New music
Thomas H. Green
Mike Scott is The Waterboys. Launched by wide-eyed 1980s folk-rock, and “The Whole of the Moon”, he’s long since roamed into whatever stylistic gumbo he fancies. The latest album – the band’s 16th – is a concept piece, a 25-track sonic biography of the late Hollywood maverick Dennis Hopper.It’s sometimes entertaining, sometimes preposterous, and sometimes pure cringe. The songs follow the chronology of Hopper’s life. For instance, there’s a floaty Floyd-ish song early on called “Blues for Terry Southern”, in honour of Easy Rider’s co-writer, while near the end is “Golf, They Say”, a southern Read more ...
Tim Cumming
I saw the Miki Berenyi Trio play a warmly received sold out set at the Lexington last autumn, at which many of the songs now coming out on Tripla ("three" in Hungarian) had their live previews, alongside a few from the Lush years – the likes of “Kiss Chase” and “Ladykillers” – and Piroshka, the four-piece that emerged briefly from the ashes of the 2016 Lush reunion.Berenyi has since written a superb memoir (Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me from Success), looking back at her idiosyncratic – at times traumatic – family life and history, as well as her trajectory from zine-making teen music Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Pigsx7 have hardly got a reputation for penning tender and soulful ballads, but Death Hilarious is a particularly aggressive and punishing album even by their standards. Taking cues from Black Sabbath’s heft, Motorhead’s “bend not stab” sound and soul shaking noise rock, their new album is the aural equivalent of being mugged by a gang of feral kids and being left feeling particularly battered by the experience.Starting as they mean to go on, opening track “Blockage” is a riotous barrage of speedy riffs and heavy beats punctuated by atonal guitar soloing that’s reminiscent of Black Flag’s Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Spring may have sprung, but there’s little in life to truly raise the sprits, so this week’s release of Who Believes in Angels? the much-anticipated album from Elton John and Brandi Carlile is especially welcome.The album cover alone is rather magnificent, all dazzling Seventies retro that references Tina Turner and Village People and, more specifically, Amy Winehouse and Little Richard, the latter celebrated in the second cut, “Little Richard’s Bible”, Bernie Taupin’s lyric being the breakthrough moment in sessions that “appeared to be lurching towards disaster”.The idea for the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A pizzicato violin opens Song Over Støv. Gradually, other instruments arrive: bowed violin, a fluttering flute, pattering percussion, an ominous double bass. They merge. The climax is furious, intensely rhythmic. Suddenly, it is over.“Straumen frobi” – which translates from Norwegian as The Current Passing By – sets the scene for five more equally dynamic, just-as feverish tracks. Each is as much about the structured interplay of instruments as it is impact. At times – especially during “I natt” (Tonight) and “Trø” (Step) – proceedings evoke the folk music/rock hybrid characterised by Sweden’ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The sticker on the front cover says “The heaviest proto-metal compilation ever released.” And considering the label behind Yeah Man, It's Bloody Heavy is Rise Above, founded by former Napalm Death and Cathedral frontman Lee Dorrian, this is not idle hubris.Yeah Man, It's Bloody Heavy collects 10 tracks which were not originally released (a bonus seven-inch with early copies of the LP takes it to 12 tracks). The first band heard are Birmingham’s Heavyboots. They are followed by Band Of Mental Breakdown (also known as B.O.M.B.), Macbeth Periscope, Agatha’s Moment, Jessica’s Theme, Greenfly, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
On the spoken word LP Loose Talk, Amelia Barratt reflects on her or other women’s experiences, real or imagined, over tunes drawn from Bryan Ferry’s demos, some from early in his career. To hear his instantly recognisable sound applied to a female sensibility, especially that expressed with such confiding intimacy by the painter, writer, and performance artist Barratt, makes for a unique and satisfyingly unsettling listen. Barratt enunciates her miniaturist monologues understatedly but not insouciantly. If her white, middle-class English diction seldom betrays emotion, her observations Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Will Smith’s new album, Based on a True Story, is a prime example of why some comebacks should remain hypothetical. After two decades away from music, one might expect a seasoned, self-aware return – something with the wisdom of age and the energy of experience. Instead, we get a collection of tracks that feel like they were brainstormed during an awkward dad-joke marathon.The album kicks off with Smith addressing that Oscars moment, but instead of offering insight or clever lyricism, he dances around it like he’s dodging responsibility at a family barbecue. The track plays like a Read more ...
joe.muggs
I can’t stop reading and re-reading the review copy I got of a new book, out next week. Liam Inscoe-Jones’s Songs in the Key of MP3: the New Icons of the Internet Age is one of those books where you’ll find yourself shocked that it didn’t exist before: it’s a mapping out of the modern musical and subcultural landscape on terms defined by the millennial artists who’ve come to define it. That is to say, it elegantly cuts loose from establishment critical discourse that has all too often tried to assess artists and subcultures on the criteria of the late 20th century – Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s been 14 years since Alison Krauss and Union Station released an album – 2011’s Paper Aeroplane. The world’s shed a few skins since then, and little resembles the way it was. The ten songs on their new album, Arcadia, recorded in studios across Nashville, are tied up in that cat’s cradle of time, of the past and how it is remembered.“The stories of the past are told in this music,” Krauss has written. “It’s that whole idea of ‘in the good old days when times were bad.’ There's so much bravery and valour and loyalty and dreaming, of family and themes of human existence that were told in a Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
It took until the last song before Lauren Mayberry started to well up onstage, which was good going. The singer had mentioned early on the prospect of a hometown Glasgow gig for her solo career had left her emotional all day, both with joy and fear. Hopefully she hadn't popped her head out for a look at the venue around an hour before stage time, though, because there was considerable empty gaps across the dance floor. In addition, the fact one of the venue's bars was sealed off indicated demand for Mayberry on her own didn't match that for her day job with synth popsters Chvrches, who sold Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On the cover of her eponymous debut album, the Bolton-raised Toria Wooff reclines on a church pew located in Stanley Palace, a 16th-century mansion in her adopted city of Chester. In her hand, a Celtic Cross. Such imagery implies that what will be heard on the grooves within the sleeve might cleave to forms of gothic-inclined British folk. This, though, is not the case.It’s clear from the album’s second track that Wooff is aware of dark Texas country singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. “Lefty's Motel Room” is an open nod to his totemic composition "Pancho and Lefty.” As Wooff’s song picks up Read more ...