Nicole McCabe
A Song To Sing
LA-based saxophonist and composer Nicole McCabe has led her own quartet since 2018, offering a fresh take on bebop which reflects her personal style whilst acknowledging the influence of Cool School jazz giants like Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz.
She has always demonstrated an impressive improv vocabulary, but for her third LP McCabe says she was “thinking more about melody”. This led her to accommodate synths, woodwind and clubby beat patterns alongside the more usual piano.
It’s a move that shifts her further into the genre-blurring territory of LA’s “new school” players like keyboardist Jacob Mann (whose Big Band she’s served with) and fellow saxophonist Sam Gendel.
These 11 tracks are innately soulful, luminescent and irresistibly nimble, airy yet never lightweight. There’s fire and urgency, too, as on ‘Prism Prison’, whose knockout astral-synth symphony is introduced by an athletic, Ethio-jazz passage. Other standouts include the title track, where McCabe’s soloing swoops with swallow-like grace over plangent piano and frantic, muffled beats, and joyously burbling closer ‘Foraging For Truth’, which joins the dots between Ralph Vaughan Williams and Alabaster DePlume.
Label: Colorfield
Bryan Ferry & Amelia Barratt
Loose Talk
It’s 11 years since Bryan Ferry released his last set of original material. Given the hiatus, you’d be forgiven for assuming the former Roxy Music frontman had retired to live a luxe and impeccably tailored life in a sun-soaked clime.
In fact, Ferry claims that his debut collaboration with visual artist and writer Amelia Barratt has “opened up a whole new chapter” of his creativity.
There’s an archival element to Loose Talk: the music uses unreleased demos from across Ferry’s career as its base (some dating back to the 70s), which were then worked up in the studio and fitted out with Barratt’s lyrics and vocals. The neutral delivery of her recitations, often emotionally ambiguous and at times oddly unsettling, chimes with the hazy, almost lo-fi nature of the songs’ stems.
There’s a cinematic quality, yet this is provided in snapshots rather than panoramic vistas. Echoes of Ferry’s past are haunting rather than reassuringly familiar – nowhere more so than in ‘Stand By Me’, with its prowling bass line and off-kilter synths, and bittersweet piano piece ‘Landscape’, where his (original) vocal provides a ghostly background foil to Barratt’s detailed observations of police and their horses’ tack, on duty at a funfair.
Label: Dene Jesmond Enterprises
Greentea Peng
Tell Dem It’s Sunny
In 2018, the debut EP from Londoner Aria Wells created a serious buzz. A hazy, down-tempo fusion of psychedelic soul, hip hop, experi-pop and jazz, it hinted at an artist who could carry Erykah Badu’s baton: sensual and soothing yet odd enough to intrigue whilst resisting easy definition.
Tell Dem It’s Sunny is the follow-up to her first album, 2021’s Man Made, which was recorded at 432Hz rather than the standard 440 frequency, due to the former’s supposed calming properties.
As this fact would suggest, vibe is paramount in Wells’ work, and her latest record reflects her ability to conjure that most nebulous of qualities. Her latest set has a darker mood than its predecessor, recalling Tricky’s smoky conjurings with Martina Topley-Bird and the late-night beatscapes of Portishead. Reggae and dub lend more weight, too, from hypnotic head-nod to depth-charge shudder.
Whilst the sonics tend toward retro, its lyrics offer an emotionally direct correction, whether suggesting “come over and in, and let the healing begin/It’s always sore business when shedding one’s skin” (on ‘Green’), or admitting existential exhaustion (“I’m one foot front and back again/ Don’t tell me it’ll be like this until the end”) as in ‘One Foot’.
Label: AWAL
Perfume Genius
Glory
Mike Hadreas has staked out his territory as Perfume Genius with rich, boldly anthemic, experimental-pop songs, reaching twin peaks with 2017’s exhilarating No Shape and three years later, Set My Heart On Fire Immediately. Perhaps this is why his follow-up proper takes a different approach – where to go but somewhere different, after those highs?
With his longtime producer Blake Mills in place, Hadreas lined up players including stellar guitarists Meg Duffy (aka Hand Habits) and Greg Uhlmann (of SML), for what is his most fully collaborative record yet.
The result is a new leanness, intimacy and spaciousness with a bygone college-rock, rather than modern, monumental-pop sensibility: there are overtones here of Elliott Smith (in “It’s A Mirror”), a stripped-back REM (a poignant “Me & Angel” and the exquisitely delicate “Left For Tomorrow”) and, in “Hanging Out”, the vaporous, jazzy abstractions of Talk Talk. Hadreas has said Glory is his “most directly confessional” record, which doesn’t mean explicitly autobiographical – rather, it introduces characters to which he’s assigned various narrative roles, though his own fears and anxieties cut through loud and clear. Picking highlights is tough, but an impeccably pitched “Full On”, thick with synths, plucked strings and woodwind and “Capezio”, where Hadreas’s hushed falsetto rises and falls over a gently quivering, electro-acoustic soundbed, are among them.
Label: Matador
