The Pennys distills romantic garage pop to wistful essence, the chiming guitar lick, the rattle of tambourine and the plaintive whispery melody. The Oakland duo is comprised of two low-key but excellent mainstays of the Bay Area scene. RE Seraphin came up in Apache and the Impediments but lately has been spinning out a string of bittersweet solo discs. Mike Ramos is known for his lo-fi but gemlike work with Tony Jay, Cindy and Flowertooth. Together they put together six songs, all relatively concise but in no particular hurry, all with the unfussed grace and shifting moodiness of bands like the Reds, Pinks and Purples and the Jeanines.
Author: Justin Gage
Bandcamping :: Spring 2025
We’re somehow barreling our way through 2025, time speeding up as spring’s renewal comes around again. The future is unknown, but music keeps us sane, humanity at its best. With another Bandcamp Friday hitting on May 2, check out a few recent recommendations below. Fill up your cart and keep on dreaming.
PJ Harvey :: To Bring You My Love at 30
Harvey made To Bring You My Love at the age of 25. The album was her third full-length, and the first to explore a career-spanning collaborative partnership with Jon Parish. Other musicians contributed, notably Bad Seeds veteran Mick Harvey, drummer Jean-Marc Butty and Joe Gore, but the album takes it shape from the fluid interactions of Harvey and Parish, often both of them playing guitars at once.
Teo’s Bag: Constructing Bitches Brew
55 years on, Miles Davis’ 1970 opus, Bitches Brew remains as mind-bending as ever, but its most enduring influence may lie in its innovative construction. A deeper look at Teo Macero’s methods and madness, paired with a 2-hour collection of unused session reels expands its universe.
The Aquarium Drunkard Show: SIRIUS/XMU (7pm PDT, Channel 35)
Comme il faut. Via satellite, transmitting from northeast Los Angeles — the Aquarium Drunkard Show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35. 7pm California time, Wednesdays.
34.1090° N, 118.2334° W
Ras Michael & The Sons Of Negus :: Rastafari
If there exists a more perfect reggae album than Rastafari to symbolize the rejuvenating, re-energizing power of spring we have yet to hear it. Turning 50 this year, this is far more than sound-system music, this is reggae as art form.
The Lemon Pipers :: Through With You
Nine-minute psychedelic opus “Through With You” landing on the same record as 1968’a chart-topping pop gem “Green Tambourine” is the crux of the bizarre duality of the Lemon Pipers saga. Though gaining admiration from the likes of Moby Grape, the “Eight Miles High” meets “Interstellar Overdrive” ripper was the intentional antithesis of the polished bubblegum sound that the label had orchestrated. It’s a real hidden reward for those who ventured to the end of the decisively mixed bag of a record.
Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard :: April 2025
Freeform transmissions from Radio Free Aquarium Drunkard on dublab. Airing every third Sunday of the month, RFAD on dublab features the pairing of Tyler Wilcox’s Doom and Gloom from the Tomb and Chad DePasquale’s New Happy Gathering. For April, Tyler kicks it off with an hour’s worth of recent, semi-soothing instrumental zones, and Chad follows with a mix of dream pop, experimental rock and a splash of springtime bossa nova. Sunday, 4-6pm PT.
The Ex :: If Your Mirror Breaks
If Your Mirror Breaks is the Ex’s 19th full-length album. The band, extant since the late 1970s, has collaborated with everyone from the Mekons and Sonic Youth to Ethio-jazz saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya. Their music started in punk but has, over time, incorporated many other genres, including free jazz, noise and non-western music from Africa, Eastern Europe and the Middle East …
The Aquarium Drunkard Show: SIRIUS/XMU (7pm PDT, Channel 35)
Pacific rim. Via satellite, transmitting from northeast Los Angeles — the Aquarium Drunkard Show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35. 7pm California time, Wednesdays.
34.1090° N, 118.2334° W
Beverly Kenney :: Born To Be Blue (1959)
Once championed to eclipse the likes of June Christy and Chris Connor, Beverly Kenney was found dead a few months after the release of Born To Be Blue (1959), wearing only a pink nightgown and surrounded by empty bottles and scattered pills. With this in mind, the album takes on a haunted quality, and Kenney becomes an enigmatic figure whose legacy exists in the twilight of myth and verity. If there were a Mount Rushmore of “Midnite Jazz” artists, Kenney would be on it, her short life as bittersweet as the songs she sang.
Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes
In the latest permutation of the adventurous L.A. jazz group SML, guitarist Gregory Ulhmann and saxophonist Josh Johnson are joined by bassist Sam Wilkes, for an album that both deepens and expands the SML project. Looking back to bebop and drifting through post-rock, with pit stops at Jaco Pastorius, Lyle Mays and the Beatles, Uhlmann/Johnson/Wilkes is unafraid to embrace the beautiful, even as it remains committed to experimentation and smooth radicalism.
Guru Guru :: The 1971 Bremen Concert
Guru Guru aren’t the most celebrated of Krautrockers, but this 1971 live recording puts the lie many of the common and naive Krautrock narratives: not motorik enchanters but psychedelic shredders, not minimalists but maximalist noise makers, not anti-American but celebrants of Bo Diddley! It’s a miracle a German radio station was there to capture this killer performance.
Shudder To Think :: Pony Express Record
Shudder to Think’s art rock masterpiece Pony Express Record. With roots in Washington D.C.s legendary post-punk scene the band started out from the onset as a square peg in a round hole. Not unlike Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica there was little to prepare the listener for the band’s forward thinking vision of the future.
Liam Grant :: Prodigal Son
With Prodigal Son, fingerstyle rambler Liam Grant continues his investigation into lineage and place with quite possibly the rawest, loudest acoustic guitar recording you’ll hear all year. Casting aside delicate precision, Grant offers up unwieldy and elemental excursions that reach from the well-trod terra firma and wreath themselves into a knotty concentric circle inside the heart of contemporary guitar soli.