New music
Kieron Tyler
Hug of Thunder makes its case with “Victim Lover”, its ninth track. For the first time on Broken Social Scene’s follow-up to 2010’s Forgiveness Rock Record, the album takes a breath to focus on the song rather than its architecture. “Victim Lover” is a drifting, lovely reflection with a hazy atmosphere balancing a yearning vocal line against a soulful, gospel-esque chorus.Up to this point, immediacy has been the emphasis. After a brief instrumental scene setter, Hug of Thunder kicks off with “Halfway Home”, a less-bludgeoning foil to fellow Canadians' Arcade Fire’s revved-up bluster. Before “ Read more ...
joe.muggs
Imagine that The Ramones were not only still playing into the mid 2000s, but were still writing new songs as good as “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” and still sending young audiences completely delirious to boot. That might seem fanciful, but it's a pretty accurate analogy for where Lorenzo D’Angelo – Lory D – is now. From 1991, Rome-born and bred Lory D has been making techno that boils all of the European and black American history of the genre down to its most perfectly minimalist but completely wild core elements, and delivering it to crowds who want nothing more than that. One of the most Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Considering Shelleyan Orphan, Melody Maker said “someone’s been smearing themselves in art…were they artists or did they just wallow in shit?” While the late Eighties’ British music press often made assertions to seek attention, slagging off a band because they sought to follow their own path is, with hindsight, rich given that roughly contemporary cover stars such as Chakk and Set The Tone dealt in music so precisely fixed in the moment they now sound as dated as Sheena Easton’s efforts to get funky and U2’s lunges at the blues.Shelleyan Orphan – the duo Caroline Crawley and Jem Tayle – Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Those coming to Lifetime of Love expecting something – anything – approaching Moses Archuleta’s day job in Deerhunter will find those expectations confounded. With his Moon Diagrams solo project, Archuleta has presented us with a sonic sketchbook of ideas that range from ambient, hymnlike refrains to hypnotic house grooves and epic experimentalism.Where Lifetime of Love does share ground with Deerhunter is in its deeply personal feel and its genesis in personal strife. Written over a 10-year period that saw the breakdown of Archuleta’s marriage and a self-imposed exile from friends and family Read more ...
peter.quinn
Denys Baptiste's deep dive into the mid-1960s work of jazz icon, sax player and composer John Coltrane also serves to mark 50 years since Coltrane's shockingly early death at the age of 40. The saxist's core quartet features two long-standing collaborators, double bassist Gary Crosby and drummer Rod Youngs, plus Jazz FM Instrumentalist of the Year, pianist Nikki Yeoh.One of Coltrane's most captivating melodies, Youngs opens up a suitably vast canvas on "Living Space" with temple bell and cymbal strokes (and what sounds like a wind machine), before Baptiste’s incantatory Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Reviewed this month with the windows open, in weather hot enough to warp records, this month theartsdesk on Vinyl casts two ears over 34 releases, starting with a striking foray into elegant songwriting and ending with Now That’s What I Call Classic Rock. Along the way, expect encounters with everything from decade-old hip hop reissues to brand new sludge-punk metal, as well as two of the most influential bands that have ever existed.VINYL OF THE MONTHThe Fiction Aisle Heart Map Rubric (Brighton’s Finest)Overdue vinyl release for the debut from Electric Soft Parader Thomas White’s latest Read more ...
joe.muggs
Gossip – the trio fronted by Beth Ditto from 1999 until last year – always felt a bit overshadowed by their 2006 breakthrough hit “Standing in the Way of Control”. It's understandable: it still stands up now as a bona fide banger, in original form or the Soulwax remix that soundtracked a million Skins trailers and captured a dayglo period when indie rock and rave culture were “having a bit of a moment” together, and it absolutely deserved its ubiquity. But it's also unfair, as Gossip were a force of nature live, made plenty of excellent records, and were generally way more than one-hit- Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Sgt. Pepper is a popular choice for a tribute but also a dangerous one. How to say anything meaningful about a work widely agreed to be the most influential in rock history? How to approach a work that is already a multi-layered pastiche, in places nostalgic and sentimental, in others subversively mind-expanding? With decades of innovative, madcap music-making, including as a leading light in Loose Tubes, Django Bates is undoubtedly the man to try. Bates has transcribed the album afresh, but retained the original structures and keys, and with the musical foundations unchanged, there’s Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Supersonic Festival is Birmingham’s annual gathering of the sonically weird and wonderful pitched at “curious audiences” happy to lend their ears to sounds that would ordinarily be difficult to discover without a lot of effort. An urban event, spread over a weekend and a number of indoor venues, is usually the way to go in the UK before summer festivals take hold. In years past, revellers have been glad of the protection from the elements. This year, however, fierce heat and humidity gave the proceedings a Mediterranean sheen and turned some of the gigs into saunas. But with plenty of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“So you wanna be an outlaw, better take it from me/ Living on the highway, ain't everything it's supposed to be” sings Steve Earle on the opening track of his latest album, with a little help from Willie Nelson. Recorded in Texas, where Earle did most of his growing up and where he began to play music, So You Wannabe An Outlaw is an acknowledgment of his roots and influences and an “unapologetic” channelling of Waylon Jennings, a fellow Texan with a career as multi-faceted as Earle’s own.The album’s frame of musical reference is wide: the bluesy “If Mama Could Seen Me”, commissioned by T-Bone Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“So you wanna be an outlaw, better take it from me/ Living on the highway, ain't everything it's supposed to be” sings Steve Earle, a man with no shortage of outlawish credentials, on the opening track of his latest album, with a little help from Willie Nelson. Recorded in Texas, where Virginia-born Earle did most of his growing up and where he began to play music, So You Wannabe An Outlaw is an acknowledgment of his roots and influences and an “unapologetic” channelling of Waylon Jennings, a fellow Texan with a career as multi-faceted as Earle’s own.The album’s frame of musical reference is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In a 1967 headline, The Washington Post pegged Lynn Castle as a “Shapely Blonde in Blue Jeans, Popular Barber in Hollywood”. She had attracted attention as the hairdresser of choice for The Byrds, The Monkees, Del Shannon, Sonny & Cher and Stephen Stills. Known as “The Lady Barber”, she also cut the hair of music business movers and shakers Lee Hazlewood and Monkees’ songwriters Boyce and Hart.The Washington Post had no interest in her other life as a songwriter. Her song “Teeny Tiny Gnome” (originally titled “Kicking Stones”) was recorded by The Monkees but wasn’t issued until 1987. In Read more ...