Chicken Rhythms (Expanded Edition) features radio edits as well as new remixes from pop-music veterans The Reflex & Leo Zero. Produced by The Lightning Seeds’ Ian Broudie (Echo & The Bunnymen, Shack, The Coral, Texas), their album released in 1991 and peaked at number 19 in the charts.
Northside was a minor-league player in the Madchester field of all-stars. Formed in Manchester, England, in 1989 by Warren Dermody (vocals), Michael Upton (guitar), Cliff Ogier (bass), and Paul Walsh (drums), Northside had the backing of the indomitable U.K. indie Factory Records, but musically the band wasn’t as ambitious as its peers the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays. In fact, the British press accused the group…
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…Consisting of Koshiro Hino – he of Osaka’s goat (jp) – and cellist Yuki Nakagawa, KAKUHAN forged their sound on the 2022 debut Metal Zone. Hino’s percussive abrasions pan, pop and cascade as Nakagawa’s use of echo boxes and other effects dissolve expectations of what the cello ought to sound like. The duo slip between sonic states like lucid dreamers, combining dance rhythms, scraping drones, post-classical footwork, artillery snares and a frigid bass that hits the body like oceanic waves. Live it is sometimes difficult to tell who is responsible for which sound, a characteristic formally exploited on Repercussions, their collaborative album with the Polish percussionist Adam Gołębiewski.
Gołębiewski has worked with experimental…
Teaming up again with Swedish drummer Uno Bruniusson, CV Vision switched up the last production approach and opted for a return to previous studio methodologies. “I wanted to get a rougher sound on this record,” he says. “I dug out my two broken reel-to-reel tape machines, and patched them together, like Frankenstein. That’s what gels everything really – there’s different musical styles, but it’s the tape machine that brings it all together, sound-wise.”
Release the Beast does indeed fly off in several directions over the course of fourteen tracks, and gives us an insight into the full spectrum of the CV Vision musical universe. Fuzzed-out backbeats and psych progressions establish the opening tracks, as the sweet harmonies of ‘RTB’ and ‘The Rhythm’…
On his sophomore long-player, London-based jazz composer and keyboardist Yoni Mayraz retains his seamless contemporary melding of modern jazz, hip-hop, and electronics in settings that retain the spontaneity of live performance yet offer detailed arrangements.
Following Dybbuk Tse!, his 2022 debut, Dogs Bark Babies Cry expands the approach, focusing on his trio’s interplay (bassist Tim Dreissler and drummer Zoe Pascal). He also appends the cast with special guests. Recorded at London’s Konk Studios, the set is released by Pino Palladino and David Passick’s New York-based PPK Records.
Opener “Darwish Records” walks the tightrope between slick, soulful fusion, post-bop, and contemporary jazz. Mayraz weaves together…
…features 28 unreleased tracks and takes the listener on a journey from the band’s earliest demos and BBC Radio One Sessions through the singles to the album and beyond. Each disc contains rare and, in most cases, unreleased versions of songs.
Universal Music Recordings are shooting a new box set in the right direction, covering Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s U.K. pop landmark Welcome to the Pleasuredome in exhaustive new detail.
Though it’s already been exhaustively been reissued – once on a 2CD set from Salvo Music, on 2014’s vinyl / cassette / DVD set Inside the Pleasuredome (along with a 2018 Record Store Day box set of 12″ singles and the 2022 RSD comp Altered Reels, which brought a pair of…
Live God is the new live album from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. It’s a stunning testament to the transcendent Wild God Tour, which wowed audiences across the UK, Europe and North America, and which travels to Australia and New Zealand in 2026.
The tracklist includes performances of songs from the acclaimed 2024 studio album Wild God, as well as mind-blowing versions of catalogue favourites, such as ‘From Her to Eternity’, ‘Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry’ and ‘Into My Arms’.
…Cave described the shows as “an antidote to despair”, with longtime drummer and percussionist Jim Sclavunos agreeing that “this tour seemed distinctly more embracing of a love of life”.
“‘Transcendental’ is too pretentious a word,…
This new release features the complete 88-minute score, adding nearly a half hour of music to the program originally released on Hollywood Records. The extras include a demo of a short suite Zimmer and collaborator Steve Mazzaro prepared in 2014 to be performed live in concert.
Hans Zimmer was truly flying high in his career by the mid-’90s. He had successfully made the jump from London to Hollywood and had just won an Academy Award for his score for The Lion King (1994). His sound was going through an evolution during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it was on Backdraft (1991) that Zimmer fully embraced meshing an orchestra with his trademark synthesizers. It was also the start of the “power anthem” for which Zimmer would become known.
Falle Nioke unveils his debut album on Eat Your Own Ears after years of refining his unique, mercurial sound. The result, Love from the Sea, comes from a planetary body all its own, a macrocosm where ancient and futuristic elements constellate into something wholly unique. Sumptuous in its textures, Nioke’s latest release is exploding with fresh and intoxicating rhythms.
From a young age, Nioke had felt music as his calling. He eventually left his home to join Nimbé Sacré, a troupe of traveling musicians who performed across West Africa. Years later, while on a beach, he met a photographer, and in a twist of fate, encountered her again on the same beach three years later. They married soon after and eventually settled in Margate, UK.
“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…
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…
Thank you ! One of my favorite albums ever !