New music
Russ Coffey
The Darkness are back, and predictably, as they inch towards serious rock’n’roll, they also tourette tic a little preposterousness. “Every Inch of You”, which opens the album, sees Justin Hawkins filling his lungs and screaming “suck my cock". It has left some commentators scratching their heads. Do The Darkness want to be ACDC? Can they ever match the wit of Bon Scott’s bon mots? Neither are questions worth asking. This album simply wants you to air guitar 'til you drop.It also soon settles into a slightly less tongue-in-cheek pastiche of Seventies good-time rock; more like the Black Key’s Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Stumbling across the perfect pop hit must be its own kind of curse. It’s been two and a half years since Owl City’s “Fireflies” shot its way into the charts, seemingly from nowhere. With its lush, quirky melodies and wistful, lovelorn lyrics, Adam Young’s quirky electronic project seemed almost to have been custom-built by a crack team of pop scientists to appeal to dreamy girls like me. “Fireflies” used to play on a loop at the store where I was working at the time; Young’s vocals and programming a dead ringer for Ben Gibbard’s work with The Postal Service - a band whose one album I loved to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It’s a place where human beings don’t belong,” says Efterklang’s Rasmus Stolberg. “It’s a very inspiring place, but a very sad place”. The Danish band’s new album, Piramida, is built around sounds they recorded in Pyramiden, a former Russian mining settlement on the island of Spitsbergen, north of Norway, close to the North Pole. It was abandoned in 1998. The climate means nothing decays.“Hollow Mountain” opens Piramida, and Efterlkang have chosen to premier the film for the track on theartsdesk. “We don’t consider this a video, more a visual piece that follows the song,” explains Stolberg Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s Sunday lunchtime and Swiss thrash metallers Battalion are hammering out jagged, smashed up riffage with gleeful ferocity. Indeed, every one of Bloodstock Open Air’s four stages contains bands playing the hardest metal. To aficionados this music breaks down into multiple sub-genres – death metal, power metal, prog metal, and on and on, ad infinitum - but to the rest of us it’s simply a fearsomely tough, ear-searing pummelling. Like all extreme music, it’s easy to dismiss as noise, and that’s both the point and missing the point. I wish, however, that I’d got there a bit earlier, then I Read more ...
joe.muggs
Although the Eighties revival has now been going on for longer than the actual Eighties, it shows no sign of abating – to the point where maybe it would be more sensible to refer to it as a tradition or a palette of techniques rather than than considering it as retro at all. However you see it, Jessie Ware and her production team do it with style.Ware was initially best known for her collaborations with UK electronic artists like Joker and SBTRKT, and producers Dave Okumu of The Invisible and Julio Bashmore normally deal in post-Radiohead experimentalism and classic house music respectively, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Towards the end of a ridiculously easy and enjoyable hour spent in their company, Flap!’s singer and ukulele player Jess Guille described “Rock in Space” as “jazz-folk-disco” – and, you know, it kind of was. A bawdy, slap-happy five-piece from Melbourne, their root note is pre-war American jazz, but to that foundation they add ska, gypsy music, blues, folk and flickers of more contemporary styles, mixing them all together with deceptive ease. And although their defining aim is to get the audience to laugh, dance (and drink), they can really play, too.Guille alternated lead vocals with Eamon Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This was an odd duck of a concert for the final night of the Olympics. Elsewhere in London were the reformed Spice Girls and Blur and general partying, whereas this was at times a sombre show, curated by Hal Willner as part of Antony’s Meltdown Festival. It was inspired by the Freedom Rides, a turning point in the American Civil Rights movement.The Freedom Rides were in 1961 when, deliberately violating Jim Crow laws, more than 400 black and white Americans risked their lives - and many endured brutal beatings and imprisonment - for simply travelling together on buses and trains as they Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Even as London partied, the talk was already about legacy. And as Blur took the stage on a Best of British bill that impressively included New Order and The Specials, the open secret that this may have been their last ever gig – “certainly in this country, for a long, long time” – gave a chance to assess the question of what the legacy might be of the band that unquestionably inspired a generation.Unlike the band’s reunion tour of 2009, which climaxed with a similar Hyde Park homecoming show, there was little talk between songs nor room for sentiment. Damon Albarn admirably stayed true to his Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ry Cooder is an unpredictable quantity. He’s a prickly, opinionated old coot who doesn’t seem the type to pass a night in the pub with. He’d probably not get your jokes and moan about the Rolling Stones nicking his songs. His musical output is equally tricksy. For every fab film soundtrack (Paris, Texas, Southern Comfort, The Long Riders) or Buena Vista Social Club, there’s some less loveable tangential whim, such as his Buddy concept album, about a cat and a toad.However, there’s little doubt Keith Richards did find a golden seam of new songwriting via Cooder in the early Seventies, or that Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Rosie Wilby: How (Not) to Make it in Britpop, Bongo Club *** In the 1990s Rosie Wilby was lurking on the outer edges of Britpop with her band Wilby, whose giddy career highlights included opening for Tony Hadley (he evacuated the entire room for the soundcheck), being clamped outside the venue while supporting Bob Geldof, and getting their own plastic name tag in the racks of Virgin Megastore.Her band were rated “enjoyable” in a 2000 Guardian review – Wilby back-projects the proof in case we don't believe her – and the same adjective applies to this hour-long show. It’s a bit of a curate Read more ...
mark.kidel
James Yorkston, the very able singer-songwriter from Fife, is now on his fifth album for Domino. This comes hot on the heels of the reissue of his first and excellent release, Moving Up Country, which established him as one of the most talented artists in the crowded field of nu-folkies, musicians who have drawn inspiration from British folk traditions but worked the forms up in an imaginative and risk-taking way. James Yorkston’s well-crafted songs, swathed in atmospheric strings, and tinged with melancholy and mystery, are never far from “this strange country, with its strange old gods Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Kinks: The Kinks at the BBCKieron Tyler“Meet a group that recently came from nowhere to the top of the hit parade. A rhythm and blues outfit with long, shoulder-length hair and the strange name of The Kinks.” With that, Brian Matthew introduced The Kinks to BBC listeners on 19 September 1964. Two months later, Matthew declares the band “members of the shaggy set”. On being asked why they grow their hair so long, Ray Davies says that “girls go for it”. His brother Dave offers that girls are going kinky.Almost 50 years on, these off-the-cuff remarks are amongst the wealth of fabulous Read more ...