Those thus far unaware of Shovel Dance Collective’s bracing approach to folk should probably note that their third album is not much interested in breaking newcomers in gently. Everything in Readiness kicks off with a three-song suite that lasts more than 10 minutes and takes you, via a series of dramatic sonic jump-cuts, from a grinding one-note drone to a reel that seems to split the difference between trad folk fiddle-playing and the punishing squall of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Black Angel’s Death Song’. It then leaps to ‘Tally Ho! Hark Away!’, which sets a hunting song first collected in the late 1940s over a blast of what might best be described as ecstatic noise. It’s genuinely hard to work out what instruments are involved in the clattering arrhythmic chaos behind the vocal…
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For the last decade, Caroline Rose has garnered a reputation as one of indie-rock’s most unpredictable songwriters. They’re impossible to categorise, with albums like Loner and Superstar hopping from genre to genre – as Rose has said “I’m just trying to make music diverse enough that AI can’t reproduce it”.
On the evidence of the excellently titled Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall, Rose has certainly achieved that. This is probably their best album since 2018’s Loner, and has the same air of unrestrained chaos running through it. Rose has always been at their best when they’ve completely slipped off the leash, and there’s a giddy sense of excitement which runs through the record from the very first track.
The word “dangerous” isn’t one most bands would embrace. That especially concerns any with a handful of popular radio singles. But The Doors not only fit, but celebrated that description.
Look no further than 1967s debut album which included not only the huge hit, and controversial radio track, “Light My Fire” (in edited form) but some truly out-there covers that ranged from Kurt Weill’s 1930s era, quirky, carnival-esque “Alabama Song” to Howlin’ Wolf’s searing and lascivious approach to Willie Dixon’s “Back Door Man.” Add the experimental and unsettling, 12-minute disc-closing epic “The End” whose sheer length, dark, even threatening Oedipal theme remains a challenge to delicate sensibilities, and you’ve got an act that defined and even relished…
There are albums that sell by the truckload and albums that quietly reroute a career, and Accident Of Birth belongs firmly in the second camp.
Released in May 1997, Bruce Dickinson’s fourth solo record arrived at the lowest commercial ebb heavy metal had known in a generation, with grunge having flattened half the genre and the other half still picking itself out of the rubble. Dickinson himself was four years out of Iron Maiden, his last outing Skunkworks had confused as many fans as it converted, and the bookies would have offered long odds on him ever standing on a stage alongside Steve Harris again. Then came this: twelve tracks of unapologetic, gloriously overblown heavy metal, made with Roy Z behind the desk and Adrian Smith…
Legend’s album is produced and co-written by his longtime friend and fellow musician Pharrell Williams, marking the pair’s first collaboration together.
“The album is the first project the two have undertaken together in more than two decades of friendship — a cinematic, lush body of work that weaves together the strands of Black music, from gospel and the standards to doo-wop, classic soul, Afrobeat and hip-hop,” a description for the album reads. Legend (whose real name is John Stephens) and Williams worked on the album together in Paris at the Louis Vuitton headquarters, where Williams, 53, serves as men’s creative director. Legend noted the collaboration “felt past due.”
The pair had a certain goal…
There are few duos in modern Country music as consistently adventurous as Brothers Osborne. Bound by blood, a lifetime of playing music together and a shared working-class upbringing in Deale, Maryland, John and TJ Osborne have spent more than a decade establishing themselves as one of Nashville’s most distinctive acts.
Their music has always occupied an exciting space between Country, southern rock, blues and soul, with John’s formidable guitar playing providing the perfect counterpoint to TJ’s unmistakable, expressive vocals. On Watertown, they bring those ingredients back to the place where their story began, delivering a record that feels both like a homecoming and another step forward.
Named in reference to their…
The Nerves were an American power pop trio, formed in San Francisco in 1974 and later based in Los Angeles, featuring guitarist Jack Lee, bassist Peter Case, and drummer Paul Collins. All three members composed songs and sang.
Although The Nerves only lasted a short time they managed to self release one legendary 4 song EP in 1976 distributed by Bomp! Records that included 2 Jack Lee songs: “Hanging On The Telephone” and “Give Me Some Time,” 1 Peter Case song: “When You Find Out,” and 1 Paul Collins song: “Working Too Hard,” and play many shows up and down the west coast and to tour the US and Canada including some support slots with the Ramones.
The Nerves went on to become one of the most influential of the new wave…
“We’re recording this, so we need you as loud as fucking possible please”, says Nicky Wire before “feel-good singalong anthem of the winter” ‘Mausoleum’. “Take it a-fucking-way”. An audience of Manics devotees at London’s Roundhouse responds magnificently. The chorus to ‘Mausoleum’, after all, is a humdinger. “No Birds!” they scream as one. “No Birds!” It’s probably the biggest, most naggingly infectious, poppiest chorus on the entire album. A knock-em-dead singalong. A moment of pure release delivered over a swaggering Chuck Berry groove. “No Birds!” they yell, like an Oasis crowd doing the “sooooooo Sally can wait” bit in ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’. It’s not that, though. “No Birds!” they sing, “No Birds! … Holy Mass … Of Dead Insects!”
“Who Do You Want Me to Be” asked singer/songwriter Joanne Shaw Taylor on her 2009 debut, White Sugar. 11 studio albums and 17 years later she takes a more direct stance with “This Is Who I Am.” That tune is the lone cover from The Trouble with Love. The ten-song set further defines who she has become as a veteran roots artist who has gradually coalesced her approach and strengths. Taylor’s blues roots have always been on display, specifically through guitar solos like she and guest Joe Bonamassa ignite on the opening title track. For the following Bad Company-styled “Hell or High Water” she sings about her career with “I’m just a soul/trying to exist/All on my own/And I’ve given it my best.”
That’s just one of the truths expressed on…
…features four never-before-heard demos alongside rare B-sides, alternate studio takes, and a previously unreleased live set recorded on the Back to Black tour in Amsterdam in 2007.
…While U.K. native Winehouse’s 2003 debut Frank made overtures to establish her as a unique new talent – her combination of vintage jazz/soul styles with raw, honest lyricism won the album an Ivor Novello Award – it was Back to Black that made her a superstar. Working with one of Frank‘s primary producers, Salaam Remi (best known at the time for producing the Fugees’ “Fu-Gee-La”), as well as Mark Ronson (a wunderkind New York DJ and stepson of Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones), Winehouse’s songs became even more confessional and grimily indebted to…
In November 2024, Michael Kiwanuka released his fourth album, Small Changes, an extremely poised and self-assured piece of work. After three gold albums, a Grammy nomination, a Mercury prize win and the ongoing success of Cold Little Heart, a 2017 single hoisted to virality and million-selling status in the US after its use in TV drama Big Little Lies, Kiwanuka – and his long-term production collaborators Danger Mouse and Inflo – evidently felt confident enough to release a beautiful but wilfully understated album. Recorded in LA, some impressive names lurked in the credits: legendary session musicians including bassist Pino Palladino and the drummer James Gadson, who played on Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Want You’ and Donald Fagen’s ‘The Nightfly’; the similarly…
The iconic Tony Iommi has released a new solo record, From the Dark, squarely in his wheelhouse of titanic riffs, thundering low end, and flights-of-fancy vocals. It is good to see the metal god still churning out headbanging tunes in a style his fans will instantly recognize.
Working with vocalist Jørn Lande (who co-wrote the songs), bassist Becky Baldwin, and drummer Karl Brazil, Iommi keeps his tried-and-true hard-rock vision intact. Co-produced by Tony and Mike Exeter, his long-time creative partner, co-writer, producer, and audio engineer, the album feels timeless, thick with metal riffs and grandiose dreams.
The classic heavy metal guitar licks of a genre he helped create start right on the opener,…
Since Britpop began, there have been endless arguments about the best Britpop band, the best Britpop album, the defining Britpop image. Choices vary, but it feels inarguable that Elastica – and Elastica – remain the coolest in all the above categories. The four-piece were cemented as elegant, eternal stars on their self-titled 1995 debut album: a collection of short, sharp songs, with equally short, sharp haircuts on the cover. Like the supernatural pop ideal immortalised in 1998’s Velvet Goldmine – a film they cameoed in – Elastica came from London but also seemingly arrived fully formed from another, sexier, less effortful dimension. Untouchable louche perfection. Exacting boy-girl androgynous tension. Post punk guitars arrived encased in…
Sharing secrets with strangers is more common than many realize. Sometimes it’s just a way to test a reaction, so you’re better prepared to share the secret when it counts. This is one of singer-songwriter Mary Bragg’s subjects on her album of the same name, Secrets to Strangers. She also wrestles with uncertainty throughout the album, bringing problems into the open, often without resolving them. In that sense, we are all the receptive stranger to her conversations. Said another way, it’s her way of being relatable. We all have baggage that we need to shed.
Bragg spins stories and ruminations across her twelve songs, written with co-writers Mindy Smith, Maia Sharp, Brady Stablein, and Zach Berrman. After years of producing and engineering…
When two paths to ecstasy unexpectedly converged in the middle of the Mediterranean, Maxime Denuc’s Club Imperiale was born. Two years ago, the French composer was sent video footage of a bride and groom walking the aisle on the small Spanish island of Menorca, but it was the soundtrack, rather than the scenery, that made an impression: Instead of the standard nuptial accompaniment — Vivaldi, Bach, Celine Dion — the organist performed Denuc’s own “Infinite End,” a minimalist epic from his 2022 album Nachthorn. Encountering his own music reverberating through the church’s majestic limestone arches, Denuc experienced a vision of gleaming whitewashed chapels perched above azure seas. But the Balearic connection also brought to mind…
Another week, another tech bro triumphantly declaring music solved, with hyper-individualisation via AI just around the corner. This obnoxious class of talentless grifters is obsessed with optimising everything, art included, and misses the point entirely. We want – no, need! – art to be messy, incomplete, and flawed.
Take Institut für Feinmotorik, originally from Germany’s Black Forest. The collective have spent years paring their sound down to squeaking, sparse forms that sound like mechanical contraptions in their death throes, indebted to both post-Cagean traditions and the Profan school of minimal techno. Their main medium? The Octogrammoticum – an orchestra of eight recordless turntables augmented by the scraps…
A classical dimension has always been part of Raphael Weinroth-Browne‘s music, be it in the formal rigour of the compositional writing or the finesse of the Canadian cellist’s playing. It’s even more pronounced on his latest release, however, given that Empyrean is an album-length treatment of material created in 2024 for the James Wilton Dance company’s BACH Reimagined project. After touring his commissioned cello score with James and Sarah Wilton, Weinroth-Browne decided to shape it into what’s now the nine-part suite Empyrean. He’s not far wrong in pitching it as “a dialogue with Bach across the centuries.”
Don’t get the wrong idea: the album isn’t some mid-career pivot into classical, full stop; instead, it’s another of his…
Doug Dulgarian founded Julia’s War Recordings in 2021 to help his friends release cassettes of the cool music they were making. The Philadelphia musician and They Are Gutting a Body of Water frontman has long demonstrated a fondness towards physical media formats: wearing out CDs in his tour van; dismantling VHS tapes for music videos; and, as a kid, collecting unlicensed remix compilations of tracks by his favorite artists, absorbing an eclecticism that he’d eventually reflect back in TAGABOW’s output.
Since 2017, Dulgarian has grown TAGABOW from its placid, solo origins into one of the decade’s most influential and inventive shoegaze bands; the proof is in Lotto, their bold and relentless breakout LP from last year.