Editors frontman TOM SMITH makes his solo debut with Lights Of New York City (Play It Again Sam) which, opening and closing with a greasy late night, neon-washed sax, is a slow-paced introspective ballad recalling “Losing ourselves in the East side cliff/
Caramel sunset nothing to care/Falling into fairground, sugar on the air” and a lament for the fleetingness of youth (“I wanna run those hotel corridors again/That spill out to a skyline, bloated by the rain/A cold night air meets steam from a train/Hear them gone, just a subway train/Speaking your name…it's such a pity/We can't meet again when we were young/It's right there in your hand, and then it's gone”).
Produced by and featuring Dan Whitehouse and Peter Millson with Harriet Harkum on backing vocals, Wolverhampton’s ANGELLA CORRINA releases her second EP, Nature’s End, the jaunty, poppily acoustic title track inspired by a 2025-set dystopian 1986 novel by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka that proved remarkably prophetic in its narrative of ecological disasters, poverty, hunger, society collapse and the extremes of politics, the track concluding that “the elite shall inherit the earth”.
The thinly veiled sarcasm of Safe Brown Token draws on her personal experiences while working as a ‘diversity hire’, expected to be a model employee and not challenge the discrimination she encountered, the chorus with its rallying cry to ‘sing our songs’ and ‘dance our dances’, inspired by both Diversity’s dance performance about the death of George Floyd and the resulting flood of complaints and Billie Holiday classic protest song Strange Fruit.
Personal experience also informs the echoey keyboards-backed The Assimilation Game which relates how, as an ethnic minority employee unsure of her own identity, workplace bullying and racism had a devastating effect on her mental health as she fought to find her authentic self. Strummed on guitar, Propaganda & Conspiracy Theories looks back to the COVID pandemic and how some people were ready to follow whatever regulations the government drew up without question while others were up in arms about the idea of wearing masks and social distancing, and the inevitable conspiracy theories that ensued; basically, it’s about assessing the evidence and making up your own mind. Finally, there’s A Song For Humanity, a recognition of the primal urge to come together through the unity of song and music as a way to understand others and ourselves and become one voice in a time of division.
John Napier wears a variety of musical hats, a folksy singer-songwriter, purveyor of Italo Disco as Real Velour and, sporting Kneecap-like balaclavas, alongside bassist Andy Kearney and drummer Olly Forrester, one third of New Wave outfit THE LINE MANAGERS. The trio’s new EP, The New Normality, is a cocktail of PiL, The Clash, The Pistols and Big Special, the echoing, chimed guitar, slow, spoken title track (“resignation disguised as optimism”) getting things going, followed by a new wave rework his previously folksy Not Your Enemy. There’s a similar thundering propulsive drums and scratchy guitars urgency to the staccato Kings, a studio version of a Claptrap live track released in January, with its world turned upside down lyric (“It's not our fault the culture changed/No one told us no one explained/We weren't ready to live this way/Some say we got what we deserved/Others told us it could be worse/But indifference is what really hurts”), ending with a live version of the Big Special-like bench-pressing drums, snarly guitar and spat out spoken vocals of This Is Not A Showcase. They fully deserve to follow in Hickling and Moloney’s footsteps into national recognition.
From Lichfield, JAYLER are a blues rock quartet of 19-year-olds with a clear hard-on for Zeppelin, right down to frontman James Bartholomew’s hair and trousers and Tyler Arrowsmith’s Page guitar licks and posturings. They do it well, however, and new single Riverboat Queen, recorded at Vada Studios in Birmingham, is a solid 70s riff belter complete with obligatory guitar solo breakdown. With an EP already under their belt, hopefully a debut album should be along sometime next year.
In 2018, AMIT DATTANI, acclaimed for his fingerpicking guitar work, was diagnosed with a degenerative nerve condition and the prognosis that at best he had two more years of playing guitar before his hands would no longer cooperate. He refused to be defined by his condition. Seven years and much perseverance later, armed with a custom-built guitar and an adaptation in his playing style, he returns in splendid vocal form with ‘Wrong Kind Of One’, the sprightly and intricately fingerpicked (showcased on a lengthy play-out) title track of his forthcoming album, which, with a melody that I suspect deliberately recalls ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken’, addresses refugees who have had to make terrible sacrifices and journeys to escape violence, hardship, war and destruction (“Where’s my home now, dust and rubble”) , only to find themselves dehumanised, left aside and mistreated (“they say I’m, I’m unwelcome, and they turn out all the lights…I will stay here, in the shadows/I’m the wrong kind of one”) in the lands where they sought refuge.
