New music
Tom Carr
Travel back in time to the mid 2000s and you would be hard pressed to escape "Take Me Out" by Franz Ferdinand on the air waves. On the radio, music channels, in discos and clubs, what felt like overnight, the track catapulted frontman Alex Kapranos, guitarist Nick McCarthy, bassist Bob Hardy and drummer Paul Thomson into a household UK name with its tension building first section, and iconic riff.Ever since, the band have striven to reinvent themselves and their sound. The post-punk rock sound of their debut self titled album has since evolved to take on dancier tones and stylings. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title Cold Blows The Rain encapsulates it. A mournful, unembellished female voice sings of loss. The musical backing is sparse. Rhythms are measured. Nothing is hurried. If this album was a weather forecast, it would predict impenetrable mist followed by cold rain and wind. Then, more mist.This is Bridget Hayden’s first album which can clearly be defined as folk. Since the late 1990s, her music has been experimental, impressionistic – most often made with Schism and Vibracathedral Orchestra. She has also played and recorded with edgy shoegazers The Telescopes. Tellingly for Cold Blows The Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Sometimes magic really can’t be recreated. However hard it’s strived for. The incendiary magic that was Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg three decades ago has not been conjured again in this long-awaited reunion. There are sparks of genius, for sure, and some notable beats and samples but it’s certainly no Doggystyle. Maybe the clue is in the “cheeky” title and painfully obvious condom packet imagery on the cover. So far, so teen.One might expect a more mature vocabulary and smarter ideas from the now 53- and 59-years-olds but, sadly – and predictably – we are served liberal sprinklings of effing Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
A gem for me this year has been the collaborative project between the veteran minimalist composer Chihei Hatakeyama and jazz drummer Shun Ishiwaka, Magnificent Little Dudes Vol. 1. It’s an album I stumbled upon, not being familiar with either artist, but which has taken me down many rabbit-holes and soundtracked my year. Hatakeyama is a prolific minimalist composer with over 70 albums to his name. His signature sound consists of slow, sustained notes of modular synthesisers, warped guitars and field recordings that shimmer and dissolve. The glacial pace of Hatakeyama’s music evokes Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The descending refrain opening the song isn’t unusual but attention is instantly attracted as it’s played on a harpsichord. Equally instantly, an elegiac atmosphere is set. The voice, coming in just-short of the 10-second mark, is similarly yearning in tone. The song’s opening lyrics convey dislocation: “You and I travel to the beat of a different drum.”“Different Drum,” the September 1967 single by an outfit dubbed Stone Poneys Featuring Linda Ronstadt, was immediate, had a country edge and was written by Mike Nesmith – then best known as a member of The Monkees. The band had already issued Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Does absolutely everything have to get more difficult with each passing year? Apparently so. The amount of time I’ve spent deciding which of the many truly excellent albums I’ve reviewed this year should get the ‘top prize’ has, frankly, been ridiculous. I’m not an indecisive person. And, for God knows that reason, I feel personally loyal to the artists upon whom it would have been easier to bestow this huge honour (Nadine Shah, Elbow, Joan as Policewoman, see below). I am choosing the road less travelled. Sort of.Get over yourself, I hear you cry. And you’re right. The reason I’ve plumped Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Mk.gee has been an unexpected thread in a year of music that’s pulled me in many different directions, punctuating the need for unique, sonically interesting music alongside the huge pop and rock albums that we’ve also been treated to in 2024.Music, this year, isn’t worth mentioning without the surprising jump in sophistication that Fontaines DC took with Romance, which captured a perfect mix of love and hatred for the world and the people in it. The band has matured since their last album, Skinty Fia, evolving the gritty post-punk sound that started with Dogrel in 2019, and abruptly Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Young eldritch junkie Nick Cave would have struggled to predict his maturity as a font of wry and sacred wisdom, or the fathomless loss he reckoned with en route.Wild God followed the harrowed Skeleton Tree and grief-illumined Ghosteen, necessary steps towards the new album’s explosion of hope. The Bad Seeds returned in full, though compressed by Dave Fridmann’s controversial mix to one more forceful layer among a gospel choir, orchestra and Cave’s ecstatic voice. The sound could seem superficial at cynical first glance, the lyrics uncharacteristically rough, the whole project a bid to secure Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A reissue can be an aide-mémoire, a reminder that a record which has been off the radar for a while needs revisiting, that it deserves fresh attention.In that spirit, this column has looked at straight vinyl reissues of albums of varying styles, from various periods; from the well-known to those which attracted barely any consideration when they first surfaced. In the latter category, there is the reissue of Horizoning by the Canadian folk-inclined singer-songwriter Stefan Gnyś whose sole album had, until 2024, never advanced beyond the 12 two-sided acetate discs which were specially cut in Read more ...
mark.kidel
Beth Gibbons’s latest album touched me more deeply than most of what I heard in 2024. She’s true to herself and honest in a way that’s extraordinarily disarming. Her vulnerability matches, in a microcosmic and yet authentic way, the unutterable pain and suffering that has coursed through the year, amplified by the media-boosted repetition of horrific news cycles.This isn’t a time for celebration, but for empathy and the homeopathic healing that comes from songs that speak directly from the heart. Like cures like, so they say, and shedding layers of protective skin, the former singer from Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
From the iconic Pop anthems that dominated this Summer, to the Pop Punk resurgence that is still going strong, it’s been an exciting twelve months of new music. I haven’t struggled to choose an album of the year, but I acknowledge that my choice is in great company. To Dream of Something Wicked by Mat Kerekes deserves a mention before I continue, the solo career of the Citizen lead singer receives a criminal lack of attention, and his latest album is a perfect addition to his growing catalogue. It is melodically and lyrically fascinating, gentle, and captivating, and would have been a strong Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Back in November Katherine Priddy released a winter single with the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, “Close Season”, wrapping the spirit of winter and snowfall into the uncertainty and possession of attraction, possession, desire – warm things that glow in the seasonal dark.It’s a good song, Priddy is in fine voice, the musical setting a little more emphatically ‘rock’, but the Poet Laureate’s lyrics, smart and succinct as they are in their character sketching and double-edged evocation of the ‘closed season’, do not quite reach Priddy’s lyrical depth and prowess on on her second album, The Read more ...