New music
Russ Coffey
Is there anything more comforting to men of a certain vintage than the crunching guitars and wailing vocals of classic rock? Not for me. This year, the genre transported me back to a musical era of sheer joy and wild, creative spirit; a time when musicians were as interested in letting the good times roll as saving the world. A time of bands like classic rock revivalists, Greta Van Fleet. Throughout 2021, GVF's mixture of exhilarating energy and exquisite silliness was my antidote to the litany of misery on the news. I found myself lifted by Josh Kiszka's quicksilver voice and thrilled Read more ...
Guy Oddy
2021 was a year of two halves in New Musicworld. For the first seven months or so, venues remained closed and live performances were either a cherished memory or something experienced online. During the last five months, however, concert halls and clubs have slowly but steadily reopened to real audiences. In the meantime, musicians have had more time to digest and reflect on a post-Brexit, ongoing-Covid world of climate chaos, where things can feel decidedly more unstable than they did two years ago – and this has produced some fine sounds indeed.While it wasn’t a new idea, a number of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I do like this record. Despite their tremendously loser name, this group from America is pretty good. They have a sound of their own added to by Byrd-like guitar playing and Everly Brothers voices. In a funny way, it’s rather sexy.”Although Penny Valentine’s verdict on The Beau Brummels’s “Don’t Talk to Strangers” edges towards damning the single with faint praise, it was positive and homed in on an important aspect of the San Francisco band – their Everly Brothers’s resonance. Readers of her Disc Weekly reviews column that mid-November in 1965 will have been well-aware of America’s decisive Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There’s something about a search for fine detail in the music I’ve listened to this year, whether it’s reaching to recognise the Orkney birdsong in Erland Cooper’s Holm (Variations & B-Sides) or conjuring up images of the characters Arlo Parkes so vividly portrays in Collapsed in Sunbeams.One of the best places I’ve found such specific lyric description is in the fascinatingly fresh spoken word of post-punk South London band Dry Cleaning, fronted by Florence Shaw. The feminist fury of punk’s leading female figures Bikini Kill, Pussy Riot and Siouxsie and the Banshees have here been Read more ...
joe.muggs
2021 might not seem the most likely of years for the globalisation of dance music to intensify, what with the lack of travel and the lack of... well... dancing. But, in fact, thanks partly to the enforced time spent online which led to a lot of discovery for a lot of people, and partly to a simple yearning to get back out there dancing, the connections made have been wild. And no record exemplifies this quite like Toya Delazy’s Afrorave. The adopted Londoner comes from Zulu royalty, and is very keen to represent her heritage in her music: this entire album is rapped/sung in Zulu, its Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
We did that whole state-of-things COVID/Brexit/anxiety/neurosis blah-blah in the end-of-year pieces last year. And, indeed, the year before (when Bozza was elected). Not this year. I’m over that. Let’s crack on. Live life. Own it. All that. An equivalent bullishness of tone, filtered through a defiantly feminine aesthetic, rules Marina Diamandis’s fifth album (she of Marina and the Diamonds). Or, at least, the parts of it that aren’t concerned with “highly emotional people” or mourning the end of her five year relationship with Clean Bandit’s Jack Patterson.It’s an outrageous album; Read more ...
Rachel Newton
I am fortunate to be one of the musicians involved in Spell Songs, a musical companion piece to both The Lost Words and The Lost Spells by acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane and award-winning illustrator and author Jackie Morris.There have been some truly magical moments since the project began back in 2018. When we gathered to make our first album, I remember watching as Jackie created the first of the beautiful paintings that went on to capture the essence of each musician, each of us painted as a bird with our musical instrument. The first was an egret perched on a harp, my Read more ...
Nick Hasted
José James regularly steps away from the straight jazz singer berthed for years at Blue Note, pining to be an R&B voice for broader black audiences. Covering both Freestyle Fellowship and Rashaan Roland Kirk on his debut The Dreamer (2008), his sensibility straddles sounds and eras which are anyway intimately linked.This Christmas album is, though, aimed straight at the easy listening heart. The Fifties of Nat “King” Cole, Ella and Sinatra at their most frictionless, as well as Blue Note’s more straightahead jazz moments, fill the grooves. The sublimated shadows Gregory Porter found on Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“I wanna hear the music play, I wanna dance and laugh and sway” sings Norah Jones on “Christmas Calling”, the opening track of this her first festive outing, “I wanna happy holiday for Christmas”. Doubtless when she recorded I Dream of Christmas, all that seemed easily possible, along with a smooch under the mistletoe. Now much of the world faces not a white Christmas but possibly another Covid Christmas – for many people sadly “a blue Christmas without you”, as the old chestnut has it.The Billy Hayes and Jay W Johnson song is well-covered, most famously by Elvis Presley, and it’s always hard Read more ...
Jasper Rees
To clarify: this is less a review, more a dispatch from a raucous wake. We all have a band that means something extra. Mine is The Men They Couldn't Hang, who I saw on Saturday night at the Powerhaus in Camden for the umpteenth time.I first came across the band when I was commissioned to go to Reykjavik with them in March 1989. They had been going for five years, were on the rise, their third album Waiting for Bonaparte was out, and they were warming up for a big tour. Beer had just been legalised in Iceland for the first time since the 1930s and I may well have ingratiated myself by buying a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As we ride towards the holiday break on our magic reindeer, it’s time for one last theartsdesk on Vinyl, a seasonal special that, if you scroll down, contains all the usual up-to-date music reviews but, before that, takes a look at Yuletide-themed releases, reissues and heritage fare that might make great presents. As ever, all musical life newly pressed to plastic is here. Dive in.VINYL OF THE FESTIVE SEASONPatrik Fitzgerald featuring Lemur No Santa Clauses (Crispin Glover)This year’s VINYL OF THE FESTIVE SEASON top pick is by long lost new wave troubadour Patrik Fitzgerald. It’s only his Read more ...
joe.muggs
Liverpudlian singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams has always had a literary bent. This doesn’t just manifest in overt ways, like writing a concept album about Sylvia Plath in 2015’s Hypoxia, but in perfectly potted narratives, microscopically brilliant turns of phrase, and even titles that make you double-take going all the way back to 1999’s “Dog Without Wings”. And this tendency is not just written into her lyrics, but her performance too. Her understated style and vocals which combine impossibly pure tone with conversational earthiness bring the fine detail of words to the surface, on Read more ...