Should your knowledge on the history of American folk music be a little rusty, Hedy West, who passed in 2005, aged 67, was one of the leading lights of traditional folk music. She is probably best known for her song 500 Miles. West was born in Cartersville in the hill country of northern Georgia. She was the daughter of Don West, a miners trade union organiser and poet who also ran a couple of folk music centres. She started singing early in her life, winning first prize at the Asheville Annual Folk Festival in the mid-50s when she was just 12, she was later invited by Pete Seeger to sing alongside him at Carnegie Hall. She signed to Vanguard and released her debut album in 1963 with the snappy title of Hedy West accompanying herself on the 5-string banjo, followed a year later by…
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Since releasing their 2016 LP New Futures, Candace (formerly known as Is/Is) has been hard at work on a follow-up, New Ruins. Listening to the Minneapolis-born, Portland-based trio’s latest nine-track offering, it doesn’t take long to figure out which direction Sarah Nienaber (guitar/bass/vocals), Sarah Rose (guitar/bass/vocals), and Mara Appel DesLauriers (drums/vocals) are taking their acid-washed pop.
Opening track “Sunlight” is perhaps the best possible introduction to Candace, masters of the sweetly delivered head-nodding rocker. And despite the inherent gloominess of New Ruins, songs like “Rewind” prove Candace is capable of festooning their moody pop with enough uplifting crescendos and cascading layers…
Tired of all the Western shouting and keen for a bit of Eastern serenity, MIEN – a transatlantic coalition of like-minded, psych-minded members of The Horrors, The Black Angels, Elephant Stone and The Earlies – have come together to make good on an old promise to jam, rewiring the potential of raga rock in the process.
One of the selling points of any supergroup, on paper at least, is the appeal of the A-meets-B combination of band attributes, though sometimes the math doesn’t always add up. In this instance, the groups from which MIEN stems were pretty much on the same page, if not in the same paragraph, from the start. This factor allows them, and us, the freedom from formal introduction awkwardness, as the pieces come naturally…
Taking techno deep down the loneliest wormhole, with I Started Wearing Black, Cologne-based producer Sonia Güttler — aka Sonae —tracks the soft noise haunting the pulse of the modern world and documents her findings as if with high-contrast black-and-white reversal film, feverishly scratching her own mark in the decaying emulsion with angst and melancholy.
Güttler reaches for a variety of sounds that are both recognizable and familiar (string instruments, pianos, horns, ticking clocks, techno) here, but noise is omnipresent throughout, whether as ambient phenomena or toxic filter, steering stark figures through muted minefields or washing over all like acid rain. It’s a bleak and challenging record, but with unique political affect,…
Aside from family duties and running his Planet Mu empire, Mike Paradinas has seemingly spent the majority of the 2010s going through his archives. He hasn’t released much new music during this period, apart from one LP and two EPs as µ-Ziq and two albums as part of Heterotic, the synth pop duo consisting of him and his wife, Lara Rix-Martin. Apart from these, there have been several collections of rare and unreleased material, not to mention hundreds of loosies uploaded to SoundCloud, most of which date from the ’90s. Challenge Me Foolish is a collection of mostly unheard tracks produced near the end of the decade, around the time Paradinas toured with Björk in support of Homogenic, and was working on the woefully underappreciated Royal Astronomy.
Born in Philadelphia in 1961, Gene Jackson had already determined by his late teens to become a professional drummer. He attended Berklee College of Music where his classmates numbered Branford Marsalis, Cindy Blackman, Terri Lyne Carrington and Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts to name just a few. He’s worked with many major players in jazz including Dave Holland, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Kevin Eubanks. For his debut album as leader, Jackson has shrewdly selected two truly inspired musicians.
Listening to the opening number, Cole Porter’s “I Love You” might give the impression that this is an album of standards but that’s far from what’s on offer. Carlo De Rosa’s luscious, deep bass is a particular standout here. “Great River,” one of two Jackson-penned numbers, is a jaunty,…
Boston-based indie rock act Fiddlehead are a musical dream team, featuring vocalist Patrick Flynn and drummer Shawn Costa (both of Have Heart) and Basement guitarist Alex Henery. The group released 2014’s Out of the Bloom EP on Lockin’ Out Records to a short period of praise, but the all-star effort was mostly known as a secondary project until this year. Fiddlehead’s full-length debut, Springtime and Blind, stems from the loss of Flynn’s father. The lyrical output is an emotional purgation; channelling his and his mother’s pain into an aching, relatable ambience.
Springtime and Blind offers a poignant musical perspective on the coming-of-age feelings of springtime. The sonic result meets in the middle of their two formers, forging an identity…
Nels Cline has it all figured out. He plays with Wilco for the bigger audiences and makes adventurous avant-jazz albums to satisfy his ever-changing, creative muse. Wilco’s lead guitarist since 2004 began his recording career in 1980 and with this release, Currents, Constellations; under his own name he has delivered almost 50 albums, this being his second for Blue Note and the first with this band.
Fueled both by the success of his quietly orchestrated 2016 Blue Note debut Lovers and mostly by his 2014 guitar duet album Room with Julian Lage, Cline once again teams with Lage but adds the aggressive, flexible rhythm section of bassist Scott Colley and drummer Tom Rainey to form The Nels Cline 4.
At 3:32 of Pinned‘s anthemic opening track, “Never Coming Back,” a single guitar tone with the deceptive appearance of an army decimating any enemy within its radius of destruction ties A Place to Bury Strangers‘ past to its present. After four studio albums and numerous EPs, Pinned showcases A Place to Bury Strangers’ latest, and most solid, iteration of a band that specializes in creating sonics that cut through the bone and straight to the marrow, sounding timely, relevant, and groundbreaking.
Since the A Place to Bury Strangers released their brilliant self-titled debut album in 2007, and at the same time opened for the legacy industrial act Nine Inch Nails, the promise of greatness loomed large for the band, However, multiple…
London singer-songwriter Lookman Adekunle Salami doesn’t sing so much as ramble adventurously through treatises on the thorniest corners of human nature, from mental illness to the radicalism that leads to (and results from) terrorism, all the way back around to more mundane chronicles of everyday life. He loves to fill the air with words, but those words come freighted with big ideas and bold ambitions — and, at times, welcome jolts of noise.
On L.A. Salami‘s second album, The City of Bootmakers, his ideas have never been more grandiose, as the song titles announce upfront. “Terrorism (The ISIS Crisis)” tackles its subject point-blank, with a jaggedly blurted chorus to hammer home the intensity.
In the course of a career spanning 19 years, 15 albums and countless tours and live performances around the globe, British four-piece The New Mastersounds have carved out a unique space for themselves as world-class purveyors of contemporary jazz-funk.
Their particular blend of mostly instrumental, guitar-driven and organ-driven grooves has developed throughout the years to include a rich tapestry of textures that finds their full expression in this latest full-length studio album Renewable Energy.
Recorded in two separate sessions, one in New Orleans and the other in Denver a few months later, Renewable Energy expands on the NMS template while still providing plenty of the band’s…
When asked to describe the title track from his new record, Kyle Thomas- aka King Tuff -takes a deep breath. “It’s a song about hitting rock bottom,” he says. “I didn’t even know what I wanted to do anymore, but I still had this urge-this feeling-like there was this possibility of something else I could be doing… and then I just followed that possibility. To me, that’s what songwriting, and art in general, is about. You’re chasing something, there is something out there calling to you and you’re trying to get at it.
The Other is basically where songs come from, it’s the hidden world, it’s the mystery. It’s the invisible hand that guides you whenever you make something. It’s the thing I had to rediscover-the sort of voice I had to follow-to bring me…
Esoteric Recordings issue The Studio Recordings 1979-1987, an eight-disc box set collecting the work of classical rock supergroup Sky.
Formed in 1979, Sky brought together the worlds of rock and classical music in a highly successful and inspiring way. Featuring the gifted talents of guitarist John Williams, percussionist Tristan Fry, legendary bass player Herbie Flowers, former Curved Air keyboard player Francis Monkman and guitarist Kevin Peek, Sky recorded their debut album at Abbey Road studios in the early months of 1979. The band’s self-titled debut reached the UK top ten in May 1979 and went on to achieve Platinum status in the UK and was also a major hit in Europe and Australia.
Also a huge live attraction, Sky released their…
Keith Kenniff’s recordings as Goldmund typically mine a pleasant yet poignant form of neo-classical music, mainly consisting of slow, delicate piano melodies with sparse amounts of effects or additional accompaniment. This isn’t to say that all of his albums are alike, however; 2011’s All Will Prosper was an acoustic guitar-focused set of Civil War folk melodies, and albums such as Famous Places and Sometimes have experimented with textures and ambience more than his earlier releases. Occasus doesn’t abandon the fragile, atmospheric pianos, but it’s a bit darker and cloudier than usual for Goldmund, edging a bit closer to Kenniff’s ambient electronic work as Helios. Tracks like “Above” are augmented by a faint trace of shoegaze-like distortion,…
Urgency fuels the long-awaited full-length album, Joyride, by Tinashe. To say that this has been long gestating would be putting it mildly; after dropping the summer hit “2 On” and a strong debut album in 2014, Aquarius, the buzz from Tinashe meant that Joyride was due for a rollout back in 2015, but despite a single or two, it looked like it wouldn’t see the light of day. A second effort, 2016’s Nightride, was a mixtape meant to tide us over, but by then we were too primed for the much-promised release.
Joyride is finally here and it highlights the artist’s promise and potential, while, at the same time, leaving us wondering what the wait was about. Title track “Joyride” is a foreboding number, despite its hard-driving promise of “living life,” with ominous percussion giving way to a surprising…
The party doesn’t stop on Confidence Man‘s irrepressibly upbeat debut Confident Music for Confident People.
The Australian quartet – fronted by duo Janet Planet and Sugar Bones and backed by synth man Reggie Goodchild and drummer Clarence McGuffie – do not relent over the course of 11 pulsating dance anthems, infusing each one with a heavy dose of campy, tongue-in-cheek fun like predecessors Scissor Sisters, Fischerspooner, LCD Soundsystem, and CSS.
Taking additional cues from late-’80s and early-’90s club kids like Tom Tom Club (“Bubblegum”) and Deee-Lite (“C.O.O.L. Party”), they focus on addictive rhythms, pulsing beats, and deceptively simple lyrical earworms…
Over the course of nearly a decade, Jeremy Malvin has refined a singular brand of electronic music that is bright and glittery yet highly expressive and emotionally resonant. The producer and songwriter has progressed from making tracks in his dorm room at the University of Michigan to touring with a full band and building up an arsenal of vintage synthesizers, sharpening his songwriting chops as well as exploring more club-friendly rhythms. Recorded between his adopted home city of Brooklyn and a remote location in upstate New York, debut full-length Chrome Sparks is a dazzling display of Malvin’s ever-blossoming talents, maintaining the raw spirit of his humble beginnings while benefiting from expanded studio polish. His utilization of analog synths and drum…
Over the past decade, Ryan Lee West (aka Rival Consoles) has been crafting a brand of instrumental electronic music that has come off earnest, affecting and downright human. And with his latest LP, Persona, the Leicester, UK musician has found further inspiration from a very particular celluloid muse. Upon seeing a scene from the 1966 Ingmar Bergman film of the same name (in which a child is reaching out towards a woman’s face), West based his fourth album around the specific feeling the flick’s opening images invoked. With titles such as “Memory Arc,” “Sun’s Abandon” and “Dreamer’s Wake,” West constructs a soundscape where each beat is rounded and faded while melodies ebb and flow into each other.
Tracks like “Unfolding,” “Rest” and “Fragment”…
It has been a polarizing few years of emotion for the founding members of Stone Temple Pilots. Few would have been surprised if they decided to hang up their guitar straps following the deaths of previous singers Scott Weiland and Chester Bennington. But their resilience is astounding, and can be heard in each verse, chorus, bridge and sparkling coda off their new self-titled album. Stone Temple Pilots (2018) is a finely-honed, intoxicating rock record on which new singer Jeff Gutt busts open the walls of his cocoon and takes flight like a butterfly.
2018 release is the band’s first album in eight years, and seventh since their 1992 debut. Gutt merged from the left, crafting melodies and writing lyrics for tracks the band had finished…
Underground legend Tuli Kupferberg (1923-2010) was always the oldest man in rock and roll, co-founding the Fugs in the winter of 1964-1965 when he was already in his early 40s. Being twice the age of Dylan, Reed, Jagger, et. al, never stopped Tuli from consistently being more outrageous. Latter-day bohemian torch-bearer Jeffrey Lewis befriended Tuli in the early 2000s, and has personally organized “Tuli-day” memorial tribute concerts every year since Tuli’s passing.
This album documents some of the finer fruits of Jeffrey’s tribute arrangements, drawing from a four-decade range of Tuli’s various creative voices, from poignant ’60s classics (“Morning Morning”) to never-recorded lyrics (“Listen to the Mockingbird”), poems set to music (“The And Song”),…
