Confessions II arrives amid a welter of promotional spectacle and global corporate partnerships. At heart, though, it’s Madonna retreating from projects stuck in development hell, and working through bereavement, via the salve of making music in a low-key London situation with Stuart Price. He produced 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor, to which this is a sequel. The preceding singles did not bode well but Confessions II contains surprises and shows a superstar holding her own.Returning to the arena of clubland bangers, and presented as a continuous mix, it’s hampered by the fact that house Read more ...

To experience a performance by Seattle’s ambient metal kings, Sunn O))) is not like attending a conventional rock’n’roll gig, by any means. For a start, there are no drums, no bass and these days, no vocals. All the music comes from just two guitars, wielded by Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, and an awful lot of amplifiers, speakers and sustain pedals.It isn’t just in their instrumentation that Sunn O))) defy standard rock’n’roll lore either. Dressed in monks’ habits, they move slowly around the stage, as if in choreographed half-speed, for a show that might be characterised as being part Read more ...

“Hull Suite” is an important work in the canon of British-Bengali pianist Zoe Rahman, because it evokes themes – voyage, migration and family – which resonate strongly with her. The composition was commissioned at short notice by the Hull Jazz Festival (as a work for solo piano) for World Piano Day in 2024.Rahman drew inspiration from two statues overlooking the water in Hull. “The Crossing” is a bronze statue depicting a migrating family, and honours over 2 million people from Northern and Eastern Europe  who passed through the port on their way to America between 1836 and 1914. The Read more ...

If, like me, you’re not a dedicated jazz listener, sometimes when you dip back in even the most straightforward playing can take your breath away. Go to a small jazz club in any city in any given week, and chances are you can find some unassuming musicians, from music students to over-70s who’ve been doing it their entire lives long, doing superhuman things. They might not be breaking any boundaries or going stir crazy, but however familiar or simple the material they’re jamming on might be, the feats of memory, dexterity and borderline telepathic interlocking with one another can be as far Read more ...

“Guys, don’t grow old gracefully… it wouldn’t suit you,” The Who’s Pete Townshend told the Rolling Stones at their induction to the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. They listened. Fast-forward some four decades to 2026, and the surviving Stones have eschewed any state of grace for a raucous, almost confrontational new album in Foreign Tongues that bubbles over with energy and purpose. It picks up where their studio comeback Hackney Diamonds left off and turns it all up a few notches.However, a word of warning: if the “loudness wars” of modern-day production get you down, you’ll need to Read more ...

Butthole Surfers were once a major force in underground rock music. Due to a combination of bad luck and bad decisions, poor management and selling far fewer records than the likes of Nirvana, however, they have unjustly found themselves relegated to a scanty footnote in music’s history books. One of the pieces of bad luck that led to this story state was their record company, Capitol burying and refusing to release their 1997 album After the Astronaut – claiming it as “unsellable”.In fact, the album was eventually heavily remixed, with some new tracks added and others removed for the 2001 Read more ...

VINYL OF THE MONTHEd O’Brien Blue Morpho (Transgressive) Image The last thing theartsdesk on Vinyl thought it needed was a solo album from Radiohead’s guitarist but Blue Morpho, Ed O’Brien’s second album, spikes expectations. The opening “Incantations” is fab, a low-rolling, bongo-tastic thing hazed in mysticism, like a particularly stoned offcut from Plant & Page’s No Quarter project. The album was, apparently, a healing exercise for O’Brien, who was having brain doldrums. It feels that way, lightness touched with sadness, like that Read more ...

Judging from her second album, young country singer Willow Avalon has kissed her fair share of frogs. She doesn’t let them off the hook. Rather, she stamps all over them with a vivacious ferocity that makes for entertaining songs. “You’re so full of shit that your britches don’t fit, and your mama is the only one that likes you,” she allows on “Work to Do”. And there’s plenty more where that came from.Avalon’s father is the offbeat country singer Jim White, perhaps best-known to connoisseurs of Deep South arcana for the excellent documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus. Maybe she Read more ...

“Keys to Your Heart,” the only single by Joe Strummer’s pre-Clash band The 101’ers, was released on 27 June 1976 – 50 years ago this week.Fantastic and still vital, “Keys to Your Heart” is a driving pop-rocker with a Sixties feel. It edges towards powerpop. But the urgency of delivery and its raggedness mark it out as broadly telegraphing what was around the corner with British punk rock. And its mid section, with Strummer's testifying, presages a fundamental element of the make-up of The Clash. An important single.The anniversary is neat prompt to consider the band’s musical legacy: what Read more ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...