New music
Liz Thomson
Music, as the sociologist Simon Frith long ago pointed out, is “an experience of placing: in responding to a song we are drawn, haphazardly, into affective emotional alliances with the performer and with the performer’s other fans”. Music makes you feel things, it’s about shared emotional experiences. And while, since the invention of the Walkman, those experiences are possible in the isolation of one’s own headphones, nothing can begin to touch the communal concert experience.Performing alone onstage in a concert space, the audience unseen and unheard, can’t be easy, which is perhaps why Read more ...
mark.kidel
Dublin’s Imelda May, who made her name as a superlative performer of high-energy rockabilly in a way that reflected the music’s partly Irish roots, has just released her first poetry recordings: nine punchy, moving, sometimes humourous and well-crafted spoken lyrics, mostly accompanied by subtle yet atmospheric strings.She has a great voice, both sensual and strong. Here, the vocal textures and natural sense of rhythm and pacing serve her well. She had revealed her versatility on her previous album Life Love Flesh Blood (2017) where, in the inspiring hands of master producer T-Bone Burnett, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There’s something wrong with the picture above. It’s the sleeve of a French EP issued in August 1966 credited to a surly looking band called “Them”. The chap standing in the middle has what appear to be bullet holes in his shirt, but where’s the band’s frontman and main songwriter Van Morrison? Further confusing matters, the EP was also issued with the band credit altered to “The Belfast Gypsies”, where otherwise the sleeve was the same (pictured below left).The band on the sleeve was not Them, or drawn from the outfit Morrison was with in 1966. Them had split in Hawaii in June 1966 following Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Swallow Tales is a great album. It took three musicians fewer than five hours on one afternoon in New York studio in March 2019 to make. But there again, it also took them more than 40 years.John Scofield became aware of bassist Steve Swallow in the 1960s when he was a teenager. Swallow was on some of the first albums that the young guitarist owned. Scofield then became his student at Berklee College in Boston, the age difference between them just over 11 years. “He was an established great and I was a rookie,” he recently explained in an interview. Scofield and Swallow first recorded a pair Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Prettiest Curse is the third album by Spain’s indie-foursome Hinds and sees them take a substantial step up from the lo-fi, C86/Pastels’ like sound of their previous discs Leave Me Alone and I Don’t Run. Now they have embraced considerably more expansive production values, as well as additional instruments and a noticeable influence from their native culture, and it’s all for the good. That said, they haven’t moved too far from their influences and throughout the album there is frequently a feeling that things could spin out of control at any moment and come to a premature end. Much like Read more ...
Liz Thomson
As news bulletins compare events in America to 1968, the mental jukebox spins almost inevitably to “Abraham, Martin and John”, first recorded by Dion – the price of a new record contract after he‘d got clean and split from The Belmonts. It’s not the best known version (that’s Marvin Gaye’s) but it made No 4 on the US charts and relaunched Dion’s career.It’s a career that's gone through several phases, like that of his old friend Bob Dylan, who wrote the liner notes to Blues With Friends and with whom he shares a religious period. These past couple of decades Dion’s been rocking with the likes Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For better or worse, the lockdown may be easing in the UK but there’s no sign of any gig action, even on the far distant horizon. So it’s back to our screens for all that, and here’s the latest, liveliest selection of concerts, conversations and virtual festival action for the coming week! Dive in!The Other Songs/Brit School FestivalThe record label and management company The Other Songs, whose speciality is nurturing new talent, combine with the Brit School for a virtual festival this Friday (5th June) at 6.00 PM. It will showcase plenty of fresh-off-the-block artists, as well as dancers, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Will Westerman is not afraid of sounding retro. It's clear his influences are diverse, from jazz fusion to the bedroom proto-house experiments of Arthur Russell. But in their final form, his high gloss production, highly literate songs and fretless bass sound like something out of a creatively leftfield but megabucks studio-produced mid Eighties record: the likes of Talk Talk, Kate Bush, Roxy Music's Avalon and above all The Blue Nile loom large.Westerman's arrangements and DEEK Recordings owner Nathan “Bullion” Jenkins's production does an incredible job of doing what would have required Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Experiencing All Things Being Equal is akin to taking a trip through The Time Tunnel. Although the songs and the recordings on the new solo album from former Spacemen 3 man Pete Kember aka Sonic Boom are recent, they could have been lifted from his first (and last) solo album, 1989’s Spectrum, and Spacemen 3’s final set, 1991’s Recurring.Opening cut “Just Imagine” has the bloopiness, pulse and melancholy vocal defining Kember’s contributions to Recurring. Next, the spacey “Just a Little Piece of Me” incorporates the hymnal texture he and his then-partner Jason Pierce deftly brought to the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ghana was visited by two British musicians in the early Eighties. One was Mick Fleetwood, who recorded the Visitor album in Accra during January and February 1981. The other was Brian Eno, who came to the country in late 1980 to attend the National Festival of Arts and Culture (NAFAC). While in Ghana, he also produced The Pace Setters, the first and only album by local band Edikanfo.In the reminiscence Eno contributes to the new reissue of The Pace Setters, he says “having spent the previous few years immersed in Fela Kuti's early albums and the previous few months stuck into John Miller Read more ...
mark.kidel
Bab L’Bluz are a Franco-Moroccan band, They’re the latest in a succession of musicians - going back to the pioneers Nass El Ghiwane, and the recently departed Rachid Taha - to have created a vibrant fusion of traditional sounds from the Maghreb with the energy of rock. They draw their inspiration from the trance music of the Gnawa brotherhoods, communities of musicians and healers whose music connects with West African origins, and inevitably reflects common roots with the American blues.Yousra Mansour, the band’s versatile and charismatic vocalist, breaks with a tradition in which men alone Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Lady Gaga proclaimed by Tweet that her sixth album represents her “absolute love of electronic music”. Chromatica features EDM names such as Axwell from Swedish House Mafia, French DJ-producers Tchami and Madeon, bro’step superstar Skillex, as well as a good few more. It is a step away from the likeable pop experimentalism of her last album, Joanne, yet does not, unfortunately, have the sheer dancefloor heft of her albums Artpop and, especially, the bangin’ Born This Way.The contradictory aspect of Chromatica is that while the music is often generic Euro-cheese, it regularly plays off Read more ...