New music
joe.muggs
“Flashbacks / driving in your car volume pushed right up to max / all those late nights I’d try to drink them back” These are almost the first words you hear on this record, coming in as South London Afrobeats producer P2J’s bass tones roll in on the opener “Under my Skin”. And they’re a perfect introduction to the theme and mood of the record too. It’s over five years since Katy B’s third album, Honey; back then she was still the unofficial narrator of millennial club culture, her songs perfectly catching the whirl of the dancefloor and hypersociality, locked exactly into the finest dance Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Like a more genuinely earthed Springsteen, Billy Bragg’s middle-aged, Dorset years have offered somewhat self-conscious wisdom and awareness of his singer-songwriter status. He’s grown up and into himself, diligently expanding both his craft and ideals. Like his near contemporary Elvis Costello, he has also found musical comfort in Americana and country-soul, with accompanying, initially disorientating American accent.The Million Things That Never Happened was additionally inspired by the recent sharp fear, as successive tours were cancelled, that Covid might permanently decimate his working Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
It may go against rock n’ roll cliché, but occasionally there is merit to good time keeping for a band. Lucia and the Best Boys saw their support slot in their home town of Glasgow reach an ignominious ending when they were cut off a song early, vocalist Lucia Fairfull’s chat having seen the glam synth pop group go over their allocated slot.It was an announcement greeted with some derision from those gathered there, but seemed a fitting climax to a rather stop-start showcase. Although Fairfull has a strong voice, their dancefloor friendly tunes only rarely provided a suitably catchy backing. Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It seems totally appropriate that Lee “Scratch” Perry’s last recorded album before his death earlier this year, is a collaboration with a Canadian experimental noise outfit and that it is several musical lightyears away from his legendary 1970s Black Ark recordings. For Lee “Scratch” Perry was one of those rare artists, like James Brown and Miles Davis, who made a deep and enduring mark on modern music by showing no fear about experimenting with a whole new pallet of sounds.Perry often revelled in a ganja-fuelled, madman persona for media and audiences alike, but his crazed outbursts often Read more ...
mark.kidel
Two men trade licks: one of them delves into the heart of the blues, a potent dose of the boogie, the medicinal music of the Mississipi Delta. The other with a mournful voice and violin draws on the equally stripped-down and drone-inflected roots of Southern Italian tradition. The Italian also plays a range of frame drums with phenomenal energy and technical prowess. Mixing the rocking and rolling lilt of John Lee Lee Hooker with the frenetic pulse of pizzica music from Italy might seem an unlikely combination, but the result of collaboration based on a shared passion for the music of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
As The Rolling Stones – sans a much-missed Charlie Watts – generate old fashioned, 20th-century rock'n'roll excitement in the stadiums of north America this autumn, their final great studio album, 1981’s Tattoo You, returns to the new releases shelf after 40 years. It's available in a range of editions, from the standard single remastered album through a deluxe double set that comes with a disc of “Lost and Found” outtakes, to a “super-deluxe” four-disc boxed set encompassing a hardback book and the band’s live performance from the second of two dates at Wembley, on 26 July 1982.The Wembley Read more ...
Liz Thomson
A “sonic photograph” is how Tori Amos describes her sixteenth album, recorded at her home in Cornwall during the spring and summer of Britain’s third lockdown, when, travel, her usual mode of coping with “troubling things”, was not an option. Living in Bude, with her English husband Mark Hawley, their daughter and her partner, she had no option but to “sit with myself and accept where I was”. “Swim to New York State” is her song of escape, a languorous opening with beautiful sonorities.For some musicians, a break from the gypsy life was, at least for a time, a novelty. For Amos, the third Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Forty five minutes into their set Field Music play “A House is Not a Home”, from their 2006 second album Tones of Town. An hour in, “Them That do Nothing” from 2010’s Measure is aired. They end with “Orion From the Street”, the opening track from their recent Flat White Moon album.Afterwards, leaving the venue and pitching into the assault of Friday night Camden, its shouters and stumblers, a voice is heard above the din saying the show was a great introduction to Field Music as they’d played what amounted to a greatest hits set. Yes, but more was going on.Flat White Moon explicitly draws Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“We’ve always tossed in some super-dire, high-voltage, death-trip lyrics that offset the merriment of a melody,” John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants explained recently. And that, in essence, has been a substantial part of the band’s unchanging proposition ever since 1982 when Flansburgh and John Linnell, who had been high school friends in Lincoln, Massachusetts, started the band.And so, all but 40 years on, we find a song that asks the question “Who ate the babies...?” To which the most cogent answer the listener is offered is “Doodly doodly doodly-doo”. Followed by “Doodly doo doo doo”. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Over 1974 to 1978 Graham Collier issued five albums on his own imprint Mosaic. There was another in 1985 and eight releases on Mosaic by other musicians, but for its first four years the imprint was dominated by the British jazz composer, bassist and bandleader’s own work. In the same period, three books Collier had written came out. There was Jazz – A Students' and Teachers' Guide, published by Cambridge University Press, Compositional Devices, published by America’s Berklee College and Cleo and John, about Laine and Dankworth. Collier was busy.He had graduated from Berklee in 1963 and went Read more ...
joe.muggs
George Evelyn is one of British music’s more interesting characters. With equal parts Yorkshire bluntness, hip hop swagger and cosmic dreams, he has filled Nightmares On Wax’s beat collages and soul grooves with soundsystem heft and endless inventiveness for over three decades now. Ever since the N.O.W. sound really hit its stride on the second album, 1995’s Smoker’s Delight, it’s been like a slow, deep river meandering through the musical landscape: sometimes livelier, sometimes stagnating a little, but always making its own way with no need to change or divert for anything. On this, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lana Del Rey’s eighth album would tell her story “and pretty much nothing else”, she teased, as her planned, near instant follow-up to Chemtrails Over the Country Club slipped back from spring to autumn. Del Rey has often claimed autobiography at the heart of her artful glamour, flesh and blood behind the celluloid poise, the ad man’s daughter, metaphysics student and Williamsburg singer-songwriter Lizzy Grant still writing intently beneath the film star veneer.Chemtrails’ masterful opener “White Dress” certainly turned a teenage waitress job into a transcendently glowing snapshot of an Read more ...