When you run a record label, no matter how big or small it is, and you are an artist yourself, you have the possibility to spread your wings as wide as you can, no matter how good (or not) it is.
Philadelphia’s Douglas Dulgarian has such capabilities. He runs an up-and-coming indie label (Julia’s War), plays in tagabow and They Are Gutting a Body of Water, but also spreads his ideas, along with Scott Turner (hooky) and Sam Silbert (hooky, circle of fire) in a project that goes by the name of god of war, which just released its second album molly picture.
When you have the freedom to abandon any restrictions it can often lead you to excess, but this trio of musicians seems to have found quite a good balance between…
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Comparatively speaking, Rotherham appears in the news more than most British towns of an equivalent size. And much of that news is not good. Much of it is representative of poverty, social disenfranchisement, and the ugly face of flag-waving Britain. But self-released, 2020s grass roots indie rockers The Reytons offer a reminder of working class community power, a band who hark back to the days when the only way out of big city estates was through football and pop.
Their last couple of albums (of four, including this one), made it to No.1 and No.2 in the UK album charts, respectively. This quartet aren’t some music-journo-acclaimed-for-five-minutes flash-in-the-pan. In 2024 they put on a 20,000-capacity concert in Rotherham’s Clifton Park,…
Since 2007, whether alongside the MJC Trio, the El Arranque Orchestra or leading his own sextet, bandoneonist Pablo Jaurena has been developing an outstanding musical career. His latest work – his second as a soloist – is one of the high points of that journey. Here, the composer has brought together 31 bandoneon players to pay homage to the defining instrument of tango.
The album contains four amazing historical rescues. These are meticulous recreations or reinterpretations of emblematic works made with some of the musicians who originally recorded them, such as ‘Canaro en París’, which features Víctor Lavallén, Osvaldo Pugliese’s bandoneon player. Five compositions were written especially for the record, among them,…
A Supreme Blue is a collaboration between New Orleans trumpeter and composer Nicholas Payton and 21st century Virginia jazz-funk ensemble Butcher Brown. In celebration of the centennial birthdays of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, this 70-minute set offers complete performances of Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme. These aren’t straight renderings or re-creations; the album reflects the original recordings as guideposts for reinterpetation using a canny hybrid of jazz, hip-hop, dub, funk, house rhythms, electronics, layered production, and modern grooves.
On opener “So What,” the unmistakable call-and-response structure is replaced by a syncopated, soul-funk groove introduced by a heavily reverbed dubwise vamp from R4ND4ZZO’s…
Chicago-based bassist Christopher Dammann has a very limited discography as a leader, but that shouldn’t discourage you from checking out his latest work, Dead Words. On this album, five spiritual contrafacts are reimagined by Dammann’s cohesive and highly synergistic quintet, featuring the incomparable talents of saxophonist Jon Irabagon, trumpeter James Davis, keyboardist Jim Baker, and drummer Mike Reed.
With stately grandeur, “Montrose B” is an assertive opener, a pure post-bop piece that dazzles and invigorates. Following a magnetic bass introduction, the attractive theme is brought to the fore by the horn players, who exchange ideas freely under the spell of the swinging vibrancy coursing beneath them.
…Waylon Payne released his first album, The Drifter, in 2004, yet it took 16 years for the second one, Blue Eyes, The Harlot, The Queer, The Pusher & Me to appear. Now 6 years on, we have, in Payne’s own words, “the third instalment”. As Payne offered in a recent interview with Americana UK, “That’s what I’ve been joking about. I kind of loosely call it Volume Three in a ‘Life Well Lived’ series”. He likes to tell stories, and it’s clear that the album provides a continuation of the stories told in his previous records.
Payne is very much from the country ‘outlaw’ tradition. His mother was GRAMMY® Award-winning country singer Sammi Smith, and his father was a longtime member of Willie Nelson’s band, guitarist Jody Payne. He was named…
Alternate Routes is Reckless Kelly’s reclamation project: re-recordings of fan favorites they no longer owned, inspired by artists like Taylor Swift and John Fogerty who fought similar battles over their masters.
“These songs are your memories, your years on the road, your life’s work,” says Cody Braun. Rather than recreate the originals, the band captured how the songs have naturally evolved through decades of live performance — tracked in just three days at Arlyn Studios in Austin.
…With one exception, all the songs here come from Under the Table and Above the Sun (2003), Wicked Twisted Road (2005), and Bulletproof (2008), with a heavy emphasis on the latter two. (The one exception is their song…
Over the last few years Kurt Wagner has increasingly used Lambchop as a vehicle for musical exploration, with albums like This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You), Showtunes and The Bible reimagining the sound traditionally associated with the name. Much of the experimentation in sound was centred around his vocals, which were often processed through software and devices such as vocoders and autotune.
On Punching the Clown there’s still an on ongoing preoccupation with the human voice but the approach is different, primarily being focused on how voices complement each other rather than how they can be manipulated into different shapes. Alongside the human voice another key sound on the album comes from the banjo,…
…CD edition features the Bob Dylan cover “In the Summertime”.
Margaret Glaspy’s latest album, I Am Both, is a low-key masterwork of observational wisdom, lilting melodies, and sharp wit. She delivers her stinging lines with a conversational ease, wielding the authority of hard-won experience over ringing guitar licks that echo the guilelessness of her storytelling. Her intimacy compels us to immediately identify with the singer, even when she is singing about people other than herself.
…On songs such as the dreamy “Common Ground” and the more somber “Petty”, the singer bites off lyrics about mutual disappointments. She keeps the lyrics simple to show how basic and trivial spitefulness can be, and at the same…
A running theory: The youth yearn for breakbeats. The frenetic electronics of Nineties dance music have rumbled beneath the surface of indie rock and pop for some time now. The current wave of new acts — think Fcukers, Underscores, and of course, PinkPantheress — wield the sound with an uncanny magnetism, as if communicating from a post-digital future. Ear, the London- and New York-based duo comprised of Jonah Paz and Yaelle Avtan, who met while students at Bard College, have become the type of buzzing indie band you used to hear about in the mid-2000s, fitting as the renaissance of that era’s sounds points to a more spiritual than aesthetic concern.
Following the release of their debut single, “Nerves,” in 2024, the pair have built…
Incorporating field recordings and other organic sounds into a keyboard-heavy atmosphere is nothing new. Still, Ben Dexter Cooley is a master of this genre, and Forager shows him doing it with grace and eloquence. St. Silva is Cooley’s electro-acoustic project, described on his Bandcamp page as a “musician, researcher, and creative technologist”. Forager is a composite of material recorded months before its recontextualization. “Time creates distance,” explains Cooley, “sometimes a healthy distance, between the art and the artist,” shares St. Silva. “This is a document, a marker of where I was during a moment of time and the sounds that inspired me.”
An overwhelming sense of calm envelops the listener immediately, as “And the Catbird Sings”…
This album presents Jakub Hrůša and the Bamberger Symphoniker in the complete cycle of Bohuslav Martinů‘s six symphonies, recorded at the Bamberg Concert Hall. All six works date from the composer’s American exile and represent his mature compositional voice, and the cycle marks the first complete Martinů symphony set in Deutsche Grammophon’s catalogue, as well as a significant continuation of Hrůša’s long-standing advocacy for the composer both in the concert hall and on record.
The First Symphony establishes the cycle’s interpretive character immediately. The Scherzo is taken at a brisk tempo, but it is the sharpness of articulation and the transparency of the orchestral texture that make the movement…
Martin Newell has been releasing wonderful, distinctly British psych-pop as The Cleaners from Venus since the early ’80s. He’s kind of like the UK’s Robert Pollard or R. Stevie Moore, with a seemingly endless well of earworms, all recorded at home on whatever equipment is at hand. (He’s actually written a book on home recording.)
Beryl & Ruff Go Shopping is the umpteenth Cleaners from Venus album, made on an 8-track Portastudio, and it’s pretty hi-fi as far as their records go.
At this point, Newell’s got a signature sound — jazzy, orchestral pop influenced by The Kinks, The Beatles, and other sunshine psychedelia — and a vocal delivery that leans into the Britishness of it all and is as distinctive as his melodies.
The key track gives the album its title. “Where the Fades Meet” opens with swelling strings, which are swiftly underpinned by groovy, shuffling, percussion. The lyrics are carried by a chorale singing of a “fading signal”, “stillness” and “shadows.” It seems to about what lies in the gaps between the perceivable. The melody has a vaguely eastern Mediterranean lilt. Overall, it leans into evoking an exotica-inclined Rotary Connection – the late-Sixties/early Seventies outfit that was a core influence on acid jazz.
“Where the Fades Meet” is the sixth track on the seventh album – there has also been a compilation – that Andy Dragazis has recorded under his Blue States guise. The first, Nothing Changes Under the Sun, was issued in 2000.
Blurring boundaries, dissolving distance, and creating coherence, Velella, the 4th studio album by the Brisbane, Australia trio East of West exhibits the group’s distinctive style. The trio is led by Bosnian-born composer Goran Gajić (double bass), with Philip Griffin on oud and laouto, and Malindi Morris on percussion. Collectively, these musicians produce a compelling blend of Balkan-influenced rhythms and melodic motifs.
Both the album and its title track derive their name from the species Velella velella (by-the-wind sailor), a colonial aquatic organism, which, like the band itself, is composed of intuitively connected, interdependent individuals. The result is a cornucopia of varied and complex time signatures and rare instrumentation.
Alto saxophonist Mike DiRubbo, an acclaimed artist on the New York City jazz scene for more than three decades, traveled all the way to Vancouver, British Columbia, in October 2025 to record Way Out Northwest with a hand-picked all-Canadian rhythm section: pianist Tilden Webb, bassist Jodi Proznick and drummer Jesse Cahill.
The result of their collaboration is a sturdy, swinging slice of contemporary jazz embracing half a dozen of DiRubbo’s eloquent original compositions and others by pianist Hotep Idris Galeta (“Song for My Queen”) and trombonist Steve Davis (“A Star for Chick”). The playlist includes a pair of dedications, to trumpeter Jim Rotondi (“Jimbo”) and pianist Harold Mabern (the closing “One for Mabes”), which are…
An atonal meeting of the minds with David Watson on highland bagpipes and small pipes, and Bill Nace on 5 and 2 string taishōgotos and harmonica. Simply listing the instrumentation should be enough to thin the herd on this blistering full-length platter. But far from being a collection of traditional tunes from their respective motherlands, or some sort of angular take on cultural appropriation, On Bats delivers a sound world situated firmly in the saddle of a shared singular vision. Watson and Nace approach their instruments and compositions with an endurance and intensity that make a false chord growl sound like one-dimensional cartoon fodder.
Similar to his taishōgoto work on the stream of LP’s Nace has released on his Open Mouth…
In 1923, the young French novelist André Malraux trekked through the Cambodian jungle to Angkor, the ruins of the ancient capital city of the Khmer Empire, to steal bas-reliefs from the Banteay Srei temple. He intended to sell the art in London or New York, but was caught and sentenced to three years in prison.
That is, until France’s leading writers, among them future Nobel laureate André Gide, petitioned for his acquittal by arguing that Malraux’s potential as an author was simply too great to squander because of a youthful indiscretion.
This example of cultural colonialism is key to Saphy Vong’s new album as Neo Geodesia, Oknha Stamina. Born to Cambodian parents, Vong grew up in Nancy, France — right near…
Tiarn is a gorgeous sophomore record by Australian ambient-folk producer, composer and multi-instrumentalist Hana Stretton. It follows her 2023 debut album Soon, which, like its predecessor, comes alive off the record, existing as a living and breathing tapestry of sound. Where Soon found its focus on the fires and floods of the Australian bush, the latest project casts its gaze on the endless shores of the Pacific Ocean, where Stretton’s boundless textural explorations reflect a world suspended in blue.
Living in isolation near the ocean, overlooking the winter migration of Whales, Stretton would regularly swim for 20 minutes during the ‘blue hour’. Ideas would crystallise into existence as she submerged into icy salt water, and melodies…
Elaine Palmer grew up in an old watermill within an isolated village in rural North Yorkshire, spending much of her life travelling back and forth to family in Phoenix, Arizona. From an early age she immersed herself in music and started writing songs influenced by her surroundings both in the UK and USA, developing a repertoire which blended alt-country, Americana, folk and country rock. Elaine’s distinctive rich and expressive vocal style is characterised by her slightly husky tones, bluesy edge and the strong emotional depth which she carries through in every song she writes and performs. All of these qualities were on full display in Elaine’s most recent album Half Moon Rising which was recorded in San Diego in 2024.
Now Elaine Palmer releases her new album,…