Megan Thee Stallion
Good News
300 Entertainment
It’s hard to believe that this is Megan Thee Stallion’s debut album. And I mean that in purely musical terms – 2019’s “mixtape” Fever felt like an album-quality collection, and was a broad announcement; my introduction. I loved that set of songs, played it often – it gave me flashbacks to Foxy Brown and the couple of Lil’ Kim albums I used to love (and still enjoy on occasion). Things like that… Read More
Kodama 木
Yamabiko [EP]
dreaming of distant worlds
Yamabiko is an album of layered synth-sounds, all at once introspective and otherworldly, this is music to keep close to your chest but it also expands the mind; music that combines the ambient blueprint laid out by Brian Eno with the glitch/dissonance/disintegration ideals and ethereal soundscape patterns that artists and composers such as Aphex Twin, Laraaji, William Basinski and Lossil have added to that schematic. Read More
George Benson
Weekend In London
Provogue
In 1978 George Benson released Weekend In L.A. It’s one of my all-time favourite records; one of the albums of my childhood. We grew up with it in our house – and we loved both the guitar instrumentals (the title track) and the funky band workouts (On Broadway). We even liked the vocal-showcase ballads (The Greatest Love of All). Turns out the album was a business card, basically. A way of selling Benson to a new label – he’d been a child prodigy, a jazz wunderkind and then, after L.A., he churned out successful soul-pop with disco tinges and reminders of his great jazz chops via the scat singing and stinging solos, sometimes combining them to thrilling effect. Read More
Billie Holiday & The Sonhouse All Stars
BILLIE: The Original Soundtrack
Verve
The story behind the just released new Billie Holiday documentary is nearly as interesting as the film itself. BILLIE was started in 1971 by a journalist interested in the background story. Holiday had died, nearly penniless 12 years earlier. She had, for a time, been one of the great jazz singers – she had overcome the trauma-filled childhood to achieve musically. But the racism, sexism and the complications of her trauma (raped before she was a teenager) saw addiction take its toll on her career. It’s alleged a self-destructive streak was her only chance of a psychological escape. Read More
MXXWLL
SHEESH
Rare Chords
Australian-based beatmaker/producer MXXWLL operates in a post-D’Angelo world; the nu-soul groove that is on the R’n’B tip always but has notes from hip-hop, funk and sinewy digital-Prince era vibes. Read More
Ben Harper
Winter Is For Lovers
Anti / Epitaph
If this lockdown hasn’t already recalibrated how we feel and what we know is real then I’m painfully aware of that now as I throw almost my full support behind a brand new Ben Harper album. Read More
Kevin Smuts
My Octopus Teacher [Music From The Netflix Documentary]
Maisie Music Publishing, LLC
For me, by far and away the best thing about the recent Netflix documentary hit, My Octopus Teacher was its soundtrack. Read More
Jonathan Besser – Jade String Quartet
Besser String Quartets
Rattle
I’ve been listening to Jonathan Besser’s music across the last two decades – he’s been active in music for at least as long ago, moving fluidly through jazz, klezmer, gamelan, composing for small and large combos, making soundtracks and soundscapes. There’s an emotional resonance, always, to his music. Read More
Lambchop
TRIP
Merge Records
I love Lambchop so much that even the thought of Kurt Wagner trying to croon via a vocoder wasn’t going to put me off…until they went to that well once too often (ie: twice) and I just haven’t really been able to care about the last few Lamchop albums – haven’t hated them at all but haven’t remembered them; I feel like that’s the worst thing that can happen when it’s an artist you love. Read More
Riki Gooch: NGĀ TUONE
St. Peter’s on Willis, Wellington Jazz Festival
Friday, November 22
I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone else that thinks about music the way Riki Gooch does. You can pile up any of the usual clichés – the music flows through him, he is a conduit for groove, he lives and breathes it, he is the music; the music is (in) him. All of this is true and yet transcends any notion of cliché. Read More
Once a month or so I have a chat on RNZ on their Afternoons show with Jesse Mulligan. These things start – randomly and stop in much the same way. I hope to keep doing this. For a while at least. I think I started in December of 2015, so now four years into it or so…
For October November I talked about two Lockdown-Assembled compilations. First up I talked about the new posthumous Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings compilation of their cover versions and played my favourite Sharon Jones cover – her version of Janet Jackson’s What Have You Done For Me Lately? Read More
Buckethead
Healing Inside Outside Every Side
Hatboxghost Music
I’ve never wanted to be a Buckethead fan. It feels problematic. And not in the way you usually read the word ‘problematic’ in reviews or articles. There’s no likelihood that Buckethead – a physically grown man in a mask with a KFC bucket on his head, played by someone that used be called Brian Carroll though I fear his essence was absorbed in much the way Anakin Skywalker morphed into Darth Vader – is anyway peddling a cart alongside Ryan Adams or Woody Allen or, hell, Kirstie Alley…It’s not for me to worry that Buckethead might be a creep or, nearly worse, a Trump supporter. My issue is that Buckethead fans are creepy incel-types. And I don’t want to be anywhere near a reddit sub-thread ever. Read More