Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 19 April 2024.
Multi-Grammy® Award winner and living legend, T Bone Burnett returns with a solo project The Other Side – out now. The album, featuring artists Lucius, Roseanne Cash and Weyes Blood on select tracks, promises a sweeping return to folk and form for this formidable guitarist and singer-songwriter.
claire rousay (no caps) is a singular artist, known for challenging conventions in experimental and ambient music forms. rousay incorporates textural found sounds, sumptuous drones and candid field recordings into music that celebrates the beauty in life’s banalities. Her music is curatorial and granular in detail, deftly shaped into emotionally affecting pieces. Her new album sentiment (also no caps) is a meditation of the poignant emotional terrains of loneliness, nostalgia, sentimentality, guilt, and sex. The album’s narrative arc is guided by delicate musical gestures and artistic vulnerability, audaciously synthesizing disparate and unexpected influences. rousay crafted the songs in various homes, bedrooms, hotels, and other private places, the feeling of time and energy spent alone radiating from each passage. The album is a collection of heart-rending, incisive pop songs that explore universal feelings with subtlety and remarkable vision.
Vocalist/pianist Champian Fulton has been called the most gifted singer of her generation. A mainstay on the vibrant New York Jazz scene, she has performed with musical royalty such as Lou Donaldson, Frank Wess, Buster Williams, and Louis Hayes. From New York to Barcelona, Champian’s swinging style and charismatic performances have made her a guardian of the legacy of Jazz. A saxophonist with an expressive sound rooted in jazz tradition, Cory Weeds has released 20 recordings as a leader on Cellar Music, the label that he founded in 2000 including Dream A Little…. with Champian. Their new album together is Every Now and Then, and it’s out now.
Acknowledged as one of the world’s finest piano trios, the Trio con Brio Copenhagen’s multifaceted members are not only performing artists who tour extensively, but also esteemed recording artists, artistic directors and educators. Founded at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna in 1999, the trio is now based in Copenhagen and tours worldwide. The Trio was born out of an idea of the coming together of ‘musical pairs’ – of the two Korean-born sisters, Soo- Kyung Hong (cello) and Soo-Jin Hong (violin), with Soo-Kyung and her husband, Danish pianist Jens Elvekjaer. Their new album, The Passenger, features piano trios by Mieczysław Weinberg (Piano Trio op. 24) and Franz Schubert (Piano Trio in E flat major D. 929).
With their third album, A Lover’s Guide To A Lucid Dream, SAFIA (all caps) threw everything into it, going over and over ideas for songs that for some reason simply refused to take shape. After losing perspective – not just about what the next SAFIA record would look like, but even on what they loved about making music in the first place the band realised that the key to unlocking it all was simple: just letting go. The result is an album that grapples with dreams and reality, the loss and reclamation of identity, which over the course of its 14 tracks moves from surreal night to the soft breaking of the day.
While their first two releases (Prequel and Space Mirror) saw Infinite River – veterans of post-punk, new psychedelic noise, and 1990s garage rock expertly navigate the murky waters of COVID isolation with yoga-worthy ambient excursions, on their third record, Tabula Rasa, the quartet slides into fifth gear and terraplanes toward a fresh take on instrumental prog-rock. It’s not entirely unexpected, but there’s rapid accelerated growth at play. Tabula Rasa highlights the point at which new age type music can become biker rock—which at times approximates Hawkwind or much German music from 1976, while rarely sounding like anything but itself.
Irish indie rock band Pillow Queens have shared their third studio album Name Your Sorrow. At their most exposed yet, the group dives headfirst into a raw, open landscape of feeling highs and lows, resulting in a cathartic, brave, explorative body of work that stays long after the album ends. Name Your Sorrow finds the group at their most vulnerable and self-assured as they explore themes of queerness, insecurity, desire and heartbreak as well as the positivity and strength that can grow from pain.
Other reviews you might enjoy:
- New music round-up (for w/e 29 September 2023)
- New music round-up (for w/e 15 November 2024)
- New music round-up (for w/e 18 October 2024)
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television