New Music Reviews
Common People Festival 2016, SouthamptonTuesday, 31 May 2016
Rob da Bank’s Faustian pact with the weather gods continues apace with the second year of Common People, which takes place simultaneously in Southampton and Oxford. The forecast for days beforehand had predicted a cold front bearing relentless drizzle but, in the event, wellies were left packed away as the elements chose instead to offer blazing summer sunshine for the 30,000 revellers who attended the festival's second day at Southampton. Read more...
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Brighton Festival: Beth Orton, Attenborough Centre for Creative ArtsSunday, 29 May 2016
Beth Orton’s sparsely ethereal new collection Kidsticks has been well received for marking an interesting change of direction. Last night’s Brighton Festival gig gave audiences the best of both, beginning with most of the new songs, then climaxing with some old favourites that evoked her rockier past. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Death and VanillaSunday, 29 May 2016
Last May, Malmö trio Death and Vanilla issued the To Where the Wild Things are album and it seemed they had arrived as a fully formed post-Broadcast proposition, harmoniously fusing vintage influences like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Italian giallo soundtracks and The United States of America. Read more... |
theartsdesk on Vinyl: Volume 17 - Paul McCartney, Moby, Grace Jones and moreSaturday, 28 May 2016
News just in that the vinyl soundtrack to Star Wars: The Force Awakens will feature holograms that can seen as the record is played, if a light is shone upon it. It seems that every month there’s a similarly bizarre development in the many ways that vinyl is returning to the public eye. It’s now commonplace for Graham Norton to introduce the musical guests on his TV show by waving about a vinyl copy of their new album, something unthinkable even a year ago. Read more... |
The Burning Hell, OsloWednesday, 25 May 2016
“We’ve been visiting libraries on this tour and it’s a lot of fun learning people still read.” The words of The Burning Hell’s main man Mathias Kom before launching into “Give Up” stress he and his band are not typical rock‘n’rollers. “Give Up” itself is the rollicking song-story of a call-centre worker who goes to a library, finds inspiration in Herman Melville and then meets a mysterious woman who rings in. She gives him a poster of a kitten captioned “Never Give Up”. Read more... |
Brighton Festival: Haçienda Classical, The DomeTuesday, 24 May 2016
Of all the nostalgia-fests, of all the retro events, those that involve rave culture have the wildest sense of glee. The atmosphere in the Dome tonight, before a note has even been played – just as when The Prodigy hit this city last year – dials the anticipation levels up to delirious. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Manic Street PreachersSunday, 22 May 2016
“Over the horizon they come; the anniversaries; joyous, arduous, remorseless.” The opening words of Stuart Maconie’s fine, nuanced essay in the book accompanying this 20th-anniversary reissue of Manic Street Preachers’ fourth album acknowledge the inescapable fact that today’s heritage rock industry is indeed largely about anniversaries and their close cousin the reunion. Bands tour to air one of their past albums in track-by-track order. Read more... |
Brighton Festival: Laurie Anderson - Slideshow, Brighton DomeThursday, 19 May 2016
Brighton Festival’s guest director speaks in a sort of rapid-fire drawl, ideal for her debut as a stand-up comic, which she claims was tonight’s Plan A. This half-century veteran of performance art is more slippery than that, proffering a discursive, unreliable, funny and profound master-class in shaggy-dog philosophy, with the festival’s theme of home at its arguable core. Read more... |
Brighton Festival: Laurie Anderson – Song Conversation, Brighton DomeThursday, 19 May 2016
The foyer of Brighton Dome for Brighton Festival director Laurie Anderson’s Song Conversation would have had a PR executive flummoxed; from punks in their 20s licking the rim of a plastic pint to a hobbling couple clutching programmes. The breadth of audience is surely a testament to Anderson’s unique career of performances combining pop melodies with countercultural performance art. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Bernard HerrmannSunday, 15 May 2016
“Ladies and gentlemen, in view of the controversy already aroused the producers of this film wish to re-emphasise what is already stated in the film: that there is no established scientific connection between mongolism and psychotic or criminal behaviour”. With these opening words, Twisted Nerve instantly defined itself as a film out to attract attention. Despite this questionable exploitation aspect, the genuinely unsettling 1968 work is ripe for reassessment. Read more... |
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