New music
mark.kidel
The day that Little Richard’s death was announced, my friend the soul singer PP Arnold wrote on her Instagram feed, of a “sanctified boogie-woogie piano style that was just electric”. She went on, recalling first hearing the man’s undiluted craziness: “I loved it when he did that "ooo" thing after the “Tutti Frutti aw Rudi” bit that sounded like one of the high soprano sisters in church”. This recognition of the essence of Little Richard’s unique artistry comes from a soul diva best known for her time as an Ikette with Ike and Tina, her Sixtie’s hit “The First Cut is the Deepest”, and her Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Moses Sumney’s second album is a double, and splits and nuances in gender, sexuality and identity define its fluid nature. A 28-year-old Ghanaian-American who grew up as an outsider in both countries, Sumney is most interested in removing masculinity’s hard shell, and touching the tenderness beneath.The sensitively quavering male voice has become a grating indie cliché, but Sumney’s potently polymorphous falsetto is something else. This is soul holding forth in the confession booth, and indie rock locked in a brimming bedroom. Sometimes it’s beatlessly unemphatic, bonelessly liquid R&B. Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Like his friend the late John Prine, Jason Isbell is a master storyteller. His skill, like Prine’s, is to inhabit the characters he sings about so fully, and with such empathy, that it can be difficult to tell where the songwriter ends and the story begins.Take “Letting You Go”, the country ballad that closes seventh album Reunions. It’s a song packed with poignant detail that could be drawn from life: a father strapping his newborn baby daughter into a car seat, sleepless nights and first steps. But it ends with Isbell – father to a daughter, yes, but one who is four years old – giving his Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Like mellotrons before them, synthesisers could project a strange and deep emotion – something in the wiring had an inherent melancholy. Previous generations had often disparaged synths as dehumanising machines but, at the turn of the 80s, a new generation of musicians appeared who could coax them into creating modern and decidedly moving music. It was almost as if these groups had intentionally set out to prove the doubters wrong.”The strapline from the back of the Saint Etienne-compiled The Tears of Technology lays out the 20-track collection’s mission statement: to rescue synth-infused Read more ...
Asya Draganova
The Yorkshire metal veterans Paradise Lost have been around for more than three decades. The name of the band has become synonymous with a distinct sound combining gothic, death and doom to deliver a layered, wonderful type of darkness. Their 16th studio album, Obsidian will very much please serious metal fans who have followed the band throughout, presenting a natural continuation of The Plague Within (2015) and Medusa (2017). At the same time, even a metalhead’s non-metalhead neighbours might not complain too much if Obsidian penetrates through the walls: the album is riddled with brilliant Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The music of monstrously successful emo-pop sorts Paramore is globally massive but is far from everyone’s cup of angst-lite. There is something polished and squeaky clean about them, Teflon fluoro-goth with an off-putting whiff of decent boy/girl-next-door niceness. This writer, then, comes to the debut album of lead singer Hayley Williams with Everest-sized prejudices. Unbelievably, these must be cast aside, for Petals For Armor, despite its stinky title (had to get one dig in!), is a vibrantly funky, imaginative and more-ish album.From the writing credits, Williams appears to have put it Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s 35 years since the original and best loved line up of X last released any new material: the less than special Ain’t Love Grand. Somewhat unexpectedly then, a new album, Alphabetland has appeared out of the ether and it’s certainly up there with the band’s spectacular, first four discs.40 years on from X’s lively debut, Los Angeles, Exene, John Doe, DJ Bonebrake and returned guitarist, Billy Zoom are still taking elements of raw rockabilly and The Doors’ more impressive moments and marrying them to a US blue-collar lyricism that makes Bruce Springsteen sound like a troubadour of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Way into lockdown now and, as the music world adjusts, so what artists are attempting becomes, in some cases, more sophisticated. In others, many impressively make the most of whatever tech they have to hand. Either way it’s always fascinating to check in on the best that’s out there. Below is this week’s pick. Dive in!Foals’ FBC TransmissionsLast Friday Brit Award-winning alt-rockers Foals launched Foals Broadcast Corp Transmissions, a weekly series of short films that will be appearing over 12 weeks on YouTube. Foals are currently poised to become that rare thing, a stadium-level outfit who Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dinosaur’s Mercury-nominated debut was a jolt of 1970s Miles and James Brown electricity. This third album steps back into the familiar comforts of acoustic jazz, with a cool inquisitiveness combining trumpeter-leader Laura Jurd’s rural Hampshire roots, conservatoire-schooled compositional rigour, and a sometimes New Orleans rasp that reaches right back to Louis Armstrong.“Slow Loris” is Sisyphean blues, climbing ever upwards as Elliot Galvin’s piano sprawls cat-like across pulsing bass, ending in shadowy 1920s clubland, then Crescent City funeral brass. The title track’s ice-pick piano Read more ...
mark.kidel
There are few albums as relentlessly dark as Mark Lanegan's latest: the raw and intense exploration of a tortured soul. This stuff is a few circles of hell deeper than anything Leonard Cohen ever did, and when the Canadian poet of melancholy "wanted it darker", the sombre tones and slowness were always laced with Jewish irony.Lanegan has just written a well-received memoir, Sing Backwards And Weep, in which he gives a heart-wrenching account of years of inner turmoil and drug excess. The new album was inspired by his autobiographical journey, and shares with it a searingly honest scalpel- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The enduring status of The Beatles shouldn’t distract from them having been one amongst many Liverpool bands while they found their feet. In October 1961, local impresario and Cavern Club DJ/MC Bob Wooler worked out that there were 125 active bands in Liverpool and its environs, and that he knew of 249 overall since he began working with music in the city.At that point, like The Beatles, King Size Taylor and the Dominoes were on the rise. They had come together in 1958 in Seaforth, north of Liverpool, as a union of rock ’n rollers The Dominoes and six-foot-five guitarist Ted “Kingsize” Taylor Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Of all the disappointments the lockdown has brought, great among them is the cancelled Eurovision Song Contest, which was due to be held in Rotterdam later this month. And while there are bigger concerns at the moment than a light entertainment programme, the Isolation Song Contest reminded us that community, the arts and a sense of humour will help to get us through.It was the brainchild of comic Tom Taylor, who persuaded friends from comedy, music and drag to take part for free, with donations from viewers going to the Trussell Trust, Crisis and Refuge charities. He randomly assigned 14 Read more ...