Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 12 August 2022.
The Voices of Creation are a community-based choir led by vocalist, songwriter, arranger, producer and mainstay of the Los Angeles scene Jimetta Rose. Made up of a multigenerational group of mainly non-professional singers backed by some of the city’s finest musicians, their music marries hip strains of gospel with layers of jazz, soul and funk. While aspects of their music might recall Kamasi Washington, The Staple Singers or Sly Stone, Jimetta’s unique vision has resulted in new spiritually-charged forms of music whose whole-hearted embrace of love, joy and peace act as sonic healing balms for the soul. How Good It Is, the new album from Jimetta Rose and the Voices of Creation, is out now on Day Dreamer Records.
What happens when cosmic Americana embraces ambient, and vice versa? That’s the question at the center of I Survived, It’s Over, the third album from Nashville multi-instrumentalist Michael “Rich” Ruth. Ruth, who made his first appearance over a decade ago with the sprawling, brass-amended psychedelic rock band Kansas Bible Company, spends most of his days adding noisy guitars and synths to albums by a loose network of Music City and Bible Belt musicians who occupy the weirder corners of the jam band underground. Ruth’s own albums embrace ambient music—both the kosmische of Eno/Cluster as well as the processed melodic lines of Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes. But Ruth works best when embracing a more broad, complex palette, writing music that pairs odd textures and melodies, bringing them into songs stacked with strange harmonies and juxtapositions. His 2019 debut Calming Signals was already full of easy-on-the-ears synth acceptance, and fraught with a narrative tension that never let things get too easy.
Kaidi Tatham is back with a brand new 12-track album entitled Don’t Rush The Process, now available via First World Records. This is Kaidi’s fourth solo album under his own name, following on from An Insight To All Minds (2021), It’s A World Before You (2018), and In Search Of Hope (re-pressed in 2020). Tatham is a legendary multi-instrumentalist born in the Midlands and based in Belfast. Once dubbed “the UK’s Herbie Hancock” by Benji B, he’s a virtuoso on the keys and a true innovator in sound production as one of the original creators of the Broken Beat sound.
Marking the first album of their career to be produced by frontman John Rzeznik, Chaos in Bloom finds the Goo Goo Dolls at the top of their game and continuing to constantly evolve just as they have for nearly four decades together. Consisting of 10 tracks, Chaos in Bloom is an album of biting sarcasm, stadium-ready choruses, and the type of spear-sharp songwriting that’s led them to becoming one of the most influential alternative rock groups of all time. The album is out now on Warner Music.
Nico Muhly is one of today’s most sought-after composers. On Stranger, tenor Nicholas Phan presents world premiere recordings of three of the composer’s major works: Impossible Things for tenor, solo violin and orchestra; Lorne Ys My Likinge for countertenor, tenor and piano; and Stranger for tenor and string quartet. A song cycle exploring the American immigrant experience, the title work was expressly written for Phan, who gave its acclaimed world premiere performance two years ago with Brooklyn Rider in January 2020 as part of his Emerging Voices project at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. For Stranger, Muhly juxtaposes settings of accounts of immigration through Ellis Island with those of texts protesting the United States’ Chinese Exclusion policies of the late-19th century. Phan describes his encounters with Muhly’s music as being both “artistically and personally transformative,” and recalls the Stranger’s premiere as the first time he felt his identity had been respectfully represented in a work classical music.
West Coast Hip-Hop icon The Game drops his tenth studio album DRILLMATIC Heart vs. Game, out now via 100 Entertainment. The 31-track project boasts heavyweight features from Kanye West, Blxst, Moneybagg Yo, NBA Youngboy, Big Sean, Diddy, Rick Ross and many more. With the release of DRILLMATIC Heart vs. Game, The Game continues to be a driving fixture in Hip-Hop.
WAAX have released their highly anticipated second studio album At Least I’m Free via Dew Process. Awash in samples and programmed beats as well as gargantuan riffs and, of course, frontwoman Maz DeVita’s spine-tingling howl, At Least I’m Free telegraphs the band’s ambition to step beyond ‘Australian rock’ and into a weirder, wilder landscape.
Other reviews you might enjoy:
- New music round-up (for w/e 26 July 2024)
- New music round-up (for w/e 24 March 2023)
- New music round-up (for w/e 9 August 2024)
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television
