New music
Matthew Wright
New Orleans trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah has been at the forefront of the movement to reinvent jazz for some time. On this album he claims to be creating a new kind of “Stretch Music” (and has created an app of the same name, which won Jazz FM’s innovation award), supposedly a genre-blind evolution of jazz. The concept of diaspora, inspired by his experience of New Orleans multiculturalism, is an exploration of the African-American musical contributions to jazz. In this respect he’s joining several other young(ish) musicians of jazz origins including Britain’s Shabaka Hutchings, Read more ...
joe.muggs
For over 30 years, Melvins have been flagbearers for a kind of foundational American underground rock. Monstrously psychedelic, heavy as lead, mischievous and angry, they are part of a lineage that connects to squarepeg counterculture forefathers like Beefheart and The Fugs, share swathes of DNA with heavy metal and particularly Black Sabbath, and are particularly impervious to outside cultural shifts. Though they were fleetingly affiliated by the media with grunge, thanks to founder Buzz Osborne's musical and personal relationship to Kurt Cobain, they were something else. And along with Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Manchester International Festival – a biennale of new creative work – this year has a new artistic director in John McGrath, and there’s no large-scale new opera or prominent "classical" work, it would seem, other than Raymond Yiu’s song cycle, The World Was Once All Miracle, performed on Tuesday by Roderick Williams with the BBC Philharmonic. But the BBC Philharmonic also teamed up with Icelandic composer-photographer-creator Jóhann Jóhannsson for an ambitious premiere at the Bridgewater Hall, Last And First Men, that McGrath clearly sees as one of the festival’s most substantial Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The precocious Steve Winwood joined the Spencer Davis Group when he was 14, when the Sixties themselves were still young, and hasn’t really stopped ever since. True, it has been nearly a decade since his last album of new material, Nine Lives, but he has toured with Eric Clapton and Tom Petty, pops up at assorted festivals and live events, and has put together a highly capable live band that can bend his songs into shapes you might never have thought possible. His voice and abilities on guitar and Hammond B3 organ (a wonderfully quaint instrument which looks like a small wardrobe) remain Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Back in 2013, Haim's debut seemed like the freshest breath of air in a slightly stuffy rock scene. The girls' inimitable musical style – a kind of blend of Stevie Nicks and Shania Twain – lit up any number of radio playlists. Equally important was their air of authenticity. These three musical prodigies from LA were literally sisters and literally doing it for themselves. But there were still nagging doubts – particularly after one TV performance which they, rather oddly, dedicated to David Cameron. For all their hippy hairstyles were the girls actually as free- Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Lucy Rose is not mainstream. She doesn't rely on commercial record deals to the point that she essentially crowd-sourced her recent tour of Latin America, playing for fans for free as long as they hosted her. It was an experience that spawned this album, documented most clearly in “Find Myself”, in which the 28-year-old sings "'Cause you helped me find myself… Find myself within your old dreams".For Something's Coming, she has joined forces with Communion, an independent label with a knack for digging gems, often those which refuse to conform, out of the industry – and it's a match made Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Tel Aviv producer Nadav Spiegel hadn't set out to make a full-length follow-up to last year's Can You Pass the Knife? mini-LP, but once he had a backbone of songs, events sort of got away from him. I Love You, Go Away is the result and its nine songs, spread over nearly 40 minutes, appear, in one way or another, to deal with loss – of love, identity and self.The title of opener “New Heimat”, referencing the German word for the feeling of belonging to a place, suggests a new beginning of sorts. While the lines “Home is where the hatred is” and “No more fighting for the state/No more bleeding Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
From beginning to end, B-Sides and Rarities plays through like a regular album; as though it collects a series of tracks recorded where a cohesive release with a flow was the goal. Yet this 14-cut collection is a compilation with its earliest selection from 2005, the year Beach House formed. Its most recent tracks are from the sessions which resulted in the two 2015 albums Depression Cherry and Thank Your Lucky Stars. It doesn’t matter that the 2005 track , “Rain in Numbers”, is skeletal and of demo quality – it is of a piece with its companions.What this says about Beach House – Victoria Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Peter Perrett is one of the most underrated songwriters. If people have heard of him, it’s down to The Only Ones’ classic, “Another Girl, Another Planet”, but The Only Ones made three albums (and an odds’n’ends collection) as the Seventies turned to the Eighties, all peppered with gems. Perrett also surfaced in the mid-Nineties as The One, with another album, Woke Up Sticky. However, since then, despite multiple false starts and an Only Ones reunion (teasing fans with unreleased new song “Black Operations”), there’s been no sign of new material until now.Perrett’s career was famously derailed Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“You can't hate on Harris, he is summer king,” says an anti-troll post on a thread announcing the fifth album by the 6’5” Scottish super-producer known to his mum as Adam Wiles. But it would be easy to do just that. Calvin Harris is one of the key people responsible for turning chart pop into earbud shite, for fast-forwarding dance music into compressed saccharine trop-house/EDM candy. He, Will.I.Am and David Guetta have fucked it for anyone who wants to turn on daytime radio and not hear plastic suburban dancefloor toilet.In his 10-year career, Harris has become ubiquitous, worth tens of Read more ...
caspar.gomez
It’s a Tweet-age Glastonbury aftermath. It’s monsooning grey outside. The real world’s back, consensus reality fast encroaching. Everything’s moved on, spun to the next thing as we A.D.D. onto Wimbledon, Hard Brexit or whatever. Even my 14-year-old daughter knows the “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” chant (to the riff from White Stripes “Seven Nation Army”) that rolled across this year’s Glastonbury crowds like a steady rumble of perturbed destiny. “Jeremy Corbyn isn’t just Jeremy Corbyn, he’s a thing now,” she explained. And I sort of know what she means.I woke up today with Rag’n’Bone Man’s chorus Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Every Valley is Public Service Broadcasting’s second studio album since 2013’s Inform - Educate - Entertain, and like its predecessors, it’s a nostalgic trip to the not-too-recent past with an electronica-heavy backing and a bag full of samples culled from the spoken word library of the British Film Institute. While J Willgoose Esq and Wrigglesworth may have been inspired by steam-powered railways and the space race on previous discs, Every Valley sees the London duo take on the death of the coal industry in South Wales and its social impact as their source material. If this terminology Read more ...