New music
Thomas H. Green
Jimmy Cliff (b 1948) is one of Jamaican music’s biggest names. Raised in the countryside, he went to Kingston in his teens and persuaded record shop owner Leslie Kong to record him. The resulting song, “Hurricane Hattie”, was the first of a string of local hits but in the late Sixties he moved to London and, working with Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, his songs such as “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” and “Vietnam”, the latter a favourite of Bob Dylan, reached a far wider audience, becoming hits in Europe.In 1972 Cliff played the lead role in the film The Harder They Come, about a Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Noura Mint Seymali is possessed of the most extraordinary voice; its very fabric is electrifying, its reach, power and depth cut from an entirely different cloth to the rest of us. Maybe it’s a cloth of gold. And then there is her axe-hero husband Jeich Ould Chighaly’s shapeshifting, inventive guitar work, its distorted fizz and fuzz redolent of Seventies Glam and heavy rock melded into Mauritanian desert blues – and just as addictive. The guitar lines twist, smoulder, spark and melt like solder, with the traditional andine acoustic harp that Noura Mint plays and uses to define her music’s Read more ...
Guy Oddy
In the main, it could be assumed that Snarky Puppy’s bandleader, Michael League sleeps soundly in his bed every night. For sure, his band’s latest collaboration with Jules Buckley’s Metropole Orkest focuses on the land of dreams and is a generally calming soundtrack for drifting pleasantly into the arms of Morpheus.That is, apart from the unsettling and somewhat disorientating “Chimera”. Alone among the tunes on Somni, it’s anything but relaxed and seductive. This rather forceful track could be an imaginary collaboration between Bristol’s post-jazzers, Get The Blessing and Charles Mingus’ Read more ...
Guy Oddy
This week, UK electronica originals Cabaret Voltaire hit Birmingham on their penultimate tour before they finally put their synthesizers into storage and call it quits this time next year. For a band that have been going (on and off) since 1973, however, they were seriously on fire – with no suggestion that they should be considering permanent retirement any time soon.Richard H Kirk may have passed away in 2021, but Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson, who had both left the fold more than 30 years ago, put on a fine show and paid tribute to their fallen comrade early in the proceedings. Read more ...
mark.kidel
Keaton Henson is a master of dark introspection and unashamed vulnerability, a 21st century manifestation of what used to be called bed-sit blues. There isn’t a shred of extrovert joy in his latest album, where he explores, with forensic authenticity and a gift for poetic lyrics, a miasma of self-doubt, regret and resignation. “Don’t I just know how to fuck things up” he sings, almost mantra-like. It’s very British, this gentle and almost whimsical self-deprecation, but unless you’re seeking a homeopathic remedy – in which like cures like – for you own despair, this might be an album to Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Barbra Streisand has given her blessing to Where We Fall (Backwards Dog Records), an album of six covers and five original songs. She wrote to her 1.8 million Instagram followers: "[Jason] just gave me his new album […] and it stopped me in my tracks. His sound, his soul, his musicality. I’m sooo proud to be his mama!" Streisand’s son Jason Gould is also the "true" son of Elliott Gould – as opposed to Ross and Monica from Friends, who are merely his fictional children in his role of Jack Geller, a "pater simulatus" with enduring celebrity status in his own right.
There you have it: at Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Leisure Process issued four singles between March 1982 and May 1983. Signed to Epic Records, the electropop-inclined duo was primed for success. Debut 45 “Love Cascade” was Radio 1 DJ Peter Powell’s record of the week. At the other end of the coolness spectrum, John Peel also played the single. A Leisure Process Peel session was recorded on 10 March 1982.Another factor feeding into the perception Leisure Process was ready for take off was the identity of their producer: Martin Rushent. He was integral to shaping British pop of the period. His work with Altered Images, The Human League and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The first live performance at the inaugural Riga Music Week is by Saucējas (pictured above). This seven-piece vocal ensemble is avowedly Latvian. Formed in 2003 at the Latvian Academy of Culture, their singing, though polyphonic, allows space for solo lines within the framework of the collective voice. Drones and rounds are incorporated. A kinship with runo song is clear. In traditional costume, they embody an aspect of Mother Latvia: that this country wants to celebrate its traditions, ensuring they are not lost.
Saucējas are tremendously powerful. Experiencing them at Riga Music Week’s Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Implosion is a purely instrumental, collaborative album of cinematic, dystopian sounds from dubstepper and extreme electronica experimentalist the Bug and his pal Ghost Dubs. However, rather than working on the same tracks together, as could be implied, they have each applied their production know-how to alternate tunes on the two discs that make up this recording.
That isn’t to say that the sounds on Implosion swing from one flavour to another and back again. This is an album with a singular vision that is consistently eerie and sinister and has much in common with early 1990s ambient Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s really interesting to see how Amy Winehouse’s legacy continues to reverberate – and not just through endlessly repeated iconography or the tragedy-for-sale machine that’s built around her but musically too. Even rapper Little Simz namechecks and musically nods to her, and her unique update of Billie Holiday’s tone has been passed on to one degree or another to singers like Lola Young, Yazmin Lacey – and especially Celeste.Not that Celeste is a copy of anyone by any means: her voice is very much her own with its own strengths and mannerisms, and her gothic cabaret-tinged style and Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Mavis Staples, the woman to whom a young Bob Dylan proposed marriage when they met at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival and whose voice he has described as his “favourite voice”. Mavis Staples, who announced her retirement in 2023 and then realised she still had “work” to do, even after more than 75 years on the road. Mavis Staples, sole survivor of the Staple Singers, founded by Roebuck “Pops” Staples, a friend of Martin Luther King Jr who committed his family to the civil rights struggle and toured throughout the Jim Crow south – the whole family was once arrested in Memphis after Pops was Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s weird, right? We’ve somehow stumbled into a world where, for all we’re told that algorithms homogenise music, actually more people than ever are exposed to very, very odd and abstract soundmaking.There’s new age gong baths at even the most normie health spas. There’s a kajillion hours of “relaxation music” flooding streaming services from who knows where, a lot of it just drones and/or modulating white noise. There’s the sound design of scores by the likes of Hildur Guðnadóttir, Daniel Lopatin, Cristobal Tapia De Veer that reach millions in surround sound via movies, games and prestige Read more ...