New music
Kieron Tyler
A raga-rock circularity. Finger cymbals. A distant, etiolated female vocal. A fuggy atmosphere. A kinship with Jefferson Airplane’s “Come Up The Years”, The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey” and The Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties”. Hangman’s Beautiful Daughters' “Love is Blue” is a beautiful, haunting recording.The band’s “Outta My Head” is as great, but is taken at a faster tempo and along the lines of US Sixties psych-garage rockers The Neighb'rhood Childr'n or “Don't Cry Your Tears”, the 1981 single by Edinburgh band The Delmontes.“Outta My Head” and “Love is Blue” are Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Talk about a great big melting pot! The eighth studio album by the man born 36 ago as Andrew Heissler in Bloomington, Indiana, and known to the world as Pokey LaFarge digs deep into the bubbling cauldron of Americana, in its very broadest sense. He himself has described it as kind of like a mix-tape and even the most casual listener will discern in Rock Bottom Rhapsody elements of country, blues, bluegrass, barrelhouse, doo-wop, jazz, rockabilly, the great American songbook and even hints of movie music.Pokey’s first outing since 2017’s Manic Revelations, it was mostly written in LA, to where Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Netflix’s ReMastered series is one of the streaming channel’s undersung gems. Launching in 2018, when Tricky Dick and the Man in Black first aired, it has proved to be a solidly well-made set of music documentaries. Some of its subjects have been raked over many times before, but the saga of President Richard Nixon inviting country superstar Johnny Cash to play the White House’s East Room (capacity 250) on April 17th 1970, while hardly obscure, is a lesser known event that proves fascinating.The hour-long film quickly sets the scene, pinballing between Cash’s youth and his status in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Filmic. Lushness balanced with intimacy. Ren Harvieu’s follow-up to 2012’s Top Five Through The Night is crammed with wide-screen aural dramas. Take “Cruel Disguise”. It begins with a slinky Sixties spy thriller vibe along the Shirley Bassey lines and after a brief moment of contemplation evolves into a swirling drama evoking Dusty Springfield’s “You Don’t Have to Say You Love me”. Next up, the crisp “Yes Please” nods to Laura Nyro when she’d hooked up with LaBelle but, again, darker – trip-hop-tinged – terrain is explored.The singing voice is melodic, yearning and nuanced. Yet Read more ...
mark.kidel
Purity Ring, the Canadian duo, are purveyors of simple yet sophisticated dream pop. Corin Roddick makes synth tracks at one end of the country, while crystalline-voiced Megan James writes the lyrics and records the vocals thousands of miles away. Perfect music for the age of social distancing, similar in a way to those multi-layered anthems now popping up on the internet with musicians syncing up in quasi-miraculous symphonic harmony.Womb is their third album, and it is, if anything more ethereal than the first two, Shrine (2012) and Another Eternity (2015), both of which stayed closer to the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Jazz people,” one commentator has written this week “are amongst the most adaptable of our species as life mirrors art and we improvise our way through – we're uniquely qualified to weather the storm.” There has indeed been a worldwide flurry of adaptability and creativity. The list below is a selection of seven initiatives to adapt and to bring people closer to the music which have caught my eye since lockdown began.Of course it’s not all about music. The real world, the politics, the unfolding story of the pandemic are omni-present. And there is already sadness and tragedy as Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Alongside the man he calls “the other half of my brain”, Flying Lotus, Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner sits near the heart of Los Angeles’ fertile, genre-busting scene, helping to link Kendrick Lamar’s righteous rebel rap, Kamasi Washington’s spiritual jazz, and the faux-nerd white one-man bands of Louis Cole and Sam Gendel. Breaking through himself with Drunk (2017), It Is What It Is confirms Thundercat’s own complex character, being both slyly funny and obscurely moving, as if attending a party that’s almost over.“Black Qualls” features another in the current generation of prodigious, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Available in Britain now on YouTube for only a couple of days, Elton John’s iHeart Living Room Concert for America was put together in less than a week and was broadcast in the US on Sunday evening. In normal circumstances, the slot would have been occupied by the iHeart Radio Music Awards, which were to have been carried live from the Shrine Auditorium in LA.When the ceremony cancelled earlier this month, Fox execs wondered what they might replace it with – what would be appropriate given the encroaching horror? And if they could put something together, would the public be forgiving about Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Since she burst onto the global scene in 2014 with her debut album, Chaleur humaine, Christine and the Queens' (aka Chris, real name Héloïse Letissier) work has been difficult to pin down. Is the French pansexual singer-songwriter-performance artist's music synth-pop, alt-pop or, as she describes it, “freakpop”?No matter, because her records – the latest is February's surprise release of a six-track EP, La Vita Nuova, about a difficult time in her life – prove that she is endlessly inventive, both with music and lyrics (Letissier's as happy speaking and singing in English as she is in French Read more ...
Liz Thomson
We’ve all spent time considering our desert island discs, which is of course why the programme Roy Plomley devised one winter’s night in 1942 is still thriving. The choices are perhaps less favourites than music that takes you back to a specific moment in time, that reminds you of someone, or something, special. “Favourites” are almost necessarily changeable. I prefer to think of music – a track, an album – that has in some way changed my life. Clichéd maybe, yet I suspect that most of us for whom music is a central part of life, not mere wallpaper, could come up with a little list of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“My favorite in the place was Karen Dalton. She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky and sultry. Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday’s and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it. I sang with her a couple of times.”Well Bob, that’s how you remember it. Dylan was writing in his 2004 memoir Chronicles Volume One about encountering Dalton at the Fred Neil-compered Cafe Wha? in the first half of 1961. Part of what he says seems fair. On 1969’s It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You, the first of her two albums, she melded Billie Holiday’s Read more ...
Richard Williams
A combination of chopped-up newsreel and fever dream, “Murder Most Foul” is Bob Dylan’s most striking piece of work in years. This is the author of “Desolation Row” populating a 17-minute song with a lifetime of remembered cultural fragments, zooming out and panning back and forth from the single pivotal event of the Kennedy assassination, plucking references out of the heavy air.The voice is sombre, the mood subdued, occasionally lit by flashes of the absurd. Images like frames from the Zapruder film – date, time, location, automobile, wound, wife – are gradually eased aside to Read more ...