New music
Harry Thorfinn-George
Back in June, there was a Tik Tok of a woman with eyeliner and a skinny tie miming to the 2002 hit, “Sk8er Boi”. They say trends come in 20 year cycles, which makes sense given the current pop-punk revival we are in. For zoomers, it’s nostalgia for a time they just missed. For millennials, it’s unfettered longing, summed up by the aptly titled When We Were Young Festival (headliners include Paramore and Bring me the Horizon). It was therefore not surprising hearing “Sk8er Boi” on Tik Tok. But it was surprising that the woman was not just anyone, but the pop-punk princess herself, Avril Read more ...
joe.muggs
Tears For Fears were an odd non-presence through their most successful years. They were right up there in the premier league of stadium rock-pop bands, but had none of the Celtic romantic bombast of U2 and Simple Minds, weren’t as weird as Eurythmics or Depeche Mode, as muso as Sting, nor as showbiz as Duran Duran or late Queen. Their Songs From the Big Chair album sold eight million copies, and everyone of a certain age can just about chant along to “Shout” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”, but what really was there to them? It was all very earnest, Roland Orzabal Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s not breaking any secrets to note that the woman immortalised as the “Chestnut-brown canary/Ruby-throated sparrow” in Stephen Stills’ “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” will shortly turn 83. Not that you’d know it from Spellbound, her new album.Her voice has retained a youthful quality – no uncontrollable vibrato, no loss of top notes – and a general surety of pitch which singers many years younger long ago lost (and in some cases never possessed). It’s a little over 60 years since she released A Maid of Constant Sorrow, and she’s not stopped since. Extraordinarily, this is the first album featuring Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The death of U-Roy was announced on 17 February 2021. A year on, the reappearance of his oft-reissued 1971 debut album Version Galore brings the opportunity to celebrate the music which brought him his earliest success; the music which propelled him into Jamaica’s top ranks.U-Roy – born Euwart Beckford – had been testing his skills as a DJ since the early Sixties. His initial inspiration was Count Macuki who, from the late Fifties, had performed with Tom Wong’s and Clement Dodds’s sound systems. U-Roy passed through Wong’s, Sir George The Atomic’s and Dodds’s set-ups before he came to King Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Healing, ecstasy and transformation are the aims, from Johnny Marr’s Manchester counter-culture adolescence to this compendium of Covid-era EPs, released as he nears 60. Rock’s alchemising of dreams into action is Fever Dreams’ constant refrain, aimed at a perceived audience much like Marr, motivated by faith in music, and essentially kind.Rearing feedback as Marr plugs into opener “Spirit Power & Soul”, then he’s singing: “I’ve seen some shimmering things/Seen a vision of things…” Musically as well, it’s an account of coming up, getting high after a low, a transmission of a stiffening Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Melt Yourself Down’s last one, 100% Yes, was the most ballistically exciting album of 2020. The band are unique, a six-piece mutation who, as their album title indicates, don’t fit in anywhere. The good news is that they’ve not tempered what they’re up to one jot. Pray For Me I Don’t Fit In amplifies the in-yer-faceness of their music and rampages out of the speakers like a wild beast.Where 100% Yes was underpinned by a lively Afro-indie funk aesthetic, their fourth album ups the ante, becoming closer to the scene that gave them their name (they were named after an obscure album by Seventies Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On her sixth album, Basia Bulat re-records 16 of her own songs with specially created string arrangements. The Garden isn’t a best-of, more a recalibration of how the Canadian singer-songwriter sees herself through her music and how the meanings of the songs have changed.Bulat had played double bass in a chamber ensemble and has worked live with a string sections, so there’s a logic to how The Garden is arranged. Although three different string arrangers are used and there is a nod to Bartók and touches of Bernard Herrmann-esque drama, the defining characteristic is the relationship of Read more ...
joe.muggs
Metronomy have gone all out to knock off their quirky corners here, and goodness, it’s worked. It’s quite a move from a band whose eccentricity has always been part and parcel of their image – and they really haven’t done it by halves, in fact they’ve brought themselves a lot closer to their peers and near-peers in the process. But somehow, by zooming in on the archetypal, risking losing unique character, this album really demonstrates the level of talent that Metronomy main man Joe Mount really has. It’s been a roundabout route here – this is the seventh Metronomy album in 16 years Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The ECM label has been welcoming British and UK-based musicians to its roster for more than half a century. The very first were a group consisting of Evan Parker, Derek Bailey and Hugh Davies. Then came a bassist who, back in 1971, was called “David Holland”. Then Azimuth (Kenny Wheeler, Norma Winstone, John Taylor) and many more. The story of Manfred Eicher’s label could, in theory, have happened without musicians from these islands, but it would have been a different story.In the past few years a major welcome has been extended to Kit Downes. The phenomenal, Norwich-born pianist/organist/ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1957, popular music was given a jolt when the first electronic pop record was recorded. “Song of the Second Moon” was created and composed by the Dutch musician Dick Raaijmakers who was working at NatLab, the research laboratory of the electronics company Philips.“Song of the Second Moon” was based around a rhythmic pulse, and incorporated tape manipulation and multiple Ondes Martenots. It predicted the bubbling sound which became associated with Jean-Jacques Perry and presaged the machine beat Giorgio Moroder incorporated into his Donna Summer productions. It is also echoed by the 1962 Read more ...
mark.kidel
Combining ancestral music with electronic sounds has become so widespread that it’s almost a cliché. Dance floors now pulsate with sounds from around the globe, adding a welcome warmth and heart to the tropes of techno, house and trance. Malian singer Rokia Koné with producer Jacknife Lee stand miles above the rest, and offers an object lesson in working so subtly with the original that the richness of African music isn't colonised by technology but miraculously enhanced.The gutsy authenticity of Bambara music – Rokia Koné hails from Ségou, the capital of the ancient Bambara Empire – is Read more ...
joe.muggs
Mary J Blige is a monumental musical power. 30+ years, 14 albums, various labels and untold collaborations into her career, she still has the ability to deliver records that push everything else aside, existing entirely on their own terms and forcing other cultural forces to rearrange around them. Thus with Good Morning Gorgeous. This album has a stack of new and veteran guests and ranges in production style from lush Seventies soul to viciously sharp, UK-influenced electronic drill beats – but all of these are bent to Blige’s will: they all become adjuncts to her voice, song structures Read more ...