New music
bruce.dessau
I had a terrible fright last week. While listening to BBC London DJ Robert Elms introduce a track from the new Paul Weller album, Sonik Kicks. What I heard sounded remarkably like Oasis. It seemed that the man who once influenced Noel Gallagher was now so bereft of ideas he was reduced to ripping off Noel Gallagher. To my relief Robert Elms followed the track with an apology. He had pressed the wrong button and had played a Noel Gallagher track by mistake.If you've got enough hair to make it stand up at 53, why not flaunt it?By contrast Sonik Kicks actually sounds fresher than anything by Read more ...
bruce.dessau
I decided to listen to the new album by former Ultravox frontman John Foxx on a trip to buy some louvre doors at a branch of Homebase. I thought the journey to the city's edge industrial estate via flyovers and concrete spur roads would provide the appropriate scenery for this master of Ballardian urban alienation. I was not disappointed. Well, I was actually. They didn't have louvre doors in the right size. The Shape of Things, on the other hand, was a perfect fit.From the opening track “Spirus”, in which an almost funky riff morphs into a synthesiser lament, Foxx has skilfully tracked back Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Manchester’s Buzzcocks were first to hit the seven-inch racks with their Spiral Scratch EP, but south London’s Outsiders were the first punk-era band to make a do-it-yourself album. The Wimbledon trio’s Calling on Youth, released in May 1977, was self financed, recorded at home and manufactured independently. Thirty-five years on, it’s reissued on CD for the first time today.The Outsiders weren’t by-numbers punks, even though they regularly played Covent Garden hot-spot The Roxy. Frontman Adrian Borland was influenced by America’s Doors and Stooges, whose Iggy Pop was so moved by one of their Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The word “grimes” conjures up images of a Dickensian London underworld, or of tough modern urban music, but Grimes is far, far from these reference points. For starters, she’s from Canada. She also makes music that defies easy categorisation. Visions is her third album but it is a lot less niche than her first two, as if she has finally bloomed sonically. In the broadest sense it’s electro-pop but Claire Boucher – Grimes – spices her computer sounds with a swooping multi-tracked vocal style that recalls Kate Bush, Enya and the Cocteau Twins rather than Lily Allen.Some songs, such as “ Read more ...
ash.smyth
I spent a fair chunk of last Sunday evening at Douglas Adams' 60th birthday party. This was a bit of a curve ball, not only because I'd never met the author of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - but also because he's been dead for nearly 11 years. But there he was, all the same, selling out the Hammersmith Apollo with a little help from Stephen Fry, Clive James, Jon Culshaw, a couple of thousand nerds in dressing gowns, and a posse of dancing rhinoceroses.The Supreme Hitch-Hiker, author of a five-part trilogy (now six-) and creator of Dirk Gently, was by all acounts a classic Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s two songs into Port of Morrow, the Shins’ first album since 2007’s Wincing the Night Away (and the band’s first to be distributed by a major label, Columbia) and it hits me that what I’m hearing isn’t something I’ve heard before. Sure, the track - “Simple Song” - started streaming on the band’s website back in January with accompanying fanfare, but that isn’t exactly what I mean. It’s more that those first two songs sound like a continuation, and a surprising one at that.When you’ve had any level of investment in a band at all, news of a full-on line-up change never goes over well. While Read more ...