Funatic Asylum releases July 3rd via Sabotage Records.
Skydiver releases July 7th via Gob Nation.
Standing on Stones / British Rails (Are Long And Fast) releases June 30th via Gob Nation.
Head releases August 1st via Neon Taste Records.
Weapon Fetish releases June 26th via Convulse Records.
Caustic releases July 1st via Slow Death Records.
From left: Binker Golding, Jihad Darwish, Tee Peters, Sarah Tandy, Jamie Murray, Poppy Daniels (photo: Paul Pace/Ronnie Scott’s Club) All Sarah Tandy has to do to make me happy is sit down at a good piano and play a standard ballad. But she’s an ambitious bandleader and composer, and it was those aspects of her musical journey that were explored at Ronnie Scott’s last night. As she did when her debut album, Infection in the Sentence, came out seven years ago, she brought her quintet to the…
Boards of Canada “Father and Son” This is my best attempt to summarize the themes of Boards of Canada’s fifth full-length album Inferno after less than a week of obsessive listening: It’s broadly about how most people can sense the existence of some sort of God, but trying to understand what God is takes them in very different directions – scientific rationalization, all manner of religious devotion, fascistic cult behavior, occult philosophy, apocalyptic dread, psychedelic exploration, overt…
Grave Pilgrim have been on the rise in the American black metal underground. After releasing a remarkable self-titled debut album in 2021, the band initiated a conceptual trilogy of follow-up releases starting with 2023's The Bigotry of Purpose — a record you must listen to immediately if you haven't already. The Oregon duo's sound is rooted in black metal, but also carries traces of Americana, folk, and a martial grandeur. Most importantly to me, it's always driven by ideas. The Pungent Wine…
All One Song - “Barstool Blues” with Matt SweeneyWe’ve covered a lot of Shakey ground so far during All One Song seasons one and two, leaping from decade to decade, from era to era, from album to album. It’s easy to do when you’re dealing with a body of work that is so vast, spanning 60 years now. But somehow, we’ve yet to talk about any songs from Zuma. Which is weird! Neil fanatics — like our hero — can be an ornery, contrarian bunch. It would be tough to get them to agree on anything. But I…
Chicago Bears football fans are gasping with excitement and stocking up on antacid today after it was announced that the team’s quarterback, Caleb Williams, has been picked to grace the 2027 cover of the popular game Madden NFL. It’s certainly great recognition for the quarterback who had some amazing moments on the field last year in a surprising Bears season. He’s an exciting, if sometimes erratic player who managed to pull out last minute victories with some spectacular plays more times than…
I’ve been an avid fan of R.E.M. since first hearing them whilst on holiday in 1990. I’ve also found music by Bristol band The Blue Aeroplanes incredibly cathartic (for want of a better word) since the early ’90s. In particular, the wonderfully twanging, story-telling albums Swagger and Beatsongs. This afternoon, probably thirty-three (?) years after first hearing the albums, I discover by chance that the “ooh-ing” in the background of their song “What It Is” is only bloody Michael Stipe! He…
I've never really listed to nothing but thieves, but this new song is on repeat now!
Just a quick note to post the correct #ListenBrainz stats from last month. The data still had to be processed, in fact you can see that Celtic Frost dominated the chart. Also, Monolord became an obsession in the very last days. What an album! Hey, thanks for reading my blog via the RSS feed! Feel welcome to get in touch!
"Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What's a song that you like but most of your friends don't. - Magic Carpet Ride by Steppenwolf I think it's a real classic. My friends think it's old AF. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile
Aaron Title Crave Hailing from Washington DC, Aaron Title is a singer-songwriter, focused on creating lo-fi alt pop, R&B and electronic music. Aaron previously appeared on BlackPlastic back in 2023, with his song New Moon (Riptide). Here on Crave he has a piece of music, written and produced in his bedroom, that combines introspection and an upbeat feeling of momentum. Crave stands out for its clean synth stabs and crisp percussion, which evoke the kind of sounds produced by Fred Again..,…
New Order: One more week at number one on 5th September 1987The Smiths: One more week at number one on 12th September 1987Here the record buyers go again, ruining the natural cut and flow of my blog with their historical purchasing decisions. As we've seen before, rebound number ones are very common in the NME Indie Chart - sometimes because a record doesn't immediately realise its full potential and has a second or even third wave of mainstream support ("Blue Monday"), sometimes because a…
Gary Peters is the author of two books, both published by the University of Chicago, on improvisation, Improvising Improvisation: From Out of Philosophy, Music, Dance, and Literature and The Philosophy of Improvisation. In this short solo improvisation, he lets the music do the explaining. The piece, simply titled “Gentle Pedal Steel Improvisation,” moves from a slow, old-timey opening through a more modern exploration of tentative scales and ambiguous atmospheres, as if shifting from Oliver…
Where’s the kaboom? Boston, that’s where! One Rainy Afternoon Last Saturday, 2026-May-30, at 2:06pm EDT (18:06 GMT) here at Château Weekend, we were just sitting on the couch reading. It was raining, so it was no particularly shocking thing to hear the boom of thunder. But… it was particularly loud thunder that shook not only the windows but the house. I thought maybe it was a nearby lightning strike, or at any rate thunder just above the house. But there was no flash, and the Weekend Editrix…
"One Love / People Get Ready" by Bob Marley & The Wailers Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What's a song that instantly makes you smile? - One Love by Bob Marley and the Wailers You know, I've never met a cool person who didn't like Bob Marley. Just sayin' View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile
Primal Scream’s “Echo Dek” was recently repressed for Record Store Day. It’s been interesting to go back and listen to it in retrospect. When the album was first released, in 1997, it seemed like a radical move. The band handing over the masters for their brand new long-player, “Vanishing Point”, to On-U Sound co-founder, Adrian Sherwood, to create an accompanying collection of dubwise versions. However, in hindsight, a heavy dub influence can already be heard in several of the original tracks.…
About 15 years ago, I stumbled upon a songwriter named Sam Baker who had released an album called "Cotton." I liked almost every song, not because he was a great singer or a great musician but because he was a great songwriter/wordsmith.One of the good things about A.I. is that I can use it as a starting point to find out about subjects that I've lost track of over the years. As I dug in deeper, I learned that Sam's story was much more interesting than I knew. From Wikipedia: "In 1986, Baker…
We remain grateful for the Evanston Vineyard, though we live far away. Our I WILL from this sermon was to invite folks over for dinner. Dr. Josh Sermon 31-May-2026
It’s election day in California, the time when primaries dump that first, refreshing splash of cold water on our hopes for sweeping change in the mid-terms. Especially with the Cheesecake Factory Menu quality of the candidates for governor, it’s hard not to get a strong vibe of “Pick Me”. I’d never heard of RiRi, I don’t know anything about her, and I don’t even know what language this song is in. From context clues I’m guessing it’s from somewhere in south Asia? In any case, the song is silly…
When Casey Neistat started to say that he made all the music in this video, my heart stopped. I thought we were going to hear “I don’t even know how to make music,” and then launch into how great SUNO is, or whatever the fuck that thing is. But no – he bought an Orchid! He looked up YouTube videos to learn the notes, then chord progressions. As a third generation musician this makes me so happy. Also, this:
New LP coming this autumn. The post Kiefer signs with Blue Note Records appeared first on Sampleface.
The other morning I received this fantastic book that I purchased second-hand for £28 – Classic Cafés, published in 2004. I ordered it in a bout of nostalgia when I was in Whitecross Street near the Barbican and it reminded me of the blog that the book was a product of – there’s a café in the area that featured on the blog. And I holding the book that morning it was a double whammy of nostalgia both for the era that produced the blog and the book, and of course the book itself is an exercise…
The Secret of DeathOut 21st May on Xtreem Music Since the departure of Jarno Nurmi in 2016, Tommi Grönqvist has steered the good ship Desecresy in painfully incremental steps from one album to the next, a process that feels like it’s finally bloomed on their latest album ‘The Secret of Death’. Namely a synthesis of Bolt Thrower from ‘War Master’ onwards with the gothic sheen of chasmic death/doom, a story told with characteristically drab Finnish wit, evincing all the eerie atmosphere we’ve…
Sonic Youth + Pavement - Den Grå Hal, Freetown Christiania, Denmark, November 17, 1992Ah, to be in the Danish anarchist commune known as Freetown Christiana in the fall of 1992! You could’ve gotten phenomenally high and gone to see a sweet double-bill of Sonic Youth and Pavement — both bands that were reaching respective peaks at the time. It would’ve been fun. But the audience tapes are also fun, taking us back to those uhh simpler (????) times. Pavement leads things off, with Gary Young…
A beat is a repeated sequence of percussive effects. A groove is an extended engagement with time. It takes certain musical skills to construct a good beat, but that’s a job you can outsource to a machine. There’s a different kind of musicality at work in a groove: you have an extended and ever-negotiated relationship to time that develops through the course of a song. Stuart Copeland reminds us that when Ringo got demoted from being the drummer on “Love Me Do” — because the EMI people didn’t…
