The New Cue #576 March 13: Iceage, Kacey Musgraves, Art School Girlfriend The Black Crowes, The Count Ferrara, The Lemon Twigs, Really Good Time, Kevin Morby, Kojaque, The Orielles, Ora Cogan
"A studio of one’s own."
Good morning!
It’s Friday the 13th, one of the best days of the year after Maundy Thursday (good hangover weather, just round the corner) and the bit between Christmas and New Year when all the yuppies leave London for a bit. It’s been a very good week for new music, most of which we will be telling you about below the line (apart the stuff that we couldn’t fit in but will mention next time). Stick on the playlist and waft it around your home, as if musical sage to ward off any bad juju superstitions.
And here it is for the Apple Music users amongst the flock.
A reminder that we’re having an event next Tuesday to help launch Roy’s Boomerang Process, the first book published by our TNC Books imprint. Its author PJ Smith will be reading from it and I, Ted, will be quizzing him, so please feel free to join us along with several dozen exiled Everton fans at The Long Player Sessions at ICMP, London NW6 6PA on Tuesday March 17. About three (five) minutes from Queens Park tube station. Last few tickets here.
Right, on with show. It’s renewal time for New Cue subscribers and we are extremely grateful INDEED for all those who we can see renewing. Thank you. Newcomers welcome, always. Here’s this week’s playlist:
Enjoy the edition,
Ted and Niall
Recommender Pt. 1
Ted Kessler
Elias Rønnenfelt has been so productive as a solo and collaborative artist in the last couple of years that it seemed likely he may have been moving away from Iceage, the Danish post-punk group he’s fronted for the best part of two decades. Recently, as I’d been playing 2025’s Lucre mini album he made with Dean Blunt a lot, I stuck on Iceage’s sprawling last album, 2021’s Seek Shelter. Grooving to its lo-fi Mondays-meets-Stones-isms I thought, ‘Shame it came out during the pandemic: it’s epic going out music.’ The very next day an email arrived saying that a new Iceage single would be announced this week. How about that? No news of a new album just yet, that must be in the post, but Star has a punch and groove that is unusual in contemporary art-rock. Satisfyingly oblique and poetic lyrics, too. How many bands do you want to be in today? Here’s one…
Whenever I was sent to interview British bands on the road in the mid 1990s, the two contemporary rock records that I would hear most often being played backstage or in tour bus lounges were The Verve’s A Northern Soul or The Black Crowes’ The Southern Harmony And Musical Companion. The Black Crowes in particular were something of a routine guilty pleasure for other musicians: I remember a very stoned Mark Morriss of The Bluetones playing Wiser Times from The Black Crowes’ Amorica album several times in a row late at night in a hotel room in Lancaster in ’96. There’s nothing quite as euphorically groovy as that song on A Pound of Feathers, the Atlantans’ tenth studio album that is out today. But it still kicks surprisingly hard. Recorded by the happily reconciled brothers Chris and Rich Robinson in Nashville with minimal input from any other Black Crowe other than a new touring drummer (Rich played all the bass parts as well as the guitars), it’s a tough, joyful, full-throated rock’n’roll party record and, as such, I commend it to all our friends in the rock’n’roll party community.
