New music
Sebastian Scotney
The tour by the 81-year-old Mulatu Astatke which is currently under way and this album seem to be giving off different messages. Coming to London on 16 and 17 November, it is being marketed as a farewell. Last night's show at Ancienne Belgique in Brussels had lured a full house through being billed as “his very last concert on Belgian soil". Paris’s Salle Pleyel mentions “une grande tournée d’adieu”.And yet the video trailer for Mulatu Plays Mulatu, his first major statement since Sketches of Ethiopia from 2013, asserts directly, and this fine album absolutely Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The remarkable The First Family: Live At Winchester Cathedral 1967 represents the first-ever release of a previously unheard recording of a 26 March 1967 Sly and the Family Stone live show. It is the earliest document of Sly and Co. to surface.At this point, the band had not yet signed with Epic Records. The release of their debut album A Whole New Thing was just-over seven months away. "Dance to the Music" would – in its second wind, following its November 1967 release – became a US hit single in March 1968. After this: world-wide success, Woodstock and everything else. The First Family Read more ...
mark.kidel
Robert Plant is magnificently well-equipped to shine as a consummate musical survivor: not only has his voice kept its magic, with a range from sensual caress to ecstatic howl, but he’s deeply rooted in timeless music, Scots-Irish and American folk as well as the country blues.These qualities were well in evidence when he exploded onto the rock scene with Led Zeppelin, a pioneer of heavy metal, whose fire was tempered by an affinity with the magical side of British folk and the melancholy beauty of the blues. His latest album, the first with Saving Grace, his regular touring band for the last Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hackney’s Round Chapel is an appropriate venue. Scottish smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul opens her set with “Dùsgadh/Waking.” It has the spirit of a call to prayer: the directness, the insistence, the magnetic quality. All of which draws in anyone exposed to its power. It enchants.As well as beginning this sell-out appearance at the multi-use, horseshoe-footprint nonconformist East London church which opened in 1871, “Dùsgadh/Waking” is the first track on Chaimbeul’s recent album Sunwise. Completing the trio of firsts, this is the opening date on what is billed as the ‘Sunwise’ Tour.The Read more ...
ALA.NI
I’ve never thought of myself as a political artist. I write about love. The tender bits, the messy bits, the heartbreak that rearranges a life. That’s where songwriting usually finds me. “TIEF”, from my forthcoming album Sunshine Music, arrived differently. It’s built around an interpolation of “Slave” by the legendary calypsonian singer Mighty Sparrow. Calypso, a music that has lived in my bones for as long as I can remember. “Slave” proposed a question I sought to answer. “If there were a contemporary Part Two to such a statement song, what would mine say?” What does reparation look Read more ...
Graham Fuller
With their second album Altar, the Irish combo NewDad has moved from the love-embittered shoegaze of their 2023 debut Madra toward a worldlier perspective married to a comparatively sophisticated but confrontational style. Some reviewers have suggested it’s poppier, but tunes like "Other Side" (with its deceptively quiet start), “Misery”, “Puzzle”, and “Mr. Cold Embrace” are happily closer to post-punk. Nice and angsty does it every time in my book.It’s still shoegazey, still rueful, but the music made by Julie Dawson (vocals, rhythm guitar), Sean O’Dowd (lead guitar), and Fiachra Parslow ( Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Neil Hannon has been recording and touring as the Divine Comedy since 1989 and has tried a fair few flavours along the way, from chamber pop to Britpop, while sounding fundamentally himself throughout. Rainy Sunday Afternoon, however, sounds like a stocktaking, a deep breath and a meditation on late middle age.Clearly not full of the hormonal rush traditionally associated with classic rock and pop, it is an album that is literate (with nods to both Patrick Shaw-Stewart and Machiavelli, among others) and mature. It is considered and unashamedly oozes a middle-class take on the passing of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sometimes, record labels don’t like what those on their roster have recorded. Such was the case with BMG Sweden and Robin Carlsson who, as Robyn, had made three albums with varying success and a raft of home-country hit singles for the label from the mid-Nineties to 2002.She decided that hers would be the reins guiding what would became her fourth album. Up to this point, the credits of her dance-pop records were littered with the names of seasoned producers. Safe hands. Odd tracks had, early on, entered the US charts but that did not translate to a sustained international breakthrough. When Read more ...
Tom Carr
For the past decade, the Ohio alternative superstars Twenty One Pilots have cultivated a deep lore starting with 2015’s Blurryface, and continued through the subsequent albums of 2018’s Trench, 2021’s Scaled and Icy, and seemingly concluded with last year’s Clancy. Yet the duo of Tyler Joseph (vocals) and Josh Dun (drums) left proceedings on a cliffhanger.So perhaps predictably, their latest, Breach, continues the story. The yarn the duo has been spinning for ten years is a dystopian tale set in a fictional city called Dema. Dema is run by nine bishops, one of which is a titular Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“It’s a long way up from rock bottom/There’s been times I felt I could fall further.” So runs the opening line of Ed Sheeran’s eighth studio album. It’s delivered with the quavering falsetto-voice-breaking that’s become default for sung emotion. Like much of the album, it’s a “poor me” lyric. A generation has grown up with popular music ruled by solipsistic whining, with Sheeran leading from the front. Meanwhile the world burns.Not his fault of course, the trouble we’re all in. He seems a decent man, likeable, good values. But why do so many relate to this drivel? It deflates the soul. Play Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
Everyone’s favourite angsty pop-punk nerds are back, balancing new with nostalgia and synths with guitars, this is exactly what fans have been waiting for after a decade-long hiatus from the Minneapolis rockers. The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World is an album that not only continues Motion City Soundtrack’s legacy but expands on it and gives a glimpse into what the band have been focusing on in their time off. Their sound is as recognisable as ever, and the album is sprinkled with various 2000s alt-rock star collaborations just to make the nostalgia even sweeter.Single “She Is Afraid” did a Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Quite why Baxter Dury isn't already a national treasure is a mystery to me. Not for his nepo connections but for his perfectly pitched delivery and super-dry observations. He's sardonic, sleazy, sexy and has a cracking dog – what more does any man need? Maybe a bigger profile and some higher rankings in the charts...This is a very different proposition from the last album, I Thought I Was Better Than You (full disclosure, I gave it album of the year on this very site, so this was going to have to work hard to impress). The different tone is down to producer Paul Epworth (Adele, Rhianna, Read more ...