New music
Guy Oddy
Once upon a time, albums of cover versions were something of a “go to” (along with hastily assembled live records or compilations with one or two new tracks) when an artist’s creative juices were running a bit dry. In recent times though, these stop-gaps seem to have been replaced with the remix album – because who really wants to give away all that lovely publishing income?However, it seems that the covers album might be making something of a comeback in 2026. Already this year, the Damned have put out Not Like Everybody Else and even Willie Nelson has released Last Leaf on the Tree. The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Jazz,” exclaims an audience member just after Plantoid launch into “Ultivatum Cultivation,” tonight’s second song – also the second song on the band’s recent second LP Flare.He’s got a point. What’s emanating from the stage at East London’s Moth Club is more a candidate for a description as jazz rather than the math rock – or even the prog rock – tags often cropping up when trying to pin down Plantoid. Jazz: in this case a take on the genre fusing a Miles Davis Bitches Brew sensibility with, in contrast, softer things; things suggesting a familiarity with Gary McFarland’s Sixties Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although it was released as a single in November 1968, The Goodees’ “Condition Red” could – apart from a specific quirk – have been issued four years earlier, in the wake of The Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack” hitting the US charts. Despite going on sale in the hippie, back-to-the-roots, heavier-than-heavy, burgeoning-bubblegum era, “Condition Red” is so in sync with “Leader of the Pack,” it can pass for a follow-up.However, the lyrics – that specific quirk – of “Condition Red,” while in line with the Shangri-Las’ tale of the demise of a ruff-’n’-tuff rebel boy after a vehicular mishap, are Read more ...
Joe Muggs
If you’re supposed to be in touch with pop culture as part of your professional life, there’s not much that can sharpen the lines of your ignorance like having teenage kids. Of course, not everyone can know or like everything, especially not in this era of unimaginable abundance. But my kids reaching the age of proper fandom has really brought me up on how I’ve lazily treated huge sections of the global mainstream as homogenous blocs, when musically and culturally they are really anything but. This has particularly been the case with the arena rave sounds of American EDM, and with the factory Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Over the years, Ronnie Scott’s, one of the premier jazz clubs in the world, has hosted some truly transcendental music. There’s something about the horseshoe layout of the seating that promotes exceptional intimacy. When the music zings and the audience feels it, there is a positive feedback loop which elevates the event beyond the merely ordinary.Steve Coleman and Five Elements, although still jet-lagged, in the early stages of an intense European tour, rose to the occasion, with an incandescent set that had the punters bewitched and – for Ronnie’s – unusually quiet. Unlike many other star Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There was a surreal moment in February when, scrolling through my feed, I became briefly convinced that Sting had cult-napped Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso.The evidence was a deadpan video of the "Every Breath You Take" singer welcoming two traumatised-looking Argentine pop stars into something called the Free Spirits Wellness Centre. It took a sec to work out that this announced the new album from the smooth-voiced, mulleted, snarly-pouting Ca7riel and his friend since childhood, gravelly sounding and perpetually wide-eyed Paco Amoroso. What was going on?If you're not yet acquainted, the duo Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In this most challenging of times, we need music to lift our spirits and relieve the gloom. Step forward, in all their retro-chic, cabaret-burlesque splendour The Puppini Sisters, with their perfect harmonies and songs that cheer and distract. Their style, and sometimes the songs themselves, are drawn from the dark days of the 1940s, when The Andrews Sisters filled the crackling airwaves with songs such as “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”, their style heavily influenced by an earlier close-harmony sister act, The Boswell Sisters, who came out of the Jazz Age and enlivened the years of the Great Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Mother Pearl is not direct. While sixth track “Checking In,” with its rising-falling cadences and verse-chorus structure, is its most immediate, the dominant impression of the new LP by the Iceland-born Gyða Valtysdóttir is that it’s about creating an atmosphere and then nurturing it to generate an enveloping aural milieu.According to Gyða, quoted in the promotional material, “Mother Pearl is a seed, is potential, is a gift, is an aragonite, is a jewel created from an irritation from a grain of sand, is iridescent, contains all the colours, is vibrant, it is a fertile egg waiting to become.” Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Phil Campbell, guitarist for Motörhead from 1984 onwards, died on Friday 13th March after a "long and courageous battle in intensive care following a complex major operation". He was 64. While Motörhead's "classic line-up" is often eulogised, Campbell was their riffing heartbeat for over three decades, longer in the band than anyone but Lemmy himself. He played amped-up rock as well as any rocker out there but was, at least in later life, a quiet-spoken, unpretentious and down-to-earth man. Below, is a piece I wrote in 2013, presented as it was then.Phil Campbell (b 1961) has been guitarist Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Juanita Stein had a simple request for her bandmates. “Don’t fuck this up”, she joked, before the Australian group played a song from their new album for only the second time ever. You could understand the concern, however lightly it was expressed. These are still early days in the band’s reformation, with this year’s “Strange Days” offering the first material in 11 years.Hence the trio, augmented to a foursome here, were back in what Stein called a home away from home – the cramped surroundings of King Tut’s. It is a familiar haunt for the group, while also indicative of the fact that Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s disquieting, as a bloke, to hear 2000 female voices singing about the sexual frustration caused by premature ejaculation. A noisy chorale, heartfelt, behind Lily Allen’s 2009 hit “Not Fair”, cascades from two tiers of balconies. “And then you make this noise, and it's apparent it's all over.” Lily Allen isn’t even on yet. Just this celebratory femme-centric congregation around the joys of dating a one-minute man.It’s the first half of the show – and make no mistake, this is a show, touring theatres, not a gig – and it’s a simple set-up. Three female cello players, clad in black, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although the bulk of the 20 tracks collected on Eternal Journey - The Arrangements and Productions of Charles Stepney were originally issued between 1967 and 1971, the period evoked by this compilation dedicated to the titular musical polymath is not limited to the late Sixties and the early Seventies. There is an early Nineties character too.That was when a lot of what’s heard on the compilation reached a fresh listening audience. Twenty or-so years after they were first released, Terry Callier’s “What Color is Love,” Minnie Riperton’s “Les Fleur” and Marlena Shaw’s “California Soul” Read more ...