New music
Thomas H. Green
“As you’ve noticed, I’m really terrible at talking between the songs,” announces Melt Yourself Down singer Kushal Gaya, two-thirds of the way through the gig. He is. But it really doesn’t matter; the genre-uncategorizable London six-piece smash through their hour-and-15-minute set with a lean, giddy forward propulsion that brooks no pause. Consequently, the small, sold-out, low-ceilinged club venue gradually becomes a wriggling, sweaty rave-pit.A lot has been written about the London jazz resurgence of recent years. Names such as Shabaka Hutchings, Nubiya Garcia and Seb Rochford bandied about Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Demonstrating how much the world really can change in a very short time when things spin out of control, Swedish power-metal five-piece Sabaton’s album now seems especially tasteless. It’s also a scalpel-sharp example of how important context is to creative acts. The band have made a career of absurdly OTT story-telling songs of real world battles and those who fought them. They’re Amon Amarth for military history geeks. But when military history is actually happening in Europe in all its bloody grotesquery, The War to End All Wars doesn’t seem so appetizing.When they planned and played this Read more ...
Tim Cumming
I tried, I really did. Took a shot at my best, and fell short, Yup, I couldn’t get beyond the opening chapters of Dolly Parton’s first novel, written with that veteran of popular page-turnin’, James Patterson. The best bit for me was on the first page, and it was pure Dolly, but in 22 little words, not 80,000. “Is it easy? No it ain’t. Can I fix it? No I cain’t. But I sure ain’t gonna take it lying down.”That, more or less, is the country zen koan that encapsulates the adventures of the young heroine singer, Ms AnnieLee Keyes, budding on the precipice of stardom and catastrophe that is the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Eamon Ivri, from Cork on the Irish south coast, is a polymath. He’s a poet (his nom de techno is taken from minimalist poet Aram Saroyan), a fascinating political thinker, and a searing online satirist of cultural mores (or “shitposter” as the vernacular has it). He is also one of the most exciting electronic music talents in the world right now. His first two solo albums, Gore-Tex In The Club, Balenciaga Amongst The Shrubs and Holy Light, and his recent Entropy in collaboration with Claire Guerin, are flat-out masterpieces, blurring the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Though Marillion have experimented with modern rock textures, and have also cut an acoustic album (2009’s Less Is More), the group is defined by its ardent, layered neo-prog sound – given a Romantic bark and fervor by Fish when he was the singer (1981-88), and a classical drama by his replacement Steve Hogarth (since 1989). On their twentieth studio album, An Hour Before It's Dark, at least, it’s a sound in search of a form.The record addresses subjects like climate change, the pandemic and materialism with lyrics by Hogarth that are often oblique and too frequently unctuous. He urges us Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
This new edition of People Move On, Bernard Butler’s April 1998 debut solo album, takes what was issued then to up to four CDs. Nothing unusual in that. Box set-isations of a single album customarily add alternate versions, outtakes, non-album tracks from singles, demos, live tracks, recordings from tracking sessions.However, the new People Move On takes a fresh tack. Disc One is the album as it was issued back then. Disc Two is the album – but with new vocals. Butler added them in 2021 to DAT recordings of the backing tracks, most of which differ from what was issued as they were not the Read more ...
peter.quinn
When 2020 MacArthur Fellow and three-time Grammy Award winner Cécile McLorin Salvant previewed some of the material from her forthcoming album to an enraptured audience at Cadogan Hall as part of last year’s EFG London Jazz Festival, you sensed that something special was in the offing. But the treasure trove of marvels that is Ghost Song exceeds all expectations.Whether it’s the unaccompanied fragment of the sean-nós song “Cúirt Bhaile Nua” segueing into Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” (recorded in the beautiful acoustic of St. Malachy’s Church, New York), the imaginative splicing together of Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Back in June, there was a Tik Tok of a woman with eyeliner and a skinny tie miming to the 2002 hit, “Sk8er Boi”. They say trends come in 20 year cycles, which makes sense given the current pop-punk revival we are in. For zoomers, it’s nostalgia for a time they just missed. For millennials, it’s unfettered longing, summed up by the aptly titled When We Were Young Festival (headliners include Paramore and Bring me the Horizon). It was therefore not surprising hearing “Sk8er Boi” on Tik Tok. But it was surprising that the woman was not just anyone, but the pop-punk princess herself, Avril Read more ...
joe.muggs
Tears For Fears were an odd non-presence through their most successful years. They were right up there in the premier league of stadium rock-pop bands, but had none of the Celtic romantic bombast of U2 and Simple Minds, weren’t as weird as Eurythmics or Depeche Mode, as muso as Sting, nor as showbiz as Duran Duran or late Queen. Their Songs From the Big Chair album sold eight million copies, and everyone of a certain age can just about chant along to “Shout” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”, but what really was there to them? It was all very earnest, Roland Orzabal Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s not breaking any secrets to note that the woman immortalised as the “Chestnut-brown canary/Ruby-throated sparrow” in Stephen Stills’ “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” will shortly turn 83. Not that you’d know it from Spellbound, her new album.Her voice has retained a youthful quality – no uncontrollable vibrato, no loss of top notes – and a general surety of pitch which singers many years younger long ago lost (and in some cases never possessed). It’s a little over 60 years since she released A Maid of Constant Sorrow, and she’s not stopped since. Extraordinarily, this is the first album featuring Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The death of U-Roy was announced on 17 February 2021. A year on, the reappearance of his oft-reissued 1971 debut album Version Galore brings the opportunity to celebrate the music which brought him his earliest success; the music which propelled him into Jamaica’s top ranks.U-Roy – born Euwart Beckford – had been testing his skills as a DJ since the early Sixties. His initial inspiration was Count Macuki who, from the late Fifties, had performed with Tom Wong’s and Clement Dodds’s sound systems. U-Roy passed through Wong’s, Sir George The Atomic’s and Dodds’s set-ups before he came to King Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Healing, ecstasy and transformation are the aims, from Johnny Marr’s Manchester counter-culture adolescence to this compendium of Covid-era EPs, released as he nears 60. Rock’s alchemising of dreams into action is Fever Dreams’ constant refrain, aimed at a perceived audience much like Marr, motivated by faith in music, and essentially kind.Rearing feedback as Marr plugs into opener “Spirit Power & Soul”, then he’s singing: “I’ve seen some shimmering things/Seen a vision of things…” Musically as well, it’s an account of coming up, getting high after a low, a transmission of a stiffening Read more ...