Is The New Sound a tonic for these times?  Let’s ask Geordie Greep.  “Music can be so much more than learning to play the same as everybody else. It can be anything you want. With recording The New Sound, it was the first time I have had no one to answer to. Being in a band (black midi), we often have this ‘we can do everything’ feeling, but you are also kind of limited in that approach, and sometimes it’s good to do something else, to let go of things.” Geordie’s debut solo album boasts a brand of high quality, all-embracing alternative pop fun not heard in a very long time, walking the line between the ridiculous and brilliant with a teflon-coated aplomb.  How the record came about is a thing to marvel at. Over thirty session musicians were involved in its making, on two continents. Greep says, “Half of the tracks were done in Brazil, with local musicians pulled together at the last minute. They’d never heard anything I’d done before, they were just interested in the demos I’d made. The tracking was all done in one, maybe two days.” The spirit of Greep’s increasingly febrile and furtive soliloquies simultaneously calls to mind both Frank Zappa and Frank Sinatra, with a healthy dash of Scott Walker sprinkled throughout.  The instrumental title track is a jazz-funk workout that could double as a soundtrack for a TV series or the intro music for a Broadway musical. Brass, wah-wah pedal and bass stabs, choruses and polyrhythms, all fizz and tumble around the place creating a sense of excitement and expectation. Tracks often oscillate from whispers to shouts, and start and end on a bang. The stories themselves act as a shopping list of the Active Male Imagination. A series of vignettes, where Geordie Greep plays the role of emcee and conductor. The characters we hear from are engaged in wild fantasies and situations in which they inevitably falter. “The main theme of the record is desperation; someone who is kidding themselves that they have everything under control, but they don’t.” Here Greep gives color to a set of imaginings which include cannibalism, being boiled alive, and a woman giving birth to a goat.  Street life is all around The New Sound: the listener is thrown into a world of cafes, bars, rented rooms, cabarets and strange museums. Here we see our heroes carry out a series of naughty assignments, military cosplay or socio-economic triumphs. The lines between parody and sermon are often blurred. The urbane romantic fantasy of single ‘Holy Holy’ tells the story of an imaginary liaison in a nightclub, soundtracked by ’noughties indie chords and bravura Latin big band arrangements - including a three-piano attack. What next?  “My plan is to ‘do a Keith Jarrett thing’, have a different group of session musicians in a different place and lean into the fact that we’re not going to get it the same.”  How can anything ever be ‘the same’ with Greep at the helm?

Through evocative, emotionally resonant music, Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, the new LP from American harpist and composer Mary Lattimore, speaks not just for its beloved namesake — a hotel in Croatia facing renovation — but for a universal loss that is shared. Six sprawling pieces shaped by change; nothing will ever be the same, and here, the artist, evolving in synthesis, celebrates and mourns the tragedy and beauty of the ephemeral, all that is lived and lost to time. Documented and edited in uncharacteristically measured sessions over the course of two years, the material remains rooted in improvisation while glistening as the most refined and robust in Lattimore’s decade-long catalog. It finds her communing with friends, contemporaries, and longtime influences, in full stride yet slowing down to nurture songs in new ways. The cast includes Lol Tolhurst (The Cure), Meg Baird, Rachel Goswell (Slowdive), Roy Montgomery, Samara Lubelski, and Walt McClements. “When I think of these songs, I think about fading flowers in vases, melted candles, getting older, being on tour and having things change while you’re away, not realizing how ephemeral experiences are until they don’t happen anymore, fear for a planet we’re losing because of greed, an ode to art and music that’s really shaped your life that can transport you back in time, longing to maintain sensitivity and to not sink into hollow despondency.” Memories, scenes, and split-second impressions have long filled Lattimore’s musical universe. As one of today’s preeminent instrumental storytellers, she has “the uncanny ability to pluck a string in a way that will instantly make someone remember the taste of their fifth birthday cake,” writes Pitchfork’s Jemima Skala. Lattimore’s impulse to record life as it happens matches her drive to travel and perform, as profiled by Grayson Haver Currin for The New York Times: “Lattimore recognized that being in motion shook loose strands of inspiration, moods she wanted to express with melody. She needed, then, to remain on the go.” That sense of fluidity has also made her a prolific collaborator outside of solo work. 2020’s Silver Ladders, recorded with Slowdive’s Neil Halstead, opened the door for Lattimore to widen the vision of her primary project as well, and its proper follow-up is the natural next scale. “All of these people I asked to contribute have deeply affected and inspired my life.” For the title and inspiration, Lattimore’s mind returns to the island of Hvar in Croatia, where she first saw those silver ladders at the water’s edge. “There’s a big old hotel there called the Hotel Arkada, and you could tell it had been hosting holiday-goers for decades in a great way. I walked around the lobby and the empty ballrooms and it looked like a well-worn, well-loved place. My friend Stacey who lives there told me to ‘say goodbye to Hotel Arkada, it might not be here when you get back’ and I heard soon after that it was actually going to be renovated in a very crisp, modern way.” Lattimore became fixated on the ingredients that make a place special — for Hotel Arkada, the patinaed chandeliers, the patternedbedspreads, the echoes of its intangible charm — and how when those leave this world, as they inevitably always will, it feels important to memorialize them, “to bottle it for a brief second.”