sun 18/05/2025

New Music Reviews

ZZ Top: That Little Ol' Band From Texas, Netflix review - riffs, drugs and rodeos

Thomas H Green

ZZ Top always seemed like a Texan version of Status Quo. It turns out, from watching this entertaining but hardly revelatory documentary, that is kind of what they are.

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Colors performance stream on YouTube review - vocalists on lockdown

joe Muggs

The Colors studio in Berlin has quietly created one of the biggest new brands in music from filming back-to-basics performances with laser-focused branding. From international megastars (Billie Eilish, Mac DeMarco) to up-and-comers, singers and occasionally rappers are filmed alone in a simple cube-shaped stage with distinctive colour-cycling lighting.

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theartsdesk on Vinyl Lockdown Special 1: Napalm Death, Brazilian jazz-pop, 1980s indie and more

Thomas H Green

For the duration of this C19 Lockdown, rather than the usual sprawling monthly epic, theartsdesk on Vinyl will be presented regularly in bite-sized editions, roving across the pile of releases we have already, since those incoming have been whittled down a trickle. Welcome, then, to a cross edition of plastic ranging from the beautiful to the bizarre. Dive in!

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Hangman’s Beautiful Daughters

Kieron Tyler

A raga-rock circularity. Finger cymbals. A distant, etiolated female vocal. A fuggy atmosphere. A kinship with Jefferson Airplane’s “Come Up The Years”, The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey” and The Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties”. Hangman’s Beautiful Daughters' “Love is Blue” is a beautiful, haunting recording.

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ReMastered: Tricky Dicky and the Man in Black, Netflix review - dynamic saga of music and politics

Thomas H Green

Netflix’s ReMastered series is one of the streaming channel’s undersung gems.

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Elton John’s iHeart Living Room Concert for America, YouTube review - the real star was a Mayo Clinic doctor named Elvis

Liz Thomson

Available in Britain now on YouTube for only a couple of days, Elton John’s iHeart Living Room Concert for America was put together in less than a week and was broadcast in the US on Sunday evening. In normal circumstances, the slot would have been occupied by the iHeart Radio Music Awards, which were to have been carried live from the Shrine Auditorium in LA.

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Christine and the Queens/Instagram review - musical missives during lockdown

Veronica Lee

Since she burst onto the global scene in 2014 with her debut album, Chaleur humaine, Christine and the Queens' (aka Chris, real name Héloïse Letissier) work has been difficult to pin down. Is the French pansexual singer-songwriter-performance artist's music synth-pop, alt-pop or, as she describes it, “freakpop”?

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Recording Is The Trip - The Karen Dalton Archives

Kieron Tyler

“My favorite in the place was Karen Dalton. She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky and sultry. Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday’s and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it. I sang with her a couple of times.”

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Single: Bob Dylan - Murder Most Foul

Richard Williams

A combination of chopped-up newsreel and fever dream, “Murder Most Foul” is Bob Dylan’s most striking piece of work in years. This is the author of “Desolation Row” populating a 17-minute song with a lifetime of remembered cultural fragments, zooming out and panning back and forth from the single pivotal event of the Kennedy assassination, plucking references out of the heavy air.

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ReMastered: Devil at the Crossroads, Netflix review - a story well told but marred by clichéd style

mark Kidel

Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson’s reputation was much enhanced by the story – never substantiated – that he’d met with the devil one night at a crossroads, and was miraculously taught exquisite guitar licks that astounded his juke-joint audiences and later the world.

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