New music
joe.muggs
One of the great things about club music is that it deals with ageing in very different ways to rock – and as such can offer fantastic creative rebirths. Witness theartsdesk's recent startling Q&A with Mark Hakwins aka Marquis Hawkes, who'd been around the artistic block and back a good few times before achieving his current success. Or Sean Dickson – the singer with Scottish indie band The Soup Dragons, who went from Eighties psychedelic janglers to Nineties baggy-clothed ravers, then faded away. Dickson, though, took fully to clubland, is still a jobbing DJ, and has slowly and Read more ...
james.woodall
It could be a book, film, TV or radio piece, essay or exhibition. If it’s about or based on The Beatles, the question is always the same: how on earth can anything new be said? In the case of Ron Howard’s Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years, surprisingly quite a lot, is the answer.Factually, there’s little with which the Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind director can grab even the most noddingly acquainted. Four boys from very modest backgrounds test themselves as a band in the early 1960s in Europe’s raciest city (Hamburg), get noticed in a scuzzy Liverpool basement by a posh shopkeeper (Brian Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Johnny Lynch – the artist otherwise known as Pictish Trail – is one of the country’s most intriguing musicians. In 2010, he upped sticks and moved into a caravan on the remote island of Eigg, ensuring every appraisal of his work evermore would refer to him as a “hermit” or a “recluse”. And yet, despite the geographical challenges, Lynch somehow remains the life and soul of any party he cares to put his name to: festival curator (they come to him); label boss (releasing music into the world on the back of postcards, with coordinates rather than catalogue numbers); purveyor of the finest space- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Beach Boys signed with Capitol Records on 24 May 1962. Early the next month, their first single for the label became “409”/”Surfin’ Safari”. It was not their debut release. The “Surfin'”/ “Luau” single had been issued in November 1961 by Candix.Before Capitol, Hite and Dorinda Morgan had brought them into a recording studio. The former was a music publisher known by Murry Wilson, the father of Beach Boys’ Brian, Carl and Dennis. When the Morgans first encountered the band, they were known as The Pendeltones. Without being asked, they were renamed The Beach Boys for the release of "Surfin Read more ...
Katie Colombus
This album is the rebuilding of KT Tunstall - in a spiritual sense if not a musical one.It’s not a huge departure from the norm in terms of sound. She's kept the distinctive zazzy guitar pop and poetic lyric, imbued with a style of music that skirts the peripheries of folk but remains pop at its core. Drawing inspiration from Californian classics such as Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Tom Petty and Fleetwood Mac (Tunstall took a two year time out in LA to reflect, relax and complete a Sundance film composers lab) there is a laid back, sunsetty shimmer to almost all of the tracks. They are Read more ...
Bernadette McNulty
Back in February, M.I.A. released the first single “Borders” from this her fifth and allegedly last album, taking a powerful aim at the refugee crisis engulfing the world. The video was as stark and simple as the track, with still, almost painterly long shots of M.I.A. sat among a boatful of motionless migrants or surrounded by bodies clinging onto barbed wire fences, staring with her trademark fierce poker face down the eye of the camera.This wasn’t new territory for the always geopolitically polemical singer, herself a child refugee from the civil war in Sri Lanka, and as she said on Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The best and most confident debut since ‘Anarchy in the UK,’” said weekly music paper Sounds of the debut single by Ultravox! “Dangerous Rhythm” had been released in February 1977. “Cosmic reggae," declared Record Mirror. Melody Maker identified a “rare quality and haunting presence”. The NME said the song was a “reggae abstraction” and “mesmeric”. Ultravox! – the attention-grabbing exclamation mark was ditched in early 1978 – were off to a good start.Soon, though, the wind direction changed. Stranglers’ bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel said they were session musicians put together by Island Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Once again theartsdesk on Vinyl returns to offer a round-up of the very best available on plastic, covering every style imaginable and, this month, a few that have to be heard to be believed. From albums to 7” singles to boxsets, all vinyl life is here. The ultimate vinyl reviews selection.Various Eleven into Fifteen: a 130701 Compilation (130701)Fat Cat Records were there at the beginning. In many ways it was unsurprising that the label who signed and supported classically influenced Icelandic acts Sigur Rós and Múm would be early adopters of new, accessible trends in classical modernism. Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Californian saxophone phenomenon Kamasi Washington is never knowingly understated. He rocked up for his Proms debut on Tuesday night having led a vast musical entourage on tour across Europe all summer, and delivered an ecstatic, if occasionally verbose, statement of intent. There were problems with both the performance and one or two of the compositions. But as a live experience, it was, in places, euphoric. Only a determined curmudgeon could leave without a grin.We were treated to some highlights of last year’s album The Epic. The title doesn’t disappoint, in terms of ambition, at least. Read more ...
Tina Edwards
Australia and Japan were first to host Björk Digital, but it lands at London’s Somerset House with fresh, never-before-seen work. The immersive virtual reality exhibition collates several digital- and film-based works born from Björk's critically acclaimed album Vulnicura. Arguably her most revealing release to date, Vulnicura – in all its forms – documents the destruction of her marriage, with devastatingly unguarded lyrics.Visitors are greeted by a 360-degree film commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, Black Lake. Accompanying the track of the same name, the dual-screen panoramic video Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Britain loves Meat Loaf. Never mind that his 1977 breakthrough, Bat Out of Hell, was once inescapable on pub jukeboxes and in school sixth form rooms throughout the land. Or that “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” was the country’s biggest-selling single of 1993. Let’s talk more recently. Meat Loaf’s commercial clout has globally dropped away, but he remains a bestseller here, his every album of the last 30 years, including ones released in 2010 and 2011, making the Top Five.Braver Than We Are is Meat Loaf’s first album in a decade to feature predominantly the songwriting of Jim Read more ...
caspar.gomez
The Short VersionSet in the grounds of elegant Northamptonshire country house Kelmarsh Hall, Shambala has a wild atmosphere wherein psychedelic hippy antics meet spliff-lovin’ post-hip hop youth. It’s a great party, with a friendly, high-spirited crowd, offering a niche musical menu, mostly across a range of small, well-crafted venues. Friday night headliner Sister Sledge is great fun but Saturday night headliner Beardyman is, unexpectedly, rubbish. Nevertheless, the whole thing joyfully succeeds, whether in blazing sun or monsoon downpour, due to its vivaciousness, colour and imaginative Read more ...