indie
Kieron Tyler
Santa has returned home, but he wasn’t the season’s only visitor from the Nordic lands. The crop of recent music in from the region embraces genre-crossing jazz, vintage-style rock, the expected electropop, cross-border collaborations and a seven-year-old Finn. Exploring all corners of Scandinavia’s music, theartsdesk journeys where no one else does, landing in Norway first for some finely formed jazz.The debut album from Trondheim's Moskus ought to straightforward. And it is, to a point. A jazz piano trio, their line-up conforms to the known. Yet, as Salmesykkel unfolds, it’s increasingly Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Along with bands like Belle and Sebastian and The Beta Band, Yo La Tengo represent a kind of lo-fi vibe indie-aficionados can get a little smug about. To be found in the section marked “cult", they have been going forever, never broken into the mainstream, and exude an effortless superiority. YLT's cred, however, doesn’t always guarantee a thumbs-up. Not from me anyway. Previously I've gone both ways on them.It’s hard to argue with Fade, however, their thirteenth studio album. This is, quite simply, a very pretty record. Gone are the unnecessary jazz diversions or rummaging through blues and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Broadcast: Berberian Sound Studio Original SoundtrackMore than the soundtrack to one of last year's most impactful films, the release of the music for Berberian Sound Studio is a tribute to the memory of Trish Keenan. With her Broadcast partner James Cargill, Keenan had begun working on Peter Strickland’s film before her death in January 2011. Cargill found sound files of her voice on her computer and began from there – a task that must have been both eerie and poignant.Broadcast had long drawn inspiration from Italian soundtrack music and their 2009 album collaboration with The Focus Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Up to this point it’s all gone swimmingly for Manchester-based quartet Everything Everything. Their debut album Man Alive charted high in the summer of 2010, but follow-up Arc is the test of whether they’re in for the long haul. Although the answer is largely in the hands of their strong fan base, the unfocused Arc suggests the band themselves aren’t sure of who they are.It’s difficult to stand still while paddling furiously, but that’s what Arc sounds like – a band with a million-and-one ideas and no overriding sense of unity. Not only does it fail to take them beyond Man Alive, it dilutes Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Who ever said making a movie was a glamorous business? Shooting the climactic scene of his most recent film Boxing Day, British-born director Bernard Rose (pictured below right) found himself in the freezing Colorado mountains - so cold you couldn’t even see your breath - with just his two stars, Danny Huston and Matthew Jacobs, and a sound-recordist for company. Rose was his own cameraman, as well as editor, and a major inspiration behind the redemptive musical score.Rose may live in Los Angeles, and have made plenty of films on a much larger scale, but his ongoing series of adaptations of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Can’s The Lost Tapes towers over any of the other reissues theartsdesk has covered this year. Although not strictly a reissue – it collected unheard recordings from tapes which had lain in the band’s archive – it rewrote the story of the seminal German band, offering a new perspective on their creative process and what they had issued. More than any of this, its three discs were a great listen and as essential as any of their albums - Soundtracks, Tago Mago and Future Days.Re-reviewing The Lost Tapes is unnecessary, but taking it as a yardstick for the year’s other reissues is, by turns, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Gil Scott-Heron: The Revolution Begins – The Flying Dutchman MastersKieron TylerThis fine box set has a cuckoo in its nest which has to be dealt with instantly. Like Eric Clapton’s 1976 declaration of support for Enoch Powell, Scott-Heron’s “The Subject Was Faggots” is a blot that’s hard to erase from a career otherwise marked by inclusivity. “Giggling and grinning and prancing and shit… faggots who were balling because they couldn't get their balls inside the faggot hall,” is how it goes, with Scott-Heron plumping for “he, she or it” as his favoured signifier. Yeah, times were different, the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The real test of whether an album stands apart from everything else is not whether it’s well crafted, moves a genre forward, is thrillingly original or is searingly confessional. The list could go on. The measure is whether it invites revisiting. Repeatedly. There’ve been many magnificent releases this year, but The Echo Show by Paris duo Yeti Lane is the one which has to be heard more than any other - again, again and again. This seductive swoon of an album has a rare beauty transcending the styles it’s rooted in.The Echo Show, Yeti Lane’s second album and first as a duo, nods towards Read more ...
theartsdesk
Herbert: Bodily Functions (Special Edition)Thomas H GreenMatthew Herbert is an electronic polymath whose career is fascinating whether you’re a fan of his music or not. Currently he’s working hard resurrecting the BBC’s iconic music and sound effects unit, the Radiophonic Workshop, and he’s recently released an album (as Wishmountain) sampling the top ten best-selling items in Tesco’s, while also having time for the odd Björk collaboration and the occasional tour wherein pig parts are cooked on stage in an anti-consumerist sonic performance art extravaganza. In short, Herbert has grown into Read more ...
theartsdesk
The House of Love: The House of LoveKieron TylerAfter The Jesus & Mary Chain, The House of Love were Creation Records’ next most-likely sons. Their melodies had an epic sweep, they had a top-notch songwriter in Guy Chadwick and, with Terry Bickers, a fabulous guitarist. Yet, after signing to a major label their potential was never achieved despite regularly packing major venues. Their first, eponymous, album – reissued here, 24 years on – is their finest hour. All that said, as the liner notes reveal, Creation were more convinced stablemates The Weather Prophets were more likely to happen Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Jam: The GiftThomas H GreenGiven his continued artistic renaissance, it’s currently rather unfashionable to suggest Paul Weller was never better than with The Jam. Nonetheless, a trawl through their back catalogue will assure most this was the case. Musically, it’s arguable but lyrically it’s definitive. The Gift was The Jam’s sixth and final album, released in the spring of 1982. The trio were at the peak of their powers, riding chart success that melded punk’s snarl with Weller’s suburban angst, including, in “Going Underground”, one of the greatest and most furious songs ever to hit Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s been a bumper year for fans of Public Image Ltd. John Lydon took his new version of the band out on the road and issued the This is PiL album. His former PiL colleagues Jah Wobble and Keith Levene reworked the landmark 1979 PiL album Metal Box live, as Metal Box in Dub. Now, the duo have re-cemented their relationship with Yin & Yang, their first new work together since co-writing Gary Clail’s “Beef (How Low Can You Go?)” in 1990.The motives for these reunions and restatements of ownership are rendered moot by the forceful, and sometimes perplexing, Yin & Yang, an album which Read more ...