Contemporary classical composer Elliot Cole debuts five new compositions in Journals, Vol. 1. The album is crisp, clocking in just shy of 20 minutes, and its stirring performances make it seem to pass by even faster. Joined by cellist Gabriel…
If you’re looking for someone to blame for the new album by Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine, A Beginner’s Mind, blame Bryce Dessner of The National. After all, it was his house in New York’s Catskills mountains where the two…
From the opening blast of horns, Ana Egge establishes that her new album Between Us is going to be a bit different than her 11 previous ones. That shouldn’t really come as a surprise. Egge has constantly found new pathways, this one…
When a band changes its name there’s always the feeling they’re desperate for a new start, yet nothing could be farther from the truth for Watchhouse. As Mandolin Orange they had managed to create a respected body of work, on that…
Following up 2019’s breakthrough The Big Freeze, Stevenson’s sixth studio album finds her facing up to a friend’s unspecified but “absolutely unthinkable” trauma, against the backdrop of first-time motherhood and the wild emotions of a couple of years like no…
One of the last gigs I went to pre-lockdown, in November 2019, was the magnificent Holy Moly and the Crackers in York. On the merchandise table afterwards, alongside the standard array of CDs and T-shirts, was a solitary copy of…
Josienne Clarke has fought to be given the credit her work has deserved for years. It’s been exhausting and she admits that she had to be explicit in explaining how much her name and talent warranted recognition, as if she…
Conor O’Brien’s gradual inching from his acoustic folk roots since 2010’s Mercury-nominated debut Becoming A Jackal is fully realised in his kaleidoscopic fifth studio album. Recorded with a band pre-pandemic, it’s intriguing to wonder how much Fever Dreams morphed into its lysergic final shapes…
“I don’t accept any limitations as a writer,” Laura Nyro said and no words have ever been truer, with the proof on display in the eight-disc collection of American Dreamer. The four albums she released from 1967 to 1970, (More Than a New Discovery, Eli…
Dot Allison will always be identified with the band that initially launched her career, One Dove, whose Andy Weatherall-produced album Morning Dove White became a downbeat electronic classic. Other collaborations include Kevin Shields, Hal David, Paul Weller, Pete Doherty and…