Earl Patrick pivots sharply away from his usual indie-folk and guitar-driven comfort zones for his newest release, the wildly inventive album "Conditioned By Machines". The Portland, Oregon-based composer, singer-songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist has spent over two decades building a dense, eight-album catalog. Here, however, he entirely flips the script. Feeling that classical flute music too often prioritizes gesture over pure melody, he set out...

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...