There are few voices more deeply embedded in the iconography and mythology of American indie rock than that of Chan Marshall. Under the musical nom de plume of Cat Power, Marshall has released music for nearly 25 years now and her prowess as a songwriter, a producer, and most notably-as a voice-has only grown more influential with time. On her 10th studio album, Wanderer, Marshall resets her dials, offering a collection of songs that function as pristine examples of her still-evolving creative practice. Held aloft primarily by Marshall’s own guitar and piano, Wanderer is a collection of winding, wondering narratives all perfectly imbued with the kind of yearning and warmth that have made her one of the most distinctive and beloved artists of her generation. Produced by Marshall and mixed by Rob Schnapf (Elliott Smith, Beck), the album includes appearances by longtime friends and compatriots, as well as guest vocals courtesy of friend and recent tourmate Lana Del Rey. Wanderer is, in many ways, a kind of quintessential Cat Power record, with Marshall’s clarion voice front and center in a set of songs that are remarkably stark and straightforward. Tracks like “Black” and “Me Voy” have the kind of haunted quality that recall the most emotionally harrowing moments of Moon Pix or You Are Free, while the elegant lilt of “In Your Face” and the minimalist blues of “You Get” (“You Know there’s nothing like time, to teach you where you have been” Marshall sings on the latter) have the same kind of playful, soulful timbre of The Greatest. Meanwhile, the album also showcases Marshall’s uncanny abilities as one of the great interpreters of songs, with a stunning version of Rihanna’s “Stay”. “I love the tradition of interpreting songs”, she says. “I think it’s one of the highest compliments you can pay another artist. It’s one of the great traditions in American music and one of the great pleasures.” While Wanderer represents a hard-won stability for Marshall, it’s also evidence that stability -emotional, physical, financial -is often fleeting. It’s a thing that must be cared for, protected, and can easily evaporate. Songs like “Robbin Hood” and “Nothing Really Matters” confront duplicity and hopelessness in equal measure, examining what it means to be taken advantage of (“Who Robbing, who robbing who?”) and the nihilism of trying to do the right thing in a world where it often feels as if it truly makes no difference. In stark contrast, the album’s first single, “Woman,” (featuring backing vocals from Lana Del Rey) is a full-throated push back against doubters and critics, as well as a righteous claiming of space. “The doctor said I was not my past, he said I was finally free,” sings Marshall, “I’m a woman of my word, or haven’t you heard? My word’s the only thing I’ve ever needed.” Defiant, unbowed, and fantastically steadfast, the song ends with the perfect, beautiful coda: “I’m a woman.” If old Cat Power records might have easily been viewed as repositories for pain, Wanderer is, at its heart, a testament to the transformative nature of songs, an album-length imagining of alternate paths, redemptions, connections, and open-ended possibility. This is most evident on “Horizon”, the album’s emotional centerpiece, in which Marshall sings about the complicated, emotionally elastic bonds between family members. For someone whose entire life has been predicated on movement -years of comings and goings with little time to pause and connect – the song offers a bittersweet reconciliation: “You’re on the horizon / I’m on my way / You’re on the horizon / I’m headed the other way.”

Everybody in your life will write his or her own chapter in your story. Take a step back, and you’ll see the influence of your loved ones, mentors, and friends in your decisions. Shook Twins refer to these folks in the title of their fourth album, Some Good Lives. Throughout fourteen tracks, the duo-identical twin sisters Katelyn Shook and Laurie Shook -pay homage to everyone from a late grandpa and godfather to Bernie Sanders. “We realized there was a theme,” Katelyn reveals. “Even though our minds are mostly on the women of today and wanting the monarchy to rise up, we have several men in our lives who have been such positive forces. We wanted to thank them and honor the good guys who showed us the beauty in this crazy world we live in. So, it’s an album for Some Good Lives that have crossed paths with ours-and to them, we are grateful.” Laurie agrees, “It’s also an acknowledgment of our thankfulness of the good life that we get to live.” However, the pair derived their own strength from these relationships. Over the course of three full-length releases and a handful of EPs since 2008, acclaim would come by way of everyone from USA Today and Baeble Music to Langhorne Slim, The Lumineers, Mason Jennings, and iconic best-selling author Neil Gaiman who enthusiastically decreed, “They make music that twines through your soul the way vines cover an abandoned shack in the woods.” Beyond gigs with the likes of Gregory Alan Isakov and Ani DiFranco, they captivated crowds at High Sierra Music Festival, Lightning In A Bottle, Bumbershoot, Hulaween, Summer Camp Music Festival, and Northwest String Summit, to name a few. During 2016, they planted the seeds for what would become Some Good Lives by thinking bigger. The girls intermittently recorded at Hallowed Halls in Portland, OR. Within this old library building, “which feels full of stories,” they tapped into palpable energy like never before, locking into a groove inside of the spacious, reverberant live room. Moreover, the full band-Barra Brown , Sydney Nash , and Niko Slice -expanded the sonic palette. “It took us a long time to find the band that we wanted to record these songs with and for the songs to fully mature,” admits Laurie. “Once Barra, Sydney, and Niko joined us, we really started to explore what our music could be. These amazing players helped us realize that we could be more than just ‘folk pop’. We started adding other genres to the word like ‘disco,’ ‘psychedelic,’ ‘funk,’ and ‘soul.’ We really honed in on a new sound.” They initially teased that evolution with the single “Safe.” Its airy acoustic guitar and delicate harmonies materialize as a heartfelt and hypnotic rumination on love. The track quickly surpassed 1 million Spotify streams and stoked excitement among audiences for the eventual arrival of Some Good Lives. “‘Safe’ was written up at a cabin in the woods,” recalls Katelyn. “I had the line ‘a love that feels safe’ in my mind for a while. That’s the only kind of love truly possible and healthy when you’re touring and away from your person all the time. You feel like you can trust it, and it’s not going to change within either of you-no matter how long and far you are away from each other.” “I was struggling to find that kind of love at the time, and Katelyn had this other perspective,” adds Laurie. “It’s my breakup song my sister wrote for me,” she laughs. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify | YouTube

The new album by Tinariwen could well have been called Exile on Main Street. But other people have already thought of that. It also could have been called A la recherché du pays perdu (‘Remembrance of a lost country’). Except that would have been a tad Proustian for musicians who grew up pretty much between a rock and a sand dune, in the midst of their goat herds and camel caravans. But the idea is apt. As is the painful paradox, if you consider that while Tinariwen were busy criss-crossing the globe on their recent triumphant tours (160 concerts played in the past three years), expanding their audience on all five continents, becoming one of the latest musical phenomena of truly universal calibre, the frontiers that encircle their desert home were closing down and double-locking, forcing them into exile to record this their 8th album. Over the past five years, their beloved homeland in the Adrar des Ifoghas, a Saharan mountain range that straddles the border between north-eastern Mali and southern Algeria has, in effect, been transformed into a conflict zone, a place where nobody can venture without putting themselves in danger and where war lords devoted either to jihad or trafficking (sometimes both at the same time), have put any activity that contradicts their beliefs or escapes their control in jeopardy. Even though the 12 songs on this new record evoke those cherished deserts of home, they were recorded a long way away from them. And, as a result of this separation, at a time when the political, military and humanitarian situation in the region has never been so critical, the feelings and the emotions that the band managed to capture on record have never been so vivid. In October 2014, making use of a few days off in the middle of a long American tour, the band stopped off at Rancho de la Luna studios in California’s Joshua Tree National Park. The place has become the favoured refuge of the stoner rock tribe. Josh Homme and his Queens of the Stone Age were the first to make it their hive, and since then, whether in use by P J Harvey or the Foo Fighters, Iggy Pop or the Arctic Monkeys, neither the mixing console nor the kitchen ovens have had a moment to cool down. For Tinariwen, the geographical location of the studios – lost in the middle of that horizontal desert, that mineral immensity, where Man is reminded of his own insignificance in ways that can only, in the end, either kill him or sublimate him – proved to be particularly propitious in terms of creativity. Links: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram