New music
Jo Southerd
Sophomore records are never easy, especially when your debut was as acclaimed and beloved as french artist Melody Prochet’s first outing as Melody’s Echo Chamber, and this follow-up has had its fair share of bumps in the road. Prochet first announced Bon Voyage in April last year, on her 30th birthday; a new song was released, and a string of tour dates to go with it. But shortly after, Prochet was hospitalised following a serious accident that left her with broken vertebrae in her neck and spine, and a brain aneurysm. The album and accompanying live shows were put on hold. It’s impossible to Read more ...
mark.kidel
Hot in the burning footsteps of Bargou 08, last year’s subtle but daring mix of traditional Tunisian sounds and electronic beats and textures, Sofyann Ben Youssef launches a new project under the name of AMMAR 808, Maghreb United. There is a great deal more fire and confidence in this new album, which plunges deeper into the rich sonic universe of the Maghreb while taking a few more risks with the contemporary electronic and rock elements that are deftly combined to create a beguiling whole.Traditional popular music from the Maghreb works with distortion – the snare on the bendir frame drum, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Past My Door” weaves together a series of leitmotifs. Beginning as a downbeat, mid-tempo shuffle, it then shifts into a staccato passage after which the tempo picks up before a more pacey section. Next, the character established at the song’s introduction returns. Over four-minutes 20 seconds, the different approaches are supported by oblique lyrics which include the memorable phrase “too late, cries the melting snowman". At its core, the melancholy “Past My Door” seems to be about missing chances and being left behind.This remarkable portmanteau composition is one of the many highlights of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The line that best summed up the European opening night of Taylor Swift’s latest tour had nothing to do with snakes, or tattered reputations, or tabloid melodrama. It came, in fact, from opening act Charli XCX, who chose the intro to cotton-candy sound-of-last-summer “Boys” to shout out the “three incredible, badass women” who’d take turns sharing the stage tonight.Anointing Taylor Swift as any kind of feminist figurehead rarely ends well, but I’ll say this: when one of the world’s biggest pop stars stops the show two songs in to introduce by name every female dancer and singer sharing the Read more ...
joe.muggs
For a decade now, Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson – Lykke Li – has been a poster girl for the Scandinavian, and particularly Swedish, ability to find the highest common factors between high gloss pop and introspective indie/alternative music, and to make it into something that hides emotional heft behind glossy surfaces and impeccable poise (see also Little Dragon, Alphabeat, Miike Snow...) Her fourth album, however, might well lose some of the fans who leaned towards the indie elements of her music. In probably the biggest single creative shift of her career, huge swathes of Slowdive, Beach Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Mark Hodkinson is a Rochdale writer, journalist, songwriter and musician who’s also behind underground label/publishing house Pomona. Black Sedan is the latest product of his febrile mind, a band collective that’s been slowly coming together over the last couple of years. Their debut album sprawls about a number of styles but retains a likeable cohesiveness, wallowing in a loose, strummed stew that’s lightly psychedelic with plenty of sonic trimmings.It begins with “Love on Love”, a delicious, widescreen piece based around Charlie Chaplin’s fantastic speech at the end of The Great Dictator, Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
In just five years, what the team behind Hidden Door Festival has achieved is quite remarkable. Having sprung up in 2014, taking over a group of disused vaults behind Waverley train station, the festival’s mission to transform redundant spaces in Edinburgh has left an immovable, and much needed, creative footprint on the city. In 2017 this not-for-profit festival, which is run entirely by volunteers, re-opened the Leith Theatre, a stunning venue which had lain in disuse for almost three decades.Having breathed new life into this incredible space, which is now gradually becoming used more and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Lily Allen has long been an unlikely inhabitant of the tabloid sphere. She was born into it and her pop career sealed the deal, rendering her a recalcitrant victim of paparazzi fishbowl idiocy, ugly magazines and online sidebars. She is, however, one of the few to undermine this process, offering gritty, poetic response in song. “The Fear”, for instance, was a huge hit that also 100 percent nailed vapid celeb aspiration. Her fourth album is, at its best, her rawest and most revealing.Allen’s last outing, 2014’s Sheezus, saw her less focused. Lyrically sharp as ever, it was hampered by lesser Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Although once famous for her Australian drawl and hazy jams, on her most recent album Tell Me How You Really Feel, Courtney Barnett has transformed herself into an all-singing indie star, resulting in something more assured, vulnerable, and intense than her previous work. Touring the UK with her band of Bones Sloan, Dave Mudie and Katie Harkin, her 19-song set in Albert Hall in Manchester is faultless.Barnett starts by playing Tell Me How You Really Feel in its entirety. The reflective songs sound hefty and visceral live. The delicate “Need A Little Time Out” rests on chugging guitars and Read more ...
Barney Harsent
For his fifth solo album (not counting last year’s delayed soundtrack to Set Fire to the Stars) Welsh singer-songwriter and sometime Super Furry frontman Gruff Rhys inhabits an imaginary landscape in order to deal with issues that are all too real. Like its filmic predecessor, it has been a long time coming. The songs were recorded back in 2016 and, given the world's trajectory in the ensuing years, the dystopian landscape Rhys paints could easily be seen as visionary. The reason for the delay was not to encourage comparisons with Nostradamus but to ensure that composer Stephen McNeff Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Wooden Shjips’ new album was apparently written as a “summer record” and, if that was Ripley Johnson and his psychedelic confederates’ intent, it has been fully achieved. While this may not be immediately apparent to fans of Calvin Harris, David Guetta or George Ezra, V does represent a significant shift away from the frantic motorik monsters such as “Down by the Sea” and “Lazy Bones” that have seen the band take a major role on the US psych scene. Taking on the relaxed sounds of Spacemen 3, Grateful Dead and Neil Young, Wooden Shjips have knitted together laidback psychedelic tunes from a Read more ...
Jo Southerd
Lindsey Jordan was 16 when she released her first EP as Snail Mail on her local punk label Sister Polygon Records. Two years later, she has graduated from high school and signed to Matador Records, home of Stephen Malkmus, Kurt Vile and Helium. Lush is Jordan’s debut full-length album, which she describes as being “more deliberate” than her previous work.The record starts as it means to go on: unapologetically sad. This is a break-up album, and the painful confusion of young love rings through with every chord. A melancholic intro paves the way for “Pristine”, the first of many great pop Read more ...