Earlier this year I reviewed the debut album by keyboard player and singer Massimo Pieretti, ‘A New Beginning’, and he has now sent me the debut album from one of the bands he is in, Noage. Formed by singer Germana Noage (Aetherna), the rest of the line-up is Massimo...

Matt and Kerryn may now be residents of Melbourne in Victoria, but they both grew up in Aoteaora, Matt on South Island and Kerryn on the North. They are both well-known in their new home, with Matt’s ‘Between Tonight and Tomorrow’ winning Music Victoria’s Best Country...

I have been fortunate to see Matt play in concert a few times, twice as totally solo and one with Kerryn Fields and his Dead Leaves bandmate Andy Pollock. This acoustic session finds him with just Andy and long-time Dead Leaves member Katya Horrop, recording live in...

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)...