wed 20/08/2025

New Music Reviews

Reissue CDs Weekly: Manfred Mann

Kieron Tyler

Dress each of the band in the same clothes. Stand them in a line outside the EMI headquarters building on Manchester Square. Get the taller ones with glasses to stand at either end of the row. Put the other taller one in the middle. Have the pair of less tall ones – who could be twins – stand between the taller ones. Symmetry and uniformity duly achieved, take the promotional photograph.

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theartsdesk in Essaouira: Festival of Gnawa - 21st-century trance masters

Tim Cumming

Essaouira, on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, is the place of winds. Day or night, hot or cold, year in, year out, the “Alizee” blows, and it blows.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Zuider Zee

Kieron Tyler

The most intriguing aspect of the mid-Seventies, Memphis-based band Zuider Zee isn’t that they took their name from a geographic feature of the Netherlands or that they dealt in against-the-grain Anglo-centric pop rock or even that the new compilation Zeenith features top-drawer music which was never released at the time.

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theartsdesk in Orkney: St Magnus Festival 2018 - choral music to the fore

David Kettle

With – unusually – no visiting orchestra at this year’s St Magnus International Festival in far-flung Orkney (the fall-out from delayed funding confirmations, we’re assured), there was a danger that the annual midsummer event might have felt a little – well, quiet.

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Supersonic Festival 2018 review – Birmingham waves the flag for New Weird Britain

Guy Oddy

A mere fortnight after the Download Festival, the Midlands was at it again over the weekend, celebrating noisy musical mavericks who have no truck with the mainstream.

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The Cure, RFH review - sterling close-up show from alt-pop stalwarts

Ralph Moore

The Robert Smith-curated Meltdown festival in London came to a close on Sunday night with a spectacular, concept-driven headline set by The Cure, or CUREATION 25, as the band was actually billed, presumably because of a previously contracted show at Hyde Park that's due to take place in two weeks’ time.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Contract in Blood / Winds of Time

Kieron Tyler

Although the cover of the 19 May 1979 issue of the music weekly Sounds was dominated by a photo of American rocker Ted Nugent, attention was also grabbed by a trail for a feature on “Heavy Metal…The New British Bands”. The two-page article it related to was headlined If You Want Blood, You’ve Got It...

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theartsdesk at Glastonbury Festival 2018

Caspar Gomez

Daft Punk! Kendrick Lamar! The Kinks! Yes! We blew the lid off!

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theartsdesk on Vinyl 40: Talking Heads, Ornette Coleman, Crayola Lectern, Brian Eno, Ash and more

Thomas H Green

Earlier this year, in May, Brighton hosted the Vinyl World Congress where Paul Pacifico, head of the Association of Independent Music, told the assembled that, “People pay for vinyl not because they have to but because they want to - they want a physical representation of their emotional connection with an artist." There was a general agreement that vinyl collectors and fans account for the majority of sales, but...

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David Byrne, Eventim Apollo review - twice in a lifetime?

Peter Culshaw

Forgive the sports metaphor, but David Byrne knocked this one out of the park.

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