New music
Thomas H. Green
In March of this year Edwyn Collins released his ninth studio album, Badbea, his fourth since two life-altering cerebral haemorrhages derailed him in 2005. It’s a vivacious collection that runs the gamut of what guitar pop can be, from acoustic strumming to psychedelic riffing to lo-fi punkin’, all catchy as burrs. His set is peppered with it. By the time he reaches the encore, even the slow, elegiac title track, with its gloomy references to “a ruined monument to life and death”, holds the audience rapt.Clad in a Fred Perry-style white shirt with red trim, Collins initially appears on stage Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Charli XCX would make a cracking mixtape. I mean that not in the hip hop culture sense - although she’s knocked out a few of those in the five years since the release of Sucker, her last album proper - but like the mixtapes you used to make for your friends and crushes. There’s every chance that the 27-year-old Charli has never made a physical mixtape, but no matter: Charli, with its mixture of styles and guest features from across the worlds of rap, pop and hip hop, is her gift to you. And if you don’t love every track on it, that’s kind of the point: who universally adores their pals’ music Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On a first pass, The Practice of Love seems to be an electropop album in thrall to trance music’s tropes: the synth wash, repeated musical phrases, a whooshy programmed percussive pulse, an otherworldly atmosphere. But the lyrics invite further inspection. On the first track “Lions”, a narrator invites the listener to look at grass and trees, ants on the ground, flowers, mushrooms. “Study this, and ask yourself where is God? This place doesn’t know, this place doesn’t care...[it’s]…whispering a pagan song.”As The Practice of Love moves beyond its opener, trance remains the musical template Read more ...
Owen Richards
According to Metronomy maestro Joseph Mount, his first attempt of album number six was a much snappier affair. But it wasn’t until he broke from his self-imposed immediacy that it started connecting with him. In its final form, Metronomy Forever clocks in at 17 tracks of singles, instrumentals and soundscapes, and though it skirts close to double-album indulgence, you’re never more than one song away from a winner.The title Metronomy Forever refers to the never-ending nature of radio, and this airwave-skipping mindset has given Mount a toy box of genres and forms to play with. The preceding Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Thanks for being in here with us tonight,” Wayne Coyne begins, “when you could be outside with the universe shining down on us.” Having clearly experienced a pre-gig epiphany from the unexceptional South London sky, The Flaming Lips singer seems primed to take us all higher. And so this 20th-anniversary celebration of their breakthrough LP The Soft Bulletin begins with an explosion of joy. Giant balloons rain down and stay rogue, bouncing through the childishly engaged crowd for the next two hours. Confetti cannons fire at will, dry ice pumps. And as the yearning anthem of quixotic human Read more ...
mark.kidel
Over two days in 1972, the great Aretha Franklin, undoubtedly one of the greatest American voices of the 20th century, performed and recorded gospel classics in Los Angeles, with a predominantly African-American audience, the red-hot Los Angeles Community Gospel Choir and the support of Rev James Cleveland. She was generally known for her soul classics, including “Say a Little Prayer”, “Think”, “Respect”, “I Never Loved a Man”, “Natural Woman” and many others, but she had grown up in the church under the tutelage of her father the Rev CL Franklin, one of Detroit’s most fiery preachers.Warners Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This is the kind of thing that the Proms does well – indeed, where else would it get an outing? A "big event" piece of massive scale in terms of size and duration, in many ways a modern Spem in Alium, but where Tallis’s 1570 piece demands 40 singers, In the Name of the Earth ups the ante to 700-plus voices, led by eight conductors and arrayed around the Royal Albert Hall. Both the title, with its nod towards the Christian sign of the cross, and the scheduling for Sunday morning, made this feel like a secular meditation with the natural environment substituting for a traditional God. As the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
With a line-up that has been stable for a few years, Black Francis seems to have decided that it’s now time for Pixies to embrace their role as Rock’s Elder Statesmen by taking the best bits of their sound and adding something of a more mature sheen. That’s not to say that the band have recently lurched into easy listening pop territory, but with Beneath the Eyrie it finally seems natural to consider Pixies on the same terms as some of their heroes and influences, like Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young.Beneath the Eyrie is a stew of sunny power pop with slyly twisted lyrics, country rock Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Original UK pressings of Slade’s Seventies mega-hit singles like “Coz I Luv You”, “Everyday”, “Gudbuy T’Jane” and “Mama Weer all Crazee Now” sell for between £1 and £5 if they’re in decent shape. If a copy is needed to listen to, there’s little need to fork out more than £2. On seven-inch, the real Slade rarities are their pre-hit singles and what they issued earlier as Ambrose Slade and The 'N Betweens.Slade, though, weren’t all about the UK. They were, for example, popular in the Netherlands where “Coz I Luv You”, “Everyday”, “Gudbuy T’Jane”, “Merry X-mas Everybody” and “Take me Bak ’Ome” Read more ...
Ellie Porter
It’s fair to say that things are going pretty well for Denver folk-rockers the Lumineers: Grammys, two platinum-selling albums, huge arena tours, support slots for the likes of U2 and Tom Petty, and the massive boost of having one of their songs (the insanely catchy "Ho Hey") make a memorable appearance in soapy TV country saga Nashville. Now they're back with their much-anticipated third album, III.With III, the Lumineers are really upping their game – and it’s possibly their finest album yet. A harrowing story told in three "acts" of three or four songs apiece, it follows the fictional Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's no knowing what to expect from Natasha Khan. Her most recent output has been furiously intense Thai and Persian psyche rock covers (as SEXWITCH in 2015) followed by torch songs full of shadow and eeriness (Bat For Lashes' 2016 The Bride). It rather felt from these two releases that she was happy cosmically dreaming on the margins – certainly in contrast to the strange pop promise of her early work, which prefigured the likes of Grimes and Lana Del Rey in many ways, and suggested someone with an eye on grandiose visions materially as well as mystically. But it turns out she Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Neu!, Neu! 2 and Neu! 75. For many a committed collector of rock’s more interesting corners, these three albums are the motherlode of 1970s Kosmische Musik, or Krautrock, the fruit of an intense and far-out focus on musical essentials, combining guitarist Michael Rother’s trippy lyricism with wild-man drummer Klaus Dinger’s motorik drive. The sound of Neu! was a mixture of sigh and scream, meshed in a grid of minimal rhythms, maxed-out thrash and Dinger (who died in 2008) expressing what sounded at times like a bad acid trip in sound.Rother and Dinger, along with their contemporaries – Read more ...