On their third LP, Celestial, the Brazilian progressive metal band Papangu cracks open a universe of possibility by foregoing digital shortcuts in favor of ecstatic analog craftsmanship. Following their blistering 2021 debut Holoceno and the percussive fables of Lampião Rei three years later, Celestial showcases the band’s exploratory techniques with spacey jazz and textured folk instruments, harkening back to the experimental prog of the ‘60s and ‘70s without overrelying on retro nostalgia. Their music has traces of King Crimson and Magma’s stardust, sure — but the band, who hail from João Pessoa, are ultimately aligned with the psychedelic canon of the country’s Northeast; a bridge between acoustic tradition and electronic innovation constructed…
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Between snatches of harried breath and taxed adrenal glands, our frail mortality begs us to slow down. Distressing headlines, leaning towers of obligations, and the holes that fast living leaves in our memories as it eats away at our sanity can leave us craving reminders that life is more than a series of frantically checked boxes.
London-based Brazilian artist Marcelo Frota, MOMO., has crafted a listening experience in his new album, Tum Tum Tum, that acts as a buffer from the frenzy. Rhythmically confident and seasoned with grace, MOMO.’s eighth collection invites us into intimate moments and quiet reflections. Across its measured 25 minutes, Tum Tum Tum weaves a dream of sun-splashed Brazilian warmth through samba,…
The volatile reedsman Kjetil Møster is undersung outside of Norway (and even inside?), but has been a consistent provider of extreme saxophonics and memorable tune themes, until he has now reached his 50th year. Perhaps his power is too frightening for some? Bergen’s Møster is rocking it out (and screaming it out also) on this new album, yet another set with a thematic, suite-like nature. Development is everything. Blasting off heavily, ‘Desert Ride’ is one made on a 19-wheeled monster, careening up and down the dunes of blow-out squall and occasional pockets for reflection (like the last minute of this extended explosiveness). Hængsle’s grunge bass is overloaded, Kapstad’s drums slam with a teetering forwardness, while Møster snakes…
Like past gatherings of tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman, pianist Matthew Shipp, bassist William Parker, and drummer Bobby Kapp, inscribed to memory on the highly touted Ineffable Joy (2019) and Heptagon (2017), Synesthesia erupts into consciousness with a punch and flurry.
Feverish by design, “First Color Heard” stays true to its title and to the heart of each participant. Rambling, rumbling, reaching for the stars, Perelman exhorts his fellow travelers, and “First Color Heard” fills the airspace with a noise beyond beauty, ending its nine minutes in Shipp’s restful hands. “Phosphene,” an impression of light that occurs without light entering the eye, resulting from excitation of neurons in the visual system, breaks the mold and off…
Following a pair of companion albums — Tender and the more energized Spiral Your Way Out — that captured different stages of post-breakup emotions, Zahara Jaime broadens the topics at hand while still navigating the deeply personal on their fourth album, Distant Lands. Lending Zzzahara a hand in wrangling their rangy sound spectrum — one that integrates post-punk, giddy dream pop, driving indie rock, and murky shoegaze — is Casey Lagos (Stick to Your Guns, Cold War Kids), who less polishes than reinforces the songwriter’s knotty sound. They pull listeners to their feet with the swirling, squalling opener, “Whispering Tree,” a song whose mismatched multi-tracked vocals, warbly injected guitar hooks, tonal percussion, and wall of strummed guitars…
Over their nearly twenty year existence Ceremony has been hard to pin down. Ceremony’s turn away from blistering powerviolence into post-punk over time has become their calling card. By 2019’s In The Spirit World Now they had completely flipped the band’s paradigm over 6 albums. Synth took focus in the mixes and the band seemed fully passed punk.
Despite sonic shifts Ceremony retained their hardcore credibility. Live, Ceremony never abandoned their early material, the post-punk of “Turn Away The Bad Thing” nestles closely with the stomping juggernaut of “This Is My War”. Fan-favorite “Kersed,” is a live staple, much in the same way Napalm Death has to play “You Suffer”. Even as Ceremony continued…
…features an instrumental versions bonus disc on CD2.
Legacy bands must straddle a line between the musical approach that originally brought them to fame and trying something new. With some fans, either choice – if made outright – dooms the latest release. But what of bands that undergo radical lineup changes over the years? Are they still beholden to what came before? And what of those that emerge with no remaining original members? Are they doomed to a life of caricature?
That’s Yes’ basic conundrum. They never had a lineup for longer than two consecutive albums. Well, until now. The current grouping of Steve Howe, Geoff Downes, Jon Davison, Billy Sherwood and Jay Schellen has lasted longer…
Recorded in Nashville with producer Steven Wood and featuring a veritable who’s who of premier Nashville studio musicians, The Country Side of Paul Carrack Vol 2 features cover versions of 10 classic Country hits.
Paul says: “I’ve always wanted to make a country album, and I’m now very pleased to be coming with the second edition. A lot of people detect the influences of soul in my music, but I’ve always loved country as well. Growing up, I was hungry for any kind of music, but I would listen to people like Chet Atkins, The Everly Brothers, Hank Williams and I particularly loved Ray Charles, who is predominantly known for his soul and jazz stuff, but could also sing great country.
I have an older brother, John and one Christmas…
Gathered here are the cardigan-clad teens’s near-complete recordings. Channeling spoken word, loud-quiet dynamics, the K aesthetic, and questionably-tuned guitars into an emo cacophony all their own, this hand-screened edition includes the 1995 four-song 7” and five-song demo tape, two previously unreleased songs from their Tim Green-produced session, and a pair of unhinged live cuts, all housed in a glorious hand screened chipboard sleeve, with squeal-along lyric insert. It perfectly captures their jangly, emotionally open sound that would later become known as “tweemo.” Shaped by Calvin Johnson’s orbit and the influence of bands like Lync, Evergreen, and Nuzzle, tweemo was exactly what the name implied. As Kalin put it: “Vulnerability is part of the style, I guess.”
A 6-show 2025 residency at the Teragram in Los Angeles turned into something special. To shake things up, Brigid Dawson joined the fold, bringing a vital spark back to this middle-era garage punk run.
Drawn from the final 3 shows, this set gathers what OSEES call the creme de la creme: some long bloated fliers, some short sweet friers, and plenty of grease. It’s a sharp snapshot of a band clearly having a very good time.
That chemistry stuck. This is the version of the band touring this year: 6-piece OSEES, with newer material and surprise crypt-crackers added to keep it up to snuff.
“Tried to mix it up for the kiddos so I brought on the big guns…Brigid Dawson.
Much like scene counterparts Turnover and Basement, Citizen budded in the haze of early 2010s emo and grew to ripen in the radiance of alternative rock. The raucousness of formative releases like Youth matured on 2017’s As You Please, blooming on 2021’s Life In Your Glass World onwards, where huge hooks and electronic experimentation entered proceedings. Calling The Dogs stuck to that formula in solid, if perhaps unspectacular, fashion, and Halcyon Blues sits as a significant brick in the band’s road towards a strengthened sonic identity.
Reflective of life’s sudden changes and need for catharsis amongst the chaos, the record encapsulates its theme across 11 dynamic tracks that veer between Citizen’s…
In June 2026, the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music opened its doors in Long Branch, NJ and became a must-visit for any fan.
Hundreds of fascinating artifacts (e.g., the radically different alternate cover mock-up for Nebraska) and curated displays tracing the roots of American music up through the present day appear, and in the James F. Allen In Concert Gallery, you can watch videos of live performances. One particularly striking clip captures Springsteen at Max’s Kansas City in 1972 performing “Lost in the Flood” on piano.
Springsteen graced small stages in New York City and elsewhere as a solo performer between his formative years in bands like The Castiles and Steel Mill and the start of touring with…
Neapolitan duo Nu Genea have evolved from producing cosmic house music to making a much more organic, vintage-sounding blend of disco, funk, and boogie which incorporates global influences including Mediterranean pop, MPB, and Afrobeat. They released an album with pioneering Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen in 2016, and both of their subsequent LPs, 2018’s Nuova Napoli and 2022’s Bar Mediterraneo, have been in demand, selling out multiple pressings.
People of the Moon, Nu Genea’s 2026 effort, expands their scope, with a greater amount of guest musicians and songs sung in five languages, yet it also feels like the group is continually refining their sound and writing catchier material. The two songs featuring Spanish…
The soulless age of the Hollywood blockbuster, rife with CGI and A.I., has left viewers nostalgic for the golden age of cinema, when a widescreen epic meant months of set building and thousands of extras, but a small, intimate picture with a compelling story could still become a runaway smash. Ori Kaplan & Lihu Melamed‘s Reverie recalls the film scores of this era, focusing on the timbres of the 1960s and ’70s while unfolding like a reel of greatest themes. At various junctures, one may think of a love story, a car chase, or a desert crossing; the high drama of a western, the tension of a spy film, or even the snappy banter of a Blaxploitation flick. The cover implies a weirdness, a readiness to experiment, the courage to walk deep into a haunted glade, well…
Booker Stardrum and Evan Shornstein’s new album begins by depositing you into a new world. “OOPS!,” the title track and opener, kicks off immediately, with monolithic bass and shuffling drums swarmed by an army of insect-like blips and bleeps. You might need a moment to orient yourself, as piano notes hang in the air and keyboard tones settle like mist on a pond; it’s as though your eyes are adjusting, taking in the contours of the twinkling, alien landscape. The drums and shaker keep their mechanized pace, but the electronics constantly brighten and fade like flowers blooming in time lapse. When the song ends after a brisk two minutes, it feels like you’ve walked many miles without realizing it, distracted by the beautiful sensory overload.
With his playful, nature-bound alter ego, Art Feynman, Luke Temple has so far offered an unpredictable, experimental patchwork of folktronica, Krautrock inspirations, global rhythms, Talking Heads-inspired art pop / rock, environmental field recordings, themes relating to the collective consciousness, and so on.
His fourth Art Feynman album, Orphans, surprises again with a 13-track set of mostly instrumentals. While intended as background music, this is Luke Temple after all, and the songs nevertheless hold an allure all their own. The solo LP starts off with a pair of simple, sparse recordings made up of understated yet bittersweet keyboard melodies over sustained chords, and components like time-keeping bass, nature sounds,…
Few bands from the original psychedelic era can return nearly six decades later with a new studio album that feels driven by artistic curiosity rather than nostalgia. Strawberry Alarm Clock accomplishes exactly that with Where’s One?, an album that embraces the group’s unmistakable musical identity while continuing to expand its creative boundaries.
The opening track, “Feel The Love,” immediately recalls the band’s signature sound. Rich vocal harmonies, swirling organ, flute, and electric sitar evoke the colorful spirit of late-’60s psychedelia without sounding like a museum piece. However, the album quickly makes it clear that revisiting the past is not its primary objective. “Monsters” introduces a darker…
A sonic essay on memory, The Rest Is My Ghost defers from any climax; it offers caution and meditation, but not release. This is by careful design – this soundscape doesn’t want to be enrapturing, in any typical sense. It sits nicely with other such ambient drone works like Richard Skelton’s Ivystrung and Lowercase Noises’ This Is for Our Sins.
There is something oceanic about the whole album – organ-esque glitches on ‘Eclosion’ don’t build up as much as they accumulate, like sediment on a beach. Every section seeks to immerse, like in ‘Sodium Vapour Halo’, which tumbles out without much fanfare, its mournful synth line dragged down and out in a persistent low-end churn.
Everything in the album sounds shrouded,…
Donald Fagen’s Kamakiriad would be notable if only for the fact the album marks a full-on reunion of the two principal Steely Dan staples more than a decade after they splintered. For all the creative sparks and thrilling musicianship that result from the long-awaited regrouping of Fagen and Walter Becker, the 1993 record remains significant for many other reasons — from the hopeful narrative to the sharp playing, adventurous arrangements, and crisp production. More than 30 years later, those facets coalesce like never before on this reference-quality reissue.
Sourced from the original masters, mastered by engineer Rob LoVerde, Mobile Fidelity’s numbered-edition hybrid SACD presents the Grammy-nominated Kamakiriad with expansive…
…newly mastered by Matt Colon at Metropolis Studios (under the supervision of Bobby Gillespie and Andrew Innes) and features the original track list alongside a curated selection of B-sides and rarities.
Primal Scream found themselves in danger of losing their hip audience in the wake of their misconceived trad-rock record, Give Out But Don’t Give Up. As a reaction, they returned to the genre-bending, electronic dance-rock of the seminal Screamadelica for Give Out‘s follow-up, Vanishing Point. Instead of recycling the dazzlingly bright neo-psychedelia of Screamadelica, Primal Scream reaches deep into cavernous dub and ’60s pop. Vanishing Point is a dark, trippy album, filled with mind-bending rhythms and cinematic flourishes.