"Yenbett" arrives like a hot wind that doesn’t ask permission. It lifts sand, memory, voltage, and suddenly you’re dancing in a place that feels ancient and uncomfortably current at the same time. Noura Mint Seymali has always worked in this unstable zone - where tradition isn’t preserved in formaldehyde but wired, amplified, and thrown into the night - and with this third album she sounds less like a curator of heritage and more like a force of nature that happens to know exactly where it comes from.

What strikes first is the voice: elastic, commanding, almost architectural. Seymali sings as if her throat were a resonant chamber rather than a body part, stretching phrases into ululations that feel ritualistic without ever slipping into museum-piece reverence. There’s authority here, but also urgency - this is not the sound of history being politely remembered, it’s history insisting on being heard over the noise of now.

The album’s structure already tells you a lot. Short, almost ceremonial interludes open doors for longer, more kinetic pieces, giving "Yenbett" the feel of a sequence rather than a playlist. The opening invocation with the ardine is sparse, meditative, and deceptively calm; when the electrified version crashes in shortly after, it’s less a remix than a revelation. Tradition and electricity aren’t in dialogue - they’re the same sentence, spoken louder.

Musically, the band operates with a kind of disciplined ferocity. Jeich Ould Chighaly’s guitar doesn’t solo in the rock sense; it coils, flickers, and worries at motifs like a thought that won’t let you sleep. The rhythm section keeps things grounded but never polite, alternating between hypnotic pulse and moments of near-collapse, as if daring the songs to fall apart (they never do). There are flashes of funk, hints of psych-rock abrasion, and stretches where repetition becomes a trance technology rather than a compositional shortcut.

Seymali’s role as a griot matters here, but not in the way liner notes often flatten it into “cultural context”. Her singing carries social weight without sounding didactic. Praise, narrative, exhortation, dance - these functions blur into each other, stitched together with a logic closer to jazz improvisation than to fixed-song formats. The lyrics may draw from Moorish poetic traditions, but the delivery is pointed, physical, and meant to move bodies as much as ideas.

What’s quietly radical about "Yenbett" is how unbothered it is by genre borders. It doesn’t ask whether it belongs to “desert blues”, “world music” or “psych rock”. It simply exists, loud and unapologetic, reminding you that categorization is mostly a concern for listeners, not for music that knows what it’s doing. If there’s humor here, it’s in that confidence: the album dances while critics scramble for labels.

By the time "Yenbett" winds down, you’re left with the sense that this isn’t just a strong return after a long gap - it’s a tightening of vision. Seymali sounds fully in command of her lineage and fearless about bending it to her will. This is music with deep roots and sharp edges, ritual that sweats, tradition that moves forward without looking over its shoulder. Desert music for dense cities, yes - but also proof that the future doesn’t have to forget where it learned how to sing.

There are records that present themselves, and others that quietly arrive because they had to exist. "Fulcrum" belongs to the second category. Leslie Keffer doesn’t dramatize grief, doesn’t aestheticize pain for effect, and - mercifully - doesn’t explain it away. Instead, she lets sound do what language consistently fails to do: sit with the unsayable without trying to fix it.

Written in the immediate aftermath of a devastating loss, "Fulcrum" unfolds as a chronological diary of becoming unbalanced and slowly, uncertainly, finding a new axis. The title is precise: a fulcrum is not stability itself, but the point around which weight shifts. This album lives exactly there, in that fragile zone where emotional mass redistributes itself and nothing feels reliable - not even silence.

Musically, Keffer works with restraint and intuition rather than overt drama. The palette leans toward ambient forms, but not the polished, antiseptic kind. These tracks breathe, hesitate, and sometimes seem unsure whether they want to continue. "Journey" and "Passage" open with a sense of motion that feels inward rather than forward, as if walking through a corridor you’ve memorized but suddenly can’t recognize. Textures glow softly, then dim, as though testing how much light the moment can tolerate.

What’s striking is how "Fulcrum" avoids the expected emotional arc. There’s no neat progression from darkness to redemption. Pieces like "Flicker" and "Liminal" hover in states of partial presence - neither collapse nor recovery, but something in between, where grief sharpens perception instead of dulling it. Keffer understands that mourning is not linear; it loops, doubles back, occasionally cracks a joke at the wrong moment, then apologizes to itself.

The emotional center of the record lies in its sense of connection beyond absence. "Kindred" and "Fulcrum" itself feel less like laments and more like conversations conducted at frequencies just below language. Whether one believes in telepathy, spiritual continuity, or simply the brain’s stubborn refusal to let go, the music doesn’t argue. It listens. And listening, here, is an act of devotion.

The closing track, "Mirror", stretches out over nearly fifteen minutes, and it earns every second. Rather than resolving anything, it gently refracts what came before - memories, tones, emotional residues - into something quieter but heavier. This is where the album stops processing and starts coexisting. Not peace, exactly. More like acceptance’s awkward cousin who doesn’t know where to put their hands.

Leslie Keffer, whose work often explores healing, spirituality, and sound as a relational force, doesn’t position herself as a guide or a guru here. She’s present as a human being, unshielded, letting the music carry weight it wasn’t designed to carry - and somehow managing not to break it. There’s no catharsis on demand, no inspirational slogan hiding in the reverb. Just honesty, held carefully.

"Fulcrum" is not an easy listen, but it’s a necessary one. It doesn’t ask for sympathy or reverence. It asks for attention. And if you give it that - patiently, without multitasking - it gives something back. Not answers. But a place to stand, briefly, while the world recalibrates around loss.

"Paperopolis" doesn’t ask to be understood. It asks to be entered, preferably without a map, maybe slightly jet-lagged, with your internal compass gently malfunctioning. Lorenzo’s Oil - the meeting point between Spencer Clark (that indefatigable cartographer of hypnagogic pop zones) and Lorenzo Camera of Mondo Riviera - don’t build an album so much as a soft, unstable city made of sounds, flickering images, and half-remembered nights.

Musically, this record lives in the cracks between genres, and seems very comfortable there. Synths don’t behave like synths so much as weather systems: pads drift, sequences wobble, rhythms arrive as if broadcast from a late-night TV station nobody remembers tuning into. There’s a deliberate lo-fi tactility at play, but it’s not nostalgia for its own sake. These textures feel used, handled, smudged - like flyers peeled off a wall and reattached somewhere else.

The long opener, "Neo-Paperopolis Jump Suite", sets the coordinates immediately. It unfolds in chapters rather than movements, sliding from naïve keyboard figures into a gently propulsive groove, then dissolving into warped reflections of club music that feels filtered through fogged glass. Nothing here rushes; momentum is achieved through accumulation, not force. Clark’s instinct for psychedelic drift meets Camera’s sense of melodic suggestion, and the result is oddly physical for such a slippery record.

Throughout the album, rhythm functions less as a grid and more as a suggestion. "Upworld Groove (TV Version)" pulses with the logic of something overheard rather than performed, while "You Wouldn’t Understand It’s Swamp Thing" leans into a narcotic bounce that feels part dub, part dream-jazz, part imaginary soundtrack to a cartoon that never existed. There’s humor here too - not punchline humor, but that sideways grin you get when something is clearly enjoying its own strangeness.

Shorter tracks like "The Neverending Skylines of Taipei" work almost like postcards: quick, impressionistic flashes that hint at places without describing them. Meanwhile, "Central Jungle, Paperopolis" pulls everything inward, layering synth lines and rhythmic debris into a slow, humid sprawl that feels less composed than grown. The music doesn’t climax; it thickens, like air before rain.

What makes "Paperopolis" compelling is its refusal to resolve. There’s no grand statement, no conceptual hammer brought down at the end. Instead, Clark and Camera operate like urban explorers of the subconscious, documenting zones where past and future, kitsch and ritual, dance music and private hallucination coexist without argument. It’s psychedelic music that doesn’t insist on transcendence - it just opens a door behind your head and leaves it ajar.

In a time when so much electronic music is obsessed with clarity, "Paperopolis" opts for blur. And in doing so, it feels oddly honest. This is not a city of monuments, but of alleyways, side rooms, and places you swear you’ve been before - maybe in a dream, maybe on a cheap TV channel at 3 a.m. Either way, you’re already there.

If funk were a kitchen, Lettuce would be the crew that sharpens the knives before you even sit down. "Cook" doesn’t arrive with revolutionary intent, nor does it pretend to reinvent the stove. Instead, it does something rarer and arguably harder in 2025: it sounds confident. Not loud-about-it confident, but the quiet assurance of musicians who know exactly when to add salt and when to let the groove simmer.

Lettuce have been together long enough for telepathy to replace rehearsal-room debate, and that longevity is all over "Cook". The sextet - born, famously, at Berklee - have always treated funk as a living organism rather than a museum piece. Here, the lineage is explicit but never stiff. James Brown’s ghost nods approvingly, Tower of Power’s horn discipline looms large, and yet the band never sinks into tribute-band inertia. This is funk as practice, not reenactment.

Tracks like "Clav It Your Way" and "7 Tribes" lean hard into rhythmic elasticity: Deitch’s drumming snaps and breathes, Coomes’ bass moves with the calm authority of someone who knows the floor won’t give way, and the horn section cuts with precision rather than brute force. The sound is thick but not crowded - three-dimensional, as the band themselves suggest - where every element knows its role and enjoys it.

The album’s pacing is clever without being showy. The brief "Sesshins" interludes function less as skits and more as palate cleansers, resetting the ear before the next full-bodied course. When Lettuce slow things down, as on "Breathe" or "Ghosts of Yest", they resist sentimentality. These tracks don’t melt; they hover. Nigel Hall’s vocals glide rather than plead, and the keys shimmer with restraint, proving that funk doesn’t need to sweat constantly to remain physical.

Covering Keni Burke’s "Rising to the Top" is a risky move - sacred territory for groove aficionados - but Lettuce approach it with respect and just enough swagger to justify the attempt. Elsewhere, "Keep On", co-written with Emilio Castillo, wears its message plainly, almost stubbornly so. In an era obsessed with irony, there’s something faintly rebellious about a song that just tells you to persist and means it.

What "Cook" ultimately reveals is a band thinking beyond records as isolated objects. The wine, the recipe book, the scholarship initiative - these could feel gimmicky in other hands. Here, they read as extensions of a philosophy: music as something shared, embodied, and passed on. You don’t just listen to Lettuce; you gather around them.

Is "Cook" radical? No. Is it necessary? Probably more than we admit. It’s an album that trusts groove as a form of knowledge, repetition as refinement, and pleasure as something worth taking seriously. Lettuce aren’t chasing the future or embalming the past. They’re doing what seasoned cooks do best: feeding people well, night after night, and making it look easy.

There are albums that politely ask for your attention, and others that grab you by the collar and whisper, "don’t resist". "Curandero" belongs firmly to the second category. This first collaboration between Steve Roach and SoRIAH doesn’t merely play - it performs a function. What that function is depends on the listener: meditation, confrontation, trance, or a gentle sonic shove into unfamiliar inner territory.

Steve Roach, a foundational figure in ambient and tribal electronic music, has spent decades refining a language that moves slowly but speaks in deep tones. His long relationship with the desert landscapes of the American Southwest isn’t a romantic footnote; it’s structural. On "Curandero", his synthesisers, sequencers and ritual percussion don’t decorate the space - they prepare it, laying down a terrain that feels ancient without cosplay, expansive without drifting into vagueness.

Enter SoRIAH, whose throat singing is less vocal performance and more presence. His overtone work, rooted in Khöömei traditions yet clearly shaped by a life of travel and hybrid practice, doesn’t float above Roach’s electronics - it wrestles with them, merges, splits, reappears elsewhere. The result is not a fusion in the polite world-music sense, but a genuine interdependence: remove one voice and the structure collapses.

Tracks like "Analog Cave" and "Shadow Current" unfold with ritual patience. Rhythms pulse rather than push, suggesting movement without destination. There’s a physicality here - low frequencies press against the chest, while higher overtones shimmer like heat mirages. Online commentary often frames the album as healing, but that word can be misleading. This isn’t spa music. It’s closer to controlled exposure: the sound equivalent of standing very still while something large circles you.

"Stars of Darkness" and "Shard Tribe" introduce denser layers, where Roach’s sequenced patterns begin to feel almost architectural, and SoRIAH’s voice fractures into multiple spectral roles - chant, breath, warning signal. At moments, it’s unsettling; at others, strangely grounding. The humour, if any, lies in the album’s absolute lack of irony. In 2025, committing this hard to ritual seriousness is practically subversive.

What makes "Curandero" compelling is its refusal to explain itself. The references to indigenous knowledge, shamanic practice and altered states aren’t presented as concepts to be consumed, but as conditions to be entered - carefully, respectfully, and at your own risk. Roach and SoRIAH don’t promise enlightenment. They offer a doorway, hold it open, and let the sound do the rest.

This is music that doesn’t ask whether you believe in its power. It proceeds on the assumption that sound, given enough space and intention, will do what it has always done: unsettle, connect, and remind us that listening can still be an act of transformation. Whether you call that healing or simply attention sharpened to a blade is entirely up to you.