New music
CD: Purple – BodaciousMonday, 25 July 2016
Purple’s 2014 debut album, (409), was a burst of party punk straight out of Texas that deftly avoided crass clichés while letting the good times roll. Sophomore effort Bodacious won’t disappoint those who were bitten by the Purple bug the first time... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Bitori, Space EchoSunday, 24 July 2016
Since achieving international success in the final years of the 1980s, the late Cesária Évora has dominated much of globe’s perception of music from the Cape Verde (officially Cabo Verde). This fascinating pair of releases reveal other aspects which... Read more... |
theartsdesk in the Faroe Islands: G! Festival 2016Sunday, 24 July 2016
Familiar words pepper the lead item on the 9am radio news: "Brexit", "Theresa May", "Boris Johnson". Yet the bulletin is delivered in the first language of the 49,000-population Faroe Islands. The self-governing region of Denmark may be a remote... Read more... |
CD: Viola Beach - Viola BeachSunday, 24 July 2016
It was somewhere around the third posthumous Jeff Buckley compilation that I realised that my love for an artist, and my completist nature, would never quite compensate for the general ickiness I felt about the nonconsensual release of their works... Read more... |
Pet Shop Boys, Royal Opera HouseThursday, 21 July 2016
Anyone remember the Boobahs? They were the less successful cousins of the Teletubbies, from the same production house. They were puffy, fat, primary-coloured humanoids who bounced endlessly around in bizarre choreographed dance routines. They were... Read more... |
CD: Ben Chatwin - Heat & EntropyThursday, 21 July 2016
Ben Chatwin's music speaks loudly of solitude. He lives and records on the coast of the Firth of Forth, just outside Edinburgh – not exactly the most isolated of spots, but it's not hard to hear in his waves of texture and simple repeated motifs the... Read more... |
Becca Stevens Band, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseWednesday, 20 July 2016
Becca Stevens’ limpid, luscious and artful fusion of Appalachian folk, jazz and indie rock found a perfectly empathetic setting in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, in an inspired choice for Lauren Laverne’s Wonder Women series of summer gigs. Stevens’... Read more... |
CD: Jim Causley & Luke Thompson - The Clay HymnalWednesday, 20 July 2016
Devonian singer and accordionist Jim Causley released Cyprus Well, settings of his relative Charles Causley's poems, in 2013. What may be his finest album to date, Forgotten Kingdom, came early this year, and now he has released a second album of... Read more... |
CD: Black Merlin – Hipnotik TradisiMonday, 18 July 2016
Dance music has, for millions of people, become synonymous with the very worst that the human race has to offer. Preening, vain, beach-body bumholes dancing like everyone’s watching, while keeping half an eye on their camera, making sure than the... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: The Hollywood BratsSunday, 17 July 2016
July last year saw the publication of Sick on You: The Disastrous Story of Britain’s Great Lost Punk Band, Andrew Matheson’s chronicle of his band The Hollywood Brats. The essential book was impossible to put down. It took in picaresque encounters... Read more... |
CD: John Martin - The Hidden NotesSunday, 17 July 2016
Few new releases come with quite such a specific technical claim as this double release from British saxophonist John Martin. His album title refers to his incorporation of multiphonics, an established technique in free improvisation, within his 11... Read more... |
CD: MSTRKRFT - OPERATORSaturday, 16 July 2016
Music is so often about context, some music more than others. Such is the case with the latest album – the third – from Canadian electronic bolshies MSTRKRFT. It’s wilfully obnoxious, caustic stuff, a battering techno-based assault that cares not a... Read more... |
