New music
Guy Oddy
Todd Rundgren is not known for sitting on his laurels and churning out the same old stuff year after year. Since Runt, his debut solo album from 1970, he has tried out a vast array of genres from heavy metal to prog rock, EDM and power pop, as well as having a prominent role in Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell. Runddans, his second album of 2015, sees him venture further into pastures new by teaming up with Scandinavian electronica boffins Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Emil Nikolaisen for a one-track ambient beast – albeit one with a hefty injection of prog sounds.Runddans came about after Rundgren Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The timing of this tour, to celebrate the 15th anniversary of their self-released, lo-fi masterpiece Mwng, could not be more fitting. The album was inspired, in part, by Welsh language punk band Datblygu, and the left-wing political feelings that ran through that band’s work. Fast forward to now and London looks like an island of red surrounded by a sea of blue following the recent election – and there are a lot of people here aching for escape after Thursday's events.The tour has the air of a retrospective. The songs from Mwng, including the sea-shanty sway of “Ymaelodi A’r Ymylon” and the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There’s no doubt SPOT is Europe’s tidiest music festival. In hosting SPOT, Denmark’s second-city Aarhus turns the expectation of what a festival can be around. There’s no mud, no one takes a stage late and the sound is always immaculate. Underworked stewards collect what little debris there is. The two main venues are so spotlessly non-rock they force the focus towards the music.The Aarhus Musikhuset is an airy, early-Eighties complex with a glass-walled façade reminiscent of London’s Royal Festival Hall. Inside, cool wood panelling and designer light fittings set the tone. SPOT has seven Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Fall has always delivered great album titles, and Sub-Lingual Tablet is right up there with the best – Witch Trials, Hex, Caustic, Are You Are Missing Winner… The song titles, too, have a medicated, sub-lingual ring that no other artist could pull off – “Junger Cloth”, anyone? – guaranteed to wipe away all psychiatric waste...Several songs take on the soft-focus Stasi surveillance of mobile social media – the rage and fury of “Facebook Troll” – Smith’s multi-layered vocal stylings, whiplash shrieks and raw blizzard of gleeful hatred are breathtakingly purgative, the song's Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Spooky Tooth: The Island Years (An Anthology) 1967–1974After Spooky Tooth called it a day in 1974, various long-time members struck out in directions as unpredictable as their former band’s identity was hard to get a handle on. Drummer Mike Kellie joined the Lou Reed-influenced, punk-era band The Only Ones. Their main songwriter, co-vocalist and keyboard player Gary Wright scored a massive US hit in early 1976 with the fantastically atmospheric proto-yacht rock single “Dream Weaver”. Guitarist Mick Jones formed the immediately successful (in America) formulaic rock band Foreigner. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s an odd duality about Brighton tonight. Post-election, it’s a righteous oasis, a green and red bubble amid a sea of blue. Most of Britain may have chosen to systematically destroy the NHS and the education system but Brighton stands fast. The mood, then, is one of victory – a brass band plays jauntily in the street outside the Dome and the streets gabble giddily of Caroline Lucas, the Green MP who held the city’s centre - but the celebrations are tempered by hurt and a sense of epic defeat. Squarepusher’s Brighton Festival gig encapsulates the dichotomy.Tom Jenkinson – Squarepusher – Read more ...
Lydia Perrysmith
It was a strange atmosphere inside Camden’s KOKO last night, like a very particular nu metal subgroup of 2003 having a reunion. There was no one under the age of 20 but there were still dreadlocks and beards aplenty. First up on this nostalgia-fest were Alien Ant Farm, the American rock band who formed in 1995 in Riverside, California. By the time the band come out on stage, the crowd has had time to buy a few warm, over-priced beers and are ready to let loose.As they launch into “Wish” there’s a surge of excitement, with grown men and women suddenly reverting to awkward angst-ridden Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The over-full O2 Academy is already like a sauna, with sweat dripping down the walls and clouds of condensation drifting above the audience, before the Prodigy even take to the stage in Birmingham. However, when a fur-coated MC Maxim leads the band out the atmosphere goes up several notches further and then positively explodes as Liam Howlett lays down the intro to 1997’s hit single “Breath”. Bodies are thrown around from the first beat, hands are raised and the temperature climbs even further.“Nasty” and “Omen” follow in quick succession with heavy metal guitar riffs, football terrace Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The venues Laura Moody has played on this, her first national tour, have included a launderette, a lighthouse, and the philosophy section of a well-known Oxford bookshop – all, apparently, selected for their “intimate and unusual” quality. It's certainly been an odd couple of months. On the other hand Acrobats, the album she featured last night, seemed a little more mainstream than her previous material. Normal for Moody is still a relative term. Her early stuff included "avant-pop" numbers like "There Could Be No Doubt of His Sex", where quivering high vocals were accompanied Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Back in the Seventies, in between keeping an eye out for the unwanted attentions of radio DJs and waiting for punk, the internet or colours to happen, there was real beauty if you knew where to look. By which I mean telly, of course. From the haunting fairground tones of the introduction to schools programme Picture Box, to the rolling sci-fi thrill of The Tomorrow People theme, it seemed that, far from not wanting to scare the horses, these oddball music makers would have sampled their galloping retreat and used it as a rhythm track for an animated short about a deaf boy and his magic snail. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Chungking are Brighton's great could-have-should-have band. Appearing around a decade ago the trio, enigmatically fronted by singer Jessie Banks, offered up an opulent alternative take on the whole indie-dance thing. Songs such as “Stay Up Forever” had irresistible, hedonic punch but the band were equally capable of channelling a delicacy that recalled The Carpenters at their most melancholy. They seemed to be on the cusp of hugeness. They were, after all, potentially accessible to a wide pop audience at the same time as appealing to clubland connoisseurs.The cusp, however, was where they Read more ...
Matthew Wright
For someone apparently so suave, Joe Stilgoe feels uncomfortable in the modern world. His third album is an express journey - in an exquisitely furnished, authentic carriage - back to a pre-bebop era of bronzed, big-band swing, and witty pianist-singers. If the album title doesn’t sum things up clearly enough, there are songs like “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times”. Nothing Stilgoe does is crude enough to hammer a point home, but songs like this one and “Nothing’s Changed”, on which Stilgoe poignantly sings “Did we know jazz would all get rearranged?” make the point unambiguously.Music so Read more ...