Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 28 October 2022.
In the spring of 2020, singer-songwriter Aoife Nessa Frances packed up her things in Dublin and moved to rural County Clare on the west coast of Ireland. It was there, amidst the stillness, that she began to work on the songs that would become her second album, Protector: a personal, mystical journey of self-discovery through dislocation, transformation, and restoration. “I might have been running away from my problems,” she admits. “I was disconnected from myself and from nature, but I found peace far away from the city, where there were no distractions. I isolated myself with nothing to do but make music.”
Déjà vu is translated as “already seen” but for South California native Ben Schwab, his discovery in a small Ohio town 2000 miles from home led to an epiphany of creating the “already heard.” Unearthing a box of 1975 cassette tapes of his father’s old band, Sylvie, the recordings – or “Sylvies” as Ben would affectionately call them later – became the imprint for a familiar feeling he would end up chasing. The songs were timeless, effortless, and soulful. Awakening senses to the eternal quality of hidden or lost music, Sylvie (the album) fully encompasses that very same musical lineage and spirit living in those lost yet beloved time capsules.
Traditionally as a young artist’s career develops, the proverbial “music business” whittles their musicianship down to the narrowest box it can fit in, finding a neat label to pigeonhole their name into for all future offerings. Occasionally, singular artists rail against that conformist machine, and put out a wide range of music that encompasses the entire breadth of their influences and taste, labels be damned. Alexander Claffy is one of those artists. To call him just a bassist is to only tell a part of the story. With Music From Big Orange his latest album as a bandleader, “Claffy” serves as his own Executive Producer, as well as composer/arranger on all of the songs.
The wait is finally over for Melbourne’s genre bending trio The Grogans’ third studio album Which Way is Out (available now via Cousin Will Records). An album encompassing the trio’s legacy of lucrative, finger-on-the-pulse songwriting, combining their love of a past aesthetic with a modern day twist. The album seamlessly blends the genre borderlines between heavy, cruisy, and acoustic tracks to create a fresh twist on the classic Grogans sound.
On Igor Levit’s double album Tristan (out now) the pianist explores nocturnal themes of love and death, fear, ecstasy, loneliness & redemption in the music of Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Gustav Mahler & Hans Werner Henze. It includes Levit’s first concerto recording with the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig under Franz Welser-Möst with the album’s central work Henze’s “Tristan” for piano, electronic tapes and orchestra. The five works, including Liszt’s “Liebestraum no. 3” and “Harmonies du Soir”, as well as transcriptions of Wagner’s “Prelude to Tristan und Isolde” and Mahler’s “Adagio from Symphony no. 10”, span a period of 135 years (1837 to 1973) and represent very different genres. Only one of these works was originally conceived for piano solo, but Igor Levit’s exploration of borderline experiences in our lives – death in Life (2018), spirituality in Encounter (2020) and now, with Tristan, the link between love, death and our need for redemption – inevitably means that it is not just masterpieces for the piano that are central to his concern but, above all, compositions in which certain thematic associations find their most personal expression.
After the success of Hasta la Raíz and different projects that paid tribute to Latin American music, Natalia Lafourcade decides to return to the recording studio, after seven years to record twelve songs, and in this way confront what had become a hidden fear: To release an album of newly written songs. De Todas las Flores (Of All the Flowers) is a musical diary inspired by different life experiences. It is a piece that honors vulnerability, life and death, femininity, nature, the mystical, love and heartbreak.
A suite for Indigenous resistance, the new album from Wabanaki bassist, composer, and songwriter Mali Obomsawin flies in the face of Western tropes that insist Indigenous cultures are monolithic, trapped in time. Instead, Obomsawin highlights centuries of clever adaptation and resistance that have fueled the art and culture of Wabanaki people. Written as a compositional suite, the album Sweet Tooth (available now on Out of Your Head Records) blends Wabanaki stories and songs passed down in Obomsawin’s own family with tunes addressing contemporary Indigenous life, colonization, continuity, love and rage. In three movements, Obomsawin’s powerful compositions honor the Indigenous ability to shape great art from the harshest fires of colonialism. The compositions reveal threads that bind together blues, jazz, hymns, folk songs, and Native cultures, and foreground the breadth and continuity of Indigenous contributions to these genres.
Other reviews you might enjoy:
- New music round-up (for w/e 1 December 2023)
- New music round-up (for w/e 8 October 2021)
- New music round-up (for w/e 9 September 2022)
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television
