Tel Aviv producer Nadav Spiegel hadn't set out to make a full-length follow-up to last year's Can You Pass the Knife? mini-LP, but once he had a backbone of songs, events sort of got away from him. I Love You, Go Away is the result and its nine songs, spread over nearly 40 minutes, appear, in one way or another, to deal with loss – of love, identity and self.The title of opener “New Heimat”, referencing the German word for the feeling of belonging to a place, suggests a new beginning of sorts. While the lines “Home is where the hatred is” and “No more fighting for the state/No more bleeding Read more ...

Every Valley is Public Service Broadcasting’s second studio album since 2013’s Inform - Educate - Entertain, and like its predecessors, it’s a nostalgic trip to the not-too-recent past with an electronica-heavy backing and a bag full of samples culled from the spoken word library of the British Film Institute. While J Willgoose Esq and Wrigglesworth may have been inspired by steam-powered railways and the space race on previous discs, Every Valley sees the London duo take on the death of the coal industry in South Wales and its social impact as their source material. If this terminology Read more ...

Those coming to Lifetime of Love expecting something – anything – approaching Moses Archuleta’s day job in Deerhunter will find those expectations confounded. With his Moon Diagrams solo project, Archuleta has presented us with a sonic sketchbook of ideas that range from ambient, hymnlike refrains to hypnotic house grooves and epic experimentalism.Where Lifetime of Love does share ground with Deerhunter is in its deeply personal feel and its genesis in personal strife. Written over a 10-year period that saw the breakdown of Archuleta’s marriage and a self-imposed exile from friends and family Read more ...

Alison Moyet is one of Britain's best-loved singer-songwriters. Known for her deep, soulful voice and down-to-earth personality she has managed to combine commercial sensibility with artistic integrity for over 30 years. Today, 16 June, she releases her ninth solo album Other, recorded with long-time collaborator Guy Sigsworth.Geneviève Alison Jane Moyet was born in Billericay, Essex to a French father and English mother. Her teenage years were spent playing in various punk and garage bands. In 1982 she formed the seminal new wave band Yazoo with former Depeche Mode keyboard player Vince Read more ...

Formed in 1958 by Desmond Briscoe and Daphne Oram, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop pioneered groundbreaking innovation in music making, using anything and everything to create new textures and tones to satisfy eager TV producers looking for otherwordly sounds to lead audiences through their programmes. Although it shut its doors in 1998, the work done there has proved an enormous influence on generations of electronic musicians, from The Human League to Hot Chip, Portishead to Pye Corner Audio, all of whom cite the Workshop as a major inspiration.After getting together for a series of gigs under Read more ...

Clifford Price – Goldie – has long cut an imposing, and complicated, figure in the music industry. Part larger-than-life entertainer, part monster (as satirised in music industry grotesque Kill Your Friends), part irrepressible raver, part grandiose conceptualist. But there's another side to him too: the massive, Pat Metheny-idolising, jazz smoothie.His breakthrough 1994 track “Inner City Life” was partly high-tech drum'n'bass ferocity, but it was completely merged with jazz-soul sophistication and of course the soaring voice of the sadly recently-deceased Dianne Charlegmane (who would work Read more ...

Some say Alt-J represent a paradox, blending, as they do, consummate artsiness with some absurdly catchy tunes. It's precisely this combination of ambition and accessibility that's helped them become one of Britain's most universally acclaimed bands. Everyone, it seems, has a soft spot for them, except, possibly, hipster journalists who feel they've sold out. Relaxer is a slightly different proposition. It's more ambitious than ever, and in places sublimely pretty, just not as immediate.The songs naturally divide into two groups. Firstly, there are a handful that still evoke the spirit Read more ...

Helmut Geir has been around the block multiple times but, like an electro-sonic Batman, always pops up just when he’s needed. Never much moved by fads, the Bavarian DJ-producer has always kept a foot in pre-house music styles, notably punk, Eighties synth-pop and Seventies electronica. His new album, only his fifth in a 25 year recording career, is, without doubt, his meisterwerk. Titled after the German for “Music of the Future”, a Wagnerian term, it’s actually retro-futurist in tone, yet so startlingly original and ambitious it posits directions for not only electronic music, but pop, rock Read more ...

While the 36 records reviewed below run the gamut of Wreckless Eric to Democratic Republic of the Congo Afro-electronica, this month there’s also a special, one-off section for modern classical. This is due to an ear-pleasing haul of releases reaching theartsdesk on Vinyl lately. Modern classical, often computer-treated, is on the rise, recalling the long ago days when tweedy collectors would have chests of classical to dig into on Sunday afternoons, place on weighty old stereos, and sit quietly, eyes closed, contemplating the eternal verities (well, I knew one older gent who did that, back Read more ...

Has Glasgow’s Tectonics weekend turned away from its wilder excess? Has it, in its fifth outing, even – well, grown up and got serious? That was partly the sense from the opening day of conductor Ilan Volkov’s visionary mix of contemporary classical, rock, folk, jazz, electronica, and all the uncategorisable hinterlands in between them, a concept that he kicked off in Reykjavík and which he’s now delivered all over the globe. In Glasgow’s previous offerings, we’ve had works directed from a kids’ sandpit, foley artists making music from scrunching packets of dried pasta and flicking through Read more ...

Flawlessly uniting atmosphere and melody is challenging. Especially so when creating music is approached unconventionally and with the desire to be individual. Having set her bar high, Juana Molina triumphs on all counts, again proving herself as a virtuoso artist who executes her vision with enviable assurance.Halo is the Argentinian musical witch’s – the press release describes her as a “good witch”, which, considering her unearthliness, seems fair – seventh album, the follow-up to 2013’s WED 21. Molina edited, produced, programmed, recorded and played almost everything. Yet it does not Read more ...

Kasabian are more musically exciting than a multitude of bands taste-making hipsters thrust our way, yet they’re universally derided by those sorts. The reason is their blokeyness. And it’s true, even the light, lovely, strummed ballad “Wasted” from their new, sixth album has (quiet) terrace-chant backing vocals. And anything singer Tom Meighan touches musters a certain Liam Gallagher belligerence. That, however, isn’t a good enough reason to dismiss them. For Crying Out Loud is full of tasty bits.For those familiar with Kasabian’s back catalogue, the album’s flavour is midway between 2006’s Read more ...