New music
Thomas H. Green
When Disclosure appeared a decade ago, they were a necessary antidote to the rank gorgonzola of EDM, which was turning club music into a garish mire of musical infantilism. These two deliberately faceless Surrey brothers, Guy and Howard Lawrence, doffed their caps to the classic house sound but updated it to the 21st century, splashed it with garage and R&B, and never wandered too far from the party. Their third album, with assistance from impressively well-chosen collaborators, attempts the same but is too often trapped by its own tastefulness.The short of it is that the first half of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It’s not all just about that great voice. Gregory Porter also has a mighty generosity of spirit, plus empathy, warmth and optimism. And he has gathered a superb team around him to make a strong album with plenty of scale and depth.All Rise (Blue Note/Decca) is deliberately a very different album from Nat King Cole & Me. The 2017 album was mostly covers, with arranger Vince Mendoza ensuring a creation of luxuriant spaciousness. Songs on the new album are all written or co-written by Porter who brings satisfying variety, both emotional and stylistic.There are gentle, thoughtful, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
AK/DK’s third album, Shared Particles is a lo-fi electro-punk monster with a psychedelic splatter that has the dancefloor clearly within its crosshairs and the muscle to deliver on its intentions. These punchy, relentless grooves with distorted, half-heard vocals from Brighton’s synths and drums duo are more than enough to spin any minds while getting hips swinging and working up a sweat. In fact, in this festival-free summer, it is an emphatic reminder of just what we are all missing while Covid-19 stalks the globe.As with on their previous discs, Synths+Drums+Noise+Space and Patterns/ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A skim though the track listing confirms that this is no typical soul compilation. Actress and some-time pop singer Connie Stevens crops up. So does Johnny Mathis. Such seeming quirks are fitting as Thom Bell was never a typical arranger, producer or songwriter. There’s much more to the story than the timeless O’Jays and Stylistics hits he created for Gamble and Huff’s label Philadelphia International Records.Ready Or Not – Thom Bell's Philly Soul Arrangements & Productions 1965–1978 collects 23 tracks which Bell arranged, produced or wrote, or any combination first two and the last. The Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This episode of Peter Culshaw’s episodic global music radio show is a celebration of the life and times of Malcolm McLaren, visionary and provocateur, who died 10 years ago. The two hours is more podcast than radio show and is spent mainly spent in discussion with Paul Gorman, who has spent much of the last five years writing an epic 800-plus-page biography The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, a towering tome that brilliantly tracks the waterfront of the politics, art, fashion and music of an era. As Gorman says, “I wanted to break McLaren out of either the style press view of him or the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Some of the greatest acts of all time are the ones which find a sound and never need to alter it. Motörhead, Dinosaur Jr, Status Quo... and in the electronic world, Switzerland’s finest, Yello. It’s over 40 years since they first set millionaire playboy and conceptual artist Dieter Meier’s maniacal cackle to music, and 36 since he and former truck driver Boris Blank settled into their status as a duo, codifying their formula of Meier’s dada scatting over zippy electropop with their first hit “Bostich”. Their louche and high tech style would become a foundational influence on global club music Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The title, translated from the Portuguese, is “now” – an immediacy that, on first listen, seems apt for Bebel Gilberto’s lush and loose Agora. Originally scheduled for a May release, the Brazilian singer’s first album in six years sings with a creative freedom one imagines slowly returning to Rio as it emerges, tentatively, from coronavirus lockdown: in interviews, Gilberto has spoken of quarantining in the city through the worst of the pandemic.If the release isn’t quite what Gilberto was imagining, neither was the album itself. Much of it was recorded in 2017 and 2018 with indie producer Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The usual summer vinyl release slump doesn’t seem to apply this year. During the COVID-19 crisis, the demand for vinyl has risen rather than fallen and theartsdesk on Vinyl reflects that again this month with another monster round-up of reviews, covering everything from extreme metal to country’n’western to contemporary jazz.VINYL OF THE MONTHVarious Come Stay With Me (Come Play With Me)August 2020’s Vinyl of the Month is an Arts Council-backed compilation on bright red vinyl from Leeds label Come Play With Me. It’s designed to help support the contributing artists from the area as they deal Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Rock’n’roll’s spirit is mother’s milk to Prophet, imbuing everything he touches. His old band Green On Red had stopped being roots rivals to R.E.M. long before their 1992 split, but alongside their co-leader Dan Stuart’s solo trilogy embellishing his Mexican wild years (where Ambrose Bierce met Hunter Thompson), Chuck Prophet has become a Zen rock songwriting master, rolling out a series of unassuming classics. His touchstones are mostly dead wastrels, his style wry, low-slung and romantic.The Land That Time Forgot finds him gentrified out of recording in his San Francisco hometown, instead Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Norwegian singer Solveig Slettahjell has a feeling for slow. Her 2001 debut album was called Slow Motion Orchestra, and in the years since then she has turned her very fine sense of how to convey the essence and the meaning of songs at a very measured pace into her calling card.She has explained what draws her to slowness: “When I slow down the tempo, I can hear the sound in the words, there are so many little details when you play and sing slowly. These little details fascinate me.”In the early days when she was taking on the mantle of Norwegian jazz singers such as her teacher Sidsel Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bill Nelson’s views on his band Be-Bop Deluxe’s debut album are measured. In the essay accompanying its reissue, he writes “Axe Victim is one brief snapshot of a band in the process of becoming something else…a modest beginning, flawed but not without charm. And not the end of the story. I’ll always be grateful for the way that it helped launch a more appropriate vessel for my music, a ship which sails onward to this very day.” He sees the album as transitional.When it was issued in June 1974, NME’s dismissive Ian MacDonald was less restrained in his review: “I confidently predict that Be-Bop Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
During the first decade of this century Conor Oberst was critically anointed as a successor to the likes of Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen. It didn’t seem to make him very happy. His project Bright Eyes, with musical prodigies Nate Walcott and Mike Moggis, twisted and turned through varying musical styles, as if purposefully evading easy definition, while Oberst’s lyrics became increasingly bleak and opaque. Bright Eyes now return, after nine years of absence. Oberst is no happier, but his cryptic, committed, broken-voiced melancholy is a good fit for these times.Bright Eyes' last Read more ...