Tabla de contenidos para January 2024 en MOJO

FOR ONE OF the most hi-tech rock shows ever staged, it was an ironically lo-tech thing to go awry. As the 18,000 audience members at the first night of U2’s residency at the Sphere oohed and aahed, enraptured by the morphing artworks on the vast screens above, behind and around the band, some realised that there was something missing from Where The Streets Have No Name – namely, the guitar – and someone – namely, the guitarist. “Yeah, Edge broke a string,” chuckles U2 bassist Adam Clayton a few days later. “The last time he broke a string and disappeared off the stage, it was probably the Hope & Anchor in about 1978. And there were four people in the audience.” U2 have history with hi-tech live premieres at Las…

1 BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN & PATTI SCIALFA ADDICTED TO ROMANCE From rom-com She Came To Me, Bruce’n’Patti sit at the shadowed bar of dreams and float on in the wonder of it all. A relative of Tom Waits’ Jersey Girl, which he and The Boss once duetted on? Find it: Streaming services 2 BRITTANY HOWARD WHAT NOW A full-throttle preview of Howard’s second solo album: choppy guitar funk recalling her Alabama Shakes hit, Don’t Wanna Fight. Find it: YouTube 3 WOODLEIGH RESEARCH FACILITY GATES OF THE SOUTH From Phonox Nights, the last track Andrew Weatherall recorded with Sabres partner Nina Walsh, is looowbpm electronic hypnosis for urban interzones. Find it: Bandcamp 4 JULIA HOLTER SUN GIRL Holter breaks cover with a one-off single of warped tapes, heat haze and abstract…

DAWES’ TAYLOR GOLDSMITH is one of a growing legion of young singer-songwriters who’ve become acolytes of Warren Zevon, covering his songs in concert and singing his praises to the press. “It’s one thing to be a fan of Dylan or Joni or Springsteen,” says Goldsmith. “But when you find another Warren Zevon fan, it’s this other level of communing and connecting. Zevon does that in a way that not all artists do. Loving Zevon is almost a secret handshake.” The War On Drugs’ Adam Granduciel is another recent convert to the Church of Zevon. “He was always in the periphery when I was growing up listening to classic rock radio in Boston,” says Granduciel. “But I didn’t go much deeper, until I moved to LA in 2016. I was living…

IT WAS ALREADY, possibly, the greatest concert movie of all time, but in 2023 a 4K digital upgrade added bold new dimensions to director Jonathan Demme’s simultaneously dense and spacious portrait (“Like an austere orgy,” New Yorker critic Pauline Kael suggested) of a tight, taut Talking Heads at their 1983 peak, feeding their love of African pop into a King Sunny Adé-style big-band jamboree. At core, Stop Making Sense remains as much surrealist theatre and architectural design as musical performance, from the drip-fed introduction of band members to the bare-bulb lighting and shadow-play that expanded Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre stage. Reflecting on this masterpiece of relentless energy, joy and funky union, Talking Heads multi-instrumentalist Jerry Harrison spoke to MOJO… Congratulations! The remastered Stop Making Sense is MOJO’s Music Film of 2023.…

DESPITE APPEARANCES, goth has always been the subculture that refuses to die. Even by its undead standards, however, 2023 has witnessed intense activity. In May, Siouxsie Sioux played her first live shows since 2013. Cure co-founder Lol Tolhurst and former Banshee/Creature Budgie cemented their drummers’ bond by releasing potent, time-slipping collaboration Los Angeles. The Sisters Of Mercy played two volatile nights at London’s Roundhouse in September, while The Cult’s Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy announced a tour under their transitional 1983 guise Death Cult. Meanwhile, as if summoned by an unseen bell, there’s also been an outpouring of writing on the subject: John Robb’s The Art Of Darkness; Cathi Unsworth’s Season Of The Witch; Tolhurst’s Goth: A History and Simon Price’s Curepedia. Why now, though? Why are audiences – “16…

1 BLUR The Ballad Of Darren (PARLOPHONE) An album to genuinely rank with their best was not the only surprise sprung by Blur, and their emotional frontman, in 2023. By Danny Eccleston. JULY 9, 2023. WEMBLEY STADIUM. Sunday Sunday. Here again in tidy attire, Blur’s Damon Albarn is perched on the very front of the vast stage having a very public, private chat with a man from South America who’s clearly in bits. Albarn is warm, appreciative, calming, but not unaffected. He will choke up at least twice during this intense greatest hits show, the second of two consecutive nights that seem to embrace all that Blur and their fiftysomething core fans have been through since the band’s debut single, She’s So High, cracked the UK Top 50 in October…

AROOJ AFTAB Diva of Ghazal jazz-pop fusion. As I was watching the George Michael documentary on a flight, I realised I hadn’t listened to him since the ’90s, so I went back to Older. It’s so beautiful and emotional, and his songwriting – The Strangest Thing and You Have Been Loved… I had it on repeat for weeks. Chocolate Genius is a singer-songwriter, almost indie rock but neo-soul-adjacent: he co-wrote a song on my next album, and I thought I’d heard everything of his but actually not his album Black Music from 1998, which has some absolute gems. I loved Henry Threadgill’s book, Easily Slip Into Another World, which is like a treasure trove. He writes about growing up in Chicago listening to these jazz legends, like Sonny Rollins, and…

Peter Gabriel ★★★★ i/o REAL WORLD. CD/DL/LP PARTLY BASING their “world music inventing” comic creation Brian Pern on Peter Gabriel, Rhys Thomas and Simon Day had Brian make a Christmas LP in support of bi-polar polar bears. “I’m flattered by it,” Gabriel told MOJO’s Mark Blake when he asked about the parody. Game for a laugh, he seemed to recognise that his daft doppelgänger’s thirst for innovative and worthy projects rang true. Though no orphaned bonobos jam with Gabriel on his first LP of new material since 2002’s Up, i/o – read in/out – is the typically techie, multi-media meshing work of one of rock’s true Renaissance men. Its themes, meanwhile, are as humane and for ward-looking as ever, hence Panopticom (sic) advocates sur veillance of suspect politicians by…

For LP 13, the Nutty gents enter the prog music hall of existential despair. By Ian Harrison. Madness ★★★★ Theatre Of The Absurd Presents C’est La Vie BMG. CD/DL/LP/MC IN THE wake of Robin Williams’ 2014 suicide, the well-worn fable of a desperate man being advised to cheer himself up by seeing the great clown Pagliacci made the internet rounds. “But Doctor,” answers the suffering patient: “I am Pagliacci.” As followers of warped British humourists including Max Wall, Spike Milligan and Tommy Cooper, it’s a tragicomic scenario Madness could sympathise with. They’ve been a mirth-bringing, all-ages part of the pop furniture since 1979, but they’ve also long acknowledged the less cuddly connotations of their name, with depression, awry family dynamics, alcohol abuse and other traumas present in their lorr yload…

Moritz Von Oswald ★★★★ Silencio TRESOR. CD/DL/LP Techno pioneer explores synthetic sound and the human voice. As Basic Channel, Maurizio, and Rhythm & Sound with Markus Ernestus, Moritz Von Oswald set the agenda in the 1990s and 2000s with pioneering ventures into dub and minimal techno. Silencio begins – in typically Oswald fashion – with the title track’s 12-minute plunge into pared back, abstract melody and pillowy beats. But what follows is evidence of an abiding quest to explore further. With Finnish composer Jarkko Riihimäki and choral group Vocalconsort Berlin, Oswald investigates the relationship between human and synthesized sound. On Luminoso, bass voices lay down a titanic drone, offset by piercing soprano, into which Von Oswald folds in white noise and synthetic distortion. What at first appears to be…

Bob Dylan ★★★★ The Complete Budokan 1978 COLUMBIA/LEGACY. CD/DL/LP BOB DYLAN had a lot on his mind in August, 1977: the messy end of his first marriage; the new songs coming from the wreckage; a world tour in the next year. Then he heard that Elvis Presley had died. “Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail,” Dylan once said. When the Memphis flash snuck a cover of the Hibbing bard’s Tomorrow Is A Long Time onto a 1966 film soundtrack, Dylan called it “the one recording I treasure the most.” His 1978 tour was, in return, a tribute fit for the King: Dylan leading an 11-piece band that combined the massed picking and choral glow of his Rolling Thunder caravan with the imperial-pop scale…

CREDITS Tracks: Meil AiaäärneTänavas/ Kiigelaul/Haanja Miis/Oh Mina Väike Mehekene/Jaan Lä’eb Jaanitulele/ Karjase Pühapäev – Kirbuga Kirikusse/ LaulikuLapsepõli/ Iirekene/Kui Mina Alles Noor Veel Olin/ Mardi Laul/ Vennakene, Hellakene/Pill Oll’ Helle Personnel: Reet Hendrikson (voice, guitar) Producer: Andres Raudsepp, Mel Crosby (engineer) Released: 1969 Recorded: Andres Raudsepp’s apartment and Mel Crosby’s studio, Toronto Current availability:Moved-By-Sound reissue, 2023 Reet Hendrikson Reet REINDEER, 1969 IN 1968, a few years after arriving in Toronto, Andres Raudsepp first discovered the magical music of Reet Hendrikson. Following a five-year stint in the Canadian army, the 30-year-old Estonian-born secondar y school teacher began to immerse himself in the city’s Estonian community and its music. “Estonia had lost its independence during the Second World War,” he explains, referring to the Soviet occupation that began in 1940 and ended…

THE LEGACY The Album: 3 + 3 (Epic, 1973) The Sound: T-Neck albums Brother, Brother, Brother and Givin’ It Back were excellent shots at marrying R&B and rock, but they hit the bullseye on their all-killer debut as a funk-rock family band, reviving early highlight That Lady, conjuring definitive covers of Seals & Croft’s Summer Breeze and Stephen Stills’s Listen To The Music, and selfpenned evergreens The Highways Of My Life and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight. POP MUSIC would sound very different if The Isley Brothers hadn’t happened, if only because of their significant impact upon The Beatles, Hendrix, Sly Stone and others, never mind their run of highcalibre hits for Motown in the ’60s and their own T-Neck imprint in the ’70s and ’80s. When the fiercely…

Janette Beckman, Eric Watson ( Courtesy The Raincoats ), Eva Vermandel HELLO 1977 I was kind of aware that something was going on when I came down to London in the autumn of 1976. I’d actually chanced upon the first Sex Pistols gig before that, when I was looking for an art school to come to. I moved into a room in a squat off Westbourne Grove and went to loads of gigs – exciting times! In the autumn, I met Ana [Da Silva, guitar and singer] at Hornsey Art School. She grew up in Madeira and knew a lot about music, and together we explored what was happening. We went to the Roxy almost every night. It was only when I saw The Slits play their first gig in…

WAITING IN for someone to collect a broken washing machine from outside his house in Robin Hood’s Bay, North Yorkshire, Martin Carthy is talking about his return to live performance after a three-year hiatus. “I’m going round with a fellow called Jon Wilks,” the 82-yearold tells MOJO. “We do lots of talking and occasionally illustrate something with a song, but it’s basically a summary of what I’ve been doing for the last 63 years.” The pandemic and the death in 2022 of Carthy’s wife and fellow folk revival titan Norma Waterson conspired to keep the master guitarist and interpreter away from his natural habitat. These ‘Remember Me To One Who Lives There’ shows are helping him to regain his stage legs. “I just wanted to be visible again,” he says.…

MENTION NAMES including Enrico Cadillac Jnr, Bette Bright and Cliff Hanger, and music heads of a certain vintage will tremble at the knees. Particularly the so-called Deafsters, who follow Scouse legends Deaf School. One of the great should’vebeen-bigger sagas of the ’70s, they play 50th anniversary shows in London and Liverpool in December. “There’s no new album to promote,” explains co-lead singer Enrico Cadillac Jnr, AKA Steve Allen. “Fans just seem to need a Deaf School fix. Well, there really was nothing else like us.” To describe the band is to deploy several clichés about art students forming art-rock bands – a riot of satire and pastiche, costumes and make-up. But, crucially, Deaf School also had full commitment to unfettered entertainment, to a hook-driven soundtrack that straddled glam, vaudeville and…

“THIS IS OUR time to say something.” Piya Malik is reflecting on the state of the world in 2023, of gun control and #metoo and planned parenthood, and how current affairs have energised the New York-based trio Say She She. “We’re talking about things we care about, but we’re not here to shove something down people’s throats.” A mix of soul, jazz, funk, retro pop and disco, with a helping of Eddie Hazel-like guitar, a soupçon of Minnie Riperton coloratura and plenty of Patti Labelle-esque oomph, over the past 15 months Malik, Sabrina Cunningham and Nya Brown have released two albums and a clutch of singles and toured seemingly without a break. “We’ve been grinding like nobody’s business,” groans Brown as they prepare for a show in Boulder, Colorado, a…

It was a year of little miracles. A landmark Bob Dylan album came with unexpected bounty. Jaimie Branch’s trumpet reached us from the great beyond. Blur remembered how to be Blur. The best concert film ever got better. Folk flexed. Siouxsie Sioux, Ian Hunter and Everything But The Girl rolled back the years. Depeche Mode, The Rolling Stones and Julie Byrne defied the Reaper. The power of music epitomised? You bet your life. FEATURING: The 75 Best New Albums, 20 Best Reissues, films and books of the year, over 25 pages. Includes Blur, Talking Heads, Bob Dylan, Lankum, Sly Stone, Paul Weller, Jaimie Branch, Lisa O’Neill, Arooj Aftab, Robert Forster, Fatoumata Diawara, Everything But The Girl, Ian Hunter… and goth!…

1 YOUNG FATHERS Drum A highlight of the Edinburgh band’s fourth LP. “They sound like they’re having a ball,” wrote MOJO’s Tom Doyle, “whether expressing the sheer delight to be found in rhythm or indulging in daft punning.” Written by Bankole, Hastings, Massaquoi. Published by Just Isn’t Music. &©2023 Ninja Tune. From Heavy Heavy (Ninja Tune). www.ninjatune.net/ www.young-fathers.com 2 THE TUBS Round The Bend “I want to write about how bad mental health can make you a prick. There’s nothing virtuous about it,” Tubs frontman Owen Williams told us, explaining frenetic janglers like Round The Bend. For fans of Sugar’s If I Can’t Change Your Mind. Written by Williams, Nicholls, Warren, Stonholdt. &©2023 The Tubs/Trouble In Mind Records. From Dead Meat (Trouble In Mind Records); www. troubleinmindrecords.com 3 THE CORAL…

Terry Hall: We were heading into a really interesting area with the second Specials album [More Specials, 1980] but we just couldn’t carry it on, ’cos of people’s personalities, and because it had become too big, really. Lynval Golding: We were having a break and the publisher gave me some money to go into the studio. So if you look at the Fun Boy Three, the songs were written while we were in The Specials. The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum [November ’81 FB3 debut] felt like the natural follow-up to [July ’81 Specials Number 1] Ghost Town, but due to disagreements, we decided, OK, we’ll just release it ourselves. Neville Staple: It didn’t seem like, Oh, let’s start a new band. It was just, we’re going to do…

Raze Regal & White Denim Inc. ★★★★ Raze Regal & White Denim Inc. BELLA UNION. CD/DL/LP WHEN WHITE Denim first erupted out of a 27-foot Spartan trailer parked by a forest near Austin, Texas, there was a seductive purity about this trio hatching their own twist on Southern rock in isolation. Across the 15 years since 2008’s inaugural Workout Holiday, singerguitarist James Petralli necessarily brooked external influence. The early line-up’s final outing, 2013’s Corsicana Lemonade, was self-designated a “barbecue record”, sunny and hassle-free, and as a wider pool of players gathered around Petralli and staunch bassist Steve Terebecki, brief liaisons ensued, like Cass McCombs co-penning Thank You for 2016’s Stiff. While there was no shortage of propulsive energy on 2019’s Side Effects, latterday albums have largely dialled down the…

John Francis Flynn ★★★★ Look Over The Wall, See The Sky RIVER LEA. CD/DL/LP Lankum circle trad maverick mounts the barricades. “My approach is just being very respectful to the essence of the actual tune and then you can frame it however you want,” John Francis Flynn told MOJO, explaining the thinking behind his second album’s astringent brew of extreme vocal understatement and ravishing ghost noise. The Lankum associate’s complex take on the encroaching soullessness of the Irish capital, Look Over The Wall, See The Sky finds electronic static attacking The Zoological Gardens, while Within A Mile Of Dublin showcases Flynn’s lyrical flute playing before descending into a pounding racket. If there is harsh reality, though, Flynn offers transcendent loveliness as well: The Seasons takes on a luminous Bill…

★★★★ Songs Of Silence MUTE. CD/DL/LP Synth-pop lifer steps into solo limelight. WITH A CV that includes Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure, Vince Clarke has spent more than 40 productive years operating as serial collaborator rather than electronic lone wolf. Songs Of Silence sees him finally diverting onto a more solitar y path, its suite of dankly atmospheric tracks composed alone on modular synth system Eurorack. There’s a dream-logic momentum, the mood often paranoid and propulsive. The heavy-breathing White Rabbit and Scarper come with a prickle of John Carpenter menace, while Last Transmission or Imminent are hyper-vigilant Tangerine Dream. There are times when a less obviously doctored emotion bleeds through, though: the cello-driven The Lamentations Of Jeremiah, Caroline Joy Clarke’s operatic vocals on Passage, or Blackleg, the eerie repurposing of…

Bryan Ferry ★★★★ Mamouna BMG. CD/DL/LP BRYAN FERRY first began work on the album that would become Mamouna in 1989. Between that year and 1993, when he released the languid covers LP Taxi, he suffered some kind of writer’s block. Sequestered in his north London studio without a manager or a producer, creating 56-track instr umentals and believing he was, in his own words, “the Duke Ellington of whatever”, he recorded an entire album, entitled Horoscope, which was finished then shelved; deemed “too fussy, too complex, too dense”. Believing the original title to be cursed and running up costs he’d later equate with director Michael Cimino’s studio-destroying 1980 vanity project Heaven’s Gate, he renamed the work Mamouna (Arabic for “good luck”) and, in 1991, enlisted the help of Procol…

“The hits we know, but Sparks have always been an albums act.” THEY’RE QUITE the pair, the Mael boys: Ron, 78, and his baby brother Russell, 75. Together as Sparks, they’re in their sixth decade of making albums. They’ve had their troughs, but those troughs have been commercial rather than artistic. Yet they’ve usually been popular somewhere: first the UK after 1974’s Kimono My House, then France, the US (West Coast only), Germany, the UK again and now seemingly ever ywhere from Austria to Australia. Russell is Ron’s muse and Sparks’ producer since 1986’s Music That You Can Dance To. The songs are Ron’s. “I’m not a genius,” Russell readily admits, “but my brother is.” The teetotal, drug-free Maels from Pacific Palisades have never married, although Russell has wed Jacqueline…

DECEMBER 17 Today, Ronnie Scott’s jazz club moved to the Frith Street location it still occupies in London’s Soho. House trio pianist and leader Stan Tracey, like many others, would refer to its original premises in Gerrard Street as ‘The Old Place’. During the festive period of 1965, however, Tracey’s sense of location was becoming perilously disorientated. On the surface, it all looked rosy. The south London-born Tracey had of late backed visiting American jazz heavyweights including Roland Kirk, Freddie Hubbard and Sonny Rollins, who gave him a glowing endorsement to silence those who said British musicians were poor relations who couldn’t cut it with the grown-ups: “Does anyone in Britain really know how good he is?” A man healthily suspicious of such plaudits, Tracey was cautiously gratified. He also…

“YOU DON’T EXPECT MEN IN THEIR middle fifties to write tunes,” Damon Albarn tells us this month. “That’s supposed to have long abandoned you.” Albarn, we discover, is currently indulging his inner Mozart and working on a sequel to The Magic Flute. But it’s his activities fronting a revitalised Blur that most concern us in our wide-ranging review of 2023. As Blur and Pulp brought their nuanced takes on ’90s revivalism, and even Taylor Swift embarked on a thorough inventory of her past on the Eras tour, 2023 found new generations embracing their own kinds of nostalgia and older artists moving into rewarding new stages of their careers. Four singers in our Top 75 albums of the year – Paul Simon, John Cale, Ian Hunter and Shirley Collins – are…

TWO DAYS before Gruff Rhys arrived at La Frette Studios outside Paris in March 2022, noted footballer-philosopher Eric Cantona finished his first solo EP there, I’ll Make My Own Heaven. “That,” says Gruff, “was exciting.” There was no time to reflect on how, say, the hooligan-kicking Cantona mirrored Cardiff City’s boot-happy Robin Friday, who appeared on the sleeve of Super Furry Animals’ 1996 single The Man Don’t Give A Fuck. Instead, Rhys and his tour-honed band (pianist Osian Gwynedd, double bassist Huw V Williams and ex-Flaming Lips drummer Kliph Scurlock) had an album to make – in three days. La Frette was an auspicious location for this. Founded in 1980, the studio boasts an embarrassment of vintage recording equipment rescued from the bygone studios of Paris. “The gear’s unreal,” says…

ON TOUR recently, Hamish Hawk woke to find Neil Tennant praising him on social media – in particular his “wistful” track titled Bridget St John. “To have Neil Tennant say that was a delight,” says Hawk. “I’m a big fan of his lyrics – the economy, great couplets – and I’d even like to think there might be common ground.” St John herself also passed on goodwill. “She sent a lovely e-mail,” says Hawk of the venerable singer/songwriter. “She said the band and I have a productive musical life ahead of us.” Hamish Hawk is the name on the singer’s passport. It’s now also the name of his band. His lyrics are an exhilarating rococo landslide, citing John Lennon, Varanasi and Christopher Wren. Scottish playwright David Greig, whose work has…

50 JANA HORN The Window Is The Dream (NO QUARTER) If the Texan singersongwriter’s 2020 debut, Optimism, seemed adjacent to acid-folk, this second album provided a clearer angle on her spectral, literary art. The Window Is The Dream was no less subtle, but its spare and considered moves emphasised a closer affinity to art-pop than folk tradition: the vocals unforced, uncanny; the guitar lines a precise needlepoint. A candlelit Cate Le Bon, perhaps, or even a Lana Del Rey raised on Smog albums. Standout track: The Dream 49 OSEES Intercepted Message (IN THE RED) “A pop record for cruel times,” was John Dwyer’s sell for his 28th Osees album and, after the gnarly fundamentalist hardcore of 2022’s A Foul Form, he’d at least reorientated his main band towards new wave.…

JAIMIE BRANCH didn’t stand on ceremony. That’s clear from just a cursory listen to the late trumpeter, singer and composer’s final recording, voted a Top 10 album of 2023 by the writers of MOJO. Finished months before the 39-year-old died from an accidental overdose at home in Red Hook, Brooklyn in August last year, Fly Or Die Fly Or Die Fly Or Die ((World War)) was a joyous denouement to a riotous jazz trajectory. Although it closes with a funereal dirge, the album’s celebratory tone belied Branch’s struggles with addiction – she had been an on/ off heroin user since 2008 – and caught her at a levitating artistic peak. Branch was a rare talent who put her distinctive stamp on recordings by TV On The Radio, Yo La Tengo,…

GROWING UP IN THE DAKOTA building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Sean Lennon was forever opening up cupboards and discovering his dad’s old guitars, amps and effects pedals. As his own ambition to become a musician grew, he would ask his mum if he could put some of it to use. “She was pretty careful with the guitars,” he tells MOJO today, “even though she did let me play a few. What she wasn’t as worried about was the pedals, so I got to kind of rummage through that stuff. I got to nick them and mess around with them.” The only items of John Lennon’s extant musical paraphernalia that Yoko Ono deemed absolutely off limits to the young Sean were the cassettes and tape reels containing his dad’s home…

★★★★ Chaos & Calypso GOD UNKNOWN. CD/DL/LP Elemental Brighton blues man brings that weird chill. THOUGH HIS voice rumbles like God rearranging the furniture, John J. Presley is likely closer to the man downstairs, his deliciously amoral tales regularly playing the sinnerman as the hero. Presley’s fire’n’brimstone second album contains precious little calypso, and chaos isn’t really his thing, either – from their simmering slow-build to their eventual explosions into cathartic jazz-skronk (Sea Of Deserters) or distorted noise (The Sequel), ever y element of Presley’s brooding blues songs is expertly placed for precise effect. His uncanny balance of black humour and bleak drama, meanwhile, places him in the lineage of Nick Cave and Mark Lanegan, but while Presley spins tales of a similar gravity to those dark princes, he’s never…

Shirley Hurt ★★★★ Shirley Hurt MELODIC. CD/DL/LP “WHEN YOU met me/I was really going through it,” sings Sophia Ruby Katz on Charioteer, a meditation on love, reincarnation and horses that forms one of her debut album’s more curious extended musical metaphors. The myster y of what it is exactly that the Canadian singer-songwriter is going through lies under these songs, their turmoil rendered in oblique strokes and opaque arrangements, any painful glare filtered through her smoked-glass, Bridget St John voice. It makes sense that she should have cloaked herself in such an enigmatic, ambiguous name as Shirley Hurt – part variety bill headliner, part wounded Ever ywoman. These songs emerged from a similarly obscure set of impulses. Trying to relieve a period of creative inactivity, Katz tried to shake…

Acetone ★★★★ I’m Still Waiting. NEW WEST. LP IN MAY, 1994, only a few weeks after Kurt Cobain’s suicide shattered the giddy momentum of alternative rock’s mainstream insurrection, the Los Angeles trio Acetone – bassist and lead singer Richie Lee, guitarist Mark Lightcap and drummer Steve Hadley – arrived in Nashville to make what they expected to be their second album. Their interior baggage far outweighed the physical luggage. “We went down there without any songs written because Steve and Richie were too strung out,” Lightcap admits in the linernotes here, referring to his bandmates’ drug habits at the time. And there were the expectations from Acetone’s quietly profound arrival in 1993: a self-titled EP and full-length debut, Cindy, that countered the narcissistic ire of grunge with a raw…

ABBA ★★★★ The Visitors UNIVERSAL. LP For its 40th anniversary (in 2021… they won’t be rushed) ABBA’s eighth on 2-LPs, a singles box and 7-inch pic-discs. Darkside brilliance fuelled by interior anguish (divorce songs When All Is Said And Done and One Of Us Is Lying) and a broader malaise (Soldiers’ Cold War pop), it was their final word. Until it wasn’t. JB Black Sabbath ★★★★ Hand Of Doom 1970-1978 BMG. LP Eight albums featuring the classic line-up, from the first self-titled LP to Never Say Die!, transposed onto comely picture discs. Yes you’ve heard it all before, but the metal frisson of the first five, as they revolve evilly, cannot be denied. IH Mike Makhalemele & Winston Mankunku Ngozi ★★★★ The Bull And The Lion WE…

Lou Reed: The King Of New York ★★★★ WHigh in till Hermes VIKING BOOKS. £25 WITH SHELVES of books on The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed, is there anything new to say? This sharp, tight, well-str uctured biography delivers a convincing affirmative, not least because Will Hermes has had access to Lou Reed’s personal archives, deposited in the New York Public Librar y after his death. These illumine the difficult years after 1979 – when Reed cleaned up his act – and deliver delightful details like John Cale’s note to Reed with a copy of What’s Welsh For Zen, hoping that the book will prompt, “at the very least, a distant smile of amusement. After all, it really was the most outrageous fun, wasn’t it?” As you’d expect from…

A REVOLUTIONARY PIECE of studio software linking home set-ups and full-size facilities, Audiomovers enables you to work with multiple collaborators simultaneously wherever they are in the world. Offering full-fat, high-res streaming and binaural mix, it was acquired by Abbey Road Studios, and is used by names including Aaron Dessner, Taylor Swift and many more. We’ve got FIVE memberships for the full suite of Audiomovers innovations (each worth £225) to give away, and ONE lucky winner will also receive a set of the new KRK CLASSIC 5 studio monitors (worth £499). The CLASSIC 5 is an active two-way studio monitor that utilises a 1-inch textile soft dome tweeter paired with a 5-inch glass aramid woofer. The built-in Class AB power amplifiers provide a total of 50 watts of power, with a…