New music
Sebastian Scotney
Barbra Streisand has given her blessing to Where We Fall (Backwards Dog Records), an album of six covers and five original songs. She wrote to her 1.8 million Instagram followers: "[Jason] just gave me his new album […] and it stopped me in my tracks. His sound, his soul, his musicality. I’m sooo proud to be his mama!" Streisand’s son Jason Gould is also the "true" son of Elliott Gould – as opposed to Ross and Monica from Friends, who are merely his fictional children in his role of Jack Geller, a "pater simulatus" with enduring celebrity status in his own right.
There you have it: at Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Leisure Process issued four singles between March 1982 and May 1983. Signed to Epic Records, the electropop-inclined duo was primed for success. Debut 45 “Love Cascade” was Radio 1 DJ Peter Powell’s record of the week. At the other end of the coolness spectrum, John Peel also played the single. A Leisure Process Peel session was recorded on 10 March 1982.Another factor feeding into the perception Leisure Process was ready for take off was the identity of their producer: Martin Rushent. He was integral to shaping British pop of the period. His work with Altered Images, The Human League and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The first live performance at the inaugural Riga Music Week is by Saucējas (pictured above). This seven-piece vocal ensemble is avowedly Latvian. Formed in 2003 at the Latvian Academy of Culture, their singing, though polyphonic, allows space for solo lines within the framework of the collective voice. Drones and rounds are incorporated. A kinship with runo song is clear. In traditional costume, they embody an aspect of Mother Latvia: that this country wants to celebrate its traditions, ensuring they are not lost.
Saucējas are tremendously powerful. Experiencing them at Riga Music Week’s Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Implosion is a purely instrumental, collaborative album of cinematic, dystopian sounds from dubstepper and extreme electronica experimentalist the Bug and his pal Ghost Dubs. However, rather than working on the same tracks together, as could be implied, they have each applied their production know-how to alternate tunes on the two discs that make up this recording.
That isn’t to say that the sounds on Implosion swing from one flavour to another and back again. This is an album with a singular vision that is consistently eerie and sinister and has much in common with early 1990s ambient Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s really interesting to see how Amy Winehouse’s legacy continues to reverberate – and not just through endlessly repeated iconography or the tragedy-for-sale machine that’s built around her but musically too. Even rapper Little Simz namechecks and musically nods to her, and her unique update of Billie Holiday’s tone has been passed on to one degree or another to singers like Lola Young, Yazmin Lacey – and especially Celeste.Not that Celeste is a copy of anyone by any means: her voice is very much her own with its own strengths and mannerisms, and her gothic cabaret-tinged style and Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Mavis Staples, the woman to whom a young Bob Dylan proposed marriage when they met at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival and whose voice he has described as his “favourite voice”. Mavis Staples, who announced her retirement in 2023 and then realised she still had “work” to do, even after more than 75 years on the road. Mavis Staples, sole survivor of the Staple Singers, founded by Roebuck “Pops” Staples, a friend of Martin Luther King Jr who committed his family to the civil rights struggle and toured throughout the Jim Crow south – the whole family was once arrested in Memphis after Pops was Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s weird, right? We’ve somehow stumbled into a world where, for all we’re told that algorithms homogenise music, actually more people than ever are exposed to very, very odd and abstract soundmaking.There’s new age gong baths at even the most normie health spas. There’s a kajillion hours of “relaxation music” flooding streaming services from who knows where, a lot of it just drones and/or modulating white noise. There’s the sound design of scores by the likes of Hildur Guðnadóttir, Daniel Lopatin, Cristobal Tapia De Veer that reach millions in surround sound via movies, games and prestige Read more ...
Katie Colombus
After cancelling his Birmingham gig an hour before curtain-up due to illness, the anticipatory hype around whether Benson Boone’s London show at The O2 would actually go ahead was almost as electric as his infamous song. But a reassuring ping from the ’gram confirmed: it’s on. And indeed, it was.Two hours of rip-snorting kitsch-pop later, and any trace of illness or fatigue was well hidden. Somehow, Boone summoned the energy to bring full Bennie-style spectacle to a sold out arena in a show equal parts confetti-drenched musical dream and emo-tinged, power-grabbing balladry, delivered by a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Climb upon a bridge to far, go anywhere your heart desires.” The key phrase from the title track of Midlake’s sixth studio album conveys the perception that anything is within reach should an appropriate mind-set be attained. However, later on the album there are references to a “lion’s den” and “war within the valley of roselesss thorns,” a setting where “power and glory were in store.”It seems, then, that this is a realm where escaping to a place called “far” is necessary for self-protection. Midlake singer and frontman Eric Pulido has said of the album’s "The Calling" that the song “has Read more ...
Guy Oddy
During a false start to “Billy Don’t Fall”, on Sunday night at Birmingham’s iconic Town Hall, Sananda Maitreya took the opportunity to address the packed house before him. He noted that there’s now a King on the throne of England, an American Pope and that “all the white ladies have got big lips and big asses – so, it’s a long time since we were here last.”It certainly is an age since the artist formerly known as Terence Trent D’Arby headlined a UK tour. Twenty-three years, to be precise. In fact, for those who don’t remember that far back, he was once a global superstar to rival anyone who Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Three of last year’s finest singles were by Luvcat, a classy-but-naughty Eartha Kitt-style bad girl steeped in burlesque-rock’n’roll spirit. In fact, she’s the wanton basque’n’fishnets persona that, during a decadent sojourn in Paris, possessed the soul of Liverpudlian singer Sophie Morgan.The question is, can she engagingly maintain this wordy, filmic conceit for a whole album? The answer is… yes.First, those singles, all golden and placed in sequence early on this 13-track set. Her debut, “Matador”, is a mariachi nightworld chanson of lust and vengeful rage; “He’s My Man” is a sinister Read more ...
Tom Carr
If you were looking for the most perfectly brooding autumnal album this year, Florence Welch and her Machine may have been one of the least likely places you would have expected. However, motivated by deeply personal tumult of the past few years, Welch and co return with an ominous, hauntingly beautiful sixth album, Everybody Scream. Since their iconic, evergreen debut album in 2009, Welch’s voice has beckoned the Machine to be an everlasting presence across the airwaves and atop the charts ever since. Following their last album, 2022’s Dance Fever, Florence had an unexpected brush with death Read more ...