mon 30/06/2025

New Music Reviews

My Baby, Castle & Falcon, Birmingham review – the Dutch/Kiwi band start up the festival vibe early for 2019

Guy Oddy

Balsall Heath’s Castle & Falcon is one of the newer live music venues in Birmingham, a city that finally seems to be undergoing something of a renaissance in these otherwise uncertain times.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Rema-Rema - Fond Reflections

Kieron Tyler

Until now, Rema-Rema’s only release was a 12-inch EP released in August 1980. It had hit shops after the band fell apart at the end of the previous year. Negotiations with 4AD, a new offshoot of the Beggar’s Banquet label, were underway towards the end of 1979 but then guitarist and future Adam and the Ants-man Marco Pirroni left. They rehearsed without him but called it a day in November.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Where The Girls Are Volume Ten

Kieron Tyler

The US music trade weekly Cashbox chose a picture of the then-hot Diana Ross & the Supremes and Temptations joint enterprise for the cover of its 14 December 1968 issue.

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Yxng Bane, Brixton Academy review - all the fam on stage

Katherine Waters

There’s a wolf howl and Yxng Bane (pronounced Young Bane) jumps off a block on stage and his furry hooded coat flies open and the arena erupts in screams. The pit is filled almost exclusively with seventeen year old girls, excellently contoured and sporting chunky trainers and crop tops like it’s the early 2000s all over again, and he’s wearing nothing underneath except many hours at the gym.

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Loreena McKennitt, Royal Albert Hall review - making Celtic connections

Liz Thomson

Having long been immersed in folk and world music and acoustically-oriented singer-songwriters, it’s a surprise to be given a CD of music by someone who’s never crossed your radar, especially...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: The Residents

Kieron Tyler

Writing in 1980, the musician and musical theorist Chris Cutler said that “without the support and patronage of the culture-establishment, The Residents were able to exist, continue to exist, grow, find their public, hold that public – and expand it – until the pop establishment was forced to take notice.” He contended that as they were neither musicians or part of music sub-culture they “exemplified a new type [of development], specialising in nothing, turning their hands to anything: a...

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I'm Every Woman, JW3, London - a musical celebration of International Women's Day

Liz Thomson

In one of the award-winning club’s forays from its Camden Town home, Green Note welcomed International Women’s Day with a special one-off concert exploring and celebrating the many ages and stages of being a woman. Three generations of musicians were on stage at North London’s JW3.

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CD: Karen O and Danger Mouse - Lux Prima

Owen Richards

As collaborations go, it’s a doozy. Karen O’s signature vocals over Danger Mouse’s production – it was always going to pique interest. And Lux Prima does much to meet expectations, gorgeous cinematic soundscapes that flit between haunting and defiant. At its best, its damn near mesmerising. But for those expecting a genre-defying, structure-blowing new horizon, it falls just short.

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Kamasi Washington, Brixton Academy review - reaching transcendence

Katherine Waters

There’s jazz, and there’s transcendent jazz. Kamasi Washington and his band are the latter. His group — who hail from Los Angeles and have played together since childhood, made waves in 2015 when they released The Epic, a three-hour concept album, followed up by Heaven and Earth, which similarly explored esoteric conceptions and abstruse riffs.

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Massive Attack, Steel Yard Bristol review - propaganda and pomp

mark Kidel

Massive Attack have travelled a long way from the Dugout, the Bristol bar where the collective first tried their hand at spinning discs for a crowd whose cultural mix reflected the constant ferment of one of Britain’s most vibrant cities.

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