Since its debut in 2019, mòs ensemble has turned into an eight-piece band guided by a collective vision, with a preference for areas where genres overlap or cease to matter, where rich arrangements of voices and other instruments become fully realized. The band members are active with an impressive list of bands and projects – in pop, jazz and remote areas -, and relinquish this broad-mindedness with a self-evident love for adventure and exciting interaction. The result is a collective in continual transformation, maintaining a balancing act between wonder and determination. Their latest album Pets & Therapy is the sound of a band still honing its sound, refusing to settle for a formula. Not because they’re trying to adapt to the whims of the day, but because their inner urges compel them to. It’s spellbinding to witness how this octet has managed to refine its art while keeping that sense of unpredictable discovery intact. If anything, the ongoing tension between apparent contradictions is what makes their third album such a winner. By now, labels like pop, jazz and chamber music hardly matter anymore. mòs ensemble became a band that swiftly switches from light-footed energy to dense drama, from dreamy fragility to punkish power, from melancholia to euphoria, and from the direct to the whimsical. Recorded in the spring and fall of 2022 in Ghent and Milan, Pets & Therapy boasts eleven songs. It is at once more compact and nimble then its predecessors Limbs (2019) and Behind The Marble (2022). As well as more elaborate and ingenious, the separate parts of the bands merging more fluently while keeping their distinctive individual identities intact.

Brooklyn singer-songwriter Jackie West’s songs follow her protagonists across city blocks, into and out of different rented rooms, and down farflung highways that form backdrops for liminal moments in her life. But even when she describes feeling lost -whether in someone else or in the world- West never sounds less than certain of her capacity to navigate the situation, singing in a voice that seems to be able to phrase any thought indelibly. More than two years after her first EP (Find Indigo), out in 2022, her debut album, Close to the Mystery (out May 10th via Ruination Records Co.), threads together moments of searching and reaching out from a variety of relationships and settings. Its masterful baroque-pop songs form abstract scenes in a larger story about a self and worldview taking shape. The varied musical treatments mimic her changes in setting and vantage. She breaks up sophisticated harmonies recalling bossa nova and classic R&B with cycling chord progressions influenced by folk (Tiny Flowers ii), progressive pop, and shoegaze (Snow Amplified). Led by producer/mixer/multi-instrumentalist Sarah Pedinotti (Lip Talk, Kalbells), West’s team of crack musicians accommodate these intrepid shifts, including Shahzad Ismaily, guitarist Adam Brisbin, Nico Osborne (Nicomo), singer-songwriter Katy Pinke, and more. Recorded live with the band, West’s alluring, jazz-inflected vocals sit commandingly at the center of the mix, bringing a diverse collection of classic singers—Sibylle Baier, Vashti Bunyan, Hope Sandoval, Peggy Lee.