New music
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Five albums down, and it seems that The Pierces are yet to stop dressing up their music in different, albeit recognisable, clothes. If 2011’s You & I was the big pop album that with any justice would have made Allison and Catherine household names, then its follow-up finds them going full Stevie Nicks. The sisters have made much in interviews of enlisting the help of a shaman and the hallucinogenic tea ayahuasca to get them in touch with their “spiritual” sides before recording Creation – and certainly these compositions make for a heady brew, even if the basic premise of the musings Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The 13th Floor Elevators: Live Evolution Lost“I lost control of my body. I looked up and Tommy and Roky were turning into wolves, hair and teeth. And in my mind I was hearing the echo of space, and rays of light were shooting through the roof. All of a sudden there was a vision in light that we were wolves and we were spreading drugs and Satanism into the world. These angels walked into the room and they had light shining on them.”Stacy Sutherland, The 13th Floor Elevators’ guitarist’s subsequent memory of the events surrounding the live show caught on Live Evolution Lost were vividly Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Ms Bush walked on in a black, tasselled tunic with the slight air of an aging hippy. Her feet were bare and her tousled hair was half tied-back. And that – for anyone who had managed to avoid the papers all week – answered the first question: what she would look like. That just left us to see for ourselves what she would sing and do.One would have thought a couple of days’ distance from the first night hype would have made it easier to appreciate the concert for what it was, rather than how people felt about her. But, from the moment Kate’s silhouette appeared in the wings and the entire Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It looked like Dresden after the bombing.” Blondie’s Chris Stein may be a member of one of pop’s most-loved bands, but he also has a way with words. Describing 1970's New York City in this way is offensive to the memory of the 25,000 who died in the World War II air raids on Dresden. More pertinently for New York-dweller Stein, his comment also chimes badly with the destruction of the twin towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Centre in 2001.Blondie’s New York and the Making of Parallel Lines unquestioningly celebrated the band’s massive-selling, breakthrough third album but some care could have Read more ...
Guy Oddy
To most people, Louis Armstrong wasn’t the young jazz firebrand of “St James Infirmary” but the smiley old bloke who sang “What a Wonderful World”. Unfortunately, Dr John’s latest album – a tribute to Satchmo – isn’t going to change this perception at all. In fact, there’s a fair chance that anybody coming to Armstrong’s music for the first time through this collection is going to assume that the great man spent his time turning out seriously dull, middle-of-the-road lift music.“What a Wonderful World” itself is served up as easy listening, light entertainment that’s all glitter and no soul, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For their fourth album Simian Mobile Disco - AKA London producers James Ford and Jas Shaw – have taken electronica to the Joshua Tree. The area in the South Californian desert where Keith Richards, Anita Pallenberg and Gram Parsons bathed their minds in LSD inspiration in 1969 (and where the latter died of a heroin overdose four years later) has long been a place of pilgrimage for musicians looking to widen their perceptions, from U2 to the Arctic Monkeys. Simian Mobile Disco actually went to nearby Pioneertown rather than Joshua Tree itself but the premise remains the same, allowing wide- Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Andy Milne cut his teeth in the 1990s playing with the influential saxophonist and musical theorist Steve Coleman, whose structurally experimental improvised music was so strongly opposed to any kind of commercial influence he became virtually an underground artist. Fortunately for the listener, Milne has absorbed Coleman’s restlessly broad horizons and determination to forge something new, alongside a willingness to charm, intrigue and beguile.Though Dapp Theory was formed in 1998, this is only their third album. The years of concentrated creative thought come through in the diamond-like Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Popcorn GirlsAlthough the sole single by troubled American televison and film star Tuesday Weld seems an unlikely dance floor filler, 1962’s cute and gently shuffling “Are You the Boy” became a staple with one of continental Europe's most important and longest-lasting dance music subcultures. Weld sang flat but what mattered for Belgium's Popcorn scene was the rhythm: a mid-tempo, almost-martial two-step which could accompany the “slow swing” dance which gripped the country in the late Sixties and continues to do so.Like Northern Soul – its closest cousin – Popcorn is a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When you listen to J Mascis’ solo work – 2011’s Several Shades of Why in particular, and now this follow-up – it’s hard to imagine him doing anything else. Which is ridiculous, of course: as frontman of still-active slacker-rockers Dinosaur Jr. Mascis has been an influential figure in alternative rock circles for years. But I challenge you to listen to the way his warm, creaky voice meanders its way through the songs on Tied to a Star, like the sound of somebody talking to himself as he fumbles his way through a musical diary entry, and tell me that it is not a perfect fit.Which is not to Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
It’s been five years since British duo Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe released their last studio album after deciding to take a few years out in a bid to not get jaded. In the interim they worked alongside Steven Price to produce a pulsating score for Joe Cornish’s debut feature film Attack the Block. Their return, Junto (which means to join for a common purpose) marks a laidback, reflective mix of music which embraces both their Nineties roots and eclectic influences.Zooming through a range of sounds and moods via jungle beats, steel drums and robotic voice effects makes for breezy summer Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Bristolian Roni Size was a leading light among Nineties drum & bass originals. By 1997, like many of his contemporaries, he was feted by the media as an artist about to supernova, to lead pop in wild new directions. It was all very exciting and when New Forms, the debut album by his band Reprazent, won the Mercury Music Prize, it marked a moment when drum & bass seemed about to take over. It never did. That was it. The breakthrough that dubstep eventually made the following decade was not to be. Outside his scene, then, Size has been relatively quiet for nigh on fifteen years. He Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Royal Blood are Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher: the latest in a long line of rock two-pieces that have been assaulting the senses since the first appearance of White Stripes a decade and a half ago or so. This pair of guys from Brighton make muscular blues-rock that suggests the sound of the Black Keys’ younger, feral cousins or perhaps Drenge’s older brothers. Huge riffs, a bone-crushing beat and a volume that is permanently set at “11” back up Kerr’s suitably desperate howl that neither aims for heavy metal falsetto nor punk rock bark. This is music that would be just at home at Download as it Read more ...