New music
Kieron Tyler
The thrill of hearing “Crawdaddy Simone” never wears off. As the September 1965 B-side of the third single by North London R&B band The Syndicats, it attracted next-to no attention when it came out. The top side of the flop 45 was “On the Horizon,” a version of a Ben E. King B-side. After this, The Syndicats’ time seemed to have passed.Then, in 1982, a compilation album titled The Demention Of Sound turned up in shops. “Crawdaddy Simone” was on it, alongside tracks from singles by relatively well-known UK Sixties mod/R&B bands The Bo Street Runners (members of whom went on to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Selena Gomez is the enormously successful Disney child star who grew up to be a Hollywood actor and global pop sensation. As notably, she’s the third most followed person on Instagram, the most popular woman, with 421 million followers. Benny Blanco is the golden boy American producer-songwriter whose many, many hits run the gamut from Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger” to Ed Sheeran’s “Happier” to Kesha’s “Tik Tok”. The pair got engaged last December.This, then, is a monster album. It’s also better than its icky title and tacky celeb status suggest. I admit I came to I Said I Love You First Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For fans of The Horrors, the headline here is that, 20 years into the career, for their sixth album, the band have lost two of their founding members. Original keyboard player Tom Furse has gone, as has drummer “Coffin” Joe Spurgeon, to be replaced, respectively, by Amelia Kidd of Scottish synthy post-punkers The Ninth Wave and Jordan Cook of alt-indie Welsh outfit Telegram. Happily, these changes have not scuppered their overall dynamic. Indeed, the five-piece is now imbued with an encompassing darkness that harks back to their beginnings.This is not to say the The Horrors have reanimated Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The body language fascinates. Mercury Rev’s frontman Jonathan Donahue could be playing a theramin. The arm movements fit the bill, yet the putative instrument is absent. At other points, his arms are outstretched, palms down. He might be projecting invisible rays in the manner of a silent-screen magician or, when he's in front of the band’s guitarist Grasshopper, absorbing invisible energies.During “Dream of a Young Girl as a Flower,” his arms – seemingly of their own volition – jolt up and down, tight to his body, a constricted analogue to the movements of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. Judging Read more ...
mark.kidel
Lizz Wright’s exquisite singing breaks all boundaries between soul, gospel and jazz. In so doing she channels many interwoven strands of the African-American experience. Wright thrives on singing to an audience: her recorded output is wonderful enough, but, a child of the church, the sacred ceremony of raising the spirit in myriad ways is undeniably her home ground.There’s a majesty here, and spiritual authority. Not just her stature, but the full-length blue dress, hand and arm movements nourished by the music, as well as leading it on - all of these evoke and reinforce a tradition of the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Wardruna are something of a modern musical phenomenon. Part Scandinavian folk revival, part prog rock epic and part pagan ritual, their wide-screen performances are a beautiful and mesmerising celebration of repurposed ancient traditions, the natural world and the power of singing together.Their audience is usually a suitably diverse crew of metalheads, silver-haired goths, fishermen’s friends folkies and more than the odd cosplaying Viking, as it was at the magnificent Symphony Hall. However, their crowd was firmly of the Generation X and Boomer age group and there were certainly very few, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There was a telling remark in Wynton Marsalis’s recent interview with Katty Kay for the BBC show “Influential”. Talking about how jazz functions in real time as a democracy, he said: “Our music requires you to be in balance with other people”, contrasting it with unnamed but all-too-obvious examples in the US of the rise of cultures based on principles diametrically opposed to that, i.e. the search for victory and 'greatness' through bullying and subjugation.As I listened to Just, the new ECM album from the quartet of octogenarian drum icon Billy Hart, I became rapidly convinced that this Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Going by the sounds of her new album, it wouldn’t unreasonable to assume that Greentea Peng enjoys sucking on a spliff every once in a while. Tell Dem It’s Sunny is certainly Gold Seal gear with a distinctly smoky atmosphere, that’s for sure.Dubby trip hip and woozy neo-soul are the order of the day with lyrics that are sometimes political, sometimes spiritual and sometimes absurd but which always flow with the loops and basslines that she’s dreamed up with collaborators from Earbuds to Samo and Wu-Lu, to name only a few. However, even at its most heavy and forthright, as on the Dälek-like “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After scoring a hit in 1966 with the distinctive folk-pop of her jazz-inclined debut single "Walkin' my Cat Named Dog," US singer-songwriter Norma Tanega (1939–2019) seemed to melt away. Three follow-up 45s weren’t hits. Her album wasn’t a strong seller. Latterly, though, one of its tracks, “You're Dead,” has been heard as the theme of the TV and cinema versions of What We Do In The Shadows.There was, despite the lack of subsequent commercial success, a second album. I Don’t Think It Will Hurt If You Smile was recorded in the UK and issued in 1971. Sales were low and it ostensibly attracted Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Sitting on a sofa, cigarettes and beer, ten years disappear…agreeing to agree, just to get along.” By going into the difficulties of resuscitating the past, the lyrics of “Ten Years,” the fourth song on The Loft’s first album, neatly sum-up the band’s current situation. The final line gives the 10-track set its title: “Everything changes, everything stays the same.”Everything Changes, Everything Stays The Same is, indeed, the first album by The Loft, a band integral to the early days of Creation Records which fell apart on stage in June 1985. Forty years ago. A long time. Before that rupture Read more ...
joe.muggs
America – the pro-wrestling-ass nation, the ultimate society of the spectacle – famously likes things big, and modern country and western music has gone along with that. Big hats, big trucks, big sentiment, big pop production, very big sales indeed, and not a lot in the way of subtlety. But country also has a parallel history, of course: as music of the little guy, the theatre of the domestic, a place for preservation of simple folk traditions in the face of the overwhelming scale of modernity. And it’s into this that through this century the Alabaman singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, whether Read more ...
David Gray
Occasionally, when I pass my own reflection, out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of the likeness of my father, shining out through the bones in my face. In this way his ghost walks with me. Sometimes the making process can feel like that, a matter of training our peripheral vision to retrieve the images and ideas that are flickering at the edge of our field of view, existing in the same dimly lit space as dreams, primal impulses and hazy memories. It’s obvious that a lot of songs are written in response to events, either in our own lives or in the lives of those around us Read more ...