New music
Phoebe Michaelides
Texan trio Khruangbin are a rare concoction, psychedelic rockers, for sure, but seamed with all manner of global influences, notably Thai pop but also running the gamut from Latin sounds to Middle Eastern scaling. Hitting the UK in support of their second album, Con Todo El Mundo, they initially presented an aloof front, which was compromised briefly by a minor technical glitch.This didn’t distract from the band’s striking retro-future aesthetic, especially bassist-singer Laura Lee, who wore a chic white leotard and red thigh-high boots like a supersonic empress from a kitsch old sci-fi film Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There are two types of people - those who are fans of Belle & Sebastian and those who are too ashamed to admit such plebbishness regarding musical tastes, that they won’t admit to not being fans of the Glaswegian band.Unfortunately I fall into the latter camp. I wish I got this band, I really do. I wish I was one of those cool-kid superfans. So I’m trying my darndest with this triplicate mini-album release – a hark back to their 1997 album of the same order.“Sweet Dew Lee” hearteningly opens with a duet that promises the filmic soundscapes of earlier albums, but ends up being try-hard Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The spiky, angular traditional songs that made up Stick in the Wheel's first album From Here were stripped of any varnish and any trappings of nostalgia to become direct, upfront, yanked from the parlour into the street, and out of the past into the turbulence of the present. They were songs that had things to say and ears to listen, and the album won them the fRoots and Mojo Folk Album of the Year and four nominations in the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.Since then, Stick in the Wheel have toured with the likes of Dublin’s brilliant young band Lankum, released the fascinating From Here: English Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What does a band do when it loses a key member? Pack it in? Carry on as if nothing has happened? Execute a radical change of direction? Nick McCarthy, Franz Ferdinand’s rhythm guitarist and keyboard player, left the band last July and their new album Always Ascending answers the questions.Obviously, Franz Ferdinand have not packed it in after the loss and two new members replace McCarthy, a keyboard player and a rhythm guitarist. Before his departure, McCarthy had co-written all the band’s songs. The last record Franz Ferdinand contributed to was their hugely successful 2015 collaboration Read more ...
Matthew Wright
They look like a jazz trio, they’re signed to Miles Davis’s label, and in short passages they make the involved and intimate sound we associate with one of the iconic jazz ensembles. But listen to the riotously popular Manchester contemporary fusion outfit GoGo Penguin for more than 30 seconds and it’s clear this is not spontaneously improvised, intimate harmonic and rhythmic development between individual players.Yet their musical premise is still an original and highly addictive one, their blend of classical minimalism and dance rhythms sufficiently deft to appeal to fans of both genres, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1976, when his first solo album Slippin’ Away was released, Chris Hillman could look back on being a founder member of The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers, two of America’s most important bands. He had also played alongside former members of Buffalo Springfield in Manassas and The Souther-Hillman-Furay Band. Before any of this, Hillman was in the bluegrass-inclined Scottsville Squirrel Barkers and The Hillmen. Issuing an album under his own name was new. Slippin’ Away was issued when he was only 32.Slippin’ Away was followed-up in 1977 by Clear Sailin’. Both were issued by Asylum Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Kings of the South Seas first set sail back in 2014, with their debut album drawing on songs about South Pacific whalers. They are Ben Nicholls on concertina, banjo and fine, sonorous vocals, Spiritualized guitarist Richard Warren and drummer with the Neil Cowley Trio, Evan Jenkins. On a polar vortex of a midwinter night they launched their second album in the theatre aboard the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, where endurance and engulfment took centre stage as the harsh Victorian tale of maritime derring-do unfolded with the story of John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to discover the North West Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In a career spanning almost 40 years, Beth Nielsen Chapman has been sparing with her album releases. She’s been twice nominated for Grammys and many may still think of her as primarily a songwriter: “This Kiss”, of which she was co-writer, was a big hit for Faith Hill and artists as blue-chip, and as diverse, as Bette Midler, Waylon Jennings, Bonnie Raitt and Elton John have recorded her songs. So Americana-plus.Hearts of Glass is her 13th album – if you don’t count Greatest Hits (1999) and Liv On (2016), an album of hope and healing recorded with fellow breast cancer survivor Olivia Newton Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Transangelic Exodus is a roller-coaster ride. Songs twist, turn, have sudden shifts in tempo, are punctuated by unexpected instrumental interjections, and come to a dead stop after which they resume their unpredictable course. Although Ezra Furman's musical touchstones of late Fifties pop and The Modern Lovers are still apparent, the follow-up to 2015’s Perpetual Motion People comes across as nothing less than a vigorously shaken-and-stirred take on pre-Born in the USA Bruce Springsteen.Furman says the narrative thread running through the frenzied Transangelic Exodus is his being “in Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Rae Morris, a singer from Blackpool, has shinned up the slippery pop biz tree the modern, major label, mainstream way; ultra-managed, co-writes with Clean Bandit, support slots with George Ezra and Tom Odell, vocal collaborations with Bombay Bicycle Club, slow careful “development”. It’s plain old vocational training, really. In terms of raw, gutter-to-the-stars excitement, her career emanates the dizzy appeal of a dentist’s apprenticeship in Dorking. It is to her credit, then, that a good helping of actual character escapes onto her second album, alongside a few decent songs and one absolute Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Fresh from Celtic Connections in Glasgow, I’m With Her stepped out at Bush Hall in west London for their only England date before embarking on a major US tour. Sarah Jarosz, who plays guitar, banjo and mandolin, Aoife O’Donovan, guitar, and Sara Watkins, a mean fiddler, are being described as “a folk supergroup” – and seeing, and hearing, is indeed believing. It’s no hype: these three thirtysomething women, each with their own successful solo career, make a beautiful noise.The concert was sadly short, little more than an hour, and served as a showcase for I’m With Her’s debut album, See You Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s hard to be sure if Rakal, Bella and Alice from Dream Wife are a rock’n’roll band or a girl gang with guitars. Either way, their debut album has got some cracking Riot Grrrl-flavoured tunes and a stridently feminist, in-your-face attitude. There is nothing demure about this trio and they really don’t care what your thoughts on that might be.Like Blondie on rocket fuel or Bikini Kill with better songs, Dream Wife is a set of thrilling tunes of raw guitar from Alice Go and the harpy-like vocals Rakel Mjöll. “Hey Heartbreaker” comes on like turbo-powered glam rock and a kick in the nuts, Read more ...