Tomorrow (1995), Out of Tune (1998), Excuses for Travellers (2000), Spoon and Rafter (2003), and Puzzles Like You (2006) are available on standard black LP and CD, as well as in a 4AD exclusive slipcase featuring all five albums on clear vinyl, complete with an 8×10″ print. Ask Me Tomorrow features newly updated artwork with photographs by Colin Gray, while all of the other albums retain their original artwork.
Born from the ashes of Slowdive in 1995 by former members Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell, and newly acquired drummer Ian McCutcheon, Mojave 3 began by recording six sparse, acoustic, vocally-driven tracks that stripped away the swirling guitar distortion that had once cloaked…
It doesn’t seem that long ago that singer-songwriter Maya de Vitry’s former group, The Stray Birds, was charming audiences.
Yet that ended in 2018, and de Vitry has been prolific since, issuing her fifth solo album, All My Faith. The album is self-produced and comes on her own independent label, Mad Maker Studio. She originally hails from Lancaster, PA, but has resided in Nashville for nearly a decade. Her crystalline voice is the essence of beauty, while her songwriting continues to grow in personal expression and imagery.
The album embraces folk music, folk-rock, and alt-country influences. Simply put, she’s leaning more toward country here than on her previous releases. The project, recorded in three…
All India Radio’s sixth studio album and the first to be released on vinyl back in 2010. The new vinyl and digital version features gorgeous new artwork from Ryan T Hancock. This repress uses the original 2010 vinyl master by Tony Mantz which was flawless.
The Silent Surf features the voice of Professor Don Gurnett, famous for his NASA ‘space sounds’ (also used by the Kronos Quartet on their famous Sun Ring recordings) and a cameo (on ‘The Bomb’) by The Church’s Steve Kilbey (Under The Milky Way). “Since the turn of the 21st century, All India Radio has mashed the ambient-hop signatures of DJ Shadow, Tortoise and Thievery Corporation with the instantly recognizable guitar soundtracking of Ennio Morricone and Angelo Badalamenti.
A founder of the jazz rock group Isotope, Gary Boyle embarked on a solo career in 1977 and recorded his debut album ‘The Dancer’ later that year. The recording sessions saw Boyle joined by such celebrated alumni as Robin Lumley, Rod Argent, Dave MacRae, Morris Pert and Simon Phillips. The resulting album was first released on Gull Records in 1978 and is now regarded as a classic in the jazz rock genre.
Boyle’s follow-up album was ‘Electric Glide’ and saw him joined by special guest guitarist Gary Moore (then with Colosseum II), along with contributions from Robert Awhai, Simon Phillips, John Giblin and Pete Jacobsen. ‘Electric Glide’ was met with acclaim and rightfully placed Gary Boyle among the great jazz rock players.
…features twelve new songs widely available for the first time: stripped-back versions of songs written before the recording of ‘I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!’ had finished, live favourites heard on McRae’s recent headline tours and festivals appearances, a new version of “Mother Wound” featuring Maisie Peters as well as new tracks elsewhere featuring contributions from Brandi Carlile and Brittney Spencer.
Ever since the release of her stand-out ‘Who Hurt You?’ EP back in 2021, Jensen McRae has been marked out as a special songwriter. Even in that early foray, the Californian managed to effortlessly distil an array of powerful emotions into its six tracks in a way that felt, in moments, truly heartbreaking. So it feels more than…
Discover is the breakthrough third album by Gene Loves Jezebel. Originally released in 1986, Discover captures Gene Loves Jezebel at a watershed moment, propelling the band to an international audience. This 40th Anniversary expanded edition has been remastered at Abbey Road and expanded across a double LP with updated artwork. The second LP contains Glad To Be Alive, a live recording from a 1986 Nottingham show, pressed to vinyl here for the first time since it’s original release.
Recorded live at Nottingham’s Rock City on March 17, 1986, Glad To Be Alive was originally issued as a limited edition 8-song bonus album with initial UK vinyl and cassette copies of Gene Loves Jezebel’s 1986 album, Discover.
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60th anniversary edition of Four Tops Live! offers even more from the two dates at Detroit’s Roostertail club which comprised the original LP. Now expanded with 10 tracks not featured on the original album, the concert features all of the quartet’s most scintillating hits for the label (“Baby I Need Your Loving,” “I Can’t Help Myself,” “It’s the Same Old Song,” “Ask the Lonely,” “Reach Out I’ll Be There”) plus a selection of popular favorites (Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” The Sound of Music‘s “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” The Beatles’ “Michelle,” folk standard “If I Had a Hammer” and Getz/Gilberto/Jobim masterpiece “The Girl from Ipanema”) and even a take on The Supremes’ then-new “You Can’t Hurry Love.” (The single topped the Billboard Hot 100…
Corey King brings a spellbinding, cross-genre fluidity to his third album, 2026’s Change the Wind. A trained jazz trombonist, King is also a singer/songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist who has worked with a diverse array of artists including José James, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, and Iggy Pop. He also took home a Grammy for his co-writing and production work on singer/bassist Esperanza Spalding’s Songwrights Apothecary Lab. He brings all of this experience to bear on his solo work, crafting a holistic blend of alt-R&B, indie rock, and electronica. The follow-up to 2019’s A Loveless Sunken Sun, Change the Wind is a deeply personal production that finds King once again revealing his many-textured sound. The album was also written and…
Kirk Barley has spent time tracing the edges of sound without ever seeming especially interested in arriving at any definitive statement. Arc continues that tendency, but with a new confidence in duration and restraint. Rather than presenting a sequence of discrete statements, these nine tracks seem to breathe through one another, each leaving traces that subtly colour what follows. The record’s title proves apt: its movement is gradual, curved, almost architectural.
The opening stretch is particularly striking. ‘Billow’ emerges with a sense of suspended motion, its slow internal shifts proving more compelling than any obvious destination. ‘Ion’ introduces a denser physicality, its low frequencies lending weight without sacrificing the sense of…
Isn’t the world gorgeous through Sofie Birch-tinted glasses? Listening to “Sefirot Surfa,” a gentle, whimsical romp from Bivabippabualukka, has made the harsh and poorly maintained streets around my East London flat feel magical and new: What portals, it begs a listener to ask, could lie between those cracks in the pavement, or beneath that pile of refuse?
Lush and animated, Bivabippabualukka is an extraordinary break from convention in comparison to Birch’s previous releases, a series of ambient folk records that encouraged scholarly engagement with the minutiae of Birch’s compositional choices. 2025’s soundbath-like Hiraeth, for example, was hardly casual listening, a listening experience that would likely be impeded…
The solo project of Kelly Truong, a producer/songwriter from Southern California, kelz joined the roster of Bayonet Records early on in her music career, with the label issuing her self-recorded debut album, 5 AM and I Can’t Sleep, in 2022. It established a gentle and airy yet dance-oriented sound that she created by combining shimmery synths with fingerpicked guitar, high, gossamer vocals, and simple looped beats.
While the follow-up was four years in the making, it can be described the same way with the caveat that it offers a softer and slightly more intricate version of kelz’s distinctive sound, a sound that never quite moves out of the bedroom headphones and into the club. Its cover design features a blurred photo of Truong.
Spyro Gyra’s 2022 concert in Leverkusen takes the viewer along on one of their trademark odysseys that has sustained them as a top attraction in the jazz world for over fifty years. As founder/bandleader Jay Beckenstein explains, “I’ve always spent a lot of effort in contouring the show to maintain audience interest and hopefully takes them on a bit of a rollercoaster ride with ups and downs to a final conclusion.”
This show is notable for another reason. It was shortly after its filming that keyboardist Tom Schuman decided to end his long tenure with the band to move to Spain. So it exists as a final document of an era of the band with its combination of these two musicians. “When I now listen to those recordings…
VA – Where the Willow and the Dogwood Grow: Words and Music By Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan (2026)
With undeniable cultural gravity, the team of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan join luminaries such as Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, Randy Newman, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Leonard Cohen, Lee Hazlewood, Brian Wilson and Laura Nyro in Ace Records’ long-running series of multi-artist compilations celebrating the great American songwriters of the modern era. Hundreds of artists from all walks of music have recorded songs from Waits and Brennan’s matchless catalogue, 19 of the finest of which comprise this hand-picked selection, including many chosen by the songwriters themselves.
Few artists have remapped the terrain of popular music, and culture at large, like Tom Waits. Over the course of five decades…
…include the remastered album plus two discs of rarities, including previously unreleased tracks, B-sides, demos, acoustic recordings, covers, live performances and BBC sessions.
In the two years that followed the release of their debut album, Keane established themselves as a promising part of the mainstream rock canon. Hit singles like “Somewhere Only We Know,” “Bedshaped,” and “Everybody’s Changing” made Hopes and Fears a transatlantic hit, earning the trio two Brit Awards, a Grammy nomination, and a host of sold-out world tours. Critics deemed them as likeable and as accessible as Coldplay, but Keane’s return isn’t as buoyant as their initial introduction, even if it keeps melody at the forefront. Whereas Hopes and Fears faced…
Sometimes a solo project and sometimes a band, Jilian Medford’s IAN SWEET has switched up its sound from album to album, sometimes favoring bright guitar pop, sometimes shimmery, synth-aided noise pop, and other times applying heavier guitar tones and dissonance to the songwriter’s personal, melodic songs. With IAN SWEET’s fifth album, Shiverstruck, she delivers her most direct-sounding material yet, which is to say that she sticks with mostly full-band arrangements of amplified indie and synthy pop, but makes room for balladry, the occasional appearance of instruments like strings and piano, and a more vulnerable sensibility. The occasion is a breakup album that also carries the weight of a relocation from N.Y.C. to her hometown of L.A. and…
…The expanded tracklist appends rare live versions of tracks like “Fat Lip,” “All She’s Got,” “Crazy Amanda Bunkface,” “Machine Gun,” and “What We’re All About”.
It would be a mistake to view Sum 41 as just another second-rate band cashing in on the early-’00s punk-pop boom, even if it did recruit Jerry Finn to produce All Killer No Filler. Just as Finn had done for both blink-182 and Green Day, he charges Sum 41’s punk-pop with a razor-sharp edge, the sort of dynamic in-your-face sound that helps this music cross over to MTV and radio so well. Besides the notable production, a lot of credit should go to the band as well. Its songwriting is obviously more diverse here than it was a year earlier on its debut album,…
Charles Lloyd pays homage to his dear friend and longtime collaborator Zakir Hussain with Sangam & Friends, an extraordinary document of the deep musical affinity between the legendary saxophonist/flutist and master tablaist along with their Sangam trio mate drummer Eric Harland. The album is built around studio recordings made in Mumbai in 2009 for an album that was begun but never completed featuring an expanded ensemble with Carnatic singer Vijay Prakash, Sabir Khan on sarangi, Rakesh Chaurasia on bansuri, Ranjit Barot on keyboard, and Niladri Kumar on sitar.
…Lloyd had first heard Indian music in 1957 – Ravi Shankar and Hussain’s father the great table master Alla Rakha – and it’s surprising that he didn’t travel to the source until four decades later.
The newest offering from pianist/composer Marco Benevento, Glera, finds the artist expanding his sonic palette, working with different vocalists to score the retro Italian movies playing in his head.
Benevento was heavily inspired by Italian film scores and melody for this album, which uses cinematic lines on every track, providing emotion and depth to the mostly instrumental tunes. Benevento plays more of a role as composer/leader here; a jamband veteran, Marco lets the songwriting be the focus throughout Glera as the tunes run short, set the visual scene, and move on. Opening with the excellent “Frizzante”, the joyful instrumental bounces along with a sunshiny feeling and could have been a theme song to a 70’s television show with its bright,…