singer-songwriters
Thomas H. Green
London-based singer-songwriter Hannah Scott has warned her next song may reduce us to tears. It is, she says, inspired by events following the death of beloved father. The undertaker advised her, and her sister, that it wasn’t really done for women to bear the coffin. They considered this and ignored it. The resulting song, over a simply repeating piano motif played on her Roland keyboard, is called “Carry You Out” (“You carried me into this world/I will carry you out”). I look around and multiple hands are brushing at faces that silently stream with tears. Hannah Scott deals in weepies. But Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Picture this: framing the stage are two pearlescent clouds which, throughout the performance, gently pulsate with flickering light. Behind them on a giant screen is a spinning globe, its seas twinkling like a million stars.Suddenly, this magical image is rent asunder. Thunder and lightning shake the heavens and torrential rain cascades down in stair rods. Spotlights flash and dance through billowing smoke while Laurie Anderson serenades the tempest on her violin and Kenny Wollesen lashes symbols and drums into a clamorous frenzy. The Apocalypse!DEATHLY HUSH.Anderson breaks the silence. “Hi, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tucker Zimmerman is singing a number called “Don’t Go Crazy (Go in Peace)”. At 83, he performs sitting down. Surrounded by support band Iji, who act as his pick-up, he approaches the song in a whispery, affable voice. At the start of his set he was assisted to his seat but, knees aside, he’s not frail. He’s just laid back, a Sixties original, strumming gently. “Don’t go crazy,” he sings, “Go with the flow, go in peace.” Although he’s advised us to not think about politics, it’s hard not to. Yet his hour-long show soothes, offers a window into some of what’s best about America.Tucker is one of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Chuck Prophet speaks the old language of rock’n’roll as if it’s bright and new. His long gone band Green On Red were R.E.M.’s Eighties peers, and as rock’s cultural tide has receded, his loyalty to its spirit of liberty, askance at authority and place with those clinging to or embracing the bottom rung has become a natural act of faith.Wake the Dead is Prophet’s first album since his recovery from cancer, and splices his Mission Express band with ¿Qiensave?, Californian practitioners of cumbia, the Columbian sound which proved his musical light in dark times. He’s sought fresh inflections and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For many performers, flirting with death is a pose or a distant metaphor, or simply don’t-give-a-damn insouciance. This is not the case with Halsey on her fifth album. She’s been assaulted, in recent years, by a range of serious illnesses and conditions, of which Lupus and a T-cell disorder are the latest. The Great Impersonator spends time staring down the barrel of her mortality, viewed through the prism of motherhood. It is moving and musically impressive.Halsey is a global star who’s used the pop platform to spring in interesting directions. For instance, she created her last album with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHHannah Scott Absence of Doubt (Fancourt Music)Sometimes a singer comes along who’s not stylistically my thing at all, but their voice has a quality that wrenches, reaches inside, beyond usual taste judgements. For me, a good example would be Kirsty MacColl who, excepting the hits, I came to later in life. There is a similarly direct potency to the voice of Suffolk-raised, London-based singer Hannah Scott. Hers is a crystal-clear instrument, beautiful in the classical sense, words crisply enunciated, but also riven with whatever it is in her life that’s made her who she is. 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 ...
Joe Muggs
Beatrice “beabadoobee” Laus provides strong backup for the common argument that, particularly in the mainstream, genre is no longer particularly important. From the outset, she has consistently dissolved the mainstream/indie binary, and pulled from a grab-bag of big time and obscure influences across decades while maintaining a distinct songwriting personality of her own.In this regard she resembles The 1975 (whose label she is signed to, and who have previously lent songwriting and production to her work) and Taylor Swift (who she has supported on tour), although one might argue that she’s Read more ...
peter.quinn
Meshell Ndegeocello's groundbreaking new album No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin takes you on a musical journey which defies categorisation.Eight years in the making and set for release on 2 August – Baldwin's centennial – the album’s origins date back to Ndegeocello’s 2016 musical and theatrical tribute to the iconic writer and activist, "Can I Get a Witness? The Gospel of James Baldwin", commissioned and produced by Harlem Stage through its WaterWorks programme.A nuanced exploration of race, sexuality, religion and other recurring themes explored in Baldwin’s canon, which takes its Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the world of popular music, tangential connections to success are profile-raising. They offer an immediate connection to an artist. It is beholden on me, then, despite not knowing it when I first enjoyed this album, to mention that rising Grammy Award-winning Americana star Molly Tuttle appears. She is guitarist-vocalist Sullivan Tuttle’s sister. It speaks to the solid pleasures of City of Glass by Santa Cruz quartet AJ Lee & Blue Summit that the song in question, “I Can’t Find You at All”, written by the Tuttles' dad Jack, is not outstandingly ahead of the restSinging mandolin-player Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Madeleine Peyroux made her name with her second album, 2004’s Careless Love. It consists almost completely of cover versions, delivered in a quiet, jazz-bluesey shuffle redolent of singers from the 1930s. She’s never flown as high again but has maintained a decent career, mostly mining similar sonic territory. Her new album, and first in six years, does not wander far from the path, but is all originals, written with regular collaborator Jon Herington. Despite being spiked with songs that have something to say, it’s a deliciously lazy summer listen.Contrary to a common perception, Peyroux is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I feel ashamed because I couldn’t become the man that you always hoped I’d become.” The line is repeated during “Father,” The Art of the Lie’s third track. After this, there’s “Mother and Son,” “Daddy” and the allusive “The Child Catcher”. Parent-child relations, from either perspective, are key to John Grant’s sixth solo album. Specifically, how these have rippled through his life to form his present-day self.The US-born though now Iceland national’s follow-up to 2021’s Boy from Michigan is not just about interpreting growing up in a context which would not accept him as gay. The scope is Read more ...