Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 13 January 2023.
Yo-Yo Ma’s new album with Emanuel Ax and Leonidas Kavakos, Beethoven for Three: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 5, is available now on Sony Classical. The album presents two of Beethoven’s iconic symphonies in intimate arrangements that maintain the power and immediacy of Beethoven’s orchestral works. Here, Ax, Kavakos, and Ma seek out the most essential elements of Beethoven’s musical language, pairing his second symphony, arranged for trio by Beethoven’s pupil Ferdinand Ries, with his fifth — among the most recognizable pieces in western classical music — in a newly-commissioned arrangement by Colin Matthews.
Jo Meares is a Sydney-based songwriter but he spends a large portion of his time in different locations around the globe, whether it’s Melbourne, France or Berlin, gathering life experiences and inspiration for the impressionistic and cinematic songs that have comprised his previous four albums. Over the last three years, Jo Meares and Anth Dymke (Pony Face) have been undertaking a journey of creative collaboration, sometimes in person but more often than not firing musical ideas, edits and files down high-speed internet lines between Sydney and Melbourne, their respective cities of residence. Dream Hotel is the culmination of Jo Meares and Anth Dymke’s collaborative explorations within their musical partnership over the last three years; taking inspiration, shaping and re- contextualising each others ideas as they built an album’s worth of atmospheric sonic landscapes around Meares’s evocative and poetic songs.
The music of Rozi Plain has always felt like a freeze-frame. A colourful and graceful snapshot of the world, paused, suspended in time, and then gently toyed with, like stepping out of the linear world as we know it. Her new album Prize is out now. Rozi’s signature, free-floating sound was set with her 2015 breakthrough Friend and cemented with 2019’s globally adored What A Boost (‘Like slipping between cotton sheets’ was Pitchfork’s description). Prize builds on both, but takes its cues from elsewhere. By a stretch, it’s Rozi’s most upbeat and daring album to date.
An intriguing element of Michael Feinberg’s superb Criss Cross Records debut is that the leader could easily have titled it “Bassist In The Background” (Fans of Duke Ellington’s wonderful 1960 LP “Pianist In The Background” will get it). Throughout Blues Variant – which includes six tunefully percolating originals by Feinberg, one by tenor saxophonist Noah Preminger, and one by pianist Leo Genovese – the 35-year-old bass maestro hews to the mantra, “If you want to hear me solo, come to a gig, where I often play a solo on every tune”.
Jeremy Nutzman, the Minneapolis-raised artist known as Velvet Negroni, has released his second album, Bulli. Created during a particularly tumultuous time in Nutzman’s life that involved drug abuse, bank fraud, and a house fire, it’s unsurprising that Bulli would echo his present state of mind. Bulli feels anticipatory, often frantic and manic but, given the period of his life that it emerged from, its songs glimmer with a pop sheen as fragmentary soundscapes meld leftfield electronic sounds with alternative rock, power pop, even tender R&B and deft hip-hop.
Never Going Under is Circa Waves’ highly anticipated fifth record, and the encapsulation of a continued upward trajectory for Circa Waves over the last decade. Becoming one of Britain’s most influential and adored guitar bands, the four piece’s dedication to constantly developing their sound has seen them secure increasingly high positions in the Official Album Charts, as well as amassing an army of dedicated fans.
Glaswegian soul star Joesef has released his highly anticipated debut album Permanent Damage, out now via AWAL. Writing songs that are nakedly, wrenchingly honest, but with a sense of humour that “underlines the harsh punchline”, Permanent Damage is a “transportive, moving and soulful body of work” (i-D), which digs deeper into heartbreak with each listen, and the permanent damage left by lost love.
Other reviews you might enjoy:
- New music round-up (for w/e 11 November 2022)
- New music round-up (for w/e 2 September 2022)
- New music round-up
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television
