Style US Edition From Spring 2015

Stone Temple Pilots has announced a March 16 release date for its highly anticipated new self-titled album, Stone Temple Pilots. This marks the band’s first album with the new lead singer, Jeff Gutt.

A really beautiful chapter in the career of reedman Sadao Watanabe - a batch of mostly original compositions, as you might guess from the title - and a double-length record that really showed an evolution of his talents! The sound is often highly lyrical - with Watanabe blowing alto, soprano sax, and flute in modes that are clearly informed by his bossa nova recordings of the late 60s, but which also spring forth in even more complicated styles - with echoes of French soundtracks, European jazz, and other sweet styles of the time. The group's a small one - with Yoshiaki Masuo on guitar, Kazuo Yashiro on acoustic piano and Fender Rhodes, Masabumi Kikuchi on piano, Yoshio Suzuki on bass, and Fumio Watanabe on drums.

Mew are prepping to release a brand new album, Visuals, this spring. Due out through Play It Again Sam, the 11-track effort marks the Danish dream pop outfit’s seventh overall following 2015’s + –. According to frontman Jonas Bjerre, the upcoming LP came together as a direct result of the touring the band did behind +-. “The live shows around that album saw us hit a creative peak, writing tracks on-the-road and the spark was lit,” he explained in a press release. “Breaking the normal cycle felt right and we wanted to make an album spontaneously retaining the energy we’d generated on that world tour, rather than wait the normal three or four years.”