New music
Kieron Tyler
Microtonic comes into focus on its third track, “Infinity Peaking.” Album opener “Goit,” featuring a guest vocal by Working Men’s Club’s Syd Minsky-Sargeant, is doomy post-Balearic impressionism with spoken lyrics seemingly about the loss of self. Next, the distant-sounding rave-shoegazing hybrid “John on the Ceiling.” “Infinity Peaking” is the point of coalescence; where beats-bedded, drifting electronica is suited to the comedown experience.After this, bdrmm’s third album – their second for Mogwai’s Rock Action label – settles into developing the marriage of Seefeel-esque post-rock Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
An album is one thing, a live show is another. A truism of course, but one which is inescapable during this London date by the Rotterdam-based Rats on Rafts at a shabby chic pub in Dalston, East London.Rats on Rafts’ measured new album, Deep Below – released a couple of weeks ago – inhabits the shadows cast by the early Eighties Cure, with a nod to the Cocteau Twins of slightly later. The hyperactive sonic assault colouring their predecessor albums is set aside in favour of a hazy shade of grey.It’s not-quite goth and not-quite a fun factory, but this is irresistibly kinetic stuffThis Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Sol Abrahams, singer and guitarist for Essex rock’n’rollers Bilk, was suffering from a bit of guitar trouble in Birmingham on Friday evening. By the time the band was ready to power through “On It”, from new album Essex, Drugs and Rock and Roll, he was already on his third or fourth instrument, the last one having literally fallen apart in his hands.Not that this put any kind of dampener on his Pete Townsend-like flailing right arm as he blasted through the power chords of “RNR”, “F Up” and “Be Someone”. His band were also serious about being here to promote their new disc of post-Oasis and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Spare a thought – please – for Leipzig-born pianist Jutta Hipp (1925-2003). In 1956, she became the very first woman to record albums in her own name for the Blue Note label. Earlier this month was the centenary of her birth. It went by more or less unremarked.Whereas in 2025 Artemis, the first ever all-star all-female jazz group on Blue Note, is made up of five highly respected musicians, each a bandleader in her own right, and has the benefit of global support from Blue Note/Universal, Jutta Hipp made just three albums in 1956 for the label, after which she never recorded again. Within Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Hinds don't believe in God. They declared this as they surveyed the converted church that is St Luke's, and given the past few years you can't blame them for lacking faith.The Spanish duo later admitted they weren't sure they'd ever be playing material from last year's Viva Hinds live, and it was not an exaggeration, given the past few years saw half the group leave, a departure from both their management and label, and a drastic drop in money after the outbreak of Covid-19 cancelled touring plans.Yet here they were, bounding about in Glasgow with zeal and charm, beginning with the riff- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1964, the Norwegian division of Philips Records began issuing singles labelled “Bergen Beat.” The picture sleeves of 45s by Davy Dean and the Swinging Ballades, Sverre Faaberg and the Young Ones, The Jokers, Rune Larsen and Teen Beats, The Quartermasters, Helge Nilsen and the Stringers and Tornado bore a bold stamp recognising each band’s origin in the country’s second city.As a marketing tool, “Bergen Beat” made sense. A Norwegian counterpart to Merseybeat might catch on (irrespective of some of the bands dubbed thus being in the mould of Cliff Richard & The Shadows or Swedish instro Read more ...
Katie Colombus
With her 13th studio album, Heather Nova delivers what you might expect from one of the 90s' most distinctive alternative voices – though longtime fans of London Rain will find she's meandering down a sandier path. Breath and Air finds the Bermudian singer-songwriter in a mellower space, trading alternative rock edges for a contemplative acoustic approach. The result feels like a summer afternoon by the Mediterranean, complete with salt spray and whispered confessions."Hey Poseidon" drifts along on gentle, hopeful acoustic currents, while "The Lights of Sicily" paints pictures as rich as Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Sinister Grift is Panda Bear’s first album since his 2022 Reset collaboration with Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom. Anyone anticipating any lasting influence from working with Rugby’s premier psychedelic adventurer, however, is going to be sorely disappointed.Noah Lennox’s first solo album in five years comes on more like a collection of demo tracks and out-takes from a Smiley Smile-era Beach Boys than anything that implies that Animal Collective’s leading light has been taking the perfect prescription of drugs to make music to take drugs to. Sure, there are laidback but gently hip-swinging tunes Read more ...
Tom Carr
While discourse on many topics grows toxic and polarised, it’s the voices who speak plainly about the reality of everyday lives that provide some sanity and make us feel heard. Enter Sam Fender, whose straight talking and pride of his working-class roots has seen him emerge as a figurehead for the younger generation, who at times feel unheard and underappreciated.Fender rocketed to stardom with his 2019 debut Hypersonic Missiles, which paired cutting takes at the political elite with a huge, spacious indie rock sound that harkened back to Eighties era Springsteen. With his follow up, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Canadian singer Basia Bulat has tried on various musical hats during her career but is most associated with singer-songwriterly folk-pop. Her last album was the melancholic, string-swathed The Garden but with Basia’s Palace, her seventh album, she seems in a jollier frame of mind. She has veered into overtly electronic pop before, especially on her 2016 album Good Advice, but this time it’s a bubblier, warmer version. Then again, these nine songs still find room for heartache.Bulat’s voice and style remind of Emmy the Great. This isn’t to hint at plagiarism – both singers started releasing Read more ...
Tim Cumming
On the first date of a 17-concert tour that had its preview at Celtic Connections in January, Across the Evening Sky begins with the liminal, predatory dangers of associating in any way with the sly “Reynardine”, with Matt Robinson on piano and electronic keyboards and Alec Bowman-Clarke’s bass evoking the twilit murk of the magical faerie song, recorded by Sandy on Fairport’s Liege & Lief.From that opening performance, Clarke had the room, the charm was cast, her own distinctive voice and stylings merging with Sandy’s originals – filling the vessel but in doing so assuming her own shape Read more ...
mark.kidel
There is an atmosphere of otherworldly stillness within the stony womb of a large dilapidated church in Bristol, at the bottom of St Michael’s Hill, the winding road that climbs up to what used to be the favoured place of execution, where the city’s sombre gibbets stood.For a special show by the singer-songwriter Patrick Duff, this deconsecrated place of worship, provides a perfect space to present a mostly new set of remarkable songs, in which he explores with touching candour lost loves, the torment of a confused identity and disillusion with a world of over-reaching ambitions and lies. He’ Read more ...