sat 21/09/2024

New Music Reviews

I'm Every Woman, JW3, London - a musical celebration of International Women's Day

Liz Thomson

In one of the award-winning club’s forays from its Camden Town home, Green Note welcomed International Women’s Day with a special one-off concert exploring and celebrating the many ages and stages of being a woman. Three generations of musicians were on stage at North London’s JW3.

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CD: Karen O and Danger Mouse - Lux Prima

Owen Richards

As collaborations go, it’s a doozy. Karen O’s signature vocals over Danger Mouse’s production – it was always going to pique interest. And Lux Prima does much to meet expectations, gorgeous cinematic soundscapes that flit between haunting and defiant. At its best, its damn near mesmerising. But for those expecting a genre-defying, structure-blowing new horizon, it falls just short.

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Kamasi Washington, Brixton Academy review - reaching transcendence

Katherine Waters

There’s jazz, and there’s transcendent jazz. Kamasi Washington and his band are the latter. His group — who hail from Los Angeles and have played together since childhood, made waves in 2015 when they released The Epic, a three-hour concept album, followed up by Heaven and Earth, which similarly explored esoteric conceptions and abstruse riffs.

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Massive Attack, Steel Yard Bristol review - propaganda and pomp

mark Kidel

Massive Attack have travelled a long way from the Dugout, the Bristol bar where the collective first tried their hand at spinning discs for a crowd whose cultural mix reflected the constant ferment of one of Britain’s most vibrant cities.

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Laura Gibson, Hug and Pint, Glasgow review - fable songs and unpretentious intimacies

Lisa-Marie Ferla

Laura Gibson’s songwriting was always that of a storyteller but her newest album, Goners, ups the ante still further. Her first album to be made after completing an MFA in creative writing, the album explores weighty themes like grief and the persistent march of time with a spellbinding elegance.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Sparks

Kieron Tyler

Although American, Sparks’ initial commercial breakthrough was in the UK where their rococo art-rock chimed with ears attuned to, say, Roxy Music. Their sensibility has always been more European than American. In 2009 they issued an album titled The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman. Its theme was a flight of fancy which took the Swedish director to Hollywood.

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Joan Baez, London Palladium review - fare-thee-well generosity

Liz Thomson

“If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure,” observed Dave van Ronk, the late folk musician known as “the Mayor of MacDougal Street” in Greenwich Village.

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CD: Hozier - Wasteland Baby!

Russ Coffey

In the summer of 2014, there was little getting away from Hozier's "Take Me to Church". Whenever you turned on the TV or the radio there it was. It wasn't just in this country. Eventually, the song became number one in 12 countries and number 2 in the States. Of course, for the singer, this massive success also brought a big problem: how to top it? When Hozier sat down to write his new album he must have agonised about what he'd got so right first time around.

On paper, the recipe was...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Eric Dolphy

Kieron Tyler

The tapes from which Musical Prophet: The Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions is sourced were found in a suitcase Eric Dolphy had given to musical polymath Hale Smith and his wife Juanita before setting off on a European tour in 1964. What was handed over by the prodigious multi-instrumentalist for safekeeping has never before been fully explored by an archive release.

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Joshua Redman Still Dreaming, Barbican review - world-class quartet

Sebastian Scotney

Joshua Redman's Still Dreaming Quartet is a project surrounded by an abundance of facts, context and backstories. Jazz folk really like that stuff. If fans can’t get enough of all the interconnections and the minutiae, the truth is that a concert stands or falls by what actually happens in the moment, whether it actually works or doesn't.

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