New music
Lisa-Marie Ferla
With last month's debut album, Boys and Girls, still riding high in the charts and a buzzworthy Jools Holland performance under their belts – to say nothing of the attention they've attracted on their own side of the Atlantic from the likes of Jack White – Southern roots four-piece Alabama Shakes have become the hottest ticket in town on this, their first headline UK tour. Those dates on the run that aren't full have been upgraded to bigger venues and when they told me that their Glasgow date was sold out they meant SOLD OUT. The only reason I made it in at all was through creative use of an Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Traction isn’t a very rock‘n’roll word, but sometimes it’s difficult to understand why one act achieves a hold where another doesn’t. So it is with Beach House. They are great, but so are – say – the similarly positioned and styled, but less-lauded, Papercuts. Who grabs ears isn’t predictable. Conversely, Beach House’s fourth album doesn’t deviate massively from how they’ve already defined themselves: misty, shoegazing-derived pop with melancholy melodies and distracted vocals. Resignation hangs heavy.The Baltimore-based duo of Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand (she's the niece of Michel) Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Kevin Rowland always did march to the beat of his own drum. Whether it was purloining his album’s master tapes from his record company or refusing to consort with the music press, he constantly straddled a wobbly fence between control freak and paranoid lunatic. This, as much as Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ sublime, heartfelt music, made him a riveting, charismatic presence in the early 1980s. The name is now just Dexys, but what else had changed three decades on?Well, the seriously intense vocalist certainly sustained his contrary reputation at the Shepherds Bush Empire, following in the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of my formative musical experiences, small but important, was tuning into John Peel’s late night Radio 1 show, early in the Eighties, and hearing …and the Native Hipsters’ “There Goes Concorde Again”. It was, quite simply, the weirdest “pop music” I’d ever heard – lo-fi, abstract and deranged, most of it consisting of a female voice, sounding funny-farm pie-eyed, repeatedly announcing, “Ooh look, there goes Concorde again”. It had a whiff of actual madness and, setting aside Guardian-style agonising over pop revelling in mental illness, to my junior self this was thrilling. It was also, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Any concerns that Best Coast might have abandoned the sun-kissed California scuzz-pop sound that made their 2010 debut, Crazy For You, such a runaway success are answered in its opening - and title - track. “So leave your coat behind / We’re gonna make it to the beach on time,” Bethany Cosentino sings, and I sigh from a rainy Glasgow attic and keep on waiting for summer.It’s a little simplistic to call The Only Place a rehash, so perhaps in deference to producer Jon Brion we could call it a sequel. The album is full of the things that have always made Best Coast great - short, simple songs Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is a techno album. A techno album on a British label best known for the indie-est of indie rock, from a duo whose last album featured rock vocalists Beth Ditto and Alex Turner among others, but a techno album nonetheless. It's all about pulse and texture, immersion and physicality, the power of the hypnotic beat, and it is absolutely bloody lovely.And why shouldn't it be? There's a school of thought that to make music in genres most popular in the early 1990s is “retro”, and that this is by definition a bad thing – but this is clearly idiocy. This is no more beholden to the past than, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
One day soon Beatles scholars and Professors of Fabology will emerge from their caverns and their ashrams to inform us that it was 50 years ago today. On 5 October 1962 “Love Me Do” was released and, to recycle a phrase often appended to lesser earthquakes, the world would never be the same again. There will be celebrations, doubtless, across the universe. Tribute bands will perform bootleg gigs in the likes of, probably, Indonesia and the Baltic, all booted and suited and moptopped up and harmonising like the Everlys etc etc. American Fab Fourists will, in the slightly imperialistic way that Read more ...
Russ Coffey
To recap the Keane story so far: in 2004 three precocious middle-class boys stormed the charts with bland anthemic radio-friendly rock that used no guitars. Over the next six years, they then went on to experience the kind of growth that George Osborne dreams of. This culminated in the Night Train EP which not only contained guitars but managed the improbable feat of mixing in rap in a non-embarrassing way. Artistically, things were looking good. And when they announced with this year's follow up, the consensus was that their main problem would simply be the lingering issue of brand image.But Read more ...
theartsdesk
Small Faces: The Decca Album (Deluxe Edition), From The Beginning (Deluxe Edition), The Immediate Album (Deluxe Edition), Ogden's Nut Gone Flake (Deluxe Edition)Kieron Tylertheartsdesk’s reissues round-up is usually dedicated to three unrelated CDs, but these spiffy Deluxe Editions of the first four Small Faces’s albums derail that for a week. This quartet – preceding the posthumous Autumn Stone – are testament to a band developing at lightning speed during the headlong rush towards their inevitable fragmentation. One of Britain’s greatest, they created accessible, zeitgeist-infused hit Read more ...