Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 28 January 2022.
Piece of Me is the sophomore full length offering from Lady Wray. This is something of a homecoming for Nicole. Where her 2016 solo debut Queen Alone leaned more towards Soul and R&B with tinges of hip-hop, this record changes the mixture. It’s still R&B with the textures of analogue Soul, but there’s a heavy Hip Hop influence that brings the sum of Nicole’s career together in a new sound that will define her future. Boom-bap drums and chunky bass lines are front-and-center creating a perfect head-nodding backdrop for Lady Wray to take on the good, the bad, the difficult, and the joyful on her most personal collection of songs to date.
Cloakroom celebrate their tenth anniversary as a band with their new album, Dissolution Wave. Dissolution Wave is a concept – a space western in which an act of theoretical physics—the dissolution wave—wipes out all of humanity’s existing art and abstract thought. In order to keep the world spinning on its axis, songsmiths must fill the ether with their compositions. Meanwhile, the Spire and Ward of Song act as a filter for human imagination: Only the best material can pass through the filter and keep the world turning.
Tyler Mitchell and Marshall Allen go way back — and way out. Having worked together in the Sun Ra Arkestra in the mid 1980s, the two resumed their partnership again over the past decade, with Mitchell rejoining the Arkestra after exploring other paths. That group carries on the Sun Ra name today under the direction of Allen, now 97, yet what they have in common goes far beyond the music of one man. Inspired by their former boss, the two are finding new common ground, cross-pollinating their experiences with both free and arranged jazz, and harvesting a new album in the process, Dancing Shadows. Joining Mitchell and Allen on the new Mahakala Music release are Chris Hemmingway (tenor sax), Nicoletta Manzini (alto sax), Wayne Smith (drums) and Elson Nascimento (percussion), and the sextet can deliver both horn arrangements and free passages with aplomb. In so doing, the album fulfills a vision that Mitchell has had for years.
Josephine Foster’s new album Godmother is a slowly unfolding song cycle that marries a myriad of previous musical escapades with electronic experiments. Exploring new horizons on this record, it sees Foster at her most expressive and hypnotic. Now back home in the mountains of Colorado, Josephine’s 20-year journey to this new nirvana becomes enthralled further with a symphony of synths that sound like they are played in some neighbouring netherworld, through cotton gauze. It’s music that’s devotional, spiritual, a fitting soundtrack for any journey within or without, a means to experience places and vibrations beyond the boundary of time and space.
On his third Pentatone album Time Traveler’s Suite, pianist Inon Barnatan redefines notions of the suite by taking listeners on a journey through time and space, from Baroque pieces by Bach, Handel, Rameau and Couperin to more recent works by Ravel, Barber, Adès and Ligeti. The program culminates in Brahms’s ingenious Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel.
Pinegrove’s new record 11:11 is an album that seizes listeners with hook-filled songs imbuing feelings of warmth, urgency, and poetic beauty, even as it asks some of life’s big and difficult questions. On previous Pinegrove recordings, band member Sam Skinner usually oversees mixing duties, but this time out, noted producer and former Death Cab for Cutie member Chris Walla has assumed the role. Calling previous album Marigold’s production “crisp and contained,” Hall, who co-produced 11:11 with Sam, sought more of a “messier” feel for these new songs. Most of the recording took place at two Hudson Valley facilities (Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock and The Building in Marlboro) with the final touches done side by side with Walla in Seattle. 11:11 features lush soundscapes, organs, Megan Benavente’s melodic and adventurous bass playing, Josh Marre’s signature guitar work & a special guest- Doug Hall, Evan’s father- playing piano on many tracks. The record sounds intimate, yet expansive.
Continuing their mystical saga, NYC’s Combo Chimbita roar back onto the global stage with their cathartic new album IRÉ. The album’s evocative title is forged upon double-edged meaning: on one hand embracing the divinely inspired blessings and prosperity foretold by our spiritual elders, and on the other a brazen, propulsive affirmation of revolutionary futures in the making. Afro-Caribbean transcendance, bewildering chants, booming drums and psychedelic distortion lay the rhythmic foundation for IRÉ; a testament to the ever expanding scope of Combo Chimbita’s sonic palette and their modes of resistance in realms both spiritual and terrestrial.
Other reviews you might enjoy:
- Blu Wav (Grandaddy) – music review
- New music round-up (for w/e 21 January 2022)
- New music round-up (for w/e 4 March 2022)
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television