New music
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, O2 Academy, Glasgow review - revisiting the past produces mixed results
Jonathan Geddes
Towards the end of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's run-through of their old album Howl, bassist Robert Levon Been told the crowd the "pain was nearly over". By BRMC standards that's a wisecrack, referencing the gloomy, pared-back tone of that 2005 release, but some of the Glasgow audience seemed to have experienced it for real, having headed for either the bar or exits as the set progressed.That is partly on them, given the show was clearly advertised in advance as a 20th anniversary revisitation of Howl. However, it is unquestionably an album that was an odd pick to play in full, lacking many Read more ...
joe.muggs
One of this year’s best music books, Songs in the Key of MP3 by Liam Inscoe-Jones, paints a picture of musicians of the “streaming era” having a different relationship to the past, compared to those of… well, the past. He shows how artists like Dev “Blood Orange” Hynes have adapted to mass availability of culture by indulging not in nostalgia for something vague, but using the endless micro detail at their fingertips for reconstructing, picking up unfinished business, creating “alternative presents” from which new lineages might branch off.So it is with a lot of this year’s best records. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Heard now, 50 years after its release, Tangerine Dream’s Rubycon sounds like what it became: part of the musical template for Jean-Michel Jarre’s 1976 international breakthrough and also as an integral component of the records The Orb began attracting attention with in the early Nineties. Beyond the aesthetic ripples, a specific aspect of the May 1975 album was and is also significant.Rubycon was one of the first albums by a rock – in its loosest meaning – band to seamlessly incorporate the use of a sequencer. Those with the budget for the gear and the attendant technical know-how could Read more ...
Guy Oddy
In all honestly, 2025 has not been a vintage year for new recorded music and there certainly seems to have been a significant paucity of high-profile album releases that are likely to be viewed as stone-cold classics in years to come. Nevertheless, there has been gold for those prepared to look hard enough.Swiss electro-rock veterans, the Young Gods unleashed a techno-metal monster, Appear Disappear, that dug deep into an intoxicating malevolence with their muscular, sample-heavy electronics and live percussion. Soulwax brought us the gritty electro-pop flavoured All Systems Are Lying. While Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Of all the problems a band could face, fighting for room onstage with a Christmas tree must be far down the list of possibilities. Yet there was David "Jaff" Craig struggling to find room to move around, while avoiding knocking over the decoration next to him with an errant swing of his bass. It was the Futureheads own fault though, as both their current album and tour have a festive theme, hence the choice of two large trees on either side of the band.Some of the crowd had taken this theme to heart, with Christmas jumpers and Santa hats worn, suggesting a works night out had wandered into Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Among millennials, Taylor Momsen is likely to be primarily remembered as an actor of things relatively sweet and family friendly. She appeared in Spy Kids 2 and TV’s Gossip Girl, but most notably as Cindy Lou Who with Jim Carrey in How the Grinch Stole Christmas at the turn of the century.Since then, of course, she’s reinvented herself as the post-grunge front woman of the very successful Pretty Reckless. As a rock’n’roller, she may like people to believe that she’s something of a replacement Courtney Love but actually she really inhabits Avril Lavigne-like territory. Still, she’s not Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
According to the fifth song on their first Christmas album, seasonal shenanigans in Old Crow Medicine Show’s family are boozy and raucous. Step aside Santa because “Grandpappy's been a-brewing since before the war” and is “the best bootlegger for a Georgia mile”. The result is the riotous barndance fiddlin’ of “Corn Whiskey Christmas” (which brings “good cheer to all the gals and the fellas). I’m in!The song is a highlight of OCMS XMAS, a 13-track set which showcases the light-hearted side of a Nashville outfit who’ve been at the forefront of the US bluegrass revival for over two decades. Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This album truly is a delightful surprise. Winter Songs Vol. 2 is simply more fun, it swings harder and is filled with far more freshness than I could ever have expected. There will always be people keen to tell you that Nat King Cole and Rosemary Clooney said all that needed to be said about the American Songbook Christmas standards several decades ago. But they’re wrong. In this, the most potentially tired of all genre niches, Ohio-born, New York-based jazz singer April Varner and her cohort of singers and instrumentalists really have found some magic dust to sprinkle over every number. Read more ...
joe.muggs
Well, this is a surprise. Not so much that the Sunderland band should do a Christmas album, mind. Despite their raw and spiky hardcore framework, which channelled heavyweights like Gang Of Four and Fugazi, they were always capable of being gentle, dreamlike, flirting with but never tipping over into the whimsical, as on their huge breakthrough cover of Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love”. And maybe even more relevantly, their harmony singing bordered on the choral from the start, something made explicit on their a capella reworking folk songs and their own work on their 2012 Rant album.No, it’s not Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The opening track initially seems straightforward. To begin “Sons of Art,” Michael Garrick runs up and down his piano keyboard. Norma Winstone adds wordless vocals which weave in and out of his sparkling arpeggios. Then, the bass arrives. Drums kick in. So do the tenor sax and trumpet. After a climax around the two-minute mark, what begins as pacific turns turbulent. The conventional has become unpredictably experimental.To conclude the album, an extraordinary nine-minute piece which, on one hand, sounds like dawn breaking and, on the other, a collision between the contrapuntal and a free- Read more ...
Tim Cumming
American R&B singer Eric Benet is the latest star to throw Santa’s hat into the ring and spin a Christmas album out of the seasonal market – the cover has him in 1950s mode, in a deep leather armchair in front of a coal fire in magnolia jumper and slacks and a pair of Christmas socks. Cosy.Guests to Benet’s Christmas party include Nina Nelson, sharing vocals on a Christmas cut with a Hawaiian bent from the Bing Crosby stable, “Mele Kalikimaka”. Elsewhere Stacey Ryan shares the mic on one of Benet’s own songs, getting the tone just right for the jazzy, sprightly gait of “It’s Christmas”. Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Nightmares On Wax’s new album Echo45 Sound System feels like the soundtrack to a twilight walk through memory and possibility. At its core is a deep reverence for sound system culture. The album title refers to a battered old speaker box called Echo45 that first sparked George Evelyn’s love of music when he was young.Released on 14 November 2025 through Warp Records, the project spans 13 tracks along with a continuous mix version. It features a wide collection of collaborators including Yasiin Bey, Greentea Peng, Oscar Jerome, Liam Bailey and others.The opener, “Echo45, We Are!” featuring Read more ...