Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 18 February 2022.
Through the hazy daze of a smoky folk opus, Modern Studies craft rich soundtracks, stuttering Super-8 sketches from a washed-out world of melancholy, hand-tinted and tantalising. Lullaby couplets blossom into gorgeous chamber pop melodies, the drama unfolding behind Emily Scott’s plaintive vocal; part Julie London, part Sandy Denny, a little bit Kate Bush, with a hushed sigh of Joni. Sweeping strings carry them into uncharted terrain on their new album We Are Here, flying high above their psych-folk roots, it’s an epic journey that’s exquisitely delivered, transcending categories, nodding to Brubeck, Low, Talk Talk, Jim O’Rourke and Pentangle, making music that is ready to cross over in these modern times with songs of substance.
Produced by Grammy-winner Pete Anderson (Dwight Yoakam, k.d. lang) Nightroamer is the new album from Sarah Shook & the Disarmers. The collection features 10 tracks written by Sarah Shook. The songs take a hard look at relationships, but do not claim to have one-size-fits-all answers.
Mikkel Holm Silkjær, the frontman of Danish indie rock combo Yung, has released his long-awaited debut solo record as Holm – the first release with this solo project since 2018’s ”Dappled” EP. Titled Why Don’t You Dance, it’s a product of three years of writing and nearly six months of recording, it’s a gleefully varied guitar-pop record that veers between styles, from the fizzing energy of ‘Descending’ and opener ‘Intelligent Moves’ to the gorgeously melodic ‘Like a Dog’ and ‘The Rope’, via the stately introspection of tracks like ‘K’s Choice’ and lead single ‘Back Home’.
Why would one of poetry’s most revered voices want to curate a jazz saxophonist’s album of gospel hymns and spirituals? “These songs are so important,” says Nikki Giovanni, one of Oprah Winfrey’s 25 “Living Legends” and a Maya Angelou Lifetime Achievement Award winner for 2017. “They comforted people through times of slavery, and during recent years we needed them to comfort us again. But a lot of the students today do not know about the history of these songs, and they should. So I’m out here putting water on the flowers, because they need a drink.” Giovanni’s historic collaboration with saxophonist-composer and former Jazz Messenger Javon Jackson has yielded The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni, out now on his Solid Jackson label. “The spirituals have been around so long,” says the renowned poet, activist and educator, who came to prominence in the 1960s and ’70s as a foundational member of the Black Arts movement following the publication of such early works as 1968’s book of poetry Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgment and 1970’s Re:Creation. “Some spirituals have been updated and stayed around and some have been lost over time,” Giovanni notes “So for me, it’s just helping to keep something going. And I do it because there’s a need.”
Are You Haunted? is the fourth album from Western Australian alt-pop eccentrist Jake Webb aka Methyl Ethel. Methyl Ethel makes music that draws from myriad influences and a history of new wave and indie rock, whilst sounding like its own thing entirely. Both familiar and alien, intimate and aloof, you never quite know what you’re in for, but the trip is bound to be enchanting. Methyl Ethel will tour the album in the coming months with several headline shows throughout April and appearances at Perth Festival, Byron Bay’s Splendour in the Grass and Bambra’s Meadow Music Festival.
Norwegian saxophonist and composer Marius Neset has earned countless nominations and awards for his performances and recordings, and has performed with jazz musicians all over the world. He is increasingly in demand as a composer of works for the concert hall; these range over a wide spectrum of performing forces, many featuring the saxophone. His new album features four world premiere recordings, three of which feature the composer as saxophone soloist. MANMADE is a concerto for saxophone and symphony orchestra in which the form and the structure are inspired by the climate change which our times are experiencing. The work is divided into five movements which concern themselves with man-made historical innovations that have contributed to the development of society, but that in many ways have also brought us step by step to the great global challenges facing the world today.
There’s something ageless, scarred, and American about the music of Mark Nelson, better known as Pan.American. It’s both displaced and devotional, the ghost of rust belts and dust bowls looming in a horizon of deepening dusk. The glacial distillation of Nelson’s “romantic minimalism” achieves unique fruition on his latest collection, The Patience Fader. A suite of solo guitar instrumentals accented with lap steel, harmonica, and twilit atmospherics, the strings smear and sparkle in elegant, windswept swells, a guitar mode once described by Brian Eno as “Duane Eddy playing Erik Satie.” These are elegies as much as songs, lulling and lilting in private currents of beauty and bereavement. Nelson speaks of the notion of “lighthouse music,” radiance cast from a stable vantage point, sending “a signal to help others through rocks and dangerous currents.”
Other reviews you might enjoy:
- For the First Time (Black Country, New Road) – music review
- New music round-up (for w/e 1 April 2022)
- New music round-up (for w/e 7 January 2022)
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television