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Thomas H. Green
American singer-songwriter Damien Jurado is both prolific and enigmatic. His latest album follows too many to count (OK, not really, I think this is his 20th). On his own label, it's as opaque as anything he’s done, and that’s saying something.There are 12 songs, at least half of them around the two-minute mark, all opaque and mysterious, but also often fascinating. “What is he singing about?” the listener asks themselves, a sense of what’s going on elusive but also, tantalisingly, almost within reach.A concept album, then? Kind of. There’s a very loose thematic of films sets. Possibly. Or Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Figuratively, “Tselane” is Blk Jks’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Both songs begin quietly and move through passages of turbulence suggesting an impending tempest. Each has a command of dynamics which pulls the listener in, generating anticipation for what comes next. On stage, “Tselane” is introduced as a “lullaby.”Musically – beyond them being a form of rock – little obviously connects “Tselane” and Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” but the association is there: it’s about the contrasts, the subtle union of drama and tranquillity.“Tselane” was first heard as the closing track of Blk Jks – said Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Summer has arrived outside and sunny sounds are blasting from the speakers at theartsdesk on Vinyl. But not just sunny sounds, to be truthful, also sounds that cover most of the human emotional range, all from plastic discs in varying colours. Check in below for over 8000 words on music, from Afro-electro to Cornish rock to tango to genres beyond naming. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHShelf Lives Yes, Offence (Sorry Mom)Juddering, sweary, punkin’, sneering electro-rock is the game of London-based duo Shelf Lives, fronted by single-monikered Canadian frontwoman Sabrina and Brit producer-guitarist Read more ...
Tom Carr
For the Oxford alt-rock mainstays Foals, the past two years brought an anti-climactic pause to a triumphant 2019: their meteoric trajectory had kept pace with their duo of albums, Everything Not Saved Will be Lost Part 1 and 2. The sister albums had given the group their first UK album #1 with Part 2, and their live reputation was glowing brighter still.And then it all stopped.Now, as the bleak lockdown years silhouette their new album Life Is Yours, it’s no surprise they return with a sound steeped in summertime vibes. Moving away from the cinematically framed Part 1 and Part 2, Life Is Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In these meta times when everything – EVERYTHING! – is ironic, a smirk to be replayed forever on a screen, the last thing we expect is a hippy, a proper real-life hippy, preaching oneness and love. Even yoga sorts these days mostly go on about their own “wellness”, rather than the cosmic inference of it all. Nick Mulvey’s previous albums were lightly marinaded in Baba Ram Dass and ayahuasca revelation but, with his third solo album, New Mythology, he’s gone full mystic.After creating some of the most gorgeous, original singer-songwriter music of the last decade he doesn’t let empyrean Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title The Great Awakening is a metaphor for America’s switch from its previous presidential administration to the current: the arrival of a new era and, with it, a fresh phase of life. Emblematic of this is the xenarthran, a type of armadillo, which lends its name to the album’s third track. Native to South America, it slogs its way into Texas where it deals with a new environment.While Texas outfit Shearwater’s seventh album, the follow-up to 2016’s Jet Plane and Oxbow (there are other, less formal, releases) is chock-full of allusions, the band’s driver Jonathan Meiburg has chosen a Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
As Bloc Party singer Kele Okereke noted at one point in this gig, his band have now been visiting Glasgow for nearly two decades. Yet few of the shows played in that 18 year span, which have touched upon nearly all of the city’s main music venues, have been as contrasting as this one. By the night’s end, when the band blasted out a rare outing of their very early single “Little Thoughts”, the audience were a jubilant and sweaty throng, but it was hard work getting there.Okereke noticed it as well. Clad in a bright multi coloured shirt that possessed more vibrancy than the early part of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Side Two of A Child’s Chant for a New Millennium opens with “Wrenbird,” a consideration of whether it’s possible to have a bird’s freedom of mobility. “Anywhere but here,” sings Wren Hinds. He may not be happy where he is, but the accompanying soundtrack is enough to make anyone stick around.During its four-and-a-half minutes, “Wrenbird” shifts from an acoustic guitar-accompanied reverie to incorporate strings, brushed drums and flute-like keyboard lines. By the mid-point, it’s epic – albeit in a restrained way. When wordless vocals appear towards the end, there’s a hint Hinds may have taken Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Crispy Moon is a musical kaleidoscope encompassing free-jazz skronk, Japanese folk melodies, Krautrock insistence, echoes of Recurring-era Spacemen 3, South African percussion styles and space rock. One is overlain onto another, or there are sections where one approach dominates before diving into another.The album opens with the gentle “Makkuroi Mizu (まっくろい水)” where a reggae lope gradually gives way to a more linear rhythm. Next, “Dividual Individual” – with the album's only English-language lyrics: declaring “you are free to go” – brings more on board: bubbling sounds, spacey synth and what Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
While Britpop was a retrogressive media construct, Oasis were a genuine socio-musical phenomenon (albeit also retrogressive!). And at their heart was, of course, Liam Gallagher, bullishly Manc, sneeringly rude and pugnaciously charismatic, a proper rock star, perhaps the last before the oncoming generation of coffee-drinking, fleece-wearing nice-boys-next-door.He’s mellowed with age; the 2019 documentary As It Was revealed a more self-aware, likeable fellow, yet retaining just enough truculent edge. It’s a shame that more the latter is not present on his third solo studio album.Gallagher told Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Toronto’s Tallies have acknowledged their fondness for Aztec Camera, The Smiths and The Sundays. Add Cocteau Twins into the building blocks, too. Encountering a band so strongly immersed in the back catalogues of familiar names can obscure what’s really notable about them. Do they transcend their influences?Seeing them live on the final date of a short UK tour – booked before the July release of their second album Patina – meets the question head on. Yes, a Smiths “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” guitar swirl fuses with a Cocteau’s shimmer. And The Sundays are never far.But whatever there is Read more ...
Tom Carr
Since their 2010 debut, Man Alive, Everything Everything have dissected the various structures of human relationships, from socio-political to interpersonal, but all in their own experimental art-rock sound.As a result, their recent albums took on an uncanny relevance: 2017’s A Fever Dream was inflected by the uncertainty of Brexit and Trumpian rhetoric, while 2020’s Re-Animator was heavily poignant amidst the isolating pandemic owing to its deep, personal introspection and drawing from Julian Haynes’ theory of the bicameral mind. Now on Raw Data Feel they cast a curious glance over our Read more ...