Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 9 September 2022.
Grammy-nominated Scottish musician KT Tunstall’s new album, Nut, completes a trilogy of albums that started in 2016, and represents the mind. Produced by Martin Terefe, Nut draws on Tunstall’s love of percussive West African grooves as a metaphor for the learning patterns of the mind. It is an eclectic album that seamlessly weaves together disparate styles while showcasing KT’s singular knack for balancing introspective folk and propulsive rock.
Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, born four years before her brother, Felix Mendelssohn, was an accomplished pianist and a prolific composer. When she died of a stroke, aged just forty-two, she left around 460 pieces of music, some 250 of which are songs. The difficulties of making a career in her own era (her supportive father would not allow her to publish or work as a ‘professional’ composer) have condemned much of her work to obscurity, a situation that is now rapidly being reversed as the number of concerts and recordings devoted to works by women composers increases. Here the award-winning Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective champions her Piano Trio and Piano Quartet, alongside Felix Mendelssohn’s under-performed Piano Sextet. Fanny composed her Piano Quartet whilst a student, aged seventeen. In contrast, the Piano Trio was her last chamber work, written in her final year. The Piano Sextet by Felix Mendelssohn was also an early work, written in just a few short weeks in the spring of 1824. For some reason he never published the work (perhaps because of the unusual scoring), hence it became his Op. 110 when published, posthumously, in 1868.
Heady with hooks and unforgettable melodies, gliding on deeply danceable grooves, always with Air Waves’ innate compassion, concision and uncanny pop sense shining throughout. A masterpiece that’s beautifully simple, instantly accessible and entirely addictive. Featuring Cass Mccombs, Skyler Skjelset (Fleet Foxes, Beach House), Luke Temple, Brian Betancourt (Hospitality, Sam Evian), Rina Mushonga, Frankie Cosmos, Lispector, David Christian, Ethan Sass, and Ben Florencio.
The members of the legendary original 1990s Joshua Redman Quartet — Joshua Redman (saxophone), Brad Mehldau (piano), Christian McBride (bass), and Brian Blade (drums) — reunited twenty-six years after their 1994 debut album, MoodSwing, for 2020’s RoundAgain. Now they return now with their new album, LongGone, which is out now. The new album features original Redman compositions from the RoundAgain recording sessions, plus a live performance of the MoodSwing track “Rejoice,” captured by SFJAZZ at the San Francisco Jazz Festival.
Like the many Banded Stilts (birds) that spread across the cover of her newest album Flood, Stella Donnelly is wading into uncharted territory. Here, she finds herself discovering who she is as an artist among the flock, and how abundant one individual can be. Flood is Donnelly’s record of this rediscovery: the product of months of risky experimentation, hard moments of introspection, and a lot of moving around. Her early reflections on the relationship between the individual and the many can be traced back to Donnelly’s time in the rainforests of Bellingen, where she took to birdwatching as both a hobby and an escape in a border-restricted world. By paying closer attention to the natural world around her, she recalls “I was able to lose that feeling of anyone’s reaction to me. I forgot who I was as a musician, which was a humbling experience of just being;being my small self.”
For the past fifteen years, The Hooten Hallers have been crisscrossing the US as inveterate road warriors, bringing their peculiar vision of Americana – a fiery rock-and-roll fever dream birthed in Missouri’s fertile musical heartland. They’ve put so many miles into the road that they’ve burned through multiple tour vans and left twisted metal and frayed rubber strewn across the road behind them. With their aptly named new album, Back In Business Again, the trio roar back on to the international stage with ten incendiary new original songs drawn from their many travels and inspired by the hardships that all touring musicians have faced throughout a seemingly never-ending pandemic. There’s hope in these new songs, but tinges of madness too, driven by the raw drumming of Andy Rehm, the infernal growl and swirling
Dreamtape is Conrad Greenleaf’s second album of ambient music, following 2017’s Shimmering Twins, but it’s sonically very distant from that record. While Shimmering Twins was awash with warm synthesizers (both analogue and digital) and largely made on computer, Dreamtape is a far more organic affair. Recorded mostly on cassette 4-track during the main COVID lockdown of 2021, the album is full of guitars, bass, mellow keyboards, sound effects and tape manipulation – reflecting a deeper, more sombre side of Greenleaf’s music.
Other reviews you might enjoy:
- New music round-up (for w/e 5 August 2022)
- Heather Redman & the Reputation – music review
- New music round-up (for w/e 27 August 2021)
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television
