New music
Thomas H. Green
The chorus to Working Men’s Club’s song “Money is Mine” usually runs, “Endless depression, it’s time/Suicide is yours when the money is mine.” Presented as the penultimate song of their set, frontman Syd Minksy-Sargeant distils this. Grim-faced, his hand twisting about under his tee-shirt as if suffering from an untenable itch, he spits “endless depression” and “suicide” into the mic on a jarring loop, backed up every inch by harsh, dark, techno-adjacent battering. It’s a moment that sums the night up.Appearing a couple of years ago from rural Yorkshire, Working Men’s Club are a contradiction Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Even the jolliest number on Micah P Hinson’s new album, a banjo-pickin’, wistful campfire jig entitled “Waking on Eggshells”, has him singing, “Give me a knife, I’ll show you my vein”, alongside offers to “blow out your brain” with various firearms, and proclamations he “must be going insane”.If the listener is after jollity, best look elsewhere then, but those searching for world-weary Americana could do worse than settle down, lonely and broken, with these 10 tracks from the Texas-raised singer.Hinson has released numerous albums since he appeared 20 years ago. He has a penchant for Read more ...
joe.muggs
I had high hopes for this show. After all, Eska Mtungwazi is pretty much the only singer on earth I’d go out of my way to hear sing Joni Mitchell songs.Not only does she have the necessary vocal range and control, but her own sole solo album sits exactly in the right intersection of folk, jazz and experimental songwriting to suggest she’s got the stylistic fluidity to carry it off. And she’s an amazing performer. She may have only made that one album in 2015, but her work with everyone from Grace Jones and UNKLE to Tony Allen and Matthew Herbert over many years has demonstrated that she’s one Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There are moments when a very great jazz musician makes her or his ideas flow naturally, unstoppably and with complete conviction. And when one is in a tiny venue and can feel the joyous intensity with which every single person in the room is listening… there are few if any musical experiences that can match it.Yes, improvisation is by its nature that most unpredictable of crafts. Charles Mingus said that “trying to play the truth of what I am” was difficult because he was changing all the time. Pianist Keith Jarrett would complain about the pressure of having to be simultaneously both the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Carl Cox is one of the key DJs of his generation, the generation that propagated the club culture which blossomed from the European acid house/rave scene (and originally, of course, from black American house and techno).Going through various musical stages Cox ended up as “the three-deck wizard”, focusing on tougher techno-centric sounds. These are the core of his fifth album, and first in over a decade. Utilising analogue equipment dug out of his garage, he achieves mixed results, but the best of Electronic Generations, despite its uninspiring title, has solid exhilarating whip-bang foot- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Merrell Fankhauser's first outing on record was with Californian instrumental surf band The Impacts, who issued their sole album in 1963. Thereafter, he was the prime mover in an unbroken succession of pop, psychedelic and freak-rock bands. His first solo album arrived in 1976.Commercial success? None that was measurable. The Impacts had a track titled “Wipe Out” but The Surfaris scored a hit with a different instro with the same name. His top-notch psychedelic-era band Fapardokly were only heard as part of an album with random other Fankhauser-related tracks which was issued in early 1968. Read more ...
Tom Carr
Jamie Lenman is as cult an icon as cult icons can get. The former guitarist, song-writer, frontman of Reuben, a band unfortunately most notorious for breaking up, but still dearly beloved by a devoted, passionate fanbase.Lenman has since carved for himself his own niche as a solo artist, kickstarting his solo venture with 2013’s double-sided debut album Muscle Memory. A handful of albums and an EP have followed, cementing his crown as one of the UK’s lesser-known but underrated alternative rock stars.Returning with his fourth album, The Atheist, Lenman sets his stall out on a smoothed-out Read more ...
joe.muggs
Quite how Shabaka Hutchings manages to be Shabaka Hutchings is one of the great mysteries of modern culture, and one that could probably teach us all a lot of value to society if we ever worked it out. From the devastating energy of The Comet Is Coming and Sons Of Kemet to the gentlest of shakuhachi experiments posted near daily on his social media, he consistently pushes the boundaries of style and genre. He’s played with everyone from Courtney Pine to the Sun Ra Arkestra, Mulatu Astatke to the Ligeti String Quartet, and he’s still only in his thirties. And on top of that, he is a mentor to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Christeene is not so much a musical entity, as a performative assault, an artist who pushes drag somewhere visceral, caustic, wilfully edgy and defiantly unpolished. The creation of New York-based, Louisiana-raised Paul Soileau, her videos and shows have thus far probably been more important than her albums, but her third raises the bar.Where previously her music has been rap-laden, post-electroclash, the excellently titled Midnite Fukk Train is more fully-formed, in New York’s underground punk rock tradition. And she nails it.Accompanied by her Fukkn Band, the album has eight tracks and is Read more ...
joe.muggs
There can be few currently operating musicians who have a sound as distinctive as Craig Fortnam’s. Whether solo or with his erstwhile band The North Sea Radio Orchestra, his writing has a kind of zig-zagging melody that’s part Robert Wyatt, part early Kate Bush, part medieval, part super modern, but all Fortnam. And that’s as true on this collection of 12 songs, each – as the title hints – recorded (with a “b-side”) in the space of a month and released on the full moon over the course of a year. You wouldn’t know, though, that this wasn’t conceived and recorded as a Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When most of us fall victim to things beyond our control, the impulse is to howl into the abyss, scream to the stars, wave our fist at clouds. Most of us, of course, aren’t Neil Young.While the raging wildfires that destroyed the singer’s home in 2018 are unlikely to be the sole driving force behind this collection of environmentally-focused songs (he hitched his horse to that wagon decades ago), they certainly seem to have focused his ire and given him a theme to roll with for World Record, his 42nd studio album.Following the success of 2021's Barn, Young sticks to familiar ground with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Very little points to anything specific. Parts of “Superseded” nod towards the 1968 Pretty Things’s track “Eagle’s Son”. Elsewhere in the set, a circular bass guitar figure is reminiscent of a motif from Spirit’s “1984”. But for a band so explicitly looking to rock’s psychedelic lineage, the influences are effortlessly subsumed into the whole to become mostly invisible foundations rather than noticeable elements of the superstructure.This London show by Nick Saloman’s Bevis Frond is nominally to promote last year’s album, Little Eden. The encore is its final track “Dreams of Flying”. Read more ...