Honest, in-depth album reviews by KLOF Mag – championing and curating intelligent, uncompromising voices in contemporary and experimental music since 2004.
Albums
by Danny Neill
Neon Summer Skin is built around a simple revelation: childhood doesn’t end on schedule, and its afterglow can hit hardest when you think you’ve left it behind. Bedouine returns to the instruments of her early years — piano, trumpet, brass — and wraps memory in bossa nova sway, jazz warmth, and a touch of psychedelia. The result is intimate without being small, and deeply, unguardedly felt.
by Thomas Blake
The final instalment of Folklore Tapes’ Ceremonial County Tapes series is fittingly personal. Mary Stark’s Cumbria side weaves her mother’s home and Conishead Priory’s Buddhist mantras into something intimate and quietly sacred. Monkshood — David Chatton Barker and his eight-year-old son Rowan — then take on Wiltshire’s West Kennett Long Barrow with discordant electric guitar and heavy percussion: ancient ground, thrillingly contemporary sound.
by Danny Neill
On first listen, REXEN sounds like an introspective singer-songwriter. He isn’t. “The Chauffeur,” his first full studio album, recorded at Real World Studios with John Parish on the mix, swings from intoxicated baritone croon to high register, bending faintly sinister Americana into one new shape after another. The result is an album designed for deep engagement, one that rewards close listening and lingers long after it ends.
by Thomas Blake
Out now on International Anthem, Jeff Parker ETA IVtet’s “Happy Today” is the perfect example of why we need to go deep every so often, to a place constructed with care and attention and absolute creative freedom, by people who understand each other innately as human beings and artists.
The Handover return with “New Old Medicine,” out June 5th via Sublime Frequencies. The Egyptian-rooted trio of Aly Eissa, Ayman Asfour and Jonas Cambien follow their 2024 debut with a second long-form composition, recorded in Berlin by Rabih Beaini. Oud, violin and vintage organ move through one continuous piece into something psychedelic and strange.
by Danny Neill
GALVEZTON is the one-man vehicle of songwriter Robert Kuhn, and on “Ocean Cabaret” he folds surf-streaked psych, folk and Gulf Coast dust into something all his own. These were the late-night kitchen songs his wife overheard and pushed him to release — recordings kept intentionally bare, foregrounding voice, guitar and the emotional grain of his writing. Music for healing.
On “The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music”, Marisa Anderson reinterprets music from places the United States has been in conflict with since 1970, drawn from Harry Smith’s private collection of nearly a thousand records. It feels like a very open-armed project and a gesture of connecting that could hardly be better timed — beautifully studied and played, and a resounding success.
by Thomas Blake
North Carolina’s Magic Tuber Stringband return with “Heavy Water”, their first album as a full-time trio. Inspired by Courtney Werner’s work as an ecologist on a nuclear-contaminated stretch of the Savannah River, it combines intuitive appreciation for the landscape with intellectual and conceptual rigour — an album so engaged with history and place it’s hard to say where those things end and the music begins.
by Thomas Blake
Lady Maisery and Jimmy Aldridge & Sid Goldsmith return with “Wakefire: A Summer Album”, a full-scale double album that trumps its predecessor in both ambition and reward. Presented as a largely chronological account of summer, twenty-seven tracks might sound like something of a throwback in today’s climate of instant gratification, but they make it seem like a revolutionary act, and a hugely gratifying one at that.
by Danny Neill
On their self-titled debut, The MerKaBa Brotherhood — duo Roman Norfleet and Andre Raiah — treat rhythm as a vessel for hidden knowledge, shaping sound the way mystics shape symbols. Drawing on esoteric texts, sacred imagery and improvisation, this coded manuscript turns noise into philosophy, vibration into shared language, parachuting us into the place where all the in-between notes live.
On his eighth album, his first since 2023’s ‘More Photographs,’ Kevin Morby returns from somewhere far. “Little Wide Open” is a road record across 13 tracks: tangled highways, small towns, roadside crosses, and rock-and-roll romance. From the engine-rumble of opener ‘Badlands’ to the open-armed homecoming of closer ‘Field Guide For The Butterflies,’ Morby writes with weary-eyed honesty.
On “Counting Sunsets”, out now on Northern Spy Records, the New York trio SUSS further distil their sound across ten songs, allowing plenty of space between the instrumentation. An intricate fusion of Americana ingredients and electronic soundscapes, this is their finest, most fully realised expression of “ambient country” yet — a lesson in minimalism from a band with delicate, discerning touches.