New music
joe.muggs
The noise in the international mainstream in recent years might be about dance-pop, hip hop beefs and the serious balladry of Taylor, Billie and Lana – yet at the same time, R&B has been strange, brilliant, ultra-popular, but generated a tiny fraction of the column inches and “discourse”.Jhene Aiko, Tinashe, SZA, H.E.R., Mahalia: these are radical artists, each making fascinating music that generates billions of streams, yet certainly in the UK they’re generating micro-fractions of the column inches that their contemporaries in other genres are. The reaction to SZA’s Glastonbury Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Late summer 1966. Jazz was Margo Guryan’s thing. She was not interested in pop music. This changed when she was played The Beach Boys’s “God Only Knows.” Amazed by what she heard, she tuned in to pop radio for the first time. Her head was further turned by The Beatles and The Mamas & the Papas. A copy of “God Only Knows’s” parent album Pet Sounds was bought.Newly thrilled by a pop she saw as more innovative than a jazz scene she thought too full of Ornette Coleman imitators, she wrote a song titled “Think of Rain.” In tune with the burgeoning harmony pop style, its baroque leanings and Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The mournful, lonesome voice of John Moreland from Bixby, Oklahoma, will be known by a few, but not many, in this country. The 12 songs on his latest album, Visitor, released on the Thirty Tigers label, should help to remedy that.Visitor is the result of a self-imposed year of internal exile, commencing in November 2022, during which he did no shows, didn’t even use his mobile phone, and took time instead to rest and reflect, and eventually write. Visitor was recorded at home alone over ten days in late 2023, with Moreland on all instruments aside from a lead acoustic guitar on the Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
The current trend for package tours with two headliners appears to be growing, and this jaunt presented somewhat unlikely bedfellows – the theatrical angst of Billy Corgan’s crew and Rivers Cuomo’s indie trendsetters united by a shared love for guitar histrionics, 90s nostalgia for those who remember MTV2 and not much else.Fitting both bands in required an early onstage time (pity support act Teen Mortgage, who trundled onstage at 6.30pm), while the night’s format presented a few quirks that resembled a festival, from the heavy turnover of people moving about between sets to a clear need for Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
US electronic perennial Moby has had a good run. He was a rave culture phenomenon from 1991 onwards. He blew that with a vegan punk album. He released Play at the decade’s end and sold millions. He then had decadent superstar years, a run of huge, often juicy albums. He quit booze’n’drugs in 2008. His music blossomed again, culminating in a trio of albums raging at the state of his nation. Following the last of these in 2018, not much has held the attention. Always Centered at Night has moments that do.Those wanting energy and urgency should look elsewhere. This is mostly a downtempo Read more ...
Guy Oddy
For a band just putting out their debut album, West Belfast’s Kneecap have been courting media attention for some while and have already been seen in the LA Times, The Guardian and even Variety. But then, they have previously released a swathe of irreverent but blistering singles (none of which appear on Fine Art) and have just previewed their cinematic biopic, which features Michael Fassbender, at the Sundance Film Festival.The charismatic and hilarious Mo Chara, Mόglai Bap and DJ Prόvai have clearly been making a lot of friends, despite their claims that “the beauty of Kneecap is that we Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHAriel Sharratt & Matthias Kom Never Work (BB*Island) + Ella Ronen The Girl With No Skin (BB*Island)Two offbeat albums from the uncategorisable Hamburg label BB*Island. They are home to the literary indie outfit The Burning Hell. The central figures of that band are Canadian singers Mathias Kom and Ariel Sharratt (assuming the latter is Canadian as Google wouldn't tell me). Together, their second album is a concept affair loaded with brilliant, poignant freak-folk responses to contemporary capitalism, the gig economy and similar. These include the inspiring title track “ Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There was a point in this pop revival jaunt where you could feel members of the crowd wince. Not for the performance, but because Nicola Roberts introduced a song by mentioning it was from “the Chemistry album, which came out 19 years ago”. You could almost feel some in the crowd recoil, as if expecting to crumble to dust at that confirmation of the passing of time.Reunion gigs can often carry that nostalgic air, and it was more pronounced than most at this show, part of the girl group’s first tour in 11 years. The sad passing of Sarah Harding due to breast cancer, here remembered through big Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I feel ashamed because I couldn’t become the man that you always hoped I’d become.” The line is repeated during “Father,” The Art of the Lie’s third track. After this, there’s “Mother and Son,” “Daddy” and the allusive “The Child Catcher”. Parent-child relations, from either perspective, are key to John Grant’s sixth solo album. Specifically, how these have rippled through his life to form his present-day self.The US-born though now Iceland national’s follow-up to 2021’s Boy from Michigan is not just about interpreting growing up in a context which would not accept him as gay. The scope is Read more ...
mark.kidel
At 81, John Cale, an immensely prolific, wide-ranging and innovative musician, continues to take risks, making music that may not always be instantly appealing, but always true to an artist’s authentic path. Hot on the heels of Mercy (2023), in which he collaborated with a number of off-centre cutting-edge talents, he has produced another album full of surprises and yet immediately recognisable as his own work.He has written music and lyrics and plays most of the instruments, as well as co-producing the album with long-term collaborator Nida Scott. The guitarist Dustin Boyer contributes Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Moving Away from the Pulsebeat” is the final track – barring the locked-groove return of the two-note guitar refrain from “Boredom” – of Buzzcocks’ March 1978 debut album, Another Music In A Different Kitchen. At five minutes 40 seconds it didn’t cleave to the short, sharp punk template. Also, it was largely instrumental. And it had a drum solo.Buzzcocks had emerged with punk yet weren’t going along with it or, rather, what it had been reflexedly characterised as. Their label, United Artists, had faith in “Moving Away from the Pulsebeat” and pressed it onto a one-sided promotional-only 12- Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
Inspired by the desire to remain present in the modern world, Sea Girls’ latest album, Midnight Butterflies, is a collection of uplifting tracks to enjoy effortlessly this summer. Most of its songs could easily slide into any indie pop driving playlist and would be undoubtedly fun to sing along to live.This is the band’s third album and the first under their new independent record label Alt Records, it solidifies their fun guitar pop vibe, but it doesn’t do much to progress their sound. The already released title track feels familiar from the first listen, with an easy-going melody and simple Read more ...