New music
Ellie Roberts
Sum 41 honour their 27-year career with Heaven :x: Hell, a 20-track double album, due to be their final, without a single skip. Harking back to their widely acclaimed debut All Killer No Filler, the album that gave us “Fat Lip” and “In Too Deep”, the band have maintained their commitment to making every track count with Heaven :x: Hell.“Waiting On a Twist of Fate” opens Heaven with as much energy as you can cram into 2 minutes and 46 seconds, and the early-2000s Pop Punk summer nostalgia does not falter in the 19 tracks that follow. Although Hell aims to dive deeper into heavy metal than Pop Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The British folk artist and singer songwriter Olivia Chaney released her third solo album this week, as we break out into springtime, and she’ll be touring sporadically around the UK over the next few months, with a showcase at London’s Union Chapel in June.Chaney is a singular singer and songwriter with a beautiful voice and the instrumental finesse honed at the Royal Academy of Music and Aldeburgh. She released her first EP in 2010 and 2013, the year she was nominated twice, for the Horizon Award and Best Original Song, at the BBC Folk Awards (and again for Folk Singer of the Year in 2019). Read more ...
Guy Oddy
During the mid to late 90s, Sheryl Crow and other grunge lite-friendly female artists like Alanis Morrisette were all over the airwaves. Sheryl’s particular schtick being a soft rock stew of pop/country/folk that threw up monster hits like “All I Wanna Do”, “If It Makes You Happy” and “Everyday is a Winding Road”.Thirty-odd years on and Sheryl seems to have been relatively quiet for some considerable time. So, it is something of a surprise to hear that Evolution is her 12th album and in 2023, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But then, she had announced that her previous Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Winston Holness started his own record label in 1969. Missing a finger, he became known by many folks as Niney. Born 7 December 1944, he had lost a thumb in an accident at work. By the point his imprint debuted, he had sung on a Clement “Coxsone” Dodd-produced track and was working as a salesman for other producers, including Clancy Eccles, Bunny “Striker” Lee and Lee “Scratch” Perry.Niney would get on a bike and take records to dances where he tried to get DJs to play them. He was also shadowing Bunny Lee in the recording studio, picking up on how records were produced. He began co-producing Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Dee C Lee was born Diane Sealy in London in 1961. She is best known for her 1985 hit “See the Day”, later covered by Girls Aloud, and for being in two of the Eighties' most notable pop acts, The Style Council and WHAM!. But she was also prolifically involved in multiple other musical projects, and now has a new album appearing, Just Something, her first in over 25 years.Lee’s first break came through talking her way into working with the British soul outfit Central Line, who had a couple of US club hits in 1981. From here, EMI picked her up as a session singer and, alongside Shirlie Holliman Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hey Panda is unlike any previous High Llamas album. While the characteristic traces of late Sixties and early Seventies Beach Boys, Van Dyke Parks and Steely Dan are here, they have become melded with a sensibility lead-Llama Sean O’Hagan has absorbed from multifaceted US hip hop producer J Dilla – whose approach to rhythm and song structure rewrote standard linear templates.In the promotional material for the first High Llamas album – the title comes from a panda seen on TikTok during the coronavirus pandemic – in eight years, O’Hagan is quoted saying “when I heard J Dilla in the early 2000s Read more ...
David Nice
In what feels like the beginning, or at least the Old Testament, there was Riverdance. Now, ready to flow through the world once the world knows it needs it, there’s a rainbow-coloured river of just about everything musical and choreographic that’s found its place in contemporary Ireland, performed with a pulsating energy as well as a poetry that stops you wondering too much about all the connections.Such is WAKE, created by pioneering company THISISPOPBABY's Jennifer Jennings, the polymathic Philip McMahon and Niall Sweeney with a score by Alma Kelliher, who sings superbly throughout. Read more ...
Cheri Amour
Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield never set out to play country music. In her teens, she performed in a high school power pop band, The Ackleys, alongside her twin sister Allison. A few years later, the siblings formed PS Elliot, a riot grrrl group. They even nabbed a support slot with explosive punks Ceremony in their hometown of Birmingham, Alabama (ruffling a lot of feathers in the hardcore scene at the time).But more recently, Katie Crutchfield has been leaning into the country thing. In 2017, she toured solo with her partner and Kansas City troubadour Kevin Morby. Heading out onto the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Jim and William Reid’s musical trajectory has been extraordinary. They started out by out-punking punk with terrifying noise barrages and wilfully clumsy three-chord thrashing, but quickly revealed a deep love of classic pop song structures which became ever clearer as they sonically mellowed in the early stages of their career.From there, in the early 90s, they managed to catch a wave as elder statesmen of alternative rock – but suffered from creative and personal diminishing returns, eventually acrimoniously breaking up at the end of the decade. They reconciled in 2005 and very Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
On this, their 10th album, the melodious Mancunians started at the drum kit and built from there. This is no bad thing. The overall effect is wide-ranging, surprising and altogether more uplifting than either the delicious despairing Giants of All Sizes (2019) or gentle, soulful Flying Dream 1 (2021).We kick off with “Things I’ve Been Telling Myself For Years”, (for instance, “Of course I’ll live to 96 and fix the welfare state”) a self-deprecating piece of analysis that packs in the influences without ever being derivative. As Garvey puts it, “We referenced The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Crashing chords are followed by a spindly, untrammelled solo guitar. After this subsides, the singer lays out the issue: “I try, I cry, I just can't see why. It's clear, she's near, the sights and sounds I hear.” He’s distressed, his anguish palpable, All the while, slabs of guitar squall get ever-more edgy, increasingly wigged out. There are more solos which aren’t far from those of The Velvet Underground’s “I Heard Her Call my Name.”This monumental recording is “Frustration,” the top side of a self-issued March 1967 single by Long Island garage band The Mystic Tide. Aesthetically, it wasn’t Read more ...
mark.kidel
Julia Holter has created a long line of albums that trade on sophisticated poetry, both lyrical and musical, and her latest, perhaps the most adventurous of all, inhabits a world where nothing is certain, narratives are disjointed, and the imagination of the listener is left to run free.Los Angeles, so grounded in showbiz commerce, is also the city of angels, and the place where dreams can be transformed into reality. Perhaps not surprising that the city should often produce music – from the warm embrace of dream pop to the edgy experimentalism of avant-garde experiment – that has the Read more ...