The surprise companion to The National’s April release First Two Pages of Frankenstein, Laugh Track is the band’s most freewheeling, all-hands-on-deck album in years. If Frankenstein represented a rebuilding of trust between group members after 20+ years together, the vibrant, exploratory Laugh Track is both the product of that faith and a new statement of…
Polaroid Lovers is the seventh studio album from four-time Grammy-winner Sarah Jarosz. Produced by Daniel Tashian, Polaroid Lovers is a bold creative statement that sees Jarosz exploring new sonic territory. The 11 songs on the album, all co-written by Jarosz with songwriters including Tashian, Jon Randall, Ruston Kelly and Natalie Hemby, touch on themes both…
They say long live the king and all, but nothing’s ever set in stone. A quarter of a century since his self-inflicted coronation, and self-released debut solo album, Kenny Anderson – DIY pop voyager, ancestral seaside home restorer, squeezebox lothario, Fife for lifer, diamond miner, hijacker of hearts, and the man also known as King…
The Harmony Codex – the seventh solo album by Steven Wilson – takes you on a trip. A genre-spanning collection that opens up like a musical puzzle box, it presents a series of endlessly beautiful vistas that roll out and shift in front of you. Arguably the best album Wilson has made during a career…
The Asylum Years (1972–1975) is the latest entry in Rhino’s ongoing, Grammy-winning series exploring the vast untapped archives of rare recordings by Joni Mitchell – a project guided intimately by Mitchell’s own vision and personal touch. The collection begins with an early cut of ‘Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire’, one of two songs (along…
The Handsome Family’s new record, Hollow, began with a scream in the night. “It was a bleak winter during the middle of the pandemic,” says Brett Sparks. “One night around 4 a.m. Rennie started screaming in her sleep. She screamed, ‘Come into the circle, Joseph! There’s no moon tonight.’ Scary as it was, I thought,…
Wilco’s thirteenth studio album, Cousin, was recorded in the band’s legendary Chicago studio The Loft over a period of two years. The ten new tracks were written by band leader Jeff Tweedy and feature musical performances by the long-time line-up of Nels Cline, Mikael Jorgensen, Glenn Kotche, John Stirratt, Pat Sansone and, of course, Tweedy…
Black Grape could only have been made in Manchester. The swagger, fun and cryptic humour seem hewn from a city historian AJP Taylor once described as offering an archetypally different way of English urban life to London. Both Shaun Ryder and Paul Leveridge, known as Kermit, came from edgy-but-cool parts of the city: in Shaun’s…
Emma Anderson, co-founder of Lush, is one of the most underrated British songwriters to emerge from the era that encompassed shoegaze and Britpop. She has now teamed up with producer James Chapman (aka Maps) for her debut solo album, Pearlies, an album that combines effervescent electronic pop with psych and folk textures with lyrics covering…
The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light is a classic Streets album – filled with Mike Skinner’s trademark lyrical wizardry and beats honed over a decade of building his other career as a legitimate bass/rap DJ in clubs. All the songs on the album were written by Skinner but feature vocal contributions from longtime…