A to Z
JUSTIN ADAMS & MAURO DURANTE Still Moving
PONDEROSA
7/10
World music’s answer to The White Stripes
A serial collaborator who has played with everyone from Robert Plant to Tinariwen, Adams here mixes his rich hinterland of desert blues, Arabic quarter-tones, spacey experimentalism and garage-rock with the thundering frame drum, fiddle and keening vocals of southern Italy’s premier folk artist Durante. The Mississippi-to-Mediterranean blues of the opener “Dark Road Down” sets the tone and sounds like Ali Farka Touré jamming with ZZ Top on a Neapolitan holiday. The potency of Adams’ guitar-playing is familiar enough, but he also emerges for the first time as a fine singer, with a deep and bluesy growl which bears the influence of his years backing Plant.
NIGEL WILLIAMSON
COURTNEY BARNETT Things Take Time, Take Time
MARATHON ARTISTS
9/10
Melbourne miniaturist’s journal of the plague year
“I might change my sheets today”, mutters Courtney Barnett on “Rae Street”, but if her solo lockdown in 2020 did not give the Australian songwriter many exciting ways to fill her day, her third solo LP shows it gave her plenty of time to think. In her familiar Modern Lovers style, the 33-year-old with a voice like an unmade bed marvels at the timeless power of human connections on “Write A List Of Things To Look Forward To” and finds her reason for hope on “Take It Day By Day” as she sings: “Don’t stick that knife in the toaster”. Worth waiting for, waiting for.
JIM WIRTH
LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES
Despatches KHAKI ANGEL
6/10
Captain Corelli author belatedly reaches for his mandolin
A folk-club performer way back when, Louis de Bernières was drawn away from a life of floor spots by a successful career as a novelist. Making up for lost time, the 66-year-old’s debut album slathers 20 songs across two CDs, and if de Bernières – like his touchstones Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan – is not exactly a singer, Despatches is at least an intriguing folly. Elegantly embellished by members of the Bookshop Band, the creepy “Iphegenia” and “Lavender & Roses” place Despatches somewhere between the 1970s bedsit ballads of Al Stewart and the outsider artlessness of Current 93. JIM WIRTH
BITCHIN’ BAJAS
Switched On Ra DRAG CITY
7/10
Analogue synths beaming down to Earth from Saturn
The music of jazz pioneer Sun Ra walked a tightrope between the revelatory and the ersatz; though he’s perhaps best known for the mystical free-jazz blowouts of his Arkestra, Ra was a musical connect-the-dots, effortlessly weaving between genres like bebop, disco and Disney. So it makes sense that Chicago’s synth trio Bitchin’ Bajas would hitch a ride with Ra, amplifying the convivial otherworldliness of his music by grabbing hold of mythic melodies like “Outer Spaceways Incorporated” and “We Travel The Spaceways” and filling them with their analogue fantasia, alien chants going intergalactic on gently fried circuit boards.
JON DALE
THE BRKN RECORD
The Architecture Of Oppression – Part 1 MR BONGO
8/10
Required listening for ‘white privilege’ sceptics
Helmed by Jake Ferguson, Heliocentrics’ co-founder, master of David Axelrod production techniques and – crucially – anti-racism activist, The Brkn Record’s debut is a profound, intense document of the British black experience incorporating spoken-word and street recordings into its melange of soul, funk, jazz and psychedelia. London-based Nigerian poet Dylema rages compellingly against Mussorgsky-inspired menace on “Assimilation”, and Ugochi Nwaogwugwu underscores “On The Daily”’s Rotary Connection grooves, while “Lifeline”’s ominous echoes of The Velvet Underground’s “Venus In Furs” can’t suppress Zara McFarlane’s expressive vocals. “The Babylon Encounter”’s surreptitious taping of a ‘stop and search’ encounter, however, is troublingly revealing.
WYNDHAM WALLACE
CARAVAN
It’s None Of Your Business MADFISH
7/10
Canterbury scenesters’ stunts still cunning
The only prog band deemed acceptable to 1980s indie folk, Caravan’s gawky humour and Buzzcock-ish ear for a lovelorn chord change happily persists, their first studio album since 2013 a less priapic descendant of 1973’s impish For Girls Who Grow Plump In The Night. At 74, Pye Hastings is quietly abuzz at the joys of post-Covid existence, as depicted on love song with flute “I’ll Reach Out For You”. Sardonic opener “Down From London” showcases Caravan’s pop smarts, while they make complex fun on the title track, exploding into Steve Hillage-style Euro-rock around the nine-minute mark. Business most certainly good. JIM WIRTH
JOHN CARPENTER, CODY CARPENTER AND DANIEL DAVIES
Halloween Kills OST SACRED BONES
7/10
Horror master back on the big screen
John Carpenter’s return to the live stage might not have gone so devilishly smooth were it not for the contributions of his son Cody and godson Daniel Davies, who helped transmute the horror auteur’s iconic scores into high-camp rock epics. Carpenter is no longer in the director’s chair, but this score to the latest in the franchise sees his sonic hallmarks – repeating piano
