Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 1 March 2024.
Faye Webster has released her fifth album, Underdressed at the Symphony. The songs on the new album explore the rarely mapped territory of emotional intimacy, where desire and passion are in conflict with comfort, understanding and even platonic love. These themes are found throughout Underdressed at the Symphony, alongside hyper-specific imagery that paints a picture of Webster’s life, like her eBay Purchase history (“eBay Purchase History”) or the physical objects she covets (“Lego Ring”). All of these uniquely Faye thoughts are wrapped in the warm glow of her otherworldly vocals, ever present pedal steel and her cinematic and sweeping string arrangements but also more unpredictable elements like vocoder can be found on the new album.
The Kitchen Dwellers continue their musical evolution as they present their highly anticipated 4th studio album, Seven Devils, via No Coincidence Records. Produced by Grammy-winning Glenn Brown (Billy Strings, Greensky Bluegrass), the ascending Montana quartet continues to redefine the boundaries of bluegrass, folk, and rock. Inspired by Dante’s epic voyage through the Nine Circles of Hell, the album guides the listener through a similar exploration. The Dwellers invite the listener to treat this as a musical journey inward to the self.
Slavonic Dances with the Prague Symphony Orchestra sees Dvořák in good hands. Dvořák’s music is deeply engraved in the DNA of the Prague Symphony Orchestra, who have performed it under conductors of such renown as Jiří Bělohlávek, Charles Mackerras, Václav Neumann, Tomáš Netopil, etc. The new recording, made with Tomáš Brauner, the orchestra’s current music director, draws upon an illustrious interpretation tradition, with its rounded and transparent sound capturing the best qualities of the exquisite Art Nouveau Smetana Hall of the Municipal House in Prague.
On their third studio full-length, Mildlife link microcosmic personal meaning with a macro view from on high. Chorus is the sound of singular entities coalescing into a wondrous whole. It’s harmonious togetherness and celebratory symbiosis. And it’s the band’s ultimate statement of their borderline mystical unity, their unified theory of groove. Following 2020’s Automatic and 2017’s Phase, Chorus arrives as Mildlife’s most optimistic record, serving as a sonic testament to the band’s unwavering adoration for the beguiling realms of 70s psychedelic and cosmic sounds.
Daniel Romano has been busy. Since the release of the massive, singular, La Luna in those long ago days of autumn 2022, full brilliant albums have been made and set aside (maybe two, maybe more), vast landscapes have been crossed and re-crossed, the maps redrawn, songs remade nightly with passion and gusto. Now here arrives Too Hot To Sleep, simultaneously a transcendent document of the spirit, and a swaggering, street level blast of power-pop and Stones-derived rock ‘n’ roll.
The Pheromoans are tenants of an unruly domain. Over the last 18 years the group have evolved from garage rock primitivists to auteurs of their own curious sound; a frothy brew of loose electronics, refractory rock and humdrum musing. Their songs are mutable, capricious, unreliable narrations, often withholding as much as they reveal. Russell Walker’s understated vocal has always been the band’s unifying focus, it is wry, unsparing and wilfully honest. Walker’s lyrics are an observational tour de force, sometimes droll, yet often tipping over into unlikely pathos. Now The Pheromoans return with lucky album number 13, entitled Wyrd Psearch.
What drives Amaro Freitas in life is experience. In 2020 the pianist, who hails from the Northeastern Brazilian coastal city of Recife, was drawn to Manaus, located in the Amazon basin, some 4600 kilometers to the west. His experience in that lush wilderness led him into a new realm of musical creation, one rooted in magic and possibility and tempered by a sense of stewardship for the earth’s bounties and a connection to the Sateré Mawé indigenous community. Crucial to the experience for Freitas was the maintenance of a true exchange of knowledge. According to Freitas, in the resulting album, Y’Y (pronounced: eey-eh, eey-eh), he pays “homage to the forest, especially the Amazon Forest, and the rivers of Northern Brazil: a call to live, feel, respect, and care for nature, recognizing it as our ancestor.”
Other reviews you might enjoy:
- New music round-up (for w/e 11 October 2024)
- New music round-up (for w/e 11 August 2023)
- New music round-up (for w/e 7 June 2024)
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television
