New music
Thomas H. Green
Now going for over a dozen years, ever-busier since Live Nation took over its parent company in 2015, The Great Escape Festival is the annual multi-venue band showcase and music conference which sees Brighton swamped with music biz sorts. This year these especially seemed to be young men and women called Piers and Hannah watching female-fronted indie bands. This writer only catches the last of the three days – Saturday – but is sucked into the venue-trawling spirit of the thing.Down on the seafront an encampment of marquees has appeared on the eastern end of Brighton beach, enclosing three Read more ...
Owen Richards
Better Oblivion Community Center may be a supergroup of sorts, but the name still draws less recognition that its members (Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes). Maybe it’s just too complicated to remember, because a packed Shepherd’s Bush Empire proved the band’s wide appeal – lairy lads and muso pensioners, side-by-side for a night of charm and angst.Oberst and Bridgers have very different voices, but her effortless tones melt through his fragile strains to form a sort of alchemy together. It worked surprisingly well on record, and perhaps more so live. There’s an honesty and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ed Sheeran, Tom Odell, all those Mr Vulnerability cats; this dude makes them sound like a night out with Slipknot. He is, in fact, a generational divider. Taking the contemporary route to success, wherein smirky, buddy-ish social media is just as important as the music – if not more important – Scottish singer-songwriter Lewis Capaldi’s sudden stadium-level success is bewildering to anyone over 25. So, is Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent, wherein every song catalogues his supreme emotionality, a new musical benchmark for the skinless sensitivity of Millennial youth?Perhaps, but, also Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Repackaging and resuscitating the catalogues of endlessly reissued bands is fraught. By their nature, completists already have everything and the casually interested are not fussed by alternate versions of obscure tracks or disinterred lo-fi live recordings. It’s challenging to freshen up or put new spins on predominantly familiar material by endlessly reissued bands. Preaching to the converted is frequently the best which can be hoped for.To varying degrees, current archive releases of material by Manfred Mann, The Searchers and The Yardbirds feed into these concerns. To wit: Manfred Mann’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Due to exciting matters beyond theartsdesk on Vinyl’s control there’s been a slight delay to this month’s edition but, never fear, to ensure we cover all that’s juicy, we’re doing a special two-volume version, with Part 2 coming next week. Watch this space. As ever, all life on plastic is here, from new to re-issued, from pop to techno to Northern soul and far, far beyond. Dive in.VINYL OF THE MONTHBlack Flower Future Flora (SDBAN/N.E.W.S.)Here at theartsdesk on Vinyl we’re fans of knitwear-loving Belgian five-piece Black Flower. Why wouldn’t you be? Their output so far, three albums and a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Five years ago, the Swedish tech company Elektron began marketing the first version of the Analog Four, an all-in-one instrument marrying analogue oscillators with a digital sequencer, digital processing and a multi-track capability. That past-present interface had been done before but with its integral keyboard this was, at that point, the most user-friendly piece of kit to do so. K-X-P’s IV is built around compositions created on the Analog Four by the band’s main-man Timo Kaukolampi.Notwithstanding the way of formulating the music, those keeping an eye on the idiosyncratic Finns’ oeuvre Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
“I hope you’re not only Wolverine fans or this is going to be a long night,” a grinning Hugh Jackman tells a screaming Glasgow crowd. The line – delivered in front of a giant screen on which Jackman, adamantium claws extended, is climbing out of a river with his shirt off – sums up a particular curiosity about the actor known to many as the Greatest Showman: how did an award-winning musical theatre actor end up playing a comic book mutant?There’s actually an answer of sorts in Jackman’s new one-man show, which kicked off an extensive world tour with three nights in Glasgow – as well as a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Gastwerk Saboteurs is the debut album by Imperial Wax, the final line-up of the Fall (the one whose first album together was Imperial Wax Solvent) – but one without the menacing presence of Mark E Smith of course. It’s also a collection of gritty garage rock, rockabilly and indie flavours with plenty of heft – if not quite so much of the snarling cynicism of their former employer. Nevertheless, it suggests that Pete Greenway, Dave Spurr and Keiron Melling had more than a passing influence on the greatness that was Manchester’s finest band of all time and teaming up with ex-Black Pudding Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Whitesnake were always the most absurdly priapic of the successful Eighties heavy rockers. It was therefore with some glee that this writer approached their 13th studio album. In the snowflake age, where offence is taken at the slightest politically incorrect infraction, these hoary oldsters would surely be a ball. They did, after all, once infamously release an album entitled Slide It In. It turns out, however, that for much of the time, overblown musical cliché is the lasting aftertaste.David Coverdale has led Whitesnake for just over 40 years although, of the rest of the band, only drummer Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
To consider the third album from experimental composer Holly Herndon solely as a piece of music is to miss the point. PROTO is part artwork, part research project, on which Herndon teams up with collaborators both human and inhuman to discover whether artificial intelligence can be trained to produce art. The results aren’t always beautiful but that, perhaps, is what makes them human.As track listings go, PROTO’s is perhaps a little too on-the-nose. The 13-track album opens with “Birth”; a minute-long, alien-sounding composition whose jarring sounds and guttural, inhuman vocals seem to pass Read more ...
Owen Richards
For a time, it looked like Catfish and the Bottlemen might finally be the next-gen guitar band with crossover appeal. Though that never quite came to pass, their new show promoting latest album The Balance proves why the indie faithful value them as Britain’s guiding light. Despite the band being Welsh, it’s hardly a hometown gig - Llandudno is nearer to Liverpool - but Cardiff greeted them like prodigal sons. Opener and recent single “Leftovers” led straight into breakout hit “Kathleen”, and the crowd were immediately part of the band, giving every chorus their all. With a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Nature of Why is not so much a concert as a multi-discipline happening. To assess it is to relate a human experience rather than just an aesthetic appreciation of the new orchestral work by Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory which is at its heart. On the surface, it’s an hour-long piece in nine short movements, interspersed with old BBC recordings of the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Richard Feynman explaining how magnetism is unexplainable in layman’s terms. As a participant, however, there’s much more to it than that.The event takes place at the Brighton Dome’s main concert hall and the Read more ...