New music
Saskia Baron
"We’re not just a dance band, we’ve got things to say.” Pauline Black, lead singer with The Selecter, succinctly pins down what made the era of 2-Tone Records so important to the British music scene at the end of the 1970s.A consortium of bands reworked Jamaican ska, calypso and reggae beats and imbued them with punk energy and their own socially conscious lyrics. In an era when the National Front stirred up racial hatred, the 2-Tone philosophy was all about mixing up young people with a multicultural agenda – two-tone in every way. And as well as black and white musicians up on stage Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On Domestic Sphere, Josephine Foster’s guitar and voice are joined by clacking crickets, a flock of sheep and wailing cats recorded in La Janda in southern Spain. There are also Colorado and Tennessee's birds and frogs. Foster’s great-grandmother is here too, her singing recorded around 1970: the voice from the past enters proceedings suddenly but not jarringly on the album’s ninth track “Reminiscence”.For Foster, this domestic sphere appears to be a figurative space which is spiritual as well as physical. Domestic Sphere ends with the suitably titled “Sanctuary” but the preceding tracks Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
An original pressing of 1979’s Thrust fetches at least £1000. Its 1980 follow-up Thrust Too can be a relative bargain at around £400. The prices are partly explained by J Dilla having sampled Thrust Too’s “Survival of the Funkiest” and Thrust’s “Summer Fun” being sampled by Daphni. Both funk-soul albums – the first credited to McNeal and Niles, the second to Wilbur Niles and Thrust – were barely circulated and barely sold. Text-book collector’s items.But without the music, potential buyers’ wallets would stay in their pockets (though the attraction rarity brings can, of course, sometimes Read more ...
Cheri Amour
Maybe you’ve heard the Native American parable about the two wolves. An old Cherokee’s grandson is grappling with internal tensions; self-hatred and self-aggrandising. For Phoebe Bridgers, one-third of indie supergroup boygenius (usually styled with no initial capital letter), this analogy sits at the heart of album standout ‘Not Strong Enough’. In it, the trio, completed by Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, let out the divine line “Always an angel / Never a god,” adding a wry smile to the delivery.Subverting male hero worship is one of the (many) things that’s so refreshingly brilliant about a Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s something charmingly unassuming and humble about The Zombies. Nowadays their 1968 second album Odyssey and Oracle regularly figures in all time greatest albums lists, but it was a flop at the time and its reputation grew through a gradually snowballing cult status, and the band split soon after its release. Most of their existence, in fact, has been in this century, with Rod Argent and Colin Blundstone reviving the name in 2004 and staunchly putting in the legwork on the revival rock circuit ever since. If you ever see them talk, even now at knocking on 80, they are just seemingly Read more ...
Guy Oddy
1982 is only A Certain Ratio’s third album this century but it’s one that’s brimming with funky vibes that are more than enough to get anyone on their feet and dancing with a big smile – not that it doesn’t have plenty to say about the state of things in 2023 too. In fact, 1982 builds upon the band’s recent resurgence to such an extent that you might imagine that A Certain Ratio were a new act, not one that has been around for pushing 50 years.Not ones to stand still, the present line-up of Martin Moscrop, Donald Johnson and Jes Kerr have brought neo-soul singer Ellen Beth Abdi on board and, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As Inspiral Carpets play “She Comes in the Fall”, a great song and one of their signature tunes, its martial drumming drags me into my own past. Seeing them play it at a 600-capacity venue makes me recall seeing them, over three decades ago, headlining the Reading Festival and, indeed, their own festival-style event at Alexandra Palace, when a female marching band would come onstage during this song. They were huge news then.There’s no marching band in 2023 but the song is still delivered with raucous punch that has the sold-out Concorde 2 loudly matching singer Stephen Holt on the choruses. Read more ...
mark.kidel
This is an enchanting album which brings together four outstanding musicians, brilliant in their own right, but also adept at the kind of collaboration in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.The distinguished cellist Vincent Ségal – with roots as varied as can be imagined – has known how to bring out the excellent musicianship of the Malian kora-player Ballaké Sissoko, in a series of beautiful albums for the adventurous French label No Format, which has once again brought the two perfectly matched players together. They are joined by accordionist Vincent Peirani and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
From around July 1977, Jeremy Gluck began contributing to the UK music weekly Sounds. Amongst his pieces were features on The Lurkers, The Rezillos, 999 and his home country Canada’s punk band The Viletones. He’d also written about Generation X for what ended up as the final issue of Sniffin' Glue. In parallel, along with guitarist Robin Wills, he was formulating the band which became The Barracudas.The pair met at an early 1977 show where The Unwanted, the punk outfit Wills was in, was the support band. Once The Barracudas debut single was out – August 1979’s independently released “I Want Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Welcome to the church of Mulvey. The sold-out venue is packed with a svelte crowd, mostly ranging in age between about 30 and 45. Nick Mulvey is playing a new number which has an air of lockdown-inspiration about it, with its lines about “missing every one of you” and “feeling grace in solitude”. The audience may not know the song, but they’re still in thrall, transported, a good few with eyes closed, hands reaching upwards as in evangelical service, swaying from side-to-side. One dark-bearded man and his guitar are held in esteem beyond the usual fandom.Mulvey, long-ago in Portico Quartet, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Ten years ago, three leading young English folk musicians got together in a room and swapped some tunes – Rob Harbron, whose English concertina graced the likes of The Remnant Kings and Emily Portman’s albums; melodeon player Andy Cutting, a three-times winner of Radio 2’s Folk Musician of the Year; and former Bellowhead alumni and fellow Musician of the Year, fiddler Sam Sweeney.Together, they chose the name Leveret, a term for a young hare, and went on to record a set of ancient English tunes, including an epic, drone-tastic take of “The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance”, and went on to revive an Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Compared to her peers, Lana del Rey is mightily prolific. This is her eighth album since her breakthough 11 years ago (her ninth in total). Her last album appeared 15 months ago. There’s still much she wants us to hear. Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd is an hour-and-a-quarter long. It sprawls. It could do with an edit, but as so often when talented musicians sprawl, there are also gems.The mood of the album is mostly built around stunningly deft piano, presumably from her usual keys person Byron Thomas. Many of the tracks are becalmed, delicate things. There’s a section of Read more ...