New music
Liz Thomson
Never have the early months of the year felt more cruel. Escape is what we all yearn for – from home, from ourselves and our shrunken lives. Never has music been more important to us and, over the last few days, I’ve had Steve Hackett’s new acoustic album playing and replaying as I’ve worked at long-overdue practical tasks. And while thoughts of Spain are bittersweet just now, I’m loving Under A Mediterranean Sky, which has energised me, despite all.It’s not all about Spain – the musical accents of Malta, Greece, Italy, France, and places farther east and farther south are evident Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Hope”, from the debut album by 20 year old London singer-songwriter Arlo Parks, has a perfect chorus for these times. Blissed piano chords, lazy funk beats, lusciously upbeat synth dreaminess, and on top of it all, her sweet, airy voice offering support: “You’re not alone like you think you are.” It seems directed at those who quarantine isolation has swirled down into a dark place. There is much on Collapsed in Sunbeams that easily, chattily offers similar solace.Let’s be clear, it’s not a Covid-centric album, it’s a set of gently pensive sketched miniatures whose lyrics are a cut above the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
"Three plus versions of the same album. It’s ridiculous, but I’m glad.” The first paragraph of Richard Hell’s text in the booklet accompanying Destiny Street Complete lays it out. There are, indeed, three versions of his and his band The Voidoids’s July 1982 album Destiny Street on this double-CD set. It seems excessive.Reviews of Destiny Street at the time of its release were positive. Creem said “Hell himself has hit on a style – part Nuggets-era basement rock 'n roll, part speed-balling protest (not in content, but in attitude) rock, part confrontational CBGB psychodrama – that gives the Read more ...
mark.kidel
Bicep's second album fufills the promise of the first, released in 2017 to wide acclaim. Andrew Ferguson and Matthew McBriar, friends since childhood from the city of Belfast, draw inspiration from Chicago house, Detroit techno, Italo disco and other now vintage dance genres. They appeal as much to a younger generation for whom their heady mix of dancefloor styles feels fresh and new, as to an older crowd for whom the duo serve up quality nostalgia.Made over two years and the result of a trawl through 150 demos, "Isles" reflects the impact of Bicep's move to London and exposure to music from Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Norway’s Wardruna have proved to be an unlikely international musical success, both within Scandinavia and further afield, since releasing their 2009 debut album Runalijod – Gap Var Ginnunga. In this time, Einar Selvik’s Norsemen have managed to draw fans from a broad variety of genres, including folk, world music, heavy metal and born-again Vikings, no doubt helped by their involvement in soundtracks for television dramas like Vikings and computer games like Assassin’s Creed.Kvitravn, their fifth album, doesn’t much mess with Wardruna’s established formula, which falls somewhere between Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Becoming a has-been is Eminem’s main raw material now, the rocket-fuel for his rhetorical flights. He was a folk-devil 20 years ago, then a prescription drug-zombied recluse, then a huge comeback pop star. Extending that third act has been hobbled by social media sneers since the unfocused but often excellent Revival (2018), and a perception that he’s run out of road.Having finally retired his work’s real-life supporting cast of relatives out of belated respect for their privacy, and shown withering scorn for contemporary hip-hop trends such as mumble rap, he has fallen back on his core Read more ...
Katie Colombus
In such a somnolent time We Come From The Sun is an awakening – the immediacy and presence of poetry urging you to listen, and pay attention to the beauty of now. For her latest album Cerys Matthews selected 10 poets to record their work and composed background music to accompany it, alongside Joe Acheson of Hidden Orchestra. The result is a sound journey that orbits the theme of Genesis by way of present British heritage.It is a beautifully presented soundscape of time – historical, personal, planetary. Poets speak in vivid sequences about nature, the inheritance of womanhood, football, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The tears of a clown is a familiar enough metaphor – a cliché, perhaps – and as an image it adorns the sleeve of the latest album by Mike Rosenberg, better known as Passenger, the platinum-selling former Brighton busker. Scheduled originally for release last May, Songs for the Drunk and Broken Hearted is his twelfth solo album and it was partially rewritten in lockdown, the tears for a relationship that ended just before.New songs written in solitary replace those which no longer fit, among them “Sword from the Stone”, which in an appealing acoustic version launched Passenger’s fireside Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The First Generation 1965–1974 is a 35-CD box set dedicated to the blues maven and propagator John Mayall. As well as the discs, there are three books: one a hardback, another reproducing fan club material, and the third a facsimile of the press pack for his first album. Also included are two posters and a signed photograph of Mayall. Five thousand copies have been made. As it sells for £275, the 3.8 kilogram The First Generation will not be a casual purchase.What’s encompassed by The First Generation is not the well-defined narrative of a standard band or musician. Mayall’s Sixties band Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
What’s all this? Female voices, guitars, a song lasting over four minutes… harmonies? Have Britain’s savviest social commentators gone soft? Fear not, their sixth album is wall-to-wall uncomfortable sleaziness, biting observation and bruising belittlements.If anyone is equipped to document the horrors of the last year on plague island, it is Iggy Pop favourite, Jason Williamson (who kicks off proceedings, in "A New Brick", by confirming that we’re all “Tory-tired”). Too true. Who else is in the firing line this time? “Class tourists” in "Nudge It" (featuring Amy Taylor of Amyl & The Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Cerys Matthews is a best-selling author, award winning DJ and multi-million selling musician, singer, reciter... and broadcaster, originally from Wales. Her wide-ranging Sunday morning radio show on BBC 6 Music has a large, loyal and appreciative audience. She also presents the Monday night Blues Show on BBC Radio 2.As came across strongly in this interview, poetry is hugely important to her, and her passion for it comes across vividly. “I am a keen imbiber of writers and collections,” she says. Her direct involvement in poetry also extends to her roles as a judge for the Dylan Thomas Prize Read more ...
Robert Beale
Jonathan Bloxham makes his debut as conductor with the Hallé Orchestra in the third of the Hallé’s Winter Season concerts on film. It’s a poetry-connected programme in several respects and features poet laureate Simon Armitage reading both his the event horizon (to introduce the whole programme) and Evening (immediately before Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite).The event horizon is engraved in steel on the Hallé St Peter’s centre (pictured below right with Simon Armitage), where the concert was filmed, and reminds us in one way of what we’re missing: do you remember when concerts used to begin “ Read more ...