Auckland-based Living State continue to release catchy singles and having seen them play a few times I know they power through the live environment as well. Musically they focus the arrangements around singer Marissa who is building her confidence so that while we are...

Between 2012 and 2019 Italian technical death metal act Hideous Divinity released four full-length albums, but it has taken five years for them to return with their latest, which is probably due to a certain pandemic, plus the line-up changed with the loss of both a...

This is the debut album by French act Foncedalle, who comprise Marius Mermet (guitar, vocals), JD Mimouni (drum machine, synth) and Clément Maltassat (bass, vocals, synth), they describe the album as a rock band making electronic music as opposed to the other way...

I must admit the reason I grabbed this album was due to some of the people involved as it sounded interesting. This band originally commenced as a project between songwriter Nate Bauer (guitar, bass, keyboards) and veteran mixing/mastering engineer Gary Long, owner of...

The Contractions (I don’t know why there is no “The” on the cover, but everything I can find on them has “The”) were an all-female punk trio from San Francisco featuring Mary Kelley (guitar & vocals), Kathy Peck (bass & vocals) and Debbie Hopkins (drums &...

I get offered a lot of albums to review on a daily basis, with most of the emails being filed in case I need to reference them later, but without downloading the music. For some strange reason I decided to grab this set from a band which broke up in 1985, releasing...

In many ways this feels like the beginning of a whole new world, and I am sure this is not the last time we will come across an album like this. On one level here we have a fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable jazz EP by the trio of Sam Ross (piano, Fender Rhodes)...

Red Hot Shame is an indie rock group from a Northern California where the mainstay is singer-songwriter Xeff Scolari who works with a fluctuating line-up of friends. This time around it included frequent collaborators Steven Pitsenbarger (vocals, percussion), Ryan...

Back in 2020 I reviewed the debut album by Kariti, ‘Covered Mirrors’, and she is finally back with the follow-up. Kariti (карити), which means 'to mourn the dead' in church Slavonic, is a Russian-born artist now based in Italy and this release sees her moving away...

One of my favourite NZ metal bands in Just One Fix, and it is way too long since they released an EP. We have been getting tasters with singles, but at least we have six tracks, 26 minutes in length and the only real issue is that it is not enough, where is the album?...

Towards the end of 2022 I was asked to review the ‘Limited Edition’ EP by this band, and to be honest I was not too sure about undertaking it as this is a reggae act, a genre I confess to knowing virtually nothing about. I found I really enjoyed it, although I was...

What we have here is a double CD set from Dave Edwards to celebrate 25 years of Fiffdimension, with one disc acoustic and the other electric, both housed in the same digipak so by turning it over one has the correct artwork and track listing for one style and by...