In addition to being one-half of synth pop legends Erasure for over 40 years and engaging in numerous other solo and collaborative projects, Vince Clarke has racked up a sizeable discography of remixes. Remix/Remodel: The Vince Clarke Remixes selects 26 of them, though that’s nowhere close to complete.
The set begins with the first remix he ever did back in the late ’80s, a house-inspired version of Happy Mondays’ “Wrote for Luck” which stripped out the guitars and placed a thumping kick drum up front. The remix ended up being a bigger hit than the original album version, and helped define the alternative dance sound of the Madchester scene. Aside from this remix, however, the collection skips ahead two decades (leaving…
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J.P. Reali’s Grateful Blues may not seem a wholly original thought, at least upon a cursory glance, given Luther Dickinson and Datrian Johnson’s vividly wrought Dead Blues Volume I, released late in 2025.
But the veteran Delaware guitarist, long a staple of the Washington, D.C. music scene, puts a distinctive twist on his concept for this six-song EP. Rather than do what the NMA co-founder and his compatriot did, that is, assemble blues material covered by the iconic band, Reali and company arrange a discerning selection of Dead material in a largely authentic style.
Given that slant, it should come as no surprise that the late Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan figures heavily in the mix. Reali doesn’t sound quite…
Robert Sawrey’s story inevitably shapes the way The End of the Road is heard. Recording under the name Hadnot Creek, he only began releasing music after retiring from a career outside the music industry. That sense of freedom runs throughout these ten songs. There is no sense of chasing fashions or commercial expectations, just a songwriter drawing on country, blues and americana traditions to tell stories about flawed people, broken relationships and the long shadows cast by addiction and mortality. Despite the darkness that often inhabits the lyrics, there is also something quietly life-affirming about the album simply existing: proof that creativity need not have an expiry date.
Opener ‘A River of Love’ immediately introduces…
Philly’s Mopar Stars do a nice job stripping some great old alt-rock for parts, then rebuild them into something sleek and sporty. Their first full-length album, 2026’s Official Researchers of the NJ Devil, welds together the hooky power pop feel of vintage Teenage Fanclub, the beery, bleary, and wistful sound of the Replacements, and the chunky chord change rock of early Bob Mould. There are also traces of Built to Spill, Urge Overkill, Redd Kross, Bitch Magnet, and Matthew Sweet in there for good measure. What could have just been a fun game of spot the influence becomes something less obvious and more impressive as the sticky hooks, heart-felt vocals, and witty lyrics begin to pile up. Songs like “Only Bar in Town” and “Everyone Wants What I Got” don’t just sound…
The songs come trailing jets of psychedelic blues, the singing tamped down to a smoke-haloed whisper, hard rock in a liminal space. Tiger Bear Wolf, out of Greensboro, NC, distills ZZ Top, Kyuss, Sabbath and Om into a seething mesh of guitar-heavy mysticism.
This third album — 15 years delayed with some material over 20 years old — reaches back to an earlier musical era, when hairy dudes and feedback and boogie-ing blues vamps still figured prominently in the culture. Songs nod to late 1970s, early 1980s heavy metal a la Deep Purple or Blue Cheer, or later on, to the Stoner rock revival of the early 1990s that birthed QOTSA.
Tiger Bear Wolf dates to the Bush II era, taking shape in 2002, as art rock glittered and…
…6CD special edition featuring unheard material, including early demos, alternate takes, and unreleased songs.
There’s a live recording on this boxset that seems to perfectly embody the challenges faced by Paul Weller after he split up The Jam. He and his new band, The Style Council, are playing the Goldiggers in Chippenham, Wiltshire, in March 1984, showcasing tracks from the upcoming Cafe Bleu album to an increasingly restless audience.
“I need absolute quiet for this number,” Weller insists, before a bossa nova called “The Whole Point of No Return”. The crowd start wolf-whistling as Dee C Lee comes out to sing “Paris Match” and, as the band perform low-key acoustic songs inspired, variously, by Antonio Carlos Jobim, …
Just two years into their subtle takeover of radio, MTV, and concert stages across the globe, The Cranberries played a surprisingly intimate show in 1994 at London’s Astoria II. A recording of the set was recently discovered and is being released for the first time. The show finds a band that had just released their (soon-to-be massive) debut with a follow-up on the way (1993’s Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? and 1994’s No Need to Argue). Despite still being a relatively young band, they played that show with the confidence many groups take decades to develop.
Coming off a series of massive gigs in the U.S. o, opening for Duran Duran, playing to a crowd of around 1,000 at this London gig must have been just as jarring as their leap from small…
Six years after finding themselves unexpectedly at a crossroads, Kasabian arrive at their third act with a fresh sense of direction and a renewed appetite for experimentation. Act III draws deep from Kasabian’s back catalogue without getting stuck in it, retaining the familiar while allowing the band to explore some new territory. As the third act following The Alchemist’s Euphoria and Happenings, it brings the curtain down on what Serge Pizzorno calls “a bloody opera” – six years that have ultimately led to this record.
The band’s ninth studio album has the distorted basslines, huge riffs and trademark swagger you’d expect, but also makes room for psychedelic textures and influences that take them somewhere less familiar. The tracklisting…
Emerging from Baltimore’s incredibly energetic hardcore scene, TURNSTILE have always displayed a penchant for eclecticism. Last year’s album NEVER ENOUGH epitomised their magpie-like eye for glittering sonics, exploding their hardcore palette into something that could be blissfully melodic and crushingly intense all within the same song. Very much an international breakout moment, the band toast 12 months of NEVER ENOUGH with VERSIONS, a staggering broad selection of re-workings which serves to illustrate the ongoing impact of the parent record.
As a collection, VERSIONS is led by the highs: Porches re-crafts the title song into a spectral slice of after-hours introspection; Blood Orange transforms ‘LIGHT DESIGN’ into a zero…
There’s a slang term in Brazilian Portuguese that defines the dark, unkempt spaces where underground parties tend to happen: “inferninho,” or “little hell.” Whether they’re abandoned warehouses, as was so common for the UK’s acid house parties in the 1980s, or repurposed samba school rehearsal venues, these makeshift places are almost inescapable if you want to get to know São Paulo’s independent electronic scene. Producer Agazero’s new EP, Dissidente, is a sonic representation of the “inferninho”: a grimy and sometimes harsh experience that’s highly entertaining but could leave your head reeling.
For the last decade, the São Gonçalo-born, São Paulo-based artist has been making jittery club music after first finding his audience…
It’s a bold move in this attention economy to create an album that requires close listening, but that doesn’t bother leo. If you need a flashy hook, then he doesn’t need you. The Manchester producer’s new album, Cicada Burnt, is an abstract, dubby journey full of pristine sub bass; the swing and syncopation of UK and Detroit dance music; and an ultra-clear sound design. It’s sparse and wandering, with numerous side quests and a tendency to circle back to revisit ideas. The release, on L.A.’s Peak Oil, is more polished than leo’s recent projects — like Dissipating Heavily and the live recording lived II — but it’s not sterile either, featuring distortion and fuzz that add a distressed character to the proceedings.
Cicada Burnt is both vivid and mysteriously…
Listening to Denny Zeitlin has often felt like accepting an invitation to the unknown. Zeitlin has never been content to simply play a tune. He probes it, turns it inside out, and often uncovers possibilities most musicians overlook.
Odyssey reinforces that reputation. Although much of the material spans different periods of his career, the album never feels like a nostalgic exercise. Instead, it captures an artist whose curiosity remains remarkably intact.
The trio’s 2003 concert performances, featuring the late bassist Mel Graves and drummer George Marsh, remind us of what made this partnership so rewarding. There is complete trust among the three performers, allowing the music to unfold naturally rather than following…
It is tempting to search the Family Stereo debut album for lyrical snippets that talk of upbringing and home life, like a musical busybody. For the pseudonym belongs to Blake Watt, the twenty-something son of Everything But the Girl parents Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn. Doesn’t that make you feel old?!
Yet on The Thread that, emphatically, is where the musical similarities end, in spite of the occasional richness suggesting the tonal qualities of his mother’s vocal, or the poised songwriting with which his father has made an understated impact as a solo artist.
Those are mere sidelines, happily, for it is clear Watt has forged his own musical path and can easily stand on his own two musical feet.
Powerhouse seven-piece roots-rock outfit Bywater Call stake their claim with Broken Souvenirs, their fourth studio album. It’s a record that confidently blends rock, Southern soul, blues, funk, and singer-songwriter sensibilities. At the heart of it all is frontwoman Meghan Parnell, one of the finest vocalists working today. She possesses killer pipes, not unlike Susan Tedeschi but with an edge. She’s soulful and powerful, dialed back when necessary. With an innate sense of timing not unlike Aretha Franklin, her phrasing is spot on. You’re either born with a voice like Parnell’s or you spend a lifetime reaching for it.
Formed in Toronto in 2017 by guitarist Dave Barnes and Parnell, Bywater Call also features Bruce McCarthy (drums), Mike Meusel…
Described as “a luminous collection of scenes and reckonings”, Love, the 7th and possibly final album from Dexys Midnight Runners if Kevin Rowland is to be believed, continues to display the regained spirit Rowland has shown since 2012’s One Day I’m Going to Soar. If 2023’s The Feminine Divine was all about sex (and without doubt Rowland’s autobiography Bless Me Father was full of it); Love is, well, unsurprisingly, about love.
The Feminine Divine was raw and redemptive, and Love is largely a smiling coda. Broadly working with largely the same set up as the last album, with Sean Read and Mike Timothy (Jim Paterson has three co-writes, also), Love reveals itself gradually. Horns and strings are used sympathetically and sparingly; the attack…
Arab Strap were full of middle-aged malaise from day one, at least spiritually. Now, 30 years on they’ve grown into the curmudgeons they were always destined to be, but their ninth album is just as funny and insightful as ever, as the grinding minutiae of life’s banality is contrasted with touching messages of hope and contentment.
Many of these songs are more or less an inventory of gripes on a given theme: internet slop, physical decrepitude, the manosphere etc. All backed with varied arrangements, like the no-wave skronk of ‘Dollar Park’, the old-school thrash finale on ‘You You You’ or the industrial jazz-rock bombast of ‘I Get Noise’. It’s a rich musical abyss for Aidan Moffat to shout into.
But while the one-liners and pop culture…
Ed Askew was a New York artist, poet, songwriter and genuine underground legend. Having first broken through with his self-titled album in 1968 (subsequently known as Ask the Unicorn), he made ripples in the Woodstock generation, and ploughed a furrow similar to the likes of The Incredible String Band or Vashti Bunyan on this side of the Atlantic. However, this did not translate into commercial success, and he soon settled into a life of painting, writing, and teaching art. He never stopped making music, although this was generally of the home recording variety, without any particular label interest.
In 2002, a re-release of his lost second album, Little Eyes, gradually started to garner some attention, and eventually led to 2013’s…
The charismatic Albert Castiglia is one of our most preeminent blues-rockers, a certified badass, an engaging entertainer, and an underrated guitarist. As we learn on his 13th solo album, Grits & Glory, he’s also an unapologetic songwriter in touch with our chaotic times. It’s by far his most expansive album, as one of the few roots-blues artists who covers The Beatles and John Coltrane on the same record.
There are several threads here. He recorded live at Abbey Road Studios, working in the same space where The Beatles recorded their White Album and Pink Floyd laid down Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. For the first time, Castiglia demonstrates an affinity for jazz in a searing take of Mongo Santamaria’s…
When Jerry Joseph and his band, The Jackmormons, released Panther Tracks, Vol. 1, last year, he suggested that there was enough material for probably four records. Here is the second one, Panther Tracks, Vol. 2 (Cavity Search Records). These are fan-favorite songs, rendered in the studio, as Dave Schools of Widespread Panic suggested a few years ago. The second installment of this four-volume series, like the first, went to drummer/producer Steve Drizos, who helmed the recording with the band and guests at The Panther studio in Portland, OR, not losing an ounce of ‘live’ energy in the process. The six original songs, all written at different points in Joseph’s four-decade career, were released as a subscription service for fans through Joseph’s website.
New York’s Prison are nebulous at best, a loose and ever-changing collective of players who consistently produce some of outsider rock’s most freaked-out jams, regardless of who’s taking part. There are key contributors like Endless Boogie’s Paul Major, Liquor Store’s Sarim Al-Rawi, and multi-instrumentalist Matt Lilly, but different sessions find them joined by various like-minded heads making for different shades of psychedelic intensity on each new record.
Prison’s third long-player, Big Rigs on the BQE, is the product of a recording date in 2024 that included percussionist Ryan Sawyer and Sic Alps’ Mike Donovan adding fuzz-saturated organ to the mix, along with former Prison-staffers Matt Leibowitz and Adam Reich also adding…
Sounds good! Don't know them at all and looking forward to hearing it. Thanks, exy!