Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 22 April 2022.
On his latest project, singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Particle Kid (J. Micah Nelson) pulls listeners down the rabbit hole to experience the music he’s been making over the past five years. His self-described “experimental future-folk solo project” is releasing a sprawling epic, Time Capsule, taking listeners on a nearly two-hour trip through various genres, ideas and sounds, an eclectic palette of sonic colors, both familiar and exploratory feelings painted together like a collage, as if 90s alt, 60s psych, 70s electric jazz, and some abstract future were all magazines — chopped up and somehow cohesively glued together by Micah’s voice and lyrics as well as guest spots from Margo Price, J Mascis and Sean Ono Lennon, among others.
Claudio Santoro was one of Brazil’s most eminent and influential composers. Over a 50-year period, he wrote a cycle of 14 symphonies that is widely acclaimed as the most significant cycle of its kind ever written in Brazil. This is the inaugural volume of the first complete recording of his symphonies from Goiás Philharmonic and Neil Thomson. The two selected works focus on the 1950s, a period when Santoro sought a more direct and communicative idiom using Brazilian elements. His use of folk-based material is nonetheless highly creative, sometimes indeed abstract, as in key moments of Symphony No. 5. Symphony No. 7 is one of his most complex and intense works, a celebration of his country’s new capital Brasília in music of striking modernity.
S. Carey is the moniker of multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and producer Sean Carey, commonly recognized as the drummer, backing vocalist, and second-longest serving member of Bon Iver. Over the past decade, Carey has fostered his flourishing solo career via themes of nature and sustainability, songwriting built from jazz beginnings, and heartfelt, emotive lyricism. His latest and fourth album, Break Me Open, adds to a discography of three full-length releases, two EPs, and countless collaborations.
Making the impossible look easy has always been Carlyn Bezic’s musical M.O. Faster Than I Can Take is her sophomore album as Jane Inc., a solo project forged after years of building her bona fides in the Toronto music scene with groups like U.S. Girls, Darlene Shrugg and acclaimed dance-pop duo Ice Cream.
A View with a Room is the fourth release by saxophonist and composer Trish Clowes and her acclaimed band My Iris, an intense and thrilling quartet that represents the front rank of the contemporary UK jazz scene. Lauded for her imaginative approach to improvisation and composition, Clowes provides her bandmates Ross Stanley (piano/Hammond organ), Chris Montague (guitar) and James Maddren (drums) with a unique platform for individual expression, delivering driving grooves and lingering melodic lines, seamlessly morphing between earthy restlessness and futuristic dreamscapes.
Australian singer-songwriter Lisa Mitchell has just released her highly anticipated fourth studio album A Place To Fall Apart. The album is a glorious and heartrending tribute to what it means to be alive and learning in the world, having been old enough to feel its bruises and heartbreaks, but also be at the beginning of understanding our own individual insignificance within it. Accompanied by her beguiling melodies and hushed tones, the lyrics within the album are deeply introspective and impactful, written in the thick of the first year of a global pandemic that forced everyone’s lives and spheres to become very small and very still.
Kathryn Joseph has released her new LP ‘for you who are the wronged’. The record follows on from Joseph’s 2014 debut ‘bones you have thrown me and blood i’ve spilled’, and her 2018 ‘from when i wake the want is’. And though her sparrow-boned musical structures are as slight and sparse framed as their singer – they burn with a fearsome new certainty. The sound is spacious, honouring the rawness of her original demos, written in early 2020. The subject matter is violation – of power, of love, of access – a pain that may not belong to her alone, but she strives to make sense of what’s being enacted on others. In crafting these songs, Joseph offers a window into these toxic patterns that she hopes could save someone.
Other reviews you might enjoy:
- New music round-up (for w/e 9 April 2021)
- New music round-up (for w/e 13 January 2023)
- New music round-up (for w/e 11 February 2022)
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television