On a beautiful 80-degree day in the Willamette Valley of northwest Oregon, the city of Albany hosted the first of its 2026 free summer concert series. The River Rhythms summer concerts in Monteith Park first began in 1984 on the banks at the confluence of the Calapooia and Willamette rivers. On Thursday, July 9, 2026, Kim Wilson and the Fabulous Thunderbirds headlined, taking the stage shortly after 7:00 p.m.

The Fabulous Thunderbirds first formed in 1974 in Austin, Texas, with Kim Wilson on vocals and harmonica and Jimmie Vaughan on lead guitar. Over the past five decades, band members have come and gone, with Wilson remaining the constant as the band’s frontman and the glue that holds everything together. The current lineup consists of Kim Wilson on lead vocals and harmonica, Johnny Moeller on lead guitar, Bob Welch on keyboards and guitar, Rudy Albin on drums, and Steve Kirsty on bass.

After being introduced, the band took the stage and dove into “Rush Hour Blues” without Kim Wilson, who joined them about a minute later. Johnny Moeller wailed on his axe while Bob Welch added keyboard runs over the driving beat provided by Albin’s drums and Kirsty’s bass. Barrett Strong’s “Money” followed and was reminiscent of the Beatles’ version, but it wasn’t until the band launched into “My Babe” that Wilson picked up the harmonica. By this point, Welch had stepped out from behind the keyboards, strapped on a guitar, and began trading licks with Moeller as his playing transitioned from a chicken-scratch sound to stratospheric peals.

Their set comprised 14 songs, including a drum-driven, dueling-guitar version of Sam & Dave’s “Wrap It Up,” which became a hit single for the Fabulous Thunderbirds in 1986. “Low Down Woman,” from the band’s second studio album, released in 1980, had Wilson spitting out the lyrics:

“Well, sometimes I wonder
Why do I keep that low-down girl of mine”

Bob Welch took the lead, alternating with Wilson’s wailing mouth harp. By the time the band was cooking in overdrive, they broke into Herbie Hancock’s 1962 composition “Watermelon Man,” with Wilson leading the charge on harmonica and Moeller stepping out with stratospheric peals. “Don’t Bite the Hand That Feeds You” came from Wilson’s 1994 solo release That’s Life, with Welch back on the keys, interplaying with Moeller’s guitar while Wilson straddled them with his harp.

The final song of the more than 90-minute set was the Fabulous Thunderbirds’ biggest hit and signature song, “Tuff Enuff,” from their 1986 album Tuff Enuff. After Wilson introduced the band members, they launched into the song with Moeller’s and Welch’s fingers flying across their fretboards as they traded dueling guitar lines, both individually and in tandem. Albin’s drums and Kirsty’s bass drove the beat with an explosive rhythm, sandwiching Wilson’s vocals as he sang:

“I’d climb the Empire State, fight for Muhammad Ali
Just to have you, baby, close to me”

The band returned for an encore with “The Crawl” from their second studio album, What’s the Word, released in 1980. The song was originally written by Eddie Shuler and Raymond Victorian and first recorded by Guitar Junior in 1958. Wilson encouraged the crowd to do the Crawl while the band rocked out with more stratospheric guitar runs dancing over the infectious beat. Wilson thanked the crowd as the band made its final exit, and the audience responded with enthusiastic appreciation.

The post Fabulous Thunderbirds: Monteith Park Gig Review appeared first on Blues Rock Review.

been stuck in
a forest lately
and I keep
burning it down 

Ruby Haunt have spent more than a decade making music that feels built for empty streets, apartment windows, and the uneasy hour when memory begins rewriting the evening. Since Hurt appeared in 2015, the Los Angeles duo have developed a patient form of dream-pop and slowcore, led by hushed singing, expressive guitars, and arrangements that seem to widen around every private admission. Their DIY discipline has helped turn that quiet persistence into a devoted following, one release at a time.

Big Room, the first glimpse of their eleventh album, Paper Halo, carries that history forward with greater scale and a sharper sense of motion; a meditation on longing, repetition, and the search for something just out of reach. The track opens a new era for the project, pairing a bigger, more immediate sound with the emotional atmosphere that’s always been central to their music. Big Room sets the tone for an album that explores memory, transformation, and the spaces we return to in search of ourselves.

The song circles a plea for rescue, returning to Eden as both shelter and impossible destination. Its central image of a forest repeatedly burned down gives the longing a self-destructive edge, while the search for a lost sound suggests someone trying to recover the signal that once pointed home. Repetition becomes emotional gravity; each return lands with more weight.

That idea comes alive in the accompanying video, a strange romance staged along a darkened highway. Ruby Haunt perform inside a glowing square, contained within the frame while the road keeps stretching beyond them. The imagery carries the nocturnal unease of Lost Highway, then slips onto a motorcycle with two dreamers racing through a tunnel that seems to bend time. When the route opens into a neon city somewhere in Asia, the film trades abstraction for intimacy, following the pair into their dwelling as though the camera has crossed from fantasy into a private life already in progress.

Watch the video for Big Room below:

Big Room is spacious without losing the closeness that anchors their work, and its emotional pull comes from the sense that every escape route leads back to the same unanswered need. Fans of Beach House, Nation of Language, Black Marble, and The Radio Dept. will recognize the balance of cool restraint and bruised feeling, though Ruby Haunt remain firmly inside their own midnight world.

With Paper Halo due in fall 2026, followed by more videos, West Coast dates, Mexico City, and a European tour, “Big Room” opens the album cycle with confidence, mystery, and a beautiful, deeply felt ache.

Order Big Room here.

Catch Ruby Haunt live:

2026

• 24 October — Mexico City, Mexico
• 9 December — San Diego, California
• 11 December — Vancouver, Canada
• 12 December — Seattle, Washington
• 13 December — Portland, Oregon
• 15 December — San Francisco, California
• 16 December — Los Angeles, California

2027

• 11 March — New York, New York
• 14 March — Cologne, Germany
• 16 March — Utrecht, Netherlands
• 17 March — Hamburg, Germany
• 18 March — Copenhagen, Denmark
• 19 March — Berlin, Germany
• 20 March — Prague, Czechia
• 21 March — Vienna, Austria
• 23 March — Munich, Germany
• 24 March — Aarau, Switzerland
• 25 March — Paris, France
• 27 March — London, United Kingdom

Follow Ruby Haunt:

• Instagram
• YouTube
• Spotify

The post “Been Stuck in a Forest Lately” — Los Angeles Dreampop Duo Ruby Haunt Share Video for “Big Room” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Blues Rock Review is exclusively premiering the new music video for Reed Turchi’s latest single, “Keep On Drinkin’,” a raw, live-in-the-studio performance that revisits one of the earliest songs from the acclaimed singer-songwriter’s catalog with the perspective that only time can provide.

The performance arrives ahead of the 15th anniversary reissue of Turchi’s Road Ends in Water, due out October 9 via Gitcha Records. Originally recorded as a series of basement sessions featuring special guest Luther Dickinson of North Mississippi Allstars, the album has never been available on streaming platforms or pressed on vinyl, receiving only a limited personal CD release when it was first recorded.

Musically, the track pairs Turchi’s storytelling with the driving rhythm section of Cameron Weeks and Chris Reali, while Dickinson’s fuzz-drenched slide guitar injects another layer of intensity.

Looking back on the song nearly 15 years later, Turchi said revisiting it gave him a deeper appreciation for both the writing and the story he was trying to tell.

“It’s a funny thing to revisit this song I wrote nearly half my life ago, and to hear some of my songwriting and guitar playing tendencies from way back then, when I was just starting out. ‘Giving new voice to an old song’ feels like an appropriate phrase here, as I’ve had to figure out how I want to re-approach these lyrics both narratively and as a vocalist. While I’m not sure I’d make all the same decisions in terms of lyric writing, I do, now, feel like I have a deeper sense of the story I was trying to tell — and those are the elements I’m trying to make sure I emphasize as I sing it now.”

The musical side of the project also presented its own unique challenges. Turchi explained that relearning the original arrangements only increased his appreciation for the musicians who helped shape the first recording while allowing his current band to bring fresh interpretations to the material.

“Musically, it’s really been an interesting process to re-learn these songs both for my own guitar parts and for this new ensemble — who inevitably put their own flavor on things, as they should. Going back and learning the parts, I’m even more impressed by, and grateful for, the drumming of Cameron Weeks, the bass lines of Chris Reali, and the mind-bending delicious fuzzed-out solo that Luther Dickinson added to the track. All of which is to say, I’ve tried to find ways to incorporate those elements in this new, live-in-studio version, including learning some of Luther’s lines for my solo, and having my other bandmates (Joseph Yount, Seth Barden, and Eric Burns), pick out some of the “key” parts of the studio version to base their interpretations on.”

Turchi said the goal was never to improve upon the original recording, but rather to create something that honors the past while reflecting who he is today as an artist.

“One of my favorite poets, Ellen Bryant Voigt, has a line which I’ll paraphrase here — ‘to dig a hole to the past is to bury the living grass on either side’ — and one of the challenges with this project has been to try and ‘unearth’ the past (the original studio versions and parts), and bring them back to life in a way that doesn’t diminish any of the earlier parts. I would be a fool to think I could always make newer things ‘better,’ and so this is, ideally, somewhere in-between: a combination of the coolest things of the studio version, with the perspective and re-energizing that 15 years of reflection can offer.”

That same philosophy extended to the video itself, which was recorded live in one room at Atomic Sound in Red Hook, Brooklyn without edits or overdubs.

“We recorded these videos at Atomic Sound, in Red Hook, Brooklyn, which is a studio I’ve been eager to work in for years, and we set up all live in one room — amps out on the floor, room mics, all one-take with no editing or overdubbing. You can sense it and feel it in the way this turned out, which I’m really proud of, and appreciate Brad Wagner (video) and David Turk (audio) for doing such a great job capturing. The stakes are raised when you do it live — and this music is all about living.”

Watch Blues Rock Review’s exclusive premiere of Reed Turchi’s “Keep On Drinkin’” below.

Reed Turchi’s Road Ends in Water will be released on vinyl and CD via Gitcha Records on October 9.

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen

The post Video Premiere: Reed Turchi – “Keep On Drinkin'” featuring Luther Dickinson appeared first on Blues Rock Review.

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And it seems like it may be a vinyl collaboration.

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Mastodon have spoken about the moment that they discovered that their former guitarist Brent Hinds was dead.

Bill Kelliher, Troy Sanders and Brann Dailor were awaiting the arrival of their bags in the baggage claim area of Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport when Kelliher’s mobile phone rang, displaying an incoming call from Hinds’ ex wife Raisa Moreno. The three musicians instinctively knew that this was no mere social call.

“I was like, He’s either fucking really gone off the rails and he’s in jail, or he’s killed somebody… Or he’s dead’,” vocalist/guitarist Kelliher admits in a new interview with Kerrang! “And it was the latter.”

A founding member of the Atlanta, Georgia band, who played on every release from their 2001 debut EP Slick Leg through to 2021’s Hushed And Grim album, their eighth studio collection, Hinds died on August 20, 2025 when his Harley-Davidson motorcycle collided with an SUV in Atlanta. The guitarist had parted company with Mastodon five months earlier, the split initially conveyed as an amicable parting, a notion subsequently shot down by Hinds in a succession of angry, accusatory social media posts.

“He was going through very, very difficult times,” Troy Sanders acknowledges in the Kerrang! interview. “I don’t mean to cheapen it, but with his unhinged love of life and free spirit, he was one of two people in my life where I always felt I would get ‘the phone call’ and be very saddened, but not surprised. I hope that doesn’t sound cold.”

Mastodon recently shared a powerful and emotional 35-minute film titled The Mastodon in the Room, detailing the circumstances which led to Hinds’ exit.

Brann Dailor describes the day Hinds left the band as “horrible” but says that the decision to cut him loose came from “a place of love.”

“It was really depressing and sad and fucked up,” says the drummer. “And we just wanted that beautiful, amazing creature, Brent Hinds, to be out there serving up the honey-baked ham and screaming his head off and playing, ripping amazing, incredible, beautiful solos. We desperately wanted that guy, but he showed us time and time and time and time and time again that that person wasn’t coming back without some kind of dramatic change.

“We really were coming from a place of love,” he adds. “It’s like, maybe this will be like some kind of bottom for him. You know what I mean? You never know. We had to set some boundaries and we had to take care of our own sort of mental health.”

Watch the film below.

Between 1970 and 1972, Black Sabbath released four albums that still stand as one of the greatest hot streaks in rock – Black Sabbath, Paranoid, Master Of Reality and Vol. 4. But when it came to making their fifth album, they found the tank was empty.

“I got writer’s block,” said Tony Iommi. “It just went dead. We had the studio booked. And it was just one of those times. I really panicked: ‘Oh my God, I can’t seem to think of anything that we like!’. I could play stuff, but it just wasn’t sinking in; I didn’t like it.”

An attempt to write new songs in Los Angeles ended in failure. Panicked, the band returned to the UK and rented Clearwell Castle, in the Forest Of Dean, where things swiftly became spooky.

“We were in the dungeon playing away, and all of a sudden we saw this person walk past the door [with] a big black cloak on,” said Geezer Butler. “We thought, ‘What the hell is going on around here?’ Tony and one of the roadies ran after him. They saw him go into this other door at the end of the corridor.

“They ran after him and they were shouting at him, because they thought he was some lunatic who got into the castle. They went into the room where he had gone into and there was nobody in there; he totally disappeared. We asked the owner of the castle about it, and he told us, ‘Oh, that’s just a ghost.’ Apparently, he was the regular castle ghost! We all saw it. Tony went after him. You couldn’t miss him wearing that big black cloak.”

The ghostly apparition did the trick. The Rifflord was back.

“And then that was it,” said Iommi. “We came up with Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, and the rest came fairly shortly afterwards. The block had gone.”

Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler was blown away when Iommi presented the riff to the rest of the band.

“When Tony came up with the riff to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, it was almost like seeing your first child being born. It was the end of our musical drought… It meant the band had a present – and a future – again.”

While that signature riff is truly monumental, as with all the great Sabbath songs, there’s more to it than one thing. ‘Nobody will ever let you know/When you ask the reasons why,’ sings Ozzy, during a moment’s respite from Iommi’s razor-sharp blitzkrieg, lending the song a light-and-shade dynamic, while the song concludes with a long, instrumental jam section, à la Children Of The Grave.

“The outro to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is the heaviest shit I have ever heard in my life.’ said Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash. “To this day, I haven’t heard anything as heavy that has as much soul.”

As with the majority of Sabbath’s early material, Butler was the song’s lyricist.

“The lyrics were about the Sabbath experience, the ups and downs, the good times and the bad times, the ripoffs, the business side of it all,” he said. “‘Bog blast all of you’ was directed at the critics, the record business, the lawyers, the accountants, management, and everyone who was trying to cash in on us. It was a backs-to-the-wall rant at everyone.”

Released as the album’s lead-off single, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was the first Sabbath song to have a promo shot to accompany it. In it, the group don’t mime the lyrics or fake playing their instruments – in fact they don’t even bother to pick up their instruments at all – as they waltz through what appears to be a forest.

“That was Geezer’s garden we were walking around in,” Iommi recalled of the ‘forest’ scene. “What I remember about that is that we just turned up and that was it, really: ‘We’re doing a video!’”

The single featured a rather abrupt fade that removed the outro Slash loved, leaving the song a full two minutes shorter than the album version. It failed to chart, but Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’s place in the pantheon of rock was secure. Readers of Classic Rock voted it the fourth-best Black Sabbath song of all time, while Rolling Stone’s put it at number nine.

It’s been covered many times, by everyone from thrash veterans Anthrax to viking metallers Amon Amarth via novelty bluegrass rockers Hayseed Dixie. Some of the covers have been unexpectedly poor – Guns N’ Roses’ version at Black Sabbath’s Back To The Beginning show in 2025 was marred by Axl Rose struggling to match the cadence of Ozzy’s original vocal – and some have been unexpectedly great.

“One that surprised me, quite honestly, out of all the people that have covered our songs, was the Swedish band [the] Cardigans,” said Iommi. “They recorded Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. I heard it on a radio station in Sweden. The DJ played it for me. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘What’s this?’ I thought it was a joke at first. I was amazed at the treatment they’d done to it. It’s really good and different. Sang sweet and nice.”

Performing the album in its entirety each night.

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They built the war before they built a place for her in it. There was already a script waiting in nineteenth-century Japan. Every role had already been assigned before a battle ever began. Men inherited the battlefield. Women inherited everything the battlefield left behind: the blood to wash away, the wounds to close, the empty bowls to fill. History had already decided which hands were allowed to carry a weapon, and which were only allowed to carry the cost.

When war came, the rules became law. Women were expected to forge ammunition, prepare rations, and tend to the wounded. They were explicitly forbidden from entering the battlefield. Stay out of the war room. Stay off the front lines. Be useful, but never be remembered.

Then, in 1868, Japan began tearing itself apart. The Boshin War erupted into a civil war between the ruling Tokugawa shogunate and imperial forces seeking to restore political power to Emperor Meiji. As the conflict spread across the country, it reached the samurai domain of Aizu, where imperial troops laid siege to one of the last great strongholds of the old order.

The military’s response never changed: The men would defend Aizu, while women would wait.

Nakano Takeko read the script. Then she tore it apart.

Takeko was highly educated and exceptionally skilled with the naginata, the traditional Japanese polearm she had spent years mastering. She taught martial arts and possessed every quality expected of a samurai warrior. The only thing she lacked was permission.

She formally asked the military commanders to let her fight alongside the men defending Aizu. They refused. They answered with silence dressed up as law. “Stay behind. Wait. Be useful, but never be remembered.”

She accepted their answer only long enough to realize it changed nothing. So she stopped knocking on doors that were built to stay locked. If the establishment refused to give her a place in its ranks, she would build her own.

She gathered around twenty to thirty women, many already trained in combat, including her own mother and sister. Together they cut their hair short, dressed in men’s military clothing, armed themselves with naginatas and swords, and formed an independent fighting unit. They belonged to no official regiment. They answered to no commander. They simply walked past a chain of command that had already decided they didn’t belong. No orders. No blessing. Just conviction louder than protocol.

The imperial army waiting outside Aizu carried modern rifles. Against them stood warriors armed largely with traditional weapons, fighting a battle that history itself was beginning to leave behind.

Takeko didn’t wait for history to be kind. She led her unit in a direct charge against the enemy’s gun lines. When the imperial soldiers realized they were being attacked by an all-female force, disbelief spread faster than gunfire. Their commander reportedly ordered his men to hold their fire. Not because they were merciful, but because reality had betrayed every certainty they had ever been handed.

For one impossible moment, the world stopped making sense. Takeko didn’t waste that moment. She turned their disbelief into a weapon and drove straight through it, cutting down multiple soldiers in close-quarters combat before they could recover. Sometimes the sharpest blade isn’t steel. It’s becoming something your enemy never prepared themselves to face.

The rifle found her before the war let her finish speaking. A bullet struck her in the chest. She knew the wound would be fatal. Under samurai tradition, the head of a fallen warrior was often taken as a trophy of war, a symbol of victory and a public declaration of defeat. Even dying, Takeko refused to let the enemy write the final sentence of her story. She called for her sister. With what little time remained, she ordered her to cut off her head and bury it beneath a nearby tree before the imperial soldiers could claim it. If her story had to end, it would end in her own handwriting. The enemy could take her life, but would never take ownership of it.

Nakano Takeko died during the Battle of Aizu in 1868, but the army she created became one of the most enduring symbols of courage and defiance in Japanese history. She had been denied a place within the military establishment, yet history remembers her not because she obeyed its rules, but because she refused to let those rules define the limits of her courage.

Maybe that’s what courage really looks like. Not winning every battle. Not surviving every wound. Just refusing to let the people who underestimated you become the authors of your life.

Every generation builds its own script. It decides who belongs in the room where decisions are made and who is expected to support them from a distance. It gives those boundaries respectable names: tradition, protocol, experience. It asks the people outside them to wait patiently until someone else decides they’re ready. But doors that were never built for you rarely open because you knocked politely. Sometimes the only way into history is to stop asking for permission, gather the people who believe in the same impossible thing you do, and let your footsteps become the permission they refused to give.

The post She’s In Charge | Nakano Takeko: The Samurai Who Tore Up the Script first appeared on FemMetal – Goddesses of Metal.

Opening acts remain pending.

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