indie
Kieron Tyler
Looking for answers to what qualifies an album for a makeover and its attendant return to record shop racks can cause heads to spin. Multiple variables are at play but, still, it merits pondering. Market factors come into consideration, including the prices fetched by original pressings, even if the album isn’t obscure.Take Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating in Space, originally released in June 1997. The band’s third album was then issued in a collector-friendly range of formats and packages. The double-album version currently sells for around £260. The CD edition – with 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 ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Hey What is 47 minutes long and includes 10 tracks, it comes across as shorter due to its homogeneity. That’s not to say it all sounds the same, but that it has the overarching feel of a suite where the individual songs equate to movements within a long-form piece. It means that Low’s 13th full-length studio outing is an album as such, rather than a grab-bag collection of disparate compositions.Hey What is also astonishingly powerful. Metallic bursts of noise open the album. As they pass, “White Horses” emerges from the maelstrom. The pulse running throughout the first track suggests Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Following the death last year from COVID-19 of keyboard player Dave Greenfield, it appears the The Stranglers’ five decade journey may finally be drawing to a close. They bucked all odds by maintaining a path after singer Hugh Cornwall left in 1990, and the last two decades, especially, have seen them hold steady, both as a live draw and with critically respected albums. Dark Matters, their eighteenth, is a decently wrought, sometimes elegiac conclusion to a career that’s taken them from pre-punk to post-everything.Eight of the 11 songs were recorded before Greenfield’s death but the single “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Rather than being retrospective, I’ve Been Trying To Tell You is about retrospection. The distinction is crucial as Saint Etienne’s follow-up to 2017’s Home Counties arrives 30 years on – to the month – from their debut, 1991’s Foxbase Alpha. Their 10th album is concerned with what contemplation induces. The period examined is 1997 to 2001: from the Labour Party’s UK election victory to the fall of New York’s Twin Towers. However, what could be historiography is indirect, oblique. Mood is what matters.Some pointers imply the specifics at play. “Pond House” refers to somewhere in particular 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 ...
Kieron Tyler
The presence of Nashville’s Erin Rae and Caitlin Rose on guest vocals suggests Spencer Cullum's Coin Collection could be a take on country music. Indeed, the album was recorded in Nashville and Cullum has contributed pedal steel to live shows and records by A-grade Music City star Miranda Lambert. However, Cullum has also played on records by Herman Dune and Kesha. His first solo album sounds nothing like a product of Nashville.Cullum is British and has been based in Nashville for close to a decade. His work as a session player has been stellar; he’s been on stage with Dolly Parton. Coin Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Already Dead’s opening cut is titled “Youth on a Spit”. As it unfolds, Willy Mason declares “I feel no pain I’ve already bled / You can’t kill me I’m already dead.” After setting a pessimistic tone the next track is the “You’d Like to be Free”, a disquisition on a life where feelings of specialness haven’t been reciprocated by passively waiting for something to come along. “You blame the things you didn’t get…you never let yourself enjoy the thing you are,” sings Mason in his familiar disconsolate voice.The bleak outlook continues through “Gilded Lie”, where all the crooks have the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Willow Smith has done more during her life than the average 20-year-old. The daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith, she bounced off her childhood appearance in her father’s film I Am Legend to a No 2 UK hit with “Whip My Hair” a decade ago, and has since released a bunch of music. This is her fourth album and, where her last couple came from a musically contemplative, indie-tronic, singer-songwriter stance, Lately I Feel Everything ramps things into the sweary pop-punk and metal zone.Avril Lavigne appears on the slick self-affirmation power-pop of “Grow” (“I hope you know you’re not 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 ...
Katie Colombus
Rory Graham’s first words as he comes on stage are: “Well this is a bit weird, isn't it? It's been a while.” After a run of cancelled gigs, the band haven’t performed live for a year and a half – which feels, says Rory, “a bit like missing a testicle.”Anatomy aside, we all get it. While I knew how much I had missed live music, the depth of intense emotional response to this band's sound and lyrics; the overwhelming energy connection between artist and audience and the transformative healing power of music is another level at this gig.There is a chemistry in the Jazz Cafe that I have never 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 ...