3 d. ago ALBUM REVIEW: The London Suede dances with death on ‘Antidepressants’

ALBUM REVIEW: The London Suede dances with death on ‘Antidepressants’  RIFF Magazine

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4 d. ago Titanic: Hagen review | Ammar Kalia's global album of the month

(Unheard of Hope)On their second collaborative album, the couple based in Mexico City add pop shimmer and thundering blastbeats to their unique, always-surprising soundIn just five years, Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti has become one of experimental music’s biggest names. In addition to her spellbinding solo releases, she is an eager collaborator, working with the likes of Efterklang, the improv quartet Amor Muere – which she co-founded in her adopted home of Mexico City – and with her romantic partner, guitarist Hector Tosta, as Titanic. On the latter’s superb 2023 debut, Vidrio, they pioneered a genre-agnosticism that veered from squealing free-jazz saxophone to hammering drum grooves and aggressively processed cello, always anchored in Fratti’s soaring falsetto. It heralded the arrival of a group who embraced experimentation as much as earwormy melodies.On Hagen, the duo double down on their convictions, complementing their unusual arrangements with a newfound pop shimmer. Opener...

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5 d. ago Blood Orange: Essex Honey review | Alexis Petridis’s album of the week

(RCA)Gorgeous melodies ground Dev Hynes’s questing fifth album, via dancefloor rhythms, indie pop and languorous funk – and cameos from Lorde and Zadie SmithDev Hynes’s fifth studio album as Blood Orange opens with a series of unexpected musical juxtapositions. The first track, Look at You, starts out with softly sung vocals over a cushion of equally soft synthesiser chords, before stopping dead, then re-emerging as almost an entirely different song: harmonies over guitar chords strummed so lazily you can hear the plectrum hitting each individual string. The second, Thinking Clean, offers a piano over pattering hi-hats: there’s something anticipatory about it, like an intro that’s about to burst into life, but when it does – complete with dancefloor rhythm – the song swiftly falls apart. The piano becomes increasingly abstract, before everything gives way to scrabbling, apparently improvised cello.It’s a lot to cram into six minutes, but anyone familiar with Blood Orange’s back cata...

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1 week ago Earl Sweatshirt: Live Laugh Love review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(Tan Cressida/Warner Records)With a sunlit disposition and paeans to his daughter, the mood turns lighter on the US MC’s sixth album – but the glitching, crashing beats are as esoteric as everThe launch party for Earl Sweatshirt’s sixth album was, by all accounts, a confounding affair. Some attenders came away convinced that Live Laugh Love contained guest appearances not merely by Vince Staples, but actor/rapper Donald Glover and comedian Dave Chappelle (it doesn’t, although all three contributed to a fanzine produced for the event). At one juncture, the DJ announced the arrival of “my brother, Earl Sweatshirt” before the appearance of someone who was visibly not Earl Sweatshirt – he was Asian, and apparently goes under the winning stage name Gary Underpants – performing a succession of Earl Sweatshirt songs. In the aftermath, at least one online music title didn’t seem sure whether it actually was a launch party for a new album or “an elaborate prank”: would a man whose grim world...

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1 week ago Royel Otis: Hickey review – Australian duo come off as problematic exes on their second album

Lead single ‘Moody’ caused controversy over lyrics that played into tired stereotypes of the nagging girlfriend – other tracks riff on themes of dark distrust

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1 week ago Album reviews: Laufey – A Matter of Time, and Mac DeMarco – Guitar

Laufey’s gorgeous, romantic third album feels like a brilliant throwback, while Mac DeMarco’s low-fi release is slight, if unremarkable

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1 week ago Album reviews: CMAT | Wolf Alice | Woody Guthrie | Bryan Adams

CMAT is a natural talent with a big voice, a social conscience and an impish sense of humour, writes Fiona Shepherd

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1 week ago Adrian Thrills reviews Laufey's new album and finds jazz's hottest young star adding bite to her bebop, with help from Taylor Swift's pal Aaron Dessner

The singer is still in thrall to Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. But the last year has also seen her step out of her comfort zone to work with Beabadoobee and Noah Kahan

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1 week ago A Matter of Time by Laufey review: Is this my album of the year?

The Grammy award-winning Icelandic-Chinese singer Laufey expertly blends classic jazz and piquant pop confessions

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1 week ago Linda May Han Oh: Strange Heavens review | John Fordham's jazz album of the month

(Biophilia Records)Ambrose Akinmusire and Tyshawn Sorey join the bassist-composer on originals featuring top-end squeals, bass flurries and a guilelessly delicate highlightThe power of three has had a great press for a long time, embedded as it’s been in the tenets of Christians, witches, Buddhists, or just the beginnings, middles and ends of fireside stories. And in the thrifty music-making years after the second world war, the economical appeal of the jazz trio – often led by piano virtuosi such as Bill Evans or Ahmad Jamal, occasionally by such sax giants as Sonny Rollins – also revealed just how much spontaneous creativity could fly from minimal gatherings.Linda May Han Oh, the Malaysia-born, New York-based Australian bassist and composer whose star employers have included Vijay Iyer and Pat Metheny, leads this standout example, composing everything except for covers of Geri Allen and Melba Liston tunes. Her trio partners are those stellar inventors of contemporary jazz, Ambrose...

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2 w. ago Laufey's 'A Matter of Time' embraces anger, jazz, pop and a collaboration with twin sister

Icelandic Chinese artist Laufey has achieved her yearbook dreams of moving to the U.S., signing a record deal, and winning a Grammy

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2 w. ago Mac DeMarco: ‘People use AI to write lyrics now. Give me a break’

The sometime poster boy for slacker rock talks to Kevin E G Perry about quitting drinking and smoking, starting his new album over again and why young artists should embrace the messiness of human imperfection

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2 w. ago Benedicte Maurseth: Mirra review | Jude Rogers' folk album of the month

(Hubro)Rhythmic repetitions and rustling textures evoke the traditional music and ecological harmony of Maurseth’s native NorwayA hardanger fiddle player from the fjord-and-mountain-filled region of Norway, where the instrument comes from, Benedicte Maurseth explores traditional music, nature and landscape influenced by the idea of ecosophy, a philosophy of ecological harmony. From childhood, she studied under master hardanger fiddler Knut Hamre, exploring the tunes, styles and effects associated with her instrument: its sympathetic strings, funnelled under the fingerboard, are particularly hypnotic, vibrating in response to the notes resonating above, as they do on the sitar and sarangi.A follow-up to Maurseth’s 2022 Nordic music prize-winning Hárr, Mirra is named after an old dialect word describing wild reindeer running together in a circling pattern. Norwegian folk’s rhythmic repetitions feed Maurseth’s intricate compositions (as do the influences of minimalism and Krautrock), b...

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2 w. ago Petrassi: Concertos for Orchestra Nos 7 & 8 album review – dramatic power from rarely heard Italian master

Tonda/Rome SO/La Vecchia(Naxos)Francesco La Vecchia draws out the fierce contrasts of Goffredo Petrassi’s later music in this new recording of his final two concertos.Though his music is rarely heard in the UK these days, Goffredo Petrassi was one of the most significant and influential Italian composers of the mid 20th century. Born in 1904, just a few months after Luigi Dallapiccola, Petrassi’s early works were firmly neoclassical, but after 1945 he began to incorporate elements from his younger contemporaries in the European avant garde. He was also a distinguished teacher; among the many who studied with him were Ennio Morricone, Peter Maxwell Davies and Cornelius Cardew.Petrassi’s eight concertos for orchestra are at the core of his orchestral output, and Naxos has now released recordings of all of them. The pairing of the last two, composed in 1964 and 1972, are typical of his later music, trenchantly argued, with fierce contrasts between strings and wind. It’s music of great ...

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2 w. ago Ravel: Complete Orchestral Works II album review – Mallarmé miniatures shine brightly

Barron/Duhamel/OBC Barcelona/Morlot(L’Auditori)Ludovic Morlot creates a shimmering web around soprano Fleur Barron’s lucid vocals in Trois Poèmes, on an album that also showcases Shéhérazade and Don QuichotteThe first disc of Ludovic Morlot’s Ravel survey with the Barcelona orchestra of which he’s been music director since 2022 appeared last year. That included two of Ravel’s best known scores: the suite Le Tombeau de Couperin and the ballet Mother Goose. At the heart of this latest instalment are Ravel’s three orchestral song cycles: the mezzo soprano Fleur Barron sings Shéhérazade, the 1904 settings of poems by Tristan Klingsor, and the 1913 Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, while between them the baritone Alexandre Duhamel is the soloist in the charming product of Ravel’s old age, which was originally intended as a film score, Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, from 1933.For all the oriental beauty of Shéhérazade, delivered with suitably seductive warmth by Barron, it is the Mallarmé min...

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3 w. ago Album reviews: The Black Keys – No Rain, No Flowers, and Memory of Jane – Unsinking the Cypress

The Black Keys sound surprisingly muted after experiencing one of their most tumultuous periods as a band, while Memory of Jane finds clarity on his delightful debut

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3 w. ago Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos 1 & 3; Two Scherzos album review – deft execution of the Russian’s early exuberance

BBC Philharmonic/John Storgårds/Hallé Choir(Chandos)Capturing the momentum of two of Shostakovich’s first Soviet-era symphonies, this performance adds a pair of scherzos that pre-date even themIf the key stylistic reference in Shostakovich’s symphonies from the Fifth onwards would unmistakably be Mahler, his early symphonies show a much more catholic array of influences, and often hint at other directions his music might have taken had events in the Soviet Union allowed him the freedom of choice. The First Symphony in particular, composed in 1924-25, is an energised bundle of ideas derived from many sources, with the Stravinsky of Petrushka and the early neoclassicism of Paul Hindemith vying for supremacy in music that careers along with sudden changes of direction – alternating exuberance with flashes of pathos – which never fail to surprise.In what is the latest instalment of their Shostakovich series for Chandos, John Storgårds and the BBC Philharmonic are more effective in maint...

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3 w. ago Ethel Cain: Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You review – a dark, Lynchian coming

The American singer-songwriter follows up her 2022 debut ‘Preacher’s Daughter’ with a concept album that’s often mesmerising

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3 w. ago Amaarae: Black Star review – glamour, glitz and lust from a pop star who should be a supernova

(Golden Angel/Interscope)With a sleek dancefloor-facing sound, the Ghanaian American singer is deliriously in thrall to wealth and celebrity – but most of all loveFountain Baby, the second album by Amaarae, was a revelation – a sensual, funny, frank and musically dense record released in 2023 that established the 31-year-old Ghanaian American pop musician as a cultural force to match contemporaries such as Rosalía and Charli xcx. Although the songs are hedonistic – largely oscillating between wry flexes of wealth and lyrics about trifling with, and being trifled by, women in her orbit – she is also a realist: actions have consequences in Amaarae’s world, such as on Reckless & Sweet, as she wonders whether her lovers desire her or merely her money.Despite the ingenuity and complexity of her music, Amaarae has struggled to break into the mainstream, in the UK at least. A recent Glastonbury set felt sparsely attended and, aside from 2020’s Sad Girlz Luv Money, one of the most ...

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4 w. ago Time Flies review – existential flight game with a bittersweet buzz

PC, Mac, PS5, Nintendo Switch; Playables/PanicClever puzzler has you freely buzzing around trying to quickly achieve all your bucket list activities while avoiding sharp or gooey life-ending hazardsThe death of a housefly is usually an unceremonious event. Within minutes of the insect’s appearance in our periphery, a tide of annoyance rises, and with the quick thwap of a swatter or rolled-up magazine, the bug is gone. Time Flies, a perception-warping bug puzzler, reimagines this inevitably short lifespan as an absurd tragedy – by providing the soon-to-perish pest with a bucket list.Over the course of roughly a minute, players freely buzz around minimalist 2D environments in an effort to make those last wishes come true. The fly’s dreams arrive as vague, far-ranging clues such as “make someone laugh”, “find God”, “start a revolution” and “get rich”, and it’s your job to ricochet around the space until you land, often literally, on a clarifying and usually funny realisation. Similar t...

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