New music
mark.kidel
Circa Waves, the guitar-band from Liverpool, go over a storm at festivals and large venues. With simplicity, tightness and concentrated energy, they know how to play with the tension that can build between soft and hard, the yin and the yang of rock forms that continue to sound fresh because they're delivered with a sense of fun and the joy of making party music with catchy lyrics.This is their third album, and they live up to the promise they offered back in 2013, when they first burst on the scene with punchy and uncomplicated power pop, crafted to please, little jewels of songwriting, with Read more ...
mark.kidel
The inaugural Aga Khan Music Awards, a three-day event held last weekend in Lisbon, celebrated nearly 20 years of wide-ranging work dedicated to the preservation of ancient and threatened cultures, an impressive programme of educational initiatives, and the encouragement of musical exchange and experiment in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.These awards are far removed from the world of the Eurovision Song Contest, the Grammys, MOBOs or other well-spun and marketed events: the notion of excellence, which lies at the heart of the Aga Khan Music Initiative, is connected to ideas and practices Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Every month we start theartsdesk on Vinyl with the Vinyl of the Month, however, the truth is that, depending on your taste, many of the records reviewed below may be your own vinyl of the month. Whether reissues or new material or compilations, theartsdesk on Vinyl attends to all music on plastic. This time we run the gamut from country’n’western to Eighties pop to acid techno to Ozric Tentacles and much else. All sonic life is here. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHYves Jarvis The Same But By Different Means (Anti-)Montreal artist singer Jean-Sebastian Audet recorded three albums as Un Blonde but Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's kind of vertiginous to realise that the revivalism of acid jazz was way closer to its 1960s and '70s source material than we are to it now. But the patterns that were laid down by the DJ sessions of Gilles Peterson and people like him back in the 1980s abide. Jazz fusion, spiritual jazz, hard bop, obscure soundtracks, Blue Note records: all have continued to demonstrate their immediacy on dancefloors. And recently, a generation of prolific and prodigious musicians have come to prominence whose interest in jazz is not as some musty, dusty memory of the past, but as part of London's club Read more ...
Chris Harvey
Drake walked on water at times in his opening show at the O2 Arena. Sadly this was solely down to the impressive video projection that filled the giant screens beneath his feet. The 32-year-old Canadian rapper is one of the biggest-selling stars in the world – at one point last year he had a hard-to-believe 27 tracks on America’s Billboard Hot 100 chart. But here he produced a patchy, stop-start performance, in which he seemed obsessed with whipping up the crowd to keep the energy levels high, when one glance at his own back catalogue could have told him – just play one great song after Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Support bands rarely get a mention in live reviews but Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs’ opening act for their present jaunt around the UK, Cattle are no bog-standard fare, designed to make the headliners look good. Comprising two drummers, screaming electronics, bass and howled vocals, they brought an apocalyptic sound that had much of the audience pummelled into submission well before their set was finished.There was certainly no way to ignore them as distortion and extreme volume swept all away with a sonic artillery barrage and a singer throwing himself around in a frenzy throughout a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Drums appeared a decade ago out of New York, riding a media froth about indie music to critical acclaim and, at least for their debut album, some degree of commercial success. They were a four-piece who owed a large debt to New Order but had enough of their own pizzazz to look promising. Ten years and four albums later (meaning this is their fifth), The Drums are a one man band and don’t sound anything like New Order. This isn’t necessarily always an improvement.For a couple of years The Drums have been the solo project of frontman Jonny Pierce. According to the press release, Brutalism Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We like people here in Estonia. I think we all here very much value being European. To all our British friends, we know that the offer of e-residency has been ticking-up constantly. You can find a sure foothold for your business here in Estonia. There’s enough space, please come.”In her welcome speech at Tallinn Music Week 2019, Estonia’s President Kersti Kaljulaid (pictured below right, photograph by Aron Urb) was unequivocal about how she sees her country. “Estonia is the creative hub of Europe,” she also said. “It’s an innovation-driven society. You are very welcome to set up your Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
This new collection, compiled by Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs of Saint Etienne, aurally delineates a period when much that was British had an edge of bleakness. Accordingly, Three Day Week – When the Lights Went Out 1972–1975 ought to be a grim listen, a slog during which the mind is improved and new outlooks are brought on board but is as lively as a tractor reversing through swiftly setting concrete.Glam rock and sparkly soul may have been on the chart menu, but as the back cover puts it: “In 1973 Britain was still a nation of outside bogs; tens of thousands were housed in wartime pre-fabs. Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Kettering might not be the first place you’d associate with spaced-out psych-rock, but neither are Croydon or Rugby and they gave us Loop and Spacemen 3 respectively. Maybe it’s something to do with the need for escape that can make such prosaic surroundings the backdrop for wide-screen exploratory escape. Perhaps there’s just sod-all else to do there. Whatever the reason, four-piece psychedelic rock band Thee Telepaths have a sound that, while not original, manages to dwarf expectation by virtue of being pretty much perfectly executed. The points of reference are what you might expect: Read more ...
joe.muggs
Billie Eilish is a vaudevillian. Crack that and everything else falls into place. Her impossible precociousness (at 17, she's a superstar and has been in the public eye for four years) and voraciousness (her and her brother Finneas's writing swerves from torch songs to trap beats, far-out electronica to glam-goth) should by all rights be an annoying mess, but absorb this album like a hallucinatory gothic cabaret show and it all makes sense. The gender ambiguities and gallows humour make sense. Even the manic pixie dream girl filtered via Resident Evil persona makes sense. Dammit, even the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Encountering a debut album this good is a rare thrill. Nonetheless, the case isn't made instantly – "Simpatico People”, the opening track of W.H. Lung’s Incidental Music, takes 127 seconds to bed in and the vocal arrives after another minute.During that lengthy intro almost everything which needs to be known is disclosed: this is an assured band, one so confident that clear references to the New Order of “Temptation” are overridden and soon left behind. The testifying vocal is akin to that of first-album Stone Roses and there’s also a suggestion of John Squire’s circular guitar six Read more ...