New music
Sebastian Scotney
I was excited by what I had heard of this quartet – guitarist Julian Lage, keyboardist John Medeski, bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Kenny Wollesen – on their album Scenes from Above, which came out in January; I thought it was Lage’s strongest album in eight years.Their concert in front of a full-ish and highly appreciative Royal Festival Hall audience on Friday night absolutely fulfilled the best expectations. But perhaps above all I am excited by where this band can go over the next few years. Lage has had seven Grammy nominations until now, but never won one. Maybe that is about to be Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“I tell people this is my first and last big band album,” says Helen Sung about Oracles. The Houston-born pianist received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021, and that enabled her to bring what she has called this “dream project” to fruition, to write and record a whole programme of music for big band. The new music she says, “pays homage to the jazz masters whose music, wisdom and generosity changed my life,” and that gratitude fuels an album which is an upbeat celebration of several of the jazz luminaries whom she has known, learnt from and been inspired by.If Oracles doesn’t get a Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There must have been something in the ether. Only last month, not knowing that they had a surprise album about to drop, I namechecked “groovy Wirral millennials The Coral” in reviewing Ringo Starr’s Long, Long Road, linking them to Merseyside’s “romanticisation of the far side of the Atlantic”. And hey presto, here they are with 388, their 13th album – released without announcement initially in physical shops only – and both their grooviest and their most transatlantic-facing record in quite a while.The band have always been doused in nostalgic Americana of various kinds, of course. When they Read more ...
Tom Carr
Rewind the clock back 10 years, and all seemed very promising for the upcoming rock group Marmozets. Cultivating an energetic sound from a range of influences as diverse as Dillinger Escape Plan and Architects, they appeared to heading to wider success. Tunes like "Move Shake Hide" and "Captivate You" exemplified how they refined their eclectic influences into something truly their own. Their third album in 2017 seemed to only further signify at the time that things were coming good for the Yorkshire group, at the time consisting of - and founded by - two sets of siblings: Becca, Josh Read more ...
Mark Kidel
A gig with Tricky remains a trip to the Underworld: forever shrouded in almost total darkness, his haunting voice barely audible, he’s an artist who’s always shunned the spotlight, seen through the charade of celebrity fame, and made a virtue out being a shade rather than a hero. He’s never been shy of plumbing the depths – drawing, with tons of originality and creative energy, from a family and community background steeped in violence, the curse of suicide, and a super-sensitivity that prejudiced his breath and skin. His preference for a darkened stage might suggest a parallel with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Maisie Peters is a singer-songwriter from Sussex who’s 26, next week, and is a protégé of Ed Sheeran (she’s on his Gingerbread Man label). If you’re younger than her, you’ve likely never heard of her, but her last album, The Good Witch, was a chart-topper, and the one before that, her 2021 debut, only stalled at No. 2. She has a devoted fanbase.Her third album is lyrically impressive, if lacking musical heft. Her default musical mode is over-airy acoustic songs, carefully painted with warm electronic production, occasionally rising to a pulse that’s faintly danceable. What she does has much Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Love Train” is first up. Rather than the 1972 O’Jays’ hit, this totally different song was originally released as the B-side of a 1971 single – though it’s often credited as a 1968 release. By The Lovemasters, a Chicago band active under that name from 1970, it’s an absolute winner – vaguely along the Temptations line, with a circling guitar figure, subtle piano fills and a loose funkiness. Their founder member Edith Andrews had been active in Chicago’s music from the late 1950s.
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The label which issued the Lovemasters 45 was Jacklyn, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Drake just released not only his expected ninth album, Iceman, but another two albums, Maid of Honour and Habibti. Forty-three songs. Two-and-a-half hours of music. And a trying listen for anyone with a soul.Drake is the one of the world’s most successful male pop stars. This is troubling, but it makes sense. He’s admired, in our capitalism-as-religion age, as much for his social media reach and business acumen as his art. “I’m not a people-pleaser, bro’, I’m a CEO,” he burbles over the horizontal chillage of “White Bone”. That’s about right. He’s a figurehead for the romance-free, the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Tamikrest are one of the swaths of Tuareg bands that were born out of the violent oppression of their people at the hands of the Malian Army, Kremlin-controlled paramilitaries and radical Islamists but who came to prominence in the wake of Tinariwen’s breakthrough in the early years of this century. Along with the likes of Tartit and Terakaft they have sung their hypnotic desert blues in exile from a land which is ruled by a military junta, where political opposition is banned and media suppressed, with an intense yearning to return that is thoroughly tangible.Assikel, which was recorded live Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There’s a whole wide open area of leftfield music that belongs entirely to Chicago. The 1960s social radicalism and futurist musical experiments of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and its parent organisation the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), fused into punk and alternative attitudes with the founding of labels like Thrill Jockey and Touch & Go, fed the jazz-electronic-dub-“post-rock” genre meltdown of bands like Gastr Del Sol, Tortoise and Chicago Underground Duo/Trio/Quartet/Orchestra in the 1990s, and is still vividly present in a sprawling and endlessly Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
The All-American Rejects are back with their first album in 14 years, and their first ever independent release. At the height of their success in the early 2000s, the band had an established place in the pop rock landscape, one foot in emo culture and the other heading into the mainstream, but halted before they inevitably became too radio ready. Their return follows a string of free backyard pop-up concerts, a symbol of their intention to get back to their roots, American kids making fun, high octane rock, and Sandbox is a clear continuation of this energy.With a catalogue of timeless Read more ...
Liz Thomson
First date, last dance: Emmylou Harris, possessor of one of country-rock’s most beautiful and evocative voices, opened the British leg of her farewell tour on Monday with a generous show at Liverpool's Philharmonic Hall. It was, of course, sold out, the audience on the older side (it was notable how many guys needed to take a comfort break as time wore on!) and Emmylou herself acknowledging, as she briefly massaged her left wrist, that “I’m 79… arthritis.” But she stood – in her customary cowboy boots, shoulder-length silver hair glinting in the spotlight, and playing her signature Gibson Read more ...