New music
Harry Thorfinn-George
It felt inevitable that Doja Cat would turn her back on being a popstar. The Californian rapper’s career has been shaped by her ambivalent relationship to fame and earlier this year she went as far as denouncing her previous albums as “mediocre pop”. She regularly gets into spats online, recently telling one of her own fan accounts that they should “delete the entire account and rethink everything.”It was refreshing to see a popstar challenge the toxic aspects of modern fan culture so head on. But the dismissal of her own music felt a bit harsh. Doja Cat’s blend of disco-revival and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In September 1955, the grandly named London Skiffle Centre set up for business each Thursday in a room above the Round House pub in Soho’s Wardour Street. A prime mover in the venture was blues acolyte Cyril Davies. Two months after the opening, Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line” was issued as a single. It was previously out as a track on a 1953 Chris Barber album. Despite the wonky timeline, the skiffle boom was on.Davies – now in partnership with fellow blues enthusiast Alexis Korner – grew increasingly dissatisfied with skiffle and in March 1957 the duo renamed The London Skiffle Centre Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Animal Collective have been putting out albums of off-kilter and whimsical psychedelic pop, in various guises, for over 20 years. And while their 12th album together doesn’t exactly rock the boat and bring on a major stylistic change, it’s not really business as usual either.Isn’t It Now? has been produced by the Grammy Award-winning Russell Elevado, who can more usually be found at the controls for the likes of D’Angelo, the Roots or Kamasi Washington. He hasn’t turned the Baltimore four-piece into a group of hip-hop soul-jazzers though nor have they seized the moment to make a desperate Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Two years after the release of her rather flaccid Disco album and five since her somewhat inadvisable foray into country-ish music, 2023 has seen something of a return to form for Kylie Minogue. First there was this summer’s all-conquering single, “Padam Padam” – which even managed to persuade some national radio stations to rethink their policies on which tracks should be played on heavy rotation. Now comes her new album, Tension, which is marinated in Nineties House and Electro grooves and more than confirms that its lead single was no flash in the pan.In fact, album opener, “Padam Padam”, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Can there be too much repetition? Is there a limit to the level of rhythmic insistence which can be tolerated? Judging by the enthused reaction to this sold-out show from Mexico’s Lorelle Meets The Obsolete where a heads down, no-nonsense pulse propelled their set, the answer to these questions is no.Central to this display of musical determination are drummer Andrea Davì and bassist Fernando Nuti. Both are Italian. Neither are full-time members of Lorelle Meets The Obsolete though each has played on their records, including this year’s Datura album. Whack, whack, whack goes Davì. Thump, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Had Devendra Banhart been born between 1940 and 1950, he’d likely be a household name. His output – very loosely – sits between Cat Stevens, Syd Barrett and Richie Havens, studded with a greatness not widely acknowledged. He had a spell around 15-20 years ago when he seemed about to commercially explode. That didn't happen but he’s settled to a solid career and done much gorgeous work since.2013’s Mala album, a career highlight, was followed by two that appeared to dip into the alternative possibilities of 1960s Latin American songwriting (do check the luscious Helado Negro remix of "Love Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nothing Lasts Forever opens with a drone, a weightless prologue of guitar feedback evoking the initial moments of the Buffalo Springfield’s “Everydays,” written by Stephen Stills and heard on his band’s 1967 second album Again. Teenage Fanclub’s 11th album ends with “I Will Love you,” a similarly gossamer reflection fusing the atmosphere of The Beatles’ “Across the Universe” and the cyclic rhythms of motorik.While an airiness suffuses the mostly low- to mid-tempo Nothing Lasts Forever, it is impossible with Teenage Fanclub not to think of what could have inspired them, what they might be Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It was more than a decade ago when I first saw Rachel Sermanni in concert, in the upstairs room at The Old Queen’s Head in Islington, London, for a Nest Collective night. She had yet to release her debut, 2012’s Under Mountains, but was already making an impact as a stage performer.Her most recent album, 2019’s So It Turns was a self-released set of songs inspired by her time spent at Samye Ling Tibetan Buddhist monastery, the first to be established in the west, and which features, too, in the work of the late Genesis P Orridge. Dreamer Awake, meanwhile, is her first release on Navigator Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“In the Light of Time” was the second track on Side One of April 1995’s Further, the third album by Bristol’s Flying Saucer Attack. At the time, Further felt like a hyper-vaporous take on shoegazing infused with touches of British folk. Attitudinally and temporally, Slowdive’s February 1995 third album Pygmalion wasn’t too far.Now, Flying Saucer Attack are co-opted to name In the Light of Time - UK Post-Rock and Leftfield Pop 1992-1998, a ground-breaking 17-track compilation with a self-explanatory subtitle. There may have been previous collections along these lines, but this is the first Read more ...
India Lewis
Less than ten days after (surprise) releasing her new album, trip9love…???, Tirzah took to a small stage in Hackney Wick to play it through (in order), wreathed enigmatically in dry ice. The space itself felt like it matched the music well, a laid-back intimacy enjoyed by a packed, relaxed audience. Warming up beforehand, the floor was filled with smoke (a harbinger of the gig to come), lit with soft, coloured light, and soundtracked with gentle piano. A DJ began mixing glitchy beats over slowed Drake and Bjork-adjacent tracks as more people started filling in towards the main Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Joshua Redman’s latest album, where are we, marks the jazz saxophonist’s debut on the Blue Note label, after a recording career which now spans just over thirty years and has many high points, not least his eponymous debut on Warner in 1993.When announced in May ths year, the label move was, unsurprisingly, described in such a way as to raise expectations. Blue Note President Don Was gushed that Redman was “the living embodiment of the Blue Note ethos”. Redman dutifully responded with his thrill at joining the Blue Note family for a “new phase in my recording journey.”Those announcements left Read more ...
Tom Carr
With 2022’s Laurel Hell and Be The Cowboy from 2018, the Japanese-American solo musician Mitski Mayawaki – better known simply as Mitski to all – had refined a massively Eighties influenced, synthesiser led sound.Having combined the invaluable songwriting experience of her earlier, more frenetic and indie lo-fi albums, her most recent two efforts were creatively elaborate and thematically whole.This has continued to drive her forwards, returning with her seventh album The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We. Once again she employs a wholly different sound, yet retains the crux of her previous Read more ...