The run-down of this week’s six best releases starts with Someday, Now, on which the signature acoustic-led, sweetly-voiced singer-songwriter fare of Katy J Pearson’s albums Return and Sound of the Morning is transmuted through the desk of electronic producer Nathan Jenkins aka Bullion. After a period of burnout, self-enforced exile from music-making and solo travel, Pearson came back to her practice with clarity of mind and vision. “I knew exactly who I wanted to work with, I knew exactly who my session band were going to be, I knew where I wanted to record. It felt like I was finally calling the shots for myself, and that was so empowering,” she reflects.
Jamie xx replicates the emotional crescendos and thrilling volatility of an almost mystical night out on In Waves. The album’s 12 tracks include ‘Baddy on the Floor’, his joyous summer collaboration with club culture icon Honey Dijon, and features further collaborations with Robyn, The Avalanches, Kelsey Lu, John Glacier and Panda Bear, Oona Doherty and his The xx bandmates Romy and Oliver Sim. The music was created over a four-year period ushered in by his much-loved 2020 Essential Mix and peppered with periods of self-reflection, a global pandemic, the blinking re-emergence into the strobe light and a newly discovered love of surfing as escapism.
Five Dice, All Threes is a record of uncommon intensity and tenderness, communal exorcism and personal excavation. These are, of course, qualities that fans have come to expect from Bright Eyes, nearly three decades into their career. The tight-knit band of Conor Oberst, Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott tends to operate in distinct sweeping movements: each unique in its sound and story but unified by a sense of ambition and ever-growing emotional stakes. Even with this rich history behind them, these new songs exude a visceral thrill like nothing they have attempted before.
Carve the Runes then Be Content with Silence, a new three-movement work for solo violin and string ensemble by Erland Cooper, gets its first public reveal 3 years after the only master tape was planted deep in the soil of the Islands of Orkney and all digital copies were deleted. It will be released exactly as it sounds after being ‘recomposed’ by the earth. The work was written to mark the centenary in 2021 of the birth of the celebrated Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown.
In September 1982, Fleetwood Mac embarked on a 31-city US tour in support of Mirage, the band’s fourth consecutive multi-platinum album and third No. 1 in America. Both shows at The Forum were recorded, and Mirage Tour ’82 combines songs from both nights into a single concert experience. Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were at the height of their collective power at these shows, delivering a hyper-charged set list filled with hits new and old, with standouts including ‘Songbird’, ‘Oh Well’, ‘Love In Store’, ‘Go Your Own Way’ and a version of ‘Landside’ for the ages.
Our release of the week comes from Nubya Garcia, an artist whose music you can’t easily classify. Is it jazz? Sure, the London-born saxophonist, composer and bandleader grew up studying the genre under the noted pianist Nikki Yeoh at Camden Music. But listen to her latest album, Odyssey, and you hear a far broader creativity shining through: it’s jazz, classical, dub, R&B and whatever else Garcia wants to convey. It all comes from a place of exploration and self-study, of wanting to do all the things across all disciplines while ignoring arbitrary boxes that don’t.
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