New music
Thomas H. Green
The 1960s media's wild excitement about the space race is now almost forgotten. The era when every boy wanted to be an astronaut is ancient history. The period is, however, a goldmine for gloriously kitsch cosmic samples, a fact electronic groups such as The Orb have taken advantage of. Conversely, the new album from Public Service Broadcasting mines the area for neither irony nor comedy. The London duo’s second album is, instead, determined to celebrate humanity’s wide-eyed initial glee at blasting beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.Musically Public Service Broadcasting are somewhat Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Had it not been for the fact that Charli “XCX” Aitchison had struggled to find a hit of her own until last summer’s Fault in Our Stars-soundtracking “Boom Clap”, I’d be convinced that she had tapped into some secret formula for producing perfect pop hits. “I Love It”, the rabble-rousing breakup anthem she wrote for Swedish electropop duo Icona Pop and her attention-grabbing hook on Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” share a distinguishable swagger, but had little impact on the negligible success of her 2013 major label debut True Romance. In the fickle world of pop music, that should have been enough to Read more ...
Barney Harsent
There’s a danger in an artist having their work reinterpreted that the end result will be little more than a rough outline of the original. Look at Metallica’s axe job on the Velvet Underground for instance. Still, on the bright side, at least they increased the band’s "reach" to include jocks and morons.Following a series of live shows over the last few years, Throbbing Gristle alumni and art-dance legends Chris & Cosey were inundated with requests for recordings of the live versions of old songs and ended up complying, dressing up their back catalogue for a night out on the tiles.So, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: Junk CultureOMD’s fifth album, Junk Culture, followed 1983’s Dazzle Ships into the shops. Where that was experimental, fragmented, wilful, used found sounds and, in places, eschewed melody and traditional song form, 1984’s glossy release was recorded at Montserrat’s swish Air Studios, the facility founded by George Martin which was favoured by Dire Straits, Elton John and Paul McCartney. Dazzle Ships was influenced by Stockhausen. Junk Culture featured the mambo-esque calypso “All Wrapped Up”, a weedy echo of early Eighties chart funsters Modern Romance.Of Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The death of Steve Strange, aged 55, was both a surprise and not a surprise to me. His adult life in and out of the spotlight had been something of an unpredictable rollercoaster ride where anything could happen.I had followed his career since the late 1970s and the early 1980s when he was at the forefront of the New Romantic movement, minding the door and acting as general tastemaker at the Blitz Club in Covent Garden. Then in 2001 I was approached by a publisher to ghostwrite his autobiograply, Blitzed!. His contemporary Martin Kemp had just had great success with his book, True, and there Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
While much of Hexadic is a blast, the first album from Six Organs of Admittance since 2012’s Ascent offers much that’s familiar: the snail’s pace heaviosity and shifts between bone-crushing density and desiccated sparseness of Dylan Carlson’s Earth, spaghetti-western guitar interludes (also favoured by Carlson), an approach to malformed riffing and guitar mangling blending Bad Moon Rising-era Sonic Youth, Harry Pussy and early Pussy Galore. Six Organs of Admittance’s prolific constant presence Ben Chasny used to be tarred as freak-folk, but nowadays his various musical guises hop with ease Read more ...
Jasper Rees
First there was the movie, the album, the book and the app. Now there is the tour. American Interior, Gruff Rhys’s postmodern narrative concept, has spread tentacles in any number of media. At the heart of it is the mythic story of John Evans, a young Welsh explorer who in the 1780s took himself off deep into the unvanquished heart of America in search of a myth, the lost Welsh-speaking tribe of Madog. A serpentine river odyssey that involved him in vast geopolitical forces, it has spawned a suite of songs about the solitude of adventure. Onstage, Rhys presents them in the form of a lecture Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The vibe in the Concorde last night was unbelievably up. The short version of this review is that the band are decent live but the crowd made the evening fizz with manic human electricity. Gorgon City, like a less funk-based Rudimental, performed songs that magpie about the history of electronic dance music, focusing especially on the classic house template, but attaching it all to soul-pop songwriting. DJ-producer duo, Foamo and Rack’n’Ruin, AKA Kye Gibbon and Matt Robson-Scott, appeared on either side of the stage in front of banks of synths, the latter with nine drum pads too, and then Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Several years ago, punk pranksters Art Brut had a tune called “Slap dash for no cash” which asked “Why is everyone trying to sound like U2? It’s not a very cool thing to do”. It seems that Imagine Dragons have gone one misstep further on Smoke + Mirrors – by trying to sound like Coldplay.Tracks like recent single “Shots”, “Smoke and mirrors” and “It comes back to you” are all aimed at the arena environment with Wayne Sermon’s twiddly, Edge-type guitars and a great dollop of 80s style production, courtesy of Alex Da Kid. Dan Reynolds’ lyrics meanwhile are consistently banal generalisations Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s a lot to like about Steve Earle. He wears his hard times in clear view but has come out of them emanating a gritty positivism. Like Neil Young – in more ways than one – he also displays an admirable refusal to do the predictable. From his appearances in the TV series The Wire to his novel, I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, to the multiplicity of musical styles displayed on his 15 previous albums, he never seems tethered to the demands of any entertainment industry treadmill. At heart he’s a songwriter and Terraplane is his first stab at an all-out blues album.Happily, Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“Jazzerbaijan”, the giddy publicity tag attached to last night’s double bill of Azeri jazz at Ronnie Scott’s, was sounding soberly appropriate by the end of a dazzling display of generic shape-shifting by the young Isfar Sarabski Trio. A packed and exuberant audience thrilled to his sound, which seemed to transcend generic boundaries with a breath-taking lyricism and fluency. The first set, an accomplished, if perhaps more familiar sound from the Amina Figarova Sextet, had a more consistent Western focus, though Azeri music still featured in Figarova’s playing and compositions.Jazz in Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The Unthank sisters may be best known for hauntingly bleak songs about dead babies and bald women but, it turns out, they’re not just about misery. Nor are they afraid to experiment. Their latest studio album, Mount The Air, is a floating, swirling, blend of folk, indie-rock, and jazz. For some, this will seem like a stylistic departure. But, for those who’ve kept up with their recent Diversions projects (which feature, inter alia, songs from Anthony and the Johnsons and Robert Wyatt) things may not appear so odd. Adrian McNally's piano motifs, in particular, Read more ...