New music
Barney Harsent
With Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys seemingly hitting the best form of an already outstanding career, the bar has been pretty high for any other Furries looking to leap into pastures new. Not that this should unduly worry Gulp – SFA bassist Guto Pryce and bandmates Lindsey Leven and Gid Goundrey – their 2014 debut, Season Sun, was a gorgeous summer haze of an album, all dreams and driftwood. After a four-year gap, however, could they replicate the success? The short answer is yes. Yes, they can. But that seems a little perfunctory, so I suppose I’d better drill down on detail. Much Read more ...
joe.muggs
In basic creative terms of the ingredients that make it up, this is not a bad record. Hip hop production is in extraordinary period right now, and the six tracks on this EP have the best production that money can buy: woozy, narcotic, digitally surreal, vast in scale, perfect for heatwave listening as they boom and slither their way along, every one built around microscopic but lethally memorably bleeping hooks. “Tokyo Snow Trip” and “Kawasaki” in particular are extraordinary.The lyrics, too, in theory at least, work on this instant level: they're about money, stripping, weed, swagger, Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
In the days around WOMAD there have been plenty of media about how the “hostile environment” towards migrants has created all sorts of problems for artists attempting to get here from around the world. Certainly, we are being denied some of the hottest new acts - like the wild blue-haired Moonchild Sanelly from South Africa or the hottest new act from Nigeria, Chicoco Sounds. WOMAD have just signed a new 12-year deal at Charlton Park, however - and if you wanted to find the spiritual centre for the liberal, tolerant, positive globalism currently under threat, WOMAD would be a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A sight every music fan should see and hear once is The Proclaimers playing Scotland. Around 18 years ago I saw them play a giant marquee at the T In The Park Festival. It was like a rally, a roaring wall of joyful fanaticism (on which note, their autumn 2018 tour there sold out 30,000 tickets in 20 minutes!). If it was a rally, though, it was a righteous, tending-to-socialism one for The Proclaimers have a strand of activism in their blood. On their latest album, this is writ large.The title track sets the stage at the start, a two-and-a-half minute classic, one of their best, with punk Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Gusting. It’s not a word I’ve ever given much thought. You hear it on weather forecasts but I’m not a farmer of a fisherman so when they say it’ll be windy “with possible gusting speeds of up to 45 miles per hour” my brain doesn’t really register what that means on the ground. Until now. Camp Bestival 2018 was eventually defined by gusting (that and, apparently, Mary “Irrelevant” Berry). It was the unstoppable gusting that finally cancelled the festival a day early, a sad development but I could understand why. And I could feel it too, for by the time we left all my senses deeply knew exactly Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In recent years there’s been an explosion in feminised self-empowerment anthems, perhaps best epitomised by Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” (This is my fight song/Take back my life song/Prove I'm alright song). For those in need of a masculine equivalent, Dee Snider’s latest album may prove a tonic. A word of warning, though: where the feminine self-empowerment anthem can sometimes veer into the trite and solipsistic, this male version is simply a preening strut of preposterous bravado. Once that’s understood, however, there’s much to enjoy.Dee Snider was, for decades, the singer with face- Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Even seasoned veterans can suffer from programme amnesia over the four days and nights of rock, pop, dance and traditional music from around the world to be found at WOMAD, such is the array of choices across its 10 stages, ranging from the main arena through to the Ecotricity stage in Charlton Park’s leafy Arboretum – also home to the World of Words and Taste the World tents, the gong bathers and tarot readers in the World of Wellness.Most of us clearly knew where and when we were when Leftfield headlined on Friday night, reproducing their 1995 classic Leftism live and drawing one of the Read more ...
peter.quinn
This gloriously feel-good album offers irresistibly catchy hooks, a myriad of musical influences handled with an unruffled ease, plus a communicative power that thrills at every turn.Penned by the orchestra's MD and co-founder, multi-instrumentalist Paul Booth, album opener "Cross Channel" typifies the band's all-inclusive aesthetic, careening as it does between darbuka-fuelled rhythms and Afro-Cuban grooves of enormous heft, with pianist Alex Wilson's left hand driving the music to its inexorable climax. As evidenced by the freewheeling dialogue between Jonathan Mayer's sitar and Jason Yarde Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It might have begun with The Beatles espousal of Bob Dylan in 1964. There was also The Animals whose first two singles, issued the same year, repurposed tracks from Bob Dylan’s 1962 debut album. Before The Byrds hit big with their version of his “Mr. Tambourine Man” in summer 1965, Britain’s pop groups were already hip to Dylan and incorporating elements of his approach into their sound.Some acolytes like Donovan, who emerged in early 1965, even attempted to clone the Dylan look. Other were more subtle. The Searchers’ late 1964 single “What Have They Done to the Rain?” was an adaptation of a Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It starts with countdown to cacophony. A well-indicated pathway to absolute and total sensory overload. It’s calculated, clear and concise. The succinctly titled “Intro” hits like a sucker punch you never saw coming because it was never on the cards. The next thing that Sweden’s Echo Ladies presents is Kick-era INXS-level compression on “Almost Happy”, a track that answers the age-old question we’ve all struggled with – what would Peter Hook have sounded like with the Sisters of Mercy? This debut from Matilda Bogren, Joar Andersén and Mattis Andersson is awash with distorted synths, Read more ...
joe.muggs
He's known for his myriad collaborations – Public Image Ltd, Primal Scream, The Orb, The Edge, Can, all the way through to recent work with singers PJ Higgins and Hollie Cook – but Jah Wobble really deserves attention in his own right. A cosmic Cockney of immense erudition, he has created some extraordinary fusions of global sounds, ambient, electronica, post-punk and more. Perhaps the ideal illustration of his modus operandi is the incredible footage of him performing “Visions of You” with Sinead O'Connor and his band The Invaders Of The Heart, or maybe even better the interview Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As far as All Saints aficionados will be concerned, 17 years after they originally split they’ve pulled the dream team back together. Not only is regular “fifth member”, producer/songwriter K-Gee Gordon on board, but for two songs so is producer William Orbit, the man who, back in the day, polished “Pure Shores” and “Black Coffee” into their final chart-topping form. More to the point, Melanie Blatt, Shaznay Lewis and the Appleton sisters sound like they’re having a top time, bubbling with a joyousness which saturates their music.In the latter half of the Nineties All Saints were second only Read more ...