Strings swirl. A flute drifts like a bird floating on warm air. The melody is subdued, its tonality evoking The Smiths’ “Please, Please, Please, Let me Get What I Want.” A wistful, French-accented voice sings “I’ve always been so cruel, Hard on myself, You say I’m just a fool, Trying to be somebody else.” Mood set with opening track “Bluer Than Blue,” How and Why subsequently showcases nine more similarly moody, acoustic-centred songs.The dreamy, slightly husky, voice is recognisable. Since 2003, Mélanie Pain has been a main vocalist with France’s Nouvelle Vague, Marc Collin and Olivier Read more ...

If you want a peek into a lost world of rock n roll degeneracy and decadence, you won’t find a better glory hole than the grubby, outlandish view offered by the video for “Hey Negrita” from the Rolling Stones’ 1976 album, Black & Blue. It’s on the band’s YouTube channel, Jagger flouncing about in some lime green Latina blouse, vocally molesting pianist Billy Preston on the breakdown, and Keith and new boy Ronnie posing about in shades, their battered guitars locking in to that song’s unspeakably brilliant, filthy, sleazy groove. Black & Blue is not high in the canon of Great Rolling Read more ...

VINYL OF THE MONTHMartel Zaire (Evil Ideas)Montenegro-born, Cyprus-based producer Martel Vladimiroff is a hard man to find out about. His meagre online imprint and extensive global travels make him seem more like “an asset in the field” than a musician. Whoever he is, his new EP, four tracks drawn from his second album of the same name, is a unique idea, well-executed. Inspired by the imperial ravaging of Africa and the ongoing horrors of its modern equivalent, with the Congo as prime exemplar, it’s a conceptual head-trip. A dense gumbo of African field recordings and tribal drums play off Read more ...

Opening acts don’t always enjoy a full house, but at at the Royal Albert Hall at the end of a UK tour in support of Suzanne Vega and her acclaimed new album Flying with Angels, there was a warm and generous welcome for singer-songwriter Katherine Priddy’s opening five-song set, drawn from her first two albums, The Eternal Rocks Beneath and The Pendulum Swing, and featuring a preview from the third, These Frightening Machines, due in March.The new song is “Matches”, about the witch trials, but a springboard, too, to broader and wider concerns that persist and exist beyond historical time. They Read more ...

Issued in September 1974, Hall of the Mountain Grill was Hawkwind’s fifth LP. The follow-up to 1973’s live double album The Space Ritual Alive in Liverpool and London, it found the band in a position which seemed unlikely considering their roots in, and continued commitment to, West London’s freak scene. Their June 1972 single “Silver Machine” had charted and, irrespective of what they represented or espoused, Hawkwind had breached the mainstream.Nonetheless, Hall of the Mountain Grill didn’t chart high – in the UK, it peaked at 16 in late September 1974: when Mike Oldfield’s Hergest Ridge Read more ...

Barbra Streisand has given her blessing to Where We Fall (Backwards Dog Records), an album of six covers and five original songs. She wrote to her 1.8 million Instagram followers: "[Jason] just gave me his new album […] and it stopped me in my tracks. His sound, his soul, his musicality. I’m sooo proud to be his mama!" Streisand’s son Jason Gould is also the "true" son of Elliott Gould – as opposed to Ross and Monica from Friends, who are merely his fictional children in his role of Jack Geller, a "pater simulatus" with enduring celebrity status in his own right.  There you have it: at Read more ...

Leisure Process issued four singles between March 1982 and May 1983. Signed to Epic Records, the electropop-inclined duo was primed for success. Debut 45 “Love Cascade” was Radio 1 DJ Peter Powell’s record of the week. At the other end of the coolness spectrum, John Peel also played the single. A Leisure Process Peel session was recorded on 10 March 1982.Another factor feeding into the perception Leisure Process was ready for take off was the identity of their producer: Martin Rushent. He was integral to shaping British pop of the period. His work with Altered Images, The Human League and Read more ...

The first live performance at the inaugural Riga Music Week is by Saucējas (pictured above). This seven-piece vocal ensemble is avowedly Latvian. Formed in 2003 at the Latvian Academy of Culture, their singing, though polyphonic, allows space for solo lines within the framework of the collective voice. Drones and rounds are incorporated. A kinship with runo song is clear. In traditional costume, they embody an aspect of Mother Latvia: that this country wants to celebrate its traditions, ensuring they are not lost. Saucējas are tremendously powerful. Experiencing them at Riga Music Week’s Read more ...

Implosion is a purely instrumental, collaborative album of cinematic, dystopian sounds from dubstepper and extreme electronica experimentalist the Bug and his pal Ghost Dubs. However, rather than working on the same tracks together, as could be implied, they have each applied their production know-how to alternate tunes on the two discs that make up this recording. That isn’t to say that the sounds on Implosion swing from one flavour to another and back again. This is an album with a singular vision that is consistently eerie and sinister and has much in common with early 1990s ambient Read more ...

It’s really interesting to see how Amy Winehouse’s legacy continues to reverberate – and not just through endlessly repeated iconography or the tragedy-for-sale machine that’s built around her but musically too. Even rapper Little Simz namechecks and musically nods to her, and her unique update of Billie Holiday’s tone has been passed on to one degree or another to singers like Lola Young, Yazmin Lacey – and especially Celeste.Not that Celeste is a copy of anyone by any means: her voice is very much her own with its own strengths and mannerisms, and her gothic cabaret-tinged style and Read more ...

Mavis Staples, the woman to whom a young Bob Dylan proposed marriage when they met at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival and whose voice he has described as his “favourite voice”. Mavis Staples, who announced her retirement in 2023 and then realised she still had “work” to do, even after more than 75 years on the road. Mavis Staples, sole survivor of the Staple Singers, founded by Roebuck “Pops” Staples, a friend of Martin Luther King Jr who committed his family to the civil rights struggle and toured throughout the Jim Crow south – the whole family was once arrested in Memphis after Pops was Read more ...

It’s weird, right? We’ve somehow stumbled into a world where, for all we’re told that algorithms homogenise music, actually more people than ever are exposed to very, very odd and abstract soundmaking.There’s new age gong baths at even the most normie health spas. There’s a kajillion hours of “relaxation music” flooding streaming services from who knows where, a lot of it just drones and/or modulating white noise. There’s the sound design of scores by the likes of Hildur Guðnadóttir, Daniel Lopatin, Cristobal Tapia De Veer that reach millions in surround sound via movies, games and prestige Read more ...