New music round-up (for w/e 14 June 2024)

Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 14 June 2024.

John Grant began thinking about a new album in the autumn of 2022. Earlier that year, John had been introduced to Ivor Guest, producer and composer at Grace Jones’ Southbank show, the finale of her Meltdown Festival. A year and a half later, the result is John Grant’s most opulent, cinematic, luxurious album yet: The Art of The Lie. As the title suggests, the lyrical ingenuity counterweighted under all this considered musical largesse is as dark as its production is epic and bold. Ivor Guest and his cast-list of storied musicians have brought the drama, flecks of intrigue as beguiling as Laurie Anderson or The Art of Noise. John Grant has earthed it in deeply felt humanity and pitch-black realism.

Rectangles and Circumstance is an album of ten songs co-written and performed by Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion. The album follows their Grammy-winning debut on Nonesuch Records, Narrow Sea; and their debut as a band, 2021’s Let the Soil Play Its Part. The record features Shaw on vocals backed by Sō — Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting. Grammy Award–winning engineer Jonathan Low (The National, Taylor Swift) co-produced with them on both Let the Soil… and Rectangles and Circumstances.

On their latest album, Sonido Cosmico, Hermanos Gutiérrez embark on a sonic exploration that defies the conventional boundaries of instrumental music. Produced by Dan Auerbach, the collection is a richly textured tapestry, interwoven with the intricate threads of Latin rhythms and ephemeral atmospherics: each track a vignette, a carefully crafted narrative without words, where the brothers’ transcendent guitars speak in a language all their own.

Among the vanguard of today’s contemporary composers and big band arrangers, trombonist Ben Patterson and his Washington, DC-based band deliver with this hard-driving, bone-chilling set of electrified funk. His music is just as comfortable harnessing the power of the traditional big band horn section as it is with the intermingling of electronica to achieve a singular, complex vision. Surrounded by the elite rhythm section of pianist Chris Ziemba, guitarist Shawn Purcell, bassist Paul Henry, and drummer Todd Harrison, Patterson moulds deep musical magic around their swirling grooves.

Spanning 23 years of recorded output, Grammy Award winning artist Bilal performed a mid-career retrospective featuring an ensemble of luminaries from his storied musical tribe. For one night only, the supergroup re-worked standouts from a genre-defying catalog including Bilal’s debut, 1st Born Second, his famously unreleased sophomore album, Love For Sale, Airtight’s Revenge, Common’s seminal Soulquarian-era Like Water for Chocolate, as well as premiering Bilal’s newest song, Humility. The concert was recorded live at Glasshaus in Brooklyn, New York on 2 December 2023 and is now available as Bilal: Live at Glasshaus.

After tackling Berg, Schoenberg, Bartók and Stravinsky, Isabelle Faust now approaches Benjamin Britten with Jakub Hrůša and the Bavarian Radio Orchestra. Britten: Violin Concerto, Chamber Works reveals a little-known face of the British composer. This concerto with its extremely personal language combines drama with humor, seriousness with satire, in a moving emotional depth.

Smithsonian Folkways has released The Complete Friends of Old-Time Music Concert by Bessie Jones, John Davis and The Georgia Sea Island Singers with Mississippi Fred McDowell and Ed Young. The record presents a riveting, historic look at the intersection of Black folk traditions and civil rights activism. Taken from a concert in April 1965, this recording showcases the haunting songs of the Georgia Sea Islands Singers, led by Jones and Davis. These Black folk songs and spirituals that have influenced everyone from Jerry Garcia to Afrofuturist Folkways artist Jake Blount. The songs of the Gullah Geechee people of Georgia even today retain deep connections to Africa, and were encoded with powerful messages of resistance to slavery and oppression. The concert also featured the country blues of legendary singer and guitarist Mississippi Fred McDowell and Mississippi cane fife player Ed Young. It was a star-studded concert, and the excitement of these seminal musicians joining together on songs and inspiring each other is palpable. But the powerful subtext of this concert was clear even then.

Other reviews you might enjoy:

• New music round-up (for w/e 2 June 2023)
• New music round-up (for w/e 23 June 2023)
• New music round-up (for w/e 20 September 2024)