New music round-up (for w/e 4 February 2022)

Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 4 February 2022.

The music of saxophonist and composer Immanuel Wilkins is filled with empathy and conviction, bonding arcs of melody and lamentation to pluming gestures of space and breath. Listeners were introduced to this riveting sound with his acclaimed debut album Omega, which was named the #1 Jazz Album of 2020 by The New York Times. The album also introduced his remarkable quartet with Micah Thomas on piano, Daryl Johns on bass, and Kweku Sumbry on drums, a tight-knit unit that Wilkins features once again on his stunning sophomore album The 7th Hand. The 7th Hand explores relationships between presence and nothingness across an hour-long suite comprised of seven movements. “I wanted to write a preparatory piece for my quartet to become vessels by the end of the piece, fully,” says the artist. Conceptually, the record evolves what Wilkins begins exploring on Omega, which included a four-part suite within the album. On The 7th Hand, all his compositions represent movements, played in succession. “They deal with cells and source material like a suite would,” says Wilkins, “but they function as songs, as well.”

 

Violet Opposition is the latest album from Brock Van Wey’s ever-prolific bvdub long-form ambient project. With Violet Opposition, Van Wey floats the project into murkier waters by adding a layer of overdriven gilding to his trademark sound. This sound is a texturally fibrous take on ambient that Brock has been experimenting with recently. As a result, the bvdub peaks and valleys you know, and love, are even more arresting with the added grit and brume. Violet Opposition is four achingly impelling tracks smeared across a double LP in violet and yellow swirl, each song taking its time to evolve and cradle you in sinewy tones. Violet Opposition is out now.

 

With his tango nuevo, Astor Piazzolla has been welcomed into the world of classical music in a way that no other ‘non-classical’ composer has experienced. His music is played in concert halls around the world, and has been arranged for the most varied forces: symphony orchestra, string quartet, brass ensemble, mandolin orchestra, harpsichord… Taking their name from Piazzolla’s Escualo (‘Shark’), written in 1979 for his Quinteto Tango Nuevo, the five musicians that make up ESCUALO5 have a different approach, replicating the formation that Piazzolla performed with for much of his career: bandoneon, violin, piano, guitar and double bass. The aim isn’t to recreate Piazzolla’s own performances, however – based in Munich but hailing from respectively Brazil, Germany, Greece and Belarus, the members are soloists in their own right, bringing their individual talents as improvisers and arrangers to the recordings. The programme that ESCUALO5 have devised for their first album includes some much-loved as well as less familiar pieces for the quintet setup – Primavera Porteña, Soledad, Adiós Nonino, Fracanapa – as well as arrangements of Tango Suite and Histoire du Tango, originally for two guitars and flute and guitar, respectively.

 

Pompeii, Cate Le Bon’s sixth full-length studio album and the follow up to 2019’s Mercury-nominated Reward, bears a storied title summoning apocalypse, but the metaphor eclipses any “dissection of immediacy,” says Le Bon. Not to downplay her nod to disorientation induced by double catastrophe — global pandemic plus climate emergency’s colliding eco-traumas resonate all too eerily.

 

Icelandic-American Gudjon Bergmann makes music in his home studio south of Austin, TX. He composes folk, rock, funk, and acoustic singer-songwriter music as G. Bergmann and records instrumental New Age music as Pax Kshanik. Bergmann’s new album, Spiritual Blues, was inspired by his memoir Spiritual in My Own Way.

 

The Rave-Ups’ three previous albums — 1985’s independently released Town + Country, along with 1987’s The Book Of Your Regrets and 1990’s Chance, both for Epic Records — established the group as one of the pioneers of the cowpunk genre that eventually transformed into Americana, following in the footsteps of L.A.-bred country-rock groups from The Flying Burrito Brothers and The Byrds through contemporaries like X, The Blasters, and Rank + File. The original Los Angeles line-up — singer/songwriter Jimmer Podrasky, guitarist Terry Wilson, bassist Tommy Blatnik, and drummer Timothy Jimenez, who first met while working together in the A&M Records mailroom — have reunited for Tomorrow. The record is out now on Omnivore Recordings.

 

Partying is the glue that bonds Los Bitchos together – as well as being superb musicians, that is. They’re used to drinking Mac DeMarco under the table, having been enlisted by him to support him on various shows across Europe. Serra Petale (guitar), Agustina Ruiz (keytar), Josefine Jonsson (bass) and Nic Crawshaw (drums) hail from different parts of the world but met via all-night house parties, or through friends, in London. Their unique sound binds them together, though, taking in a retro-futuristic blend of Peruvian chica, Argentine cumbia, Turkish psych and surf guitars. They’re London’s answer to Khruangbin, if Khruangbin spent all weekend getting slammed on cheap tequila in a Dalston dive bar. Their debut album, Let The Festivities Begin!, is out now.

 

Other reviews you might enjoy:

• New music round-up (for w/e 14 May 2021)
• New music round-up (for w/e 11 October 2024)
• New music round-up (for w/e 28 January 2022)