Albums

MMM (Gayle Brogan, Elizabeth Still, Nick Jonah Davis) provide a fascinating, deep listening experience on “Lunistice Alignments”. The record covers a lot of sonic ground, each of the six tracks occupying a very different space and mood. Somehow sounding ancient and contemporary, light and dense: MMM ask for close attention and repay it in full.

Shabason & Krgovich’s “Four Days in June” is an album of subtle, often delicate layers, borrowing from country, sophisticated AOR, laid-back jazz and chamber-pop. This is music that settles on you gently, sometimes like a fine rain or sometimes like dust — songs that patiently take stock as their creators slip into middle age. Deceptively light, wholly profound art.

Emmett Kelly, Stephen Malkmus, Matt Sweeney and Jim White have all done time in supergroups before. Could they handle it on a cold Tuesday night on a Bluetooth stereo in Glasgow? Alex Neilson gives an emphatic and unequivocal yes. Released in late 2024, “The Hard Quartet” carries all the messy, confounding joy of Dirty Three and Pavement, and makes you remember what you love about music.

New Mexico banjoist Johnny Bell builds “Mountain States” around the character of the five-string banjo, though his focus is far from traditional. There is unease and an underlying gravity to music that is stark, edgy and gnarly in places, with an ominous drone haunting throughout. He set out to make a modern solo banjo album, and he’s done exactly that.

A free jazz saxophonist known for incendiary live shows, Zoh Amba turns to thirteen guitar-based rock songs on “Eyes Full”, their raw, passionate singing to the fore. Sight and being seen thread the album, and a return to Kingsport reckons with the past. It’s an album so complete and so accomplished that it’s hard to believe that it’s their first foray into songwriting.

Eleven songs of top-drawer Americana, “Coin-O-Matic” is pure Deer Tick: unfiltered, honest, at ease in their own skin. Two decades in and self-produced for the first time, they draw on Rhode Island’s half-mythic characters and wear the Springsteen influence honestly with the closing five-song sweep, ultimately confirming the album’s quality — a long-storied band taking aim and hitting all their targets.

On “Long Live Brown Wimpenny,” the eleven-strong Manchester collective are, like The Watersons, both iconoclastic and deeply rooted in tradition. It works precisely because it isn’t a conscious decision: they are simply playing the songs that mean the most to them, in open collaboration and in a vernacular entirely their own — folk music that resounds with originality and freshness.

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.

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.

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.

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.