New music
Guy Oddy
Among millennials, Taylor Momsen is likely to be primarily remembered as an actor of things relatively sweet and family friendly. She appeared in Spy Kids 2 and TV’s Gossip Girl, but most notably as Cindy Lou Who with Jim Carrey in How the Grinch Stole Christmas at the turn of the century.Since then, of course, she’s reinvented herself as the post-grunge front woman of the very successful Pretty Reckless. As a rock’n’roller, she may like people to believe that she’s something of a replacement Courtney Love but actually she really inhabits Avril Lavigne-like territory. Still, she’s not Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
According to the fifth song on their first Christmas album, seasonal shenanigans in Old Crow Medicine Show’s family are boozy and raucous. Step aside Santa because “Grandpappy's been a-brewing since before the war” and is “the best bootlegger for a Georgia mile”. The result is the riotous barndance fiddlin’ of “Corn Whiskey Christmas” (which brings “good cheer to all the gals and the fellas). I’m in!The song is a highlight of OCMS XMAS, a 13-track set which showcases the light-hearted side of a Nashville outfit who’ve been at the forefront of the US bluegrass revival for over two decades. Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This album truly is a delightful surprise. Winter Songs Vol. 2 is simply more fun, it swings harder and is filled with far more freshness than I could ever have expected. There will always be people keen to tell you that Nat King Cole and Rosemary Clooney said all that needed to be said about the American Songbook Christmas standards several decades ago. But they’re wrong. In this, the most potentially tired of all genre niches, Ohio-born, New York-based jazz singer April Varner and her cohort of singers and instrumentalists really have found some magic dust to sprinkle over every number. Read more ...
joe.muggs
Well, this is a surprise. Not so much that the Sunderland band should do a Christmas album, mind. Despite their raw and spiky hardcore framework, which channelled heavyweights like Gang Of Four and Fugazi, they were always capable of being gentle, dreamlike, flirting with but never tipping over into the whimsical, as on their huge breakthrough cover of Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love”. And maybe even more relevantly, their harmony singing bordered on the choral from the start, something made explicit on their a capella reworking folk songs and their own work on their 2012 Rant album.No, it’s not Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The opening track initially seems straightforward. To begin “Sons of Art,” Michael Garrick runs up and down his piano keyboard. Norma Winstone adds wordless vocals which weave in and out of his sparkling arpeggios. Then, the bass arrives. Drums kick in. So do the tenor sax and trumpet. After a climax around the two-minute mark, what begins as pacific turns turbulent. The conventional has become unpredictably experimental.To conclude the album, an extraordinary nine-minute piece which, on one hand, sounds like dawn breaking and, on the other, a collision between the contrapuntal and a free- Read more ...
Tim Cumming
American R&B singer Eric Benet is the latest star to throw Santa’s hat into the ring and spin a Christmas album out of the seasonal market – the cover has him in 1950s mode, in a deep leather armchair in front of a coal fire in magnolia jumper and slacks and a pair of Christmas socks. Cosy.Guests to Benet’s Christmas party include Nina Nelson, sharing vocals on a Christmas cut with a Hawaiian bent from the Bing Crosby stable, “Mele Kalikimaka”. Elsewhere Stacey Ryan shares the mic on one of Benet’s own songs, getting the tone just right for the jazzy, sprightly gait of “It’s Christmas”. Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Nightmares On Wax’s new album Echo45 Sound System feels like the soundtrack to a twilight walk through memory and possibility. At its core is a deep reverence for sound system culture. The album title refers to a battered old speaker box called Echo45 that first sparked George Evelyn’s love of music when he was young.Released on 14 November 2025 through Warp Records, the project spans 13 tracks along with a continuous mix version. It features a wide collection of collaborators including Yasiin Bey, Greentea Peng, Oscar Jerome, Liam Bailey and others.The opener, “Echo45, We Are!” featuring Read more ...
Guy Oddy
On her latest Melody’s Echo Chamber album, Unclouded, gentle Gallic psychedelicist, Melody Prochet wastes absolutely no time in setting out her stall, making clear her chosen style right from the first bars of opening track “The House That Doesn’t Exist”. Featuring spaced out, dream pop sounds with airy, helium-tinged vocals, a shuffling groove and an orchestral backing – and it’s, without a doubt, a beautiful accompaniment to drifting off into the distant stratosphere.Prochet has released three previous albums in her Melody’s Echo Chamber guise, some to great acclaim – particularly the self- Read more ...
Liz Thomson
On a rainswept Monday, “Miss American Idol 1956”, as Judy Collins likes to introduce herself these days, drew a near-capacity crowd to the Union Chapel, Islington, for an intimate concert that felt at times as if it were in a large living room. She’s 86 now, wearing a pixie cut instead of her once-signature rock-star mane, but the eyes that so entranced Stephen Stills are no less blue and she’s still doing what she's done so gloriously for some 65 years. It was, she reflected, 1965 when she made her British debut, with Tom Paxton, and she’s been a regular visitor ever since. In the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The voice is fluting, translucent. The melodies it carries are linear yet sinuous, their rise and fall akin to undulating terrain. The instrumentation – acoustic guitar, bass guitar, some keyboards – is unobtrusive. Spíra is about the voice. It is also timeless – sounding as if it were recorded at any point in the last 60 years.However, getting to grips with what is being sung is less straightforward as the lyrics of Spíra are in Icelandic – a demonstration of the bond of trust between non-Anglophone songwriters and listeners who are not from their home territory or do not speak their Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The feelgood vibe that made Dreadzone famous nourishes a sensibility that reaches beyond time and space. Their music, originally honed in the early 1990s, hasn’t aged one bit, and as they drove an enthusiastic crowd of devoted followers to something near ecstasy in Bristol last Saturday, every glorious moment felt as good as new. Part of a musical movement that fed into a party culture held together by substances that encouraged an open heart and collective communion, the live experience always brought out the best in them. Although MC Spee has had his share of health problems and came Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Last Dinner Party’s second album, From the Pyre, is one of this year’s most enjoyable. Its lead single, “This is the Killer Speaking”, is a belter that’ll be around for years. Their musical and pop chops are hard to argue with. They’re a band who can put on a show which combines theatrical opulence and rockin’ zest. I’ve seen them do it. Tonight, however, they undermine themselves during the latter half by sabotaging the concert’s forward momentum Things start well. The quintet, accompanied by a male drummer introduced as “Luca”, appear on a stage set akin to a ruined church Read more ...