Alan Dearling shares some crate-digging musical discoveries, added in to a mix of new(ish) sounds
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Robert Plant with Suzi Dian – ‘Saving Grace’
An album resonant with optimism, together with a nod by Robert towards his original Band of Joy one feels. It’s definitely old skool, but yet it is fresh and feisty too. The album came out late in 2025, but there is already a follow-up EP on Nonesuch Records for Record Store Day 2026: ‘All that Glitters’. Apparently, Robert Plant assembled the band together in the Welsh borderlands. The resultant album – is a nicely moulded and melded group effort. Lots of vocal harmonising between Robert and Suzi, with five of the six band members joining in. Matt Worley’s banjo contributions are a key to the overall cocktail of ‘sounds’.
It’s folksy Americana with rockier moments. And there’s obviously a fair amount of care and attention that has been lavished on the choices of material. The sleeve notes tell us: “Welcome to the labyrinth” of musical lore. The resultant sound is at times very much Plant-like in his World vocal mode, but it is also in thrall to folk-roots too. Music from around the world, but with a distinct Southern American states accent. The album kicks off with a re-imagining of Memphis Minnie’s ‘Can I do it for you’ from 1930 in its ‘Chevrolet’ version, which many of us also know from Donovan as ‘Hey Gyp, dig the slowness’. There’s plenty to savour…much is a magical mash-up of power and fragility. There’s a tribal cadence to ‘As I roved out’, and ‘It’s a beautiful day today’ is a gentle lilting version of a song that evokes late 1960s American rock…courtesy of Moby Grape (in fact from 1968). At other ends of the musical spectrum, ‘I will never marry’ is a re-working of ‘The Drowned Lover’ (1905) which itself is based on ‘Captain Digby’s Lament’ from 1671. Low’s ‘Everybody’s Song’ is far rockier, heavier with a hefty drive to it. The album ends with ‘Gospel Plough’, another lament to older traditions in music and life.
Official video for ‘It’s a beautiful day today’ (with a curious array of world images):
All in all, it’s an album to make muso fans smile and raise a hurrah for Mister Plant’s longevity!
Irmin Schmidt – Gormenghast (2025-6) and Filmmusik Anthology Vols 1, 2 & 3 (also available Vols 4 & 5)
Recently, the rock-opera, ‘Gormenghast’ created by Irmin (founder member of Can) was premiered in Linz. Looks wonderfully fantastical in this trailer:
Coincidentally, I bought the first triple CD collection of his film music recently. It covers all manner of musical bases – from stripped-back jazz-noire to tribal drumming. And it ranges from smooth in Volume 1, including some standout themes such as the Title music for ‘Rote Erde’, and the almost erotic percussion from Trilok Gurtu on ‘Bohemian Step’. Volume 2 features a lot of vocals from Irmin along with his keyboard and synth contributions. A standout on Volume 2 is the unsettling, ‘Zombie Mama’. There’s still more unusual percussion, including from Reebop Kwakuba. As it is all music used in film soundtracks it is almost impossibly ‘atmospheric’, filled with dread and darkness, expectations, uncertainties, musical doors opening and closing. In Volume 3, Irmin Schmidt is reunited on some of the tracks such as ‘Lurk’ with bassist, Holger Czukay – also a member of Can.
‘Lurk’:
Overall, it is a collection well-worth dipping into, and discovering the colour and feeling of ‘DARK’!
Here’s an excerpt from Volume 3’s ‘Endstation Freiheit’, staccato rhythms from Michael Karoli’s guitar. Strangely strange:
Volumes 4 & 5 are much more ambient, more lyrical, but still hinting at what is creeping around the corner, things that live at night! On Youtube – a mix, which morphed into Can’s ‘Dead Pigeon Suite’, which is weirdness personified:
Keeley – Girl on The Edge of Time
Described in the promo as an “Anglo-Irish dreamrock trio, fronted by Dubliner, Keeley Moss.”
The new album ranges all over the musical shop. Tinkling rock, stadium rock with an ethereal, spacious hue in the opener, ‘Hungry for the Prize’. Lots of breathy, floating vocals almost ghostly, suspended above ever-shimmering guitar and electronic effects. On the ‘London Underground’ Keeley’s vocals are interspersed with found sounds, including travel announcements, as they are on the first track. I think it’s all meant to convey a cosmic consciousness. Keeley calls it their ‘Sonic Swirl’. The album is divided into two parts: Part One – The Magic Maze and Part Two – The Tragic Phase.
‘Big Brown Eyes’ includes a contribution from Miki Berenyi from Lush. Yes, indeed – a veritable mosh-pool of lushness. The title track, ‘Girl on The Edge of The World’ offers some reflectivity – a more endearing glimpse of vulnerability and fragility. By track 11, ‘The Movie of Our Yesterdays’, we have been floating in a somewhat portentous outer-space, rumbling ever-onwards on a sea of dreampop pomp that left me slightly less than comfortably numb. I was looking out of the spaceship porthole, looking for Major Tom to come to the rescue!
Live and direct, Keeley certainly looks the part – Blondie-styled rock goddess, often with her guitar strapped tightly to her body.
Video: Live in Portsmouth:
Ben de la Cour – New Roses
Perhaps a kind of new romantic folk singer. A pleasing voice, with a New Age sort of backing. Think floating spheres, clouds, that sort of musical image. A sparse kind of soundscape. Ben’s voice sits firmly centre-stage, utilising a ‘talking’ rather than ‘singing’ vocal style. “I must be lonely tonight”, Ben croons or intones. I can’t make up my mind. It’s quite simple stuff, yet another lonesome Americana country-singer, a songsmith with a predilection for the wide open spaces, bloodshot moons and long, endless highways. When it comes down to it, he’s a bit of a rougher kind of Chris Rea, possibly? The new album makes Ben look a little like Freddie Mercury!
Ben was apparently born in London but raised in Brooklyn. He spent five years of his young adulthood as a boxer. Now, he is a moderately intense, rather introspective folky. ‘New Roses’ is a rather lovely track, Abraham coming down to share some doomy thoughts and words. Nice guitar work, strange backing, somewhat ephemeral ‘sounds’. Electronica with a sense of foreboding -Fairground Cloud Nine.
‘New Roses’:
The Final Age – New Hallucinations
With a cover evocative of Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’ this is a drum-infused musical glimpse into the depths. Glimpses of darkness, majestic and magisterial. The insistent and intense percussion is enveloping, involving – enticing one to come in towards the sacrificial altar. A Wiccan affair it would be right to presume! It’s the latest musical love-child from Jesse Webb, augmented and abetted by almost a dozen of his mates. ‘Individuation Point’ kicks off the musical journey, which is perhaps more of a ceremony. ‘Winter in My Soul’ is cinematic in scope. ‘Synth 2’ continues in my mind’s eye, the drum incantations, further into the drum sacrifice. By ‘Another Hundred Years’, I was almost seeing aliens arriving onto a barren landscape, possibly zombies crawling out of their crypts at night. A venomous Gollum. Maybe an outtake from ‘Apocalypse Now!’
Most certainly these ‘New Hallucinations’ from Jesse are firmly located in the Heart of Darkness.
Annette Berlin’s vocals on ‘Pleasures’ add another timbre to the musical palette, as does the jazz-infused trumpet playing from Pete Judge on the closer, ‘Beneath the Underdog’. Jesse Webb provides the propulsive drums and percussion on all the tracks. As a whole, it is a large helping of dark hallucinations to tackle in a single helping. But ‘tis an impressive nightmarish set of soundscapes. This new ‘chapter’ arrives ten years on from the advent of his improvisational project, ‘The Final Age’. In that time and longer, Jesse has been behind the drum kit with Gnod, Faust, Repo Man and many more outfits experimenting on the outer reaches of hard-edged, propulsive rhythms.
The music from Jesse and The Final Age can be found on Bandcamp.
Satellite Inn – From Nowhere Revisited
There’s a world-weary, weathered quality to the music of Italy’s Satellite Inn. The latest album offers a well-travelled and nurtured slice of loss and loneliness, redemption-times – it’s Americana with a number of mood changes. It’s mostly gnarled, bluesy with colourings of country. It starts with some nice lap steel guitar and a conjuring up of a laid-back, more wistful America. In ‘Fall River’, it all ends in “…a couple of drinks”.
Stiv, the lead singer, has a nasal vocal style that suits a mournful Americana tradition, but ‘Cigarettes’ for me, is one of the most memorable songs. It’s rockier and heavier in cadence: “She came in to buy some cigarettes”, capturing a moment in time, a little vignette of life. There are lighter, almost fun-filled moments, ‘Hey Mister, What’s the matter now?’ is almost hoe-down, with some nice changes of rhythm. But overall, Satellite Inn evoke a darker world where: “Pain-killers are a drug for the insane.”
I couldn’t find any video of the band featuring tracks from the new album, but here’s ‘Two Old Brothers’ recorded live in Italy, March 2025:
I had a little insider knowledge of Chris Peet, who has recently created a new music studio, NorthHouse Studio in Ebbw Vale in Wales. (It features on the cover of the album). We share quite a lot of muso friends and festies and gigs in common. He was the engineer for the final mastering of the ‘From Nowhere Revisited’ album tracks. Here’s the conversation we had about the process…
Alan: I reviewed the 2024 Satellite Inn album, so did you try to create a similar sound, ambience, on Nowhere Revisited?
Chris: So, I went into this latest album in very new surroundings. Having only just bought the Church where the studio now resides. We wanted to capture the band as they are, with the added bonus of the wonderful space we had. It’s full of ambience and character and we want to capture it all. We wanted to start with a blank canvas.
Alan: The 2002, tracks 1, 3, and 9 (which were produced by Robert Fisher from Willard Grant Conspiracy) have an almost entirely different audio sound. Were you tempted to augment them and make them meld with the more muscular 2025 recordings from Italy, Netherlands and your own Welsh, NorthHouse studio?
Chris: We tried to bring the tracks closer together but equally it was important to keep the original recordings and present them in the way they were originally recorded. The producer on the tracks had done a wonderful job on them, and it was recorded when recording technology was very much evolving into the world we see now.
Alan: Would it be fun to record them live at the Betsey Trotwood? (In London where Satellite Inn played a warm-up gig for the new recordings).
Chris: I always love recording in small intimate environments. I think you get to capture a band in a really special place and the interaction between the band and the audience can make for a really special record.
Alan: Was it fun?
Chris: Fun? It’s always fun, but more than that, it’s always an education working with Stiv and the guys. I have been fortunate to be friends with them for many years now and have been even more privileged to work together on a number of projects together. The methodology and effortless delivery of such powerful and moving music is something I’m always truly honoured to be a part of. I only hope that I can serve them in the right way and we can complement one another!
Mulatu Astatke – Mulatu plays Mulatu
This was a lovely discovery for me. It’s crammed full of poly-rhythms, waves and layers of sounds, employing plenty of Ethiopian instruments – the Krar, Washint and Begena. Mulatu is now quite an old man, born in 1943, yet this album emboldens him, working with younger musicians to bring new life to many of the compositions from across his musical lifetime. It’s World Music, Ethio-Jazz’, and it is a varied mix, a cornucopia of jazz, full of infectious percussion, vibraphone, sax, piano, flutes, brass, bass, probably viola or cello. It’s frequently complex. The opener, ‘Zelesegna’ is densely constructed. Mulatu music has been sampled by artists such as Kanye West and featured in ‘Broken Flowers’, something of a cult film by Jim Jarmusch.
Much of it is full of hypnotic repetitions, mixed in with simple melody lines. ‘Chick Chikka’ verges on becoming a dark voodoo invocation ceremony. There are Latin-American strands webbed together with the Ethiopian elements. It’s ambitious, an intricate and masterful ensemble collection. The rhythms of Africa and South America drive it along. It’s also a beautiful sonic adventure. Full of fine musicianship and passion. It feels totally modern, yet built on some fine traditions. And some of the musical ideas exhibited remind me of the experimentation by young jazzers such as the Ezra Collective. It is getting plenty of plays on my studio sound systems. Mulatu is obviously a Master Musical Magician. Recommended.
‘Mulatu’
Sam Fender – People Watching (De Luxe 2 CDs)
Even though I frequently work with very young creative musicians, I rarely delve into the mainstream of current pop music. However, some names of artists do get through onto my radar. Sam Fender is one of them. 2025 seems to have been his year to hit the Big-Time. His album, ‘People Watching’ was the fastest selling Brit album of the year. It’s now been released in a Deluxe version with 8 additional tracks including the catchy ‘Tyrants’ and ‘Talk to You’ with Sam duetting with Sir Elton John.
The album’s producer is Adam Granduciel, from War on Drugs, whom I really rather admire. Like Adam, Sam Fender seems to be in thrall to Bruce Springsteen. Sam has a nice voice, he is apparently a working-class lad from North Shields, and the overall impression given by the album is that he is a charismatic ‘crowd-pleaser’, offering plenty of sing-along opportunities, along with some grandiose productions such as ‘Wild Long Lie’. ‘TV Dinner’ provides Sam a vehicle to engage in something akin to vocal gymnastics on speed! When Sam keeps it relatively simple, he is engaging, earnest and expressive. I like him less in falsetto mode accompanied by a vast array of backing singers. One senses that Sam will be on the main stages at the big festivals for some years to come. He has certainly ‘arrived’! It’s hard not to ‘quite-like’ him…
Sam and Elton ‘Talk to You’:
‘Tyrants’ video:
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