indie
Javi Fedrick
As son of the famous Blockheads frontman, Baxter Dury has always had big (new) boots to fill. Over the last 15 years though, he’s become distinguishable in his own right for his Chiswick accent and roughened-up pastoral music. Both are just as present in Prince of Tears as they have been on his previous albums, but with friends Madeleine Hart, Jason Williamson (Sleaford Mods) and Rose Elinor Dougall (The Pipettes) providing guest vocals, it’s an album that engages with a wrenching variety of humanity's different sides, often more shade than light, rather than being just about the music.Single Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Both Rhode Island’s Downtown Boys, and Washington D.C.’s Priests sit at the centre of today’s feminist punk scene. As stated in a recent Downtown Boys press release, they oppose “the prison-industrial complex, racism, queerphobia, capitalism, fascism, boredom, and all things people use to try to close our minds, eyes and hearts”. This, perhaps, explains why the promoters have listed the night as a “radical double bill”. Having also both released extremely well received albums this year - Cost of Living and Nothing is Natural respectively - they descend on Manchester’s Deaf Institute amid a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Super Besse are from the Republic of Belarus, Europe’s sole dictatorship – a country where freedom of expression and opportunities for individual self-determination are limited. As there’s little musical infrastructure in their home country, the label they are on is Latvia’s leading independent imprint. Despite the obstacles, the Minsk-based trio – named after a French ski resort – have played across mainland Europe. La Nuit* is their second album.Given where they are from, Super Besse would be notable whatever the nature of their music. However, what they deal in and how they put it over Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Michael Winterbottom has always been a mercurial director, moving swiftly between genres, fiction and documentary, keeping us on our toes. But with On the Road it’s time to mark the tiniest of trends.24 Hour Party People is one of the best films about the music industry ever made, a riotous fictionalisation of the revolution in Manchester in the Eighties and Nineties that revolved around Tony Wilson’s Factory Records and the bands Joy Division, New Order and The Happy Mondays. 9 Songs was a radical experiment, as the director presented a sequence of gigs as the backdrop of a sexually explicit Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
London indie-rockers Wolf Alice’s debut album, My Love Is Cool, made it to no 2 in the charts a couple of years back. It was a bona fide success story and a rare thing, a gold record for a female-fronted outfit who major in grungey, ambitious post-Pixies rock. It was derivative, but also showed a feisty, admirable willingness not to be pigeonholed, especially on songs such as the ecstatic “Freazy”. Its successor initially seems destined to be even more wide-ranging, to reach headier heights, but then settles, during most of its second half, for being simply a decent album.Let us not damn Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
The Horrors have always had a penchant for churning out pop-tinged gems, and on V, with help from Adele/Coldplay/Florence and the Machine producer Paul Epworth, they’ve applied their same winning formula to darker music. The album cover, a mishmash of faces, sums up V perfectly – it nods to a huge range of influences, creating something that feels larger and more engaging than all of them on their own.“Hologram” oozes in with monolithic drums and hazy synths, storming its way to the four-minute mark before offbeat eight-bit sparkles create a solo that’s as bemusing as it is enjoyable. We Read more ...
Joe Muggs
One of the more interesting developments of this decade is a blurring around the edges of modern soul music: almost a complete dissolution, in fact, of the boundaries of R&B. From the hyper-mainstream – Drake, The Weeknd, Future – via Solange, Frank Ocean, Blood Orange and Sampha, to fringe experimentalists like Atlanta's Awful Records, international Afro-diasporic collective NON and UK one-off Dean Blunt, R&B is being remade as dark, unpredictable and unsettling.It's into the weirder, gloomier end of this territory that Bristol trio Jabu fit with discomfiting comfort. They come out Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This is, in many ways, an underwhelming evening, but the fault does not primarily lie with The Psychedelic Furs. Things start well with support act Lene Lovich who gives a lively performance, in a black’n’red ensemble with striped sleeves and a gigantic, beribboned, plaited wig/hair/hat confabulation which has something of Big Chief Sitting Bull about it. Despite not playing her only Top 10 hit, 1979’s “Lucky Number”, she whoops and theatricalises while her band delivers a suitably punchy new wave racket.The Psychedelic Furs aren’t going to get away with not playing the hits, especially as Read more ...
Joe Muggs
With the wind behind them, the San Francisco-founded band Deerhoof are one of the greatest live experiences you can have. Two decades since their first album, they still have a relentlessly experimental hunger for sonic surprise, mixing extraordinary virtuosity with an indie/punk directness, love of infectious melody and natural surrealism, which all together makes every moment of their shows full of ideas but also thrilling on an immediate sonic level.It's tough to bottle something so predicated on spontaneity, and given years of studio experience the Deerhoof sound has naturally been Read more ...
Liz Thomson
A striking and memorable debut made possible by a combination of crowd-funding and an Arts Council grant, Stories of the Sky combines 31-year-old Kev Minney’s twin obsessions, music and astronomy.Born in Northampton, and Brighton-based these last few years, he’s created an unusual and distinctive sound world in which his own impressive acoustic guitar playing is to the fore. The songs are thoughtful, unformulaic, but what makes Stories from the Sky stand out from the pack is the fact that it’s scored for a wide variety of instruments – and real instruments at that, not synthesised. There are Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The second decade of the 21st century will undoubtedly be remembered for huge innovations in accessing music, just as much as for the music itself. As well as acknowledging upfront talent, then, the Hospital Club’s h.Club 100 Music shortlist for 2017 makes it clear what’s going on behind the scenes is currently as important as what’s out front. It’s an era of fast and vast change in the music industry, and, over the last year, a select few have stood out at the forefront, demonstrating shrewd, even visionary awareness of where things are headed.Richard Davies, for instance, and his ticket Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It’s telling that, on their 2014 debut LP, Ballad of the Ice, Dori Sadovnik and Niv Arzi covered Bauhaus’ epic proto-gothic ode “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”. The 1979 single, with its incessant shuffle, dubbed-out tape delay and post-punk guitars, straddled the worlds of rock and dance with perfect balance and fine judgment. It has, quite clearly, been an influence on Tel Aviv’s Red Axes, who, with their second full-length offering, The Beach Goths, have delivered a collection that shares a similar sense of poise and purpose. After a slew of single releases on labels including their own Garzen Read more ...