Beekeeper

After thirty years of playing on stages all over the world from Dublin to New York, Tokyo to Sydney, premier traditional Irish band, Altan came back to the hills of Donegal to record their new album, THE GAP OF DREAMS. The 13 tracks transport the listener to the lifestyle of rural Donegal, to a time before electricity when folks would gather together in the mists of winter to tell stories, sing songs and dance into the wee hours of the night. The music lifted the locals’ spirits and helped elevate them beyond the hardships of the day like famine, conflict and emigration. It is this spirit that informed the development of the band through their many phases of growth from a duo performing in pubs to international touring and recording artists.

To mark their 30th anniversary as a band, the Residents released this strangely programmatic album, their first since 1998's Wormwood: Curious Stories From the Bible. According to Cryptic Corporation (the band's corporate face), the songs on Demons Dance Alone were "written for the most part in the days following September 11" and "capture a quite different side of the Residents" – a vulnerable and questioning side that poses unanswerable questions. What this means is a more subdued ambience and more tunefulness, and a little bit less "nyah-nyah-nyah," though not that much less. The first singing voice (on "Life Would Be Wonderful") is that dorky pseudo-country & western one that listeners have all come to know and be irritated by, but the next one sounds like it could be Syd Straw or maybe Lori Carson (Residents are never identified by name), and the song she sings, "The Weatherman," is disarming in its naked emotion. Goofiness is never far from the surface, as song titles like "Mickey Macaroni" and "Make Me Moo" indicate, but this time out it is seriously tempered by what sound like – dare one suggest it? – intimations of mortality.

Lakeshore Records has released The Shrink Next Door—Original Apple TV+ Series Soundtrack. The original music is by Joshua Moshier (Baskets), with a nimbly orchestrated score that reflects many moods—from warm and lighthearted, to disturbing and dark. Starring and executive produced by Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd, “The Shrink Next Door” premieres globally on Apple TV+ on November 12.Says Moshier: “When I first began imagining the musical interior world of Marty and Ike, I created seven short musical vignettes to evoke the arc of their relationship. Georgia Pritchett, Michael Showalter and the entire team were incredibly supportive of these ideas, and of using the score boldly to tell this story. Their trust was creatively liberating, and I felt free to let the music find its own sound, one as lyrical and heartfelt but also as dark and tangled as the relationships portrayed. I’m grateful to them for bringing me along to be a part of this beautiful series.”