Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 13 May 2022. Decca Classics has released Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä’s debut album Sibelius, a complete cycle of the Jean Sibelius’s symphonies, plus the tone poem Tapiola and 3 Late Fragments. Mäkelä directs the Oslo Philharmonic, an orchestra with…
Melbourne’s Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever is a band that has the appearance of following an older music model. I believe with their third long player, Endless Rooms, that model continues to pay large dividends. Artist development is pretty much a thing of the past these days but even with the success of their 2018 debut,…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 6 May 2022. Headful of Sugar follows New York-based trio Sunflower Bean navigating the agony and ecstasy of contemporary American life. “Tomorrow is not promised, no tour is promised, no popularity is promised, no health or money is promised,”…
Soprano Stacey Alleaume is almost ethereal in a scintillating performance as Violetta Valery in Giuseppe Verdi’s fraught, emotion-charged, love story La Traviata (which translates to The Fallen Woman). Her pure voice reaches remarkable highs as she dominates the stage in a bravura showing. Violetta is a Parisian courtesan and the life of every party. Recently returned from…
(watch my moves), the ninth studio album from Kurt Vile if you include his collaboration with Courtney Barnett on 2017’s Lotta Sea Lice, finds the folk/rock singer-songwriter guitarist in now familiar territory. A traditionally laid-back creator of jangly guitar rock, Vile used some of the pandemic shutdown to build a home studio, OKV Central, which…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 29 April 2022. Emotional Eternal, the third studio album from Melody’s Echo Chamber, is a deeply human collection of songs full of prolonged moments of sonic transcendence – a record that clearly exhibits its maturity but still regards the…
Even if you haven’t loved every step on the journey with Weezer, you have to be impressed by composer/bandleader Rivers Cuomo’s work ethic and high-quality output. Frankly, I was less than enamoured with the mega-buzz that accompanied the band’s cover of “Africa” by Toto than say, the original the first time around. But not only…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 22 April 2022. On his latest project, singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Particle Kid (J. Micah Nelson) pulls listeners down the rabbit hole to experience the music he’s been making over the past five years. His self-described “experimental future-folk solo…
Unquestionably one of the most talented singers on the planet (not to overlook her many other creative endeavours), it is hard to believe that Barbra Streisand turns 80 on 24th April. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) and Live Nation thought it was only fitting that they put on a special tribute show to mark the occasion. They…
When Calexico’s primary members and writing team, Joey Burns and John Convertino convened at the home studio of their keyboard player Sergio Mendoza last summer it may have seemed unlikely that the rock press would be discussing an 18 year-old album track off their Feast of Wire album by the end of 2021. Turns out…
