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Last Night Watchman – Old Blighty
Last Night Watchman Lets History Breathe on Old Blighty
Last Night Watchman’s Old Blighty feels like the work of a songwriter who has stopped chasing noise and started listening for the grain in it. Built in a small home studio after years away from recording, the EP moves with the patience of someone who has lived a little, lost a little, and learned to let the songs arrive on their own terms.
Across tracks like “Old Blighty,” “Footprints” and “Towards The Sun,” he folds colonial history, deep time and private reflection into arrangements that nod to Neil Young, Paul Simon and Tom Waits without borrowing their shadows. John Horton’s guitar and keys add lift and texture, but the heart of it is still solitary: layered vocals, overdubbed guitars, banjo, ukulele and a choir-like sweep that gives the songs room to breathe. It’s thoughtful, unshowy and quietly bracing.
Zach Montana – Son
Zach Montana Calls Into The Dark On “Son”
Zach Montana writes where private memory begins to take on the scale of myth, without sanding away its dust, bruises, or human weight. On “Son,” the standout from Sum of Parts, he starts with a hush of acoustic reflection, then lets the track bloom into theatrical rock that feels equal parts campfire confession and arena-sized ache. Montana’s voice carries the weight of a memory you can’t quite place, repeating, “You are my son / You were my song,” as the song circles loss, innocence, and the strange distance between who we were and who we’ve become.
What makes it hit is the way he refuses to smooth the edges. The writing is bruised, vivid, and haunted, but the arrangement keeps reaching higher, folding in heavier guitars and a kind of desperate grace. “Son” doesn’t solve anything; it keeps calling into the dark, hoping something tender answers back.
Vidura Barrios – Chant!
Vidura Barrios Finds Stillness In Motion On Chant!
Vidura Barrios has long treated chanting less like genre and more like practice, and CHANT! makes that devotion feel immediate. Composed by Barrios and released through Inner Splendor Media, the album moves between drum-driven kirtan energy and hushed, meditative passages that seem to breathe in real time. “Krishna Invocation” and “108 Names of Vishnu” settle into repetition as a kind of quiet trance, while “Govinda Gopala” and “Rama Raghava” lift with percussion, voices, and the communal pulse of sacred song.
What gives the record its weight is the balance Barrios strikes between sound and silence. A longtime meditation practitioner and founder of Inner Splendor Media, he has spent nearly two decades shaping music for contemplation, and here that experience feels distilled rather than decorated. “CHANT!” doesn’t separate devotion from meditation; it finds the seam where they meet, and lets the listener linger there.
Fish and Scale – Elf
Fish And Scale Gathers Mysticism And Memory On Elf
On Elf, Fish And Scale, the alias of German songwriter Roland Wälzlein, gathers eleven tracks into a hushed, magnetic whole. New songs sit beside defining cuts from his path so far, but the real thread is mood: soulful folk brushed with a mystical touch, built on a voice that can burn, soften, then suddenly reach for the light. The arrangements feel carefully hand-stitched, like winter wood and candle smoke, with melodies that lean toward the intimate and the uncanny.
What gives Elf its weight is the life inside it. Wälzlein’s lyrics keep circling the essential questions, shaped by a childhood heart operation and later transformed by a silent retreat. That history doesn’t read as confession; it pulses through the songs as clarity. This is music that opens the heart, then asks it to listen harder.
Brandes – Love in Two Degrees
Brandes Turns Heartbreak Into A Quiet, Jangling Reckoning
On “Love in Two Degrees,” Brandes folds folk-poetry and spoken word into something lean, bruised and strangely luminous. The UK-based singer-songwriter — also known as author and former Labour MP Peter Bradley — lets a half-spoken vocal ride over jangling guitar and a driving beat, giving the song the nervous pulse of The Pretenders with the shadowy emotional reach of Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave. It’s a song about the wreckage of love, but also the dangerous hope that follows it, when spring arrives and you’re not quite sure whether you’ve found something real or only convinced yourself you have.
That tension is exactly where Brandes thrives. His writing moves with clarity and restraint, drawing from the same reflective, confessional instinct that made The Distance Between Dreams resonate. With Still Life on the horizon, this first single feels like a patient, unsentimental statement of intent: intimate, literate, and quietly devastating.
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