Charlie Freeman, who records as FREE/MAN, approaches his new EP Reconnection like someone testing the range of their own voice. Across four tracks, he moves from subdued funk to wistful folk, from acoustic intimacy to cosmic rock reverie. The title suits the collection; it’s as if he’s revisiting different parts of himself, reconnecting with sounds and emotions that shaped him as an artist.

It opens with “Not Tomorrow,” a sharp and soulful groove that hooked me immediately. The rhythm section feels earthy and unprocessed, anchored by a dry, organic kit and a bassline that moves like breath. Freeman’s delivery is refreshingly unguarded, playful but sincere, never pushing harder than he needs to. When the orchestral strings appear, they don’t overwhelm; they glide through the mix like memory surfacing at the right moment. It’s one of those rare songs that sounds both effortless and deliberate.

“Bluebird” shifts the tone entirely. It’s a hushed folk ballad steeped in melancholy, the kind of song that could close a film with quiet grace. The strings take on a more emotional weight here, circling around a simple guitar figure while Freeman sings as if from the other side of a long night. His version of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” strips away everything but the essentials: voice, acoustic guitar, conviction.

“Two Witches” closes the set in widescreen mode. There’s a slow-building grandeur reminiscent of Pink Floyd, with reverb trails, subtle synth textures, and a sense of looking out at something vast and unknowable. It’s an ambitious and atmospheric piece that balances the EP’s earlier intimacy with something more expansive.

​Reconnection has some serious range. Each song seems to exist in its own orbit, distinct in tone and feeling, yet united by Freeman’s honest and unforced presence. “Not Tomorrow” is still the one that stayed with me; it has that ineffable spark that makes you hit repeat, but the variety across these tracks suggests an artist still joyfully exploring what he can do.

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If I close my eyes while listening to Steel & Velvet, I can almost smell the grain of an old wooden cabin, the kind that creaks when the wind moves through it. The Breton trio of Johann Le Roux, Romuald Ballet-Baz, and Jean-Alain Larreur treat folk rock like a language passed down by memory rather than written down in ink. Formed in 2021 through friendship and a shared devotion to restraint, their songs are stripped to bone and breath. There’s no production gloss or performative reach for grandeur, just wood, string, and voice, held together by a fragile stillness that feels both personal and ancient.

People Just Float, their six-song EP, extends that philosophy into something cinematic. It’s accompanied by a short film from longtime collaborator Loïc Moyou, a surreal western that drifts between solitude and revelation. The music mirrors the film’s tone, each song like a chapter in a sparse novella, told through quiet guitar and low, resonant vocals. Silence isn’t just the space between notes here; it’s the pulse of the whole work.

“Orphan’s Lament” opens with a voice that belongs on a grand stage, operatic and unhurried. But beneath it, the guitar does most of the emotional heavy lifting. The playing is patient and luminous and recalls the American Primitive stylings of Jack Rose or John Fahey. Their cover of “Ring of Fire” follows, pared down to its essence. The baritone delivery lends gravity to lines that, in other versions, might sound worn thin by repetition. Here, they regain their weight.

“Man in the Long Black Coat” reimagines Dylan’s ballad as a dark fable. I could almost see fog curling around castle walls as the story unfolded. “Silver” leans into harmonic interplay, the voices folding around each other like candlelight on wood. Their take on “Lake of Fire,” best known through Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged set, nods back to the Meat Puppets’ original with reverence and restraint. The closer, “In Heaven,” feels like a benediction whispered to no one in particular.

​By the end, People Just Float doesn’t try to reinvent the songs it borrows; it listens to them differently. These are minimalist recordings, voice and guitar, nothing more, but they breathe with conviction. I knew every song here before pressing play, yet somehow, in the trio’s hands, they sounded newly unearthed, as if rediscovered in the dust of that imagined cabin.

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“Harbor Boulevard” from Blind Man’s Daughter, the moniker of Denver-based artist Ashley Wolfe, sits somewhere between comfort and familiarity. It’s a gentle, mid-tempo pop rock ballad that doesn’t try to reinvent anything, and maybe that’s part of its charm. Wolfe writes from a deeply personal place, channeling the slow ache of watching her father slip away to Alzheimer’s, yet the delivery feels restrained, more soothing than raw.

I found myself appreciating its directness. The acoustic guitar and brushed percussion create a warm, steady pulse, and Wolfe’s voice lands somewhere between resolve and ache. There’s no metaphor to decode or emotional puzzle to solve; she tells you exactly what she’s feeling. “I wrote ‘Harbor Boulevard’ for my dad,” she’s said, and the lyrics echo that plainly, tracing family memories and fading moments with a steady hand.

At times, I wished the song pushed a little harder or took a risk melodically. It’s safe, maybe too safe, the kind of track that could sit between a Norah Jones cut and a mid 2000s country crossover on a coffeehouse playlist. But its simplicity gives it an easy appeal, and Wolfe’s sincerity keeps it from feeling hollow.

​“Harbor Boulevard” might not surprise you, but it might still find you at the right moment, that quiet evening when you need a song that doesn’t demand much, just offers a bit of light. It’s tender, predictable, and undeniably human.

Jaan’s Baghali is the kind of album that refuses to sit still. Before a single note is heard, there’s already an aura of mystery surrounding it, a record born from motion, silence, and the refusal to be easily known. Jaan, a deliberately anonymous figure described as an “activistic unit,” operates between Greenland, the Middle East, and Europe, creating something that feels both ancient and futuristic.

The anonymity isn’t an aesthetic choice so much as a guiding principle, a belief that the sound should speak louder than the identity behind it. What emerges is a world of tones and textures that feel hand-worn, unpredictable, and alive in their imperfections.

Recorded over a year spent on the move, snowed in, stranded, or lost in the desert, Baghali plays like a travelogue of dislocation. The music is stitched together from scraps of tape loops, broken synths, handmade instruments, and field recordings, each piece forming its own climate.

“Scented Feathers” sets the tone with something close to Tim Hecker’s spectral haze, its chopped loops mutating subtly as they repeat. “Purple Watermelon” places Eastern percussion against clouds of white noise, while “Feverish Heights” could soundtrack a slow, rising sense of dread. “The Lust Greens of This Restless Mind” dips into something more surreal and psychedelic, a trip through the machine-spun otherworlds of Fennesz or Aphex Twin’s ambient stretches.

“The Girl Is a Lady” feels comparatively human, evoking Lynchian dream-band energy with faint Eastern inflections. “Mashid” and “Velesh Kon” move slower, expanding on repetition until the music feels suspended in time. Elsewhere, “Pomegranate Garden” and “Fragments of Home” trade melody for atmosphere, letting textures speak in place of form. “This Is the Year” closes in a fog of alien unease, where dissonance becomes its own resolution.

These songs have a classic ambient structure. Each song introduces a unique palette of textures, tones and colors and then explore variations of the patterns and melodies. It’s not about getting from point A to point B but just appreciating the micro variations as well and the patterns in the song. Similar to a lot of other ambient music if you want to really explore these songs I suggest some headphones and active listening. 

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If memory had a soundtrack, it might sound like Between the Shadows. Jonni Slater’s new album captures that in-between space where reflection and imagination overlap, where what’s gone and what never happened coexist in the same flickering frame. These moments feel held in suspension, half-lit by melancholy and half-illuminated by wonder. Slater’s fascination with contrast, light and dark, intimacy and expanse, runs through every note here.

The title, lifted from “How to Build a Cage for Mice,” becomes a quiet thesis statement. Slater balances introspective piano ballads with sweeping, layered arrangements that touch on soul, rock, and electronica.

The opener, “Voices,” is a cinematic burst of piano-driven drama that feels more like a finale than a beginning, immediately setting the emotional temperature which tends to feel grand and vast. The keys are a salient part of this song as well as the album.

“Super” follows with more energy and movement, a track that trades some of the introspection for rhythm while keeping the sense of longing intact. “Forgiven” dips into darker waters, landing somewhere between Peter Gabriel’s grandeur and Radiohead’s brooding tension, while “Things We Didn’t Say” slows to a near whisper, delicate and weightless. “Believe in the Morning Sun” brightens the mood, showcasing one of Slater’s most assured vocal performances and my personal favorite song on the album.

“Outside” reaches for an epic balladry reminiscent of Coldplay’s early records, while “Red Canvas” softens the edges again with tender, emotional restraint. “Walked Beside You” is a clear high point that brings a subtle groove, a subdued funk that adds warmth and motion.

Later, “How to Build a Cage for Mice” returns to the album’s core theme, pairing its reflective lyrics with an almost meditative stillness. “The Wreck” evokes the sea, steady, mournful, and strangely communal, while “Heavy” and “Last Dance” close things out with weight and grace, each one pulling the record deeper into its emotional center.

Between the Shadows thrives on contrast. Its moments of stillness carry as much gravity as its crescendos, and its occasional bursts of rhythm keep the emotional weight from sinking too deep. The production is clean but personal, the kind of balance that invites you to sit with it and let its details slowly surface. There's a lot to appreciate on Between the Shadows.

Back in the early ’90s, I was in high school and completely obsessed with my guitar. I recorded demos, grainy, innocent, and overconfident, that I still have tucked away somewhere. Listening to them now, they sound like a snapshot of a mind still figuring out what emotion even was.

​So when I heard sixteen-year-old Ava Valianti’s “Running on Empty,” I couldn’t help but compare. Her songwriting carries the kind of reflection and self-awareness I couldn’t have imagined at that age. It’s not just impressive for its maturity but for the sincerity behind it. She’s not trying to sound older than she is, she’s simply writing what she feels, and that honesty gives the song its depth.

The song opens with a gently strummed guitar and banjo, a pairing that immediately grounds it in folk tradition. From there, Valianti’s voice cuts through with dramatic precision, singing about love and distance as if recalling memories twice her age. When the bass and strings swell, the song widens emotionally, tracing the lingering questions of youth, where people go, what remains, and what it means to grow out of your own stories. There’s a cinematic quality in the way she balances restraint and emotion, letting the melody breathe without forcing its weight.

​The music industry looks nothing like it did when I was sixteen, but Valianti is off to a good start. “Running on Empty” is a piece of pop folk songwriting that shows real potential and an early sense of artistic identity. I look forward to seeing how she evolves as a musician and how her voice continues to shape itself with time and experience.

Favorite Son’s debut album Juniper moves like a record caught between two decades and a few different genres, but it never loses its sense of direction. The band’s foundation is hard to pinpoint, though their instincts pull toward organic tones and the warmth of 70’s singer-songwriter records. What holds it all together is the chemistry between the players. The twin guitars of Cooper Greenberg and Ramon Botello trade melodic ideas with a quiet confidence, while bassist Joseph Cantu and drummer Andres Ovalle provide a rhythm section that’s more about finesse than volume. The interplay makes the record feel organic, like musicians playing for each other before anyone else.

The opening track, “Flamingo,” sets an early standard. I loved the way it balances a funk-tinged groove with broad, strummed chords. It’s a confident opener that highlights the band’s sense of dynamics. “New Mexico, Texas” drifts into a softer 70’s ballad space, with brushed drums and guitar tones that shimmer under a phaser’s subtle swirl. Then comes “Boogie Nights,” a barroom sing-along with horns and a looseness that suggests it was recorded at the tail end of a long, good night.

The title track “Juniper” might be the album’s peak. The rhythm section locks into a relaxed but infectious groove that reminds me of Steely Dan’s cool precision. The guitars glide over it, doubling and harmonizing in a way that’s both nostalgic and modern. “Take Me With You” turns inward again, led by inventive bass work that reshapes the song’s calm surface.

“Over the Line” lifts the mood with a dose of classic rock swagger, and there is even a touch of Grateful Dead in its sense of motion. “Reassuring Hand” brings the emotional core of the album into focus with one of the strongest vocal performances here. “Whistler” closes things out in pure alt-country territory, a nod to the band’s roots after so much stylistic wandering.

​Juniper moves between reflective calm and groove-heavy energy, sometimes sharply enough to feel disorienting, but the songwriting and musicianship keep it grounded. By the end, what stands out most is the band’s strong song structure and delivery. It’s a debut that shows both curiosity and confidence, an album worth sitting with more than once.

“Sleepwalker,” the new single from Ben Heyworth, opens with a sound that immediately took me back to the 80s. Within half a minute I was thinking about New Order, especially in the way the drum kit sounds like a mutated 808 kit. The song in terms of feel sot of inhabits both an electronic and organic quality.

It's more grounded in 80's synth pop then Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada. At the same time, there’s a sheen to the production that feels modern, as if Heyworth had taken a track from Studio 54 and rebuilt it through a contemporary lens.

What I liked most was the tension in tone. The track walks a line between melancholy and motion, with strings that add a fragile sense of beauty against metallic, quantized textures. The guitars enter with a muted rhythm that hints at a build that never fully arrives, giving the song a subtle sense of restraint. It’s moody and slightly orchestral, there's not real defined hook and it's  more about layering and repetition. When the vocals fade into an instrumental stretch, the song breathes differently, letting the production take center stage which was the most inspired section .

The energy comes almost entirely from the music itself. The vocals stay understated, almost secondary to the arrangement’s slow evolution. Structurally, it’s grounded in a steady 4/4 rhythm and conventional harmonies, but what keeps it interesting is how Heyworth stacks and shapes each layer. By the end, the song resolves into a wash of pure orchestration, closing on a reflective note rather than a climax that builds with a crescendo.

“Sleepwalker” succeeds most as an exercise in texture and atmosphere. The production is clean and detailed, and the balance of synthetic and organic sounds is thoughtfully done. I found myself imagining how an instrumental version might expand its emotional depth, something closer to Jon Hopkins’ immersive world-building. Still, as it stands, “Sleepwalker” is a finely crafted piece of electronic pop that I enjoyed quite a bit. I'm looking forward to hearing more. 

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H is for House is the debut electronic album by Swedish collaborators Henrik Johansson and Johan Antoni, recording together as Pelican Company. Johansson was known for his 90's releases which have been reissued under the name Smyglyssna. The duo says Pelican Company "bridges the rough-edged funk of early electro with Smyglyssna’s atmospheric precision; an unexpected meeting point where broken beats, analog grit and shimmering harmonics form something new yet deeply rooted in decades of underground craft."

The band info says this album is "a complete journey through the duo’s fused styles of broken IDM beats, creamy analog goodness and FM synthesized drums, gathering ambient, electro, break and techno into a portrait of Pelican Company and what real analog electronic music still
can be in this day and age." The genres cut a swath through electronic, ambient and glitch. For me this "futuristic" music actually evokes a past of Morton Subotnick ("Silver Apples of the Moon") and the original video game, Pong. They call it an EP, but that's clearly incorrect as these tracks add up to more than a traditional album.

The album opens with a 7-minute mini-epic titled "Klept" (most tracks are about five minutes, give or take) that starts with a somewhat shrill pulse with a definite SciFi edge. Ghostly chords are soon added, playing the role of electronic string section. Like Neil Young's vocoder experiments, there's a real beauty to these sounds when imbued with melody. The middle section settles on a dramatic film-score like arrangement, with the final movement closer to ambient. Next is a shorter selection titled "Werk the CV Utilities" which has clusters of notes like those online melody generators. 

"Glowsticks, Purdey's and LFO's K1" gets super-active again, with a jumpy, pointed loop featuring electronic raspberries, telephone tones and what sounds like a bouncing ball. The middle section adds different melodies, then melds with the main section. The final third is both more contemplative and (eventually) a little more crazy, with banks of tones that approximate a horn section. This track definitely contains the most value for your dollar-fifty! 

"Red Wine & Cow Bothering" is the longest track at over 11 minutes and has the best title. The opening tones have a xylophone feel, backed by a steady kick drum beat. At three minutes the synths approximate the sound of a human chorale, one of my favorite patches. Around five minutes we kick into an almost traditional, prog-like pattern reminiscent of Tony Banks with Genesis. The section with the drums has the lively invention of the new electronic trio Song for a Gorgeous Blonde (also Swedish, it turns out!). "Alvaret" peppers its soundscape with even cooler varieties of "vocal-like" synths. With the title "Turn It Off" I was expecting a hellish soundscape, but it's another collection of interesting, shifting blocks of diverse patterns and patches, while "Zebra Striping" is more a pure wash of synth pads and sleeping-giant breaths. The album ends with a Marcus Price remix, though of which tracks I'm not sure. It does seem a bit more active than normal, with quicker changes and more crosscurrents.

If you're a circuit head (and in some ways, aren't we all?) this just might get your transistors humming. Coolness!

"You've got a face for radio" is a very old but still funny insult, and also makes for a puzzling yet amusing title for the second One Man Boycott album titled Face For Radio. One Man is actually four: Joe Brewer (vocals), Lee Bryant (guitar), Nathan Layland (bass) and Dan Courtney (drums). Based in North Devon UK, they perform a powerful brand of pop-punk and alternative rock that (to my ears) sometimes approaches speed metal velocity.

Since the boys supplied a press kit, here's a nice quote: "One Man Boycott balances bouncing musical urgency typical of pop punk with a more serious vulnerability in lyrics and subject matter that leans closer to alternative rock... something like a 'thinking man's' alt-pop punk, with a DIY-but-polished ethos. This record captures the inner struggle of an artist who lost his way but, through close friends, inner conversations, and a supportive fanbase, found the road back." According to Bandcamp their first full-length release was in 2016, along with a smattering of singles and solo projects, so these guys have been at it for a while!

Thematically, these 12 tracks are said to "channel mental health battles, relapse-and-recovery
cycles and stubborn optimism into big choruses and straight-talking, at times vulnerable lyrics." Leader Joe Brewer adds: “This record is me admitting where I’ve fallen apart and choosing to come back anyway. It’s loud, it’s honest, and it’s for anyone who’s had to rebuild from zero.” Brewer recorded the band at home in North Devon, with mastering by Grant Berry at Fader Mastering.

The album opens with an anomalous piano composition titled "Boycott Fans Saved My Life & Not For The First Time (Intro)." It's pretty much keys and a heartfelt solo vocal, with some backward piano fragments seeping around the edges. All that changes with the monstrous chorus, in which the full band is so loud that it's like three orchestras through fuzz boxes. Brewer has literally yanked his heart out for display in the very first track ("Don't you let me drown / Won't you save me now / You're my all." The intro leads directly into the super-charged “Imposter Syndrome” which the band calls "a melodic opener with a cathartic chorus." It's loud, speedy and intense at every level. The vocals feel familiar and the guitars are blocks of molten fuzz. And then it just stops!


“Confidence” is "an urgent, internal plea to a past version of yourself" and feels like the same harmonic arena and definitely the same speed, with maybe a bit more pop jangle like The Strokes. “Nevergenetics” is said to be a fan-favorite single about "breaking what’s in your DNA." I admit that the crisp riffage and herky-jerky patterns totally grabbed me too! I'm still gobsmacked that these amazing-sounding tracks are home-recorded. “Life Is A Movie” is also good but feels very much like a second section to the previous track. 


“The Alchemist” starts with techno-style alchemy, and is a darker tune about addiction. You can feel Brewer's anger with lines like "It feeds on your insides... and it fucking lies if you let it." Most of these songs are way under three minutes yet it feels like there are multiple levels of invention playing out, and this track is a standout in that regard. Could it have gone a bit longer? Sure! Following are two pop-punk tracks including “Simulation Theory” with excellent bass and drum support behind guitar chords that seem as emotionally torn as the vocals. It's another very short track that seemingly contains multitudes. “Too Close For Comfort” is another classic that features a cool overdriven bass part. “I’m Broken, You’re Lonely” combines rock and synth in a manner I haven't heard since The Who.


These tracks have a very consistent feel and are consistently excellent in that crunchy power-pop way! Good times!

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