Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 11 February 2022.
Ride guitarist and songwriter Andy Bell has released his second solo album, Flicker. Written almost as a conversation with his teenage self, it follows the triumphant solo debut that was 2020’s The View From Halfway Down and was recorded by Andy with Gem Archer and mastered by Heba Kadry. Stylistically, the four sides of Flicker take in everything from modern psychedelia to finger-picked folk, whimsical baroque pop, and Byrdsian 12-string beauty. It’s a breathtaking array and makes it even more abundantly clear that Andy has entered a purple patch in his songwriting, hitting a new velocity in contrast to his initial inhibitions about becoming a solo artist. He gradually overcame these after the passing of David Bowie in 2016, with the Thin White Duke’s bountiful 50 years of music providing inspiration from beyond the grave.
To mark the 300th anniversary of the publication of Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier, Julien Libeer had the idea of presenting it in an unusual light: here he initiates a dialogue in which Bach’s major-key prelude-and-fugue pairs ‘converse’ with later pieces (in the corresponding minor keys) by composers who, in their own way, have built on the advances Johann Sebastian made in his foundational undertaking. Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninov, Ligeti, and Schoenberg are all part of the conversation with the Leipzig Cantor in this intricate play of mirrors.
“I was born in the North Carolina mud,” says Jamil Rashad, better known as Boulevards. His fourth album, Electric Cowboy: Born in Carolina Mud, is caked in the soil where he grew up, mired in the muck of that place — not stuck but freed. Grounded in personal experience and haunted by personal demons, Electric Cowboy is an album that reaches out, that embraces the world, that mixes the confessional and the communal. But the dominant sound—the dominant mindset—is funk: gritty, warm, weird, charismatic. Rashad once again composed and recorded with Blake Rhein, guitarist for Durand Jones & the Indications, after they had worked so well together on 2020’s Brother! EP.
Pianist and composer Ethan Iverson makes his Blue Note Records debut with the remarkable Every Note Is True, an engaging and evocative date featuring a masterful new trio with bassist Larry Grenadier and legendary drummer Jack DeJohnette. The album is an opportunity for Iverson to look back at and expand upon his own musical history as he revisits the pop/rock influenced jazz style of The Bad Plus, the influential trio that the pianist co-founded in 2000.
Acclaimed country-soul group The Delines have released their new album The Sea Drift. The Delines are the current outfit for acclaimed novelist and songwriter Willy Vlautin, who first came to prominence with his band Richmond Fontaine, and who has published six acclaimed novels, the most recent of which, The Night Comes In, was published by Faber & Faber in 2021. Love Police proudly toured The Delines in 2014 when they played the first Out On The Weekend Festival. Willy has also appeared at the Melbourne Writers Festival since then.
After two albums of home recording, New Zealand quartet Mild Orange finally dove into a proper studio for their aptly titled third LP, looking for Space. The results are spacious indeed, wrapping the band’s leisurely dream pop in a warm shroud of reverb while giving each individual element plenty of room to shine. But this record wasn’t without its challenges: Frontman/producer Josh Mehrtens battled pneumonia and pleurisy midway through, informing his lyrical themes in the process.
L’Ecole de la Caz is the new album from Melbourne sound artist Aarti Jadu. Described as “an alien folk album”, L’Ecole de la Caz explores displacement, belonging and isolation with stories that negotiate the material and the ethereal. A time capsule of a home lost; as one moves in multiple directions of change, travelling across, ascending, and transcending. Their work is formed from a culmination of self enquiry, existentialism, experimentation and research. Jadu threads together a journey with sounds of minimal classical, distorted folk beats, and processed wordless melodies. Their set revolves around the interchange between digital processing / recording, synthesizers and organic voice. In these progressive song structures, Jadu draws from pop music and cinema, creating motifs and trance-like repetitions.
Other reviews you might enjoy:
- New music round-up (for w/e 19 May 2023)
- New music round-up (for w/e 1 July 2022)
- New music round-up (for w/e 13 January 2023)
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television
