New music
Kieron Tyler
In November 1975, UK music weekly New Musical Express included an article by Charles Shaar Murray titled “Are You Alive To The Jive Of The Sound Of '75.” Recently in New York, he was revealing what he had discovered.The bands looked at – and he saw most saw live – in his prescient round-up were Blondie, The Heartbreakers – “the first N.Y. punk supergroup” – a “new-look” New York Dolls, The Ramones, The Shirts, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Television and Tuff Darts.
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Central to what he covered in this remarkable role call was a venue: the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Lincoln, you have not been a Monday night crowd, they can be a bit funny,“ says Suede frontman Brett Anderson just before then band exit the stage for the final time. “You’re more than just watchers, you got involved.”It’s doubly true. For multiple obvious reasons, Monday can be an underwhelming gig experience for both bands and audiences (I’ve come to almost resent it when bands I like hit town that day). But within this giant, red brick, converted 19th century steam engine shed, the capacity 1500 crowd respond fervently from the very start.It says something about Suede’s partial rejection Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Fuck Thatcher, fuck neoliberalism.” After these words from the stage, an audience response. “Fuck Thatcher” echoes the approving shout from the darkness.The performer expressing his views is the Sheffield-based folk-rooted stylist Jim Ghedi. What he’s said has not come out of the blue. There is context. He is introducing “Ah Cud Hew,” a song included on his In the Furrows of Common Place album. He learnt it from Ed Pickford, a County Durham singer and songwriter with a family background in coal mining. The song – “I could hew” – is about the decimation of the coal industry during the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Peaches is primarily known as a purveyor of transgressive, sex positive anthems that have no room for shame whatsoever. This is just as it should be, although her music might not be for the easily offended, and her seventh album is not only one of her best, but possibly her most audacious too.No Lube So Rude is packed with hardcore punk attitude, biting sarcasm, raw electroclash grooves and is blatantly sexually explicit throughout. Seemingly, as she stares down the barrel of her sixties, Merrill Nisker feels no need to veer towards the middle of the road, declaring herself “a horny little Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It’s been a long wait. More than five years have passed since Maria Schneider’s most recent "magnum opus", the double album Data Lords came out. That was in July 2020, and the album went on to win not only a sixth and a seventh Grammy for the composer/bandleader, it was also a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Music. And I can’t help noting with some pride that theartsdesk’s review of that album is extensively quoted on the Pulitzer Prizes website (link below).In the intervening years, the main addition to Schneider’s catalogue has been Decades, a retrospective package released in Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The first time I heard Wuthering Heights I felt a bit like I’d walked into the wrong room – one lit by firelight rather than LEDs. Is this the sound of an artist in retreat? Away from the dancefloor, from self-scrutiny, from the lime-green glare of her hyperpop Brat era? Or a clean break from the terms that used to define her?When film maker Emerald Fennell asked for one song last year, Charli was on the brink of burnout. But the more she got into the creative world of Fennell’s new Wuthering Heights adaptation, the more she realised how much she wanted to escape into someone else’s 177-year- Read more ...
Joe Muggs
One of the smaller but more passionately enduring subcultures in the world today is that around slow dance music. The core of its audience is a Gen X crowd, a good number of whom have stuck with club culture since the mid Nineties or earlier, with others who’ve rekindled their love of electronic music in middle age: people whose knees might not be up to stomping to techno for hours, but are still deeply committed to the experience of deep and prolonged immersion in repetitive beats.Belfast’s Phil Kieran is a key mover and shaker in this scene. Though his career began 25 years ago as a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Jill Scott is neo-soul royalty, without any doubt whatsoever. In fact, her debut album, Who Is Jill Scott? remains a monumental release over quarter of a century since it first saw the light of day.Nevertheless, Scott has continually refused to be boxed-in as a singer but is a true Renaissance Woman who has also made her mark as a spoken word artist, poet and actor. Hence, she can easily be forgiven for making us wait 11 years since her last album, Women. That said, any fans approaching To Whom This May Concern with a degree of trepidation due to its long gestation can be rest assured. Jill Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There are always a few drawbacks to being a support act. For Allie X, the biggest issue was simply finding space to stand onstage, with so much ground already filled with covered up props for the night’s headliners. Still, she made a good effort with what she had, working the crowd well, and the clattering electro-pop of “Super Duper Party People” and a wickedly noisy “Off With Her Tits” carried enough verve by themselves that no stage craft was needed.Magdalena Bay had plenty of those songs too, but accompanied them with a stage décor that appeared to be aiming for the stars, or the moons. Read more ...
Ibi Keita
After leaving my headphones elsewhere, I plugged my wired earphones into my laptop and sat cross-legged on my bed. It felt like the universe wanted me to rewind time, back to when 2014 Forest Hills Drive first dropped, a teen in my room, listening to tinny rap through cheap speakers, imagining myself on some apartment rooftop in New York. The Fall Off took me straight back there, safe and familiar, as J. Cole carries that same boom bap spirit into his latest, and possibly last, 24-track album.From the opening moments, the album feels like home. Cole’s voice sounds like countless artists and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For Richard Hawley, a “little banger” is a top-notch single, one condensing everything about the performance and performer into what can he held on one side of a seven-incher. A flab-free, power-packed record. And it’s a mark of his discrimination that anything fitting the bill is a grade-A killer.Little Bangers From Richard Hawley's Jukebox Volume Two follows-up a correspondingly styled comp issued in 2023. As before, 28 tracks are selected: indeed, the first collection was titled 28 Little Bangers From Richard Hawley's Jukebox. For a second time, Link Wray crops up. This time, well-known Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Edward Simon shows again on this new album of re-imagined songs from Venezuela what a very fine pianist he is. His touch and inventiveness, his command of counterpoint and voice-leading are never short of jaw-dropping, and what he does remarkably well here is to create a succession of specific, authentic moods from songs that have a personal resonance.Simon is from that golden generation of musicians who studied as teenagers at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA) – Christian McBride, Kurt Rosenwinkel and the late Joey De Francesco. Simon arrived there as a Read more ...