Marta Salogni and Stefano Pilia’s Phren is music of accretion. Inputs are fed through Pilia’s chain of filters and tape echo and on into Salogni’s Revox reel-to-reel tape machine for further manipulation and modulation, the signals absorbing new layers and mutations as they go. According to the release notes, that initial input is often Pilia’s guitar, but the pair’s plastic approach to sound makes that far from obvious. They telescope the act of mediation, mottling, shading and bending signals as they pass from sound source to ears.
‘Sopra l’acque scavate’ opens with distorted notes sparking like a frosty firework display. The more your ears focus, the more ambiguous those notes become. The attack and decay seem awry for a guitar, the timbre too guitar-y…
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You don’t expect Chuck Roth’s music to have lyrics. The Brooklyn-based guitarist’s experimental style and broad range of techniques, especially on his latest album Texture Songs, occupy plenty of speaker space, even when the music is spacious and minimalist, so the introduction of softly sung words is surprising. Take the gnarly shards of ‘Hometown Hero’, a piece built on observations of a changing New York City, changes clearly not all welcomed. The playing is sharp and muscular in places, with heavy strums and mini high-string flexes that bring plenty of urgency. The vocals add something of a pulse, a beating heart to the sound, without demanding too much attention.
Roth has an interesting view of vocals, looking to use them to ‘decorate the border of…
Of the many elements Blair Dunlop has got right with What Still Survives, the award-winning British singer songwriters sixth full-length album, is the backbone of the sound. Bob Dylan was trying to describe something like this back in 1966 when he settled, aptly, on the phrase ‘wild mercury’. I cannot hope to improve upon that description. Still, I will, all the same, say that, aided by Ian Grimble on production duties, the combination of acoustic and electric guitars, drums and bass, with frequent embellishments by Hammond organ, pedal steel and violins, pretty much lays out a musical toolkit that can conjure the widest possible range of emotional responses. Blair has put himself and his latest batch of original songs, mostly written solo with the odd co-credit to…
The cover photo for soulful, bluesy singer/songwriter Eric Jerardi’s tenth album is a bit misleading. The Game has nothing to do with Chess or any other recreational board activity played against others.
Rather, it references the concept that inspired this often riveting dozen song collection.
Jerardi was challenged to write 12 songs in three months, one per week. The “game” was further complicated by a rule requiring him to use a prompt or a phrase verbatim within the lyrics, sent by a longtime friend. Financial penalties were levied for late submissions.
Although this seems inherently non-organic (what happens if his muse isn’t in sync?), the results are impressive. The maxims sent were…
After last year’s 50th anniversary bonanza for the score to JAWS at Intrada, one good bite deserves another! The label will reissue the out-of-print score for JAWS 2, the unlikely 1978 sequel to Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece. (Spielberg, of course, did not return, and French director Jeannot Szwarc assumed directorial responsibilities.) Once again, Amity Island contends with a great white shark problem – only this time, police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) is mostly on his own against the beast, racing against the clock to rescue a marooned group of teen sailors that includes his children. Intriguingly, JAWS 2 was the first time John Williams scored a sequel, and instead of simply reprising his own work, he brings the iconic shark theme back alongside a set of…
On A La Altura: Visionary Mexican Music 1977-1999, Volume 1, a new compilation of Mexican experimental music from the latter quarter of the 20th century, the misconception that cosmic exploration is reserved for futuristic science fiction is thoroughly righted. Instead, ambient and New Age ruminations sprawl with celestial curiosity, while pre-Hispanic instruments and cinematic field recordings ground the secrets of the universe in our own verdant home-world. The result is a fascinating dialogue between ancient wisdom and Space-Age zeal, with just enough rock grooves for the body to pick up wherever your intellectual journey peters out.
Curated by the Mexican journalist Carlos “Tropicaza” Icaza and Mark “Frosty” McNeill of…
…remastered and restored for its 40th anniversary, including five previously unreleased bonus tracks sourced directly from the original 1986 recording sessions.
Wind was first issued in 1986 on Masin’s private imprint, Bear in the Moon, and marked the start of a much loved catalogue which has more recently flourished with contributions to the Music from Memory label, including a solo 2LP compilation and the Gaussian Curve album, beside his work on that first Lifted LP for PAN alongside Co la and Max D. Coming from a similar place, spiritually speaking, as the pioneering work of K. Leimer and Savant, and finding modern antecedents in the exploratory, bittersweet arrangements of Laura Groves or pretty much anything you’d hear on…
About halfway through new album, We Can Rot Together, Kill Alters drops a karaoke rendition of “Toy Soldiers,” the 1989, U.S. chart-topping ballad from teen pop star Martika. This version was recorded in 1993 and it sounds like a dusty childhood memory unspooling in a now-vintage Walkman. That this intimate recollection comes after a 20 minute digital hardcore onslaught of frenetic beats and vocals that morph from chirpy to brutal is perfect. It gives the listener a few moments of respite before the pace picks up again with a cover of the Y2K trance banger “Castles in the Sky.” By the album’s conclusion, you’ll be grateful for that breather. We Can Rot Together is exhilarating. For Kill Alters’s third album, Bonnie Baxter works solo as the project’s vocalist,…
Historically eclipsed by the influence of the foundational post-hardcore bands from neighboring New Jersey (your Lifetimes, your Midtowns), NYC emo is enjoying a moment thanks to new-school groups like alt-pop specialists Zachshots and screamoviolence outfit OLTH. Brooklyn-based Holidays in United States, while hardly new on the block, officially enter the chat with How to Count to Five: 10 endearing nu-emo numbers that split the difference between the genre’s first and second waves.
The spectre of Midwest emo looms large; American Football in particular casts a considerable shadow. The album also brings to mind the iconic cover of Saves the Day’s Through Being Cool, where the band sits on a couch looking…
Named for a Ride song, England’s Sennen debuted their mix of dissonant shoegaze, slow-burning guitar rock, and warm harmonic pop with the mini-album Widows in 2005. While often adjusting the balance of these components between records, they regularly returned to the studio through the mid-2010s, when they delivered their fourth full-length, 2016’s First Light.
Ten years later, the band return with their fifth proper studio album, New Quiet. (An expanded version of Widows with additional recordings from the 2000s appeared in the interim.) With the band saying that they more confidently leaned into influences this time around, it begins with the Mercury Rev-inspired seven-minute epic “I Can See the Future.” The song’s opening…
On their previous releases, San Francisco’s Aluminum often combined the swirling, psychedelic guitars of shoegaze with drum loops inspired by big beat and Madchester, though they also had plenty of driving indie pop songs as well. While the group primarily self-recorded their music in the past, second album Iconoclast Haha was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Jack Shirley at Oakland’s Atomic Garden Studio, and has more of a live band feel than their other records. Co-leader Ryann Gonsalves sounds much more present in the mix on this album, and she also recalls Kim Deal more than she used to.
Opener “Give Me a Reason” is hazy and grungy but sounds crisp and direct, showcasing the group’s vocal harmonies and an abundance…
Dave’s Picks Volume 60 contains the two previously unreleased complete concerts recorded on April 13 and 14, 1984 at the Hampton Coliseum in Hampton, Virginia on 4 discs, and was recorded by a reportedly “super-dialed-in” Dan Healy and mastered to HDCD by Jeffrey Norman at Mockingbird Mastering. In his “seaside chat” about the album, David Lemeiux, the namesake and overseer of the series, says he couldn’t believe they were at number 60. He calls the two shows “magnificent”, noting that one of the “Morning Dews” from the two was one of the best he had heard from the band’s 1980s performances. He also says that the second show is “really interesting”, as the set begins with “Scarlet Begonias” segueing into “Fire on…
Given that Grey DeLisle keeps herself quite busy doing voice animation, it’s always a pleasure when she finds time to record a new album, especially one as rewarding as Don’t Turn Around. It’s a smart, fun, and vibrant record where she effortlessly cruises through several styles, unified by her wonderfully flexible voice and trademark incisiveness about love, loss, and heartbreak. While DeLisle has already proven herself to be a songwriter and vocalist of note, the bar is raised by some fabulous production and arrangements that make every track shine.
Original production was handled by the late Andy Paley, and his touch is everywhere, from the soaring, sun-dappled harmonies on Drive Around to the big melodic hooks on Disneyland.
As this album’s title implies, and her bio confirms, roots singer/songwriter Miko Marks has been through personal challenges in the four years since her previous release. A marriage of 29 years ended (amicably), she lost her mother and sister and, as the promotional notes say, “she began her journey with sobriety.”
So it’s little surprise that Hell or High Water is Marks’ first full blues album. As those who have followed Marks’ career know, blues has always been woven through her folk, country, gospel, Southern fried rock and roll, and singer/songwriter material. So this isn’t a major shift. Regardless, the singer’s powerful, churchy voice injects power, honesty and heat into these ten tracks.
She leaves her Resurrectors band, so essential…
A behemoth of an album, Trip the Night Fantastic arrives carrying the weight of big ideas, and an overriding belief in the power of community to spark social change. Built around the core chemistry of pianist Aaron Parks, guitarist Matthew Stevens and multi-instrumentalist Morgan Guerin, and delivered under the aegis of drummer, educator and changemaker Terri Lyne Carrington, the project manages to sidestep the earnestness that can sometimes dog overtly political projects, favouring deep grooves, rich textures and a cinematic sense of movement.
Opener ‘Riddim Song’ is a glorious tempo-changing clash of spoken word, organs and horns and crisp, unfussy backbeats featuring the golden voice of Malian diva Fatoumata Diawara…
Dan Barrett, also known for the dark ambient project Worms of the Earth, runs Aetherium Nebula out of Baltimore, Maryland. Barrett spent 2026 extending the project’s fiction across two parallel story cycles, the Dhuna-Rhim series and the ArcSec City cycle, released as a run of singles and EPs, before returning to a full-length with Ephemeral Port on Cryo Chamber.
…The focus is on cyberpunk-themed electronics, lilting voices, and aleatoric percussion elements, all centered around a synth grounding. While some passages may come across as brightly-toned at first, this is a wrapper that surrounds a hidden darkness. The tracks generally move at a slow pace, evoking feelings of melancholy, longing, and dread. Thematically, Ephemeral Port comes…
Hildur Guðnadóttir celebrates two decades of music on This Will Be Us, placing old compositions in new skins with Robert Ames and the DSO Berlin. When initially recording her first album, Mount A (as Lost in Hilderness), she set out to “involve other people as little as she could;” now she admits, “I always dreamed of having more people playing with me.” This is not to say that the new versions are the definitive or even better versions, because there is great appeal in the intimacy of her solo work, which jump-started her career. In her early years she worked with luminaries such as Jóhann Jóhannsson, Ben Frost and Múm; in later years she has become famous for her scoring work, from the award-winning Chernobyl and The Joker to this year’s The Bride! and…
On Melting Pillars of Snow, Swedish composer Maria W Horn attempts to map the relentless passage of time across five expansive compositions. The record sets out to chart the friction between microscopic moments and deep historical time. Yet for all its conceptual weight and formal intent, the listening experience remains curiously remote, leaving the pieces sounding like static, glass-encased dioramas which may be meticulously assembled, but are emotionally lacking in power. Lead single ‘Scythe of Saturn’ sets the template. Built around slow-motion acoustic and electronic friction, it features a guest spoken performance from Swans’ Michael Gira. Gira’s low and heavy delivery is commanding, but his presence feels strangely grafted onto…