New music
Liz Thomson
Dylan aficionados will get the cover art reference immediately: one of Elliott Landy’s celebrated Woodstock photos, taken in 1968. Joan Osborne, Grammy nominated “no-nonsense Dylan” (New York Times) interpreter, is wearing neither hat nor guitar on the sleeve of her latest album but the allusion is clear and two of the songs on what she hopes will develop into a “songbook series” (in the manner of Ella Fitzgerald’s homage to the great American songwriters) are from The Basement Tapes.On this her ninth studio album, the Kentucky-born singer-songwriter who’s called New York City home for some Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Nitin Sawhney is one of Britain’s most diverse and original creative talents. Having trained as a classical pianist, jazz musician and flamenco guitarist, as well as a tabla and sitar player, his highly distinctive pieces blend European and Indian classical music with soul, jazz, funk, hip hop, flamenco and dance music. As well as 11 albums, he has composed dozens of film, TV and video-game scores, been adapted for dance shows, worked prolifically as a DJ and an educator. He has collaborated with a glittering roster of stars, from Paul McCartney Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of the stranger things about popular music is how unwilling most are to crossbreed and experiment. Surely that’s where the real kicks are? Most seem to prefer ploughing ruts that were overfamiliar 10, 20, 30, even 40 years ago. Either that or slavishly imitating contemporary cheese. Why’s there not more avant-salsa? Where’s the ambient country scene? Who’s into Teutonic electro-ska? The career of New Jersey three-piece Dälek hints at the answer to such questions. Consistently firing out an absorbing and original fusion of hip hop and feedback-laden space-rock/noise, they’re no nearer the Read more ...
mark.kidel
Iron and Wine’s songs sweet melancholy songs are instantly recognisable, as if their principal author Sam Beam inhabited a parallel universe of the American imagination, a slightly whimsical and yet soulful territory, in which the extremes of hope and despair, love and disappointment, joy and grief, co-exist, feed of one another and provide one of the essential tonal colours of what is know as Americana.There has always been a strain of hard-sought purity in the American adventure, a natural and yet paradoxical contrast with the greed and a territorial expansion and exploitation that have as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Some Bizzare Album was released in January 1981. Compiled by DJ Stevo, it featured twelve unsigned acts he felt represented a fresh way of approaching pop – one enabled by the availability of synthesisers and rhythm machines. Stevo was playing the new music at the nights he hosted, putting the bands on and compiling the electronic chart for the weekly music paper Sounds. After being inundated with demo tapes, he chose the ones he liked best and issued the album.From today’s perspective, the Some Bizzare Album plays out as a prescient snapshot of what would enter the mainstream. The Fast Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It seems quite a shock to consider that it’s now 10 years since Portico Quartet’s breakthrough album Knee-Deep in the North Sea was released to much acclaim and a Mercury Prize nomination for its melding of jazz, ambient electronic and minimalist sounds. Since then, the Londoners’ sound has edged progressively away from their cool jazz foundation until they wholeheartedly embraced a more electronic vibe as the three-piece, Portico in 2014.Their new album, Art in the Age of Automation, finds Keir Vine rejoining the band with his hang drum, ensuring a return to many elements of the instrumental Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Mogwai’s ability to create both frighteningly intense and gorgeously understated compositions has led to them being one of post-rock’s most celebrated and accessible bands. In recent years, they’ve increasingly become known for their unnerving and ingenious soundtracks (most recently Atomic, which underscored Mark Cousins' documentary Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise). Every Country’s Sun continues in this vein, largely leaving behind the heavy shoegaze textures Mogwai were once known for in favour of undulating sounds and subtle synth trickery. Picking up where Atomic left off, album Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
True to their name, Finland’s Man Duo are male and there are two of them. The better-known half is former Helsinki tram driver Jaakko Eino Kalevi. Born Jaakko Savolainen – the Kalevi nods to his home country’s epic tale, The Kalevala – his long solo discography stretches back to 2001. That year, he made a collaborative single with Sami Toroi, who traded as Long-Sam. Following a 2012 album credited to Jaakko Eino Kalevi & Long-Sam they’re back, but as Man Duo.Orbit isn’t going to upset those familiar with Kalevi’s most recent, internationally issued, releases. On these, he’s taken a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As a live phenomenon Gogol Bordello are unstoppable, a crowd-whipping Balkan-punk storm that sweeps venues away with them. For some years this blinded me to their recorded output. Their albums sent shivers up my spine, a tinctured version of their explosive performances, and I was unable to understand why, despite their wildness, rock’n’roll attitude, and ability to rip out a solid tune, their success remained of the cult variety. Listening to Seekers and Finders, things are clearer.Frontman Eugene Hutz has the charisma and zip of Joe Strummer, with whom his artistry has much in common, but Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As the title and Seventies-style cover image indicate, Across the Multiverse is knowing. Though the “Across the Universe” reference nods to The Beatles, it is the spirit of the Alessi Brothers, Hall & Oates, Harry Nilsson, Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson which are nearest. But whatever Dent May’s smarts, his fourth album is shot through with instantly memorable melodies.While his previous trio of albums were recorded in his native Mississippi, Across the Multiverse was completed in Los Angeles, now his home. More specifically, the entire album was written and recorded in the bedroom of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Last year, the arrival of Close to the Noise Floor compelled theartsdesk’s Reissue CDs Weekly to conclude that it was “hugely important and utterly delightful”. A four-CD set, it was a thrilling, first-time overview of the UK’s early indie-synth mavericks from Blancmange to Throbbing Gristle and Muslimgauze to Sea of Wires. Now, it has spawned a follow-up.Noise Reduction System: Formative European Electronica 1974-1984 is another four-CD set. As well designed and well presented in its hardback binding as Close to the Noise Floor, it includes a crisply laid-out 52-page book with an Read more ...
Barney Harsent
We are living, I think it’s fair to say, in troubled times. That is, if we’re living at all by the time of publication. Putting aside, for a second, the sabre-rattling of two monstrous egos, there is a need, in such dark days, of some light. Thankfully, Hard Lines, the third album from British pop act Lucky Soul shines with the force and intensity of the Sun – admittedly still not as hot as an exploding thermonuclear warhead, but let’s work with what we have.The album has been a long time coming – it’s seven years since the band’s well-received second outing, the Motown flecked A Coming of Read more ...