New Music Reviews: Blondshell and Cosmic Cathedral

Alt-rock and prog rock this week. Blondshell’s refined her angsty alt-rock, while Neal Morse recruits a veteran band and gives them a hokey name.

Blondshell

If You Asked For A Picture

2025, 8.5/10
Sabrina Teitelbaum took a while to find her musical direction – between 2017 and 2019, she released singles as the pop artist BAUM. Dissatisfied with the results, she showed her producer an alt-rock song she’d been working on. During the COVID-19 lockdown, she got sober and wrote a full album of songs influenced by 1990s artists like Hole and PJ Harvey. Her second album mines the same territory, but it’s even better – more refined and more confident.

I think sonically, I’ve always wanted to make this kind of music, because this is the kind of music I’ve always liked the most. During the pandemic, I started being like, ‘Well nobody’s going to hear this anyway, so I can just write whatever I want’ – and that was when I got all of the songs that I’ve got now.

Sabrina Teitelbaum, NME

Like most good alternative music, angst fuels If You Asked For A Picture. While it’s often directed at disappointing men, ‘What’s Fair’ examines her volatile relationships with her mum.

It sounds like a well-worn formula, but Teitelbaum’s tuneful sincerity is extremely effective. ‘Thumbtack’ is a great opener, yearning and folk-flavoured, a false gambit before ‘T&A’ explodes out of the speakers. As you might expect, ‘T&A’ is partially inspired by The Rolling Stones’ typically sexist ‘Little T&A’.

https://youtu.be/0Zy1_ZbBbJg

Blondshell sounds mundane on paper, but works well in practice.

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Cosmic Cathedral

Deep Water

2025, 8/10
Another year, another Neal Morse supergroup. This time, he has a cringeworthy band name for a strong cast of venerable musicians. Phil Keaggy’s a legendary CCM guitarist who first recorded with Glass Harp in 1969. Drummer Chester Thompson’s resume also goes back to the 1960s, touring with Ben E King, then playing with legends like Weather Report, Frank Zappa, and Genesis. Bassist Byron House is a Nashville veteran who’s played with Robert Plant and Dolly Parton.

The quartet connected after Thompson and Morse attended the same Steve Hackett concert. Deep Water largely originated in jam sessions. Morse describes the album as  “prog meets yacht rock meets The Beatles”, but it’s not radically different from his Transatlantic records, even though the players add their own distinctive licks.

Deep Water is a long record, over seventy minutes, divided into two parts. The first four songs stand alone, while the rest of the record is devoted to the suite.

It’s often very strong, even if the overt Christian content might deter some listeners. Piano ballads like ‘I Won’t Make It’ are close to CCM. The lengthy suite is probably more appealing to prog fans – the talented band cut loose on the recurring ‘Launch Out’ motif.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehkwCgOTS0I

If you don’t mind Morse’s Christian lyrics, Deep Water is a typically enjoyable effort.

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