soul music
Nick Hasted
Moses Sumney’s second album is a double, and splits and nuances in gender, sexuality and identity define its fluid nature. A 28-year-old Ghanaian-American who grew up as an outsider in both countries, Sumney is most interested in removing masculinity’s hard shell, and touching the tenderness beneath.The sensitively quavering male voice has become a grating indie cliché, but Sumney’s potently polymorphous falsetto is something else. This is soul holding forth in the confession booth, and indie rock locked in a brimming bedroom. Sometimes it’s beatlessly unemphatic, bonelessly liquid R&B. 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 ...
Kieron Tyler
How Mitch Ryder is seen depends on particular perspectives. The Detroit blue-eyed soul belter racked up a string of US hits on 45 in 1966 and 1967. He made many albums, became an oldies radio staple and a perennial live draw. In the UK though he was small beer and his only sniff at the charts was with “Jenny Take A Ride”, which brushed the outside edge of the Top 30 in early 1966.However, one section of Britain’s music-loving public was keenly attuned to his take on soul. Ryder’s May 1966 single “Break Out” was initially played in the late Sixties at Manchester’s Twisted Wheel, and then 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 ...
Kieron Tyler
Filmic. Lushness balanced with intimacy. Ren Harvieu’s follow-up to 2012’s Top Five Through The Night is crammed with wide-screen aural dramas. Take “Cruel Disguise”. It begins with a slinky Sixties spy thriller vibe along the Shirley Bassey lines and after a brief moment of contemplation evolves into a swirling drama evoking Dusty Springfield’s “You Don’t Have to Say You Love me”. Next up, the crisp “Yes Please” nods to Laura Nyro when she’d hooked up with LaBelle but, again, darker – trip-hop-tinged – terrain is explored.The singing voice is melodic, yearning and nuanced. Yet Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Buried lyrical tremors barely disturb Little Dragon’s blissed electronic R&B, on the former Gothenburg schoolmates’ fifth album. Though forming in 1996, they took another decade to really begin a career which has included collaborations with Gorillaz, DJ Shadow and Outkast’s Big Boi, and co-headlining the Hollywood Bowl with Flying Lotus. The conscious hip-hop and spiritual jazz influences which saw them jam on A Tribe Called Quest and Alice Coltrane tunes as teenagers have now filtered down into modern quiet storm soul, with female vocalist Yukimi Nagano suggesting the androgynous Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
One can only marvel at the versatility of Ruby Turner. As a vocalist, she spans the whole blues/soul/ R&B spectrum, and has been a major presence on the British scene since the late Seventies. Her unvarying capacity just to step forward and deliver a strong line, clear words, and powerful emotions are an unfailing and unique aspect of the musical life of this country. Perhaps the Halls of Fame and the honours system have a bit of catching-up to do.She has done everything from taking a major role in the British blues movement at the instigation of Alexis Korner, to performing Ray Charles Read more ...
howard.male
Up until a couple of weeks ago, I had every intention of making Songs Of Our Native Daughters featuring Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell and Amythyst Kiah my Album of the year. It’s a solid work of great beauty, elegance and substance. But you can read my thoughts on it elsewhere on The Arts Desk. And the album is number eight in Rolling Stone’s Top 40 of the year, as well as being Iggy Pop’s personal album of the year, so more waffle on it from me is neither here nor there. Whereas the still relatively unknown Louisiana pop group Seratones may still be new enough to this game Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I was just released from the hospital…the doctor told me that the medicine can’t do me no good. They told me what I have is beyond medical science…he told me that what I have is more serious than cancer. He told me what I have is a very, very bad case of the blues. I found out the best remedy for the blues is to be with the one you love.”This astonishing spoken declaration comes during the first half of Jerry Washington’s “Right Here is Where You Belong”, a 1972 single which its performer, producer and writer self-released on his own Top Pop label. Washington’s day job was as a New York Read more ...
joe.muggs
In the eight years since theartsdesk last spoke to Carl Craig, a lot has happened. He moved from his native Detroit for a sojourn in Barcelona (partly for ease of access to his summer DJ residencies in Ibiza), then recently returned. He's reinvented tracks from his back catalogue for orchestra, in a style he dubbed "action and adventure" - certainly more John Williams than Debussy - and has performed them as such around the world. He's successfully built the Detroit Love brand for compilations and club nights via his Planet E label, featuring the city's unsung heroes like Stacey Pullen, Read more ...
peter.quinn
Jazz Voice unfailingly supplies a gigantic sugar-rush of auditory pleasure, and this year’s edition was no exception. Arranged, scored and conducted by the brilliant Guy Barker, the evening’s opener saw rising US vocalist Judi Jackson and the EFG London Jazz Festival Orchestra transform Nirvana’s brooding “Come As You Are” into a swaggering, Vegas-style workout.With a sound firmly rooted in classic Motown and Stax, the US-born, Liverpool-based singer-songwriter Jalen N’Gonda gave the world premiere of his self-penned “Angel Doll”, displaying a marble-smooth tone and pitch-perfect falsetto, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It's Gonna Take a Miracle” just missed out on a mainstream US Top 40 placing after The Royalettes issued it as a single in June 1965. But the song had staying power. In 1971 Laura Nyro covered it, choosing it as the title track for the album she made with LaBelle. Deniece Williams’s version hit big in 1982.The song’s co-writer was Teddy Randazzo. He had arranged and produced The Royalettes’s interpretation, the first time it was issued. Their reading is as he conceived the song: the template for what followed. The other vocal group most associated with Randazzo is Little Anthony and the Read more ...