New music
Barney Harsent
As well as releasing electronic music on Ron Morelli’s feted L.I.E.S. label, and the sporadically brilliant Ghost Box, as well a particularly impressive outing on Static Caravan (as Primitive Neural Pathways), Steve Moore is the bass- and synth-playing half of Zombi. On Shape Shift, a heavier, darker and more rock-sounding record than fans of 2009’s Escape Velocity might be expecting, he is doing his utmost to show the acceptable face of horror-suited post-rock. Meanwhile, his accomplice, AE Paterra, provides the path from which they must not stray by beating several shades of something out Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Little Bob Story: Off the Rails + Live in ‘78Aki Kaurismäki’s 2011 film Le Havre features a cameo from a hard-rocking band fronted by a grey-haired gentleman who crops up elsewhere in the action. He is Roberto Piazza, and trades under the name Little Bob. Although born in Italy, his family moved to France in 1958 when he was 13. Integral to and at one with France’s perennial love affair with classic rock ‘n’ roll, he formed the band Little Bob Story in Le Havre in 1974.Kaurismäki recognised that the wilful Little Bob is the genuine article: a man forever marinated in the spirit of high- Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“I always think she knows a little more than the rest of us,” said film director Paul Thomas Anderson, on casting Newsom as the knowing narrator Sortilège in last year’s Inherent Vice. Fans of her music know the feeling. It’s five years since the epic Have One On Me, all of which time Newsom claims to have been working, on and off, on Divers, an inspiringly complex and ambitious collection discussing love, history, time travel, desolation, the indigenous people of New York (I’ve only got 300 words, so I’ll leave it there…).Vocally, Björk and Wuthering Heights-era Kate Bush (with glimpses of Read more ...
Matthew Wright
You would expect a galactically-themed album like Astronautilus to blast off into extra-terrestrial airiness. The fifth album from west-country jazz-rock space cadets Get The Blessing scorched some earth at its launch in Shoreditch last night, yet the battery of horns, bewitching, asymmetric drums and repeating patterns of surging melody felt grounded and earthy.They played nearly all of the new album, with a couple of old favourites, “OCDC” and “Cake Hole”. Their sound hasn’t, on the surface, changed all that much since their prize-winning 2008 debut All Is Yes. Drummer Clive Deamer and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Time, released in 2013, was Rod Stewart's first album of fresh compositions in nearly two decades. The business of working on his deservedly bestselling autobiography triggered a windfall of new songs in the key of Rod: reflections on love and family with the odd mea culpa thrown in. Another Country picks up where he left off.Thus from another dad-rock goodies bag comes “Love Is” (see video overleaf), a four-square chugger with bluegrass tinges in which Rod expatiates, presumably to one of his vast brood, “on a subject on which I’m well versed”. A younger bairn is apostrophised in the lullaby Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Back when this was the plain old Brixton Academy, before Britpop, before New Labour, before the world wide web had weaved its way into our homes, before the war on terror, before the nebulous notion of ‘content’ had yet to ruin everything and devalue everyone, I saw Ride play a gig here. It was ace.Tonight, it seemed as though everyone who had been there that night was back: older, wider and balder perhaps (the ratio of men to women was roughly that of a pre-suffragette parliamentary cabinet), but with the anticipation of a child on Christmas Eve. It’s a heritage gig of course – let’s not Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title Tape Hiss instantly telegraphs a dissatisfaction with today’s digital world and, fittingly, the all-analogue second album from Rotterdam’s Rats on Rafts could soundtrack a half-remembered Eighties evening taking in a bill of Britain and New Zealand’s most singular post-punk survivors. Their musical inspirations ring through loud and clear. But – and it's a massive but – these Lownlanders do it better and more ferociously than any of their forebears.Most prominent in the mix are the two-step swing of early “Pink Frost” Chills and the unwavering rolling crescendos of “Going up” and “ Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Hawklords were one of the first splinter groups from late Seventies Hawkwind, when Dave Brock and Robert Calvert were joined by bassist Harvey Bainbridge, Pilot’s Steve Swindells and drummer Martin Griffin for a short-lived but brilliant incarnation.Thirty years later, Hawklords was reborn from the ex-Hawkwind survivors' club – Nik Turner, Ron Tree, Danny Thompson, Jerry Richards, Alan Davey, Adrian Shaw, Harvey Bainbridge, Steve Swindells and Martin Griffin among them – to play benefits for dear departed Hawk alumni Robert Calvert and later Barney Bubbles, the band's visionary set and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I spin about the gravity-free access chambers of Levantis’s Romantic Psychology 1. He calls this entry experience “Exploding Boxes”. I ping about for four minutes, finding my bearings, disorientated, my weightless form clanking into equipment, each sound rendered opaque and radio-mic metallic. I push through an airlock. The next area – "Red Blocks" – is in darkness. Must be some sort of engine in here, judging by the low, echoing hum. This lasts for five minutes and it’s spooky. I’m glad to move beyond it. My senses pulse. Is there a lifeform? Something’s going on, certainly. “Yoghurt” thuds Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Kinks have turned 50 last and nagging talk of a reunion is still in the ether. In the absence of the real thing, there is a double-disc greatest hits album surfing the wave of latter-day Kinksmania. Meanwhile a kind of Kinks reunion stormed the West End in the shape of Sunny Afternoon, written by playwright Joe Penhall from an original story by Ray Davies.Taking the band’s glorious songbook as its soundtrack, the musical follows the Kinks from their first number one “You Really Got Me” through to the end of the 1960s when they were allowed back into America after a four-year ban caused by Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Georgie Fame: The Whole World’s Shaking – The Complete Recordings 1963–1966Last month, theartsdesk’s Reissue CDs Weekly tackled a collection of albums by Faces which, despite great remastered sound and noteworthy bonus tracks, was a thoughtless, cheapo package ill-befitting a band of such popularity and status. This splendid new Georgie Fame box set is exactly the sort of thing the Faces release could and should have been.The meat of The Whole World’s Shaking – The Complete Recordings 1963–1966 is Fame’s four albums from the period: Rhythm and Blues at the Flamingo, Fame at Last, Sweet Read more ...
Katie Colombus
In terms of musical gravitas, style and general swag, Peter Andre ain’t no Frank Sinatra. He’s not even a Michael Bublé, but like Strictly Come Dancing in which the pop star is currently appearing (and which, by superfluous marketing cohesion, this album is released alongside), Come Fly With Me kind of sweeps you up and bounces you around a bit. Like a shop-bought cocktail from a squeezy metallic pouch, it's sweet and slightly fake, but it does the job.With all the very best tunes to watch girls go by – "Fly Me To The Moon", "I’ve Got You Under My Skin", "Come Fly With Me", "Mack The Read more ...