L&Q Weekly
Crow Vs Musk, new Gilla Band side project, Hamilton Leithauser live in London, the week's album announcements, art critic Clive La Bouche returns!
Supported by Partisan Records
Album News
Albums for your diary announced this week:
Maria Somerville – Luster (25 April, 4AD): The Irish musician’s debut album for 4AD, and her first that is less drone and more dream pop, following on from her self-released 2019 debut.
Brian D'Addario – Till the Morning (20 March, Headstack): The debut solo album from Lemon Twig number one, featuring two collaborations with LA poet and Beach Boys collaborator Stephen Kalinich. Naturally.
Leal Neale – Altogether Strange (2 May, Sub Pop): Not quite lo-fi but certainly not hi-fi (mid-fi, I guess), Neale’s new album is made for her own jet-lagged sound; the product of returning to LA after three years living in rural Virginia, and feeling out of sorts with a place so familiar yet so strange.
Track of the Week
The Null Club is a new project from Alan Duggan Borges of Irish noise band Gilla Band, which will see the musician and producer release a limited edition white label featuring vocals from The Horrors’ Faris Badwan, New York rapper ELUCID (of Armand Hammer), and Mandy, Indiana’s Valentine Caulfield. The 3-track 12” (out 4 April and hand stamped by Duggan and his wife) is also called The Null Club, and was announced this week with the track ‘Slip Angle’, featuring Caulfield singing in French over a demonic analog bongo that grows into a feverish siren of hiss. Maybe give it a listen later if you’re feeling unsure of the world right now. Listen here
3 Sentences Live Review
HAMILTON LEITHAUSER – EARTH HACKNEY, LONDON, 17 FEB: With no support (and none needed) the show of 2 halves feels like a meet-and-greet and fan club experience. Like the Walkmen singer just had to fly from New York to London to play his new album, This Side of the Island, to us, accompanied only by 4 tracks from his greatest solo (more or less) work, I Had A Dream That You Were Mine. When Leithauser isn’t rasping in a voice that could be singing the phone book for all we care (do phone books still exist?), he’s a revelling raconteur, explaining what his new lyrics are about in great detail, one absurd story of meeting misfits on park benches at a time. Stuart Stubbs
Bottom Gear
Sheryl Crow has sold her Tesla and donated the money to NPR, in protest of Elon Must, who has said that he wants to defund the US radio station. (NPR actually receives just 1% of its funding from the US government.) In an Instagram post, Crow wrote: “My parents always said… you are who you hang out with. There comes a time when you have to decide who you are willing to align with. So long Tesla.” The previous month, a UK group called Everyone Hates Elon branded Tesla’s in London with stickers that said “Don’t buy swasticars” following Must’s Nazi salute at Donald Trump’s inauguration. This is how to slowly destroy the richest fascist in the world – a death by a thousand cuts, getting inside the head of the most insecure and miserable man alive. It might be easier than we think for a man so thin skinned. Like repeatedly spelling his name incorrectly.
Do not believe the rumours: I am alive. I’ve actually been doing fantastically well this last year. If only your Brat summer was half as Brat as mine! But Brat’s over now, isn’t it? It’s all “Eusexua” and bootcut jeans and this new album cover from Elton John. Retired Elton John. But you can’t retire Elton John. Not when he’s making radical album art like this, slipping through a retirement loophole by releasing his new record as a collaboration with country enabler Brandi Carlile. What Elton is saying with this image is, Brat is dead; long live Brat. He’s saying 2024 may have been about being ratty and hot and boiling everything down to its messy essence, but 2025 is about “meeeee”. And who is Elton John if not a man stood in his own front room wearing gold from head to toe (however short that distance may be) with his arms open wide saying “look at my stuff”? I am the cultural moment of 2025, says John, who’s clearly named his album ‘Who Believes In Angels?’ only to needle Charli XCX’s ‘Charli’s Angels’ fanbase, hoping for a clapback that will give him the opportunity to deliver this year’s ‘Not Like Us’. Brash, colourful and whatever the opposite of iconic is, do we know if there are any election campaigns running this year? CB