CDs/DVDs
Guy Oddy
After a long period of relative inactivity, the last five years has had A Certain Ratio getting the bit between their teeth, trying out new sounds and releasing new tunes at a rate not seen since the early 1980s. It All Comes Down to This is their third album since 2020, as well as the four stand-alone EPs.Despite coming out almost exactly a year since its 1982 predecessor, this set would actually have been released six months ago if bass guitarist Jez Kerr hadn’t broken his pelvis and fractured a hip just as recording was meant to begin. So, it seems that precious little slows them down Read more ...
Tom Carr
For the past almost two years, Maggie Rogers has taken an unexpectedly special place in my heart and musical tastes. Upon reviewing her previous album, Surrender, because of the difference in style and sound to my usual tastes I was caught completely off guard.Combined with just as unforeseen changes in my personal life, Surrender was an unfounded delight that chimed completely at that point in time. Now it’s not just an album, but a time capsule of those summer months of 2022.Fast forward, and Rogers has provided another tapestry of sounds steeped in texture and personal depth with third Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Lizz Wright has established herself, over a number of steadfastly excellent albums, as one of the very best vocalists of her generation. Not so long after a gripping live album recorded in Berlin Holding Space (2022), her latest offering shines with all the brilliance and originality she brings to her own cross-genre mix of jazz, soul, gospel, country and folk.What holds it together is her deep contralto voice, as distinctive in its own way as the sound of Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Shirley Horn, or Aretha Franklin. There’s a combination of delicacy and force, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Gal Beckerman’s 2023 book The Quiet Before makes a plea that if ideas, revolutionary or otherwise, are to grow, there needs to be a retreat from “our current cacophony”. And if there is one artist who is truly living out that principle in his musical life, it is Shabaka. As he said to the audience at this year’s Winter Jazzfest in NYC: “Change is never easy.”What is clear, though, is how utterly serious and focused he is on the change. Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace is almost entirely a meditative and quiet album. His live shows in the past few months have all been in Read more ...
graham.rickson
Happy End’s big draw is its central conceit, that of a convicted murderer narrating his life story backwards from the guillotine to the cradle. Made in 1967 by Oldfřich Lipský (1924-1986), renowned as a director of off-beat comedies, you wonder how on earth such a peculiar film was produced during such a turbulent time in Czechoslovak history.Lipský himself described Happy End as an experiment, “though not in the sense of the new waves…”, he and co-screenwriter Milos Macourek more worried about viewers finding Happy End incomprehensible than in any political interference. What could be a Read more ...
Joe Muggs
At 24, Bradfordian Nia Archives has already clearly marked out her musical territory.While many of her Gen Z contemporaries have embraced the rave, jungle and drum’n’bass sounds of the early-mid 1990s, she’s done it more wholeheartedly than most: particularly rebuilding the rolling breakbeats and deep bass of jungle as a kind of British urban folk music, collaborating with older generations (original junglists DJ Die and Randall of Watch The Ride), and demonstrating how her natural Caribbean-influenced Yorkshire vocal articulation fits perfectly into that. Crucially, though, having shown Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
A Fabiana Palladino album has felt like a possibility since the early 2010s. Back then she was a session musician touring with the likes of SBTRKT, Jessie Ware and Sampha. In 2017 she was approached by the elusive producer Jai Paul to join his new label, Paul Institute. She released three excellent singles with the label over the next four years, making a name for herself as an unhurried perfectionist with a knack for warped 1980s grooves.After many years then, there is finally a Fabiana Palladino debut. It is a meticulously crafted album of funky, downcast 80s R&B and synth-pop which Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
Perfecting Ernest Hemingway’s advice that “a writer should create living people; people not characters”, In Lieu of Flowers sees Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties’ Dan Campbell invite fans back into the fictional universe of open-wound Aaron in a way that is so intimate and descriptive, you can’t help but hurt for him.The Emo-Americana band, now made up of 16 musicians, introduced Aaron West’s tragic story a decade ago. We Don’t Have Each Other was followed by a three-track EP and a single; and then a second album, 2019’s Routine Maintenance. The fervent interest in the next chapter of this Read more ...
Joe Muggs
This is a reviewer’s nightmare: it’s literally just Khruangbin doing what Khruangbin do. As ever, the Texan trio are rolling out laid-back psychedelic spaghetti western Tex-Mex country-soul-funk groove after laid-back psychedelic spaghetti western Tex-Mex country-soul-funk groove, all drenched in the usual hazy reverb that practically demand you start drawing for adjectives like “sun-bleached” and talk about big skies and desert landscapes. The instrumentation is, as ever, all super-trad too. Bass, drums, guitar and just tiny wisps of Hammond organ and vocal are recorded in lovingly analogue Read more ...
Tom Carr
It’s been a winding road to album number 12 for blues rock duo Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney, better known as The Black Keys. Albums one to five – from debut The Big Come Up to 2008’s Attack & Release – all played in a modern, blues rock wheelhouse. Then everything changed as they exploded into the mainstream with the quickfire releases of Brothers and El Camino. Since their meteoric rise, heralded by tracks like “Howlin For You” and “Lonely Boy”, the duo has somewhat meandered through. The following albums Turn Blue, Let’s Rock, and Dropout Boogie all Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Carl Barat and Peter Doherty are "the Glimmer Twins" of their own wayward trajectory through the worlds of rock and roll, stardom, drugs, distraction and destruction.The noughties indie stars, releasing their first album in a decade, are perhaps as near as their generation will get to the steady state of the Mick-n-Keef equation. But it pulls you up to realise that, more than 20 years after they went in to a studio together, this is only their fourth album as a band.Recorded, in part, at their Albion Rooms hotel on Margate’s Eastern Esplanade, its 11 new tunes display Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The second act of a trilogy, launched with “Renaissance” (2022), Beyoncé’s latest release has been loudly proclaimed as her “Country” album. In a tradition of surprising and controversial self-reinventions that includes among others Bob Dylan’s gospel albums and Ray Charles’s “Modern Sounds in Country and Western” (1962), the superstar has once again broken the rules of genre, and done her own all-too-remarkable thing – with the usual brilliance and panache.Of course, this is so much more than a Country album, even though she's surrounded herself with some of the top black Country singers, Read more ...