New music
Kieron Tyler
In July 1967, a British band called The Ingoes changed their name. Up to this point they’d traded in R&B, blues and soul, and tackled some rock ’n roll covers too. Ingoes referenced the 1958 Chuck Berry song “Ingo”. As they’d just recorded their debut album, a rebranding was needed. It was psychedelic so their management came up with Blossom Toes.When it was issued in November 1967, that album – We Are Ever So Clean – wasn’t a strong seller but, in time, its magnificence was recognised. Original copies now fetch around £250. It’s reissued as an expanded three-CD edition, supplementing the Read more ...
theartsdesk on Vinyl 69: Andrew Weatherall, Courtney Barnett, Wings, Los Bitchos, Popol Vuh and more
Thomas H. Green
As the year starts to rev up, theartsdesk on Vinyl returns with over 7000 words on new music on plastic, a smörgåsbord of the kind you will find nowhere else. This month we also have a competition for the dance music lovers among you, a chance to win a £50 gift card for the new app Recycle Vinyl (online stock of 10,000 records + 25,000 in their warehouse + 500 more added every week). For a chance to win, simply email the answer to the following question to recyclevinylcomp@gmail.com: who is described in the reviews below as a "Canadian violinist”? (check in on Recycle Vinyl here). That aside Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Seven and a half years ago, Loop frontman Robert Hampson retired the band's back catalogue in front of a live audience. “You won’t hear these old songs again,” he told the audience at Islington’s Garage.As shocks go, it might not have been up there with Bowie handing Ziggy Startdust – and most of his unsuspecting band – their P45s live on stage, but it was still a searing statement of intent. It signalled Loop as a continuing concern, but one determined not to trade on past glories.With Sonancy, Hampson has made good on his promise. While some might hear the muscular riffing and relentless, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“As you’ve noticed, I’m really terrible at talking between the songs,” announces Melt Yourself Down singer Kushal Gaya, two-thirds of the way through the gig. He is. But it really doesn’t matter; the genre-uncategorizable London six-piece smash through their hour-and-15-minute set with a lean, giddy forward propulsion that brooks no pause. Consequently, the small, sold-out, low-ceilinged club venue gradually becomes a wriggling, sweaty rave-pit.A lot has been written about the London jazz resurgence of recent years. Names such as Shabaka Hutchings, Nubiya Garcia and Seb Rochford bandied about Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Demonstrating how much the world really can change in a very short time when things spin out of control, Swedish power-metal five-piece Sabaton’s album now seems especially tasteless. It’s also a scalpel-sharp example of how important context is to creative acts. The band have made a career of absurdly OTT story-telling songs of real world battles and those who fought them. They’re Amon Amarth for military history geeks. But when military history is actually happening in Europe in all its bloody grotesquery, The War to End All Wars doesn’t seem so appetizing.When they planned and played this Read more ...
Tim Cumming
I tried, I really did. Took a shot at my best, and fell short, Yup, I couldn’t get beyond the opening chapters of Dolly Parton’s first novel, written with that veteran of popular page-turnin’, James Patterson. The best bit for me was on the first page, and it was pure Dolly, but in 22 little words, not 80,000. “Is it easy? No it ain’t. Can I fix it? No I cain’t. But I sure ain’t gonna take it lying down.”That, more or less, is the country zen koan that encapsulates the adventures of the young heroine singer, Ms AnnieLee Keyes, budding on the precipice of stardom and catastrophe that is the Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Eamon Ivri, from Cork on the Irish south coast, is a polymath. He’s a poet (his nom de techno is taken from minimalist poet Aram Saroyan), a fascinating political thinker, and a searing online satirist of cultural mores (or “shitposter” as the vernacular has it). He is also one of the most exciting electronic music talents in the world right now. His first two solo albums, Gore-Tex In The Club, Balenciaga Amongst The Shrubs and Holy Light, and his recent Entropy in collaboration with Claire Guerin, are flat-out masterpieces, blurring the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Though Marillion have experimented with modern rock textures, and have also cut an acoustic album (2009’s Less Is More), the group is defined by its ardent, layered neo-prog sound – given a Romantic bark and fervor by Fish when he was the singer (1981-88), and a classical drama by his replacement Steve Hogarth (since 1989). On their twentieth studio album, An Hour Before It's Dark, at least, it’s a sound in search of a form.The record addresses subjects like climate change, the pandemic and materialism with lyrics by Hogarth that are often oblique and too frequently unctuous. He urges us Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
This new edition of People Move On, Bernard Butler’s April 1998 debut solo album, takes what was issued then to up to four CDs. Nothing unusual in that. Box set-isations of a single album customarily add alternate versions, outtakes, non-album tracks from singles, demos, live tracks, recordings from tracking sessions.However, the new People Move On takes a fresh tack. Disc One is the album as it was issued back then. Disc Two is the album – but with new vocals. Butler added them in 2021 to DAT recordings of the backing tracks, most of which differ from what was issued as they were not the Read more ...
peter.quinn
When 2020 MacArthur Fellow and three-time Grammy Award winner Cécile McLorin Salvant previewed some of the material from her forthcoming album to an enraptured audience at Cadogan Hall as part of last year’s EFG London Jazz Festival, you sensed that something special was in the offing. But the treasure trove of marvels that is Ghost Song exceeds all expectations.Whether it’s the unaccompanied fragment of the sean-nós song “Cúirt Bhaile Nua” segueing into Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” (recorded in the beautiful acoustic of St. Malachy’s Church, New York), the imaginative splicing together of Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Back in June, there was a Tik Tok of a woman with eyeliner and a skinny tie miming to the 2002 hit, “Sk8er Boi”. They say trends come in 20 year cycles, which makes sense given the current pop-punk revival we are in. For zoomers, it’s nostalgia for a time they just missed. For millennials, it’s unfettered longing, summed up by the aptly titled When We Were Young Festival (headliners include Paramore and Bring me the Horizon). It was therefore not surprising hearing “Sk8er Boi” on Tik Tok. But it was surprising that the woman was not just anyone, but the pop-punk princess herself, Avril Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Tears For Fears were an odd non-presence through their most successful years. They were right up there in the premier league of stadium rock-pop bands, but had none of the Celtic romantic bombast of U2 and Simple Minds, weren’t as weird as Eurythmics or Depeche Mode, as muso as Sting, nor as showbiz as Duran Duran or late Queen. Their Songs From the Big Chair album sold eight million copies, and everyone of a certain age can just about chant along to “Shout” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”, but what really was there to them? It was all very earnest, Roland Orzabal Read more ...