Does the world need to hear more from Red Hot Chili Peppers? Outside the bouncin’ bro’ fanbase, a regular consensus is that, despite being one of the biggest bands in the world, doing their global stadium rock thing – with free added funk! – achieving the highest level of commercial success, they're not of actual interest.Then they release two very long albums within six months of each other, Return of the Dream Canteen being the second. Who the hell needs that? Turns out that anyone with an ear for joyously executed West Coast-flavoured pop-rock just might.The twofold keys to its Read more ...

The journey of Ross “Hudson Mohawke” Birchard has been truly one of the most extraordinary in modern music. From teenage scratch DJ champion and happy hardcore raver in some of Glasgow’s more feral club environments, in the late Noughties he quickly moved through making rhythmically fractured hip hop.Just as quickly he leapt into huge trap beats that made him a trailblazer in the explosion of the arena-packing US EDM scene, and from there to being studio collaborator of choice for Kanye West, making significant contributions to 2013’s Yeezus and 2016’s Life of Pablo. Now LA based, he is Read more ...

By day three of any festival things are usually winding down. But there was a sense that Love Supreme have saved the best for last this year with a strong offering of funk and soul, R&B and experimental jazz.Crowds of Londoners hitching a tractor ride to Glynde rubbed shoulders with campers and glampers – there’s a definite demographic here of people whose kids have flown the nest and they’re living life to the fullest.Georgia Cecile (pictured left) in peach satin with fur cuffs kicked off the party on the South Downs stage with a touch of old school jazz glamour and a nod to the Great Read more ...

In 1990, teenage prodigy Ron Trent released a single on Armando’s Warehouse imprint. Recorded on cheap equipment it was, nevertheless, a staggering piece of music. Urgent, insistent and unrelenting its piercing strings, metallic cymbals and  juddering, robotic bass created a spiralling sense of joy that has remained undiminished for more than 30 years.While the low-level lighting and smooth-as-silk production on Trent’s latest outing, under his WARM moniker, has more in common with the lush and expansive deep house he pioneered alongside Chez Damier on the Prescription label, there is Read more ...

Harry Styles’ previous two albums sounded like someone rifling pleasantly through the history of pop and rock, but always genially and politely. More entertaining than his scalpels-ready critics wished when One Direction paused in 2016, those albums still didn’t fully hold together as bodies of work. Harry’s House does. It’s also more middle-of-the-road, albeit in a self-aware and musically sussed way.The nearest historical equivalent to Styles’ career is probably Robbie Williams, but whereas Williams went off on bizarre tangents that somehow usually worked, Styles is smoother. Even more so Read more ...

Kendrick Lamar is so breathlessly revered it’s sometimes hard to pull apart what’s going on in his records. It’s sometimes felt like he might become the rap game Radiohead: exploratory, aware, hugely technically accomplished, endlessly thematically “important” – but not actually that interesting to listen to.And certainly on the 18 tracks of his comeback album after a near four-year break – five since his last album proper, DAMN. – there’s a lot that’s potentially extremely worthy.  There’s a lot of moody piano lines, there’s a lot of ultra-intricate rhyme patterns, and Read more ...

There are few people, especially musicians, who would wish to revisit the spring and summer of 2020 with any fondness, but Sophie Ellis-Bextor might be an exception. Her kitchen discos, in which she and her husband Richard Jones, aided by their children, played a variety of covers became a lockdown source of solace and regular entertainment at a time when it was much needed.Two years later she has taken the concept out on the road for a celebratory party, albeit sans the kids, as she admitted with a laugh. To replace her children’s unexpected antics we instead had a large wheel, spun on a Read more ...

“As you’ve noticed, I’m really terrible at talking between the songs,” announces Melt Yourself Down singer Kushal Gaya, two-thirds of the way through the gig. He is. But it really doesn’t matter; the genre-uncategorizable London six-piece smash through their hour-and-15-minute set with a lean, giddy forward propulsion that brooks no pause. Consequently, the small, sold-out, low-ceilinged club venue gradually becomes a wriggling, sweaty rave-pit.A lot has been written about the London jazz resurgence of recent years. Names such as Shabaka Hutchings, Nubiya Garcia and Seb Rochford bandied about Read more ...

Melt Yourself Down’s last one, 100% Yes, was the most ballistically exciting album of 2020. The band are unique, a six-piece mutation who, as their album title indicates, don’t fit in anywhere. The good news is that they’ve not tempered what they’re up to one jot. Pray For Me I Don’t Fit In amplifies the in-yer-faceness of their music and rampages out of the speakers like a wild beast.Where 100% Yes was underpinned by a lively Afro-indie funk aesthetic, their fourth album ups the ante, becoming closer to the scene that gave them their name (they were named after an obscure album by Seventies Read more ...

If ever there were a year to cherish new music, 2021 was it. Lockdown v3.0 came with unwelcome updates (shit weather, structured home-schooling) and the only end in sight was of the nation’s collective tether.With passports rendered next to useless, the arts offered an escape like never before, and music was no exception. In March, Jane Weaver’s phenomenal album Flock arrived full of psychedelic swagger and propulsive momentum. Retaining the melodic sensibilities and esoteric influences that defined her previous records, most notably 2017’s Modern Kosmology and 2015’s The Silver Globe, Weaver Read more ...

Neo Jessica Joshua, better known as Nao, has been consistently putting out good – often excellent – music since 2014. Back then she was making off-kilter, funky R&B that felt both retro and futuristic. Since then she’s grown as an artist on both 2016’s For All We Know and 2018’s Saturn. And Then Life Was Beautiful is her third album and the emotional accumulation of the past few years. After burning out and struggling with writer's block, an eye-opening trip to South Africa and becoming a mother were catalysts for a renewed creativity. As a result, these songs feel Read more ...

The UK is currently in the middle of a jazz, funk and soul renaissance. Homegrown, grassroots talent is producing an abundance of glorious music both retro and forward facing, in a way not seen since the combined influence of Soul II Soul and the acid jazz scene created a wave of groove in the early-mid Nineties. A lot of it has a powerful contemporary political edge too, taking cues from Black Lives Matter and incendiary Stateside releases by D’Angelo and Solange in the last decade – from SAULT to Shabaka Hutchings, Jorja Smith to Joel Culpepper, this is music with heart, brains and Read more ...