funk
Owen Richards
Janelle Monáe had already established herself as pop’s next great innovator with The ArchAndroid and Electric Ladyland, two albums full of earworms, high production and retro-futuristic lyrics. This all-too-brief musical career seemed in jeopardy when Monáe successfully made the jump to film, with her debut features Hidden Figures and Moonlight winning heavily at the Oscars. After all, her act was as much reliant on theatre as it was songwriting, perhaps this was always the endgame. But with the joint release of singles “Django Jane” and “Make Me Feel” in early 2018, it appeared that if Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Egbert Nathaniel Dawkins III – Aloe Blacc – is one shrewd dude. He's extremely adept at reaching out beyond the confines of his natural beat of funk and soul, whether that's credible (covering The Velvet Underground's “Femme Fatale”) on his breakthrough 2010 Good Thingsalbum or commercial (co-writing and singing the late Swedish EDM gigastar Aviicii's “Wake Me Up” can't have done his bank balance any harm, what with going to number one in 22 countries). And of course nobody ever went bankrupt releasing a Christmas album... And yet, extraordinarily, he has always avoided having any Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
My Baby are one of the most exciting live acts currently in existence. They’re a three-piece consisting of Dutch frontwoman guitarist/bassist Cato van Dijk, her brother, drummer Joost, and New Zealand blues rock guitar virtuoso Daniel Johnston. Together they whip up tight, rollin’ sets that are also supremely danceable, leading the audience into jammed psychedelia that also emanates sex, sweat and wildness, their own shamanic performance personas – especially Caro van Dijk’s mesmeric stage presence - only amping up the heat. Their latest release finally lives up to their concerts.My Baby’s Read more ...
theartsdesk
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why. Baxter Dury, Etienne de Crécy and Delilah Holliday - B.E.D. ★★★★★ A small but perfectly sleazy work of sweary, cynical brillianceBob Dylan - More Blood, More Tracks ★★★★★ The fourteenth volume in the Bootleg Series is a keeperBrad Mehldau Trio - Seymour Reads the Constitution! ★★★★★ Prolific improvising pianist creates the apotheosis of the piano trioThe Breeders - All Nerve ★★★★★ Kim and Kelly Deal - plus Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Collaboration clearly suits Neneh Cherry. From co-writing with husband Cameron McVey, to projects with Youssou N’Dour, her band cirKus, The Thing and RocketNumberNine, the give-and-take of partnership has produced some stunning work that has always seen the singer give as much as she has taken. Cherry is an honest, open performer and that translates to her vocal style. Much attention has been focused on the involvement of Keiron “Four Tet” Hebden as producer on this project, and his trademark sparkle is much in evidence with carefully controlled clatter and subtle rewinds sitting behind Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Knowing a deceased artist's archives are available for re-release is a double-edged sword. Will there be a shoddy flood of any and every old bit of tat a la Jimi Hendrix? Will there be half-arsed, half-finished and even fake songs bodged together by trashy but popular modern dance remixers like Michael Jackson? Will the vaults just stay infuriatingly locked? With the impossibly prolific, but often self-indulgent Prince, it is doubly worrying: who has the rights? What will the quality control filter be like?Well, thank all that is holy, on the evidence of this release they're taking the right Read more ...
Barney Harsent
2017 was a year in which Paul Weller reminded us all why he’s a force to be reckoned with. An impressive foray into the world of soundtracks (the score to Johnny Harris’s Jawbone) was followed by A Kind Revolution, which was, for the most part, a very impressive collection. This year sees yet another album from an artist who is clearly mining a rich seam of form. True Meanings is a surprising album. Let’s get one thing out of the way at the start: it’s very, very good – that’s not the surprise. Given his recent run, you’d expect this to be the case. No, the surprise is in the timbre Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Gusting. It’s not a word I’ve ever given much thought. You hear it on weather forecasts but I’m not a farmer of a fisherman so when they say it’ll be windy “with possible gusting speeds of up to 45 miles per hour” my brain doesn’t really register what that means on the ground. Until now. Camp Bestival 2018 was eventually defined by gusting (that and, apparently, Mary “Irrelevant” Berry). It was the unstoppable gusting that finally cancelled the festival a day early, a sad development but I could understand why. And I could feel it too, for by the time we left all my senses deeply knew exactly Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Ryuichi Sakamoto has conquered underground and mainstream with seeming ease over four decades, never dropping off in the quality of his releases. Indeed his most recent projects, following his return to public life after treatment for throat cancer in 2014-15, are among his best. The async album was rightly listed by many, including theartsdesk, as one of 2017's best; the async remodels remixes showed him absolutely keyed in to the electronica zeitgeist, and Glass, his live collaboration album with Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto is a worthy addition to the duo's extensive Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s a regular problem with techno albums. The DJ-producers who make them are usually so deeply embedded in club techno that when it comes to making a long-form collection, leaving the dancefloor and showcasing variety, they’re incapable. What, to them, sounds like a sonic adventure, to the rest of us sounds like a series of four-to-the-floor bangers that, after a couple, grows quickly monotonous, however good they’d have sounded at 3am in strobe-strafed Belgian warehouse darkness.Holland-living Brit Oliver Way, however, has some success evading this particular curse. Way, after all, has Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The death of “world music” is a wonderfully reassuring thing. That is to say, with every year that passes, it becomes less and less possible for media and consumers to bracket together music from outside the US and Europe as a single thing, and easier and easier for us to understand specific talents and currents within global culture for what they are. Obviously the fact I need to even say this means there's a good way to go. But talents like Baloji, the Congolese-born, Belgian-raised singer-songwriter, are blasting away the simplistic distinctions.As this album kicks off, the cascading Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Jack White isn’t one to shy away from a challenge. Whether it’s launching a record player into space to play Carl Sagan’s “A Glorious Dawn”, or embarking on seemingly unlikely collaborations with Beyoncé or hip hop act A Tribe Called Quest, he seems to be a game sort. It’s this ambition (with a small "a" – for "artistic") that we see writ large over Boarding House Reach, his third solo LP and the first he’s released in four years.The result is a sprawling collection of songs, uneven to the point of seeming almost willfully inconsistent and, occasionally stunning. Boarding House Reach is Read more ...