New music
Kieron Tyler
Immediately before recording their first album in 1977, Motörhead were on their last legs. They went into the studio after playing what was initially conceived as their farewell show. Appropriately, no one then could have predicted that the band formed by Hawkwind’s former bass player in 1975 would become integral to rock’s rich tapestry. It wasn’t even their first attempt to make an album: one begun in 1975 had been shelved. The early Motörhead were bedevilled by false starts and upsets.The unpremeditated subsequent durability of the band has ensured Motörhead was never deleted. Read more ...
peter.quinn
With her third recording for Mack Avenue, Grammy Award-winning vocalist and songwriter Cécile McLorin Salvant has delivered a vocal jazz album for the ages. A 2CD set recorded live at NYC’s renowned Village Vanguard, the fascinating track list juxtaposes jazz standards, vaudeville songs, blues and more. A number of studio recorded originals sprinkled throughout, featuring the exquisite playing of the Catalyst Quartet, offer an intriguing commentary on the live material.Having immersed herself in early jazz and blues, it’s no surprise to see McLorin Salvant dusting down the glorious “You’ve Read more ...
joe.muggs
When Miley Cyrus released the deliriously patchy Bangerz in 2013 she was as over-exposed as any pop star has ever been, as I subtly pointed out at the time. Far less so now. Her only album in the interim has been a slightly tedious, flung-out drug folly of a Flaming Lips collaboration in 2015. Other than that, she's steadily edged away from the limelight, meaning this record arrives with less fuss and kerfuffle than more or less anything she's done since her very beginnings as the child star of Disney's Hannah Montana.And it's all the better for it. My first reaction on seeing the title was “ Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s more than 40 years since Sparks appeared on Top of the Pops with “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us”, one of a handful of hits from the brothers Mael, Ron and Russell, who grew up in 1950s and ‘60s LA detesting the “cerebral and sedate” folk boom and grooving to such British acts as the Who and the Kinks. They spent part of the Seventies in London, gaining an Island Records deal on the back of an Old Grey Whistle Test performance.They looked weird then and they still do, Russell Mael leaping about manically like an ageing pixie, brother Ron still sitting impassively behind his Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
When we were at peak Norah a decade ago, she looked rather intimidated by the large crowds at venues like the Forum. Having been suddenly catapulted into the limelight she looked nervous, lacked any real stage charisma and her so-so band looked like the kind of musicians you’d find in an average bar in Brooklyn, competent rather than anything remarkable. Her recent Day Breaks, was something of a return to the style of her first multi-million selling album 2002’s Come Away With Me, and to see her back playing a smaller venue like Ronnie Scott’s was a treat.She looked and sounded Read more ...
joe.muggs
It was this album's good fortune to arrive on a miserable rainy afternoon. At other times my first impressions might be a bit harsher about its comfortable, retro dad-grooves and easily flowing sax solos, but instead I let it wrap me like a blanket, and by three tracks in it was absolutely impossible to dislike it.But then again, back in the Eighties, The Blow Monkeys were always adept at turning the smooth, super-mainstream and potentially pastiche-y into something rather more interesting – somewhere in the British white soul continuum between the gruff urgency of The Style Council and the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
London indie-rockers Wolf Alice’s debut album, My Love Is Cool, made it to no 2 in the charts a couple of years back. It was a bona fide success story and a rare thing, a gold record for a female-fronted outfit who major in grungey, ambitious post-Pixies rock. It was derivative, but also showed a feisty, admirable willingness not to be pigeonholed, especially on songs such as the ecstatic “Freazy”. Its successor initially seems destined to be even more wide-ranging, to reach headier heights, but then settles, during most of its second half, for being simply a decent album.Let us not damn Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
September and October see a deluge of new releases. Everybody and their aunt puts out an album as autumn hits, so theartsdesk on Vinyl appears this month (and next) in a slightly expanded edition. As ever, the fare on offer is as diverse as possible, from black metal to Afro-funk via film and TV soundtracks. All musical life is here, ripe and waiting.VINYL OF THE MONTHThe Television Personalities And Don’t The Kids Just Love It + Mummy You’re Not Watching Me + They Could Have Been Bigger Than The Beatles + The Painted Word (Fire)Usually theartsdesk on Vinyl has a rule that the VINYL OF THE Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The main man of folk big band Bellowhead steps out solo with a companion piece to his 2009 outing Songs from the Floodplain. Where that album was essentially rural, the new one is altogether more urban, Boden describing it as a story of "two star-crossed lovers trying to find each other amongst a backdrop of decaying buildings, burning oil drums, home-made fireworks, tribal rioting and Bacchanalian revelry”.Once again we are in a dystopian near-future, a world transformed by global warming though less bleak than the apocalyptic vision conjured up in prose by Cormac McCarthy, over whose Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
That this year is the 40th anniversary of 1977, the year punk rock went mainstream, shouldn’t obscure the pub rock foundations underpinning much of what was supposedly new. The Clash’s Joe Strummer had fronted pub circuit regulars The 101’ers. In 1976, the Sex Pistols regularly played West London pub The Nashville Rooms. The Damned came together after Brian James and Rat Scabies scouted the audience at a Nashville Pistols/101’ers show for potential members of the band they intended forming. The Damned’s future label Stiff Records was run by pub rock movers and shakers. Their producer, Nick Read more ...
Barney Harsent
David Crosby might be entering life’s twilight but, like a tired drummer, he seems to be speeding up towards the end. Perhaps he’s simply hit a rich vein of form – the success, both artistic and critical, of 2014’s Croz, and the 2016 follow-up, Lighthouse, certainly suggest that he has. But one can’t help wondering whether the quickening of the pace is also down to a sense of time running out.If anything, this new creative burst feels more like a rebirth than the end of anything and the dichotomy this presents is not something lost on Crosby. The lilting rise and fall of “Here It’s Almost Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The last song on The Killers' new record is called "Have All the Songs Been Written?". The words refer to Brandon Flowers' writers' block during the album's recording. Apparently, he tried everything to get out of the slump, including asking Bono for advice. The U2 singer had no answers but their meeting started a process that gradually led to Flowers realising what he really needed to do: to write about his own life.This self-reflective approach has resulted in a record which starts out full of ambitions but ultimately ends up sounding low-key compared to their earlier work. The Read more ...