thu 24/07/2025

New Music Reviews

BBC Proms live online: Anoushka Shankar/Laura Marling - scintillating sitar and fortified folk

Miranda Heggie

In what would have been the year her father, the legendary sitar player Ravi Shankar turned 100, sitarist and composer Anoushka Shankar pays tribute to him and builds on his legacy in this online Prom.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: The Stooges - Live At Goose Lake

Kieron Tyler

So far this year, Live at Goose Lake August 8th, 1970 is 2020’s most exciting archive release. The album is a previously unknown soundboard recording of The Stooges playing at Jackson, Michigan’s Goose Lake Festival. The event was formally billed as Goose Lake Park – International Music Festival.

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South West Four Live, Electric Brixton online review - the dance goes on?

Nick Hasted

If two dozen DJs spin tunes and no one’s there, did a rave really happen? There is plenty of time for such questions during the 25 hours of livestreams substituting for SW4’s annual bank holiday party on Clapham Common.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: This Is Our Music - Jazz Out Of Norway

Kieron Tyler

The Turnamat is a type of washing machine made by AEG. In the composition titled “Turnamat”, Seventies-type synths, wobbly keyboard lines and hard-grooving drums give way to a brass-led interlude suggesting an acquaintance with the compositions of Lalo Schifrin. It’s as if a jazz-inflected soundtrack from 45 years ago has been shoved into a blender rather than a washing machine, then reconstituted and given a major buff-up.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Ready Or Not - Thom Bell's Philly Soul Arrangements & Productions

Kieron Tyler

A skim though the track listing confirms that this is no typical soul compilation. Actress and some-time pop singer Connie Stevens crops up. So does Johnny Mathis. Such seeming quirks are fitting as Thom Bell was never a typical arranger, producer or songwriter.

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theartsdesk on Vinyl 59: Johnny Cash, Bananagun, Fleetwood Mac, Romare, PJ Harvey, Kamaal Williams and more

Thomas H Green

The usual summer vinyl release slump doesn’t seem to apply this year.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Be-Bop Deluxe - Axe Victim

Kieron Tyler

Bill Nelson’s views on his band Be-Bop Deluxe’s debut album are measured. In the essay accompanying its reissue, he writes “Axe Victim is one brief snapshot of a band in the process of becoming something else…a modest beginning, flawed but not without charm. And not the end of the story.

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Cara Dillon Live at Cooper Hall, YouTube review - a warm Irish welcome

Liz Thomson

Cara Dillon and Sam Lakeman were bringing it all back home when they performed their first live stream concert from Cooper Hall, in Frome, Somerset, close to were they live and where they recorded Dillon’s 2017 album, Wanderer.

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AIM Awards 2020, SBTV review - a game attempt to rewire awards ceremonies

joe Muggs

Music awards shows are a strange beast: part window display, part industry conference and part party. Especially if you don’t have Brit Awards or Mercury Prize budget to create a whizz-bang spectacle, the ceremonies can be an interminable pileup of attempts to earnestly celebrate both musicians and behind-the-scenes figures, in front of a room full of increasingly drunk and impatient people.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Dudu Phukwana and the "Spears"

Kieron Tyler

Whether explicitly or indirectly, what’s written on a master tape box can tantalise. Revealing part of a picture creates a desire to want to know more. Take the example seen above. It’s for an album by South African alto saxist Dudu Pukwana.

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