fri 25/07/2025

New Music Reviews

Live is Alive!, Brighton Festival 2021 review - local talent makes for snappy return to gig-land

Thomas H Green

The idea live music is back is worth shouting about. Indeed, the BBC News has been doing just that about this gig. In reality, though, while it’s a joy to be out (this is my first major venue concert for a year-and-a-half), Live is Alive is a stepping stone towards a ‘proper’ gig, rather than the real deal. The Brighton Dome is less than half full, the moshpit set with cabaret-style tables, everyone socially distanced.

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theartsdesk on Vinyl 64: Chet Baker, Lava La Rue, Bob Mould, Krust, The Yardbirds, The Fratellis and more

Thomas H Green

Things got out of hand at theartsdesk on Vinyl this month and these reviews run to 10,000 words. That's around a fifth of The Great Gatsby.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: The Outsiders - Count For Something

Kieron Tyler

With the Spiral Scratch EP, Buzzcocks became the first British band of the punk rock era to issue a do-it-yourself seven-inch. Everything was organised and paid for by the band: the recording session, the manufacture of the record and its sleeve, its design. It hit shops in January 1977.

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Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young: Déjà Vu 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition

Adam Sweeting

With over eight million copies sold in its 50-year lifespan, Déjà Vu was, as Cameron Crowe writes in the booklet accompanying this compendious four-CD edition, “one of the most famous second albums in rock history”.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Al Stewart - Year Of The Cat

Kieron Tyler

At the end of 1976 Al Stewart talked to Melody Maker, contrasting how he was seen in America and the UK. He was in Los Angeles. “I haven’t played in England for nearly two years,” he told Harvey Kubernik. “The best way of looking at it was that I had Love Chronicles [his second album, issued in 1969], and I was getting a lot of good press.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Northern Soul's Classiest Rarities Volume 7

Kieron Tyler

Carolyn Crawford’s “Ready or Not Here Comes Love” is a 1971 recording.

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Psappha, Phillips, Hallé St Peter’s, Manchester online review - Turnage world premiere

Robert Beale

Manchester’s Psappha have been proudly flying the flag of new and radical music right through the year of lockdown, and last night’s livestream, with two-and-a-half world premieres, one of them by...

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Album: Teenage Fanclub‎ - Endless Arcade

Kieron Tyler

A few hurdles need jumping before grappling with the essence of Teenage Fanclub’s 11th album. Endless Arcade is their first without bassist and founder member Gerard Love. He, alongside Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley, was one of the band’s songwriters.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Spiritualized - Lazer Guided Melodies

Kieron Tyler

Lazer Guided Melodies was great. It still is. Spiritualized’s debut album built from what was already there in Jason Pierce’s previous band Spacemen 3 and took it into newer, more textured territory. While softer-focussed and more dynamic than Spacemen 3 there was still an edge, a brittle carapace which ensured Spiritualized was its own thing.

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Album: Field Music - Flat White Moon

Kieron Tyler

Although it is not solipsistic, Flat White Moon is Field Music’s most personal, most revealing, warmest-sounding album so far. David and Peter Brewis have opened up. Their ninth studio album together opens with a seeming declaration. “Orion from the Street” has a drum pattern, bubbling, whooshing sounds and weaving, treated guitar unambiguously alluding to The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows”.

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