New music
Matthew Wright
The Afrobeats scene is coming to a venue near you. Anglo-Ghanaian artist Fuse ODG, who won the best African Act MOBO last week for the second year running, launched his first album T.I.N.A. last night with a relentless, exuberant performance that brought out the African party flavour to these songs. His album release and tour, on the back of the MOBO success, marks a significant moment in his progression from niche internet popularity to the mainstream. Fuse is a working model of how to create a music career online, and his profile has been raised to its current breaking-through status Read more ...
Tim Cumming
At the end of last year, The Fall released an EP, The Remainderer, one of their more refreshing studio tonics of recent years, a madly diverse range of songs and sonic attacks with Mark E. Smith’s vocals thick with phlegm and gleeful, gristly exuberance. Among the EP’s tracks was "Amorator", a spindly, crooked 3 and a half minutes of intense weirdness, which reappears in even wilder, woolier form here alongside a second studio track, "Auto (1914) Chip Replace", a fantastically bonkers, multilayered fixture of this year’s live sets, with the line-up expanded to accommodate a second drummer Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Minny Pops: Drastic Measures, Drastic Movement The Pop Group: Cabinet of Curiosities, We are TimeTwo groups with tangential relationships to the pop in their names. One from Bristol, the other from Amsterdam. Each attracted attention in the punk's slipstream yet most certainly weren’t punk. In time, both would be pigeonholed as post-punk, despite The Pop Group having formed in 1977 and Minny Pops getting off the ground in 1978 – successive years when punk was still vital, common currency and commercially viable.The term post-punk, like most after-the-fact categorisations, doesn’t neatly Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Every rock fan knows Cat Stevens' story: how, during the early Seventies, the son of a Greek café owner conquered the world’s charts with classics like “Wild World” and “Father and Son” but eventually tired of the music business, found Allah, and packed his guitar away. Since 2006, though, the artist currently known as Yusuf Islam has been slowly returning to his old day job. So far, most agree, the results have been pleasant rather than stellar. Tell ‘Em I’m Gone, however, is in a different league. Teaming up with production guru Rick Rubin (of Johnny Cash’s American Recordings) Cat Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Gaga’s relationship with her fanbase, her “Little Monsters”, is quite a thing. I’ve not seen the O2 so permanently on its feet. Large swathes of her capacity crowd are up and dancing right from the opening number. They adore her and are dressed to show it, from middle-aged ladies to gay men to teenage girls to many multitudes of humanity in between.They couldn’t care less that her third album, Artpop, was lackustre compared to its predecessors and her set, which includes most of it, certainly supports that perspective. It sounds a lot more rip-roaring fun than it did on the home stereo. The Read more ...
Guy Oddy
John Cooper Clarke has assumed many roles since he came motoring out of Salford in the mid Seventies, spitting out poetry from a distinctly untraditional view point. There were tales of how you’d never see a nipple in the Daily Express (“This paper’s boring mindless mean, full of pornography, the kind that’s clean”) and marrying a monster from outer space (“We walked out tentacle in hand. You could sense that the Earthlings would not understand”) and then there was hair, sun glasses and tight suit, which gave him an air of mid-1960s Bob Dylan. Since then, there’s been heroin addiction (now Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Anglo-Ghanaian musician Fuse ODG – born Nana Richard Abiona – is a leading exponent of the new Afrobeats movement, which combines Western pop and rap with Nigerian and Ghanaian pop, and some stylistic elements from the Fela Kuti-inspired Afrobeat scene. Unlike many of his contemporaries on the scene, Fuse spent many years of his childhood in Ghana, returning to London for secondary school, and has detailed first-hand experience of both cultures. He retains a musical interest in both countries, and is the first British musician to be nominated for two Ghanaian music awards.He’s built his Read more ...
Guy Oddy
To the uninitiated, Black Veil Brides are five young men who look and sound pretty much like ‘80s hair metal horrors Motley Crűe – but with a hefty dollop of emo attitude on top. They may be the kings of hard rock cliché but it hasn’t stopped them from selling ridiculous amounts of albums right from their 2010 debut, We Stitch These Wounds.Black Veil Brides IV is, unsurprisingly, the band’s fourth album and sees them taking on the woes of the world with a bagful of jolly ditties going under titles such as “Drag Me To The Grave” and “World Of Sacrifice”. “You want a fight. I’ll bring the war” Read more ...
Matthew Wright
In the time that Culture Club have been planning reunions, bands, movements, whole musical eras have come and gone. And still, once every couple of years, a rumour circulates, and a demo is aired. Generally, nothing comes of it, and those memories of dancing drunkenly to “Karma Chameleon” grow a little fainter. Now, with last night’s taster gig at Heaven (where the band gave their first big London performance in 1982), we can definitively say, they are back. A nationwide tour is booked, new songs are written, and the album (provisionally entitled “Tribes”, if I heard Boy George correctly) is Read more ...
Matthew Wright
You wonder what gets them out of bed. After more than a decade together, and with this, their fourth album, just released, The Twilight Sad must be feeling very miserable. The odd thing is, they seem to revel in their misery. “Scottish band who enjoy drinking & making miserable music,” says The Twilight Sad’s Twitter profile. “Enjoy” and “miserable” are key. They have taken shoe-gazing mournfulness to a new level of craftsmanship. This time, it’s more enjoyable than ever, but you can’t help feeling it’s a bit less spontaneous. There’s just a hint that this is not ordinary misery, but Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The humming is rising. Only three songs in and already a large section of the crowd is swaying, tranced out, from side to side, like southern Baptists, swept along by an extended version of “Meet Me There” from Nick Mulvey’s 2014 Mercury Music Prize-nominated debut album First Mind. The Komedia’s basement is an odd venue. It has a very low ceiling and takes exact ratios of performance energy, visual impact and audience goodwill to make it work. Whatever it takes, Nick Mulvey has it from the off. He doesn’t say much but captivates a cheerful, chatty and, admittedly, distinctly partisan crowd. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As tough-going as expected, the eagerly anticipated collaboration between Scott Walker and deconstructed metallers Sunn O))) is 48 minutes of deliberately ugly darkness. On the opening track “Brando”, in his now-familiar strangulated tenor, Walker wails “a beating would do me a world of good.” He’s already punned “whip-poor-will” which was, with crushing inevitability, followed by the sound of an actual bullwhip. All the while, Sunn O))) grind away, producing elongated slabs of unyielding noise.Like Walker's last album, 2012’s Bish Bosch, Soused (as in saturated or drunk) is, sonically, Read more ...