New music
Sebastian Scotney
This week marks a major step in the songwriting collaboration between British/Italian singer-songwriter Georgia Mancio and Alan Broadbent, the Grammy-winning jazz pianist who has played with Woody Herman and Charlie Haden’s Quartet West. Having first started working together eight years ago, they are launching not just their second album of jointly written songs, Quiet Is the Star, but also, The Songs of Alan Broadbent & Georgia Mancio an illustrated book containing 32 songs.Their first album together, Songbook, for quartet, was launched in 2017 at Ronnie Scott’s in London (where Mancio Read more ...
Asya Draganova
My first (conscious) encounter with the music of American jazz saxophone legend Pharoah Sanders was 1970’s “Let Us Go into the House of the Lord”, a nearly 18-minute piece which, right until the end, sounds like it’s only just forming through an explosion of light and layers of sound. Promises has a similar effect – an ever-unfolding spiritual journey, marked by repetition, build-ups and climaxes.Indeed, what brings together Sanders and the lead musical figure in this collaboration – Sam Shepherd, or Floating Points – is their shared dedication to exploring the spiritual qualities of music Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I See Your Face” opens with a short burst of Phil Spector-ish tambourine rattling. The sort of thing also employed by the early Jesus & Mary Chain. Then, a cascading folk-rock guitar paves the way for a disembodied voice singing over a spooky one-finger keyboard line and chugging, reverbed guitar. Occasionally, what sounds like a syn drum goes “pff.”“Gorgeous Weather” is equally remarkable, equally other-worldly. A spiralling, distant-sounding creation, its subterranean feel suggests an oncoming storm rather than what’s usually thought of as gorgeous weather.Then there’s “There's A...” “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Track two on Dream Of Independence, the new album from Sweden’s Frida Hyvönen, is titled “A Funeral in Banbridge”. An account of attending a funeral in, indeed, Banbridge, County Down, Northern Ireland, it’s bright, melodically jaunty, piano-driven and moves along at a fair clip.But there’s a disconcerting disparity between the buoyant arrangement and the lyrics. The direct, almost deadpan, voice sings a rolling melody. “A funeral in Banbridge/ I took the train here/ From London/ Through Wales/ Beautiful day/ I had a salad, I had a drink,” it begins. The song is a diary entry recounting Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lana Del Rey has turned pop’s volume down, returning hushed intimacy to the music’s heart. Her collaborator Jack Antonoff was also heavily involved in Taylor Swift’s Folklore reinvention, but Del Rey’s idea of Americana remains very different. Its emotional thread is again pulled tight by mid-20th century, glamorous iconography, and fame and love met with equal, glassy passion.Del Rey has found a new way to be post-modern, decades after the condition became too total to be mentioned. She is authentically artificial, honestly romantic, a self-conscious construct lit with her voice’s sensual Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Indie rock has taken a commercial back seat, even if the music press still hasn’t quite caught up. Sure, there have been hit-makers, and bands that sell out stadiums, but overall, indie’s tide is very slowly retreating. Like any genre, it will always be about, like westerns in Hollywood, a classic formula, but the take-up of technologies far beyond the electric guitar renders it a retro curio. Like metal, it offers invigorating rejigs, rendered fresh by each new generation revelling in the classic singer/guitar/bass/drums chemistry. Black Honey from Brighton are just such a case, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ted Barnes is an outsider by design. Not in the sense of being wilfully awkward or outré – the music on his first solo album in almost 13 years years is gentle, harmonically rich, extremely accessible – but in that he has sidestepped standard career paths, and seems to be all the better for it. As guitarist for Beth Orton for a decade and member of the band Clayhill, he certainly had more than a glimpse of what music industry life entailed, hard touring included, but he chose to get off the treadmill and focus on composing for films, music libraries and acrobatics shows. And his music is Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Deep England is Gazelle Twin’s reimagining, with the help of ambient drone choir NYX, of her 2018 Pastoral album. Based on their live reworking of the album from 2019, it is like the musical soundtrack to wandering through an unfamiliar English forest under the influence of magic mushrooms. For where Pastoral was angular and harsh, Deep England is haunting and trippy and is really something special. One thing it isn’t, though, is hippy dippy.Opening with the sound of church bells, “Glory” brings in recorders, ambient electronic drone and a female choir of pagan plainsong like a hallucinatory Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bill Nelson knew February 1978’s Drastic Plastic was the last Be-Bop Deluxe album. In his essay for the book coming with the new “deluxe expanded” box-set reissue, he writes “that, as far as I was concerned, was that, the final Be-Bop Deluxe studio album, an era ended and a new one was about to begin. As the songs developed, I felt that the album might provide a kind of bridge to what might happen further along the road. It was definitely a half-way house between Be-Bop Deluxe and Red Noise.”Be-Bop Deluxe split in August 1978 and Nelson’s new band Red Noise first played live on 2 February Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Last month Willie Nelson wowed us with a new album. Now comes Loretta Lynn, a year older (89 next month) with her 50th studio outing. It must be something in that proud Cherokee blood they share.Born in poverty, married at 13. Four children and several miscarriages by 21, twins a decade later. A grandmother at 34. And of course, the hard-drinking, unfaithful husband to whom she was married for 50 years... Lynn’s story is a country classic, and like Dolly Parton she’s told it memorably in song, the hard-scrabble Kentucky childhood laid bare in “Coal Miner’s Daughter”, the song which would Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
What a very beautiful thing this is. From the off, this second album marks itself out as something most unusual. A piano-based instrumental opener ("Moon Rise") is reprised half way through the album ("All Shall Be Well" and "Paris") and at the close ("Moon: An End") – these masterful exercises in capturing the depth of loss would be enough in themselves. But there’s so much more. And the Anchoress heads in all kinds of directions to make sense of that big, nasty inevitability that lurks for us all.In some ways it’s desperately unfashionable (there’s something of the Seventies in here; in the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Somewhere in dance culture or other, the Eighties revival has now been going on more than twice as long as the actual Eighties did. Starting around 1998, it reached an initial peak in the early 2000s as the dayglo-fashion led electroclash, but though the eye of the press moved away, it never really died away. European or Europhile fusions of electropop and industrial, taking in more obscure styles like coldwave, new beat and EBM (electronic body music), have been current and fully functional on one dancefloor or another ever since. It’s squarely into this milieu that Louisa Pillott – “ Read more ...