New music
Matthew Wright
Fin Greenall’s career is developing as a reverse mirror image of musical history. Originally a DJ and electronic music pioneer working on the edge of contemporary performance, for the past decade he has been on a journey into the acoustic and American past. His last release, 2014’s Hard Believer, had tinges of blues alongside some resonant Americana. Sunday Night Blues Club is billed as the real thing – his first “purely blues” album – but is it?Like Hard Believer, this contains some very evocative soundscapes, executed with seeming authenticity and style. Obviously, the argument about Read more ...
mark.kidel
Tamikrest’s fourth album is well-presented, good enough, but a little hamstrung by what have become the clichés of the modern Touareg genre: the lilting rhythms of a camel cruising slowly across the dunes, intertwined guitars that smoothly swirl bewteen old Tamashek melodies and gentle riffs that might have come from the Deep South. The lyrics touch on the politics of the Southern Sahara, and the Touaregs’ tragic position at the mercy of conflicting interests – political, economic and religious.Music that bewitches around a campfire, under the vast canopy of the Milky Way doesn’t have the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Miraculous Mule summon up that great feeling when you walk into an anonymous festival marquee and are caught up in a storm of music by someone you’ve never heard of. Two Tonne Testimony has a looseness, where songs matter less than hefty grooves, a feeling that its stew of swamp rock, psychedelia and grungey biker riffs is merely the jumping-off point for a wild live show. It’s also punctuated by a very contemporary paranoia that time is running out.Miraculous Mule is a three-piece fronted by Michael J Sheehy, alongside his brother and a childhood friend. Born of north London's council Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
By the time Buzzcocks recorded the 12 tracks heard on Time’s Up, they had played with Sex Pistols twice. They had also shared bills with The Clash, The Damned, Eater, Slaughter & The Dogs, Stinky Toys and The Vibrators. After singer Howard Devoto (then known as Howard Trafford) read about Sex Pistols in the 21 February 1976 NME he and his friend Pete Shelley (Peter McNeish) saw them on the 20th – the weekly paper was available in their home-town Manchester from Thursdays rather than the date of the issue – and the 21st in High Wycombe and Welwyn Garden City. They recorded the latter show Read more ...
Katie Colombus
It's part and parcel of Ed Sheeran's success that both your nan and your teenage kid can bond over his music. His newest album, Divide, pushes that generalisation even further, with its easy-to-compartmentalise songs underpinned by a distinctively down to earth sound."Shape of You" is the one that everyone already knows, currently melting the airwaves and double-repeating on the dance floor, with its clipped, quick lyrics, base-y hum and dance beat. There are familiar soppy ballads full of youthful promises of eternity that will delight those of prom age, like "Perfect" or "How Would You Feel Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Peter Culshaw’s nomadic monthly round-up of the latest brilliant intercontinental sounds includes Frippertronics from São Paulo, Indian classical electronica, Vietnamese jazz and Ethiopian nostalgia. It features great new releases from King Ayisoba, Blue Beast, Orchestra Baobab and some terrific compilations, notably from the late, great Nashville master songwriter Guy Clark.The show was recorded at the enterprising MusicBoxRadio UK’s spanking new studio in Farringdon, London. Since being posted on Mixcloud the show has already gone to number two in Mixcloud's Latin chart and Afrobeat chart, Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Laura Marling's new album is called Semper Femina - two words the singer-songwriter also has tattooed on her leg. It's Latin for "always a woman". Despite having the motto inscribed on her flesh, Marling claims to find it hard to write intimately about other women. Hence the singer describing her recent spell in Los Angeles as a particularly "masculine time" causing her now to look "specifically at women". Full marks for ambition, some might feel, but might she be overthinking it?If the underlying rationale can seem a tad laboured, the music is anything but. Fans will be familiar with Read more ...
William Green
Apocalyptica are a band that became famous for playing Metallica on cellos. And tonight they’re playing only Metallica covers because it's 20 years since they released Plays Metallica by Four Cellos, their debut album. The quartet formed at Finland’s Sibelius Academy in 1993 and the man responsible for bringing together classical cellists to play metal is Eicca Toppinen. Tonight, referring to their debut album, he admits that they were “expecting to sell 1,000 CDs”. Six million albums later and constantly on tour they return to their roots: without Metallica there would be no Apocalyptica. Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Soundtrack work may have been seen as a respectable sideline for veterans of the punk era for a while but it has taken 40 years for Paul Weller to join the likes of Nick Cave and Barry Adamson and strike out in this genre. Somewhat fittingly, Weller’s first foray into cinema provides the accompaniment to Johnny Harris’ gritty boxing flick Jawbone and it’s certainly no aural wallpaper but instead provides an ebb and flow of its own even without the accompanying visuals.The sprawling “Johnny/Blackout” opens the album with a sonic soundscape that builds and falls back for 20 minutes and is a Read more ...
joe.muggs
There is no band of the Eighties generation who've remained both as big, and as great, as Depeche Mode. Duran Duran? Lightweights. U2? Sunk into self-parody a long time ago. But the boys from Basildon are something else: they've come through all the pressures of fame, addiction, ageing and the rest with their mojo very much intact, sounding like themselves but still writing fresh songs and hitting new emotional spots. They are also clearly still willing to experiment sonically, as signalled by the drafting-in of James Ford of techno duo Simian Mobile Disco as producer for their 14th album.All Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Julian Cope is one of pop music’s outsiders, a singer and author who began his career in the post-punk pop band The Teardrop Exolodes but whose solo career has drifted gleefully off-radar, more recently releasing albums that blend psych, Gaelic music, blues and prog rock at the rate of about one a year. He takes to the stage decked out in his usual leather vest, knee-high leather boots, and beige three-quarter-lengths, with his grizzled mane poking out from under a navy cap and sunglasses. He’s greeted by a rowdy yet well-intentioned audience, who’ve evidently grown up with his music, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Temples’ debut album, 2014’s Sun Structures, was an instant and surprise success. Within weeks of its release, the Brit-psych outfit were headlining major venues for the first time. Sun Structures went UK Top 10. Tame Impala had opened the door and Temples stepped through. As if to stress this, Volcano’s fourth track, “Oh the Saviour”, rhymes “lava” with “impala” and, three tracks on, “Open Air” could pass for a Tame Impala stomp-along.Instead of taking Temples further out, their second album Volcano is a consolidation which drops the overt nods to Oasis and supplements the edgy 1966-Beatles Read more ...