New music
caspar.gomez
SUNDAY 30th June 2024It’s late. But not really. Not by the standards of this place. Photographer Finetime and I are in Block9 in the South-East Corner. The so-called “naughty corner”. We take turns juggernauting quomble off a pinecone. Finetime’s right eyelid is twitching. This tic developed today. Nearby is a gigantic head. About the size of a large Victorian house. It’s at an acute angle to the ground. Instead of eyes it has a kind of welders’ mask blitzing white-noise light. Like the haunted, detuned television in the 1982 film Poltergeist.We all know what happened to the little blonde Read more ...
Tom Carr
For a band as creative as St Albans’ own electronic-hardcore-rock fusion pioneers, Enter Shikari, the last thing you would expect them to do is sit on their hands.And that’s exactly what’s come to pass, as only a year after achieving their first UK number one with A Kiss For The Whole World, they follow up with companion album Dancing On The Frontline.There is always a risk with remix albums that they either end up feeling superfluous. Or, they go too far down the rabbit hole away from the original. Here, Enter Shikari thread the needle somewhat and limit the remixes, and include live Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Great bands’ output can, famously, be predicated by the intense interaction between members, often between a central creative pairing. This can be a harmonious mutuality but, more often, music is built from tension, from difference, from the frisson between two individuals.Such was the case with Kasabian for many years, with the gradually increasing disparity, between Kasabian guitarist and primary songwriter Serge Pizzorno and bullish frontman Tom Meighan. On their first album without the latter, 2022’s quirky The Alchemist’s Euphoria, they just about got away with his absence. On the Read more ...
Katie Colombus
If the holiday season has been lacking in sun so far in the UK, Sza bought the heat to the first Saturday of the iconic London summerfest in Hyde Park, set up by a strong afternoon of support acts from Sampha, Snoh Aalegra, Elmiene and No Guidnce.On a stage smattered with rather phallic looking stalagmites, stalactites and huge silver crystals as if the set were her very own fortress of solitude, the boundary pushing R&B singer showcased songs from both her 2017 album Ctrl and 2022’s SOS, teasing to her brand new collection Lana, asking the crowd “New album, are you ready?”Opening with “ Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There was a point in this stadium spectacular when P!nk gave her fans two choices. They could either “make out with their partners or go queue for a beer” she suggested, prior to one of the first slow-paced numbers of the evening, but the latter choice was a dangerous one. Few shows, even among big pop jamborees, feature as much going on as Alecia Moore’s current Summer Carnival jaunt.The stunts, choreography and pyro were relentless, to the extent that my friend pondered if every single number would feature fireworks accompanying them. It wasn’t far off that, and the overall result was an Read more ...
joe.muggs
Jeff Mills has always been a musical sophisticate. Even in the early 90s when he was best known for derangedly pummelling techno DJ sets in the most insalubrious of sweat-pits, and even though his minimalist production style back then was used as a blueprint by the most mindless of producers, the artistry to what he did was always mind-boggling.And ever since, as he’s worked with orchestras, jazz bands and the late Afrobeat drum wizard Tony Allen, he’s continued to produce a frankly baffling volume of music, all while gigging and DJing the world over.At 61, he has 40+ albums under his belt, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1974, two albums by German kosmiche musicians working with electronics became the first from the seedbed of what’d been dubbed Krautrock to explicitly embrace – and merge – melody and rhythmic structure. One was Kraftwerk’s Autobahn. The other was Cluster’s Zuckerzeit. Once on the record player, each LP instantly made its presence felt more directly than anything either had released previously.For Kraftwerk, this resulted in an unlikely international hit with a single edit of Autobahn’s title track. For Cluster, there were no singles and, consequently, no chance to fluke any chart action. Read more ...
Tom Carr
Having propelled to stardom with their debut album Night Visions back in 2012, the Nevada pop-rock giants Imagine Dragons have reigned supreme on charts and airwaves.Their blending of elements from a wide range of genres into one melting pot, from rock to reggae, hip-hop to metal, has meant they’re a band with a little bit for everyone. Though their debut largely stayed true to a pop-rock foundation that was listenable and full of anthemic sing-a-longs, the boundaries on each album since have been pushed somewhat more noticeably.Take their 2014 follow up album, Smoke and Mirrors, which has Read more ...
joe.muggs
Oh this is sad. Up until this point Camilla Cabello has been a good pop star. Her biggest songs were loaded with familiar-to-the-point-of-cheesiness retro Latin samples, or angsty mini-dramas loaded with the musical theatre-style chops that had made her an X-Factor star in her teens, always delivered with a ton of conviction and feeling. Even the infuriatingly catchy “Senorita” with her then boyfriend Shawn Mendes somehow managed to maintain likeability despite its ubiquity. There was a general sense that she knew what she was doing and was good at it; she had her own lane.It feels churlish Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Wow, this is a trip back in time. A visit from "The Man in Black" 21 years after he passed away, just a few months after his beloved wife, June Carter Cash, who stood by him through thick and thin as together they made such beautiful music.I saw him live only once, in the very early 1980s at the annual International Festival of Country Music, a three-day Easter extravaganza at what was then Wembley Arena. Mervyn Conn, the impresario behind the jamboree, was a sleaze bag and tight with his money but boy did he pack that stage with amazing stars! He’d watch over the shows like a Roman emperor, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Unless you were around when The Beatles toured America in the mid-1960s, it’s doubtful you've heard anything like this. In 40 years of extensive gig-going, I have not. Taylor Swift has just performed “Champagne Problems” at the piano (pictured below), a song from Evermore, the second of her indie-folk flavoured COVID-era albums. There’s a rising feminine roar, Wembley Stadium on its feet, the noise grows and grows, an earthquake cacophony of women and girls screaming, so many that, combined with tens of thousands of hands clapping, it fills the head like cosmic hum. It surely cannot grow Read more ...
Tim Cumming
She has one of the most distinctive voices in folk and contemporary British music, impossible to forget once heard, and impossible to ignore. Even – or especially – as Linda Peters, singing, aptly enough, “I’ll Show You How to Sing” on a fairly obscure 1968 single with Paul McNeill.A lot of songs have gone under the bridge since then, and Thompson’s standing as one of our great singers has not been diminished by the singer’s struggles with spasmodic dysphonia, a condition that robs her of her voice, but not her music, spirit, wit, love or humour, all of which are in abundance in this new set Read more ...