New music
joe.muggs
Mary J Blige is a monumental musical power. 30+ years, 14 albums, various labels and untold collaborations into her career, she still has the ability to deliver records that push everything else aside, existing entirely on their own terms and forcing other cultural forces to rearrange around them. Thus with Good Morning Gorgeous. This album has a stack of new and veteran guests and ranges in production style from lush Seventies soul to viciously sharp, UK-influenced electronic drill beats – but all of these are bent to Blige’s will: they all become adjuncts to her voice, song structures Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The former British Sea Power’s seventh album draws on deep reserves of melancholy and ecstasy. Several songs sound like elegies for Yan and Neil Wilkinson’s recently deceased parents. The band’s emotional heart – sometimes missed beneath the perceived eccentricities of their semi-pagan, mythos-building stage-show – beats hard, even as songs reliably surge with pop power.Losing “British” from their name seems sad, when BSP’s wryly nostalgic intent seemed so clear; it feels like a defeat by nationalism, but is of course the band’s considered, moral choice, as fascism again stokes patriotic Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
A decade since they picked up the Mercury prize for An Awesome Wave, Alt-J’s latest creation is highly likely to do the double. This is phenomenal work (but one hell of a challenge to describe). Those familiar with the band’s evocative, unclassifiable sound will understand. But if you’ve never come across their work – lucky you, you’ve got a treat in store. Distinctively idiosyncratic, this isn’t just more of the same. It’s Alt-J max. And that’s a very good thing.There’s nothing straightforward about their music or lyrics. In fact, that latter can be puzzling. Allegedly, a lot of this album Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Resentment Is Always Seismic – A Final Throw Of Throes is not so much a brand new album from Napalm Death, but a collection of tunes that were recorded during, but left over from, the sessions for their last disc, Throes Of Joy In The Jaws Of Defeatism. That said, there is nothing in its grooves to suggest that it might be a mere ragbag of off-cuts, put together to fulfill contractual obligations.Still powered by the righteous fury that has sustained them on their previous 16 albums, these Birmingham noise merchants are in no danger of calming down or mellowing out just yet. From opening Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For America’s oldies radio stations Sammi Smith will forever be about “Help me Make it Through the Night”. In 1970, she was the first singer to pick up on the Kris Kristofferson song. Her version took it into the US Top Ten.Although “Help me Make it Through the Night” was an important calling card for Kristofferson with mainstream America, Smith never again figured strongly on the mainstream charts though she remained and had been a regular on the country listings since 1968. As is made clear by a new collection aimed at more that the country audience, she was a singular artist.Last summer, " Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Since exploding to fame a decade ago with the single “Pompeii” and its parent album Bad Blood, Bastille have maintained impressive success on both sides of the Atlantic. To this writer’s ears, the bombast of their early music was off-putting, and the voice of songwriter and frontman Dan Smith unpleasant. Their fourth album contains a good chunk of more-ish electro-pop, but I can’t handle the cuts with horrible Eighties stadium choruses, major key cheese, and showboating by that breathy, whooping, and very particular voice. Overall, though, Give Me the Future feels like a grower, especially if Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Ride guitarist Andy Bell has clearly been busy since the release of his solo debut, 2020’s The View From Halfway Down. As well as getting his Space Station instrumental touring show up and running, he’s found time to record a sprawling, 18-track follow-up, Flicker, also released on Sonic Cathedral.Bell’s “other life”, as a DJ and producer of immersive electronica under his Glok moniker has, for some time, been an indicator of his willingness – and ability – to veer from the playbook and embrace other forms. On Flicker, however, this impulse is supersized. From shoegaze movers to krautrock Read more ...
Liz Thomson
What a joyous album for a grey winter’s day, any day in fact – a celebration of 20 springs by Le Vent du Nord, a wonderful five-piece band that hails from frigid Quebec and who make it their business to explore and collect the folk music of French-speaking Canada.If ever there’s a band, and an album, that demonstrates the idea of music as truly international language this is it. The sounds of Brittany and Ireland are blended in a beautiful and invigorating mix, but they are leavened by the plaintive melodies of Appalachia and the driving rhythms of Louisiana and much besides.Le Vent du Nord Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Animal Collective were getting themselves back to Joni Mitchell’s Edenic Woodstock garden right from the start – musically evoking the natural high of a 5-year-old’s wide-open wonder, in their case heightened by hippie schooling in rural Maryland. Since rejecting the regal indie status offered by their avant-pop breakthrough Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009), the very idea of career peaks and troughs has been ignored as an ego-trip dead-end, replaced by wandering, often fractured progress, as when a duo version of the Collective’s quartet made last year’s trippy Crestone soundtrack. As the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Eve Adams’s third album Metal Bird is a thing of exquisite beauty that is darkly alluring yet sparse and hazy. Melancholy and intimate vocals accompanied by little more than a guitar and an occasional unobtrusive saxophone tell tales of love and loss, of insecurity and loneliness, in a way that Hope Sandoval and Lana Del Rey often hint at but never quite manage.Mature and considered yet dreamy and ethereal, it’s an album to be heard alone, maybe with a glass of something strong to hand, in the middle of the night. Unfussy and often quite raw production adds to the confessional nature of Adams Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Electric Prunes could feel happy at the end of January 1968. Since landing in London in late November 1967, they’d hung out with Jimi Hendrix and had a photo session with Rolling Stones-favoured photographer Gered Mankowitz. They also met The Beatles at Abbey Road as Magical Mystery Tour was being mixed.How hot they were live during this brush with Europe is attested to by a French TV appearance, viewable via the internet, and from the recording of a Swedish radio concert included on Disc Six of Then Came The Dawn Complete Recordings 1966-1969 (the show was first legally released in 1997 Read more ...