CDs/DVDs
Barney Harsent
If ever there were a year to cherish new music, 2021 was it. Lockdown v3.0 came with unwelcome updates (shit weather, structured home-schooling) and the only end in sight was of the nation’s collective tether.With passports rendered next to useless, the arts offered an escape like never before, and music was no exception. In March, Jane Weaver’s phenomenal album Flock arrived full of psychedelic swagger and propulsive momentum. Retaining the melodic sensibilities and esoteric influences that defined her previous records, most notably 2017’s Modern Kosmology and 2015’s The Silver Globe, Weaver Read more ...
howard.male
It was two female artists who mainly soundtracked 2021 for me. And they couldn’t be more different. Although Off Off One by Kate Stables (aka This is the Kit) was recorded just before Covid changed everything, there are some ominous mentions in the lyrics of infection, coughing and hospital. But we’re not dealing with something maudlin or doom laden here, far from it. There’s a sly wit and quietly surreal joy to Stables’ gorgeously melodic pop songs. Yes, ‘pop’ not ‘alt folk’ or whatever the critics call it. I believe Staples would have been as big as Kate Bush in the 1970s, an era when Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Has there ever been a time when the music industry has had its gaze quite so firmly fixed on the past? Once the streaming stats started giving the message that revenue growth was going to come from back catalogues rather than current releases or new artists. all it took was a few back-of the-envelope DPV calculations, and humungous dollops of cash have been landing in the laps of Dylan, Paul Simon, Springsteen...and companies like Hipgnosis have raised more fistfuls to participate in the gold rush, and to ensure that it is prolonged.This year, reviewing albums by and Tony Bennett/ Lady Gaga Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Three films, each restored to glorious 4K, make up Second Run’s Hungarian Masters set. Billed as “essential works by three of Hungarian cinema’s most renowned filmmakers”, each film earns that praise in its own way.Zoltán Fábri’s Merry-Go-Round is the first, released amid the final months of Mátyás Rákosi’s de-facto leadership, a period defined by intense industrialisation, militarisation and collectivization. Fábri and his contemporaries witnessed a severe decline in living standards, purges, and the deportation of more than half a million Hungarians to the Soviet Union, where Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Frida Hyvönen’s UK profile isn’t as high as it is in her home country Sweden. Over here, what she gets up to is less apparent than the activities of some of her more heavily marketed fellow Swedes. Hence Dream Of Independence coming as a surprise, and the choice of it as the lead here.Dream Of Independence is instantly accessible and tune-packed, with its direct lyrics given added force by Hyvönen’s blunt delivery. A few specific tracks were noted when it was reviewed in March but any of the others are similarly emblematic of the album’s excellence. “Head of the Family” describes an intra- Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Katherine Priddy’s debut album came out in the summer, and it’s remained a high point for the rest of the year as 2021 plays out to the sombre drums and drones of resurgent pandemic warnings, fresh lockdowns, closed venues, silenced auditoriums. Her last gig of the year was at St Pancras Old Church on 16th December. I intended to be there, but Omicron infection rates ballooned to the point that going anywhere seemed no longer possible. Hello, and goodbye, to 2021.So I’m here at home again, hunkering down, listening to the songs from The Eternal Rocks Beneath, astonished again at their Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Is there anything more comforting to men of a certain vintage than the crunching guitars and wailing vocals of classic rock? Not for me. This year, the genre transported me back to a musical era of sheer joy and wild, creative spirit; a time when musicians were as interested in letting the good times roll as saving the world. A time of bands like classic rock revivalists, Greta Van Fleet. Throughout 2021, GVF's mixture of exhilarating energy and exquisite silliness was my antidote to the litany of misery on the news. I found myself lifted by Josh Kiszka's quicksilver voice and thrilled Read more ...
Guy Oddy
2021 was a year of two halves in New Musicworld. For the first seven months or so, venues remained closed and live performances were either a cherished memory or something experienced online. During the last five months, however, concert halls and clubs have slowly but steadily reopened to real audiences. In the meantime, musicians have had more time to digest and reflect on a post-Brexit, ongoing-Covid world of climate chaos, where things can feel decidedly more unstable than they did two years ago – and this has produced some fine sounds indeed.While it wasn’t a new idea, a number of Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There’s something about a search for fine detail in the music I’ve listened to this year, whether it’s reaching to recognise the Orkney birdsong in Erland Cooper’s Holm (Variations & B-Sides) or conjuring up images of the characters Arlo Parkes so vividly portrays in Collapsed in Sunbeams.One of the best places I’ve found such specific lyric description is in the fascinatingly fresh spoken word of post-punk South London band Dry Cleaning, fronted by Florence Shaw. The feminist fury of punk’s leading female figures Bikini Kill, Pussy Riot and Siouxsie and the Banshees have here been Read more ...
joe.muggs
2021 might not seem the most likely of years for the globalisation of dance music to intensify, what with the lack of travel and the lack of... well... dancing. But, in fact, thanks partly to the enforced time spent online which led to a lot of discovery for a lot of people, and partly to a simple yearning to get back out there dancing, the connections made have been wild. And no record exemplifies this quite like Toya Delazy’s Afrorave. The adopted Londoner comes from Zulu royalty, and is very keen to represent her heritage in her music: this entire album is rapped/sung in Zulu, its Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
We did that whole state-of-things COVID/Brexit/anxiety/neurosis blah-blah in the end-of-year pieces last year. And, indeed, the year before (when Bozza was elected). Not this year. I’m over that. Let’s crack on. Live life. Own it. All that. An equivalent bullishness of tone, filtered through a defiantly feminine aesthetic, rules Marina Diamandis’s fifth album (she of Marina and the Diamonds). Or, at least, the parts of it that aren’t concerned with “highly emotional people” or mourning the end of her five year relationship with Clean Bandit’s Jack Patterson.It’s an outrageous album; Read more ...
Nick Hasted
José James regularly steps away from the straight jazz singer berthed for years at Blue Note, pining to be an R&B voice for broader black audiences. Covering both Freestyle Fellowship and Rashaan Roland Kirk on his debut The Dreamer (2008), his sensibility straddles sounds and eras which are anyway intimately linked.This Christmas album is, though, aimed straight at the easy listening heart. The Fifties of Nat “King” Cole, Ella and Sinatra at their most frictionless, as well as Blue Note’s more straightahead jazz moments, fill the grooves. The sublimated shadows Gregory Porter found on Read more ...