New music
Owen Richards
When a band claims a crowd is the loudest of the tour, you can usually guarantee they've said it on every other date too. But for one sweaty night in Cardiff, you had to believe them. Bombay Bicycle Club returned after a six-year absence and were greeted in the Welsh capital like long-awaited saviours. No chorus was left unsung, no build-up left unclapped, and no breakdown unshimmied.The band have perfected their show of power pop performed with pinpoint precision. They create an impressive wall of sound, built on counter rhythms and jangled guitars, supported by a striking lightshow that Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Fifty-nine years to the day, 24 January 1961, that a young college dropout named Robert Zimmerman clambered out of a car on the Manhattan end of the George Washington Bridge, having hitchhiked across the country to reinvent himself as Bob Dylan, the sixtieth anniversary of the club where his career was launched was celebrated.Gerde’s Folk City, one of the most famous of the Greenwich Village coffeehouses on whose rickety stage innumerable careers were honed, opened its doors on West 4th and Mercer on 26 January 1960. The owner was an Italian immigrant named Mike Porco, who had opened Gerde’s Read more ...
joe.muggs
Robert Henke is to techno fans as Leo Fender and Les Paul are to rock lovers. The Ableton Live software which he co-created is every bit as influential as any guitar they built, and probably more used. However, of course, being just a piece of code, it could never be iconic like a guitar. This performance was partly inspired by that fact: as Henke explained in his preamble, he's fascinated with a time when computers were a whole lot simpler and, perhaps, cooler to look at.Looking like a funky Open University lecturer in brown suit and pointy boots, Henke explained the 1980 Commodore PET Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The first album from the Boston-bred songwriter Squirrel Flower opens and closes with autobiographical songs. “I-80” opens with the artist - real name Ella O’Connor Williams - giving up on lyrics, poetry and, later, giving up on love, its rootless melody channelling the road west to Iowa where Williams went to college before building to a relentless crescendo. By the album’s closer, and title track, though, Williams has embraced poetry again: the “swimming” lyric is a reference to her being born still in the remains of the amniotic sac, the shimmering heat of the hottest day of the summer of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Since first getting together at the fag end of the 20th century, Black Lips have largely played the role of garage rockers with a hint of country and western about them. The songs on their latest album, however, turns their schtick somewhat on its head. For Sing In A World That’s Falling Apart is the band’s most explicitly country album to date, albeit one that possesses more than a dash of garage rock swagger. This is all the more emphasised by an album cover that features the five-piece looking something like a 2020 update of the Beverly Hillbillies.Any shift in their style, however, has Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
One can only marvel at the versatility of Ruby Turner. As a vocalist, she spans the whole blues/soul/ R&B spectrum, and has been a major presence on the British scene since the late Seventies. Her unvarying capacity just to step forward and deliver a strong line, clear words, and powerful emotions are an unfailing and unique aspect of the musical life of this country. Perhaps the Halls of Fame and the honours system have a bit of catching-up to do.She has done everything from taking a major role in the British blues movement at the instigation of Alexis Korner, to performing Ray Charles Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Celtic Connections, Scotland’s annual festival of folk, world and fusion music, has been brightening up dreich Glasgow Januaries since its inception in 1994. Originally proposed partly as a way to fill a scheduling gap in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall’s post-Christmas period, Celtic Connections is now a major event in Scotland’s cultural calendar. 2020’s festival incorporates over 300 events across multiple venues throughout the Glasgow. Programmed by Artistic Director Donald Shaw - a founding member of the folk supergroup Capercaillie - the festival sees artists from across the globe come Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Remembrance of clubs past motivates Neil Tennant at 65. The melancholy and wit which gave ambiguity and amused bite to the Pet Shop Boy’s pop pomp has matured naturally into distanced reflections on hedonism. Recorded partly in Berlin’s iconic Hansa studio, Hotspot's vintage synths add a mechanistic clank and tactile detail to their music’s glide, the Hi-NRG pulse which so entranced them in the 1980s now part of a Proustian rather than active E rush. Having ceded their place at pop’s heart at the century’s start, they now burnish memories and paint characters like old masters.Ray Davies, for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Commercially, The Beloved’s peak years kicked off in autumn 1989 when their electro house-pop began its chart run. The band called it a day in 1996 after the X album and its attendant singles. Throughout the period, they dealt in a form of house music – indeed, their final hit single “Ease the Pressure” was built around an acid house pulse and the sort of gospel-inclined chorus that was de rigueur for white, British dance-inclined outfits to show they had soul.There was a back story. Like Primal Scream, The Soup Dragons and all the others, The Beloved were an Eighties indie-circuit staple Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The middle-aged rap master of provocation has survived into an era of hair-trigger outrage. The wearily dignified response of parents of the Manchester Arena bomber’s victims to an Eminem lyric briefly assuming the killer’s identity has already defused a strictly local scandal, which pales beside his gigs’ picketing in his early 2000s folk-devil prime. What may now appear a tatty grab for headlines is merely the standard MO of a man who also drags John Wayne Gacy, Sharon Tate, multiple other mass American murders and “a Saudi attack when the town collapse” into his new album’s bloody Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Bombay Bicycle Club have a knack for quasi-prophetic titles. Their fourth album, So Long, See You Tomorrow, released in February 2014, turned out to be their last, at least for a while. For when the accompanying tour concluded at London’s Earls Court – the final event before the wrecking ball deprived London of another iconic venue – the band decided they’d had enough.They’d come together at school in north London and “after ten years of doing this we thought it was time for all of us to try something else”. Bassist Ed Nash released a solo album, singer-guitarist Jack Steadman immersed Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What a lovely surprise. A debut album with its own sensibility that’s come out of the blue. Aoife Nessa Frances is from Dublin and the terrific Land of No Junction – the title comes from a mistaken hearing of Llandudno Junction – signals the arrival of a major new talent.This Land of No Junction borders on zones traversed by Kevin Ayers, Cate Le Bon, The Eighteenth Day of May, the pre-Sandy Denny Fairport Convention, Bridget St John, Stereolab, Sumie, Trimdon Grange Explosion and Wendy and Bonnie.Highlights are many, but the nine-track album can be characterised. “Libra” is brilliant, a Read more ...