alternative
Tim Cumming
"The gateway to the invisible must be visible." So intones Patti Smith on the third and final journey in sound with Stephan Crasneanscki and Simone Merli, AKA Soundwalk Collective, musical psychogeographers and field recorders whose journey for this evocation of French spiritual-surrealist writer Rene Daumal’s posthumous 1952 cult classic Mount Analog took him to the peak of Nanda Devi in the Himalayas, the former Beatle hangout of Rishikesh, India’s "spiritual capital" of Varanasi, and Upper Mustang, once known as the Kingdom of Lo, which only admitted its first foreign visitors in 1992 Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Although Metallica are screening a freshly recorded concert across America’s drive-in cinemas at the end of the month, we’re no nearer to actual gigs anywhere, especially the UK. Hold tight. We’ll get there. In the meantime, here are three events worth taking a look at.AIM Music AwardsTonight (Wednesday 12th August), the annual AIM Music Awards will occur online here from 7.00 PM. The event features performances by two leading names in UK hip hop, Little Simz and AJ Tracey, as well as a tribute to the late great Afro-beat drumming legend Tony Allen by Femi Koleoso from UK jazz unit the Ezra Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
New Heavy Sounds is one of Britain’s most exciting and undersung labels. Founded in 2011, they have consistently released music that boasts innovation, imagination and a strong female presence. The added sweetener is that this comes attached to sheer guitar-slingin’ power of the kind heavy rockers, from the 1970s to the present, have always relished. Styling themselves in favour of “anything with dirty, big riffs and attitude,” their output has one foot in the metal camp but aspirations beyond it. The two men behind New Heavy Sounds, Ged Murphy and Paul Cox, avoid gimmicks and hype and let Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s been a hell of a four years for Glass Animals since their last album How to Be a Human Being, from a well-deserved Mercury nomination to drummer Joe Seaward requiring neurosurgery after a near-fatal bicycle accident. But while Human Being was leap forward in writing and production, new release Dreamland is a more subtle development. This is music designed to float on a sunlit pool to, though given lockdown restrictions, you may need to get creative with an air bed and your home lighting.It’s an album that takes its title to heart, building hazy soundscapes punctuated with drum machines Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The lockdown which began in March is now noticeably easing, although in the realm of gigs and festivals things are still nowhere near operative. Nonetheless, theartsdesk is responding to the changes by ceasing our many weeks of New Music Lockdown Specials and looking forward to an increasing amount of actual live events. This week, we can only offer one, alongside plenty of streamed entertainment, but it’s early days. Here’s to the future. Dive in!Supersonic presents SofasonicBirmingham’s Supersonic is one of the only shindigs in Britain’s jammed annual summer festival calendar that truly Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
National treasure Jarvis Cocker recently claimed in an interview with the New York Times that lyrics really aren’t that important. He’s so very wrong. Within this very album – brief though it is (seven songs, 40 minutes) and long overdue (the band started working on the material in 2013) – are some exceptional titbits. Both thought provoking and merry making.The whole album is so very much of these weird times. But it was with some prescience that tracks like recent single "House Music All Night Long" anticipated us all being stuck at home, unable to properly kick up our heels ("goddam this Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Lockdown’s easing and the record shops are opening here and there. So, to help vinyl junkies on their way, here’s 7000 words of reviews, capturing the best of the last couple of months’ releases on plastic. As ever, the sounds go everywhere, from hip hop to post-punk to Moroccan trance music. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHThe Four Owls Nocturnal Instinct (High Focus) + TrueMendous Huh? (High Focus) + Telemachus Boring & Weird Historical Music (High Focus)Three albums from Brighton’s High Focus Records which showcase many kinds of verve and ambition. The label is best known for nurturing the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Given the collaborator list on this album, it should be a bit of a mess. Brit punks IDLES, Aussie woozy pop auteur Tame Impala, pumping bassline house producer Chris Lorenzo turning his hand to drum’n’bass, as well as Ms Banks, Dapz On The Map, Oscar #Worldpeace and a host of other UK rap talents all add their distinct musical personalities to the mix. Yet somehow, what Mike Skinner drolly called “really just a rap duets album”, put together while waiting for a film to accompany The Streets’s comeback album proper, is some of his most coherent work ever.It is sonically diverse, mind. In Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A decade ago, Polly Scattergood was Mute Records’ newest, most-likely-to signing and, while she never crossed over like similar unconventional female artists of the period (Bat For Lashes, St Vincent, Anna Calvi, etc), she has a developed a cult following. Where her previous two solo albums combined vaguely Björk-ish gossamer vocals with a delicately smudged take on electro-pop, In This Moment, no longer on Mute, untethers itself into artier territory. Enjoyment depends on how far the listener is willing to follow her.One notable difference from what came before is a tendency towards spoken Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Coronavirus blah blah blah. Glastonbury cancelled. What to do? Didn’t go to the 2010 festival for reasons too tedious to go into. Suffered the worst FOMO of my life. This is different. There is no Glastonbury. But sitting around at home… we’ve all been doing that for months…I call Don Carlton, who has been my fellow adventurer for eight of the last 10 Glastonburys: “Hey Don, we’ve got to do something that weekend, but I don’t know what…”“I have a plan,” he says.It is Thursday 25th June 2020.T-minus two days until Don Carlton’s plan kicks in. I’ve just driven for four-and-a-half hours on the Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Why don’t you have children? Why aren’t you married? Why don’t you own your own home? Why are you a failure? These are the societally enforced questions that, as a 34-year-old woman, Nadine Shah finds inescapable. Much like the rest of us. When talking to friends who also considered themselves “non-achievers”, she realised something was very wrong. And that nothing much has changed in what used to be termed “the battle of the sexes” (hence the Abigail’s Party style artwork). Having covered the refugee crisis, suicide and the state of the nation, now sexual inequality comes under her Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The debut album from one woman outfit [MONRHEA] shows off the seriously impolite electronica that’s blossoming in East Africa. Electronic sounds from Africa are over-represented in Europe by jolly pop and elegantly faceless house music, but there’s a whole lot more going on. Via uber-producer and Killing Joker Martin “Youth” Glover’s Youth Sounds label, this album gives an exciting taste of the wild gumbo of dancefloor-friendly experimentation that’s on the bubble there.[MONRHEA] – and I’m going to lose the square brackets and caps from hereon – hails from Athi River, a town outside Nairobi Read more ...