New album: A beautifully evocative, documentary compilation of anonymous spontaneous performances and field recordings from descendants of slaves in a northern section of the city of Mobile, Alabama, one of the last places in the US to receive slave ships
Read moreMoor Mother: The Great Bailout
New album: The American poet and musician Camae Ayewa returns with with a pointed, powerful release aimed at Britain’s murky, slavery-profiting colonial past, with a vivid, profound, visceral, declamatory narrative and soundscape that charts many injustices about wealth and compensation
Read moreKim Gordon: The Collective
New album: Dark, crashing, whispering, abstract, deadpan internal monologues, dreamlike off-beat poetry, trip beats, crunchy electronica and industrial grunge-guitar noise, the ex-Sonic Youth frontwoman, bassist and visual artist’s new LP is a challenging, truly innovative release
Read moreFavourite albums of 2023 Part 2: Anohni to Blur to Mitski, Ren to Sufjan Stevens
Welcome once again to the annual tradition of Song Bar’s favourite album releases of 2023. This is Part 2, and Part 1 was yesterday. There’s no such thing as a chart rundown or ‘best of’ here, and these come in no particular order …
Read moreH31R: HeadSpace
New album: Pronounced ‘Air’, the duo of Brooklyn rapper Maassai and New Jersey producer JWords serve up a stylish mix of bleeps, beats, industrial sounds, with clubby to woozy, inventive, minimal, alternative electronica marked by free-flowing hip-hop/spoken word
Read moreBas Jan: Back To The Swamp
New album: This third album by the quartet fronted by singer and harpist Serafina Steer, is another wittily droll, darkly humorous collection about love and modern life’s absurdities and mundanities, with influences from The Pet Shop Boys, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Kate Bush, Heaven 17 and even a referential shake of Salt N Pepa
Read moreSen Morimoto: Diagnosis
New album: The Chicago-based Japanese singer, rapper and jazz multi-instrumentalist’s new LP comprises a richly eclectic, dynamic selection of songs with an overriding theme of seeking the right direction in life
Read moreJamila Woods: Water Made Us
New album: The Chicago singer and poet moves from 2019’s socio-historical Legacy! Legacy! LP, to a more experimental, soulful album of self-analysis, examining the life cycles of relationships across 17 tracks, in which love evolves and develops like a living cell
Read moreRen: Sick Boi
New album: An outstanding new LP by the remarkably talented Welsh, Brighton singer-songwriter rapper and guitarist Ren Gill, influenced by years of bed-ridden mental and physical illness, expressing caustic, self-torn schizophrenia, his songs are packed with wordplay, wit, catchy tunes, gut-wrenching emotion and invention
Read moreThe Streets: The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light
New album: After 12 years since the last LP, British rapper Mike Skinner returns with familiar style of his debut Original Pirate Material (2002), of interweaving stories of candid spoken word, this time with a self-funded accompanying film based on the life of a DJ
Read morePublic Service Broadcasting: This New Noise (Live)
New album: A tremendous noise indeed about radio, as the vintage footage-inspired experimentalist band led by J Wildgoose Esq release a remastered album version of their acclaimed 2022 BBC Proms performance from London’s Royal Albert Hall with the full BBC Symphony Orchestra
Read moreYussef Dayes: Black Classical Music
New album: Taking a title cue from Miles Davis, a brilliant, landmark 19-track debut LP by the supremely gifted British jazz drummer variously exploring and re-interpreting many sides of 70s funk, reggae and afrobeat, joined by a stellar group of musicians and vocalists
Read moreKofi Flexxx: Flowers In The Dark
New album: Another vibrant new project by the illustriously creative tenor saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings of Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming and Shabaka and the Ancestors, with a potent mix of jazz, spoken word and hip-hop and a stellar lineup
Read moreNoname: Sundial
New album: Super-slick, intelligent, angry but beautiful rap and and soul by the Chicago poet Fatimah Nyeema Warner in this second album after 2018’s debut, Room 25, building on her uncompromising perspectives on Black culture, racism, relationships and celebrity double-standards
Read moreLYR: The Ultraviolet Age
New album: A beautiful, profound, utterly absorbing second LP by the trio of current British poet laureate, Simon Armitage, singer-songwriter Richard Walters and multi-instrumentalist and producer Patrick J Pearson
Read moreBaxter Dury: I Thought I Was Better Than You
New album: Droll, dark, crisply phrased, downbeat, self-deprecating, sleazy and funky? It can only be the West London artist, in a candid, unflinching sixth solo album that draws on his strange childhood as son of famous Ian, echoing his brilliantly funny and painful 2022 memoir Chaise Longue
Read moreThe Orb - Prism
New album: The veteran dance music and ambient noise duo still with co-founder Alex Paterson return with a vibrant release of cosmic electronica, dub and reggae, house, drum n’ bass, guest vocalists plus newscaster and other sampled voices
Read moreHMLTD: The Worm
New album: Apocalypse: The Musical? This highly entertaining second LP by the British art-rockers could be thus described, but the concept is “an anachronistic version of medieval England” and features a 16-piece string orchestra and gospel choir
Read moreJPEGMAFIA x Danny Brown: Scaring The Hoes
New album: A frenetic, eclectic, mischievously ironic and culture-bashing collaboration between iconoclastic Brooklyn rapper Barrington DeVaughn Hendricks, and his Detroit counterpart Daniel Dewan Sewell in a crazed mish-mash of samples, voices and rhythmic restlessness
Read moreLiv.e: Girl In The Half Pearl
New album: A dizzyingly indefinable and innovative debut by the Dallas-born singer-songwriter Olivia Williams, mixing experimental R&B, gospel, neo-soul, spoken word, electronica, cosmic jazz, and pop
Read more