Phil Freeman on Free Jazz Orchestras

The seeming contradiction of the “free jazz orchestra” is what gives its music such power. How can one ask eighteen or twenty musicians, each committed to the principle of unfettered, highly individualistic improvisation, to work together with the discipline necessary to create something coherent? These works are often written out (though there’s plenty of solo space allotted), but still kept loose enough that a kind of mosaic-like group identity emerges. And when it works, free jazz orchestra music can be a kind of magic trick.

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Chris Catchpole on Murder Folk

Given folk music’s centuries-long fixation with homicide, the term ‘murder folk’ is almost a tautology. Indeed, the shadow of death and the gallows pole hangs over far more of the songs passed down from generation to generation than those illuminated by a spring morn or the love of a fair, bonny maid.

Ned Raggett on In the Nursery

UK brothers Klive and Nigel Humberstone are more than just siblings – they’re identical twins, leading to a theme they’ve observed more than once in their joint careers. They form the core of In The Nursery, an active creative partnership that has now stretched across nearly fifty years of numerous remarkable albums, creative projects and more. While they initially found a footing in a 1980s underground defined by the lingering impact of post-punk, electronic experimentation and the gelling of what could be called industrial music, they’ve ultimately become something more sui generis, not quite categorizable as any one thing except their own sound.

Andy Beta on Don Cherry

Through the 1960s, Cherry worked at the vanguard of jazz: Sonny Rollins, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, and the like. But as the decade wore on and the strife of life in America as a Black man grew onerous, Cherry made his way to Sweden and envisioned an entirely new way of putting that open musical dialogue to practice in new environs, inspired by the freedoms of the hippie lifestyle and new experiments in living. Forward-thinking, adventurous, fearless, open-eared musical travels lay ahead for Cherry and his longtime partner, artist/ musician Moki Cherry.

Reviews

Phil Freeman

Max Roach / We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite

Max Roach was not one to fuck around, but he was never fucking around less than on this album, recorded in August and September 1960 and released that December.

Art Blakey / Free for All

Sometimes avant-garde ideas slip into the mainstream in ways you don’t notice right away. Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers were one of the most energetic and crowd-pleasing bands of the early to mid-1960s, particularly when Wayne Shorter was serving as tenor saxophonist and primary composer between 1959 and 1964. But his tunes were often more than simple hard bop heads, and because they already had listener good will on their side, they could take the music surprisingly far out.

Charles Lloyd / Forest Flower: Charles Lloyd at Monterey

It’s hard to even comprehend now how popular saxophonist Charles Lloyd was in the late ’60s. His quartet with Keith Jarrett on piano, Cecil McBee (and later Ron McClure) on bass, and Jack DeJohnette on drums played jazz festivals, but they also co-headlined with rock bands at the Fillmore (a January 1967 concert yielded two live albums, Love-In and Journey Within) and toured around the world, including the Soviet Union. Forest Flower was their breakthrough release; it got them heavy airplay on “free form” FM radio and wound up becoming one of the most commercially successful jazz albums of all time, going platinum.

Jeff Treppel

Faith No More / The Real Thing

Perpetually somewhere in-between – grunge, hard rock, funk, rap, soul, metal – these San Francisco freakazoids found the perfect someone to put them together on their third album. Mike Patton provided them with a charismatic frontman, a multi-faceted voice to match their complex music, and a bandmate who wasn’t gonna punch anyone in the face on stage.

Hoaxed / Death Knocks

After their promising debut full-length, Two Shadows, Kat Keo and Kim Coffel added a third silhouette for their second venture into the dark woods. New bassist April Dimmick turns out to be no mere trick of the light. Whereas their leafless trees previously felt a little sparse, the added bass fills them out with twisting, gnarled branches.

Barón Rojo - Volumen Brutal

Volumen Brutal, Baron Rojo’s second release, presented their greatest chance at breaking through to an international market – recorded at Ian Gillan’s Kingsway Studios with contributions from King Crimson’s saxophonist and Gillan’s keyboardist, they even had Bruce Dickinson help them translate their lyrics for an English-language recording of the album. You’re in for a treat no matter what language.

Joe Muggs

B12 / Electro-Soma II

Of all the artists in the WARP Records Artificial Intelligence generation – which included Aphex Twin, Plaid / The Black Dog, Autechre, Richie Hawtin, Speedy J and more – the duo of Stephen Rutter and Michael Golding were the ones who hewed closest to the inspirations of Detroit techno and electro. Perhaps as a result, they didn’t get as much attention as their peers who veered off into their own ever-more distinctive variants.

Miryam Solomon & Rosie Turton / Maar

It’s hard to understand how music that’s so minimal as to feel like a geometry diagram can provoke deep feeling – but this 30-minute improvised micro album by trombonist Turton and alt-R&B vocalist Solomon really gets there.

Yara Asmar / Everyone I Love Is Sleeping and I Love Them So So Much

The Lebanese poet, musician, sound artist and puppeteer Yara Asmar makes some of the most intimate music in the world – in the sense that, even without lyrics, you feel like you’re being allowed into the most private of thoughts.

Nate Patrin

Nolan Potter, Population II, Yoo Doo Right / Yoo II avec Nolan Potter

Atmosphere outranks genre here, as krautrock, free jazz, noise, post-rock, and funk all blur together into a malleably fluid vehicle for locked-in ensemble work. And that allows for both a persistent, driving energy and a feeling of organic mutation.

Sherelle / With a Vengeance

Dance music has always had its synthesists — the kinds of producers who knew there was more than just an “Amen” break and a penchant for diva vocals that united the strains of post-house music that erupted from the hardcore continuum at the turn of the ‘90s. And Sherelle is made for our moment in that category: with jungle, footwork, techno, and house all recognized as crucial interlocking components of a modern genre-polyglot sensibility, her tracks on With a Vengeance double as reclamation and expansion.

Jack DeJohnette / Cosmic Chicken

The period between Jack DeJohnette’s tenure with Miles Davis and his long, fruitful run as a bandleader on ECM might look like an interstitial period in his discography, but his last album on Prestige delivers some remarkable sounds. Cosmic Chicken relies significantly on DeJohnette’s fluidity as a drummer, building complex rhythmic structures that underpin a form of fusion unafraid to venture further out past the constrictions of crossover.

Megan Iacobini de Fazio

Praed Orchestra! / The Dictionary of Lost Meanings

As a duo, PRAED’s music has always felt gloriously overwhelming: hypnotic, frenetic, driven by clarinet lines that spiral over pounding electronics and rhythms that seem engineered to push trance into overdrive.

Mai Mai Mai / Karakoz

Roman producer Toni Cutrone, better known as Mai Mai Mai, has carved out a singular space within Italy’s experimental underground. Emerging from the capital’s leftfield electronics and noise circuits, he built his reputation on a body of work that treats Mediterranean folk memory as living matter rather than archival relic.

Alfio Antico, Go Dugong / La Macchia

What makes this pairing so compelling is the balance they strike: Antico’s ritualistic pulse and voice remain central, while Go Dugong’s electronics, from subtle spatial effects to threads of psychedelia and jazz flourishes, expand the sound without overshadowing its roots.

Happy New Year everyone! Usually we do an EOY list round about now but time got away from us. Maybe next month? Or even March. Or maybe we’ll skip it altogether. You’ll know shortly after we do!

Nate Patrin on The World of Kenny Dennis

Concocted by Chicago rapper Serengeti (nee David Cohn) and given his first major place of honor as the featured character on the cover and title cut of his 2006 album Dennehy, Kenny is a fascinating study in how a detail-focused rapper with a deep interest in the inner lives of the people he writes about can develop a fictional presence into someone that feels deeply resonant, even real.

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Hank Shteamer on Jim White

Neither a chameleonic sideman nor a freewheeling improviser, neither a rock specialist nor a jazz swinger, Jim White is sui generis — as much his own species as, say, Milford Graves or Keith Moon. As subtle as his contributions to the work of Bill Callahan, Cat Power or Bonnie “Prince” Billy can be, he’s never a mere background presence. And in his collaborative duos with Nina Nastasia, Marisa Anderson, Ed Kuepper, Cretan laouto player George Xylouris (in Xylouris White) and Emmett Kelly (in the Double), or his signature and longest-running project, Dirty Three, he’s as much a lead voice as anyone else — his percussion always contributing deep atmosphere and almost shamanic sense of mystery.

Chris Catchpole on Vaporwave

Whether this chopped up, dreamlike melange of glitching beats and warped ‘90s R&B and ‘80s soft rock samples was ironic self-parody or genuinely subversive (debates continue whether it was a critique or celebration of hyper-capitalist society), its signifiers and sounds began to bleed into the mainstream, with Rihanna, Azealia Banks, The Weeknd and Yung Lean among those smearing Vaporwave’s digital gloop on their own records.

Harold Heath on Matthew Herbert

Herbert never uses sampling to recreate or reminisce; instead, he always uses it as a source to create something new, and his music quickly moved beyond his mid-90s deep house debut, blossoming in multiple directions. Recording under numerous names, including Herbert, Doctor Rockit, Radio Boy, Wishmountain, and DJ Empty, he released jazz, electronica, disco, classical, big band swing jazz, torch songs, and all sorts of experimental and avant-garde hybrid experiments and combinations.

Reviews

Jon Dale

Ashra / The Making Of

Collating some of the sessions that led to 1979’s Correlations, The Making Of is, by its nature, a much rougher beast, and more charming for that. Part of the joy is in hearing the Göttsching-Grosskopf-Ulbrich line-up letting their hair down in the studio; there’s a case to be made here for extended jams being the trio’s best side.

Seefeel / Pure, Impure

Seefeel were never shoegazers – let’s make that clear. There are some loose relationships, primarily to do with textural information and ‘new’ approaches to the guitar, but unlike the shoegaze crowd, who gestured towards pop sensibilities, the song was never Seefeel’s forte. Rather, they created a series of occluded spaces that initially appear static and empty, but reveal both intricacy and intimacy as you dive deeper.

Kingdom Come / Journey

In a blindfold test, you would swear that Journey, the third album by Arthur Brown’s Kingdom Come, was a lost early eighties post-punk masterpiece, such is its predictive qualities.

Sean Wood

Lee Morgan / The Gigolo

Morgan’s synergy with Wayne Shorter is a highlight of this 1965 session; on “Trapped,” the two one-up each other with big entrances, leading up to a blistering trading-fours section. Excellent Morgan originals form the album’s backbone: the brash “Yes I Can, No You Can’t,” the quirky blues “Speedball,” and the turbulent title track. A set that overflows with melody and swagger.

Alarm Will Sound / Land of Winter

The piece features a satisfyingly diverse range of textures that point back to his influences: spectralism (the glacial colors of “December,”), Andriessen (the teeming rhythms of “July”). But it avoids typical new-music moves for depicting the natural world, helped along by its idiosyncratic subject: Ireland’s weather manages to be both gentle and hostile at once.

Ars Nova Copenhagen / First Drop

There is such clever sequencing here: African rhythms into medieval rhythms (Kevin Volans’s “Walking Song” into Ortiz’s 5 Motets), color into rhythm (Skempton’s “More Sweet Than My Refrain” through to Reich’s “Clapping Music”). Traversing distinctions between musical worlds are what Hillier and Ars Nova Copenhagen do; both are known for their work in both early and contemporary music.

Andy Beta

Catalyst / Perception

Comparison to Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi group of the era isn’t just critical shorthand, in that Catalyst both utilized the services of Mwandishi percussionist Jabali Billy Hart and synth wizard Pat Gleason and adopted Swahili names. “Celestial Bodies” suggests the zero gravity drift of its title, before finally settling into a cosmic groove full of Nwalinu Odean Pope’s tenor sax cries. Like a visiting flying saucer, some nine minutes in, the piece then soars back up into deep space.

Jessica Williams / Blue Abstraction: Prepared Piano Project 1985–1987

But nothing is quite like the personal recordings she laid to tape in the mid-’80s, wherein she utilized the prepared piano strategies of John Cage and Henry Cowell to drastically alter the sounds of her 88 keys. Blue Abstraction finally brings this unheard element of Williams’s music to light.

Attica Blues Orchestra / Things Have Got to Change

Each of Archie Shepp’s Impulse records from the 1960s and ‘70s seemed to reveal a wholly new side of the man and his musical concerns. So consider Things Have Got to Change, his 11th album for the imprint, to be yet another side of his hendecagon.

Amelia Riggs

Sunn O))) / Eternity’s Pillars b/w Raise the Chalice & Reverential

Oh thank Satan, the Cloaked Ones are back when we needed them most. Despite the foundational templates and tropes that make up a Sunn O))) recording (low end distorted drones, played loud and long), you truly have not heard them all when you’ve heard just one.

Neko Case / Neon Grey Midnight Green

Neko Case albums are growers, and I do not mean this negatively. Quite the opposite. She makes music for repeated, intense listening, figuring out the turns of phrase and always being surprised when the heart’s blood seeps out of the steel wool her pen concocts.

Frightened Rabbit / The Winter of Mixed Drinks

An ex of mine complained about my own music while we were dating, saying “you can’t make every song sound like the last song on the record.” To which Frightened Rabbit respond time and again “hold my many many many beers.”

Rick Anderson on Recomposition

We live in a time when originality is taken for granted as a prime virtue of artistic expression, in music as well as in most other art forms. But this hasn’t always been the case. In earlier centuries, composers were celebrated and rewarded more for working effectively within the confines of clearly laid-out stylistic conventions than for breaching those conventions, or even for coming up with and developing new musical ideas. It’s also true that for centuries, music was created more for functional purposes than as a vehicle for self-expression: composers of the Renaissance, baroque, and classical periods were often hired by chapels and cathedrals to create music suitable for worship; others were hired by kings and dukes to write music designed to celebrate their patrons or entertain their guests at events.

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Amelia Riggs on Witch House

No one is saying you gotta rush to wherever you buy incense and stock up on sage. Nor is anyone saying cloaks are required before pressing Play. But as a subgenre Witch house is pretty All The Way In or Not At All; lasting either eternally or between 2000 and 2013 (depending on which forums you creep on), Witch house scrapes up elements of ambient, goth rock, trance, and industrial and sews them all together into something as brooding as it is engaging.

Joshua Levine on Electroclash

The turn of the 21st century was marked by a back-to-basics approach in popular music. The Strokes and the The White Stripes stripped rock music of its late-90s excesses, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Rapture brought movement and urgency back to indie rock, and electroclash sought the same ends with electronic dance music. After years of bloated, anonymous trance music, corporate sponsorships of artists and events and the dominance of bro-filled superclubs, electroclash turned the clock back to techno’s roots to bring some sex, danger and sleaze back to clubland.

Shy Thompson on Shibuya-kei

Shibuya-kei is most definable by its difficulty in pinning down its hallmarks. It’s retro-futurist, yet doesn’t agree on a past or a future it should most resemble. It’s a confluence of styles — Brazilian bossa nova, dub reggae, ’60s psych and folk rock, American hip-hop, French chanson, and more — but rarely do all these influences appear at once, or in predictable permutations. As an active art movement, it lasted a relatively short period from the late ’80s through the ’90s, yet left an indelible mark on the landscape of Japanese pop.

Reviews

Shy Clara Thompson

Emma Aibara — U:phobia

Emma Aibara exists halfway between Los Angeles and Tokyo and so does her music. Occasionally a resident of cities on the Eastern and Western hemispheres (currently, she’s based in Tokyo), she embodies the current trends of Japan’s emergent internet music scene in equal measure to Y2K pop-rock of yesteryear from the United States.

Telematic Visions — Opposite Mirrors

Since about 2019, Telematic Visions has been making club music and playing live houses all over Tokyo. Starting mostly as straightforward techno, his compositions gradually became more knotty and complex, morphing into longer grooves with labyrinthine structures as he welcomed more possibilities to his process.

Baa Records Selects: Thailand’s Golden Sounds

It might sometimes feel like western music nerds are interested in Asian music, but the fascination generally stops with East Asia, particularly Japan and Korea (and China, to an extent). Southeast Asia remains woefully underrepresented, even as resources for understanding the region’s creative output are more accessible than ever. It’s not a surprise to me that Baa Records Selects — a compilation of early synth and disco songs from the ’80s — barely made a blip on anyone’s radar when it was released in mid 2025, but it is a shame.

Hank Shteamer

Dianogah — As Seen From Above

If raucous crushers like the Jesus Lizard and Shellac represented one extreme of Chicago’s sprawling ’90s underground, and tasteful sophisticates such as the Sea and Cake and Tortoise the other, Dianogah fell right in the center of that pack. A largely instrumental trio made up of two bassists — Jason Harvey and Jay Ryan, the latter also known as an accomplished poster artist — and drummer Kip McCabe, the band put a more approachable spin on the elliptical post-hardcore stylings of bands like Slint and Bitch Magnet.

Jim White — Inner Day

Inner Day is actually even less drum-centric than its predecessor, 2024’s All Hits: Memories. Built around gentle synth tones and pulsations, it casts White’s drums in a subtle and coloristic role, such as on “Cloudy,” where a faint bass drum pulse and a gentle roll on the kit’s metal edges produce a pleasingly trancelike effect.

Cro-Mags — Alpha Omega

By the early ’90s, New York hardcore was evolving in potent new directions thanks to newly formed bands such as Into Another, Quicksand and Life of Agony. But the old guard were also pushing ahead into fresh territory, yielding bizarre and largely forgotten oddities like the third LP from Cro-Mags.

Harold Heath

Sault — 10

In their short history, UK collective Sault have made soul, funk, afro, R’n’B, hip hop, post-punk, no-wave, garage rock, celestial-transcendental-psychedelic gospel and more. For 10 (contrarily, their 13th album), they’ve mainly stuck to the live-sounding, uplifting classic-soul/funk and contemporary afro beats/R’n’B hybrid end of their repertoire.

Hollie Cook — Shy Girl

The songs are all characterised by sweet soul chord changes, and lilting, light, but often heart-wrenching vocal melodies from Cook, with the various tempos, styles and rhythms of reggae and dub re-worked into a highly listenable, bittersweet yet heavy-duty album.

Yazmin Lacey — Teal Dreams

Teal Dreams is a cohesive, accomplished set of storytelling soul/R’n’B and gently skanking Lovers Rock, with added afro beats and occasional forays into highly accessible pop-ish territory. As a singer, Yazmin Lacey generally eschews melisma or showy vocal acrobatics in favour of close-up, intimate performances using her bewitching, honeyed tone, a soft, tender, just-slightly-grainy voice that delivers her clever, introspective and authentic lyrics, that in this case tell the story of a relationship from beginning to end over the course of the album.

Chris Catchpole

The Milk — Borderlands

While with 2015’s Favourite Worry The Milk produced an enjoyable burst of retro-tinged blue-eyed soul, there weren’t many clues that the Essex four-piece had as remarkable a record as 2025’s Borderlands in them. When not working with the band drummer Mitch Ayling runs his own studio, and his cornucopia of analogue gear and address book of ace session players help realise a grand, widescreen vision filled with reflections of David Axelrod, Curtis Mayfield and Brian Wilson.

Doves — Constellations for the Lonely

Soaring from the sci-fi visions of Blade Runner-inspired opener “Renegades” to “Last Year’s Man”’s poignant, Smith-referencing reflections on parenthood, and the bombastic, almost Queen-like showdown of closer “Southern Bell,” it might actually be one of the trio’s finest records yet.

Sven Wunder — Daybreak

Given Danell’s meticulous attention to detail, the warm analogue glow of the recordings, and the fulsome splendour of the strings (performed by the Stockholm Studio Orchestra and conducted by Erik Arvinder), it’s hard to believe Daybreak isn’t some long-lost gem from the turn of the 70s.

Joshua Levine

Dogs — Different

The Dogs, from Rouen, crucially sang in English and used punk as a springboard to a laudable career and a source of national pride. Different was the trio’s debut and most aggressive effort. Drawing on early rock and roll, soul and proto-punk, the album is one of the stronger efforts of punk’s late-’70s second wave.

Primal Scream — Evil Heat

In many ways, Evil Heat is a simplified sibling to its monolithic predecessor, 2000’s XTRMNTR. It was recorded around the time that The Strokes and electroclash emerged, and it uses a similar back-to-basics approach.

Primal Scream — XTRMNTR

The Glaswegian pop/rock/dance experimentalists entered the new century with yet another musical reinvention (they had drastically changed directions on almost every one of their previous five albums) with their most scabrous album yet. XTRMNTR was apparently made in a period of sobriety for the band, and the lyrics capture the shock and bald-faced outrage at the capitalist politics of people for whom the anesthesia has worn off.

Andy Beta on 1980s African Music

On the flip side, African artists themselves also emerged on the world stage like never before and found new audiences in the West. Much like Simon could hear a sound that evoked memories of his favorite songs, ‘80s music fans could hear something new coming out of Africa. One can hear the funk of James Brown coursing through Fela’s Afrobeat. King Sunny Ade is a guitar god regardless of genre. The blues coursed through Ali Farka Touré’s Malian music, and even if you don’t understand Wolof, Youssou N’Dour had a commanding voice.

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Hank Shteamer on Wayne Shorter

In 20th century music, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter form a kind of holy trinity, nearly unrivaled in the scope of their impact and influence across genres. And while Miles is the indisputable icon and Herbie (still vital and active at age 85) reached the pinnacles of both jazz innovation and pop success, Wayne was every bit their equal, a perpetual vanguardist throughout his six-decade-plus career.

Harold Heath on Charles Stepney

The history of popular music is full of unsung backroom figures who shied away from the limelight and quietly performed their musical alchemy behind the scenes, people like Chicago producer, arranger, composer, musician, and songwriter Charles Stepney. Decades after he passed away in 1976, Stepney is now rightly celebrated as an influential and important figure, his work characterised by rich, sumptuous and detailed symphonic arrangements, his pioneering use of electronic techniques and instruments, and a bold, ambitious approach that effortlessly blended and then surpassed jazz, soul, rock and psychedelia.

Chris Catchpole on Lawrence

Evidence of Lawrence’s eccentricities – not letting visiting journalists use his toilet, firing a recording engineer for having the wrong shoelaces – can be observed in Paul Kelly’s 2011 film Lawrence of Belgravia and Times journalist Will Hodgkinson’s wonderful 2024 book Street Level Superstar. Yet much more than being a delightfully peculiar oddball, for those in the know, Lawrence is responsible for some of the most captivating and singular records of the past four decades.

Reviews

Phil Freeman

Coroner — No More Color

The third Coroner album is the peak of their first era, the ultimate expression of the technical thrash style they’d built on 1987’s R.I.P. and 1988’s Punishment For Decadence, while hinting at the experimental groove metal that would come on 1991’s Mental Vortex and 1993’s Grin.

Coroner — Mental Vortex

Samples of movie dialogue, news broadcasts about the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy (on “Semtex Revolution”) and a few eerie sound effects demonstrate an awareness of the larger world, but Mental Vortex is often a very claustrophobic album, trapping you in a small space with three men focused on their work.

Coroner — Dissonance Theory

The Swiss thrash trio Coroner produced five albums (and a self-titled odds-and-ends farewell compilation) in their initial run, evolving from 1987’s ambitious and flashy (with occasional Popol Vuh-esque intros and interludes) R.I.P. to 1993’s grimy, industrial-tinged Grin. Then they faded away. But in 2010, they reunited and began playing live, and now, more than 30 years after their last album, they’re fully back.

Ned Raggett

claire rousay — a little death

a little death, rousay’s late 2025 album, finds her continuing to explore in many different directions even in the short space of barely over half-an-hour, a testimony to her abilities.

Aarktica — Ecstatic Lightsongs

If the throughline of DeRosa’s work, as Aarktica or his own, has arguably been darker shades of guitar and electronic atmospherics, what’s also notable is the stylistic fluidity he’s shown in turn from ambient flow to stark folk, with Lightsongs being one of his more lyrically and musically formal efforts.

Wayne Snow — Snowdome

Nigerian artist Wayne Snow had made a growing mark with earlier releases before 2025’s Snowdome but said effort, another excellent example of a half-hour collection feeling like a proper full album at ten tracks, further showed the excellence at work.

Rick Anderson

The Rocket Summer — Calendar Days

Bryce Avary released this, his first full-length album under the name The Rocket Summer, in 2003 when he was twenty years old. He wrote all the songs and played all the instruments, and the whole thing is an absolutely exhilarating, headlong blast of intensely melodic guitar pop.

Soul Coughing — Irresistible Bliss

Soul Coughing’s second album finds them continuing to explore and develop their highly unusual fusion of funk, jazz, hip hop, and musique concrète. “Super Bon Bon,” the opening track, lays out their whole concept: Sebastian Steinberg’s acoustic bass grinds out a rumbling foundation onto which sampling keyboardist Mark Degli Antoni dumps layer upon layer of found-sound oddments, while drummer Yuval Gabay pushes everything along with what starts out as a meathead four/four rock beat and then, on the chorus, turns into a frenetically funky groove.

Ricky Skaggs, Tony Rice — Skaggs & Rice

When they recorded this album in 1980, neither singer and multi-instrumentalist Ricky Skaggs nor guitar superhero Tony Rice was yet 30 years old, but both were already elder statesmen of bluegrass: Skaggs had toured with Ralph Stanley and with the Country Gentlemen, while Rice had long since picked up the mantle left by Clarence White and taken the guitar into uncharted territory as a lead bluegrass instrument.

Jeff Treppel

Testament — Para Bellum

From the opening riff of “For the Love of Pain” — with its slashing guitars, tech-death drumming, and a deranged vocal performance from Chuck Billy — it thrills like their best Reagan-era screeds. Lyrics (never Billy’s strong suit) aimed at AI, shadow conspiracies, and gunslingers can feel a bit silly, but when backed up with the Alex Skolnick/Eric Peterson guitar onslaught and new drummer Chris Dovas’s nimble limbs, they hit the target.

AFI — Silver Bleeds the Black Sun...

It’s been over two decades since emo-goth poster boys AFI were worth pinning on the wall, and Davey Havok’s newfound scumbag mustache didn’t exactly inspire confidence leading up to their twelfth album. Thankfully, looks can be deceiving: Silver Bleeds the Black Sun… feels like a band clawing out of the grave. It’s their finest work since genre cornerstone Sing the Sorrow.

Die Spitz — Something to Consume

Primal in the way the best punk and metal prodigies always scream, this foursome — barely of drinking age — barrel through a genre-agnostic barrage of exorcisms, from bad girlfriends to bad situations to the generally bad hand we’ve all been dealt.

Joe Muggs

Emma-Jean Thackray — Weirdo

Musically, Thackray cross-wires her influences more elegantly and intricately than ever, weaving what is simply one of the most distinctive sounds in 2020s music. Inspiring on multiple levels.

Jamie Lidell — Places of Unknowing

As midlife introspection deep dives go, this one’s a doozy. Over a long career, Jamie Lidell has done everything from the most brain-scouring and underground of techno to modernist funk-soul that got him gigs supporting James Brown, Prince and Elton John. But after a very circuitous route, ending up with him living in Nashville, and a nine year gap between albums, he returned with this deep and dark set of reflections on adulthood, responsibility, ageing, neurodivergence and dark nights of the soul.

rRoxymore — Juggling Dualities

Hermione “rRoxymore” Frank’s electronic music has been honed through live performance above all else, and it’s given her an almost unrivalled sense of pacing, space and movement. Her third album is extraordinarily gentle and poised on first listen: its New Age ripples of arpeggio, warm bubblebaths of soft ambient chords and gentle deep house pulses in radical contrast to the stark, skittering, rhythm-driven approach of its 2022 predecessor Perpetual Now.

Joe Muggs on Afro-House

At the time of writing, in 2025, “Afro-house” has become kind of codified as a very commercial strand of the global dance music economy. It means something smooth and lightly funky, full of signifiers of sunshine and exoticism, for wealthy audiences to luxuriate in. DJs from South Africa play undemanding sets on Russian oligarchs’ yachts moored off Ibiza for $500k a time and it’s all very decadent. But in fact, the relationship of house music to the African continent and its cultures is… well it’s as old as house music itself and older, and has been explicitly explored in many different forms over the years.

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Ned Raggett on Halloween Music

A lot of what has shaped the idea of Halloween music in the American popular consciousness has specific roots from a time and place – the 1950s and early 1960s, thanks to a combination of ascendant television bringing back older horror icons from 1930s cinema, newer films in the overall genre, often crossed with science fiction efforts with their own distinctly unusual film music, and the concurrent ferment of blues, r’n’b, rockabilly and more that helped change the path of pop music in general.

Hank Shteamer on Glenn Danzig

There’s a case to be made that Glenn Danzig is the most underrated songwriter of the past 50 years. Sound far-fetched? Maybe that’s because of the way that so many facets of his persona — from his enduring obsession with comic-book horror and B-movie schlock to his once-chiseled physique and WWF-worthy image — have routinely diverted attention away from his musical accomplishments and turned him into perennial meme fodder.

Joshua Levine on Dance-Punk

Dance-punk was a primarily US phenomenon that originated in New York City, and it must be understood as the middle point between two other concurrent NYC movements – the Strokes-led rock and roll revival and the assaultive synth-pop and acid-house fusion of electroclash. All three styles marked a back-to-basics reset moment for underground music, as well as popular culture as a whole.

Reviews

Nate Patrin

Tussle — Cream Cuts

Tussle emerged out of San Francisco during that early ‘00s moment when the post-punkers started really getting into the full spectrum of ‘80s Hacienda booking. And while they didn’t notch the same level of Warp-shepherded cult-band lifer longevity that fellow Bay Area-minted dance freaks !!! did, Tussle at least had the kind of sporadic peaks that let them look at Nic Offer’s gang eye-to-eye.

Butcher Brown — Solar Music

The fun thing about the latter-day resurgence of jazz fusion is that there are many, many more things for it to fuse with now than were available in the ‘70s. Richmond’s Butcher Brown revels in this so deeply that even the title of Solar Music invokes the possibility that it’s a nod to Dick Griffey’s legendary boogie-funk label SOLAR, though even if it’s not they also trust the prospective listener enough to get the right associations from that unintentional allusion anyways.

Pulp — More

A surprisingly, unusually solid comeback album would’ve been fine. But the kind of self-aware, existentially anxious, empathy-forward cool that Jarvis Cocker’s made his m.o. isn’t the sort of perspective that diminishes with age. So surprising and unusual don’t entirely feel like appropriate terms to use for More., their first album in a staggering two dozen years.

Jon Dale

Hala Strana — Compendium

Steven R. Smith rolled out a series of albums under the name Hala Strana across the long 2000s. The vision for the project was unique, particularly for the ‘scene’ he might have been aligned with (Jewelled Antler, psych-folk, etc.) – Hala Strana was the repository for Smith’s imaginings and re-visioning of Eastern European folk music, though the material oscillated between traditional tunes and Smith’s own writing.

Redd Kross — Teen Babes from Monsanto

Teen Babes From Monsanto was the real statement, though; six covers and an extended blow-out of Born Innocent’s peak moment, “Linda Blair.” They were obviously trash pop mavens, but their knowledge was deep and smart; okay, they covered Kiss’s “Deuce” (and who wouldn’t), but the Rolling Stones’ “Citadel,” from their supposed psychedelic misstep (actually one of their best albums), Their Satanic Majesties Request? Smart move at the time, smart move now.

kaito — The Ground Quietly Illuminated

Since drifting from the Kompakt mothership, he’s been self-releasing material on Bandcamp that feels more exploratory, somehow, but shares a similar mood. The Ground Quietly Illuminated collapses those two approaches – beats and beatless – into one album, and works beautifully for it, though Watanabe’s traded the seeming-endlessness of trance for shuffling downtempo rhythms, deployed to hypnotic effect on the fifteen-minute centrepiece, “Persistence of Motion.”

Amelia Riggs

Geese — Getting Killed

Though not as chaotic as their previous records, Getting Killed finds Geese at the other end of the Having Something To Prove gauntlet and fully establishes themselves as one of the more thrilling bands currently working.

Talking Heads — Naked

I’m here to make the controversial argument that not only have Talking Heads never made an album that was less than great, but their post-Speaking In Tongues era is the band at its peak.

Richard Dawson — 2020

The album’s heart, however, shines bright in the description of little victories amongst the chaos of modern living; unfamiliar neighbors helping fix up a pub after a flood has knocked through town, a father consoles his son after a football loss, and even the act of quitting a soul-breaking job has the air of storybook heroism.

Megan Iacobini de Fazio

Kokonja — badik!

The music is uneasy and intense, but also playful and slightly hallucinatory, like on the delirious “agugigai,” where acid squiggles and fractured rhythms collide with folk timbres and bone shattering beats that suddenly drop out to make room for bright, pop-like vocal fragments that cut momentarily through the chaos.

Jup Do Bairro — Corpo Sem Juízo

Blending bass-heavy club beats, pop, and Jup’s theatrical, often spoken delivery, Corpo Sem Juízo is full of contrasts, shifting from melodic and danceable to intense and cutting.

Bitoi — Sirkulu

Across nine tracks, the group weaves improvisation, folky vocals, and phonetic bird-song patterns into a sound that is both otherworldly yet deeply bound to the natural world around us.

Sean Wood

Emma Houton — The Bath

The tranquil beauty of Emma Houton’s vocal harmonies, self-recorded here in eight parts a cappella, would be enough to make her work worth attention. But this debut release does not settle for ambient sameness; instead, she shapes her singing into a varied and rewarding landscape.

Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Rebecca Miller — CPE Bach: Symphonies

The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment finds a perfect match in the symphonies of the CPE Bach; this is intelligent music full of energy and contrast, performed in ways musically and historically revealing.

Ellen Reid — p r i s m

Ellen Reid achieves a number of rare feats in this 2019 Pulitzer-Prize-winning chamber opera. First among them is the creation of a powerful and original sonic portrait of sexual-violence trauma. The libretto, by Roxie Perkins, is dedicated in particular to the fragmented, layered character of survivors’ suffering, and Reid’s score manages to be both disorienting and chillingly direct.

Chris Catchpole on él Records

At odds with how labels were run at the time, independent or otherwise, Alway saw himself more like a 1960s impresario and svengali than someone who signed artists they liked and thought might sell a few records — not so much taking a hands-on approach as wielding complete control over every aspect of the label’s output, from the artwork right down to choosing the song titles.

Collections

Sean Wood on Mahler

Despite the amount of ink spilled by Mahler and others about the meanings of his music, it is important to not forget that he was ultimately a working musician, a great orchestrator, someone capable of composing striking and ambiguous musical ideas that invite interpretation without providing easy answers.

Joe Muggs on Compass Point

There are a select group of producers who helped define the high-gloss, aspirational sound of the 1980s. Nile Rodgers, Trevor Horn, Quincy Jones, Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois, “Jellybean” Benitez stand out, for example. But very few did the job with quite as much class and style as Island Records founder Chris Blackwell and studio wizard Alex Sadkin.

Rick Anderson on 80s Hardcore Punk

But punk was more than just a reaction; it also exploded existing boundaries of musical decorum, and by doing so it opened the floodgates to a wide variety of new genres that owed a debt to punk but were not at all the same thing.

Reviews

Harold Heath

Kokoroko — Tuff Times Never Last

The seçond album from London 8-piece 21st century Afrobeat jazz powerhouse Kokoroko, on Giles Peterson’s Brownswood label, serves up an expertly played set of joyous, sweet-soul and R’n’B flavoured Afrobeat and highlife hybrid jazz tracks.

Phi-Psonics — Expanding to One

The style is spiritual, devotional jazz from the serene-and-controlled rather than fiery-and-furious school, the intensity rising from their unhurried, dedicated slow-burn approach and the magic that can occur when musicians lock in and ride the peaks and troughs together.

Momoko Gill & Matthew Herbert — Clay

Songs are built from bubble sounds, softly undefined synth chords, plucks and chimes with questionable provenance, hard-to-place angular percussion, with Gill’s drums carefully entering the sound field and providing either subtle drive or rhythmic fire when required.

Hank Shteamer

Unwound — The Future of What

Unwound’s evolution from scrappy, cathartic post-hardcore outfit to visionary art-rock ensemble was a gradual one, and their third LP, The Future of What, finds them at a marvelously assured midpoint on that creative journey.

Beherit — Drawing Down the Moon

Some early-’90s black metal is prized for its rawness and ferocity, but this LP — the debut full-length from Finland’s Beherit — earned canonical status largely due to its unsettling weirdness. The genre’s familiar blast and bludgeon is here, but it’s seasoned with constant surprise.

Dazzling Killmen — Dig Out the Switch

Through marathon practices and an eclectic array of influences ranging from the Minutemen to Captain Beefheart, the trio of guitarist-vocalist Nick Sakes, bassist Darin Gray and bassist Blake Fleming honed a bizarre yet entirely coherent sound that landed somewhere between explosive post-hardcore and labyrinthine prog.

Andy Beta

Okkyung Lee — just like any other day (어느날) : background music for your mundane activities

Her oeuvre – over 30 releases – often documents prickly, challenging exchanges with the likes of Bill Orcutt, Christina Marclay, or Evan Parker, but Just Like Any Other Day isn’t just like her previous efforts. For one, Lee relies heavily on twinkling synthesizers, her exquisite bow work on cello (her primary instrument) nowhere to be heard.

Amina Claudine Myers — Solace of the Mind

Maybe the jazz press just resented her forays in the 1980s to embrace R&B, funk, and soul, but pianist Amina Claudine Myers always sought a common ground between her church upbringing in the American South, the Chicago and New York jazz scene, and popular music formats blaring on the radio.

Mal Waldron — Candy Girl

Candy Girl was always an enigma in Waldron’s catalog, a blip in 1975 and long since out of print. At times, it was mistaken for Parisian funk band Lafayette Afro Rock Band, as members of that band served as his backing band. It’s a rare glimpse of Waldron on Fender Rhodes, with Frank Abel on clavinet.

Chris Catchpole

Serge Gainsbourg — Casino De Paris 1985

The 80s didn’t look kindly on many 60s icons, yet this rare 1985 live outing six years before his death found Serge Gainsbourg in defiant form. As might be expected, the legendary bon viveur is audibly drunk for most of it, and while the slickness of his contemporary backing band might seem like an odd fit — fretless bass, yacht-rock guitar, squealing saxophone — it’s magnificent, like putting a Rottweiler in an Armani suit, as Serge growls, weaves and presumably chain-smokes his way through glossy renditions of his work with a bite and menace that frequently outstrips their studio counterparts.

Saint Leonard — The Golden Hour

Kieran Leonard’s third album was written and recorded while the singer was hunkered down in East Berlin through a bitterly cold winter during the height of lockdown, Nathan Saoudi and Alex White from notoriously debauched South London degenerates The Fat White Family serving as both his musical collaborators and guides through the city’s illicit underbelly.

Various Artists — Songs For A Central Park Picnic

Stanley and bandmate Pete Wiggs’ Songs For… series of compilations present impeccably curated playlists for a variety of settings, from rainy afternoons to 1950s teahouses, and fuggy, pre-smoking ban pubs. Songs For A Central Park Picnic lays out a suitably tasteful spread of New York-centred, pre-Beatles pop.

Joshua Levine

Oasis — (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?

Oasis’s classic 1994 debut, Definitely Maybe, had synthesized different strains of rock and roll made by British outcasts, from the mods to the Pistols to The Smiths, delivered in a defiant sneer for the ages. The result, in the UK, was a huge pop hit, and Oasis were no longer in the underclass. With a new, more technically proficient drummer, a year later, they followed it up with (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, one of the best-selling albums in British history. The point of Oasis was finding shared humanity in raw, sometimes unflattering honesty, and that’s the thread that connects both records.

Oasis — Be Here Now

The conventional wisdom is that Oasis lost the plot on this, the Britpoppers’ third album, in a blizzard of cocaine and fame-induced hubris. That view informed Be Here Now’s reputation for years – that it was one of rock music’s all-time disasters and flops. Far removed from its moment, it doesn’t quite reach the level of the two classics that preceded it (not much does), but Be Here Now has flashes of brilliance that are propped up by its excess, epic song lengths and endless instrumental overdubs.

George Harrison — All Things Must Pass

All Things Must Pass was a self-consciously massive and myth-making statement. Designed to showcase George Harrison’s songwriting (by this point equal to his former bandmates Lennon and McCartney), it was the first three-record set of studio recordings, and compiled songs that had been ignored by The Beatles, sometimes for years.

Phil Freeman on Organ Jazz

From the late 1950s to the end of the ’60s, groups featuring organ, drums, and either electric guitar or tenor saxophone were among the most popular in jazz. Clubs in black neighborhoods could always pack the house with an organ trio, and artists like Smith, Jimmy McGriff, “Brother” Jack McDuff, Richard “Groove” Holmes, Big John Patton and others played funky, soulful, hard-jamming music that also made the careers of guitarists like Kenny Burrell, Grant Green and George Benson.

Collections

Rick Anderson on Traditional Irish Music

Ireland’s folk music has inspired fascination around the world for over 200 years – in the 18th century it influenced classical composers in Europe and the British Isles, and its traces can be heard in both English and American folk music and folk rock to this day, and even in country and gospel music.

Ned Raggett on 1990s Welsh Indie/Alternative

Whether being notably experimental, engagingly poppy or aiming for the arena heights – or all three and more – there’s little doubt that a lot was going on at the time. If sometimes collectively described and perhaps stereotyped as a response to the overweening impact of ‘Cool Britannia’ as such by the mid-1990s – the phrase ‘Cool Cymru,’ referring to the Welsh name for the country, is sometimes used – the sense remains that most of these acts, many with shared roots or growing out of earlier incarnations of other acts, absolutely had something distinct happening.

Chris Catchpole on Rock Progressivo Italiano

The battle lines drawn by punk can still put many off dipping a toe into the world of 1970s progressive rock. However, if you can shake images of Rick Wakeman’s King Arthur On Ice or Peter Gabriel dressed as toad-like creature The Slipperman from your mind, then Italy’s prog scene in the ‘70s – Rock Progressivo Italiano, or RPI for short – offers a cornucopia of wonderful albums worth exploring, even for those who might not know their Gentle Giant from their Genesis.

Reviews

Phil Freeman

Marcus Miller & Miles Davis — Music from Siesta

In 1986, Miles Davis shocked the music industry twice — first by leaving his label of 30 years, Columbia, for Warner Bros., and then with Tutu, a cybernetic, digitally flash-frozen album of collaborations with bassist/producer Marcus Miller that earned him a Grammy. One year later, the pair went back into the studio to score the arty drama Siesta, and once again the results were modern and brilliant, but this time they also looked back decades, to the trumpeter’s greatest orchestral album, 1960’s Sketches of Spain.

Howard Shore & Ornette Coleman — Naked Lunch

Composer Howard Shore found the perfect partner to score the movie: alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, whose late 1950s recordings helped break open jazz, creating new avenues for instrumental expression just as Burroughs had cracked through the façade of 1950s social conformity with his horrific, junk-poisoned satire. (Naked Lunch was first published in July 1959; Coleman’s breakthrough album, The Shape of Jazz to Come, was released in November of that year.)

Jack Nitzsche — The Hot Spot

The 1990 movie The Hot Spot, directed by Dennis Hopper and based on a 1953 novel called Hell Hath No Fury, was the sweatiest noir since 1982’s Body Heat. It’s a coiled, twisting tale of robbery, blackmail, adultery and (maybe) murder, but the best thing about it is its soundtrack.

Rick Anderson

Thelonious Monk — The Complete Blue Note Recordings

As we all know, “important” recordings are not necessarily more enjoyable because of their importance. But this collection of sessions recorded by Thelonious Monk for the Blue Note label between 1947 and 1952 is truly a treasure in just about every way.

Can't Stop the Dread (High Note Roots 1975-1979)

The High Note label, owned and operated by producer Sonia Pottinger (a rarity in the almost entirely male reggae music scene), released a prodigious stream of singles throughout the 1960s and 1970s in a variety of styles, but the best songs were always those in a roots-and-culture style – sufferer’s anthems, songs of political protest, and Rastafarian doctrinal disquisitions by artists both famous (Justin Hinds, Delroy Wilson, Leroy Smart) and obscure (Aston Whittaker, The Survivors).

October Project — October Project

You want to call them pretentious, and I’ll say okay: the fruity contralto voice of lead singer Mary Fahl, the literary flourishes of Julie Flanders’ lyrics, the orchestral tendencies of the arrangements… yes, arguably it’s all a bit much. But Fahl wields that unusual voice with great taste, the melodies are consistently genuinely catchy, and the arrangements never get completely away with themselves.

Ned Raggett

Ganser — Animal Hospital

Having established themselves in the late 2010s with some excellent releases, Chicago’s Ganser went through lineup changes and other fits and starts before returning with a new full album in 2025, Animal Hospital, centered around the continuing rhythm section of Alicia Gaines and Brian Cundiff as well as new lead vocalist Sophie Sputnik. (Former member Charlie Landsman and Dove Hollis fill out things on guitar.)

Marissa Nadler — New Radiations

The continuing excellence of Marissa Nadler’s work exploring the possibilities of what singing and acoustic guitar can do are demonstrated once more on 2025’s New Radiations, her tenth official full length release over the years. Aside from engineering by Randall Dunn and extra performances from Milky Burgess, it’s all Nadler throughout, from the layering of vocals to the additional instrumentation that shapes the often haunted, sometimes queasy flow of the eleven songs featured.

Lida Husik — The Voyage Out

2025’s The Voyage Out was the first new album from the still underrated Lida Husik in seven years, and only her second overall in the 21st century, but it was well worth the wait just for the latest unexpected wrinkle in her wonderful body of work. For the first time, Husik released an album supported by a backing band, thanks to the rhythm section of Paul Montone and Luke Strahota.

Jeff Treppel

Strife — Rush

Not to be confused with the Strife with the camo pants and Converses (or the Rush with the By-Tor and the Snow Dog), this power trio came out of England swords swinging – only to mostly get met with indifference, partly from fans and partly from their own record label. With music as wild as their hair and a sound that pulled influences out of everywhere from Birmingham to Motown, their debut (of two), Rush, had everything you’d expect from a top-shelf heavy prog act: a song about the Native Americans, a 12-minute suite, racially insensitive artwork.

Gillan — Future Shock

Ian Gillan’s eponymous act tends to get lost in the shuffle between his groundbreaking run with Deep Purple Mk II and Born Again, his misunderstood one-off with Black Sabbath. There’s a reason: look at what bands like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and Ozzy Osbourne’s solo act accomplished at the same time. Still, as far as Deeper Purple releases go, Future Shock stacks up very favorably against Whitesnake’s rote blues revivalism and (post-Dio) Rainbow’s AOR glop.

Frob — Frob

Their name doesn’t quite sit right, sounding somewhere between an amphibian and a slang term for trouble, and these non-Krautrocking Germans’ only album lands in a similar liminal space. This self-titled 1976 effort sits on the boundary between heavy prog rock and jazz. No vocals to ruin the experience, just four musicians (on guitar, keys, bass, and drums) bouncing off each other.

Joe Muggs

Kokoroko — Tuff Times Never Last

It’s possible that the London jazz / Afrobeat collective Kokoroko had the vast success of their mellow and dreamy first released tune “Abusey Junction” in the rear view mirror when they made this album. Having expanded into much more maximalist and energetic vibes on their 2022 debut album Could We Be More, here they’ve very much returned to the relaxed “Abusey” feel.

Dimorphodons — Waui

This is a perfect example of transcending “record collector rock.” One-man-band Will Twynham clearly knows his psychedelic stuff and isn’t afraid to overtly reference lots of touchstones that an old school record shop dude might give you the hard sell on: Loop, Can, Love, Syd Barrett, Add N to (X), Silver Apples, 13th Floor Elevators, and a whole of lot more obscure acts besides (as well as more populist ones, e.g. there are lashings of T Rex here). But the miracle of this debut album is that he doesn’t sound like he’s copying anything, nor reverently presenting the past as superior.

NZO — Come Alive

The mysterious NZO is from Sheffield, South Yorkshire, and it shows. Her beats are hyper-modern, and hyper-funky, but like a long tradition running from Cabaret Voltaire through the early WARP Records experimenters like Sweet Exorcist, to Mark Fell and his son Rian Treanor, she channels the innate clank and clang of a city that was built on metalworking — founded on foundries, as it were.

Rick Anderson on Baroque Music

The word literally means “overly fancy,” and its original use reflects the conventional wisdom of the European musical establishment at that time: coming out of the Renaissance period, when art music was mostly somber church music and mostly vocal, the efflorescence of virtuosic, highly ornamented, and increasingly secular music during the 17th century seemed to many like an abandonment of cherished norms and values in favor of outlandish and decadent virtuosity.

Collections

Harold Heath on Leon Sylvers III's Production Hot Streak

Singer, songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist and DJ Leon Sylvers III wrote his first hit for family soul band The Sylvers in 1972, and had already clocked up an impressive music industry career when he left the group in ’78 to take up the role of in-house producer at the newly created SOLAR label. His influential production work through the first half of the ‘80s delivered massive singles and albums for Shalamar, The Whispers, his own vehicle Dynasty, Carrie Lucas, Evelyn Champagne King, Tavares, Midnight Star and more, as well as neatly charting the emergence of the classic mid-80s electro-soul sound from the ashes of disco.

Joe Muggs on Basic Channel

There are few act names more appropriate than “Basic Channel.” From the moment they first connected in the early 90s, Mark Ernestus and Moritz Von Oswald were dedicated to reducing grooves to their simplest essences.

Jeff Treppel on Proto-Metal

Proto-metal bands represent the Autumn of Disillusionment to psych rock’s Summer of Love, all the young sixties idealists waking up from their acid trips with wicked hangovers and treatment-resistant VDs. As Blue Öyster Cult said in “This Ain’t The Summer of Love,” their cynical kiss-off to the Woodstock generation: “This ain’t the Garden of Eden / And there ain’t no heaven above / Things ain’t what they used to be / And this ain’t the Summer of Love.” Even the Beatles went from “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” to “Helter Skelter.”

Reviews

Nate Patrin

Open Mike Eagle — Neighborhood Gods Unlimited

At this point, approaching his second full decade of releasing records, he’s honed such a formidable thematic blend of comedy and pathos that he’s earned a place beside the few other MCs that have nailed it quite so playfully — the turf of Pharcyde, De La Soul, and DOOM is his to roam.

Aesop Rock — Black Hole Superette

Aesop Rock’s detail-heavy observations from a left-field perspective have always been a creative strength, being one of the main reasons his intricate verbiage is always worth rewinding even when it seems impenetrable. And one of the reasons his discography is one of the most overwhelmingly and consistently rewarding of the last 25 years of hip-hop is that he’s been able to express himself in a perspective where he’s less voice of god than weathered traveler.

Yaya Bey — Do It Afraid

Sometimes all you need is a familiar sentiment delivered in such a breezily pretty way that it reminds you why that sentiment’s familiar in the first place. Yaya Bey’s artistry is given to taking a direct and clear statement and instilling the deepest possible emotional weight to it, and the spirit of do it afraid is dedicated to making sure that weight’s inverted into the antigravity of joy.

Amelia Riggs

Dragging an Ox Through Water — Panic Sentry

Much hay can be made from delving into weird terms like “folktronica” or “freak folk” or anything that doesn’t immediately fall into “acoustic guitar is being played.” The goal with pushing folk music into its nth degree is to play with limits, to futz with tradition, and often times to unsettle the coffee shop Sunday morning playlist makers.

Bill Orcutt — The Four Louies

When Bill Orcutt isn’t mutilating the guitar into something primal and ecstatic and new, he indulges the side of his musical brain that is both encyclopedia and trickster. On paper The Four Louies is preposterous; sampling, looping, tweaking, and melting together Steve Reich’s Four Organs and The Kingsmen’s legendary protopunk “Louie Louie.”

Babatunde Adebimpe — Thee Black Boltz

While his iconic vocals — often looping and layering and prone to soaring falsetto — hit a nostalgic button in the corner of the brain, the arrangements are lusher and more surprising than “the TVOTR guy’s solo album” would have you assume.

Andy Beta

Mark Ernestus' Ndagga Rhythm Force — Khadim

Ernestus’s name rests at the top of the third Ndagga Rhythm Force record, his exploration of the collision between dub techno and Senegal mbalax, but he naturally prefers a cover visual of rusted metal and old tires with a photo collage of his collaborators on the back, the man himself nowhere to be seen.

La Torre Ibiza [Volumen Cinco]

Balearic compilations used to be an annual tradition, somewhere between precious remembrances of temps perdu at DJ Alfredo’s Amnesia or Jose Padilla’s Cafe del Mar and Ibiza Airport gift shop souvenir. Modern Balearic master Mark Barrott and Pete Gooding’s fifth entry in the Hostal Torre’s La Torre Ibiza series also celebrates a decade of their own modern spin on the form.

Charles Bals — Ambientale

French collector Charles Bals earns his Euros as a creative director, but in underground music circles, he’s renowned for turning up the most baffling and un-genre-able of curios, as evinced on the beach-friendly Balearic comp Club Meduse and the loner ‘70s motel folk of America Dream Reserve.

Hank Shteamer

Deftones — Diamond Eyes

Written and recorded during a dark chapter for Deftones, when early-era bassist Chi Cheng was in a coma due to injuries sustained in a car accident, Diamond Eyes turned into an unlikely mid-career peak.

40 Watt Sun — Perfect Light

The first two full-lengths by 40 Watt Sun — essentially the solo vehicle of Patrick Walker, the U.K. singer-songwriter known previously for his work in the doom-metal band Warning — found the trappings of conventional heaviness gradually draining away. By the time of this third LP, the project bore little sonic resemblance to Walker’s prior outfit, beloved in the underground for the almost alarming despondency of its second album, 2006’s Watching From a Distance.

Deadguy — Fixation on a Co-Worker

The record feels like a nervous breakdown in progress — enraged, damaged and thoroughly disturbed — placing it in league with contemporary work from hardcore-adjacent mad scientists such as Dazzling Killmen and Craw.

Megan Iacobini de Fazio

Abagwagwa, Lagoss — Island Slang

Now based in Tenerife, Cardoso and his group Lagoss use the island’s relative isolation not as a limitation but as a catalyst to construct strange, fantastic sonic ecosystems. Island Slang continues that vision, in collaboration with Ugandan group Abagwagwa (aka Nihiloxica of Nyege Nyege fame).

Sami Galbi — Ylh Bye Bye

Sami Galbi’s debut Ylh Bye Bye is a heady collision of Maghrebi pop melodies, club-ready grit, and all the communal abandon of a North African street party.

Africa Express Presents... Bahidorá

But ever since its inception in 2006, when founder Damon Albarn and other major European artists travelled to Mali with the likes of Toumani Diabaté, Bassekou Kouyaté and Amadou & Mariam, Africa Express has built something far more organic: there’s no sense of Western musicians playing the role of tastemaker, sounds aren’t stripped of context or repackaged for western palatability.

Sean Wood

Thin Edge New Music Collective — Linda Catlin Smith: Dark Flower

“Unbroken, for Howard Skempton” is the highlight of this pensive, angular collection of instrumental pieces. It consists of a simple series of piano chords that magnetize one’s attention but evade capture, creating a sense of suspension in alternate realms of time and harmony. Smith’s music manages to be both austere and warm at once.

Marie-Claire Alain — Alain: L'oeuvre pour orgue

French musician Jéhan Alain was one of the many musical talents extinguished prematurely by the World Wars, killed at the Battle of Saumur in 1940 at the age of 29. He’s known for his organ music, both intensely colorful and intensely contemplative.

Katharine Dain, Sam Armstrong — Regards sur l'Infini

This set of twentieth-century French songs contains one of the best performances on record of “Dors,” part of the song cycle L’âme en bourgeon (“The Budding Soul”) by Claire Delbos. Delbos, known primarily as the first wife of Olivier Messiaen, led a difficult life whose story has typically been overshadowed by that of her famous husband.

Jon Dale on the 1970s Italian Underground

It’s not too hard to understand why Italian underground music was so creative, so profligate, so urgent across the seventies, at least if you believe that disrupted societies intensify creative impulses. That decade came to be known in Italy as the Anni di piombo – the Years of Lead – an extended period of political and social upheaval, in fact, that starts in the late sixties, roughly in line with student and worker uprisings across Europe and extends through to the late eighties.

Collections

Chris Catchpole on Folktronica

Although almost every act it was applied to rejected the tag (early scene lynchpin Bibio still hates the term), it has to be said: as a neat portmanteau catch-all, folktronica does exactly what it says on the tin.

Ned Raggett on 1990s Michigan Space Rock

Michigan’s scene as such – as open to multiple approaches as those covered by the original umbrella term was – certainly had plenty of roots in such forebears, but also drew on numerous more recent acts, notably the twin family trees of 1980s UK acts Spacemen 3 and Loop, finding new fusions and ways to push guitar-driven heavy psychedelic zones into the heads of new generations.

Joshua Levine on No Limit Records

No Limit was a collection of rap’s most gaudy cliches. Monosyllabic gangland tales that were the straight-to-video alternative to Biggie and Wu-Tang’s Scorsese verses. Chintzy, photocopied versions of G-funk tracks that sounded like they were presets on budget keyboards. Most infamous were the album art and promotional materials by Pen & Pixel – shiny, hallucinogenic collages of gleaming diamonds, mansions, pit bulls, half-naked models, and cash in a garish dimension where the party never ends.

Reviews

Harold Heath

Ruby Rushton — Trudi’s Songbook Vol. 1

You get four lengthy tracks broken up by a pair of sub-two-minute tracks: a brief, exhilarating journey through the highs and lows of expressive, improvisational jazz, and a swaggering, superfly, ninety seconds of highly refined jazzfunk.

Knowsum — Cosmic Breeze

Berlin-based singer-producer Knowsum describes his music as “somewhere between indie dreampop, lo-fi beats and jazz funk,” which is a pretty good summation of his 2024 debut album.

Triorität — Alg0

German electronic jazz fusion outfit Triorität are a drums, bass & keys contemporary jazz trio who answered the ‘what should a traditional jazz trio do in the 21st century’ question by incorporating synths, FX and some dance music elements into their compositions, creating a super-sharp, impressive jazz-electronic-disco fusion sound.

Joshua Levine

Hüsker Dü — New Day Rising

The sprawling and definitive Zen Arcade dissolved the boundaries of what kind of music and lyrics this Minneapolis punk trio could come up with, with psychedelic instrumentation and extended song lengths all over the double album. New Day Rising integrates the new textures into the song structures and intensity of Hüsker Dü’s original hardcore style.

I’m Just Like You: Sly’s Stone Flower 1969-1970

Outside of a few long-deleted single releases, these songs took decades after they were recorded in 1969-70 to be heard. In hindsight, I’m Just Like You lays out a considerable amount of pop music’s future.

Turnstile — Never Enough

NEVER ENOUGH sounds unsure of itself and at times like a retread of past glories. But the album’s array of strengths is revealed after multiple listens.

Jon Dale

Fabrizio De André — Creuza De Mä

Fabrizio De André is best known for his pioneering work as Italy’s premiere cantuatore, and much of his legend rests on a string of albums recorded across the sixties and seventies that build outward from his love of French singer-songwriters. But in many ways, De André’s eighties albums are his most quietly pioneering works.

Luís Cília — Penumbra

The material on Penumbra sets the poetry of David Mourǎo-Ferreira to music, oscillating between lambent songs of melancholy, plucked out on guitar and notably ‘of their time’ keyboards – the bell-like early MIDI tones are the tell – or, more beautifully still, piano and sweeping strings. Cília sighs, pensively, across the whole affair.

Anna Själv Tredje — Tussilago Fánfara

If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if the Berlin School relocated to Sweden, well… Wonder no longer. That’s possibly an unfair, and certainly reductive, reading of Tussilago Fánfara, the only album by the late seventies electronics duo of Ingemar Ljungström and Mikael Bojen, aka Anna Själv Tredje.

Ned Raggett on Bob Stanley’s compilations

Stanley, who like many others in the last few decades had started creating homegrown mixes as a teenager, at his best exemplifies the curious and generous spirit of such efforts via these formal releases.

Collections

Andy Beta on Naná Vasconcelos

Peripatetic by nature, Naná popped up in the unlikeliest of places during the course of his career, always game to improvise and explore with whatever musicians he could find. Perhaps that’s what relegated him to the small print on albums by bigger names?

Harold Heath on Playhouse

Between 1993 and 2012, Heiko Schäfer (1971-2017) and Ata’s Playhouse label were key in developing the minimal aesthetic in house music through a string of increasingly intriguing, leftfield, abstract, edgy, narcotic 12” house/techno/tech house releases in the second half of the ‘90s from artists including Ricardo Villalobos, Isolée, Losoul and Roman Flügel.

Rick Anderson on Small-ensemble Swing

Refer to “swing” music in conversation, and most people will assume you’re talking about big-band jazz from the 1930s, music made by orchestras led by the likes of Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, and Glen Miller. Such bands were so popular and had such a hold on the popular music market during that decade that it can be easy to forget that swing music had existed in small-ensemble formats before the big-band era and continued to be made at smaller scale during that period and afterwards.

Reviews

Jeff Treppel

Seikima-II — 悪魔が来たりてヘヴィメタる [Akuma Ga Kitarite Heavy Metal]

A quick glance at Seikima-II’s makeup might make you think they were Japan’s answer to KISS, and it’s frankly shocking that they didn’t have to answer to Gene Simmon’s lawyers. Of course, the God of Thunder stole the look from kabuki, a distinctly Japanese form of theater, so really they were just taking it back.

Rhys Chatham — Die Donnergötter

If you’re wondering who first took rock from its initial phase into the post- era, a strong argument could be made for Rhys Chatham. Along with frequent collaborator Glenn Branca, he was a classically trained musician who emerged from the swamp of the late 70s New York punk scene, guitar in hand, to apply his unique avant garde outlook to the nascent No Wave sounds he heard around him.

L.A. Witch — Doggod

LA-based garage rock trio adopt a palindrome for their title and make their big goth rock move. Having successfully lit a fire under their sound on their sophomore effort, album number three ventures into the ice. It leans into the reverb and David Lynch vibes of their debut but even more so.

Phil Freeman

Cecil McBee — Mutima

When bassist Cecil McBee released his first album as a leader in 1974, he was already well known for his work with Charles Lloyd, Pharoah Sanders, Andrew Hill, Jackie McLean, Wayne Shorter, Alice Coltrane and others. But he’d never had the opportunity to showcase his voice as a composer, which he does here and then some.

Messa — The Spin

Their songs have a newfound concision, thanks to a general shift from the jazzy doom metal of previous records (yes, you can do both at once; check out Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan” sometime) to an occult rock sound tinged with synthwave keyboards.

Trichomoniasis — Harvest of the Killing Fields

At this point, their music retains the sonic signatures of death metal’s most unpalatable extremes (distorted guitars, machine-gun drums, guttural vocals), but the actual song structures have more in common with noise-rock or free jazz than metal.

Joe Muggs

Djrum — Under Tangled Silence

It’s elegant and embracing, you might drift off into it. But as the record goes on disjunctions open up like cracks in reality, whether through grime-like rhythmic juddering, sudden bursts of Autechrean sound design, or just sudden melodic left turns.

Unicorn Ship Explosion — There's a Rhinoceros in the Mega Church

Is this Krautrock? Beefheartian outsider rock? Synth rock? Sleazy Euro techno? Trip hop? Well, in short, yes. It manages to be all of the above effortlessly. But also, none of the above matters.

Chicks on Speed & The No Heads — Press the Spacebar

They got fed up with the pigeonholes, though, and this 2004 album – made with Spanish rockabilly-punk band The No Heads and Chilean-British techno / abstract electronics wizard Cristian Vogel, was their staggeringly successful attempt to break out of them.

Ned Raggett

Pink Breath of Heaven — Colors Make a Sound

As much a heavy modern day psych band as well – live they’ve covered songs like Spectrum’s “How You Satisfy Me,” while Field’s singing has the kind of rich-voiced flow that Kendra Smith fans can appreciate – on their debut Colors Make A Sound the group whip up nine originals that are instantly compelling head-nodding and slow-swaying bliss.

Jefferson Pitcher — The Bellows

Given the sonic reach of his various projects over three decades, it would be reductive to say there was a spirit of the mid to late 1990s still playing out, but right from its rich opening song “Carriage | Horse,” one senses the feeling of roads not taken by many since.

Peter Murphy — Silver Shade

Given all the twists and turns of Peter Murphy’s career over nearly half a century, 2025’s Silver Shade could just as easily have been a relaxed and low-key effort taking stock of time. But the remarkable thing about Silver Shade, his first studio album since 2014’s Lion and like that album produced by another longtime veteran, Youth, is that it shows Murphy still up for explorations and possibilities, not to mention happily still in possession of that strong distinct voice much in the same way Robert Smith similarly has his.

Rick Anderson

R.E.M. — Document

It was this album, with its monstrous breakout hits “The One I Love” and “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine),” that finally turned R.E.M. from beloved college-rock weirdos into global superstars.

Pere Ubu — The Tenement Year

It was Cloudland (with its Billboard-charting “Waiting for Mary,” the closest thing to a radio hit the band ever had) that bandleader David Thomas bemusedly described as Pere Ubu’s first pop album. But that’s not entirely correct: in 1988, the year before Cloudland, Ubu had released The Tenement Year, which was light-years ahead of any of the group’s previous work in terms of general accessibility and hookiness.

Culture — Two Sevens Clash

There are lots of albums that could vie for the title Dreadest Reggae Album of All Time: the Congos’ Heart of the Congos would be an obvious contender, as would Prince Far I’s Voice of Thunder and Bunny Wailer’s Blackheart Man. But for sheer seriousness of intent, bone-deep fear of God, and stern prophetic imprecation, it’s tough to imagine any release beating out Two Sevens Clash by Culture.

Chris Catchpole

Piero Umiliani — To-Day's Sound

Although never intended for public consumption as an album, the collection of tracks that make up To-Day’s Sound has provided a treasure trove of funky grooves and retro sounds for cratediggers, musicians and DJs for decades.

Bert Jansch — It Don’t Bother Me

Arriving the same year as Burt Jansch’s acclaimed 1965 self-titled debut, It Don’t Bother Me was in many ways an extension of its predecessor, itself a pared-down, folk fingerpicking masterclass from the young Scot.

Lael Neale — Altogether Stranger

A delight for anyone who considers the Lower East Side of the 60s and 70s a desirable place to spend eternity, Lael Neale’s 2003 album Star Eater’s Delight felt like a lo-fi transmission from some super-cool liminal space — Nico making contact via Alan Vega’s drum machine and a detuned transistor radio.

Harold Heath on Chicago House

Chicago House was a genre that coalesced on the dancefloor, created from a culture that had been deemed inferior or passe by the mainstream, like the classic Philadelphia International sound, faceless Italo-Disco or manufactured Euro-synthpop. The music embraced and celebrated the elements of disco that most irked the racists and homophobes: its queerness, its relentless repetition, the synthetic production aesthetic, its narcotic hedonism, egalitarian spirit, its celebration of powerful vocal divas. Then it intensified those aspects further, distilling the genre down into a new, purified version of itself: house music.

Collections

Phil Freeman on Chamber Jazz

To put it simply, chamber jazz is jazz with the qualities of chamber music. The pieces are more thoroughly composed, rather than being melodic heads used as a springboard for improvisation. The instrumentation tends to be quieter and more subtle. There may be strings (but not an orchestra), and there may not be drums. Despite these factors, though, chamber jazz — at least in the 1940s and 1950s, when the style first began to develop — retained a swinging rhythm and kept at least one foot in the blues.

Jon Dale on Sean O’Hagan

While there were many curious trajectories out of the post-punk moment, the route taken by Irish autodidact and polymath Sean O’Hagan is still one of the most surprising, full of unexpected turns and unpredictable leaps of faith. He’s probably best known for leading the High Llamas for several decades, a group whose steady development, since their appearance in the early 1990s, betrays a musical openness and voraciousness that’s far beyond the ill-applied “Beach Boys traditionalists” tag that still occasionally haunts their music.

Joshua Levine on Hyperpop

The bubblegum melodies are framed by corrosive-sounding samples and electronics that jarringly fuse other contemporaneous turn-of-the-century styles like nu-metal, EDM, trap, and even ska. The songs are sung with the wounded intensity of Hot Topic emo. The contrast is part of the point – hyperpop producers deliberately let the seams show.

Reviews

Nate Patrin

Broadcast — Distant Call (Collected Demos 2000-2006)

If the first collection of early-draft recordings released as Spell Blanket: Collected Demos 2006-2009 hinted at a map of where Broadcast seemed to be going before singer and co-songwriter Trish Keenan passed in 2011, Distant Call: Collected Demos 2000-2006 is a sketchbook — better yet, a storyboard — of how she and co-founding member James Cargill arrived at the creative destination that inspired those future routes in the first place.

MIKE — Showbiz!

As a still-young veteran rapper who’s spent the bulk of his career figuring himself out, MIKE seems to have hit his stride after passing the quarter-century mark. That’s not just in terms of establishing an on-record persona, though he’s developed into an introspective philosopher who’s already prioritized personal, familial, and social stability over the trappings of notoriety. And in the case of Showbiz! he makes getting his shit together sound like the kind of hustle that builds the most useful form of resilience.

Traxman — Da Mind of Traxman Vol. 3

One of the sharpest tricks the best footwork producers have at their disposal is a distinct yet endlessly adaptable structure to work with. When the stutter-stepping, hyper-syncopated kick-rumble/snare-rattle momentum is prioritized over everything else, you can find an endless supply of source material to adapt to it if your crates are deep enough.

Shy Clara Thompson

LanPage — Ten Pages

Somunia’s vocals effortlessly soar over the deconstructed dance beats, changing tempo and meeting the meter wherever it takes her. Similar to recent J-pop albums by groups like PAS TASTA and TEMPLIME, it takes the temperature on various internet-braided pop trends and, well, doesn’t make them easier to understand — but makes them fun to try getting your head around.

The Time — The Time

In mid 1980, Prince was deep in the recording sessions for Dirty Mind. He had given one of his regular jamming partners, Morris Day, free reign to use the studio for whatever he wanted. One of the first songs he started putting together was the groove that would eventually become the final track of Dirty Mind, “Partyup.”

MyGO!!!!! — Michinoku (跡暖空)

BanG Dream! (or Bandori for short) is a Japanese multimedia franchise. Similar to other properties like Love Live! and Idolmaster, it elevates seiyū (Japanese voice actors) into idol-adjacent stardom by giving them music to perform and popular characters to embody. Unlike those franchises, however, Bandori’s talents are encouraged to play instruments and form groups that can perform concerts on their own — and they actually take it seriously.

Andy Beta

Wadada Leo Smith — Defiant Life

Like Don Cherry before him, Smith brings laser focus not just to the ground beneath his feet, but also to the world burning around him.

Joe Henderson — Multiple

In 1963, pianist Bill Evans began using the studio to layer his piano and record Conversations With Myself, while the next year John Coltrane famously overdubbed his voice chanting the title of A Love Supreme, and Miles Davis – with producer Teo Macero – used the studio itself as an unofficial band member to make a fusion of rock and jazz. But a decade on, Joe Henderson still faced critical grumbling for using multi-tracking to expand the dimensions of the music.

Masabumi Kikuchi — One Way Traveller

Japanese jazz masters and classic albums at times still need a translation for Westerners. But if pianist Masabumi Kikuchi’s closest parallels would be Herbie Hancock or Paul Bley, this 1982 album audaciously evokes Miles’ On the Corner.

Amelia Riggs

Adrianne Lenker — Bright Future

There’s that old tired trope about “[City] Being Another Character” in a film. The idea that the setting of the thing is so prominent, so baked into the bones into what you’re experiencing that it becomes as important as the action on screen. The same could be said for tape hiss.

Bon Iver — SABLE, fABLE

I have a lot of empathy for those who continue to have to weather a story foisted upon them long after that story was first told. Justin Vernon, in nearly every report on Bon Iver, Volcano Choir, or anything else he’s attached to, will seemingly forever be attached to the time he went to a cabin in the woods and made a really great album almost two decades ago (try not to think about that passage of time). SABLE, fABLE is the reclamation of a narrative.

Neko Case — The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You

The creatures that crawl, cry, and kill through The Worse Things Get are — before any fates are revealed — alive. Alive through the incantation that is Neko Case’s voice/pen combo, both sharp and seductive.

Sean Wood

Polyansky — Schnittke: Concerto For Choir

The 1985 Concerto for Choir, by Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke, has one of the most arresting openings in 20th-century choral music. Schnittke, known earlier in his career for wild borrowings from other genres, still works multiple styles into a single phrase: ancient-sounding polyphony fragments out into dazzlingly prismatic clusters in the course of few seconds.

Hermmann, Bernstein — Cape Fear

Herrmann’s score, taken from the original film and inserted into the new one, is both campily over-the-top and thrillingly tense, an able partner in crime to Scorsese’s frenetic cutting and zooming.

Herrmann — Taxi Driver

It all mimics the sounds of New York, but it also mimics the isolated and troubled mind of protagonist Travis Bickle — hissing clouds of mental steam, lonely nocturnal wandering, and strange juxtapositions. Herrmann’s score, his last, points out the kinships between Bickle and his environment.

Ezra Furman — Mysterious Power

Ezra Furman’s rowdy and brilliant Mysterious Power, written before their breakthrough to bigger audiences in the late 2010’s, showcases all of this songwriter’s many good sides: self-immolating punk-rock performance (“I Killed Myself But I Didn’t Die”), deft fusions of the Hebrew Bible and the Clash (“Hard Time In a Terrible Land”), and bona-fide craftsmanship (“Wild Feeling”).

Fritz Reiner — Rimsky-Korsakov: Schéhérazade

Scheherazade, based on the Arabian Nights, is one of the most kaleidoscopic orchestral showpieces of the late 19th century, memorable in particular for its thrilling portrait of Sinbad’s ship at sea. Rimsky-Korsakov, who actually did write the book on orchestration, perhaps never topped the panoramic majesty of the fourth-movement shipwreck, where the sea foam seems to leap out of the score.

Joshua Levine on Emo

Its influence was ubiquitous to a degree that would likely shock its early adopters, and in many ways its hardcore origins have become so distant as to be irrelevant. Emo began as hardcore with shades of grey, but has become more of an aesthetic than a musical genre, like punk or goth – a general attitude of self-absorption flexible enough to adapt to evolving musical trends.

Collections

Harold Heath on Blue Note’s jazz-funk era

Like soul jazz before it, the emergent jazz funk sound was influenced by the soul and R’nB of the day, and the Mizell brothers’ Blue Note productions were key in fusing sleek, sophisticated contemporaneous soul and funk with jazz, finessing a fusion that would go on to be hugely commercially successful. This musical offspring was the jazz-funk genre, and the Blue Note albums from this period by artists like Donald Byrd, Lou Donaldson and Gene Harris provide a musically rich, expertly played, innovative, progressive and above all, funky audio history of its genesis.

Rich Anderson on British Isles Folk-Rock

In England, rock and roll took root and flourished in the 1960s, eventually coming back to the US in a slightly altered but still fundamentally rockish form; at the same time, traditional musicians from across the British Isles (notably including Ireland and Scotland) created a blend of folk and rock music that sounded like nothing Americans had heard – it certainly differed very starkly from both the country-derived psychedelic pop sounds of the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers and the wispier, acoustic singer-songwriter stylings of folk popsters like Joni Mitchell and James Taylor.

Reviews

Harold Heath

The Counts — What’s Up Front That Counts

In the vast crowd of rediscovered seventies funk, this 1971 album on the legendary Westbound Records from Detroit six-piece funk outfit The Counts stands head and shoulders above many of its peers and is an outstanding example of early 70s street funk very much deserving of its remastering and rerelease.

Brittany Howard — Jaime

Stay High’s aesthetic references old soul music — Howard digs out classic soul musical motifs like plucked orchestral strings and what sound like the prettiest little Jackson 5-ish xylophone melodies — and stitches them onto raw, lo-fi hip hop beats, with the seams and rough edges left unfinished.

Scrimshire — Music for Autumn Lovers

For this, his tenth album, he’s dropped the tempo and most of the danceability, focusing instead on gentle moods and sonic textures redolent of Autumn. Music For… actually originated back in 2021 from an attempt to make a piece of music a day, in an hour, the results of which became an EP, tracks from which now make up part of this album.

Megan Iacobini de Fazio

Tarta Relena — És Pregunta

Singing in Catalan, Italian, Greek, Latin, English, and even Ladino, Tarta Relena treat language almost as an instrument, shaping their soundscapes and infusing their songs with vivid, evocative imagery.

Jamaica Mnanda — Maisha Ya Mtaani

Maisha Ya Mtaani is an explosive, chaotic debut that immerses you in the raw, percussive energy of Dar es Salaam’s streets. The music is a captivating whirlwind of distorted synths, rhythmic chants, and urgent vocals which captures the mchiriku sound, a style born from the 1990s DIY scene, where distorted Casio keyboards and hand drums redefined urban soundscapes in Tanzania.

Collignon — Bicicleta

Bicicleta moves with the freedom its title suggests, a journey powered by groove, melody, and instinct, moving fluidly between raw dub textures and vintage psychedelic warmth.

Jon Dale

Television Personalities — Mummy You’re Not Watching Me

If the intelligence of early Television Personalities songs were shielded by both DIY production and punk scene reportage, by Mummy You’re Not Watching Me TVPs leader Dan Treacy had started to find ways to fold newly deeply emotional songwriting into his group’s curious mergers of psychedelia, mod, sixties pop, and post-punk.

Souled American — Notes Campfire

It’s quite some achievement to start out wanting to merge reggae and country, and then somehow to end up with an album as self-contained and deconstructed as Notes Campfire, but the thing with Souled American is, all of their moves have always felt completely unforced: this is just how the music goes.

Steve Kilbey — Unearthed

It’s not as though The Church didn’t grant Steve Kilbey enough creative opportunities – their run of albums across the eighties are breathlessly brilliant, and rich with psychedelic pop gems – but there is certainly something curious about hearing Kilbey on his lonesome, giving fullest expression to indulgent whims.

Joshua Levine

Ike & Tina Turner — Come Together

Come Together was in the middle of a series of albums by Ike and Tina Turner that marked their transition from 1960s soul chameleons to 1970s grimy rock and rollers.

The Afghan Whigs — Black Love

Out of all the bands from the US indie rock underground that gained visibility due to the success of Nirvana and grunge in the early 1990s, The Afghan Whigs were virtually unique in their incorporation of Black soul music, often using wah-wah guitar lines or syncopated beats to temper and diversify their dense and claustrophobic rock and roll psychodramas. On Black Love the Ohio quartet fully embraced the form rather than just its signifiers.

Richard Hell & the Voidoids — Blank Generation

Unlike his peers and contemporaries, Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell wanted to recreate the conditions that led to the caustic romanticism of his literary heroes Rimbaud and Baudelaire. And so his creative process was inextricably linked to his wasted street urchin lifestyle – Hell seemed to have zero interest in the dependable and predictable professionalism necessary for music biz success.

Nate Patrin on Tribute Compilations

It was good for business, good for canon-building, good for rediscovering semi-forgotten yet low-key influential artists, and good for the occasional bizarre novelty. (Ever wanted to hear your favorite alt-rockers play your favorite James Bond or Saturday Morning Cartoon themes?)

Jon Dale on the Canterbury Scene

One thing that does seem to unite the various artists assembled, by others, under the Canterbury Scene aegis, is musical fluidity, both in listening habits (and thus influence), and in playerly capacity (and thus the music produced). Jazz was obviously big for many of the Canterbury Scene groups – it’s writ all over albums by The Soft Machine, Centipede, Hugh Hopper, Coxhill/Miller – but psychedelia is key, both in as psych-pop filigree and psych-rock grunt.

Reviews

Ned Raggett

The Legendary Pink Dots — So Lonely in Heaven

With Orbit Service member Randall Frazier now on electronics in the current quartet lineup, there’s a certain stateliness evident throughout So Lonely In Heaven, evident from the start with its title track – Erik Drost’s guitar parts are some of the loveliest they’ve had over the years, and he does a fine job throughout the album – but Ka-Spel’s particular lyrical and musical visions remain in full effect.

Supercollider — Supercollider

Supercollider’s debut album remains one of the most remarkable, unusual efforts of whatever could be termed alternative rock in the broadest sense from the early 1990s – it wasn’t simply at odds with what the term would become, it was almost at odds with nearly everything else around it in general.

Supercollider — Dual

The slight aural pun of Supercollider’s second album title also underscores the nature of the amazing partnership between Michael Horton and Philip Haut, who built on the striking promise of their debut to create an even more entrancing vision of truly modernist rock-as-such, as conversant with Steve Reichian minimalism, cyclical, relentless but never overbearing or crushing, as with vividly stirring guitar parts and an embrace of technological possibilities.

Joe Muggs

Causeway — Anywhere

And nobody more so than the US duo Causeway, who on their second album hit every reference point – Yazoo, early Human League, early Eurythmics, Chris & Cosey, Propaganda, affectless singing about devastating emotions, fizzing chords, clean sounds, all the rest – and yet manage to make it sound fresh, sonically immense, even current.

Ken Boothe — Let's Get It On

It’s truly extraordinary that this album remained more or less an obscurity for 50 years after its 1974 release. It’s as good an example as you could hope to find of how the first imperial phase of reggae could adopt any and all kinds of songwriting and make it completely its own – but perhaps because the Anglo-American critical establishment were hyperfocused on the rockstar-like rebel music of Bob Marley, the values of less glaringly politicised Jamaican music weren’t so widely appreciated.

Kuniko Kato — Bach: Solo Works for Marimba

Kuniko’s playing is careful and exacting, but also full of expressive micro-gestures and unbelievable understanding of the variation her instrument is capable of, so if you zoom in on the playing it will grip you as fiercely as any more obviously grand performance.

Jeff Treppel

Heavy Load — Death or Glory

Serious silliness from Sweden, but we could all use some quality Nordic cheese sometimes. In fact, Heavy Load may be the first Swedish metal band – their debut, Full Speed at High Level, came out the same year as metal forger Stained Class.

Dream Theater — Parasomnia

The heart of any prog rock band is almost always the drummer, so when Mike Portnoy left Dream Theater 15 years ago it was like that notorious scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Replacement Mike Mangini had the chops but not the hard-hitting soul of his predecessor, leading to increasingly byzantine and song-free concept records that put the truth to all the criticism leveled at them over the years. Portnoy’s return heralds the arrival of their finest album of perhaps the 21st century.

Rorschach — Protestant

Converge, Botch, Cave In, et al learned how to calculate infinity somewhere. That somewhere was here, Rorschach’s second album. After barking up a storm with Pavlov’s dogs on debut Remain Sedate, these five New Jersey dissonance dissidents looked at the inkblot and saw the future of hardcore.

Hank Shteamer

Pat Metheny Group — The Way Up

The Way Up turned out to be the final Pat Metheny Group album, and it’s fitting, as the record felt like both a creative peak and a culmination of everything the band had been working toward for the prior quarter-century-plus.

Pat Metheny Group — The Road to You

After making the jump from ECM to Geffen in the late ‘80s, the Pat Metheny Group transcended the jazz niche and became an international touring phenomenon, a triumph that’s captured beautifully on the band’s second live release, which opens with the sound of a massive crowd chanting the theme to Group staple “Minuano (Six Eight).”

Pat Metheny — Bright Size Life

There are auspicious debuts, and then there’s a first effort like Bright Size Life, on which Pat Metheny opened the door to a vast musical universe that he’s still exploring today. Then just 22, the guitarist led a plugged-in trio — featuring drummer Bob Moses and a bassist on the cusp of superstardom named Jaco Pastorius — but the flashiness of fusion was nowhere to be found here.

Chris Catchpole

Horsegirl — Phonetics on and On

Produced by Cate Le Bon, second album Phonetics On and On turns down the alt-rock static of their 2022’s debut, revealing more sparse and precise lines. Nora Cheng and Penelope Lowenstein’s vocals intertwine on songs of loneliness that come from a place of poignancy rather than aloofness.

Richard & Mimi Fariña — Celebrations for a Grey Day

In the mid 60s, the US folk scene faced a schism as Dylan broke ranks and folk rock, then later psychedelia, diluted what many saw as the integrity of the music. In 1965, however, Richard and Mimi Fariña found an entirely different route from within folk’s roots.

Richard Dawson — End of the Middle

Like an avant-folk Alan Bennett, Dawson’s eye for the mundane minutiae of everyday life is wonderful, with songs detailing the drudgery of post-Christmas sales (“Boxing Day”), the restorative power of gardening (“Polytunnel”) and the messy knots of family life and parenting (“Bullies”).

Miscellany

Shfl’s Best of 2024. Dig in :)

Joe Muggs on Indietronica

The nature of musical genre took a dramatic flip around the turn of the millennium. In fact you can probably pin it down to June 1999 when Napster was launched, ushering in the everything-everywhere-all-at-once era of mass availability of all styles and eras of music to the curious listener. In the post-rock’n’roll second half of the 20th century, styles tended to be linked to revolutionary moments in time, geographical scenes technological or pharmaceutical shifts, and recognisable style tribes, and thus relatively easy to define – but now, suddenly definitions were loosened, development less linear, everything generally became mixed and muddled.

Collections

Sean Wood on Renaissance Polyphony

There is in fact, a whole universe of different affects in the music of this period; irreverent humor (Lassus’ “Quant mon mary vient de dehors”), poetic eros (Arcadelt, “Il bianco e dolce cigno”), onomatopoetic play (Janequin’s “La Bataille”), and religious feelings ranging from the totally sober (Palestrina) to the totally lavish (Gabrieli). And there is a range and diversity of contemporary performing styles, too, ranging from the studious (The King’s Singers) to the outrageous (Ensemble Clément Janequin).

Harold Heath on Leng Records

Generally churning away at the mid-tempo-to-chug end of the house/disco spectrum, the Leng sound is the coalescence of a broad shared set of influences, the weaving together of strands from several musical traditions into something that sounds both familiar and new.

Joshua Levine on Bollywood Disco

The music in early masala films tended to be in a slow and sentimental ballad style, but the immense global success of 1977’s Saturday Night Fever helped change that. Its influence was felt worldwide, including in Mumbai, where directors and producers saw the potential for adapting disco music and melodrama to Hindi and hopefully replicating its box office receipts.

Reviews

Phil Freeman

Attic — Return of the Witchfinder

Cagliostro’s voice continues to be a genuinely uncanny King Diamond impression most of the time, but at a few points he delivers dramatic recitations that bring to mind Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson. This is the album on which Attic have graduated from just doing the thing they love to having a style of their own, and they’ve written some genuinely headbang-worthy songs in the process.

Bedsore — Dreaming the Strife for Love

What the Italian band Bedsore (I know, gross) asks us to consider is, What if death metal had actually started fifteen years before that, in Europe? Their astonishing second album blends crushing metal riffs with vintage organ and synth sounds, ethereally operatic and wordless female vocals, and ever-shifting time signatures to create something that crosses vintage Opeth with the dark art-rock of Van der Graaf Generator and Univers Zero, blends Goblin’s soundtracks to Dario Argento films with the short-attention-span thrash blasts of Mike Patton’s Fantômas, and calls back to an earlier landmark of jazzy, proggy extreme metal from Italy: Ephel Duath’s head-spinning 2003 masterpiece The Painter’s Palette.

Roland Kayn — Simultan

Simultan, a triple LP recorded between 1970 and 1972 and released in 1977, was Kayn’s debut, and his masterpiece. Listening to it, it’s possible to hear previews of everything from Autechre to Merzbow, and while its compositional logic is both inhuman and somewhat implacable, it has an eerie beauty. It’s a symphony of hum, crackle, crunch, and pulse, totally lacking in conventional rhythm and yet throbbing with life.

Nate Patrin

Ka — The Thief Next to Jesus

Where does your morality come from when you’re disillusioned by the church? For one of the most incisive albums of his career — and the last released in his tragically cut-short lifetime — Kaseem Ryan examines that question with the perceptive clarity and quiet power that made him one of the great sociologists of early 21st Century hip-hop.

Greg Foat — The Glass Frog

As glossy and poised as the material on The Glass Frog often sounds, its resemblance to a strain of jazz that brings up associations with library music or adult-contemporary or “fuzak” — or any other commercial-friendly trends purists found disreputable in the latter decades of the 20th Century — actually works to its advantage. Because for all its air of frictionless, high-fidelity polish, there’s an affecting emotional tinge to these performances that unsettles simple placidity.

Xylitol — Anemones

DJ/producer Catherine Backhouse, a/k/a Xylitol, is a disciple of what Simon Reynolds calls the “hardcore continuum,” the evolution of dance music that mutated acid-house-fueled rave into jungle and its frenetic sonic offshoots. Her Planet Mu debut Anemones encompasses that world with the kinds of familiar, instantly-recognizable break samples and drum patterns any Metalheadz or Moving Shadow devotee would perk their ears up for. But the throwback signifiers aren’t the whole package; her sound sprawls in both directions chronologically and takes unpredictable retrofuturist routes through every possible d’n’b-compatible strain of dance music she can fit into it.

Amelia Riggs

Landlady — Upright Behavior

By the thunderous ending of opening track “Above My Ground,” Landlady has already done more to set themselves apart from the aloofer popular indie groups in five minutes than most could in five albums.

Nick Cave — Ghosteen

Like Nick Cave’s previous monuments to living in the shadow of pain, GHOSTEEN is not the cut and dry “here’s how I’ve been coping since losing my children” album that lets the audience off easy with gloom and minor bursts of catharsis.

Titus Andronicus — The Monitor

The Monitor is Jersey punks Titus Andronicus’ second album, but every note is wrung out and hollered like it could be their last. Framing a breakup through the lens of getting really, really into the history of The American Civil War is a preposterous endeavor, but frontman Patrick Stickles weaves tales of melancholic self-loathing and paranoia with the same precision as the editors of a Ken Burns documentary.

Sean Wood

Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band — Hammersmith Odeon, London ‘75

A titanic feat of live performance that stands tall with any of Springsteen studio recordings. There were behind-the-scenes factors behind its remarkable intensity and ferocious speed: it was the gang’s first-ever show in Europe, and the Born to Run album cycle on which it fell was a make-or-break scenario for their future.

Bruce Springsteen — We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions

The record is thus a showcase for yet another corner of Springsteen’s vast performative gift: though he might never have set foot in a Greenwich Village coffee house in his youth, he inhabits this selection of antique material (“John Henry,” “Erie Canal,” “Pay Me My Money Down”) like an old hand. And he brings a savvy as a bandleader that Dylan never had to the table: the E Street Band is absent, but he still whips the “Sessions Band” up into a party over and over again.

Vangelis — Blade Runner [Original Soundtrack]

A showpiece for the remarkable capacities of what some consider the greatest synthesizer ever made: the Yamaha CS-80, which can still fetch $50,000 on the secondary market today. In Vangelis’ hands, it does serene, dreamy blues (“Blade Runner Blues”), eerie tension (“Blush Response”), heavenly glow (“Main Titles”), and more, building a remarkable sonic counterpart to the film’s dark, smoky mood.

Miscellany

Thanks everyone for sticking with us throughout 2024, you can look forward to more of the same in 2025 :) I hope Shfl has introduced you to some great music. I generally run a Best Of in January (or maybe even February depending on how long it takes me to put it together) so you can look forward to that next year, but in the meantime there’s always our continually-updated list of every 2024 release that made it onto the site here, as usual you can just click on the filter button and flip through, I’m sure there’ll be something that you haven’t heard yet in there. It’s been a good year for music!

Hank Shteamer on the ’90s Chicago Underground

San Francisco in the ’60s, New York in the ’70s, Detroit and D.C. in the ’80s — if any other recent American music scene deserves to be mentioned in that storied company, it’s Chicago in the 1990s. It’s hard to think of another time and place where such a fertile musical subculture flourished, in which so many different personalities and aesthetics swirled together in such a natural and uncalculated way. What produced this climate was a rare convergence of talent: jazz trailblazers, rock radicals and genre-transcending conceptualists, all colliding and commingling, sharpening existing sounds and birthing entirely new ones.

Collections

Jeff Treppel on Darksynth

Nostalgic for a future that never existed, darksynth artists took the blood- and neon-soaked megacities we never got and built them out of synthesizers. A nightmarish reflection of the sunny synthwave genre that arose in the late 2000’s, they drew from a similar pool of influences (Daft Punk, Justice, John Carpenter, Giorgio Moroder, Tangerine Dream), but leaned into horror and dystopian cyberpunk themes and harsher sounds. The key difference? While artists like Kavinsky and College came from the electronic scene, many darksynth artists were forged in the world of metal.

Shy Clara Thompson on Calypso

Calypso only started making its way out of the Caribbean in the ’30s and ’40s, but it’s part of a long tradition dating back to the early 19th century. When French planters arrived in the West Indies along with slaves they imported from West Africa, they were unknowingly bringing West African culture along with them. Kaiso music, which was developed by West African slaves to surreptitiously share stories amongst one another and poke fun at their masters, was usually sung by a storyteller or oral historian called a griot. Kaiso persisted through the gradual abolition of slavery in 1834, morphing into “calypso” through changes in language and Anglicization over time.

Ned Raggett on Christmas Music

First off, it’s important to be clear about one thing here – there is absolutely no true definitive guide to the truly key albums of what Wikipedia’s entry calls “a variety of genres of music regularly performed or heard around the Christmas season.” When you’re talking a couple of thousand years of musical, literary and other traditions at play, themselves with widely scattered origin points and sonic and compositional elements, it’s impossible.

Rick Anderson on Bebop

By the early 1940s, however, a coterie of New York musicians were growing tired of big band swing’s conventions and were experimenting with a new approach to jazz that involved headlong tempos, complex melodies, and extended chromatic chords. The nucleus of this group was saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker, a once-in-a-generation talent whose addictions led to a tragically young death; others in the circle included trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis (the latter of whom would go on to be a central figure in the emergence of “cool” jazz a decade later), the highly idiosyncratic pianist Thelonious Monk, drummer Kenny Clarke, guitarist Charlie Christian, and bassist Charles Mingus.

Reviews

Jon Dale

Eddie Marcon - Yahho No Potori

What stands out most about Yahho No Potori is the confidence of the writing, and some of Eddie Marcon’s best songs are here: the lush quietude of “Toratolion” is a ‘career’ best, a song as gently moving as it is self-effacing and unassumingly played. And while there are plenty of delicate, unassuming singer-songwriters out there, few do the thing with the grace and warmth of Corman and Marcon.

Cabaret Voltaire - Red Mecca

While their industrial peers like Throbbing Gristle and SPK went for shock factor, a jolt to the nervous system to shake the listener out of complacency, Cabaret Voltaire’s music simmered with angst and paranoia; later, beyond the mid-1980s when they moved closer to the dancefloor and pop, that tendency would be leavened by a relative clarity in the production, but on Red Mecca, it’s the murk that makes the music so powerful, and I’ve heard few albums that sound quite so much like they’re oozing from the speakers.

The Soft Machine - The Soft Machine

But on their debut, self-titled album, The Soft Machine’s first, and perhaps best, line-up of Kevin Ayers (bass, vocals) and Robert Wyatt (drums, vocals), joined by organist Mike Ratledge, were finding their feet, navigating terrain somewhere between psychedelia, progressive rock, and jazz, all of which were informed by a kind of playful whimsy that’d disappear after their first few albums, when the fusion took over.

Shy Clara Thompson

RRR-100

RRRecords frequently put out compilations to highlight their roster and musicians that they were connected to, and RRR-100 is one of their most ambitious undertakings: a record of 100 tracks by 100 different musicians, housed in locked grooves designed to loop endlessly.

George Kuo - Kiho’alu: Stories in Song, Vol 1

Dancing Cat’s first release following Winston’s death is by the venerable George Kuo, who still plays slack key music and passes on his knowledge despite nearing 70 years old. Having learned directly from Raymond Kane, Alice Nāmakelua, and Gabby Pahinui, he is a living relic that carries the spirit of the genre’s pioneers.

Germ Lattice - Gipping Through the Ages

The building blocks are basic — bass, synth, and huge booming percussion — but what makes Germ Lattice unique is how their music seems to unravel before it fully comes together, like a mass of fabric being braided on one end while it’s yanked apart from the other.

Joshua Levine

Mott the Hoople - All the Young Dudes

Exhausted and demoralized after several years of the recording/touring cycle with no commercial success, by early 1972 Mott the Hoople disbanded in defeat. As the legend goes, the Birmingham group’s tiny devoted fan base included David Bowie, at that moment a burgeoning star. Bowie convinced them to stay together by giving them the song “All the Young Dudes” and producing what became their long-awaited commercial breakthrough.

Mott the Hoople - Mott

Mott presaged glam but their irony-laced hard rock crunch fit right in. None of their albums were flawless but this quasi-eponymous LP – their first as hitmakers – comes close.

Mott the Hoople - The Hoople

Rock and roll has never produced another artist quite like Mott the Hoople. They exhaustively chronicled the genre with reverence and regret like no one since Chuck Berry. As students of show business, The Hoople brings the curtain down on their peak period in grandiose, baroque fashion, and the album is produced like an old Phil Spector recording.

Andy Beta

Le Grand Ouest 1978-1988

Hyper-specific regionalism no longer applied only to grapes and four years on, the Les Éditions Vermillon label moves to the Normandy/Brittany/Pays-de-la-Loire northwestern corner for Le Grand Ouest 1978-1988. The first set showed how France’s love of Chic translated into those sides, but Le Grand Ouest is a little more subtle and introverted, its flavor notes arising the longer it spins.

Jeff Parker ETA IVtet - The Way Out of Easy

What started out a night for woodshedding jazz standards soon mutated into something stranger as the group’s mycelium tendrils reached further and further out. You can hear these seeds sprouting on 2022’s Mondays At The Enfield Tennis Academy, but its follow-up, The Way Out of Easy, shows the ETA IVtet in full bloom.

Miles Davis - Birth of the Blue

It’s a brief but fascinating glimpse into a group just starting to congeal. Cannonball Adderley’s alto was already the perfect blend of blues shout and tender purr. Tenor saxophonist John Coltrane was about to make his presence known in a big way, but was still relaxed, offering up a gentle stream — soon to be a gushing torrent — of ideas on the three standards here. Bill Evans’s left hand already knows how to carve out space, and Miles takes a leisurely yet bittersweet muted solo on “Stella By Starlight.”

Megan Iacobini de Fazio

Nídia & Valentina Magaletti - Estradas

In 2023, on an absolutely sweltering summer night in Ortigia, Sicily (as the rest of the island went up in flames), Italian Drummer-composer and multi-instrumentalist Valentina Valentina Magaletti and Afro-Portuguese artist Nídia took to the stage to perform the results of the artistic residency they had just taken part in. Their show was an explosion of acoustic, wiry drumming, heavy duty electronics, and blaring synths which left the audience asking: “When will we be hearing more of this?”

Dar Disku

Indian jazz and disco legend Asha Puthli seems to be popping up everywhere recently — from reissues to remix compilations and brand new productions — which can only be a good thing.

Esy Tadesse - Ahadu

Esy Tadesse’s Ahadu is a gentle call to step back and embrace the stillness and peace of solitude. The Ethiopian-born, Los Angeles-based guitarist and composer blends traditional Ethiopian scales with desert blues, psych-rock, and Western jazz, creating a soundscape that feels both otherworldly yet grounded in a sense of place.

Megan Iacobini de Fazio on Desert Blues

From Brazil’s saudade to the American blues and Ethiopia’s tizita, cultures worldwide have developed their own musical forms to express yearning, memory, and loss — feelings that transcend language. For the Tuareg, it’s assouf, a sound shaped by the struggle to preserve their heritage and the sorrow of a lost homeland.

Collections

Phil Freeman on the Black Artists Group

The Black Artists Group (BAG), formed in St. Louis, Missouri in 1968, is often seen as a junior stepsibling to Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which launched a few years earlier. But while the AACM was focused entirely on music, BAG was a multidisciplinary arts organization that included writers and poets, dancers, actors and painters.

Harold Heath on Kirk Degiorgio

Degiorgio’s been responsible for a series of classic releases over the years, and while Detroit techno has often been an inspiration, he’s never really been a copyist. Rather, he’s drawn on all his musical loves and influences to create a rich, sophisticated and influential back catalogue that blurs and sometimes transcends the boundaries between techno and jazz, and which also includes finely crafted jazz funk, ambient, deep house, broken beat, spiritual jazz, library music, neoclassical, fusion, electro, and synth-funk, along with a pair of albums as one half of soul/pop band The Beauty Room. 

Reviews

Ned Raggett

Coil - Unnatural History (Compilation Tracks Compiled)

In 1990, on the cusp of returning to full-length work with the following year’s Love’s Secret Domain, Coil issued the first in what would be an irregular series of collections documenting a variety of one-off contributions and appearances.

Coil - Unnatural History II (Smiling in the Face of Perversity)

Released in 1995, during the semi-lull in official Coil activity due to the never completed Backwards sessions and what would be separate albums in various alternate guises, Unnatural History II continues an overview of rarities and one-offs by the group, this time drawing not just on compilations but various B-sides, EPs, singles and then-unreleased songs.

Coil - Unnatural History III: Joyful Participation in the Sorrows of the World

The final entry in Coil’s Unnatural History series, released in 1997, didn’t mean there were further earlier uncollected rarities still plus more to come in the years that remained for the duo. But it still serves as a good in-the-moment catchup, featuring singles, compilation appearances, remixes and more across what was rapidly approaching a fifteen year continuing burst of creativity.

Harold Heath

Audrey Powne - From the Fire

From The Fire is the accomplished debut from trumpeter and producer Audrey Powne, who wrote, composed and arranged the entire album as well as singing and playing piano, organ and Rhodes. It’s an expansive, sumptuous yet delicate-sounding album, which freely modulates between the rules and boundaries of jazz, classical and R’n’B, resulting in an epic, beautifully orchestrated celestial soul-jazz collection.

Tara Lily - Speak in the Dark

The debut album from British Bengali artist Tara Lily is an electronic jazz and soul conceptually based on the artist’s experience with ADHD. Her sound palette is synths, electronic percussion, piano, and string arrangements and the mood is dreamlike, at times pensive, at times blissful.

Dabeull - Analog Love

Created with analogue keyboard sounds, plastic synth strings, creamy electric piano chords, squiggly chrome-edged G-funks and Bernie Worrell-esqe synth basslines that perfectly balance heft and squelch, Dabeull carves out a sumptuous sonic space that faithfully recalls the licks of 80s machine soul while benefiting from gorgeously fat and round 21st-century dance music production.

Rick Anderson

Culture - Trod On

Usually, when people talk about the best work of this great reggae harmony trio, they bring up early Joe Gibbs releases like Two Sevens Clash, or the Virgin Front Line classics Cumbolo and International Herb. And don’t get me wrong; those are essential albums. But this 1993 effort released on the Heartbeat label is another one.

Prince Jazzbo - Ital Corner

He got into a legendary beef with his contemporary I-Roy and every time they exchanged diss tracks Jazzbo came out looking like something of a fool. But when he kept to his own musical business he could regularly produce very fine performances, and when he teamed up with the brilliant (and crazy) producer Lee “Scratch” Perry for Ital Corner the results were both weird and magnificent.

Gigi - One Ethiopia

As is typical of Ethiopian pop music, songs are as likely to be written in a fast, loping 6/8 or 12/8 as in the more conventional (in the West) 4/4. The horns that are often abundant in Ethiopian music are here approximated by synthesizers, but otherwise this is very straight-ahead Ethiopian pop: Gigi not only has a gorgeous natural voice, but she’s also a master of the graceful melisma, and on songs like “Until When?” and “Without” it turns beautiful, looping somersaults all around the melody notes.

Chris Catchpole

The Dylan II - Farewell To Yesterday’s Memories

Japan’s folk scene in the 1970s can provide a continuous source of bounty for cratediggers who know where to look. Masaji Otsuka and Yoh Nagai took their name from the Osaka coffee bar and venue which provided a fulcrum for the Kansai folk rock scene from the end of the 60s, and their 1972 debut on Underground Record Club is an absolute gem.

Bananagun - Why Is the Colour of the Sky?

The Melbourne outfit’s 2020 debut, The True History Of Bananagun, served up a heady brew of freak-fried psych and frenetic Afrobeat, but here they’ve opened their third eyes even wider to encompass an entire history of mind-altering music. From the mannered whimsy of post-Pepper psychedelic pop to astral plane-traveling space jazz, thunderous krautrock, wobbly Tropicalia, gnarled acid folk and beyond, it’s all swept up in these ten, fleet-footed songs.

Office Culture - Enough

The latest offering from Brooklyn soft rock project Office Culture, aka Winston Cook-Wilson, finds him stretching his talents over an expansive 16-track double album. The electric piano gloop, sharp mind and raised eyebrow of his previous efforts are still present, but like his clear heroes Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, Cook-Wilson is keen to show off some of the other strings to his bow. 

Hank Shteamer

Pearl Jam - Vs.

Ten will forever stand as the archetypal Pearl Jam album, but a clear-eyed look at its 1993 follow-up, released at the height of the band’s vertiginous rise to fame, suggests that they might have actually peaked here.

Pearl Jam - Dark Matter

A Pearl Jam superfan, Watt urged the band into a more collaborative and spontaneous mode, yet these songs feel surprisingly lived-in, from the title track, a stomping, anthemic hard-rocker, to “Wreckage,” a folky, midtempo tune elevated by Vedder’s still-potent vocal majesty.

Pearl Jam - Binaural

…unlike certain of its successors, Binaural notches convincing wins in a variety of moods, from reflective, downtempo efforts like “Light Years” and “Thin Air” to complex, ornery art-punk workouts such as “Insignificance” and “Grievance,” which bear a striking resemblance to the contemporary output of noted Eddie Vedder favorites Fugazi.

Ned Raggett on Coil

But the truth of their range and goals, informed further via overt resistance to mainstream heteronormative standards of love and sex as well as homophobia in general, connecting further to Balance’s deep interest in occult and esoteric practices, renders the group even more impossible to pin down, pursuing their own evolving vision as they chose.

Collections

Jon Dale on Morton Feldman

There are a few things people often say about Feldman’s compositions. One is that they are very quiet. It is hard to deny this, given his fondness for the ppppp, or pianississississimo, indication on his scores. But this seems to me to be about a redirection of attention, as well, to listen carefully and intently. It also works at a level of intimacy, and Feldman’s move toward longer pieces in his later compositions seems to shadow this as well, with Feldman wanting to give the listener a chance to develop a closer, more one-to-one relationship with the work. 

Rick Anderson on Euro-Reggae

Over the past couple of decades, as traditional reggae music has been displaced in Jamaica in favor of increasingly hard-edged dancehall and its various subgenres, interest in keeping the old-school sounds alive has grown in other parts of the world – certainly in the UK (home to the largest segment of Jamaica’s diaspora) but also in locations that might seem less likely: Germany, France, Austria, even Poland and Romania. Since the turn of the current century, serious reggae scenes have cropped up in cities as unexpected as Marseilles, Berlin, Vienna, and Geneva.

Alex Riggs on Sophisti-pop

Sophisti-pop is meant to describe something akin to adult alternative: music that has its hands in the pies of jazz, R&B, the glossy modern pop of the 1980s/early 90s. I like describing it as Bowie’s Young Americans played exclusively on MIDI instruments.

Andy Beta on Lowell George

With a singular style on slide guitar, George could deliver roadhouse boogie, nimble New Orleans soul, nuanced sunny pop, and California stompin’ garage rock.

Reviews

Phil Freeman

James Brown - Funk Power 1970: A Brand New Thang

This 1996 compilation was part of a series that allowed fans to explore specific eras of James Brown’s career in more depth than the incredible Star Time box set. The first was Roots of a Revolution: 1956-1963, the second was Foundations of Funk – A Brand New Bag: 1964-1969, the fourth was Make It Funky (The Big Payback: 1971-1975), and the last was Dead On the Heavy Funk: 1975-1983. This one came third, and was the fiercest of the bunch.

Miles Davis' Greatest Hits

This 1969 compilation is a weird curio, but one worth seeking out. It was released in 1969, when Miles Davis was about to begin a radically new phase in his career with the album In A Silent Way, and a new, loud live band featuring Chick Corea’s electric keyboards and Jack DeJohnette’s thundering drums.

Gang of Four - A Brief History of the Twentieth Century

This 1990 compilation captures Gang Of Four better than any of their albums. With 20 tracks in 76 minutes, it allows you to track their evolution from their 1979 debut album Entertainment! (six tracks are included, kicking off with the astonishing “At Home He’s a Tourist”) to the simultaneously funkier and noisier Solid Gold and the Another Day/Another Dollar EP (“To Hell With Poverty!” and a sandblasting live version of “What We All Want” are particular high points).

Joe Muggs

Ernest Ranglin - In Search of the Lost Riddim

Recorded in Dakar, Senegal, with members of Baba Maal’s band on traditional West African instruments, it brought everything from the previous two albums into a transatlantic mix – even bringing in the modernist rhythms of dancehall – less fusing styles than finding highest common factors between them, and again absolutely radiating joy in playing and discovery.

The Bug - Machine

This 2024 LP is the first The Bug LP as such not to use vocalists, and it continues to find ever more mileage in all of the above mentioned sounds, as well as the cyborg desert blues Martin explored in his 2018 collaboration with Earth. This is the sound of a fearsomely pure artistic vision that needs to be nothing else other than itself.

Gilli Smyth - Mother

The album stands up as one of the weirdest things in the entire Gong cinematic universe, which is saying something indeed, and if by the final nine-and-a-half-minute folk tale “Taleisin” your mind is still fully intact, you haven’t been listening closely.

Alex Riggs

Julie Doiron & Mount Eerie - Lost Wisdom Pt. 2

The mythical art of creating a sequel that holds up just as well as its predecessor is treacherous work with rare reward. But Phil Elverum has a habit of navigating the treacherous.

Owen Pallett - In Conflict

In Conflict finds Owen Pallett embracing exactly that; the conflict of the mundane and miserable with the beauty of making it through your 30s unscathed, if that’s even possible.

Low - Hey What

It’s impossible to write about HEY WHAT – let alone think about it – without thinking about the tragedy of Mimi Parker’s death that happened a year after its release, thus making it the final Low album and maybe giving the album an unfair air of finality. But even within that context HEY WHAT is an album that is unrelenting in its wounded beauty; bathed in maximum overdrive and lurching chords straight from the pages of doom metal, the cacophony never threatens to snuff out the glory of Parker and Alan Sparhawk’s harmonies.

Nate Patrin

Ol’ Burger Beats - 74: Out of Time

Norwegian hip-hop producer Ol’ Burger Beats gave himself a big conceptual challenge with this project: not only does 74: Out of Time invoke a year and a moment in jazz he wasn’t alive to experience firsthand, he channels his beatmaker/archive-raider fascination with this time period into an album where every single track is 74 BPM.

Khruangbin - A La Sala

Nearly ten years after debut album The Universe Smiles Upon You introduced them to an audience wider than their Texas home base — but not yet as wide as the international scope of their mellow, airy-yet-nimble global funk — A LA SALA positions Khruangbin as a band well-known enough to precipitate a bit of a shift to a back-to-basics mode. The trick here is what “basic” even means.

Ginger Root - Shinbangumi

Cameron Lew’s described his fine-tuned indie pop as “aggressive elevator soul,” a curious term steeped in a late 20th century idea of upscale commercial cheer at a time when current hauntology seems more fixated on dead-mall decline. But Ginger Root’s retro inclinations — derived from a trans-Pacific blend of city pop, new wave, and R&B — are backed up with a knack for hooky melodicism, carefree rhythmic drive, and memory-jostling atmosphere that leaves questions of genre and era compellingly hazy, familiar forms from an idiosyncratic and asynchronous perspective.

Jeff Treppel

Deja Vu - Baroque in the Future

The ominous omelette on the cover doesn’t exactly tell you what’s inside, but at least the contents are all they’re cracked up to be. In an eggshell: this is what you’d get if Keith Emerson composed music for Castlevania games.

Blood Incantation - Absolute Elsewhere

They warned us. Ambient and death metal happily exist on opposing sides of the sonic spectrum. Blood Incantation found the luminescent bridge. The connective tissue? Weird seventies prog rock.

Gun - Gun

Album art done by Yes landscaper Roger Dean in his Hieronymus Bosch phase, The Gun’s debut album is mostly remembered for the oft-covered lead-off single “Race with the Devil,” a tune tackled by everyone from NWOBHM demolition women Girlschool to Japanese murder doom act Church of Misery. Strangely, it’s one of the less wild tracks on this heavy psych gem, although its insistent riff fires the bullet that would later hit speed metal’s bullseye.

Rick Anderson on Western Swing

One of the oddest, and yet most exciting and musically fertile, stylistic fusions to occur in American popular music was Western swing – a blend of hot jazz, old-time country, cowboy songs, and blues that emerged as a distinct genre in Texas and Oklahoma in the 1930s and came into full maturity over the course of the following decade.

Collections

Harold Heath on The Great Late ’80s Rare Groove Reveal

While many collectors and DJs may have been faintly horrified as records that had previously exchanged hands for hundreds of pounds were now freely available on a £6.99 album, for anyone else into funk and soul it revealed a treasure trove of astonishingly high quality and bizarrely overlooked music.

Hank Shteamer on Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López

The vocalist/guitarist partnership has been the engine of some of rock’s most iconic acts — Mick and Keith, Plant and Page, Axl and Slash, and so on. But far less common is the singer/six-stringer alliance that isn’t rooted to a single band, instead operating as a sort of movable cell, shuttling around among various groups while retaining some key collaborative essence.

Sean Wood on Post-Tonal Music

“Atonal” or “post-tonal” music is music without a major or minor key. While it is difficult to explain that in simple terms, the sound of atonal music is often instantly recognizable, characterized by a feeling of being unmoored and irresolute at every turn.

Reviews

Shy Thompson

PeanutsKun - BloodBagBrainBomb

PeanutsKun—a streamer who entertains with an unusual avatar—is an artist who has become a lightning rod that attracts the energy of Japan’s disparate Internet music scenes. His albums bring unlikely collaborators together under his banner, and for BloodBagBrainBomb he’s done it again.

The Velvet Underground - The Legendaly Guitar Amp Tapes

The Legendary Guitar Amp Tapes, recorded at The Boston Tea Party on January 15, 1969, has a reputation for being a real blowout — but that might partially be due to how it was archived. A fan was permitted to record, but had to stand right next to Lou Reed’s amp.

Birdman, Young Thug, Rich Homie Quan - Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1

Thug and Quan, with minor hits to their name but still relatively unproven, joined their forces for a legendary mixtape of songs that still reverberate in the current consciousness of hip-hop.

Megan Iacobini de Fazio

Parus - Zara

Zara evokes the quiet solitude of dawn, as the fog lifts and each sound — darks barking in the distance, the rustling of leaves, the ticking of a clock — resonates through the stillness. But beneath the tranquil soundscape, a low, resonant hum pulls each track into shadowy, more introspective territories.

Okaidja Afroso - Àbòr Édiń (Àbɔɔ Édíŋ)

There are few sounds as laid back and serene as Ghanaian palm wine music. Just listen to Kwaa Mensah’s delicate guitar and wistful voice, and you can almost feel the pleasant, mellow daze of a boozy afternoon, and the soft embrace of a gentle breeze offering momentary respite from Ghana’s sticky humidity.

Ethnique Punch - Vinyet

Though chopped up, re-edited, and looped, the old bağlama samples and airy tanbur vibrations that Ethnique Punch (aka Al’Eksan) couples with twisting synth lines and woozy hip-hop rhythms conjure the same immersive, hypnotic energy of the Sufi traditions from which he draws. 

Jon Dale

Michael Brook, Pieter Nooten - Sleeps With the Fishes

Sleeps With The Fishes transcends expectations, though, a rare moment where collaboration creates something even more potent and evocative than hinted by its constituent parts. It has a dank, elegiac air which, nevertheless, isn’t ‘gothic’; nor is it ambient wallpaper.

Siluetes 61 - Siluetes 61

It says a lot about post-punk Germany that often the supposed ‘second-tier’ artists made albums that were just as richly compelling as bigger names like Einstürzende Neubauten, Malaria! or Palais Schaumburg. The first Siluetes 61 album is a case in point.

Seefeel - Everything Squared

Everything Squared reminds of 1996’s (Ch-Vox) in both its brevity, and the overarching feeling that it’s a satellite from something more rigorously formed. In this case, it feels like a neat mini summation of the various things Seefeel do.

Andy Beta

Walter Bishop Jr. - Soul Village

Walter Bishop Jr.’s jazz bonafides go back to the source, banging bebop piano at Minton’s and making dates with the likes of Charlie Parker, being an original member of Art Blakey’s Messengers (the Jazz would be added later), and backing a young Miles Davis. Then a drug rap, loss of his cabaret license, and the ever-shifting sands of jazz led him to cool out on the scene and take up teaching music theory instead.

Nala Sinephro - Endlessness

Based in the UK, the Caribbean-Belgian musician toggles between harp and modular synth, the former an earthy, impressionistic string instrument that fellow harpist Alice Coltrane once likened to a sunset, while the latter conveys deep space and the precise lines of a sine wave.

Total Blue - Total Blue

Total Blue – an LA trio featuring Alex Talan, Nicky Benedek, and Anthony Calonico – suggest that the thrills of cheap ‘80s jacuzzi jazz and new age might soon bring about a reassessment of that long-disdained sound on their smooth debut.

Sean Wood

Leonard Cohen - Ten New Songs

After falling into the habit of downing three bottles of Chateau Latour on show nights in the early nineties, Leonard Cohen checked himself into the Mount Baldy Zen Center outside of L.A. in 1994 and lived there for five years as a Buddhist monk. When he returned from the mountain, he came with songs like stone tablets: chiseled, authoritative, and mysterious.

Leonard Cohen - Death of a Ladies' Man

People hate this record, and Cohen himself more or less disowned it – not a single track from it appears on The Essential Leonard Cohen, one of his best career retrospectives. But for me, the extravagance of Phil Spector’s production is a welcome sonic shift, if only because it is truly an eccentric outlier from the rest of the Cohen catalog.

Jonny Greenwood - Phantom Thread

Anderson’s 2017 fable of a creatively-brilliant and obsessively-controlling fashion designer received one of Greenwood’s most fulfilling and beautiful scores.

Robbie Robertson - Killers of the Flower Moon

While it is a score by a venerable classic rocker, it takes more cues from Bob Dylan’s latter-day amorphous, historically-ambiguous Americana soundscapes than from Scorsese’s trusty Stones needle drops. It didn’t get the Oscar it deserved, but it is a brilliant and forward-thinking last hurrah for the Robertson-Scorsese collaboration.

Jon Dale on Bubblegum

In its creative voraciousness, it chewed up and spat out the music that surrounded it: in these songs, on these records, you can hear the spirit of the Beatles, the Kinks, the Beach Boys, and so many more, all placed in service of an ultimate pop spirit that drifted, in most welcome fashion, from the songwriter-auteur stylisation that was being developed by record companies, PR spin and a nascent rock music press.

Collections

Hank Shteamer on Paul Motian

One measure of Paul Motian’s greatness is the sheer scope of his 50-year-plus career: just how many eras, projects and collaborations one has to reckon with in order to fathom the full extent of the late drummer-composer-bandleader’s genius.

Rick Anderson on Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Fitzgerald’s origin story is wonderful: scheduled to perform as a dancer as part of an Amateur Night program at the Apollo Theater in 1934, she found herself slated to follow the Edwards Sisters, whose skills were so advanced that she spontaneously decided to sing instead of dance when her turn came. She ended up taking first prize that night, and one of the most storied careers in the history of American music was born.

Joshua Levine on Modern LA Funk

Modern LA funk begins with the fragmentation of the genre into post-disco, boogie and electro in the early 1980s. Artists like Prince, Afrika Bambaataa and Egyptian Lover were pioneers of this spare, futuristic sound, using Linn drum machines and OB-X synths to replace traditional R&B band instruments. Those breakthroughs form the basis of modern funk’s musical style. But it also wouldn’t exist without the first two or three waves of local gangsta rap.

Reviews

Harold Heath

Alice Russell - I Am

Russell’s themes here are grief, struggle, healing and strength, and together with her long-time collaborator and co-producer TM Juke she’s produced an album of authentic, introspective contemporary soul that feels raw — its big themes of, literally, life and death unsurprisingly producing intense performances — but with the rough edges smoothed out, and with a gently glowing positivity emerging from the real-life drama she documents.

Brittany Howard - What Now

Singer, guitarist and songwriter Brittany Howard’s second album What Now is a dense, expansive and experimental R’nB/future-soul collection that confidently incorporates the soothing wash of sound bowls and grinding rock guitar elements with equal aplomb.

The Emperor Machine - Island Boogie

Island Boogie is perhaps the mostly perfectly realised EM project to date, a collection of eight lengthy club tracks, built from elements of various disco sub genres — space, Italo, dub, cosmic et al — and NYC punk funk, electro and boogie, all created with his extensive analog synth collection.

Ned Raggett

Cold Gawd - I’ll Drown On This Earth

It absolutely blasts out of the gate with “Gorgeous,” with a buried shout and a massive chug of a riff combining exultance and heaviness, with lead creative figure Matthew Wainwright’s sighing vocals adding a glistening beauty that even carries through the near black-metal screams later.

Tama Gucci - Notes To Self

Following a string of singles and EPs, 2024 saw the formal album debut of Miami-based Tama Gucci with a truly fantastic example of in-the-moment dance and r&b in happy queer-centered fusion with Notes To Self, a twelve-song, thirty minute example of the skill of brevity at work.

Zsela - Big For You

Zsela’s calm, focused keen of a voice is compelling – there’s a cool control that suggests everyone from Nina Simone to Q. Lazzarus – while the sense of controlled space and carefully placed silence throughout the album is a remarkable calling card.

Hank Shteamer

Don Caballero - American Don

But on American Don, the Pittsburgh instrumental outfit’s fourth album and final effort before their initial breakup, they made a definitive break with their past, shedding nearly all vestiges of metal-adjacent heaviness and in the process setting a new benchmark for outside-the-box underground rock.

Don Caballero 2

This was the effort where they leveled up masterfully from For Respect, their blunt yet brainy 1993 debut, and learned how to sustain compositional intrigue across lengthy forms.

Don Caballero - World Class Listening Problem

World Class Listening Problem marked the return of Don Caballero after a several-year hiatus, and if it wasn’t the radical step forward that its predecessor, American Don, was, it was still an enormously satisfying effort from the band that led a new wave of heavy, prog-descended instrumental rock in the ‘90s.

Joshua Levine

Iron Maiden - Seventh Son of a Seventh Son

A labyrinthine concept album – both in plot and song structures – the album pushes all of Maiden’s archetypal song ideas to their limits.

Radio 4 - Gotham!

The ringing cowbells, distorted bass and analog handclaps typical of dance-punk are all consistently present, but less orthodox flourishes like conga-driven funk beats and lush synths push the mix into something approaching lurid, overcompressed psychedelic soul.

Ike & Tina Turner - Feel Good

The revelations of the monstrous abuse Tina Turner suffered at the hands of her then-husband Ike understandably tends to stain the duo’s output decades after its release, but the fact remains that taken on purely musical terms, Feel Good is not just a peak for Ike & Tina but for rock music as a whole.

Chris Catchpole

Prairiewolf - Prairiewolf

Bar the odd bit of pedal steel and some plucked acoustic on the light side of the moon escape of “Return To The Lonesome Prairie,” guitar is to a minimum as the sprightly click of a Rhythm Ace drum machine underpins twinkling synthscapes that shimmer, shift and undulate between komische, library and lounge sounds under a dreamlike haze of cosmic Americana.

Melanie De Biasio - No Deal

A classically trained flautist and jazz singer, Biasio has been likened to a Belgian Nina Simone, and while there are shades of Simone operating within No Deal’s smoky, late-night atmosphere (alongside Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry and even Eartha Kitt) and she masterfully tackles Simone’s “I’m Gonna Leave You,” the intoxicating spell Biaso casts on the likes of “The Flow”’s simmering spiritual jazz hoodoo is entirely her own.

English Teacher - This Could Be Texas

Over a backdrop that shifts between Pink Floydian piano revelry (“You Blister My Paint”), the rattle of early Smiths (“I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying”) Kate Bush-esque piano pop (the title track) and much more, Fontaine maps out a winningly original lyrical outlook that mixes absurdist surrealism with peculiarly northern English minutiae (the Magazine-like “The World’s Biggest Paving Slab” namechecks Charlotte Bronte, the Pendle witch trials and Dr Who actor John Simm).

Shy Thompson on Eccentric Satie

Today, Satie continues to be evaluated in different contexts and across every imaginable genre. Jazz greats like Mal Waldron have done Satie suites in a post-bop style, and even leftfield folk musicians have embraced the Velvet Gentleman. There are countless recordings of trained musicians tackling Satie with the utmost seriousness, but there are just as many weird and wild experiments.

Collections

Andy Beta on “The Other 2000s NYC Music”

To read Lizzy Goodman’s handy Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001–2011 is to vicariously live through an era of post-9/11 New York City where the biggest, buzziest, most stylishly tousled rock’n’roll groups emerged victorious. And yes, bands like The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol definitely defined the times. But when they get lumped in with head-scratching “tourists” such as Kings of Leon and Ryan Adams (yeck!), one wonders if there might have been other bands, artists, and scenes of the 2000s that also claimed New York City (and its burgeoning borough Brooklyn) for themselves.

Hank Shteamer on Steve Albini

The albums he recorded are as important as the ones he played on. And the many obscure titles he engineered tell us as much about how he engaged with the world — and maybe more — as the canonized classics. The same goes for the albums he championed that he played no actual role in. All of it was key to the ecosystem that he helped foster year by year, riff by riff, session by session, soundbite by soundbite.

Shy Thompson on ’70s Japanese Folk

Something that drew Hosono, and doubtless many others, to folk from the US is the way it incorporated American roots music into its sound. “We realized that,” Hosono said, “and we thought about what our own roots were.”

Reviews

Phil Freeman

Bill Frisell - Orchestras

On this expansive live set, guitarist Bill Frisell’s long-standing trio with bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Rudy Royston is accompanied (and sometimes swallowed) by two different orchestras: the Brussels Philharmonic, with nearly 60 musicians, and the smaller Umbria Jazz Orchestra, just 11 players of a jazzier bent.

Brandon Ross - Off the End

The seamless 65-minute performance unfolds like a dream, shifting from calm passages that feel like they’re being transformed into a dub remix in real time to climaxes that blur the line between fiery electric jazz and raw electronic noise.

أحمد [Ahmed] - Giant Beauty

Ahmed Abdul-Malik was a bassist and composer who performed with Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Randy Weston, among others. He also made a series of albums as a leader which blended jazz with Arabic and Middle Eastern music (in addition to bass, he also played the oud)…Each set consists of a single long track, and they’re all different, not just in the small ways that separate one extended blowout from another as long as you’re listening carefully, but in big ways.

Rick Anderson

Jonas Hellborg, Shawn Lane - Time Is the Enemy

Bassist Jonas Hellborg has played with a wide variety of illustrious frontmen and fellow first-call session musicians over the course of his long career, but I’m not sure there was ever a guitarist that brought out the joyful virtuosity in him more effectively than the brilliant and doomed Shawn Lane, who died (aged 40) just a few years after this album was compiled from a series of live shows in Hellborg’s native Sweden.

Jonas Hellborg - The Silent Life

With this music it’s a bit difficult to tell where composition ends and improvisation begins, though clearly both are involved; Hellborg’s playing is virtuosic but not ostentatious, and it’s frequently gorgeous, particularly on the discursive and sinuous “When Ambition Ends” and the funk/chordal workout “Wounded Knee” (on which, okay, he’s maybe a bit ostentatious in his virtuosity).

Jonas Hellborg - Octave of the Holy Innocents

This album, though generally filed under Jonas Hellborg’s name, fits the classic definition of a power trio release: bassist Hellborg is teamed up with Michael Shrieve (famous for his work with Santana) and guitarist Buckethead (famous both for his otherworldly guitar skills and his extremely odd self-presentation).

Joe Muggs

Slipper - Zoon Sandwich

Slipper are a deeply peculiar proposition. Revolving around Sam Dodson who had made his name with the headiest early 90s intercontinental sample plundering super spiritual hippie-rave of Loop Guru, it evolved into a very different sort of sampledelia - still predicated on the pleasure principle, but much more decadent, eerie and urbane.

Mark Fell, Will Guthrie - Infoldings / Diffractions

Fell’s glitching, swooping, swiping manipulations of Guthrie’s playing is sometimes as ultra-minimal as his early work, but tends to pile on the complexity over the course of these four long jams.

Angélique Kidjo - Remain in Light

If ever there was an example of an artist taking songs by the scruff of the neck and going “these are mine now,” it’s this glorious reinterpretation of an entire Talking Heads album by the Beninese-French diva Angélique Kidjo.

Nate Patrin

Arthur Verocai - s/t

The deeper rep of Arthur Verocai rides off some remarkably efficient engineering genius (its 20-piece soundscape was recorded on only four tracks), not to mention an eclecticism that transliterated its MPB roots through a soul-jazz vibe that earned comparisons to visionary contemporaries like David Axelrod and Eumir Deodato.

DJ Manny - Signals in My Head

More than a decade after his earliest internet-distributed singles, DJ Manny’s impact has been directly felt at the footwork scene’s Chicago epicenter as a Teklife affiliate, and expanded out into the art-dance satellite world represented by Planet Mu. But the further his artform develops, the harder it is to pinpoint its orthodoxies, if it even has any, as he treats the routes of footwork’s syncopated, sub-bass-soaked velocity as cloverleaf on-ramps to other genres.

Beak> - >>>>

Geoff Barrow’s most successful musical project since Portishead has been carrying the neo-Krautrock torch for a good while now. It’s gotten to the point where it’d be both reductive and a decent ballpark to compare them to a theoretical Pink Floyd that decamped to Cologne post-Meddle, not to mention that the inevitable Can comparisons are set up to tee-ball levels at this point.

Jeff Treppel

Les Rallizes Dénudés - The OZ Tapes

If you wanted to experience Les Rallizes Dénudés’s heavy psych majesty, you needed to catch them in person. Difficult when Mizutani died in 2019! It’s honestly a miracle this official release exists.

Viagra Boys - Cave World

Outwardly post-ironic eighties pastiche bullshit, these canny observers of the human condition in the Social Media Age transcend their jokey name. Think Tom Waits channeled by Devo via Trent Reznor’s downward spiral.

D.R.I. - Crossover

Dirty Rotten Imbeciles’ third long-player not only cemented the hybrid between thrash metal and hardcore punk but also gave it its name. Crossover proved a few things: first, that hardcore could survive a brush with actual production quality; second, that the two genres weren’t that far apart; and third, that nothing got a pit going quite like gnarly thrash riffs sped up to punk speed.