He’s had a most curious career, has Anthony Moore. Now settled in Hastings, he spent decades living an itinerant life across Europe; a member of one of pop’s great trios, Slapp Happy, and a prodigious collaborator, he also seems to value having space and time to work alone. One gets the feeling Moore’s keen both to let some old songs home to roost – On Beacon Hill has him revisiting material from his recorded history with new musician friends – and to push ever forward, with new trios like AKA and OBTRAM3.
Indeed, it can be hard to trace the complex routes Moore has pursued over the decades. After dropping out of art school in Newcastle in the late ’60s, he travelled to the Hebrides, where a chance meeting with experimental film…
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East Side Confessions is KB Bayley’s third album, and it has a delightful melancholy feel to it. It feels sparse yet layered, mostly thanks to his excellent lap steel guitar playing, which is quite stunning and is accompanied delightfully by several guests who lift his playing even further. It mixes six original songs with four interpretations, the most unusual one of which is his version of the Korgis hit ‘Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime’. He has completely changed the feeling of what was a pretty ordinary ’70s song into something quite enigmatic and far more appealing.
‘Don’t Let the Rain Fall on My Face’ has an intense Southern swamp feel to it. It relates to the last words and reflections of a dying man, someone being hanged, “They are putting up…
Daylight Heart Moonlight Soul is the first album from Belfast-based Slow Autumn, although they have previously released a couple of singles, ‘Wash Me in the Fading Light’ and ‘Lean into the Night’. They say their music is for fans of Wilco, Jason Isbell, and John Moreland, and this is a good starting point, though it is a little gentler in reality. It is laid-back americana, with, for example, the lead guitar, piano and keyboard heard in many tracks not being pushed to the fore. The melodies and choruses in the songs are good, and the relaxed sound is a pleasure to listen to. You can imagine that they would give a live audience a decent night out.
The band say that they are influenced by Dylan, and you can hear this in some of…
Germany’s Bear Family Records deserves plaudits for compiling and releasing exhaustive box sets from some of the best-known figures in early country and rock music. But the reissue label warrants at least as much praise for unearthing and taking a chance on superlative material that most listeners have never even heard of, much less heard.
A perfect example of this is the new Rich-R-Tone Folk Star Story, which fills 12 CDs and has a playing time of more than 14 hours. It collects records released between 1946 and 1954 by Rich-R-Tone, a small, independent Johnson City, Tennessee, label, and its Folk Star subsidiary. The box comes with a coffee table–sized, 144-page hardcover…
Radio Tarifa were one of the great Spanish bands of the ’90s, their blend of Spanish, North African and medieval styles winning deserved international success. Benjamin Escoriza played a key role with his rough, smoky and emotional singing, prior to the band breaking up in 2006. He sadly passed 13 years ago, but Tarifa are back, revived by surviving members, multi-instrumentalists Faín Sánchez Dueñas and Vincent Molino, and helped by 15 other musicians, including five singers. Together, they create a patchily impressive affair.
The exuberant title-track features vocals recorded by Escoriza back in 2004, while the best of the new songs sound more Spanish than North African, with compelling vocals from the flamenco-influenced Javier Castrillón, and a stately…
An expanded CD reissue of Black Rain’s Obliteration Bliss, originally released on cassette via Downwards in 2023.
Degraded, faded cities now empty of people. You can hear household appliances in the kitchens still talking, but only to each other.
The phrases are distorted, unclear; broken English, Japanese and a few Korean and Chinese automated voices, syllables, shopping lists, play lists for dinner and recipes.
Somewhere one of the machines is dialled in on an isolated pre Buddhist monk chant, distant like from a high cliff meditation cell. The flow of the wide, long Black Mother River Kali Gandaki below them. Here is Obliteration Bliss A world in a flash of light. The world running faster and faster.
The National brings an abundance of energy for a brooding, middle-aged indie rock band, as evidenced on their new live album, Rome.
The 21-track, two-LP album — recorded in concert at the Parco della Musica auditorium in Italy’s capital in June — is a fan-friendly sing-along that strings together some of the best sounds of their 25-year career.
Eight of the band’s 10 studio albums are represented in Rome, releasing Friday from this Ohio-born and New York-based quintet fronted by the gravel-voiced Matt Berninger and fueled by two sets of brothers: Aaron and Bryce Dessner and Bryan and Scott Devendorf.
The opener, “Runaway,” is one of a handful of deeper cuts, this one from the lyrically dreary…
By any measurement, it has been a hectic few years for GA-20. Since the two guitar/drum (bass-free) trio burst out of Boston’s blues scene with 2019s frills-free debut, the band has gone through a major reconstruction.
First drummers changed, but co-founding guitarist/singer/songwriter Pat Faherty leaving to form Canyon Lights was a major shakeup. That left lone initial member Matthew Stubbs to recruit singer/guitarist Cody Nilsen, maintaining the group’s name and mission; specifically, creating unvarnished blues heavily influenced by Hound Dog Taylor, Otis Rush, Junior Wells, Howlin’ Wolf and other legends of the genre whose sound was and remains raw and real. All this upheaval within five years would sink many other bands.
‘Cerulean R’ is the expanded 15th anniversary reissue of first Baths record, ‘Cerulean’.
The “R” in the title refers to the tagline “Reissue, Remix, Resurface, Remaster”. The Release itself is split into 3 constituent parts: “Reissue” LP1 is a reissue of the original record. “Remix” LP2 contains 8 unheard remixes created in 2010-2011, around the original release.“Re surface” LP3 contains 8 unsung Baths songs.
It’s fitting that Baths’ debut album Cerulean is on Anticon, as Will Wiesenfeld’s music blends glitchy, hip-hop-tinged beats with delicate atmospheres. Cerulean sounds like the missing link between Bibio, Flying Lotus, Toro y Moi, and Dilla, to name a few, but Wiesenfeld has his own sound within that realm. He keeps his intricate…
Leif swears off the ambient house of 2021’s ‘9 Airs’ and rediscovers his childhood guitar on Collide, visualising a shattered kosmische approximation that’ll surely speak to fans of Shackleton or James Holden.
If there’s a thread that links all of Welsh producer Lief Knowles’ albums, it’s memory. ‘Collide’ doesn’t aesthetically sound much like its predecessor, but there’s a shared sense of communion with the past. On ‘9 Airs’, Knowles attempted to rework old melodies into new compositions and on ‘Collide’, his decaying Aria Pro II electric guitar is used to recapture an era that’s slipping away. What sets this one apart is its commitment to the concept; Knowles has circled the dancefloor for years, muddling his foggy ambient tent-friendly…
After three-years in the making, Fred again.. has released the final instalment of his highly acclaimed USB project offering a whopping 34-track collection of songs.
Fred’s USB album originally began in 2022, featuring tracks like ‘Baby Again’, ‘Rumble’ alongside Skrillex & Flowdan, ‘Jungle’, ‘leavemealone’ with Baby Keem and ‘stayinit’ with Lil Yachty, as well as remixes from Nia Archives, HAAi and Rico Nasty; an impressive showcase of the diverse collaborators Fred surrounds himself with.
Fred has been teasing this forthcoming new material for weeks, including at small club shows across the UK and throughout the live set he recorded overlooking Naples’ Piazza del Plebiscito on a fan’s roof.
Lauded on release as Stornoway’s most expansive and confident work, Bonxie remains a hymn to connection, ecology, and the beauty of life. This expanded edition includes previously unreleased B-side tracks from the original recording sessions, as well as some of their well-known unplucked versions of tracks on the album.
Bonxie is Stornoway’s boldest and most outward-looking record, an album infused with a sense of wonder for the natural world and humanity’s place within it.
Produced by Gil Norton (Pixies, Foo Fighters, Echo & The Bunnymen), with a contribution from Craig Potter (Elbow), the songs are studded with field recordings of birds (20 species appear across the album), weaving them into melodies…
Damaged Goods is proud to present re-issues of one of thee great collaborations of our times…
Thee Headcoats Sect is the inevitable intersection of two generations of mad-hatted Punk R & B misfits with musical and philosophical lineage that can be traced back over more than 30 years. The Downliners Sect were among the country’s foremost rhythm and blues groups, their most prolific period being the years from 1964 to 1966. As is often the case, they were denied the sort of success they deserved – they were outcasts, too young, too uncouth, and just a tad too eccentric to be accepted by their peers. As the Melody Maker said of their debut album in 1964: ‘forget this one if you want a Happy Christmas, and don’t want to drive all the guests away from your party’.
…includes two bonus tracks “Sittin’ Here (Karizma DJs Dub) and “Sittin’ Here (Peacey Remix).
Coming 15 years after he dazzled the world with his jazz-house album Tourist, Ludovic Navarre returned to his St. Germain moniker with this self-titled 2015 effort, the self-titling being a signal that the project was reborn. It is, at least partially, as rare groove jazz has been replaced by music from Mali, West Africa, along with blues and funky jazz guitars from around the world.
In the case of the highlight “Real Blues,” it is a Lightnin’ Hopkins sample that supplies the blues, while Navarre does his usual — and intoxicating — light house shuffle underneath. Many of the cuts here sound like an Amadou & Mariam release that’s constantly segueing into…
Jan Akkerman in a live setting is a beautiful thing to behold, and on his new record, My Focus: Live Under the Rainbow, you can absorb his technical mastery and tone, where it was born to live – on stage.
Live music needs to offer you something that you cannot get on a studio recording. It’s the sense of freedom and intimacy, wondering how the songs will be played and what the reaction will be. Live concerts give you the tingle where the hair stands up on the back of your neck. “Live audiences give you the tension and responsibility to be creative, for me that’s the challenge I like,” says the iconic Dutch guitarist. After all of these years, you ponder what keeps Jan going out there, night after night. “It’s my love to play for people all around…
Old Rock Stars never die, and judging by Lost In Hollywood Again, they never fade away either. A 77 year old Graham Bonnet is testament to that. Recorded in the legendary Whisky A Go Go, on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, in August last year, Bonnet and band give it their all.
Raw and raucous, you can taste the sweat as it drips from the venue’s ceiling. You can hear every voice in the crowd whooping and hollering as they give it up for each song. Bonnet is clearly welcome here. In reality it’s unvarnished proof of Graham Bonnet’s phenomenal voice. Ok, it’s lost a little of its lustre over the years. But he still climbs the upper slopes and delivers with vigour and indeed, soul. More than that, every note is weighted with a flinty edge of “Look, I’m still here” defiance.
The reissue expands the original 8-track album to 20 tracks in total, including never-before-heard material discovered in White’s personal archives after his death in 2018.
Forty-five years ago, Tony Joe White released an album of what he called “swamp rock” (an amalgam of southern rock, country and blues roots music), and he called it The Real Thang. It was only released on vinyl, it only had eight tracks, and it was not very successful in terms of sales; in fact, it did not gain much attention at all. It was perhaps because White, after some success with well-balanced country blues albums in the ’70s (Homemade Ice Cream, for example), decided to ramp up his songs with a disco beat (that was pretty popular at the time), overlaying…
On her third album as a leader, tenor saxophonist Nicole Glover partners terrifically with bassist Tyrone Allen II and drummer Kayvon Gordon, who can turn on a dime and provide elastic and responsive support.
Collaborating with such versatile players proves liberating for Glover, who’s totally unshackled in these performances. Some know the Portland, Oregon native and current NYC resident as a member of the all-female jazz outfit Artemis or Christian McBride’s Ursa Major, but Glover is no less compelling when the stage is primarily hers. The trio format plays to Glover’s strengths, while variety’s added when cellist Lester St. Louis sits in with the trio on a couple of tracks.
The album title will be familiar to psychologists…
British trumpeter Laura Jurd has been around for a while – her first album came out in 2012 – but remains relatively unknown on these shores. Though young in jazz years (she’s still under 40), she’s worked in a diverse array of modes, from last year’s adventurous session with British legend Paul Dunmall to the amiable rollick of 2022’s aptly titled The Big Friendly Album to her albums with the ECM-minded quartet Dinosaur.
Jurd’s latest leader album, Rites and Revelations deals somewhat in the ceremonial and epiphanic, but it could serve as an awakening to American listeners unfamiliar with her work.
As a trumpeter, bandleader and woman, Jurd may fit the bill for fans of jaimie branch looking to fill the hole left by their untimely passing.
…features 25 bonus tracks — nine studio rarities and 16 live recordings captured by bootlegger Mike Millard at Pink Floyd’s Los Angeles Sports Arena concert on April 26 1975, now receiving its first official release. The live audio has been restored and remastered by Steven Wilson.
…It’s a considerable trove of audiovisual material chronicling the British band’s Herculean task of following up the commercial success of 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which was in the early stages of a staggering multi-year run on the Billboard charts. After mooting a conceptual piece involving “household objects” (heard on the bonus track “Wine Glasses”), Wish You Were Here largely deals with the numbness of absence. “Welcome to the Machine” and “Have a Cigar”…