Described as a reflection on singer Wayne Coyne’s youthful upbringing in Oklahoma City, The Flaming Lips’ 16th album, American Head steps away from the bombastic sci-fi rock opera visions of 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and last year’s King’s Mouth to make a record of more reflective, often tender ballads akin to 1999’s The…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 18 September 2020. John Coltrane’s Giant Steps – the influential jazz saxophonist’s first album with Atlantic Records – continues to astound and inspire listeners 60 years after its release. Consistently lauded in music histories, Giant Steps was inducted into…
Sometimes simplicity is the key to great music and what you actually don’t hear can sometimes be the highlight. That is exactly what post-punk unit Sweeping Promises delivers on their debut album Hunger For A Way Out. The group’s swagger, controlled intensity and focused detail on the little things has the cup runneth over with…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 11 September 2020. Sally Anne Morgan is an artist and multi-instrumentalist whose mastery of traditional folk forms is matched only by her ability to push the bounds of those forms into fresh, imaginative pastures. Known for her fiddle playing…
The fact that we’re talking about the 17th album by Moby says a lot. Few artists have the distinction of taking a music form often limited to the club scene – dance, electronica, ambient – and giving it mainstream relevance, earning pop radio airplay in the bargain. Early artistic triumphs like Everything Is Wrong (1995),…
With women coming on strong in popular country music last year via strong feminist empowerment anthems from the Highwomen collaborative made up of Brandi Carlile, Amanda Shires, Natalie Hamby, and Maren Morris, and Carlile’s collaborative production giving Tanya Tucker a career reboot, you had to know that we were due to hear from one of…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 28 August 2020. The time had come, Angel Olsen realized in the fading summer of 2018, to take her new songs out of the house. Olsen’s 2016 marvel, My Woman, had been a career breakthrough, but it catalyzed a…
After the death of long-time Gang of Four leader and lead guitarist, Andy Gill, in February, the band released the posthumous EP This Heaven Gives Me Migraine. It included a few spoken words from Gibb, a new track that had been slated for their follow up to last year’s full-length Happy Now, another version of…
All Together Now is the Geelong-based quintet Beans (formally Baked Beans) follow up to their 2018 debut record Babble. The group has taken their already organ-driven psych-rock and perfected the formula as All Together Now is bigger, more addictive and dives deeper into the nostalgia of classic rock. Beans succeed because they absolutely play and…
It’s almost hard to say what’s more surprising here, that Taylor Swift dropped a surprise new album last Thursday that was entirely recorded in the months of this coronavirus pandemic quarantine, or that you’re reading about it here, where I primarily focus on independent rockers. However, when the 30 year old pop star turns to…
