Although Moon Rally has unambiguous musical roots, pinning down where it’s from is trickier. The album’s title nods to Air’s Moon Safari, as does a fair degree of the rhythmic chug and shimmering atmospherics. Sweden’s Radio Department come to mind. So do Belgium’s Antena and Estonia’s Maria Minerva.Continental European then. And with a sense of a lineage too. But although most of the album is sung in English, two of its last three tracks are in Russian. The last, “Вчерашний день” ("Yesterday"), twins an echoey vocal and acoustic guitar with a keyboard wash: it’s different to what has come Read more ...

It was going to be great. Birmingham’s Digbeth Rag Market was hosting 1977’s highest-profile punk festival on 17 July. The Clash were headlining. Also billed were The Heartbreakers, Rich Kids, The Saints, Shagnasty, Stinky Toys, Subway Sect and Tanya Hyde & the Tormentors.Two days before it was meant to happen, the city council cancelled it. A gathering of punks was prevented. Even so, The Clash and the less-lauded Shagnasty came to town and after meeting pissed-off ticket holders went to local venue Barbarella’s to put on an impromptu show. They used equipment borrowed from the band Read more ...

Despite a five-year career and no breakout hits, Australian outfit Confidence Man has grabbed the attention of some heavyweights.Signed to Heavenly Records, a label which knows their Roscoff onions from the common-or-garden variety, their 2017 single “Bubblegum” was remixed to bouncing brilliance by the late, great Andrew Weatherall, and there they are, squeezed between Clairo and Courtney Barnett on Glastonbury 2022’s banner poster. Their second album fulfils such faith. It’s a primary-coloured, sexy, cheeky dancefloor explosion.It's pop, but with a 1990s feel, as in doused in beat-bustin’ Read more ...

Anthony Kiedis’s autobiography Scar Tissue, an extreme example of wisdom through sometimes squalid excess, explains a great deal about the Chili Peppers’ mix of priapic lust and wistful romance. The return of guitarist John Frusciante and producer Rick Rubin, ever-presents on all their good albums, signals the band’s retrenchment after an inconsequential decade, Rubin’s usual back to basics MO ensuring that Unlimited Love sounds comfortingly familiar, naturally following on from peaks such as Blood Sugar Sex Magik (1991), Californication (1999) and Stadium Arcadium (2006).Opener “Black Read more ...

What an exquisite album! Beautiful voices that harmonise to perfection, superlative instrumental work, and songs both new and old yet all somehow familiar and timeless. Ink of the Rosy Morning: A Sampling of Folk Songs from Britain and North America is a lockdown album that captures the spontaneity that few of us felt during that dark time.Emerging in 2016 with Before the Sun, Hannah Sanders and Ben Savage – self-described “children of the folk clubs” – met in a Cambridge folk club doing floor spots, she having returned from America, he from a tour with The Willows. The chance encounter Read more ...

The three Canadians Richie Hawtin (Plastikman), Jason Beck (Chilly Gonzales) and Tiga Sontag (aka just Tiga, who exec produced this album) are each so laden with image and persona it is easy to forget they are musicians sometimes. Hawtin has since the early Nineties not only brought techno to mass audiences, but adorned it with all kinds of conceptual and design spectacle in arenas and galleries as much as in nighclubs. Sontag too, has turned dance music into theatre to huge success, albeit in a much more knowing, camp sense ever since the turn of the millennium electroclash era. And the Read more ...

There are few people, especially musicians, who would wish to revisit the spring and summer of 2020 with any fondness, but Sophie Ellis-Bextor might be an exception. Her kitchen discos, in which she and her husband Richard Jones, aided by their children, played a variety of covers became a lockdown source of solace and regular entertainment at a time when it was much needed.Two years later she has taken the concept out on the road for a celebratory party, albeit sans the kids, as she admitted with a laugh. To replace her children’s unexpected antics we instead had a large wheel, spun on a Read more ...

The fourth Ibibio Sound Machine album is produced by Hot Chip (who also contribute musically). However, fans will not hear a drastic step away from their last album, 2019’s Doko Mien. Instead, it has the feel of a logical progression, albeit with just that bit more techno-pop heft in places, and a subtle flavour of the Eighties. Business-as-usual, then? Maybe, but Ibibio Sound Machine’s Afro-inventive business-as-usual stands out brightly from the competition.The London-based band, fronted by Eno Williams, who sings in both English and Ibibio, a southern Nigerian language, open proceedings Read more ...

Motown and its related labels have been heavily collected and meticulously scrutinised since the early Sixties. There ought to be nothing left to say. Yet here this is, a smart, 24-track collection of Motown instros which includes five previously unreleased tracks.It’d be reasonable to assume that there was nothing more to give, that every tape vault everywhere had already been scoured. The download-only tracks which appeared last decade under the banner “Motown Unreleased” ought to have been it. Nonetheless, an unreleased quintet from 1961, 1963 and 1964 have surfaced. OK, three are by Read more ...

Acknowledging the contrast between personal and public situations, The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman says “I have a lot of songs about not being heard, yet I’m holding this microphone.” An individual’s voice can be ignored, but if it’s given a context which enables reaching out – it may be heard.The Weather Station’s February 2021 album, the pointedly titled Ignorance, framed her concerns about climate change and its horrifying effects as a broken relationship. It can be read as form of break-up album. However, the fissure examined is between humanity and the world hosting it. At the Read more ...

Rakel Mjöll has a nice line in understatement. “We released this album in July 2020”, she said at one point, referring to her band’s sophomore record “So When You Gonna...” before adding, dryly, “which wasn’t the best time”. Finally, nearly two years later, Dream Wife have managed to get out on the road and actually tour those songs, and, thankfully, this was an evening worth the wait.A glowing logo with the band name on it hung above the stage in the converted church that is St Luke’s, and like a punky Bat Signal, when lit up the band appeared, with bassist Bella Podpadec in particular Read more ...

At first, Bortenfor comes across as an all-instrumental extended mood piece. A breathy saxophone and trumpet mesh over a gently see-sawing double bass. Clusters of piano notes occasionally intersperse themselves into the undulating textures. A pedal steel evokes shimmering water.After nine tracks the album ends with “I havn,” a hymnal composition with wordless vocals and a series of crescendos. Once it’s all over, the lingering feeling is of having leafed through old photo albums, the sense that frozen pasts are trying to assert their presence in the present; that Bortenfor – the title Read more ...