RiYL

There was no guarantee we’d ever see another Midlake album. The eight year gap since their last album was more than a simple break before records. Tim Smith’s departure in 2012 left the band with a major gap to fill, suddenly staring down life without a princjple songwriter. Eric Pulido stepped into the role, and the band scrapped two years of recordings, in favor of starting from scratch with Ant...

Last year saw the release of The Horses and the Hounds. James McMurtry’s 10th album was easily one of the year’s best, showcasing a seasoned songwriter at the top of his game, 35 years after entering the industry. The musician is quick to point out that his songs are essentially all fiction, something that has, perhaps, become something of a sticking point after so often inhabiting his characters...

Faced with an indefinite touring hiatus, Josh Caterer improvised. The musician recorded a pair of “live” albums – The Space Sessions and The Hideout Sessions. No audience, no overdubs – just a trio of well-rehearsed musicians putting new spins on old classics. Caterer’s vocal range tends toward crooner as many of the song veer into jazz territory. That’s nothing new, of course. His unique vocal de...

A talented flautist trained as an opera singer, Melanie Charles wanted to make a splash with her Verve Records debut, Y'all Don't (Really) Care About Black Women. She taught herself to sample and tackled a slate of songs by some of jazz’s all-time greatest vocalists, from Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald to Betty Carter and Abbey Lincoln. The result is a bold and expansive meditation on music an...

Editor’s note: Apologies for the rough audio quality this time out. Just shy of hallway through Tunnels, two of the books leads engage in a spirited exchange. The Israeli and Palestinian characters are debating who got there first. The moment is central to the plot of Rutu Modan’s latest graphic novel, while reflecting the underlying tensions of an on-going conflict that informs much of the artist...

The past two years have afforded us all plenty of time to reflect – for better and for worse. For all of those who’ve devoted pandemic hours to reaching into past and wondering how we might change the past, given the chance, The Garden presents an ideal metaphor. Over 16 tracks, Basia Bulat revisits her past, breathing new life into old songs with the aid of a band and string arrangements. It’s an...

Nostalgia is a strange thing for any artist – particularly so for a group like Pere Ubu. Perpetually striving for change and innovation, the band’s evolution has afforded little time for reflection. Last year, however, saw front man David Thomas remixing the group’s 11th and 12 albums,  Pennsylvania and St. Arkansas. It provided a rare opportunity to revisit and reflect on a pair of 20-year-old al...

Two years of pandemic couldn’t keep Melvins down. In 2021 alone, the group released a pair of LPS: Working with God and Five Legged Dog, their 24th and 25th, respectively. The latter found the band revisiting their back catalog with acoustic reimaginings of 36 tracks. Last month, the group released the four-song EP, Lord of the Flies, a preview for yet another full length due out later this year....

When she hops on the call, Naomi Yang is still in the middle of an editing project. It’s one she’s not quite ready to talk about. At it for a little over a decade, filmmaking is a relatively recent passion, but she’s managed to compile an impressive list of projects, including the 2013 short film Fortune and a number of music videos for artists including Marissa Nadler and Waxahatchee. An accompli...

Fresh off a rescheduled tour opening for Drive-By Truckers, I manage to catch Carl Nichols at home. In the not so distant future, he’ll be back on the road, with a headlining stint bookended by tours with Houndmouth and Valerie June. It’s a far cry from the years and months spent at home during quarantine in his newly adopted home of Austin, Texas. Still, he sounds restless. Having graduated from...

In July 2013, Lester Chambers was attacked. Performing at a Bay Area blues festival, the singer had just launched into the Impressions’ classic, “People Get Ready,” as a woman charged through the crowd incensed that he had had dedicated the song to Trayvon Martin. It’s something of a dramatic understatement to say Chambers is a survivor. The musician has seen the heights of music stardom, from fro...

Two years, Mark Oliver Everett interjects, isn’t really that long away from the road. In March, the Eels return to the road for the perfectly titled, “Lockdown Hurricane” tour.   Even as the rest of the world shut down, the band was never away for too long, releasing Earth to Dora in 2020, and returning this month with Extreme Witchcraft – their 14th album overall. It’s a hard rocking affair, a re...

2021 saw reissues of some of the most beloved albums in the Lilys’ 30+ year history. After many years out-of-print, A Brief History of Amazing Letdowns, Better Can't Make Your Life Better and The 3-Way were all reissued. The band kicks off 2022 by revisiting those classics on tour. It’s been more than 15 years since the Kurt Heasley-fronted group has released a proper LP, but something is definite...

In February of last year, Oliver Ackermann launched a new label. For some, such a project could easily have been written off as a pandemic project or platform for launching a few pet projects. But from the outside, at least, the Brooklyn-based musician rarely takes half-measures. Dedstrange, “built from the smoldering decay of the music industry,” per its online bio, currently lists a half-dozen b...

There may be no singular figure in rock who has aged more gracefully than Nick Lowe. This year marks the 20th anniversary of The Convincer – perhaps the quintessential example of the singer-songwriter settling into a comfortable new role as a rock elder statesman. But while the artist notes that he’s happily left the Chuck Berry-esque rock and roll stage antics in his past, two decades later, he f...

In 2017, Greta Van Fleet did the seemingly impossible: broke through the pop music world as a new rock band. And while the Michigan-born quartet was chided in some critic circles as a throwback to the genre’s heyday, it’s a no less remarkable feat. That same year, the band’s second EP, From the Fires would go on a Grammy for Best Rock Album. In spite of its rapid climb to the tops of the internati...

Nine years after her last solo album, Julie Doiron returns with I Thought of You. Written and recorded prior to the pandemic, the album was shelved for a spell, in hopes of finding a more welcoming release window. Ultimately, Doiron and her label thought better – in part, due to the stark realization that this moment isn’t ending any time soon. While touring remains difficult, the record is a welc...

A self-proclaimed theater kid, Tahlena Chikami spent much of the past decade landing roles on film and television, including a number of beloved series like Parks and Recreation and Gilmore Girls. In 2019, however, her IMDB page takes a turn. A year after forming Bite Me Bambi with with ex-pats from a number of Orange County ska titans like Save Ferris and My Superhero, the band had already made t...

In September, The New York Times published a feature on Kevin Whelan bearing the headline,  “The 18-Year Wait for New Wrens Music Is Over. Sort Of.” The piece was exactly as bittersweet as the title betrayed, documenting the genesis behind Aeon Station, a musical project born out of the ashes of what would have been a final Wrens record – the first since the band’s 2003 masterpiece, The Meadowland...

More than anything, Ex Libris is a love letter to a medium. Framed as a meta-fiction mystery of sorts, the book is an exercise in flexible styles and genre, as the story leaps from book to book. It’s an ideal outlet for author Matt Madden, who happily serves the role of stylistic chameleon, expanding the short story form of his 2005 collection 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style into a boo...

Her music career wasn’t an accident, exactly. But it’s safe to say that Anika didn’t see it coming. A music journalist by trade, the singer assumed she was signing up for a guest vocalist gig on what ultimately became her self-titled debut. Largely comprised of covers, the LP featured a smattering of originals, cowritten with electronic rock band, Beak. After being handpicked by Portishead to perf...

“If a book is good,” Lou Mathews explains, “it will find an audience.” Finding a publisher, on the other hand, is often a different question altogether. “A writer writes” is perhaps a more appropriate adage for the author and educator who has thus far had two of his seven novels published. Luck, timing and connections are every bit as important in publishing. And thankfully, in the case of Shaky T...

There’s no lingering doubt after an hour-long conversation that Bonnie Bloomgarden believes in the power of music. And not in any abstract sense, mind. This stuff is transformative manifestations, filtered through almost ritualistic commutations of the spirit. But for many, such notions are understandably secondary to the power of rock. And by that measure, Under the Spell of Joy is a routing succ...

In 2022, Hanson will celebrate 30 years as a band. It’s a remarkable accomplishment for any group, let alone one whose members ranged from age six to 11. The group was propelled to success in its earliest days on the strength of its 1997’s Middle of Nowhere, a multi-platinum debut. Hanson’s seventh’s studio release, Against the World, arrived earlier this month. At first glance, the title is downr...

In 2021, Merry Clayton returned with a vengeance. In her solo first album in 27, years the singer once again poured her heart out on record. Beautiful Scars bears the mark of a musician who has suffered tremendous loss, but remains defiantly joyous and hopeful. Her voice remains confident and unmistakable, singing a title track that references, in part, a 2014 car crash that result in the loss of...