albums
Disconcerting but often delightful new Bach transcriptions
Grade: B Everyone loves the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Rather fewer people love the sound of an unaccompanied organ,…
Why I don’t get the blues
The Louisiana bluesman Buddy Guy is releasing a new album this week. It is called Ain’t Done With The Blues…
Irritatingly, Wet Leg’s new album is pretty good
Grade: B+ There’s quite a lot to dislike about Wet Leg, even aside from their stupid name. The entirety of…
No amount of discourse will make a good pop song into a great one
There is no higher calling than making great pop music, and no mechanism by which such an achievement can be…
Alfred Brendel was peerless – but he wasn’t universally loved
In middle age Alfred Brendel looked disconcertingly like Eric Morecambe – but, unlike the comedian in his legendary encounter with…
Compelling: Little Simz’s Lotus reviewed
It is not uncommon for (predominantly male) music critics to invert the ‘great man/great woman’ dictum in order to suggest…
A lovely album: Saint Leonard’s The Golden Hour reviewed
Grade: A+ The kids with their synths and hip producers, dragging the 1980s back: I wish they would stop. It…
The repetitiveness made me cry with boredom: Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke’s Tall Tales reviewed
Grade: B+ You are in the wrong hands here for what is a homage to this duo’s favourite electronic music.…
The disturbing ambient music of William Tyler
One could argue that all musical forms are essentially incomplete until the listener joins the party, but ambient music seems…
An astonishingly good new album from Black Country, New Road
Grade: A Is that a kind of nod to Oasis in the album title? I can’t think of a band…
Sunny Schubert and iridescent Ravel: album of the week
Grade: A Maurice Ravel was tougher than he looked. True, he dressed like a dandy and wrote an opera about…
Silly, moving and imaginative: Steven Wilson’s The Overview reviewed
Progressive rock never died. Whenever some grizzled punk soldier next appears on a BBC4 documentary relaying their version of that…
How to write a piano concerto
My Piano Concerto, The World of Yesterday, began with an email during one of the darker days of the pandemic:…
A new solo album by a former Beatle that – astonishingly – demands repeated plays
For artists lacking any obvious feel for the style, ‘going country’, similar to mainstream white artists dabbling in reggae in…
The real best album of last year
Grade: A+ In a desperate wish to avoid the appellation of a derided genre, this young man from Asheville, North…
Dazzling: Marc-André Hamelin’s Hammerklavier
Grade: A When Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata was published in 1818, pianists were confronted with a mixture of ‘demonic energy and…
Goodbye to MC5, the holiest of rock’s holy cows
Grade: D+ Ah, the original Linkin Park, except even more spavined. MC5 came outta Detroit in the mid 1960s and…
Terrifically good value: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds reviewed
A few years ago, I received an early morning phone call from Nick Cave’s former PR, berating me for not…
A box set for those on the spectrum: Markus Poschner’s Bruckner Symphonies reviewed
Grade: B+ Anton Bruckner wrote 11 symphonies – Numbers One to Nine plus a student exercise and the formidable rejected…
