Vie Jester’s new EP, ‘Masquerade’, presents itself like a costume box found in an attic that smells faintly of ozone and old, ambitious blueprints. This Los Angeles trio, typically weavers of their own heavy, harmonious rock tapestries laced with esoteric concerns, have opted for a different kind of unveiling: they’re trying on other people's clothes. https://open.spotify.com/album/0grUBCwpcgdKF29lBxWmLR?si=RTUUi7H3SC2oUUHu0TdHig A covers EP can be a curious beast. Here, Vie...

Sophia Mengrosso’s new album, “Unforgiven”, doesn’t so much start as it does detonate, a thirteen-song treatise on survival. Her voice, a thing clearly trained for gilded halls and velvet curtains, instead wails from within a foundry’s clang and fire. The result is a bizarre and beautiful collision, the sonic equivalent of discovering a lost Caravaggio painting lit by a flickering fluorescent tube in a...