Udo Dirkschneider has done a very cool thing and recreated the classic Accept album Balls to the Wall to celebrate it’s 40th anniversary with the help of some excellent friends, and it’s pretty damn amazing. Let’s start with Joakim Broden of Sabaton’s duet on the opener “Balls to the Wall”; what a great remake with a darker vocal style. The music is very faithful to the original recording, with precision heavy guitars, bass and drums punching hard, and great vocal duets.

Nothing is the third album from DARKSIDE: nine transmissions of negative space, telepathic seance, and spectral improvisation. On their first two reinventions, Nicolás Jaar and Dave Harrington entered the studio with a clutch of scattered ideas to mold into what became the revered Psychic(2013) and Spiral (2021). But Nothing reflects a search for form borne out of spontaneous elliptical jams, acoustic riffing, and digital levitations. And in a fundamental shift from their first dozen years as a band, the duo recruited their longtime friend and collaborator, the drummer and instrument designer Tlacael Esparza, to become a full-time member.

Though Bob Wills has long been heralded as a country-music icon (an inspiration for artists from Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson through Lyle Lovett and Asleep at the Wheel, and toasted by Waylon Jennings in "Bob Wills Is Still the King"), the Texas fiddler considered himself more of a jazz bandleader. The Texas Playboys' signature dance-floor style of Western swing encompassed blues, jazz, country, and pop standards, with a sophistication at odds with the era's image of "hillbilly music."