New music
Sebastian Scotney
When Marie-Theres Härtel plays the viola, she is an astonishing force of nature. If great string-playing should combine the heavenly and the daemonic, the civilised and the raw, hers certainly does.She has a deep family folk heritage from the Steiermark in Austria (“yodelling was my mother tongue”, she says) but also spent quite a few years among the cohort of elite string players at the Vienna Conservatoire, trudging the streets around the Singerstrasse like Mozart (another viola player), and learning the magical Viennese art of how to function as an inner voice at the heart of any Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Bobby Gillespie (b 1962) is best known as the lead singer and driving force of rock band Primal Scream. He was born and raised in Glasgow and met future Creation Records boss Alan McGee at school. The pair would later move to London and, after a brief period drumming for The Jesus & Mary Chain (he played on their influential Psychocandy album), Gillespie signed Primal Scream to the nascent Creation in 1985. After various different stylistic incarnations, Primal Scream captured the zeitgeist and hit gold in 1991 with their MDMA-electronic-dance opus Screamadelica.Primal Scream have Read more ...
joe.muggs
Emma-Jean Thackray is not lacking in audaciousness. This is, after all, a white woman from Leeds barely into her thirties, raised on bassline house and indie rock, making music whose most obvious comparisons are with some of the most revered (in the most literal sense) black musicians in modern history: Fela Kuti, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, J Dilla and more. And what’s more, she suggests this album will “simulate a life-changing psychedelic experience, an hour where we see behind the curtain to a hidden dimension”, packs it full of full-bore, third-eye-open omnitheistic Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Rory Graham’s first words as he comes on stage are: “Well this is a bit weird, isn't it? It's been a while.” After a run of cancelled gigs, the band haven’t performed live for a year and a half – which feels, says Rory, “a bit like missing a testicle.”Anatomy aside, we all get it. While I knew how much I had missed live music, the depth of intense emotional response to this band's sound and lyrics; the overwhelming energy connection between artist and audience and the transformative healing power of music is another level at this gig.There is a chemistry in the Jazz Cafe that I have never Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The latest edition of theartsdesk on Vinyl combines the best new sounds on plastic with the vinyl reissues that are pressing buttons. Ranging from heavy rockin’ book-style boxsets to the funkiest summertime 7”s, all musical life is here. Dive in.VINYL OF THE MONTHThis Is The Deep The Best Is Yet To Come (Part 1) (B3)London indie outfit This Is The Deep make wonderfully eccentric but catchy music. The Best is Yet to Come (Part 1) is a mini-album that plays at 45 RPM, whose eight songs mingle quirky post-punk dub-funk with something altogether poppier and frothier. They are unafraid of Read more ...
peter.quinn
Album number three from Ivor Novello-winning singer-songwriter Laura Mvula sees her paying singularly personal homage to the music of the 1980s. Change, Chic, Michael Jackson and more are all called to mind at various points, with “Church Girl” seemingly nodding to the US songwriting and production team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, with its textural palate of drum machine (a Roland TR-808, perhaps?), hand claps and shiny synths, plus a final fade to the unadorned beauty of the human voice, a stylistic trait which Mvula uses to exquisite effect here and elsewhere on the album.Whether it’s the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra’s “Some Velvet Morning” is a clichéd indie-rock odd couple touchstone, and after an initial duet on Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” during the latter’s chaotic 2015 Barbican swansong, Bobby Gillespie and Jehnny Beth tried on Lee and Nancy’s threads the next year. Utopian Ashes followed, mutually developing music they recorded with most of Primal Scream and Beth’s main foil outside Savages, Johnny Hostile. What makes this more than pastiche or side-project is the songs, which cut deeply and coherently into adult relationships as they simmer and immolate. It’s an Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Empty Sky, Elton John’s first album was released in June 1969. Now, an album titled Regimental Sgt. Zippo has turned up. It’s marketed as “The debut album that never was.” The 12 tracks are annotated loosely as having been recorded from November 1967 to May 1968.Regimental Sgt. Zippo is great. The album opens with “When I Was Tealby Abbey”: string-drenched psychedelic pop easily as good as the early Blossom Toes or a Mark Wirtz confection. As the album goes on, what was being absorbed is evident. The Zombies are in there. “And the Clock Goes Round” has the rolling piano chassis of The Left Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It takes a brave musician who thinks that he or she can do a better job than the combined talents of Russian electronica trailblazer Eduard Artemyev and Johann Sebastian Bach. However, Kevin Martin, also known as The Bug and a prime mover for such sonic experimentalists as King Midas Sound, Zonal and Techno Animal, is clearly not someone who lacks either artistic ambition or confidence. For his latest project, Kevin has taken on the task of rescoring Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 celluloid sci-fi opus, Solaris.It’s fair to say that Martin has produced an eerie and dreamlike alternative soundtrack Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“Dance like its ’76”, Jack Savoretti (born 1983) sings on “Too Much History”, one of many upbeat synth-driven tracks on his new album Europiana. 1976: a sweltering summer when the charts included “Happy to Be On an Island in the Sun”, a slice of Europop by Demis Roussos, who would shortly become the unseen star of Abigail’s Party.This is Savoretti’s seventh album, conceived in sunny Oxfordshire last year with the singer-songwriter whipping up Mediterranean-style lunches served with lashings of rosé to get the band in the groove in the gaps between lockdowns. It was, he has said, very much Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There is never one Glastonbury Festival. There are as many Glastonbury Festivals as there are people who attend. Thus it ever was, even back in 1992 when the capacity was only 70,000 (plus multitudinous fence-jumpers!). What follows, then, is a cross section of memories, from bands, performers, journalists, rave crews, and those behind the scenes. Some of these are drawn from extant sources (listed at the end, along with further info about participants), but most are fresh interviews, including from artists such as Primal Scream, The Orb, Shakespear’s Sister and Carter USM.The interviewees Read more ...
John Bungey
With his band King Crimson laid up, the only chance to check out Robert Fripp's guitar prowess lately has been in the Robert & Toyah's Sunday Lunch videos that husband and wife post on YouTube. Their popular weekly assaults on classic rock hits are a game mix of the heroic and the cringeworthy. Toyah Willcox is someone to whom the label “shy and retiring” has never knowingly been attached.Anyway, here's a reminder of what Fripp can do in more serious moments, with his guitar hooked up to a container-load of digital gizmos, including a 76-second delay unit, as he creates his orchestra-like Read more ...