Press info: “Across 12 tracks the arrangements are dense and enveloping – a lattice of horns, guitars, voices, and electronics – yet melody always remains sovereign, refusing to be swallowed by the sheer sound. When the music drifts towards abstraction, a grounding bass line arrives to anchor the listener, reminding us always that there are human hands on the controls and that, however artful, this is still rock and roll.
As ever, Broken Social Scene operates less as a band than as a community and songs
evolve by ceding control to whoever can best carry them forward in the moment. Kevin Drew may be the designated driver, but collaborators on the record, including Hannah Georgas, Lisa Lobsinger, and Feist, step into the foreground throughout the record, shaping songs with a sense of collective authorship that has always defined the group’s ethos.”
Press info: “Often labelled a musical chameleon, Jackson insists that most of his work belongs to his own “mainstream” – sophisticated pop songs with ever-shifting rhythms
and textures. After his playful detour with What A Racket! (a 2023 side project exploring early 20th-century British entertainment and music), he now returns to that core territory.
The result, according to Jackson, falls somewhere between Fool (2019), Laughter and
Lust (1991), and Night and Day (1982). Nine new songs in total – ranging from biting,
witty pop to moving ballads.”
TUTV: At the age of 71 and after an impressive 56-year career, Jackson has earned
lots of stars and stripes. This new LP will be another one to remember. The versatile
songsmith obviously wanted to have and make fun.
He returns to his swinging Latin-pop side with both jaunty and vigorous ballroom tunes: Welcome to Burning-By-Sea, I’m Not Sorry, Made God Laugh, Do Do Do, and Fabulous People (actually the first 5 tracks).
But with the closing quartet of songs After All This Time, The Face, End Of The Pier, and See You In September he leaves the cocktail party behind him and offers some good
old Jackson musings. It makes Hope and Fury an album with, sonically, 2 different
moods. I like the ebullient one the most, it smells like spring spirit.
Press Info: “The record cracks open a decade-long vault of raw nerve and sonic chaos. Spanning 2015–2025, the collection gathers demos, B-sides, abandoned experiments, and forgotten fragments pulled from Ackermann’s personal archive of late-night recordings, blown-out tapes, and half-finished sessions.
These tracks capture the band at their most unfiltered, caught between
breakthrough ideas and beautiful mistakes, with the edges left jagged
on purpose.”
TUTV: Generally, albums featuring previously unreleased tracks, demos, rarities, etc.,
are an excuse for being too lazy to make new music and/or to make some easy money. This is an exception. This compilation counts enough badass barnstormers to get APTBS fans in an intoxicating rush of bafflement. Kudos to mastermind Ackerman for assembling a worthy collection of tracks that could have ended up on any of their 3 last albums.
Press info: “Ö is the anticipated debut album from New York City’s white-hot duo, who quickly built a reputation for their electric live shows and irresistibly catchy hooks.
With 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady providing additional production on tracks across the album,
and multi-Grammy-winning engineer Tom Norris (Lady Gaga, Charli xcx, The Weeknd) coming on board to mix the album, the result is 11 tracks that make you feel like you’re at the afterparty.”
TUTV: Ö is packed with woolgathering old skool techno boomers your eager body
can’t and won’t resist, although the EBM tandem never go totally out of their minds.
They love to seduce and tempt with funky feel-good beeps and bleeps juiced with Wise‘s sultry breathing.
Highlights and TUTV’s favorites are the ska-horns infused TTYGT track, the vivifying thrill
of If You Wanna Party, Come Over To My House, and the bass buzz of Beatback and L.U.C.K.Y.
Band: WHITE DENIM Who: Ecclectic rock vets from Austin, Texas fronted by founder James Petralli, producing raw racket since 2006. Yep, 20 years.
Album: 13
Their, yes, 13th LP, following ’12’ in 2024.
Tracklist and more detailshere.
Chief James Petralli
Press info: “13, the thirteenth album of White Denim’s career, is an incandescent,
groove-heavy alchemy of rock, funk, dub, soul and down-dirty blues – and plenty
more besides – it’s imbued with the same questing spirit that’s been the band’s
trademark since first starting in Austin some 20 years ago.”
Press info: “Creature of Habit is a bold, emotionally resonant record that explores the central question: how to get out of your own way so you can truly feel your life. Written in the wake of a relocation from Australia to Los Angeles and the closure of her long-running label Milk! Records, Barnett was grappling with changes that put the future of both her life and career in question. Rather than internalizing those feelings, she decided to bring all this swirling confusion directly into the recording process.”
UNCUT Magazine (British msuci monthly): It’s a document of Barnett’s unsticking, through plain doing. It’s also an instantly engaging record born out of its author’s collaborative curiosity, the deliberate avoidance of any pre-recording plan and a determination to embrace change in whatever form, while staring down the uncomfortable emotions that so often attend it.”
TUTV: Sonically it’s the Barnett we all know for years now, assembling lazy guitar-galvanizing grooves, lazy tunes and lazy reveries with lazy vocals rolling over it, that
initiate lazy foot-and-pelvis moves.
Listening to the Australian songstress feels like having an ear-massage.
Lyrially she continous her soul-searching, as many questions are still
unanwsered. CB charms and entertains, nothing more, nothing else.
That’s fine by me.
Press info: While the first releases focused on mechanical grooves, their debut
album, Boxing Days, has become a distinct guitar album. The nonconformist approach
to songwriting, however, remained: in eight tracks clocking in at just over half an hour,
it ranges from raw, back-to-the-roots punk to the closest they’ve ever come to a ballad.
There are echoes of Wire and Gang Of Four, alongside contemporary references like IDLES, Shame, and Viagra Boys, but The Rats never resort to imitation. What prevails is a radically unique identity: that of a band that never chooses the easy way out and doesn’t follow trends.”
The cover artwork features Albert Laperre, the great-grandfather of the album’s
graphic designer Stan Tijtgat, an amateur boxer who went down often but always
came back fighting.
Emile Dekeyser (frontman) adds: “It’s a fitting image for an album that, despite its title,
isn’t about fighting or winning. Boxing Days is about survival, about learning how to remain standing, even when you can’t quite keep up with the punches.”
TUTV: The rat race is on, folks. Time to get up, stand up, and fight for your right to start
a moshpit whenever and wherever you are, the moment Boxing Days torpedoes your ears. This debut is, without a shadow of a doubt, a longplayer that will last for a long time. For its sharp-teethed punkiness (British Racing Green / Won’t Stand For It / Muck And Bullets and the flabbergasting The Wrong Day), for its bloodcurdling execution, and for its overall KO horsepower in 8 rounds.
But it’s not only about the stupefying noizzz
and the turbulent spit-and-sneer excorcism.
The Rats, led by vim and vigour by motormouth Emile Dekeyser, offer barbed-wire songs with body and balls, with heart and soul, with vivacity and a jagged joie de vivre. Every uppercut stands loud and proud on its own feet.
A striking example is Boxing Day. A burning torch that moves like a snake chases
her helpless prey, slowly and viciously, until the fatal attack. Goosebumps.
Another standout, according to my enthusiastic ears, is the bone-chilling closer, called Stomper. A sort of aftermath meditation on what the fuck happened here, what
did we do, where will we go. Its ominous pace and out-of-your-Emile-mind finale is no
less than startling.
The Rats are a well-oiled rock machine wasting no time on arty-farty superfluity
and/or bombastic overproduction. 32 minutes of brutal honesty is what we get.
Great debut albums are the ones everybody remembers long after their release,
no matter how many followed, because of their uncalculated directness, their
primal, innocent discharge, and their everlasting tunes. Boxing Days undeniably
belongs to this coveted category
The Rats‘ message is crystal clear.
They’re here to stay. Join them.
Former Sonic Youth sheroKIM GORDON (aged 72) unleashed her
new solo album, titled PLAY ME.
Press info: “Kim Gordon‘s vision of art and noise has come sharper into focus just
as readily as it has changed, a paradigm of possibility that, four decades on, still
feels like a dare. Play Me is distilled and immediate, expanding Gordon’s sonic
palette to include more melodic beats and the motorik drive of krautrock.”
AllMusic says: “Reunited with Justin Raisen, Gordon tightens her focus on quickly recorded dispatches brimming with punk audacity and the multi-layered approach of an artist who still subverts expectations.”
TUTV: At age 72, no pension yet for Gordon. On the contrary, Play Me is her brand-new 3rd LP in 6 years; in between, she writes the records and tours. The first half (1-6) of the album stands out as more melodic the capricious Kim way, less percussion aggressiveness than on her previous work, especially on Play Me, Girl With A Look and sped-up rocker Not Today. Vocally, she impresses once again with her almost out-of-breath vocals.
The second half (7-12) of the full-length connects more with the other LPs. Harsh industrial shock-waves, edgy electro punches, all but one under 3 minutes, which makes your mind swing from left to right and back.
Overall, Gordon takes us again on a spooky-chilling-distressed-knife-edged crusade,
spiked with sinister, haunting, and at times bizarre lyrics. Play her on repeat.
Notorious blues rockers THE BLACK CROWES (1984–2002, 2005–2015, 2019–present)
with brothers Chris and Rich Robinson as prominent members, started their sonic odyssey in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1984.
Chris: “We made this record in eight to ten days. Bringing the high and inspiration
from our previous LP ‘Happiness Bastards’ into this album, it was a natural progression.
We experimented more, we wrote on instinct and how we were feeling in the moment. Rich brought a spontaneity to the record that I can’t describe, but it’s the best shit he’s ever done.”
Rich: “This album feels transformative to us. Going back to our roots, we felt that spark
in the studio and how we work together. Lighting a fire that hits harder, more jagged but
is still true to our musical essence.”
Album artwork
TUTV: The Black Crowes are one of those rawk ‘n raw roll bands I dig the most when
they’re on stage. Some of their records are pretty good (their first ones), but just like AC/DC, they use the same formula over and over again. So as a fan you know what to expect.
A salvo of rough riff- rippers, a couple of power ballads and Chris Robinson singing his heart out. Yep, TBC by numbers, but wait, some of them are red-hot enough to get you out of your lazy couch and play air guitar, like Prophane Prophecy, Cruel Streak, Do The Parasite!, and You Call This A Good Time. But at the end of the day, it’s just another Crowes album.
Balladeer Will Oldham, operating under his moniker of BONNIE “PRINCE” BILLY started his busy journey back in 1993. He released a lot of solo work so far, collaborated with other songsmiths (and still does), and was also a member of a couple of bands.
Press info: “However dimly we perceive it, we are living through a change of worlds.
The one we were born into is slipping away, reshaped and denuded by human action. What remains is the question of what we will carry forward, and how we will refuse to surrender ourselves. Will Oldham’s new album feels like an answer.
In Oldham’s songs friendship, community, and the stubborn joy of making art with others become a means of persistence. This isn’t a denial of collapse, which would be delusion, but a kind of defiance: remaining fully human, fully joyful, in a world with a diminishing horizon.”
Oldham: “This record was made closer to the Ohio River than any I’ve been involved
with since 1993’s Palace Brothers’ ‘There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You. Louisville’s’ current-and-past vital musical community is highlighted on every song.
Catherine Irwin, who sang on the BPB release ‘Ease Down the Road’, is back here on ‘Hey Little’ and ‘Vietnam Sunshine.’ Lacey Guthrie, Tory Fisher and Katie Peabody, the three front women of the band Duchess, sing together on the opening and closing songs, parallel odes to the beast that is fear.”
TUTV: BPB is one of those balladeers who keep on enchanting, despite their musical palette hardly ever changing. Fans know what he has to offer, as he does once again
with this new work. Acoustic guitar accompanied heart-to-heart ponderings, and
lullabies follow each other in an organic way.
Overall thematically, he reflects on our disturbingly changing world: “Life is scary,
we are scared, we’ve arrived here unprepared,” on the melancholic contemplation Life Is Scary Horses’ says a lot of what is on his mind.
His quiet voice always has a de-stressing resonance. His several duets with the equally beautiful voice of Catherine Irwin are so fitting here, as are the subtle orchestrations with strings, cello, and horns now and then. Although this record is mainly about our current rat race, there’s room for more personal moments. BPB does again what he does best. And I like it.
