New Music Reviews
Songs We Carry, Ana Silvera and Saied Silbak, Kings Place review - harmony between Arab and JewMonday, 07 October 2024
As the Middle East continues to fragment in hate and horror, a tragic unfolding of events with roots reaching back to the middle of the last century, any sign of love and deeply felt collaboration provides a welcome beacon, and signals the possibility of understanding and reconciliation. Read more... |
Album: Permafrost - The Light Coming ThroughMonday, 07 October 2024
While it does get very cold in the north of Norway, it’s likely that Permafrost’s chosen name reflects a fondness for Howard Devoto’s post-punk outfit Magazine as much as it does their home country’s environment. “Permafrost” was a track on Magazine’s second album, 1979’s Secondhand Daylight. And, with respect to the title The Light Coming Through, the penultimate track on Magazine’s 1978 debut album was “The Light Pours Out of me.” Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: The Devil Rides In - Spellbinding Satanic Magick & The RockultSunday, 06 October 2024
Just over two weeks before Christmas 1967, The Rolling Stones issued Their Satanic Majesties Request. The album’s title appeared to serve time on the peace-and-love, flowers-for-everyone good vibes of the psychedelic era. A year later, the Stones’ next LP, Beggars Banquet, went further. It opened with "Sympathy for the Devil." “Just call me Lucifer…or I'll lay your soul to waste,” sang Mick Jagger. Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Why Don’t You Smile Now - Lou Reed at Pickwick Records 1964-65Sunday, 29 September 2024
The Velvet Underground first played before an audience on 11 December 1965. A year earlier, their two founder members Lou Reed and John Cale were beginning a period of schlepping around New York and New Jersey as supposed members of an equally dubious band called The Primitives. The job was to promote a single titled “The Ostrich,” just issued under that name. Read more... |
Elvis Costello and Steve Nieve, Bristol Beacon review - so much more than a retread of the master's hitsMonday, 23 September 2024
Apart from being one of Britain’s greatest songsmiths of the past 50 years, Elvis Costello – from the early adoption of the rock’n’roll King’s first name – has produced a form of naked self-expression, blurred by intricately-tailored pretence. Though this is “art”, never artifice. Read more... |
Frank Carter & the Sex Pistols, O2 Academy, Birmingham review - Reloaded Pistols are a shot in the armMonday, 23 September 2024
Somewhat amusingly, the sign outside Birmingham’s O2 Academy on Saturday stated that the evening’s entertainment was to be provided by “Frank Carter and Members of the Sex Pistols”. In a way, it was a bit misleading, suggesting that the original and greatest British punk band was going to be backing a relative newcomer rather than that they were touring with a new front man and, no doubt was more driven by John Lydon’s lawyer than what was going to happen on stage. Read more... |
Album: Alan Sparhawk - White Roses, My GodMonday, 23 September 2024
White Roses, My God isn’t a Low album. It couldn’t be. Mimi Parker, Alan Sparhawk’s wife and partner in Low, died in November 2022. And despite Low’s many musical twists and turns, Sparhawk’s public return to music sounds nothing like any of Low’s outings across their 13 studio albums, the first of which was issued in 1994. Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: New Jill SwingSunday, 22 September 2024
As the name of a music genre, new jack swing was coined in an issue of the Village Voice dated 18 October 1987. Writer Barry Michael Cooper was profiling producer, songwriter and member of the R&B trio Guy, Teddy Riley when he created a tag exemplifying the mix of R&B and hip-hop which had hit super-big in 1986 with Janet Jackson’s Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis-produced Control. Riley was on the same wavelength, and Cooper recognised a groundswell. Read more... |
Moby, O2 review - ebullient night of rave'n'rock'n'Johnny CashFriday, 20 September 2024
Sometimes a gig suddenly and completely elevates. Such is the case tonight when Moby, on his first UK tour in 12 years, plays “Extreme Ways”, his 2002 anthem for hedonism and its desperate consequences. What has been an adequately entertaining night blossoms into something more riveting. The 20,000-strong O2 crowd, previously mostly seated, rise en masse, move and sing along. The place is a-buzz. Read more... |
Here comes the flood: Bob Dylan's 1974 Live RecordingsWednesday, 18 September 2024
Lighters at the ready, because here comes the flood. Drawn from 16-track tape, 1/4in reels and lo-fi sound board cassettes that are now a half century old, the 27 CDs of 431 performances, 417 of them previously unreleased, of Dylan and The Band’s 1974 arena tour of the US, is a set that challenges the listeners’ staying power perhaps more than it celebrates an epochal tour. Read more... |
Pages
Subscribe to theartsdesk.com
Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.
To take a subscription now simply click here.
And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?
latest in today
Director Thom Zimny has become the audio-visual Boswell to Bruce Springsteen’s Samuel Johnson, having made...
Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia begins like this: “My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost...
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
How we used to mock those stuck-in-the-mud opera houses that wheeled out the same moth-eaten production of some box-office favourite decade after...
It is unsurprising to learn in the post-show Q&A that each audience receives Jonathan Maitland’s new play based on his 2006...
Could melancholia be an elixir of creative youth? Or is it that sad people were never really that youthful, so age suits them? Certainly it seems...
All three seasons of Industry are now on iPlayer, and after watching the most recent one and then backtracking for another...
Name three operas framing dramas within, and you’d probably come up with Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos...
Even by Stanley Kubrick’s standards, Dr Strangelove went through an extraordinary evolutionary process. After starting it off as a...
Last time I saw the lovelorn Cyclops from Handel’s richly turbulent cantata, Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, he was in a warehouse at Trinity...