Pharoah Sanders
Pharoah
(Luaka Bop)
★★★★

HAVING paired Pharoah Sanders with electronic artist Floating Points on 2021’s critically acclaimed Promises, Luaka Bop have now reissued the US jazz legend’s previously hard to find 1976 album.

Recorded in a home-made studio in upstate New York, the set comprises three sections. Twenty-minute opener Harvest Time evolves over a hypnotic two chord vamp from guitarist Tisziji Munoz. With no drums, there is coolness to the track that makes it feel fresh and modern.

Love Will Find A Way feels closer to the music of Gil Scott-Heron, with Sanders contributing squealing saxophone licks and some unpolished but soulful vocals. Memories of Edith Johnson, presumably a tribute to the American jazz singer, closes proceedings.

With Sanders sadly passing away in 2022, Pharoah should rightly take its place as one of the essential albums of a long and illustrious musical career.

Bill Ryder-Jones
Iechyd Da
(Domino)
★★★★★

PAINTING on a huge musical canvas and with bags of ambition, Bill Ryder-Jones has almost certainly made one of the best albums of 2024 already.

Now on his seventh solo outing since leaving The Coral, the Wirral-based singer-songwriter seems to have experienced a serious case of heartbreak. “Oh how I loved you / But those winds blew us apart,” he sings in his low, fatigued voice. Elsewhere: “I’m happy that you’re having fun / I’d just rather not know.”

It’s a whole album listening experience. There are lush string arrangements, a children’s choir and Liverpool musician Michael Head reading/muttering from James Joyce’s Ulysses. This Can’t Go On’s grandeur is a dead ringer for the otherworldly majesty of Mercury Rev’s classic Deserter Songs record.

I’m having a hard time remembering the last time a British artist made such big, exciting and emotionally direct music.

Violent Femmes
Violent Femmes
(Craft Recordings)
★★★★★

THE term “cult classic” could have been invented for the 1983 debut record from Milwaukee folk-punk outfit Violent Femmes, now receiving a 40th anniversary reissue, complete with b-sides, demos, live performances and extensive linear notes from Rolling Stone’s David Fricke.

With lead singer Gordon Gano penning most of the songs when he was 18, the lo-fi pop music rushes out of the speakers, a torrent of nervous energy, neuroses and (feigned) youthful inarticulacy.

Hook-laden adolescent anthems abound, from indie hit Blister In The Sun, widely understood to be a paean to masturbation (“Big hands, I know you’re the one”), to the sexually frustrated Add It Up (“Why can’t I get just one screw?”)

From The Mountain Goats to the Pixies and many other alternative bands, the influence of Violent Femmes has been huge.

Awkward teenagers of the world unite!