New music
joe.muggs
Ryuichi Sakamoto has conquered underground and mainstream with seeming ease over four decades, never dropping off in the quality of his releases. Indeed his most recent projects, following his return to public life after treatment for throat cancer in 2014-15, are among his best. The async album was rightly listed by many, including theartsdesk, as one of 2017's best; the async remodels remixes showed him absolutely keyed in to the electronica zeitgeist, and Glass, his live collaboration album with Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto is a worthy addition to the duo's extensive Read more ...
joe.muggs
Everything on this record changes shape. One moment in “RayCats” Far Eastern instrumentation is being glitched beyond recognition, then suddenly it sounds like something from a relaxation tape. “Same” shimmers and twists between 20th century avant-classical, Depeche Mode at their stadium peak and pure electronic sound. “The Station” sounds like Drake or Future crooning over the bassline from a 90s grunge track, but periodically dissolves into Autechre type abstraction.But that's Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, all over. Since he emerged from the US electronic noise scene, he's Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Before starting this review a decision was taken: that the over-used description of singer-songwriter Malcolm Middleton as a “Scottish miserablist” would not appear. However, this has proved impossible. Middleton is renowned, to the coterie who enjoy his music, for songs ripe with dejection but the first half of his set tonight is especially heavy with stark soul-searching. From the opening number, “Gut Feeling”, which contains the line, “I’ve got rows of wankers in my head shouting my gut feeling down”, to a song called “Love is a Momentary Lapse in Self-Loathing”, he assays a stark, poetic Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Their ninth album should please Morcheeba fans. Take the song “Find Another Way”, for example. It rolls in like a haunted breeze, an acoustic/twangy combination preceding front-woman Skye Edwards, one of the sweetest-sounding vocalists in pop, and she still has it. Tarred with the brush of being the bland dinner-party face of 1990s trip hop, due to their easy way with a pop song, there was always more to Morcheeba than many credited. “The Sea”, “Part of the Process”, “Trigger Hippy”, “What New York Couples Fight About” and others are simply delicious songs. The happy news is that Blaze Away Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Few bands divide opinion quite like Snow Patrol. Their fans see their slow, intense anthems as cathartic friends. Others - myself included - tend to regard their music as an insidious, dreary presence. As Nicky Wire (of the Manics) once put it, "the same drab little thing, over and over". Wildness, their first album in seven years, is being billed as being something completely different - more passionate, and with a lighter touch.Apparently, the shift in musical direction is down to various changes in the band members' lives. Singer Gary Lightbody has given up drinking. He's also been Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As the veteran combo roll around one more time, five years after they last performed in the UK, many a ticket-buyer for their No Filter tour has taken the view that, as the Stones once sang, this could be the last time. They didn’t play that one, perhaps not wishing to give fate the opportunity for a free hit, but they did take us on a trip through a decent chunk of their best-loved songs, and made room for a few surprises.While the likes of “Start Me Up” and “Satisfaction” sounded strangely messy and unfocused, some of the less obvious choices paid major dividends. For instance “Under My Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Watching this band in action is a treat. They gel absolutely and play off one another in a manner that’s easy and mellow, yet also sparks by occasionally teetering on the edge of their virtuosic abilities. The songs played throughout the evening at Brighton Festival are protest classics and other socially aware fare, but the group’s leader-arrangers, singer Carleen Anderson and keyboard player Nikki Yeoh, have turned them, via jazz, into almost completely new pieces of music.Take an extended jam that combines “Oh, Freedom”, the anti-slavery spiritual made famous by activist-folk singer Odetta Read more ...
Owen Richards
When bands move to the US, some find themselves drawn into the commercial machine; when Scottish band Chvrches crossed the Atlantic, they were targeting direct assimilation from the start. Recorded with mega-producer Greg Kurstin, the band are aiming to be more direct than ever; perhaps a wise move considering they’ve always leaned heavily on the pop side of electro.This move is successful, somewhat. The production is appropriately crisp and expansive, and the songs nearly all follow the same structure (sleek verse, build up pre-chorus, hook-heavy chorus). Lauren Mayberry’s voice was built Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Gretchen Peters arrived in Nashville in the late eighties from Bronxville, New York, where she was born, and Boulder, Colorado, where she grew up. Within a decade she was writing songs for some of the biggest names in country music, among them Trisha Yearwood, Shania Twain, and George Strait, and for Etta James. It was “Independence Day”, which Martina McBride picked up, that led to her first honours (a Grammy and a Country Music Association Award), an occasional writing partnership with Bryan Adams and the release of a sequence of distinguished albums (including the garlanded Blackbird, 2016 Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
African Scream Contest 2 opens with a burst of distorted guitar suggesting a parallel-world response to The Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today”. Then, the song beds in and a James Brown groove plays off against spindly lead-guitar lines also evoking California in the psychedelic era: the extemporisation of Jefferson Airplane. At 3.06, the vocalist and percussionist are left to get on with it for 30 seconds. Next, a wheezy organ comes to the fore and injects some “Light my Fire” vamps.The track is “A Min We Vo Nou” by Les Sympathics de Porto-Novo. Recorded in 1973 or 1974 in Lagos, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The welcome to Glasgow audio-visual artist Robbie Thomson’s performance engenders a hefty sense of anticipation. It’s almost nervousness-inducing as we’re handed ear-plugs and warned about how very loud it’s going to be. Then, walking into the main hall from the bar, all is gloom. From 1849, for a century-and-a-half, this venue was a church and attached school, its claim to fame a dismissive mention in Jane Eyre. But this evening the stained glass windows are blacked out, blocking the evening sun. In the centre of the old building is a Faraday cage beside which, on a raised podium, Thomson is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Loner’s opening track “More of the Same” lyrically tracks being at a party where “everyone’s well dressed with a perfect body and they all have alternative haircuts and straight white teeth.” It triggers a flashback to schooldays when it was, indeed, the same thing. “Cry!” looks a life in the limelight, “Money” is about doing everything for money and “Bikini” is about becoming a celebrity. The price of entry? Putting on a bikini and dancing.Caroline Rose’s third album is a smart, sardonic 11-track romp through how she sees aspects of the modern condition. A sadness-tinged cynicism is Read more ...