Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 25 August 2023.
The songs that make up Jump for Joy — the sharpest and most autobiographical that M.C. Taylor has written under the Hiss Golden Messenger name — read as a sort of epistolary, postcards between the present-day songwriter and his alias Michael Crow, a teenaged dreamer very much like Taylor himself, who trips his way through the 14 tunes that make up the record. In this way, Jump for Joy is a meditation on a life lived with art, and the ways that our hopes and dreams and decisions bump up against—and, with a little bit of luck, occasionally merge with—real life.
Cindy Wilson has always been on the forefront of music’s cutting-edge: As a founding member of The B-52’s, she was a pioneer of the New Wave sound that redefined music in the 1970s and ‘80s. Cindy is known for her distinctly melodic voice and her remarkable ability to deliver powerful emotions in her music. Her work continues to influence alternative and mainstream cultures around the globe – and she’s still making new waves of her own. Her new record is Realms and it’s out now via Kill Rock Stars.
It’s difficult not to feel like everything’s already been discovered and documented, posted, scrolling under our compulsive thumbs; that what we have to look forward to is, at best, only a novel combination of well-worn elements. Micaela Tobin and Joshua Hill’s Tent Music presents a significant rebuke to this feeling. Born of a fascinating process, Tent Music is a whim turned into a staggeringly deep, psycho-mytholgical excavation. Playing at times like a more brutal, fractured version of Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet’s 2018 song cycle, Landfall while careening from bone-rattling fuzzed-out violin drones that wouldn’t be out of place on Stephen O’Malley’s Cylene to glorious psychedelic pop songs, Tent Music centers intuition to the point of channeling spirits-cum-archetypes. Tobin’s avant-operatic background, including work with Pulitzer Prize winner Raven Chacon, and her celebrated work as White Boy Scream certainly serve as reference points for this work, but the circumstances surrounding Tent Music set it apart from that work, as from the rest of earthly existence.
Pianist and composer Harold López-Nussa has been steadily building a global following in jazz and beyond over the past two decades since winning the prestigious Montreux Jazz Piano Competition in 2005. López-Nussa has released nine acclaimed albums and captivated audiences across the world with his thrilling performances at esteemed venues and jazz festivals. Born into a musical family in Havana, Cuba, his music reflects the full range and richness of the Cuban musical tradition with its distinctive combination of classical, folkloric, and popular elements, as well as its embrace of improvisation. With the release of his Blue Note Records debut Timba a la Americana, López-Nussa reaches a career milestone with a vibrant album teeming with joy and pathos that was inspired by the pianist’s recent decision to leave his Cuban homeland and begin a new life in France. Produced by Michael League (Snarky Puppy), Timba a la Americana presents 10 dynamic new compositions and features the harmonica virtuoso Grégoire Maret, Luques Curtis on bass, Bárbaro “Machito” Crespo on congas, and Harold’s brother Ruy Adrián López-Nussa on drums.
Book of Fools, the sixth studio album by indie-Americana folk quartet Mipso, sees the band at their most assured, guided mostly by their own intuition and less impacted by time constraints, expectations or outside forces. Over ten cohesive tracks, driving rhythms, earnest, thoughtful lyricism guide the band back to their roots and who they are at their core. There’s a fresh, solid confidence and profound understanding of one another that radiates through the music. It’s this palpable connection that can only come from this group playing together around the world several hundreds of times and it’s here they rediscover their joy and unmatched connection as musicians and as best friends.
The title What Remains of String Quartet No.4 (2019) by Joey Roukens can be understood in various ways. On a poetic level, the words correspond to the character of the music, which often seems to hark back to ‘something remaining’ from a previous era – ruins, ghosts, scraps or memories. This interpretation, both of the words and of the music itself, marked the beginning of the associative exploration that led to this album of the same title. A fascinatingly curated program from the Dudok, drawing on music from the 13th, 14th and 16th centuries, with 20th century works by Olivier Messiaen and Steve Reich, and into the 21st century with the work that provides the album’s title, the 4th String Quartet by Roukens, commissioned by the Dudok Quartet. Both Reich and Roukens’ were influenced by Gregorian chant, and the early organum and polyphonic music that followed. Time, travel, locomotion – journeys through time and the memories of these journeys all come together on this thrilling new album from the Dudok Quartet Amsterdam.
Filter have released their new album, The Algorithm. The album, their first in seven years, is a tight conceptual statement heralding career-best songwriting from creative mastermind Richard Patrick and giving the classic Filter sound a modern sonic edge. The Algorithm is filled with eleven mini-epics of speaker-shattering proportions, replete with dynamic power chords, monstrously heavy riffs, and soaring anthemic choruses.
Other reviews you might enjoy:
- New music round-up (for w/e 18 November 2022)
- New music round-up (for w/e 5 July 2024)
- New music round-up (for w/e 1 September 2023)
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television
