Rock Sound December 2020

Since bursting on to the UK Blues scene with their debut record ‘The Uprising EP’ in April 2019 followed by their second EP ‘Innocence Of Youth’ in May 2020, Grace and Aaron have been going from strength to strength. The British husband and wife duo have an ever-growing online fan base and have gained the attention of Cerys Matthews’ The Blues Show on BBC Radio 2. Their unique harmonic vocal-led approach to song writing, dirty electric guitar, slide resonator mandolin and fiddle create a unique distinctive and contemporary blues rock sound that echoes 1970s classic rock with hints of the 1930s blues that inspire them.

“The stone that’s buried: what the fruit is for.” So goes the title track from Plum, Widowspeak’s forthcoming fifth album. The line serves as an apt analogy for the record itself: the self-aware sweetness that the band employs to deliver the seed of a harder, sharper idea. Singer Molly Hamilton coats wry observations in a voice as honeyed as the sun-ripened fruit, and Widowspeak have always made a bitter pill much easier to swallow. From its opening strum, there’s a palpable warmth and familiarity to the music even as it hints at darker truths below the surface, questions about inherent worth. What value and meaning do we assign ourselves, our time, and how do we spend it?

Following the commercial and critically acclaimed success of the recent albums “Blues” (2019) and the three-week running No.1 album on the Billboard Blues Chart “Check Shirt Wizard – Live in ’77” (2020), UMC is pleased to present a new Rory Gallagher best of collection entitled “The Best Of Rory Gallagher” on Friday 9th October 2020.

Algiers return in 2020 with third album There Is No Year, on Matador Records. There is No Year solidifies and expands upon the doom-laden soul of their foundation, toward an even more epic, genre-reformatting sound, one somehow suspended in the amber of “a different era,” as described by guitarist Lee Tesche.

Arbouretum’s mystic folk-rock collapses a continuum of 20th century music into decidedly classic song structures. English folk, country blues, Americana and 70s psychedelia all serve as touchpoints in their singular and distinctive sound. The Baltimore-based band have perfected the craft of storytelling using the delicate interplay of melodies and prosaic lyrics to tell vivid stories that engage the listener and transport them the way an immersive novel would. Let It All In stands as their most accomplished and evocative album to date. Guitarist and vocalist Dave Heumann’s melodies and solos still remain a central focus bolstered by the hypnotic rhythms of bassist Corey Allender and drummer Brian Carey and enhanced by Matthew Pierce’s substantial yet understated keyboard figures. Each song is a vivid scene or tale; meticulously detailed and crafted, transporting the listener to another world and time.

Two weeks ago, German heavy psychedelic rockers Samsara Blues Experiment announced they would be going on indefinite hiatus. Fair enough. 2020 makes it a decade since the band made their full-length debut with the jammy fluidity of Long-Distance Trip, a record that in no small part would define listener expectation from them even as they went on almost immediately to more progressive work. They’d already toured the US by then, hitting the West Coast in 2009 on the heels of their demo (discussed here, review here), and though they wouldn’t North American shores apart from two more shows in 2015, the years since they stopped through have not lacked adventure.

The fifth studio album from the rising Australian progressive rock band. "Rise radiant" is the CALLIGULA'S HORSE sound pushed to its extremes: at once its most ferocious and its most touching, its most expansive and its most condensed, its most poetic and its most vicious.