New music
Thomas H. Green
Indigo de Souza, a singer from North Carolina, has established some reputation, mostly in the States, for combining indie, pop and emotionally open lyrical heft. This is her fourth album, but her first on a larger label, Loma Vista (she was previously on Bright Eyes-associated Saddle Creek). On Precipice she lays down a fusion of chart-style femme-pop and heartfelt guitar anthems.It’s usually engaging and sometimes outstanding. Precipice was put together with musician-producer Elliott Kozel, who’s worked with SZA, Billie Eilish’s brother FINNEAS, and others. It has a polish to it – Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There can be few musicians on the planet from a more storied musical dynasty than Mádé Kuti. He is the son of Femi, the grandson of Fela. He grew up in and around Femi’s New Afrika Shrine in Lagos, international hub of all things Afrobeat. A multi-instrumentalist from an early age, and a member of his father’s band, he now cuts loose on his own. His second solo album showcases a mighty compositional talent.Mádé released an initial solo effort in 2020 but it was part of his father’s Legacy+ double package. So, in some ways, as per its title, Chapter 1: Where Does Happiness Come From? is his Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Today gradually blossoms from unpromising beginnings. LouderUK’s On The Beach event series takes place throughout the summer and runs the gamut from indie pop-rock, such as Kaiser Chiefs and Bloc Party, to dance events featuring DJs such as Bonobo and Carl Cox. As the name suggests, it all happens on Brighton’s pebbled seashore, overseen by clifftop Georgian houses. Success is dictated, to some extent, by the whims of British weather. Today is Eighties day. It’s a case in point.Beneath cloudy skies, on a muggy early evening, to a less-than-quarter full arena, Toyah (pictured left) starts her Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Great (and not so great) bands reforming, either in the studio or in the live arena, is something of a trend at the moment. However, who would have thought that the original Alice Cooper band would not only be part of this trend but the creators of one of the best new albums to emerge from it – more than 50 years since their last long-player?Of course, the name Alice Cooper never actually disappeared and, to most people, it’s the stage name of a charismatic singer who was born Vincent Furnier in Detroit in 1948. However, in the early and mid-1970s, Alice Cooper was a lairy gang of hard- Read more ...
joe.muggs
Paul Weller occupies a strange place in the cultural sphere. Especially since he was adopted as an elder statesman of Britpop in the mid 1990s, he’s been particularly beloved of a core audience whose tastes are extremely conservative. So much so, in fact, that middle-aged men who ape his classic mod haircuts are now a shorthand for meat-and-potatoes, Brexity, red-faced, pub-coke bloke-rock. Yet Weller himself is anything but conservative.From the beginning he understood the “modernist” mission of mod, his ditching of the youthful energy of The Jam for the sophistication of The Style Council Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Guitarist Louis Campbell and fiddle player Owen Spafford started playing together as teenagers in the National Youth Folk Ensemble when Sam Sweeney (of Bellowhead and Leveret) was its director. They released their first album, You Golden, three years ago. It featured audacious musical extrapolations from Playford’s English Dance Master – also a key source for Sweeney’s Leveret – and with an emphasis on ensuring an abundance space, rather than notes, in the playing.Since then they’ve mounted multi-media solo shows – Spafford’s music and art installation Welcome Here, Kind Stranger at the Royal Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Wheels of Fire was Cream’s third album. Issued in the US in June 1968 and in the UK two months later, it was a double LP. One record was of live recordings, the other of studio material. Of the nine tracks on the latter, three were co-written by the band’s drummer Ginger Baker – who wrote the lyrics – and British jazz pianist/composer Mike Taylor.This was the closest Taylor got to the mainstream. The tracks recorded by Cream – "Passing the Time," "Pressed Rat and Warthog" and "Those Were the Days" – also appeared as the B-sides of singles. In the UK and the US, “Pressed Rat and Warthog” was Read more ...
mark.kidel
There is a freshness about a show by Youssou N’Dour that never seems to lose its glow. He still has one of the great voices of Africa, a versatile and richly-textured tenor that doesn’t show the sign (at 65) of growing old and tired.At the Roundhouse, he started the show with one of his most well-known songs, “Immigrés”. Youssou and the Super Étoile de Dakar bounced in with the kind of energy that usually emerges gradually through the simmering build-up of a set. Here, it’s the deep end from the get-go, the high-pitched sabar drums clattering away furiously at the back of the stage, djembe, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
What a great album – and what a great story to lift the heart in these fetid times. A story that crosses oceans and decades and brings together a Canadian singer-songwriter for once worthy of the label “legend” and a bunch of Bob Harris Emerging Artist Award-winners with a clutch of well-received albums under their belt.Dreams is the result of a collaboration between Canadian Songwriters Hall of Famer Bonnie Dobson and the Hanging Stars, five “cosmic cowboys” comprised of Richard Olson (guitar, vocals, percussion), Patrick Ralla (guitar, keyboard), Paul Milne (bass), Sean Reed (horns, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The best-selling single so far this year in the UK is Californian singer Alex Warren’s “Ordinary”. It stayed at the top of the charts longer than any song this decade. If you’re not familiar, imagine the lyrical mood and production of Hosier’s “Take Me to Church” filtered through the bombast of early Bastille, and supercharged with Warren’s Christian faith and love for “worship music”. The rest of his album is equally overblown and icky.At the start of the 1960s, one of the twists that made pop blossom to greatness was gospel singers applying their craft to secular love songs. In the 2020s Read more ...
joe.muggs
In the eternal now of the strobe-lit sweatbox, innovation functions in a different way to the rest of culture. Yes of course, the thrill of the new has consistently been a vital part of dancefloor culture, but so has the familiarity of particular sonic signatures that emerged from its fervid evolutionary processes. From the endless echo of classic disco house and rave samples in the mainstream, to the purity of raw, churning acid house in underground basements: once something works, it works.Sometimes the sounds that endure are super niche. For example, some time around the middle of the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
As the name suggests, the Near Jazz Experience owe a huge musical debt to jazz, but that’s not the full story by any means. For a start, the rhythm section has more in common with the motorik groove of Can and the general atmosphere is closer to the soundtracks of ‘60s TV shows and films like The Avengers and Bullitt than any of Miles Davis’ famous ensembles.For those unfamiliar with the band, they are a trio of musical veterans, comprising Madness bassist, Mark Bedford, saxophone slinger for hire, Terry Edwards and his former Higsons’ confederate, Simon Charterton on drums. None of their Read more ...