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joe.muggs
I don’t really want to talk about this year. Genuinely.It’s been so horrific on the macro scale with deranged Fascism and the effects of rampant and undeniable climate change looming everywhere you look – and on the personal level I’ve been been bombarded with all the inevitable, arbitrary slings and arrows that life can muster, from multiple bereavements on down – that I’d very much rather just neck a load of tranquilisers and fine wines and resolutely enter my hands-over-ears, “lalalala can’t hear you”, era. And yet, and yet… life persists, culture persists, community persists, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I’ve known for some time that Ariel Sharratt & Matthias Kom’s Never Work is my Album of the Year. This lividly witty, no-filler take-down of workplace servitude arrived on vinyl in May. The creation of two Canadian indie-folkies (from The Burning Hell), it’s my most-played album of 2024, containing my most-played songs, the title track and the poignant, “The Rich Stuff”, the latter a call to revolution themed around The Goonies.One big problem. I just discovered Never Work came out in 2020. Was it a vinyl reissue? Who knows!With its disqualification I scrabble about. A couple of monster Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
When Vampire Weekend arrived onstage they numbered only three and were bunched together at the front with a large curtain draped behind them, obscuring their backdrop. By the time this marathon set ended two and a half hours later, they’d more than doubled in number and had made full use of their surroundings, a shift which summed up a constantly changing, often contradictory show.One of those paradoxes was the setting itself. Vampire Weekend are an expansive band, but they still seem a strange fit in large arenas, and going by the amount of sections tarped off they’re not the easiest sell to Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s a lot of anger at algorithm-driven music discovery around – a lot of it justified, as the big platforms push the already-big acts and lowest common demoninator slop is aided in rising to the top. But we can’t talk about the topic without also acknowledging that it has provided some surprising opportunities for unorthodox music. One such is Santa Cruz, California 90s “slowcore” indie rock band Duster, who not long after they’d reformed found a two-minute sketch of theirs from 1998 called “Inside Out” going supernova on TikTok, eventually clocking up over 17 billion plays. Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
'Tis the season for all manner of bugs, colds and illnesses. One had befallen Katy J Pearson, who struck an apologetic note after the night’s first number to say she had been unwell all day and was going to do her best to get through the gig. That added an unexpected element to proceedings, namely by creating the potential for the whole show to come to a sudden halt at any point.Yet Pearson was otherwise unaffected, save for a jokey remark she made about her bodily functions that she just as rapidly quipped she regretted making. She was helped certainly, by a three-piece backing band of heft Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHBlood Incantation Absolute Elsewhere (Century Media)When death metal takes LSD it’s quite a thing. Whether this band have done acid or not, the output of Colorado's Blood Incantation feels that way on their fourth album. Each side is one long suite. “The Stargate” and “The Message”, 20 minutes and 23 minutes respectively, both three-part odysseys that take in Floydian guitar solos, ambient Gregorian-style chanting, Seventies synth-wizarding, lilting reggae rhythms and much else, occasionally and suddenly exploding into galloping guitar squalls underpinned by frenetic blast Read more ...
joe.muggs
The progress of Kim Deal has been one of the great delights of modern music. Much as one wishes Pixies well, they have never been the same without her distinctive voice and presence, whereas her other band The Breeders have only gone from strength to strength – and she has clearly enjoyed the heck out of it, as recently shown on the Live at Big Sur video where the whole band radiate pleasure in playing. Oddly though, although she’s had a spattering of solo singles in the past decade or so, she’s never put her own name to an album until now, aged 63.It could hardly have a better start. The Read more ...
joe.muggs
Could melancholia be an elixir of creative youth? Or is it that sad people were never really that youthful, so age suits them? Certainly it seems that there was something in the water for so many of the foundational 80s indie bands who dealt in sadness, pain and existential angst that makes longevity suit them: The Jesus & Mary Chain, Dinosaur Jr., Throwing Muses, Ride, Slowdive just for starters have all somehow ambled into the 2020s on the creative form of their lives. And now the daddies of them all, The Cure, have clearly cottoned on and joined the forlorn party, because this album – Read more ...
Guy Oddy
That Peter Perrett is still alive after the decades of bad habits that he inflicted on himself must be something of a surprise to those who’ve followed his career since the mid-70s. First there was England’s Glory, then the truly exquisite Only Ones and more recently an intermittent solo career – all of which have produced searing anthems from society’s seedy underbelly.At the ripe old age of 72, Perrett must surely be a poster boy for lovable scoundrels in their third acts and that he’s still turning out records of The Cleansing’s guilt-edged quality is nothing less than miraculous, Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
The years may go by and the albums might change, but there are always a few constants with Public Service Broadcasting. There is the recorded message that precedes their arrival for one, a disembodied voice booming out to inform the crowd to put their phones away and not talk loudly. It’s greeted with wild cheers and mostly adhered to, which is welcome, because this was a gig rich with visual imagery that should be absorbed rather than simply observed. The stage set-up was inspired by Ameila Earhart's cockpit, footage of the aviator flickering on screens. Earhart provides the latest Read more ...
joe.muggs
Londoner Ayman Rostom has been around the block and then some. For some 25 years he’s been a hip hop producer as Dr Zygote, for the past decade he’s made wiry and weird house music as The Maghreban – both of these aliases are still, it seems, fully functioning. Before that still he made jungle and drum’n’bass in the initial 90s boom. And now he’s got a new alias to write, as you may guess by the album title, some very sad songs.There has always been a deep strand of outsiderdom, of being the odd one out, of not doing things in the typically correct order, to his music. So it’s no wonder that Read more ...
Tim Etchells
Forced Entertainment is a theatre company based in Sheffield, touring original performances around the world. The core group of 6 artists has been working together for 40 years, often inviting others to collaborate on particular projects. From the outset we wanted to make a different kind of theatre, incoporating influence from music, cinema, visual art, stand-up and performance art as well as from experimental theatre. The idea was to make theatre to speak about the times in which we were living, in a language born out of those times. The shows vary: lots of talking or none, loud music or Read more ...