indie
Kieron Tyler
When Crazy Rhythms, the ever-fabulous first album by New Jersey’s Feelies was issued in April 1980 it seemed to have little local context. Although the band’s fidgetiness suggested a kinship with Talking Heads and there were a clear nods to The Velvet Underground, it felt more of a piece with contemporary British post-punk bands Josef K and The Monochrome Set than anything American. Fittingly, Eno's first two solo offerings also fed into the album.And after this landmark album? Nothing until the release of its belated and welcome follow-up The Good Earth in 1986. The line-up had changed Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Arctic Monkeys are the great British guitar band of the 21st century so far. Only now they’re not. For the last couple of albums, Sheffield’s ever-smart rock four-piece have pushed their innate indie guitar sound further and further into 21st pop territory. This time, centred on lead singer Alex Turner’s piano, Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino leaps off somewhere else entirely, dipped in Rat Pack cool and sun-blissed retro easy-listening.Turner’s lyrics remain as poetic as ever, but he’s become more conceptually abstract, positing rather than commenting. He lives in LA now and the lovely, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As it was with his last album Golden Sings That Have Been Sung, it’s impossible to listen to Ryley Walker without comparisons to John Martyn and Tim Buckley – the jazz-infused, non-linear Buckley of Lorca – springing to mind. But this time round, for his fifth album, Walker appears to have also been sponging up the free-flowing ethos of David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name and the lithe Arthur Lee of Four Sail. Additionally, there’s the spiralling instrumental current of fellow Chicago dwellers Tortoise and dashes of math rock.On his label’s website, Walker says the only music he Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Pinkshinyultrablast might be a long way from their hometown of St Petersburg, but in recent years they’ve built themselves up in England as one of the more bizarre and original bands in today’s psych/shoegaze revival, and on the day their third album Miserable Miracles is released, they hit the north for a night of fuzz and electronic trickery.Support comes from Warm Digits, whose propulsive set has the room hooked from the off. Mostly playing tracks from their 2017 LP Wireless World, drummer Andrew Hodson and guitarist Steve Jefferies don’t let the groove drop, with their songs forming, Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
It’s been nearly 30 years since Gaz Coombes’s former band Supergrass released their first brash single “Caught by the Fuzz”, and he hasn’t stopped making great indie music since. His second solo album Matador received a Mercury Prize nomination in 2015, setting the bar high for World’s Strongest Man but, with its emotional complexity, melodic grace, and classically Coombes-ian soundscapes, it easily surpasses these expectations. As always, Coombes manages to cover a lot of ground across the album. “Shit (I’ve Done It Again)” calls to mind Radiohead’s more tragic, dramatic side, whilst “ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
David Shrigley (b. 1968) is an artist whose work has become broadly popular via a wide range of formats. At first glance, his stark pen-on-paper drawings seem akin to humorous newspaper cartoons – and, indeed, he’s contributed to The Guardian for years – but there's another layer to his work, something odder, slyer, psychologically attuned to the relationship between the subconscious and the ruthlessness of the human condition.As well as a long series of books and multiple exhibitions all around the world, including forthcoming ones this year in Shanghai, Stockholm and on the Greek island of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In terms of chart statistics, Julian Cope’s period with Island Records looks pretty good. He issued four albums with the label and all of them charted. Saint Julian (issued in March 1987) peaked at 11, My Nation Underground (October 1988) stalled at 42 but Peggy Suicide (March 1991) and Jehovakill (October 1992) climbed to 23 and 20 respectively. Not bad.Yet Jehovakill became his last album for Island and, in 1994, he signed with the Chrysalis Records subsidiary Echo for whom Autogeddon climbed to a 16 position. The chart statistics tell part of the story.With Island, the release schedule was Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Maen, a member of the rap collective Sa’aleek, was working one night in their small makeshift studio in the Qalandia refugee camp near Ramallah. He dozed off, only to find the studio door had been concreted over and he was trapped. It took fellow band members 36 hours to dig him out, but Maen didn't seem that worse for wear. As studio disaster anecdotes go, that takes some beating... Palestinian musicians tell you of many difficulties, not just anarchic building in the camps, notably that there are at least eight different travel documents, allowing different rights of movement. One Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Blossoms are the latest inheritors of the massive-in-Manchester mantle that has, so often in the past, translated into massive-almost-everywhere ubiquity. That their eponymous 2016 debut album was a chart-topper shows they’re on the way, although they’ve not yet mustered a single that’s thrown them to the next level. The surprise when they first appeared was that, although they look indie and have fans such as Ian Brown of The Stone Roses, their sound was a blend of polished yacht-rock and electro-pop, more The Killers than New Order. With Cool Like You, the rock aspect is almost gone. This Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Record Store Day 2018 – Saturday April 21 – is upon us. It should really be Record Shop Day 2018 as this is the UK but let’s not quibble. Instead, put aside cynicism about major labels cashing in, wander down to the nearest record shop – and, happily, new record shops are starting to pop up a lot lately – then rifle through the racks. Below are the releases that reached theartsdesk on Vinyl, quite a few of them rare as hens’ teeth. Dig in, see what takes your fancy, then go out and find them, out there on the high streets and back streets...theartsdesk on Vinyl's FAVOURITE RELEASE FOR RECORD Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s a crisis in popular musical vocals. They’ve reached a very naff stasis. After a decade-and-a-half of Cowell hegemony and stars that have risen during the same period, a generation thinks there are only two ways to express emotion. One is melismatic singing (for women – wandering wildly about the higher registers on every syllable, a la Mariah Carey/Whitney Houston), the other is voice-breaking (for men - cracking into a vulnerable falsetto a la Jeff Buckley/Coldplay). It’s all very boring. There are so, so many other ways to express emotion. Just ask Louis Armstrong, Ian Dury, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Stones do it. U2 too. It takes immense and lordly clout for a touring band to breeze into town and each night summon a major recording artist to step onstage for some party fun. For Arcade Fire’s first night at Wembley Arena it was Chrissie Hynde. For the second, Jarvis Cocker lolloped up in a cream twin-breast linen suit to deliver that radio-friendly anthem, “Cunts Are Still Running the World”. Plus ça change, as they say in Montreal.From “Everything Now” to “Wake Up”, this was a sensational spectacle. Arcade Fire have taken the concept of performing in the round and, with the aid of an Read more ...