New music
Sebastian Scotney
I was excited by what I had heard of this quartet – guitarist Julian Lage, keyboardist John Medeski, bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Kenny Wollesen – on their album Scenes from Above, which came out in January; I thought it was Lage’s strongest album in eight years.Their concert in front of a full-ish and highly appreciative Royal Festival Hall audience on Friday night absolutely fulfilled the best expectations. But perhaps above all I am excited by where this band can go over the next few years. Lage has had seven Grammy nominations until now, but never won one. Maybe that is about to be Read more ...
Mark Kidel
A gig with Tricky remains a trip to the Underworld: forever shrouded in almost total darkness, his haunting voice barely audible, he’s an artist who’s always shunned the spotlight, seen through the charade of celebrity fame, and made a virtue out being a shade rather than a hero. He’s never been shy of plumbing the depths – drawing, with tons of originality and creative energy, from a family and community background steeped in violence, the curse of suicide, and a super-sensitivity that prejudiced his breath and skin. His preference for a darkened stage might suggest a parallel with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Maisie Peters is a singer-songwriter from Sussex who’s 26, next week, and is a protégé of Ed Sheeran (she’s on his Gingerbread Man label). If you’re younger than her, you’ve likely never heard of her, but her last album, The Good Witch, was a chart-topper, and the one before that, her 2021 debut, only stalled at No. 2. She has a devoted fanbase.Her third album is lyrically impressive, if lacking musical heft. Her default musical mode is over-airy acoustic songs, carefully painted with warm electronic production, occasionally rising to a pulse that’s faintly danceable. What she does has much Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Love Train” is first up. Rather than the 1972 O’Jays’ hit, this totally different song was originally released as the B-side of a 1971 single – though it’s often credited as a 1968 release. By The Lovemasters, a Chicago band active under that name from 1970, it’s an absolute winner – vaguely along the Temptations line, with a circling guitar figure, subtle piano fills and a loose funkiness. Their founder member Edith Andrews had been active in Chicago’s music from the late 1950s.
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The label which issued the Lovemasters 45 was Jacklyn, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Drake just released not only his expected ninth album, Iceman, but another two albums, Maid of Honour and Habibti. Forty-three songs. Two-and-a-half hours of music. And a trying listen for anyone with a soul.Drake is the one of the world’s most successful male pop stars. This is troubling, but it makes sense. He’s admired, in our capitalism-as-religion age, as much for his social media reach and business acumen as his art. “I’m not a people-pleaser, bro’, I’m a CEO,” he burbles over the horizontal chillage of “White Bone”. That’s about right. He’s a figurehead for the romance-free, the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Tamikrest are one of the swaths of Tuareg bands that were born out of the violent oppression of their people at the hands of the Malian Army, Kremlin-controlled paramilitaries and radical Islamists but who came to prominence in the wake of Tinariwen’s breakthrough in the early years of this century. Along with the likes of Tartit and Terakaft they have sung their hypnotic desert blues in exile from a land which is ruled by a military junta, where political opposition is banned and media suppressed, with an intense yearning to return that is thoroughly tangible.Assikel, which was recorded live Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There’s a whole wide open area of leftfield music that belongs entirely to Chicago. The 1960s social radicalism and futurist musical experiments of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and its parent organisation the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), fused into punk and alternative attitudes with the founding of labels like Thrill Jockey and Touch & Go, fed the jazz-electronic-dub-“post-rock” genre meltdown of bands like Gastr Del Sol, Tortoise and Chicago Underground Duo/Trio/Quartet/Orchestra in the 1990s, and is still vividly present in a sprawling and endlessly Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
The All-American Rejects are back with their first album in 14 years, and their first ever independent release. At the height of their success in the early 2000s, the band had an established place in the pop rock landscape, one foot in emo culture and the other heading into the mainstream, but halted before they inevitably became too radio ready. Their return follows a string of free backyard pop-up concerts, a symbol of their intention to get back to their roots, American kids making fun, high octane rock, and Sandbox is a clear continuation of this energy.With a catalogue of timeless Read more ...
Liz Thomson
First date, last dance: Emmylou Harris, possessor of one of country-rock’s most beautiful and evocative voices, opened the British leg of her farewell tour on Monday with a generous show at Liverpool's Philharmonic Hall. It was, of course, sold out, the audience on the older side (it was notable how many guys needed to take a comfort break as time wore on!) and Emmylou herself acknowledging, as she briefly massaged her left wrist, that “I’m 79… arthritis.” But she stood – in her customary cowboy boots, shoulder-length silver hair glinting in the spotlight, and playing her signature Gibson Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTH 1Simo Cell & Abdullah Diawy Dying is the Internet EP (Dekmantel) + Simo Cell FL Louis (TEMƎT)
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Where house music has drifted to conservatism, becoming predictable and dull, some electronic producers are still creating dancefloor-adjacent music that rips. One of the very best is French machine-freak Simo Cell. His wonked-out bangers defy definition. He’s been Vinyl of the Month before, with his Yes. DJ EP, back in 2021. These two new releases are also essential. The first, via Amsterdam’s Dekmantel organization, is Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Well beyond the muscle-flexing of the manosphere, there are men who wear their hearts on their sleeves, and show much deeper courage than the macho poseurs and influencers who pretend that all is well and more. Teddy Thompson is such a specialist of the heart, and his new album delves fearlessly into love and pain, never afraid of celebrating loss rather than boasting of conquests and wins.Teddy Thompson is hardly alone, as the scions of boy bands, tenors who play with falsetto androgyny, dominate the charts. But he does it to perfection. Ably supported by veteran producer David Mansfield – Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Quicksilver Messenger Service were central to what emerged from San Francisco as 1966 unfolded – the psychedelic-dance-ballroom scene. They first played the city’s Avalon Ballroom on 13 May 1966, and were there a further 74 times. Before this, the band had been on stage at the also-Family Dog-promoted Fillmore on 26 February, and over 25 to 27 March. Their initial booking for the city’s other main promoter Bill Graham was also at the Fillmore, on 19 March.These early shows – of a band which debuted live in December 1965 – ensured that QMS was moving fast, seemingly as much so as their the Read more ...