Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 7 July 2023.
The first album in over six years from American songwriter Julie Byrne is a testament to patience and determination, the willingness to transform through the desolation of loss, the vitality of renewal, and the courage to rise, forever changed. For nearly a decade, Byrne has moved through the world as a characteristically private artist largely outside the public eye. A self-taught musician that has committed her life to her work, she now emerges from a deeply trying and generative period with the most powerful, lustrous, and life-affirming music of her career, The Greater Wings. While they hold the plasticity of grief and trauma, the songs are universally resonant, unbridled in their devotion and joy, held up by the love and alliance of a chosen family. Byrne leans further into atmospheres both expansive and intimate; the lush, evocative songcraft flows between her signature fingerpicked guitar, synthesizer, and a newly adopted piano, made wider by flourishes of harp and strings. It is the transcendent sound of resource, of friendship that was never without romance, of loyalty that burns from within like a heart on fire, and the life force summoned in unrepeatable moments — raw, gorgeous, and wild.
Laurence Equilbey, conducting her period-instrument Insula Orchestra, champions the composer Louise Farrenc, a prominent and pioneering figure in 19th century Paris. This album presents two of Farrenc’s three symphonies, No. 1 in C minor, first heard in 1845, and No. 3 in G minor, premiered in 1849. “The score is so well written that it deserves a prominent place in the history of the early Romantic symphony,” wrote the Financial Times after a performance of the Symphony No 3 in London, marking International Women’s Day 2018. “Equilbey and the Insula orchestra gave it a fleet, fiery performance. Their crusading spirit lived up to the day’s billing.”
A sense of optimism infuses Penguin Cafe’s fifth studio album Rain Before Seven… not the braggadocious, overconfident kind, but more a blithe, self-effacing optimism in keeping with the national character. Even when all signs point to the contrary, it operates within the certainty that things are going to be alright. Probably. The title comes from an old weather proverb with the rhyming prognostication — fine before eleven — hinting at a happy ending, irrespective of the science: “I found it in a book and I’d never heard it before,” says Arthur Jeffes, leader of Penguin Cafe. “It has faintly optimistic overtones and I quite like it. It’s fallen out of usage recently but it does describe English weather patterns coming in off the Atlantic.”
Melbourne/Naarm based folk group The Finks have just unveiled their new record Birthdays at Solo Pasta. The 12-track LP, out via Melbourne based indie record label Milk! Records, is a beautiful window into the world of The Finks. Through this stunning collection of indie folk, pop infused songs, The Finks tenderly guide you through the highs and lows of life with their gentle melodies and poetic lyricism.
What’s behind The Red Door? For pianist Orrin Evans, that question has come to symbolize the daring path his life and music have taken over the course of his three-decade career. On his latest album, he once again flings that door open, delighting in the collaborators, friends, inspiration, and history that he finds inside.
The Slingers have shared their anticipated debut album, Sentimentalism via Flightless Records. The Naarm-based 5-piece has garnered a devoted following in the contemporary underground/alternative scene, selling over 1000 tickets in Melbourne alone. The band defy classification, with a diverse catalogue spanning from country to folk, grunge rock to ballad, Australiana to Americana, acoustic and spoken word to electronica.
My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, Anohni’s 6th studio album, shape-shifts through a broad range of subject matter to express a world view. Through a personal lens, Anohni addresses loss of loved ones, inequality, alienation, acceptance, cruelty, ecocide, devastation wrought by Abrahamic theologies, Future Feminism, and the possibility that we might yet transform our ways of thinking, our spiritual ideas, our societal structures, and our relationships with the rest of nature.
Other reviews you might enjoy:
- New music round-up
- New music round-up (for w/e 30 July 2021)
- New music round-up (for w/e 11 October 2024)
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television