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Harry Thorfinn-George
Neo Jessica Joshua, better known as Nao, has been consistently putting out good – often excellent – music since 2014. Back then she was making off-kilter, funky R&B that felt both retro and futuristic. Since then she’s grown as an artist on both 2016’s For All We Know and 2018’s Saturn. And Then Life Was Beautiful is her third album and the emotional accumulation of the past few years. After burning out and struggling with writer's block, an eye-opening trip to South Africa and becoming a mother were catalysts for a renewed creativity. As a result, these songs feel Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As the summer folds away on itself, theartsdesk on Vinyl returns. Beset by backlogs at pressing plants and delayed by COVID, it's finally here, jammed to the gunwales with commentary on a grand cross section of the finest music on plastic. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHGod Damn Raw Coward (One Little Independent)Let’s start with some NOISE! With their fourth album Wolverhampton band God Damn continue the reinvigoration that began with their eponymous 2020 Album. There’s metal in there somewhere but mostly it’s a roaring rage of punk rock, with singer Thomas Edwards howling his indignancy at, well Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In an interview with Zane Lowe about her new album, Halsey said that the producers wanted to “make some really weird choices”. This was, you suspect, the intention: you don’t bring Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails onboard to produce the follow-up to your mainstream pop breakthrough without being open to something pretty weird. Described by the singer (who uses she/they pronouns interchangeably) as “a concept album about the joys and horrors of pregnancy and childbirth” and combining cinematic production with pure pop riffs, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is the boldest Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Toyah, always a one-off, has been a surprise star of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Her YouTube Sunday Lunches, kitchen-filmed cover versions with her husband, King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, have been celebratory shared moments, jaunty, unlikely, silly, revelling unashamedly in pop music (and, bawdily, in her own physical attributes!). Toyah is enjoyably eccentric, even when her music does not appeal, thus I really wanted to like this album, a celebration of her indefatigable spirit, but it failed to win me over.Co-written and produced by regular collaborator Simon Darlow, and with contributions from Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Bobby Gillespie (b 1962) is best known as the lead singer and driving force of rock band Primal Scream. He was born and raised in Glasgow and met future Creation Records boss Alan McGee at school. The pair would later move to London and, after a brief period drumming for The Jesus & Mary Chain (he played on their influential Psychocandy album), Gillespie signed Primal Scream to the nascent Creation in 1985. After various different stylistic incarnations, Primal Scream captured the zeitgeist and hit gold in 1991 with their MDMA-electronic-dance opus Screamadelica.Primal Scream have Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The latest edition of theartsdesk on Vinyl combines the best new sounds on plastic with the vinyl reissues that are pressing buttons. Ranging from heavy rockin’ book-style boxsets to the funkiest summertime 7”s, all musical life is here. Dive in.VINYL OF THE MONTHThis Is The Deep The Best Is Yet To Come (Part 1) (B3)London indie outfit This Is The Deep make wonderfully eccentric but catchy music. The Best is Yet to Come (Part 1) is a mini-album that plays at 45 RPM, whose eight songs mingle quirky post-punk dub-funk with something altogether poppier and frothier. They are unafraid of Read more ...
joe.muggs
Greentea Peng is a south Londoner, heavily tattooed, heavily spiritual, heavily anti-establishment, and very, very heavily into basslines. She cuts a singular figure in many ways, but her rebel dub soul style also makes her a particularly British archetype: the next iteration in a lineage starting with Poly Styrene and Ari Up, and running through Neneh Cherry, Tricky and MIA. (Yes, OK, Ari Up was German and MIA is Sri Lankan, but their sound and their cultural fusions could only have happened on this island.) Like each of those artists, she is unmistakeable in sound. One of the most Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ask someone in the early 2000s to predict which cities were going to be influential in electronic music in coming years, and it’s unlikely many would have picked Kampala, Uganda. But here we are. Across African countries, vernacular electronic forms and versions of DJ culture have been bubbling for a good while, but in Uganda, catalysed by two immigrants – Greek-Armenian Arlen Dilsizian and Belgian Derek Debru, founders of the Boutiq Electroniq club and Nyege Nyege festival and label – misfits from these various scenes, and indeed from none, have gathered, influencing one another and any Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Well this is rather groovy! National treasure and the man with that voice, Matt Berry has been locked away in his lair, channelling the early seventies and twiddling with lots of knobs. Save for the drums, he plays every instrument (all 19 of them) on this magical mystery tour de force – that includes piano, Wurlitzer, Mellotron, Moog, Hammond, Vox and Farfisa organs. There’s no getting away from it, this man is ridiculously talented. But there’s also no getting away from the fact that you’re half expecting a joke at any moment. That’ll teach him to be so intrinsically funny.Be that as it may Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
They stand in a row, nine of them, in a long, strange corridor between rows of stacked, palleted, planked wood and the red brick wall of an endless warehouse. Nine tripods, each two humans high, with a spinning helicopter head, double-ended by conical horns that emanate a gentle angelic howling or lower end drone-hums. Eyes closed – and being music-geeky about it – this carefully calibrated tonal concerto assails the ears somewhere between US mystic Laraaji’s processed gong experiments and the final ethereal works of Spacemen 3.But this is about the experience. Artist Ray Lee Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s funny how the most high tech music can sound very traditional. In the case of producer / instrumentalist / occasional singer Ziúr, it’s the tradition of her hometown of Berlin that is expressed in her whirrs, clangs and mutated voices. Here – as on her previous records with British labels Planet Mu and Objects Limited and Canada’s Infinite machine, and like most of the roster of her new home, Berlin’s PAN – the sound palette is hyper-detailed: glistening, crackling and booming with the kind of abyssal vastness and obsessional detail that only today’s processing power can generate. But Read more ...
mark.kidel
Sufjan Stevens is not only prolific, multi-talented and wide-ranging in his experimentation, but he never fails to make interesting work. He’s undoubtedly one of the giants of American contemporary music. His originality and creative risk-taking have led to him being one of the most underrated artists of his time. His latest album – over two hours of instrumental composition and made during lockdown – is a daring, profound and fiercely personal requiem to his recently-deceased father.Convocations, hot on the heels of Stevens' s previous album The Ascension (2020) is a lengthy suite of both Read more ...