New music
Asya Draganova
It is difficult to live up to your own legacy when you’ve reached an iconic status in rock’n’roll. It is even harder when you are a frontwoman in a “masculine” genre where age makes you increasingly invisible and/or viciously criticised. Like Chrissie Hynde sings in the autobiographical “Can’t Hurt a Fool” from the new record, she does not “play the rules” and is “too old to know better/too young for her age”. She rises to the challenge with confidence and oomph: the tunes from the new Pretenders album Hate for Sale are well worth the listen.If you are a Pretenders fan, you will not be Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s been a long strange trip for Dennis Herrold. The Virginia-born rocker’s sole single, December 1957’s “Hip Hip Baby” / “Make With the Lovin’”, was a full-bore rockabilly two-sider. Yet it made no waves despite being reviewed glowingly by music biz journal Billboard. “Hip Hip Baby” was “a la Presley on a fast moving rockabilly tune,” while “Make With the Lovin’” “packs plenty of sales savvy into another infectious rockabilly song.” The single sold barely any copies. Nonetheless, over sixty years on Herrold is a rockabilly phenomenon.The 10-inch album The Mystery Of Dennis Herrold includes Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Peter Culshaw’s periodic global music radio update is back, quicker than usual as there is some catching up to do. There’s a focus on Ennio Morricone, who died this week - with his amazing range from Westerns to lush soundscapes and experimental hipster 1960s hipster pop. A secondary focus is on re-issued and new Moroccan grooviness - the wonderfully stoned 1970s soundscapes of Abdou El Omari to the hot off the press fabulousness of Bab l’Bluz. Other sizzling new stuff includes a rework of Saint Germain’s “I Want You To Get Together Right Now”(who sampled it from Marlena Shaw in the first Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
National treasure Jarvis Cocker recently claimed in an interview with the New York Times that lyrics really aren’t that important. He’s so very wrong. Within this very album – brief though it is (seven songs, 40 minutes) and long overdue (the band started working on the material in 2013) – are some exceptional titbits. Both thought provoking and merry making.The whole album is so very much of these weird times. But it was with some prescience that tracks like recent single "House Music All Night Long" anticipated us all being stuck at home, unable to properly kick up our heels ("goddam this Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Lockdown’s easing and the record shops are opening here and there. So, to help vinyl junkies on their way, here’s 7000 words of reviews, capturing the best of the last couple of months’ releases on plastic. As ever, the sounds go everywhere, from hip hop to post-punk to Moroccan trance music. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHThe Four Owls Nocturnal Instinct (High Focus) + TrueMendous Huh? (High Focus) + Telemachus Boring & Weird Historical Music (High Focus)Three albums from Brighton’s High Focus Records which showcase many kinds of verve and ambition. The label is best known for nurturing the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Given the collaborator list on this album, it should be a bit of a mess. Brit punks IDLES, Aussie woozy pop auteur Tame Impala, pumping bassline house producer Chris Lorenzo turning his hand to drum’n’bass, as well as Ms Banks, Dapz On The Map, Oscar #Worldpeace and a host of other UK rap talents all add their distinct musical personalities to the mix. Yet somehow, what Mike Skinner drolly called “really just a rap duets album”, put together while waiting for a film to accompany The Streets’s comeback album proper, is some of his most coherent work ever.It is sonically diverse, mind. In Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Hot Shot 2020 has been billed as a rerub of Shaggy’s colossal turn of the century release Hot Shot. It’s not quite an accurate description of an album that has already been released in three different forms and shifted nine million copies though. In fact, this version only has six tracks in common with the original and adds cover versions, re-recordings of some of Mr Boombastic's other huge hits, like “Oh Carolina” and, of course, “Boombastic”, and a few other odds and sods. However, taken on its own terms as a grab bag of Orville Burrell’s musical highlights, it hits the spot on a relaxed Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Shoegaze stable Sonic Cathedral has, in truth, always been a much broader church than its name implies. From the psychedelic, sunshine pop of Gulp, to the blistering art noise of Spectres, it has consistently released music that shares a similar heritage, without putting all its pedals on the same board.Bedroom, the debut album from Leeds/Hull-based five-piece bdrmm, however, plays exquisitely to type. It channels the shoegaze sound with such purpose and resolve it’s hard to believe most of band weren’t born when My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless nearly crippled Creation.Brimming with taught Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Ennio Morricone was a genius, or as close to that description as makes no odds. If we mean someone who created a unique body of work, one that changed culture, had a distincive style and was massively influential, then Morricone fitted the bill. theartsdesk's Joe Muggs was discussing today on Facebook and Mixmag his influence on dubstep and Jamaican music, for example. He was uncompromising, never learning English or moving to Hollywood, however much he was cajoled by film types there.It appears he saw his non-film music as the serious work and posterity will no doubt give the verdict on that Read more ...
Liz Thomson
After Unfollow the Rules: The Paramour Session and the #Quarantunes “robe recitals” comes the album: Unfollow the Rules, no longer stripped back (though everything's relative) but in all its pomp and glory. It’s Rufus Wainwright's ninth collection of originals but his first pop outing since Out of the Game (2012), which was promoted by a music video starring Helena Bonham Carter. This time Wainwright starred in his own video for the Randy Newman-esque opening track “Trouble in Paradise”, which declares itself insistently with drums over which his distinctive voice enters.Wainwright wants Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Strange Destinies” is the first track. “Take your eyes off me Svengali” is its memorable opening phrase. Conjuring up Van Morrison, Tom Petty, Mike Scott, Bruce Springsteen and even The Boomtown Rats when they were aping the first and fourth of those, the song clangs along with a powerpop chug and sports a hook-filled melody. Great.Despite this memorable opening, a triple-CD retrospective dedicated to Philip Rambow might seem like a cult item. Especially when no tracks from The Winkies, the band which first brought him to attention, are included. But there’s definitely a story.The Winkies Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Peter Culshaw’s occasional global radio music show comes blinking into the light after lockdown, as MusicBox radio’s studio In London’s Clerkenwell has tentatively, antiseptically, opened. In the months since March, we have lost numerous kings of rhythm, including, as mentioned in the show, Florian Schneider and Little Richard.This edition focuses on the legacy of the great drum legend Tony Allen, who pioneered Afro-beat with Fela Kuti. We talk to Stephen Budd, Tony Allen's friend, as well as an obsessive Afro-beat collector and DJ. He has had an illustrious career in music, from being a Read more ...