Album Reviews

On his first release of new music in over 15 years, Dax Riggs returns with 7 Songs For Spiders, a collection of ominous meditations on spirituality, love, death, and what lies beyond. Having started his career with the death/sludge outfit Acid Bath (who are also returning this year) and branching out to more blues rock with […]

It has been seven years since we heard from Benjamin Booker. The NOLA-based multi-hyphenate weaves through sonic realms with an air of mystique, putting his auto-biography across several warping albums that challenge genre norms and place Booker in a league of his own. His soulful yet eerie approach to nostalgic blues is drowned in dense […]

Following up their 2024 Grammy-winning Blood Harmony, the southern rock/blues/roots sister duo Larkin Poe brings us, Bloom, with all songs a collaboration between Megan and Rebecca Lowell and their co-producer Tyler Bryant. The duo, backed again by their touring bassist and drummer, Tarka Layman and Caleb Crosby, respectively, have Bryant (bass, electric guitar, 12-string guitar), Michael Webb (B3), and Eleonore Denig (strings) joining them in the studio. It’s an […]

Coming four years after her last record, Forever is Lilly Hiatt’s strongest blend yet of alt-rock guitars with Americana sensibilities. You can hear it in the chugging chords on the album opener “Hidden Day,” a stellar driving song that foreshadows what’s to come. Forever is an ambitiously experimental record that’s still anchored by Hiatt’s strong, […]

W4RP Trio has already made their mark as one of the most daring chamber groups in the game, blending elements of modernist classical, tango, and jazz into something wholly their own. On Sermon of the Matriark, W4RP Trio—pianist Mikael Darmanie, violinist Josh Henderson, cellist Ju-Young Lee and drummer/percussionist/composer Rick Martinez—team up with spoken word artist […]

The seemingly enigmatic marriage between country and punk was first consecrated in the late ‘70s and early’80s with bands like Rosie and the Screamers and The Gun Club, where more adventurous groups started picking elements from the seemingly disparate genres and finding common ground with each making for a hybrid that is still around today. […]

Trumpeter and composer Ambrose Akinmusire’s imagination and vision transcends any concept of boundaries and structures. He seems almost ego-less. Some of his pieces have very little trumpet, almost like the basketball point guard that savors assists more than points. The end goal and vision are most important.  The music is compelling, abstract, discordant, gorgeous, and […]

Piet Dalmolen has spent the past fifteen years gigging with other bands and playing covers.  Sure, it was good to have the work, but these gigs did not feed a necessary creative fire and it’s been a long dry spell since he made his own music. That has now changed. Feeling inspired to dive back […]

The seventh studio album from Canadian folk outfit The Weather Station, titled Humanhood, finds frontwoman Tamara Lindeman yearning for tangible connections and normalcy in a world that is on fire. Using dizzying electro synths, rich horns and jazz influences, Linderman and company deliver a tangled collection of dense offerings. On album closer “Sewing,” Linderman uses the […]

On their third album, 2020’s Optimisme, we described the Songhoy Blues sound this way,  ”… an activist rock & punk band, not just a “world music” act… Some have referred to them as ‘The African Clash’.” Their latest offering and fourth album, Heritage, defies that description almost entirely as the band turns acoustic, re-imagining the […]