New Music Reviews
Northern Winter Beat 2025, Aalborg review - The Courettes, Dungen and Lubomyr Melnyk confront ideas of how to playWednesday, 12 February 2025
The exhortations don’t seem necessary as the audience is already letting off the steam which has built up in anticipation of a full-bore show. Nonetheless, The Courettes’ Flávia Couri knows higher levels of excitement are there to be tapped, that it’s possible to get the crowd to liberate themselves from any restraint they may have left. Limits are there to be pushed. Read more... |
Bowling For Soup, Civic Hall, Wolverhampton review - nostalgic, celebratory funTuesday, 11 February 2025
Bowling For Soup are celebrating their iconic album, A Hangover You Don’t Deserve, on a fun-filled, energetic tour for its 20th anniversary. Their sold out stop at Wolverhampton’s Civic Hall was a joy to experience from start to finish, the light-hearted essence of the band evident from the minute we walked in. From comical merch to on-stage banter, the fun was infectious and made for a special evening executed by clear well-seasoned professionals. Read more... |
Cyndi Lauper, OVO Hydro, Glasgow review - still having chaotic fun after all these yearsMonday, 10 February 2025
Cyndi Lauper was preceded onstage by a brief video that zipped through her career, which she drily declared was just in case someone was at the gig by mistake. It’s tempting to wonder what an unexpected visitor might have made of this farewell tour, given it shifted from Rabbie Burns mentions to gestures of support for the LGBT+ community, wig changes and, at one point, Lauper climbing up from a trap door wrapped in what looked like percussive body armour. Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Beggars Arkive - The Lurkers’ 1978 John Peel sessionSunday, 09 February 2025
On its own, the second session The Lurkers recorded for the BBC’s John Peel show on 18 April 1978 is arguably a curio, a footnote. Four tracks of bracingly straight-ahead Brit-punk with a headstrong freshness undiminished by time. But whatever the impact, The Lurkers were never a main-agenda band, and the Peel session was an adjunct to their discography. Read more... |
Album: Rats on Rafts - Deep BelowFriday, 07 February 2025
Deep Below’s first track is titled “Hibernation.” “A winter breeze blows through my mind,” intones a colourless, dispirited male voice. The ensuing lyrics are similarly bleak. “Trying to warm myself with the memories you’ve left behind, Deep inside this hole bitterness consumes my soul, One day I might wake up but I know it won’t be today.” Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: You Got Me Hooked! - More Marylebone Beat GirlsSunday, 02 February 2025
After co-fronting Vinegar Joe with Robert Palmer, Elkie Brooks first charted as a solo artist in 1977 with “Pearl’s a Singer.” Yet there was more to her musical past than the 1971 to 1974 spell in the blues-rock outfit. Her contributions to You Got Me Hooked! - More Marylebone Beat Girls are “He's Gotta Love me” and “Stop the Music” – both released a decade before “Pearl’s a Singer.” Read more... |
Formal Sppeedwear, The Windmill review - Stoke-on-Trent trio reinvigorates the new wave eraThursday, 30 January 2025
As Stoke-on-Trent’s Formal Sppeedwear immerse themselves in what turns out to be their penultimate song, they become lost in the music. What they are playing takes over. Revolving guitar motifs spray forth like light reflected from a glitter ball. An elastic bass guitar bubbles, the frill-free drumming is hard, precise and about forward motion. Read more... |
theartsdesk on Vinyl 88: Violent Femmes, Ringo Starr, ARXX, Dexter Gordon, Black Star, Dennis Bovell and moreTuesday, 28 January 2025
VINYL OF THE MONTH Buñuel Mansuetude (Skin Graft/Overdrive) Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: New York Dolls - Showdown At The MercerSunday, 26 January 2025
“A band you’re gonna like, whether you like it or not.” The proclamation in the press ads for the New York Dolls’ debut album acknowledged they were a hard sell. Read more... |
Album: ALT BLK ERA - Rave ImmortalSaturday, 25 January 2025
The utopian messiness of 1990s dance music culture is now so far back in time that what remains, for those under 40, is an idea, a meta myth. It is one that ALT BLK ERA embrace. Read more... |
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