New music
Album: Black Doldrums - Dead AwakeMonday, 07 March 2022
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... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Blossom Toes - We Are Ever So CleanSunday, 06 March 2022
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... Read more... |
theartsdesk on Vinyl 69: Andrew Weatherall, Courtney Barnett, Wings, Los Bitchos, Popol Vuh and moreSaturday, 05 March 2022
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... Read more... |
Album: Loop - SonancySaturday, 05 March 2022
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... Read more... |
Melt Yourself Down, Patterns, Brighton review - ballistic double sax punk attackFriday, 04 March 2022
“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... Read more... |
Album: Sabaton - The War to End All WarsFriday, 04 March 2022
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... Read more... |
Album: Dolly Parton - Run Rose RunThursday, 03 March 2022
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... Read more... |
Album: Lighght - SeodraWednesday, 02 March 2022
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... Read more... |
Album: Marillion – An Hour Before It's DarkMonday, 28 February 2022
Though Marillion have experimented with modern rock textures, and have also cut an acoustic album (2009’s Less Is More), the group is defined by its ardent, layered neo-prog sound – given a Romantic bark and fervor by Fish when he was the singer (... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Bernard Butler - People Move OnSunday, 27 February 2022
This new edition of People Move On, Bernard Butler’s April 1998 debut solo album, takes what was issued then to up to four CDs. Nothing unusual in that. Box set-isations of a single album customarily add alternate versions, outtakes, non-album... Read more... |
Album: Cécile McLorin Salvant - Ghost SongSaturday, 26 February 2022
When 2020 MacArthur Fellow and three-time Grammy Award winner Cécile McLorin Salvant previewed some of the material from her forthcoming album to an enraptured audience at Cadogan Hall as part of last year’s EFG London Jazz Festival, you sensed that... Read more... |
Album: Avril Lavigne - Love SuxFriday, 25 February 2022
Back in June, there was a Tik Tok of a woman with eyeliner and a skinny tie miming to the 2002 hit, “Sk8er Boi”. They say trends come in 20 year cycles, which makes sense given the current pop-punk revival we are in. For zoomers, it’s nostalgia for... Read more... |
