New music
joe.muggs
Around the turn of the millennium, two producers – the Californian Otis Jackson Jr aka Madlib, and the late James Yancey aka J Dilla from Detroit – started a revolution in hip hop: knocking beat patterns off the musical grid, searching further and wider than before for obscure and psychedelic sample sources, and generally making things weird and wonky.This abstracted approach is only now really making its mark on the mainstream thanks to Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar, but it has also created a well-established underground known simply as “the beat scene”, where producers from LA to Saint Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The EU referendum isn’t the only thing causing polarised opinion over European issues. The question of what constitutes Balearic Beat looms large over the music community. For some, it’s a fixed point, namely celebrated DJ Alfredo’s record box in the mid-80s. For others it’s built on more shifting sands, a sentiment DJ and author Bill Brewster summarises with trademark élan: “Balearic Beat today is the same as it was in 2011, 1999 and 1984. It’s shit pop records and brilliant EBM records. It’s everything and nothing.”International Feel record label boss and producer Mark Barrott’s take is Read more ...
joe.muggs
A few beers down, in the middle of a crowd listening to music you love, you tend not to think of the latest news story as your highest priority. But Britain's relationship to Europe weighs heavy on the mind these days, and when the news of the violent attack on Jo Cox started filtering through as we danced under the Catalan sun on Thursday afternoon, it threw the nature of Sónar festival into relief.Unlike a lot of international music events, which can often be little more than monocultural awaydays for Brits and/or Germans seeking hedonism in the sun, Sónar is both proudly reflective of its Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Completed from scratch in seven days, The Magic features 15 songs veering from spindly, fidgety No Wave excursions to tuneful yet harsh pop-New Wave nuggets and headache-inducing bangers. In short, Deerhoof’s 13th album proper encapsulates everything they have done to date from 1997’s debut album The Man, The King, The Girl.The prescriptive approach is nothing new. Its predecessor La Isla Bonita was similarly speedily tracked live in a basement, and the album before that, 2013’s Breakup Song, was collated from digital files each band member had made separately. Seemingly, Deerhoof are Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For new, independent artists, access to putting music on vinyl can seem daunting, especially to those who’ve grown up in the era of virtual music. There are schemes out there to counter this, notably the VF Selects programme, wherein the self-explanatory Vinyl Factory, together with FACT online magazine and the crowd-funding site Born.com, offer an opportunity. Between these organizations, the weight of funding, production and promotion is carried. Music is vetted, partly, by considering what chance it might have of selling, but, then, that’s been the way of all art forever, so it’s surely Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
How does Hannah Georgas’s 98-year-old grandmother feel about her collaborations with Graham Walsh, her two-time producer better known as part of Canadian electronic quartet Holy Fuck? It is, one suspects, one of a few aspects of this rich, immersive record that the Evelyn of its title might raise an eyebrow at – but in its themes of family, longing, loyalty and resilience, particularly on the gorgeous not-quite-title track, there’s plenty for her to be proud of.It was obvious from their work together on her 2013 self-titled album that Walsh had a knack for drawing out the unexpected from Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Punk rock, or what’s touted as punk rock, is practically inescapable right now. In London, a series of events tagged as Punk.London: 40 Years of Subversive Culture includes concerts by reanimated bands, exhibitions and film seasons. Backers include the British Fashion Council, the British Film Institute and the Design Museum. The Mayor of London is an official supporter. Sponsorship has come from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The year 1976 was apparently when punk began, and it’s time for these august bodies to celebrate the anniversary.Joe Corré, the son of Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
DJ Shadow, AKA Californian producer Josh Davis, is a renowned figure in the world of electronic music. His profile was especially high during the millennial period, primarily down to his groundbreaking 1996 debut album, Endtroducing…, which was built entirely from samples. It was a listening experience based around hip hop principles yet accessible to aficionados of post-rave electronica, and influenced multiple producers, leaving Shadow a figure of unassailable esteem.In more recent times, Shadow himself has clearly felt that, after a 20-year career in the wake of his landmark work, he’d do Read more ...
Barney Harsent
After two albums in rapid-fire quick succession, 2012’s eponymous debut and its 2013 follow-up, Shangri-La, Jake Bugg could be forgiven for taking a little longer to get his third out into the world. There was talk of working with the Beastie Boys’ Mike D, of taking risks, and rumours were of something darker, different and more diverse.Feburary’s unveiling of the new album’s title track, “On My One”, gave no such sense of a shift. Although Bugg reigned in the worst excesses of his nasal tones, it was familiar and surprisingly safe ground. Then, barely a week later, “Gimme the Love” arrived, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
While many acts have deployed the live album as a stop-gap or an easy money-spinner, some of Neil Young's best work was recorded live – Rust Never Sleeps, Weld and Arc-Weld, Live at Massey Hall 1971, the enigmatic Time Fades Away and so on. As an artist who works spontaneously and intuitively, much of his studio work is effectively live anyway.With Earth, Young has put a new spin on the live approach by picking a batch of songs from across his career, recorded onstage last year with backing band Promise of the Real (featuring Willie Nelson's sons Lukas and Micah), then piecing them together Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Of all the challenges the Chilis have faced over the years none has been greater than how to deal with guitarist John Frusciante's occasional spells of retirement. When, in the mid-nineties superstar axeman Dave Navarro stood in for him, his technical style lacked emotional simplicity. Frusciante was coaxed back. Then, when in 2009 the guitarist finally left for good, the band hired Josh Klinghoffer. Yet what initially seemed like an inspired choice, resulted in an album that was, ultimately, underwhelming. Now Klinghoffer returns with The Getaway – notably, also the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
When folk rock’s demon fiddler Dave Swarbrick died at 75 on 3 June, it was barely noticed that Real Gone Music released Fairport Convention’s Live in Finland 1971 the same day. Featuring the lineup of Swarbrick, Dave Mattacks (drums), Simon Nicol (guitar), and Dave Pegg (bass), which performed at the annual Ruisrock festival that 22 August, the disc features seven songs played with such force and briskness you’d think they wanted to get the hell away from the Archipelago Sea.Either that or they wanted to show the Finns that they could rock as hard as fellow festival acts the Kinks, Canned Read more ...