New music
Album: Madeleine Peyroux - Let's WalkMonday, 24 June 2024
Madeleine Peyroux made her name with her second album, 2004’s Careless Love. It consists almost completely of cover versions, delivered in a quiet, jazz-bluesey shuffle redolent of singers from the 1930s. She’s never flown as high again but has... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: The Cryin’ Shames - Please Stay, Do The Strum! - Joe Meek's Girl Groups and Pop ChanteusesSunday, 23 June 2024
Liverpool’s The Cryin’ Shames were responsible for two of mid-Sixties Britain’s most striking single’s tracks. The February 1966 top side “Please Stay” was so eerie, so wraithlike it came across as an attempt to channel the experience of making... Read more... |
Album: Zara McFarlane - Sweet Whispers: Celebrating Sarah VaughanSaturday, 22 June 2024
When Zara McFarlane sang the National Anthem at this year’s FA Cup Final, it served as a reminder of quite how adaptable she is, how suited so many different contexts. Other work in recent years has been with the Royal Shakespeare Company and... Read more... |
Rain Parade, 229 review - the Paisley Underground perennials prove unafraid of their pastFriday, 21 June 2024
It kicks off with “No Easy Way Down.” First released on 1984’s mini-LP Explosions in the Glass Palace, it was an instant benchmark by which to measure Rain Parade. Churning, dense and foggy, it made good on what this California outfit were portrayed... Read more... |
Album: Wytch Pycknyck - Wytch PycknyckFriday, 21 June 2024
Out on the perimeters where there are no stars, in a void full of bong-smoke and synesthetic noise… there, in a greasy biker hovel full of gigantic amps, there live Wytch Pycknyck. Some say that place is called Hastings. Whatever it’s called, this... Read more... |
Album: Pepe Deluxé - Comix SonixThursday, 20 June 2024
Pepe Deluxé are no exemplars of the puritan work ethic. Comix Sonix is only their sixth album in almost 30 years – but while they aren’t concerned with quantity, they certainly know how to produce electronic psychedelic weirdery of seriously high... Read more... |
Album: Naomi Bedford & Paul Simmonds - Strange News Has Come to TownWednesday, 19 June 2024
Almost exactly five years ago, I was transported by Singing It All Back Home, the third album from Naomi Bedford and Paul Simmonds. I gave it four stars, which in retrospect was perhaps a little ungenerous. Now at last comes a new opus from the duo... Read more... |
The Master Musicians of Joujouka, Morocco review - a healing encounterTuesday, 18 June 2024
A small mountain village, tucked away in the foothills of the Rif Mountains, south-east of Tangier. The “smallest music festival in the world”, so it says in the Guinness Book of Records. But this remarkable musical event – more of an encounter than... Read more... |
Album: Kehlani - CRASHMonday, 17 June 2024
The noise in the international mainstream in recent years might be about dance-pop, hip hop beefs and the serious balladry of Taylor, Billie and Lana – yet at the same time, R&B has been strange, brilliant, ultra-popular, but generated a tiny... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Margo Guryan - Words and MusicSunday, 16 June 2024
Late summer 1966. Jazz was Margo Guryan’s thing. She was not interested in pop music. This changed when she was played The Beach Boys’s “God Only Knows.” Amazed by what she heard, she tuned in to pop radio for the first time. Her head was further... Read more... |
Album: John Moreland - VisitorSaturday, 15 June 2024
The mournful, lonesome voice of John Moreland from Bixby, Oklahoma, will be known by a few, but not many, in this country. The 12 songs on his latest album, Visitor, released on the Thirty Tigers label, should help to remedy that.Visitor is the... Read more... |
Smashing Pumpkins / Weezer, OVO Hydro, Glasgow review - double-bill of unlikely bedfellows makes a racketFriday, 14 June 2024
The current trend for package tours with two headliners appears to be growing, and this jaunt presented somewhat unlikely bedfellows – the theatrical angst of Billy Corgan’s crew and Rivers Cuomo’s indie trendsetters united by a shared love for... Read more... |
