wed 06/08/2025

New music

Music Reissues Weekly: Broadcast - Maida Vale Sessions, Microtronics, Mother Is The Milky Way

In 2000, Broadcast’s first album The Noise Made By People entered the UK’s mainstream Top 100 and claimed the top spot on the dance charts. Three years later, their second album Haha Sound was in the Top Ten of America’s dance/electronic charts. It...

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Album: Midlake - For the Sake of Bethel Woods

After a count in, the first lines of album opener "Commune" are “I’ve been away now far too long, lost and alone with no commune.” Fair enough. For the Sake of Bethel Woods is Midlake’s first album since 2013’s Antiphon.The second track is “Bethel...

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Album: The Shires - 10 Year Plan

Seems odd now, but there was a time when many Brits found country music laughable. It was a common thing. For instance, when Keith Richards embraced country, Jagger initially thought it a joke. By the time I was coming up in the Eighties, post-punk...

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Album: Jenny Hval - Classic Objects

Norwegian artist Jenny Hval is a novelist as well as a singer-songwriter, and her new album certainly has a literary approach to music making.Classic Objects is made of up little stories set to music - standalone units of narrative outside of the...

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Album: Black Doldrums - Dead Awake

Dead Awake may be the first album by London-based trio Black Doldrums, but it is one with very deep roots that grow from dark psychedelia, early Goth sounds and those ever-reliable touchstones, Suicide and the Velvet Underground. In short, it harks...

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Music Reissues Weekly: Blossom Toes - We Are Ever So Clean

In July 1967, a British band called The Ingoes changed their name. Up to this point they’d traded in R&B, blues and soul, and tackled some rock ’n roll covers too. Ingoes referenced the 1958 Chuck Berry song “Ingo”. As they’d just recorded their...

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theartsdesk on Vinyl 69: Andrew Weatherall, Courtney Barnett, Wings, Los Bitchos, Popol Vuh and more

As the year starts to rev up, theartsdesk on Vinyl returns with over 7000 words on new music on plastic, a smörgåsbord of the kind you will find nowhere else. This month we also have a competition for the dance music lovers among you, a chance to...

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Album: Loop - Sonancy

Seven and a half years ago, Loop frontman Robert Hampson retired the band's back catalogue in front of a live audience. “You won’t hear these old songs again,” he told the audience at Islington’s Garage.As shocks go, it might not have been up there...

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Melt Yourself Down, Patterns, Brighton review - ballistic double sax punk attack

“As you’ve noticed, I’m really terrible at talking between the songs,” announces Melt Yourself Down singer Kushal Gaya, two-thirds of the way through the gig. He is. But it really doesn’t matter; the genre-uncategorizable London six-piece smash...

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Album: Sabaton - The War to End All Wars

Demonstrating how much the world really can change in a very short time when things spin out of control, Swedish power-metal five-piece Sabaton’s album now seems especially tasteless. It’s also a scalpel-sharp example of how important context is to...

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Album: Dolly Parton - Run Rose Run

I tried, I really did. Took a shot at my best, and fell short, Yup, I couldn’t get beyond the opening chapters of Dolly Parton’s first novel, written with that veteran of popular page-turnin’, James Patterson. The best bit for me was on the first...

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Album: Lighght - Seodra

Eamon Ivri, from Cork on the Irish south coast, is a polymath. He’s a poet (his nom de techno is taken from minimalist poet Aram Saroyan), a fascinating political thinker, and a searing online satirist of cultural mores (or “shitposter” as...

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