Matthew Ellis

Sheelanagig’s latest album, ‘Cirque Insomnia’, finds the band once again stirring their crowded melting pot of world musical influences. Balkan folk music is a constant throughout the record & offers them a basis for experimentation.

Sproatly Smith’s latest release ‘The Minstrel’s Grave’ demonstrates a band that are willing to play at the fringes of folk music and incorporate musical ideas drawn from rock, psychedelia and even rap.

Jazz-rock quartet Get The Blessing is a heterogenous beast at the best of times. Bassist and leader Jim Barr hails from Portishead while trumpeter Pete Judge and saxophonist Jake McMurchie are both National Youth Orchestra alumni. Tonight, with Goldfrapp’s Daisy Palmer replacing Clive Deamer on drums, they were more chimerical than ever. But the band take an almost schizophrenic joy in opposites and, slinking onto stage in identical evening wear, …

[rating=3] Two narratives will dominate discussion of Hannah Cohen’s Child Bride. The first situates her within a lineage of female singer-songwriters. The second recounts Cohen’s past life as a model before explaining the album’s emergence from a dizzyingly fashionable New York scene comprising artists like Ryan McGinley and Terry Richardson as well as a stable of the city’s finest musicians. But both approaches, straying too far from her music, fail …

The audience at Queen Elizabeth Hall that witnessed Neil Cowley Trio’s live performance seemed to recognise the watershed nature of the performance and rewarded it with a deserved standing ovation.

★★★★★ Sólaris, the recent collaboration between experimental musicians Ben Frost and Daniel Bjarnason, re-imagines the score to Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris.