electronica
Barney Harsent
Before we get to the music, there’s the title of Clinic’s first album in seven years to deal with. It comes from the title of a 1970s Granada TV series, The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, a northern entertainment revue presented by, among others, Bernard Manning. The surviving episodes of the show, with the blue dialed down for a wider audience, offer a veneered view of working men’s clubs that gently steers anything too unsavoury into the wings. As a symbol of Britain’s relationship with its past, it’s damn near perfect. Musically, the post-punk troupe’s return has a Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Editors’ last album, the electronic-infused Violence, was hailed as a big departure for the indie rock band on its release a little over a year ago. It wasn’t really, it was simply the latest stage of a transformation that can be traced back to guitarist Chris Urbanowicz’s 2012 departure, and first came to light on 2015’s In Dream. For their 2018 release, the band handed over complete control of the production process to Blanck Mass, otherwise known as Ben Power of electronic drone duo Fuck Buttons. It was a fairly ballsy move by the band to offer their songs as a Blanck canvas – Read more ...
Joe Muggs
On his second album, Swedish star DJ Kornél Kovács has achieved the impossible and made “tropical house” interesting. Somehow, he's taken every cliché of that slow, lilting pop dance sound Drake and lifestyle influencers Instagramming from pristine beaches and tweaked them to find unexpected strangeness and depths. All the tinkling marimbas, autotuned crooning (from pop duo Rebecca & Fiona), loping Latin/dancehall rhythms and pristine cleanliness you'll know from a million radio hits are here, but there's also an insidiously hallucinatory approach to the fine detail.Tiny little bleeps and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“I don’t know if I’m going to recognise any of it,” I say to my accomplice as we drain a couple of light ales amid the sea of grey beards in The Old Market’s bar. “I don’t think they’ll play the hits,” he replies, deadpan, “but don’t worry, there should be some onstage banter that’ll give you a couple of the titles.”“The hits” he refers to are composer Terry Riley’s seminal works, such as the totemic minimalist masterpiece In C and the 1969 electronica milestone A Rainbow in Curved Air. He’s right; they do not turn up. Alas, he’s not so right about the banter which is limited to a couple of Read more ...
Owen Richards
“Our attendees are a select group, but we have a connection,” remarked Damon Albarn at the end of The Good, the Bad & the Queen’s set. He’s not wrong – much of the band had outgrown Cardiff’s Great Hall 25 years ago, but it proved the perfect venue for this musical love-in.It was a show of two halves, quite literally. The first dedicated to the band’s recent album Merrie Land, and the second to their eponymous debut (which unbelievably is 12 years old). It’s clear why: both are concept albums with their own sound and themes. This time we’ve moved out to the seaside, emphasised by the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Every month we start theartsdesk on Vinyl with the Vinyl of the Month, however, the truth is that, depending on your taste, many of the records reviewed below may be your own vinyl of the month. Whether reissues or new material or compilations, theartsdesk on Vinyl attends to all music on plastic. This time we run the gamut from country’n’western to Eighties pop to acid techno to Ozric Tentacles and much else. All sonic life is here. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHYves Jarvis The Same But By Different Means (Anti-)Montreal artist singer Jean-Sebastian Audet recorded three albums as Un Blonde but Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Billie Eilish is a vaudevillian. Crack that and everything else falls into place. Her impossible precociousness (at 17, she's a superstar and has been in the public eye for four years) and voraciousness (her and her brother Finneas's writing swerves from torch songs to trap beats, far-out electronica to glam-goth) should by all rights be an annoying mess, but absorb this album like a hallucinatory gothic cabaret show and it all makes sense. The gender ambiguities and gallows humour make sense. Even the manic pixie dream girl filtered via Resident Evil persona makes sense. Dammit, even the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Writing in 1980, the musician and musical theorist Chris Cutler said that “without the support and patronage of the culture-establishment, The Residents were able to exist, continue to exist, grow, find their public, hold that public – and expand it – until the pop establishment was forced to take notice.” He contended that as they were neither musicians or part of music sub-culture they “exemplified a new type [of development], specialising in nothing, turning their hands to anything: a type whose aims were no longer conceived in terms of music, theatre, film, writing or the visual arts, but 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
It is hard to absorb the news that Keith Flint of The Prodigy has been found dead at his home in Essex. Keith Flint! The guy with the double Mohican and panda eye-liner who terrified Middle America in the video for “Firestarter”. He was ever an integral part of The Prodigy’s unstoppable live electronic dance assault and, while it’s too early to ponder such things, it’s difficult to imagine them without him.Prior to global fame that found the band circa 1997, The Prodigy had been a breakout rave act, hitting the UK charts with hits such as “Charly”, “Voodoo People”, “Out of Space” and “No Good Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Massive Attack have travelled a long way from the Dugout, the Bristol bar where the collective first tried their hand at spinning discs for a crowd whose cultural mix reflected the constant ferment of one of Britain’s most vibrant cities. The city welcomed them back, warmly as it will always do, at the Steel Yard, a vast purpose-built performance space in Filton, home of the Rolls Royce works that make jet engines for Boeing, still vibrant with the ghosts of the engineers and fitters that helped create Concorde, that symbol of European cooperation and future progress.Massive Attack’s set, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Twenty years on from No Angel, the most successful debut ever by a British woman which went on to become the top-selling album, worldwide, of 2001, Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O'Malley Armstrong releases her fifth album. Spare output by most standards, though she has contributed songs (Britney Spears, Rihanna) and backing vocals elsewhere in the interim.Dido has described Still On My Mind as “accidental” because she never plans anything, and the experience of its creation “magical”, perhaps because it was all so unexpected. It’s an album intended to capture “the rush” she herself gets Read more ...