New music
joe.muggs
Theartsdesk is a labour of love. Bloody-mindedly run as a co-operative of journalists from the beginning, our obsession with maintaining a daily-updated platform for good culture writing has caused a good few grey and lost hairs over the years. But it has also been rewarding – and looking back over the 10 years of Disc of the Day reviews has been a good chance to remind ourselves of that. One thing in particular that drew me into the collective when it was founded, and has kept me going throughout, was the understanding that artistic forms would be treated with equal respect and Read more ...
simon.broughton
“Zanzibar, are you ready?” yells the singer from the stage.There’s a huge cheer. It seems the crowd – and it is a crowd – is certainly ready. In shades, a flat cap and dreadlocks down his back, singer Barnaba Classic (pictured below left) is on stage at Zanzibar’s Sauti za Busara festival. Over from Dar es Salaam, Barnaba is a big star in Tanzania and is headlining the festival’s first night after seven hours of music.Seeing it live on Plus TV, it seems like watching another world. A live band on stage and an audience of some 2500 people, mostly dancing. Usually audience cutaways Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Immersively arranged and intricately lyrical, Ghetts’ third full album further boosts grime’s takeover of British music’s front rank. Aged 36, he’s a contemporary of Kano, and similarly still evolving.Last year’s eerily mesmeric single, “Mozambique”, shows how he now layers his music deep, helped by subtly supportive orchestration and potent deployment of a packed guest list. Chopping strings add classical gravity as synth police sirens stir, while on the hook, South African “future ghetto punk” Moonchild Sanelly trills rrrs hard as an Art Blakey press-roll (wanting “gr-r-reen dough”), over Read more ...
theartsdesk
Continuing our week of pieces celebrating the 10th birthday of theartsdesk’s album reviews section, today it’s time to ‘fess up! Seven of our regular reviewers reflect on occasions when, in retrospect, their writing did not correctly sum up the music in question. Yes. It happens. Even to us!The Black Keys - El Camino – by Russ CoffeyContext, in music, explains a lot: it’s why mediocre melodies heard at the right time can send a shiver down your spine, while total bangers, experienced at the wrong moment, leave you cold. That’s pretty much what happened when I received my copy of The Black Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Mathieu Boogaerts has been recording since the mid 1990s, emerging from the nouvelle chanson scene in Paris, a chansonnier who’s performed at the likes of Cafe Oto over here, while establishing himself as a star turn on the Tôt ou Tard label in France, mixing Afro-pop and reggae as well as indie electronica and folk into his chanson. He’s previously based himself in Paris, Brussels and Nairobi, and now, London, where he’s spent the past five years living in the hinterland between Clapham and Brixton. Out of that sterling cultural exchange experience comes his first English-language album, Read more ...
mark.kidel
Writing for theartsdesk offers a freedom that I‘ve never experienced before. Encouraged by the much-missed Sue Steward and by Peter Culshaw, two of the website's founders, I started by writing solely about music – something I've done since I was a student. But very soon, I was covering theatre in Bristol, where I lived at the time, and I occasionally wrote about the visual arts, and then the cinema. What a joy, not to be bound by specialism but inspired by my enthusiasm and curiosity!With music, I’ve usually avoided going off-piste. I‘ve mostly selected albums by artists I knew, or who Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s odd to hear a band benefit from becoming more conventional. But where Glasgow’s Mogwai used to fiercely stake out a very distinctive musical space of their own, here they’re letting their influences flood into their songs – and note the word “songs” there – yet managing to retain all the sonic power they ever had, and adding extra emotional impact to boot. It’s been a gradual process: from the late Nineties records that scraped along a grindingly slow and sinister instrumental rock groove occasionally welling up into barrages of noise, they’ve gradually elaborated. Melodies, vocals Read more ...
theartsdesk
On Valentine’s Day 2011 Disc of the Day album reviews sprang into being, and has been solidly reviewing five albums a week ever since. Out of the many thousands, which ones did we rate the most? To mark 10 years since its inception, 12 of theartsdesk’s music writers mark the occasion by choosing an Album of the Decade. They appear in alphabetical order by writer.Alt-J – An Awesome Wave – by Russ CoffeyThe early 2010s was a period when UK rock music slowly lost its swagger. The harsh economic climate meant songwriters increasingly forgot about the good times; instead, they turned their minds Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ten years ago yesterday, on Monday 14th February 2011, one of theartsdesk’s writers, Joe Muggs, reviewed an album called Paranormale Aktivitat, by an outfit called Zwischenwelt. It was the first ever Disc of the Day, a new slot inserted into theartsdesk’s front page design, where it still resides today. By the end of the year, we’d introduced the now-obligatory stars-out-of-five system, keeping in the swim with other reviewing media. Since then, Disc of the Day has covered approximately 2600 albums and, before COVID, when the tube trains were running, it gave me great pleasure to see those Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Witless punk” was the weekly music paper Sounds assessment of Disco Zombies’s first single “Drums Over London”. NME’s Paul Morley was more measured, declaring it “ill-disciplined slackly structured new pop but the chorus alone makes up for it.” That was March 1979. Heard now, “Drums Over London” comes across as energised pop-punk with a sing-along chorus and a wacky bent.The band’s next release followed in September 1979. Considering when it shops, the Invisible EP’s second track “Punk a Go Go” made little sense. Issuing a punk novelty when the world had moved on was perverse. However, the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The top-selling vinyl at independent UK record shops in 2020 was Idles' latest album (closely followed by Yungblud, which is impressive, given his only came out in December!). The Top 10 is dominated by indie, rock and retro but, actually, the bigger picture is that limited runs by music in all styles are selling across the board. Our first theartsdesk on Vinyl of 2021 showcases, as ever, the enormous range of music pouring out on plastic. From Bond themes to blues rock to Afro-experimental and much more, it’s all here. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHAlostmen Kologo (Strut)This album is punkin’. Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Nottingham’s perpetually disappointed romantics, Tindersticks would seem to have spent 2020’s almost never-ending Covid lockdown creating their 21st album (including film soundtracks), Distractions. However, just as the pandemic has been for the rest of us, its recording sounds like it was something of a socially distanced affair. Gone is the lush orchestrally infused backing of brass, strings and such that often made Stuart Staples’ mob come over like the musical offspring of Barry Adamson and Tom Waits. Instead, a more minimalist style has been adopted that occasionally seems to utilise Read more ...