New music
CD: Nick Mulvey - Wake Up NowWednesday, 06 September 2017
Nick Mulvey’s 2014 debut album First Mind may be one of the century’s best so far. Album number two, then, has the critical bar set high. On that opening record, the ex-Portico Quartet singer-songwriter majored in complex-yet-simple songs that wove... Read more... |
CD: Deerhoof - Mountain MovesMonday, 04 September 2017
With the wind behind them, the San Francisco-founded band Deerhoof are one of the greatest live experiences you can have. Two decades since their first album, they still have a relentlessly experimental hunger for sonic surprise, mixing... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Ólafur ArnaldsSunday, 03 September 2017
We’ve been here before. Not to exactly the same territory, but to a neighbouring space in the same time frame. Last year, theartsdesk looked at a reissue of 2007’s Room to Expand, the first widely available album by the minimalist pianist Hauschka.... Read more... |
CD: Tom Russell - Folk HotelSunday, 03 September 2017
Close your eyes and be transported. Not just to Greenwich Village, New York and America’s west, but to Copenhagen, Belfast and Swansea, from whence Dylan Thomas – dedicatee of “The Sparrow of Swansea” – set out on his adventures. The album was... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Musician Albert HammondSaturday, 02 September 2017
Albert Hammond might not be a household name but he's still, undeniably, one of the world's greatest living songwriters. His songs have sold 360 million copies, ranging from Starship's soft-rock classic "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" to Julio... Read more... |
CD: Kev Minney - Stories of the SkyWednesday, 30 August 2017
A striking and memorable debut made possible by a combination of crowd-funding and an Arts Council grant, Stories of the Sky combines 31-year-old Kev Minney’s twin obsessions, music and astronomy.Born in Northampton, and Brighton-based these last... Read more... |
h.Club 100 Awards: Music - opening up the futureTuesday, 29 August 2017
The second decade of the 21st century will undoubtedly be remembered for huge innovations in accessing music, just as much as for the music itself. As well as acknowledging upfront talent, then, the Hospital Club’s h.Club 100 Music shortlist for... Read more... |
Sue Steward 1946-2017: She came, she saw, she salsa'dMonday, 28 August 2017
Sue Steward, who died suddenly last week from a brain haemorrhage, was one of theartsdesk’s most loved members, her free spirit and her double specialism in world music and photography making her an intrinsic asset to this pioneering critics’ site... Read more... |
CD: Red Axes - The Beach GothsMonday, 28 August 2017
It’s telling that, on their 2014 debut LP, Ballad of the Ice, Dori Sadovnik and Niv Arzi covered Bauhaus’ epic proto-gothic ode “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”. The 1979 single, with its incessant shuffle, dubbed-out tape delay and post-punk guitars, straddled... Read more... |
CD: Hannah Peel - Mary Casio: Journey to CassiopeiaSunday, 27 August 2017
The brass band/electronica interface is not a seam which musicians have previously mined regularly. Or, for that matter, at all. Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia is probably – nothing else springs to mind – the only album teaming pulsing analogue... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: The Radiators From SpaceSunday, 27 August 2017
TV Tube Heart, the debut album from The Radiators From Space, was issued on 21 October 1977, a week before the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks. Each was a punk rock album and one, inevitably, has been subjected to greater historical analysis... Read more... |
Prom 53 review: Buckley, Metropole Orkest - extravagantly entertaining jazzSaturday, 26 August 2017
Think Charles Mingus, and it’s unlikely that a neon-coiffed saxophonist playing acoustic house while doing a solo can-can around the stage will come to mind. A highly original, introspective figure whose best music is a thrillingly rumbustious... Read more... |
