Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 4 November 2022.
Emmet Cohen’s time has come. Since the release of Future Stride, Cohen has toured the world consistently — bringing the joy of music to people in need during a global pandemic — all while hosting weekly live-stream concerts from his home in Harlem, NY. These live-streams provided a sense of community and a home to the displaced musicians of New York, reminiscent of the 1920s rent parties. On Uptown in Orbit, his sophomore release for Mack Avenue, Cohen brings the tradition of jazz to the forefront while providing the modern twist needed for the current times. Featured on this release is trumpeter/educator Sean Jones, saxophonist Patrick Bartley, bassist Russell Hall and drummer Kyle Poole.
“Even my subconscious is self-conscious,” Okay Kaya sings on “Inside Of A Plum”, giving us a sense of the mental state she entered while making SAP, an album she wrote, performed, engineered, and produced alone, sometimes spending weeks at a time without social interaction. This is a concept album about consciousness in which Okay Kaya focuses her trademark combination of abstraction and wit on what happens to her mind unaccompanied, on her tendency to feel less like a human and more like the sticky secretion of a tree.
Julien Chang writes music that tunnels toward a series of deeper truths, investigating everyday existentialism, love and life, art and the artist. Arriving in 2019 with his critically acclaimed album Jules, Chang set a precedent with his breezy, dreamy debut and is now exacting his focus on 2022 with forthcoming new music. Chang’s second album The Sale testifies to his talents as he wrestles with enviable grace across his new 12-track catalogue, the idea of estrangement and the problematics of artistic creation.
Imbued with the spirit of the dance, Fatma Said’s new album Kaleidoscope spins across the floor and across cultures, genres and eras. The young Egyptian soprano takes the hand of such composers and songwriters as Johann Strauss, Franz Lehár, Jacques Offenbach, Charles Gounod, Kurt Weill, Carlos Gardel, Astor Piazzolla, Serge Gainsbourg, Gino Paoli, Frederick Loewe (half of the team who wrote My Fair Lady), and George Robert Merrill and Shannon Rubicam, who gave Whitney Houston a hit with ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’. Among Fatma Said’s partners as she sings in French, German, English, Spanish, Italian and Arabic are the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo conducted by Sascha Goetzel, mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa (in the Barcarolle from Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann), trumpeter Lucienne Renaudin Vary (in Irving Berlin’s ‘Cheek to Cheek’), and tango ensemble Quinteto Ángel. If the album’s title and concept epitomise brilliance and joie de vivre, Fatma Said’s approach to the album is, characteristically, as thoughtful as it is creative.
Three-time GRAMMY-nominated singer/songwriter JES has released her new album, Memento. The album carries an incredible 28-track-strong, career-spanning double-disc’s worth of music. It features a host of work alongside some of the world’s best known electronic music producers, Aly & Fila, Cosmic Gate, Markus Schulz, BT, Ferry Corsten and Tiësto among them. ‘MEMENTO’ also includes some of her best-known releases (‘As The Rush Comes’, Will Atkinson’s reworking of ‘Imagination’, which, on release, topped the Beatport chart for close to a month, ‘Fall Into You’ and others), as well as her most recent hits, ‘Sunrise’, ‘By My Side’ and ‘Long Way Home’.
Throughout their lifespan as a band, The Lone Bellow have cast an indelible spell with their finespun songs of hard truth and unexpected beauty, frequently delivered in hypnotic three-part harmony. In a departure from their past work with elite producers like Aaron Dessner of The National and eight-time Grammy-winner Dave Cobb, the Nashville-based trio struck out on their own for their new album Love Songs for Losers, dreaming up a singular sound encompassing everything from arena-ready rock anthems to the gorgeously sprawling Americana tunes the band refers to as “little redneck symphonies.” Recorded at the possibly haunted former home of the legendary Roy Orbison, the result is an intimate meditation on the pain and joy and ineffable wonder of being human, at turns heartbreaking, irreverent, and sublimely transcendent
Rising psychedelic-funk multi-instrumentalist Kainalu has shared his highly anticipated sophomore LP Ginseng Hourglass (out now). The captivating project, titled Ginseng Hourglass, is a contemplative, philosophical exploration of the passage of time and the finite nature of life over nine tracks. It manages to strike a delicate balance of feeling airy and effervescent while plunging into the depths of despair. Following the recent untimely passing of his mother, and the conversations they had surrounding her life and mortality in her last few months, Kainalu took to creating an album that captures the tiny joys amid the trauma and wisdom in the emotional ruin.
Other reviews you might enjoy:
- New music round-up
- New music round-up (for w/e 17 November 2023)
- New music round-up (for w/e 12 May 2023)
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television