Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 30 September 2022.
A thunderstorm of a return is what the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have in store for 2022, with the release of Cool It Down, their first new music since 2013’s Mosquito. Their fifth studio album is an eight-track collection, and an expert distillation of their best gifts that impels you to move, and cry, and listen closely and is bound to be a landmark in their catalogue. They never expected it to be so long between albums, and they certainly had stayed busy: There was a tour for their 2003 debut album, Fever to Tell that was re-issued in 2017; Karen released an album with Danger Mouse (Lux Prima, 2019) and co-composed the score for the animated film Where Is Anne Frank?; Nick made an album with his hardcore side-project Head Wound City, scored Films, and collaborated with artists including Phoebe Bridgers, Amen Dunes and Songhoy Blues, Brian started his own label Chaiken Records. Karen and drummer Brian Chase both became parents in recent years.
After receiving four Grammy nominations for his highly successful series of recordings that “latinize” the music of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Joe Henderson, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Horace Silver, Conrad Herwig turns his attention to the legendary Charles Mingus. An imposing figure in jazz, Mingus was known for being complicated, volatile and a touched-by-genius innovator. As an homage to this influential artist, Conrad Herwig provides a fiery excursion into the world of Afro-Caribbean rhythms skillfully applied to Mingus’ wildly imaginative compositions. Joining Herwig is special guest trumpeter Randy Brecker together with long-time “Latin Side” band colleagues pianist Bill O’Connell, reedman Craig Handy and the trumpet/flugelhorn of Alex Sipiagin with the rhythm section of Luques Curtis, Robby Ameen and Camilo Molina. Collectively they bring a vibrant spirit and authority to this repertoire which is unique among today’s salsa ensembles.
Pocket Fantasy, the sophomore album from Mamalarky is an instant-classic sunny-day record, imaginative and introspective, an enveloping listen of skyhigh hooks and keyboards that soar with joyful abandon. Its twelve kaleidoscopic tracks shapeshift aesthetically and thematically, through ideas about death and impermanence; love and gratitude; nature and technology; humor and hope. Heralded by Billboard, Nylon, The Fader and more, the new album expands on the unique sound of their self-titled debut which Pitchfork called “tenderly tangled indie rock”. On Pocket Fantasy some of the band’s purest pop tendencies collide with more warped and weird strains of quirky psych. It’s a treasure trove of playful grooves and zigzag riffs, a phenomenal album from a young group poised to carve their own place in the bins of your favorite record store.
With five acclaimed releases in as many years, Denmark’s Mythic Sunship have rapidly established themselves among Europe’s finest purveyors of psychedelic music, bridging the gap between heavy riff worshipping and expansive, free jazz-tinged experimentation. Their new album, Light/Flux, is out now through RT Records.
René Jacobs and the B’Rock Orchestra complete their Schubert cycle on Pentatone with the composer’s two most famous symphonies, the Unfinished and Great. In his extensive liner notes, Jacobs develops a theory that the B Minor Symphony did not remain “unfinished”, but was deliberately left unfinished, because Schubert shaped its two movements in analogy to Mein Traum (My Dream), an autobiographical narration in two parts, written in 1822, simultaneous to the creation of the symphony. While the first half of Mein Traum tells about his mother’s decease and his problematic relationship to his father, the second part enters a magical, Romantic realm, and eventually brings a reconciliation with his father. On this recording, the two parts of the narration precede the two movements of the Unfinished symphony, and are recited by Tobias Moretti. Jacobs argues that, after the dream-inspired Unfinished, the Great C Major Symphony, with its solemn character and sublime dimensions, served as a liberation for Schubert. Presenting these contrasting works forms a fitting apotheosis to a cycle that has been designed from the onset as a series of symphonic pairs.
Multi-instrumentalist and producer e4444e {pron. e4} – AKA Awabakal / Newcastle’s Romy Church, has released his third full-length album I Spend All Day Drawing a Circle via Dinosaur City Records. Rich with otherworldly melodies, I Spend All Say Drawing A Circle is an immersive and poetic album containing some of Church’s most experimental and expansive compositions to date. Each track is an intricately-arranged vignette, with Church using guitar fuzz, backyard field recordings, and drone to create beautiful and celestial soundscapes.
Forming approximately 3 years ago, before the world changed irrevocably, Odd Men Out are something of a garage-psych international supergroup, with members originally hailing from Italy, Spain and the UK, brought together in the sprawling megalopolis of London in the sticky heat of summer 2019. Lois (drums) and Alessandro (guitar, organ, vocals) were already playing together in freakbeat trio The Embrooks since ’96 (with a 10-year hiatus between 2005 and ’15), while bassman Bruno has served time with moody-psych-turned-spiky-British-Beat exponents The Liquorice Experiment and Looking Glass Alice. The untried ‘x-factor’ in this equation is the frontman, guitarist, and songwriter Nicolino whose love of moody 12-string folk rock and florid psychedelia shapes the overall sound of the band. Their self-titled debut album is out now via Dirty Water Records.
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David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television