New music
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The first album from the Boston-bred songwriter Squirrel Flower opens and closes with autobiographical songs. “I-80” opens with the artist - real name Ella O’Connor Williams - giving up on lyrics, poetry and, later, giving up on love, its rootless melody channelling the road west to Iowa where Williams went to college before building to a relentless crescendo. By the album’s closer, and title track, though, Williams has embraced poetry again: the “swimming” lyric is a reference to her being born still in the remains of the amniotic sac, the shimmering heat of the hottest day of the summer of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Since first getting together at the fag end of the 20th century, Black Lips have largely played the role of garage rockers with a hint of country and western about them. The songs on their latest album, however, turns their schtick somewhat on its head. For Sing In A World That’s Falling Apart is the band’s most explicitly country album to date, albeit one that possesses more than a dash of garage rock swagger. This is all the more emphasised by an album cover that features the five-piece looking something like a 2020 update of the Beverly Hillbillies.Any shift in their style, however, has Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
One can only marvel at the versatility of Ruby Turner. As a vocalist, she spans the whole blues/soul/ R&B spectrum, and has been a major presence on the British scene since the late Seventies. Her unvarying capacity just to step forward and deliver a strong line, clear words, and powerful emotions are an unfailing and unique aspect of the musical life of this country. Perhaps the Halls of Fame and the honours system have a bit of catching-up to do.She has done everything from taking a major role in the British blues movement at the instigation of Alexis Korner, to performing Ray Charles Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Celtic Connections, Scotland’s annual festival of folk, world and fusion music, has been brightening up dreich Glasgow Januaries since its inception in 1994. Originally proposed partly as a way to fill a scheduling gap in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall’s post-Christmas period, Celtic Connections is now a major event in Scotland’s cultural calendar. 2020’s festival incorporates over 300 events across multiple venues throughout the Glasgow. Programmed by Artistic Director Donald Shaw - a founding member of the folk supergroup Capercaillie - the festival sees artists from across the globe come Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Remembrance of clubs past motivates Neil Tennant at 65. The melancholy and wit which gave ambiguity and amused bite to the Pet Shop Boy’s pop pomp has matured naturally into distanced reflections on hedonism. Recorded partly in Berlin’s iconic Hansa studio, Hotspot's vintage synths add a mechanistic clank and tactile detail to their music’s glide, the Hi-NRG pulse which so entranced them in the 1980s now part of a Proustian rather than active E rush. Having ceded their place at pop’s heart at the century’s start, they now burnish memories and paint characters like old masters.Ray Davies, for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Commercially, The Beloved’s peak years kicked off in autumn 1989 when their electro house-pop began its chart run. The band called it a day in 1996 after the X album and its attendant singles. Throughout the period, they dealt in a form of house music – indeed, their final hit single “Ease the Pressure” was built around an acid house pulse and the sort of gospel-inclined chorus that was de rigueur for white, British dance-inclined outfits to show they had soul.There was a back story. Like Primal Scream, The Soup Dragons and all the others, The Beloved were an Eighties indie-circuit staple Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The middle-aged rap master of provocation has survived into an era of hair-trigger outrage. The wearily dignified response of parents of the Manchester Arena bomber’s victims to an Eminem lyric briefly assuming the killer’s identity has already defused a strictly local scandal, which pales beside his gigs’ picketing in his early 2000s folk-devil prime. What may now appear a tatty grab for headlines is merely the standard MO of a man who also drags John Wayne Gacy, Sharon Tate, multiple other mass American murders and “a Saudi attack when the town collapse” into his new album’s bloody Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Bombay Bicycle Club have a knack for quasi-prophetic titles. Their fourth album, So Long, See You Tomorrow, released in February 2014, turned out to be their last, at least for a while. For when the accompanying tour concluded at London’s Earls Court – the final event before the wrecking ball deprived London of another iconic venue – the band decided they’d had enough.They’d come together at school in north London and “after ten years of doing this we thought it was time for all of us to try something else”. Bassist Ed Nash released a solo album, singer-guitarist Jack Steadman immersed Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What a lovely surprise. A debut album with its own sensibility that’s come out of the blue. Aoife Nessa Frances is from Dublin and the terrific Land of No Junction – the title comes from a mistaken hearing of Llandudno Junction – signals the arrival of a major new talent.This Land of No Junction borders on zones traversed by Kevin Ayers, Cate Le Bon, The Eighteenth Day of May, the pre-Sandy Denny Fairport Convention, Bridget St John, Stereolab, Sumie, Trimdon Grange Explosion and Wendy and Bonnie.Highlights are many, but the nine-track album can be characterised. “Libra” is brilliant, a Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Brussels – The Cultural Guide” for 2020 is a very substantial book. It consists of 212 tightly-packed pages in a quite small font. The message is that there is indeed a lot going on culturally in Belgium’s capital city.Whereas the separatist-led government in Flanders has recently, visibly chosen to make culture into a battleground by reducing subsidies, raising the public ire of internationally known figures such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Ivo van Hove, the Brussels-Capital Region is keen for culture to be a magnet.There are all kinds of events across all art forms throughout the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Selva is the sophomore album from Uruguay’s arch tripsters, Las Cobras. More ethereal and even less direct than its predecessor, Temporal, it is a disc of dark and dreamlike psychedelia that brings to mind the possibilities of the Jesus and Mary Chain, at their most woozy but by no means passive, collaborating with Mazzy Star. Fuzzy bass, somewhat less than sunny electronics and otherworldly vocals duetting over a spaced-out drum machine don’t so much propel Las Cobras’ songs but guide them through a sinister and unsettling atmosphere that is distinctly shaded by the dark.“You wanna go for a Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s a good few years since Judy Collins last toured Britain and Ireland, though in the US she’s rarely off the road. Over the last couple of years she has notched up more than 100 concerts (and an album) with Stephen Stills, who famously celebrated their 1960s love affair in the magnificent “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”. Her latest album, Winter Stories, with Jonas Field and Chatham County Line, had American critics reaching for superlatives and put her in the charts once more.Her eyes are still as blue and even up close you’d never guess she celebrated her 80th birthday last May Day. The pink Read more ...