New music
joe.muggs
Welcome to theartsdesk's first radio show with Peter Culshaw and Joe Muggs, recorded with the extremely able help of Brendon Harding at Red Bull Studio London.In the course of this show, Peter and Joe take a look at the depth and breadth of music covered by theartsdesk, playing some delicious tracks just out or about to be released (see below), and discussing the meaning of musical genre in a globalised world and asking whether it is still a useful way of bracketing artists. In amongst this you can hear an interview with the young Soweto-born musician Spoek Mathambo, now mainly residing Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Before I came to what I was surprised to discover is a fifth album from hard-rock six-piece Lostprophets, there were two things I knew about the band: firstly, that they are Welsh; and secondly, that they showed up in magazines like Kerrang! a lot back when I was in high school.Alternative rock in the 1990s wasn’t well known for either its staying power or its crossover appeal, so for a band to still be filling mid-sized venues 15 years on they must be getting by on more than tattoos, skateboards-as-accessories and misguided rap interludes (although I’d maybe steer clear of track seven). At Read more ...
Natalie Shaw
Drake’s routine is divisive; he’s attracted hip-hop’s most loyal following in a somewhat unconventional way. By using self-doubt as his signature complex, he’s taken something traditionally uninteresting and made it his calling card. The cringe factor in his lyrics seem, from the outside, best suited to an album at the tail-end of a career, but that’s without considering his charm, his astute ear for a chorus, and how unashamedly, loveably contrived and cheesy his whole shtick is. At his second sold-out night at the O2, 25-year-old Canadian Aubrey Drake Graham proved to be a master of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The 1972 Jethro Tull opus Thick as a Brick was offered by Ian Anderson as a parody of progressive rock concept albums. Its sub-Pythonesque packaging proclaimed the record’s lyrics to be an epic poem composed by an eight-year-old swot, Gerald Bostock, who was disqualified from winning a literary prize after swearing during a BBC interview. Anderson talks up the jape to this day, neglecting the Oedipal struggle central to the album’s opaque narrative, its layered, intricate musical motifs, and its cinematic sweep. Never given its critical due, Thick ranks beside its predecessor, Aqualung, as a Read more ...
mark.kidel
Ambrose Akinmusire is the new jazz sensation, the messiah of the post-bop trumpet. With his hyper-talented and youthful quintet, the 29-year-old Californian delivered a set in Bristol that rang all the changes from the soft and lyrical to high-energy heat.Akinmusire took the stage following an at times dazzling opening performance from the equally young, gifted and black British pianist Robert Mitchell. The American trumpeter started with a kind of alaap, a jazz equivalent of the prelude to a raga when the lead instrumentalist explores the tonalities of his chosen mode. It was as if Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The Moscow girl punk band Pussy Riot say their impromptu performance inside Russia’s major cathedral of their song “Holy Shit” was a prayer. They were replying to the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill who called it “blasphemy”.Speaking at a liturgy in Moscow’s Deposition of the Robe Cathedral, the Patriarch condemned Pussy Riot’s actions at Christ the Saviour Cathedral as “blasphemous” saying that “the Devil has laughed at all of us.”“We have no future if we allow mocking in front of great shrines, and if some see such mocking as some sort of valour, as an expression of political Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Norway’s bouncy electropoppers Casiokids release their new single “Kaskaden” next week. They’ve chosen to premier the video on theartsdesk. Directed by their long-term collaborator Blank Blank, the fantasia takes in Kung Fu films and the Hollywood of the Eighties, mixing them with a Norwegian flavour.The video for “Kaskaden”, a track from their recent Aabenbaringen over aaskammen album, is produced and directed for Casiokids by the Finnish/Colombian/Norwegian collective Blank Blank and choreographed by the Dutch contemporary dancer Marjolein Vogels. The band describe the video as a “ a film- Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The dazzling Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca delighted a packed Barbican last night – but part of the fun was seeing him negotiate the balance between more soulful, minimal playing and sheer technically brilliant extravagance. Is he more an heir to Chucho Valdez, the consummate sophisticated Havana Jazzer, or to Ruben Gonzalez, the more lyrical pianist of the Buena Vista Social Club, into whose shoes he had the tricky task of stepping for their live tours? The set lifted off with the driving beat of the self-penned “80s”, also the opening track of his new album Yo. It enabled the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
To dubstep or not to dubstep, that was the question perplexing the nearly 5000 metalheads jammed into the Brixton Academy to see Korn.The California four-piece made their name as purveyors of "nu metal" in the mid-Nineties (like old metal - but with funkier rhythms), and they’ve done extremely well, topping the album charts in the States and around the world. They have always reinforced their sound with funk and hip-hop stylings, but their latest album, The Path of Totality, their 10th, pushed unexpectedly far into the snarling world of dubstep (of the post-Skrillex variety).Throughout the Read more ...