New music
Sebastian Scotney
This album truly is a delightful surprise. Winter Songs Vol. 2 is simply more fun, it swings harder and is filled with far more freshness than I could ever have expected. There will always be people keen to tell you that Nat King Cole and Rosemary Clooney said all that needed to be said about the American Songbook Christmas standards several decades ago. But they’re wrong. In this, the most potentially tired of all genre niches, Ohio-born, New York-based jazz singer April Varner and her cohort of singers and instrumentalists really have found some magic dust to sprinkle over every number. Read more ...
joe.muggs
Well, this is a surprise. Not so much that the Sunderland band should do a Christmas album, mind. Despite their raw and spiky hardcore framework, which channelled heavyweights like Gang Of Four and Fugazi, they were always capable of being gentle, dreamlike, flirting with but never tipping over into the whimsical, as on their huge breakthrough cover of Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love”. And maybe even more relevantly, their harmony singing bordered on the choral from the start, something made explicit on their a capella reworking folk songs and their own work on their 2012 Rant album.No, it’s not Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The opening track initially seems straightforward. To begin “Sons of Art,” Michael Garrick runs up and down his piano keyboard. Norma Winstone adds wordless vocals which weave in and out of his sparkling arpeggios. Then, the bass arrives. Drums kick in. So do the tenor sax and trumpet. After a climax around the two-minute mark, what begins as pacific turns turbulent. The conventional has become unpredictably experimental.To conclude the album, an extraordinary nine-minute piece which, on one hand, sounds like dawn breaking and, on the other, a collision between the contrapuntal and a free- Read more ...
Tim Cumming
American R&B singer Eric Benet is the latest star to throw Santa’s hat into the ring and spin a Christmas album out of the seasonal market – the cover has him in 1950s mode, in a deep leather armchair in front of a coal fire in magnolia jumper and slacks and a pair of Christmas socks. Cosy.Guests to Benet’s Christmas party include Nina Nelson, sharing vocals on a Christmas cut with a Hawaiian bent from the Bing Crosby stable, “Mele Kalikimaka”. Elsewhere Stacey Ryan shares the mic on one of Benet’s own songs, getting the tone just right for the jazzy, sprightly gait of “It’s Christmas”. Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Nightmares On Wax’s new album Echo45 Sound System feels like the soundtrack to a twilight walk through memory and possibility. At its core is a deep reverence for sound system culture. The album title refers to a battered old speaker box called Echo45 that first sparked George Evelyn’s love of music when he was young.Released on 14 November 2025 through Warp Records, the project spans 13 tracks along with a continuous mix version. It features a wide collection of collaborators including Yasiin Bey, Greentea Peng, Oscar Jerome, Liam Bailey and others.The opener, “Echo45, We Are!” featuring Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
According to legend, Glasgow can be a tough place for a support band a crowd do not warm to. Therefore brotherly duo Faux Real were perhaps taking a risk when they elected to bound into the audience during the first number in their Wet Leg support slot. It was greeted with mostly puzzlement from early attendees, but when they repeated the trick 30 minutes later - finding space and sprinting towards each other before jumping into the air with high kicks - the reaction was much more enthusiastic. The pair had mixed up synth-heavy pop of varying quality with relentless, hard working Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Detroit musician, Blue Note artist and expressive saxophonist Dave McMurray’s fourth album for the label, I Love Life Even When I’m Hurting, sets out to celebrate his home town, and his own life, and life in general. Warren Zevon once said wisely: “Enjoy every sandwich.” McMurray would likely enjoy the whole loaf. The phrase “I love Life Even When I’m Hurting” was seeded and conceived in the wake of a lonely death of a friend who had succumbed in body and spirit to a long, isolating illness. Out of that pain comes the fuel of resilience – a fuel that ignites his music and sax-playing too.“Man Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Jimmy Cliff (b 1948) is one of Jamaican music’s biggest names. Raised in the countryside, he went to Kingston in his teens and persuaded record shop owner Leslie Kong to record him. The resulting song, “Hurricane Hattie”, was the first of a string of local hits but in the late Sixties he moved to London and, working with Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, his songs such as “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” and “Vietnam”, the latter a favourite of Bob Dylan, reached a far wider audience, becoming hits in Europe.In 1972 Cliff played the lead role in the film The Harder They Come, about a Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Noura Mint Seymali is possessed of the most extraordinary voice; its very fabric is electrifying, its reach, power and depth cut from an entirely different cloth to the rest of us. Maybe it’s a cloth of gold. And then there is her axe-hero husband Jeich Ould Chighaly’s shapeshifting, inventive guitar work, its distorted fizz and fuzz redolent of Seventies Glam and heavy rock melded into Mauritanian desert blues – and just as addictive. The guitar lines twist, smoulder, spark and melt like solder, with the traditional andine acoustic harp that Noura Mint plays and uses to define her music’s Read more ...
Guy Oddy
In the main, it could be assumed that Snarky Puppy’s bandleader, Michael League sleeps soundly in his bed every night. For sure, his band’s latest collaboration with Jules Buckley’s Metropole Orkest focuses on the land of dreams and is a generally calming soundtrack for drifting pleasantly into the arms of Morpheus.That is, apart from the unsettling and somewhat disorientating “Chimera”. Alone among the tunes on Somni, it’s anything but relaxed and seductive. This rather forceful track could be an imaginary collaboration between Bristol’s post-jazzers, Get The Blessing and Charles Mingus’ Read more ...
Guy Oddy
This week, UK electronica originals Cabaret Voltaire hit Birmingham on their penultimate tour before they finally put their synthesizers into storage and call it quits this time next year. For a band that have been going (on and off) since 1973, however, they were seriously on fire – with no suggestion that they should be considering permanent retirement any time soon.Richard H Kirk may have passed away in 2021, but Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson, who had both left the fold more than 30 years ago, put on a fine show and paid tribute to their fallen comrade early in the proceedings. Read more ...
mark.kidel
Keaton Henson is a master of dark introspection and unashamed vulnerability, a 21st century manifestation of what used to be called bed-sit blues. There isn’t a shred of extrovert joy in his latest album, where he explores, with forensic authenticity and a gift for poetic lyrics, a miasma of self-doubt, regret and resignation. “Don’t I just know how to fuck things up” he sings, almost mantra-like. It’s very British, this gentle and almost whimsical self-deprecation, but unless you’re seeking a homeopathic remedy – in which like cures like – for you own despair, this might be an album to Read more ...