electropop
Thomas H. Green
You know those people who claim to literally only like the very first music a band does at the start of their career, then kind “Meh” decades-worth of solid later stuff? Ridiculous, right?That’s me and Hot Chip. 16 years ago I fell in love with “Over and Over” from the moment I heard it. Still love it. A brilliantly catchy, shrewdly observed Ecstasy anthem. A classic. While I’ve liked other Hot Chip songs since, that same absolute rush never happened again. Until now. There’s a few on Freakout/Release that bullseye the sweet spot.This eighth album from the consistently successful pop-tronic Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There’s polarising discourse and there’s polarising discourse, and then there’s Beyoncé discourse. On the one hand, there’s “the Bey Hive”: the very model of a furious modern fandom who will boost her and monster her critics at a microsecond’s notice. There are the commentators for whom everything she does is by definition profound, moral and important, regardless of any hypercapitalist excesses and hanging out with dicators’ offspring. And they're all buoyed up by a press so desperate for “access” that every profile is done with HELLO! magazine levels of management-vetted swooning. Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
As Bloc Party singer Kele Okereke noted at one point in this gig, his band have now been visiting Glasgow for nearly two decades. Yet few of the shows played in that 18 year span, which have touched upon nearly all of the city’s main music venues, have been as contrasting as this one. By the night’s end, when the band blasted out a rare outing of their very early single “Little Thoughts”, the audience were a jubilant and sweaty throng, but it was hard work getting there.Okereke noticed it as well. Clad in a bright multi coloured shirt that possessed more vibrancy than the early part of the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Initially, the weird thing about this is it’s being released as a Neneh Cherry album rather than a compilation of artists doing Neneh Cherry covers, which is what it is. That said, awareness slowly grows of a kindred sensibility to recent Neneh Cherry output, the esoteric jazzual spirit that’s imbued her last couple of albums. The Versions is a crafted, mellow, late night affair containing material different enough from the originals to be interesting, even if it cannot top their cheeky hip hop-pop potency.Take the version of 1989 cut “Heart” by Los Angeles violinist-singer Sudan Archives, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“I live to survive another heartache/I live to survive another mistake,” roars a sold-out Heaven. It’s a new song but everyone seems to know it. It’s not MØ’s most famous song but is the bluntest monster banger of the night, crunching four-to-the-floor club-pop that brooks no argument. It’s the last of the set (prior to an encore) and MØ is now a perspiring ball of energy. She’s clad in a white vest top, black shorts, and leather effect chaps, their ties flapping everywhere, as are her two red-auburn pigtails. Then she hurls herself into the crowd and continues the song born aloft, lying on Read more ...
Tom Carr
Since their 2010 debut, Man Alive, Everything Everything have dissected the various structures of human relationships, from socio-political to interpersonal, but all in their own experimental art-rock sound.As a result, their recent albums took on an uncanny relevance: 2017’s A Fever Dream was inflected by the uncertainty of Brexit and Trumpian rhetoric, while 2020’s Re-Animator was heavily poignant amidst the isolating pandemic owing to its deep, personal introspection and drawing from Julian Haynes’ theory of the bicameral mind. Now on Raw Data Feel they cast a curious glance over our Read more ...
caspar.gomez
My friend George claims to have nightmares about The Great Escape. In them he’s standing in an endless queue, never reaching the front, never entering the venue, and never seeing the band he wants to see. That was his experience the only time he attended, and he consequently reckons The Great Escape is rubbish.“I’ve been going for years and that’s never happened to me,” I said to him.“Yeah, well, you’re press, aren’t you,” he responded, with only a smidgeon of bitterness.“I s’pose so,” I replied, with only a smidgeon of smugness.But now photographer Finetime and I are standing outside Horatio Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Onstage at The Old Market in Hove, New York’s Mykki Blanco has been waving around a knot of garlic bulbs as if it were a wand or occult aspergillum. At some point during Blanco’s punchy rendition of 2016 single “Loner”, or possibly the dizzier “Summer Fling”, they transfer it to the flies of their trousers, let it hang there, all mischief. They explain that this is the result of the band becoming obsessed with “a mad coven of witches in Italy”.Whatever, it certainly adds to the freeform conviviality. Blanco (pictured left) no longer adopts a draggy look. The non-binary MC first enters wearing Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Dubstar didn’t really fit the niche where the 1990s put them. Signed to Food Records, original home of Blur, they were lumped in with Britpop but their music was always closer to the thoughtful electronic pop of Saint Etienne, and they also had – and have – something in common with Pet Shop Boys. Their new album, their fifth and second since reuniting a few years back, is permeated with a wistful sadness, pinpointed by smartly prosaic lyrics and sweetly doleful orchestration.Two is produced by Stephen Hague, who was at the desk for their first two albums, producing all those songs that Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Soft Cell, the duo consisting of Marc Almond and Dave Ball, announced they were calling it quits in 2018. The two sold out shows at the 02 in London were supposed to be their swan song, waving goodbye to their Soft Cell days. But as their eponymous Eighties single hinted, waving goodbye is often paired with a hello. In 2020 they embarked on a nationwide tour, playing their classic 1981 album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret in its entirety. This wasn’t just a nostalgia tour though. Brand new songs made it onto the setlist as well, like “Bruises On My Illusions”, “Heart Like Chernobyl “and “Nostalgia Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Spring is in the air and vinyl is, as always, on the turntable here at theartsdesk on Vinyl. We’ve been ploughing through all the latest releases and reissues, played loud on a large sound system, each evaluated as fully as possible. Below you’ll find 7000 words to pick through and locate what sounds good to you. Unrestricted by genre, all musical life is here. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHJames Domestic Carrion Repeating (Amok/TNS)Suffolk-based James Scott is in more bands than there’s space to list here, most notably punk outfit The Domestics. His solo debut is a complete treat that deserves Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Returning with their first new music in almost a decade, EDM supergroup Swedish House Mafia (the producer-DJ trio Steve Angello, Axwell and Sebastian Ingros) deliver their debut album with a sense of vaulting ambition and anything-is-possible belief. In their own words, Paradise Again is a “sonic adventure” to a “new world, a world of free thoughts, limitless ideas and space for progression.”There are, if we’re being generous, two ideas on Paradise Again. The first is one that anyone familiar with their oeuvre will already be well acquainted with: big, showy, glitter-gun production that Read more ...