The enduring good health of UK soul – the fact that we are treated to a continual stream of great records by the likes of Jorja Smith, Children of Zeus, Cleo Sol / SAULT, Maverick Sabre, Joel Culpepper, Yazmin Lacey, Ego Ella May, Michael Kiwanuka and so many others – is down to a few things.
It begins with a superb rendering of his 2018 song “Ain’t Gonna Moan No More”, on which Van is joined by the mellifluous voice of Kurt Elling, and which was recorded alongside the other duets on the album in 2018 and 2019.
Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (To Live) begins with an X-ray photo of the central character’s cancer-ridden stomach, a man described by the narrator (an uncredited Kurosawa) as someone “drifting through life… we can’t say that he is really alive at all…”.
White Roses, My God isn’t a Low album. It couldn’t be. Mimi Parker, Alan Sparhawk’s wife and partner in Low, died in November 2022. And despite Low’s many musical twists and turns, Sparhawk’s public return to music sounds nothing like any of Low’s outings across their 13 studio albums, the first of which was issued in 1994.
Robert Crumb puts America’s racist, misogynist Id on paper with self-implicating obsession. Terry Zwigoff’s 1995 documentary on the underground cartoonist and his even further out family is reissued as the channels for such purging, pungent art have contracted further, zealously policed by Left and Right dreams of moral perfection.
Life can be unfair, and Katy Perry can’t be alone in finding herself having to take the rough with the smooth. Still, anyone would have thought that with the excessive pearl clutching that accompanied the July release of 143’s lead single “Women’s World” that she’d put out a Nazi marching song, not a clunky attempt at a feminist anthem.
Miranda Lambert is one of those country stars who’s massive in the States but no-one’s heard of this side of the Atlantic. Famous since her early twenties, she’s had a quarter century career, encompassing seven Top Five US albums, including one chart-topper, as well as parallel success as part of trio Pistol Annies. But the most she’s troubled the British album charts is reaching No.52 a decade ago.
There’s been a lot of early 90s rave aesthetics in popular culture lately, but an awful lot of it has been at the level of signifiers. Fila, Stüssy, Air Max 90s, smiley faces, sirens, rewinds, crowd noises, hop in a Ford Cortina, tribes coming together, dancing at dawn, baggy hoodies for goalposts, isn’t it, wasn’t it, hmm? There’s been a little less discussed, though, about what raving actually felt like, and in particular that it its revolutionary character came from everyone having the same feeling of being on the same drug at the same time.
Lighters at the ready, because here comes the flood. Drawn from 16-track tape, 1/4in reels and lo-fi sound board cassettes that are now a half century old, the 27 CDs of 431 performances, 417 of them previously unreleased, of Dylan and The Band’s 1974 arena tour of the US, is a set that challenges the listeners’ staying power perhaps more than it celebrates an epochal tour.
Real-life couple Graham Coxon and Rose-Elinor Dougall are both musicians of some profile in their own rights. The former, especially, for his work with Blur. Their band The Waeve is a relatively recent development but they’ve thrown themselves at it with verve since their appearance a couple of years ago.