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Kathryn Reilly
Thirty-three years ago, at Manchester's Festival of the Tenth Summer, I fumed that New Order had been given top billing over The Smiths, much to the mirth of a couple of reviewers of this very parish. History has proved me wrong, obviously. So, to Italy, and a modest-sized and relatively modern piazza (Napoleonic) in beguiling, ancient Lucca. To see two of Manchester’s most revered bands. This time I don’t have to choose sides.It couldn’t be further from Salford, Macclesfield and Bury in every sense. A balmy evening breeze rustles through the leaves and brings welcome relief from the day Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Thom Yorke is frontman of Radiohead, a festival-headlining rock band who sell out stadiums all over the globe. His artistic aspirations, however, right back to Radiohead’s Kid A album 19 years ago, often seem to lie elsewhere, in the world of glitching, otherworldly electronica. He’s had mixed success in this area but with last year’s soundtrack to Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria he finally nailed it. Anima proves that album was no fluke.This is Yorke’s third solo album (excluding the soundtrack), and where its predecessors attempted, sometimes awkwardly, to staple classic song Read more ...
Owen Richards
Better Oblivion Community Center may be a supergroup of sorts, but the name still draws less recognition that its members (Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes). Maybe it’s just too complicated to remember, because a packed Shepherd’s Bush Empire proved the band’s wide appeal – lairy lads and muso pensioners, side-by-side for a night of charm and angst.Oberst and Bridgers have very different voices, but her effortless tones melt through his fragile strains to form a sort of alchemy together. It worked surprisingly well on record, and perhaps more so live. There’s an honesty and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
To consider the third album from experimental composer Holly Herndon solely as a piece of music is to miss the point. PROTO is part artwork, part research project, on which Herndon teams up with collaborators both human and inhuman to discover whether artificial intelligence can be trained to produce art. The results aren’t always beautiful but that, perhaps, is what makes them human.As track listings go, PROTO’s is perhaps a little too on-the-nose. The 13-track album opens with “Birth”; a minute-long, alien-sounding composition whose jarring sounds and guttural, inhuman vocals seem to pass Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Will Gregory (b.1959) is best known as one half of the alt-pop duo Goldfrapp but has a long career in music that dips into many areas. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he was a working musician who toured with multiple bands, notably, Tears for Fears, as well as playing on sessions for albums by artists ranging from The Cure to Portishead. He is a multi-instrumentalist valued for his saxophone and woodwind playing (from Moondog and Michael Nyman to Peter Gabriel and it’s him on Spiritualized’s Lazer Guided Melodies), but as much for his general studio and arrangement abilities.Since 1999 Read more ...
Owen Richards
As collaborations go, it’s a doozy. Karen O’s signature vocals over Danger Mouse’s production – it was always going to pique interest. And Lux Prima does much to meet expectations, gorgeous cinematic soundscapes that flit between haunting and defiant. At its best, its damn near mesmerising. But for those expecting a genre-defying, structure-blowing new horizon, it falls just short.Of course, those parameters are wholly unfair to judge an album, but it was hard not expect something ground-breaking after the titular lead single “Lux Prima”. Clocking in over nine minutes, a synth groove Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Their music is a bit wizard-y. It’s certainly imbued with a pungent sense of mammoth weed. And the “bastard” is surely for the sheer, meaty rock’n’roll heft of the word (much as Motörhead used it to title an album). But don’t be fooled. Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard are not a passing indie-punk turn with a novelty name in the vein of, say, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin or Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head. Their new album carries serious weight. It’s heavy as osmium.Fans of this quartet from Wrexham, Wales, will observe that Yn Ol I Annwn (Return to the Underworld in Welsh) isn’t as heavy as their previous Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Let’s cut straight to the chase. Here are reviews of 48 records, running riot across genre boundaries and categorizations, from preposterous pop metal to woodland-themed classical piano pieces. It’s the wildest vinyl ride in review-land, an adventure for the ears. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHVula Viel Do Not Be Afraid (Vula Viel)To describe this record is not to do it justice: Vula Viel are a three-piece investigating the possibilities of the Ghanaian xylophone (the gyil), using it to explore minimalist Afro-jazz potential of the traditional music of Africa’s Dagaaba people. So far so dusty and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When Ladytron appeared in 1999, at a time when electronic music was glutted with pop-trance, Mitsubishis and superclubs, they drew instead directly on the post-punk synth-pop explosion of 20 years before, The Human League and the like. While all about revelled in warmth, hedonism and groove, Ladytron embraced the android: crisp in appearance, dry and enigmatic of lyric, symmetrically stylish. Coming back now from a five-year break, it’s their own music of 20 years before they may be defined against, a striking back catalogue they often match.When I first heard Ladytron all that time ago, I Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
If we think of Robert De Niro and Brian De Palma, we likely think of The Untouchables from 1987 with the great actor in his career pomp, chewing up the scenery in a memorable cameo as Al Capone. However, the pair had history. They made three films together in the 1960s – Greetings, The Wedding Party and Hi, Mom! – which are now gathered together in 2K restorations from the original negatives. The short of it is that two of them are now little more than historical curios for archivists, but the other is revelatory on a number of counts and well worth exploring.The Wedding Party began Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Few bands have grown up in real time in quite as interesting a way as Girlpool. It’s partly a question of timing: Harmony Tividad and Cleo Tucker were barely old enough to play bars around the release of their precocious 2013 debut EP, with its sing-song harmonies and cover like a child’s painting. And it’s partly a reflection of how their musical world has expanded with each release, each new album showing off a fuller sound yet still perfectly reflecting the internal and external chaos of figuring out your place in a confusing world as a young adult.This evolution has never been more Read more ...
Jo Southerd
In 2016, Sharon Van Etten took a hiatus from music, and threw herself into other projects. She got her first acting role in Netflix drama The OA and, inspired by the intense emotional connection her fans had found with her songs, began studying to become a mental health counsellor. She also found out that she was pregnant. Of course, before long, music found a way of creeping back in; her performance in David Lynch’s 2017 revival of Twin Peaks took her music back onstage, and the process of penning her first film score took Van Etten back to the studio. It was here, working on the score for Read more ...