Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 31 July 2020. Madeline Kenney bounds toward the unknown on her third album, Sucker’s Lunch. On the record, Kenney expands on the idea of what a love song could be – a little more cautious than exuberant, more nuanced…
Like many of the innovative, influential women artists who carved out a name for themselves in the early days of modern rock & roll music – Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Nina Simone, Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Joan Jett – Chrissie Hynde is practically a force of nature unto herself. As she sang…
Somehow, even when Rufus Wainwright was getting a lot of buzz for the sophisticated sound on his self-titled debut (’98) and his sophomore outing, Poses, he felt like an old soul, someone who’s idea of pop music came from Cole Porter’s prestigious catalog in the 1930’s, and prone to quoting lines from the plays of…
The debut of NZ band The Beths, Future Me Hates Me, was one of the musical bright spots of 2018, making it onto a lot of music critics’ ‘best of’ lists. We hear a continuation of the band’s bright power pop, and the smart songwriting by lead vocalist Elizabeth Stokes, along with the supportive vocal…
Phoebe Bridgers’ solo sophomore album arrives amid a growing demand for the young indie rock singer/songwriter. After the release of her debut, Stranger in the Alps in 2017, Bridgers formed the group Boygenius with Julian Baker and Lucy Dacus, releasing and EP in ’18 and then touring. In early ’19, the duo of Bridgers and…
Avoiding the sophomore album slump is a monumental task for any group that had a successful debut, like Melbourne-based band Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever. Hope Downs (2018) had the college jangle at times like R.E.M., which then combined with the raw rock of The Replacements. This guitar indie rock was a breathe of fresh air…
This long “lost” Neil Young album was recorded late in 1974, two years after his classic solo, commercial breakout album, Harvest, which contained some of Young’s best known and loved songs – “Heart of Gold,” “Are You Ready for the Country,” “Old Man,” “Alabama,” and “The Needle and the Damage Done.” Somewhat overwhelmed by his…
By now, there are some constants that we can assert about The 1975. They like to dream big, and they love a wide concept with lots of room for experimentation. They come up with cool, often long album titles. Oh, and musically, well, they are all over the map. None of this is news, we…
Over the decades, county music has loved a hard-luck story, a tears-in-your-beer weeper about a romance gone bad, hard livin’ and hard lovin’ with the promise of a party on the weekend. But it also came with the expectation of authenticity, the idea that the person singing the song had lived it, or at least…
You get the sense listening to the fifth album from Perfume Genius, aka Mike Hadreas, that at heart he’s a torch singer. Whatever the musical direction or production style an individual track takes – and he does just about everything here, from dirge-y electronica to buoyant faux-50’s dancefloor pop, maudlin grungy rock, and of course…
