Q: What does next week have in common with John Entwistle, Bill Wyman and George Harrison? A: It’s a quiet one. How quiet? Well, there are only four new releases on my radar. You can blame the long weekend for that. But you can thank these artists for coming through in the clutch:
Guided By Voices
Tremblers And Goggles By Rank
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Tremblers And Goggles By Rank marks a new phase in Robert Pollard’s songwriting evolution. His songs have always included non-traditional approaches to form and song structure, but with this album, he has pushed it further than ever. While the familiar Guided By Voices pop-craft and melodic virtuosity always occupies center stage, the first-time listener will never be able to predict what’s coming next. GBV’s latest batch of brilliant songs ride on colorful psychedelic flourishes and brash post-punk textures that make this 10-song album a one-of-a-kind head trip. While there are hooks and earworms aplenty within, this album is a complex and kaleidoscopic journey, representing a new echelon in the Guided By Voices universe. It represents another level of songwriting and performance from the group. It plays out like an intricate and powerful collage, in a very multicolored and multi-faceted fashion; a work grand in scale and undertaking.”
Moor Mother
Jazz Codes
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Jazz Codes is Moor Mother’s companion to her celebrated 2021 release Black Encyclopedia of the Air. Jazz Codes uses free jazz as a starting point but the collection continues the recent turn in Moor Mother‘s multifaceted catalog toward more melody, more singing voices, more choruses, more complexity. In its warm, densely layered course through jazz, blues, soul, hip- hop, and other Black classical traditions, Jazz Codes sets the ear blissfully adrift and unhitches the mind from habit. Through her work, Camae Ayewa illuminates the principles of her multidisciplinary collaborative practice Black Quantum Futurism, a theoretical framework for perceiving and adjusting reality through art, writing, music, and performance, informed by historical Black ontologies. The songwriter, composer, vocalist, poet, and educator spent years organizing and performing in Philadelphia’s underground music community before moving to Los Angeles to teach composition. She released her debut album as Moor Mother, Fetish Bones, in 2016, and has since put out an abundance of acclaimed music, both as a solo artist and in collaboration with other musicians who share her drive to dig up the untold.”
Paolo Nutini
Last Night In The Bittersweet
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “For the past six years, Paolo Nutini has been learning how to speak his own language. After touring 2014’s Caustic Love, his second U.K. No. 1 on the bounce and his biggest chart success to date in the US, Paolo found, in the gap between his late 20s and early 30s, that he’d assembled a musical vocabulary that he hadn’t put into proper use in his own work to that point. Last Night In The Bittersweet is an album of reframed experiences and rewired iconography, where the lurid colours of a neon motel sign or a snatch of dialogue from a movie can mean as much as a heartfelt plea or wrenching goodbye. It’s a 70-minute epic that spans the distance from classic rock to post-punk to hypnotic Krautrock, in the process proving its value as his deepest, most varied, most accomplished, and ultimately most rewarding set so far. The insistent Motorik rhythms of the single Lose It brings shades of early ‘70s German bands like Can and Neu!, and are a product of Paolo writing increasingly on bass guitar. At the other end of the spectrum are squalling mini-epics and self-contained, hook-driven cuts best described with heavy labels like Motown, Stiff or Sun.”
Tedeschi Trucks Band
I Am The Moon: II. Ascension
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “I Am The Moon, the fifth studio release by Tedeschi Trucks Band, is the most ambitious and, at the same time, intimate recording that America’s best rock ’n’ roll big band has ever made: a genuinely epic undertaking in four albums and 24 original songs inspired by classical literature but emotionally driven by the immediate drama, isolation and mourning of the pandemic era. There is the recurring fight for hope too, the reaching across damaged connections — all of that trial and urgency unfolding over a robust tapestry of blues, funk, country, jazz and gospel in collaborative writing, luminous singing and the instant fire of improvisation. At more than two hours of music, the four albums that comprise I Am The Moon – Crescent, Ascension, The Fall and Farewell – are like a full evening of all-new composition and performance with Tedeschi Trucks Band, the 12-piece touring phenomenon founded in 2010 by its married leaders, guitarist Derek Trucks and singer-guitarist Susan Tedeschi. In its heart and scale, I Am The Moon is also a living, evolving map of the soul: the enduring tale of star-crossed devotion in Layla and Majnun by the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi, brought forward to present day, through universal experience and faith.
