indie
Owen Richards
Lamp Lit Prose is the ninth Dirty Projectors album since 2003, an incredibly prolific output for any artist. All the more impressive when you consider it’s the project of producer/songwriter David Longstreth, who also finds time to collaborate with artists such as Rihanna, Kanye, Paul McCartney and Solange. Such a notable CV befits an act as innovative as Dirty Projectors, and their latest release further demonstrates the talent on show.“Change is the only constant law” sings Longstreth, an appropriate lyric as Lamp Lit Prose is a journey of shifting influences. Tracks range from folk and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Earlier this year, in May, Brighton hosted the Vinyl World Congress where Paul Pacifico, head of the Association of Independent Music, told the assembled that, “People pay for vinyl not because they have to but because they want to - they want a physical representation of their emotional connection with an artist." There was a general agreement that vinyl collectors and fans account for the majority of sales, but also that things are still stable and/or rising. Here at theartsdesk on Vinyl, we cover collectible artists of yesteryear (below are boxsets by Buffalo Springfield, Brian Eno, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
How great is Uniform Distortion? As great as Greg Sage’s Straight Ahead or Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s Ragged Glory or Dungen’s Ta det lugnt or Alex Chilton’s Like Flies On Sherbert. That’s how great Uniform Distortion is.Uniform Distortion is the fourth solo by Jim James, mainstay of My Morning Jacket and in-demand producer and collaborator. He’s helmed albums by Basia Bulat and Dean Wareham and, most recently, contributed to Laura Veirs’ The Lookout. His last solo album, Tribute To 2, was a covers set where he tackled songs by such unlikely bedfellows as Al Bowlly, Dylan and ELP. Tribute Read more ...
joe.muggs
For a decade now, Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson – Lykke Li – has been a poster girl for the Scandinavian, and particularly Swedish, ability to find the highest common factors between high gloss pop and introspective indie/alternative music, and to make it into something that hides emotional heft behind glossy surfaces and impeccable poise (see also Little Dragon, Alphabeat, Miike Snow...) Her fourth album, however, might well lose some of the fans who leaned towards the indie elements of her music. In probably the biggest single creative shift of her career, huge swathes of Slowdive, Beach Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Mark Hodkinson is a Rochdale writer, journalist, songwriter and musician who’s also behind underground label/publishing house Pomona. Black Sedan is the latest product of his febrile mind, a band collective that’s been slowly coming together over the last couple of years. Their debut album sprawls about a number of styles but retains a likeable cohesiveness, wallowing in a loose, strummed stew that’s lightly psychedelic with plenty of sonic trimmings.It begins with “Love on Love”, a delicious, widescreen piece based around Charlie Chaplin’s fantastic speech at the end of The Great Dictator, Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
In just five years, what the team behind Hidden Door Festival has achieved is quite remarkable. Having sprung up in 2014, taking over a group of disused vaults behind Waverley train station, the festival’s mission to transform redundant spaces in Edinburgh has left an immovable, and much needed, creative footprint on the city. In 2017 this not-for-profit festival, which is run entirely by volunteers, re-opened the Leith Theatre, a stunning venue which had lain in disuse for almost three decades.Having breathed new life into this incredible space, which is now gradually becoming used more and Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Although once famous for her Australian drawl and hazy jams, on her most recent album Tell Me How You Really Feel, Courtney Barnett has transformed herself into an all-singing indie star, resulting in something more assured, vulnerable, and intense than her previous work. Touring the UK with her band of Bones Sloan, Dave Mudie and Katie Harkin, her 19-song set in Albert Hall in Manchester is faultless.Barnett starts by playing Tell Me How You Really Feel in its entirety. The reflective songs sound hefty and visceral live. The delicate “Need A Little Time Out” rests on chugging guitars and Read more ...
Jo Southerd
Lindsey Jordan was 16 when she released her first EP as Snail Mail on her local punk label Sister Polygon Records. Two years later, she has graduated from high school and signed to Matador Records, home of Stephen Malkmus, Kurt Vile and Helium. Lush is Jordan’s debut full-length album, which she describes as being “more deliberate” than her previous work.The record starts as it means to go on: unapologetically sad. This is a break-up album, and the painful confusion of young love rings through with every chord. A melancholic intro paves the way for “Pristine”, the first of many great pop Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s four albums all centre around off-kilter pop and flirtations with distortion; their latest LP, Sex & Food, carries this tradition forwards in a more laid-back manner. Their current European tour in support of the album seems to have lined up nicely with the schedules of American acts Deerhunter, Black Lips and Sam Evian (as well as much-hyped British act Boy Azooga), with all five artists descending on the Albert Hall in Manchester for the six-hour Strange Waves III.Between the criminally early start time of 5pm and Transport for Manchester’s bus timetabling Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Before starting this review a decision was taken: that the over-used description of singer-songwriter Malcolm Middleton as a “Scottish miserablist” would not appear. However, this has proved impossible. Middleton is renowned, to the coterie who enjoy his music, for songs ripe with dejection but the first half of his set tonight is especially heavy with stark soul-searching. From the opening number, “Gut Feeling”, which contains the line, “I’ve got rows of wankers in my head shouting my gut feeling down”, to a song called “Love is a Momentary Lapse in Self-Loathing”, he assays a stark, poetic Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Few bands divide opinion quite like Snow Patrol. Their fans see their slow, intense anthems as cathartic friends. Others - myself included - tend to regard their music as an insidious, dreary presence. As Nicky Wire (of the Manics) once put it, "the same drab little thing, over and over". Wildness, their first album in seven years, is being billed as being something completely different - more passionate, and with a lighter touch.Apparently, the shift in musical direction is down to various changes in the band members' lives. Singer Gary Lightbody has given up drinking. He's also been Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Loner’s opening track “More of the Same” lyrically tracks being at a party where “everyone’s well dressed with a perfect body and they all have alternative haircuts and straight white teeth.” It triggers a flashback to schooldays when it was, indeed, the same thing. “Cry!” looks a life in the limelight, “Money” is about doing everything for money and “Bikini” is about becoming a celebrity. The price of entry? Putting on a bikini and dancing.Caroline Rose’s third album is a smart, sardonic 11-track romp through how she sees aspects of the modern condition. A sadness-tinged cynicism is Read more ...