New music
Phoebe Michaelides
Many festivals have become increasingly family-friendly. The children who, 10 years ago, were taken to outdoor multi-dayers such as Latitude, Camp Bestival and the now-defunct Big Chill, are now teenagers. Many have grown up with festivals as a usual part of their summer holidays - rather than a countercultural escape - and now they want to strike out on their own. Theartsdesk asked 17-year-old aspiring actor-writer Phoebe Michaelides to attend Latitude (with a friend) and report back. This is what she had to say. With minds full of high expectations and Morrisons Basic cider in hand, my Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Owl & Mouse is a name so cutesy that even the Scottish legions of twee who bloom, decade after decade, from the ashes of Eighties indie – the Pastels, Camera Obscura, Belle & Sebastian, etc – might flinch at it. And like that movement, with its endless coy, baby-sweet reassessment of the Velvet Underground, the music of Owl & Mouse initially seems to have a glaze of guilelessness about it, a pride in naivety. Keep listening, though, sucking down the sugar-coated but eventually lovelorn lyrical themes, and this debut defies such expectations.Owl & Mouse are not from Scotland, Read more ...
Matthew Wright
With nothing to sell except herself, Jessie J was at her most engaging and spontaneous last night, closing the summer series at Somerset House, and her own current tour. There was no need to plug her latest album, Sweet Talker, now nearly a year old, so the set picked and mixed her whole career. For some musicians that would emphasise a stylistic narrative of some kind; but Jessie has always been characterised by a kind of generic patchwork quilt, with soul, pop, and R&B sharing a slightly uneasy bed alongside snatches of hip hop and dance music. It took the engineers a minute to Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Lautari Vol 67: Live 2014 features Michael Zak on clarinet, flute and shawn, with bassist Marcin Pospieszalski, fiddle player Maciej Filipczuk and the prepared piano and accordion of Jacek Halas.That instrument list gives you an idea of the musical territory you’re travelling through. Just as Jabusz Prusinowski Kompania, of which Zak is a member, specialises in antique Polish styles, so Lautari set about blowing wind, striking keys and drawing bows across a musical landscape of angular and contemporary arrangements of deeply rural tunes and dances.Sonically, they shape-shift from antique Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Mission of Burma: signals, calls, and marches/Vs.The opening moments of Mission of Burma’s “That’s When I Reach for my Revolver” still exhilarate. Recorded in early 1981, it was the first track on the Boston-based band’s 12-inch EP signals, calls, and marches. The tension, power and forward motion of this sparse encapsulation of rock at its most textured lay the bed for a brooding melody drawing its lyrical jumping-off point from – depending on how the story is told or who is telling it – either a Hermann Göring comment about his antipathy to culture or a line from 1930s German play by Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When you’re a big Bruce Springsteen fan, as I am, there’s a game that you end up getting quite good at: one in which you have to separate the stories, about the hard-drinkin’, hard-livin’ workingman, from the multi-millionaire songwriter. Roots rocker Jason Isbell writes from a similar place as Springsteen – albeit on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line – but his work has never presented as much of a dichotomy. Sure, it’s not like he’s at Springsteen’s level of success, but with his understated, gravelly vocal delivery and gentler melodies, his portraits of Southern life are Read more ...
Barney Harsent
There’s been a real sense of expectation surrounding Kevin Parker’s new offering, with rumours of a disco album from the saviour of psychedelia after a conversion to the joys of the Bee Gees while on mushrooms. That sounded an interesting proposition – one that could make the mind bogle.“Let It Happen” is a bold opening gambit – a delightfully melodic stroll over a glitchy bridge to an epic conclusion. It’s head-spinningly good, but doesn’t lead us by the hand to a dancefloor. “Nangs”, a dreamy pop vignette with heavy, hip-hop beats and wonky strings is lovely, but it’s also territory Koushik Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of vinyl’s more controversial corners is the postal subscription club. Sign up to one of these and, for a fee, a number of records are sent to your home. The draw is supposed to be exclusivity of content or simply trusting the taste of a faultless musical guru. Subscription is thus, to put it mildly, a mixed bag. Sites such as Wax&Stamp are typical. Their policy is to send two-per-month, one chosen by them and one by a guest selector. Most of the real success stories, though, are labels with solid reputations, such as the longstanding Fortuna Pop and Too Pure singles clubs. Flying Read more ...
Guy Oddy
If you have a tendency to use the spellings f*** and c***, perhaps Sleaford Mods are not for you. If you can cope with a liberal dose of expletives and a fiery attitude, however, then Key Markets is as good a reflection of the state of Austerity Britain as anyone has put to music. As with 2014’s breakthrough Divide and Exit album, Jason Williamson lays down barbed snarls and vitriolic stream-of-consciousness vocals, like an East Midlands Travis Bickle, while Andrew Fearn provides claustrophobic grooves made up of minimalist loops and beats that make it clear that neither of them could ever be Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Anywhere the Chemical Brothers’ music has been posted online at least a third of the comments are liable to be their 1990s fans moaning. The essence of what they have to say is, “Why doesn’t their new music sound like Exit Planet Dust or all those giant breakbeat monsters they used to do?” This has been going on for a decade. During that time the duo of Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons have created some of their most muscular music, including killer singles “Galvanize” and “Do It Again”, the smart soundtrack to Joe Wright’s lethal tween thriller Hanna, and the equally filmic concept album, Further Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
An all-analogue space-rock, Krautrock-influenced, motorik-driven psychedelic ride on Saturn’s rings, Gwenno’s Y Dydd Olaf is a treat from start to end. Her sweet but dislocated vocals mesh with snappy bass guitar, bloopy synths and the otherworldly atmosphere of Ralph & Florian Kraftwerk. Apart from a track in Cornish, the Welsh-language album has its own flavour with exotic, lilting, almost-Japanese melodies, but it fits snugly with other recent-ish albums drawing from similar influences which also lean towards the conceptual by Eccentronic Research Council, Jaakko Eino Kalevi, Jane Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Love Affair/Steve Ellis: Time Hasn’t Changed us - The Complete CBS Recordings 1967-1971The connection between Sex Pistols, the stars of last week’s Reissue CDs Weekly, and late-Sixties London soul-pop hit-makers The Love Affair is unlikely, but genuine. Shortly after they formed, when their repertoire of originals was thin, the instigators of UK punk rehearsed a version of The Love Affair’s 1968 Top Ten single “A Day Without Love”. Despite the supposed year-zero ethos of Brit-punk, Sex Pistols covered a fair amount of pre-hippy nuggets, including – as well as that Love Affair song Read more ...