Television’s Marquee Moon reimagines guitar rock in such original, pioneering ways that critics and fans still struggle to describe its essence five decades after its original release. Made after the band cut its teeth for four years amid New York’s thriving arts scene, the 1977 album blends the inimitable interplay of guitarists Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd; spontaneous and precise approaches; and winding arrangements that draw as much from classical, jazz, and psychedelia as the punk ethos to which the album is often linked.
Marquee Moon reaches new sonic heights on Mobile Fidelity’s hybrid SACD. Mastered by engineer Rob LoVerde, this numbered-edition reissue of the effort Pitchfork named the third greatest of the entire 1970s plays with excellent…
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Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, Lucy enters Narnia through the back of a wardrobe, and Dorothy gets whisked away in a tornado to the Land of Oz. Literary theorist Joseph Campbell would define each of those moments as a “call to adventure,” the first step of the hero’s journey that underlies all storytelling.
Now we can add one more such odyssey to the list: Marina Herlop follows her muse into the world of Dja Dja.
After two relatively unadorned albums of piano and voice, Herlop made her name with the expansive Pripyat and the daring Nekkuja. For her follow-up to the pair, she wanted to put restrictions on her creative process — an effort, given her seemingly boundless energy,…
As a common element of science fiction stories, transmissions from space often spell doom for recipients on Earth. The recent streaming series Pluribus is an example of this plot, with an RNA sequence communicated through a radio signal from space. Once replicated, it leads to a virus that creates a hive mind among humans and resulting chaos and breakdowns. The Sirens, the new album from Animal Collective’s Geologist (Brian Weitz) and artist/printmaker Kyle Simon, is informed by this type of story to the degree that the composition process yields to the undeniable and, in some ways, inscrutable power of its source.
In this recording of an experiment/capture/ performance that occurred in October 2024, human musicians are not the primary initiators.
Dis Fig, producer and vocalist Felicia Chen, embraces every facet of heaviness. Chen is driven by a desire to express deeper emotions through meticulously crafted, innovative production and expressive vocals. On acclaimed collaborations with The Bug, The Body, and Asian Dope Boys, Chen’s sound is indelible.
Her solo work utilizes electronic, industrial, and bass-forward music as filters for sonic plentitudes, unbounded and wholly her own. Every granule of sound is in service of alchemizing intense emotion and vulnerability. What To Make Of These Mortal Hands is an ambitious widening of Dis Fig’s scope, traversing tectonic dynamic shifts and heartrending arrangements in a filmic study of humanity’s capacity to create both beauty and devastation.
Punk supergroup Fake Names return with Punk Ruins, their third studio album, out on Epitaph Records. Bringing together five architects of punk and hardcore, Fake Names channel decades of experience into a sound that feels immediate, electric, and entirely their own.Built on the collision of ’70s UK punk, classic hardcore, and guitar-driven power-rock, Punk Ruins finds the band pushing their chemistry further than ever-balancing sharp melodic instincts with explosive guitars, driving rhythms, and the restless energy that defines great punk rock.
A rare collaboration between five influential musicians whose combined history spans decades of underground and alternative music. The Band Fake Names features an all-star…
Many current artists who have been filed by PR people with that good old singer-songwriter label have long ago abandoned what initially signified it – a singer with a singular acoustic instrument explaining what bothers or makes her or him happy. Not only have the lyrical themes diversified (a long time at that), but the musical approach has too, from diversified arrangements to bringing in elements that are not essentially either folk, blues or country in some shape or form.
With the fact that she is a vocalist/multi-instrumentalist (flute, guitar, etc.) Chicago’s V.V. Lightbody immediately defies that old singer-songwriter label. As somebody who has collaborated with a wide spectrum of artists, from Harry Styles to jazz drummer…
There is an authenticity to the music of South Carolina’s Winyah that can’t be faked.
Much like The Strokes were distinctly a New York band and their music reflected the city they grew up in, Winyah’s indie rock has a breeziness and small-town sentimentality that feels of its time and place. The songs, especially on their sophomore effort, Right Here, Right Now, capture a restlessness that comes from driving around the same dusty roads and hanging out in backyards on summer nights.
The record opens with “The Ignition,” a two-minute instrumental that starts with the sound of rain and then slowly builds before guitar and drums kick in for the final third, constructing an impressive soundscape to start…
In the early ‘90s, Corin Tucker and Tracy Sawyer were living in Olympia, Washington, barely out of high school and finding themselves in the very heart of the just-forming riot grrrl scene. Inspired by the feminist politics and exciting rethinking of what punk rock was capable of that defined the riot grrrl movement, the duo formed Heavens to Betsy, an emotionally furious and musically raw group consisting of Sawyer on a spartan drum kit and Tucker on guitar and vocals.
From 1991-1994 Heavens to Betsy performed and recorded steadily, disbanding after releasing multiple singles and a sole album, with both parties quickly forming new bands (Heavens to Betsy was Tucker’s first band before co-founding the wildly popular and influential…
His profile elevated for the world to see and hear as Brian Eno’s creative partner on Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics (1980), trumpeter-composer Jon Hassell went on to make a name for himself with a litany of increasingly ambitious projects work, not only under his own name, but in other collaborative scenarios such as Dressing for Pleasure (1994). Hassell even deigned to perform live as the years wore on and Music Is Invisible is just one of those instances. And in reality, this album is taken from his final stage appearance, recorded with Rick Cox and John von Seggern at St. John at Hackney church, London on 23 May 2015. The 40-plus minutes was carefully edited and mixed by Jeff Rona in such a way that themes, motifs and riffs occur throughout…
25-year-old German saxophonist Jakob Manz’s live album Supernova, recorded in front of 2,600 listeners in the Grand Hall of Frankfurt’s Alte Oper, makes clear: today’s jazz generation can still produce stars capable of captivating a large audience. At the same time, it proves that contemporary jazz from Germany can be exhilarating without sacrificing musical complexity or intensity. Above all, the album documents Manz’s extraordinary talent. Born in this century, he already possesses remarkable assurance and a strong sense of artistic identity – as well as the compelling ability to rise to the biggest occasions.
And the big occasion this certainly was. The concert on 27 January 2026 was the main event during Manz’s period as the youngest…
It has now become a sort of tradition for artists from Sweden to come up with some high-quality to excellent power pop and pop rock.
Is it something in the water, or something else, makes no difference. We are regularly treated with the pop-oriented sounds that are oh so easy on the ear.
Count in former frontman of power poppers The Merrymakers David Myhr in, who has just come up with his third solo album, Everything Is All About You. Now, The Merrymakers were able to make quite a name all around with their take on power pop, but here, Myhr takes a bit of a different approach.
That difference is that Myhr leaves a lot of that power element in the shadows and…
“Feels so good to play my blues for you again…I took some time off now I’m back on the scene” sings Bernard Allison on the roots/funky “Blues Thing,” the closer on this, his first album of originals in four years. While it might have been better positioned as an opening statement, the intent remains; Allison has returned after taking time off.
The ten tracks on Loving You capture the diversity Allison has concentrated on since 1994’s debut. Even though the son of Chicago blues great Luther Allison released an album collecting various performances of his father’s songs (2024’s appropriately titled Luther’s Blues), the younger guitar slinger tilts his focus into a lighter but still powerful amalgam of funk, soul,…
In the small town of Bomarzo in central Italy lies the Parco dei Mostri, a 16th-century garden filled with enormous, grotesque sculptures that have been carved directly into the rock. Also known as the Sacro Bosco (“Sacred Grove”) it was commissioned by Pier Francesco Orsini and stands apart from the more ordered ideals of Renaissance garden design. Among its many sculptures, the Orcus Mouth — a huge stone face with an open mouth leading into a small chamber — has become its most recognizable image.
Its cavernous jaws have also found their way into music: Anna von Hausswolff used the sculpture for All Thoughts Fly, Italian prog band Taproban had featured the same image on their 2002 debut album, and now Mexican trio…
La-La Land Records, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Universal Music Enterprises present the 55th anniversary remastered and expanded 2-CD re-issue of renowned composer John Barry’s original motion picture score to the seventh James Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever.
…For the sixth and last outing with Sean Connery as 007 (who sat out the previous film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), Bond sets out to Las Vegas on the trail of a diamond smuggling ring tied to his longtime enemy, the fiendish SPECTRE mastermind Ernst Stavro Blofeld (this time played by Charles Grey). Composer John Barry’s as-yet unbroken streak of scores in the series was punctuated by a title song with lyrics by Don Black, featuring vocals from…
Discontinuity was conceived as a response to the deteriorating conditions in the U.S. I examined on my previous album Continuity. Media capture, heightened surveillance, and the consolidation of control over our information have reshaped our world, and I wanted to see what resistance might look like by gathering a polity of remixers.
Where Continuity traced how systems designed for transparency instead function as tools for manipulation, Discontinuity responds by presenting the remix as an analog for personal resistance: the individual act of reclaiming control through deliberate obfuscation.
In a landscape like this, resistance can take many forms: privacy tools that create gaps in data collection, platform exodus…
“Creative inspiration is often like vapor, appearing and dissipating quickly” says Vicky Mettler, aka Kee Avil, an artist who has already made waves with her first two albums (Crease from 2022 and Spine from 2024), and whose two-year release tempo seems to continue with this year’s Vapor.
The idea of inspiration as vapour might be the reason Mettler decided to originally release her new album song by song, as a form of a sonic diary – essentially, capture the moment the idea appears and recorded; it disappears. Yet, instead of making this album a collection of disparate ideas that came at the spur of the moment, there is a backbone here, a basic concept/idea that becomes audible when Vapor got its release as a collection of songs/compositions.
The Felice Brothers is celebrated in the album Felice County Fair, a tribute album exploring and reimagining the band’s back catalogue, released via Free Flight Records/Sun Mountain Records. “A couple of years ago, a friend and advocate of the band named Brandy Schultz called us with a vision to create a tribute record to our band and wanted to ask for our blessing,” comments Ian Felice in a note to fans. “Brandy is a uniquely powerful force of nature who usually has the ingredients to make margaritas in a cooler in her car. It’s two years later now, and somehow, by her sheer will and the devotion of many wonderful musicians and producers, her vision has become a reality. The fact that so many artists have contributed to this project simply out of a love for our music…
…includes three new acoustic versions of previously released songs as well as two entirely new tracks including previously released single ‘Pity,’ and fun, rocking indie folk anthem, ‘Fell in Love (Couldn’t Get Out)’ featuring Cat Clyde.
Cowboy hats and colorful shirts can be a deceiving thing for musicians. For a general set of listeners that rely on musical snippets it would immediately indicate that who they have in front of them is your regular cow poking country singer whose life dream is to end up in some Nashville studio leading her/him to Billboard country charts.
Yet in these modern times, classic country (and western) is just one stream, and country pop, roots, Americana, and Canadiana are not only the terms in vogue, but very real genres or…