When we last checked in with Jack Cooper’s Modern Nature, he and his band were drifting into territory that suggested ambiance over sturdy form on 2023’s No Fixed Point in Space. But with the rhythm section of bassist Jeff Tobias and drummer Jim Wallis augmented by new guitarist and vocalist Tarra Cunningham, the UK band’s latest, The Heat Warps, finds Cooper in the most guitar centric zone he’s explored since the heyday of his old indie rock band Ultimate Painting.

The resurrection of Strata-East is nothing short of monumental, and that’s a fact. While each album on the legendary jazz label is a masterpiece in its own right, there is perhaps no clearer line to the heart of the Strata-East psyche than Charles Tolliver and Music Inc.’s Live at Slugs’ Vol. 1 & 2.

Interior Live Oak is a striking change of pace for Cass McCombs. His last album Heartmind was all set pieces: eight distinct tracks with eight distinct vibes. Interior Live Oak works in fewer hues but more shades. Every song here has its own little signpost, an indelible sonic signature to situate and settle you on your trek across the record’s four exquisite sides. By the time it wraps on the barn-burning title track, you’re ready to hit play on “Priestess” and do it all over again. It’s a fully-realized ecosystem, a California of the stereo.

“Wish you were here/as I sing bloody mary to the mirror/and the chandelier begins to tremble,” sings Donovan Quinn in a charcoal shaded drawl, in the laid-back but evocative “Black Pine Estates.” It’s the first cut from the first album by Western Extra, Quinn’s project with Chris Rose of Vampire Hands and Robust Worlds, and as close as you can come, musically speaking, to getting stoned with your most well-read friend.

In this day and age, very few albums are truly lost. Some just get misplaced. Take Bay area jazz band Smoke’s 1973 album Everything, an album that should be universally acknowledged as a stone-cold classic of groove music and proto-acid jazz and yet seldom gets mentioned. A half-century later, it still sounds fresh. Spacey, funky and ambient in turn, Everything managed to anticipate so much of where twenty-first century jazz has recently wound up.

There’s serious rock and roll firepower at play in this inaugural disc from three grizzled, amp-damaged veterans. You know Bill Orcutt from his noise-jamming youth in Harry Pussy or his more recent coruscating solo electric albums. Steve Shelley comes direct from drumming through free-form grooves with Winged Wheel and, before that, from his work with Sonic Youth, the acknowledged acme of cerebral guitar interplay. And Ethan Miller is the man behind the 21st century’s last practicing classic rock band, Howlin’ Rain and, before that, the sky-scorching Comets on Fire.

East of the River Nile is a masterpiece of haunting and hazy ambience from Augustus Pablo (aka Horace Swaby), whose plaintive melodica leads waft through these dubbed-out instrumentals like fragrant and heady strains of ganja mist.

The Leeds, UK group The Sorcerers have long excelled at making an irresistible brand of action exotica, cooked up from Sun Ra records, Ethio-jazz, Moondog minimalism and funky library grooves. The return of original keyboardist Johnny Richards, bringing with him a battery of vintage synths, gives their fourth album Other Worlds and Habitats an eerie, sci-fi glow and sprinkles everything in moondust. The result is an album of thick spacey global jams made up of vibes, horns, flutes, synths and one of the most rock solid rhythm sections out there.