New music
Owen Richards
Oh Sees have been perennial festival favourites for over 15 years now, releasing 21 albums under seven different band names. The change of name usually indicates a new direction, with previous records ranging from alt Americana (OCS) to lo-fi garage (Thee Oh Sees). 2016’s Orc christened the band’s latest moniker Oh Sees, and after a brief diversion last year, they’re back with more explorations into post-rock riffs and rhythms.Smote Reverser’s cover immediately draws to mind the melodramatic imagery of metal: a Lovecraftian leviathan tears down on a burning futuristic city. Indeed, the lyrics Read more ...
Guy Oddy
When Kentish hardcore punk two-piece, Slaves emerged with their debut album, Are You Satisfied?, they caused quite a stir with lairy tunes of austerity Britain like “The Hunter”, “Sockets” and the magnificent “Hey”. Since the heady days of 2015, however, they seem to have been somewhat stuck in the musical doldrums, in need of something to reinvigorate their sound. 2016’s follow-up album, Take Control, had great tunes like “Rich Man” and “Consume Or Be Consumed” but proved to be a set to cherry pick rather than cherish. And so, it continues to be with Acts Of Fear And Love.Isaac Holman’s Ian Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Once heard, Wimple Winch’s “Save my Soul” is never forgotten. The A-side of a flop single originally issued in June 1966, it is one of the most tightly coiled British records from the Sixties and has sudden explosions of tension suggesting the band are ready to punch anyone within reach. Late the previous year, The Who’s “My Generation” had taken pop music to new, hitherto unexplored, levels of aggression. “Save my Soul” went much further. It is a landmark.Nevertheless, before 1984 the Liverpool group's single was barely known. It had been included – in lo-fi – on the 1983 bootleg compilation Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Turning over the sleeve of With Animals reveals a full-frame picture of a Tascam Midistudio 688. First marketed in 1990, it was an eight-track home studio which aimed to bridge the gap between analogue and digital. Midi signals could be fed into it. As could digital recordings. What was input was captured as an analogue recording on a cassette tape. White Town's "Your Woman" became the best-known track recorded on this hybrid, envelope-pushing tech.Foregrounding this gear is a statement of intent. Not just to say that retro mind-sets are at work, but also that a particular ambiance is being Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Dance music duo Gorgon City exist within a fickle market. It’s all very well to mooch about on a Saturday night in Woking to house music merging into pop, R&B-tinted, smooth, garage-flecked, touched with just a whiff of Ibiza’s hedonic promise, but does anyone know who makes it or actively care enough to pursue them? Gorgon City fired out a run of Top 20 singles in 2014, but haven’t had such attention for the songs thus far released from their second album. It is, however, no worse - and may even be slightly better - than its predecessor.In any case, their market changed years ago. Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s been a decade since we last heard from Tom Baxter when he released his second album Skybound, which itself was four years after his debut Feather & Stone. That album included “Almost There”, a song somewhat implausibly covered by Shirley Bassey; Baxter accompanied her when she sang it at the Roundhouse’s Electric Proms.As the title suggests, it’s been a somewhat tricky 10 years for this very English singer-songwriter, one of four children of Jeff and Julie Gleave whom folkies with long memories may remember from the 1960s and ‘70s folk circuit. So with Rufus Wainwright and Tom Waits Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Twinned with the legendary Newport Folk Festival, founded on Rhode Island in 1959 as a counterpart to the celebrated jazz festival, the Cambridge Folk Festival this year celebrated its 54th birthday under blue skies. The sun shone relentlessly throughout its four days, which meant that performers squinted out at a sea of semi-clad and often tattooed bodies, many sheltering under beaded parasols. Keeping everything in tune with the high levels of humidity can’t have been easy though most everyone managed it – even though, as Janis Ian joked, tuning has sometimes been antithetical to folkies. Read more ...
caspar.gomez
There are two schools of thought on the Scissor Sisters. One was that they were vapid, over-cheery retro-pop of the worst order. The other is that they were an extension of New York’s ever-mischievous underground in all its underground LGBT+ disco glory. While they certainly leaned occasionally towards the former, I very much valued them as the latter. The first solo album from frontman Jake Shears provides the same quandary and its relentless Labrador bounciness won’t be for everyone.Shears took time out when the Scissor Sisters went on hiatus in 2012 after their fourth album. Recently his Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of the banes of music culture is over-categorisation. It always has been. The statement that there are only two types of music, good and bad, has been apocryphally attributed to a wide range of figureheads – most especially Louis Armstrong – but whoever said it first, the reason it keeps popping back up is there’s a truth to it. The music nominees for this year’s Hospital Club h 100 Awards reflect a satisfying public swerve away from niche listening, away from those who would isolate via genre and background, a move towards opening all out to all, which can only be a healthy development. Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The post-modernists have taken over the asylum. At least, that's what I thought twice this week. Once when I saw Vlad Putin on YouTube doing karaoke to an adoring audience. The other was seeing Brazil’s latest contenders BaianaSystem, who played to a sweaty packed-out house at the Village Underground. "Post-modern" in the sense of beyond defineable genre and with a dose of irony thrown in, and not quite beleiving what is in front of your eyes.Of course, there have always been interesting musical mixes in Brazil, especially in Bahia in the North-East where they come from. The state has been a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Death Grips are a self-proclaimed “conceptual art exhibition anchored by sound and vision” who are forever threatening to split up, but don’t let that put you off. Year of the Snitch, their sixth album in as many years, is an experimental hip hop diamond in a world that really doesn’t need any more fake macho rappers or self-obsessed multi-millionaires, propped up by auto-tuned backing singers. With a sound that frequently suggests My Bloody Valentine going toe to toe with Run the Jewels, Death Grips are throwing out anything but smooth and mainstream grooves backed by gangster-fantasy rhymes Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Gary McFarland’s 1965 album The In Sound had the Samba and Bossa Nova influences which were colouring the sound of American jazzers from around 1962, it was on the button for the year it was released. This despite sporting a pop art sleeve evoking those of the swing-based easy listening albums from Enoch Light and Terry Snyder issued by the Command label in 1959.The In Sound’s sensitivity to a then-current zeitgeist is confirmed by its fast-on-the-uptake version of “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction”, which The Rolling Stones released as a US single on 6 June 1965 – the album was Read more ...