Table of contents for April 2023 in MOJO

Billy Bragg Between recording albums, Billy spends his time writing books. His 2017 tome Roots, Radicals & Rockers: How Skiffle Changed The World was a MOJO book of the year. This month he gets together with a fellow fan of the guitar, washboard and tea chest bass, Van Morrison, on page 44. Jim Wirth In the 1990s, Jim wrote album reviews for NME while fielding death threats behind a Fulham record shop counter. He reviews the Lankum LP on page 80 of this issue, and on a recent expedition discovered that R.E.M. recorded Fables Of The Reconstruction not far from the Wood Green branch of Iceland. Bill Janovitz Bill’s name might sound familiar to those who were moshing, spilling beer, and possibly yowling along to indie guitar bands in the…

OVER LOCKDOWN, Steven Wilson wrote his long-planned, unorthodox memoir Limited Edition Of One. Its penultimate chapter, a disconcerting short story which evoked a synthesis of JG Ballard and Willy Wonka was, he says, “a little piece of dystopian science fiction… then I thought, Wouldn’t it be interesting to write some music for the imaginary movie interpretation of the short story and to use it as the basis for something a little bit more conceptual, or pretentious, in the best possible sense of the word. I love to be pretentious.” FACT BOX Title: The Harmony Codex Due: Autumn 2023 Production: Steven Wilson Songs: What Life Brings, Economies Of Scale, Impossible Tightrope The Buzz: “I still love this idea of the album as a continuum, as something that you sit down…

DOROTHY MOSKOWITZ may not be the only retired school music teacher in Piedmont, California, but chances are she’s the only one who was part of one of the most radical avant-garde American pop groups of the ’60s, The United States Of America. She also has a new album to promote, with two more waiting in the wings. “It’s about the joy of making the music,” says Moskowitz from her home office. “People ask me, ‘What style do you like?’ I said, ‘I don’t care. Show me and I’ll do it.’” The latest Moskowitz style is embodied in the remarkable Under An Endless Sky, recorded with Italian electronic composer Francesco Paolo Paladino and lyricist and author Luca Chino Ferrari as Dorothy Moskowitz & The United States Of Alchemy. “They awakened some…

DAVID CROSBY MAY JUST BE having the time of his life right now. The 76-year-old has released four albums in the last four years, each better than the last, and made with two distinct, young-ish bands. The latest, Here If You Listen, is polished, timely, and politically challenging. Most remarkable of all: his singing voice remains an object of wonder. “Look, man, I did everything wrong,” Crosby says. “I did it all wrong. So there’s no excuse for me to be singing the way I am right now. I know that. My partners? My current partners that are so good I have to paddle faster to keep up? Those ones? They all tell me that I’m singing as good I’ve ever sang in my life. And I don’t think they’re…

IN ANY ARTIST’S LIFE, THERE’S OFTEN TALK OF A moment, an epiphany, which sparked the whole creative journey. Jeff Beck revealed his epiphany on an American TV show devoted to his most fervent passion. Not music, nor even guitars: cars. In 2009, when Car Crazy came to film on his East Sussex spread where he stabled the collection of hot rods and custom cars he’d rebuilt himself, our host recalled his uncle taking little Geoffrey for a tear-up in his MG, getting up to all of 75mph, whereas in the family car his dad never pootled above 45. The MG also had that rare extra, a radio, which sat tantalisingly silent until Geoffrey, fiddling about as small boys do, switched it on and out burst music such as he’d never…

★★★ Music In The Madness WTW. CD/DL/LP UK’s “most successful country act” continues to ditch the country. Hampshireborn twins Catherine and Lizzy Ward Thomas have steadily moved away from the Nashville country-pop of 2014 debut From Where We Stand. At the suggestion of new producer Ed Harcourt, Music In The Madness is the first Ward Thomas album to be recorded with their touring band, rekindling the warmth that was lost amongst the digitised pop-rock of 2019’s Restless Minds album. There’s little left of the country flavours that propelled Cartwheels to the top of the UK album charts in 2016, but the lush Fleetwood Mac-isms of the title song, Next To You, Joan Of Arc and Unravel showcase their knack for writing powerful choruses, while the Keane-like If It All Ends…

False Lankum is the traditional song the band are named after, but why is this record ‘False’? IL: “I just like the questions that it raises – is this the false Lankum or is there such a thing as a true Lankum? – and the ideas that it brings to mind about the tradition. Is it some kind of false messenger?” Do you see what you do as traditional music? IL: “I don’t think there’s purity in the tradition. It’s always been in flux. We’re doing what people have always done; absorbing things and playing them in a way that makes musical sense to us. Individually, we go to sessions and we sing in a traditional manner, but the band Lankum: that’s not what we’re here to do. I wouldn’t…

★★★★ Workin’ On A World FLARIELLA. CD/DL/LP Fury and vengeance from John Prine’s favourite collaborator. It feels like country/folk/ gospel singersongwriter Iris DeMent has written far too few songs over her 30-year career but, when she does, there are zero punches pulled. Her first original material since 2012 sees injustice everywhere. The sinister, serpent-like Let Me Be Your Jesus speaks with the forked-tongue lies of white supremacy; on the eightminute Goin’ Down To Sing In Texas she tackles the twisted logic that links unfettered gun ownership, intolerance and police brutality. She prefers to hope, however, looking for inspiration on Mahalia, a tribute to the Queen Of Gospel Song, and from Martin Luther King on How Long, while the title track calls for strength to carry on the work of others…

★★★★ Altitude SNAKEFARM. CD/DL/LP Umpteenth album by country legend who can do it all. As a teenager he played in bluegrass legend Lester Flatt’s band, he spent six years touring with Johnny Cash, and 20 years ago gathered his own backing band, the Fabulous Superlatives. Twenty-plus albums down the line, Marty Stuart has seen it, done it, and is doing it all again. Altitude hits all the Stuart hallmarks, jingle-jangling through the Byrdsian Sitting Alone, bringing the low-down twang to Country Star and Vegas, surfing vibes on Tomahawk and roadhouse brawling for Time To Dance. The ease with which he flits between styles is matched by the light touch of his lyrics, particularly on the Jimmy Webb-like gentle introspection of The Sun Is Quietly Sleeping. And although the concept behind…

Matthew Donaldson ★★★ Say What You Like OUTSIDE. CD/DL/LP Toronto singer-songwriter returns with fifth album. “There’s so many ways to get rearranged,” sings Doug Paisley on I Wanted It Too Much, a bruise-pressing study in self-defeat and unmanaged decline. That line might ring true on the human level, but it would be a stretch to apply it to the songs on Paisley’s follow-up to 2018’s Starter Home. Instead, the Canadian sticks close to a country guitar palette, lap steel, electric piano and Felicity Williams’ gilt-tipped backing vocals subtly recalibrating the mood without tricks or alarms. Yet there’s an easy elegance to the title track’s Sultans Of Swing roll, or Old Hometown’s caught-in-a-trap dejection, while Sometimes It’s So Easy or Rewrite History have an undyed beauty. With many of Paisley’s songs…

The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs Of Black British Experience ★★★★ TOPIC. CD/DL Black muses: lost voices imagined into British tradition. Britain’s small pre-Windrush black population left little mark on traditional song, but Angeline Morrison (born in Birmingham to Jamaican and Scottish parents) retrofixed matters for one of the most important ‘folk’ releases of the last 12 months. Debuting on vinyl in 2023, The Sorrow Songs expertly splices stories of real black British lives into the Anglo-Celtic musical idiom. A stately mother’s lament for the drowned child found among the cargo of a Scilly Isles shipwreck, Unknown African Boy (d.1830) exemplifies the June Tabor-voiced Morrison’s soft power, but if she has miserable tales to tell (not least Mad-Haired Moll O’Bedlam), she offers hope too, guest Martin Carthy (father of the LP’s…

★★★★ CookUp NONESUCH. CD/DL/LP Prolific LA ambient jazz saxophonist re-imagines turn-of-the-century R&B hits. Among the most unpredictable saxophonist stylists out there, Gendel has collaborated with bassist Sam Wilkes, indie auteur Blake Mills and teenage producer Antonia Cytrynowicz. Reunited with regular rhythm section Gabe Noel and Philippe Melanson, these typically lopsided, minimalist R&B covers – witness the whooshing waves and high whistling harmonics applied to All-4-One’s I Swear – riff selectively off the original’s key elements, highlighting Gendel’s breathy psychedelic style (not a million miles away from Jon Hassell). Highlights include a total tonal flip on Aaliyah’s Are You That Somebody, Meshell Ndegeocello’s sensuous, close-miked vocal turn on 112’s Anywhere, a playful re-imagining of Mario’s megahit Let Me Love You and a mysterious ambient retake on Ginuwine’s thug ballad In Those…

★★★★ Ridin’ REPUTE. CD/DL Excellent follow-up to 2021’s Dear America. Guests include Taj Mahal and the jazz guitarist Russell Malone. At 71, Eric Bibb has made a late-life classic. Inspired by Eastman Johnson’s 1862 painting, A Ride For Liberty, Ridin’ is Bibb’s erudite processing of the state of the nation – his aim, he says, to “encourage understanding and communication”. Produced and co-written with Glen Scott, it’s also an incredibly edifying set of tough blues and folk originals. At times, as with the title track, he channels Bob Dylan and Mavis Staples, both friends of his father, the folk singer/ activist Leon Bibb who marched with Dr King. But for the most part his songs, imbued with the hope and dreams of the freedom riders, are delivered in his own…

★★★ I Am The River, The River Is Me MILK!/MARATHON ARTISTS. CD/DL/LP Heartfelt reckoning with home and identity from Aussie singer-songwriter. There’s a track on Jen Cloher’s fifth solo LP called Protest Song, a deliberately mellow meditation on the uses and limits of music that begins with the story of a distraught woman coming backstage and pleading “we need to do something”. I Am The River, The River Is Me is Cloher’s decisive something – a fierce engagement with the singer’s Māori heritage that opens conversations about land, culture, justice and sexuality. While there’s blazing anger at colonialism’s “genocidal legacy” on Being Human – Cloher backed by the haka chants of group Te Hononga o ngā Iwi – these songs also convey a jubilant selfrealisation, especially on the Sleater-Kinney crispness…

★★★★ Radical Romantics RABID. CD/DL/LP A familiar erratic intensity pervades Karin Dreijer’s third LP. Radical Romantics comes six years after Fever Ray’s Plunge and a decade from Shaking The Habitual by The Knife, the former project of siblings Karin and Olof Dreijer. Temporal gaps aside, this new offering hints at the genre-bending essence of the latter – the electronic patchwork contains fragments of ambient (Bottom Of The Ocean), new wave with a nod to David Sylvian (North) and K-pop (Looking For A Ghost). The similarity is not coincidental – Olof co-produces a few tracks, including the arpeggio-led opener What They Call Us. Although musically it might be a step back, thematically, Radical Romantics can be seen as a mellow follow-up to the angrier, gender-politicsdriven Plunge. Instead, it celebrates self-exploration. Wrapped…

★★★★ WOW RVNG INTL. DL/LP Russian artist’s fifth album: intriguingly out-there, playful electronica. With loops, lo-fi electronics and otherworldliness, Russian musician Kate Shilonosova forges a multi-layered record that’s charming and endlessly diverting. Her tools are unorthodox: notes created by samples drawn from malfunctioning instruments from the Philadelphia schools system, vocals that are often just squeaks or tics, and idiosyncratic found sounds, like a wind-up chattering teeth toy. D D Don’t – the titles are equally quirky – is a case in point, packed with blips, glitches and whirrs. Shilonosova is singing something that sounds like English, but can we be sure? Part of the fun is guessing the sound. Is that someone flicking their cheek? WOW’s melodies and motifs are pretty with a dash of strange – Asleep is a…

★★★ V JAGJAGUWAR. CD/DL/LP New Zealand’s psychedelic conductors reach for fifth dimension. While Ruban Nielson has long projected his music across the widest screens – Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s 2018 album was called Sex & Food; 2015’s Multi-Love detailed the collapse of a polygamous relationship – it makes sense that the dot-joining introspection of V should demand double album status. Explorations of memory, family and Nielson’s Hawaiian heritage lead to Keaukaha and I Killed Captain Cook, tracks influenced by Hapa-Haole (“half-white”) pop music. Contrasting with these deep roots, however, are songs that seem to have sprung from the shallow soil of Nielson’s recent residence in Palm Springs. Layla or The Beach are tightly manicured, hothoused, irrigated by diverted ’80s pop, Spyro Gyra fusion and chemically treated funk; the Lost In Music…

King Ayisoba ★★★★ Work Hard GLITTERBEAT. CD/DL/LP More wise words from the king of kologo – a Ghanaian lute – featuring rasping vocals, electronic pulses (based on traditional rhythms) and a relentless set of rhythms. Tips on being a good king sit next to thoughts on adultery (he is anti, and angry that women receive the worse scorn) and people who speculate (“Let’s see what go happen”). Vote for Ayisoba! Polobi & The Gwo Ka Masters ★★★ Abri Cyclonique REAL WORLD. CD/DL/LP Moise Polobi has been singing (and drumming) mystical trance in the jungles of Guadeloupe for 50 years but only recently recorded – and to be honest, that would have been a hard sell. Enter Irish dub maestro Doctor L, who instantly got the trippy roots vibe and set…

Particles Of Faith ★★★ DIE WITH YOUR BOOTS ON. CD/DL/LP Norwegian singersongwriter’s third album looks beyond recognisable prototypes. Half-way through Particles Of Faith’s sixth track, Carrickalinga, the song becomes a showcase for a husky, three-minute sax solo from fellow Norwegian Harald Lassen. This is glass-voiced singer-songwriter Signe Marie Rustad’s third LP, but giving way to another musician suggests she’s unconcerned about hogging the stage. Second track I Loved You From Before executes a similar transformation when, for its last third, a mid-tempo, Joni Mitchell-esque reflection abruptly turns impressionistic: whispered, wordless vocals interweave with rippling electric piano, cymbal taps and bloopy electronics. Rustad is ostensibly in a Laurel Canyon bag here and, for the most part, satisfyingly so. Along with Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones and Fiona Apple come to mind…

This Is Flying Dutchman 1969-1975 ★★★★ BGP. CD/DL/LP Excellent sampler showcase of producer Bob Thiele’s innovative jazz label. After working at Impulse! with John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp etc, producer Bob Thiele formed Flying Dutchman in 1969 and put out albums that coupled forward-thinking improv with a social conscience and spiritual dimension. This 16-track compilation provides a great introduction to the label’s early years – it closed in 1984 – mapping its musical giant steps by Gil Scott-Heron and Lonnie Liston Smith, the former with his crucial street sermons The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and Whitey On The Moon, the latter with the foundational jazz-funk fusion of Expansions and Peaceful Ones. There is also hard blowing flute and blues moaning from Leon Thomas and What’s Going On-styled…

Starting Point ★★★★ FAR OUT RECORDINGS. CD/DL/LP Lost 1975 debut album by revered Brazilian experimental jazz act. During the mid-1970s, in the midst of establishing a reputation in Brazilian composer/multiinstumentalist Hermeto Pascoal’s group, keyboardist Lelo Nazario, his drumming brother Zé Eduardo and bassist Zeca Assumpção formed spin-off project Grupo Um. The trio fused contemporary jazz and Afro-Brazilian rhythms in a São Paulo basement as a sonic challenge to the strictures of Brazil’s oppressive military dictatorship. Debut album Starting Point moves between spacey jazz-funk revelries and introspective abstractions: beginning with a ghostly berimbau, Onze Por Oito builds tension through Assumpção’s spiralling bass patterns, Lelo’s piano melodies reaching for the cosmic as Zé Eduardo plays fast and loose; Cortejo Dos Reis Negros recasts the maracatu rhythm as a platform for meandering piano.…

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ATOMIC JONES Rickie Lee’s rockers. 1 Van Morrison Veedon Fleece (WARNER BROS, 1974) 2 Coleman Hawkins The High And Mighty Hawk (FELSTED, 1958) 3 CSNY Déjà Vu (ATLANTIC, 1970) 4 Taj Mahal Giant Step/De Ole Folks At Home (COLUMBIA, 1969) 5 Laura Nyro New York Tendaberry (COLUMBIA, 1969) RICKIE LEE JONES has been busy. She’s soon to release a new album, Pieces Of Treasure, which reunites her with Russ Titelman, co-producer of her first two records Rickie Lee Jones (1979) and Pirates (1981). She’s also writing screenplays for a fictional TV series loosely based on her life. When MOJO visits her via Zoom at her New Orleans home, she’s been out working in the backyard, chopping dead limbs off trees. Despite a long history of getting in a car and…

SEEN THROUGH the back window of a car motoring down West 58th Street in February 1964, Beatles fans chase down the middle of the road. The striking black and white image, taken by Paul McCartney on the Fabs’ first, seismic trip to New York – and believed by him to be lost – vividly captures one of the first scenes of Beatlemania in the US. The next month, the band and director Richard Lester would recreate similar scenarios at Marylebone Station for their first film. “Crowds chasing us in A Hard Day’s Night were based on moments like this,” McCartney remembers in upcoming photo book, 1964: Eyes Of The Storm, due in June at the same time as an accompanying exhibition opens at the National Portrait Gallery. Both will feature…

SLEAFORD MODS’ JASON WILLIAMSON OPENS the door to his Nottingham home sporting a flourspeckled apron, accompanied by a welcoming waft of baking. He’s just conjured up a tray of cinnamonsweet mince pies. “Paul Hollywood’s recipe,” he says, modestly crediting the portly star of TV’s The Great British Bake Off. “He’s a horrible twat, but he knows how to bake.” Williamson lives in a handsome terraced house on a wide residential road, with the floodlights of Trent Bridge cricket stadium overlooking his garden. He resides here with his wife Claire, who also manages Sleaford Mods, and their two young children. “Once, we’d be in the boozer, sneaking in the bogs for lunchtime lines,” he says ruefully, leading us into their smart kitchen extension. “I always imagined it’d be like that doing…

IT’S A FINE DECEMBER MORNING IN NEW YORK CITY. AS MARQUINHOS’S PENALTY thumps against the Croatia goalpost and Brazil’s World Cup ambitions evaporate, however, a 10-year-old boy starts crying in another room and his father, Rio de Janeiro-born Roger José Cury, AKA Rogê, AKA (in homage to that city’s cultural hub) “the Prince of the Lapa nightlife scene”, turns his attention to MOJO. “Sometimes the best don’t win,” he shrugs, wearing the experienced, rueful smile of one who has seen promise and potential dashed on the rocks of reality many times before. Our meeting was first postponed after he discovered when Brazil’s quarter final kicked off, then again when it went to extra time, and once more as penalties loomed. But, with years of playing guitar in the bars of…

THE FILLMORE EAST IN MANHATTAN WAS packed on March 27, 1970. The audience filled the hall right to the lip of the stage. They were there to see Joe Cocker, who’d recently skyrocketed from obscurity to stardom on both sides of the Atlantic, in large part due to his knockout performance at Woodstock the previous August: a blue-eyed soul singer for the rock set. The documentary film of that festival had just been released the day before the Fillmore show, but his definitive version of The Beatles’ With A Little Help From My Friends, a Number 1 single for Cocker in the UK, was making waves in the States. “Delta Lady!” yelled a woman in the crowd. “Delta Lady it is, my love,” purred Cocker. The drums rumbled in, syncopated…

★★★★ Travel NORTHERN SPY. CD/DL/LP Album #19: four stunning jams capture the start of four practices. What’s left to rehearse, really? Atomise the simmering improvisations of brilliant Australian trio The Necks, as many have previously done, and their instrumental sagas crumble into hillocks of pretty junk – crystalline piano snippets, stunted drum lines, and resonant upright rumbles, all strange puzzle pieces with no partners. Travel, the nonpareil group’s best record in exactly a decade, again captures their uncanny ability to amass and arrange these seemingly inconsequential bits into staggering mountains, each musical stone situated for maximum intrigue. As The Necks go, these four umpteen-minute pieces are very distinct, from the locked-groove clave of acoustic opener Signal to the acid-organ roar of mighty closer Bloodstream. In spellbinding fashion, they all try…

★★★★ I Don’t Know A Thing About Love: The Songs Of Harlan Howard SONY LEGACY. CD/DL Full-album tribute to Willie’s late, great country songwriter friend. Nelson’s 73rd studio album features 10 songs by his old buddy Howard, a one-man country (and occasionally R&B) songwriting hit machine. Howard’s philosophy was,“three chords and the truth”, which suits Nelson fine. A delightful album, the songs are mostly about love and, being country, mostly love gone wrong. There’s heartbreak ballads with tearful steel (She Called Me Baby) or plaintive folk harmonica (Beautiful Annabel Lee), or that classic country combination, sad words, cheerful music (foot-tapping opener Tiger By The Tail). Backed by a top-notch session band that knows how to give a song all it needs and no more, Nelson’s in great voice, sounding as…

★★★ Sleep Standing Up HELIUM. CD/DL/LP UK trio’s elegant debut has the Roxy Music seal of approval. Singersongwriters Mary Home and Henry Jack are an unknown quantity, yet they have some big-hitters on side: Bryan Ferry, who loaned them his Avonmore Studio, producer Chris Hughes (Adam & The Ants, Tears For Fears) and the Lithuanian Philharmonic. Though equally noteworthy, Maven’s third member, guitarist Tom White (Electric Soft Parade/Brakes), virtually disappears amid all the luxurious dream-home contours (some via the same keyboard settings as Roxy smash More Than This). Gilding this chilly beauty is chief vocalist Home. Her calm, unwavering delivery, like an alpine hybrid of an English rose, is nevertheless the vehicle for a torrid inventory of heartbreak following a recent divorce: fear (Me Versus The Volcano), loneliness (Dark Blue…

★★★★ Five Easy Hot Dogs MAC’S RECORD LABEL. CD/DL/LP North American road trip spawns easeful, transporting instrumentals. “Kind of like being on tour, except there weren’t any shows”, says DeMarco of Five Easy Hot Dogs. Its 14 mellow, meditative tunes are named for the various US and Canadian cities in which they were recorded, DeMarco travelling light and tapping a spartan palette mostly comprised of acoustic guitar, hand percussion, woolly bass, beat-boxes and phat keys hatched from a vintage TX7 tone generator. This brings thematic unity, the clave percussion and flanged acoustic arpeggios of Vancouver 2 and Vancouver 3 like different threads of the same movie score, and the film in question conceivably shot on Kodachrome Super 8 and framing a naval-gazing stoner on his hols. Some years on from…

Detail From A Dream ★★★★ STUCK. CD/DL London singer/songwriter’s fourth LP mixes ghostly Americana and acoustic soul. Rosie Brown’s voice is warm and beguiling, with lyrics that reflect an imaginative inner landscape. Her last album, Strange Recollection (2009), was expansive and ambitious, whereas this one, recorded with guitarist/ producer and long-term collaborator Bernd Rest, has a more pared-down sound that ebbs and flows from slow, drifting harmonies to country swing. Black Dog, for instance, is a slice of hallucinatory Americana, detailing the mental tussle of the black dog mood that she feeds at night and fights by day. This contrasts with the rockabillyinfused rhythm of Lucky The Moon, sung with the insouciance of a ’50s Les Paul and Mary Ford track, and a fluid version of Johnny Cash song Oh,…

★★★★ El Espacio Entre TAK:TIL/GLITTERBEAT. CD/DL/LP Challenging but startlingly original second solo album from Lee Ranaldo and Richard Youngs collaborator Raül Refree. EL ESPACIO ENTRE started life as a soundtrack for restored 1930 Spanish Cinema landmark The Cursed Village and then expanded in all directions. Dramatic opener Lamentos De Un Rescate puts down a marker by feeding an exquisite Monteverdi madrigal through a blender of digital dub effects, so the soprano vocal has to fight its way out of an ominous electronic landslide. Refree refines his rebooted madrigal methodology on two further Renaissance version excursions, but there are plenty of other shots in his Iberian experimentalist locker. Switching – often in the space of one song – between grandiose neoclassical reveries, Iberian folk-tinged moments of contemplation and fullon musique concrète,…

Rest Lurks ★★★★ ROCK ACTION. CD/DL/LP New project from Malcolm Middleton of Arab Strap and Joel Harries from Northampton. When two worlds collide, the result can be mutual obliteration, but sometimes they work. As strangers, Malcolm Middleton and Joel Harries share little beyond musical versatility and a desire to collaborate. The lack of baggage works in their favour on this lavishly layered, twinkling collection where both parties contribute a little of everything, from drums to vocals. At its best, there’s an Arab Strappy throbbing electro pulse and trumpet propelling The Things We’ve Done, while the mostly Middleton-sung Preset notes, with tongue some distance from cheek, that “shit bands singing shit songs are everywhere and the people are listening as if it’s good”. The similarly cynical Sunshine Policy (Sombre Song) features…

★★★★ From Nothing To A Little Bit More ISLAND. CD/DL/LP/MC The sound of young Wigan. When The Lathums’ debut, How Beautiful Life Can Be, topped the British charts in 2021, it was a reminder that The Cribs do not carry the indie-rock torch alone. Now slimmed down to a trio following bassist Johnny Cunliffe’s departure, The Lathums have recruited Arctic Monkeys/Adele helmsman Jim Abbiss to produce album number two. Taking lyrical inspiration from frontman Alex Moore’s recent break-up, they’ve broadened their emotional and musical palette, hence the brass section chirping through the deceptively upbeat Lucky Bean; Say My Name’s guitar pyrotechnics, or the out-of-kilter but still lovely piano ballad, Turmoil. The air of melancholic joy kicks hardest on Underserving, the closing eight-minute, acoustic confessional which begins and ends with…

★★★★ Drag On Girard DRAG CITY. CD/DL/LP The unsung kings of Philly’s garage-rock freak scene! Had Purling Hiss slunk out of the US underground circa 1986, there’s a fair chance this band could have been your life. Instead, Mike Polizze’s Philly rockers are more of a footnote in their city’s musical history: compadres of Kurt Vile and The War On Drugs; direct descendants of local noise lords Birds Of Maya. Their seventh album proves how unfair all this is, being essentially the most enjoyable Dinosaur Jr album you’ve never heard. Polizze’s bubblegum melodies cut through the fuzz (Out The Door is a cracker), while Baby ups those ’80s bona fides by echoing Pixies’ Wave Of Mutilation. And if you ever wanted Dinosaur Jr to be more like Crazy Horse –…

Tarbes ★★★ KWAÏDAN. CD/DL/LP Erudite French investigation of a personal history’s psycho-geography. Agnès Gayraud grew up in Tarbes, in the south-west of France. For her fifth LP as La Féline, she’s returned there. In Paris and as a philosopher, she’s complemented the music with writing for Libération newspaper, generating a lengthy academic bibliography and lecturing at California’s Stanford University. Her 2016 paper Are There Any Skills Required To Listen To Pop Music? was followed by the 2019 book The Dialectic Of Pop. Tarbes the LP, then, is a form of French-language musical memoir with an emphasis on discovering what is still tangible from her past. The self-analysis is framed by music akin to a vaporous filtration of Can’s Future Days allied with an Air-esque funkiness. While unsurprisingly deliberate, an overriding…

The Rainbow Wheel Of Death ★★★ WHARF CAT. CD/DL/LP Singer, songwriter, computer programmer, some-time Stetson wearer, New Yorker. Three LPs in, Dougie Poole is beginning to carve out an urban country niche. With a voice that’s as classic country as Buck Owens and the ability to twang with the best of them here on Worried Man Blues 2, there’s a part of him that’s unashamedly traditional. There’s more to him than that though. On an LP recorded with a band at his coproducer’s parents’ house, he displays a knowing way with a city boy’s surreal lyric, musing on Nickels & Dimes that, “I picked you up a knockoff watch and I came home to find you’d filled the bathtub to the brim with nickels and dimes”. Meanwhile, on Must Be…

Moonlight Benjamin ★★★★ Wayo MA CASE. CD/DL/LP Voodoo blues to the fore on the Haitian’s third. It’s a fine line between the vodun of western Africa and the blues of the south-eastern states of the US, but it’s a line the Haitian-born Moonlight Benjamin has become increasingly at ease walking since her 2018 debut, Siltane. Raised by a Catholic priest on the island after her mother died giving birth in 1971, Benjamin has been exploring the syncretic belief system (Vodou in Haiti) since her teenage years and began playing with fellow Haitian musicians around the same time, her renown as a gospel singer opening doors. Her voice is a wonder, cavernous yet warm; her band sound as if they learnt their chops backing Beefheart and Janis then spent 50 years…

Flare Up ★★★★ DECCA. DL/LP Welcome British Jazz Explosion reissue for the debut album as band-leader by the great Barbadian trumpeter and cornetist. So stellar were his contributions to the most potent and innovative British jazz of the late 1960s (never mind Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, Songs For A Tailor and Manfred Mann Chapter Three among numerous rock deviations) that it was something of a scandal that it took until 1970 for Harry Beckett to get his name above the title. Flare Up finds him making the most of that overdue opportunity with a killer octet including fellow Jazz In Britain alumni John Surman and Alan Skidmore on saxes, John Taylor on piano, Frank Ricotti on vibes, Mike Osborne on alto and Chris Lawrence on bass. It’s the less familiar…

Bad Magic: Seriously Bad Magic ★★★★ SILVER LINING MUSIC. CD/DL/LP Their final album, released four months before Lemmy’s death in 2015. “Look down and see the road you’re on/ As if you’re on a marathon”, sang Lemmy Kilmister on Bad Magic’s opener Victory Or Die. Like The Victor comic character The Tough Of The Track, Motörhead’s captain wouldn’t quit until he had to, and this was his fond, fiery adieu; the denouement of his long pact with metal mayhem. Here, that Seriously Bad Magic title suffix denotes the LP’s expansion to include Motörhead’s ballsy, attendant cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes”, two previously unreleased tracks, and an adrenalised, truly heroic Fuji Rock Festival set from the subsequent tour. The original tracklisting’s snarling, hell-for-leather standouts Teach Them How To Bleed and Tell…

Ian Hunter MOTT ONLY BUT ALSO What music are you currently grooving to? I love The 1975. Their frontman is exceptional, and they know what they’re doing. Chasing Mallory are just a great rock’n’roll band, they’re a Shropshire band, and I’m a Shropshire lad. Sam Fender has got the lot. He’s a Newcastle lad, and they make ‘em good in Newcastle. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Blonde On Blonde. I was a Bob fan from the beginning. This guy comes along, he’s a whole different thing, talking all kinds of shit. I didn’t know what he was on about, but I just knew he was absolutely right. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? Blue Tango, I…

THE LAST TIME DAVID CROSBY spoke with MOJO was in the summer of 2022. We talked to him about The Beatles, and the world of possibilities they opened up for a young man from Los Angeles who was already quite the free spirit. Crosby had, as he once again reminded us, introduced George Harrison to the sitar, and to Ravi Shankar. But he was generous in his praise, and revealing in his competitiveness. “Revolver’s impact on The Byrds was obvious,” he explained. “Look at how hard we were trying to go in the same direction, as fast as we possibly could… Revolver completely convinced me I was playing music at the most adventurous level I could manage.” When Revolver came out, Crosby and The Byrds had already released three albums…

VAN MORRISON SMILES. THE PROSPECT of being interviewed by a fellow artist seems to put him at ease. When I comment on how odd the situation feels to me, he says that he prefers interviewing to being interviewed. If we can get through this sharpish, I tell him, we can turn the tables and he can interview me. “Oh no,” he laughs. “I don’t have any questions ready!” We’re meeting today to discuss Morrison’s new album, Moving On Skiffle, in which Van returns to the songs that first inspired him to make music. Born in 1945 in east Belfast, he grew up in the shadow of World War 2. Until 1954, he wasn’t able to go into a sweet shop and choose whatever he wanted. Sugar, like clothing and petrol…

★★★ Moving On Skiffle EXILE. CD/DL/LP ‘The Man’ pauses his war on ‘The Man’. Notwithstanding one’s opinion of the views expressed on Van Morrison’s last two albums – Latest Record Project, Volume 1 and What’s It Gonna Take? – where bitter blasts of Covid dissidence merged with broad-brush conspiracy theorising, it would be fair to say that they did not play to his strengths, their tone being more Blowin’ Your Nose than Blowin’ Your Mind!. What a relief it is, then, to see the clouds part and Morrison’s loving light shine on a collection of skiffle songs never less than warmly sung. In fact, it’s arguable that Morrison and his smooth, jazzy pards skew a tad too good-natured – more of OG ’50s skiffle’s rough bite would not have gone…

★★★★ Brothers & Sisters DOUBLE SIX. CD/DL/LP Political defiance and polyrhythms on erstwhile Beta Band singer’s solo fifth.  Where 2019’s About The Light saw Steve Mason employ a more band-oriented sound, this successor finds him hooking up with Joy Crookes/ Celeste producer Tev’n for a return to a more electronicbased approach, with added global flavours (a “fuck you”, says Mason, to antiimmigration). The brooding, atmospheric No More, with its military snare groove and interjections from Pakistani singer Javed Bashir, rails against imperialism, while Mason explores his inner world on the slow, housey lament for departed friends and family that is Pieces Of Me. Best of all, the closing title track is a rallying cry to dormant ravers, which has the singer confessing, “I want to meet a dealer in the…

★★★★ Tumble In Shade HUSKY PANTS. CD/DL/LP Garcia Peoples’ psych tearaway chills out. As New York poster boys of the indie jam-band scene, the brilliance of Garcia Peoples’ chops can sometimes come at the expense of fully-realised songs and vocals: the prog-folkkosmische choogle is so exhilarating, their core is occasionally stress-tested beyond its limits. Among many great things about this first solo album from Danny Arakaki, one of the band’s multiple singing guitarists, is that he slows down a little and lets his songs find more measured resolutions. The psychedelic blend remains strong, and his accompanists – drawn from Endless Boogie, Chelsea Light Moving and Weyes Blood’s alma mater, Jackie-O Motherfucker – are just as skilled. But there’s a mellower roll here, even when Arakaki and guitar foil Mike Bones…

★★★ Love As Projection NIGHT SCHOOL. CD/DL/LP Fifth studio album, five years in the making. Rose’s legacy is in reverbheavy punk nihilism (The Vivian Girls) and indie-folk noir (Crystal Stilts), but recently she reinterpreted The Cure’s Seventeen Seconds and a hooky, electronic pop-rock charisma invaded her soul. It’s evident from the outset: Sixteen Ways opens with propulsive, ultra-’80s dark sparkle, full of serrated fun and swirling around eerie, sulky vocals. First single Anything is bone-crushingly fine, epic pounding pop with ringing choruses and casual asides: “It takes a lot of nerve/To come and ask for sugar/You’ve never been too sweet, what would your honey think?” After this, Rose trips back to her earlier days with tracks of atmospheric, synth-borne metaverse. Occasionally it’s dull – but the mood’s upbeat where once…

★★★★ UK Grim  ROUGH TRADE. CD/DL/LP Desperate, dank: bleak duo drill down into the state of the nation and themselves. Just when you think Sleaford Mods can’t pick any more stringy flesh from the bones of their skip-scavenged muse, Andrew Fearn and Jason Williamson have a way of finding fresh meat. If 2021’s Spare Ribs edged towards newly controlled lyricism, UK Grim is abstracted by rage and anxiety, Liz Truss, Vladimir Putin and Sid James swirling about in a tornado of fight-or-fight cortisol. There’s comic rap-battle grudge-bearing against contemporaries on D.I.Why, but Tilldipper, Right Wing Beast and the title track (a brazier-huddled Firestarter) have bigger, more rotten fish to fry. Accomplices don’t ease the tension: Perry Farrell pitches in with So Trendy’s bubbling disgust, while Force 10 From Navarone uncannily…

★★★ Strange Dance BELLA UNION. CD/DL/LP Radiohead drummer’s lavishly produced third solo outing. Strange Dance finds Philip Selway’s hushed, conspiratorial vocals garlanded by Hannah Peel’s extravagant, wide-screen orchestrations, gleaming idiophones, deluxe electronics, Laura Moody’s cello and Adrian Utley’s guitars – he even cedes the drum stool to the dextrous Valentina Magaletti. Initially moody, ultimately towering opener Little Things evinces Selway’s film score work – imagine latter-period Bowie doing the theme for an unusually arty Bond movie – while the title track is built from a lattice of processed, industrial percussion offset by banks of lyrical strings and ethereal female ululations. Lyrically, Selway eschews metaphor in favour of unambiguous existential questions (“What if there’s a lightning strike on the plane?” he entreats on Make It Go Away) or what might be…

★★★★ Foreground Music KILL ROCK STARS. CD/DL/LP “What an existential crisis would sound like were it also fun,” says Gallo. Song titles that have you at hello (I Love Someone Buried Deep Inside Of You; Big Truck Energy); out-there guitar tones that razor your speaker cones – there’s lots to love about Foreground Music’s kooky, disruptive energy. Big on garagey art-rock and fractured funk, the New Jersey-born Gallo brings fizzing zeal and a bounteous grab-bag of ideas, his songs’ hooks as striking as his idiosyncratic lyrics. In his 2018 mockumentary Really Nice Guys, Gallo sent himself up as he played a series of unsuccessful release shows, but here he sounds like a real contender, tapping something of Kurt Vile’s industrious slackerdom and railing against greedy Airbnb developers, male entitlement, and…

Kendrick Scott ★★★★ Corridors BLUE NOTE. CD/DL/LP On a mission “to make myself uncomfortable”, Scott’s third for Blue Note is an understated gem that disguises its players’ virtuosity: Walter Smith III’s arcing sax melodies and Reuben Rogers’ sliding bass figures enhancing carefully woven grooves on the haunted title track and a soulful take on Bobby Hutcherson’s Isn’t This My Sound Around Me?. A reflective, top-tier set, Corridors majors on commonalities and connections. Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble ★★★★ Spirit Gatherer SPIRITMUSE. CD/DL/LP There’s added resonance to this powerful tribute to Don Cherry after the death of his eldest son David. He adds piano, melodica and douss’n gouni to fellow guest Dwight Trible’s resonant baritone as El’Zabar’s band disrobe standards by Coltrane, Coleman, Sanders and Monk, revealing previously unheard dimensions. Elsewhere,…

★★★★ Islands In The Sky  SUICIDE SQUEEZE. CD/DL/LP Bonnie Bloomgarden’s LA psych voyagers venture further. A love letter to “future incarnations” of the self, Islands In The Sky fires on purring or Clint Boon-like organs, garagey guitars; occasionally a kind of spooky Motown girl-group aesthetic. Bloomgarden’s inspiration was her new, self-healing oriented mindset having recovered from a mysterious, debilitating illness, and she brings formidable, shamanic energy to California Mountain Shake, Magic Powers and Sunday, her untamed vocals on the latter conjuring a young Maria McKee. With Larry Schemel, brother of Hole drummer Patty Schemel, proving an excellent guitar foil – witness his ritualistic-sounding arpeggios on tribal trip Journey To Dog Star – much of IITS sounds as though it was spelled-out on a ouija board rather than merely recorded. The…

★★★ The Almond & The Seahorse ROUGH TRADE. DL/LP Super Furry Animals man scores British film about amnesia starring Charlotte Gainsbourg. Long adept at diversification, Gruff Rhys has previously penned computer game music and an opera libretto. This, his second full soundtrack, fuses songs and an instrumental score, and is named for the nicknames given to the parts of our brains which maintain memories. Amen, part smudged schoolroom piano, part pop-psych, is central since its lyrics about yearning and frustration echo the film’s plot, while Rhys also makes extensive use of cello and subtle Mellotron in “a varied quilt” of 22 often bijou tracks which sometimes reprise key melodic motifs. Joe’s Theme, all waltzing shades of Yann Tiersen’s Amélie score, is lovely, but decoupled from the film’s visuals it’s the…

Your Own Adventure ★★★★ CURATION. CD/DL/LP Brighton-based talent comes on like The Traveling Wilburys’ sixth sibling. Tapping a Zeitgeisty folk-horror vibe in the video for recent Byrdsian single Heaven Just Watched, and variously evoking everyone from Stealers Wheel to Jeff Lynne to Tom Petty, Hollow Hand, AKA singer/multi-instrumentalist Max Kinghorn-Mills, is a shape-shifting beast. Album number three preserves some of the charming DIY aesthetic of earlier, more psychedelicsounding HH releases, but with a twist: Kinghorn-Mills also travelled to Nashville to oversee guest spots from pedal-steel ace Spencer Cullum and former Midlake linchpin Tim Smith, among others, and this lends parts of Your Own Adventure – a rallying call for self-reliance and autonomy, says its maker – depth and transatlantic sheen. Try One Last Summer’s über-relaxed powerpop or I’m Going To…

★★★★ In/FLUX CITY SLANG. CD/DL/LP Intimate second album from charismatic Londoner. A radical take on heartbreak, this claws a path from obsession to hard-won serenity. Opening on a thudding heartbeat, The Ghost has Savage’s voice – so hollowly subterranean it could be Cleo Laine or Jarvis Cocker at his bitterest – laid against stark piano and tom-toms, darkening from amused reminiscence (“We used to notice the same things/That little pug…”) to misery. Pavlov’s Dog is blithely jazzy as she details the lover’s hold: “He said such/Dirty and kind things to me/Said I had strength in my sexuality…”; reduced to “waiting, salivating”, she’s become his trained animal. The pivotal title track is killer: fugue-like as, against a harmonium, Savage intones the affair’s end then ramping funkily into unhinged but liberated jubilation.…

A Good Dream ★★★ HEIST OR HIT. CD/DL/LP Young Bristolian quartet party like it’s 1982 on their debut album. Slickly downtempo as Tungz’s fine, J Dilla-meets- Prince single 80,000 may be, things turn ugly in the song’s ’70s TV-influenced promo video, the at first wholesomelooking band morphing into flesh-eating zombies. That’s not where the Thriller influence ends either; the staccato, dampened guitar licks on If and Is Cory Okay? are seemingly cognisant of Michael Jackson’s Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’. Vocal about their (to these ears inaudible) love of ABBA, and big on Toto-like string pads, synth-funk and lovelorn drama, Tungz are at their best on deftly airbrushed ballad Nothing To Do With You and the percussion-rich Always; songs wherein their evident facility with ’80s sonics serves as garnish, not the…

Racing The Storm ★★★ BELLA UNION. CD/DL/LP Torrini’s second LP with Belgian electronica duo TCO. Aarich Jespers and Kobe Proesmans first collaborated with their Icelandic- Italian muse when they approached her with reinterpretations of her songs for 2018’s The Colorist Orchestra & Emiliana Torrini. This time, artist billing is reversed, the pop-immersed, operatically trained Torrini taking the reins on a richly detailed album of co-writes sketched in bold, exotic colours. Predictable, perhaps, to mention Torrini’s compatriot Björk, and the rich marriage of electronic elements, strings and bustling percussion here does occasionally evoke Ms Guðmundsdóttir’s work with Matmos, say – and her liking for sketching Iceland via sound. Ultimately, though, RTS charts its own path. Torrini’s malleable, intimate voice, the title track’s haunting Tropicália and foreboding instrumental A Scene From A…

Terfysgiaith 1982-2022 ★★★★ ANKST. CD 3-CD monument to Aberteifi sprechgesang visionary David R. Edwards. It would be stretching a point to call this rivetingly splenetic compilation a Rosetta stone of Welsh cultural self-determination, but not by much. The first two discs offer a suitably fluid and fractured summation of Datblygu’s 40-year stint as generational catalysts, but it’s the ‘rarities’ disc which opens up a new dimension of understanding. These demo, live and session tracks are in fact essential stuff, from the opening Hendrixinspired deconstruction of Abide With Me – “Wales is now for sale for one shilling” – through Maes E 2018, superfan David Wrench’s electro-pop remix of a song about a fictitious Eisteddfod where there is no adjudication (it’s Pet Shop Boys sing RS Thomas!), via six unreleased tracks…

East Coasting ★★★★ BMG/BETHLEHEM. LP Mingus delivers on lesser-known band session from 1957. Master bassist/ composer/ bandleader Charles Mingus once said of his trombonist Jimmy Knepper, “He’s all eras on that instrument.” The same can be said of Mingus’s own work, and this rarely heralded sextet session from 1957 is evidence. The title track is straight-ahead bop. The one non-Mingus composition (standard Memories Of You) has the full arrangement of a swing-era big band despite there being only three horns. West Coast Ghost and Conversation contain hints of early New Orleans jazz – the latter includes the horn trio trading layered lines. Classical motifs make subtle appearances (often courtesy of piano great Bill Evans in a rare collaboration with Mingus) and of course the blues are ubiquitous throughout. And as…

Salt Of The Earth ★★★★ REAL GONE MUSIC. DL/LP First-time reissue of funk holy grail. Formed in 1968 by Washington DC-based Chuck Brown, The Soul Searchers laid down ridiculously funky grooves and OTT sentimental ballads. 1974’s Salt Of The Earth, the follow-up to the group’s 1972’s debut We The People, originally issued on LA’s Sussex label, contains the best of both. The relentless Blow Your Whistle, the punishing Funk To The Folks and Ashley’s Roachclip with its celebrated drum break (sampled by Run-DMC et al) pulse and throb, their choppy rhythms and hard-edged jams paving the way for go-go. A gushing cover of Bacharach & David via The Carpenters’ Close To You, meanwhile, disarms with its emotional intimacy and places the outfit in Barry White territory. Not long after, Brown…