Michael Sumsion

Shafts of light peer through darkness on Nick Cave and fellow Bad Seed Warren Ellis’s Lockdown album, Carnage, a recording steeped in both the turmoil of the pandemic and the singer’s classic themes of loss, redemption and apocalypse.  Nick Cave has spoken of how Lockdown has felt oddly familiar; the veteran singer-songwriter is well acquainted with isolation, loss and grief … [Read more...] about Nick Cave & Warren Ellis: Carnage – Review

The operatically trained Brooklyn native Sarah Kinlaw delivers dreamy, slow-burn art-pop on her brooding debut. The rise to fame of the New York singer-songwriter Sarah Kinlaw has been unspectacular and steady, encompassing stints as a dancer, visual artist, choreographer and composer as well as a series of bleeding-edge collaborations with Blood Orange, Caroline Polacheck, … [Read more...] about Kinlaw: The Tipping Scale – Review

A gorgeously presented and impeccably curated collection of smouldering Lockdown oddities from the boutique soul and funk imprint, Colemine, Brighter Days Ahead provides a rallying cry for the genius of this niche independent label.    Musicians and labels have had to dig deep in adjusting to the financial and cultural challenges of the Covid pandemic. The Ohio-based cult … [Read more...] about Brighter Days Ahead: The Colemine Records Sampler – Review

On his new, genre-blending record, the idiosyncratic and versatile classic-rock magpie Aaron Lee Tasjan meshes together acoustic and electronic sounds from different eras to conjure free-flowing, interstellar pop melodies with a tangy zest. The music career of the thirty-four-year-old singer-songwriter and ex-glam rock guitarist Aaron Lee Tasjan has followed a crooked and … [Read more...] about Aaron Lee Tasjan: Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan! – Review

Ryan Sambol, the ex-Strange Boys singer-songwriter, discovers the joy of scaling back, pursuing understated lonesome cabin folk missives for quarantine times. The Texan musician and poet Ryan Sambol first came to prominence as leader of rootsy Austin garage-rock combo The Strange Boys. Since the demise in 2012 of the band he’d formed as a teen, his muse has followed him to … [Read more...] about Ryan Sambol: Gestalt – Album Review

Tindersticks’ thirteenth studio, Distractions, feels like more a subtle gear change than a stop-gap Lockdown album; its murky beauty marks thirty years of going against the grain.  Tindersticks have long become used to being ahead of, and out of step, with their times; their labyrinthine, revelatory and poll-winning debut in 1993 served up an anachronistic set of lushly … [Read more...] about Tindersticks: Distractions – Review