New music
Sebastian Scotney
This six-track EP on Verve/UMG brings the breakthrough year of 2023 for Samara Joy to a neat close. In February she won two Grammys, as Best New Artist and Best Jazz Vocal Album for “Linger Awhile”. In July she was Downbeat’s Critics’ Poll’s Rising Star Female Vocalist of the Year and Rising Star Artist of the Year. And just a couple of weeks ago she passed the mighty age of… 24.The first four tracks do exactly what the press release states so comfortingly. We hear “an extension of her latest album”, recorded at Sear Sound in NYC and with Matt Pierson again as producer. The opener is “Warm in Read more ...
Katie Colombus
I honestly never thought I'd add a Cher song to my painstakingly curated Christmas Spotify playlist. But after listening to the ultimate diva's new album entitled simply, Christmas, as we decorate the tree (much to my children's chagrin – they'd much rather it be Sia's Every Day Is Christmas), "DJ Play A Christmas Song" slides its way onto the end like a Baileys on ice.It's a kitsch, disco-synth dancefloor banger with a rampant, bauble-swinging beat, in which Cher merrily belts out "I want to be dancing all night long" that is sure to melt away all seasonal affective blues. " Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The cat in the hat with the mellifluous voice delivers his Christmas Wish for the festive season, his first Christmas album, and it sounds more or less as you would imagine it – tasteful, discreet, soulful, reined in, but richly expressive, and celebrating the spirit of a sharing, caring Christmas.It comes with some fine orchestral settings arranged by album producer Troy Miller, recording with the Kingdom Orchestra at Abbey Road, while Porter and his excellent band – pianist Chip Crawford, bassist Jahmal Nichols, drummer Emmanuel Harrold, saxophonist Tivon Pennicott and Ondre Pivec on Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Down memory lane, taking us back some six decades to the Buffalo Springfield, the latest Neil Young album's almost 50 minutes of continuous music, each song segueing into the next.“Songs from my life, recently recorded, create a music montage with no beginnings or endings,” Young has stated. “The feeling is captured, not in pieces, but as a whole piece, designed to be listened to that way… This music presentation defies shuffling, digital organisation, separation. Only for listening. That says it all.”Well, that’s the idea at least. Getting up from the sofa to move the tone arm was always a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Myriam Gendron's debut album Not So Deep As A Well was originally released in 2014 by Feeding Tube, a US label run by the prominent music writer Byron Coley. When it came out, he wrote that she was a “wonderful if spectral guitarist and singer, whose signature sound was as light as it was intoxicating. This album glows with holism and is one of the most beautiful evocations of times past and present and future you will hear this year.”Coley found out about Canada's Gendron when she played a concert dedicated to the songs of Michael Hurley, the Greenwich Village-associated singer-songwriter Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The realisation that Shirley Hurt is the name assumed by Canada’s Sophia Ruby Katz for recording helps explain why her debut album is so oblique. As well as the cloaked identity, what seem initially to be direct songs cleaving to familiar musical forms have winding structures which don’t end up where they seem to be heading. Similarly, the lyrics are tough to parse.Take “Problem Child.” Beginning in a vaguely Rickie Lee Jones manner, its jazzy undertone is bolstered by minimal, shuffling drums. Then, there’s some equally muted and unexpected “Do you Know the Way to San Jose” trumpet-like Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Ghost Woman’s 2022 self-titled album and this January’s swift follow-up Anne, If were both fairly laidback and spaced out affairs, with echoes of Beak’s free form motorik grooves and the Byrds’ pastoral psychedelia. Now that multi-instrumentalist Evan Üschenko has recruited the forceful percussion of Ille van Dessel to gang, however, their third album in 18 months, Hindsight Is 50/50 presents a considerably heavier prospect.In fact, with the duo seemingly taking pointers from Spacemen 3’s superlative monster trip soundtracks on the head-spinning trance of “Alright Alright”, it might well be Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A deathless trend in pop is taking great songs, slowing them down, doing orchestral versions, or rendering them raw acoustic. This, ostensibly, reveals their genius and/or brings them a new audience. Rarely, it can work, as on Johnny Cash’s final albums, but usually it simply renders sonic perfection as bland, naff slop. Such is the case with Trevor Horn’s latest.Horn is a great and visionary pop producer. He’s also performed in bands, notably his breakthrough group Buggles and prog behemoths Yes. In 2019 he released Reimagines the Eighties, which featured star singers on hits of the relevant Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Some 28 years in gestation, Peter Gabriel’s eighth studio album of wholly original songs – his first since 2002’s Up – will delight his fans and top the charts. Gabriel’s best instrument remains his voice, that husky marvel, which is at its most resonantly tender, vulnerable, and intimate here.Gabriel has always been a humanitarian, earth-friendly artist, but on my initial listenings to I/O – overly tasteful and scarcely risk-taking in its immaculate production, songwriting, and autumnal sentiments, a clear sign of mellowing – I missed the bite and foreboding that shaped much of the music on Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There was a moment towards the end of this exuberant evening when Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson compared the show to a pantomime. This was an extremely apt comparison, in a good way, for alongside the singing and dancing there was a helping of cheeky raised eyebrow wit, lashes of audience participation and even the usage of unexpected props.When a bra was launched towards the Dublin songstress she sashayed around with it and asked for “more where that came from”, which is why several moments later the Glasgow crowd found themselves enjoying the sight of Thompson clutching more underwear while Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After leaving Midlake while recording their fourth album, Tim Smith said he was pursuing music under the name Harp. That was in 2012. Smith had been the Denton, Texas-based band’s singer and main songwriter. Without him, Midlake pushed on and issued 2013’s still-stunning Antiphon album.A decade later Smith is releasing Albion, his first record as Harp. During the interregnum, his only known musical activities were appearing on the 2017 and 2021 albums by Lost Horizons, a project driven by former Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde. Harp, Midlake and Lost Horizons are all on Bella Union, Raymonde’s Read more ...
India Lewis
Coming at the end of a long year’s gigging, This Is The Kit’s performance at the Barbican on Saturday night was an excellent demonstration of the whole band’s familial, compelling musicianship.Support came from The Raincoats’ Gina Birch (and friends), whose politely raucous set was backgrounded by films that she had made during her art school days – the first of which, she told us, is featured in Women in Revolt!, currently on show at Tate Britain (a still from it is actually the poster for the show). Gina and her two bandmates played a rousing collection of songs, pulling no punches and with Read more ...