New music
caspar.gomez
Sweating in my lair, there’s no trip to the mecca this year. If the festival was on, I'd be there right now, but it’s a fallow year and Glastonbury Festival is keeping its head down. The Glastophilic chat rooms bubble with antsy longing. My house is prowled by ghosts of yesteryear. Finetime’s camera is dormant. The cows on the farm chew their cud in peace.Instead of taking it to the wire in the fields of dreams, scribbled later with the urgency of one possessed, sleepless and obsessed, I can only offer ruminations. Snapshots and snippets. Aided by a large box of mementos from the attic, I Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Muse are one of the best advertisements in the world for silliness. When the Devon trio came along in the late Nineties, they found a niche for people who wished Radiohead had kept writing big rock songs instead of tinkering with avant electronics – but they really found their feet with 2006’s Black Holes and Revelations when they started cutting loose with glam rock stomp, laser-zapping electronics, huge choruses and wild sci-fi imagery. Ever since, they’ve always been at their best when they drop any earnestness (not always possible, given singer Matt Bellamy’s penchant for doomy conspiracy Read more ...
Cathi Unsworth
I got my contract to write Season of The Witch: The Book of Goth just as the first Covid lockdown began in March 2020. During that time of plague and alienation, I time-travelled back to the era I had pinpointed as the beginning of this suitably dark and prophetic musical subculture: the 1978-9 Winter of Discontent. I planned to chart the course of Goth's rise from the ashes of punk and the economic crisis that paved the way for Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government to take power on 4 May 1979. Then follow its course through the coming decade of Cold War, Miners' Strike, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Shadows opens with “The Lone West,” a short, desolate instrumental featuring a simple keyboard refrain with a flute-like quality and what may be an early Seventies drum machine. There’s a bit of Young Marble Giants in there. The Brian Eno of Another Green World, too. The Ghost Box label’s characteristic nebulousness is also apparent.The next track features a vocal. Sailing over a similar musical bedding, Cate Kennan’s voice on “Shadows” is distant, etiolated, devoid of colour. A twangy guitar plays single notes. There is some Santo and Johnny-esque lap steel and sparingly used castanets. The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Between June 1964 and September 1966, London-area R&B band Downliners Sect issued ten singles, one EP and three albums on EMI’s Columbia imprint. A lot of records. Especially so for a band which barely charted. Only one of the singles, their Columbia debut, a dash through Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What’s Wrong” got anywhere – 29 on the New Musical Express Top 30.Despite its meagre hit parade status, the single sounds irresistible – an unfettered headlong rush. But it, and subsequent releases, did not achieve the traction needed to take Downliners Sect to the level of their similarly minded Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Beginning with “The Ground Above” and closing with “Otherside”, there’s an ambient, otherwordly, disembodied feel to Beth Orton’s new album on Partisan Records, a follow-up to 2022’s self-produced Weather Alive, which had its own spectral, dreamlike airs. “The Ground Above” is voiced by one of those unsettled spirits that rise out of one the hoary old Murder Ballads, but here, Orton is disembodied “among the choirs of the gods”, “ecstatic as a mother’s love” and lusty too: “And you kissed me and I knew what I was for, And it wiped me out like chalk off of a board.”Her voice is worn and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
La Sécurité are a Montreal supergroup… kind of; in that all members are involved in other projects which have had local success. In the case of bassist Félix Bélisle’s outfit Choses Sauvages and guitarist Laurence-Anne Charest Gagné’s solo career, cult success has spread further afield. “Cult” is the word, though, for La Sécurité’s tasty punk-funk stew is more-ish but likely too gnarly for mainstream success. Their second album is a smash’n’grab raid rife with pogo-party energy.At ten songs in around half an hour, it’s a set that makes its case with vim, then exits. The lyrics cover territory Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
The World Cup is everywhere in Scotland these days, even among the country’s gigging venues. Rolled up Saltires were visible on the balconies of the O2 Academy, a reminder that the Glasgow venue is hosting watch parties for the national team’s matches, and when Lola Young came back onstage for the encore she was serenaded by fans belting out “no Scotland no party”, to which the Londoner cheerfully joined in.Roughly an hour earlier, the 25-year-old had walked out to the sort of wild reaction that greeted John McGinn hitting the back of the net against Haiti, with screams and hollers from the Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Lots of international superstar DJs end up making cosmic and exploratory records when they tire of – as the late Andrew Weatherall, albeit with tongue firmly in cheek, put it - “that ghastly oompty-boompty music.” Lots of them do quite well at it, too. But they are just daytrippers in the galactic expanse compared to Detroit hero Jeff Mills who is not only still bashing out the brain-jellifying techno to vast crowds week-in-week-out well over 40 years into his DJ career, but has been making out-there sounds for imagined futures in performances, collaborations and recordings for very Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Thirty years since the release of their breakthrough self-titled album and lead singer Bradley Nowell’s passing, sunburnt reggae punk rockers Sublime are back with an hour-long love-letter to their past, and their home. The band proudly states in their 1996 chill out track “Doin Time”, that they’re “qualified to represent the L.B.C”, a statement that has stood the test of time considering how little they have faltered. All of the same laid-back stoner rock, soaked in sunlight, Mexican beer and good times, but now, however, there’s a new man at the helm. Jakob Nowell, son of founding Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
After his record-breaking and warmly remembered Love On Tour, Harry Styles is back with a fresh, slightly more experimental twist on universal, blockbusting live pop. The revision of his performance style is subtle enough that Together, Together feels comfortable and familiar but the minor rebrand that came with his latest album Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. sufficiently spices things up. Following a glittery, feel good singalong with Shania Twain to warm things up, “Are You Listening Yet?” opens the show, with tangible gratitude flying through the stadium from Styles in the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For many years Paul Weller had a conflicted relationship with the oldest parts of his back catalogue. It was rare to hear more than one of his pre-1990 songs in concert. Then he started slipping them in, but only a couple. Tonight, he’s clearly at peace with the whole of his long and varied career, playing seven songs by The Jam and four by the Style Council in a set well over two hours long. It’s a joy to hear these gems scattered with vital precision among the eclectic smorgasbord of what came after.Weller has always been a lean, urgent presence and he remains so. Chewing gum, iron-grey of Read more ...