New music
Thomas H. Green
Many of her fans initially came across Filipino-born, London-raised singer Bea Laus – Beabadoobee – via the massive TikTok sensation “Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head)” by Canadian producer Powfu, which was centred on the extremely catchy chorus to her song “Coffee”.But Laus, now 22, has been releasing music since she was 17, and her debut album Fake It Flowers, hit the UK Top 10 in 2020. Beatopia moves things forward sonically. Its sound is more interesting, hazy and stoned, but the songs don’t always match its ambitions.Where Fake It Flowers trod a path somewhere between Avril Lavigne pop- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As either a producer or songwriter Gary Usher worked with The Beach Boys and The Byrds, the two most consequential California bands of the Sixties.When he co-wrote “409” with Brian Wilson for the Beach Boys’s first Capitol Records single in mid 1962, he teamed the hot-rod fad with surfing in popular culture for the first time. By his own reckoning, Usher wrote and recorded more than 50 car songs in one month in 1963.Any of this would make Gary Usher a significant figure in pop music. But, of course, there’s a lot more. Much more. Getting to grips with his world means that bands or studio Read more ...
joe.muggs
You can’t really blame Lizzo for playing to her strengths. When she started putting out records some nine years ago, there wasn’t really a niche in the market for a flute playing, twerking, positive-thinking, plus-size rapper-stroke-disco-diva.Roundly ignored by the mainstream “urban” American music industry despite her obvious abundant talent, she went about building her own diverse – but leaning female and/or LGBTQ+ – cult following, which grew fast until she couldn’t be ignored. Without changing or dialling down her approach, this eventually resulted in her 2019 ascent to global mega fame Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Martin Jenkins, AKA The Head Technician, AKA Pye Corner Audio, is all about layers. From the stacked pseudonyms, to the dense, sound-steeped strata of his music, there’s lots going on.His Black Mill Tapes series, released over the last 12 years or so, blends elements of contemporary dance music, epic electronic soundtracks, music concrète and dense, brooding atmospherics. The sound of dark soot dust descending on a remote hillside, it’s simultaneously comforting and claustrophobic. 2021’s Entangled Roots, meanwhile, was inspired by the underground conversational pathways of plants, taking Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Oy vey, life is just too short for this kind of nonsense. Katie Melua fans will have to be very dedicated indeed to get into this particular groove. Post-classical, post-rock, post whatever."As the album reveals itself, so does a picture of two artists both pushing from and revelling in the conventions of their respective musical fields", reads the long portentous press release:For Simon Goff, who composed the album in its entirety, this amounted to a renewed respect for the art of lyric writing. “I remember Katie telling me about "Lay Lady Lay" and "Don’t Think Twice" by Bob Dylan, how she Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
We music journos miss stuff too. This writer had not come across New Zealand-based Canadian singer Tami Neilson before, despite the fact she’s been around for over a decade and this is her sixth studio album. How did I miss her?Kingmaker contains the best kind of raw heartfelt country and scalpel-sharp lyricism, catchy songs spiked with a sassy rockabilly twang that propels them towards fresh territory. It boasts direction and energy which, with any justice, would see it racking up sales well beyond the niche. In short, an absolute zinger of an album.Neilson hails from a family of singers, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Last weekend saw the long-awaited, post-Covid return of Birmingham’s urban festival of sonic strangeness, and yet again it was a time to wallow in the sounds of previously unknown or vaguely heard about artists, while trying not to melt as temperatures sent mercury levels into orbit.It may have been a bit of a struggle getting there through the pre-Commonwealth Games roadworks, but as it always is, it was an effort that was well-worth making – with audiences being treated to feral drum and bass, doom metal, twisted folk music and some seriously experimental weirdness, amongst much else. Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
For most Montrealers, their 10-day jazz festival (30 June - 9 July) is, as the new head of programming Maurin Auxéméry described it to me, a “free, all-you-can-eat musical buffet every night”. People head into the town centre to the Quartier des Spectacles in their thousands for the free events, from smaller free stages right up to the main Scène TD in the Place des Arts, which accommodates up to 60,000 people partying. Of about 350 events during the festival period, at least two-thirds had free admission.This was the festival’s 42nd edition and marked a comeback, putting large-scale events Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Throughout the history of music, there have been plenty of artists whose ideas have been far more appealing and interesting than the way they were put into practice. The whole of the studio recorded work of the Grateful Dead and the lion’s share of the No Wave movement being cases in point.For most people, there could well be a new nominee to this list in Black Midi’s Hellfire album – a joyously chaotic and frequently almost unlistenable racket that will no doubt eventually join the likes of Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica as a record of supposed great influence that many will actually Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A compilation album titled Pennsylvania Unknowns was issued in 1982. Its 17 tracks chronicled the US state’s Sixties garage rock and psychedelic scenes. Amongst the bands included were Pat Farrell & The Believers, The Flowerz, The Loose Enz and The Shandells. About the best known were Allentown’s The Kings Ransom, whose moody 1968 single “Shadows of Dawn” was a collector’s staple.Pennsylvania, though, is better known musically due to what came a little later from its capital city Philadelphia: the soul music of the Philly Sound. Before, in the Sixties, few bands from the state broke Read more ...
Tom Carr
Despite not matching the success of their fellow New York post-punk colleagues, The Strokes, Interpol have nonetheless carved out a respectable path for themselves since their 2002 debut Turn on the Bright Lights. Occupying the darker edges of indie rock, they are the shadier counterpoint to the eccentricities of Julian Casablancas and co, their albums consistently making the UK Top 10 for the past two decades.Returning after four years with their latest effort, The Other Side of Make-Believe, its origins have a familiar-sounding tale to many recent albums: recording began in 2020, each of Read more ...
joe.muggs
James Bay couldn’t be more unhip if he had pelvic removal surgery. He is so middle of the road that he could be a cat’s eye. Everything about him is old before his time – he was inspired to pick up a guitar by hearing “Layla”, he sings in a husky transatlantic semi-Celtic voice, he exists in a continuum of soft rock that runs from the start of AOR through U2, David Gray and the Coldplay imitation explosion of the 00s through to Ed Sheeran and Louis Capaldi.And he is also very, very, very good at doing what he does indeed. This album makes no bones about his positioning. The opener “ Read more ...