The first of this week’s sizzlers out the bag is Careful of Your Keepers: daring and soft, cutting and warm, this is a wild feat of complexity and combined dispositions. There’s a shared language of This Is The Kit’s family experience that is as audible as ever in these recordings, which boast beautiful instrumental performances…
Teenage Fanclub’s eleventh full studio album, Nothing Lasts Forever, is a beautifully rich and melodic album that is the sound of a season’s end, of the last warm days of the year while nights begin to draw in and thoughts become reflective and more than a little melancholy. That reflection is everywhere on the record,…
The first of this week’s peaches to be unpeeled is Such Ferocious Beauty, which is vintage Cowboy Junkies and another dimension from the lo-fi Canadian band that comprises … well, family. A tangle of sonic textures, the album is a rumination on ageing, losing parents, facing mortality and creating space for one’s life in the…
Blur, one of the most successful British bands of the last three decades, are back with their first new album in over 8 years: The Ballad of Darren, preceded by first single ‘The Narcissist’. The album was produced by James Ford and recorded in Studio 13, London and Devon. It’s the sound of a band…
We start this week’s super six with the twice Grammy-nominated, Mercury Prize- and Brit Award-winning artist Arlo Parks, who returns with her second album, My Soft Machine. This is a deeply personal body of work: a narration of Parks’ experiences as she navigates her 20s and the growth involved. She explains articulately in her own…
Joni Mitchell stunned the Newport Folk Festival audience last summer when she gave a surprise performance – her first in 20 years – delivering a heartfelt set filled with some of her greatest songs. Mitchell’s triumphant return to the stage on 24 July, 2022 is now featured on a new live album, At Newport, which…
The first of this week’s six of the best is Seven Psalms, which was recorded entirely on acoustic instruments performed predominantly by Paul Simon and showcases his craft at its finest and most captivating, simply with his voice and guitar. Intended to be listened to as one continuous piece, the 33-minute, seven-movement composition transcends the…
The Death Of Randy Fitzsimmons, the colossal new album from The Hives, reignites the band’s lore in arresting fashion, exploring the disappearance of the band’s mysterious sixth member Randy Fitzsimmons. Having gone missing some time ago, the band are without their best man, and things are not well in the manor. Maybe, just maybe, the…
This week’s six sizzlers open up with BC Camplight (Brian Christinzio). Is there a curse that says he cannot move forward without being knocked back? That the greatest material is born out of emotional trauma? While making his new album, The Last Rotation of Earth, Christinzio’s relationship with his fiancé crumbled after nine inseparable years.…
Loving You is a reflection on the life and music of Bobbie Nelson by Grammy-winning singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Amanda Shires. Shires’ mission in making Loving You is to pay respect to the only woman she saw working in a band and pursuing a career as a sideman. “I first saw Bobbie playing when I…