Singer Bongeziwe Mabandla’s voice, at its highest register, is a singularly plaintive falsetto that articulates so much even before lyrics become a consideration. Over the course of five albums, his voice has increasingly been couched in a synth-heavy, polyglot electro-folk sound, courtesy of producer Tiago Correia-Paulo, who has produced the singer’s last four albums.
This malleable frame accommodates the increasingly bigger venues the artist now plays, while also proving well-suited to radio. And yet, no matter the casing, Bongeziwe’s voice never loses the personability that is its currency. Thanks to its thoughtful sequencing, the album unfolds conceptually in three acts.
To this end, ‘Libambe Lingatshoni’, in which…
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Sometimes, all you need is a change. When Nora Stanley, an accomplished saxophonist who has worked with, among others, Beth Orton and The New Pornographers, moved to New York City from Oakland, California, she didn’t know she’d be inspired to write so many songs that she’d release an album of her own. “It’s a very unique and specific experience to live in a city that’s hyper-stimulating,” Stanley says.
Her songs are elegant, poetic, and lush, more of a retreat from the city’s chaos. They act as a way for Stanley to “slow things down and process them.” An experienced collaborator herself, Stanley enlisted a wide range of musicians for her debut album, including Shahzad Ismaily, Benny Bock, and Nate Mendelsohn.
Dent May has released many fine albums, most of which have a sweetly chewy soft rock center and all were made by May himself at the computer. He might have invited over the occasional guest, but otherwise he did everything himself. On 2026’s The Big One, May made the decision to change up his way of making records and went into an actual recording studio. Once there he invited in several of his friends to add instrumentation and vocals to the tracks. The result is the warmest, most expansive record he has made yet. The songs are the usual melange of Nilsson-esque baroque pop, gently percolating disco, and sun-bleached singer/songwriter-style ballads, with none of the power pop that crept into the previous album. It’s a predictably nice batch of tunes that…
In 1957, John Coltrane was still building the foundation of a career that would eventually alter the course of modern music. Having already established himself as a vital member of Miles Davis’s first great quintet, the fully realized artist behind Blue Train, Giant Steps, A Love Supreme, and countless other landmarks had not yet completely emerged. Coltrane, his debut album as a leader for Prestige, captures him at the beginning of that evolution. Coltrane arrived between his work with Davis and his celebrated tenure with Thelonious Monk.
…The album opens with “Bakai,” where the melody feels slightly unsettled before the rhythm section settles into a comfortable groove, creating an interesting push-and-pull between…
The mark that Miles Davis left not only on jazz but also on hip-hop, rock, and funk cannot be overstated. This year marks what would have been the 100th birthday of the jazz legend, and the year-round centennial celebration is seeing multiple reissues from labels. As part of their Original Jazz Classics series, Craft Recordings is releasing Cookin’ with The Miles Davis Quintet featuring all-analog mastering from the original tapes by Cohearent Audio.
Recorded during sessions between Birth of the Cool and Kind of Blue, the quintet recorded enough material to span four albums (Cookin’, Relaxin’, Steamin’, and Workin’). Cookin’ finds Miles Davis leading what many still consider the definitive first great quintet with John Coltrane…
Included in the booklet for The Planned Child is a personal note by its creator, Amsterdam-based Avishai Darash that, while brief, casts an illuminating light on the solo piano pieces presented on the 45-minute release. Conspicuous by its absence, however, is anything bio-related, which is perhaps surprising when his professional background is so varied and extensive. Reviewing the experiences he’s had allows for an enhanced appreciation of the music he created for the release. By his own admission, The Planned Child came together over the past year, but “has been more than sixteen years in the making.” It makes sense, then, to first acquire some impression of what happened in the time leading up to the album’s creation before turning to its contents.
The ’60s gave us many artistic firsts from pop and performance art to psychedelic rock and free jazz to interspecies music-making between humans and whales. From saxophonist Paul Winter’s Common Ground to Judy Collins‘ Whales and Nightingales to pioneering synthesist Bernie Krause’s Ocean Wonders, musicians have engaged in and recorded a call-and-response with these massive sea mammals that has produced some singular sonic wonders and oddities. With his cheekily titled new album, Orcas’ Greatest Hits, Jim Nollman is adding what may be the most varied and expansive chapter to this tiny but intriguing corner of the musical universe.
Nollman is an avant-garde sound artist, guitarist and naturalist whose work stands at…
Since 1964, there have been numerous interpretations of The Beatles’ music. Stax, jazz, classical, Motown, country, Bing Crosby, Laibach, and easy listening have all had a go at Beatles cover albums. Mystic Liverpool: The Beatles’ Psychedelic Psongbook may be the most original, and after 60-some years, that is a huge accomplishment. Jah Wobble and his sons, John T and Charlie Wardle, have collaborated on a dub/drone version of Beatles songs, focusing on their more psychedelic tracks, which makes great sense.
…On paper, this might look like it would not work. The complete opposite is true. The use of traditional Chinese instruments, alongside Wobble’s distinct and trademark bass, creates an unusual yet fascinating take on these songs.
1973 was a pivotal time for Lee “Scratch” Perry, as it was the year he built his fabled Black Ark studio, where he created much of his most celebrated work, and he released Upsetters 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle, often noted as the first full-length dub album. Up until then, he worked as a freelance producer, often recording at King Tubby’s studio. Flashing Echo, part of Doctor Bird’s comprehensive series of Perry’s single productions, compiles one last batch of material before he had fully switched over to recording at Black Ark. During this period, Perry was working with deejays and toasters like Dillinger, I-Roy, and U-Roy as well as singers including Leo Graham, David Isaacs, and Junior Byles. Several of these tracks appeared as singles on Perry’s own Black…
There are inherent pitfalls for a band when they set about recreating a sound from the past with exacting precision. It’s far too easy for their work to sound like a hollow pastiche if they don’t play with undeniable energy or come up with a brilliant batch of songs. On their second album Was It Always This Way, Real Numbers do everything they can to sound exactly like a band who would have recorded for Sarah Records in 1989. Except for when they sound like they wanted to be signed to Creation in 1986. The order of the day is echoing guitar jangle, vocals that express powerful amounts of melancholy, synths that moan like faraway ghosts, and a rhythm section that sound like they studied every move the Cure made in the early ’80s. They have the sound down dead to…
André Cymone is here to let you know that the rumors of funk’s extinction have been greatly exaggerated. He would know. Cymone was not only central to Prince’s sound as the Purple One’s bassist in the early years, he was also a major part of the Minneapolis funk scene even before Prince was crowned. And he’s had an impressive run on his own ever since, including not only some killer solo albums, but production and songwriting for Jody Watley, Adam Ant, and loads of others.
In recent years, though, Cymone’s solo outings have been few and far between, so The Resurrection of Funk works as a welcome reintroduction to the guts and grandeur of his groove kingdom. That there’s more than a passing sonic similarity to Prince in Cymone’s…
The contemporary blues community is densely populated with posers long on affectation and short on authenticity. Not so Peter Parcek for whom the blues carries truths that resonate in such a deep and abiding way that his own musical articulations, plus those of kindred spirits within and without the genre, become expressions straight from the heart and the soul.
In fact, as demonstrated on Most of the Time, this native of Connecticut — who moved to England in the Sixties just in time for the blues boom to echo throughout the British Isles — may very well suffer for an embarrassment of riches; the surfeit of considerable talent at his disposal renders moot the blemishes pockmarking this 78-minute-plus album.
Kelly Doyle is a Telecaster-favoring guitarist based in Houston, Texas, whose eclecticism has led him to play for a variety of acts in a range of musical styles. A musician whose use of ambient textures is at least as important as his guitar technique, Doyle has released Thieves, an album that plots a scenic route through the open terrain of his musical world. While his EPs Okay Okie, In the Weeds, and Stranger Danger are draped in ambient backgrounds, Thieves opens with the title track and a great deal of intention, driven by Doyle’s focus on making an album where the melodies really stand out. Mission accomplished, although it may require the listener to adopt a broader definition of melody. We’re not talking about something you would hear on a pop song, but…
In the last few years, Getdown Services – the duo of Ben Sadler and Josh Law – have gone from being an underground outfit with a cult following, to selling out entire tours, playing Later… With Jools Holland and being selected to perform as part of Harry Styles’ Meltdown festival. Since forming “accidentally” in lockdown, the pair – originally from Minehead and now based in Bristol – soon grew a reputation for playing raucous high-octane shows, usually shirtless and dripping in sweat, while performing a concoction of genre-fluid tunes that range from slick electro to lo-fi garage rock, with lyrics that are ironic and irreverent, as well as surreal and silly.
Given the project was originally based as much on trying to crack each other up as on musical…
How to honor women? Nina Winder-Lind, the Swedish songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, follows that exact question throughout her debut album, Wild Love. Comprised of songs so ephemeral that they refute their own existence, as if they had emerged ex nihilo and could disappear again. Like an interlocutor, Winder-Lind listens to her ancestors’ tales, tracing a lineage from them to her to the past she will become to someone else. When performing as a member of the Brighton-based, post-punk band the New Eves, Winder-Lind inveighs against a patriarchal society, backed by three other steadfast Eves. What you will hear is her guttural, quivering vibrato reverberating over a bowed cello, played with such verve and stridency it could be the rumbling of earth…
In the music industry, rawness is a commodity. Struggle and hardship alone are not enough. They have to be tapped into. They have to be shaped. This process of shaping is sometimes called art, but it also results in a product fit to be sold and consumed, however ragged, however scratchy it may seem. Some artists understand that they are trapped in this paradoxical bind, but they don’t necessarily know how to escape from it. Elliott Smith and Kurt Cobain fall into this group. Others have successfully learned to laugh at it from the outside, using surreal humour as a distancing technique even as their music leans into the lo-fi. Think early Stephen Malkmus.
Sometimes a new artist emerges, a fresh voice with a fresh take on confession and…
In 2024, Hovvdy released their most ambitious album yet, a nearly hour-long eponymous double LP that experimented further with the duo’s combination of earthy, earnest lo-fi pop and reality-bending atmospheric effects. It was produced by Hovvdy’s Charlie Martin and Will Taylor, along with Andrew Sarlo and longtime collaborator Ben Littlejohn. It was also their most personal album to date, with Martin remarking that he could be heard crying on some of the songs. While still inhabiting the intimate spaces and loose performance style they’re known for, Hovvdy took a distinctly different approach to the follow-up, Big World, which was recorded with Littlejohn. The album, their sixth, reflects a deliberate attempt by the duo to make something…
t would be hard to find a more arresting opener to any album of 2026 than the jarring discordant flutes and blast of brass which announce Grace Cummings’ fourth LP, Bloodhorse! In fact, let’s push that further and boldly say it would be impossible. Opening track ‘The Hills are Alive …’ arrives with a sudden impact of unusual sounds from all directions; there’s no chance of giving this music only half your attention. If you had hoped to press play, sit back and let the music fill your background, you’ll be disappointed. Cummings belts out “The hills are alive with the sound of – ” and, as the subject of the song appears, the music develops into a big, bold orchestral journey; it’s a clichéd epic presented in an entirely serious juxtaposition with the subject matter.
…Recorded between 1988 and 1989 in a small 8-track home studio in Amman, Jordan, Pieces of a Dream captures a side of the Arab music scene rarely documented: a group of musicians deeply inspired by jazz, soul, yacht rock and city pop, creating music that sounds closer to late-night LA or London than what most would associate with Jordan at the time.
Nechazz was formed by Palestinian-Jordanian musician Basim Said & Khaldoon Nasser and Iraqi singer and guitarist Kassim Sabounchi. While the trio became locally known for their live shows at the iconic Amman club Rumours, the music they wrote and recorded together was never officially released and remained unheard even among friends and family of the band.
Coming from a historic lineage, The Womack Sisters’ self-titled debut album is a throwback to the heyday of soul. Expansive and luxurious, focused on interlocking, ardent vocals, the trio of Kucha, Zeimani, and BG makes a strong career opening statement with these eleven efforts.
Perfectly paired with the retro-soul label Daptone Records, the backing music supports the vocals at every step, swelling when called upon or receding when needed. As the granddaughters of Sam Cooke, daughters of Womack & Womack (Zekkariyas & Zeriiyaa), and nieces of Bobby Womack, this music is their heritage.
The trio work best when all take turns singing lead and harmonizing, such as on the head bopping opener “Chauffeur”, grounding…