New music
Russ Coffey
“Tonight there’s no one else in the world – just us together,” announced Josh Homme halfway through the night. And it felt so. But it didn't seem like we were in the Roundhouse. More like we were sitting amid the heat haze of California’s Palm Desert, on a two-hour psychedelic trip, and the Queens of the Stone Age front man was our personal shaman. Sometimes it was euphoric, and other times it was dizzying. And when the volume was cranked really high it was like the top of the Roundhouse might blow off.This world tour is supporting the reissue of the band’s eponymous debut recording. As such Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore has never been constrained by being in one of the planet’s coolest and always-interesting bands. Since the late Eighties he’s released a string of collaborations and solo releases that are mainly experimental, atonal or outré – he still issues material solely on cassette. Enthusiasms define who he is and as a card-carrying record collector he’s never been shy of declaring his favourites. Holding a torch for improvisers like Derek Bailey, he’s also a supporter of outer-edge folk artists like Ed Askew. His new, Beck-produced solo album is the culmination – so far - Read more ...
david.cheal
They’re a fun band with some cracking tunes and they provided a vibrant night’s music last night at the Roundhouse, but where on earth did the idea come from that Noah and the Whale are a folk band? On this evidence, they’re about as folkie as Motörhead. Granted, they have a violinist in their line-up, but this is really no signifier of folkiness. In fact, the musician who sprang to mind most frequently during this pacy, compact show was Bruce Springsteen, especially on the material from the band’s recent Last Night on Earth album, with its heroic chord changes, its loose scansion and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It took until the fourth song of their set for Suuns to take off. Lurching into “PVC”, the Montréal quartet gelled. Monolithic drums, pounding, relentless bass guitar and slabs of sheet-metal guitar rolled off the stage. Harnessing the power of heavy metal, they’d achieved escape velocity. More powerful than on album, the unassuming-looking Suuns made a compelling case for their stripped-down, post-Krautrock rock.Before that, the stage belonged to Gyratory System, the vehicle of Andrew Blick. Recent instrumental album New Harmony was a hypnotic marriage of bloopy early acid house and motorik Read more ...
david.cheal
What is it with synthesisers and sadness? There’s something inherently melancholic about this instrument, a quality that’s been accentuated by its use in the soundtracks to dystopian movies such as Blade Runner. Moby is a man who has exploited this quality to the full during his 20-year recording career, and he does so more than ever on this, his 10th album: Destroyed is really sad. Not bleak, or dark, or bitter; just really sad.Written in hotel rooms in the course of a world tour, it reflects the rootless, shifting and lonely existence of a man who finds himself in a string of strange Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Moby (b 1965) has been a presence on the dance scene and in global clubland for two decades. He is best known for the multimillion-selling 1999 album Play which, among other things, combined lush electronic orchestration with old field recordings of a cappella blues shouters. Moby's musical career, however, began at least a decade earlier.Born Richard Hall, he was raised in Connecticut, and moved to New York in his late teens. He played with punk band Vatican Commandos and gained the name Moby due to his very distant ancestral relationship with Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick. The single Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As well as a new album, Destroyed, Moby is putting out a book of photographic prints under the same title. The idea of the book is to capture the essence of being on a global tour, from the mundanity of waiting in airports to the majesty of landscapes and cities, from the explosive excitement of stadium-sized crowds to the solitude of hotel rooms at night. The images will also be on display in the Proud Gallery in Camden Town, north London. theartsdesk showcases a selection below.
Read theartsdesk's Q&A with Moby
Moby, Destroyed at the Proud Camden, London NW1 from 18 May to 19 Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The video for W’s opening cut “Doorway” is unforgettable. Janine Rostron – who is Planningtorock – is seen face on. The music is tense, yet sepulchral. The voice is treated, neither male nor female. With her prosthetic nose, she looks alien but not cutely so. It’s disturbing, a bad-dream version of what Cindy Sherman might film to soundtrack the song.Rostron isn’t from another planet. She was born in Bolton and now lives in Berlin. W is her second album. She plays all the instruments. She produced W. One track is called “Janine”, another is titled “9”, from the “nine” in her first name. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I've spent the last week feasting on John Martyn via Spotify. He was a gap in my musical education. He turns out, as a large portion of you reading already well know, to be a rich, raw talent. I knew his rep but had a misguided notion he was another blueprint for whiny contemporary singer-songwriters. All that reveals is my own ignorance.There's a fair chunk of miscalculated stodge in his back catalogue but the best of it combines Britain's folk heritage with all manner of jazz, blues, funk and roiled emotion and is something that will require a great deal more investigation on my part. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Private music patrons aim to raise £2 million to fund 400 scholarships for London children with a talent for music. The aim is to give steady four-year support for disadvantaged children to have Saturday lessons, individual coaching and group tuition to learn a musical instrument. Alongside the scholarships, there is to be a "partnership" scheme whereby professional musicians go into schools to work on music with up to 10,000 schoolchildren.The 400 scholarships and the partnership scheme will be funded by a new music charity, The Mayor of London’s Fund for Young Musicians, set a fundraising Read more ...
joe.muggs
The last time I saw Atari Teenage Riot play was in a gig venue above a pub some time around 1999 and it was one of the most intense gigs I've ever experienced. Then-member Carl Crack – who would take his own life not long after – was clearly a man on the edge, and the entire group were acting wired, scared and weird. They made the most stupendous racket, and the well-over-capacity audience reacted by leaping about so violently that the building needed structural repairs afterwards. To be part of that seething crowd required commitment, passion and complete obliteration of ego – it was easy to Read more ...
david.cheal
“Hi, I’m Sufjan Stevens,” said Sufjan Stevens as his show, the first of two nights at the Festival Hall, got under way. “I’m your entertainment for the evening. I’ll be singing a lot of songs about love and death and the apocalypse. But it should be a lot of fun." This was quite an understatement. Fun? It was one of the best nights of music I’ve ever witnessed, a torrent of captivating songs and visuals from the Michigan oddball who combines a prodigious musical talent with a deliriously unfettered imagination.Take the mad frenzy of a Flaming Lipsgig, the whole mothership shtick of George Read more ...