L&Q Weekly
The timeless joy of a new David Byrne song, Waxahatchee live in London, AJ Tracey releases an album via Deliveroo, I can still hear the screams of the Cowboy Carter Tour
Track of the Week
Will anyone ever do absurdity as well as David Byrne? His new track ‘Everybody Laughs’ is silly as hell, initially, it feels, to the point of trying to tire kids out at a birthday party so when they go home their parents will like you. He never says, “now just wiggle,” but you imagine he might at any moment. Still, you can not listen to 30 seconds of this song – or watch 30 seconds of its video – without smiling your face sore, even when Byrne is calling us all twats for looking at our phones so much. His ageless voice helps, and hearing a brand new David Byrne song still sounds like discovering Talking Heads for the first time, but the shamelessly joyful orchestration from Ghost Train Orchestra really makes ‘Everybody Laughs’ fly. They’re on every track of Byrne’s new album Who Is The Sky?, which was announced this week. Due for release 5 September via Matador. Listen and watch here
3 Sentence Live Review
WAXAHATCHEE, HAMMERSMITH APOLLO, LONDON, 11 JUNE: It’s rare to go to a show of an artist six albums in and be most looking forward to the songs from their new record, but 2024’s Tigers Blood was proof that Katie Crutchfield’s knack for the perfect folk rock melody is only getting stronger. The country-centric Saint Cloud tracks still land so well that a woman in front of me films each of them in their entirety, but ‘Right Back To It’ knocks me over and ‘The Wolves’ floors everyone. Waxahatchee could hardly be better at what she does, and yet that’s the way it keeps going. Stuart Stubbs
Little Simz’s album of big beef
Little Simz’s Colors performance of ‘Venom’ has been a regular fixture in my YouTube watch history for five years. It often autoplays on my TV when another video finishes, and I let the algorithm feed it to me again. It’s the kind of rap song that thrills by emphasising the technical. Like KRS-One or Twista, there’s joy in hearing how many words she can stuff into a short space. Every line is delivered in a rapid burst, but Simz is clear as day. She makes you pay attention to breath control. There are thousands of people like me in the video’s comments, feverishly talking about where she places her gasps for air. I still get chills when she picks up speed as the beat shrinks to just a hi-hat, all focus on the high-wire act of performing with precision... Continue reading
Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour and the art of the stadium show
Beyoncé was approaching 2 hours on stage when she asked, “Can we play y’all one more?” ‘If I Were A Boy’ then brought home a gold run of classics: ‘Crazy In Love’, ‘Single Ladies’, ‘Love On Top’, ‘Irreplaceable’. One song later she floated past my head on a neon-lit horseshoe singing her Cowboy Carter version of ‘Jolene’. We waved at each other. The guy next to me thought she was waving at him. Twelve more songs and she floated by again, this time in a flying Cadillac for ‘16 Carriages’. Now there really was one song left, but before she reached ‘Amen’, she thanked us for coming to a show she “designed to make everyone feel like they had a front row seat”... Continue reading
Albums for your diary announced this week
Goal Girl – Below The Waste - Orchestrated (18 June, self release): Ahead of their first ever headline tour of the States, the south London trio will release a 4-track EP of songs from their 2024 (and best) album, Below The Waste, reimagined with the help of a DIY orchestra recorded at London’s Total Refreshment Centre. Listen to ‘Sleep Talk’ here
Theon Cross – Affirmations: Live at Blue Note New York (11 July, New Soil/Division 81): South London tuba virtuoso Cross is honoured with an album recorded at the legendary New York jazz venue, featuring music from his three solo albums as well as improvisations and tracks he’s never recorded before, performed with Chicago saxophonist Isaiah Collier.
Round this up
Pop genius Brian Wilson died on Wednesday, two days after the passing of funk legend Sly Stone. Both were aged 82.
Underground synth-pop artist John Maus has signed to YOUNG Records and released his first track in 7 years, ‘I Hate Antichrist’, with an accompanying, hellish vision of a Sims civilisation.
Loud And Quiet best friend Killer Mike has been named as an ambassador of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with games to be played in his beloved home city of Atlanta.
Merge Records, the US indie set up by Superchunk bandmates Laura Ballance and Mac McCaughan in 1989, has sold 50% of its stake to indie giant Secretly Group (Dead Oceans, Secretly Canadian, Jagjaguwar) – Ballance’s 50% to be exact, who will leave the game of releasing independent artists. McCaughan will continue as Merge label president and head of A&R.
AJ Tracey just released a new album… via Deliveroo. If you’re in London, Manchester, Brighton, Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, Nottingham or Cambridge you can get a CD or vinyl copy of Don’t Die Before You’re Dead delivered in the next 20 minutes via ‘AJ Tracey’s Record Shop’ on the app. Your lamb buna will follow shortly, in the next 45 minutes to 2 hours.
I saw Waxahatchee last year in Zurich and she, and the band of course, were amazing, but don't get me started on phones at gigs. I saw Nick Cave on his stripped down show with him on piano and Colin Greenwood on bass, and there were people around me who seemed to be filming the whole damn show (despite announcements beforehand about not using phones). It's bad enough in a bigger and noisier performance, but when it's this kind of quiet and, in some ways, more intense experience I find it deeply distracting (and I'm sure the people filming can't be fully focused on the performance). I'd ban them all if I could :-)