singer-songwriters
Kathryn Reilly
National treasure Jarvis Cocker recently claimed in an interview with the New York Times that lyrics really aren’t that important. He’s so very wrong. Within this very album – brief though it is (seven songs, 40 minutes) and long overdue (the band started working on the material in 2013) – are some exceptional titbits. Both thought provoking and merry making.The whole album is so very much of these weird times. But it was with some prescience that tracks like recent single "House Music All Night Long" anticipated us all being stuck at home, unable to properly kick up our heels ("goddam this Read more ...
joe.muggs
Will Westerman is not afraid of sounding retro. It's clear his influences are diverse, from jazz fusion to the bedroom proto-house experiments of Arthur Russell. But in their final form, his high gloss production, highly literate songs and fretless bass sound like something out of a creatively leftfield but megabucks studio-produced mid Eighties record: the likes of Talk Talk, Kate Bush, Roxy Music's Avalon and above all The Blue Nile loom large.Westerman's arrangements and DEEK Recordings owner Nathan “Bullion” Jenkins's production does an incredible job of doing what would have required Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
At the start of March an obscure alt-metal outfit called Cegvera released a concept album titled The Sixth Glare. The physical album featured the headline “DISEASE” alongside a photograph of a woman in a protective facemask, and the sleeve notes expand on the idea that, if we don’t tend to our environment, an illness will arrive to which the world doesn’t have immunity. It opens with a cut called “Infection”. Looked at now, it’s bizarrely prescient. The Bristol-based, British-Mexican band were ahead of the notorious curve to come.In the three months since, hordes of musicians have thrown Read more ...
Barney Harsent
In 2000, when Badly Drawn Boy released his debut album, The Hour of Belwiderbeast, it felt like an embarrassment of riches. Along with the string of singles he’d previously put out, ranging from the lo-fi to the luminous, Damon Gough’s creative tap was in full flow. His 2002 follow-up, the soundtrack for hit film About a Boy, was similarly sublime. Of course, if you’re going to place a bar that high, you won’t always reach it. Gough’s last album proper was 2010’s It’s What I’m Thinking…, an introspective affair that pays dividends, but demands close attention and repeated listening Read more ...
joe.muggs
A singer-songwriter of somewhat mystical bent, originally from a forested island in the US Pacific Northwest, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith really came into her own when she discovered vintage synthesizers. In particular, her masterpiece, 2016's EARS, saw her vocals merging into the rich flows of bubbling tones, melodies channelling folk traditions from various corners of the world, creating an unmistakably utopian sound. It felt neither futurist nor retro – rather, of a part with Craig Leon's Interplanetary Folk Music or Ursula K. Le Guin & Todd Barton Music and Poetry of the Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Glorious Joan is back! Eleven years after her first covers album, with that very cheeky artwork, comes Joan Wasser’s celebration of "songs I adore" – 10 tunes that she’s been working on ever since 2009.Those lucky enough to have caught her in concert over the past few years will have been treated to her particularly personal rendition of Prince’s “Kiss” and the shimmering, faultless version of Blur’s “Out of Time” that makes the Albarn original sound somewhat soulless. Apart from “There Are Worse Things I Could Do” (remember Rizzo in Grease?), these are all songs originally performed by men, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
He's only in his mid-20s, but this is Seattle singer-songwriter Damien Jurado’s 15th album. Veering away from a predictable path, his career is dotted with sonic experimentalism alongside a tendency to try abstract lyrical forms. He also appears on one of the most beautiful songs of this century, Moby’s haunted chorale, “Almost Home”. This time round, however, having disposed, the PR sheet tells us, of most of his possessions, like a zen sage, he gives us a relatively straightforward set.Jurado’s voice is a fragile instrument. He can do that whole vulnerable falsetto thing, but he prefers to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
John Prine, who has died at the age of 73 from a Covid 19-related illness, was one of the great American folk poets. Having spent his early adulthood pounding the sidewalks as a mailman in Chicago, he never quite shucked that blue-collar aura of the working man's minstrel. His best songs - "Paradise", "Angel from Montgomery", "Speed of the Sound of Loneliness", "Souvenirs" - are gritty and unpretentious snapshots of ordinary American lives, but inflected by Prine's quirky worldview and way with words.He was no overnight sensation. He had been making a good living in folk clubs when one night Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Colors studio in Berlin has quietly created one of the biggest new brands in music from filming back-to-basics performances with laser-focused branding. From international megastars (Billie Eilish, Mac DeMarco) to up-and-comers, singers and occasionally rappers are filmed alone in a simple cube-shaped stage with distinctive colour-cycling lighting. In one sense, it's an incredibly slick marketing operation: for all the international diversity of the performer, they're photogenic one and all, and the consistency of the visuals gives an eerie, slightly cult-like air to things.But at the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Since she burst onto the global scene in 2014 with her debut album, Chaleur humaine, Christine and the Queens' (aka Chris, real name Héloïse Letissier) work has been difficult to pin down. Is the French pansexual singer-songwriter-performance artist's music synth-pop, alt-pop or, as she describes it, “freakpop”?No matter, because her records – the latest is February's surprise release of a six-track EP, La Vita Nuova, about a difficult time in her life – prove that she is endlessly inventive, both with music and lyrics (Letissier's as happy speaking and singing in English as she is in French Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Waxahatchee’s fifth album wasn’t intended as an escapist fantasy. Written shortly after Katie Crutchfield decided to get sober, Saint Cloud documents a journey towards self-acceptance; one woman’s reckoning with her past and its impact on the people she loves. But it’s a journey that is as literal as it is metaphysical, Crutchfield’s vivid lyrics and wide-open arrangements painting pictures of the places she has seen along the way: Memphis glowing in the sunlight as if on fire; tomatoes sold by the bag on a roadside in Alabama; homesickness on the crowded streets of Tennessee.After evolving, Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The best place to start with Morrissey's new LP is the title track, which begins as a petty dig at the media: "I do not read newspapers/ they are troublemakers", the singer croons indignantly. But then, as the music builds and his anger mounts, Moz loosens up and his emotions flood out. The same dynamic is repeated throughout the entire album, with songs that alternate between mannered electro-pop and stirring, experimental rock. Opener "Jim Jim Falls", falls into the latter category, with pulsating, twitchy electronic noises that lead into sweeping melodies and dark lyrics about Read more ...