Clémentine March is a French British singer and multi-instrumentalist based in London, and if a first thing that comes to your mind is a possible connection to Stereolab, formally there isn’t one. Musically, though March’s latest album Powder Keg has all the trademarks of a great new Stereolab album.
Oh, and March is not a copyist, but like Stereolab, her musical style is so hard to pin down, as she veers all over the place, from sixties pop musings whether it is the psych pop or French yé-yé, or Brazilian Bossa to krautrock and anywhere else that she fancied at that moment.
And she does it with some great flair, whether she takes on the instrumentation herself or whether accompanied by quite an excellent…
Category: chamber pop
As an artist who tries to present your art in more forms than one, there are so many obstacles in front of you, particularly if you try to present a certain concept or concept through it. It not only requires a ton of talent but also hours of hard work to make something sensible out of it.
Producer, singer, rapper, and visual artist Quadeca is one such artist who started out by presenting his work through YouTube, whose previous work which slowly took him to a spot at last year’s Coachella Music Festival. Now, Quadeca is coming with his latest concept album and a feature film Vanisher, Horizon Scraper, through which he presents a concept, as he puts it, “about a man who sets sail alone in search of freedom but is unknowingly drifting toward destruction”.
James Walsh’s It’s All Happening is a masterclass in quiet intensity. The Starsailor frontman has always had a knack for turning fragile and thoughtful moments into rousing anthems for the band. With his latest solo offering, he strips everything back to raw emotion – stripped of spectacle, It’s All Happening is Walsh at his most intimate: tender, precise, and quietly electrifying.
Every track feels lived-in, the kind of songs that could only come from someone with James’ songwriting pedigree. Following 2023’s Coming Good, Walsh continues his reflective solo journey, exploring love, heartbreak, and the empowering triumphs of self-discovery.
Written, produced, and performed by James, the album flourishes in its restraint.
Composer/producer Paul Russell (Axes/Tough Glove) returns with Thank You, the fourth album to be released by his Human Pyramids project. Featuring members of Axes, Suicide Bid and Modern Studies, the album was recorded all over the world and mastered by Alan Douches (Sufjan Stevens/Animal Collective).
…The twelve-strong ensemble, anchored by Russell, still pulls out all the stops. Almost every track is a party, with generous servings of brass and strings. Guitar, accordion, marimba, vibraphone and hammered dulcimer fill in the buffet. The music’s propulsive energy keeps the spirts high; the opening track (titled “Shut Down,” since the music stops and restarts in the second half) eases the listener in with…
Witches, Templars, gargoyles — all are roll called in “Town of the Castle,” a jaunty medieval pop song that plays like an overture to John Southworth‘s marvelous 15th album. Southworth is an Englishman who for most of his career has called Canada home. Many of his poetic, surrealist records are set against North American backdrops, but on The Red Castle, Europe is his muse. After bearing witness to his father’s medically assisted death, the singer/songwriter took himself overseas for what became a kind of spiritual ramble through the Old World. With its impeccable production and orchestral adornments, The Red Castle is consistent with much of Southworth’s late-period catalog, though there is a poignancy here that bleeds through his signature abstraction.
There’s a thread of trauma running through most of The Antlers’ albums, and their latest is no exception. Yet while the band’s earlier work, particularly 2009’s Hospice and 2011’s Burst Apart, explored the psychological toll of distress on an individual level, Blight takes a more global approach. Singer, guitarist, and songwriter Peter Silberman here mourns the degradation of the natural world through waste, pollution, and sheer apathy. There are plenty of ways that theme could go wrong, but Silberman manages not to sound doctrinaire or heavy-handed on these nine songs, even as he quietly excoriates a culture of convenience that has chosen to overlook the consequences of next-day delivery and cheap mass-production. Mostly, he sounds…
The opening of Prize Hunter, the lead song and single from Emma Pollock’s first album in 9 years, is sung over a sprightly bass line that belies a rich compendium that is the songwriter’s most personal and expressive collection to date. Recorded over five years against a backdrop of personal tumult, family grief and self-revelations, Begging The Night To Take Hold documents hardships but also points to glints of light in the darkness.
Recorded during and immediately after the Covid pandemic at Chemikal Underground’s Chem19, Begging The Night To Take Hold takes the artist’s musical imagination and develops it into a baroque landscape, an invocation of physical and psychic place. With longterm collaborator Paul Savage in the producer and drummer’s chair…
In 2023, while the singer/songwriter/composer was touring in support of the previous year’s Better in the Shade, Patrick Watson woke up after a show in Atlanta and couldn’t speak. It turned out that he had hemorrhaged a vocal cord while singing. Uncertain, per his doctors, if he’d ever be able to speak or sing again, he continued to work on music in the months to follow and eventually had the idea to invite some of his favorite singers to perform the songs he was writing. With Watson slowly regaining limited use of his voice after several months of silence, the resulting set of hushed chamber pop, Uh Oh, consists of two solo songs and nine duets, each with a different guest vocalist. Using only two microphones and a laptop, Watson traveled to places like Paris, Mexico City…
…Limited Edition Digital Album includes the full album, album instrumentals, and two demos.
…Deluxe includes the bonus disc ‘Live in Paris & London’.
As its title may suggest, Neil Hannon’s 13th studio album as The Divine Comedy is a mile away from jaunty songs about woodsheds and National Express coaches. After the joy and whimsy of his soundtrack to Wonka, Rainy Sunday Afternoon finds him far more contemplative and wistful.
It’s certainly Hannon’s most personal album to date. There are songs about family, loss and grief, as well as pot shots at a world seemingly falling to pieces around us. Bolstered by some truly gorgeous orchestrations by long-term Hannon collaborator Andrew Skeet, even a simple piano…
As the pandemic loomed over London in 2020, Patrick Wolf was living in a Lewisham tower block where he cut the desolate figure of the Arthurian Fisher King. A wounded protector surveying his barren kingdom, gripping onto the Holy Grail of his voice as he drank himself into oblivion. Neither alive nor dead, a man very firmly on the edge.
Twenty years before, when Wolf first emerged, he was seen as the next break-out star alongside Amy Winehouse. His first two albums Lycanthropy and Wind in the Wire were an almighty deluge of high-octane fucked-up acid folk, cut with a classically trained balladry that absorbed a cosmos of instruments and was supremely suffused by Wolf’s baritone. Others elsewhere such as Animal Collective may have been playing…
Philippe Cohen Solal and Mike Lindsay have worked together to create a phenomenal concept album – Outsider – a musical and visual extrapolation of Henry Darger’s work, his obsession with the weather, his tormented Christian faith, deceptively naive paintings and lyrics to songs, that were never before set to music. The record has been 5 years in the making and is the brainchild of Philippe Cohen Solal, producer and composer who co-founded Gotan Project. Solal has been given exclusive, unprecedented access to Henry Darger’s estate comprising lyrics, poems and visual art and has brought together an epic collaboration with Mike Lindsay from acid folk group Tunng, Hannah Peel and the vocals of Adam Glover.
…Darger’s visual art has been much celebrated.
Those unfamiliar with the name Maia Friedman may actually know her from at least one of the collaborations or indie bands to her credit, including the Partisan Records collective Bobby, the short-lived dream pop outfit Uni Ika Ai, long-running experimental pop project Dirty Projectors, and the soft rock trio Coco. While Friedman is valued as a multi-instrumentalist, her remarkably articulate and soothing voice is an attraction of its own, and, when combined with her lyrical compositional skills, it’s surprising that she didn’t step forward with a solo album until 2022, at least ten years into her career. That’s when she released the highly melodic dream pop LP Under the New Light, her Last Gang Records debut. The follow-up, Goodbye Long Winter Shadow,…
In 2023, at age 73, film director Sally Potter released Pink Bikini, her singer/songwriter debut album. Its songs revolved around her growing up a young female activist and rebel in London during the 1960s. Potter is well known for composing and recording her own film scores — Orlando, The Tango Lesson, The Roads Not Taken among them — and her musical pedigree dates to the 1970s with Lindsay Cooper’s various groups including the Feminist Improvising Group.
Anatomy, from Bella Union, is a song cycle that charts “the passionate love, destructive human behaviours, spiritual longings, physical dependencies and rampant exploitation that make up our turbulent love affair with the planet we inhabit.” She enlisted Marta Salogni as…