Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 19 August 2022.
Sometimes even the longest journey ends close to where you started. Previously, Oneida pushed further into abstract sounds, recording compositions that couldn’t have been more different than the hammering anthems of their past. They return with ‘Success’, their most guitar-centric, rock album in decades.
Done Come Too Far continues Shemekia Copeland’s riveting, clear-eyed testimony about our troubled world while celebrating the blessings that keep hope alive. The new album is again produced by Will Kimbrough, and an all-star supporting cast includes slide guitar whiz Sonny Landreth, Hill Country blues great Cedric Burnside and Hi Rhythm Section organist Charles Hodges. Shemekia’s rousing vocals bring the heat in an infectious array of muscular rockers, stomping blues, swampy soul and heartbreaking ballads. Intense, topical new originals make up most of the tracks and spirited versions of songs by Ray Wylie Hubbard and her father, Johnny Copeland, fit right into the mix.
It’s taken its sweet time, but Szun Waves’ majestic new album, Earth Patterns, is ripe for the listening. “We started making the record in 2019,” Luke Abbott explains. “So this one has taken longer than usual, but things have been weird for a while. We have this improvisational way of working, which means we end up with recordings that are sometimes unwieldy and often surprising to us. The record took a while to make sense. When we first did the recording sessions, I don’t think we understood what we’d made. It took the world turning upside down to give a new perspective on it.”
It Takes One To Know One – the new album from Sam Dillon and Andrew Gould – has been a long time in the making! Twenty years of friendship having both grown up on Long Island and many hours of shedding together has come full circle with the release of Takes One To Know One. FUN describes this album best. Two friends coming together to make joyous music. Joined by seasoned veteran Kiyoshi Kitagawa on bass and much talked about young drummer Jimmy MacBride.
Ever Crashing, the second LP by Kennedy Ashlyn aka SRSQ [pronounced ‘seer-skew’], is the summation of a nearly three-year journey of soul searching, songwriting, and self-discovery: “I became myself in the process of making this record.” From the first choral swells of opener “It Always Rains,” it’s clear this collection exists on an ascendant plane, capturing an artist in super bloom. Every song hits like a single, heaving with guitar, synth, strings, live drums, and oceans of Ashlyn’s astounding voice, balletic and illuminated. The tracks gleam with detail, often assembled from as many as 100 separate tracks, all of which were written and played solely by Ashlyn – a feat of world-building as daunting as it is devastating.
Mozart’s piano concertos form a set that is not just exceptional but absolutely unique in the history of music: from No. 9 to No. 27, all are definitive masterpieces. According to H.C. Robbins Landon, an eminent specialist in the composer’s life and work, ‘It is above all their immense stylistic diversity that places Mozart’s piano concertos above and beyond those of his contemporaries’. What these scores also share is their position at a crossroads for strongly impacting influences: that of the symphony, encouraging Mozart to make lavish use of the orchestra; the wind bands of the Imperial court, shaping his enhanced role for the woodwinds; and the influence of the opera, whose styles he worked into these concertos, often treating the dialogue between piano and orchestra as if they were stage characters. In this new recording, Eric Le Sage is joined by the Gävle Symfoniorkester to perform the 17th and 24th concertos for piano and orchestra by the Salzburg composer.
Melbourne punk power trio CLAMM return with their second album Care, released on vinyl and digital by Chapter Music via Inertia Music. CLAMM’s music was already concerned with the woes of the world, but the last two years have added extra urgency to their blown out, dystopian punk power. CLAMM explore the confusion of what it is to be a young person trying to live an honourable life in this fucked up world. Their songs are about trying to navigate systems of power and oppression while retaining a healthy sense of self and mental health. Community, creativity, and catharsis are what they hope to achieve through their music.
Other reviews you might enjoy:
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television
