New music
Thomas H. Green
The music of monstrously successful emo-pop sorts Paramore is globally massive but is far from everyone’s cup of angst-lite. There is something polished and squeaky clean about them, Teflon fluoro-goth with an off-putting whiff of decent boy/girl-next-door niceness. This writer, then, comes to the debut album of lead singer Hayley Williams with Everest-sized prejudices. Unbelievably, these must be cast aside, for Petals For Armor, despite its stinky title (had to get one dig in!), is a vibrantly funky, imaginative and more-ish album.From the writing credits, Williams appears to have put it Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s 35 years since the original and best loved line up of X last released any new material: the less than special Ain’t Love Grand. Somewhat unexpectedly then, a new album, Alphabetland has appeared out of the ether and it’s certainly up there with the band’s spectacular, first four discs.40 years on from X’s lively debut, Los Angeles, Exene, John Doe, DJ Bonebrake and returned guitarist, Billy Zoom are still taking elements of raw rockabilly and The Doors’ more impressive moments and marrying them to a US blue-collar lyricism that makes Bruce Springsteen sound like a troubadour of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Way into lockdown now and, as the music world adjusts, so what artists are attempting becomes, in some cases, more sophisticated. In others, many impressively make the most of whatever tech they have to hand. Either way it’s always fascinating to check in on the best that’s out there. Below is this week’s pick. Dive in!Foals’ FBC TransmissionsLast Friday Brit Award-winning alt-rockers Foals launched Foals Broadcast Corp Transmissions, a weekly series of short films that will be appearing over 12 weeks on YouTube. Foals are currently poised to become that rare thing, a stadium-level outfit who Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dinosaur’s Mercury-nominated debut was a jolt of 1970s Miles and James Brown electricity. This third album steps back into the familiar comforts of acoustic jazz, with a cool inquisitiveness combining trumpeter-leader Laura Jurd’s rural Hampshire roots, conservatoire-schooled compositional rigour, and a sometimes New Orleans rasp that reaches right back to Louis Armstrong.“Slow Loris” is Sisyphean blues, climbing ever upwards as Elliot Galvin’s piano sprawls cat-like across pulsing bass, ending in shadowy 1920s clubland, then Crescent City funeral brass. The title track’s ice-pick piano Read more ...
mark.kidel
There are few albums as relentlessly dark as Mark Lanegan's latest: the raw and intense exploration of a tortured soul. This stuff is a few circles of hell deeper than anything Leonard Cohen ever did, and when the Canadian poet of melancholy "wanted it darker", the sombre tones and slowness were always laced with Jewish irony.Lanegan has just written a well-received memoir, Sing Backwards And Weep, in which he gives a heart-wrenching account of years of inner turmoil and drug excess. The new album was inspired by his autobiographical journey, and shares with it a searingly honest scalpel- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The enduring status of The Beatles shouldn’t distract from them having been one amongst many Liverpool bands while they found their feet. In October 1961, local impresario and Cavern Club DJ/MC Bob Wooler worked out that there were 125 active bands in Liverpool and its environs, and that he knew of 249 overall since he began working with music in the city.At that point, like The Beatles, King Size Taylor and the Dominoes were on the rise. They had come together in 1958 in Seaforth, north of Liverpool, as a union of rock ’n rollers The Dominoes and six-foot-five guitarist Ted “Kingsize” Taylor Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Of all the disappointments the lockdown has brought, great among them is the cancelled Eurovision Song Contest, which was due to be held in Rotterdam later this month. And while there are bigger concerns at the moment than a light entertainment programme, the Isolation Song Contest reminded us that community, the arts and a sense of humour will help to get us through.It was the brainchild of comic Tom Taylor, who persuaded friends from comedy, music and drag to take part for free, with donations from viewers going to the Trussell Trust, Crisis and Refuge charities. He randomly assigned 14 Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Abyss is the second disc by Osaka’s self-proclaimed “dark witch doom” duo BlackLab, but their first album proper, and it certainly delivers the monster sounds that were only hinted at by the compilation of impossible to find, early releases, Under the Strawberry Moon 2.0. In fact, BlackLab’s latest is a feral beast that bulldozes all before it like a true force of nature. Loud and distorted guitars, thunderous drumming and howling, banshee-like vocals burst out of the speakers like a caged animal set free and encourage the volume to be turned up to 11 right from the first notes. For this is Read more ...
Liz Thomson
An all-acoustic album is perhaps a surprising arrival from a musician who started out in electronica and dance music, worked as a DJ, produced for Elbow, has co-written with artists as diverse as Professor Green, Amy Winehouse (“Half Times”) and Banks, and who has collaborated with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra on concert arrangements of six of his songs.Bloom Innocent – Acoustic is Fin Greenall’s 10th outing in 18 years and since Biscuits for Breakfast (2006) he’s been working with bassist Guy Whittaker and drummer Tim Thornton. Both Greenall himself and his band are known as Fink, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Midway through another week of lockdown, here's a cross section of small good things to keep the eyes and ears entertained. There's some lively stuff here for the old grey matter to chew on. Take a look. Dive in!Neil Young Fireside SessionsNeil Young’s website, neilyoungarchives.com, is densely populated, counter-intuitively designed and fiddly, but, for fans and others willing to persist, the great American singers-songwriter and proto-grunge rocker offers up a plethora of material in his two online “Hearse Theater” screening spaces (set up to look like cinemas). Screen 2 offers a Read more ...
joe.muggs
Drew Daniel is never short of concepts, invention or mischief. As one half of Matmos, with his life partner M.C. Schmidt, he has made some 10 official albums and many more collaborative ones – all pushing the boundaries of electronic bricolage and sound processing in the pursuit of extremely complex ideas about American history, plastic surgery, philosophy, queer identity and all that kind of stuff. Occasionally, as Soft Pink Truth, he has made more overtly dance records, but even these are heavily loaded with twisted intellect, including as they do an album of anarcho-punk covers and one of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
He's only in his mid-20s, but this is Seattle singer-songwriter Damien Jurado’s 15th album. Veering away from a predictable path, his career is dotted with sonic experimentalism alongside a tendency to try abstract lyrical forms. He also appears on one of the most beautiful songs of this century, Moby’s haunted chorale, “Almost Home”. This time round, however, having disposed, the PR sheet tells us, of most of his possessions, like a zen sage, he gives us a relatively straightforward set.Jurado’s voice is a fragile instrument. He can do that whole vulnerable falsetto thing, but he prefers to Read more ...