New music
Music Reissues Weekly: Saturno 2000 - La Rebajada de Los Sonideros 1962-1983Sunday, 17 April 2022
What’s in the groove isn’t necessarily the end of the story. Sound is fixed into a record when it’s pressed. Get it revolving on a turntable, dump the needle onto it and what’s heard is what’s intended to be heard. It’s fixed. Nonetheless, DJs... Read more... |
Album: Swedish House Mafia - Paradise AgainSaturday, 16 April 2022
Returning with their first new music in almost a decade, EDM supergroup Swedish House Mafia (the producer-DJ trio Steve Angello, Axwell and Sebastian Ingros) deliver their debut album with a sense of vaulting ambition and anything-is-possible belief... Read more... |
Goldfrapp, Symphony Hall, Birmingham review - crowd-pleasing nostalgia for the fansFriday, 15 April 2022
Felt Mountain is not one of Goldfrapp’s most dynamic albums. So, what better venue to stop off in Birmingham to celebrate 20 years since its release than the iconic all-seater Symphony Hall? This the venue, after all, that is renowned for some of... Read more... |
Album: Reef - Shoot Me Your AceFriday, 15 April 2022
I have a theory about Reef. In the mid-Nineties, when the Somerset outfit appeared, they were reviled by London music journalists. This was mostly because they sounded like a hoary, unreconstructed early-Seventies blues-rock band. Those same... Read more... |
Album: Earthen Sea - Ghost PoemsThursday, 14 April 2022
Kranky, run in Chicago for very nearly 30 years now, is one of the most remarkably consistent record labels around. They helped define “post-rock” in the Nineties with key releases from the likes of Labradford and God Speed You! Black Emperor, and... Read more... |
The Mission, Chalk, Brighton review - the hits, delivered straight, to an enthused crowdWednesday, 13 April 2022
“Play something we can dance to,” heckles a fan. “Fuck off, we are not a dance band,” fires back Wayne Hussey, leader of The Mission. He’s right. They’re not. But still there is dancing.One especially notable aspect of this gig is the total and... Read more... |
Album: Kurt Vile - (Watch My Moves)Wednesday, 13 April 2022
Although the term “hipster” has become degraded to well beyond cliché, Kurt Vile is one of those artists whose fans may indeed have that in-the-know smugness. With Vile, though, this is not a bad thing. Given the increasingly confidence-shedding... Read more... |
Album: Sirom - The Liquified Throne of SimplicityMonday, 11 April 2022
Expansive, free-form, handmade and improvised, the extravagantly-titled The Liquified Throne of Simplicity is the fourth album from this freewheeling Slovenian trio of multi-instrumentalists. They forage among the world’s musics as well as their own... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: My World Fell Down - The John Carter StorySunday, 10 April 2022
Fat Man’s Music Festival. The Haystack. Red Line Explosion. Stormy Petrel. Butterwick. Sweet Chariot. Names which don't immediately spring to mind.The factor linking them is also common to 1967’s “Let’s go to San Francisco” hit-makers The Flower Pot... Read more... |
Mdou Moctar, Hare & Hounds, Birmingham review - Tuareg rock’n’rollers have their audience entrancedSaturday, 09 April 2022
It doesn’t happen very often that I find myself experiencing a performance of music that I don’t really know, sung in a language that I don’t speak – and completely entranced by what’s going on. But prior to this week, Mdou Moctar was a bit of... Read more... |
Album: Camila Cabello - FamiliaSaturday, 09 April 2022
The global popularity of Latin music in the past few years is almost incomprehensibly huge. 2017’s “Despacito” by Puerto Rican Luis Fonsi was the point where it became clear that Latin America – like South Korea – was now operating entirely on its... Read more... |
Album: Jack White - Fear Of The DawnFriday, 08 April 2022
Jack White is still unsatisfied, and rock’n’roll still unfinished business for its most extremist exponent. His last pre-pandemic album, Boarding House Reach (2018), seemed a major blow to his career, its experiment in warped dynamics and Beat... Read more... |
