CDs/DVDs
peter.quinn
Released yesterday to coincide with International Women’s Day, The Sisterhood will surely prove to be one of the brightest jewels in Sarah Jane Morris’s varicoloured discography.A labour of love which Morris has been contemplating for two decades, the album presents a tribute to “my ten singers, my essential lodestars”, as she puts it, acknowledging and honouring female artists past and present who have inspired her own musical journey. Wonderfully arranged and stylistically diverse, Morris and her co-writer/co-producer Tony Rémy pull off a remarkable feat of crafting 10 songs which tell each Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ariana Grande is the seventh most-followed Instagram account in the world (nearly 400 million). She has worked in promotion and/or “brand ambassador” positions with Reebok, Givenchy, Apple and many others. She is a successful film/TV star (about to go next level with Wicked). She has her own billion-selling perfume line. In an age when consumer capitalism has replaced religion in the west, she is a dream, an exemplar.Music is a central supporting beam to her profile maintenance. Thus, her new album, her seventh, is key content for this well-oiled brand. It does its job efficiently and, Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album starts on an extremely literal note. The whole record is themed around Belgian born-and-raised Bolis Pupul’s explorations of the Chinese side of his heritage after his mother’s death in 2008, and his regrets at not having done so when she was alive. And the opening title track has him explaining precisely this, in a portentously pitched-down voiceover reading the titular letter to his mother. It’s sweet in its directness, but in context its “this is what this record is, and this is what it’s going to do” statement seems blunt – like turning the sleeve notes into a tune.It feels a Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Here’s a question: do singer-songwriters produce their strongest songs in times of upheaval, as they seek to express a feeling of “this stuff is hard”? Or do more powerful creations emerge once the anguish has been overcome?Norah Jones’s Pick Me Up Off the Floor, from 2020, was in the former category. Blue Note label honcho Don Was remembered: “I wanted to reach into the speakers and give her a big hug.” Visions (2024) is in the latter camp. Its clear message is that Norah Jones is in a better place now, and able to celebrate and savour the passing moment.Cards on the table. For me Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It was one of those truly memorable evenings – a Royal Albert Hall concert by a someone with a long career (and record sales of 14 million), a woman I’d been introduced to only a few months earlier when a music-loving friend gifted me a CD. Interestingly, she’d been put on to it by a friend in Europe.So it’s a treat in this cacophonous, unsettling age to have a new album from Loreena McKennitt, a singer-songwriter with her own record label whose numerous honours include two Junos, Canada’s premiere music award, two Grammy nominations, and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society Joseph-Elzéar Read more ...
joe.muggs
Tom “Squarepusher” Jenkinson has covered a lot of ground over three decades, from dank cellar ambience to refined baroque composition, and from chirpy funk to monstrous noise. But his default mode is instantly recognisable: 170+ beats per minute jungle / drum’n’bass-adjacent breakbeats, squelching acid techno synths, high drama rave chords, all with him playing jazz fusion bass guitar over the top like a maniac.And that’s what he does here. OK there are “Arkteon” parts one to three – solo bass pieces which form intro, mid point interlude and outro to the album, that are very much in that Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
Kaiser Chiefs’ appropriately named Kaiser Chiefs’ Easy Eighth Album is a collection of ten easy listening, but not particularly imaginative, tracks. That said, with nine Top 40 singles and a comfortable legacy under their belt, perhaps imaginative is not something that the band were striving for with this album.The sometimes-jarring combination of Britpop, Electronica, Disco, Indie Rock, and Boyband Pop that can be heard throughout the tracks suggest a certain level of comfort within the band. Certainly, it seems that they were less concerned with how the songs would fit together and more Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Those who were around to witness the release of the Stone Roses’ Second Coming album will no doubt remember how a record-buying public were generally left shaking their heads in disbelief when, instead of a raft of tunes echoing the magnificent “Fools Gold”, they got a stodgy disc of lumpen Dad Rock. It may have sold zillions in the 30 years since its release, but the general lack of enthusiasm that was left in its immediate wake was a major influence on the band soon going their separate ways.Not one to be told, it seems, John Squire has now got together with Manchester’s most adept self- Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The best popular music tunes into the zeitgeist. It can reflect cultural currents, encourage them, or enable the public to turn away and just party. At a time when the future of humanity feels more uncertain than at any time since the height of the Cold War, Yard Act, one of the most interesting British bands to emerge in recent years, play on the sense of doom around the corner, while laughing in its face.The acclaimed band from Leeds, fronted by James Smith, who speaks the lyrics as much as he sings, come in a tradition of English bands – often from the North – who place cultural and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Musically, the assured Focus on Nature knows exactly what it is. Fuzzy, psychedelic-leaning, folk-aware pop-rock with an emphasis on guitars about captures it. And what tunes – this 75-minute double album’s 19 songs are immediate, instantly memorable and stick, limpet-like, in the head. Even during “A Mirror’s” backwards guitar coda the song’s melody is still to the fore.Lyrically, The Bevis Frond’s new album draws from main-man Nick Saloman’s concerns about where the world is – and shouldn’t be – heading, “I’m so tired of scary ecological forecasts” are the blunt opening words. The song, “ Read more ...
Tom Carr
There are few bands who can claim to operate in a similar visionary style as Everything Everything. Since their 2010 debut Man Alive, the Manchester group have played in a space all their own, dissecting the structures of human relationships from the personal to the political all while refining an experimental yet accessible art-rock sound.With their last album, 2022’s Raw Data Feel, they demonstrated again how ahead of the curve they are by utilising AI in their creative process. Their exploration of future-tech was a heady experience supercharged with creativity and spontaneity. It was also Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Glitterbeat is home to a wildly eclectic and reliably brilliant world of artists, from Korea’s Park Jiha via Slovenia’s Sirom to Mauriania’s Noura Mint Seymali, Turkey’s Altin Gun, and desert blues masters Tamikrest. Hailing from the Sahrawi refugee camps of the Western Sahara – disputed territory for decades now – the superbly distinctive singer Aziza Brahim returns after five years with Mawja (‘Wave’), her fourth album with the label, and an excellent addition to her her catalogue, one that revisits the feel of her 2014 Glitterbeat debut, Soutak.Now based in Barcelona, with Mawja she Read more ...