New music
Dope Lemon, O2 Academy, Birmingham review - Australian cosmic cowboys bring the house downMonday, 29 August 2022
The Academy 2 may not be the biggest venue in Birmingham, but it was packed on Friday evening for the first gig of Dope Lemon’s much delayed Rose Pink Cadillac tour – to support an album that was finally released after delays of its own back in... Read more... |
Album: Julia Hülsmann Quartet - The Next DoorMonday, 29 August 2022
Not every musician has friends in high places in quite the way German jazz pianist and composer Julia Hülsmann does these days.A few weeks ago she played a private concert at the invitation of the German Head of State. Bundespräsident Frank-Walter... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: The Swinging Blue Jeans - Feelin’ Better Anthology 1963-1969Sunday, 28 August 2022
In late August 1962, Liverpool’s Swinging Blue Genes were booked to play Hamburg’s Star-Club for the first time. At the opening show of their season, they were booed and the curtain was pulled across them. The audience took against their mix of... Read more... |
Fleet Foxes, Islington Assembly Hall review - exceedingly aliveFriday, 26 August 2022
Just under two weeks ago, Fleet Foxes finished their US tour at the 13,000-capacity Forest Hills Stadium. Now, here they are kicking off their European dates in an auditorium attached to a North London town hall. Capacity 890. Unsurprisingly, it’s... Read more... |
Coldplay, Hampden Park, Glasgow review - a pop spectacle for all agesThursday, 25 August 2022
It is a testament to Coldplay’s capacity for reinvention that a good portion of this stadium crowd were not even born when the band first broke through over two decades ago. Such an age range in the audience clearly caught the eye of Chris Martin,... Read more... |
Camp Bestival Shropshire, Weston Park review - a musical mixed bag for the pre-teens and their parentsWednesday, 24 August 2022
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... Read more... |
Album: Muse - Will of the PeopleWednesday, 24 August 2022
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... Read more... |
Album: Gabriele Mirabassi and Stefano Zanchini - Il gatto e la volpeTuesday, 23 August 2022
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... Read more... |
Album: Ezra Furman - All of Us FlamesMonday, 22 August 2022
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... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Lou Reed - Words & Music, May 1965Sunday, 21 August 2022
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... Read more... |
Album: Fisherman's Friends - One and AllSaturday, 20 August 2022
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-... Read more... |
Album: Demi Lovato - Holy FvckFriday, 19 August 2022
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... Read more... |
