New music
Tim Cumming
Rock'n'roll rejuvenators, Eurovision winners with more of their songs streamed online than there are people in the world, the glammy young Roman rockers have opened for The Stones in Las Vegas, delivered a city-stopping sold-out show at Rome’s historic Circus Maximus and been hailed as “America’s New Favorite Rock Band,” in the Los Angeles Times. They recorded a lovely interpretation of Elvis’s late-Sixties hit “If I Can Dream” for Baz Luhrmann last summer, and their raucous, gritty, upbeat and confrontational third album, emerging from that audience explosion of the past year or two, is a Read more ...
joe.muggs
Despite the silly name, the pigtails, the propensity for cutesy posing with ice cream and candy, and of course the title Bubblegum all playing with ingenue tropes, Biig Piig – or Jessica Smyth – is a serious proposition. Irish born, partly Spanish raised, now resident in both London and LA, she’s been in the public eye since her songs started clocking up millions of streams in her late teens, and she seems to have quite a good grasp of where she’s going.Linking with Lava La Rue’s NiNE8 multimedia collective, she’s taken her own sweet time in finding her voice and identity and is only now, at Read more ...
mark.kidel
John Cale has always walked a cutting-edge. At 80, he is still making music that stretches the mind. He is accompanied on his most recent album by a number of talented and original ground-breakers from both sides of the pond – from the eccentric and pure voice of Natalie Mering (aka Weyes Blood) to the Stockhausen-flavoured explorations of Actress, the psychedelic anarchy of Animal Collective to the avant-pop sweetness of Tei Shi.Cale was one of the founders of The Velvet Underground, but he soon established himself as an independent force on the fertile fringes of classically-tinged rock, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After a few listens, the second album from Evan Uschenko’s musical alter-ego Ghost Woman increasingly resembles something which could have emerged from the early Eighties Los Angeles scene dubbed the "Paisley Underground". However, this does not seem to be what Canada’s Uschenko is aiming for.The promotional text for Anne, If on the label’s website is peppered with different references: the harmonies of Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Nuggets compilation, a 12-string guitar evoking The Byrds, Love, and Jefferson Airplane, Safe As Milk-era Captain Beefheart, Shel Talmy's Sixties productions for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A first encounter with Rustic Hinge and the Provincial Swimmers is unforgettable. Their summer 1970 recordings are so far out they at first seem unlistenable. Persistence pays though and the ear tunes in. It becomes clear this band swallowed the Captain Beefheart playbook and regurgitated it after applying a severe dose of the cut-up technique.Despite sending a letter which generated the interest of Beefheart fan John Peel, who wanted to add them to the roster of his Dandelion Records label, Rustic Hinge and Co were close-to unnoticed. There was a January 1971 mention in the underground Read more ...
Cheri Amour
As second-wave feminism vouched in the late 1960s, the personal is political. For Billy Nomates, the moniker of Sleaford Mods-approved musician Tor Maries, that sentiment is rife.Entrenched in her eponymously titled debut in 2020, the songwriter tapped into flailing societal structures, dead-end jobs in dead-end towns and the dichotomy of the Fat White Man. Despite touching on such evocative and self-assured issues, Billy Nomates came to being after a period of intense instability.Leaving the West Country with a relationship and a job in tow, Maries set up her seemingly picture-perfect life Read more ...
Guy Oddy
What do power-poppers do when they get older and return to the fray after an eight-year lay-off? If they’re the Subways, they recruit a new drummer, invest in a synthesiser and add some alt-rock sounds to their repertoire.That said, plenty else has also been going on with the Subways during their hiatus. In addition to Camille Phillips replacing original drummer, Josh Morgan, lead vocalist and guitarist, Billy Lunn has studied for an English degree at Cambridge University, embraced his bisexuality and had to deal with various personal mental health issues – never mind having to negotiate the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Time’s Arrow is electro goths Ladytron’s seventh album since the late Nineties and marks their post-Covid re-emergence into the modern dystopia that is our seemingly never-ending, Brexit-damaged Tory Britain. However, while it isn’t an album that’s full of the joys of spring exactly, it does nevertheless attempt to reach out for at least some optimism in these difficult times.Despite the amount of time that has passed since the band’s previous, 2019 self-titled disc, not a great deal has changed with Ladytron’s sound. Time’s Arrow is still marked by Helen Marnie’s characteristic, somewhat Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Iggy Pop is one of rock’s great survivors but his fans are divided into two categories; those who claim he hasn’t done anything worthwhile since the late-Seventies and those, like this writer, who find much to enjoy, right up to the present.Every Loser-era Pop takes a break from the less visceral directions his solo career has pursued for the last 20 years, the jazz experiments and the knowingly crafted hat-tips to his Berlin years. Instead, while laced with delicious, crooned West Coast rock slowies, such as the lost sunrise sadness of "Morning Show", it's also righteously rooted in goofy Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A strange new single went on sale in Britain’s record shops in April 1962. Credited to Ray Cathode, “Time Beat” combined a metronomic rhythm with peculiar, otherworldly sounds. It was not a standard pop record. The flipside, “Waltz In Orbit”, was also about its tempo and was just as weird. Not many copies were sold.The Ray Cathode single was issued seven months before The Tornados’s equally unearthly “Telstar” and was, in time, recognised as a ground-breaking combination of studio-created sounds and pop music. The Ray Cathode handle masked a collaboration between the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’ Read more ...
mark.kidel
Perfect timing for the release of Lucas Santtana’s new album release. The return of Lula to the presidency of Brazil has been received with a surge of optimism and joy. We have witnessed the end of Bolsonaro’s corrupt, opportunistic and authoritarian years, in which the Amazon forest was opened up further to those who would destroy it, along with the indigenous people who struggle to survive against the depredations of greed.With a soft tenor voice, and accompanied by his delicate guitar playing, and skilfully integrated synthesised wind instruments, Santanna sings dreamily in praise of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Carvings is recorded so it sounds as if Juni Habel is adjacent to the listener’s ear. The Norwegian singer-songwriter may as well be inches away. Such intimacy can be disconcerting, especially as Carvings evokes a reflective melancholy. Its eight crepuscular songs evoke twilight and wintertime, when introspection is never far.Habel’s second album is the follow-up to summer 2021’s All Ears. That was a mood piece drawing from influences including Vashti Bunyan and Jessica Pratt. Carvings is less about the atmosphere created but more about the form of the song itself, and rising and falling Read more ...