New music
joe.muggs
It’s over ten years now since theartsdesk cited Tinie Tempah’s success as marking the start of a revolution for post grime black British rappers conquering the pop charts on something approaching their own terms. And it’s very nearly as long since we noted the bleak directness of what was then known as “road rap”, underground hip hop well away from the charts in a world of self-distributed mixtapes and YouTube videos, and charting the violence and rivalries of the class A drug trade. That revolution did happen and then some, and in fact it incorporated the grim Read more ...
Ellie Porter
Making sourdough, PE with Joe Wicks, writing a novel… none of that for Derby’s finest purveyors of unapologetically retro rock. Instead, the Struts decided to make the most of lockdown by recording a new album – all piling into producer Jon Levine’s Los Angeles house (having got themselves COVID-tested first) and spending ten days coming up with this, the follow up to their 2014 debut Everybody Wants and 2016's Young&Dangerous.Ten days well spent, it turns out. Strange Days is a great record that does its darndest to put a smile on your face – full of radio-friendly, huge- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The term electro-pop has kind of lost its meaning, The Top 20 has, for many years, been full of music created on computers, from Charli XCX to BTS to Clean Bandit. Yet still, as a genre header, it's often used to refer to music that riffs on the sound of the 1980s synthesizer pioneers. The music of Norwegian singer Annie has tended in this direction but her latest album, only her third in two decades, is even more explicitly in this vein. It is a bright, engaging affair, given emotional heft by her trademark melancholia.Annie appeared amidst the millennial focus on the Norwegian city of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s been 22 years since the Dub Pistols surfed into public view on the Big Beat wave with the absolutely rocking “There’s Gonna be a Riot” single. Eight albums later and Barry Ashworth’s collective are back with a cracking new disc of ska, dub and drum’n’bass rhythms, shot through with punk attitude, that are more than enough to get any self-respecting party-goer into the dance floor and working up a sweat. Just when we all need it, Addict has plenty to raise smiles and get feet moving and hips swaying.As with their previous albums, the Dub Pistols have again managed to rope in plenty of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The cultural imprint Crass were leaving was apparent while they were active. As well as their own music, their label Crass Records released records by Flux Of Pink Indians, the pre-Sugarcubes outfit Kukl and The Damned’s Captain Sensible – Crass were instrumental in him becoming a vegetarian.Crass also had significant boundaries-testing brushes with the establishment: the Penis Envy album led to court cases; a montage tape of a supposed conversation between Reagan and Thatcher was linked to Crass. Further subversion came when the song "Our Wedding" was given away with the mainstream Read more ...
joe.muggs
Today is World Mental Health Day and of course that means an awful lot of hugs and homilies, thoughts and prayers, deep-breathing exercises and it’s-good-to-talk platitudes from people speaking from positions of immense privilege – ranging from the well-meaning to outright grifters.All too rarely does any of this speak to people’s lived experience of mental suffering, and that goes double in the music world, where perpetual insecurity has increased exponentially with the collapse of the live performance industry and the future looks particularly bleak right now. One new book, however, is Read more ...
Liz Thomson
When Katie Melua arrived on the scene in 2003, a graduate of the BRIT School and a protégé of Mike "Wombling" Batt, I was somewhat underwhelmed. Another one in a long list of tepid female singer-songwriters that were pleasant enough, but… Then I pitched up, without too much enthusiasm, to review her Christmas concert at Westminster Central Hall with the Gori Women’s Choir in December 2018 and was both moved and impressed.Album No 8 is her first outing in four years – In Winter, recorded in Georgia, was her first post-Batt album following a six-album contract. By then, of course, Melua had Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Emma-Lee Moss has a lovely voice. It conveys an ache, a longing, but is sweet too, and well-mannered. Combine this with an aptitude for literate, thought-provoking lyrics and hooky songs, and Emmy the Great is quite the package. It’s a mystery, then, why she has not been critically and commercially elevated to the status of peers such as Laura Marling and KT Tunstall. Her fourth album is a delight, rich in imagery and ideas. It confirms her as an artist always well worth following.That April / 月音 is so enjoyable is a pleasing surprise. Moss’s last album, Second Love, was a misstep into more Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Space for the Earth is Ozric Tentacles’ 21st studio album since coming together at the 1983 Stonehenge Free Festival and their first since 2015’s Technicians of the Sacred. However, while the band still revolves around multi-instrumentalist Ed Wynne, with assistance from Silas Neptune’s synths and Balazs Szende’s percussion, this album also sees a wealth of appearances from a number of former band members like drummers Nick Van Gelder and Paul Hankin, flautist Champigon and ex-Eat Static synth man Joie Hinton. Similarly, these tunes could just as easily have been recorded during the band’s Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Those Wainwrights, they never cease to surprise. Get out your soft shoes and prepare to shuffle, for the “six-string diarist” has set his guitar aside and put on his metaphorical tux to croon with a band on more than a dozen timeless classics. Songs (to coin a phrase) that your mother would know.It appears the genesis for I’d Rather Lead a Band was the participants’ shared work on the music for Boardwalk Empire, set in 1920s Atlantic City. The songs – which, says Wainwright, “reflect on my whole life, really” – were chosen by Nighthawks bandleader Vince Giordano, with producers and music Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title comes from the lyrics of “Andy Warhol”: track two, side two of David Bowie’s late 1971 album Hunky Dory: ”Put a peephole in my brain, Two new pence to have a go, I'd like to be a gallery, Put you all inside my show.” The new pence reference recognised Britain’s recent adoption of decimalised currency. Whatever the album’s sales on release it was only in 1972 that Bowie hit the single’s chart with “Starman”, the proof he was more than 1969’s “Space Oddity” one-hit wonder.In 1971, Marc Bolan and T.Rex were cleaning up as a singles phenomenon. “Ride a White Swan”, issued in 1970, was Read more ...
Barney Harsent
There are no one-size-fits-all solutions and Lockdown (it has surely earned its capital status) provided its own problems for many of us. For some, however, there was an upside. For people who find themselves powering through when they need to power down, it was a chance to take themselves away from the anxieties, expectations and obligations of the everyday and narrow focus. It was an enforced clarification of our lives - a diktat to breathe.For Andy Bell, Ride guitarist and former member of Oasis and Beady Eye, it was a chance to put the finishing flourishes to a collection of songs that Read more ...