Favourite Five Recently Reviewed CDs
Five of the best albums from the recent postings at New Music From Elsewhere. Music too good to let slide into the archives. The Elsewhere place if you are looking for a quick fix of great and interesting albums.
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Mdou Moctar: Ilana; The Creator (Sahel Sounds)
6 May 2019 | 1 min read | 1
These days with so many artists trickling out singles and then maybe an album every few years, this Tuareg singer/guitarist from Niger has an admirable work ethic. Although this is his first studio album he's clocked off a handful of live album including the soundtrack to a movie he was in which paid homage to Prince's Purple Rain and Perry Henzell's struggling central character Ivan... > Read more
Asshet Akal
Soak: Grim Town (Rough Trade)
6 May 2019 | 2 min read
It has seemed a lifetime (four years) for this young Irish singer-songwriter to follow up her slightly uneven but impressive debut album Before We Forgot How to Dream. If that album suffered a little from some arch poetry it was forgivable, she was 18 when the album came out so those were pieces written when she was 17 and probably still in school. Now 22 and with... > Read more
Knock Me Off My Feet
Ekiti Sound: Abeg No Vex (Crammed Discs/Southbound)
29 Apr 2019 | <1 min read
Anyone looking for something which threads together clever lo-fi London tenement-block beats and sounds with rap'n'chant and the percussive soul of Lagos need look no further. This is an often beguiling amalgam of primitive drum'n'bass, the attitude of Congotronics who created idiosyncratic sonic magic out of cheap instruments and the deep spirit of Afrobeat beyond the obvious Fela... > Read more
ADHD
Sophie Mashlan: Perfect Disaster (digital outlets)
22 Apr 2019 | 1 min read
This young singer-songwriter is in her final year as a pop music student at the University of Auckland, but while others are getting singles together she leaps out with a fully-fledged, professional and mature album which has elements of dark country woven through the sometimes heroic pop-rock songs and the literate, reflective folk. Given she's already sprung a couple of singles (included... > Read more
The Comet is Coming: Trust in the Lifeforce of The Deep Mystery (Impulse)
15 Apr 2019 | 1 min read
The name to note in this UK trio is saxophonist and jazz-shaman Shabaka Hutchings, the pivotal figure in the emerging new wave of British jazz who is in Sons of Kemet and Shabaka and the Ancestors. He's a prime mover in a scene which is enjoying a renaissance (and enjoying itself in the process) with big and boisterous music, controls sometimes to the heart of the sun above a spiritual... > Read more