New music
Ellie Porter
Ashley McBryde had a very busy year in 2018. After the Arkansas singer-songwriter and "curly-headed bourbon enthusiast" played a tiny stage at Country To Country, she released her debut album to huge acclaim and a Grammy nod; toured with fellow no-nonsense country star Luke Combs; played Jools Holland; sold out her first headline show in London – and made Barack Obama’s "favorite songs of 2018" list. She’s now set to play C2C’s main stage in March, sharing the bill with country giants Lyle Lovett and Chris Stapleton.Full of rich Southern storytelling, radio-friendly choruses and gritty blues Read more ...
Owen Richards
Janelle Monáe had already established herself as pop’s next great innovator with The ArchAndroid and Electric Ladyland, two albums full of earworms, high production and retro-futuristic lyrics. This all-too-brief musical career seemed in jeopardy when Monáe successfully made the jump to film, with her debut features Hidden Figures and Moonlight winning heavily at the Oscars. After all, her act was as much reliant on theatre as it was songwriting, perhaps this was always the endgame. But with the joint release of singles “Django Jane” and “Make Me Feel” in early 2018, it appeared that if Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Moments into “Maker of me”, it’s evident that The Story of Valerie is special. A circular piano figure accompanies a disembodied female voice singing and speaking of a relationship that’s “greater than myself.” Punctuation from a bass guitar is sprinkled sparingly. The next track, “Golden Boy”, is similarly formidable but employs an electronic keyboard, a drum machine and features an even more intense vocal. The singer – Carola Baer – is striving for a form of ecstasy.The Story of Valerie’s third track “Love me” is doubly impassioned. A keyboard conjuring a pattern evoking Philip Glass meshes Read more ...
Liz Thomson
We end 2018 “down to the wire, runnin’ out of time”, as Joan Baez sings in Eliza Gilkyson’s “The Great Correction”, the penultimate song from Whistle Down the Wind, the album which – at 77 – she says will be her last, though perhaps there’ll be a live album of highlights from her final tour, which has been extended into 2019.Baez’ swansong was one of a number of classy Americana releases this past year and it thoroughly deserves the many plaudits (including a Grammy nomination) with which it has been garlanded. It is a rich and rewarding opus that bookends her 1960 debut, Josh Ritter’s “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any of the individual elements making up Ilmamõtsan would be enough. Unified, they imbue Ilmamõtsan with beauty and an understated power. That questing Estonian singer-songwriter Mari Kalkun does not sing in English is no barrier to being affected.The most immediate component is the pure, though commanding, voice. The melodies Kalkun sings are carried with apparent ease, yet they are sinuously unpredictable while instantly memorable. The arrangements seem spare but her accordion, harmonium, kannel (the Estonian zither), chimes, bells and sound-colour from a bone spinner lock together in Read more ...
peter.quinn
A 3CD set featuring 17 singers, 34 tracks and over three hours of uniquely rewarding music, my Album of the Year, Voices Fall From The Sky by the NYC-based musician, improviser, composer, educator and author William Parker, represented an inexhaustible treasure trove for lovers of song.Cécile McLorin Salvant’s The Window offered yet more astonishing examples of her captivating art, whether breathing new life into Buddy Johnson’s ‘Ever Since the One I Love’s Been Gone’ or dusting down a hidden gem such as Cole Porter’s ‘Were Thine That Special Face’.The Questions presented Kurt Elling’s Read more ...
mark.kidel
Rudderless, and under the unpredictable and self-interested leadership of crazy and authoritarian populists, the world finds, as ever, some solace from music. I’ve spent a lot of time exploring '90s Dub Techno this year, not least the work of Moritz von Oswald, Mark Ernestus and Carl Craig. Prince’s early demos on Piano & and a Mircophone 1983 were a revelation as well. I was at a loss, however, to pick a single outstanding album, but perhaps the most timely and stirring came from Ry Cooder, whose The Prodigal Son combines soul and politics, faith and social engagement, in a way all Read more ...
David Nice
If you're seeking ideas for new playlists and diverse suggestions for reading - and when better to look than at this time of year? - then beware: you may be overwhelmed by the infectious enthusiasms of Ed Vulliamy, hyper-journalist, witness-bearer, true Mensch and member of the first band to spit in public (as far as he can tell). Anyone who in a single paragraph can convincingly yoke together Thomas Mann's Adrian Leverkühn, the blues of both Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Johnson, and Bob Marley is clearly a seer as well as an eclectic true original. Elsewhere, Dylan is connected to Dvořák Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“…all four [Beatles] worked tirelessly together in the studio, they carved out a sound and a ‘feel’ for each song. On the many tapes that have been carefully preserved from the sessions there is extraordinary inspiration – mixed with plenty of love and laughter. Admittedly, The Beatles incessant work ethic wore down the studio staff. Balance engineer Geoff Emerick left the project after recording nine songs…”Giles Martin’s introduction to the book included with the Super Deluxe Edition box set reissue of The Beatles Anniversary Edition – the untitled double album dubbed ‘The White Album Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Sometimes it seems that the more complex life becomes, the less interested we are in simple emotion. Take, for instance, 2017's Masseduction by St Vincent (aka Annie Clark). No-one could fault how artfully Clark expressed contemporary gender politics. But that was also its weakness. On about half the album, the songs sounded like a Guardian article set to music.This year Clark re-recorded the LP as a simple piano-and-voice piece, MassEducation. It was an utter revelation. Suddenly, the tracks sounded like Tori Amos in her heyday - full of beauty, and anger and sorrow. That Read more ...
joe.muggs
The cliché of hard times making for good culture is a distinctly dodgy, even dangerous, one. But there's no doubting at all that the era of Trump, Brexit and all the rest has added an urgency particularly to underground culture, which is leading both to some searching questions about what the music and all its trappings are actually for, and to some blisteringly good music. In particular it's led to club music in certain quarters regaining its sense that putting on a good party that is welcoming to the broadest possible range of people is a political act in itself.There are venues and Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Irish American supergroup was only meant to be a one-off, but the fervour of their audiences’ passion for the music – across two studio albums from Real World, and some magnificent concerts in the UK, Ireland and the US – has given The Gloaming the crown when it comes to radically reinterpreting and performing traditional folk.There is no other group like them, and few with the sheer heft of brilliance displayed by fiddler Martin Hayes, viola/hardanger player Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, sean nos singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, American pianist Thomas Bartlett and guitarist Dennis Cahill.Their live Read more ...