New music
Kieron Tyler
In December 1977, the music weekly Sounds included an article about the County Durham punk band Penetration. By Jon Savage, it was headlined The Future Is Female. The same four words would be used by the band for their promotional badges.Penetration were fronted by Pauline Murray. In the article, an unidentified male band member is quoted as saying “we’ve never considered Pauline as anything different from just another member of the group – why should she be any different? It's person to person that's important..."Pauline Murray said “I just feel as though I'm a boy. (laughter). Nooooo. You' Read more ...
Tom Carr
Flick through my 2022 Spotify Wrapped playlist and those who know me best won’t be surprised by what they find. Architects, the UK’s preeminent metal group who grapple with progressing their sound further on the classic symptoms of a broken spirit – check. Foals, the indie delights who continue to sweep all before them, and adorned new, summery vibes with latest album Life Is Yours. Check.Also present are Alexisonfire, Rolo Tomassi, and Zeal & Ardor among many others, but all indicative of how my go to listens span the spectrum of hardcore and metal, to straight edged indie/rock. Though Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Some of what’s nourishing the debut album by Sweden’s Dina Ögon is evident. A Bossa Nova jazz-pop essence evokes Brazil’s Quarteto em Cy. There’s a trip-hop undertow. Vocal lines bring to mind Free Design. Less easy to pinpoint is a melodic sensibility which seems to be derived from local traditions; echoing the sort of fusion pioneered by Jan Johansson’s Jazz på svenska and Merit Hemmingson when she reframed folk music on the Svensk folkmusik på beat albums.It’s likely Dina Ögon – the name translates as “your eyes” – are mindful of all or some of this, but what they’ve come up with doesn’t Read more ...
Graham Fuller
This is not a rehash of my Skinty Fia review, but smoke from the same grate.Asbury Park, New Jersey, 5 October – we've driven down from NYC to see Fontaines DC play hopefully most of their blistering third album at the Stone Pony venue. Bruce Springsteen and Southside Johnny played here in the Seventies. It's legendary – and bad news for we arthritics. The stage is not at the end of the narrow hall opposite the entrance and the bar but runs along a side wall, so the audience is squashed and stretched in front of it. Naturally wanting to get as close as we could to the Irish quintet Read more ...
Liz Thomson
One of popular music’s greatest songwriting talents released her final album back in January. The Light at the End of the Line was Janis Ian’s first album of all-new material in 15 years, and it was planned as a stage-setter for her swan-song tour, US dates scheduled through to the end of the year, European concerts to follow. Then Ian got hit by a particularly nasty form of laryngitis that meant she could no longer sing.I’m so glad I got to see her New York show just a couple of weeks earlier but to think I will never see her play live again makes me very sad. If you never saw her – well, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Beatles loomed over everything else. It wasn’t inevitable, but the arrival of the revealing Revolver box set and Peter Jackson’s compelling Get Back film confirmed that there is more to say about what’s known, and also that there are new things to say about popular music’s most inspirational phenomenon of the 20th century.Just as it was when The Beatles were operational, the Revolver box and Get Back gave other things out there standards to aspire to. This pair of archive releases became a wholly unexpected yardstick for 2022. Obviously though, brows at labels aren’t furrowing about Read more ...
peter.quinn
Bolivian marching powder, sexual violence, fraud. As the actions of the present kakistocracy edged ever closer to that of a lost Brian De Palma film script, it was to music that we turned once again for beauty and the best of humanity.With stunning recorded sound plus an irresistible communion between singer and band, Lizz Wright’s Holding Space was the most transporting album I heard this year. Recorded live in Berlin on the final date of her 2018 European summer tour, the material ranged from her 2003 Verve debut, Salt, to her most recent studio album, 2017’s Grace.Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It’s always hard to choose one album to spotlight come the annual Best Ofs, and 2022 has given us an extraordinary embarrassment of riches to choose from – the bountiful bastard…January brought with it a small but perfectly formed under-the-radar gem in Bed Wetter’s A Life in the Day. A deeply personal piece, it saw producer Geoff Kirkwood removing his Man Power mask and letting us in to his world of gorgeous, atmospheric sound sculptures.Andy Bell’s Flicker followed. A double album of wide-eyed eclecticism, Bell’s second solo outing felt simultaneously new and nostalgic. It was, without Read more ...
mark.kidel
I am a sucker for Malian singers. I have been ever since I made a couple of films there at the end of the 1980s. According to ancient tradition, the jalis, and other singers have a mission: to open the hearts of those who hear them, and to fill them with healing and courage. Thirty years on, Rokia Koné keeps the flame going and touches me in the same way. Her first solo album, the highpoint of the year for me is, a collaboration with US producer Jacknife Lee, who brings to the combination exquisite taste and a profound complicity with West African soul. He is always at the service of the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
2022 was, without any shadow of a doubt, the year when live music once again managed to provide an arena for music lovers to come together for shared magic and the occasional joyous evening after the main wave of Covid had passed us by. A place for heads to spin and for hips to swing.This was helped by a festival season that was generally kind to campers and by a relaxation of the draconian travel rules that had stymied international artists from visiting the UK during the last couple of years. WOMAD especially proved a significant highlight, particularly with the UK debut performance by Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Welcome to the final theartsdesk on Vinyl of 2022 which is topped off by two Vinyl of the Months, one there for seasonal jollies and the other for musical adventurousness. As ever, the rest runs the gamut from reissues of albums from decades ago to the most contemporary, cutting edge music around. Dive in!CHRISTMAS VINYL OF THE MONTHVarious The Muppet Christmas Carol (Walt Disney)Is there a more Christmassy object than a picture disc of the soundtrack to The Muppet Christmas Carol? There may be but this will do us very well. Coincidentally, theartsdesk on Vinyl’s festive film-show this year Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
I tend to run away from all known bandwagons, but I'm on this one. Peter Quinn called Cécile McLorin Salvant’s album Ghost Song “a moving, imaginative, at times laugh-out-loud collection of songs” back in February, and it is a wonderful piece of work on every level.McLorin Salvant has gone from winning the Thelonius Monk competition in 2010 at the age of 21, to becoming a MacArthur Fellow in the class of 2020. Three of McLorin Salvant’s four albums on Mack Avenue won Grammy Awards, and this, her debut on Nonesuch, must surely win her another. It is a reminder that the greats of our time have Read more ...