wed 12/02/2025

New music

Cyndi Lauper, OVO Hydro, Glasgow review - still having chaotic fun after all these years

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...

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Northern Winter Beat 2025, Aalborg review - The Courettes, Dungen and Lubomyr Melnyk confront ideas of how to play

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...

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Album: Manic Street Preachers - Critical Thinking

Manic Street Preachers’ earnest and literate pretentiousness is both their Achilles Heel and their superpower. Their greatest songs are amped by full investment in whatever awkward path they’ve cussedly marched down. At these times, their ever-...

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Bowling For Soup, Civic Hall, Wolverhampton review - nostalgic, celebratory fun

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-...

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Music Reissues Weekly: Beggars Arkive - The Lurkers’ 1978 John Peel session

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...

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Album: Squid - Cowards

Brighton band Squid are not in the business of straightforward. Combining jazz chops with a sensibility that’s at once post-punk, prog and avant-garde, their music is wilfully tricksy. Yet it does groove, upon occasion, it does funk. Tunes do pop in...

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Album: Rats on Rafts - Deep Below

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...

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Album: Hifi Sean & David McAlmont - Twilight

It was only six months ago that Hifi Sean and David McAlmont released their Daylight album. A fine disc of summery dance pop that was enough to put the spring in anyone’s step.Now, however, it’s time for the comedown and its soundtrack, the...

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theartsdesk Radio Show 36 - legendary producer Joe Boyd discusses his recent book on global music

The latest in Peter Culshaw’s peripatetic radio shows is a conversation with Joe Boyd whose recent tome, published by Faber, is a magisterial sweep through global and popular music called And the Roots of Rhythm Remain. TO LISTEN TO THE SHOW...

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Album: Biig Piig - 11:11

Is there such a thing as a boundary between pop and alternative any more? The presence of strange characters like Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish and Lola Young in the mega mainstream suggests not – and so does trajectory of Jessica Smyth aka Biig Piig...

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Album: Inhaler - Open Wide

You could be easily forgiven for thinking that the young indie rockers, Inhaler, would stick to the formula that has already served them so well for album number three. The Dublin lads had soared to success with their first two albums, seeing them...

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Music Reissues Weekly: You Got Me Hooked! - More Marylebone Beat Girls

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...

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