With each album, Creative Adult move further away from their post-hardcore roots — the band includes former members of Life Long Tragedy and All Teeth — and further into a more unusual niche.
As on their debut Psychic Mess, Creative Adult sound more visceral on Fear of Life than many post-punk-inspired acts, yet more pensive and philosophical than some bands influenced by hardcore. Creative Adult have feelings about having feelings: There’s muscle behind their moods on “I Can Love,” where the title sounds equally like an affirmation and a threat, and lyrics like “Push/pull” hint at how emotions can feel almost physical. Thanks to Jack Shirley’s production, however, Creative Adult’s music is cleaner, more eclectic, and possibly even bleaker than ever before.
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The Departed are typically known for revolving around frontman Cody Canada. However, in their new effort, In Retrospect, bassist Jeremy Plato takes the lead with the group temporarily going by the moniker Jeremy Plato & The Departed. The album is a collection of pure country covers, most of which are from the ’60s. Though some of the selections are well known, while others are significantly more obscure, all of the songs are representative of an era in country music now mostly bygone, one that has been almost entirely supplanted by pop culture influences and demographic marketing approaches.
In Retrospect isn’t The Departed’s first collection of cover songs; in a daring debut, the act’s “This Is Indian Land” was also a collection of such songs, a musical homage to friends and fellow artists…
Since the Australian group’s self-titled debut in 2005, singer-guitarist Andrew Stockdale has written songs that are magnificently generic — a stew of vintage rock influences in which listeners can hear almost anything they want, from the stomp of Led Zeppelin to the scuzz of the MC5 to the scream of Deep Purple to the scrape of The White Stripes. Just as an arena is built to hold anyone and everyone, Wolfmother’s arena-rock is designed to contain everything that inspires it.
That blankness isn’t a drawback; it’s Wolfmother’s strength. And Victorious is glorious proof. After many lineup changes over the past few years, Stockdale and the latest incarnation of the band (bassist Ian Peres and drummer Vin Steel) have crafted 10 songs that screech for the stars.
As a significant contributor to those wonderful albums by the Cinematic Orchestra “Everyday” and “The Man With the Movie Camera,” terrifyingly more than a dozen years ago, John Ellis showed himself as a musician who was not afraid of unusual combinations of sounds or juxtapositions of instrumentation. Here the approach is to draw you in with familiar sounds or references, before throwing some inspired, unusual, combinations into the mix. Take the way that the decayed synthesizer and cymbal of “Interlude 2” sounds like the ambient wash of some great lost mid-90s LTJ Bukem production but leads into “The Ladder” with its prominent use of the kora. The synthesizer rhythm is every bit as deep as something on, say, St. Germain’s classic Boulevard, yet the clever use of…
Brooke Sharkey is a London-based singer-songwriter who was raised in France and the UK. Wandering Heart is her second full-length, telling tales of London-life and summers spent traveling the coasts of France and Italy with long-term collaborator guitarist Adam Beattie. A travelogue of sorts perhaps.
Wandering Heart is a sonically ambitious record, painting a broad sound canvas in muted colors over which Brooke’s voice soars and shines. Brooke’s backup band includes a French horn, an unusual addition used to full effect, and on this record her band’s sound is expanded by strings, utilized sparingly but very effectively to enhance the cinematic quality of her music. Brooke’s vocals are delicate and powerful, in the tradition of…
Cliches about Los Angeles usually allude to Hollywood, and its preponderance of models and actors — not so much its jazz scene. But with his singular album To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar changed all that; calling up some of the city’s then- little-known luminaries like Thundercat, Terrace Martin & Kamasi Washington. The latter turned the jazz world on its head in 2015 with a double-disc release called The Epic, and now Miles Mosley — the bassist on that album — release his own project Uprising (on the Alpha Pup Records sub-imprint World Galaxy), born of the same sessions that generated Kamasi’s sea change-inducing record.
Mosley, a fixture of the Los Angeles scene, has appeared on recordings with everyone from India.Arie to Chris Cornell — recently, he was…
Before Mark Sultan began teaming up with King Khan or started working in the studio with other musicians, he cut a few rowdy one-man-band albums as BBQ, with Sultan singing, playing guitar, and stomping out a beat all at once. Sultan takes a stroll down memory lane with BBQ – Mark Sultan, in which he holed up with a four-track recording rig and bashed out a dozen tunes (each a first take) the same way he did on Tie Your Noose in 2005.
As a vocalist, Sultan has learned a few tricks and his approach is a bit more refined than it was back in the day, but in terms of the songs and his elemental instrumental attack, this could have been recorded a decade earlier, which isn’t in itself a bad thing. Sultan’s guitar work is simple but forceful and big on energy, while his percussion footwork…
John Mayall has earned the title “Godfather of British Blues” by the very longevity of his career in combination with the pedigree of musicians who’ve advanced through his bands over the years. Mayall celebrated his seventieth birthday fourteen years ago with a concert featuring Eric Clapton and Mick Taylor, guitarists for Mayall in the Sixties, while Mick Fleetwood and John McVie were also members of the man’s Bluesbreakers band in that era, at one point alongside Peter Green, with whom that rhythm section also played in an early lineup of Fleetwood Mac.
All of which history is particularly relevant to Talk About That. John Mayall is pictured playing guitar both inside and out this slim-line…
Even though it’s been more than four years since Tift Merritt‘s last solo album, 2012’s Traveling Alone, she’s hardly been idle. In fact, between releasing a collaborative album with classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein, working with Andrew Bird’s Hands of Glory and singing on country-soul band Hiss Golden Messenger’s latest album Heart Like a Levee (not to mention getting a cut on Don Henley’s most recent album, Cass County), she’s actually been more visible than ever.
Stitch of the World, Merritt’s sixth studio album, was written on a friend’s farm in Marfa, Texas, at Merritt’s California cabin and in New York City in the wake of several major changes in her life. Merritt workshopped the songs on Stitch of the World with longtime friend Sam Beam of…
Two very different musicians from the wide range of the jazz spectrum, Mats Gustafsson and Craig Taborn played together just once, for the 2015 edition of the Ljubljana Jazz Festival, and that explains the chosen title of this LP.
The meeting seemed improbable, but in what concerns improvisation, if the protagonists are committed explorers of spontaneity anything can happen, even the most extraordinary music.
That was the case – the encounter was recorded and here it is, documented, as it should.
Particularly happy with the results, Gustafsson said in an interview: “It was like a kick in the ass; please, give me more challenges like this one, in order to keep my sanity!” Imagine the refined chords defining Taborn’s piano music.
A question: What does it mean when a folk tradition is passed down through vinyl rather than from villager to villager and without a personal and social context? That was answered in the ‘60s by folk revivalists such as Jim Kweskin and Geoff Muldaur.
As part of Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band (along with Maria Muldaur and others) these two popularized obscure performers and songs from the past. The two have joined back together to make a new album. (This is not the first time.) They list the records they originally learned the material from in the liner notes as a badge of honor. Several of the 15 tracks originally appeared on the 1952 Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music. In this world of streaming music, Kweskin and Muldaur want to let listeners know they acquired their repertoire…
With Your Wilderness, Bruce Soord’s the Pineapple Thief shift their musical focus away from their exploration of polished rock so evident on 2012’s All the Wars and 2014’s Magnolia, and back toward contemporary prog.
Drummer Dan Osborne, who made his debut with the band on Magnolia, proved short-lived in his role; he has been replaced by Porcupine Tree/King Crimson kit man Gavin Harrison. Soord also enlisted guests including Supertramp’s John Helliwell on clarinet, Caravan’s string player/arranger Geoffrey Richardson, Godsticks’ guitarist Darran Charles, and a four-voice choir. Harrison’s addition can’t be overstated. His playing extends the reach of their musicality exponentially.
The album title denotes themes of isolation,…
The latest offering from Cryo Chamber is a collaboration between Ukrainian ProtoU and Iranian Alphaxone entitled Stardust, which explores the endless sequence of worlds beyond our solar system. The moods and worlds built by Alphaxone and ProtoU draw on science fiction clichés, but in marrying the concept to a thick carpet of the very darkest ambient, they have conjured up something new.
Cryo Chamber says about the album: “Float weightless in the void to the sound of exploding supernovas. A solid thump closes the airlock behind you. Greeting your vision, a myriad of stars shining like beacons in black space. Rapid fingers across the uplink to the mothership…
Jerry Paper is the internet experience brought to life by mastermind Lucas W. Nathan, who leans into charming absurdity under a genre he describes on his Bandcamp page as “11th dimension pop.”
Blending MIDI sounds with catchy keyboard hooks, the L.A.-based songwriter has been creating heartwarming, outlandish pop for years, and has garnered an abounding online fan base in the process.
Nathan dives into the further reaches of the realm of eccentricity with his latest record Toon Time Raw! and doesn’t look back. Deviating from his more electronically centered pop with the help of BadBadNotGood, he grounds us in a kaleidoscopic, jazzy dissonance as he layers dozy keyboard over warm saxophone and roots songs in bossa nova…
In 2015, ARIA award winning singer / songwriter Josh Pyke joined the incredible Sydney Symphony Orchestra, for two stunning shows at the iconic Sydney Opera House. After showcasing his talents alongside conductor Christopher Dragon, Pyke releases Live at the Sydney Opera House.
Live at the Sydney Opera House features 16 tracks including songs from Pyke’s previous 4 albums. Tracks such as ‘Middle of the Hill’, ‘Leeward Side’ and ‘The Lighthouse Song’ performed and interpreted as you have never heard them before.
“I’m so proud of this record. The whole experience was amazingly rewarding and a huge learning curve for me. I love the fact that these songs have been given a new lease on life in this new form.”
Ten recordings by one of the greatest saxophonists of his generation, American jazz master Lucky Eli Thompson with the Michael Naura Trio, Quintet and guests in Hamburg 1959 and 1960.
Small and larger group improvisations with the melodic sound of Lucky on tenor and soprano sax, featuring Heinz von Moisy, Hajo Lange, Jimmy Gourley, Wolfgang Schlüter and Hans Koller. Hard bop with a nod to Lester Young (Cherokee, Thin Ice) and soft ballads (Summertime, Deep Passion), all light, fluffy, intimately personal and with a lyrical bebop approach. Lucky was a hell of a saxophone player (Miles Davis). Produced by Hans Gertberg Tracks 3, 4, 7, 8 & 9 recorded April 17,1959 at Studio 10 in Hamburg featuring Lucky Thompson (ts & ss), Hajo Lange (b), Michael Naura (p)…
Cheap Thrills, the major-label debut of Janis Joplin, was one of the most eagerly anticipated, and one of the most successful, albums of 1968. Joplin and her band Big Brother & the Holding Company had earned extensive press notice ever since they played the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, but for a year after that their only recorded work was a poorly produced, self-titled album that they’d done early in their history for Mainstream Records; and it took the band and the best legal minds at Columbia Records seven months to extricate them from their Mainstream contract, so that they could sign with Columbia. All the while, demand continued to build, and they still faced the problem of actually delivering something worthy of the press they’d been getting — Columbia even tried to record…
For decades, Australian trio The Necks have built themselves a reputation as one of the most restless, adventurous groups in the world of avant-garde jazz. After delivering a trilogy of albums for their own Fish of Milk label, Chris Abrahams, Lloyd Swanton and Tony Buck resurface with a new long player as The Necks on Ideologic Organ. Few other bands can grapple three decades of genre-defying musical innovation and still sound fresh, but The Necks do it with supreme class on Unfold, a four-track album pressed up on double vinyl and gifted the mastering touch of Rashad Becker at D&M.
The label state these four tracks are not numbered deliberately, leaving the listener to navigate Unfold from whatever angle they choose. All four approaches are, as you would expect, a delight;…
Originally issued as the fouth LP in the limited edition box set Tandoori Dog, Jerusalaam follows Jaagheed Zarb, the title disc, and Libya Tour Guide with a CD reissue; finally, the long out of print box has been completely reissued. Again the increased space of its new medium has allowed unreleased material from the original tape to be included.
This time, however, the extra material is neither alternate versions of Tandoori Dog material nor new songs intended for those releases; the two extra tracks here, clocking in at near 15 minutes and just under 8, make up unused material from the Return of Black September sessions.
The contrast, even for someone with as wide a range as Muslimgauze had, is stunning. The original Jerusalaam fits in with much of…
This Is Steve is the third studio LP by songwriter and guitar whiz Steve Marion under his performance alias Delicate Steve. It follows a nearly five-year gap between new material, during which Marion played on several recordings by other artists, including Yeasayer, Sondre Lerche, and Lewis Del Mar. He also released a live album from a tour in support of Tame Impala, and, most notably, provided slide guitar for Paul Simon’s critically acclaimed Stranger to Stranger LP. Known to fans and many colleagues for experimenting with tones as well as for his unusually whimsical approach, Marion outdoes himself on This Is Steve, a collection of Seussian guitar pop instrumentals. There’s actually a tune called “Cartoon Rock” here. Just a few seconds over two minutes in length, it’s a rush of galloping…
