There's an intimacy to the new FREE/MAN release, "The Reconnection EP," that borders on a welcome invasion of personal space. It is the sonic equivalent of someone leaning in, not to share a secret, but to create the silence where your own might finally surface. Charlie Freeman hasn't built a grand cathedral of sound here; he's simply furnished a quiet room with stark, necessary...

There is a specific kind of electricity that runs through Dying Habit and their latest album "There Is No Sky", a static charge that feels less like a new discovery and more like a memory you didn't know you had. Hailing from Anglesey, the quartet Nathan Jones, Alan Hart, Daniel Garner, and Mark Jones has managed to bottle that peculiar, restless friction of being...