The New Cue #574 March 6: Aldous Harding, Shabaka, Bonnie Prince Billy, Little Barrie, Joshua Idehen, Chris Cohen & Cass McCombs, Ebbb, Charlotte Cornfield, Mildred, Turnstile
"Baggy emo: knew it was coming someday."
Oi oi,
It’s Friday, we’ve spent a long week working inside while the sun finally blessed the earth and now, now it rains once more. Nobody is in the mood for our supercilious nonsense. Let’s get this Recommender show on the road. Look, here’s the playlist…
And for those who speak Apple Music.
There’ll be plenty of time for long intros in the coming weeks when we have various very exciting events and new books to plug you with, but our valued and loved paying subscribers deserve instant recommendations when nothing’s on the horizon. Oh, you’d like to subscribe? You are actually a generous, principled person who feels they should pay for the work of others? Thanks. Here you go.
We’ll see you on Monday. In the meantime, please enjoy the edition…
Ted and Niall
Recommender Pt. 1
Ted Kessler
One Stop is the first cut from Aldous Harding’s fifth album, Train On The Island, an album I have just listened to for the first, then second, then third and now fourth time in a row and am already hysterically describing as her best yet. It’s definitely the first since 2017’s Party that has me Don Draper-ing across the room at it with a “who are you?!” Recorded once more with John Parish at Rockfield, One Stop is a kind of on-the-verge of a manic episode piano soul ballad, with Harding returned to New Zealand, popping into the One Stop store for provisions, wandering down childhood memory lanes, her old and new worlds colliding in her mind’s eye: “I met the real John Cale...”
More, much more to come about Aldous Harding and Train On The Island ahead of its May release. But no Life & Times with The New Cue, unfortunately. “She’s not doing any interviews,” comes the disappointing update from her PR: a shame, as she’s one of the most enjoyably complex and funny interviewees I’ve encountered, but who can blame her? A decade of rebuffed enquiry about her childhood and love life must wear thin. There’s plenty of detail in the lyrics for us to obsess over nonetheless…
The prolific, wildly skilful and innovative band leader Shabaka Hutchings retooled both jazz and his chosen instrument, the saxophone, for modern audiences in his Sons of Kemet and then The Comet Is Coming, before setting off on various solo journeys and, surprisingly, putting the tenor sax away for 2024’s excellent Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace. On that album, he focused on the flute mainly. On Shabaka’s new Of The Earth, he packs the flute again, but also puts his tenor sax back in the bag alongside all kinds of percussive instruments and electronics, before blasting off into the psychedelic, beatific inner Milky Way.
