New music
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHRahill Flowers at Your Feet (Big Dada)Rahill Jamalifard’s debut solo album somehow transmutes autobiography into gorgeous slow-pop. Of Iranian-American origin and best-known as singer of the band Habibi, she and FKA Twigs producer Alex Epton use home recordings and pensive, sometimes nostalgic lyrics to create something unique, lolling and amiable. Beck appears on one song, “Fables”, and the magpie spirit of his best work is a good reference point. It’s a lovely album that seems at once familiar, yet strange and new, a collation that includes elements of jazz, trip hop, hip Read more ...
mark.kidel
The circular form of the large turf-roofed round house at the Ancient Technology Centre in Cranborne, Dorset, is tailor-made for music in the round. The latest in the series of Jaminaround concerts made the most of the intimacy that the venue provides, with music that engaged the audience in a way that conventional staging makes difficult.On a conventional stage, performers are elevated above the spectators, and, even if they body-surf through the crowd, there's a certain distance, a show rather than a conversation. Expertly and sensitively curated by musician Olly Keen, whose father Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Council Skies was created in Noel Gallagher’s new studio, partly during lockdown, an attempt to reconnect with where he came from, Manchester, as per its cover art. It’s not an exercise in nostalgia (except insofar as everything either Gallagher sibling has ever done is), but more about mining his origins for inspiration, authenticity and emotional meaning. There’s an audible earnestness, then, a ferventness, but, unfortunately, the ratio of catchy anthems is low.Let’s face it, neither Gallagher sibling actually needs to reform Oasis. Both their solo careers have proved strong, chart-topping Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” was the UK’s first explicitly psychedelic record. Although there were delays with it hitting shops, it was recorded in December 1965. A large part of its impact came through the instrumentation and arrangement. Jazz players were on board, playing in a folky way without abandoning their core musical sensibilities. The ground-breaking arranger responsible was John Cameron.In 1976, Heatwave issued the instant dance-floor filler “Boogie Nights” as a single. It was a world-wide chart smash in 1977. Producer Barry Blue brought in arranger John Cameron to work on the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s 27 years since Gretchen Peters released her debut album, The Secret of Life, championed by Bob Harris and the late Terry Wogan, whose morning-tide enthusiasms also helped propel Eva Cassidy and Beth Neilsen Chapman to success - the term “Americana” hadn’t yet been invented!Peters has been touring Britain for some 25 years, unusually for an American recording a live album here (The Show: Live from the UK), which captured her just pre-Covid performing a career-spanning selection of songs with the all-female Southern Fried String Quartet. She’s won, or been nominated for, a raft of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom first crossed our paths in July 2021, his first streaming event, and coming little more than a year after the garden of unearthly delights that was Rough and Rowdy Ways. To enter this kingdom, you were given a key code for $25, and allowed fifty minutes, 13 songs, and the chance to revisit over the following 48 hours. Then Alma H’arel’s film evaporated into the digital ether, its noir-ish settings turning dark, apparently never to return.Two years on, and while the film itself remains for now in the dark room, the soundtrack is manifesting in traditional physical Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Jim Jones has been around the block a few times, plying his garage/punk/rock’n’roll schtick – most notably with his last couple of outfits, the Jim Jones Revue and Jim Jones and the Righteous Mind. Back in the ring with his new crew, the Jim Jones Allstars, however, he’s subtly changed the template to bring some serious old school rhythm and blues to the party as well.As part of this change, Jones has recruited some brass into the band, with a couple of saxophones to add a bit of vim. His eight-strong crew still look as if Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds had crawled out of South London though. Trilbies Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Mount Caburn is east of Lewes in Sussex. Shirley Collins’s stepfather used to call it Archangel Hill. The site of an Iron Age hill fort, it was defended with a ditch during the Roman and Saxon periods. In World War II, a gun emplacement was positioned there. While physically strategic, it’s a spiritual landmark for Shirley Collins – a marker in the story of her life.Correspondingly, Archangel Hill the album collects a series of reflections on where she is now, and where she has been. The third album since her 2016 comeback on record ends with the title track, a recitation contemplating the Read more ...
Cheri Amour
On a recent podcast, poet and producer Arlo Parks admitted, “Music is definitely a place where I put the softest part of myself and push it out into the ocean.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise if you spent time with her Mercury prize-winning debut Collapsed in Sunbeams. The record quite literally cast light during the depths of another lockdown here in the UK back in early 2021.But along with the awards, the release also bestowed hefty titles onto the British songwriter with NME dubbing her “the voice of Gen Z”. Parks was thrust into an exhaustive touring schedule going from supporting Read more ...
mark.kidel
Danûk are a group of exiled musicians, mostly Kurdish, and Morîk is their very appealing first album. They draw their bewitching songs and instrumentals from Kurdish tradition as recorded on wax cylinders in the early years of the 20th century by German and Austrian ethnomusicologists and companies.The five of them play an assortment of Middle Eastern string and percussion instruments. They first met playing in the streets of Istanbul and the tracks have been produced by Michael League, a musical explorer, who has distinguished himself as a member of the jazz fusion band Snarky Puppy, and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A standing ovation part-way through a concert is unusual. Conductor Jules Buckley gestures to the members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Chorus that they should rise. Beside Buckley, Father John Misty stands looking from the conductor to everyone else on the stage, to the audience. Seemingly, in the midst of this, he’s thrown.That this is an overwhelming experience is summed up a little later by Buckley when he interrupts the magic to speak from his podium. “This is pretty crazy”, he declares before getting into acknowledgements and an explanation of how this evening’s Read more ...
joe.muggs
There is a truly fascinating story to be written about the hidden Punjabi influence on UK bass music. Maybe it’s natural for kids growing up with the huge booming sounds of dhol and tabla drums to gravitate to big bass speakers, but some of the most unique and influential producers in the interface between reggae, grime and dubstep have been from Punjabi backgrounds: notably Kromestar, V.I.V.E.K. and brothers Sukh Knight and Squarewave.And perhaps most successful of all is Pahuldip Singh Sandhu from Newham, aka Steel Banglez. SB first made his mark in grime, and has effortlessly adapted to Read more ...