In a vanitas painting, life is captured in ephemera. Popular with Dutch Baroque painters during the 16th and 17th centuries, the style used the still-life format to comment on the frivolity of earthly possessions. Artworks showcased scattered — and for the time, pretty mundane — stuff: a lute, a conch shell, a half-drunk glass of wine. The old masters didn’t include descriptions of why each item mattered or what historical memory they were meant to evoke. But they rendered them in vivid detail nonetheless.
The French producer Malibu, whose debut album Vanities draws its name from the vanitas movement, imbues her New Age-inflected ambient with a similarly sharp eye for the totemic. Past records, like 2024’s Essential Mixtape…
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When Bar Italia hit the Dean Blunt-starved Zillennial masses like a fucking atom bomb, skeptics accused the disaffected trio of coming off as too cool for their own good. We can argue over whether Tracey Denim has held up, but I’d counter that what made the band stand out in the first place wasn’t some effortless sense of style, but rather how awkward and discomforting they all seemed. Though their references may have been extremely well-worn, their pitchy singing, bizarre fashion choices, and sweet-but-slightly-off songwriting made them poster children for a growing generation of artists whose rock-star fantasies were shaped from late nights spent scrolling soon-to-be-shuttered blogs.
The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1976 Live Recordings picks up four months after 2019’s 
Silver Lake, California. Hipster suburb of East LA, preferred haunt of artists and bohemians, and fertile ground for a burgeoning independent scene: gentle souls bringing folk, soft rock, chamber pop and psychedelia together to create meticulously crafted yet beautifully balmy music that captures the ache of the human condition in universally relatable terms. But just what decade are we in? Because the mid-2020s in this happening ’hood are sounding a lot like the early 1970s.
…Doom Country is 
A year on from the release of 
The barefoot, country Alabama singer-songwriter 
Fresh off a Mercury nomination for their acclaimed sixth album 
‘It’s Me’ is a delicious slice of Seventies AM radio – a sunlit melody with a tad of wistfulness – that opens the 21st album of serial Ivor Novello winner, Gilbert O’Sullivan.
It’s not often you hear a kazoo highlighted in the chorus of a blues rock song. But Dan Auerbach takes care of those duties on the swinging “Blowin’ Up,” one of his co-writes on 
The songwriter’s new yuletide compilation is an extensive diary of his decades-long musical quests. It’s also a far-reaching look into Christmas’ greater profundity, a celebration of life in the face of death.
The friends and family of the late 
Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher floor the accelerator and embark on another collision course of energised and uncompromising riff-rock for album number five.
Steve Kilbey and the Church conjure a spectral pop magic on their 28th album, 2026’s 
Releases of new jazz bands or artists can sometimes be maddening. You want, above all else, to hear a complete document of what the band sounds like. Instead, you often get a release choked with guest appearances by whoever happens to be the bigwig players of the day, inevitably changing the group’s personality. The relatively […]
New Orleans Joys: The Earliest Recordings, 1923- 1926 is a two disc set from the always compelling Tompkins Square. Its 53 tracks chronicles definitive early work by the pianist / composer / arranger