Table of contents for March 2021 in MOJO

...after 40 years in the music game, Minneapolis eminences JIMMY JAM and TERRY LEWIS (right) will release their debut duo album later in 2021. The former Time members will collaborate with names from across their career, including Babyface – will Janet Jackson and Phil Oakey be close behind?...PAT METHENY has left the Nonesuch label for BMG’s Modern Recordings and will release new record Road To The Sun in March: guests include guitarist Jason Vieaux and the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, whose Scott Tennant spoke of, “Such beautiful melodic and harmonic flow!...a soundscape of epic proportions”...there’s a guitar duet of note coming this year when MARISA ANDERSON and WILLIAM TYLER team up. It will be released on Thrill Jockey... Adam Granduciel opened up about the new WAR OF DRUGS record to…

Like many errant Irish musicians, I began deriving great pleasure and inspiration from the folk music of the common people of Britain on my arrival in London in the 1980s, largely through libraries in north London. At that point, Lal Waterson’s voice, a timeless, unearthly presence, was heard to best effect on the album Bright Phoebus. Her songs on that album, for this listener, stop time. Fast forward to soon after the turn of the century. Lal was gone, taken by illness in 1998. I was looking for ‘other music’ to keep my interest alive. Commuting hours a day, there was time to seek transcendence. Lal’s later works became part of that menu. Once In A Blue Moon is all that Lal’s songs from Bright Phoebus were, and more. Flight…

FROM THE ISLE OF MAN TO MANCHESTER to Australia and back, the Bee Gees took a picaresque route to fame, mostly at the heels of their restive father, Hugh Gibb, a drummer and bandleader by inclination, a baker, photographer or salesman by necessity, doing anything he could to feed a wife – Barbara, who often worked too – five kids (in order of appearance, Lesley, Barry, twins Robin & Maurice, and Andy) and their far-fetched dreams of stardom. Hardscrabble days of truancy, petty theft, arson and jam sandwiches in Whalley Range and Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester – what Barry calls “a very typical post-war childhood in the ruins” – were memorable but not ideal. When the family left for Australia in 1958, Barry had a suspended sentence hanging over him for “borrowing”…

WASA WASA (Harvest, 1969) Produced by Peter Jenner in the luxury of Abbey Road, the Broughtons’ debut is the sound of a roughnecked trio trying (and almost succeeding) to transfer their anarchic electric blues set to vinyl. Hendrix and Beef heart influences are to the fore but so is a working-class stoner rage, deep in their DNA. EDBAR BROUGHTON BAND (aka ’The meat Album’) (Harvest, 1971) From the shimmering if disquieting Evening Over Rooftops and the Peter Greenesque For Doctor Spock to the white-boy soul testifying of What Is A Woman For? and Madhatter’s cynical Toy town psych, this was the sound of the heavy trio growing into maturity and learning how to use the studio as an instrument. OORA (Harvest, 1973) If1972’s In Side Out captured the stay-in-bed vibes…

FROM PLAYING SONGS OF SUBURBAN alienation in English church halls to symphonising the mysteries of life across the world’s most prestigious stages, the odyssey of The Cure spans six decades and defies rock’n’roll logic. Yes, it says: you can do whatever you want, all the time, in your own time, and people will fill football stadiums to vindicate you. A post-punk Monet, Robert Smith has worked with a consistent palette for more than 40 years - but thanks to the rigour and intricacy of his craft, there’s always something new to catch your eye. Because The Cure’s song canon is as varied as any in pop, comparable with Smith’s hero David Bowie for creative handbrake turns, a sonic landscape that permits DayGlo fantasy and monochrome gloom, the euphoric and the…

The Weather Station Ignorance FAT POSSUM. CD/DL/LP/MC THERE ARE NOW, perhaps unsurprisingly, academics who study the emotional rather than the physical impact of climate change. One is Panu Pihkala, a specialist in eco-anxiety at the University of Helsinki. In a BBC online piece from last April, Pihkala wrote about using the work of grief researchers who’d investigated the impact of bereavement. “[William] Worden defined that one of the key tasks in the grief process is ‘the adjustment to a new environment’,” Pihkala observed. “Something has profoundly changed, something or someone is either lost or in the process of going away, and grief can help us to adjust... These definitions match the needed scale of climate grief.” On first listen, much of the fifth album by Tamara Lindeman, an exceptional Canadian…

William Parker Migration Of Silence Into And Out Of The Tone World CENTURING/AUM FIDELITY. CD Female voices are at the centre of Parker’s latest – an audacious 10-hour, 10-disc odyssey that c aptures the austere Bronx-born free jazz bassist/composer taking inspiration from around the globe and firing it back with polyrhythmic force. A rich, autobiographical sonic tapestry reveals a range that peaks on Manzanar, a four-part coalition with the Universal Tonality String Quartet. Caixa Cubo Angela HEAVENLY. DL/LP Azymuth fans will find much to savour on this Brazilian fusion trio’s seventh set. Live-sounding and jam-like, it’s dominated by Henrique Gomide’s playful Rhodes and synth runs which keep Joao Fideles and Noa Stroeter on their toes. Standouts include Palavras, a duet with singer Ze Leônidase, and a surging, energetic cover of…

Screamers Screamers Demo Hollywood 77 SUPERIOR VIADUCT An EP of the LA punk pioneers’ recently unearthed earliest demos, with explanatory notes by Jon Savage. Screamers were among the very first Angelenos to answer the Ramones/Sex Pistols call-to-arms, playing their first show in May ’77 at a party launching Slash fanzine. The Germs, X, Dils and Dead Kennedys all played early gigs supporting them, but this performance art-leaning quartet pursued a rare nonconformism, encapsulated in their line-up of two synth-players, drummer, and none-more-wild vocalist Tomata Du Plenty. After founder David Brown quit to start up scene label Dangerhouse, they also chose never to immortalise themselves on vinyl, preferring the bi-sensory assault of video. Despite their keyboard bedrock, these initial five demos from September ’77 are a million miles from Suicide’s pulse,…

Beachwood Sparks Beachwood Sparks CURATION. CD/LP Good vibes galore on this 20th anniversary reissue - the debut of an LA country-rock band as schooled in Felt and Flying Nun as the Flying Burritos and 5D- era Byrds. Has remastered vinyl, unreleased tracks, rare 45s and a 2000 live show on CD. JM Madness Absolutely BMG. LP. From 1980, the Nutty Boys’ second kicks off with Bash Street caper Baggy Trousers, but elsewhere the cheeky exterior contains adult ruminations on racism, poverty, prison and more: hidden gem Disappear reflects on the proposed demolition of the Alexandra Palace. IH Various Our New Orleans NONESUCH. LP Double LP of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina benefit with Crescent City royalty Alien Toussaint, Dr. John, Irma Thomas (poignant on Bessie Smith’s Backwater Blues) et al. Among side…

Stephen Morris BEATS NEVER END What music are you currently grooving to? Currently, the Working Men’s Club LP, Marie Davidson’s Working Class Woman and quite a bit of Bob Dylan. I watched the Rolling Thunder doc on Netflix and found myself desperate to hear Blood On The Tracks. I hear his new one’s pretty good. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Probably Love’s Forever Changes. It really is an all-time five-star classic. You can always find some tiny detail that you’ve never noticed before. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? First 45 was The Loco-Motion by Little Eva from a record shop in Churchwallgate, Macclesfield. Album was, embarrassingly, Gather Me by Melanie. I’d gone to buy In…

Blues Creation Blues Creation (POLYDOR, 1969) With Kazuo Takeda on guitar, these Tokyo rockers do psych’d up cover versions of Memphis Slim, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson and others. And then they got even heavier, freer and fuzzier on the 1971 album Demon & Eleven Children. Blues Dimension Blues Dimension (DECCA, 1968) From Zwolle in the Netherlands, this up-for-it soul band with horns does Smokey Robinson and Otis Redding tunes, and groovy pop originals. They put undertakers on the cover of B. D. Is Dead Long Live B.D. and expired in ‘69. Black Strobe Blues Fight (BLACKSTROBE, 2014) Brylcreemed ex-death metaller Arnaud Rebotini’s analogue electro/rock project – who’ve graced Peaky Blinders, Django Unchained and other soundtracks – bring twangy guitars to spare synths, dreaming of American punch-ups, in France. Slim…

AS A COLLABORATIVE musician, producer and general studio vibesman, Quebec-born Daniel Lanois has made his rootsy, atmospheric presence felt on key albums by U2, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel and Neil Young. Following his time as co-architect of Brian Eno’s early ’80s ambient albums, the pair took exploratory sonics into the mainstream. In recent years, he has worked on Leonard Cohen’s posthumous 2019 album Thanks For The Dance and pursued adventures in electronica with Venetian Snares. Looping back to his early studio years in Toronto, Lanois’ upcoming Heavy Sun is a space gospel record featuring Johnny Shepherd, a singer/ organist from Louisiana. Heavy Sun recalls your early days, recording gospel singers. Yes, I was associated with a Christian organisation and these folks brought singing groups from all over the world to…

1 “You can’t follow a bunch of kids”: the young Gibbs in Australia (from left) Maurice, Robin and Barry acting up, early 1960s. 2 We had to go to Sydney: (from left) Barry, Robin and Maurice in the mid-’60s. 3 To love somebody: Barry with then-girlfriend Linda Gray, December 1968. They are still married. 4 In the event of something happening to me: now a band in the UK (from left) Barry, Robin, Maurice, Vince Melouney, Colin Petersen. 5 I had my mind on something else: two days into his honeymoon, Barry rejoins his brothers to record, September 1970. 6 They should be dancing: the Gibbs in 1977 – Saturday Night Fever will break out the following year. 7 “He was fantastic… one of the last great managers”: Gibb with…

GIMME A PIGFOOT (OKeh, 1933) Ten years a top star, on one of her final sides, Smith reminded her fans that fame hadn’t changed her, preferring a spliff and beer, and the titular trotter, over champagne and caviar – and the rasp in her “Yeaaaah!” testifies to her relish. “Women weren’t supposed to talk the way Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey talked,” says Shemekia Copeland. “I love any artist who defies what they’re supposed to do. Bessie was always herself.” A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND (Columbia, 1927) “Bessie didn’t have a whole lot of luck in love,” understates Copeland, and Smith roars this out like she’s exorcising Jack Gee, who drove her, in real life, to seek comfort on both sides of the gender divide. “There’s a new…

IT WAS ONLY AFTER HE HAD PICKED THE NAME FROM WIKIPEDIA - “IT sounds very post-rock, let’s go for it” – that Isaac Wood realised Black Country, New Road might have a deeper symbolism. “It’s really funny, because when I found it, I didn’t really realise what it quite obviously meant,” says the 22-year-old singer and guitarist. “Hilariously, it was exactly what we wanted to say. Over time, someone pointed out to me that it obviously means a dark place, and then moving on from that. And that’s definitely what it was.” On the surface, the band’s route to their debut album, For The First Time, which is released early next month, doesn’t seem too treacherous. “There’s not that many examples of people who are like you when you’re a…

NOT LONG AFTER Lou Adler met Carole King in 1961, he realised he had a problem with his new company’s young songwriter: Her demos were so catchy and complete that producers refused to return them. A 19-year-old mother then pregnant with her second daughter, King and her husband, Gerry Goffin, had recently signed a publishing deal with Aldon Music, a burgeoning stable of chart-defining talent a block up from New York’s Brill Building. Late in 1960, The Shirelles had given the kids their first hit with the cascading doo-wop of Will You Love Me Tomorrow? A decade older, Adler had already found success himself as a California songwriter and music manager before Aldon recruited him to open a West Coast branch. In New York to meet the bosses and get…

• Around the time The Weather Station were starting up, Tamara Lindeman was winding down an early-2000s acting career – as Tamara Hope – that had spanned youthful roles as Elizabeth I and Tilda Swinton’s daughter, and as a snowboarder in Canadian TV series Whistler. “Maybe acting influenced my interest in being scrupulously truthful,” she said in 2015. “Music allowed me to be fully present in a way that’s difficult in life, let alone in the film industry. It was the place I went to be honest.”…

Serge Gainsbourg Intégrale Des Enregistrements Studio, Volume I: 1958-1970 WRASSE/MERCURY. LP A SUCCESSFUL songwriter, a confidant of Juliette Gréco and Jacques Brel, newly remarried: in 1964, Serge Gainsbourg, 36, should have been feeling unbeatable. In January, he had released his fifth album, Gainsbourg Confidentiel, his first 12-track, 12-incher, described by Sylvie Simmons in her biography, A Fistful Of Gitanes, as “spare, sophisticated jazz with a rock-swing element”. Yet it was distinctly out of step with the times: Chez Les Yé-Yé and Le Temps Des Yoyos laid into the teen stars of the day whose “imbecilic” ditties were threatening his career. Gainsbourg Confidentiel sold 1,500 copies. Vindication of sorts. It’s always startling to realise how badly some now-revered records did on release ― Dusty In Memphis, Pet Sounds, River Deep, Mountain…

OF ALL THE Lucinda Williams concerts this writer has seen, the one that seemed to best sum her up was in Austin, Texas, in 2001, at an outdoor festival by the Cumberland River. Steve Earle played a set, and Cheap Trick. When Lucinda took the stage she started to sing in her sand-and- honey voice the songs from her new album Essence. Pretty downbeat for a festival, but that didn’t bother her. She dedicated one song to Joey Ramone; another to an Austin club owner who’d been jailed for dope; and a third to all the people in Nashville who had put her down, saying, “You can kiss my pretty white ass.” Lucinda Williams has the lyrical skills of a poet and the attitude of a punk rocker. “America’s greatest…

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Dir. George C. VVolfe NETFLIX: ST Black American culture under the microscope in this powerful adaptation. You can never really disguise those theatrical roots so sometimes it’s better not to even try. That’s the approach adopted by Tony-awardwinning playwright and director Wolfe in his powerful adaptation of the late August Wilson’s 1984 play, centred around an afternoon recording session by “the Mother of the Blues” in a Chicago studio in 1927. Wilson’s dialogue is intentionally musical, the play layered in a manner similar to the Georgia Jazz Band’s playing and given over to two soloists, Ma and her volatile horn player Levee, played respectively here by Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman. It’s in Davis and Boseman that the film finds its intense power, but…

GLADIATORS vocalist ALBERT GRIFFITHS (below, b.1945) was a session guitarist for producer Clement ’Sir Coxsone’ Dodd when he founded the Kingston roots reggae harmonisers in 1967. The following year they found success with the Dodd-produced Hello Carol. Further recordings with Coxsone led to The Gladiators, now a crackoctet, signing with Virgin for five albums including the highly-regarded Trenchtown Mix-Up (1976) and Proverbial Reggae (1978). The group weathered changing styles, recording and gigging regularly, but in 2006, Griffiths retired from touring and was replaced in the group by his sons Al and Anthony. AVANT-GARDE pianist ‘BLUE’ GENE TYRANNY (b.Bob Sheff, 1945) was a piano prodigy in Texas where he programmed new music events with composer Philip Krumm. He later moved to Ann Arbour, Michigan, where he played with blues rockers The…

YOO HOO, BABYLON ZOO 4 Having been used on a Levi’s ad, Spaceman by Wolverhampton band Babylon Zoo (above) is at UK Number 1. Some buyers are nonplussed that only a segment of the song resembles what they heard on the advert. MANIC FRIDAY 9 At 6pm on Channel 4, music/chatshowTFI Friday debuts, with Shed Seven, Skunk Anansie, Ocean Colour Scene, Cher and Count Indigo. Chris Evans hosts, Danny Baker scripts, it lasts until December 2000. PRINCE HITCHED 14 Prince marries dancer Mayte Garcia. She later recalls a $500,000 flower bill, a white-and-gold paint job at Paisley Park and a wedding programme that reads ‘Coincidence Or Fate?’ “I’m so in love with love now,” Prince tells writer Sylvia Patterson. HELLO, SFA! 26 Hometown Unicorn, the first non-EP single by Super…

In All Back To My Place in MOJO 325,I was interested to hear about Stevie Nicks’ Road Tapes. Can you tell us any more about them?Steve Robertson, via e-mail Fred says: Stevie told us, “I’ve been making them since 1978. Whatever tour I’m on, we pick two or three tapes, and we stay with them. I play them from 5 o’clock in the afternoon when I get to the show until 8.15 when I walk on stage. I have all my cassettes of my Road Tapes in a drawer in my pantry. Did I draw covers for them? Oh yeah!” The first of three volumes of Beats, she says, includes Lady Gaga’s Applause, Adele’s Rolling In The Deep, Fleetwood Mac’s Seven Wonders and Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen,…

HELLO WINTER 1967 It wasn’t a case of joining the group, it was a lifestyle. How long was it from first setting eyes on them to actually living with them as my life? You could say it was the day that Robin [Williamson] came to see me, when I was studying in York, and then I cameto London. I was already fairly cut off from mainstream society, so it was easy to fall into another free-floating life. Robin and Mike [Heron] made a hell of an impression. They were the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen - they looked so fantastic, the way that they spoke, that ability to just pickup an instrumentand sing and make music, it was so entirely different from anything I could imagine. I was quite…

THE WEIRDEST ART, AS WE’VE OFTEN observed, flourishes in the most innocuous places. This month, MOJO returns to the suburban hinterlands of Southern England in the late 1970s, and to Crawley, a sprawl of roundabouts and housing estates next to Gatwick Airport. It’s here we find the nascent Cure, working on an outsider music as uncompromising as it is strangely accessible. There are fights at hospital dinner dances, ill-advised cover versions, disastrous record deals and, at first, a prevailing suspicion the band might never escape their hometown. “Deep in our psyche we knew,” the drummer Lol Tolhurst tells Keith Cameron, “If we don’t do something, we’re destined to live in this place until we die.” It would be foolish, though, to underestimate the stubbornness and will to succeed of genius.…

ALYNDA SEGARRA was not alone in taking up running during the pandemic; field-recording crows while exercising, however, makes her more of an outlier. One bird collected from her New Orleans neighbourhood is looped on a track intended for Hurray For The Riff Raff’s seventh album, its caw emphasising a political point. “Louisiana is becoming a place where a lot of undocumented people are being jailed,” explains Segarra, “and you combine lyricism about something like that with this crow, and the crow becomes a character. It’s really cool to watch that come to life – like, collaging my life and experience.” Ornithomancy is just a fraction of Segarra’s follow-up to 2017’s The Navigator, a concept album that used the story of future street-kid Navita to explore Puerto Rican history and urban…

Precious Soul (HI, 1969) “Vocally, I was giving it all I got and hoping my singing would go over better by hollering,” says Bryant of the 12 covers here, from Wilson Pickett’s raw sensuality with Marvin Gaye’s velour phrasing. The Hi Records Singles Collection (SOLID, 2013) From dancefloor to heart-rending ballads, here are Bryant’s 11 Hi 45s and flipsides, plus six duets with Marion Brittnam, demos and two incendiary collaborations with Ann Peebles. Don’t Give Up On Love (FAT POSSUM, 2017) Packed with tales of desire, heartbreak, and separation, Bryant’s majestic comeback LP affirmed the Bluff City songwriter as a top Southern soul storyteller.…

1 LANA DEL REY CHEMTRAILS OVER THE COUNTRY CLUB Slo-mo California anomie from the remarkable Ms Del Rey, as the follow-up to Norman Fucking Rockwell looms. Find it: streaming services 2 BRITTANY HOWARD 13TH CENTURY METAL (MICHAEL KIWANUKA REMIX) MK morphs Robert Glasper’s Morse code keys into tough funk, adding bongos and ecstatic choir to Brittany’s megaphone-delivered call for compassion. Find it: streaming services 3 THE BEATLES GET BACK (SNEAK PEEK) Musical montage from Peter Jackson’s 2021 film: the gang’s all laughing, George’s gear is polyester-brite, Lennon and Macca dance together. How could a group this happy split? Find it: YouTube 4 AL GREEN BEFORE THE NEXT TEARDROP FALLS Harking back to his classic Hi sides, the Rev Green’s first tune in a decade covers Freddy Fender’s 1975 country hit,…

THE FANFARE Bee Gees 1st (POLYDOR, 1967) With confidence gained from their near 10 years of experience and Robert Stigwood behind them, the Brothers Gibb cut an audacious ‘debut’ album within weeks of returning to England, filling it with Beatle-like psych-pop (In My Own Time), lachrymose curiosities (New York Mining Disaster 1941), and proto-soul classics (To Love Somebody; I Can’t See Nobody), for a stylistic switchback ride as colourful and timely as its Klaus Voormann-designed sleeve. THE SPRAWLER Bee Gees Odessa(POLYDOR, 1969) Started in summer ’68 and released nine months later, this ambitious, semi-conceptual double album, dressed in vivid scarlet flock, proved to be the swansong for the five-piece pop band. Dense, dramatic, sometimes beautiful, sometimes baffling, based on a hard-to-grasp concept of Robin’s, dotted with orchestral instrumentals by arranger…

WHEN THE EDGAR BROUGHTON BAND EMBARKED UPON a 10-date tour of Germany in the winter of 1970 their reputation preceded them. In the 18 months since the Hyde Park Free Concert on June 7, 1969, when they had seemingly emerged from nowhere, blasted through the low-key folky vibes of the day (Donovan, The Third Ear Band) and shamed an under-rehearsed Blind Faith into apology with their elemental Beefheart blues, these working-class Midlanders had become the fevered soundtrack of UK student insurrection. Led by autodidact scholarship dropout Rob Broughton (Edgar was his middle name), whose feral Bohemian appearance suggested a crazed laudanum addict on the rob in Mayhew’s London, this hairy triumvirate, with brother Steve on drums and school pal Arthur Grant on bass, became a fixture at free festivals and…

BLACK MIDI “I told you I loved you in front of Black Midi,” sings Wood on Track X, a woozy cross between Julia Holter and Wild Beasts. Associates from the scene around south London’s Windmill, the two bands united as Black Midi, New Road for a charityshowatthevenuelastChristmas. SLINT On Science Fair, a fable of raging insecurity and humiliation, Isaac Wood wisheshecould have"fled from the stage with the world’s second-best Slint tribute act.” The Kentucky post-rock pioneers have left an undoubted mark on BlackCountry, New Road’s dynamics and storytelling; Wood’s penchant for self-laceration strikes again. KENDALL JENNER Half-sistertotheKardashians, Jenner has been a constant presenceforthelnsta-genera- tion. BlackCountry, New Road have an early non-album track that bears her name, a sinister meditation on growing up in publicandtheviolence-real or metaphorical - it entails. ARIANA…

MARGO PRIGE “As I was really getting into singer-songwriters like Joan Baez when I was 19, my dad said, ‘I think you would really love Carole King.’ Tapestry is a monster – it feels like every song could be a single, and it’s so cohesive. Every time she sings a chorus, there’s a different vocal run that is so smart and so memorable. People don’t write like that any more – smart pop that’s hooky and deep and poetic. Everyone just wants stuff that sounds like a song lyric – my husband, Jeremy Ivey, and I call them ‘na-na na-na boo-boo’ songs, where it just repeats over and over. Something that’s missing from a lot of pop music today is melody. Carole had melodies to carry whatever it is she…

MYSISTER WAS a huge Cure fan, and through her, I became totally obsessed with the Standing On A Beach singles compilation, on cassette, with all the B-sides. Disintegration was the first aIbum I ever bought, and I bought all their others too. There are many different layers to The Cure, so much that they can do. Obviously, they’re a brilliant singles band, butthey can be amazingly minimalist or more frenzied too. Robert’s lyrics have resonated with me my whole life, as a kid, then a teenager and still now that I’m older. Pornographyis my favourite album, I think because I’ll always be a teenage goth. But it’s very focused and loud, and very singular. I listened to Faith just the other day. Now that I don’t listen to music in…

Did you have a defined idea of how Ignorance would sound when you started work on it? “I did, actually. I wanted to have these conflicting qualities of vulnerability and propulsive strength, and this order and chaos. I have such bad rhythm; I love The Incredible String Band and all this music that’s very nebulous, rhythmically. But I thought it’d be nice to take a break from that. In part, because my nebulous rhythm makes it difficult for me to play music with other people, and I wanted to make space for other musicians to accompany me. And it came out, essentially, how I wanted it to, which was great.” Were there any specific records that inspired you? “As I was talking about this sound I wanted to make, a…

Martin Gore The Third Chimpanzee MUTE. CD/DL/LP Jared Diamond’s award-winning 1991 book on human evolution forms the basis of this EP-length collection of angular electro, cavernous soundscapes and delightfully off-kilter rhythms from Depeche Mode’s creative hub. On the slo-mo Kraftwerkian stomp of Vervet, Gore sets a twinkling, music box melody to juddering synth stabs to create a deliciously unnerving experience. Steve Moore Analog Senstivity BE WITH. LP The themes that characterise the work of Steve Moore, whether as one half ofprogressive synth rockers Zombi, his ambient/drone solo output and, latterly, film soundtracks, percolate through this unique and meditative collaboration with the legendary British music library KPM. Created entirely on analogue synth hardware, it’s eerie and haunting, yet comforting and deeply affecting. Pauline Anna Strom Angel Tears In Sunlight RVNG INTL.…

• The son of immigrants from Russia, Gainsbourg (who changed his name from Lucien Ginsburg after having to wear a yellow star to signify his Judaism during the German occupation) had planned to be an artist but found himself instead playing piano in cabarets, often deputising for his classically trained father. At 30, heavily influenced by old-school-style singers such as Boris Vian and working for Michele Arnaud (above), he decided to record his own songs, their lyrics often considered too dark for other singers.…

LU’S JUKEBOX Being an utter perfectionist in the matter of her own songs, maybe it comes as some relief to sing other people’s songs. There aren’t that many covers on her own albums, but you can find some really good stuff on various compilations and tribute albums. Among this writer’s favourites: her version - with David Crosby – of Return Of The Grievous Angel on Return Of The Grievous Angel: A Tribute to Gram Parsons (1999); You Don’t Have Very Far To Go on Tulare Dust: A Songwriter’s Tribute to Merle Haggard (1994); Whispering Pines on Love For Levon (2012); and – not to be missed – her absolutely heartbreaking cover of Rainer Ptacek’s The Farm on The Inner Flame: A Rainer Ptacek Tribute (2012). In recent months, “Lu’s Jukebox”…

SWEDISH ALBUMS FEBRUARY 24 1 INGENMANSLAND NORDMAN (SONET) 2 MURDER BALLADS NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS (MUTE) 3 FÖR ÄLSKAD VIKTORIA TOLSTOY (EMI) 4 THE MEMORY OF TREES EN YA (WARNER) 5 THE DEFINITIVE SIMON AND GARFUNKEL SIMON AND GARFUNKEL (COLUMBIA) 6 BOYS FOR PELE TORI AMOS (ATLANTIC) 7 (WHAT’S THE STORY) MORNING GLORY? OASIS (CREATION) 8 POPSICLE POPSICLE (TELEGRAM) 9 SOMETHING ТО REMEMBER MADONNA (WARNER) 10 FILTH PIG MINISTRY (WARNER)…