wed 28/05/2025

New music

Camp Bestival Shropshire, Weston Park review - a musical mixed bag for the pre-teens and their parents

When I first started going to music festivals in the late 80s and early 90s, they were all wild celebrations of bacchanalian excess. Children were nowhere to be seen and there was always a crustie on hand, openly plying a wide array of brain...

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Album: Muse - Will of the People

From three young lads making music to escape adolescent boredom, inspired by heavy doses of Nirvana and Deftones, Muse now regularly make stadiums around the world their own with seas of thousands adoring fans their home. Since 2006’s Black...

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Album: Gabriele Mirabassi and Stefano Zanchini - Il gatto e la volpe

The clarinet-player, clarinet-owner or clarinet-lover in your life is going to want and need this record. The combination of a glorious sound, lyricism that is lived and (okay, obviously) breathed, contrasted with insane finger-busting at crazy...

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Album: Ezra Furman - All of Us Flames

The third track of All Of Us Flames is titled “Dressed in Black.” Its protagonist “come[s] to me by night beneath my window sill…you leave before the sun comes up. Haunted eyes, you’ve got those haunted eyes.” Though tortured, this relationship...

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Music Reissues Weekly: Lou Reed - Words & Music, May 1965

Lou Reed went to the Baldwin, New York post office on 11 May 1965 to mail himself a five-inch reel-to-reel tape with 11 recording of songs he had written. The sealed package was registered and stamped, and also signed with that date by a local...

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Album: Fisherman's Friends - One and All

A decade or so ago, I imagine if I’d run in to Fisherman’s Friends while enjoying a beer and a nice fat crab sandwich in a Port Isaac pub I’d have passed a happy evening and possibly returned the next night.Sea shanties – indeed, any good close-...

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Album: Demi Lovato - Holy Fvck

Demi Lovato doesn’t do things by halves. She has one of the most powerful voices around, as suited to the yang of punchy hard rock as it is to the sensual yin of R&B or or the contagious sweetness of girly pop.Self-professed gender fluid, her...

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Mingus Dynasty, Ronnie Scott's review - official keepers of the flame at the temple of jazz

Very good things have come to pass as a result the Mingus Centennial in April this year. A light has been shone not just on the jazz bassist and bandleader’s uniquely defiant spirit, but also on the astonishing extent of his emotional range and...

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Album: Aitch - Close to Home

22 is a pretty young age to be jaded. But this album starts out with Mancunian rapper Aitch detailing how tough it is at the top, and how traumatised he is by life: "sitting on my throne with an open stare / 'cause to me it's just a broken chair"....

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Album: Hot Chip - Freakout/Release

You know those people who claim to literally only like the very first music a band does at the start of their career, then kind “Meh” decades-worth of solid later stuff? Ridiculous, right?That’s me and Hot Chip. 16 years ago I fell in love with “...

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Album: Loudon Wainwright III - Lifetime Achievement

Celebrating, if that is the right word, his 75th year, Loudon Wainwright III offers us his 26th studio album in 52 rollicking years, Lifetime Achievement. Though he does have one Grammy on the shelf, for 2009’s double set, Charlie Pool Project,...

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Music Reissues Weekly: The Telstar Story, The Heinz Sessions Vol. 1

“Telstar” was released 60 years ago this week. On 17 August 1962, British record buyers could purchase the second single by The Tornados, a band whose claim to fame until then was being Billy Fury’s back band – their March 1962 debut 45 was...

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