New music
Kieron Tyler
“My Ice Queen” immediately makes its case. A mid-to-low tempo chugging rhythm underpins choppy guitar, a contemplative, distant vocal and a general air of disassociation. Brief sections of the song feature – albeit muted – guitar mangling and feedback. The lyrics tell of a “heartbreak machine, coolest girl you’ve ever seen.” Icy? Absolutely.Then take the similarly restrained “Life Goes on,” so hazy a rumination it seems to have materialised from the mists enveloping Venus.
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It isn’t all so crepuscular. “Song For John” – seemingly an Read more ...
Bedouine
I watched a video online recently of a three-year-old girl being quizzed with questions about her mom (adorable). It was a Mother’s Day video set up by her father who was speaking just out of frame. Some of the questions were answered with precision. "What's your mom's name?" was met with her mother's actual name. When the stakes rose and it came time for her middle and last name, the answers provided were "mommy" and "mom", respectively. I delighted in this video for many reasons. Among them was that it was very relatable. It reminded me of how comfortable we get with the people closest Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
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By the time Marina Diamandis reaches “Cuntissimo”, Birmingham’s O2 Academy is a sing-along sauna. We’re squeezed in like rice in vine leaves, drenched in human juice. Attempts to dance are restricted to meagre hip wiggles and hands waved above the head. No-one seems to care. The outrageous, pop-ballistic single of last year hits the desired chord. “Your ex is hitting you up,” Marina sings, and holds the mic towards us all. “BUT YOU NO LONGER GIVE A FUCK!” the place roars as one.Marina is that curiosity, a cult female star making pop Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As I started to write this review, I found that Tucker Zimmerman died in January this year. This was news to me, sad news, made worse by the fact he died in a house fire at his home in Belgium, alongside his wife of more than five decades, Marie-Claire. I’d no idea and, as a fan taken by unhappy surprise, it likely affects my writing and perspective on this, his final album. At 84, Zimmerman was not young, and had decades of sporadically released, underheard music behind him, starting with his Tony Visconti-produced 1968 debut, Ten Songs (which David Bowie listed in Vanity Fair in 2003 Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Judy Garland's Carnegie Hall comeback concert on Sunday, 23 April 1961 has often been lauded as "the greatest night in show business history", though that judgment surely depends on where Garland sits in one’s personal pantheon. Elvis’s made-for-television 68 Comeback Special, the king lean in leather, must be up there, and likely Sinatra at Madison Square Garden in 1974. Whatever, the sold-out performance featured some 25 standards, Garland backed by a 40-piece orchestra conducted by Mort Lindsey. Marilyn Monroe, Richard Burton, and Julie Andrews were in the audience. The album, Judy at Read more ...
Guy Oddy
While it’s four years since the Bobby Lees’ excellent Bellevue album was released, they haven’t been stumbling around in the slow lane since then. Having gone on a burnout-enforced hiatus in 2023 with guitarist Nick Casa moving on to pastures new, singer and all-round Renaissance woman Sam Quartin has appeared in a couple of films, while rhythm section, Macky Bowman and Kendall Wind have been seen playing with veteran garage rocker, Jon Spencer of late. So, they’ve certainly been keeping themselves busy.This busyness may explain the brevity of their new disc, which only clocks in at a little Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There’s not – and never has been, really – that much discourse about commercial dance music as music. It’s either talked about by ageing doomers (“oh the kids just want to film on their phones, they don’t dance any more”), as spectacle or social phenomenon, without ever really differentiating EDM from big room house from bassline from whatever else. Not that musicians like Sonny Fodera probably care, mind. Over 13 years and now six albums, racking up quarter-billion stream songs at a time, and ubiquitous in pop radio as much as mega-raves, Fodera has constantly trodden an interesting line Read more ...
Mark Kidel
In a cultural world with no frontiers, French-Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf has a musical CV that ranges very widely: collaborations with Angélique Kidjo, Sting, Quincy Jones, Amadou et Mariam, Archie Shepp and countless others. While rooted in Lebanese and Arab tradition, he moves with ease through jazz, rock, hip-hop and other genres. His new album, Vol 2 of the Michel-Ange project dedicated to his trumpet-playing father Nassim whom he revered as a kind of musical Michelangelo, is once again focused on a contagiously festive brass sound, part-Balkan Roma, part-Herb Albert and the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Ryland Caravan Festival is an annual festival put together by local musical eccentrics, Independent Country, and held in the outside amphitheatre at the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) in Birmingham’s Cannon Hill Park. As it is takes place just as spring becomes summer, the elements can obviously be a bit temperamental – with punters being just as likely to have to deal with sunstroke as trench foot – but with the bar of the MAC within spitting distance, there’s always protection from whatever the unpredictable weather might produce with a bit of added alcoholic support.The MAC’s amphitheatre Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
As Metallica have long known, Ennio Morricone's Ecstasy of Gold is a rousing choice of walk on music. Deadletter might not be playing the stadiums the metal giants ply their trade in, but strolling on to a near pitch black stage with music from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly booming out was a nicely theatrical opening.The group themselves might have wished for a Clint Eastwood style lawman at points this year. While 2026 has marked the arrival of second album “Existence Is Bliss”, it also saw the theft on tour of thousands of pounds worth of equipment and gear from the Yorkshire six-piece, a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Back when One Direction alumnus Niall Horan released his second album, Heartbreak Weather, in 2020, songs such as “Nice to Meet Ya”, “Arms of a Stranger” and “Small Talk” hinted that new sonic adventures might be opening. Not in the vanguard sense of, say, St Vincent or FKA Twigs, but hints of envelope-pushing, nonetheless. These did not lead anywhere and, now up to album number four, he’s settled to a very 2026 gumbo that melds 1970s West Coast soft rock/yacht rock with a pinch of indie edge, but without the tunes to match his own poppiest (such as the contagiously joyful, if saccharine, “ Read more ...
Erin Lewis
Lizzo used to be fun. For a long time, the now 38-year-old singer-songwriter emitted a vibrant energy but that has lately seeped out of her music. This may be down to any of a litany of reasons that span her musical and personal life, but the result is the same regardless: Bitch is a deeply uninspired album. Her lyrics, which used to be full of interesting turns of phrase, if occasionally corny or overwrought, are now flat repetitions of previous work. Proclamations of self-love on “That Grrrl” are just recycled phrases from her number one single “About Damn Time” and “Bitch” is just “ Read more ...