Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 26 May 2023.
Baby Rose makes healing music for the aimless and heartbroken. The Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter and producer’s uniquely rich voice naturally lends itself to her powerful, smoke-filled ballads lamenting lost loves and broken futures. “I make music to help myself get through things,” she says. The piercing honesty and vulnerability she brings to her lyrics in turn helps others process their feelings and find a place of healing. For Rose, it’s a journey that’s still ongoing. “If I’m going to leave anything behind, it’s going to be getting people back to themselves,” she says. “As I get back to myself, it’s a constant reset: Remember who you are, remember who you want to be.” You can hear the impact of this approach in Baby Rose’s upcoming second album, Through and Through.
Siblings Henry and Rupert Stansall, known as Ruen Brothers, are saddling up from their home of Scunthorpe, England to ride into unmarked territory. Inspired by their love of noir and neo-western films, their cinematic new album Ten Paces exhibits the rich, sonic versatility of the brothers, as every instrument heard on the album is performed by Henry and Rupert. The anthemic build of “The Fear” to the lonesome balladeering of “Bullet Blues” showcases these two outlaws at their creative peak.
Drummer Joe Farnsworth sets out on a bold new path in answer to the question In What Direction are You Headed? and features a stellar all-star quintet with guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, pianist Julius Rodriguez, and bassist Robert Hurst. In What Direction are You Headed? marks a turning point in Farnsworth’s career, as he’s assembled a new quintet featuring not his renowned forebears but esteemed talents from his own generation and a younger, rising class. While he has honed his estimable skills behind the kit through decades of work with some of jazz’s greatest elders – iconic names like McCoy Tyner, Pharoah Sanders, Harold Mabern, Horace Silver, Benny Golson, Cedar Walton, Barry Harris, Curtis Fuller, George Coleman, Johnny Griffin, Lou Donaldson, Cecil Payne, Kenny Barron, and others.
Roxx Revolt & the Velvets have released their debut record Turn Your Head This Way via SSK Records. At first listen, one could easily mistake the Florida four-piece for seasoned veterans amongst the rock greats, but this entourage of noisemakers is just beginning to rev their engines. They seamlessly shift the dial between arena ready rock, power pop, blues sensibilities, Western twang, punk, and everything that falls a half step in between. Roxx Revolt & the Velvets are no replica of rock acts of the past — no, they are pioneering a modern sound that is fully their own, deftly innovating upon the music they were raised on with effortless flair and swagger
Jean Sibelius’ Symphonies No. 3 & 4 with Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting the Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal is out now on ATMA Classique. Recorded at Maison symphonique de Montréal, this new release is part of our complete cycle of Sibelius symphonies, launched in 2019 with Symphony No. 1. Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Orchestre Métropolitain since 2000, Yannick Nézet-Séguin signed a “lifelong” commitment with the Orchestre in September 2019. In September 2018, he became the third Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera (MET) in New York in addition to his ongoing duties as Music Director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, where he has served since 2012.
Since his 2016 debut album Primitives, Bayonne has channeled his vast imagination into an elegant yet wildly experimental form of electronic pop, equal parts meditative and mesmerizing. In the making of his latest body of work, the Austin-based artist/producer/multi-instrumentalist otherwise known as Roger Sellers found himself in even greater need of an outlet for his kinetic creative impulses, thanks to an intense convergence of events in his personal life: his father’s diagnosis with and eventual death from cancer, the end of a significant relationship, and an overwhelming struggle with depression and anxiety. Deeply informed by a deliberate transformation of his musical process, Bayonne’s third full-length Temporary Time ultimately makes for his most expansive work to date—an album of both painfully raw introspection and otherworldly beauty.
Dreams In Splattered Lines fuses together Wolf Eyes’ 25 years of DIY electronics with the avant-garde sensibilities of Fluxus and the granite of dreary Midwestern life. Continuing some of the ideas explored on the Difficult Messages record of collaborations, the result is a surreal dreamscape of disorienting sound collages, where hit songs are transformed into terrariums of sonic flora and decimated fauna. As if pulled from a fever dream, the surrealists of the 1960s converge with alien electronic blues musicians in an underworld of mystery. The air is thick with car wash radio white noise, crackling and fizzing like a toxic elixir, spoken word poetry transmissions as absurd and cryptic phrases. Each corroded aural environment is a microcosm of chaos, honed to razor-sharp precision. Swept away in a whirlwind of thirteen perplexing narratives, each one an unpredictable journey through subterranean worlds, a sonic trip of reality folded into itself.
Other reviews you might enjoy:
- New music round-up (for w/e 7 June 2024)
- New music round-up (for w/e 21 January 2022)
- New music round-up (for w/e 19 May 2023)
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television
