New music
Jonathan Geddes
CMAT knows how to make an entrance. The opening of this show, in common with the rest of her tour, featured her band assembling onstage before a spotlight was suddenly shone on the back of the room – and there was Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, in a vivid green outfit and snazzy spectacles, standing on a raised section usually home to seats.It was a fitting entrance that could have nestled on the silver screen alongside the varied tunes from films played over the PA before the gig started. Thompson is an undoubted star these days, a charismatic and energetic mega watt performer. This gig, part of Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
As a disillusioned ex-admirer – like so many – it’s with a degree of dread that I approach Morrissey’s 14th solo album (the first for six years) not least because of the positively Kafkaesque struggle to actually hear it. But an open mind is necessary.What if there were no axe to grind? What if the hopeless search for love had been answered? What if there were no conspiracy theories? Why, then, there would be no new album (and – let’s face it – we’re all thigh-high in conspiracy theories right now). So we must buckle up and hear what the once-great man has to opine. The hilarious album Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Talking to Dave Stewart is like being on a psychedelic roller-coaster. He’ll start with one thought, spin it round and turn it upside down a few times, and just at the point when you’re feeling completely disorientated, whirl you to its conclusion. His is a mind in constant motion – you don’t have to spend long in his company to understand how he has emerged as one of the great musical chameleons of our time. Though most people know him from his partnership with Annie Lennox in The Eurythmics, the whistle-inducing rollcall of his collaborators includes Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Mick Jagger Read more ...
Guy Oddy
In recent years, noisy Canadian experimentalists, New Age Doom have shown themselves to be unafraid to engage with musical genius from all parts of the sonic pallet and have collaborated with the likes of Norwegian singer/songwriter Tuvaband and, on one of his final albums, the great Lee “Scratch” Perry. This is as well as having been remixed by musical mavericks from South Africa’s BLK JKS to US post-hardcore types, Quicksand.Their new disc, however, sees them go directly to the source and team up with the mighty HR, long-time vocalist of US hardcore punk originators Bad Brains – a group Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
When David Byrne made a mention of heroes and superheroes, one audience member could not resist. "Like you" they yelled out, and while the former Talking Heads singer might not be able to leap buildings in a single bound, his current creative hot streak is a nifty power indeed. Several years on from his terrific American Utopia tour, and Byrne is back on the road with a 12-piece backing band and a seemingly empty stage. To begin with, he was joined by only three musicians for a pared back "Heaven", the Talking Heads track from 1979, but it wasn't long until more and more started arriving Read more ...
Tim Cumming
With two albums, The Eternal Rocks Beneath and The Pendulum Swing behind her, and tours aplenty to support them (including a recent trek with Suzanne Vega) singer songwriter Katherine Priddy’s third album is keenly anticipated and deftly delivered. These Frightening Machines is a reckoning with forces beyond your control. It was written and recorded as she enters her thirties, and the machinery in the title is her own body and mind’s workings and malfunctions, as well as the machinery of connections and visions, of friendships and passions, of the systems that we are a part of, and that Read more ...
Music Reissues Weekly: This Can’t Be Today - A Trip Through The US Psychedelic Underground 1977-1988
Kieron Tyler
This Can’t Be Today - A Trip Through The US Psychedelic Underground 1977-1988 is marketed as a “3CD set documenting the 1980s American ‘paisley underground’ scene” which includes “over 65 scene setting, taste making tunes inspired by all things 60s, thrift store and Rickenbacker” with “scene staples, underground nuggets, leftfield gems and everything else between.”Indeed, this is pretty much what this clamshell set, titled after a Rain Parade track (it’s on Disc Two), does. However, the words “leftfield gems and everything else between” imply that this umbrella shelters more than The Bangles Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
When an artist as popular as Harry Styles releases an album, it’s inevitable that the noise and expectation surrounding it cloud the music initially, with fans and critics jumping to share their intensely positive or intensely negative long held thoughts about the musician’s place in the cultural landscape, regardless of how the album sounds. Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. feels like it needs more time to land, probably intentionally. The tracks are slow building, casual and subdued but all feel like they’ll mature well, even if the initial spark is missing. As is typical Read more ...
Joe Muggs
This album raises an interesting question: how many other musical artists have had as much of a career as Joshua Idehen prior to releasing their debut album proper? The Nigerian-Brit found his feet in the London poetry scene of the Noughties, just as grime was blowing up and bringing varied local vernacular into the heart of pop culture. A relentless collaborator, he has regularly made theatre, performance and video pieces as well as three albums with his band Benin City, four with Hyperdub-signed electronic duo LV, one with Californian beat scene godfather Daedelus, one in Calabashed with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Somnambulist, the debut album from Lunar & The Deception, showcases a goth-leaning rock which is imbued with a good dash of the anthemic. Take the album’s third track “Your Monsters”: while strings swirl through a guitar-based chug, the choruses are uplifting – lighters beg to be held aloft in accompaniment. Big stuff, stadium ready too and like a rockier analogue of Finland’s ever-potent HIM. If genre categorisation is needed for The Somnambulist, darkwave fits the bill.Lyrically, over its crisp 33 minutes, The Somnambulist is concerned with the lies permeating international networks Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Squeeze have done well. They’ve worked their arses off for years and now have significant profile again, playing some of Europe’s bigger venues (such as the O2). Their latest release, then, is anticipated. It’s a fanciful rejig of a concept album the band’s central duo, Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook, created, pre-success, when they were teenagers in 1974. For both better and worse, it sounds that way.Trixies offers 13 snapshots of an imaginary nightclub, much flavoured by Difford’s youthful reading of Damon Runyon’s New York nightworld tales, mingled with the lowlife of their native south Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title comes from the August 1965 Paul Revere & the Raiders single “Steppin' Out,” a paint-peeling stomp which just missed the US Top 40. While it wasn’t a massive hit – a UK release made no mark at all – the track can be taken as helping to define a strand of American pop which is, well, identifiably American. It didn’t matter that “Steppin' Out” was released by a major label: it’s directness, heft, reductiveness, snotiness, unbridled pep and lack of sophistication positioned it as garage rock.“Steppin' Out” is one of the great Sixties singles. So are The Beach Boys’ “I Get Around,” Read more ...