funk
Albums of the Year 2022: Sault - Untitled (God), Today & Tomorrow, 11, Earth, AIIRFriday, 23 December 2022
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... Read more... |
Trans Musicales Festival 2022 review - vibrant eclecticism rules in RennesTuesday, 13 December 2022
It’s Friday night and I’ve finally arrived at 43-year-old French music festival institution Trans Musicales. Due to some dreadful nonsense, it’s taken a 12-hour train journey, two baguettes, one short Stephen King novel, six large beers, a tumbler... Read more... |
Sugababes, O2 Academy, Glasgow review - pop perfection hampered by sluggish soundWednesday, 09 November 2022
Any younger Sugababes fans might have felt a little neglected here. “Who’s a 90s child?” yelled out enthusiastic DJ Shosh as she warmed up the crowd, followed soon after by a cry of “Who’s an 80s child?”, which received an even louder roar in... Read more... |
Album: STR4TA - STR$TASFEARWednesday, 09 November 2022
There’s retro and there’s retro. Some music – what you might call the Oasis tendency – simply reproduces the obvious signifiers of the past as signposts of cool. But there’s other stuff that shows deep understanding of both the technique and the... Read more... |
Album: Red Hot Chili Peppers - Return of the Dream CanteenSaturday, 15 October 2022
Does the world need to hear more from Red Hot Chili Peppers? Outside the bouncin’ bro’ fanbase, a regular consensus is that, despite being one of the biggest bands in the world, doing their global stadium rock thing – with free added funk! –... Read more... |
Album: Hudson Mohawke - Cry SugarThursday, 11 August 2022
The journey of Ross “Hudson Mohawke” Birchard has been truly one of the most extraordinary in modern music. From teenage scratch DJ champion and happy hardcore raver in some of Glasgow’s more feral club environments, in the late Noughties he quickly... Read more... |
Love Supreme Festival, Sunday review - eclectic jazz on the Sussex DownsWednesday, 06 July 2022
By day three of any festival things are usually winding down. But there was a sense that Love Supreme have saved the best for last this year with a strong offering of funk and soul, R&B and experimental jazz.Crowds of Londoners hitching a... Read more... |
Album: Ron Trent presents WARM - What Do the Stars Say to YouMonday, 13 June 2022
In 1990, teenage prodigy Ron Trent released a single on Armando’s Warehouse imprint. Recorded on cheap equipment it was, nevertheless, a staggering piece of music. Urgent, insistent and unrelenting its piercing strings, metallic cymbals and ... Read more... |
Album: Harry Styles - Harry's HouseSaturday, 21 May 2022
Harry Styles’ previous two albums sounded like someone rifling pleasantly through the history of pop and rock, but always genially and politely. More entertaining than his scalpels-ready critics wished when One Direction paused in 2016, those albums... Read more... |
Album: Kendrick Lamar - Mr Morale & the Big SteppersSaturday, 14 May 2022
Kendrick Lamar is so breathlessly revered it’s sometimes hard to pull apart what’s going on in his records. It’s sometimes felt like he might become the rap game Radiohead: exploratory, aware, hugely technically accomplished, endlessly thematically... Read more... |
Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow review - pop songstress partying like it's 2020Tuesday, 29 March 2022
There are few people, especially musicians, who would wish to revisit the spring and summer of 2020 with any fondness, but Sophie Ellis-Bextor might be an exception. Her kitchen discos, in which she and her husband Richard Jones, aided by their... Read more... |
Melt Yourself Down, Patterns, Brighton review - ballistic double sax punk attackFriday, 04 March 2022
“As you’ve noticed, I’m really terrible at talking between the songs,” announces Melt Yourself Down singer Kushal Gaya, two-thirds of the way through the gig. He is. But it really doesn’t matter; the genre-uncategorizable London six-piece smash... Read more... |
