New music round-up (for w/e 26 April 2024)

Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 26 April 2024.

Grammy Award-winning vocalist, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Judith Hill reclaims her strength on a deeply emotive new album, Letters From A Black Widow (out now via Regime Music Group). ‘Black Widow’ finds Hill confronting the malign label that haunted her for years, coined by tabloids and keyboard warriors because she had collaborated with two of pop music’s biggest ever stars – Michael Jackson and Prince – shortly before their deaths. She struggled in the wake of undeserved hatred for years before recently finding the emotional capacity to confront, reflect and write about her experience.

There are one million ways to approach love, one million ways to experience love, one million ways in which love shapes both the course of our lives and how we choose to navigate that course. On her second album, Bnny’s Jessica Viscius looks love square in its many eyes and describes, with self-awareness and humor, not only what she sees, but what it makes her feel. Deep romantic love, breathy lust, generous self-love—and their opposites, self-loathing, resentment, disappointment—all make appearances on One Million Love Songs, Bnny’s revelatory second album.

The Fullness is Omar Musa’s third full length album of music and poetry, an expansive opus of sounds and styles. With long-term collaborator Papertoy at the helm, Omar explores themes such as environmental destruction, grappling with Muslim identity, addiction, grief, searching for a homeland – and ultimately – rejuvenation. In one moment, Omar rages about logging corruption over traditional Bornean war horns in Fire On The Hills or rapping in Malay on North Borneo Soul, the next, he’s wistfully examining his complicated relationship with Islam in a post 9/11 world on Too Hard to Say, or poetically paying homage to his beloved Queanbeyan River on Love So Deep. Omar, who now divides his time between Brooklyn and Borneo, says that The Fullness, was “made in joy, polished with grief.”

Never mind Webster’s – how does Charles McPherson define reverence? “To me, it means deep respect and admiration,” explains the legendary saxophonist, who chose the word as the title for his new album, REVERENCE. On his first release for Smoke Sessions Records, McPherson certainly reveals why he’s been held in such reverence for the last 64 years. The album captures a scintillating live performance from Smoke Jazz Club, where McPherson is joined by his remarkable current group featuring trumpeter Terell Stafford, pianist Jeb Patton, bassist David Wong, and drummer Billy Drummond. The set is a showcase for McPherson’s gifts as both composer and soloist and bridges his deep and far-reaching exploration of the full jazz spectrum.

Spanning more than two decades, Mike Kinsella’s widely influential songwriting has steadily sharpened and evolved with each new chapter. In his solo vehicle as Owen (in addition to his roles along the way with American Football, Cap’n Jazz, the more recent LIES, and other collaborative ventures), Kinsella’s ability to seamlessly stitch jagged emotional currents into crushingly beautiful songs has remained at the forefront of his art. This contrast has become more distinct as Owen expanded from unassuming acoustic beginnings into more ornate production, reaching new levels of complexity and clarity by the release of 2020’s The Avalanche. The Falls of Sioux, Kinsella’s newest Owen full-length, levels up even further. As much as these nine songs represent a type of reinvention, they also feel like the natural next step in Kinsella’s growth, both artistic and personal. The album perforates an established sound to explore unlikely musical ideas, while the songs document a time of moving through life-altering turmoil into brighter days. Heavy themes are turned over with a gentle hand, and Kinsella inhabits the deeper perspectives that come with hard-earned life experience.

In a follow-up to its extremely successful album Her Voice, the Neave Trio once again champions the works of female composers on A Room of Her Own. The only non-French composer on the album is Ethel Smyth whose Piano Trio, one of her earliest works, was composed in 1880. Like many of her works from this era, it shows a clear nod to the Austro-German influences of her studies in Leipzig, particularly of Brahms. Cécile Chaminade was born just a year before Smyth, and her First Piano Trio was written in the same year as Smyth’s. The Paris première was very well received by the critics, and the Trio was published a year later. Germaine Tailleferre’s Piano Trio began life in 1916 – 17 as a work in three movements, and then gathered dust for over sixty years, until a commission from France’s Ministère de la Culture, in 1978, enabled Tailleferre to revive and re-imagine it. By then in her mid-eighties, Tailleferre replaced the original second movement and added a fourth. The Trio is an excellent example of her compositional style – a voice that remained consistent though her long compositional career. Lili Boulanger’s D’un matin de printemps and D’un soir triste are perhaps now better known in their orchestral versions: this recording proves that the two pieces work equally well at either scale. As they are among the last compositions of her short life (she died of chronic illness at twenty-four), we are left to imagine what she might have written had she lived longer.

Berlin psych/post-punk band The Third Sound have released their new album Most Perfect Solitude (out now on digital; physical 17 May). Talking about the album (The Third Sound’s sixth full-length), Hakon Adalsteinsson says: “After touring First Light heavily and releasing our Fuzz Club Session LP last year – a career-spanning, retrospective document in a way – this album feels like starting with a clean slate. There is a certain warmth to some of the songs that has not been there before, but they still flicker between light and shadows, kind of like a slow-motion audio version of Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine.”

Other reviews you might enjoy:

• New music round-up
• New music round-up (for w/e 19 April 2024)
• New music round-up (for w/e 20 August 2021)