New music
joe.muggs
Oh this is sad. Up until this point Camilla Cabello has been a good pop star. Her biggest songs were loaded with familiar-to-the-point-of-cheesiness retro Latin samples, or angsty mini-dramas loaded with the musical theatre-style chops that had made her an X-Factor star in her teens, always delivered with a ton of conviction and feeling. Even the infuriatingly catchy “Senorita” with her then boyfriend Shawn Mendes somehow managed to maintain likeability despite its ubiquity. There was a general sense that she knew what she was doing and was good at it; she had her own lane.It feels churlish Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Wow, this is a trip back in time. A visit from "The Man in Black" 21 years after he passed away, just a few months after his beloved wife, June Carter Cash, who stood by him through thick and thin as together they made such beautiful music.I saw him live only once, in the very early 1980s at the annual International Festival of Country Music, a three-day Easter extravaganza at what was then Wembley Arena. Mervyn Conn, the impresario behind the jamboree, was a sleaze bag and tight with his money but boy did he pack that stage with amazing stars! He’d watch over the shows like a Roman emperor, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Unless you were around when The Beatles toured America in the mid-1960s, it’s doubtful you've heard anything like this. In 40 years of extensive gig-going, I have not. Taylor Swift has just performed “Champagne Problems” at the piano (pictured below), a song from Evermore, the second of her indie-folk flavoured COVID-era albums. There’s a rising feminine roar, Wembley Stadium on its feet, the noise grows and grows, an earthquake cacophony of women and girls screaming, so many that, combined with tens of thousands of hands clapping, it fills the head like cosmic hum. It surely cannot grow Read more ...
Tim Cumming
She has one of the most distinctive voices in folk and contemporary British music, impossible to forget once heard, and impossible to ignore. Even – or especially – as Linda Peters, singing, aptly enough, “I’ll Show You How to Sing” on a fairly obscure 1968 single with Paul McNeill.A lot of songs have gone under the bridge since then, and Thompson’s standing as one of our great singers has not been diminished by the singer’s struggles with spasmodic dysphonia, a condition that robs her of her voice, but not her music, spirit, wit, love or humour, all of which are in abundance in this new set Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Madeleine Peyroux made her name with her second album, 2004’s Careless Love. It consists almost completely of cover versions, delivered in a quiet, jazz-bluesey shuffle redolent of singers from the 1930s. She’s never flown as high again but has maintained a decent career, mostly mining similar sonic territory. Her new album, and first in six years, does not wander far from the path, but is all originals, written with regular collaborator Jon Herington. Despite being spiked with songs that have something to say, it’s a deliciously lazy summer listen.Contrary to a common perception, Peyroux is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Liverpool’s The Cryin’ Shames were responsible for two of mid-Sixties Britain’s most striking single’s tracks. The February 1966 top side “Please Stay” was so eerie, so wraithlike it came across as an attempt to channel the experience of making successful contact with a spirit presence. “Come on Back,” an unpolished September 1966 B-side, could pass for US garage punk at its most paint-peeling.The Cryin’ Shames only issued three singles, so that’s a pretty high batting average in terms of quality. Add in the crunching Bob Dylan re-write “What’s News Pussycat” (sic), “Please Stay’s” flip, and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
When Zara McFarlane sang the National Anthem at this year’s FA Cup Final, it served as a reminder of quite how adaptable she is, how suited so many different contexts. Other work in recent years has been with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Glyndebourne, and her last album, Songs of an Unknown Tongue (Brownswood), was a collaboration with producers Kwake Bass and Wu-Lu which the label’s blurb calls “a futuristic sound palate” (sic) of Jamaican rhythms and electronica.Sweet Whispers: Celebrating Sarah Vaughan (Eternal Source Of Light/!K7 Records) is totally different from its predecessor. It Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It kicks off with “No Easy Way Down.” First released on 1984’s mini-LP Explosions in the Glass Palace, it was an instant benchmark by which to measure Rain Parade. Churning, dense and foggy, it made good on what this California outfit were portrayed as: integral to a Sixties-inspired wave of bands defiantly reconfiguring the past for the present. Not all Rain Parade songs were like this, but “No Easy Way Down” was a head-spinner. It still is.What was dubbed The Paisley Underground also scooped up The Bangles, The Dream Syndicate, The Long Ryders and The Three O’Clock. But “No Easy Way Down” Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Out on the perimeters where there are no stars, in a void full of bong-smoke and synesthetic noise… there, in a greasy biker hovel full of gigantic amps, there live Wytch Pycknyck. Some say that place is called Hastings. Whatever it’s called, this four-piece arrive to reinvigorate heavy rock with a demented energy, zigzagged to the gills with lysergic spirit and a belief in gutter-punk rock’n’roll.Their debut album’s opening lines, on the speeding, riff-tastic smasher “Rawkuss”, are “I wanna party with the animals and live in the zoo”. It’s not metal, although the music tips its hat that way Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Pepe Deluxé are no exemplars of the puritan work ethic. Comix Sonix is only their sixth album in almost 30 years – but while they aren’t concerned with quantity, they certainly know how to produce electronic psychedelic weirdery of seriously high quality.After coming together in the Nineties club scene and initially blending electronica with hip-hop, breakbeats and trip-hop, they soon jumped ship from anything that might even tangentially be described as “commercial” to inhabit far more experimental and eccentric genre-spanning territory. A place where they still find themselves.Comix Sonix Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Almost exactly five years ago, I was transported by Singing It All Back Home, the third album from Naomi Bedford and Paul Simmonds. I gave it four stars, which in retrospect was perhaps a little ungenerous. Now at last comes a new opus from the duo, Strange News Has Come to Town, the making of which was “a long march across hard ground”, obstacles including the pandemic, as well as personal health and money issues.The self-drive of 21st century music-making makes “entry” into the world seem superficially easy but recording is only the first tiny step. Getting the music out there, reaching the Read more ...
mark.kidel
A small mountain village, tucked away in the foothills of the Rif Mountains, south-east of Tangier. The “smallest music festival in the world”, so it says in the Guinness Book of Records. But this remarkable musical event – more of an encounter than a performance – has none of the usual trappings of the larger events that populate our summers.The Master Musicians of Joujouka play music that’s centuries-old, not as folk revivalists, but in a living tradition that offers healing and transformation as well as sublime entertainment. Since the 16th century, this music – similar in many ways to Read more ...