thu 19/06/2025

singer-songwriters

Album: Yaya Bey - do it afraid

One of the great untold stories of the past decade is just how potent a cultural force R&B has been. It might not have had the wild musical innovation it did in the 2000s when the likes of Neptunes, Missy Elliot, Timbaland and Rodney Jerkins...

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Bonnie Raitt, Brighton Dome review - a top night with a characterful, very American blues rock queen

If you walked into a bar in the US, say in one of the southern states, and Bonnie Raitt and her band were playing, you’d have the best night of your life. They are the kind of purely American rhythm’n’blues experience, tempered with FM radio...

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Album: Nick Mulvey - Dark Harvest Pt.1

Nick Mulvey’s first two albums, First Mind in 2014 and Wake Up Now in 2017, are among the loveliest singer-songwriter fare released this century. With his last album, 2022’s New Mythology, his ayahuasca-fuelled search for spiritual meaning went full...

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The Great Escape Festival 2025, Brighton review - a feast of music from across the world

Photographer Finetime and I have our first pints outside Dalton’s, a bar on Brighton seafront, at almost exactly midday. They are Beavertown Neck Oil IPA at 4.3%. The sun is out, glinting off the sea. Feels like the calm before the storm.Quarter of...

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Lucy Farrell, Catherine MacLellan, The Green Note review - sublime frequencies

Lucy Farrell, one quarter of the brilliant, award-winning Anglo-Scots band Furrow Collective, and a solo artist whose stunning debut album, We Are Only Sound, was released in 2023, divides her time between the UK – she’s a native of Kent – and...

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Album: Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke - Tall Tales

I’ve got an admission: I never really got Radiohead, in no small part because of Thom Yorke’s singing. I appreciate his technical abilities and songwriting, and that a lot of people find his anguish cathartic, but the more he goes for it the more I...

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First Person: rising folk star Amelia Coburn on her French inspiration

“Sandra” is one of my favourite tracks from my album Between The Moon and the Milkman which was released last year.  While living in Paris a few years ago I shared a flat with an older French lady. We loved to chat every night when I came home...

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Album: Dr Robert & Matt Deighton - The Instant Garden

There’s this mod milieu, harking back to the Eighties. Weller at the forefront; Dr Robert and his Blow Monkeys; all righteously hate Thatcher; then the electronically groovy 1990s arrive; Acid Jazz Records; boss mod Eddie Piller; his collection of...

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theartsdesk on Vinyl 89: Wilco, Decius, Hot 8 Brass Band, Henge, Dub Syndicate, Motörhead and more

VINYL OF THE MONTHRattle Encircle (Upset! The Rhythm)Rattle are an unusual band. Consisting of Nottingham duo Katharine Eira Brown and Theresa Wrigley, their set-up is two drum kits, with which they build simple hypnotic patterns then add repetitive...

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Album: Perfume Genius - Glory

I can’t stop reading and re-reading the review copy I got of a new book, out next week. Liam Inscoe-Jones’s Songs in the Key of MP3: the New Icons of the Internet Age is one of those books where you’ll find yourself shocked that it didn’t...

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First Person: singer-songwriter David Gray on how the songs on his new album came to him

Occasionally, when I pass my own reflection, out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of the likeness of my father, shining out through the bones in my face. In this way his ghost walks with me. Sometimes the making process can feel like...

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Album: Heather Nova - Breath and Air

With her 13th studio album, Heather Nova delivers what you might expect from one of the 90s' most distinctive alternative voices – though longtime fans of London Rain will find she's meandering down a sandier path. Breath and Air finds the...

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