New music
Guy Oddy
Back in 2013, fuzz-heavy space cadets the Telescopes headed off to Berlin and then back to Leeds to record an album of intoxicating tunes that were written as they were recorded while relying on “the heightened instinct of being entirely in the now”. However, things came to a grinding halt due to a crashed hard-drive and the project was unfortunately abandoned.Ten years later, some long-forgotten back-up recordings of the sessions turned up and the band’s main man Stephen Lawrie decided to dust down and polish up seven of the original tracks of raw and trippy sounds for release as Growing Read more ...
Ed Vulliamy
Twenty years ago, the British-Ghanaian saxophonist Tony Kofi recorded the results of a venture as ambitious as it was potentially audacious: an album of transpositions for sax of music by the master of improvisational quirk and idiosyncratic technique on piano: Theolonius Monk.Plays Monk was, duly, an astonishing debut statement of intent, musicality, and reverent but confident understanding of Monk specifically, and of Bebop’s journeys parallel to Monk’s studio and live recordings for Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside and Columbia records.During the interim years - and several awards and Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Well this is something different. Goth pop teetering on the verge of histrionics but redeeming itself with some super-catchy melodies, expert musicianship and one hell of a lead singer. The Last Dinner Party's influences clearly include Queen, Kate Bush, Love, Sparks, Roxy Music, Abba, Florence + The Machine (who told them they’d won BBC Radio 1’s Sound of 2024) and much more yet are that most overused of words – unique.For such a young group (they only formed in 2021), they’ve got all the right people on their team. James Ford produces, they’re signed to Island and they’ve supported the Read more ...
joe.muggs
It seems like time flows differently for J Mascis. He’s now not far off 60, it’s 40 years since he founded Dinosaur Jr, and he’s been involved in untold musical project from the most rarefied of abstract psychedelia to guesting with Lemonheads and Nirvana, but within his own core output he is tapped into exactly the same wellspring as he was all those years ago.And I mean exactly. His solo material might be mellower than Dinosaur Jr on the whole, but nonetheless, play any of these songs next to more low key early Dinosaur classics like 1985’s “Repulsion” or 1987’s “The Lung” to an unfamiliar Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Terrapath is a prog-rock album with a large dash of jazz-rock fusion. When the styles were in their Seventies pomp, an album side could be occupied by one cut. Both sides might feature, at most, four, maybe five tracks. Yet Plantoid’s debut LP fits 10 tracks into its 39 minutes, three of which are under three minutes apiece.This take on early Seventies archetypes, then, doesn’t cleave to a standard template. Nonetheless, songs sport shifts in time signatures, very Jan Akkerman-come-John McLaughlin guitar and jazzy drums. There is also fuzz guitar, a hard rock sensibility and a manic approach Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In October 1977 Glasgow punk band Johnny & the Self Abusers decided to change their name. This was a problem for Chiswick Records, who were about to release their debut single. The records were pressed, the sleeves printed and the press release issued. There was no time to recall any of it and alter the band’s name. The single was credited to Johnny & the Self Abusers.The new name the band went for was taken from the “so simple-minded” lyrics of David Bowie’s “The Jean Genie.” After reconfiguring their line-up, Simple Minds began regularly playing under the new Bowie-derived name from Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Critically acclaimed in the US, singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz has won four Grammies during the course of her career. Born in Texas, spending most of her adult life in New York, her seventh album was created in her new hometown of Nashville, with an all-star cast of country-flavoured session musicians and producer Daniel Tashian.She moved to Nashville to be with her future husband, and some of the songs reflect this, but musically Jarosz holds the line with what came before, highly polished, reflective folk-Americana.It’s a matter of taste as to whether listeners find her style of production Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Since The Smile drummer Tom Skinner’s bandmates Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood are two-fifths of Radiohead, the trio is often designated a “side project”, or satellite, as if its music pales beside the mothership’s. On the strength of its second album, that’s an absurd, not to mention insulting notion.A Radiohead-trip in spirit, Wall of Eyes’ deceptively airy post-punk, electronica, and jazz melange might prove rock's ne plus ultra in 2024. Its title redolent of Big Brother and pernicious social media, the album follows 2022's A Light for Attracting Attention and most of Radiohead’s Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
Alkaline Trio’s gruesomely named 10th album, Blood, Hair, And Eyeballs, is a commentary on the modern world through the dark, poetic lens that the band have honed over their 25-year career. In both theme and sound, it captures their identity while offering new observations.The striking riff and sombre lyrics that open the album in “Hot for Preacher” set the tone for the remaining tracks. Cries of “I just cannot seem to get my rotten head around this mess” and “God has given up on me” are intertwined with solid melodies and an almost romantic smirk. For every reference to horror and despair, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Halfway through this album, “They Sold My Home to Build a Skyscraper” unlocks it. On first listen I’d been nodding along with the first few songs, enjoying how they find glimmers of more or less forlorn hope in amongst sadness and middle-aged domestic stress.I’d been enjoying, too, how the gentle, even kitsch bossa nova and psyche pop lilt of the arrangements makes them into what I like to think of as “soft music for hard times” (in fact an obsession of mine, see my playlist series now over 130 volumes strong). And then came “...Skyscraper” which pulled all of those elements together, Read more ...
Cheri Amour
When Ed Sheeran sang about a Galway girl in his radio-friendly folk number of the same name, he hadn’t met NewDad vocalist and guitarist Julia Dawson. This Galway girl doesn’t play a fiddle. She fronts an ethereal foursome re-energising a classic shoegaze sound rather than falling in line with fellow Irish acts and their hard-hitting anthems (see 6Music staples IDLES and SPRINTS). The band, completed by Cara Joshi, guitarist Sean O’Dowd and drummer Fiachra Parslow, share a closer resemblance to their experimental rocker peers Just Mustard – another group happy to swoop in on the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Native Sons joyfully reframed musical styles of the past for the present. Even so, the freshness and oomph of The Long Ryders’ debut album meant revivalism was sidestepped. Originally issued in October 1984, it was a landmark in helping to nurture what would later be habitually defined as Americana. The word had been around, but Native Sons was pivotal to it gaining traction.Up to this point The Long Ryders were lumped in with Los Angeles’ “Paisley Underground” scene, a loose branding of Eighties bands schooled in and drawing from cool sounds of earlier eras – The Bangles, The Dream Syndicate Read more ...