At the Dot To Dot Festival in Nottingham, back in May, I noticed some of the most exciting bands I caught were marinated in grunge. One of them was Grandmas House. Their debut album now arrives and the grunge element turns out to be only part of the deal. The queer Bristol femme-punkin’ quartet try on various musical hats but, even at their poppiest, maintain a creeping sense of threat.Their lead weapon is the rasping voice of singer-guitarist Yasmin Berndt, whose vocals sound like no-one else around, a death metal growl plastered around a tone somewhere between Karen O and Scott Weiland. Yes Read more ...

Miles Davis’s centenary this year has led to some fascinating work. The MILES play with Jay Phelps at Southwark Playhouse Borough in February – reviewed here – has been the most thought-provoking of the ventures so far. The Theo Croker Mixtape at the Festival Hall In March had only the briefest and most cursory glimpses of Miles, but did welcome Gary Bartz to blast us from the past. Ingrid Jensen was on imperious form with the Porgy and Bess album re-creation at Guildhall in May. But this BBC Prom was the big one, the XXL celebration with Ambrose Akinmusire and his quartet and full orchestra Read more ...

Jorja Smith’s performance at the recent Radio 1 Big Weekend shebang is really worth tracking down if you want a lesson in high functioning nonchalance. Dressed down in denim, performing with only a DJ as backing, she gave very little in the way of gesture or pizazz, ran through mostly short snippets of her songs – and yet held the essentially pop crowd of thousands in the palm of her hand. From a lesser talent it wouldn’t have worked, but the vital thing here was that Smith was working with the tools of deep rooted Black London music. This was a soundsystem set, showcasing classic party Read more ...

Almost 20 years ago, Late Of The Pier were an exciting post-nu-rave band who injected synthesizer sparkiness into indie. They even had a Top 30 album. They were a breath of fresh air. One of their members, Sam Eastgate, went on to produce solo material as LA Priest. While electronically constructed, his output has often wandered into Moderat/James Blake territory. Which is to say, sensitive, falsetto-leaning singer-songwriter fare. But for album number four he’s amped up the bang factor.To assist him in this, his producer is Alex Ridha, AKA German EDM kingpin Boys Noize, a man who’s worked Read more ...

“My Lost One”, Materia’s second track, is remarkable. Exemplifying the Julia Holter ethos to the max, it begins wispily with interweaving rippling electric piano figures, a whispered, echoey vocal and slippery acoustic bass. Gradually, grandeur is assumed: a sonic architecture soaring into and beyond the clouds, and outwards into the wider cosmos.Despite the next track “Fantasy” having a similar, though much more brief exposition, nothing else on Materia is so strikingly consummated. The rest of the album is more muted, foggy, out of focus, restrained. Etiolated, even.Overall, Materia is line Read more ...

The latest in Peter Culshaw’s occasional radio shows with a global music bent is a post-WOMAD chat with one of its originators, who suggested the idea to his pal Peter Gabriel at the bar at a Talking Heads gig. The chat starts with WOMAD - Mark relies on recommendations of what to see from younger family members, like José González (pictured above) who graced the stage on the Sunday of teh festival.Mark, also an esteemed theartsdesk contributor, has had an amazing and productive past, notably doing a series of ground-breaking music documentaries, from an on-the-road film with the Kursaal Read more ...

Like electronica, metal is an umbrella term that contains multitudes of micro-genres. How do you fancy sludge, blackened crust or funeral doom? And that’s just scraping the surface. One of the more common ones is metalcore, a portmanteau word for the heaviest metal crashing into hardcore punk. A rising band in this category is São Paulo’s AXTY whose fourth album is as inventive as it is apoplectic.They’re a three-piece, with frontman Felipe Martins delivering hacksaw-throated, gurgle-growled lyrics. There’s also drummer Gabriel Marques and guitarist Jonathas Xavier, and one of them Read more ...

Just over 24 hours before Idlewild stepped out at the Kelvingrove Bandstand, the much ballyhooed solar eclipse had proved a damp squib for much of Scotland, with cloudy weather obscuring any views. With inevitable irony, the following day brought clear skies and sunshine, meaning the audience for this outdoor Glasgow show were basking in brightness and warmth for the arrival of Roddy Woomble and company, a band now holding indie veteran status.Sadly the good weather did not massively help support act Sorren Maclean, a well kent face in Scottish music. His low-key set, built around trad Read more ...

The Adverts’ debut single was released by Stiff Records in late April 1977. The top side of the “One Chord Wonders” / “Quick Step” pairing was a dry humoured assessment of the state of play in British punk. It was and is a remarkable record.However, reviews back then were mixed. NME’s Tony Parsons said it was “mundane rock by new wave flotsam and jetsam” and that The Adverts are “almost unbelievably boring.” In contrast, Sounds rated it as Single Of The Week and said “If [singer] TV Smith can keep writing songs like this, The Adverts will be up there with them.” Prescient. Their next single, Read more ...

A lost weekend is time you can't account for: you come out of it changed, unsure quite how. Phoebe Bridgers, it seems, has been living inside one. Six years after Punisher, she returns not with interviews but phone-free pop-up shows for $20, and an album that drifts further out than anything she's done before: sixteen songs about losing her father, ending a relationship and falling headlong in love."The Outside" opens muffled and distorted, Bridgers' delicate voice melting through the static as she watches someone "get carried away", frozen in place but not afraid. It is an introduction to an Read more ...

Unlike in Britain, where the bar for entry is more survival than talent, “national treasure” is not a term in such wide currency in America. But Mavis Staples is indeed a National Treasure – rather, an International Treasure – writ large. Younger readers who were mesmerised by Timothy Chalamet playing Bob Dylan and who then asked on social media “what did Joan Baez and Pete Seeger do after A Complete Unknown?” (yes, really) may recall a scene early in that movie where “the unwashed phenomenon” (as Baez would later describe him) plays a hootenanny at Riverside Church. There he meets not Read more ...

It’s easy to miss what an interesting artist Carly Simon is. I’ve certainly been guilty of it; bar a few undeniable gems, it felt like her oeuvre was based in a 1970s white rock music retreat from the innovations of the previous decade – a footnote to The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac and Elton John’s mega-big building of a new conventionality. It didn’t help that contemporary reviews or cultural commentary tended to mention her almost entirely in gossipy terms about her glamour and social / romantic life – essentially through a prism of her relationship to famous men. As such I ignored her later Read more ...