At times Beirut can seem a little esoteric. Zach Condon dropped out of high school at 17 and worked at a movie theater specialising in international films. There he learned about Fellini arias, Sicilian funeral brass and Balkan music. After…
Rhiannon Giddens has a passion for the banjo. Not so much the banjo heard on bluegrass recordings, but the old-time claw hammer style. Together with Justin Robinson on fiddle, they explored the roots of African American music with the Carolina…
Florist seem determined to go gently into existential chaos on their new album, Jellywish. Attacking personal problems like joy, pain, life, death, reality and relationships, Emily Sprague and her bandmates, Rick Spataro, Jonnie Baker and Felix Walworth, struggle with some…
Ten albums is a long time in rock n’ roll, and My Morning Jacket have been on quite a trip since their birth in Louisville in the early 2000s. There’s been the colourful abandon of critics’ hit Z (2005), the unexpected Prince-meets-Cameo…
Jeffrey Lewis is not your average recording artist. Over a span of almost 20 years he’s created a 13-issue comic book series, Fuff; his illustrations have been viewed in The New York Times, Time Out New York and The Guardian.…
“The self-reflection in the title demonstrates a life lived. The songs are […] moments immortalised in time, bound together by nothing more than the human experience.” Thus Lancashire-born singer-songwriter Toria Wooff muses on the creation of her self-titled debut album.…
Defining Neil Young is a fool’s task. Whatever Young you choose to describe only hints at the mercurial musician who has recorded everything from the gentlest of acoustic music to the almost unlistenable sounds residing on ARC. The 10 recordings…
Renowned songwriter Jason Isbell celebrated 13 years of sobriety in February of 2025. A well earned achievement that came after a difficult year in which Isbell filed for divorce from singer-songwriter Amanda Shires in December of 2023. Isbell left the…
Polly Paulusma’s new album, Wildfires, goes against the grain. In an age of limited attention spans and content digested in quick doses, she has released a sprawling collection; 19 songs, each with a prologue that runs anywhere from 45-seconds to…
The gestation period for Patterson Hood’s Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams runs about 40 years. Which means events from his past have rung and stung him in different ways than they would have if some of the events described in…