New music
Album: Baaba Maal - BeingFriday, 12 May 2023
“Yerimayo Celebration”, which opens Baaba Maal’s brilliant and superbly paced new album, sets the tone: it starts in the mists of time, as it were, drawing deep on the minimal soul of traditional West African music: a plucked ngoni, and a haunting... Read more... |
Lucinda Chua, ICA review - sublimity on a rainy evening in LondonThursday, 11 May 2023
As my editor noted, this was the first gig in his 30 years of music journalism that had guided meditation as its support act. This set the tone for a beautiful, peaceful evening at the ICA for Lucinda Chua, a homecoming gig and a welcome listen to... Read more... |
Album: Fatoumata Diawara - London KOThursday, 11 May 2023
It’s been five years since the release of Malian musician and actor Fatoumata Diawara’s breakout album, Fento, and just short of a year since her magnificent headline appearance on the first day of 2022’s Womad Festival. So, it is with some... Read more... |
Album: Vicente Archer - Short StoriesWednesday, 10 May 2023
When is the right moment for a musician to step out of the shadows and release an album in her/his own name? Vicente Archer, one of the most in-demand NYC bassists around, has certainly taken his time. In his late forties, and with appearances on... Read more... |
Jah Wobble, Brighton Festival 2023 review - Coronation bank hol Sunday marathonTuesday, 09 May 2023
Jah Jah Jah blah blah blah. We’ll get to that.I meet Everest at Worthing station at 3.20pm. He’s clad in a light brown corduroy jacket and a cap. He looks dapper. Like a Len Deighton spy. We board the train to Brighton. I hand him a chilled bottle... Read more... |
Duran Duran, Utilita Arena, Birmingham review - New Romantic veterans return homeMonday, 08 May 2023
Duran Duran were back in their hometown of Birmingham this weekend for the first time since performing as part of the open ceremony of the 2022 Commonwealth Games and were justly forthright in trumpeting their local history. Even Pinner-born Simon... Read more... |
Die Verlierer, New River Studios review - Berlin punks instantly find an audience at their UK debutMonday, 08 May 2023
It’s flabbergasting. OK, there’s the power of the internet as a propagation tool but here’s a German band playing their first UK show to a jumping-up-and-down audience punching the air while shouting along with the chorus of “X-Ray Vision” – which,... Read more... |
Album: BC Camplight - The Last Rotation of EarthMonday, 08 May 2023
On Brian Christinzio’s sixth album as BC Camplight, he wants listeners to know about his recent experiences and their effect on him. Herewith, a mostly unembroidered account of how he sees things. When allusiveness arrives, the metaphors are easy to... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Tony Rivers - Move A Little Closer: The Complete Recordings 1963-1970Sunday, 07 May 2023
Amongst the stranger recordings surfacing in 1977’s summer of punk was the version of Sex Pistols’s “Pretty Vacant” appearing on the budget Hallmark label album Top Of The Pops Volume 60 – the latest in a long-running series collecting ostensibly... Read more... |
Lankum, Barbican review - a stunning setSaturday, 06 May 2023
“YOUR NEW ALBUM IS FUCKING DEADLY!” hollers a voice from the depths of a full house at the Barbican on Thursday night, the first date on the north Dublin band’s UK tour for their stunning new album, False Lankum.Queue it up for your listening... Read more... |
DVD: Jazz Fest - A New Orleans StorySaturday, 06 May 2023
New Orleans “is not a music business city, it’s a music culture city,” says David Shaw of The Revivalists, one of the interviewees in Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story.This documentary sets out to describe that multiracial culture and heritage... Read more... |
Album: Steve Mac - Bless This Acid HouseFriday, 05 May 2023
Some rock bands base their career around being musically fluid, an ever-changing what-will-they-do-next? conundrum. Others, such as, famously, Motörhead and The Ramones, simply go on doing their thing, honing it, repeating ad infinitum, with an... Read more... |
