CDs/DVDs
Graham Fuller
Whether or not the lyrics Stuart Stawman writes and sings are autobiographical, the persona he’s created for himself as the leader of his neo-prog project SJS is that of a dutiful lover thwarted by the pressing of the self-destruct button no affair is without. That love is a game is a recurrent theme in Stawman’s songs and, of course, it means someone has to lose. Stawman’s plaintive English voice, sometimes a husky warble, sometimes a falsetto cry, is the ideal medium for the romantic disillusion he expresses on the Australia-based combo’s third album. But here’s a thought – Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Ryuichi Sakamoto can be heard here, on Opus, surrounded by silence, shuffling at the keyboard, off-mic rustles and tells, recorded in the last year of his life, in September 2022 – he died early in the following year – as he sat to make his final performances.Not in public – there's not even the ghost of an audience here – but at Tokyo's NHK Broadcast Center's 509 Studio, in a solo performance filmed by his son Neo Sora, for which this is the soundtrack. Five decades of film and Yellow Magic music are spread between the two hands of one performer across 88 keys, and it feels like he's playing Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Barefoot in Bryophyte is a collaboration between musicians embedded in Norway’s jazz and experimental music scenes. Some of it, though, sounds nothing like what might be expected. Take the fourth track, “Paper Fox.” Figuratively, it lies at the centre of a Venn Diagram bringing together Mazzy Star, 4AD’s 1984 This Mortal Coil album It'll End in Tears and the more minimal aspects of Baltimore’s Beach House. It’s quite something.Then there’s the shoegazing-adjacent “So Low” which does, indeed, bear a familial resemblance to Low were they stripped of their tendency towards embracing noise. The Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Whatever esperanza wants, it would seem, esperanza gets. From over-riding normal conventions of using capital letters in her name, to an imposing A-List of guests on Milton + esperanza (Concord): Paul Simon, Lianne La Havas, Guinga, Dianne Reeves, Shabaka Hutchings…But what esperanza really wanted, as she explains in the album notes, was to make an album with – and to honour – Brazilian music legend Milton Nascimento. As she says: “Your heart, your music, your seeing, your spirit means to me what the sun and moon mean to the earth. You are the inspiration for so much of what I do, so Read more ...
joe.muggs
It seems like Yoni Wolf and his band WHY? may have settled into a cycle of five-year crafting of albums. The last WHY? album was 2019’s AOKOHIO and it was an extraordinary collection of abstracted miniatures locked together with each other and with the accompanying films with Swiss watch intricacy. This one is every bit as ambitious in its execution – perhaps more so as it’s super grand in its scope, expanding out in all directions from the hodge-podge of leftfield and psychedelic influences that have always informed WHY? into the more wide open spaces of the collective American imagination. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
X, although beloved of music journalists, are one of American punk’s most under-acknowledged. They took a tilt at fame in the mid-Eighties with the radio-friendly Ain’t Love Grand album and its lead single “Burning House of Love”, but it wasn’t to be. They remained a connoisseurs’ choice (inarguable evidence of their abilities is the stunning 1983 tune “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts”). Now they reach the end of the line, persuasively so, with a wistful but sonically punkin’ final album.Led by the vocal spar-harmonising duo of John Doe and Excene Cervenka, the Los Angeles four-piece were never Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Swedish-American four-piece Blues Pills are new to this writer but have been around since 2011. Their fourth album makes me wonder why.Of its 11 songs, judged purely on sheer pop-rock chops, nine have real legs. If a friend had put Birthday on and told me it had topped the charts in the US for three weeks, I wouldn’t have blinked an eye. Mind you, I might also have asked if it had been a hit some time between 1977 and 1982.That’s not quite fair. Birthday has a production sheen and feel that flirts with the modern. “Top of the Sky” sounds akin to Lady Gaga doing one of her lighters-in-the-air Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“I don’t care what they’re talking about,” says the best bugger in the business, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman). “I just want a nice fat tape.”In the minor-key masterpiece Francis Ford Coppola made in the brief interlude between The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part 2 (1974), Harry is a freelance genius of surveilled sound, whose mask of isolated control is incrementally dismantled by a recording of a clandestine lovers’ rendezvous in San Francisco. “It’s not an ordinary meeting,” he realises. “It makes me feel something.”The Conversation is a shadowy tone poem Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Still Willing opens with “Upper Ferntree Gully,” a seven and three-quarter minute workout twice as long as most of the other nine tracks on Personal Trainer’s second album. A portmanteau piece, its most direct sections have the chug of vintage Pavement, some stabbing early Tame Impala guitar and chunks of Sonic Youth-like squall. Yo La Tengo also aren’t far.Personal Trainer are based in Amsterdam, and fronted by the Australia-born Willem Smit. As "Upper Ferntree Gully" takes its name from a suburb of Melbourne, the song presumably nods to his past. Equally probable is the surmise that the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Meshell Ndegeocello's groundbreaking new album No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin takes you on a musical journey which defies categorisation.Eight years in the making and set for release on 2 August – Baldwin's centennial – the album’s origins date back to Ndegeocello’s 2016 musical and theatrical tribute to the iconic writer and activist, "Can I Get a Witness? The Gospel of James Baldwin", commissioned and produced by Harlem Stage through its WaterWorks programme.A nuanced exploration of race, sexuality, religion and other recurring themes explored in Baldwin’s canon, which takes its Read more ...
joe.muggs
In a discussion recently a friend compared generative AI to self-driving cars back in 2017: the makers were convinced, perhaps rightly, that they had solved 99.9% of the problem, and therefore would have a viable product within the year. The problem for self-driving cars back then, and generative AI now, is that the last 0.1% is something special. Intractable.It’s worth holding on to that as more and more playlists are flooded by uncannily realistic impersonations of country, disco and what have you. We are about to get glutted by a technology that seems all encompassing, but there remans an Read more ...
mark.kidel
Something of a jazz supergroup this one: with drum virtuoso, the ubiquitous Seb Rochford, Jim Bar of Get the Blessing, Adrian Utley – formerly of Portishead, a prolific collaborator and producer, but with a heart rooted in jazz, and sax and flute-player Larry Stabbins, among other credits a co-founder of Working Week, recently returned from 10 years’ sailing around the world.Playing mostly improvised music, and deftly navigating a space between fierceness and sensitivity, the four musicians (and friends) have created a dialogue of singular voices that converse and battle with Read more ...