Music news

• Mykki Blanco: ‘I’ve helped to push open some closed doors. It’s a cool feeling’

  20-06-2021 14:00 via theguardian.com
  
  The rapper has worked with Kanye and Madonna and blazed a trail for black queer pop. Their new mini album, they say, feels like the start of a new chapter…Mykki Blanco has just moved to Hollywood, and five minutes into our conversation, the 35-year old rapper’s beloved mother calls. “She needs to chill out. Like, I don’t work?” laughs Blanco. “She’s helping me pick out furniture and she’s gone crazy about the whole thing.” There is something
  
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• ‘It’s really saying you’re not gorgeous at all’: how Babybird made You’re Gorgeous

  15-04-2024 16:13 via theguardian.com
  
  ‘In the 70s and 80s, you’d regularly see images of women in bikinis draped over car bonnets. I wanted to flip that – and see how a male photographer would feel if he had to lie over a car in a thong’We’d released five lo-fi albums that had got us noticed in NME and Sounds, but we were yet to be signed to a record label. You’re Gorgeous was one of around 400 demos I’d recorded on a four-track over five years on the dole in Nottingham. I lived above the Vi
  
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• Doja Cat at Coachella review – an electrifying tour de force

  15-04-2024 14:17 via theguardian.com
  
  Empire Polo Club, Indio, CaliforniaFestival headliner delivered an A-game set, ignoring some of her mainstream hits yet bringing enough energy to power what some have called a middling yearDoja Cat took the Coachella main stage as the last official act to perform on Sunday’s bill, becoming the first female rapper to headline the festival. (She’s also only the second Black woman to do so, after Beyoncé in 2018.) Her closer rounded out a Sunday showcase of powerhouse female perf
  
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• Travels Over Feeling: Arthur Russell, a Life review – down the rabbit hole with a musical maverick

  15-04-2024 08:00 via theguardian.com
  
  He played cello for Allen Ginsberg, nearly joined Talking Heads and was sampled by Kanye West. Now the singular, genre-spanning Russell has the exhaustive study he deservesA secret hero of the dancefloor, the avant garde producer and musician Arthur Russell occupies a strange and silvery slot in the annals of music. He was a low-key cult figure in his lifetime, but one who has been increasingly celebrated. His prodigious output and his refusal to have that work pinned down has, in the decades si
  
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• Akon’s honest playlist: ‘The best song to have sex to? Smack That by Akon’

  15-04-2024 08:00 via theguardian.com
  
  The rapper would sing Bob Marley going to school and gets the party started with Black Eyed Peas, but which pop classic is he ashamed to admit liking?The first song I remember hearing
  I don’t know if it’s the first song I remember hearing, but the first song I remember singing was No Woman, No Cry by Bob Marley. I grew up in Senegal and I would sing it on my way to and from school.The song I stream the most
  I’m pretty versatile these days but I would probably say Costa Tit
  
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• Leyla McCalla: Sun Without the Heat review – a freewheeling, joyous listen

  14-04-2024 16:00 via theguardian.com
  
  (Anti-)
  The American multi-instrumentalist combines a wide range of Black musical traditions on her beautifully crafted fifth solo albumMulti-instrumentalist Leyla McCalla was exploring the Black legacies of country music and Americana long before Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter made the idea mainstream. As a member of the group Our Native Daughters, she has highlighted the presence of Black female banjo players, while her work with the Carolina Chocolate Drops explored the Black songbook f
  
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• Bodega: Our Brand Could Be Yr Life review – uneven railing against the evils of capitalism

  14-04-2024 14:00 via theguardian.com
  
  (Chrysalis)
  The New York indie-rockers retool early work into an eclectic set of musings on porn, Tarkovsky and filthy lucreIndie quintet Bodega’s third album is sort of their first. It reshapes a 33-track lo-fi collection that precursor outfit Bodega Bay dropped in 2015, railing against capitalism’s baleful effect on everything. There’s now a triptych of songs called Cultural Consumer, where once there were five. Ambitiously, Bodega employ shoegaze, Sub Pop indie, post-punk an
  
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• Shabaka: Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace review – an elegant rebirth

  14-04-2024 10:00 via theguardian.com
  
  (Impulse!)
  British jazz star Shabaka Hutchings drops the sax for reeds and flutes on an album exploring fear, courage and the power of breathworkTypical: you wait ages for a flute album from a musician famous for other things, and then two come along almost at once. Hot on the exhale of rapper André 3000’s New Blue Sun, released last November, comes another exploratory redefinition, this time from British sax phenomenon Shabaka Hutchings. André 3000 guests here.Hutchings step
  
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• ‘I spend less time self-sabotaging’: Robbie Williams and Joe Lycett on making art

  14-04-2024 08:00 via theguardian.com
  
  The pop star and comedian discuss their artwork, social media and how Williams came of age in a classic Birmingham clubJoe Lycett and Robbie Williams were brought together by Instagram. Last August, Williams posted a painting of a small, saintly looking child (not him), and captioned it with an account of how he had once made the mistake of reading the comments below a Mail Online piece. “It was hellish,” he wrote. “The person (me) they were describing was the most horrendous p
  
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• All You Need Is Love: The End of the Beatles by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines review – from best man to muckraker

  14-04-2024 08:00 via theguardian.com
  
  In this ‘director’s cut’ of their 1983 book, which Paul McCartney burned, a former Beatles employee and a music writer appear preoccupied with stirring up scandal around the band’s splitThe biannual Journal of Beatles Studies was launched by Liverpool University Press in October 2022. The peer-reviewed publication aims to “inaugurate, innovate, interrogate and challenge narrative, cultural historical and musicological tropes about the Beatles”; as such, it is
  
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• Romy review – a masterclass in bittersweet feeling

  13-04-2024 15:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Roundhouse, London
  Showcasing her debut solo album, last year’s Mid Air, the xx frontwoman escapes the elegant restraint of her band with a set full of euphoric rhythms and unambiguous hymns to her wifeRomy Madley Croft, sometimes of the band the xx, is somewhere on stage, veiled in a thick fog of dry ice. Amniotic beats throb in the distance. We’re nearing the end of the first night of her two London Club Mid Air sets in which Romy’s celebrated solo debut album of last year, M
  
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• Big Zuu: ‘Music and cooking make me feel euphoric’

  13-04-2024 15:00 via theguardian.com
  
  The rapper and presenter, 28, on coming from a massive family, avoiding Tinder and why winning a Bafta made him want to cryLiving in temporary housing as a kid gave me character and hunger. We moved all over London: Victoria, Battersea, Swiss Cottage and Kilburn. Growing up that way was very difficult, but I also appreciated the system for giving us a home. It’s a weird feeling.I come from a massive family. My dad is one of five, and Mum has 13 siblings; my grandad was busy. I’m from
  
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• One to watch: English Teacher

  13-04-2024 13:30 via theguardian.com
  
  The Leeds band fuse dreampop, psychedelia and emo-rock with smart, fresh songwriting and tender momentsAre you paying attention at the back? Whenever a music scene erupts – and it rarely does these days – it’s followed by the inevitable slew of copycats. With the breakout British bands of recent years, much of that hype has orbited south London. But English Teacher are reorienting northward, with smart songwriting that feels fresh. The four-piece met at Leeds Conservatoire, pla
  
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• Jess Ribeiro: Summer of Love review – a balm for anxious times

  13-04-2024 02:00 via theguardian.com
  
  With expansive, experimental instrumentation, the Melbourne musician’s fourth album records our contemporary chaos – and finds a glimmer of hopeGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailJess Ribeiro has range. Over the last decade, the Melbourne singer-songwriter has flitted from gentle storytelling to something a little weirder and more experimental. There was the folksy world of her debut, 2012’s My Little River; her following two albums added more texture and reverb, and a
  
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• ‘I want to bring the party up north’: Nia Archives on unleashing a Yorkshire rave revolution

  12-04-2024 12:00 via theguardian.com
  
  She had to go her own way to get her 90s indie-infused drum’n’bass bangers heard. Now, after opening for Beyoncé, the performer is about to release her first album, a ‘quintessentially British record’Nia Archives is a loud and proud junglist. When you dive deep into the West Yorkshire DJ, producer and singer’s discography, you might assume she was around during the genre’s mid-90s golden era. But being born in 1999 hasn’t stopped her from being no
  
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• Post your questions for Sheila E

  12-04-2024 11:52 via theguardian.com
  
  Whether you want to ask the Latin music legend and groundbreaking drummer about learning to play on pots and pans, paradiddles or Prince, now’s your chanceIn such an illustrious career, you might think there are few “firsts” left for Sheila E to conquer. She started performing age five and played with her father’s band. She joined the George Duke Band in 1977, the same year she met Prince, who would become perhaps her greatest collaborator. She’s toured with the lik
  
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• Still House Plants: If I Don’t Make It, I Love U review – inspiringly fearless and free art rock

  12-04-2024 10:00 via theguardian.com
  
  (Bison)
  Powered by Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach’s astonishing singing, the British trio explore Dilla-time funkiness and math-rock detailFrom the album title onwards, unstoppably ardent feeling fills this awe-inspiring album from the British art-rock trio, whose music swells your heart and fizzes your mind. Creeping ever further out of the underground since forming at Glasgow School of Art in 2015, you’d need a whiteboard to triangulate the various acts that come to mind listening to th
  
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• Grégoire Maret/Romain Collin: Ennio review – emotional, ecstatic Morricone homage

  12-04-2024 09:30 via theguardian.com
  
  (ACT)
  Harmonica star Maret and pianist/composer Collin pay homage to Ennio Morricone with drifting church-echo and trancelike soundsOrnette Coleman once told the BBC’s Jazz on 3 that when his mother Rosa gave him his first saxophone, but couldn’t afford lessons, he thought it was a toy and played it without realising “you have to learn something to find out what the toy does”. Maybe it’s an extreme case, but not an unfamiliar jazz story. Collisions of improvisers&rs
  
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• Girl in Red: I’m Doing It Again Baby! review – ambitious alt-pop overshadows candid lyrics

  12-04-2024 09:00 via theguardian.com
  
  (Columbia)
  Fresh from a support slot on Taylor Swift’s Era tour, the Norwegian singer-songwriter pivots from lo-fi indie to full-blown widescreen popGirl in Red often seems fearless. From her raw first single I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend, Marie Ulven has laid everything bare in desperately romantic queer love songs and blunt, honest lyrics about depression. Her full-band live shows are almost reckless: at her 2022 Glastonbury performance, she plunged into the mosh pit, mic still on.Since tha
  
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• ‘They said I was worse than the Sex Pistols!’: folk legend Linda Thompson on trashing dressing rooms and losing her voice

  12-04-2024 06:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Her struggles with spasmodic dysphonia has led her to write an album for a bevy of other stars to sing. She talks about trauma, ageing and stealing an audience member’s carThe photo on the front of Linda Thompson’s new album, Proxy Music, is nothing if not striking. It features Thompson posing in an identical outfit to that worn by the model Kari-Ann Moller on the cover of Roxy Music’s eponymous 1972 debut, although her expression is noticeably different: in place of Moller&rsq
  
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• Deep listening: the haunting sonic world of Cassandra Miller

  11-04-2024 17:21 via theguardian.com
  
  Her intimate compositions take existing melodies that she refracts, rethinks and expands into compelling new pieces. Ahead of the premiere of a new work for guitarist Sean Shibe, Cassandra Miller talks about process, pleasures and sleep chanting“I steal people’s souls”, says Cassandra Miller. The 47-year old Canadian composer sits in her light-filled living room at the top of a London block of flats, looking tranquil and as unlike a master of the dark arts as it is possible to
  
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• Nia Archives: Silence Is Loud review – bold, fresh jungle unbound by tradition

  11-04-2024 13:00 via theguardian.com
  
  (HIJINXX/Island)
  The Bradford producer confidently tethers her breakbeats to a pounding four-to-the-floor kick drum – which would have been unheard of in the 90s – on a pop-facing, innovative recordJudging by the cameraphone footage, Nia Archives’ support slot at the last of Beyoncé’s 2023 London gigs was not an unqualified success. Archives has suggested she “got a lot of hate for playing jungle” at the show: the audience certainly look like it’s
  
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• ‘The spirits of my ancestors empower me’: jazz great Idris Ackamoor on Afrofuturism, activism and André 3000

  09-04-2024 16:39 via theguardian.com
  
  A musical seeker since childhood, the 73-year-old’s journeys have taken himfrom lessons with Cecil Taylor to a formative tour of Africa and now work with the Outkast star. He explains why he’s still chasing the next chapterThe greatest music by spiritual jazz maestro and acclaimed saxophonist Idris Ackamoor suggests a swirling symbiosis between the living and the dead. Take his 2020 song When Will I See You Again?, in which his unfeigned croak of the words “we’ll all be f
  
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• Reindeer skins and sonic looms: Borealis music festival dives into Sámi culture

  09-04-2024 12:34 via theguardian.com
  
  At the Norwegian event, creators from Europe’s only Indigenous nation used kettles, synthpop and recordings of salmon to create music that drew on their often threatened traditionsOn stage in a former industrial building in the Norwegian city of Bergen sits a strange, if not bewildering, selection of objects. There is an upright, warp-weighted loom, one of the most ancient and basic forms of human technology, with a weaving in progress on its frame. There is a kettle, a heating element, an
  
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• Bait, ting, certi: how UK rap changed the language of the nation

  09-04-2024 11:28 via theguardian.com
  
  Fuelled by music fandom and social media, young British people’s slang is evolving to include words with pidgin, patois and Arabic roots – even where strong regional English dialects existThere’s a video format spreading on TikTok. Recorded in towns across suburban England, teenage interviewers stop their peers on the street, fielding questions that range from fashion choices to humorous hypotheticals and local neighbourhood dramas, in the process building a large social media
  
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• Back to Black review – woozy Amy Winehouse biopic buoyed by extraordinary lead performance

  09-04-2024 10:01 via theguardian.com
  
  Sam Taylor-Johnson’s best film to date is more interested in romance and creativity than demons or blame‘Her demons were probably worse’: does Back to Black reveal the real Amy Winehouse?The last time Sam Taylor-Johnson directed a movie about drugs it was A Million Little Pieces in 2019, based on James Frey’s notoriously inauthentic memoir of addiction – and the last time she made a film about a music legend it was Nowhere Boy in 2009, about John Lennon.Now she brin
  
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• Country singer Morgan Wallen arrested for throwing a chair off rooftop bar

  08-04-2024 18:56 via theguardian.com
  
  Country star was arrested on Sunday night for reckless endangerment for throwing a chair off the roof of a bar in NashvilleCountry singer Morgan Wallen was jailed on Sunday night on felony charges that he threw a chair off the sixth-story roof of a popular bar in Nashville.Billboard confirmed the arrest for reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct via a statement from the singer’s attorney on Monday. The record-breaking country musician was “fully cooperating with authorities&rdq
  
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• ‘I wrote it in a bedsit on Nick Drake’s guitar’: how Dream Academy made Life in a Northern Town

  08-04-2024 15:17 via theguardian.com
  
  ‘When I played it to Paul Simon, he suggested changing the title – saying, “No one’s going to know how to ask for A Hey Ah Ma Ma Ma in a record store”’I was a part-time presenter on the first series of The Tube, with Jools Holland and Paula Yates. That was filmed in Newcastle, but they didn’t keep me on, so I went back down to London. It was so depressing. I’d been in a band called the Act with Gilbert Gabriel, our keyboards player – one day
  
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• I couldn’t imagine doing festivals without drinking. Pulling it off filled me with relief – and pride | Laura Snapes

  08-04-2024 15:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Festivals and alcohol had always seemed synonymous to me. But a downward spiral prompted me to attempt one sober. It was a revelation, albeit not an easy oneTwenty years ago this August, I went to my first music festival. My best friend’s mum kindly – bravely – drove us two 15-year-olds from Cornwall to Reading and supervised from a distance while we queued at the signing tent to meet Goldie Lookin’ Chain, Razorlight and the Hives, joined in the euphoric yells of “b
  
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• ‘Anger compels me forward’: Drive My Car composer Eiko Ishibashi on evil, experimentation and exploding genre

  08-04-2024 12:05 via theguardian.com
  
  Her score for Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s opus helped it to Oscar glory. Now the Japanese musician has reunited with its director for a collaboration unlike any otherWhether it’s Hitchcock and Herrmann, Spielberg and Williams or latterly Villeneuve and Zimmer, film directors often get into a glorious feedback loop with a preferred composer – and the latest is a burgeoning collaboration between Ryûsuke Hamaguchi and Eiko Ishibashi. Her jazz-pop theme for Drive My Car in 2021
  
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