New music
Album: Badly Drawn Boy - Banana Skin ShoesWednesday, 20 May 2020
In 2000, when Badly Drawn Boy released his debut album, The Hour of Belwiderbeast, it felt like an embarrassment of riches. Along with the string of singles he’d previously put out, ranging from the lo-fi to the luminous, Damon Gough’s creative tap... Read more... |
Album: Steve Earle & The Dukes - Ghosts of West VirginiaMonday, 18 May 2020
Guy Clark, Steve Earle’s mentor and champion and the singer-songwriter to whom he paid homage on his 2019 album, once said that “songs aren’t finished until you play them for people”. By which he surely meant live, creating that vibe for which the... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Damily - Madagascar Cassette ArchivesSunday, 17 May 2020
Outside his home country Madagascar, Damily was first heard via a couple of tracks on the 2004 French compilation album Tsapiky, Panorama D'une Jeune Musique De Tulear, an overview of the tsapiky dance music of the south-west of the island. He’d... Read more... |
theartsdesk on Vinyl 57: Gramme, Terry Edwards, The Orb, The Monochrome Set and much moreSaturday, 16 May 2020
After C19 delays theartsdesk on Vinyl is back. My initial policy, reckoning that new vinyl would dry up under COVID conditions, was to do regular lockdown mini-editions with the material already set aside here, until it ran out. That didn’t work out... Read more... |
Album: Tim Burgess - I Love the New SkySaturday, 16 May 2020
What a joy. I Love the New Sky opens with the most un-Stones-like “Empathy For the Devil”. Rolling piano, see-sawing violin and snatches of bubbling synth course through a propulsive pop nugget with cascading harmonies and a McCartney-esque melody.... Read more... |
Album: Charli XCX - how i'm feeling nowFriday, 15 May 2020
This is an extremely impressive undertaking. how i'm feeling now was conceived, written and recorded in under two months, in isolation, with Charli XCX sourcing beats and artwork from a sprawling collective of regular collaborators and... Read more... |
Album: Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - The Mosaic of TransformationThursday, 14 May 2020
A singer-songwriter of somewhat mystical bent, originally from a forested island in the US Pacific Northwest, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith really came into her own when she discovered vintage synthesizers. In particular, her masterpiece, 2016's EARS,... Read more... |
New Music Lockdown 6: David Gilmour, Taylor Swift, Prince, Bat For Lashes and BlossomsWednesday, 13 May 2020
As the music industry slips into the rhythm of lockdown, so the spigot slowly becomes untapped and events, livestreams and similar start to flow more steadily. This week a host of big names are up to a bunch of different stuff, all worth checking.... Read more... |
Little Richard (1932-2020) - sexuality, spirituality and rock'n'roll's gospel rootsWednesday, 13 May 2020
The day that Little Richard’s death was announced, my friend the soul singer PP Arnold wrote on her Instagram feed, of a “sanctified boogie-woogie piano style that was just electric”. She went on, recalling first hearing the man’s undiluted... Read more... |
Album: Moses Sumney - græWednesday, 13 May 2020
Moses Sumney’s second album is a double, and splits and nuances in gender, sexuality and identity define its fluid nature. A 28-year-old Ghanaian-American who grew up as an outsider in both countries, Sumney is most interested in removing... Read more... |
Album: Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit - ReunionsMonday, 11 May 2020
Like his friend the late John Prine, Jason Isbell is a master storyteller. His skill, like Prine’s, is to inhabit the characters he sings about so fully, and with such empathy, that it can be difficult to tell where the songwriter ends and the story... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Bob Stanley & Pete Wiggs Present The Tears of TechnologySunday, 10 May 2020
“Like mellotrons before them, synthesisers could project a strange and deep emotion – something in the wiring had an inherent melancholy. Previous generations had often disparaged synths as dehumanising machines but, at the turn of the 80s, a new... Read more... |
