“A rich and occasionally irritatingly gimmicky album…less perfectly realised than Autobahn, though there are some quite pretty tunes. People often charge electronic music with being ‘mechanical,’ confusing machines like clocks and other wind-up toys with devices which operate in ways more analogous to the human brain, which create quite different musical problems from, say, musical-boxes. What is wrong with Kraftwerk, however, is that their music is in fact mechanical, creating a contradiction between form and content which eventually destroys its artistic credibility and any hint of a soul Read more ...

Anyone doubting Venom’s place on the highest level of the pantheon of Rock Gods might want to check out Sunn O)))’s recent, self-titled album. Their track “Does Anyone Hear Like Venom?” may not ape the Geordie trio’s Black Metal sound, but it’s clear that the Seattle ambient metalheads are seriously keen to pay homage to their huge influence on heavy music.Venom have never been renowned for bothering the top end of the charts, despite having been on the metal scene for pushing 50 years, and yet they show absolutely no sign of throwing in the towel. Into Oblivion, their first album in seven Read more ...

It’s not uncommon to suggest that we live in a post-genre musical era – but all too rarely does the discussion then move on to how we might find alternative coordinates to collectively describe sounds. If you did want to do that, though, you could do worse than take lessons from club music. For a long time before the streaming era sent everything off in every direction, DJ-led culture was adept at finding patterns in flux. The best known example is the “Balearic” aesthetic – originally music played by DJs in Ibiza and other Mediterranean party zones in the 1980s – which was completely unbound Read more ...

For Basement, the post-hardcore rockers hailing from Ipswich, their story is one of promise and unpredictability. With their debut, 2011’s I Wish I Could Stay Here, they took the scene by storm, only to disband after their second album the following year. They had left their mark so deeply though, in a sense it didn’t feel like they went away.  And after their mid-2010's return, their sound shifted subtly across their next two albums, settling on a blend of their original style with a straight-up alternative rock foundation.  What had really stood them out was an ability to cut Read more ...

Rick Rubin has revivified many late-career musicians, most notably Johnny Cash, whose quartet of American Recordings achieved both universal praise and commercial success. Twenty years ago, he worked with Neil Diamond, applying his trademark unplugged approach to Diamond’s distinctive spregesang style. The result, 12 Songs (2005), was one of the singer's most successful studio recordings, charting at #4 on Billboard. James Bassett of PopMatters considered it “an album of rare beauty, grace, and eloquence that captures Diamond in all his plain-spoken and big-hearted glory.” Home Before Read more ...

In 1999, American Football pioneered a brand-new genre with their self-titled album, and while they didn’t gain much recognition from their odd style of music, it soon grew into something beautiful, widely loved and imitated. Midwest-Emo is a genre that relies on the foundations that American Football set on that record, a slurry of twinkly melodies and precise, often off beat rhythms, I personally think it’s beautiful mess, but unsurprisingly, it’s an acquired taste. Vocals are the third piece to the Midwest-Emo puzzle, always conversational, strained and unbothered, almost shouted from Read more ...

The Puppini Sisters brought their signature blend of close harmony singing to Islington’s Union Chapel on Friday, the opening night of a three-week UK tour marking their 20th birthday and the release of their seventh studio album, titled – naturally enough – The Birthday Party. There was nothing Pinteresque about the evening, just unalloyed joy onstage and off. “The Andrews Sisters on acid”, “The Spice Girls of jazz” and “Swing Punks” – this effervescent trio, whose fans include King Charles and Michael Bublé, are all those and more. With their retro-glamour aesthetic (reflected by a few Read more ...

London band David Cronenberg’s Wife, a grimy stew of Eighties indie and folk trimmings, deal in the abject; shame, sadness and lust gone rotten. Their new album, for instance, contains a song called “Mermaid’s Tale” wherein the first-person narrator, a morose divorcee, comes across a gorgeous mermaid while sailing near the Greek island of Hydra. She needs him for sex, but things soon turn grubby, forlorn and prosaic. Also funny, in a twisted way.There’s a storied tradition of abjection in the arts, from Iain Banks’ Wasp Factory to Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop” to the paintings of Francis Bacon Read more ...

Cast your mind back to the release of “Never Be The Same Again” (1999), which seemed to come out of nowhere and turned Sporty Spice’s image on its head. For the least pushy of the fabulous five, it was something of a turn up for the books. And now, at the ripe old age of 52 (whipper-snapper), she’s pulled off what could be considered another volte face.Ask me to name the female artist with the most songs at number 1 in the UK chart’s history and I wouldn’t have plumped for Ms Melanie. But that’s what the blurb claims, alongside this mega fact: “she is he only female performer to top the Read more ...

I first saw country singer songwriter Kacey Musgraves perform at the Arts Club on Dover Street back in 2013 for the launch of her first major-label album, Same Trailer Different Park, which won her the first of her eight Grammies, and she was a great performer and an even more striking songwriter – witty, concise, memorable, with great turns of phrase and a great clarity in her  storytelling and characters. She was/is a superior version of the uber-megastar that is/was Taylor Swift.She’s funnier and filthier than Taylor; I can’t see gazillions of preteens bawling out her lyrics without Read more ...

It is almost without fail that Birmingham’s Supersonic Festival is guaranteed to be one of my annual musical highlights – and despite it still only being April, I suspect that it will be the same again this year. As is usually the case, the line-up of this celebration of the weird and distinctly wonderful was one where only the most musically literate would be aware of more than a handful of the performers. However, it was again a set-up where most would have gone home having discovered a new favourite band. This time, mine would most certainly be the raw and visceral Prostitute. That said, Read more ...

Ostensibly, Jesca Hoop’s music is categorised as folk. How to square this with “Big Storm,” the fourth track from the singer-songwriter’s seventh album, Long Wave Home? The percussion sounds like – but, it turns out, actually isn’t – a drum machine. Hoop’s voice is close-miked, intimate. The choruses are gospel-esque. Brass instruments stab. Overall, there’s a country music lilt. Just before it abruptly stops, Hoop says “OK.” Odd, and folk-adjacent rather than folk, but it coheres – and makes sense.After this, “Love is Salvation.” Here, notwithstanding the jazzy arrangement, a kinship with Read more ...