New music
Kieron Tyler
Issued in September 1974, Hall of the Mountain Grill was Hawkwind’s fifth LP. The follow-up to 1973’s live double album The Space Ritual Alive in Liverpool and London, it found the band in a position which seemed unlikely considering their roots in, and continued commitment to, West London’s freak scene. Their June 1972 single “Silver Machine” had charted and, irrespective of what they represented or espoused, Hawkwind had breached the mainstream.Nonetheless, Hall of the Mountain Grill didn’t chart high – in the UK, it peaked at 16 in late September 1974: when Mike Oldfield’s Hergest Ridge Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
According to legend, Glasgow can be a tough place for a support band a crowd do not warm to. Therefore brotherly duo Faux Real were perhaps taking a risk when they elected to bound into the audience during the first number in their Wet Leg support slot. It was greeted with mostly puzzlement from early attendees, but when they repeated the trick 30 minutes later - finding space and sprinting towards each other before jumping into the air with high kicks - the reaction was much more enthusiastic. The pair had mixed up synth-heavy pop of varying quality with relentless, hard working Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Detroit musician, Blue Note artist and expressive saxophonist Dave McMurray’s fourth album for the label, I Love Life Even When I’m Hurting, sets out to celebrate his home town, and his own life, and life in general. Warren Zevon once said wisely: “Enjoy every sandwich.” McMurray would likely enjoy the whole loaf. The phrase “I love Life Even When I’m Hurting” was seeded and conceived in the wake of a lonely death of a friend who had succumbed in body and spirit to a long, isolating illness. Out of that pain comes the fuel of resilience – a fuel that ignites his music and sax-playing too.“Man Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Jimmy Cliff (b 1948) is one of Jamaican music’s biggest names. Raised in the countryside, he went to Kingston in his teens and persuaded record shop owner Leslie Kong to record him. The resulting song, “Hurricane Hattie”, was the first of a string of local hits but in the late Sixties he moved to London and, working with Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, his songs such as “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” and “Vietnam”, the latter a favourite of Bob Dylan, reached a far wider audience, becoming hits in Europe.In 1972 Cliff played the lead role in the film The Harder They Come, about a Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Noura Mint Seymali is possessed of the most extraordinary voice; its very fabric is electrifying, its reach, power and depth cut from an entirely different cloth to the rest of us. Maybe it’s a cloth of gold. And then there is her axe-hero husband Jeich Ould Chighaly’s shapeshifting, inventive guitar work, its distorted fizz and fuzz redolent of Seventies Glam and heavy rock melded into Mauritanian desert blues – and just as addictive. The guitar lines twist, smoulder, spark and melt like solder, with the traditional andine acoustic harp that Noura Mint plays and uses to define her music’s Read more ...
Guy Oddy
In the main, it could be assumed that Snarky Puppy’s bandleader, Michael League sleeps soundly in his bed every night. For sure, his band’s latest collaboration with Jules Buckley’s Metropole Orkest focuses on the land of dreams and is a generally calming soundtrack for drifting pleasantly into the arms of Morpheus.That is, apart from the unsettling and somewhat disorientating “Chimera”. Alone among the tunes on Somni, it’s anything but relaxed and seductive. This rather forceful track could be an imaginary collaboration between Bristol’s post-jazzers, Get The Blessing and Charles Mingus’ Read more ...
Guy Oddy
This week, UK electronica originals Cabaret Voltaire hit Birmingham on their penultimate tour before they finally put their synthesizers into storage and call it quits this time next year. For a band that have been going (on and off) since 1973, however, they were seriously on fire – with no suggestion that they should be considering permanent retirement any time soon.Richard H Kirk may have passed away in 2021, but Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson, who had both left the fold more than 30 years ago, put on a fine show and paid tribute to their fallen comrade early in the proceedings. Read more ...
mark.kidel
Keaton Henson is a master of dark introspection and unashamed vulnerability, a 21st century manifestation of what used to be called bed-sit blues. There isn’t a shred of extrovert joy in his latest album, where he explores, with forensic authenticity and a gift for poetic lyrics, a miasma of self-doubt, regret and resignation. “Don’t I just know how to fuck things up” he sings, almost mantra-like. It’s very British, this gentle and almost whimsical self-deprecation, but unless you’re seeking a homeopathic remedy – in which like cures like – for you own despair, this might be an album to Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Barbra Streisand has given her blessing to Where We Fall (Backwards Dog Records), an album of six covers and five original songs. She wrote to her 1.8 million Instagram followers: "[Jason] just gave me his new album […] and it stopped me in my tracks. His sound, his soul, his musicality. I’m sooo proud to be his mama!" Streisand’s son Jason Gould is also the "true" son of Elliott Gould – as opposed to Ross and Monica from Friends, who are merely his fictional children in his role of Jack Geller, a "pater simulatus" with enduring celebrity status in his own right.
There you have it: at Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Leisure Process issued four singles between March 1982 and May 1983. Signed to Epic Records, the electropop-inclined duo was primed for success. Debut 45 “Love Cascade” was Radio 1 DJ Peter Powell’s record of the week. At the other end of the coolness spectrum, John Peel also played the single. A Leisure Process Peel session was recorded on 10 March 1982.Another factor feeding into the perception Leisure Process was ready for take off was the identity of their producer: Martin Rushent. He was integral to shaping British pop of the period. His work with Altered Images, The Human League and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The first live performance at the inaugural Riga Music Week is by Saucējas (pictured above). This seven-piece vocal ensemble is avowedly Latvian. Formed in 2003 at the Latvian Academy of Culture, their singing, though polyphonic, allows space for solo lines within the framework of the collective voice. Drones and rounds are incorporated. A kinship with runo song is clear. In traditional costume, they embody an aspect of Mother Latvia: that this country wants to celebrate its traditions, ensuring they are not lost.
Saucējas are tremendously powerful. Experiencing them at Riga Music Week’s Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Implosion is a purely instrumental, collaborative album of cinematic, dystopian sounds from dubstepper and extreme electronica experimentalist the Bug and his pal Ghost Dubs. However, rather than working on the same tracks together, as could be implied, they have each applied their production know-how to alternate tunes on the two discs that make up this recording.
That isn’t to say that the sounds on Implosion swing from one flavour to another and back again. This is an album with a singular vision that is consistently eerie and sinister and has much in common with early 1990s ambient Read more ...