New music
Thomas H. Green
The utopian messiness of 1990s dance music culture is now so far back in time that what remains, for those under 40, is an idea, a meta myth. It is one that ALT BLK ERA embrace. Where the Nineties was a smorgasbord of futurism, vanguard electronic exploration and hedonic madness, the excellently titled debut album Rave Immortal reimagines it through the prism of catchy TikTok snippets and rampant rock punch. The result is not, perhaps, the intended, explosive Prodigy-play-Download riot, but buzzy ebullient pop.Nottingham sisters Nyrobi and Chaya Beckett-Messam, who are both teenage or nigh-on Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Nine billion streams a year. That’s the sheer scale on which the music of Ludovico Einaudi reaches audiences. The Italian, who will be 70 this November, is courteous and genial in person – I interviewed him in Montreal a couple of years ago – but is also, patently, a superstar.In his new, 13-track album, The Summer Portraits (Decca Records), he has nostalgic and personal stories to tell. The annual break from school in the Sixties would stretch out from early June right into the beginning of September, so “Punta Bianca” captures the kind of dolcefarniente, spaciousness one might expect. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The quandary is this. Middlesbrough singer Amelia Coburn made one of my favourite albums of last year, her debut, Between the Moon and the Milkman, and I hear she’s playing live near me on the south coast, not something that happens every day.Then I learn the gig is supporting Jim Moray (pictured below left), a much more established folk singer, originally from Staffordshire. So, I check out his music. It’s not my bag. But, sometimes, in concert these things persuade…The short of it is that, live, Moray is still not for me. An accomplished producer outside his own work (Art Brut, Blair Dunlop Read more ...
Katie Colombus
It would be really easy to get hung up on the definition for this album. Is it a new sexuality term? A holiday genre of technopop? A planet that will align with the others on January 29th?English singer Tahliah Debrett Barnett, aka FKA Twig, describes via X, that "eusexua is a practice, eusexua is a state of being, eusexua is the pinnacle of human experience".Conceptually, this is certainly an album that seeks a transcendental state of purity and perfection, through almost psychedelic experimentation in electronica, pop and progressive house via tinkling, abstract vocals and a mellifluous Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is Tunng’s ninth album, their first in five years, and marks their 20th anniversary by consciously going full circle to the gentle sound sculpture and folk melody of their earliest work. It is also thrown into fascinating relief by arriving just as the world is reeling from the loss of David Lynch.Their aesthetic has rarely if ever been compared to his – perhaps because they are so firmly rooted in a very English pastoral, while he has always been about wide-horizons Americana – but in fact listening to this record as social media is flooded with his pronouncements and creations, it Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s been five years since the last studio album by the inestimable Mary Chapin Carpenter, the lyrical and intimate The Dirt and the Stars, recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Bath, the second of two projects with producer Ethan Johns released towards the end of the first lockdown. One of the delights of that grim period was Carpenter’s weekly livestreams from her Virginia farmhouse, Angus the Golden Retriever a frequent on-screen presence. While they were never curated and released on CD, she did record a live album at Wolf Trap, a 26-song solo set with no audience Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On 26 September 1966, The Twilights set-off from Australia to Britain. The journey, on the liner the Castel Felice, took six weeks. A day after boarding they learned their sixth single, “Needle in a Haystack,” was an Australian number one. There was nothing they could do to promote the hit, so after disembarking at Southampton they looked for work.The trip was the prize at Melbourne’s Battle of the Sounds competition. They won and, as well as the travel, the accolade included a recording session with EMI in London. As The Twilights records came out in Australia on EMI’s Columbia label, this Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Lovell sisters Rebecca and Megan can be heard supporting Ringo Starr on his new album of country songs, while at the same time their seventh album hits the shelves, and with some heft and punch, too, on the raw strength of the scuzzy guitar-led opener, “Mockingbird”. As raw-edged guitar ballads with big choruses go, it’s a strong opening account for a duo who have delivered fine albums stirring together a pungent one-pot meal of Southern rock, electric blues and Americana. Their last, 2022’s Blood Harmony, won a 2024 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album (2018’s Venom & Faith Read more ...
joe.muggs
Of the big UK indie bands of the 00s wave, Bloc Party were always the most austerely art-rockish. Where Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons, Franz Ferdinand all to some degree or other had a dose of the vaudevillian and a bit of party “woohoo!”, BP adhered way more to the seriousness, alienation and introspection of their post-punk inspirations.This certainly didn’t do them any harm in the first instance – they were, frankly, huge – but maybe stopped them having quite so much crossover appeal, and you’re less likely to hear them now on Noughties nostalgia shows on mainstream radio and suchlike.It did, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Four of Humanhood’s 13 tracks are short, impressionistic mood pieces. Between 48 seconds and just-over a minute-and-a-half long, they mostly lack singing. Instrumentation is jazzy, leaning on piano and wind instruments. Drones and white noise evoke ocean spray or wind. In one case, a wordless vocal edges towards articulating recognisable syllables.While these harmonise with the whole of Humanhood so are not discrete musical sketches, they point to the feelings of disassociation and fragmentation informing Tamara Lindeman’s seventh album as The Weather Station (the multiple selves seen in the Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Ethel Cain’s Perverts is a dark and experimental follow-up to her debut album, Preacher’s Daughter. It takes listeners on a haunting journey through unsettling soundscapes that blend elements of drone, slowcore and dark ambient music.Exploring heavy themes like religious guilt, sexual shame and emotional trauma, Perverts is an intense and ambitious project that’s both captivating and difficult to digest. The album aims to combine dark, confessional storytelling with eerie, atmospheric sounds. But while there are moments of real beauty and emotion, the execution sometimes feels uneven and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Rooted in South African electronic styles such as kwaito, amapiano and gqom, the music of Moonchild Sanelly also shows a rich in awareness of US and European hip hop and pop.Initially a product of Durban’s poetry scene, Sanelly, born Sanelisiwe Twisha, spent years building a reputation there and in Johannesburg, before coming to wider attention when Beyoncé featured her on her Lion King soundtrack. She signed to the forward-thinking Transgressive label in 2020, and her second album for them, her third in total, bounces with her trademark sex-positivity and booty-shaking beats’n’bass.There are Read more ...