Your Brother’s Keeper & Gary Bartz

Where Rivers Meet

Brownswood

This debut from the collective assembled by drummer and producer Jake Long from players on London’s vibrant jazz scene sees them teaming up with esteemed saxophonist Bartz, who’s served in bands led by Art Blakey, McCoy Tyner and Miles Davis. It’s not only a meeting of generations – at 86, Bartz is many decades older than his confreres – and creatively enquiring minds but also evidence of a kind of spiritual chemistry, bringing improv highlights into composition while tapping the expansive possibilities of cosmic jazz via synths and modular effects, propelling it further into the great beyond.

Bartz may be the star of the project in one sense but across the set democracy reigns, in the tradition of the finest ensemble playing, modern improv and deep tradition the double helix of its DNA. The descriptor “impeccable” suggests something overstudied but Where Rivers Meet is seemingly effortless, a living organism that both breathes fire (as on the peppy, percussion-accented “Cauldron”) and spreads serenity, via stunning trumpet piece “Eclipse” and the epic closer, “Mantra”, with its delicate piano phrasings, descending sax coda and softly gushing synths.

Brownswood

Liz Lawrence

Vespers

A few might recognise her name from twenty-tens synth-pop duo Cash+David, some from her work with indie-folk types Bombay Bicycle Club and others from her own, wryly observational art-pop songs. The Liz Lawrence who shows up on her fifth album, however, is someone else again. 

Dedicated to her sister Jessie, who died following an accident in 2024, aged just 35, Vespers was doubly transformative in that Lawrence’s grief left her unable to even listen to music, let alone make it. However, a need to rest inside her sadness resulted in 13 songs, written over three weeks in a brief, single burst. Soaked in memory and full of love, albeit painful, they are universal: “Where Did You Go” captures the incomprehension familiar to anybody who’s lost someone close, while in “Yves Blue” Lawrence recalls that other chronicler of deep blue, Joni Mitchell, when she croons, “Blue ain’t blue enough for this”.

Throughout, her eloquence and economy of expression are striking, her voice a lustrous, lowering blend of Martha Wainwright and kd lang. The set’s melancholic calm is upset only in “A Good One”, when the reality that loss can “hit you like a ton of bricks” is underscored by a sudden, ferocious outburst of drumming.

Chrysalis

Pond

Terrestrials

Even by the loose definitions of psychedelic rock, Australian quintet Pond are a fringe element, also drawn to krautrock, pop, glam, Tropicália, prog, funk and a more thoughtful strain of their country’s pub rock. Led by Nick Allbrook, who played in Tame Impala for several years (fellow Ponder Jay Watson is still a touring member), the band have released 11 albums, the latest on their own label. 

Taking “goths at the pub” as its conceptual guide (really), Terrestrials fuses Oz rock, new wave and post-punk styles from the ’80s with the moodiness of UK bands including Sisters Of Mercy and Magazine. Its 10 tunes are variously chilly and electro-heated, employ a drum machine, are slathered in keys and spiked with flange, while the production spirits of Todd Rundgren and Peter Gabriel hover nearby. Pond are on laser-focused form, often furious (in both senses of the word – Allbrook’s lyrics address late-stage capitalism, environmental collapse and state-sanctioned inequality) and crucially, great fun. Standouts are hard to isolate but the crunchy, foot-to-the-floor punch of “Casuarina” and “Tourmaline”’s moody, wandering prog are among them.

Mangovision

Tara Clerkin Trio

Somewhere Good

Try to pin down the style of the second album from these three UK playmates and you’ll soon come (gloriously) unstuck. It fits the description of what’s now wryly called “jazz-adjacent” music, which covers its reliance on improv, inventive arrangements and elegant airiness, but not its art-pop sensibility (think, Scritti Politti and Young Marble Giants), notes of pastoral folk or the use of loops and sampling, both of ambient sounds and their own music.

Somewhere Good may be short but its skewed sweetness is irresistible, at times edging into the playfulness heard in the music of LA experi-jazz scenesters Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes, though this Trio aren’t down with the jazz tag. Which considering the range across their set is fair enough: “Silently” recalls ’90s trip-hop but adds bossa topspin via Clerkin’s vocal, while “Ups And Downs” drifts like a welcome fog, woodwind and synths gently sighing and see-sawing under improv piano, making great use of a vocal sample as it goes, and “Movin’ On” is a symphony of undeniably comical, electronic burbling threaded onto a dubby tune built from melodica and synth. Impish yes, but classy with it.  

World Of Echo