Psychedelic traveler Matt "MV" Valentine rode out the waves of freak folk, building a towering discography of both his own solo work and work with partner Erika "EE" Elder in the rotating collective MV & EE. Inspired by Indian classical and psychedelic folk, Valentine mixed improvisational acoustic recordings with field sounds, tape loops, and his own spaced-out vocals. As the years burned on, Valentine focused on a deep-fried miasma of sounds and styles with solo albums like 2019's Preserves... Light Speed 3:27
Rockbottomless 5:54
Analog Love 10:01
Matt Valentine is no stranger to psychedelic sounds. For more than 20 years, Valentine's muse was almost exclusively trippy sprawl, whether that took the form of sunburnt jamming with Tower Recordings, subdued acid folk ragas with MV & EE, or any number of experiments that lived on limited-edition CD-Rs or cassette releases. Valentine's work as a solo artist often took on a relaxed tone similar to MV & EE, with 2011's What I Became straddling the line between loner folk and guitar-heavy art rock. Assembled from eight years of back-filed recordings, Preserves goes off the deep end into a pool of demented funk, wild-eyed guitar freak-outs, and layered, druggy walls of confusion and bliss. "Light Speed" opens the album with its closest thing to a pop song. Funky bass, buried vocals, and scratchy, zigzagging wah-wah guitar lines all rise and fall in the mix, sometimes making space for what sounds like a violin or random electronics...
Circles Around the Sun is a contemporary instrumental rock band that formed with the specific purpose of creating intermission music for Fare Thee Well, a series of reunion concerts played by the surviving members of the Grateful Dead during their 2015 tour. Those shows celebrated the band's 50th anniversary and served as their official send-off, while Circles Around the Sun was designed to reflect the Dead's spacy and grooving overall feel. After the tour, the group issued a self-titled album from the Fare Thee Well gigs and supported it with their own road trip. The response was so positive that they remained a going concern and released Let It Wander in 2018, which was less influenced by the Dead and more freeform, delivering on the roots influence of jazz-funk, soul, and fusion. The band underwent a fundamental transition in 2019.... After a tour, the band took a short break; during the summer of 2019, they began working on a third album with Grammy-winning producer Jim Scott at his Southern California studio. With most of the album completed, they turned in a crowd-pleasing late-night set at the Lockn Festival in August, and also finished an EP with Joe Russo on drums. On August 26, less than a week after their performance at Lockn, Casal committed suicide. In the aftermath, keyboardist Adam MacDougall, bassist Dan Horne, and drummer Mark Levy, all in a state of shock, grew closer than ever before and spent a couple of months deciding whether to continue as a band. After committing to the October 18 release of Meets Joe Russo, they made a collective decision (along with Scott) to issue their third album. Circles Around the Sun enlisted Casal's longtime friend and collaborator Eric Krasno (Soulive) as the first guitarist to fill the chair. In mid-March of 2020, the band issued that third album. Finished the week before Casal's death, the seven-track set represented his final studio sessions. They were cut at engineer/producer Scott's California studio.Babyman 5:57
Leaving (Rogue Lemon) 7:41
Money’s No Option 5:19
Musically, these tracks walk the line between the free, unfettered improvisational jams found on 2018's Let It Wander and the more fusion-centric Meets Joe Russo EP from 2019. Things kick off to a righteous start with "Baby Man" as ringing guitar and keyboards slide into a cut-time shuffle where Horne's bass walks the line between jazz-funk and Krautrock. It evolves quickly with a vamp reminiscent of Television's "Marquee Moon" grafted on, and a loose, lovely collision of styles and rhythms assert themselves in interlocking grooves..."Leaving (Rogue Lemon)" is spacy jazz-rock fusion with a moody organ line reminiscent of Alan Parsons' "I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You," before finding and opening the door to the spiraling unknown with warmth and verve... The set closes with "Money Is No Option," with its blissed-out drifting foreshadowing a soul-disco fusion akin to Herbie Hancock's ever-hooky experiments on Feets Don't Fail Me Now, and Lonnie Liston Smith's club-centric Exotic Mysteries with Casal adding rootsy rock and blues licks inside the groove. While CATS was an idea assembled by Casal, they quickly became a band. This final outing with him is every bit as amicable, innovative, and free as the band's previous releases. Circles Around the Sun is a truly fine sendoff; it stands head and shoulders above instrumental recordings from most rock musicians. The joy shared among these four musicians was abundant in everything they recorded, which is why this is a most beautiful and enjoyable album; it's also a bittersweet one.
The Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio are a 21st century contemporary soul-jazz and funk outfit based in Seattle. Their sound is marked by kinetic, driving grooves, funky breaks, and spontaneous improvisation, whether they're playing originals or covers -- they are especially well- known for the latter. The trio features Delvon Lamarr on Hammond B-3, Jimmy James on guitar, and Dan Weiss on drums. Their debut album, Close But No Cigar, appeared in 2016 on a label started by Lamarr's wife and manager Amy Novo, and reached the jazz charts...Hole In One 4:34
Fo Sho 4:10
I Don't Know 5:12
In 2015, Seattle-based Hammond B-3 organist Delvon Lamarr was challenged by wife and partner Amy Novo to put together a career-making band; she'd take care of the business end so he could make music. 2018's self-financed live-in-studio debut, Close But No Cigar, and its Colemine follow-up, Live at KEXP, both hit the upper rungs of the national contemporary jazz charts. The band took their heady mix of jazz-funk, blues, R&B, and rock on the road across the U.S. and Europe, playing electrifying, booty-quaking shows that brought down houses and festival stages across the globe. Press comparisons usually reference soul-jazz records released by Blue Note, Cadet, and Verve during the 1960s, but DVO3's sound is louder, meaner, and leaner, more akin to hard-grooving records by Detroit's Lyman Woodard Organization and Funk Brother Dennis Coffey, the Beastie Boys' In Sound from Way Out!, or Bill Heid's nasty This Is My Rifle (another Detroit record)...
John Dwyer has been a driving force of the American rock underground for several decades, through the prolific output of his many bands, particularly Thee Oh Sees, as well as his renowned Castle Face label. Originally from Providence, Rhode Island, and connected to the city's storied noise-rock scene, he relocated to San Francisco during the late '90s and participated in several groups who earned cult followings... Briefly known as the OhSees, the project evolved from a psych-folk group to a full-fledged rock band. Dubbed Thee Oh Sees, they quickly earned a reputation for their intense, sweat-soaked live shows, as well as their restless release schedule, which averaged at least one full-length per year, in addition to singles, splits, and compilations. The band's sound constantly expanded, incorporating influences such as Krautrock, prog, and proto-metal...Gong Splat 3:47
Toagut 7:14
Yuggoth Travel Agency 8:58
Beginning with 2020's Bent Arcana, John Dwyer of Osees released a series of all-star group improvisations recorded at his house, each with a different lineup. 2021 concluded with Gong Splat, the fifth of these releases, and perhaps the best yet. Drummer Ryan Sawyer, upright bassist Greg Coates, and percussionist Andres Renteria all make return appearances, and this time Wilder Zoby, a synth player who was in Chin Chin and has collaborated extensively with Run the Jewels, joins the fold. The title seems more likely to be a reference to the band Gong than the instrument, as it has a bit of a whimsical space-rock vibe, while also inhabiting the freakier side of jazz fusion... Like all of Dwyer's improv collaborations, Gong Splat has the anything-goes feel one would expect from an impromptu jam session, but there's something in this one's combination of cosmic glide and shocked-out panic that elevates it beyond the previous releases.
Dutch quartet YĪN YĪN play a cosmic, danceable fusion of funk, disco, psychedelia, and Southeast Asian traditions. Their surf-influenced debut album, The Rabbit That Hunts Tigers, appeared in 2019 and earned the group a considerable following. They returned in 2022 with the more mystical, party-friendly The Age of Aquarius. YĪN YĪN consists of Yves Lennertz (guitar, bass, phin, synthesizer, vocals), Kees Berkers (drums, percussion, synthesizer), Remy Scheren (bass guitar), and Robbert Verwijlen (organ, synthesizer)... Nautilus 4:01
Shēnzhou V. 6:08
Dutch quartet YĪN YĪN take influence from Southern and Southeast Asian traditions, incorporating Thai melodies into their groove-heavy brand of psychedelia. Multi-instrumentalist and occasional vocalist Yves Lennertz plays the phin, a lute-like instrument originating from the Isan region of Thailand, and the band otherwise augment their standard rock band formation with synths and drum machines. The group's debut album, The Rabbit That Hunts Tigers, appeared in 2019, and became a sizeable hit on streaming services, appealing to fans of other genre-blurring, cross-cultural acts like Khruangbin, L'éclair, and Khun Narin (a Thai group who also make the phin an integral part of their sound). The Age of Aquarius is YĪN YĪN's second album, and it's far more ambitious than their debut, finding the group blasting off into space while creating their heaviest dance grooves yet...
The career of the noisy guitar unit Eleventh Dream Day -- one of the most resilient and criminally underappreciated bands to rise from the Midwestern underground community -- was a textbook study in alt rock endurance... Eleventh Dream Day's origins dated to 1981, when singer/guitarist Rick Rizzo met vocalist/drummer Janet Beveridge Bean at the University of Kentucky. Inspired by punk, Rizzo taught himself to play guitar with the aid of Neil Young's Zuma songbook; Young remained the group's major inspiration throughout its career, his incendiary aesthetic informing much of Rizzo's own raw, rootsy style...Since Grazed 6:09
Wish Too Far 3:19
In the grand tradition of Neil Young, Eleventh Dream Day are a band who revel in the joy of turning up their amps and letting Rick Rizzo's guitar summon a gale of eloquent noise. (Rizzo has never shied away from acknowledging Young as an influence.) And also like Young, they know the value of taking a more subtle approach sometimes. On 2021's Since Grazed, they've made an album that feels like their variation on Harvest or After the Gold Rush. It's not devoid of electric guitar workouts, yet a noticeably more contemplative and atmospheric tone pervades the material, and the lyrics are deeply introspective; this is music that seemingly came from people who spent a lot of time alone with their thoughts... Fans who were hoping for another dose of strong rock & roll like Works for Tomorrow may have to adjust their expectations, but Since Grazed is a great and rewarding effort from a band that will seemingly always deserve more attention than they get, but never let down the loyal followers who are paying attention.
South London's Goat Girl combine incisive social commentary with a sound that stretches from punk to country to electronic pop. On 2018's self-titled debut album, they set their frustrations about Brexit, sexual harassment, and relationships to a snarling mix of punk, country, and goth; when they returned with 2021's On All Fours, they didn't sacrifice any of their bite for the album's more expansive sound and viewpoint... Jazz (In the Supermarket) 4:34
The Crack 3:12
Bang 4:27
Even for a young, buzzed-about band, the three years between Goat Girl's self-titled debut album and its follow-up On All Fours were notable. Along with more typical shake-ups like lineup changes (bassist Holy Hole stepped in for founding member Naima Jelly), the group endured guitarist/vocalist L.E.D.'s diagnosis of stage four Hodgkin's lymphoma and six-month course of chemotherapy. Happily, Goat Girl's second album reveals that they've only grown stronger together in the wake of these events. There's a greater feeling of connection and cohesion in these songs -- which makes sense, since they took a collaborative approach to songwriting this time out -- and their experimental and pop impulses are more clearly defined and cleverly integrated... Both nervier and more confident than their debut, On All Fours is a huge step forward from a band that's well-equipped to bring post-punk's legacy into the future.
Vibraphonist, percussionist, and songwriter Mike Dillon is an eclectic, highly adventurous musician with a sound steeped in post-bop jazz, funk, and avant-garde rock. Drawing upon such wide-ranging influences as Harry Partch, Thelonious Monk, Tom Waits, and Frank Zappa, he has led and co-led numerous ensembles... he has released his own genre-bending albums, including 2007's Battery Milk with his Go-Go Jungle band, 2014's New Orleans jazz- and R&B-influenced Band of Outsiders, and 2020's inventive covers album Rosewood.Mulatu Goes to India 3:53
Vibes at the End of the World 4:45
Named after the deeply red-toned wood that marimba bars are made out of, Mike Dillon's 2020 album Rosewood finds the vibraphonist further honing his genre-bending brand of percussion-based music. The album follows up his kinetic punk-, jazz-, and experimental rock-influenced 2018 album Bonobo Bonobo, which featured his large Mallet Men ensemble. With Rosewood, Dillon decided to work primarily as a soloist, only collaborating sparingly with fellow percussionist Earl Harvin and audio engineer Chad Meise. Consequently, while improvisation is still at the core of his sound, he took a more compositional approach, showcasing his deft arranging skills on a mix of original compositions and surprising covers... Listening to the lush sounds at play on Rosewood, it's easy to forget that every instrument you are hearing is a percussion instrument. Dillon has crafted a hypnotic album that pulls you deep inside a percussive, sylvan-toned dreamscape.
...Raised on a panoply of influences from Television to Yes, childhood friends Gus Green (guitar), Max Bassin (drums), and Cameron Winter (vocals, keyboards) met up with Dominic DiGesu (bass) and Foster Hudson (guitar) during their freshman year of high school. Geese spent their high school years in the late 2010s crafting a frenetic guitar-driven sound that mixed spiky post-punk with psychedelic and prog rock influences, all filtered through a distinctly New York lens...Rain Dance 3:23
Fantasies / Survival 4:27
Projector 4:25
Geese are a quintet of native Brooklyners who formed during their freshman year of high school. They are also one of the most hyped exports to emerge from the borough in years with a complex and energetic sound built from scraps of post-punk, prog, and a deep lineage of New York rock & roll. During the front half of 2020, the band's home-recorded demos suddenly became a target for serious label attention and, having just graduated from high school, Geese found themselves fielding offers from both sides of the Atlantic. New York's Partisan and London's PIAS won out in a joint deal resulting in the release of the band's full-length debut, Projector. Members Cameron Winter (vocals, keyboards), Gus Green (guitar), Foster Hudson (guitar), Dominic DiGesu (bass), and Max Bassin (drums) project a sense of confidence and benefit from the kind of chemistry forged during youth... Throughout the set, Geese cover a nice range of dynamics, indicating the depth of their influences and tastes. Projector is an impressive debut and all-around solid effort from a band at the start of a promising career.
Nagoya, Japan's Nicfit toss elements of no wave and noise-rock into their bracing version of punk without sacrificing any of their rambunctious energy... Nicfit formed in 2009 shortly after guitarist Charley moved from San Diego to Nagoya to explore Japan's thriving punk scene. With vocalist Hiromi, bassist KenKen, and drummer Kuwayama in the fold, the bandmembers found common ground in their shared love of legendary acts such as Black Flag, Wire, and Magazine. Unleash 2:55
Rigged 2:26
Anxiety 2:43
Considering what a dynamic band Nicfit is, it's somewhat surprising that it took them over a decade to release their debut album. Then again, Fuse shows that the time the Nagoya, Japan-based quartet spent playing shows with groups like DMBQ and Thee Oh Sees and issuing the occasional single or EP (all of which were collected on a self-titled compilation in 2021) paid off. More cohesive and more crazed than any of those short-form releases, Fuse gives the band ample room for their frenetic racket. "Unleash" sets the tone for the rest of the album, with Hiromi's klaxon-like wail riding high above the lurching bass line, metallic percussion, and noise-damaged riffs set forth by her bandmates... Fuse is a whirlwind of a debut album.
Oli Astral (Olivier Grenier-Bédard) is an award-winning guitarist and composer from Montreal, Canada. His musical universe is a fusion between the sound of modern jazz guitar, digital music technology, and visual projection... In 2021, the 32-year-old Astral put together his eponymously named performing and recording trio with double bassist and modular synthesist Frédéric Alarie and drummer William Régnier. Relying heavily on digital technology, the group's sound, while heavily reflective of the sounds created by Alarie's modular synthesizers, offers musical values and strategies deeply rooted in the jazz tradition: strong melodic improvisation, group interaction, and risk-taking are the core creative tenets of their process whether playing live or in a studio...From the Astral 8:16
From the Deep 4:39
Avec plaisir 4:11
From the Astral is the debut album by the Montreal-based guitarist Oli Astral (Olivier Grenier-Bédard) and his trio with veteran double bassist/modular synthesist Frédéric Alarie and drummer William Régnier. Astral is an award-winning axeman who has studied with John Abercrombie, Mike Moreno, and Jonathan Kreisberg, and a founding member of Canadian jazz quartet LEAF. The six originals here offer a balanced meld of resonantly organic guitar jazz and very musical use of technology. Astral employs MIDI controllers to his sophisticated technique and spacious, even luxurious, sense of lyricism. The influence of the Pat Metheny Group is readily apparent in approach, but the sound is their own.
