drum and bass
Thomas H. Green
People Just Do Nothing is a mockumentary BBC TV series, now ended, about fictional Brentford pirate radio crew Kurupt FM. It’s also a comedy based entirely on the Dunning-Kruger Effect, in that the humour derives from the worldview of all the key characters – tawdry, hopeless garage MC/DJ chancers – being confidently blinkered to the point of absurdity, while all else points to their utter uselessness. The twist is that Kurupt FM’s debut album is often musically sprightly and enjoyable.Since the series ended in 2018, Kurupt FM have made major festival appearances, and a feature film has Read more ...
joe.muggs
Greentea Peng is a south Londoner, heavily tattooed, heavily spiritual, heavily anti-establishment, and very, very heavily into basslines. She cuts a singular figure in many ways, but her rebel dub soul style also makes her a particularly British archetype: the next iteration in a lineage starting with Poly Styrene and Ari Up, and running through Neneh Cherry, Tricky and MIA. (Yes, OK, Ari Up was German and MIA is Sri Lankan, but their sound and their cultural fusions could only have happened on this island.) Like each of those artists, she is unmistakeable in sound. One of the most Read more ...
joe.muggs
Theartsdesk is a labour of love. Bloody-mindedly run as a co-operative of journalists from the beginning, our obsession with maintaining a daily-updated platform for good culture writing has caused a good few grey and lost hairs over the years. But it has also been rewarding – and looking back over the 10 years of Disc of the Day reviews has been a good chance to remind ourselves of that. One thing in particular that drew me into the collective when it was founded, and has kept me going throughout, was the understanding that artistic forms would be treated with equal respect and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ten years ago yesterday, on Monday 14th February 2011, one of theartsdesk’s writers, Joe Muggs, reviewed an album called Paranormale Aktivitat, by an outfit called Zwischenwelt. It was the first ever Disc of the Day, a new slot inserted into theartsdesk’s front page design, where it still resides today. By the end of the year, we’d introduced the now-obligatory stars-out-of-five system, keeping in the swim with other reviewing media. Since then, Disc of the Day has covered approximately 2600 albums and, before COVID, when the tube trains were running, it gave me great pleasure to see those Read more ...
joe.muggs
Dance music has a notably different relationship to its past than other kinds of music. This has a real, material basis: because its core experience is that of the mixed DJ set, in principle nothing is ever the same twice, elements are constantly combined and recombined, so past and present are constantly churned together in new contexts. Once a style is established, it never completely stops being current, because its main riffs, samples or tracks are reused and remixed enough to maintain familiarity with every new generation of listener/dancer. “Revivals” of acid, dub, hardcore and what Read more ...
theartsdesk on Vinyl 61: Amy Winehouse, Krust, Motörhead, Extrawelt, Sade, Chase and Status and more
Thomas H. Green
Welcome to the penultimate 2020 edition of the world’s vastest, most musically wide-ranging, regularly posted, online vinyl reviews. This year vinyl boomed, especially in the wake of COVID-19, with gig-goers stuck at home but wanting new music. 2020’s sales are now heading for the £100 million mark, vinyl’s biggest year since 1990. When theartsdesk on Vinyl began, six years ago, it was a very different picture. All things must pass, and vinyl eventually will, but that’s for the churls! Let’s enjoy these boom times. So check out the reviews below, which run the gamut from the grungiest thrash Read more ...
joe.muggs
Everything about this mixtape oozes confidence. It crams 12 tracks plus interludes – all produced by Andre “Shy FX” Williams – into barely more than half an hour. It happily leaves “Roll the Dice”, the single which conquered club and radio and featured Lily Allen, until last. As well as roots reggae, carnival marching bands, lyrically and rhythmically brutal bashment and lashings of the drum'n'bass that Shy FX is best known for, it traverses creepy-crawling avant pop, modernist R&B and moody off-centre hip hop, yet never loses the sense of being a focused party soundtrack. And Read more ...
joe.muggs
Rob Smith & Ray Mighty are truly the unsung heroes of British bass music. Coming out of the same cultural melting pot in Bristol that gave us Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead and mega-producer Nellee Hooper, they looked to be among the city's big successes when they first emerged in 1987. Their debut single, a cover of the Bacharach / David classic "Anyone who had a Heart" on their own Three Stripe label was a club success, they produced Massive Attack's debut single "Any Love", and Fresh 4's 1989 rave and chart hit cover of "Wishin' on a Star".However an uncomfortable major label deal Read more ...
theartsdesk
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why. Baxter Dury, Etienne de Crécy and Delilah Holliday - B.E.D. ★★★★★ A small but perfectly sleazy work of sweary, cynical brillianceBob Dylan - More Blood, More Tracks ★★★★★ The fourteenth volume in the Bootleg Series is a keeperBrad Mehldau Trio - Seymour Reads the Constitution! ★★★★★ Prolific improvising pianist creates the apotheosis of the piano trioThe Breeders - All Nerve ★★★★★ Kim and Kelly Deal - plus Read more ...
theartsdesk
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.SIMPLY THE BEST: THEARTSDESK'S FIVE-STAR REVIEWS OF 2017Alan Broadbent: Developing Story ★★★★★ The pianist's orchestral magnum opus is packed with extraordinary thingsArcade Fire: Everything Now ★★★★★ A joyous pop album that depicts a world in tragic freefallAutarkic: I Love You, Go Away ★★★★★ Tel Aviv producer Nadav Spiegel's latest collection is a triumph of head and heartBrian Eno: Reflection ★★★★★ Slow-motion cascades Read more ...
joe.muggs
Clifford Price – Goldie – has long cut an imposing, and complicated, figure in the music industry. Part larger-than-life entertainer, part monster (as satirised in music industry grotesque Kill Your Friends), part irrepressible raver, part grandiose conceptualist. But there's another side to him too: the massive, Pat Metheny-idolising, jazz smoothie.His breakthrough 1994 track “Inner City Life” was partly high-tech drum'n'bass ferocity, but it was completely merged with jazz-soul sophistication and of course the soaring voice of the sadly recently-deceased Dianne Charlegmane (who would work Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Renegades of Jazz is the alter ego of German DJ David Hanke, whose blending of breakbeats, a distorted big band, rap vocals and electronica to create something billed to bring jazz back to the dancefloor would already be an unusual combination even before the addition of John Milton’s biblical epic Paradise Lost. The result is a brooding and initially rather puzzling release that after several listens reveals itself as addictive and original.The Miltonic connection seems at first to be interpreted very loosely, as a general theme, rather than specific set of references, some of which, such as Read more ...