Category: New Stuff / What’s On Sale

After 10 years producing and recording albums for Brooklyn Rider and Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad Ensemble, Johnny Gandelsman releases a debut solo album. Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for violin solo are a magnificent repertoire for Gandelsman’s interpretations, which draw on his experiences with Silkroad, Brooklyn Rider, dance and non-classical musicians to add rich layers to Bach’s…

Winning Hand, the new album from Tinsley Ellis on Alligator Records, is the veteran bluesman at his finest as a songwriter and guitarist. The epic six-minute slow blues “Gamblin’ Man” is alone worth the price, but the album is packed with hard-hitting, groove-driven electric blues. In the very first track an unexpected key change introduces…

A timeless yet specific reflection on empathy and loss, Sufjan Stevens’ 2015 album Carrie & Lowell stripped away many of the singer’s flourishes to reveal something barren and reverent, compassionate and utterly human. Writing in the wake of his mother’s death, Stevens used Carrie & Lowell to grapple with their fraught and often absent relationship,…

Few would have predicted Chris Stapleton’s dominance earlier this decade, but he’s commanded the spotlight for long enough now — through show-stealing televised performances, major awards show wins and enviable album sales —to bring what it is about him that people are responding to into focus. The 39-year-old Kentucky native relies on Dave Cobb, Nashville’s…

The last material we heard from Björk was a bit of downer, wasn’t it? 2015’s ‘Vulnicura’ was a sweeping, majestic break-up album that saw her creating a raw, emotive narrative within her otherworldly soundscapes. It was incredible, but damn it was gloomy. Happily, the febrile ‘Utopia’ sees her on more upbeat – but no less…

When Sharon Jones died of pancreatic cancer last year, the world lost its greatest exponent of vintage soul; that she’d first hit her stride in the ’00s with the revivalist, detail-obsessed Daptone label, made the accomplishment all the more striking. Recorded over her last two years with longtime sidemen, genre-masters all, Jones meets darkness with…

Indie queen Angel Olsen has come a long way from her days as part of the Cairo Gang; her legion of fervid fans steadily growing with each subsequent release. It’s a trajectory that mirrors the evolution of Olsen’s sound—and the size of her band—from the stark, indie-folk of 2012’s Strange Cacti, to the expansive, swirling…

Tragic love, drug abuse, science fiction, and Americana: Blitzen Trapper managed to squeeze all that, and more, into their rock opera, Wild and Reckless, which was produced for the stage in their hometown of Portland, Ore., earlier this year. But that wasn’t enough for frontman Eric Earley and crew. Taking seven of the songs from…

The 22-year-old songwriter Julien Baker sees this not so much as an impossibility as a challenge to reconcile, daring her to make music in which she turns herself inside out. Her songs are sparse, internally focused, and radically intimate. “I know that you don’t understand, ’cause you don’t believe what you don’t see,” she sings…