New music
joe.muggs
The history of experimental musicians from Europe and North America adopting Japanese aesthetics is … patchy. It got especially dodgy in the 1990s when every other electronica dork started flinging random kanji characters on their sleeves, writing soundtracks for imaginary Akira bike races and the like. And there are so, so many ambient producers who reference Zen gardens, minimalist interior design and bamboo flutes, you can’t go into a health spa without knocking over a pile of their CDs.Thankfully Catskills Mountains-raised, LA resident soundscaper Emily A. Sprague is a little bit more Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Trio Da Kali are griots, and their traditional role in West Africa is to connect: to evoke the glories of the past and to bring communities together through mediation and spiritual admonition. Their role, even though sung in Bambara, without surtitles – a thought worth considering – could not be more appropriate in a world so perilously divided. Their performance at the Barbican’s Milton Court concert hall transported the audience into a space in which boundaries were erased, and hearts open full-wide. The members of the trio are all three outstanding musicians: Lassana Diabaté is Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Hollie Cook was in the final line-up of post-punk groundbreakers The Slits. When singer Ari Up died in 2010 and the group ended, there was a flurry of interest in Cook for a while. She supported The Stone Roses and appeared on Jools Holland’s Later.Then the spotlight moved on, as it always does, but she continued and has become a well-liked festival performer, also turning out a series of reggae-stewed pop albums, of which this is the fifth (leaving aside dub reversions). It’s as genially approachable as its predecessors.There's always been a strong Lovers Rock flavour to Cook’s music, and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Warren Ellis is Nick Cave’s wild-maned Bad Seeds right-hand man and The Dirty Three’s frenzied violinist. Justin Kurzel’s Australian film subjects meanwhile exist on the malign edge, from Snowtown’s suburban serial killer and Nitram’s mass shooter to Ned Kelly.Ellis is the contrastingly loving renegade subject of Kurzel’s debut documentary Ellis Park, an escapee from suburban Ballarat who here journeys further out to the titular Sumatran wildlife sanctuary he helps fund, where he plays to animals like a shaman Dolittle in jungle mist.Ellis Park divides halfway between Ellis’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Pop Will Eat Itself deserve to be more celebrated. The Stourbridge outfit were one of the first 1980s bands to realise the potential of smashing punky indie-rockin’ into hip hop and electronic dance.They had hits, many great songs, and covered the same territory that later gave The Prodigy mega-success (Delete Everything contains a rackety reimagining of the two groups' 1994 collaboration, "Their Law"). Unfortunately, a combination of their major label stabbing them in the back, and being perceived by some critics as cartoonishly adolescent, faded them out in the mid-Nineties. But they Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The reappearance of These Were The Earlies for its 21st-anniversary is a surprise. Although The Earlies' debut LP received a maximum-marks review from NME on its 2004 release – and widespread praise in general – it is not an album instantly shouting “cult item.” Nonetheless, as the reissue and a tie-in reformation of the band show, there is a residual affection.Playing These Were The Earlies confirms why. From its opening seconds, it sets itself up as top-notch modern psychedelia, with references – some overt, some subtle – to The Beach Boys, Love and, more contemporaneously, Mercury Rev. A Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s funny: people say a lot online that what you’re allowed to like and dislike in music is bounded by age, gender and so forth. “It’s not FOR you,” they say. And in many ways, when it comes to Taylor Swift, that’s fair enough.There are certainly quite a lot too many heterosexual men in their 50s opining on her in ways that are a bit off: angry that she’s not Joni Mitchell, or that she’s a bit full of herself, or that her melodies are simple… Angry with a passion they can’t find for any other pop music. And no, sir, this music IS not for you. However, for those of us that do care about pop Read more ...
Tim Cumming
This is quite a tale: Shooter, son of Waylon Jennings, discovers a tranche of his father’s personal multitrack tapes from the analogue years, dating between 1973 – when he wrestled artistic control from RCA – and 1984, when he had quit cocaine, joined The Outlaws and digital technology took over everything.The tapes were shelved for 40 years, until Shooter took them down, opened them up and brought them to Sunset Sound in 2024. He started digging through them, and found that rather than the demos he expected, many of these "lost" recordings were fully fledged tracks waiting for an album to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The backscreens pop alive. A wall of photographer’s flashguns. On cyberpunk crutches, Lady Gaga stumbles jerkily towards us. She sings her 2009 global smash “Paparazzi”, her arms clad in armour, on her head a metallic skullcap. Her corseted dress has a train that extends, diaphanous, floating back behind her the entire length of the long catwalk into the audience. It disappears into the darkness of an arch.Theatre, yes, but Gaga is committed. Her eyes on the big screen above aren’t smirky or cool. They have a performative, deranged intensity. Lady Gaga is a proper pop star, haemorrhaging Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The 16-minute album opener “Between the Fingers the Drops of Tomorrow's Dawn” coalesces at the 12-minute point, when clattering percussion meshes with what sounds like a sitar to fashion a hypnotic, repetitive whole. It’s as if Slovenia’s Širom have used the time so far to work themselves into a trance-like state. Iztok Koren, Ana Kravanja and Samo Kutin have surrendered to the drone.In the Wind of Night, Hard-Fallen Incantations Whisper is Širom’s fifth album. Not only does it bear a characteristically mysterious cover image and title, it is also long. Over 74 minutes, there are just seven Read more ...
Tom Carr
In the age of streaming, it’s never been less clear knowing when you can safely say an artist is well known in the mainstream. But for the rising star of Olivia Dean, the neo-soul Londoner, if Spotify streams count for anything then with over 20 million listeners, you could argue she is arriving on centre stage.On her debut album, 2023’s Messy, Dean provided a respectful and worthwhile offering of a vintage sound with lo-fi stylings: horn arrangements, slightly de-tuned piano chords, and soulful ballds. There was also mega-hit, “Dive”, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It's a Happening Thing,” January 1967’s debut single from California’s Peanut Butter Conspiracy, is one of the year’s best. Driving, with a full sound, a psychedelic edge, soaring vocal and immediate tune, it sounds like a hit.However, despite being issued by major label Columbia, it wasn’t. As it’s put in the booklet coming with The Most Up Till Now – A History 1966-1970 box set, the single “barely scraped into Billboard’s Hot 100, peaking at the number 93 slot.”The band’s next 45, March 1967’s "Dark on You Now” was as great. But, this time, no chart action at all. Their debut album, the Read more ...