It’s a long way to the middle. Jack Savoretti has worked hard to get there. He’s grafted. His first album, 2007’s Between the Minds, hinted that his musical DNA bestrode early-Seventies Los Angeles, those Topanga Canyon strummers and such, but melded to something much more BBC Radio 2. It took a while for his core audience, the Dermot O’Leary mum-core massive, to find him. A nice fella and a looker, by about five years ago, they had. His last two albums were chart-toppers. But now he’s challenging the fanbase with an Italian language album. “Challenging” may be the wrong word. Miss Italia is Read more ...

It’s hard to imagine that The Arches – a string of stylish glass-fronted units in prime city centre location, housing boutique bars, high-end eateries and stylish salons – were once a bunch of old storage units which were opened up a decade ago by a volunteer-run, grassroots arts festival calling itself Hidden Door.Over the past 10 years Hidden Door has revitalised myriad disused spaces across the city including office blocks, a derelict cinema, a sealed-up theatre and an old gas works. So when the venue for their 10th birthday party was revealed as a car park in an upmarket shopping centre Read more ...

If there’s a feeling of déjà vu, it isn’t detectable. Conchúr White played St Pancras Old Church in April 2016 with County Armagh’s Silences, the band he fronted. This evening, a mention of having been here before is absent. Nothing in the body language suggests any familiarity with where he’s playing.Perhaps paying no heed to history is understandable. Conchúr – pronounced Conor – White is in London following the January release of Swirling Violets, the follow-up album to his 2021 self-issued solo debut. He, presumably, views where he is now as a clean break with a past which doesn’t need Read more ...

By midway, things are cooking. “Can U Dig It?”, a post-modern list-song from another age (Ok, 1989), boasts a whopping guitar riff. Keys-player Adam Mole, his ushanka cap’s ear-covers flapping, leaps onto his seat, waves his synth aloft. Frontmen Graham Crabb and Mary Byker fly up’n’down the stage-front, launching airwards for chest-bumps, staccato-firing rapped lyrics about the Furry Freak Brothers, Renegade Soundwave, Bruce Lee, DJ Spinderella and, of course, how writer-magician Alan Moore “knows the score”.  At the end Crabb segues briefly into an obscure sliver of Boys Own Bocca Read more ...

It’s been a long while since Beth Gibbons released an album. Portishead’s Third was out in 2008.  She has lived through so many changes since, and, even though her signature is still very much in glorious evidence, Lives Outgrown represents a step forward and deeper than the moody indie pop of Out of Season her last solo outing, made with with Rustin Man (Paul Webb) of Talk Talk.This is a brave mid-life album from a woman who doesn’t shrink from darkness. Beth Gibbons sang vocals for Henryk Górecki’s  Symphony No.3 (“Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”) in 2019, as if that still and Read more ...

The name, Caron and Michelle Maso explained to Los Angeles radio DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, was a literal description. “We’re both like five feet. We’re all grown up, but we’re still little.”Little Girls, the band the Maso sisters formed and fronted was active in Los Angeles over 1980 to 1985. On vinyl, though, the evidence for their existence was limited. In 1981, they contributed a track to the compilation album Rodney On The ROQ Volume 2 – named after Bingenheimer and KROQ, the radio station he worked for. Two years on, there was the six-track, 12-inch EP Thank Heaven! Finally, in 1985, a Read more ...

Having moved out of her mother’s apartment aged 15 to become “an emancipated minor” and set up her own record label, Righteous Babe, just four years later, every step of Ani DiFranco’s life has been determinedly – some might say ferociously – independent. Alt-folk, alt-rock – the labels don’t matter. What counts is her commitment and steadfastness during the course of a career that’s seen her on the righteous side of so many battles, in the US and beyond. She raised $47,500 to enable New Orleans musicians to replace their lost instruments after Hurricane Katrina. She’s worked with the Guthrie Read more ...

Anniversary is Canadian singer-songwriter Abigail Lapell’s sixth album (if we include last year’s lengthy EP of lullabies). Her success has not reached much beyond her native land, as is often the way with Canadian acts, but she’s a proven talent, one who deserves a higher international profile. Anniversary consists of 11 poetic folk-country meditations on love. However, anyone seeking musical representations of euphoria, joy and lust should look elsewhere for, lovely as it often is, the default setting here is a rich melancholia.The album is co-produced by her countryman Tony Dekker, of Read more ...

The buildup to this album offered quite a bit of hope. The promo blurb with it talks about “cutting loose, trying new things… hark[ing] back to their gritty origins… freed from any expectations.” Most glaringly, it says it’s “the album the band says they’ve always wanted to make” – perhaps, along with the plaintive album title, a tacit admission that their heart hasn’t really been in the modern day AOR they’ve been pumping out every since the strained “woah-woahs” (“millennial whoops”) of “Use Somebody” and “Sex on Fire” blasted them into the mainstream in 2008.The thing is, the Nashville Read more ...

Bab L’Bluz are a French-Moroccan four-piece that play a tasty blend of fiery psychedelic rock backed up with hypnotic North African gnawa rhythms. Featuring electric awisha lute, guembri, percussion and castanet-like qraqeb rather than more mainstream instruments, they tackle subjects like gender inequality and call for unity and tolerance – while getting hips swinging and feet stomping in a frenzied groove.Swaken is Bab L’Bluz’s second album and features Yousra Mansour’s emotive vocals and riff-heavy awisha lute backed by a giddy trance-rock sound that owes as much to Led Zeppelin’s heavy Read more ...

Pokey LaFarge has always defied categorisation. He likened his 2020 album Rock Bottom Rhapsody to a mix tape, with elements of bluegrass, barrelhouse, doo-wop, jazz, rockabilly, country blues, the great American songbook and even hints of movie music. In the Blossom of Their Shade, his lockdown album, was an exhilarating ride in the ghostly company of the likes of Hank Williams, Fats Domino, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers.In the three years since Blossom was released, LaFarge has decamped to Maine where he worked long days on a farm. “I’d be pushing a plow [sic] or Read more ...

Parentheses, I is an album title – (I) – that’s a hieroglyph of the self, the brackets like shields facing opposite ways; and as an artist and performer, Josienne Clarke knows how to use a shield, and how to use a sword, too.In her albums, especially her recent trio of solo releases, she has taken up arms to redefined her self as an artist, a female singer-songwriter and a woman extricating herself from a duo partnership that may have brought her a BBC Folk Award, but seemed to have brought her to her knees, too. But that was then. Her current standing is to be among the most Read more ...