Latest Reviews

London-based singer-songwriter and guitarist Cat Burns has enjoyed a truly meteoric rise over the last year and a half. When lockdown first hit in the Spring of last year, Burns had just started out posting clips online, mainly through Tik Tok. Within a year she’d amassed well over half a million followers, had been signed by RCA Records, and was the face of a Tik Tok advertising campaign. Not bad work for someone who had been rejected by several labels before embracing the social media platform. 

At the start of this review, it’s only fair that I make a disclosure: Chinatown by Bleachers, featuring none other than Bruce Springsteen, was one of my very favourite tracks of the last year. A real lockdown record, with its haunting vocals and infused with a sense of yearning, it captured the essence of a difficult period. When lead singer and frontman Jack Antonoff and Springsteen crooned “I wanna find tomorrow”, it felt like they were talking to us all and our hope of better times to come.

Though she is probably still most widely known for her work presenting Night Tracks on BBC Radio 3, Hannah Peel is widely recognised as one of the brightest composers around. The Northern Irish artist, composer, producer and broadcaster studied music at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts and has a wide and varied CV. Her work includes collaborating with Paul Weller on his number one album On Sunset and writing and conducting all the orchestral arrangements for his 2018 shows at London’s Royal Festival Hall, to composing and recording the soundtrack for Game of Thrones: The Last Watch, which earned Peel a 2019 Emmy nomination for ‘Outstanding Music Composition For A Documentary Series Or Special (Original Dramatic Score).

Predicting what will come next from Liars has become an almost impossible task over the years. The New York outfit are now ten albums and more than twenty years into a career that still refuses to be easily labelled. Their back catalogue has taken in everything from the punk sound that influenced their early releases to funk, electronica, dance and rock. They’ve been through personnel changes – founding member Aaron Hemphill in 2017, and drummer Julian Gross three years earlier – and yet continually refused to stand still.

Coming straight from his new album, there’s something quite cleverly unique with Anders’ opening track, “Free Myself”, through both its tone and melodies, paired with the lack of clear genre and its uniqueness.

Coloratura is Coldplay in their most epic medium – a ten-minute powerhouse that is nothing but a pure showcase of talent from the British musicians.

Just as the world was still wrapping their heads around the genius of their Silk Sonic’s first single, “Leave the Door Open”, the duo released “Skate”, another absolute masterpiece through and through.

Even if you haven’t heard of Scunthorpe-born singer-songwriter Stephen Fretwell, you will almost certainly have heard his music. That’s because his song Run – taken from his 2004 album Magpie – is the theme tune to the TV smash hit show Gavin & Stacey, and was apparently chosen by the show’s creator and star James Corden as he’s a big fan of Fretwell’s music.

When Willy Mason crashed into the early noughties indie scene as a nineteen-year-old with his rallying cry Oxygen, he was hailed as a Bob Dylan for the post-grunge generation, a folk singer-songwriter who had a political message for millenials everywhere. For a couple of years, around the release of his debut album Where The Humans Eat, it felt like Mason was a bonafide global superstar in the making. 

Here’s something that, if you grew up watching The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air and listening to DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince’s Summertime, is going to make you feel old: Willow Smith, Will Smith’s youngest child, is twenty years old. TWENTY. Seriously, where does the time go?