CDs/DVDs
joe.muggs
Some performers are born to perform. It seems obvious, but it’s not a given in the music world. Some just want to make sound, some want to compose, not all are in it to connect directly to an audience. Rob Gallagher, however, is all about that connection, and he’s never stopped doing it. It was there in his band Galliano’s genial funk from 1988 through 1997: his London beat poetry always felt like it was addressing you direct, and the band came to live above all on the live stage where he could speak to the crowd.In the subsequent band Two Banks of Four he did admittedly step back from the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There’s a specific vocabulary that attends the arrival of a new Nick Cave album in the 21st century. Words like redemptive, cathartic, stark, unsparing are a crucial part of his music’s terroir. They’re as inescapable as the figure of death, and that’s something that looms large too, in the art and in the life. With a Gothy, druggy, doomy and well-dressed back story trailing from the Birthday Party and post-punk years of the 1980s, through to the presence of the Lord, interventionist or not, on The Boatman's Call, and the epic, wracked albums of the past decade, you suspect any new Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Miguel Zenón’s Golden City (Miel Music) is an ambitious album. Its ten tracks and a postlude seek to portray “the beauty and resilience that give San Francisco its soul”.The timing of the release is fortuitous, coming just eight days after Kamala Harris gave her nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, and is impossible not to make a connection. In her impactful and historic speech, not only did Harris set out her stall to be the next US President, she also told her own story, in which the key part was her San Francisco immigrant background – and she also drew Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Whether it’s maturing or selling out, the tendency for rock bands to soften and smooth down their sound is understandable and, for fans, usually dispiriting – edge, purity, and strangeness evaporate as the dollars roll in. With their fourth album Romance, Fontaines DC have not only pulled away from their mordant, Dublin-dank post-punk toward a heady melange of rap, shoegaze, indie, and grunge, they've also become winningly tuneful. The miracle is that they’ve arrived at this eclectic juncture without sacrificing the danger and anxiety, as embedded in the music as in the lyrics, that Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Jon Hopkins is on a journey, and we’re fortunate that he feels he can share the trip with us. His latest offering takes the listener beyond the paths opened up in Singularity (2018) and Music for Psychedelic Therapy (2021).There's a coherence in the new album that builds on the explorations of the previous two. A reflection, no doubt, of the clarity he's feeling inside, an increased mastery of the electronic and acoustic means (from synths to strings) at his disposal and brought to the studio by his gifted collaborators, including regulars such as Leo Abrahams (guitar) and Cherif Hashizume ( Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The music of Brit alt-rocker Cassy Brooking, AKA Cassyette, comes from the emo school of pop-metal. Her 2021 debut single was, appropriately, called “Dear Goth”, she’s much-hyped by Kerrang, and has been tour support for both Bring Me the Horizon and My Chemical Romance. All these are apt reference points for the music on her debut album which is feisty, occasionally spicy, and – contradictorily – very precisely produced to suggest a gnarly aesthetic.The songs flip about between crunchy sampledelic wodges of metal riffage, Prodigy-ish electronic hammering, and howled, but polished vocal angst Read more ...
joe.muggs
For a record whose subject matter involves unfaithfulness, ageing, loneliness, fear of death, darkness, sorrow, battles, haunting, sleeplessness and struggling to breathe, this is a lot of fun. But then Susanna Wallumrød has always leavened fathomless darkness with wry wit.Early on in her career she was covering songs like Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” and even Kiss’s “Crazy Crazy Nights” as icy ballads, and throughout she has always had an arch cool that has allowed her to gaze into the abyss and relay what its gaze says back to her as startlingly enjoyable music.On this album, that enjoyment Read more ...
Guy Oddy
From time to time, we all come across a band name that’s new to our ears and that raises a smile and the hope of some wild and original sounds. Illuminati Hotties is such a name.However, Illuminati Hotties isn’t really a band – being the solo musical vehicle for Grammy-winning producer and engineer Sarah Tudzin. Unfortunately, Power isn’t really the home of any wild and original sounds, either. Instead, it is something of a single speed homage to the pop-grunge sound of the early 90s. At best, it digs deep in territory that has previously been mined extensively by the likes of the Lemonheads Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Named after the duo’s Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville, badly damaged in a 2020 tornado and restored by them, Woodland Studios is Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ first album in four years, when All the Good Times won the Grammy for Best Folk Album. It’s their first album of all-original material since Poor David’s Almanack in 2017, and the second to be credited to them as a duo.Its mix of the very traditional-sounding and the strikingly contemporary, evident from the outset as the opener, “Empty Trainload of Sky”, pedal steel making its presence felt before the vocals enter, gives Read more ...
joe.muggs
Trip hop is everywhere these days. From Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey on down, some of the biggest artists in the world channel a smoky, bluesy, late 90s mood – and in the UK something even more interesting is happening that taps into a longer, deeper continuum.In the burgeoning soul/jazz underground (and mainstream!) the likes of Jorja Smith, Dave Okumu, Yazmin Lacey are all tapping into a wellspring of uniquely British introspective groove that runs not just through Massive Attack and Nightmares On Wax but back through Sade, Soul II Soul to the years of lovers rock and Cymande.Squarely in Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Aside from their musical output, the fame – or notoriety – of Californian rockers Osees derives from two main factors. First, their consistently changing the spelling of their name on different releases (eg, Thee Oh Sees, OCS, etc). Second, their gushing prolificness of output. They’ve been releasing music for 21 years and Sorcs 80 is their 29th album. That’s going some.The short version of this review is that it’s a spirited electro-garage splurge but its sameyness occasionally grows annoying. Although Osees is a band it mostly represents the artistic vision of one person, frontman John Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The musical equivalent of a firework display, the third album from Norwegian art-poppers Pom Poko is bright, energised and unstoppable. It is also considered; clearly the culmination of a careful creative process. Fusing the spontaneous and the structured can be tricky, but this is what the nimble Champion accomplishes.Heard without knowing anything about Pom Poko, Champion comes across as a new wave-influenced take on math rock were those responsible cocking an ear to Imperial-era Beyoncé. Pop, but pop which has been deconstructed and then reassembled.Opening cut “Growing Story” is along the Read more ...