New music
Kathryn Reilly
Utterly, utterly gleeful. This 22-track double album oozes exuberance, joy and hope despite being yet another made-in-lockdown production. Its pace and positivity leaves you slightly bewildered, thinking “what, another great pop tune, how does he do it?” And once you find a favourite (the bontempi-powered madness of “Curiosity”, sweet and sentimental “Flamingo”, the multi-voice celebration of “Kinetic Connection”, the throwaway jubilation of “Here Comes the Weekend” perhaps), there’s another following straight behind (string-rich “Quarter to Eight” with it’s reference to Roddy Frame Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In summer 2001, The Best of Roxy Music reached number 12 on the album charts. The 18-track compilation tied-in with the band’s reunion tour, which kicked off that June. Original band members Bryan Ferry, Andy MacKay, Phil Manzanera and Paul Thompson came together for the dates. They’d last played live in May 1983, after which they split.The Best of Roxy Music was CD-only and now reappears as a double album to coincide with the band’s 50th-anniversary shows, presently on-going in the US. The UK dates begin in October. Between the 2001 shows and what’s in this year’s diary, there were tours in Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album – and its already multi-100 million stream single “Pink Venom” – starts off with a twang of Korean traditional instruments, a background chant of “blaaaackpink”, a monumentally crunching hip hop beat and – OH DEAR GOD ARE THEY DOING A JAMAICAN ACCENT? Well yes, Korean pop gigastar Jennie of Blackpink does indeed start their second album with a patois-inflected “kick in the door, waving the Coco”. Amazingly that’s not even the weirdest thing about the opening either. That line is an interpolation of a classic Notorious B.I.G. intro: “kick in the door, waving the four-four”, but Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“I can still taste you and I hate it/That wasn’t a choice in the mind of a child and you knew it/You took the first slice of me and you ate it raw/Ripped at it with your teeth and your lips like a cannibal/You fucking animal.” The opening lines of “Cannibal” the first track on Self-Titled, the solo debut from Marcus Mumford – are the first indication this might not be the album you’ve been expecting. Even if you’re already aware of the childhood abuse the singer suffered, and which inspired this collection songs, prior knowledge does little to prepare you for the visceral punch those Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Marina Allen’s singing voice fluctuates between the conversational and the flutingly melodic. In one song, she can be asking “Why do I sing my song for you” in a no-nonsense Randy Newman manner and then shift into a series of spiralling, ascending arpeggios. Centrifics, her second album, is about contrasts.While the LA-based Allen is most probably aware of Judee Sill and Laura Nyro, there’s a jazziness (especially on “New Song Rising” and “Foul Weather Jacket Drawing's" vocal vamping) and a fondness for songs with multiple counter melodies which places her as more than a Seventies-influenced Read more ...
Guy Oddy
If anyone was going to produce a raucous musical response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it was always likely to be Gogol Bordello. After all, the band has both Ukrainian and Russian members (among other nationalities), they have a tendency to champion the underdog and aren’t timid about flagging up injustice.New album, Solidaritine is indeed Eugene Hutz and his gang’s take on the things that are presently taking place in Eastern Europe. However, while it’s clear where Gogol Bordello’s sympathies lie, they don’t resort to sloganeering or explicitly calling out the Butcher of Moscow Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Suede were both prototypes and outliers of the Britpop pack, and their 2010 reunion managed a rare, creatively substantial second act; given their resurrection after guitarist Bernard Butler’s fractious 1994 exit, this may even be the band’s epic, open-ended Act 3.Where their first three reunion albums restored Suede’s sense of conceptual art, Autofiction brings back the pop, the glamour and fizz of their early singles and feverish gigs. Rather than rehash that past, it looks to post-punk for its attitude and sound, imagining a Suede born into the hard monochrome of 1979, not the hedonism and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We played the Rolling Stones concert at Long Beach Arena. The Stones came on, and it was the first time that any band had ever done better than us. I was very angry about that.” Randy Holden was The Sons of Adam’s guitarist. He was pretty certain of his own band’s impact in November 1964.The quote comes from the booklet accompanying Saturday’s Sons: The Complete Recordings 1964-1966, a definitive, long-overdue collection of his band’s work. The Sons Of Adam issued just three relatively obscure singles over 1965 to 1966 but their reputation was certified when “Feathered Fish,” the Read more ...
mark.kidel
The Star Feminine Band are from Benin, all of them under 18, the youngest only 12. They hail from a village in the north of their small country tucked between Togo and Nigeria. Their pop-inflected mix of high life, Congolese rhumba and other trans-African styles is as ebullient as it comes, and probably very infectious on the dance floor.Their second album features once again guitars, electronic keyboards and percussion. It’s mostly up-tempo, and as with so much African music, as well as in the musics of the African diaspora, the fun of the dance is inseparable from messages about how to live Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Those talented internationally-renowned musicians are just like the rest of us, you know? They had a rubbish time during lockdown too – turns out it was the great leveller after all. Santigold’s latest album (her sixth, the first for four years) is the direct result of being stuck at home with three kids under six. But rather than sending her crawling up the walls (although there is a bit of that) it’s made her reassess her creative direction.Quite why Santigold hasn’t broken through more universally is a mystery to many. Perhaps the mix of her punk ethos, echoes of dancehall, slightly “arty Read more ...
Tom Carr
Away from the spotlight of mainstream music the metal scene thrives, unbothered with how much attention it picks up. When bands like Architects reach number one in the UK charts, it is huge, but unimportant. Instead the scene is preoccupied with its own endlessly shifting subgenres and sounds.Enter Parkway Drive, an Australian metal band who spent the first part of their career firmly within the "metalcore" subgenre. Born from an aggressive merging of metal with hardcore punk, it melds the ferocious energy of hardcore with the intricate riffs and musicianship of metal – a heavy match made in Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
“We love you, Neil!” came the shout from the back of the circle. “Well, you’d have to,” he replied. Five nights, ten albums, 113 songs and 30-plus years of releases: The Divine Comedy’s residency at the Barbican was an opportunity to savour the artistry of Neil Hannon, as his creative life unfolded in fast forward for our pleasure.He began the first concert saying – and acting like – he was worried it was all a grand folly and he was about to fall flat on his face. In fact, the opposite was the case. First – and no mean achievement – Hannon filled the Barbican for all five nights, both with Read more ...