Somewhat astoundingly, The Purple Bird is Will Oldham’s album number 21 using his Bonnie “Prince” Billy alias. A fine set of alt country tunes, recorded in Nashville and largely co-written with producer David Ferguson, it also happily suggests that he’s nowhere near the end of his creative journey.
If I’d listened to this blind, I would have absolutely no idea who it was by. This isn’t the voice I remember on those Spandau backing tracks. In fact, it’s a sound straight from mid-80s soft rock. If that makes you feel queasy, step away now.
Nine billion streams a year. That’s the sheer scale on which the music of Ludovico Einaudi reaches audiences. The Italian, who will be 70 this November, is courteous and genial in person – I interviewed him in Montreal a couple of years ago – but is also, patently, a superstar.
It would be really easy to get hung up on the definition for this album. Is it a new sexuality term? A holiday genre of technopop? A planet that will align with the others on January 29th?
English singer Tahliah Debrett Barnett, aka FKA Twig, describes via X, that "eusexua is a practice, eusexua is a state of being, eusexua is the pinnacle of human experience".
This is Tunng’s ninth album, their first in five years, and marks their 20th anniversary by consciously going full circle to the gentle sound sculpture and folk melody of their earliest work. It is also thrown into fascinating relief by arriving just as the world is reeling from the loss of David Lynch.
The blurb that accompanies this Criterion Blu-ray calls Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, which co-stars John Cassavetes and Peter Falk as scuzzy, low-ranking gangsters on the run from their bosses, “an unsung masterpiece of American cinema”. For once, that doesn’t feel like hyperbole.
It’s been five years since the last studio album by the inestimable Mary Chapin Carpenter, the lyrical and intimate The Dirt and the Stars, recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Bath, the second of two projects with producer Ethan Johns released towards the end of the first lockdown. One of the delights of that grim period was Carpenter’s weekly livestreams from her Virginia farmhouse, Angus the Golden Retriever a frequent on-screen presence.
The Lovell sisters Rebecca and Megan can be heard supporting Ringo Starr on his new album of country songs, while at the same time their seventh album hits the shelves, and with some heft and punch, too, on the raw strength of the scuzzy guitar-led opener, “Mockingbird”. As raw-edged guitar ballads with big choruses go, it’s a strong opening account for a duo who have delivered fine albums stirring together a pungent one-pot meal of Southern rock, electric blues and Americana.
Of the big UK indie bands of the 00s wave, Bloc Party were always the most austerely art-rockish. Where Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons, Franz Ferdinand all to some degree or other had a dose of the vaudevillian and a bit of party “woohoo!”, BP adhered way more to the seriousness, alienation and introspection of their post-punk inspirations.
Four of Humanhood’s 13 tracks are short, impressionistic mood pieces. Between 48 seconds and just-over a minute-and-a-half long, they mostly lack singing. Instrumentation is jazzy, leaning on piano and wind instruments. Drones and white noise evoke ocean spray or wind. In one case, a wordless vocal edges towards articulating recognisable syllables.