To celebrate 50 years since the formation of Rainbow and the release of the debut album Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, Demon Music present a comprehensive box set covering the years 1975-1976. As well as including the seminal first two studio album, the box set includes a trilogy of live albums from Rainbow’s debut world tour and documenting the band’s first shows in Europe with shows from Cologne, Dusseldorf and Nurnberg. The final disc of this 9 disc set features a multitude of rare mixes, edits and studio rehearsal performances all newly mastered by Andy Pearce & Matt Wortham.
…Rainbow was initially formed as a Ritchie Blackmore solo project in the early months of 1975, after a Deep Purple tour of the previous year. On that tour, they were supported by…
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Nashville-based guitarist and composer Kevin Coleman is a far-reaching musician who likes to take the instrumental acoustic guitar genre and fully maximise its potential. His debut album, 2018’s First Songs, used the purely solo set-up to demonstrate his ambition and prowess, while 2024’s Imaginary Conversations saw him expanding the soundscape to incorporate a broad range of ideas.
K.C. Blues is a natural follow-up to Imaginary Conversations that Kevin began recording pretty much as soon as that album landed. This extended writing and recording process has resulted in a set that feels diverse, bringing in experimental folk, Americana and blues over six tracks and forty minutes. Like on Conversations,…
If you’re a fan of Gram Parsons or Emmylou Harris, husband-and-wife duo Eleese and Matthew Meschery’s band name Brand New Heartache is bound to fire a spark of recognition. You might also be pleased to hear that the inspiration of Parsons and Harris can be felt throughout A New Alchemy, the couple’s debut album, as the Californian natives – who are recent transplants to Tennessee – showcase beautiful vocals, tight harmonies and, of course, a tale or two of heartache.
The airy, acoustic Montreal sees the couple dreaming of the city, of walking its streets as revellers spill from bars and the smell from bakeries fills the air, their harmonies so tight there is no room at all for movement. ‘Next Best Thing’ finds the couple taking alternating…
Born in rural Bandjoun and raised in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, Kareyce Fotso is the daughter of a sculptor father and a businesswoman mother who also worked as a professional mourner. A former biochemistry student, she chose theatre and music instead. Accompanying herself on instruments including guitar, bells, percussion and sanza, as she does on this, her fifth album, she has since become one of Central Africa’s most distinctive voices. Her métier is a sort of bluesy Afropop with social conscience and strong emotional wallop. On Gwà, named after a traditional women’s healing circle, she turns that voice towards testimony, solidarity and survival, delivering a song cycle devoted to female survivors speaking truth to power.
DoYeon Kim works in a space informed by jazz and free improvisation, imbued with vestiges of folk music. She plays a gayageum, a plucked zither, which is not an instrument normally found in these contexts. Joining Kim are violist Mat Maneri, bassist Henry Fraser and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. The musicians are well attuned, bringing out detailed interactions between subsets of the group and the quartet as a whole.
The opening track, “The Beats of Distant Thunder,” is a case in point, with Kim and Maneri beginning the proceedings in the lead, only to have Fraser and Sorey lock in a double time groove that spurs the action further forward. Maneri and Fraser trade solos, and Kim plucks a line imitating Sorey’s use of cymbals. The whole group brings…
Before they shaped the future of music, and before they led the indispensable label that housed this sea-changing output, PC Music’s A. G. Cook and Danny L Harle were just two British kids — “Dux Kidz,” as they called themselves — who wanted to have fun. Their 2012 output under the “Dux” name ranged from happy-go-lucky pop to artfully disfigured hip-hop and even impressionistic classical music.
All of these tracks featured commercial instrumentation pulled from romplers, MIDI banks, and sample CDs — an unabashed embrace of sounds once considered tacky and undesirable. Why make an honest attempt at distinguished music with such cheeky components? Because that sort of thing sounded like a damn fun time.
Alex Cameron probably didn’t mean to release his album right after the trailer for Digger dropped, but it’s mighty good timing. Digger is a Tom Cruise venture and appears to be halfway between Tropic Thunder’s gonzo work and Christian Bale’s Oscar angling in Vice. Both Vice and Digger ogle like a carnival barker at the transformation of a usually chiseled Hollywood star getting fat, as if the gravitas and comedy simply spring from calories and discrepancy.
“I put on a ton of weight / For a role I didn’t get / Now I’m always late for set / Getting panned in the LA Times / Getting tanned on the internet,” Cameron snarls at the beginning of his new album, Late to Set. Pumped up and steely “Eye of the Tiger” guitars thud behind him, a warbly…
Welcomer’s Miles Sutton observes the world from a remove, delivering even intimate scenes from an ironic remove. Most of the time, he’s only half singing, through the verse injecting conversational lyrics with the barest tinge of melody.
Yet in the chorus, Sutton reveals a fascination with pop: the arrangements bristle with hooks and billow with strings, multi-voiced singing and rock instruments.
This is Sutton’s first full-length album as Welcomer, following a self-titled EP in 2022. The Wellington, New Zealand artist enlisted producer and engineer Jesse Austin-Stewart for this one, working with him to develop layered but buoyant orchestrations for these songs, which glisten and shimmer with trebly picking, swoops of…
“Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.” Famously uttered by bassist-guitarist Greg Lake, those words encapsulate the theatricality, thrills, breadth, and fascination surrounding Brain Salad Surgery — Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s fourth studio album. Originally released in late 1973, it finds the trio taking front-to-back control of its situation and incorporating several studio firsts. The platinum-certified effort also stands as one of the greatest prog-rock feats in history. Its cohesive blend of musicianship, songwriting, and production set a standard that, decades later, remains revered amid fans and critics alike.
Mastered at Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab’s California studio, the reissue label’s numbered-edition hybrid SACD of Brain Salad Surgery presents…
The lo-fi, melancholic slowcore of Duster proves a magical fit with the atmospheric, pleasingly pastoral sampledelica of Dirty Art Club; they teamed together under the name Sooj to make the excellent Crusher. A drifting, meandering, and hazily trippy album, it’s made up of songs that are a soundtrack for staring out the window on a cloudy day wondering where it all went wrong. Or perhaps accompaniment for a long bike ride in the autumn haze of a late afternoon, twisting and turning down unknown streets losing oneself in the music. So, a lot like a Duster album, but somehow even more so. The lovely samples and washes of sound Matt Cagle (aka Dirty Art Club) fits between the strums, thrums, and croons of Clay Parton and Canaan Amber (aka Duster)…
Many bands have written songs about surviving, whether that’s dissecting the circumstances of life events or analysing pain, but very few make survival sound so exhilarating. On their debut album, Hoping As a Coping Mechanism, Bristol trio MOULD manage to tap into and bottle the nervous energy of being human in the world today, then they shake it until it fizzes over the edges. “Misanthrope” immediately launches the listener into a paradox of simultaneously combustible and life-affirming noise.
Building on the ferocious promise of their previous EPs the band allows themselves more time and space to broaden their sonic vocabulary here. Lead singles “Float” and “Falling Posture” hinted at this evolution and within the context…
As Michael Cloud Duguay points out, church organs are the only instruments that form part of a building. Organs only play in the place where they were constructed, and people come to them if they want to listen.
Duguay is a composer and producer from Ontario, and he describes Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go as “almost” a documentary about organs. Using recordings made during a nine-day road trip around the remote fringes of Newfoundland, the album is built around the sounds of organs in seven different churches – in places called things like Agathuna, Bonavista and Cupids.
Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go is a complex, multi-layered album with a strong documentary flavour – not only bringing these crumbling…
Terry Riley has always had a propensity for cosmic whimsy. As such, and given the fluidity of his work over the last decades, it comes as no surprise that his contribution to flautist Claire Chase’s multi-decade Density 2036 project arrived not in the form of Sibelius-drafted PDFs but as a colourful sketchbook of caricatures, flying creatures, and doodled marginalia.
Expectedly, Riley’s non-conformist approach resonated deeply with Chase’s vision of a future flute repertoire – one that lives outside the rigid boundaries of classical music academia.
Fittingly, The Holy Liftoff spends most of its time in breezy motion and joyous buoyancy, where the eight-part flute chorus, multi-tracked by Chase, and JACK Quartet’s strings generate…
Drum-less, bass-less, and piano-less, this improvising quartet won’t leave you thinking about what’s missing for any longer than it takes to read this sentence. A pair of woodwinds, a couple of strings, and some restrained electronics are more than enough to keep the frantic foursome teetering on the edge of chaos for 40 minutes.
The makers of Heavy Handed are equal contributors, but the centerpiece is Camila Nebbia’s tenor sax. The Berlin-based Argentinian transplant seems to be part of a stellar new release every month, and it’s easy to hear why. She is a font of ideas, rarely stretching into extended technique or even reaching for peaks of intensity or volume, just pushing the group forward.
The other half of the woodwind section is…
Making guitar pop/rock (of any kind) work more often than not depends on the synergy of musicians involved, rather than the guitar expertise, and sometimes even the songwriting quality. That synergy seems to be the driving force for the guitar pop Manchester-to-London duo atmos bloom (Tilda Gratton and Curtis Paterson) create on their second album Everythingness.
The duo, who also became life partners, create the kind of guitar pop where that of every kind from above parentheses comes into play – it can be dream pop, it can be twee pop, it could be jangle pop or whatnot – the thing is Gratton and Paterson practically cover it all here. And they wrap it in some very good to excellent songwriting and equal quality harmonies, with high quality…
On Christian Name, an album inspired by the devastating loss of a child, Charles Wesley Godwin narrates his journey through despondency, grief, and redemption to a new understanding of his faith.
Godwin explains, “These songs really meant a lot to me. There’s parts of me and parts of the things that I’ve gone through in the last couple years that are in each and every song on this album.”
The title of the album – Christian Name – and the cover art were inspired by his late grandfather, Charles Godwin, who was a preacher in the Methodist Church. Alongside two standout collaborations, the catchy “Better That Way” with Luke Combs and the moving “Hey There Son” with Wyatt Flores, Christian Name finds …
…2CD edition with a second disc containing 10 of Neil Diamond’s hits.
…Wild at Heart is composed of outtakes recorded with producer Rick Rubin in 2007 for the Home Before Dark album (which was released the next year). Diamond has recently completed the tracks for this release.
Diamond and Rubin – whose production credits at the time already encompassed Johnny Cash, Tom Petty, Donovan, Run-DMC, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and numerous others – first teamed up for 2005’s 12 Songs. Rubin encouraged Diamond to go with a raw, minimalist sound for the album, echoing back to his earliest recordings on Bang in the 1960s. Crucially, he also encouraged Diamond to once again pick up his guitar and…
Perhaps at the end of time we will feel the full weight of history hitting us from behind like a train. Perhaps as the world limps towards its final moments we’ll experience a flickering, cut-up dream movie made up of random constituent parts of human history.
These are the sort of thoughts that must have preoccupied Creekbed Carter Hogan during the making of Peasants Revolt, a record that acknowledges the possibility of an imminent apocalypse but is steeped in a wide range of musical and social histories: medieval uprisings, the Haitian Revolution, twenty-first-century trans activism, Americana, political folk music.
To say Peasants Revolt provides a rich and varied listening experience is…
…Made up of teachers, activists and artists, London’s Shovel Dance Collective recontextualise the folk canon, steepings their songs in field recordings, subterranean drone passages and the theatrical grandeur of second wave post-rock to better fit the realities of modern Britain.
One of the shining lights in Shovel Dance is Nick Granata. A supremely gifted vocalist, Granata’s introduction to traditional music only began around the time of the recent folk resurgence, but they have since become an invigorating and uniquely moving presence among practitioners of the style, as if ANOHNI chose the pedal harmonium over the piano. Their debut solo LP, My Heart is Running Backwards! A Martial Artist! With a Closed Fist! Woof! only cements further…
The title of foodman’s new album, HIKARIGA- SASHIKOMU, translates from Japanese as “light shines in” — meaning, a sign of hope and optimism seen from a dark or difficult place. It’s a clear indicator that Foodman — real name Takahide Higuchi — is writing from a deeply personal space, not just through the emotions he conveys, but in the sense he’s inventing his own musical language as he goes.
Higuchi has been producing since the early 2010s. But it was his 2021 Hyperdub debut Yasuragi Land that really put him on the map: a quixotic spin on footwork that invested the sound’s jittery repetitions with a kawaii sense of play. Since Yasuragi Land, Higuchi has continued to release (slightly) more formally straightforward…