New music
Kieron Tyler
Paint a Room is idiosyncratic, but it is an absolute joy. Accessible too. Permeated with a summery vibe, its 10 songs glisten like the surface of lake catching the setting sun’s rays. There’s a lightness, a buoyancy which instantly fascinates.Chris Cohen has fashioned an album which is jazzy yet cleaves to a sensibility placing it as a distant cousin to Allah Las at their best or the wispier side of early Tame Impala. There are flutes, brass, sax, coconut shell-type persuasion, guitars treated to sound watery and Cohen’s lazy, just-verging on off-key voice. Swooning album opener “Damage” Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Voice and piano. The combination can have a simplicity, a conversational freedom, a rightness about it, as it does here. “My Ideal” (Dot Time), with its eleven songs from the early days of jazz up to the 1950s, is already being placed alongside classic duo albums by Ella Fitzgerald with Ellis Larkins, or the great pairing of Tony Bennett and Bill Evans, and it is indeed a very fine and uplifting album.The sixth track of the album, its centrepiece, “Ain’t That Love”, shows off the intimate vibe of the duo particularly well. Vocalist Catherine Russell and pianist Sean Mason clearly know the Ray Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the world of popular music, tangential connections to success are profile-raising. They offer an immediate connection to an artist. It is beholden on me, then, despite not knowing it when I first enjoyed this album, to mention that rising Grammy Award-winning Americana star Molly Tuttle appears. She is guitarist-vocalist Sullivan Tuttle’s sister. It speaks to the solid pleasures of City of Glass by Santa Cruz quartet AJ Lee & Blue Summit that the song in question, “I Can’t Find You at All”, written by the Tuttles' dad Jack, is not outstandingly ahead of the restSinging mandolin-player Read more ...
joe.muggs
Joe Goddard’s torrent of creativity rarely fails to amaze. As well as eight albums as a crucial part of Hot Chip, he has made two in the 2 Bears duo with Raf Rundell, one as Hard Feelings with Amy Douglas, and there’s been various other collaborations besides (A Pulse Train, Extra Credit, Greco-Roman Soundsystem, Lightbox Of Magic Unknowledge), not to mention dozens of remixes and a none too shabby DJ career too. Through all of this there’s been a strong musical personality, circling around palpable love of the dancefloor and its communities, and use of synthesisers to conjure feelings of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
NME’s Paul Morley reviewed Angelic Upstarts’ debut album, the newly reissued Teenage Warning, in August 1979. He pointed out that they were “seen as the successors to Sham 69.”The assessment made sense. Their encore song was a version of Sham's “Borstal Breakout.” Both bands played a reductive punk which was long on musical attack and lyrical howls, and low on finesse. Around the time of Teenage Warning's 1979 release Sham's front-man Jimmy Pursey was busy with J. P. Productions, a concern where he picked up bands, became their producer and placed them with major labels. He took on Read more ...
John Carvill
It’s often said that nobody mythologised Billie Holiday like Billie Holiday. I’m not so sure.In this fine, clear-eyed biography, Paul Alexander documents Holiday’s propensity for feeding the media inaccuracies and tall tales, her enthusiastic embrace of “the adage that said the truth should never stand in the way of a good story.” But the media gave as good as they got, downplaying her artistic achievements and fixating on her problems with substance abuse and exploitative, violently toxic male partners.Many of the myths imposed upon her during her lifetime persist, particularly those that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As Dust we Rise ends with “Quilt,” a percussion-driven lamentation bringing to mind the New Orleans stylings of Dr. John. The album begins with “Hem,” where stabbing piano and strings interweave with a pulsing, wordless chorale. After a while, a muted trumpet and pattering wood blocks fill it out.In between, odd suggestions of The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy For the Devil" (“Here Comes the Flood”), a spectral, twinkling ballad (“The Sea”), a sharp, skip-along, clockwork-toy of a track (“Ammonite,” one of the album's most electronica-inclined cuts) which could fit snugly into the soundtrack of Read more ...
mark.kidel
Kokoko! hail from the Democratic Republic of Congo (formely Zaire), and specifically from Kinshasa, a source over the years of a great deal of irresistible dance music. On their second album, more electronic than the last (Fongola -2019), traces of bouncing soukous music, mixed with the old-style house delights of Milwaukee-based DJ and producer Thomas Xavier, make for a heady brew.In sharp contrast with West African music, langourous High Life, elegant Manding praise songs, and the intricate polyrhythms of Afro-Beat, the music of Kokoko! draws energy from the ancient forests’ spirits, Read more ...
caspar.gomez
SUNDAY 30th June 2024It’s late. But not really. Not by the standards of this place. Photographer Finetime and I are in Block9 in the South-East Corner. The so-called “naughty corner”. We take turns juggernauting quomble off a pinecone. Finetime’s right eyelid is twitching. This tic developed today. Nearby is a gigantic head. About the size of a large Victorian house. It’s at an acute angle to the ground. Instead of eyes it has a kind of welders’ mask blitzing white-noise light. Like the haunted, detuned television in the 1982 film Poltergeist.We all know what happened to the little blonde Read more ...
Tom Carr
For a band as creative as St Albans’ own electronic-hardcore-rock fusion pioneers, Enter Shikari, the last thing you would expect them to do is sit on their hands.And that’s exactly what’s come to pass, as only a year after achieving their first UK number one with A Kiss For The Whole World, they follow up with companion album Dancing On The Frontline.There is always a risk with remix albums that they either end up feeling superfluous. Or, they go too far down the rabbit hole away from the original. Here, Enter Shikari thread the needle somewhat and limit the remixes, and include live Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Great bands’ output can, famously, be predicated by the intense interaction between members, often between a central creative pairing. This can be a harmonious mutuality but, more often, music is built from tension, from difference, from the frisson between two individuals.Such was the case with Kasabian for many years, with the gradually increasing disparity, between Kasabian guitarist and primary songwriter Serge Pizzorno and bullish frontman Tom Meighan. On their first album without the latter, 2022’s quirky The Alchemist’s Euphoria, they just about got away with his absence. On the Read more ...
Katie Colombus
If the holiday season has been lacking in sun so far in the UK, Sza bought the heat to the first Saturday of the iconic London summerfest in Hyde Park, set up by a strong afternoon of support acts from Sampha, Snoh Aalegra, Elmiene and No Guidnce.On a stage smattered with rather phallic looking stalagmites, stalactites and huge silver crystals as if the set were her very own fortress of solitude, the boundary pushing R&B singer showcased songs from both her 2017 album Ctrl and 2022’s SOS, teasing to her brand new collection Lana, asking the crowd “New album, are you ready?”Opening with “ Read more ...