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Irish Times
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
New Irish albums reviewed: Sons of Southern Ulster, Poor Creature, Darragh Morgan, The Swell Season and California Irish
Sons of Southern Ulster: Through the Bridewell Gate (SOSU) ★★★★☆ Through the Bridewell Gate by Sons of Southern Ulster The malcontents of Co Cavan resurface with the aim of once again visualising young dreams in middle age. Three albums in (and 10 years from their formation), Sons of Southern Ulster can safely lay claim to be as authentically Irish post-punk as any of the current native crop touting a similar validity. Sprechgesang songs such as Billyhill Hall, Royal Breffni, and the especially lyrical To the New World and Back ('I heard the voice of Joe Dolan – 'make me an island,' he cried'), place mainstays David Meagher and Justin Kelly in a league and a psycho-geographic place of their own. Poor Creature: All Smiles Tonight (River Lea Records) ★★★★★ All Smiles Tonight by Poor Creature Cormac MacDiarmada , John Dermody, and Ruth Clinton may have their limbs in other contemporary experimental folk bands ( Lankum , Landless), but their eyes remain firmly focused on recalibrating songs from many years past and adding unexpected sonic twists and turns without making you reach for the smelling salts. Psyche-folk might be the applicable category or genre, but there's something else filtering through on multilayered tracks such as Willie O, Bury Me Not, Adieu Lovely Eireann and Hick's Farewell. Think more kosmische variations of Cocteau Twins, Enya and several spectral others, imbued with sean-nós, drone, and artists such as Sandy Paton, Jean Ritchie, and Karen Dalton. Producer John 'Spud' Murphy sets the controls for the dark heart of the sun, while Clinton (whose father, incidentally, was once a member of Ireland's finest R&B band, The Rhythm Kings) delivers vocal shivers and delights in equal measure. Definite Album of the Year vibrations from this one. Darragh Morgan: For Violin and Electronics Vol II (Diatribe Records) ★★☆☆☆ Cover of For Violin and Electronics Vol II by Darragh Morgan New music violinist Darragh Morgan has quite the professional career, performing not only with numerous contemporary music groups (including Ensemble Modern, Icebreaker and London Sinfonietta) but also with The Divine Comedy, the Spice Girls and Sigur Ros. The sequel to his 2017 album showcases examples of what could be, for some, taxing. There are shades of that throughout the 10 minutes of Zack Browning's Sole Injection (think repetitive hiccups with occasional stabs of police car alarms). Conversely, in Scanner's A Cantegral Segment, Morgan's playing is peak elegance, but the album's longueurs far outweigh the best moments. The Swell Season: Forward (Masterkey Sounds) ★★★★☆ Forward by The Swell Season Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova reunite as The Swell Season for their first album in 16 years, and to say the results are equal parts bittersweet, heartwarming and wise is a piercing understatement. The pair's personal history is (presumably) well enough known to view Forward as a story-driven sequence of confessional regret and acceptance. Whatever the truth, there's no denying the empathy and common threads that connect not just the songwriters but also their folksy songs. Listen to People We Used to Be, Stuck in Reverse, I Leave Everything to You and A Little Sugar without your eyes brimming, and you have a heart of stone. READ MORE California Irish: The Mountains Are My Friends (7Hz Productions) ★★★☆☆ The Mountains Are My Friends by California Irish From bullish hard rock to harmonic folk is a turn we didn't expect Belfast's Cormac Neeson to take, but the former frontman of The Answer has taken to the sensibilities of Laurel Canyon like the proverbial duck to water. Gathering a bunch of musicians with similar influences, the mood enveloping the debut album by California Irish is, says Neeson, 'the opposite of boring AI-generated, no-soul perfection'. There is throughout, then, not only genuine creative instinct but also the kind of sonic warmth that comes only from musicians in a room taking cues and empathetic hints from each other.
Times
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
It's official: Coldplay have got more boring with age
In 2014, the year Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin announced they were consciously uncoupling, Coldplay released an album called Ghost Stories that was consciously uninteresting. Here was a band whose early Noughties singles had brought a new level of vulnerability to indie rock, whose singer became a touchstone for male sensitivity as we moved out of the laddish bonhomie of Nineties Britpop and into a more thoughtful, if less rebellious, approach to voicing young life in music. • Read our music reviews, interviews and guides on what to listen to next But by 2014 Coldplay had settled into a highly lucrative model of polished vapidity, rarely going towards the emotional fragility and musical nuance they captured in singles such as Trouble and Yellow, having learnt that repeating an essentially meaningless line again and again until stadiums chant it back to you is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. By the time of Ghost Stories, Coldplay appeared to have accepted that testing audiences means losing audiences. Better to stick to the rousing anthems, alongside a few intimate ballads hinting at vague universal depth, and reap the 100 million-selling rewards. 'The disappointment here is that a band with such clear intelligence and compassion have chosen to make an album so dull,' I wrote of Ghost Stories. As it turns out, such critical bashing was — and this is highly unusual for me — rooted in scientific fact. A team at Durham University, possibly rather bored themselves, have analysed the rhythms, tempo, percussion and chords of songs by REM, Radiohead, Buddy Holly, Kirsty MacColl, Patsy Cline and Coldplay, and discovered that the band are officially lame. 'Coldplay shows a downwards trend in their harmonic daring as they increasingly become part of the pop mainstream,' concluded Professor Nick Collins, while stating that 'Radiohead maintain a high diversity of harmonic language'. With immaculate timing, the scientific report on Coldplay's boredom rating comes after the hysteria around Oasis, the band who called it a day in 2009 after a decade and a half of fights, drugs, mayhem and generational epics exciting enough to make a vicar put a boot through a stained-glass window. The hysteria around the return of Oasis wasn't simply about an entertaining band with an ability to make people feel alive. It was about a wilder, more carefree time, before the personal auditing of social media, when a group of working-class lads could invade the establishment and shake things up without fear of cancellation. As Noel Gallagher put it in 2023 when I asked, just as reunion rumours began to swirl, if Oasis could happen today: 'We would be killed before we even started … 'Got this idea for a band. Couple of gobshite brothers from Manchester, bang into cocaine, lager and shagging birds, ripping off the Beatles and T. Rex.' 'Oh no, thank you.'' • Are you a modern bore? Step forward Swifties and Oasis fans From the 2010s onwards, Coldplay did a thorough clean-up of the cigarette butt and empty bottle-strewn space left by Oasis and promptly installed a Gaggia coffee machine and a Gail's bakery. While formerly dangerous areas of London such as Dalston and Peckham underwent gentrification, Coldplay offered a new approach to pop fandom — and they weren't alone. Where once there were wild, pioneering figures like David Bowie and Madonna, the Noughties welcomed in relatable boy- and girl-next-door types like Ed Sheeran and Adele. Where once independent music was dominated by bona fide weirdos like the Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine, it became the time of Snow Patrol and Keane, bands that didn't so much challenge their fans as tell them everything was going to be OK. Of course, boredom isn't necessarily a bad thing. Coldplay also represent a new era of decency in music; of thinking about the impact you have on others, of being polite and respectful, of picking up your rubbish and putting it in the correct recycling bin. In an age of increasing global volatility, Coldplay's wholesome enthusiasm and sense of reason becomes attractive. That is why their stadium concerts tend to be such joyful affairs. Yes, fire and ice are exciting and dangerous, but sometimes you just want to immerse yourself in lukewarm water.
New York Times
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Kesha Seeks a Chaotic Love, and 9 More New Songs
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs. Kesha, 'Red Flag.' Now that Kesha's lawsuits and record-company contracts are in the past, her first independently released album, '. (Period),' doubles down on her persona as an unruly, thrill-seeking party girl who wants what she wants. In the peppy 'Red Flag,' she welcomes chaos and complication over boredom. 'I need a certain kind of chemical / It's dangerous and unforgettable,' she sings, with an edge of Auto-Tune. The track revs up a combination of synth-pop pulsation and hand-clapping trance buildups, an adrenaline rush of romantic disaster. J.I.D. featuring Eminem, 'Animals (Pt. 1)' The Atlanta rapper J.I.D. — born Destin Route — zooms through a barrage of syllables in the virtuosic 'Animals (Pt. 1).' It's a breakneck boast that juggles rhyme schemes and percussive flows with casual precision: 'I'm good at my job / It's not a walk in the park 'cause I'm in a metropolis / I'm lost in a thought but escaping the darkness.' J.I.D. is confident enough to split the track with a past master of enunciation and internal rhymes, Eminem. He pivots the production from eerily electronic to orchestral, without lessening the beats per minute or syllables per second. Foo Fighters, 'Today's Song' 'Today's Song,' the first new Foo Fighters song since 2023, starts as an elegy, then explodes into an exhortation to persevere. 'Two sides to a river,' Dave Grohl sings as drums and power chords come crashing in, and, later, 'We'll drown in the middle / Which side are you on?' It's the band's latest earnest, uplifting hard-rock anthem, and despite a few rhyming-dictionary lyrics, the feeling comes through. The Reds, Pinks and Purples, 'What's the Worst Thing You Heard' The Reds, Pinks and Purples, from San Francisco, merge the 1960s and the 1980s at their most dejected. They share the ringing picked guitars of folk-rock with the bitter tunefulness of the Smiths and the Go-Betweens. On their new album, 'The Past Is a Garden I Never Fed,' the song titles are a checklist of pessimism, from artistic careers to life choices: 'The World Doesn't Need Another Band,' 'You're Never Safe from Yourself,' 'No One Absolves Us in the End.' In 'What's the Worst Thing You Heard?,' rising chords disguise dimming expectations; 'I know we're going to crash,' Glenn Donaldson sings, unconsoled by a brisk beat and a pretty guitar pattern. Ethel Cain, '___ Me Eyes' In the new single from Ethel Cain's album due in August, 'Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You,' she sings about a troubled fast girl from a small town, potentially a romantic rival in the album's narrative. 'She's got her makeup done and her high heels on,' the singer observes. 'She goes to church straight from the clubs / They say she looks just like her mama before the drugs.' The track's pulsing synthesizers echo the 1981 Kim Carnes hit 'Bette Davis Eyes,' which Cain has covered on tour. But unlike the casual seductress in that song, Cain's character grows tearful behind her bravado. 'They all want to take her out / But no one ever wants to take her home,' Cain wails in a surge of sympathy. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Erykah Badu's Woozy Flirtation, and 9 More New Songs
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs. Erykah Badu and the Alchemist, 'Next to You' Erykah Badu floats some companionable requests — 'I wanna take walks with you,' 'I wanna just talk with you,' 'I can't wait to see you after school' — in this leisurely, woozy, increasingly hypnotic track. The Alchemist's production gathers countless layers of Badu's vocals, with and without lyrics, but places most of them at a distance, for a happy tangle of inner voices. Brittany Davis, 'Sun and Moon' Brittany Davis, a blind, nonbinary pianist, singer and songwriter based in Seattle, recorded their second album, 'Black Thunder,' leading a classic jazz piano-bass-drums trio. 'Sun and Moon' reaches back to Nina Simone for its husky, organic, bare-bones dynamics. This six-minute song rises ever so gradually, affirming everyday pleasures; 'In the sun, my heart is full of joy and light,' Davis sings. 'In the moonlight, I'm thankful for the blessings of the night.' The track has a jammy, improvisational feel, with serious purpose behind it. Billie Marten, 'Clover' The English songwriter Billie Marten calmly savors tensions and contradictions in 'Clover': 'You're raining heavy, I'm almost dry / I'm only learning to love you right.' The tempo is relaxed; keyboards plink and twinkle through mild dissonances. It's affectionate but watchful: 'Don't push me over, I'm half your size,' she admonishes. Kehlani, 'Folded' Kehlani dramatizes the most reluctant of breakups in 'Folded.' Yes, she's waiting for her ex to 'come pick up your clothes,' neatly folded. But this isn't the door-closing scenario from Beyoncé's 'Irreplaceable.' Kehlani urges, 'Meet me at my door while it's still open' and notes, 'It's getting cold out but it's not frozen.' Descending chords, a string section, little guitar licks and Kehlani's voice all convey a world of regret and a chance to reunite. Cari, 'Luvhiii' Cari Stewart-Josephs, an English songwriter, surrenders to infatuation in 'Luvhiii,' from an EP due July 10. 'You hit me like a truck,' she sings, 'And I never will get enough.' A loping bass line, jazzy piano chords and a faraway but insistent tambourine arrive, enfolding Cari's multilayered vocals in a trip-hop haze as she succumbs. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
RNZ News
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
Tributes pour in for Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson
Tributes are pouring in for Brian Wilson - the musician, songwriter, and founder of The Beach Boys - who has died aged 82. Listener music reviewer Graham Reid spoke to Charlotte Cook. Tags: To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.
