New music
Kieron Tyler
Johnnie Taylor’s big break came with the ever-fabulous September 1968 single “Who's Making Love.” His ninth 45 for the Stax label, it went Top Ten on the Billboard Hot 100. Up to this point, the Arkansas-born singer had been on the R&B charts only. Hitting the mainstream countdown had taken a while: Taylor’s first solo single had been issued in April 1961.Before this, he had been in gospel outfits The Five Echoes – who he joined in 1951 or 1952 at age 17 – and, from 1957, The Highway QC’s, who Sam Cooke had passed through. In August 1960, he took on the Cooke role in the Soul Stirrers – Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Morcheeba reach their 30th anniversary this year. The 1990s band, a unit once synonymous with phrases such as “trip hop” and “chill-out”, are up to album number 11. Their multi-million-selling oeuvre is based around a hazy combination of low-slung hip hop beats, stoned electronic atmospherics, spacey, slightly John Barry wah-wah guitar, and the luxurious voice of frontwoman Skye Edwards. Because the formula is always approximately the same, each album wins or loses dependent on whether they’ve nailed a sweet set of songs. On this occasion they do.Morcheeba has been the duo of singer Skye Read more ...
mark.kidel
Ammar 808 is the high octane vehicle for the Tunisian-born producer Sofyann Ben Youssef, now based in Denmark. His first album Maghreb United (2018) struck hard and fast in a field already well-populated by the fusion of traditional Arab sounds and modern electronics. It was a marriage made in heaven. His second album Global Control/Invisible Invasion (2020) explored links with South Indian sounds, but in the latest, he returns to his roots and the result is a frenetic and very danceable mix of ancient and modern.In the company of some of Tunisia’s most popular vocalists, the producer weaves Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Pixies might just be the ultimate Radio 6 Dad band. They’ve been around (on-and-off) for around 40 years; they’ve got a fine back catalogue of slightly weird, guitar-driven scuzzy rock music and they have absolutely no pretentions to being flash at all.However, while Black Francis and his crew pulled in plenty of their core fan base into Birmingham’s O2 Academy this week, it was also pleasing to see plenty of young men and women who couldn’t have even been born when Pixies temporarily decided to knock things on the head and go their separate ways in the early 1990s. It was also clear that Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
How do you solve a problem like Sports Team? Taking them at face value, they’re a living metaphor for the slow music biz relegation of the working class in favour of the privileged, a bunch of snarky ex-Cambridge University students who make smug guitar pop, a Brideshead Revisited version of The Kooks. And yet, and yet, that’s too trite, too obvious; they mine their background and image with self-awareness, their songs smart, ironic observations of the world they’re perceived to inhabit. They’re gunning for Roxy Music’s elegant trick of rendering monied louche wryly cool. On their third album Read more ...
joe.muggs
Stereolab always walked a knife edge between deadly serious and dead silly. Their sound was constructed around the sort of reference points – French, German and Brazilian psychedelia, Radiophonic Workshop sound effects, 1960s library music – which back in pre-streaming, pre-discogs days of the early 1990s when they started out you had to be a proper nerd to have any grasp of.Lyrics were shot through with references to obscure Marxist theory, situationism, obsolete electronics catalogues and so on, with layer upon layer of absurdism and earnestness interleaved to the point you could very Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Photographer Finetime and I have our first pints outside Dalton’s, a bar on Brighton seafront, at almost exactly midday. They are Beavertown Neck Oil IPA at 4.3%. The sun is out, glinting off the sea. Feels like the calm before the storm.Quarter of an hour later, the singer Luna Roja (pictured left) takes to the small indoor stage. She tells the small crowd that she wants her music to “connect South America and spaghetti westerns”. With long straight black hair, she’s clad in a powder blue fringed jacket, pale jeans and a cowboy hat. Her guitar adds the Morricone twang but the songs mostly Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Tell me what you see” invites Robert Forster during Strawberries' “Tell it Back to me.” The album’s eight songs do not, however, necessarily say what Forster actually sees. These vignettes about encounters between characters come across as imaginary scenarios.This contrasts with the former Go-Betweens lynchpin’s last album, The Candle and the Flame, which was a direct – albeit allusive – reaction to the diagnosis and treatment of his wife Karin Bäumler’s cancer.“Tell it Back to me,” the tale opening Forster’s ninth solo album, tells of a man – an English teacher – who meets a woman who Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Quoted in an early music press article on his band Chapterhouse, singer-guitarist Stephen Patman said their ambition was “to have our records on sale in 20 years’ time. To leave something behind when we die." That was September 1990, in a piece tied-in to their soon-to-be-issued debut single.Setting aside the pessimistic proposal of a two-decade lifespan, the ambition has been achieved. And then some. White House Demos is a four-track, 12-inch EP collecting previously unheard demos the band recorded on 15 January 1989, by which point Chapterhouse had played only four live shows. His band’s Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Songlines Encounters is your round-the-world ticket to great world music and performances, a chance to travel widely in music and culture without the burden of check-ins, passport control, flight delays, or transfers. All you need do is get to Kings Place over this weekend for a festival of world music that encompasses Mali in West Africa, with Rokia Kone from the striking and sensational Amazones d’Afrique on Friday night’s menu, paired in Hall 2 with Kurdish-Anatolian singer Olcay Bahir, who mixes her own songs with Anatolian folk songs.To open on Thursday, audiences had a pairing of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As every social space in Brighton once again transforms into a mire of self-important music biz sorts loudly bellowing about “waterfalling on Spotify”, it’s also a great time for those who relish gigs by new talent from all over the world. For three days (four, if you count warm-up Wednesday), every nook and cranny has half-hour showcases running from lunchtime until close. And on top of that are the freebie Alternative Escape fringe events.This writer starts in Chalk, arguably Brighton's best venue, an approximately 800-capacity space, open and airy, with great sightlines and an acceptable Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Rico Nasty’s new album LETHAL signals a shift in direction, but whether it is a bold evolution or a step towards something less distinct is up for debate. Known for her fiery rage-rap and punk energy, Rico tones things down here, trading some of her wild unpredictability for a more polished, trend-aware sound.Tracks like “TEETHSUCKER (YEAH 3x)” bring back her signature distortion and chaotic charm, but those moments are scattered. Songs like “Butterfly Kisses” and “Soul Snatcher” lean into vulnerability, showing a softer side of Rico that feels genuine, but are not especially groundbreaking. Read more ...