New music
Kieron Tyler
Choosing such a loaded name is wilful. Scottish trio Haight-Ashbury are going to be identified with psychedelic-era San Francisco whatever they do. Should they wish to extend their musical wings, diversions into drum and bass or metal aren’t going to be easily accommodated. It's just as well then that Haight-Ashbury are top-drawer practitioners of a terrifically attractive dark psychedelia.Their second album (released under the name Haight-Ashbury 2, but they still trade as Haight-Ashbury too) opens with hand percussion, a jangling sitar and a keening, modal vocal line. Rhythm is Mo Tucker Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
With confirmation earlier this month that Blur’s Olympic gig in August will be their last - or not, depending which interviews you’ve read - only a fool could have approached the new studio album by Damon Albarn expecting anything like the projects for which he is more famously known. Particularly having read the press release introducing the titular Dr (John) Dee: “mathematician, polymath and advisor to Elizabeth I.”This fool did not read the press release. At least not until after a first, jarring and longer-than-anticipated listen.A word of background, presuming I am not the only one who Read more ...
howard.male
It’s hard to think of any other records as exuberantly hedonistic as the handful of singles this London band rattled off at the beginning of the 1980s. Yes, they were accompanied by the then necessary punk sneer which said, This is all strictly ironic. But the music couldn’t lie. The music really did want you to go wild in the country, even if naughty Annabella Lwin just wanted to sneak off for a fag. Or was naughty Annabella just an illusion too? The 40something Lwin who skipped and twirled onto the Islington Academy stage last night certainly had as much energy as the 14- to 18-year-old Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
So, Rizzle Kicks, teenybop pop-hop, right? So what we’re going to get is a bunch of over-excited tweens fobbed off with pre-recorded backing tracks, a bit of choreographed dancing and maybe some balloons? Certainly the support acts, Josh Osho and Mikill Pane, while passably entertaining, adhered to a minimal set-up and plenty of basic hype man call’n’response, but Rizzle Kicks didn’t. In fact, they firmly booted pre-conceptions into touch.The duo of Jordan Stevens and Harley Alexander-Sule are Brighton’s own, via the Brit School, and it’s clear there are many of their peers here as well as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Goods, the second album by Sweden’s Edda Maganson was one of last year’s highlights. With a playful jazz sensibility which intertwined with a quirky pop, Magnason’s approach was unusual and refreshing. Coinciding with the release of her new EP, theartsdesk premieres the video for its lead track “Jona”.Magnason’s time is currently filled playing the lead in a biopic about the legendary Swedish jazz singer Monica Zetterlund. Being shot in Sweden and New York, it’s directed by Denmark’s Per Fly (the director of 2010’s The Woman Who Dreamed of a Man, made for Lars von Trier's company Zentropa).“ Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A new publicly funded UK web channel for performing arts opens tomorrow morning, preparing for a major launch this weekend streaming top international streetdancers to the web audience and publishing John Peel's notes on his record collection. The channel, called The Space, is funded by the Arts Council England in partnership with the BBC, and will run for six months over and through the Olympics period as an on-demand channel to put performance out via smartphones, tablets and computers.Described as an experimental digital arts channel and "communal playground", The Space clearly hopes to Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Dan Mangan’s gravelly, expressive voice and the wisdom that infuses his lyrics do not speak to a songwriter still in his twenties. There’s this song on Nice, Nice, Very Nice, his first album for the Arts & Crafts indie powerhouse back in 2009, that has always given me chills for those reasons. It’s called “Basket” and, the singer explained, is “based on old people” he’s gotten to know over the years. Standing in the centre of an empty stage in the “underground rock'n'roll dungeon” that is Stereo, accompanied only by a battered acoustic guitar and an inopportune air conditioning unit, Read more ...