New music
Thomas H. Green
Mark Hodkinson is a Rochdale writer, journalist, songwriter and musician who’s also behind underground label/publishing house Pomona. Black Sedan is the latest product of his febrile mind, a band collective that’s been slowly coming together over the last couple of years. Their debut album sprawls about a number of styles but retains a likeable cohesiveness, wallowing in a loose, strummed stew that’s lightly psychedelic with plenty of sonic trimmings.It begins with “Love on Love”, a delicious, widescreen piece based around Charlie Chaplin’s fantastic speech at the end of The Great Dictator, Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
In just five years, what the team behind Hidden Door Festival has achieved is quite remarkable. Having sprung up in 2014, taking over a group of disused vaults behind Waverley train station, the festival’s mission to transform redundant spaces in Edinburgh has left an immovable, and much needed, creative footprint on the city. In 2017 this not-for-profit festival, which is run entirely by volunteers, re-opened the Leith Theatre, a stunning venue which had lain in disuse for almost three decades.Having breathed new life into this incredible space, which is now gradually becoming used more and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Lily Allen has long been an unlikely inhabitant of the tabloid sphere. She was born into it and her pop career sealed the deal, rendering her a recalcitrant victim of paparazzi fishbowl idiocy, ugly magazines and online sidebars. She is, however, one of the few to undermine this process, offering gritty, poetic response in song. “The Fear”, for instance, was a huge hit that also 100 percent nailed vapid celeb aspiration. Her fourth album is, at its best, her rawest and most revealing.Allen’s last outing, 2014’s Sheezus, saw her less focused. Lyrically sharp as ever, it was hampered by lesser Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Although once famous for her Australian drawl and hazy jams, on her most recent album Tell Me How You Really Feel, Courtney Barnett has transformed herself into an all-singing indie star, resulting in something more assured, vulnerable, and intense than her previous work. Touring the UK with her band of Bones Sloan, Dave Mudie and Katie Harkin, her 19-song set in Albert Hall in Manchester is faultless.Barnett starts by playing Tell Me How You Really Feel in its entirety. The reflective songs sound hefty and visceral live. The delicate “Need A Little Time Out” rests on chugging guitars and Read more ...
Barney Harsent
For his fifth solo album (not counting last year’s delayed soundtrack to Set Fire to the Stars) Welsh singer-songwriter and sometime Super Furry frontman Gruff Rhys inhabits an imaginary landscape in order to deal with issues that are all too real. Like its filmic predecessor, it has been a long time coming. The songs were recorded back in 2016 and, given the world's trajectory in the ensuing years, the dystopian landscape Rhys paints could easily be seen as visionary. The reason for the delay was not to encourage comparisons with Nostradamus but to ensure that composer Stephen McNeff Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Wooden Shjips’ new album was apparently written as a “summer record” and, if that was Ripley Johnson and his psychedelic confederates’ intent, it has been fully achieved. While this may not be immediately apparent to fans of Calvin Harris, David Guetta or George Ezra, V does represent a significant shift away from the frantic motorik monsters such as “Down by the Sea” and “Lazy Bones” that have seen the band take a major role on the US psych scene. Taking on the relaxed sounds of Spacemen 3, Grateful Dead and Neil Young, Wooden Shjips have knitted together laidback psychedelic tunes from a Read more ...
Jo Southerd
Lindsey Jordan was 16 when she released her first EP as Snail Mail on her local punk label Sister Polygon Records. Two years later, she has graduated from high school and signed to Matador Records, home of Stephen Malkmus, Kurt Vile and Helium. Lush is Jordan’s debut full-length album, which she describes as being “more deliberate” than her previous work.The record starts as it means to go on: unapologetically sad. This is a break-up album, and the painful confusion of young love rings through with every chord. A melancholic intro paves the way for “Pristine”, the first of many great pop Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although a minimalist approach informed John Foxx’s first solo album, the new “Deluxe Edition” reissue of Metamatic expands what was two sides of vinyl to a three-CD, 49-track box set. After leaving Ultravox following their early 1979 American tour, he quickly signed with Virgin Records and began recording with a couple of synthesisers and a rhythm machine. A bass guitar cropped up intermittently. The album’s lead-off single “Underpass” used only six of the recording studio’s available eight tracks. Despite the pared-down sensibility, Metamatic was organic and imbued with a human sensitivity. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Songlines Encounters festival is in its eighth year, and opened its doors on Thursday night at Kings Place in London with 3MA, (TroisMa in French), comprising Malian kora player Ballake Sissoko, Moroccan oud player Driss El Maloumi and Madagascan valihah player (that’s a member of the zither family) Rajery. Between them they share a few strings and 3MA expertly and deftly used them to conjure up a pungent pan-African world of complementary musical flavours, extending from north to west Africa, with each member taking solo turns, as well as merging together as one to create some marvellous Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
BBC Four is the TV music equivalent of those oldsters music mags like Q and Mojo. Have there been five, or is it six, documentaries about Queen on the channel? You can sense the commissioners feeling with this new series they have now done their bit for African music for the next few years. In general, the BBC, unlike counterparts in places like France, have been ridiculously Anglocentric in their music coverage – like having a cooking channel that leaves out Indian, Chinese and Japanese food.The main difficulty, in the first episode, is that the idea of “doing” Nigerian music in an hour Read more ...
joe.muggs
Would it come as a terrible surprise to learn that this record is highly problematic? Well, duh. Kanye West is the sad clown narrating the global tragicomedy, a troll on an epochal scale, a bundle of contradictory drives all attempting to express themselves to reductio ad absurdum levels. Every time he seems to trip himself up and the world acts as if he's humiliated, it just spurs him on to go “uhuh, you think that's bad? Watch this.” The most powerful of all among those tangled drives seems to be an appetite for preposterousness: hip hop's natural flamboyance expanded way beyond a Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It can be hard to put distance between an artist and their behaviour. Woody Allen films present a problem for some, while I, for one, will never see Tommy Robinson’s impressionist landscapes in the same light again. One rock musician who recently came under scrutiny is The Who frontman Roger Daltrey, after calling the #metoo phenomenon “obnoxious” and “salacious crap”, before adding, of his extra marital activity, “Come on, men are men,” and “there have been times when I’ve hurt her [his wife] and that’s upset me.” Sending hugs, Rog, sending hugs. His rejection of the zeitgeist also Read more ...