New music
joe.muggs
It's five years since Steven Ellison aka Flying Lotus released an album, and it's not entirely clear how far he's moved creatively. To be fair he's been busy branching out in other directions, producing for superstar rapper Kendrick Lamar, making short films, and helping members of his Brainfeeder stable like Thundercat and Kamasi Washington along to greater fame. But with this album he seems to have taken up precisely where 2014's “Your Dead” left off. The same preoccupations are here: exquisite musicianship mashed together with deliberate decay and destruction, high falutin spiritual Read more ...
peter.quinn
While some vocalists build an entire career on a 'one-timbre-fits-all' approach, one of Claire Martin's greatest strengths is the way in which she brings all of the different colours of her voice into play such that each song is allowed to resonate in the most powerful way.This was the second of two nights at Ronnie Scott’s which saw the award-winning vocalist performing material from Believin’ it, Martin’s twentieth release on Linn Records and her first album with her new all-Swedish trio: pianist Martin Sjöstedt, bassist Niklas Fernqvist and drummer Daniel Fredriksson, with Johan Ramsay Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
We return, after only a week away, with Part 2 of Volume 49. Starting out with an amazing comeback from Adrian Sherwood’s Pay It All Back compilation series as Vinyl of the Month, this edition takes in everything from Prince to death metal to ambient classical. From reissues to spanking new fare, all life on vinyl is here. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHVarious Pay It All Back Volume 7 (On U Sound)To ancient music warriors who recall prehistory, before ’88 and acid house, one of only places in Britain where electronics splurged into brain-frying psychedelic dance music was On U Sound. Their Pay It Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Mike Scott has never been afraid to call on high-brow literary influences in his songwriting – 2011’s An Appointment With Mr Yeats album being the most obvious example. Now, almost forty years (on and off) into the Waterboys’ career, Scott takes a more all-encompassing view on the influences that have fired up his literate yet soulful rock’n’roll: be they musical, geographical or bookish.The title track, which opens Where the Action Is, is a vamp on Robert Parker’s Northern Soul classic “Let’s Go Baby” and makes it clear that Scott and his crew won’t be revisiting the band’s Raggle Taggle Read more ...
joe.muggs
Carly Rae Jepsen is a brilliant pop star. Her music pure and unashamed radio pop, full of the excitement of living and loving, but her status with her audience and relationship with them are a bit more like what you'd expect from a cult indie act. As Canadian Idol runner up through her earnest singer-songwriter debut album she was charming enough.But when the perfect bubblegum of 2012's “Call Me Maybe” exploded as an enormous international hit, she went with it and parlayed the energy of the single into a career. Embracing her wonderfully unhinged fan community, and particularly the LGBT+ Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Here they come again – the band most adept at capturing the mood of an era in catchy, critical three-minute songs. Just at the very point we need them most, the original ska-punk popsters surface and their message is as deeply relevant as it was four decades ago. But is this a 40th anniversary or a number one album tour? Or both?In these unprecedented times, receiving political commentary from near-pensioners seems strangely apt (remaining original members frontman Terry Hall, guitarist Lynval Golding and bass player Horace Panter are 60, 67 and 65, respectively). It’s a turn of events Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Cuz I Love You starts with a big, bold, black-and-white soul moment, an album title hauled from the heavens via the lungs of an extraordinary pop star. It’s a stunning rush of feeling from Lizzo, the Minneapolis-based singer and rapper, alone in the spotlight before a brass band kicks in. It’s also, delightfully, the closest her major label debut album gets to letting anybody else dictate her feelings.Sure, the “you” of that opening track could be a third party – someone whom she promises, in a delicious deadpan, to “put on a plane” and “fly out to wherever I am” – but the “you” of the album’ Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Chilly Gonzales sits for so long at the piano, in his smoking jacket and slippers, before commencing his first song that I wonder if this is a John Cage moment. It’s a stark contrast to his energy at the end of the gig, where Chilly (real name, Jason Beck) is stamping both feet in marching motion, his whole body hunched and rocking, hair flicking as he pounds the low keys with virtuosic intensity.Turns out he is quite an extreme person. He's silent and focused in his opening pieces – a series of medleys from three solo piano albums that date from 2004, which move on to giggle-inducing rap Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Now going for over a dozen years, ever-busier since Live Nation took over its parent company in 2015, The Great Escape Festival is the annual multi-venue band showcase and music conference which sees Brighton swamped with music biz sorts. This year these especially seemed to be young men and women called Piers and Hannah watching female-fronted indie bands. This writer only catches the last of the three days – Saturday – but is sucked into the venue-trawling spirit of the thing.Down on the seafront an encampment of marquees has appeared on the eastern end of Brighton beach, enclosing three Read more ...
Owen Richards
Better Oblivion Community Center may be a supergroup of sorts, but the name still draws less recognition that its members (Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes). Maybe it’s just too complicated to remember, because a packed Shepherd’s Bush Empire proved the band’s wide appeal – lairy lads and muso pensioners, side-by-side for a night of charm and angst.Oberst and Bridgers have very different voices, but her effortless tones melt through his fragile strains to form a sort of alchemy together. It worked surprisingly well on record, and perhaps more so live. There’s an honesty and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ed Sheeran, Tom Odell, all those Mr Vulnerability cats; this dude makes them sound like a night out with Slipknot. He is, in fact, a generational divider. Taking the contemporary route to success, wherein smirky, buddy-ish social media is just as important as the music – if not more important – Scottish singer-songwriter Lewis Capaldi’s sudden stadium-level success is bewildering to anyone over 25. So, is Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent, wherein every song catalogues his supreme emotionality, a new musical benchmark for the skinless sensitivity of Millennial youth?Perhaps, but, also Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Repackaging and resuscitating the catalogues of endlessly reissued bands is fraught. By their nature, completists already have everything and the casually interested are not fussed by alternate versions of obscure tracks or disinterred lo-fi live recordings. It’s challenging to freshen up or put new spins on predominantly familiar material by endlessly reissued bands. Preaching to the converted is frequently the best which can be hoped for.To varying degrees, current archive releases of material by Manfred Mann, The Searchers and The Yardbirds feed into these concerns. To wit: Manfred Mann’s Read more ...