New music
Barney Harsent
After the success of 2014’s Aquostic, which saw the band shift nearly half a million albums, Status Quo are back with more of the same to see whether they can repeat the trick.The big lie about the Quo is that their entire career has been based on this very premise: turf out a load of three-chord, feelgood, 12-bar boogie blues; tour; repeat to fade. In fact, there’s rather more to them than that, and I don’t mean the reedy psych of “Matchstick Men” either. Transitional, early Seventies LPs Ma Kelly’s Greasy Spoon and Dog of Two Head, document a band who could write and play groove-led blues Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Agnes Obel’s new album Citizen of Glass is released next week. Conceptually underpinned by a fascination with the German idea of the gläserner menschen or gläserner bürger – the glass citizen – its ten compositions examine privacy, the nature of what is hidden, why it is concealed and question how much self-exposure is needed, whether in day-to-day life or as fuel for an artist. The glass citizen is one for whom everything is apparent.Discussing the album, the Berlin-based Danish singer-songwriter (born 1980) revealed its conception and inspirations, and also explained the ideas behind many Read more ...
Joe Muggs
A legacy can be a hell of a thing. When someone has a recorded archive of stone cold classics, it must be very tough indeed to present their new works, knowing they'll be compared to their best. This goes double with a voice as distinctive as Chrissie Hynde's: even the smallest inflexions of her singing are so recognisable that they instantly trigger sense memories of all the times that her songs have struck an emotional chord in the listener.Make no mistake, Alone is a very good album. From the second the title track kicks in, feeling like a strangely rowdy Velvet Underground deciding it's Read more ...
Helen Wallace
Call it re-analogification, de-digitisation or perhaps just plain reverse-engineering, Icebreaker’s set at Milton Court was all about reclaiming the electronic for hoary-handed instrumentalists. Their skills are well-honed: from Anna Meredith to Steve Martland to Kraftwerk, with an inspired side-order of Scott Walker, they conjured propulsive rhythmic lines and saturated layers of harmony from inauspicious sources – pan-pipes, soprano sax, a single cello, bass drum. Of course, there were electric guitars, keyboards and a stage groaning with amplifiers, but it was a damn sight more interesting Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
While there were 20 years between the 74-year-old David Crosby’s last solo album, 2014’s Croz, and its predecessor It's All Coming Back To Me Now..., Lighthouse arrives with what must be seen as exceptional speed. It’s also, despite being recorded at Jackson Browne’s studio (like Croz) and one co-write with singer-songwriter Mark Cohn, an album more dialled-in to today than Croz due to Snarky Puppy’s leader Michael League being on board as producer and main co-writer. Venerable figures like Mark Knopfler, Wynton Marsalis and Leland Sklar are absent. But there is a lot of Crosby himself. More Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Dont Look Back is the Ur-rockumentary, the template for hundreds of hand-held rock tour films, a source of inspiration as well as a model to aspire to.When director DA Pennebaker went on the road with Bob Dylan as he played a number of English gigs in 1965, he was intending to make a concert film. The backstage, limo and hotel room material was imagined as filler. But something unexpected happened: Dylan and his entourage, not least his constant companion road manager Bob Neuwirth, realised very soon that the performance didn’t end as the protest singer stepped out of the spotlight, high on Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Moby’s last proper album, not including the ambient affair he released via a free download from his LA restaurant earlier this year, was Innocents in 2013. It was a rich yet melancholic affair, the culmination of some years when a sober Moby, no longer on the touring conveyer belt that followed his post-Play mega-success, appeared to find solace in elegant musicality. His new album leaves that behind. Moby has relocated his noisy inner punk and put him to good use.Moby’s career began on the straight-edge US punk scene but his last attempt to reanimate these origins was 20 years ago with the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Autumn arrives and theartsdesk on Vinyl is ready at the turntables with a vital selection to kick out the drizzle and seasonal blues. Now in a more toned, slimmed down form, we offer 30 reviews that pinpoint the very best new vinyl available, regardless of genre. Lovers of music, from gentle jazz to detonating death metal will find something worth trying.Various DJ Amir Presents Buena Musica Y Cultura (BBE)The BBE label continue to ceaselessly spoil us with collections of obscure wonders from their stable of crate-diggers and experts. Through a series of reissues a decade ago I became aware Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Readers of a certain type of lifestyle blog will be familiar with the concept of hygge. The Danish word, which refers to a state of cosiness and good cheer in which to survive the winter months, is nothing new – but this year, it’s popping up everywhere badged as a lifestyle trend. Hygge in 2016 is grey-knit blankets that look homemade, but which retail for £100; it’s steaming, monogrammed mugs of hot chocolate and rose-gold pillows. And it’s In Winter, Katie Melua’s collaboration with the Gori Women’s Choir – basic, yes; but there’s a reason nobody can resist the tie-in candle collaboration Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The Shaggs are real, pure, unaffected by outside influences. Their music is different, it is theirs alone.” So began the liner notes to Philosophy of the World, The Shaggs' sole album. Not many people read the words or heard the music when it was pressed in 1969. Only 100 copies were made. It was meant to be 1000, but a murky business deal meant the balance of 900 never showed up.The Shaggs were Betty, Dorothy and Helen Wiggin, three sisters from Fremont, New Hampshire. Their father, Austin Wiggin Jr., was their champion and took them into Revere, Massachusetts’ Fleetwood Recording Studio in Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Wells Cathedral, masterpiece of Gothic architecture, is distinguished by relatively intimate scale: a perfect place to present Carl Dreyer’s 1928 classic and visually arresting account of the trial and burning of Joan of Arc. The screen was hung in front of the massive “St Andrew’s Cross”, the almost modernist bracing arches – a backdrop of immense presence that complemented the compellingly architectural look of the film.The event was presented by Hauser and Wirth, the London gallery who extended their activities to Somerset a couple of years ago. In some ways, an Anglican cathedral filled Read more ...
Tim Cumming
You get two singular punk-era artists – a poet and a songwriter – together in a room for a few nights, with a rack of guitars, a rack of songs from their sweet youth, and a few musical friends to help out on keyboards, trumpet, flute and sax. Then you pick up on that idea you had not too many late nights ago for the 67-year-old punk poet to sing for the first time, and not his own words, but words you both know by heart from your youth, and what you end up with is not just personal, strictly personal, but a universal account of great 20th-century pop at its shortest, sweetest, and lingering Read more ...