hip hop
Album: Loyle Carner - HugoThursday, 20 October 2022
You’ll want to love Loyle Carner. There’s so much about what he gives and how he delivers it that’s disarming, charming, brilliant even. His lyrics across this album are very obviously from the heart and took real courage to hammer into shape. He... Read more... |
Album: Broken Bells - Into the BlueThursday, 06 October 2022
Not content with having released one of the best hip-hop albums in recent memory (Cheat Codes, alongside Black Thought), producer Brian Burton has rekindled his partnership with The Shins’ James Mercer for the first Broken Bells album in almost a... Read more... |
Album: Aitch - Close to HomeThursday, 18 August 2022
22 is a pretty young age to be jaded. But this album starts out with Mancunian rapper Aitch detailing how tough it is at the top, and how traumatised he is by life: "sitting on my throne with an open stare / 'cause to me it's just a broken chair".... 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... |
Album: Danger Mouse & Black Thought - Cheat CodesWednesday, 10 August 2022
The last time Danger Mouse (Brian Burton to his mum) dropped a hip hop album, it was 2005’s The Mouse & The Mask, a witty, beaty, big and bouncy collaboration with the late, great MF DOOM. That was 17 years ago. In fairness, he’s been busy with... Read more... |
Album: Beyoncé - RenaissanceMonday, 01 August 2022
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... Read more... |
Album: Lizzo - SpecialSaturday, 16 July 2022
You can’t really blame Lizzo for playing to her strengths. When she started putting out records some nine years ago, there wasn’t really a niche in the market for a flute playing, twerking, positive-thinking, plus-size rapper-stroke-disco-diva.... Read more... |
theartsdesk on Vinyl 71: Sparks, Ibeyi, Amy Winehouse, The Residents, Hanterhir, Astor Piazzolla and moreThursday, 16 June 2022
Summer has arrived outside and sunny sounds are blasting from the speakers at theartsdesk on Vinyl. But not just sunny sounds, to be truthful, also sounds that cover most of the human emotional range, all from plastic discs in varying colours. Check... Read more... |
Album: Neneh Cherry - The VersionsSaturday, 04 June 2022
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... Read more... |
Transgressive Records showcase, The Great Escape, Brighton review - five acts offer intriguing pop alternativesSaturday, 14 May 2022
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 “... 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... |
Album: Swedish House Mafia - Paradise AgainSaturday, 16 April 2022
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... Read more... |
