New music
Tom Carr
In the age of streaming, it’s never been less clear knowing when you can safely say an artist is well known in the mainstream. But for the rising star of Olivia Dean, the neo-soul Londoner, if Spotify streams count for anything then with over 20 million listeners, you could argue she is arriving on centre stage.On her debut album, 2023’s Messy, Dean provided a respectful and worthwhile offering of a vintage sound with lo-fi stylings: horn arrangements, slightly de-tuned piano chords, and soulful ballds. There was also mega-hit, “Dive”, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It's a Happening Thing,” January 1967’s debut single from California’s Peanut Butter Conspiracy, is one of the year’s best. Driving, with a full sound, a psychedelic edge, soaring vocal and immediate tune, it sounds like a hit.However, despite being issued by major label Columbia, it wasn’t. As it’s put in the booklet coming with The Most Up Till Now – A History 1966-1970 box set, the single “barely scraped into Billboard’s Hot 100, peaking at the number 93 slot.”The band’s next 45, March 1967’s "Dark on You Now” was as great. But, this time, no chart action at all. Their debut album, the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Doja Cat is a fascinating one-off. She’s a rap-centric Californian artist whose background dips into everything from new age philosophy to skate culture. She’s the epitome of a 2020s singer who’s as much a social media phenomenon as a pop star (and has also been featured artist on tunes by almost everyone). Unafraid of quirk and wacky throwaway humour, it’s taken her a while to convince the dubious that she’s more than an amusing flash-in-the-pan. Unfortunately, while her latest album initially contains interest, it settles to a set of samey slow-jams.The recent single “Jealous Type” is Read more ...
joe.muggs
One of the great moments of Private Eye magazine’s fustiness in recent years was putting Mariah Carey in Pseud’s Corner, for the quote about how she deals with the ageing process: “I do not acknowledge time.” That quip is of course in no way pseudo-intellectual, and in every way fabulous, as anyone with the slightest knowledge of Carey or pop culture would grasp immediately. Of any major star, she is the one who has most comfortably inhabited the diva role in the 21st century, her dry-as-a-bone “I don’t know her” put-down of Jennifer Lopez from 2003 now meme-ified into immortality as the allt Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Solar Eyes are an indie dance two-piece from Birmingham’s Hall Green. With a sound that binds together psychedelic guitars, foot stomping beats and trippy lyrics, their sophomore album Live Freaky! Die Freaky! exudes a wild-eyed exuberance that echoes the 1990s’ marrying of electronic dance music and floppy-haired indie tunes.Their opening salvo of singles may hark back to a time when indie kids finally plucked up the courage to get onto the dancefloor and shake a tailfeather, but they are tasty and engaging with a spirit of their own. “Time Waits for No One” and “Set the Night on Fire” are Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Helix” is the ninth track on portals//polarities. With this dramatic, acid house-leaning slab of shoegazing-infused electropop, Night Tapes make the case that they’re the real deal.Up to this point, their pop-inclined electronica has embraced motorik (opening track “Enter”), breakbeat-infused chillwave (“Television”), vaporous quasi-new wave pop (“Swordsman”) and trip-hop (“Babygirl (Like No1 Else”). With so much going on stylistically, it is tough getting a handle on Night Tapes.The trio are Max Doohan, Sam Richards and Iiris Vesik. Their material is jointly composed, though main vocalist Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The tour by the 81-year-old Mulatu Astatke which is currently under way and this album seem to be giving off different messages. Coming to London on 16 and 17 November, it is being marketed as a farewell. Last night's show at Ancienne Belgique in Brussels had lured a full house through being billed as “his very last concert on Belgian soil". Paris’s Salle Pleyel mentions “une grande tournée d’adieu”.And yet the video trailer for Mulatu Plays Mulatu, his first major statement since Sketches of Ethiopia from 2013, asserts directly, and this fine album absolutely Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The remarkable The First Family: Live At Winchester Cathedral 1967 represents the first-ever release of a previously unheard recording of a 26 March 1967 Sly and the Family Stone live show. It is the earliest document of Sly and Co. to surface.At this point, the band had not yet signed with Epic Records. The release of their debut album A Whole New Thing was just-over seven months away. "Dance to the Music" would – in its second wind, following its November 1967 release – became a US hit single in March 1968. After this: world-wide success, Woodstock and everything else. The First Family Read more ...
mark.kidel
Robert Plant is magnificently well-equipped to shine as a consummate musical survivor: not only has his voice kept its magic, with a range from sensual caress to ecstatic howl, but he’s deeply rooted in timeless music, Scots-Irish and American folk as well as the country blues.These qualities were well in evidence when he exploded onto the rock scene with Led Zeppelin, a pioneer of heavy metal, whose fire was tempered by an affinity with the magical side of British folk and the melancholy beauty of the blues. His latest album, the first with Saving Grace, his regular touring band for the last Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hackney’s Round Chapel is an appropriate venue. Scottish smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul opens her set with “Dùsgadh/Waking.” It has the spirit of a call to prayer: the directness, the insistence, the magnetic quality. All of which draws in anyone exposed to its power. It enchants.As well as beginning this sell-out appearance at the multi-use, horseshoe-footprint nonconformist East London church which opened in 1871, “Dùsgadh/Waking” is the first track on Chaimbeul’s recent album Sunwise. Completing the trio of firsts, this is the opening date on what is billed as the ‘Sunwise’ Tour.The Read more ...
ALA.NI
I’ve never thought of myself as a political artist. I write about love. The tender bits, the messy bits, the heartbreak that rearranges a life. That’s where songwriting usually finds me. “TIEF”, from my forthcoming album Sunshine Music, arrived differently. It’s built around an interpolation of “Slave” by the legendary calypsonian singer Mighty Sparrow. Calypso, a music that has lived in my bones for as long as I can remember. “Slave” proposed a question I sought to answer. “If there were a contemporary Part Two to such a statement song, what would mine say?” What does reparation look Read more ...
Graham Fuller
With their second album Altar, the Irish combo NewDad has moved from the love-embittered shoegaze of their 2023 debut Madra toward a worldlier perspective married to a comparatively sophisticated but confrontational style. Some reviewers have suggested it’s poppier, but tunes like "Other Side" (with its deceptively quiet start), “Misery”, “Puzzle”, and “Mr. Cold Embrace” are happily closer to post-punk. Nice and angsty does it every time in my book.It’s still shoegazey, still rueful, but the music made by Julie Dawson (vocals, rhythm guitar), Sean O’Dowd (lead guitar), and Fiachra Parslow ( Read more ...