“Introducing Self Portrait, the latest chapter from the endlessly inventive one-man force Ryan Adams — a brand-new, 24-track album that brings together fresh, unheard originals alongside spellbinding reinterpretations of classics by R.E.M., New Order and more.
Capturing restless creativity and emotional depth across the two dozen songs, this bold collection once again proves why Ryan Adams is one of the most distinctive voices in modern music. Self Portrait shows Adams at his finest – poignant, unpredictable and sonically rich. For long-time fans, it’s another essential chapter in a prolific career, for newcomers, it is the perfect entry point into the world of Ryan Adams.
This project isn’t just another album from…
Archive for December, 2025
The second album from Pilcrowe, by their own admission, is not a concept album, but rather a three-act play. Drawing inspiration from the rugged beauty of their home state of Arizona, it provides an exploration of struggle and perseverance amid desolate times.
The first single, ‘North Rim’, takes us to an isolated part of the Grand Canyon to witness incremental change on an inhospitable landscape. Storytelling is the major strength on show here; the title track is a personal reflection on moving to new realities: “It’s funny how one day you wake up and don’t feel like anyone anymore.”
The Dust Bowl era of the 1930s is explored on three tracks: ‘Black Sunday’ recalling one of the period’s darkest days, ‘New Deal Dirt’…
…Remastered from the original multitracks by Mike Milchner at Sonic Vision.
In 2017, Real Gone Music reissued guitarist Jesse Ed Davis’ first two albums — his eponymous debut and Ululu — as Red Dirt Boogie: The Atco Recordings 1970-1972. It drew press notice partly because Davis was so prominently featured in that year’s award-winning documentary Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World by directors Catherine Bainbridge and Alfonso Maiorana. It re-centered attention on his three fine studio albums, including 1973’s Keep Me Comin’ from Epic. Real Gone Music steps in again with this rarities collection. It contains 17 unissued performances including songs, alternates and outtakes recorded during sessions for his first two albums.
In the early 1970s San Diego was a sleepy Southern California Navy town on the Mexican border and a seemingly unlikely gathering point for some of the most innovative, unclassifiable American artists of their era. Yet the presence of Harry Partch – hobo composer, iconoclast and inventor of instruments such as the Harmonic Canon and Quadrangularis Reversum – and a newly established and highly experimental music department at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) ushered in a revolution that was as much social as it was musical. Drawing from the occult, self-realization and radical political movements of 70s Southern California, these artists sought to dismantle the established control systems of American life, looking to the future even as they sometimes referenced a distant…
From Academy Award® winning writer/director Chloé Zhao, Hamnet tells the powerful story of love and loss that inspired the creation of Shakespeare’s timeless masterpiece, Hamlet. Featuring powerful performances from Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, the film has already earned widespread acclaim, taking home the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Discussing his work on the Hamnet soundtrack, Richter explained: “In composing the score, I used the basic elements of Elizabethan music—period instrumentation, grammar, and sensibility—but applied them in ways that emerge directly from the story’s psychology. Having read the script before shooting, I sketched ideas reflecting themes of familial love and loss, our place…
The latest album from London-raised, Berlin-based artist Perera Elsewhere delivers tracks that force us to confront the lack of imagination in our own dreams. That’s not surprising given the breadth of her career. Whether working with “The Godmother of German Punk” Nina Hagen; importing the sounds of grime and drum & bass into techno-saturated Berlin; or via DJ sets including 3Phaz, KMRU, and Eddington Again, Sasha’s work is reliably genre-agnostic. With Just Wanna Live Some, that spirit is on full display.
Start with the features: There’s Ivory Coast’s Rap Ivoire badass Andy S, who reached out to Perera after hearing one of her tracks in Perera’s Boiler Room set. The double singles “Time Will Tell” and “Fuck Le System” are wickedly…
Coming off the less-than-classic Shake It Up, the Cars decided again to change things up, this time moving from their home studio in Boston to London to record with Mutt Lange. The producer was coming off a string of sleek modern hits, most recently Def Leppard’s Pyromania, and the Cars put themselves in Lange’s capable and demanding hands. They spent six months in the studio painstakingly putting the album together, sometimes spending days getting the right bass sound or vocal take. The bandmembers were rarely in the room at the same time and instead of using live drums on the record, Lange and David Robinson put together drum tracks using samples of Robinson’s playing. This sounds a bit like the recipe for a airless, stale album,…
“Ladies Night,” the third song off Crippling Alcoholism’s epic new LP Camgirl, is the best song the harrowing Boston sextet has put to tape – so far. It’s not the post-punk-inspired group’s most carefully crafted composition to date. Or its darkest. Or most intricate. Or even its best performed. But the tune, somehow the second-shortest offering on the new 15-song outing, embraces the subversiveness Crippling Alcoholism has always toyed with (and, yes, proudly continues to toy with) to tremendous effect. And we don’t just mean the subversiveness of frontman Tony Castrati’s lyrics, which often teeter among the morose, the horrific or, simply, the NC-17-stamped. But the group’s ability to co-opt musical phrasings or timbre, especially from…
Paz Lenchantin, the Argentine American bassist, has worked up a hell of a resume. In 1999, she helped form A Perfect Circle, Maynard James Keenan’s “other band” at the turn of the century. A few years later, she joined Billy Corgan’s indie-rock super-group Zwan, appearing on that group’s only full-length platter. An accomplished violinist in her own right, Lenchantin offered backing strings for a Queens of the Stone Age song in 2002. She returned to the “featured guest” post three years later on Silver Jews’ Tanglewood Numbers. Lenchantin’s C.V. and discography are not short on substance. This year, Paz releases her third solo outing, Triste.
But, if there’s anything that will help listeners navigate their expectations for Triste,…
Anyone who’s studied meditation or watched a Formula 1 race knows you can travel great distances without going anywhere at all — and enjoy the process of not getting there. There’s pleasure in following a circuit so frequently and so closely that everyday bits of the landscape become landmarks (we always pass that bullet-holed stop sign on this route) and a pang when those landmarks change (they replaced the stop sign!). Natural Information Society’s music operates on similar principles, drawing together the thrum of Moroccan gnawa, the austere profundity of Philip Glass, and the circular structures of John Coltrane at his most spiritual into a sound that doesn’t progress so much as it rotates. Its pleasures come from the steady accumulation…
Since the prime time of Bossa Nova in the late ’50s and early to mid-’60s, Brazilian music was one of the rare ones that was consistently able to cross the language barriers around the world, often bringing us some incredible music full of emotional intensity and intricate musicianship that cannot do anything else but transcend borders.
Mr Bongo is one of the Western Hemisphere record labels that is dedicated to bringing the best choice in Brazilian sounds, old and new, to the rest of the world, and with Rubel’s new (fourth) album, Beleza. Mas agora a gente faz o que com isso? (more or less -‘Beauty. But now what do we do with it?’), they have really raised their quality bar.
With the album itself, it is those old and new term from above that can really describe…
Colter Wall puts his mission statement (with a touch of irony) right there in his opening track. New album Memories and Empties begins with “1800 Miles,” noting the distance between Wall’s Saskatchewan home and Nashville. The singer’s about as country as it gets, but he often seems relatively untouched by Music Row. With Memories and Empties, he looks into a more traditional and radio-friendly sound, but only in his own way, still eschewing most of this century’s country music even as he moves himself off the plains.
With “1800 Miles,” Wall offers an honest self-appraisal of his artistry. There’s no flash; there’s nothing commercial. There are no “rhinestone clothes” or any adherence to subculture roles. That’s been true throughout his…
There’s a quiet hum of excitement about Merlyn Driver’s full-length debut, and with good reason. Since his first EP (This Is the Corner of a Larger Field, 2017), releases have been thin on the ground. His most notable project to date is the 2022 release Simmerdim: Curlew Sounds, a collaborative album curated and produced by Driver, featuring a vast array of talent from the world of folk music and beyond. It marked him out as one of the genre’s free thinkers, immersed in tradition yet willing to experiment, attuned to the ambience of the natural world yet always on hand with a winning melody.
That early EP saw Driver set out his stall as a kind of latter-day Nick Drake, where understated and sensitive songwriting went hand in hand…
There’s a timeline where Eliza McLamb is nearly finished with a law degree, and another where she’s climbed the corporate ladder in the solar paneling industry. In lieu of that, McLamb has fully committed herself to music, something that was once a hobby. At nineteen she gained TikTok virality from a replayable ditty about adolescent sexual confusion, and used that wit and self-awareness as a jumping off point for the career she’s built since. Now at twenty-four, McLamb’s sophomore album Good Story is her first release after stepping away as co-host of Binchtopia, the prolific and successful podcast she ran with Julia Hava. She doesn’t take the trial and error for granted, though.
…“Catch it quick/Frame the image/Make your…
The band members’ musical history prior to the band’s formation and the blues numbers they covered are all on this one disc! Little Feat was one of the most important bands that led the American rock scene in the 70’s with their unique sound that digested and absorbed various kinds of roots music. This CD is a collection of the blues numbers they covered on their albums and live shows, as well as the recordings they left before Little Feat was formed, which were also full of great players. Many people associate Little Feat with Lowell George’s slide guitar and the groovy rock sound of New Orleans funky music such as Alan Toussaint and the Meaters. Starting with the opening number from the famous live album “Waiting For Columbus”, an original song that…
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